WatDabney @ WatDabney @sopuli.xyz

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2 yr. ago

All the way through this ordeal of Biden possibly, then actually, stepping down, I've been sort of lukewarm about the idea of Harris replacing him for one and only one reason - because I assumed that, since she's the VP and the obvious first choice for a replacement, the Trump campaign would already have a complete hate campaign against her primed and ready to go, so could potentially catch her and the Dems flat-footed.

It's astonishing how wrong I was.

Nothing I disagree with there. Unfortunately.

And along those same lines, it calls to mind a thing that's concerned me to some degree all along, and just that much more so since Biden dropped out.

The painfully obvious DNC/democrat establishment strategy for decades at least has been to try to maintain the flow of corporate soft money by running candidates who aren't going to upset the status quo, which is to say are not actually leftists, and to count on just being arguably somewhat less bad than the Republican to be enough to win, or at least not lose embarrassingly badly.

And as far as that goes, Trump provides them with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, since it would be nearly impossible for the DNC/dem establishment to put up a candidate who's worse, and more to the point, the threat that Trump and his plutocratic backers and christofascist coattail-riders pose is so blatant snd severe that an awful lot of overt malfeasance on the part of the dem candidate - much more than has already been the case - would be overlooked.

I see it in myself. Even as aware as I am and as much as I loathe the establishment scum and their cynical and entirely self-serving manipulation, Trump and his handlers and followers are such an existential threat that I see no reasonable choice other than to vote for whoever ends up running against him.

But I hate it, and the more I think about it, the more I hate it, and it makes me concerned not just for who that might be (it could be much worse than Harris) but of what they might do after the election, presuming they win. We could even potentially end up trading the threat of one autocracy for the reality of another, just arguably somewhat less bad, one.

Cynically, I take this to mean that he's given up on the possibility of a 2024 presidential run.

While this will undoubtedly be popular with Californians who don't give a shit about homeless people and just don't want to have to see it, it would almost certainly have led to some blowback in the middle of a Democratic presidential campaign, so it's safe to assume that the decision was waiting in the wings so to speak - ready to be implemented, but only when it wouldn't cause problems for his federal aspirations.

Exactly.

He's one of the most loathsome pieces of shit to have ever sleazed his way into office anywhere - a foul, noxious, utterly repugnant psychopath who bears personal responsibility for tens of thousands of murders and for the undue suffering of millions. And he gets fucking standing ovations from people who have the gall to consider themselves worthy representatives of the American people.

It's grotesque. It's so far removed from human decency or even sanity that it defies any sort of valid explanation. Sincerely, the only conclusion I can reach is that the lunatics are in charge of the asylum - that somehow we've ended up with a society led by monsters - by amoral, loathsome, foul wretches who are so clearly depraved that they likely shouldn't even be allowed out in public unaccompanied, much less entrusted with power.

It's insane. Literally, completely, staggeringly insane.

Are we actually asking if an utterly vile, demonstrably corrupt, entirely self-serving psychopath who's overseeing a genocide, a violent incremental land grab and repeated attempts to provoke wars with four different neighbors has "finally lost America?"

Every time I think this timeline couldn't possibly be more fucked up, it shocks me yet again.

I was hoping for that.

He's a lame duck now. That means he's free to pursue policies that will add to his legacy, and without having to give even the tiniest shit about what the establishment and the donor class might think about it.

This is an interesting thing to come along right now.

On the one hand, it seems odd in the face of the fact that the Supreme Court appears to be doing everything they can to normalize and even legalize overt corruption. It would seem that all Congress has to do is let them, and they'll benefit from it just as much as the justices will.

But on the other hand, the Supreme Court is also trying to expand their power to legislate from the bench, and that cant be sitting well with Congress. And Alito and Thomas, at least, are so vividly and plainly corrupt that it could be to Congress's advantage, ironic as it might be, to set themselves up as the arbiters of government ethics, specifically to undermine the grotesquely corrupt SC.

Two days and they already reek of desperation and fear.

Throw a few "OP will surely deliver" memes in between the initial promise and this retraction and you'd have a /b/ thread.

It just struck me -

Ironically enough, in a way, these stories are essentially a retelling of Adam's fall from grace, just with some of the details changed.

The basic gist of the story is identical - humans were living in a state of grace right up until the moment that the evil [serpent/christian nationalists/etc.] corrupted them with [knowledge/racism/etc.].

Though I don't feel it myself, there must be some common gut level appeal to that whole idea.

(edited for clarity)

A former prosecutor and attorney general against a compulsive liar and grifter who can barely manage a coherent sentence? Yes please.

Ah.... that's hilarious.

It's not like Trump can appeal to a bunch of undecided bigoted assholes - he already had the bigoted asshole vote locked up.

If they keep it up, by November that's all he'll have.

Nobody tell them. I want to see how long it'll take for them to figure it out on their own. If they do.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

And that's not a thing I say easily or comfortably. ;)

Yeah - I'm aware of that.

I dont think it's particularly relevant to the topic at hand though, which is the jarring similarities between the mechanics of Trump's deportation scheme and the concentration camps of the Third Reich.

That said, it certainly is telling, and not a little ironic, that the regime that Americans generally consider the ur-example of destructive autocracy actually lifted a lot of its strategies and rhetoric from earlier American sources.

Though I have no doubt that one so inclined could trace a lot of the strategies and rhetoric all the way back at least to the Borgias, and undoubtedly further than that.

No surprise there.

Broadly, one can just take a lot of classic Nazi rhetoric and simply replace "Jews" with "immigrants" and one gets current Republican rhetoric.

And that's not a coincidence. The actual point, in both cases, is simply to establish an "other" toward which to get the rank and file to direct their frustration and anger, and in both cases because the rightful targets of their frustration and anger is the ruling class - the same people who are not coincidentally promoting and bankrolling the whole thing.

The article pretty much nails it.

By the rule of law - no. Biden never was the official nominee, since the nominee doesn't become official until after the convention, and the Supreme Court just recently (regarding states' attempts to remove Trump from their ballots) ruled that the states don't have the final say anyway.

So that's pretty much that There's no basis by which they could even vaguely legitimately rule that Biden must remain on the ballot, or even allow a state to rule that.

BUT - this most recent session revealed that the Supreme Court is no longer a body of law - that between blatant corruption and blatant ideological bias, it can and will just conjure whatever ruling might serve the interests of Trump and his coattail-riders out of thin air.

So there's no telling.

Right, but at this point, I wouldn't put it past a court to just dream up some other excuse for ruling as their bias/bribes dictate.

We'll never change the base. Their investment in Trump and conservatism is more akin to religious faith than ideology, and just as with religion, to question it would be to undermine the basis for their (clearly unjustified) conviction that they're decent and moral.

I don't think we really need to worry about changing their children either. Their children are already changing, which is an awful lot of the reason for their egregiously anti-democracy panic. They recognize at some level that the tide of history is turning against them, and they can't stand it. They think they can stop that process through force and fraud, and don't seem to understand that all they can do that way is maybe postpone it a bit, or that bybtrying to save their justly dying ideology that way, they ensure that a day of reckoning will come - that they'll go down in history as not just an abandoned ideology, but a justly condemned one.

I have no doubt his base will ignore it at best, and an awful lot of them will cheer it on.

But the base doesn't matter. They'll vote for him absolutely no matter what.

What matters is all of the moderates and independents and such - all of the people who could go either way. They're the ones who are likely to decide that Trump and the republicans are just too foul to support.

Honestly, I am too.

I fully expected it, but not this soon.

Looking forward to more though. Every one of these is just more votes against Trump.