tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2022452485619502579.post8779658113650848083..comments2024-03-28T09:38:52.661-04:00Comments on thwap's schoolyard: Brief Thoughts on the Recent Chaos Over Speaker of the House of Representativesthwaphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15399550285738440669noreply@blogger.comBlogger7125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2022452485619502579.post-71176426349333376142023-01-08T06:55:11.385-05:002023-01-08T06:55:11.385-05:00PLG,
I have nothing to add to your analysis of th...PLG,<br /><br />I have nothing to add to your analysis of the phenomenon of right-wing rebels refusing to bend no matter the collatoral damage and left-wing rebels propensity to do the opposite to avoid collatoral damage.<br /><br />I had one more thought re: Trump - Russia - right-wing "patriotism."<br /><br />Putin is hated by Hillary Clinton. Right-wingers see (accurately) that Putin hasn't actually targeted the USA and that most of the Democrat & Democrat-allied media lie about him. Putin is actually a right-wing, anti-regulation, social conservative. An extreme social conservative. Homophobic, anti-feminist. They like him.<br /><br />Also, <a href="https://thwapschoolyard.blogspot.com/2021/08/what-hath-russiagate-wrought.html" rel="nofollow">at this post</a> I mention a "moderate" Republican's thoughts on the consequences of russiagate that Glenn Greenwald featured on one of his websites:<br /><br />"Many of them deny it now, but a lot of 2016 Trump voters were worried during the early stages of the Russia collusion investigation. True, the evidence seemed thin, and the very idea that the US and allied security apparatus would allow Trump to take office if they really thought he might be under Russian blackmail seemed a bit preposterous on its face. But to many conservatives in 2016 and early 2017, it seemed equally preposterous that the institutions they trusted, and even the ones they didn’t, would go all-in on a story if there wasn’t at least something to it. Imagine the consequences for these institutions if it turned out there was nothing to it.<br /><br />We now know that the FBI and other intelligence agencies conducted covert surveillance against members of the Trump campaign based on evidence manufactured by political operatives working for the Clinton campaign, both before and after the election. <br /><br />...<br /><br />They might have expected such behavior from the Clintons — politics is a violent game and Hillary’s got a lot of scalps on her wall. But many of the people watching this happen were Tea Party types, in spirit if not in actual fact. They give their kids a pocket Constitution for their birthday. They have Yellow Ribbon bumper stickers, and fly the POW/MIA flag under the front-porch Stars and Stripes, and curl their lip at people who talk during the National Anthem at ballgames. They’re the people who believed their institutions when they were told Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. To them, the intel community using fake evidence (including falsified documents) to spy on a presidential campaign is a big deal.<br /><br />It may surprise many liberals, but most conservative normies actually know the Russia collusion case front and back. A whole ecosystem sprouted up to pore over every new development, and conservatives followed the details as avidly as any follower of liberal conspiracy theorists Seth Abramson or Marcy Wheeler.<br /><br />...<br /><br />There’s no need to relive all the details of the Russia collusion scam. The point is that conservatives were following it all very closely, in real time, and they noticed when things didn’t add up. <br /><br />...<br /><br />For two years, Trump supporters had been called traitors and Russian bots for casting ballots for 'Vladimir Putin’s c*ck holster.' They’d been subjected to a two-year gaslighting campaign by politicians, government agencies, and elite media. It took real fortitude to stand up to the unanimous mockery and scorn of these powerful institutions. But those institutions had gambled their power and credibility, and they’d lost, and now Trump supporters expected a reckoning. When no reckoning was forthcoming - when the Greenwalds, and Taibbis, and Matés of the world were not handed the New York Times’ revoked Pulitzers for correctly and courageously standing against the tsunami on the biggest political story in years - these people shed many illusions about how power really operates in their country."<br /><br />thwaphttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15399550285738440669noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2022452485619502579.post-52833851085522806872023-01-08T06:36:37.185-05:002023-01-08T06:36:37.185-05:00PLG,
So, for your first comment: Trump's asce...PLG,<br /><br />So, for your first comment: Trump's ascension was really a natural development in the process of right-wing brainwashing that had been going on forever (with pro-business "think tanks" funding the latter-year acting careers of people like Ronald Reagan, and "institutes" that advanced "free market" solutions to problems created by corporate greed (DDT, polluted rivers, etc.)<br /><br />This carried on with the Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch's media empire, featuring bullying hosts like Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly.<br /><br />It also carried on with the aggressive militarization of US-American culture in response to the peace movement. Everything was designed to promote the creation of the boorish, ignorant, authoritarian, toxic male, white-skinned asshole.<br /><br />But with Trump, ... I've written about this here before, ... Trump's rickety empire of corruption required exotic sources of funding and money laundering for Russian gangsters was one of them. And this made him sympathetic to Russians' point of views. Everyone thought the forever wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were a bad idea and Trump couldn't figure out the animosity towards Putin helping Assad, and therefore (one would think) the USA in helping destroy ISIS.<br /><br />Trump's position threatened a funding source for the Military Industrial Complex and, yeah, the brazen nature of his corruption threatened to expose the workings of the whole system.thwaphttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15399550285738440669noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2022452485619502579.post-24616342113964618872023-01-07T21:18:43.659-05:002023-01-07T21:18:43.659-05:00PLG,
Fucking brilliant. I'm too stoned right...PLG,<br /><br />Fucking brilliant. I'm too stoned right now to compose a thoughtful reply. But fucking brilliant.<br /><br />Thwaperinothwaphttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15399550285738440669noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2022452485619502579.post-71076922499969991802023-01-07T16:17:08.005-05:002023-01-07T16:17:08.005-05:00When I think about it, probably the weirdest outco...When I think about it, probably the weirdest outcome of the whole Trump-is-a-traitor-colluding-with-Russia schtick is that it actually unmoored many Republicans from the broader kind of US patriotism. In the alt-right, there are now tons of guys who would vote for Putin before they would vote for Biden (let alone Kamala Harris).<br /><br />This circles back to that resolute fanaticism that we see on the hard right, that was willing for instance to hang tough and extract a ton of concessions in the Speaker vote (and I believe they did in fact successfully extract a bunch). And I think one key is that they would have been fine with it <b>even if they failed</b>. The hard right are bloody-minded, aggressive, and contemptuous of rationalism. They would rather lose than compromise, and they don't care who suffers as a result of any scorched earth tactics they may use. And the thing is that strategically, that is actually a pretty powerful approach. If you look at the game theory of it, it is actually the Squad and other compromise-y "progressives" who have it wrong. If you refuse to compromise, you may lose various individual fights. But, others dealing with you will come to know that there is no point trying to extract concessions from you; if you have any power it will gradually be magnified because people will know they have to appease you to get anything done. And when you do win, you will win big.<br /><br />The key may be in the "don't care who suffers" part. So for instance, the hard right are willing to entirely shut down government, let the civil service and the poor starve and Medicare-oriented medical care shut down and people die en masse just to make some political point about debt levels that they don't even believe. Progressives tend to be the kind of people who can be told "Well, if you keep fighting this you'll lose and nothing will happen, but if you compromise we'll throw you this bone which will give a thousand people a job, or put a tiny category of people back on food stamps. You don't want those people to suffer, do you?" But as it becomes established that the progressive is someone who will compromise, they'll be made to compromise on their compromises to their compromises until their gains approach zero. In the end they'd have gotten more for their constituents by refusing to be fobbed off with molecules in the bucket. And they'd be politically more effective in the sense of having some red meat to throw their constituents.<br /><br />Mind you, with AOC I'm not even sure that's the problem. She voted to screw the railway workers, and she wasn't even pushed into it as far as I can tell.Purple library guyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01930984683714519212noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2022452485619502579.post-88067152310486667262023-01-07T16:16:55.508-05:002023-01-07T16:16:55.508-05:00It always amazed me . . . Trump was guilty of pret...It always amazed me . . . Trump was guilty of pretty much everything under the sun . . . EXCEPT the core thing they were accusing him of. Couldn't they have just picked some of the myriad things he WAS guilty of? <br /><br />The problem being I guess that all the stuff he was guilty of, Democratic politicians were guilty of too. Sure, not as flagrantly or blatantly, and probably no single Democratic politico was guilty of nearly as MANY of them as Trump, but it would still mean a lot of embarrassing back-and-forth finger pointing and in general a violation of the gentlemen's agreement in Washington that you don't bug people over a bit of corruption or where will it end? Trump probably represented a quantitative increase in corruption level so large that it represented a qualitative change as well, but he just represented a general trend--the US is going through a sort of corruption chain reaction where the ascendance of corruption produces laws and norms that make corruption easier which makes corruption ascend more which produces etc. etc.; ultimately everyone else was in on the scam too.<br /><br />So they needed something fundamentally different. Something that wasn't about corruption, which everyone in the US takes for granted anyway. Something that would actually push the buttons of US citizens and at least seem like something even a politician <b>just shouldn't do</b>. Collusion with a foreign power! Pushes the nationalist jingoism button, something that can usually be relied on in Americans. Something that's even more serious when a politician does it. Unfortunately it probably wasn't true, but when do politicians ever worry about that? I expect they considered that a minor detail which could easily be massaged. And they may have been right--fringe people like you or me try to figure out whether he was actually working with Putin, but in general Democrats say it's true because it's dirt about their enemy, and Republicans say it's false because the Dems say it's true, and it actually <b>being</b> true wouldn't change either of their opinions.<br /><br />Purple library guyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01930984683714519212noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2022452485619502579.post-65062943854630999962023-01-07T15:11:19.969-05:002023-01-07T15:11:19.969-05:00Cap,
Someone else wrote that about the Republican...Cap,<br /><br />Someone else wrote that about the Republicans reaping what they have sown by catering to extremists.<br /><br />In our case, it isn't the Democratic leadership that is suffering, it's those who put their faith in either the Democratic Party or its "loyal opposition" (the Squad) or both the party and its progressive wing.<br /><br />We saw all this before in the 1920's and 1930's. The establishment consensus fucks everything up. Some people turn "left" others "right." The oligarchy favours rightists and ends up subsidizing fascism. And leftists, it seems, splinter into fragments. I guess that I'm as guilty of that as anyone.<br /><br />I'll concede to what you said about Mueller and evidence of collusion. At the time I thought that Barr was accurate when he relayed the essential point of Mueller's report, and that he only began to editorialize when he started saying that Trump had been thoroughly vindicated.<br /><br />I remember Mueller's stupid indictments of foreign nationals being treated as the equivalent of convictions of crimes and Mueller running for the hills when one of the Russians named in his indictments came and asked for his day in court. <br /><br />I remember Roger Stone NOT being privy to Wikileaks insider information. He was convicted of lying for saying that he was and for [not seriously] threatening a witness who said that he wasn't.<br /><br />I remember Paul Manafort being convicted of sharing polling data and for not being a registered lobbyist or something or other.<br /><br />I remember [and continue to know since "The Guardian" hasn't retracted the error] the lie about Manafort visiting Assange at the Ecuadoran Embassy in London.<br /><br />I remember that Mueller interviewed neither Assange or Craig Murray in his attempt to leave no stone unturned.<br /><br />I remember Mueller himself pronouncing the Trump Tower meeting as nothing.<br /><br />Etc., etc., ... Steele Dossier totally discredited.<br /><br />But maybe you know something I don't.<br /><br />Interet Research Agency memes that amounted to nothing. etc. etc.,thwaphttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15399550285738440669noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2022452485619502579.post-57940452452828931142023-01-07T12:28:53.383-05:002023-01-07T12:28:53.383-05:00I agree that Squad members have consistently faile...I agree that Squad members have consistently failed to pressure Dem leaders into supporting their positions, and the same can be said for Sanders. You get the behaviour you reward, whether that's on the right or the left. The right has a long history of rewarding extremists - Newt Gingrich, Tom Delay, Donald Trump, etc. The "left" punishes them in the name of centrism and bipartisanship. The Squad is pure kabuki to placate progressive voters. <br /><br />BTW, Mueller never said he found NO EVIDENCE of Trump campaign-Russia collusion, that was Barr's spin. Prosecutors don't talk that way. The Mueller report outlines plenty of evidence of Trump-Russia collusion, but Mueller wasn't convinced he had enough to get a criminal conviction. Claiming Mueller found NO EVIDENCE of Trump-Russia collusion is about as accurate as saying the RCMP found no evidence that Harper and his associates tried to bribe Duffy.<br /><br />CapAnonymousnoreply@blogger.com