Politics Random, Random

[ponchi101]

What IQ level do you need to have to VOTE FOR THIS WOMAN?
It comes to a point in which you cannot simply blame her, and only her, for what she says. The people that voted for her also have to explain what led to that vote.

[ti-amie]

Was it here that I read the county she's from in Georgia was home to one of the founding members of the John Birch Society?

[ti-amie]

Where was this jacka** when Tiny was using AF1 to go golfing?

[ponchi101]

I forgot to upload the old emoji with the firing rifle... What an idiot.
And, BTW. Jan has to learn to answer these sorts of questions with: "He lives there". "AF1 is a private plane".
Deadpan the stuff. Don't fall for the trap.

[ti-amie]

[skatingfan]

Where was this jacka** when Tiny was using AF1 to go golfing?

They've brought this problem on themselves. If you have coherent policies then you're going to be asked why they don't apply to the President. The government recommends not travelling, and so the President shouldn't travel either.

[ti-amie]

Where was this jacka** when Tiny was using AF1 to go golfing?

They've brought this problem on themselves. If you have coherent policies then you're going to be asked why they don't apply to the President. The government recommends not travelling, and so the President shouldn't travel either.

He's taking AF1, a private plane. He follows C19 protocols. What is he supposed to do take Amtrak like he used to do for these weekend visits?

[ponchi101]

How do you fly in a 747 from DC to Delaware? It is like 50 miles in a straight line. They won't even have time to retract the landing gear...

[ti-amie]

DC to Bedminster, NJ by air isn't a big distance either.

[ti-amie]

Unless our system changes, a third party can't survive long term. If one branch of the GOP splits off, either it will overwhelm the GOP or it will become irrelevant/die out within a decade.

Opinion: The GOP is making a very risky bet

Opinion by
Paul Waldman
Columnist
Feb. 5, 2021 at 12:53 p.m. EST

As the GOP struggles to find its way toward a post-Trump future, Republicans are faced with two paths. One is complicated, difficult, labor-intensive and might not yield immediate benefits, even if it’s far more morally defensible. The other is a little uncomfortable but comparatively easy, particularly in the short term.

The first path would mean turning away from their party’s darkest impulses and most repugnant figures in order to fashion an identity with the same substantive beliefs about policy but tethered to reality. The second path would mean trying to keep the extremists in the fold, hoping that they can benefit from the crazy but not let it define them with the broader electorate.

From a purely political standpoint, both paths have dangers. But the latter is the one the GOP is going to follow, even if it runs the risk of alienating moderates and exacerbating its long-term problem of representing a portion of the electorate that gets smaller every year — and only the angriest among them.

At the moment, this concerns Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who has gotten far more attention than anyone could have imagined back when she was just another conspiracy-touting social media nitwit. She is now the most famous member of the freshman class of 2021.

But political celebrity is unpredictable; sometimes a figure with remarkable talent bursts into the national consciousness, like Barack Obama did when he gave the keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, and sometimes your crazy aunt winds up in Congress, then the other party makes her into a symbol of her own party’s moral depravity, and she becomes a household name.

On Thursday, the House voted to strip Greene of her committee assignments, with 11 Republicans joining all the Democrats. This occurred despite Greene clarifying that she now believes the 9/11 attacks were real and school shootings are not staged with child actors. But her contrition did not last long:

https://twitter.com/mtgreenee?ref_src=t ... sky-bet%2F

It’s noteworthy that Greene describes the ordinary status of being in the House minority as living under “this Democrat tyrannical government.” But that’s a key component of the GOP extremist’s ideology: When Democrats get elected, it can only be because elections were stolen and any Democratic governance is inherently illegitimate.

What House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and the rest of the party’s leadership would like is for Greene and others like her not to go away, but to just keep a lower profile. They want the unhinged base’s energy and anger to drive the turnout that could give Republicans back congressional majorities in the 2022 midterms. McCarthy doesn’t really care if you think House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) runs a satanic child-trafficking conspiracy and literally eats babies, as long as your delusions get you to the polling place.

The trouble is that in today’s political world, there are no more dog whistles, messages heard by only one segment of your party but unnoticed by everyone else. Democrats decided to make Greene famous, and so she is.

Now consider the alternative for Republicans. Let’s say they truly broke with the extremists and said they want nothing to do with them. The votes they lost by doing so would have to be made up somewhere, which would mean finding ways to appeal to the moderates who rejected President Donald Trump in 2020. That means developing new policies to improve people’s lives and building a party identity based on something other than anger and resentment.

They could do that, but the ongoing culture war that draws on, and draws in, the loony right is just a lot easier. All the work it requires is symbolic — finding fights to start, shouting angrily on Fox News — and there are plenty of people in the party eager to do it.

Democrats hope that holding moderates and holding the extremists will be mutually exclusive for the GOP. “You can do QAnon, and you can do swing districts, but you can’t do both,” says Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.), who chairs the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

There are many Republicans who fear that’s true, but there are others — probably including McCarthy — who think they can do both. The controversy around Greene will blow over, and they’ll be able to keep the far right on a low boil while they tell moderate voters that President Biden is a failure and electing Republicans to Congress will solve the practical problems of their lives.

The truth is that no one knows for sure, because this is a novel situation. You can look to the experience of the tea party in the Obama years — which helped Republicans take back Congress despite being plenty extreme itself — but the comparison gets you only so far.

That’s because in the eyes of an ordinary person, there’s a difference between protesters prancing around in tricorn hats while they do their Founding Father cosplay, and a murderous mob storming the Capitol.

Or at least one assumes there would be, and if Republicans don’t reject their extremists, then they’ll bleed votes in key suburban districts, where some will decide they can no longer have anything to do with a party that includes QAnon and violent insurrectionists.

If American politics in recent years had taught us that people and parties inevitably pay a price for their cynicism and morally indefensible choices, we could be more certain about how the GOP’s bet will turn out. But we can’t. So given the alternative, Republicans are willing to roll the dice on placating their extremists.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... risky-bet/

[ti-amie]

[JazzNU]

Where was this jacka** when Tiny was using AF1 to go golfing

My favorite reply to that video.

[ti-amie]

This is what I meant about doing as Mitch would do. Eff 'em.

[ti-amie]

I put this here because some are trying to belittle AOC's sharing of her trauma during 1/6. Of course they're playing politics so here we are.

Opinion: I denied my combat trauma for years. Survivors of the Capitol attack must not do the same.

Opinion by Jason Kander
Feb. 5, 2021 at 1:48 p.m. EST

Former Missouri secretary of state Jason Kander is the president of Veterans Community Project and hosts the political podcast “Majority 54.”

Some advice for the members of Congress, their staff, law enforcement, building employees and anyone else who lived through the violent insurrection attempt Jan. 6 at the Capitol: Don’t make the same mistake I did.

For the decade after I served a tour as an Army intelligence officer in Afghanistan in 2006 and 2007, I denied the trauma I brought home with me. For 10 years, I compared, ranked and ultimately dismissed my own combat experience. Unlike some of my friends, I hadn’t been physically wounded; fortunately, I’d never had to kill another human being. So I ignored my violent nightmares, hyper-vigilance, shame, self-loathing and emotional numbness.

I hid my symptoms from everyone. I became depressed. I eventually fell into suicidal ideation. All because I didn’t think my trauma measured up.

You, too, have undergone trauma. Armed insurrectionists smashed their way into your place of work, looking to kill the people inside. They placed pipe bombs near the building you walk into every day. It would be normal — not unique; normal — for it to have affected you. If you believe that anyone whose workplace or school was terrorized by an attack is justified in seeking counseling, you must extend yourself the same compassion.

Some of the lawmakers present on Jan. 6 have already taken the brave step of opening up, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) virally among them. Many received her candor about fearing for her life with appropriate compassion, but others — some of them her Republican colleagues — mocked it. While their craven partisan motive is as disgusting as it is predictable, the real damage won’t be to her, but in the chilling effect that sort of reaction has on the rest of you inside the Capitol that day who might be inclined to understate your wounds.

Cynical forces might seek to dismiss your trauma, to politicize your decision to even see it as trauma. Do not let their self-interested spin keep you from help. Do not let their words work their way into your head: “They never came banging on my door. They didn’t leave death threats on my desk. I shouldn’t let this affect me.” An individual brain doesn’t know or care what another has experienced, just as one arm broken slipping down the Capitol steps wouldn’t be any less serious if someone else broke both.

And for all you know, the unaffected appearance of some who survived the insurrection might be a pretense. Perhaps they’re just waiting for someone else to go first. Your decision to open up and get help might allow them to do the same. Getting help can be scary because it requires that you admit that something is wrong — and it is terrifying to think that something is wrong.

The constraints of working in the public eye only ratchet up those worries. Whether as Missouri secretary of state or later as a potential presidential candidate, I repeatedly denied the reality of my situation because — among other reasons — I didn’t think I could be so openly flawed and hold office at the same time. But I was wrong. And even if I had been right, it wouldn’t have mattered, because my health should have come first.

You suffered an injury, and it is normal to treat an injury. In fact, it is not normal to not treat an injury. Treating it doesn’t mean you can’t do your job; it simply means you can do your job better.

Eventually, I got help, and today I am living a productive and enjoyable life of post-traumatic growth. I do not dread going to sleep. I can sit with my back to a door. I love what I do, I like who I am, and I’m emotionally present as a father and husband. But I nearly waited too long, all because I didn’t think I’d done enough to earn the right to label what I experienced as trauma.

Ignore all the forces that discourage you from treating your wounds, and listen to me when I tell you what you experienced was real. You don’t have to feel this way. If you commit to trauma counseling, you can get to a point where it won’t disrupt your life.

And as for the shaming and the judging — either internal or external — please consider this article whatever validation you need. Print it, clip it, laminate it to remind yourself or anyone who shames you that a veteran who came home from Afghanistan with post-traumatic stress disorder wrote you this therapy permission slip and urged you to use it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... t-do-same/

[JazzNU]

I put this here because some are trying to belittle AOC's sharing of her trauma during 1/6. Of course they're playing politics so here we are.

Talking a big game now. But we all saw the video of them on the ground in the aisles and rows of the chambers scared (expletive) clutching their gas masks as they waited for rescue hoping they weren't going to die before then. AOC and the Dems aren't the only ones traumatized, just the only ones speaking out in public.