[Winstonm]

I’m certain he didn’t realize it at the time but “blue collar “ comedian Ron White years ago diagnosed the problem of being Republican today: “You can’t fix stupid!”

[Chas_P]

Winstonm, on 2022-May-14, 18:58, said:

I’m certain he didn’t realize it at the time but “blue collar “ comedian Ron White years ago diagnosed the problem of being Republican today: “You can’t fix stupid!”

After our President made comments this week about inflation, Sen. Kennedy of Louisiana was asked to comment. He said, “the President needs to eat more fiber.”

Let me know if you don’t get it.

[kenberg]

Y66, in post 19720, cites Heather Cox Richardson for her comments about Jen Psaki. I decided to (finally) look up who Heather Cox Richardson is and found an interesting 2020 NYT article with the headline "Heather Cox Richardson offers a break from the media maelstrom. It's working".

I can't say that I have extensively watched Jen Psaki but I have been favorably impressed. From the article:

Quote

"What I am doing is speaking to women who have not necessarily been paying attention to politics, older people who had not been engaged," Dr. Richardson said. "I'm an older woman and I'm speaking to other women about being empowered."

Ok, she thinks of her audience as older women but I don't have any gender identity issues and "older people" is fitting. Still quite possibly my granddaughter (the 29-year-old granddaughter not the 6-year-old granddaughter) would be interested as well.

We are desperately in need of people who can speak calmly, who seek the truth, and who acknowledge that life can sometimes be a bit complicated. Both Heather Cox Richardson and Jen Psaki speak to that need. Ok, Ms Psaki has a job to do and so neutrality should not be expected. But the calm presentation can still be appreciated.

[Winstonm]

kenberg, on 2022-May-15, 07:59, said:

Y66, in post 19720, cites Heather Cox Richardson for her comments about Jen Psaki. I decided to (finally) look up who Heather Cox Richardson is and found an interesting 2020 NYT article with the headline "Heather Cox Richardson offers a break from the media maelstrom. It's working".

I can't say that I have extensively watched Jen Psaki but I have been favorably impressed. From the article:

[/size]

Ok, she thinks of her audience as older women but I don't have any gender identity issues and "older people" is fitting. Still quite possibly my granddaughter (the 29-year-old granddaughter not the 6-year-old granddaughter) would be interested as well.

We are desperately in need of people who can speak calmly, who seek the truth, and who acknowledge that life can sometimes be a bit complicated. Both Heather Cox Richardson and Jen Psaki speak to that need. Ok, Ms Psaki has a job to do and so neutrality should not be expected. But the calm presentation can still be appreciated.

I wish there were more like Michigan’s governor(Whitner)both running and elected.

[y66]

Heather Cox Richardson, American historian said:

“I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term 'replacement,' if you suggest that the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World," Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson, who is one of the country’s leading proponents of the great replacement theory, said on his show. "But they become hysterical because that's what's happening actually. Let's just say it: That's true."

It was not true in 1879, it is not true now, and people making this argument have blood on their hands.

https://heathercoxri...HGpawJ2IKTw&s=r

Blood on their hands and god on their side.

[Winstonm]

y66, on 2022-May-16, 08:18, said:

Blood on their hands and god on their side.

As I said previously: You can’t fix stupid.

[Chas_P]

Winstonm, on 2022-May-16, 10:22, said:

As I said previously: You can’t fix stupid.

Get over yourself Winnie. You are not the sole arbiter of who's stupid. I saw a poll just today which showed that 75% of Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction. Call them stupid if you like but they, like you, also have one vote.

[y66]

Blake Hounshell at NYT said:

https://www.nytimes....epublicans.html

To a degree surpassing any other contest in the 2022 midterms so far, Donald Trump has poured his personal prestige into Pennsylvania’s Republican Senate primary race, which is going through a final spasm of uncertainty as Kathy Barnette, an insurgent candidate with a sparse résumé, gives a last-minute scare to Trump’s pick, Dr. Mehmet Oz.

The outcome of that election, as well as the G.O.P. contest for governor, is threatening to implode the state’s Republican Party — with a blast radius that might be felt in states as far away as Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina over the coming weeks and months.

The turbulence also has major implications for Trump’s hold on the party, which is growing more alarmed that the former president’s involvement in primaries could scupper Republicans’ chances of reclaiming the Senate despite President Biden’s unpopularity.

Trump endorsed Oz, a celebrity physician, over the advice of many Republicans inside and outside Pennsylvania. The bill is coming due, those Republicans now say.

You hate to see it.

[pilowsky]

Chas_P, on 2022-May-16, 17:20, said:

Get over yourself Winnie. You are not the sole arbiter of who's stupid. I saw a poll just today which showed that 75% of Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction. Call them stupid if you like but they, like you, also have one vote.

"I saw a poll"!
There's a reason the silent majority don't have much to say.

[Chas_P]

pilowsky, on 2022-May-16, 18:06, said:

There's a reason the silent majority don't have much to say.

Well it is somewhat discomfiting to know that the "silent majority" exceeds 75% of those polled. They must all be in Australia. LOL.

[Winstonm]

How about that, I found an ass#ole locator: You can’t fix stupid!

[Chas_P]

Winstonm, on 2022-May-16, 18:47, said:

You can’t fix stupid!

Quite true. But hopefully it can be voted out of office. And you, like Biden, need to eat more fiber.

[Gerardo]

Chas_P, on 2022-May-16, 17:20, said:

Get over yourself Winnie. You are not the sole arbiter of who's stupid. I saw a poll just today which showed that 75% of Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction. Call them stupid if you like but they, like you, also have one vote.

Finally the GOP is on its way to getting its wet drean of reversing Roe v Wade.

And ONLY 75% thinks that's the wrong direction? Doomed you are

[y66]

David Leonhardt at NYT said:

https://messaging-cu...896ed87b2d9c72a

Over the past decade, the Anti-Defamation League has counted about 450 U.S. murders committed by political extremists.

Of these 450 killings, right-wing extremists committed about 75 percent. Islamic extremists were responsible for about 20 percent, and left-wing extremists were responsible for 4 percent.

Nearly half of the murders were specifically tied to white supremacists:


Source: Anti-Defamation League

As this data shows, the American political right has a violence problem that has no equivalent on the left. And the 10 victims in Buffalo this past weekend are now part of this toll. “Right-wing extremist violence is our biggest threat,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the ADL, has written. “The numbers don’t lie.”

The pattern extends to violence less severe than murder, like the Jan. 6 attack on Congress. It also extends to the language from some Republican politicians — including Donald Trump — and conservative media figures that treats violence as a legitimate form of political expression. A much larger number of Republican officials do not use this language but also do not denounce it or punish politicians who do use it; Kevin McCarthy, the top House Republican, is a leading example.

It’s important to emphasize that not all extremist violence comes from the right — and that the precise explanation for any one attack can be murky, involving a mixture of ideology, mental illness, gun access and more. In the immediate aftermath of an attack, people are sometimes too quick to claim a direct cause and effect. But it is also incorrect to pretend that right-wing violence and left-wing violence are equivalent problems.

[kenberg]

Mass killings, where the killer does not even know his victims, are different from other killings. For one thing, the killer is a male in all cases I can think of. ADL has data cited above, I wonder if any mass shooting in their data set was done by a woman.

We should go carefully in comparing numbers. There are roughly the same number of men as there are women in the USA. There are, I believe, far more who are on the "American political right" than there are Islamic adherents. It's harder to say of there are more people on the "extremist American political right" than extreme Islamic adherents because we would have to decide what qualifies as extreme and probably the usage of "extreme" would be different.

None of this contradicts the fact that the political right has a violence problem, although I think of it more as those who are inclined toward violence are likely to favor right-wing political views. The difference being that some people are inclined toward violence and those that are, especially violence of the mass killing sort, gravitate toward extreme right-wing views. The tendency for violence was there first. No doubt the tendency for violence and the right-wing political chatter feed on each other.

The Right is very good at being stupid. The article says " Marjorie Taylor Greenesupported the idea of executingBarack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and other top Democrats." Well, not explicitly exactly. She "liked" a post about shooting Nancy Pelosi. She explained others on her staff get to do some of these "likes". Or some such explanation. She did not make a speech saying "Let's shoot Nancy Pelosi". So then she could say "My, my, who would have thought that would happen, I never actually said we should do that". That is pretty much the argument that Trump and his supporters make about Jan 6, and people did die there. Roughly it's "Oh, gee, I never said they should hang Mike Pence, how could I have thought they would try that?" Insanity can be a legal defense, this is more like an idiocy defense. "I am just too stupid to understand that what I said could lead to what happened".


The Right needs to tell the Extreme Right to hit the road. I have often felt that it would help if we did not use adjectives like "extreme". There could be the "Right" and the "Idiots" It's true that the Idiots often speak as if they are part of the Right, but the Right should completely disown them. Liking a post about shooting Pelosi does not put you on the Extreme Right, it puts you among the Idiots.

[Winstonm]

I 100% agree with Dr. Berg that it is imperative to once again marginalize those who insist their brand of radicalism as a sole solution and suggest violent enforcement of those doctrines.

At present that is primarily white supremacy, and the Republican Party is their home but such has not always been. The South used to be solidly Democratic and the white supremacists like George Wallace ran on blue tickets.

However, Republicans are losing now and are too desperate to alienate any voter, regardless of radicalism.

Until the Tucker Carlsons and Alex Joneses of the world are stuffed back into a box and relegated to the closet there is no end in sight. It is both a problem of morality and patriotism whether country or political power is supreme.

[barmar]

Chas_P, on 2022-May-13, 19:34, said:

I readily agree that the Republicans are not perfect. But the Democrats, in my opinion, are insane.

What do you think about the sanity of R's who believe, and make legislative policy based on:

- The "big lie"
- Replacement Theory
- Critical race theory teaches that we're all racists, and grade schools are teaching it
- Abortion should be banned when the majority of the country believes that it should be available in some form.
- Gun ownership isn't a serious problem

These people just ignore reality.

[Winstonm]

Our problems are not political; they are religious.
Specifically, the enemy is the Christian religion. This notion was re-enforced by this article about the racist shooting in Buffalo, NY:

Quote

And they say they saw nothing of the kind of racist rhetoric seen in a 180-page online diatribe, purportedly written by Gendron, in which he describes in minute detail how he researched ZIP codes with the highest concentrations of Black people, surveilled the Tops supermarket in Buffalo, and carried out the assault to terrorize all nonwhite, non-Christian people into leaving the country.

my emphasis

Another phrase that could be used for executions due to refusal to accept religious doctrine is The Inquisition. The white supremacist dogma is deeply imbued with those ideas that are dramatically fundamentalist Protestant; the fundamentalist Catholic voice is based on historical
hierarchy structures, which also places man the gender and man as white race at the top. (See any of Bill Barr's rants speeches.)

This is why there can be no debate; you can't use reason to win an argument of faith.

And, oh yeah, you also can't fix stupid. (Alert! Troll Bait!)

[y66]

All Republicans are zombies? Not so fast.

Jonathan Bernstein said:

https://www.bloomber...author_18529680

Let’s be clear about the lessons that can be drawn so far from this year’s Republican midterm primary elections: Republican voters are not behaving like zombies who automatically do what former President Donald Trump tells them to do. With Pennsylvania, Idaho and North Carolina speaking on Tuesday, a strong pattern regarding candidates endorsed by Trump has emerged.

In Ohio on May 3, J.D. Vance won the Senate nomination with 31% of the vote.

In Nebraska a week later, Charles Herbster lost the gubernatorial nomination with 29% of the vote.

In Pennsylvania this week, Mehmet Oz has 31% of the vote in a Senate primary that’s still too close to call.

And in Idaho, also this week, Janice McGeachin lost the nomination for governor with around 29% of the vote.

Trump’s endorsed candidates did better in two other contests. In North Carolina, Ted Budd won the Senate primary with almost 60% of the vote, but experts attributed that more to heavy spending from the conservative Club for Growth than to Trump’s endorsement, which was one of many for Budd. And Trump jumped very late onto the bandwagon of gubernatorial hopeful Douglas Mastriano in Pennsylvania, but I doubt many will attribute much of his 44% showing to the last-minute endorsement.

On the other hand, while many House incumbents Trump endorsed won easily, as incumbents almost always do in primary elections, one of them lost: North Carolina’s Madison Cawthorn, with 32% of the vote.

Win or lose, then, Trump’s candidates are winning about a third of the vote. That’s not nothing, but it does mean that two-thirds of Republican primary voters are either ignoring or opposing his wishes.

Trump’s real effect is surely smaller than that. Yes, there’s a good chance Vance would have wound up as a single-digit also-ran without the endorsement. But McGeachin is lieutenant governor of Idaho and the radical portion of the party that backed her challenge to the sitting governor is strong in that state; it seems likely that Trump added very little there. Surely Oz’s fame as a celebrity TV doctor would have won him some votes in Pennsylvania, Trump or no Trump.

There’s more to the story of Trump’s influence than the fact that most Republican voters ignore or oppose his endorsement. But I’ll disagree with elections analyst Nathan Gonzalez, who tweeted on Wednesday, “This is still Trump's GOP whether his endorsed candidates win or not.”

I think political scientist Nadia Brown is closer to the mark in her comment about Pennsylvania: “The hot takes will all be about Trump & his influence. I'm so over this angle of reporting. Trump is the kingmaker because everything he does is covered & less attention is paid to the candidate.”

What I’d add is that party actors — the Club for Growth, big individual funders such as the Silicon Valley billionaire and Vance backer Peter Thiel, politicians with local clout such as Republican Senator Thom Tillis in North Carolina, a big player in Cawthorn’s defeat, and most of all Republican-aligned media such as Fox News and talk radio hosts — are probably a much bigger story in terms of actually moving votes than Trump is.

Moreover, while it’s convenient to slap the Trumpism label on the radicalism of the dominant coalition within the party, it’s far from clear that Trump has much say in what Trumpism actually means. Sure, he’s successfully pushed candidates to talk about fictional fraud in the 2020 election, but Republicans were obsessed with fictional voter fraud long before Trump began his 2016 campaign, and resentment has been a winning theme in Republican politics far longer than that.

So when the Washington Post’s Annie Linskey says that “Trumpism is having a better record than Trump himself tonight,” I’d say that the strain of the party that emerges as Trumpism or Tea Partyism or Gingrichism or Nixonism or McCarthyism — and yes, there are differences among those incarnations of right-wing radicalism but it’s not hard to see continuity as well — is particularly dominant within the party now, but it just doesn’t have all that much to do with Trump.

[Winstonm]

Quote

Moreover, while it’s convenient to slap the Trumpism label on the radicalism of the dominant coalition within the party, it’s far from clear that Trump has much say in what Trumpism actually means.

Actually, it's pretty easy to determine Trumpism: it's redefining American foreign policy according to foreign government wishes and then auctioning off American foreign policy to the highest bidder, i.e., monetizing the presidency.
https://www.emptywhe...ump-presidency/