Bill Maher used to say that the difference between the two parties is that the Democrats are controlled by a slightly less scary group of special interests than the Republicans.
My take is that the Democrats are indifferent to my personal needs and vision for the country as a whole, while the Republicans work actively against both of them.
Basset hounds are also quite intelligent. They just don’t generally gaf. Mine used to pick people’s pockets, very carefully remove all the contents of their wallets and arrange them in a circle on the floor, and then sit in the middle looking proud of himself. I never did catch him in the process of doing it, so I could never figure out how a dog pulled stuff out of a wallet intact. But I digress.
I have many things in common with the stereotypical gay man (including love of showtunes), but as one of them isn’t “sexual attraction to other men” I consider that a reasonable indication that I’m not actually a gay man. Plus, showtunes are awesome.
I’m sure your basset hound was smart, and therefore must have been smarter than Herschel Walker by a very wide margin. But this is more along the lines of there being outliers in every group, like Walker being far over on the low side of the bell curve of human intelligence. Hounds are different than other working dogs who are selected and bred for capabilities that require intelligence, because traditionally their usefulness in scent tracking is innate, so they’re not specifically selected for the ability to learn things. But every breed has smart individuals.
CNN showed Herschel Walker at the debate flashing his honorary sheriff badge, though he was never in law enforcement of any kind. He also claimed to have worked for the FBI. Which led Andy Borowitz to post this article …
Last Friday Bill Maher had a pretty wild hypothesis about why Republicans vote for reprehensible morons like Walker and Trump and some of the other nuts in Congress. He thinks it’s a way for them to say to Democrats, “we hate your woke socialist liberal policies so much that we’re willing to vote for these completely unqualified imbeciles instead of you”.
There might be a grain of truth to that, arising of course from the way such “liberal” policies have been characterized and misrepresented by right-wing media. It’s implicit in the “Save America” slogan – that voting for Democrats will mean the end of American democracy as we know it, which is ironic because jeopardizing democracy is exactly what Republicans are actually doing, with election cheating, blatant lying, outright insurrectionist violence, and nominating imbeciles to important positions that they’re totally unqualified for.
It’s entirely true that they would vote for a pile of hot garbage as long as it had an (R) after its name, but it is driven entirely by tribalism and the kneejerk defense of anyone on their side. The justification that no matter how bad the Republican candidates are, the Democratic ones must be worse is post hoc spin. Which is why, as the actual GOP continues to jettison any remaining non-batshit members, their claims about how bad the Democrats are get increasingly extreme and further removed from reality; they need to keep building bigger and scarier straw men in order to make their own people look better by comparison.
Elections are no longer about policy positions or candidate qualifications (if they ever were, admittedly). They are - at least for Republicans - about winning for one’s side at all costs, no matter what. Democrats are still willing to at least vet out their worst candidates, although the worse the GOP get, the more the Dems are going to become the “never ever ever GOP” party which will inevitably end up resulting in nominations for “Garbage, Hot (D)” if the opposition can’t ever be considerable a viable alternative.
Personally (as a registered independent), I’d love to have the option to choose between two qualified and coherent candidates based on policy positions. Instead, I seem to be increasingly left to choose between feckless incompetence (D) and delusional Dominionist proto-fascism (R). No wonder the country is the way it is.
Listen. Strange men standing in flood plains distributing badges is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony. You can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just 'cause some watery tart threw a badge at you! I mean, if I went 'round saying I was a sheriff just because some moistened bint had lobbed a badge at me, they’d put me away!
I can understand the tribalism stuff, even if I don’t agree with it, but come on, at least find a member of the tribe that isn’t a complete disaster. They still exist, you know! John Kerry isn’t dead yet, is he?
I mean, I’m a fan of my local football team, but with these guys, it’s like they decided to field a team where the quarterback is blind, the receivers are all in wheelchairs, the linesmen all have multiple prosthetics, and the coaches all played basketball in college. And then they wonder why they keep losing?