I wouldn’t worry about it. The moment the Republican Party stops existing, the Democratic Party will schism.
True…and that could work. It would be great to have the presidential election be between a Bernie (or Warren or Abrams or Ocasio) type and a Hillary (or Whitmer or Romney or Buttegeig) type.
Go stroke a gun, you fucking weirdo fetishist.
lolwut?
Taking an Old Testament approach, God did hit the US with a plague during the Trump Administration, killing over a million people. So obviously she was displeased. So… yeah?
I’d consider criticizing her timing, and that 2017 might have made the connection a bit more explicit, but on reflection, waiting until 2020 was probably wise, as it took into account the famously short American attention span.
Well, Biblically speaking, God took their own sweet time in getting the Jews out of Egypt and Babylon, so three years is a God In A Hurry.
I laughed.
Once a man said to God, “What’s a million years to you?”
God said, "A second.”
So the man said to God, “What’s a million dollars to you?”
God said, “A penny.”
So the man said to God, “Would you give me a penny?”
God stopped and said, “Yes I will, just a second.”
‘Hey! I was busy trying to figure out that whole regrowing amputated limbs thing…
One of these days I will figure that one out. I mean it’s not like I’m actually and not just maximally omnipotent!’
Yahweh
Nah, I told my parents that they were supporting fascism on a regular basis.
We talked about other things, of course, but if they brought up the subject of politics, then I certainly had no trouble telling them exactly what I thought of their support of the Republican party.
And that would be people like my sister. She was raised Republican, she was taught that Republicans were good and Democrats were evil, just as I was. She just never found reason to question that dogma. She’s got 5 kids and a more than full-time job, so she doesn’t pay much, if any, attention to the news or politics. She just votes for the R, as she has done all her life and will continue to do all her life.
When she does hear bad stuff about Trump, she sees that as the evil Democrats just hating him and trying to hurt him by telling stories. And of course, if people say bad stuff about Biden, it’s because Biden is a bad president and a bad person.
It’s low information viewed through a partisan lense.
Sorry for all the quotes but I want to focus on this…phenomenon a bit more.
When I first heard Rush back in the late 80’s, I instantly recognized his tactics (as such) for what they were, and quite independently of his actual views and specific rhetoric (which were appalling enough on their own). Long story short he came off as a pure huckster, and knew that someone who used such machinations was simply NOT to be listened to much less trusted because people who do that almost certainly will have some hidden agenda which would ultimately be inimical to my morals and values (if I were to find out what said agenda was). There thus was less than zero reasons to pay any attention to such a person, regardless of what my political leanings might be.
Fast forward a decade. I had a very liberal friend, environmentalist, that I met through a (former) girlfriend c. 1992. Once I had checked out a book on Christianity from the library to research some topic (note I am a Taoist if you were to try to pin me down). When he saw the book he looked at me like I had lost my mind.
I had been in graduate school in another state for four years. When I came back to town, he had somehow morphed into a total Dittohead, spouting all sorts of Dominionist rhetoric after (he said) he had been “born again.” The LAST guy in the world I would have expected to have undergone such a change.
So, what “grievances” would he had had, then? He had fairly well-off parents (who, note, lived in a loveless marriage of convenience). What could the likes of Rush or Hannity (he became a big fanboy of the latter) possibly say that would have appealed to the liberally moral guy that I had known? He wasn’t any sort of looker but still got his share of dates so wasn’t an incel.
Relevant Note: he fell into a deep well of guilt and despair after his fiance-who I never met note-got killed in a car accident when he was driving. Said her brilliant light filled his mind right before he was going to pull the trigger on his suicide gun.
So a near-death vision turns you into a Dittohead?
It’s happened to both of my moms too (I am adopted and met my birth mother 25 years ago). My adoptive mother (now 89) 3 years ago once complained to me about Trump’s kids in cages. When I casually broached the subject 2 months later she claimed she had no idea what I was talking about and proclaimed her support for his wall and detention policies.
Meanhoo I’d go to my birth mother’s house and see crap like that book by that convicted felon D’souza guy lying around, and again could not fathom what today’s right-wing rhetoric could possibly appeal to these otherwise morally upstanding women.
You people go on here with your just-so stories: oh, they have ‘grievances’…oh, they were racists all along, nothing more needs to be said…oh, they just want to save a few bucks on their income taxes and not have de ewul libewuls steal all der monee…oh, they have an authoritarian mindset & need someone to tell them what to do…oh, they just want to stick it to the libs…oh, their brains are wired differenty and are driven by fear and dislike of uncertainty…
When there are LESS THEN ZERO reasons (or even nonreasons) for ANYONE in this country to fall for such rhetoric and bullshit. NONE. And all of your theorizing about why this and why that simply is completely and utterly inadequate to even begin to explain it. Something is FUNDAMENTALLY broken in these people’s minds, something much deeper than mere racism and “I’m alright, Jack, keep your hands off of my stack and don’t give me that do goody good bullshit.”
THEY WOULD RATHER SEE THE WORLD BURN THAN TO SACK IT THE FYUCK UP AND ADMIT THEY WERE WRONG. [about everything] That isn’t mere politics, or psychology, or whatever. All your notions are utterly inadquate to explain it.
You can’t explain Trumpism rationally. You can’t even explain it irrationally. It’s simply something which should’t have happened-COULDN’T have happened. Yet it did.
Something is deeply wrong with this world, that’s all I can ultimately say.
Except he didn’t just say it once – he pounded it on Twitter from 2011 until well into his 2016 presidential campaign. It was basically the foundation of his political career.
Could people have still not heard about it? Sure. But it wasn’t some trivial thing that was easy to miss.
That’s the thing everyone needs to realize; people who supported G. W. Bush were wrong, but people who supported (and still support) Donald Trump are evil. You can’t compromise with evil.
Here an interesting article on birtherism I enjoyed:
I’m no Conservative, but Bush the Elder was smart and had a lot of experience in government and foreign affairs. Though I disagreed with his policies, I wouldn’t call his supporters ‘wrong’. Bush the Younger, on the other hand…
I agree with the assessment of Bush the elder, who I thought was G. H. W. Bush, and Bush the younger, who I thought was G. W. Bush. I might have gotten their initials swapped. WASPS have funny names sometimes.
Bush the Younger, and his eventual legacy, kind of got overwhelmed by history. I think a lot of people have forgotten in the maelstrom of 9/11 and the War on Terror that BtY was never supposed to be a great President. In Bush vs. Gore, they were both nominated because they were the respective Rep and Dem candidates least likely to offend anyone, or to rock the boat too much. We were coming out of the 90s “End of History” era, with a mostly decent economy, and no one really wanted much in the way of radical change.
This is why the 2000 election came down to essentially a coin flip. There just wasn’t that much to distinguish one over the other.
Trump on the other hand…