I think Mr. Bannon is playing a joke on you.
You may be right.
‘Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…’
Winston S Churchill, 11 November 1947
This. Complaining about the Democratic party at this point is like complaining that the fireman carrying you out of a fire has some serious BO. There’s a time and place for those complaints, and its not while the GOP exists.
This post sounds like it could have been written by Alyssa Milano
+++.
Roman autocrats needed spectacles of lions mauling gladiators to keep their citizens in line. Americans are a simpler, stupider people, and more easily distracted. Trump will be re-elected.
Trump will be re-elected, but that’s not the reason why. It has nothing to do with people needing a “spectacle.” It has everything to do with the fact that the Democrats don’t have their shit together at all, they’re totally a “circular firing squad” and will only continue to be such…between Biden who’s too old and too white for the progressives, Bernie who’s too radical and too risky for the centrists, both Bernie AND Biden being too male for people who want to see a woman and too white for people who want to see a minority; and then Warren who has zero personal charisma, Kamala Harris who’s talking about executive orders for gun control, Cory Booker who I initially had high hopes for but seems to be getting lost in the shuffle; Beto who has had all of his thunder stolen by Buttigieg; who himself seems to be catching flak from progressives and peaceniks for being too generous to Trump supporters and having a career in Military Intelligence that stokes their fears about the surveillance state and US warmongering.
That may read like a long-winded and overly pessimistic description of the candidates. What it actually is, is a summary of everything I’ve seen people posting on Facebook over the past few days.
The day I heard Democrats squabbling over the issue of giving incarcerated prisoners the right to vote - of all fucking things to argue about RIGHT NOW (!) - was the day I knew we were doomed. We are doomed. These candidates are all a mess. Some of them are kinda OK, like Pete, Booker, and Yang (whose chances of getting the nomination are the same as my chances of qualifying for a Formula One race and signing a contract with the Yankees on the same day.) Collectively they are a mess, and by the time they’ve exhausted all of their energy in the primary, Trump will be ready and all too willing to begin the dirtiest, cruelest, and most-watched political war in history against the Democratic nominee.
We’re fucked.
The candidates are all a mess because we have 15 or so candidates and haven’t had time to sort them out - that tends to take care of itself over time.
What unfortunately hasn’t sorted itself out over time, however, is the ignorance and confusion of the average American voter. This is particularly true of moderates and independent voters, many of whom are economically anxious and aware of the fact that one bad slip and they could join the ranks of the poor, but who simultaneously are just middle class enough to fear any kind of change that might actually strengthen everyone’s social safety net. They worry about their economic futures but worry about change even more.
This is why I think that Bernie Sanders, who might very well win the nomination, will run into problems in the general election if he gets that far. But any candidate is going to have a challenge with Trump unless the economy falters because voters don’t typically vote against an incumbent when the economy is at least functioning kinda, sorta well. And statistically, the economy now is functioning as well as it has in almost a generation, which may, in voters’ minds, lend credence to the idea that a ‘bidness’ man knows how to manage an economy better than professional politicos.
A Fox News analyst admits that Donald Trump is a criminal.
I don’t think it will matter. Trump fans have always understand that he’s a crook. If Trump is the GOP nominee, he will win the November election.
Exactly, which is why I never really completely understood why people believed that the Mueller probe by itself would take him down. That’s not to say that he hasn’t been hurt by the Mueller investigation - I think his base of staunch, “Trump can do no wrong” supporters has shrunk by 2-3 points, but most people who voted for Trump knew that they were voting for a nasty sonofabitch. Nothing has changed, really.
Shit, everyone thought his TAXES would “take him down” before he even got the nomination. The hive was mindlessly buzzing about this and I was saying, “nobody gives a fuck about his tax returns, taxes are like cancer, nobody wants to talk about them, nobody even wants to THINK about them, people will do anything to avoid them”, and I maintained that Trump would simply not play by the honor system that supposedly “required” him to disclose his taxes. Sure enough, he bulldozed forward and look what happened, the tax issue didn’t amount to shit.