I do not see it as cowardice or cynicism that puts Republican or Russian ambition and greed for raw power ahead of everything -- everything human or humane or moral or ethical or rational. I see it simply as a satanic-level lack of character. All else stems from that, and from its attendant hubris. How America got to elevating such debased people to such high positions, and why they are succeeding in their quest, is the question.
The real problem isn't actually Kevin McCarthy, it's the republican base that's the real problem. As long as the actions of the leadership satisfy the anger and ignorance that the base has, this will get continually worse until the democracy is simply a memory.
I don't like Cheney's politics but by God I respect her for her dedication to the country. But the base of her former party? No, It's disgustingly thoughtless, racist, homophobic and seeks retribution for it's inadequacy to be the best they could ever become. Idiocracy was Prescient as a movie. We'll wallow in the loss of intellect.
But McCarthy? He's really pretty stupid. McConnell on the other hand isn't stupid, he's just disgusting.
Zelenskyy, Cheney, Benson, Bowers, and Moss. Five heroes that kids should learn about in their civics classes. Most people would wilt in the face of efforts to intimidate them, especially when it involves the threats of physical violence. Thanks, Bulwark, for giving us examples of hope standing tall in the face of thuggery.
Liz Cheney knew all of this all along. I cannot imagine how pissed and betrayed she feels. Her colleagues, almost to a person, her party, are completely rotten, thoroughly in thrall to a wannabe dictator, lap dogs lusting only for reelection with no righteous driving principles. Cheney herself was a doubter all the way until 2021, but if there are any doubters now, any both-sides rationalizers, any "politics is a contact sport" rationalizers, they need to shut it. They have nothing to say worth listening to. Nothing on the Democratic side looks anything like cynically supporting a traitor to our democracy for political expedience.
I read the Thau and Steffee piece on PA voters this morning:
It was anecdotal, but encouraging, especially considering the composition of the voters in the group, a plurality of registered Republicans. Most of them seem to realize that neither party is perfect, but that doesn't mean things will be any better if the out party becomes the in party, and one of the two parties is objectively worse than the other on a whole other level. We will need pragmatic voters like this turning out to the polls this November if we want to keep this republic.
McCarthy is the apex of the mountain that Gingrich started building in the late 1980s. Gingrich taught Republicans (literally, he offered classes) how to debase their opponents through lies, misinformation, and exaggerated claims. The fact that you debased yourself in the process was not problematic because Gingrich figured out that most people don't care, plus what's a little debasement if you win (and he knew Democrats can't stay focused long enough to fight back in understandable sound bites). MTG, Gaetz, McCarthy, et al. all are following the playbook Gingrich wrote 30 years ago. McCarthy just sucks at it.
I've said it lots of times, and I'll say it again: McCarthy and McConnell whiffing on a bipartisan Jan. 6 Committee is one of the dumbest political moves in recent memory. For McCarthy in particular, it may be the dumbest move of his political career.
A bipartisan committee was never going to get these tapes. Republicans would have had subpoena veto power. Instead - and this is only a minor side effect of the investigation - McCarthy will spend at least the next week smoothing this over and defusing all the leadership challenges.
Two things. One, it's strange to me that people would turn to legalizing weed as the way to win back the kids, while being against things like forgiving student debt. The reason is that it seems very odd that people would critique the latter for being a niche issue and costing money and being for an interest group while then supporting a policy that is the same as all those things.
But the second thing is more important. Your cheap shot about the Disney/Florida thing ignores a key reality: the GOP knows what it's doing. Financially ruining these communities is the entire point. Why? Because they are primarily democratic leaning minority communities. Don't believe me? The area that DeSantis is punishing is majority Latino. It is one-third Puerto-Rican. Mind you, the county swung 16 points to Trump in 2020. But much like how the GOP in Texas hates Mexican Americans, the Florida GOP is gleefully punishing constituencies that tend to vote Democratic and are not white.
Forcing these people to have higher bills, to bankrupt them and force them to leave; that's the entire point. They are gleefully doing this. To DeSantis and his boosters, they're democratic leaning, heavily minority areas, so they deserved to be ruined. This isn't a bug. It's a feature. It's the entire point.
This, many on the left would say, is white supremacy and systemic racism. If you prefer, you could call it forced relocation. But this is what people are referring to when people talk about these concepts on the left. The state, and particularly the right, punishing people who dare to vote for the other party, or who have the 'misfortune' of being born a different race and living in 'red' states.
Sadly Charlie, I don't believe there is any humiliation for McCarthy, McConnell, and many others. We're in some strange Bizarro World where right and wrong don't make a bit of a difference. And as much as the recordings demonstrate McCarthy's lack of character, I don't see this hurting him politically at all.
Good to see some ‘heroism’ awards still mean something, since the Presidential Medal of Freedom was forever tainted by DJT with the awarding to Limbaugh.
McCarthy’s lily-livered cynicism will have far less effect on the future of mankind than Manchin’s and Synema’s, who have stood in the way of historic, last-chance legislation over false concerns over small-bore nonsense like “inflation.” Inflation goes up and down, forever. But a person starves and bridges collapse and the earth tips into perpetual warming hell but one time.
I'm sorry, but I'm going to tell you about a dream I had last night. It was simply that it was 2024 and Trump was elected. The shock of it wasn't new to me. It was the same as the death of someone close to me. I have experienced the geography of grief enough to know that the initial shock isn't the worst part. It's the many, many days that follow, the ever-present dull awareness of irretrievable loss. Or, maybe worse, a moment of forgetting, and then remembering again.
When I couldn't get back to sleep, I began imagining Kevin McCarthy's plane ride from DC to Florida those few days after Jan 6. He would have rehearsed, polished his just-right humility, decided on the most potent words of flattery, flashed some anger over the stollen election. What I most wonder is could he feel his soul slipping away? As maybe a touch of indigestion, or a slight strain in his back. Or does a soul just go away, silent and unobserved, not made of any earthly matter at all?
It is hard to imagine the GOP taking the risk of allowing McCarthy to become speaker. He's not very bright but he thinks that he is. I recall an observation from someone in my youth.
Moscow Mitch, the lizard look-a-like from Kentucky, and Kevin "where must I crawl to next your Maganess" McCarthy, the former poor as a church mouse sleazebag from California, have for so long enjoyed the benefits of sucking on the teat of the Federal government they are without humility. The taste of power and wealth (however wealth might be defined by two individuals who would have found it difficult to find two spare nickels to rub together before they entered politics), has not only left them without a conscience, but they lack even a modicum of decency and dignity. For the two, and many others in Congress just like them, they have placed their need for money and power ahead of the needs of the American people, the very people for whom they work. With the lizard it was marriage and connections. With the church mouse it was marriage and dubious claims of ancestral bloodlines, or other such nonsense that would have kept him out of some of the finest WS clubs. Perhaps church rat is more appropriate. They have on so many occasions, shown exactly what they are, and leaders is what they aren't. The people who support these two clowns are just as culpable as they in their pursuits.
The coverup is always worse than the crime. This is what conspiracy theorists don't understand. Any conspiracy larger than three people and somebody is eventually going to talk.
In short: more of the same. And worse. Because that’s what happens when there is no requirement to take responsibility for one’s words and actions. At least in GOP politics we now live in a post-accountability era as much as a post-truth one, in which right and wrong are less important than what you can get away with and who has your back. And it is inevitable that each time someone in politics succeeds at wriggling off of a hook -- one that would put you or me in jail, get us fired from our jobs, and cost us the support of people close to us -- it both enables them to do more of the same and inspires others to go down the same pathway in the race to the bottom of what appears to be a bottomless pit.
We’ve seen this show before. Many times now. It never ends well because, unlike with us, they never suffer consequences. It will be an endless loop of moreofthesameness until enough people leave their tribes and come back to the community. I won’t hold my breath waiting for that to happen. I’ve been too disappointed in my fellow beings for too long now to hold out any real hope, much less expectation, that their morality somehow will return out of the blue, as if a Hollywood movie ending to a real life shit show.
I do not see it as cowardice or cynicism that puts Republican or Russian ambition and greed for raw power ahead of everything -- everything human or humane or moral or ethical or rational. I see it simply as a satanic-level lack of character. All else stems from that, and from its attendant hubris. How America got to elevating such debased people to such high positions, and why they are succeeding in their quest, is the question.
The real problem isn't actually Kevin McCarthy, it's the republican base that's the real problem. As long as the actions of the leadership satisfy the anger and ignorance that the base has, this will get continually worse until the democracy is simply a memory.
I don't like Cheney's politics but by God I respect her for her dedication to the country. But the base of her former party? No, It's disgustingly thoughtless, racist, homophobic and seeks retribution for it's inadequacy to be the best they could ever become. Idiocracy was Prescient as a movie. We'll wallow in the loss of intellect.
But McCarthy? He's really pretty stupid. McConnell on the other hand isn't stupid, he's just disgusting.
Zelenskyy, Cheney, Benson, Bowers, and Moss. Five heroes that kids should learn about in their civics classes. Most people would wilt in the face of efforts to intimidate them, especially when it involves the threats of physical violence. Thanks, Bulwark, for giving us examples of hope standing tall in the face of thuggery.
Liz Cheney knew all of this all along. I cannot imagine how pissed and betrayed she feels. Her colleagues, almost to a person, her party, are completely rotten, thoroughly in thrall to a wannabe dictator, lap dogs lusting only for reelection with no righteous driving principles. Cheney herself was a doubter all the way until 2021, but if there are any doubters now, any both-sides rationalizers, any "politics is a contact sport" rationalizers, they need to shut it. They have nothing to say worth listening to. Nothing on the Democratic side looks anything like cynically supporting a traitor to our democracy for political expedience.
I read the Thau and Steffee piece on PA voters this morning:
https://www.thebulwark.com/pennsylvania-swing-voters-arent-rushing-back-to-republicans/
It was anecdotal, but encouraging, especially considering the composition of the voters in the group, a plurality of registered Republicans. Most of them seem to realize that neither party is perfect, but that doesn't mean things will be any better if the out party becomes the in party, and one of the two parties is objectively worse than the other on a whole other level. We will need pragmatic voters like this turning out to the polls this November if we want to keep this republic.
McCarthy is the apex of the mountain that Gingrich started building in the late 1980s. Gingrich taught Republicans (literally, he offered classes) how to debase their opponents through lies, misinformation, and exaggerated claims. The fact that you debased yourself in the process was not problematic because Gingrich figured out that most people don't care, plus what's a little debasement if you win (and he knew Democrats can't stay focused long enough to fight back in understandable sound bites). MTG, Gaetz, McCarthy, et al. all are following the playbook Gingrich wrote 30 years ago. McCarthy just sucks at it.
I've said it lots of times, and I'll say it again: McCarthy and McConnell whiffing on a bipartisan Jan. 6 Committee is one of the dumbest political moves in recent memory. For McCarthy in particular, it may be the dumbest move of his political career.
A bipartisan committee was never going to get these tapes. Republicans would have had subpoena veto power. Instead - and this is only a minor side effect of the investigation - McCarthy will spend at least the next week smoothing this over and defusing all the leadership challenges.
Two things. One, it's strange to me that people would turn to legalizing weed as the way to win back the kids, while being against things like forgiving student debt. The reason is that it seems very odd that people would critique the latter for being a niche issue and costing money and being for an interest group while then supporting a policy that is the same as all those things.
But the second thing is more important. Your cheap shot about the Disney/Florida thing ignores a key reality: the GOP knows what it's doing. Financially ruining these communities is the entire point. Why? Because they are primarily democratic leaning minority communities. Don't believe me? The area that DeSantis is punishing is majority Latino. It is one-third Puerto-Rican. Mind you, the county swung 16 points to Trump in 2020. But much like how the GOP in Texas hates Mexican Americans, the Florida GOP is gleefully punishing constituencies that tend to vote Democratic and are not white.
Forcing these people to have higher bills, to bankrupt them and force them to leave; that's the entire point. They are gleefully doing this. To DeSantis and his boosters, they're democratic leaning, heavily minority areas, so they deserved to be ruined. This isn't a bug. It's a feature. It's the entire point.
This, many on the left would say, is white supremacy and systemic racism. If you prefer, you could call it forced relocation. But this is what people are referring to when people talk about these concepts on the left. The state, and particularly the right, punishing people who dare to vote for the other party, or who have the 'misfortune' of being born a different race and living in 'red' states.
Mistah Kurtz—he dead.
A penny for the Old Guy
I
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
II
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.
Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer—
Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom
III
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.
Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.
IV
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.
V
Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Sadly Charlie, I don't believe there is any humiliation for McCarthy, McConnell, and many others. We're in some strange Bizarro World where right and wrong don't make a bit of a difference. And as much as the recordings demonstrate McCarthy's lack of character, I don't see this hurting him politically at all.
Hopefully, I am wrong and just a cynic.
Good to see some ‘heroism’ awards still mean something, since the Presidential Medal of Freedom was forever tainted by DJT with the awarding to Limbaugh.
McCarthy’s lily-livered cynicism will have far less effect on the future of mankind than Manchin’s and Synema’s, who have stood in the way of historic, last-chance legislation over false concerns over small-bore nonsense like “inflation.” Inflation goes up and down, forever. But a person starves and bridges collapse and the earth tips into perpetual warming hell but one time.
I'm sorry, but I'm going to tell you about a dream I had last night. It was simply that it was 2024 and Trump was elected. The shock of it wasn't new to me. It was the same as the death of someone close to me. I have experienced the geography of grief enough to know that the initial shock isn't the worst part. It's the many, many days that follow, the ever-present dull awareness of irretrievable loss. Or, maybe worse, a moment of forgetting, and then remembering again.
When I couldn't get back to sleep, I began imagining Kevin McCarthy's plane ride from DC to Florida those few days after Jan 6. He would have rehearsed, polished his just-right humility, decided on the most potent words of flattery, flashed some anger over the stollen election. What I most wonder is could he feel his soul slipping away? As maybe a touch of indigestion, or a slight strain in his back. Or does a soul just go away, silent and unobserved, not made of any earthly matter at all?
It is hard to imagine the GOP taking the risk of allowing McCarthy to become speaker. He's not very bright but he thinks that he is. I recall an observation from someone in my youth.
"He could fuck up a wet dream."
Moscow Mitch, the lizard look-a-like from Kentucky, and Kevin "where must I crawl to next your Maganess" McCarthy, the former poor as a church mouse sleazebag from California, have for so long enjoyed the benefits of sucking on the teat of the Federal government they are without humility. The taste of power and wealth (however wealth might be defined by two individuals who would have found it difficult to find two spare nickels to rub together before they entered politics), has not only left them without a conscience, but they lack even a modicum of decency and dignity. For the two, and many others in Congress just like them, they have placed their need for money and power ahead of the needs of the American people, the very people for whom they work. With the lizard it was marriage and connections. With the church mouse it was marriage and dubious claims of ancestral bloodlines, or other such nonsense that would have kept him out of some of the finest WS clubs. Perhaps church rat is more appropriate. They have on so many occasions, shown exactly what they are, and leaders is what they aren't. The people who support these two clowns are just as culpable as they in their pursuits.
The coverup is always worse than the crime. This is what conspiracy theorists don't understand. Any conspiracy larger than three people and somebody is eventually going to talk.
Re McCarthy, “So what happens now?”.
In short: more of the same. And worse. Because that’s what happens when there is no requirement to take responsibility for one’s words and actions. At least in GOP politics we now live in a post-accountability era as much as a post-truth one, in which right and wrong are less important than what you can get away with and who has your back. And it is inevitable that each time someone in politics succeeds at wriggling off of a hook -- one that would put you or me in jail, get us fired from our jobs, and cost us the support of people close to us -- it both enables them to do more of the same and inspires others to go down the same pathway in the race to the bottom of what appears to be a bottomless pit.
We’ve seen this show before. Many times now. It never ends well because, unlike with us, they never suffer consequences. It will be an endless loop of moreofthesameness until enough people leave their tribes and come back to the community. I won’t hold my breath waiting for that to happen. I’ve been too disappointed in my fellow beings for too long now to hold out any real hope, much less expectation, that their morality somehow will return out of the blue, as if a Hollywood movie ending to a real life shit show.