Yeah it was truly shocking to watch how the conservatives on the SCOTUS, completely insulated from anything Trump could do to them, decided the way they did.
I mean is being involved a failed putsch Hitlerian? Objectively yes. Is running on Blood and Soil nationalism Hitlerian? Objectively yes. Is talking about an ethnic group poisoning the nations blood Hitlerian? Objectively yes. It's not particularly contested that Trump did all of those things so the people calling him Hitler have at least one leg to stand on.
That the left lost to him and now is obeying the laws and proceeding with a legal transition is also not hypocritical. Trying to overthrow the will of the voters is Hitlerian and the left isn't Hitlerian. Jaybird of not long ago would wearily sigh and comment on the game being iterated.
Meanwhile the rights constant and decades old tradition of Stalinist and Hitlerian name calling of Dems remains generally baseless. So you seem to be saying everything is Hitlerian which just seems to be a sophisticated BSDI but, no, both sides don't do it.
Ah yes but the curse in '24 is married to the blessing in '20.
Like, with Captain Hindsight parked firmly next to me I ask myself "Would Klobuchar or Pete truly have failed to catch on in a race with Biden not ever in it? Would the Dems truly have nominated Bernie and lost?" and from there "Could only Biden have passed the IRA and CHIPS act or managed Ukraine or the Afghanistan withdrawal (which was remarkably good regardless of what the whiners whine) as well as he did?" Or, at my darker moments, "Would it have been so awful for Trump to fish things up for four more years and for the GOP to be utterly landslided out in '24 as would have clearly happened?"
Yep, well stated, It's tough. And yeah if Biden hadn't been so fishin old. I'm still going around and around in my head on if he was a blessing or a curse in 2020.
Tried googling Spinoza and Substance monism but came up empty in terms of it being relevant as far as I could tell; so still have no idea what you just said or if one of your kitties just walked across your keyboard and hit enter.
Or is this just an oblique way of saying that only non-republicans have agency?
Who's we? And, frankly, after my entire life being spent listening to righties say that every opponent was both Hitler and Stalin and Democracy itself being on the ballot why on God(ess?)'s green earth is it at all interesting if some similar language flew from left to right?
Well how we break it is to recognize it for what it is. The neocons have to be treated like, say, libertarians or other experts who represent no voting constituency. So you can listen to their opinions in their areas of expertise but you don't treat them as representing significant voting constituency so you only use their expertise instrumentally rather than ideologically. Biden didn't actually do badly foreign policy wise, I don't think one can easily make the case that the neocons were actually dictating policy in his administration.
Where their influence is malign is in that trying to appeal to their imaginary constituency ate up far too much campaign time, language and bandwidth. It's political opportunity cost more than anything.
But yeah, grappling with the GWOT is an interesting subject because everyone left of center feels it's viscerally unfair. We all remember being opposed to W in his idiocy and getting flamed for it in the aughts. So the idea that we, his opponents, have to answer for his idiocy feels fundamentally unjust. That Bush's people were punished by quite literally losing their party, voters and becoming politically homeless is cold comfort to us, his former opponents. But the GWOT is just the largest example of a more blanket failure of expertise to both screen for ideological blind spots and to handle communicating with constituents correctly and that's not something we on the left can plead innocent on.
Sure, I mean the never Trumpers aren't placatable because they have good reason to think Trump will be a disaster (especially for conservativism as they conceive of it) regardless of Trumps surface actions and based on his past performance.
That being said let us not make the repeated mistake of thinking that never Trumpers matter which is, actually, a much deeper statement then it seems at first blush since it's a mistake that Dems have been making since Obama's first term. To elaborate in 2011 when Obama was negotiating with the GOP over their debt limit hostage taking his operating theory was that the neocons (who would become the never Trumpers) were both serious, influential and spoke for a material voting constituency. Based on that misconception Obama made a deal that’d set up negotiations for a balanced budget and impose across the board cuts if those negotiations failed. The theory was that the neocons would never permit the negotiations to fail because blanket cuts would hit defense spending, neocons sine qua non. Of course if the neocons ever did command a constituency it was destroyed by W and the right merrily blew through those negotiations and the sequester was imposed.
This story repeats in 2016 when Hillary, among her various missteps, tried appealing to neocons on trade and security grounds along with repeatedly incredulously saying “Trump is awful!” much the way the neocons did in the primary in 2015. The neocons, generally, either endorsed HRC over Trump or forswore their former neocon positions. That didn’t, however, deliver any significant votes. This story repeats again in 2024 when Kamela embraced Liz Cheney and emphasized her support and doubled down on the “Trump is a menace” themes in an effort to reach out to the Nikki Haley/Neocon voters and, again, came up empty in terms of actual voters.
The moral of the story is pretty straight forward: neocons don’t command a significant voting constituency. Yes, they have lots of monied supporters and an outsized presence in online fora and media discourse but they, like their libertarian cousins, command virtually no actual voters. You can’t get blood from a turnip and you can’t get material quantities of votes by appealing to neocons. It’s a mirage. It is invoked by the right oppositionally as a stick to beat anyone not on the right with but there’s no devotion there, no votes. It’s just a phantom.
I'm not assuming they're harmless; avoiding harm was not the option the electorate chose for us. The question is which group is likely to cause less harm: the grifters, cranks and hacks or the unphotogenic driven fanatics. I think the former group is the group more likely to ineptly cause less harm through sheer ineffectualness. If you want to lay out a brief for the latter group go for it.
Yeah that was sort of like using an armored presidential limo to deliver a pizza (but only if the limo is blown up upon delivery). I dunno wtf Putin is thinking on this except maybe it's some kind of posturing tactic for Trump?
Very interesting. If I had to guess someone figured out that there was no way in God(ess?)'s green earth that they could keep that congressional report under wraps.
In an administration that won campaigning on a myriad policies I think are awful, the appointment of cranks, hacks, thieves, and washed out celebrities is a positive thing. All I want for Christmas is the Trump admin flailing around ineffectually for two years until disgusted voters landslide the Dems into Congress in 2026.
I'd say Kamala was ok. She wasn't amazing but she was definitely better than Biden would have been. A lot of of the complaints about her are really about her adhering to the strategy she and her campaign chose which, in hindsight, was wrong but was far from unreasonable. One reason I don't think Kamala was terrible is that while Dems lost ground nation wide (inflation etc) they lost less ground in places Kamala campaigned actively. That suggests she wasn't bad, just not extraordinary.
I, very regretfully as a moderate, lay most of the blame at Joe's feet. We don't know when exactly his decline went over the line from right wing bull to reality but he and his inner circle have some idea of that. His decision to run again was obviously wrong. Heck, the outcome is so bad that I wonder, on darker days, if his decision to run in 2020 was wrong. Could only Joe have whupped Bernie and then Trump? Captain Hindsight says maybe not.
It's a plausible theory in isolation. If I saw a lot of other inflation impacted administrations escaping electoral doom that way I'd find that persuasive but all kinds of messaging and responses were wheeled out the world over and the slaughter of inflation incumbent administrations, left and right, this message and that, was pretty much total.
Not to mention it remains an open question if it was even a bad policy as policy. Obviously the politics weren't good (people hate inflation) but the payoff of that brief bout of inflation was that the economy roared back to full employment very quickly, inflation was then subsequently beat down and a soft landing achieved.
Though it can't be ignored that the political result is that Joe ended up handing Trump a fishing golden economy on a silver platter. All a Trump with two brain cells would need to do is switch from talking it down to talking it up and the media idiots would be penning "Trumpian golden age for the economy" stories all through 2025 just like they did from 2016-2020.
Yeah, and that's something to keep in mind for postmortems. Not that it's an excuse for complacency- improvement should always be sought, but it should temper the recriminations a bit.
Sure, I'm not suggesting that the Dems provide votes on nominations or legislation. But the transition stuff and the politely congratulating him on winning as if he's a normal GOP politician (and note that he now is the normal GOP politician) provides the potential of some benefit and imposes no material costs.
All of us and on the basis that they made some pretty concrete predictions with firmly definable time windows and none of them came to pass (so far, arguably they have until the end of January but the odds of something like that seem remote considering the reaction so far).
Sure, but your beef there is more with the media. Democratic politicians have an obligation to their constituents to try and mitigate Trumps damage. He's a notoriously swayable character. I agree they shouldn't cooperate to make him pass things he'd otherwise fail to pass but talking nice is a strategy and one they'd be unwise to abandon until it's necessary to do so.
Dramatic responses from Dems and the left would require dramatic violations by Trump and Co. Trump's only actions so far have been to unambiguously win the election. Bidens' and his party's responses have been appropriate. I have seen some say Biden shouldn't have pledged a smooth transition or done the White House norm. I don't agree. Biden is reinforcing the norms. It has no cost and potentially has a benefit.
Also, I think at this point it's safe to say that all the righties saying Trumps election would lead to riots or equivalent misbehavior by the Dems or the Left are now proven entirely and completely wrong and they should be expected to cop to that.
Sure, why not. But my main point in observing that the Covid lab leak imbroglio happened under Trumps administration is that if there is a smoking gun in those docs that proves the lab leak was real then Trump would never ever want it released. So, overwhelming odds are the classified docs are as big a shrug as the non classified ones are- and if they say otherwise you'll never see those ones released.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “I Told You So”
Yeah it was truly shocking to watch how the conservatives on the SCOTUS, completely insulated from anything Trump could do to them, decided the way they did.
"
I mean is being involved a failed putsch Hitlerian? Objectively yes. Is running on Blood and Soil nationalism Hitlerian? Objectively yes. Is talking about an ethnic group poisoning the nations blood Hitlerian? Objectively yes. It's not particularly contested that Trump did all of those things so the people calling him Hitler have at least one leg to stand on.
That the left lost to him and now is obeying the laws and proceeding with a legal transition is also not hypocritical. Trying to overthrow the will of the voters is Hitlerian and the left isn't Hitlerian. Jaybird of not long ago would wearily sigh and comment on the game being iterated.
Meanwhile the rights constant and decades old tradition of Stalinist and Hitlerian name calling of Dems remains generally baseless. So you seem to be saying everything is Hitlerian which just seems to be a sophisticated BSDI but, no, both sides don't do it.
"
Ah yes but the curse in '24 is married to the blessing in '20.
Like, with Captain Hindsight parked firmly next to me I ask myself "Would Klobuchar or Pete truly have failed to catch on in a race with Biden not ever in it? Would the Dems truly have nominated Bernie and lost?" and from there "Could only Biden have passed the IRA and CHIPS act or managed Ukraine or the Afghanistan withdrawal (which was remarkably good regardless of what the whiners whine) as well as he did?" Or, at my darker moments, "Would it have been so awful for Trump to fish things up for four more years and for the GOP to be utterly landslided out in '24 as would have clearly happened?"
"
Yep, well stated, It's tough. And yeah if Biden hadn't been so fishin old. I'm still going around and around in my head on if he was a blessing or a curse in 2020.
"
Tried googling Spinoza and Substance monism but came up empty in terms of it being relevant as far as I could tell; so still have no idea what you just said or if one of your kitties just walked across your keyboard and hit enter.
Or is this just an oblique way of saying that only non-republicans have agency?
"
Who's we? And, frankly, after my entire life being spent listening to righties say that every opponent was both Hitler and Stalin and Democracy itself being on the ballot why on God(ess?)'s green earth is it at all interesting if some similar language flew from left to right?
"
Well how we break it is to recognize it for what it is. The neocons have to be treated like, say, libertarians or other experts who represent no voting constituency. So you can listen to their opinions in their areas of expertise but you don't treat them as representing significant voting constituency so you only use their expertise instrumentally rather than ideologically. Biden didn't actually do badly foreign policy wise, I don't think one can easily make the case that the neocons were actually dictating policy in his administration.
Where their influence is malign is in that trying to appeal to their imaginary constituency ate up far too much campaign time, language and bandwidth. It's political opportunity cost more than anything.
But yeah, grappling with the GWOT is an interesting subject because everyone left of center feels it's viscerally unfair. We all remember being opposed to W in his idiocy and getting flamed for it in the aughts. So the idea that we, his opponents, have to answer for his idiocy feels fundamentally unjust. That Bush's people were punished by quite literally losing their party, voters and becoming politically homeless is cold comfort to us, his former opponents. But the GWOT is just the largest example of a more blanket failure of expertise to both screen for ideological blind spots and to handle communicating with constituents correctly and that's not something we on the left can plead innocent on.
"
Sure, I mean the never Trumpers aren't placatable because they have good reason to think Trump will be a disaster (especially for conservativism as they conceive of it) regardless of Trumps surface actions and based on his past performance.
That being said let us not make the repeated mistake of thinking that never Trumpers matter which is, actually, a much deeper statement then it seems at first blush since it's a mistake that Dems have been making since Obama's first term. To elaborate in 2011 when Obama was negotiating with the GOP over their debt limit hostage taking his operating theory was that the neocons (who would become the never Trumpers) were both serious, influential and spoke for a material voting constituency. Based on that misconception Obama made a deal that’d set up negotiations for a balanced budget and impose across the board cuts if those negotiations failed. The theory was that the neocons would never permit the negotiations to fail because blanket cuts would hit defense spending, neocons sine qua non. Of course if the neocons ever did command a constituency it was destroyed by W and the right merrily blew through those negotiations and the sequester was imposed.
This story repeats in 2016 when Hillary, among her various missteps, tried appealing to neocons on trade and security grounds along with repeatedly incredulously saying “Trump is awful!” much the way the neocons did in the primary in 2015. The neocons, generally, either endorsed HRC over Trump or forswore their former neocon positions. That didn’t, however, deliver any significant votes. This story repeats again in 2024 when Kamela embraced Liz Cheney and emphasized her support and doubled down on the “Trump is a menace” themes in an effort to reach out to the Nikki Haley/Neocon voters and, again, came up empty in terms of actual voters.
The moral of the story is pretty straight forward: neocons don’t command a significant voting constituency. Yes, they have lots of monied supporters and an outsized presence in online fora and media discourse but they, like their libertarian cousins, command virtually no actual voters. You can’t get blood from a turnip and you can’t get material quantities of votes by appealing to neocons. It’s a mirage. It is invoked by the right oppositionally as a stick to beat anyone not on the right with but there’s no devotion there, no votes. It’s just a phantom.
On “Open Mic for the week of 11/25/2024”
Yeah he's clearly, incorrectly, conflating ATACMS with ICBM's.
On “Open Mic for the week of 11/18/2024”
I'm not assuming they're harmless; avoiding harm was not the option the electorate chose for us. The question is which group is likely to cause less harm: the grifters, cranks and hacks or the unphotogenic driven fanatics. I think the former group is the group more likely to ineptly cause less harm through sheer ineffectualness. If you want to lay out a brief for the latter group go for it.
"
Entirely possible but less likely than with an administration of no-nonsense dedicated and capable fanatics.
"
Seems plausible to me.
"
Yeah that was sort of like using an armored presidential limo to deliver a pizza (but only if the limo is blown up upon delivery). I dunno wtf Putin is thinking on this except maybe it's some kind of posturing tactic for Trump?
On “The Mandate That Wasn’t”
Very interesting. If I had to guess someone figured out that there was no way in God(ess?)'s green earth that they could keep that congressional report under wraps.
On “Open Mic for the week of 11/18/2024”
In an administration that won campaigning on a myriad policies I think are awful, the appointment of cranks, hacks, thieves, and washed out celebrities is a positive thing. All I want for Christmas is the Trump admin flailing around ineffectually for two years until disgusted voters landslide the Dems into Congress in 2026.
"
Which, very ironically, is good news in these benighted times.
On “Paper: Inflation and the 2024 US Presidential Election”
I'd say Kamala was ok. She wasn't amazing but she was definitely better than Biden would have been. A lot of of the complaints about her are really about her adhering to the strategy she and her campaign chose which, in hindsight, was wrong but was far from unreasonable. One reason I don't think Kamala was terrible is that while Dems lost ground nation wide (inflation etc) they lost less ground in places Kamala campaigned actively. That suggests she wasn't bad, just not extraordinary.
I, very regretfully as a moderate, lay most of the blame at Joe's feet. We don't know when exactly his decline went over the line from right wing bull to reality but he and his inner circle have some idea of that. His decision to run again was obviously wrong. Heck, the outcome is so bad that I wonder, on darker days, if his decision to run in 2020 was wrong. Could only Joe have whupped Bernie and then Trump? Captain Hindsight says maybe not.
"
It's a plausible theory in isolation. If I saw a lot of other inflation impacted administrations escaping electoral doom that way I'd find that persuasive but all kinds of messaging and responses were wheeled out the world over and the slaughter of inflation incumbent administrations, left and right, this message and that, was pretty much total.
"
Not to mention it remains an open question if it was even a bad policy as policy. Obviously the politics weren't good (people hate inflation) but the payoff of that brief bout of inflation was that the economy roared back to full employment very quickly, inflation was then subsequently beat down and a soft landing achieved.
Though it can't be ignored that the political result is that Joe ended up handing Trump a fishing golden economy on a silver platter. All a Trump with two brain cells would need to do is switch from talking it down to talking it up and the media idiots would be penning "Trumpian golden age for the economy" stories all through 2025 just like they did from 2016-2020.
"
Yeah, and that's something to keep in mind for postmortems. Not that it's an excuse for complacency- improvement should always be sought, but it should temper the recriminations a bit.
On “How Republicans Can Save Trump’s Presidency”
Sure, I'm not suggesting that the Dems provide votes on nominations or legislation. But the transition stuff and the politely congratulating him on winning as if he's a normal GOP politician (and note that he now is the normal GOP politician) provides the potential of some benefit and imposes no material costs.
"
All of us and on the basis that they made some pretty concrete predictions with firmly definable time windows and none of them came to pass (so far, arguably they have until the end of January but the odds of something like that seem remote considering the reaction so far).
"
Sure, but your beef there is more with the media. Democratic politicians have an obligation to their constituents to try and mitigate Trumps damage. He's a notoriously swayable character. I agree they shouldn't cooperate to make him pass things he'd otherwise fail to pass but talking nice is a strategy and one they'd be unwise to abandon until it's necessary to do so.
"
Dramatic responses from Dems and the left would require dramatic violations by Trump and Co. Trump's only actions so far have been to unambiguously win the election. Bidens' and his party's responses have been appropriate. I have seen some say Biden shouldn't have pledged a smooth transition or done the White House norm. I don't agree. Biden is reinforcing the norms. It has no cost and potentially has a benefit.
Also, I think at this point it's safe to say that all the righties saying Trumps election would lead to riots or equivalent misbehavior by the Dems or the Left are now proven entirely and completely wrong and they should be expected to cop to that.
"
Sure, why not. But my main point in observing that the Covid lab leak imbroglio happened under Trumps administration is that if there is a smoking gun in those docs that proves the lab leak was real then Trump would never ever want it released. So, overwhelming odds are the classified docs are as big a shrug as the non classified ones are- and if they say otherwise you'll never see those ones released.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.