The Republican Agenda 2021 and Forward

JayMysteri0 said:
Florida reminding you why there is a phrase "Florida man", again.

https://www.twitter.com/i/web/status/1397964990032891907/

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'We' actually means 'They'. You know 'They', The group of politicians you want to pass laws that insure they don't win future elections.
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"Teacher bonuses"

This is cringe AF even if it was a stock photo.
 
So there's some belief that a certain guy maybe facing some legal consequences in August, so...

www.vanityfair.com

Trump Has Reportedly Been Telling People He’s Going to Be President Again by August, Which Would Suggest He’s Planning a Coup (Or Has Fully Descended Into Madness)

Meanwhile, his craziest supporters believe he’s going to be president again soon, too.
www.vanityfair.com www.vanityfair.com
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Is Donald Trump ever going to be president again? In theory, should he set aside the fact that he actually hated being president, and decide to run again in 2024, and should tens of millions of Americans lose their minds and cast their votes for a wannabe dictator who is probably at this moment ranting to a garden hose about how he beat Joe Biden, he could make his way back to the White House in January 2025. Is he going to be president as early as this August? No! Obviously! Why? Well, there’s the minor matter of the fact that Biden‘s first term doesn’t expire for another 1,329 days, making it impossible for Trump to take over any time before then, unless he is planning a coup. Which it sounds like he might be, insomuch as one can plan a coup from the omelet station at Mar-a-Lago.

According to New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, Trump has apparently been “telling a number of people he’s in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated [as president] by August.” Though we said it mere moments ago, it bears repeating that one is not simply “reinstated” as president of the United States as though their being booted from the White House was simply a mistake; again, the only way Trump could become president again by the end of the summer would be if he was scheming something that falls under the umbrella of treason. Sane people know this. Yet while Trump is assuredly not going to come within 1,000 feet of the Oval Office any time soon—or ever again!—some of his craziest supporters appear to worryingly believe he might.
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JayMysteri0 said:
THIS is the republican agenda. No policy. No desire to govern. Just say whatever the hell it is, that the most angry & frustrated want to hear

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Ah, yes, the good ole she “tells it like it is” even when it isn’t.

Fauci is “a fraud and a liar” and CDC can’t ever be trusted by the people because they “lied” once, Meanwhile “tells it like it is”:ers like Trump and Greene who regularly gets caught lying can not only be trusted, but are the future of the Republican America.
 
Still it's hard to tell whether rising evangelical dismay about the state of the Republican Party will have some positive impact on either the party's minority faction now --the true conservatives-- or perhaps more importantly to the society we live in, take a more reflective tone in private and public with respect to entanglement in hyperpartisan secular politics.

Good read in the Atlantic on this, in the form of an interview with former Tennessee governor Bill Haslam. He's now a visiting professor in political science at Vanderbilt University, and has a book out recently, "Faithful Presence". Interview was by Emma Goldman who covers the nexus of politics, policy and religion for The Atlantic.

www.theatlantic.com

The Evangelical Politician Who Doesn’t Recognize His Faith—Or His Party

Bill Haslam, the former governor of Tennessee, is trying to figure out how religious Republicans got so extreme.
www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com

Green: Do you resonate at all with the narrative that Christians are being pushed out of the public square?

Haslam: I actually would come at it the other way. Scripture says that if the meat has gone bad, it’s not the meat’s fault. It’s the salt’s fault. This is a moment for us to say, “If the salt’s lost that saltiness, how did that happen?” rather than drawing up battle lines against the other side.

Green: I’m never one to discount a good Sermon on the Mount riff, but just to translate that out of Christianese: How, exactly, do you hope Christians would demonstrate what it means to be a follower of Jesus in political life?

Haslam: [A line in the Epistle of] James says wisdom that’s from above is first pure, peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial, and sincere. Now, if you and I walked down Broadway in Nashville and we said, “Describe what Christians are like in the public square,” I don’t think we would get “pure, peaceable, and gentle.” We surely wouldn’t get “open to reason.” My point is, Christians are acting just like everyone else. We’re just as likely to send a nasty message on the internet. We’re just as likely to think we’ve won a battle because we have the most clever rhetoric on Twitter.
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[Greene] ...
I just think the reality is that we’re in a place in our politics where, for people who don’t know that much about what it means to be a Christian, the first thing that pops into their head is Trump—including his way of treating other people. Do you think that evangelicals’ widespread support for President Trump has damaged the witness of the Church?

Haslam: I do think your question is fair. There have been a lot of people, particularly younger people, whom I’ve talked with who say, “If that’s what the Church is, then I don’t really want to be a part of it.” There’s been damage to the Church by the identification with this political cause—that’s really, really fair. But, again, how did we get here, where people who claim that their faith is the most important thing in their life are having their political actions look very different from what they say they believe? I think that’s a disease that can infect people from both parties.
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Heh, Haslam can say that last there, perhaps not wanting to close the door entirely on possible future politlical endeavors of his own, but the fact now since Biden's ascension is that people of the faith on the left are coming more into focus in the public square, and it's not hard to notice that for a lot of them, their actions are more aligned with their religious ideals than have been those of so many evangelicals on the right during the Trump era.

And it's this that the RNC will eventually have to reckon with: how many evangelicals may take a breath now and glance back long enough to wonder how the hell they followed a guy like Trump to where they too have helped take the Republican Party?
 
Pumbaa said:
Ah, yes, the good ole she “tells it like it is” even when it isn’t.

Fauci is “a fraud and a liar” and CDC can’t ever be trusted by the people because they “lied” once, Meanwhile “tells it like it is”:ers like Trump and Greene who regularly gets caught lying can not only be trusted, but are the future of the Republican America.
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Yup, this is the double standard that baffles me. My MR frenemy did this. He set ridiculous and arbitrary standards for Fauci but let egregious failures of basic human decency slide from his critics. Explanation: Fauci isn't a politician vs. you EXPECT a politician to lie.
 
JayMysteri0 said:
Why do republicans hate it when others protest?

Historically it's led to others getting shit the republicans would rather the others NOT have.
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Most of the Republican Party of today in the USA (and especially their zealous Trump followers) are not only not conservative but they are not even really "republicans": their political stance is not that of a group with strong ommon interests, rather they are focused on a personality cult that some in the leadership think will keep their voters in the fold, even when they end up voting against their own actual interests.

The more coherent ones are essentially libertarians and the rest of them are variously nativists somewhat akin to members of the Know-Nothing party of the mid-1850s, or even worse. Some are completely devoid of actual political inclinations, not even devoted anti-establishmentarians, just celebrity-minded exhibitionists and hangers-on of Trump, with a lot of them seeming to suffer from contrarianism gone over to outright oppositional defiance. And then there are the ones who really bear watching... the ones like that but with a lot of money and no more sense of what it is to be a struggling American today than a visitor from Mars. The ones who bought bus tickets for insurrectionists heading to the Capitol on January 6th, for instance. The ones who sustain or manage propaganda machines that have enthralled so many voters on the right and continue to spew lies about events of the past five years as well as current news.

Some of the followers and their congressional representatives (shoved farther to the right every two years by eat-your-own primaries in red districts lack even the intellectual flair of members of the so-called Know-Nothings, who despite all their xenophobia and their anti-this and anti-that were in some respects pretty progressive: anti-slavery, in favor of organizing for labor rights and also favoring federal government investment in what they saw as the common good. The Know-Nothings today would be run out of the shreds of the Tea Party faction of the Rs in the House for harboring such inclinations.

Honestly it's dismaying how the Rs can't seem to extricate themselves from a set of power-grabbing, power-maintaining principles that have in the past 40 years completely overrun their onetime grasp of a set of coherent fiscal and social principles, no matter if some of the rest of us even then saw them as ol' fuddy-duddies or relics of a bygone era of capitalism spun off the industrial revolution.

That there's no evident moral compass nor any apparent self-check -- a "how'm I doin'??" inquiry-- being done by either leaders or followers in today's controlling GOP faction is pretty alarming. They seem literally a creature made solely of obstructionism and power lust. The passive-reactive response of their followers has given the leadership tunnel vision that cannot end well for the party. I wouldn't care about that so much except that we're still a two-party country and it's not good that one of them has lost any real sense of the needs of the people it seems to have in thrall.
 
Yoused said:
But, speaking of astronomy,

https://www.twitter.com/i/web/status/1402388019420741633/
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Kudos to the agency rep for not just cracking up before saying to Gohmert that they'd have to look into it and get back to him.

Adventures of Alice in Wonderland, our guidebook to the USA in the era of Trump. How did we get here. How can such antics be real? Or is that the point of the anti-government crowd, to make federal government processes a circus entertainment and so just an object of ridicule until some authoritarian can manage to disband the whole thing on that very argument, and then run it top down like Trump thought he could do.

Not unrelated: I read that nearly 30% of Republican respondents to a recent poll believe Trump will be reinstated as president by the end of this year. Even more startling, the same poll said 13% of Democrats responding also think that. Overall, 19% buy into it.

www.forbes.com

3 In 10 Republicans Believe Wacky Conspiracy Theory Trump Will Be ‘Reinstated’ As President This Year, Poll Shows

While most Americans dismiss the possibility, a significant chunk of Republicans believe Trump is on his way back to the White House.
www.forbes.com www.forbes.com

On the other hand Eric Trump's wife Lara says it ain't gonna happen. Still one toe in reality there in the Trump family I guess.
 
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