Saturday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Saturday, August 22, 2020
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67 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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On Kamala Harris’ historic day, Stan Herd finishes crop art of VP candidate in rural Lawrence
Pretty cool.
@OzarkHillbilly:
It’s great. Of course they all knew. It was screechingly obvious that Trump was a swine and a simpleton. but then Graham et al. realized that their constituents adored him precisely because he was an appalling human being. What could they do?
Oh, I don’t know, the honorable thing?
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BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA……
Sometimes I just crack me up.
ETA: I just like the way it’s put together, a rather damning indictment of trump and his crew in their own words.
The headline of the day-
‘To call me an agitator just flips all of the narrative on its head,’ says protester accused of hitting Chicago cop with skateboard
The Florida headline of the day-
Alligator missing head and tail found on Florida beach: report
@OzarkHillbilly:
Believe it or not, I have some sympathy for them. It’s a dreadful position to be in: suck up to a loathsome human being or lose your job and your reason for getting out of bed in the morning. I’ve been there–for totally different reasons–and take my word for it, it’s not nice.
Also, they’re now confronted with the appalling fact that 35-40% of their constituents are horrible people either sufficiently stupid and deluded to think Trump is a fine person, or evil enough to revel in the fact that he’s a malevolent, simpleminded churl. Either way, he despises them.
Objectively, I can look at this and say: Thank God that’s not me.
@CSK: We’ve all been there. One doesn’t go thru a life worth living with out facing those choices. I like to think I made the right choices at least most of the time but others might disagree. Of the occasions where I (in my mind) made the wrong choice I’ve never lied about it. I did it, I own it.
And then there are the the times when there is no good choice because the choice was made decades before and one can’t change the past, but one still has to make a Yea or Nay decision and is damned no matter which they pick. That is when a persons true self shows because the question comes down to, “If someone asks, can I tell the truth? Can I live with the consequences?” It’s a hard thing because sometimes the truth is terrible, sometimes the truth can cost you everything you hold most dear.
These… Now now tom, be good…. These traitorous, hypocritical, narcissistic, greedy, amoral, cowardly pieces of sh… wastes of oxygen? They came face to face with that moment and folded like a house of cards. I have no sympathy what so ever for them. They had a choice, they could make the right decision, or they could make the easy one.
They sold their souls for 30 pieces of fool’s gold. Hell is too good for them.
@OzarkHillbilly:
I don’t disagree. They made the coward’s choice. Still, I have some vestigial, objective sympathy, the way you would for Lady Macbeth.
Trump I have no sympathy for whatsoever. I don’t care if his father was a monster who warped his life. He chose to admire and replicate that monster.
After a repentant Trump voter’s one-man protest, what happened next?
Indeed.
@OzarkHillbilly:
I wish he had spoken at greater length about why he changed his mind so quickly. It took a little longer for most people who regret voting for Trump to arrive at that place.
@OzarkHillbilly: Good morning and thanks for the link to the Guardian article about James Walker the repentant Trump voter. In the summation paragraph, he is quoted: Until we can put aside those dividing issues and realize we’re all Americans and demand change, until those walls break down, I just don’t know how we’re going to come together.
Which reminded me of the R’s convention in ’68 which featured the acceptance speech by Mr Nixon on the theme ‘bring us together again’.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bring_Us_Together.
Which led me to ponder that the Nixon impeachment and disgrace did, in fact, bring us together. Support for Mr Nixon essentially disappeared; almost no one advocated that he was doing good and necessary work in the Watergate affair. That state of affairs lasted until the Reagan campaign vilified Mr Carter pretty thoroughly.
But I expect that following a Biden victory (FSM willing) there will be a corps of Trumpists to claim that he and they have been betrayed by enemies of America.
@OzarkHillbilly:
I don’t follow American politics that much (not an American), but I was under the impression that during the Republican primaries all the other candidates were pointing out how bad Trump was — ie they all knew it, and said it. And then when Trump won the primary anyway, they all just went team-sport and supported him (because their team was the GOP and not the country).
@Bill: Good morning, Bill! I followed the link about the dismembered ‘gator to discover that I’ve reached my limit of freebies at the Orlando Sentinel. Amazed! I can’t think of any time I’ve EVER said ‘wonder what the Orlando Sentinel says about this?’
I have only you to blame. (laughing emoji here)
More seriously, I bet that was a poached gator tossed off a boat. The head/skull is an iconic Florida souvenir. And the tail is where the meat is.
@Northerner:
Usually that’s what happens: The candidates all traipse around slagging each other and then when the winner emerges, it all turns into a giant lovefest. Republicans do it; Democrats do it.
The difference with Trump was that he was so ghastly, such a horrific choice, that the sudden 180 was especially noteworthy. And even then I don’t think Jeb Bush could bring himself to praise Trump, nor a few others. I could be remembering incorrectly.
@CSK: I was curious about that too. I suspect it was because he hadn’t been paying much attention and so didn’t know much about trump but had been indoctrinated by 30 years of anti Clinton propaganda to the point of “anything but her.”
Picture: A wild boar and its two newborns in Teufelssee in Grunewald, Berlin, where it was recently chased by a naked man after stealing his laptop The state forestry office has announced it will keep a close eye on the animals because of possible risks to humans
Just like people at a 2nd hand clothing store: “Oooo… this will look just darling on you, Esmeralda.”
@OzarkHillbilly:
That seems to be the most logical explanation. Still, if he could go from voting for Trump to apologizing publicly for so doing, all in the course of less than five months, there must have been some precipitating event. I’d be really interested to know what it was. There’s a lot from which to pick.
@CSK: I would think daily exposure to the cesspool that is trump should be enough but there are several million Cult45 members who say otherwise.
@OzarkHillbilly:
It should be enough, but bear in mind that those culties either enjoy swimming in the cesspool, or they believe that all the bad things said about Trump are lies invented by the Deep State Media to libel and slander The Best President We’ve Ever Had.
Judging by the photos taken of Steve Bannon leaving court (see http://www.abcnews.go.com for an example) he looks even worse than he did when he left the Trump administration: long greasy hair, a bigger paunch, facial stubble. I don’t know how often he bathes, but it doesn’t appear to be very often.
@OzarkHillbilly: True enough. But also didn’t (really) care then, don’t care now. He got them the stuff they wanted, so it’s all good. Plenty of time to throw him under the bus after they’re sure he can’t propel the agenda any further.
@CSK: Or, as Comma-la might say faced with similar citations
Andrew Yang
https://digbysblog.net/2020/08/bidens-superpower/
True, so very true
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Once, in a biography of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, I read an interesting anecdote: Senator JFK had been involved in some sort of ugly squabble with another senator. Then, several weeks later, they had kissed and made up (so to speak). Jackie said: “Why are you saying nice things about that rat? I’ve been hating him for the past three weeks.” JFK replied that in politics, you didn’t have friends, or enemies, but only people who were useful to you.
That has always struck me as the essence of truth concerning political relationships.
@CSK: That’s why John SJ’s “ground-in grime hobo strung out on meth and moonshine” description from yesterday is sooooooooo spot on!
@CSK: Right now the lead story at FOX News (sic) is “Rising GOP star will target Biden’s ‘47-year failed record’ in major convention speech”. This is what a lot of people see all day, every day. And they’re trained to discount as “fake news” anything that doesn’t support their prejudices. Motivated reasoning is a powerful drug. And they don’t necessarily believe all the pro-Trump nonsense very deeply. The point to Russian disinformation is not to convince the audience of the truth of anything, it’s to make everything look doubtful. If you hear that Biden is a senile doddering fool and that Trump has dementia, you can watch both and make your own judgement, but a lot of people will just go with whichever makes them feel comfortable.
@CSK: Which is why I’ve kept coming back to the problem with the GOP not being Trump but rather what the GOP (and by extension conservatism) is. The things that all of those people said in the clip can be reduced to “that was then, this is now.”
The recollection of a friend of mine on meeting a state-level GOP party leader and asking him if Nixon was a good man (c. 1960 after he’d won the nomination)
Not that much has changed.
Today’s ration of good news:
A judge has ordered Trump to pay Stormy Daniels’s legal fees, even though her suit was dismissed.
The Cleveland Police Union has refused to endorse Trump as they did in 2016. True, they decided not to endorse anyone, but even so…
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
It is, isn’t it?
@gVOR08:
Yes, they will.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
True. But the “that was then; this is now” in the case of Trump was awfully abrupt. People who excoriated him were suddenly his greatest fans. Or pretended to be. I still don’t know how Ted Cruz could abase himself to the extent that he did, although I understand he wanted to keep his senate seat.
Yesterday Paul Campos at LGM linked to a 2012 piece titled The Long Con by Rick Perlstein that seems relevant to how people stay loyal to Trump. The subject isn’t Trump and his constant lies, but Mitt Romney and his constant lies. After chronicling a list of scams like Bannon’s as a key component of conservatism, Perlstein concludes (emphasis mine),
The whole thing is a con, top to bottom, and the Grahams and Cruzes, etc. know it’s a con. After all, they’re running parts of it. They’re not loyal to Trump, they need to keep the con going.
@CSK:
You’ve gotta factor in the percentage of Americans who are just clueless and think ‘Republicans—they are the party that hates big government and the deficit right? I’m voting for them.’
Or don’t and just call them all tards that’s what I usually do. 😀
Kayleigh McEnany is saying that they might not accept the results of the election. If he tries to stick around, on January 20 at 12:01 the Secret Service will get one guy under each of his arms.
In the “I for one welcome our new robot overlords” department, did anyone watch the live simulator dogfight between a weapons instructor pilot and the winner of a DARPA AI pilot challenge?
@Teve:
We both think they’re idiots. And we haven’t been shy about saying so, either. But the problem with calling them out as fools is that it makes them that much more determined in their support for Trump. The real reason they love him so much is that they feel that “the elites” (anyone with any degree of education and cultivation, apparently) don’t respect them. They think Trump does, and that he’s their champion.
Of course, the great irony (and tragedy) is that Trump, in his vast insecurity, despises them more than we do.
@CSK: I don’t see the change as abrupt if it’s only a game to begin with. The only thing that matters in this arena is getting elected. Once that’s resolved, nothing else is important. Not policy. Not governance. Not the nation or the people. Not anything.
It’s why everyone keeps talking about how broken the system is but has no practical route to change (including me 🙁 ).
ETA: I’m not even sure that ideology is important anymore. It’s just another tool.
@Teve:
She’s been saying that for a few days now. It’s half a warning (“You better vote for Trump.”) and half a threat (“This is what will happen if you don’t re-elect Trump.”).
@CSK:
Not all Trump voters were part of The Cult. Lots of people voted for the perceived lesser of two evils, or for their team, or were low-information voters. And lots of those people have come to recognize that maybe running the government like a failing casino is not the best plan.
@Gustopher:
No, they weren’t all part of the cult. But I was speaking more of those who are, and get more avid in their membership every day.
I wonder how many of those who voted for Trump as the lesser of two evils plan to vote for Biden this year. I don’t understand the extreme loathing for Hillary Clinton, and I never did, but I acknowledge that it exists.
According to The Daily Beast, Rush Limbaugh is promoting the notion that Biden didn’t deliver his acceptance speech live because of the absence of flubs. Like Trump, Limbaugh uses the locution that “some people are saying” that the speech we saw and heard had to be edited together from the best parts of a number of takes recorded earlier, because Biden is incapable of speaking for 22 minutes without drooling or falling asleep or something.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: another humorous take I once read: that Bill Barr looks like Steve Bannon after the “Queer Eye” cast worked on him.
@CSK: There is this weird attempt to paint Biden as senile and incompetent (clearly designed to distract from Trump’s obvious issues with logic and syntax, among other things). Some family FNC devotees alternate between wanting to bring up the latest hi-larious Biden gaffe and simply “feeling sorry for him.”
I know the true believers will not be swayed, but surely some folks are going to have their reality challenged during the debates (and other aspects of the campaign).
@Steven L. Taylor:
Well, clearly the Trump fanatics will claim that Trump won any debates that are held, even if he does nothing but grin vacantly and babble mindlessly, which I’m sure they’ll interpret as somehow “owning the libtards.” (By the way, he lied today about how the Democrats at the convention removed the word “God” from the Pledge of Allegiance.) They’re still predicting, however, that Biden will either be replaced before the debates (I don’t know how) or will find an excuse to weasel out of them because Trump is such a fearsomely gifted opponent.
I don’t know if I’ll be able to watch Trump on a debate stage. I think I’ve mentioned before that I suffer badly from vicarious embarrassment.
@CSK:
This does underline the purely transactional nature of politics.
@Steven L. Taylor: Karl Rove taught them to attack the other guy’s strength. If John Kerry is a war hero, you slime his war record. If your candidate is an incoherent doddering old fool and your opponent isn’t, you slime him as one anyway.
It’s Obama and the teleprompter all over again. No matter how many times we saw Obama speak brilliantly ex tem, Rs insisted he couldn’t speak without a teleprompter. And Biden can’t speak without senile gaffes. If believing a thing will blow up your whole worldview, well you’re not going to believe it.
@CSK: I take solace in the fact that Limbaugh will be gone very soon. And it won’t be pleasant. My brother is a pulmonologist and he has told me that lung cancer is a pretty awful way to go. So at least we have that to look forward to. I believe you do have to answer for your time on earth. If that is true, I hope Limbaugh ends up looking at Sisyphus rolling the ball up the hill for eternity and thinks I wish that were me.
@CSK: Yeah. I’m old enough to remember the Bentsen/Quayle debate. Even setting aside the “you’re no John Kennedy” line, Quayle was pathetic. All he managed to do was now and again, seemingly at random, shout some GOP bumper sticker phrase. The next day half the press described him as doing well, he really got his points out there.
@CSK:
I hit the wrong reply button. This was supposed to be a response to Cracker.
@senyordave:
I imagine that Limbaugh’s passing will be as comfortable as money–and he has plenty of it–can buy.
@gVOR08:
I never understood why Bush picked Quayle. (I followed politics less closely then than I do now.) I recall that when he did, the standard response was: “Who?”
@CSK:
My recollection is that it was a combination of someone younger, but someone who would not out shine Bush.
It’s ridiculous now. but there were concerns about Bush’s age and belief that baby boomers were ready to move on from their parents generation as political leaders.
@DrDaveT:
For some reason I’m reminded of the first time a chess program came close to beating the chess world champion. And then a few years later beat the world champion. And now chess programs running on your average laptop can play at grandmaster level.
Human pilots are going to seem very quaint very soon.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Except for one thing, it’s not a game.
@OzarkHillbilly: Not to you, no.
@Sleeping Dog:
Interesting. I remember when there were concerns about Reagan’s age; he was, I think, 70 when he was sworn into office. GHW Bush was 64, and in good shape when he became president. That seems young now, given that the two current contenders are 74 and 77 respectively.
@Monala: Oooh. That’s gonna leave a mark. Ouchies!
(But the thing that is really most interesting to me about the Trump team when I see them live compared to how they photographed when they took their roles, is that their clothes no longer fit–they seem all stretched out and stressed at the seams, collars too small, etc.)
@senyordave:
Wow! That’s as good as the line attributed to CS Lewis comparing hell to a cold stormy late afternoon at some beach resort with hundreds of people queued up waiting for buses that aren’t coming. Again, ouchies.
@CSK: Certainly El Rushbo fits the line from Dr. Hook of “having all the friends that money can buy, so [he]’ll never have to be alone.” But, and maybe this is because I’m a sociopathic NPD scale dwelling misanthrope, for my belief system at least, there is an afterlife to which he will go as empty handed as the rest of us. And to paraphrase Robert Frost
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Not exactly to your point, but it always struck me how much Limbaugh and Trump have in common: They’re two old, rich, fat (Limbaugh was for nearly all of his adult life) white men who live in Florida, used to be based in New York, have had multiple trophy wives, live to play golf, pretend to espouse conservative principles, are natural-born hucksters, have had legal troubles, and have made piles of money (Limbaugh more so) conning the public.
@Sleeping Dog: My recollection about the Quayle pick was the notion that Bush wanted to head off any impeachment talk (from Iran contra) by picking a VP that no one wanted near the Resolute desk.
@Northerner: A pilot on scene using their eyeballs has a vastly better grasp on the battlefield than someone looking through a camera. If AIs reach that level of ability then we’ll be dealing with sentient AIs.
Pilots have been “obsolete” in every other aspect for a while.
@Joe:
Wasn’t that why Nixon picked Agnew?
@Northerner:
Perhaps. I think the more likely near term prospect is that when it’s time to dogfight, the pilot selects the enemy plane from a menu and presses the “dogfight” button. There are lots of other decisions and skills that pilots are responsible for that you won’t be wanting a machine to attempt any time soon.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: Not to anybody.
In a game, whether it be football, chess, Parcheesi or poker, the loser gets to knock over the king and say “Set ’em up again.” In politics/policy the loser dies. There is no setting them up again.
Now, for repubs and their wealthy benefactors losing is being forced to live on 137 million per year as opposed to 216 million. So sure, they act like it’s a game to them. They can always come back and try again. But for a black man looking down the barrel of a gun held by a man with a badge? Or a working class guy who’s wife has just been diagnosed with cancer? Or the post doc who is looking at $100 K of debt? Or the person who is working 3 part time minimum wage jobs and is barely able to afford sleeping in their car?
Or say the lowly carpenter who had to quit working way too early because *35 years* of framing and hanging left his body broken, living in pain every day and wondering what he’s gonna do when cancer/heart disease/Covid comes calling?
Yeah, we are players in the “game”. Except it ain’t a game, even if the rich act like it is, they know better and that is the lie they tell but I refuse to accept it. Fuck them with a splintered 2×4.
*My last 15 years was in the union. Dog if I had been able to work all my years in the union (meaning willing to abandon my sons with their drug addicted mother) I would be a lot better off. As is, I thank them profusely for the small pension I have earned and will soon be receiving.
@OzarkHillbilly: I used to say the country would be in a lot better shape if the average guy took a quarter of the time he spends on sports and followed current events and politics. After all, politics is a lot like sports, except that it actually matters who wins and loses.
@Sleeping Dog:
I think it was also because he had more right-wing bona fides than Bush. The right’s skepticism of Bush was a major motivating factor in his campaign, influencing everything from “Read my lips” to Willie Horton.
@Northerner:
That, and my health, were the two reasons I stopped playing correspondence chess in 2009.
To be fair, I used Chess Base database to guide me through the openings till the game I was playing got out of book*. Then it was me against my opponent or their computer.
*- When a game no longer follows any game previously played. This usually happens between moves 11 to 20. I had a large database of my own games and there was a certain Caro-Kann line that I played so often I think I had one game not deviate from one of my old games till move 26 or 27.
Opening databases or opening books were not against the rules.
@Sleeping Dog: I have to quote the paragraph that followed:
19-year-old Aaron Coleman, a progressive, won the Democratic primary for a Kansas legislative seat against an establishment Democrat. The young man has come under fire because in middle school, he bullied one girl so badly she attempted suicide, and blackmailed another girl with revenge porn. When confronted by the families of the girls, he told them to move on, because he had.
Glenn Greenwald is defending the young man with the following arguments: 1) Democrats don’t like him because he’s progressive and a white working class male; 2) Coleman’s working class childhood is what led him to these behaviors; and 3) Democrats are hypocrites who don’t really believe in giving people second chances.
A lot of people are calling BS on Greenwald, pointing out that to say that a working class childhood leads you to bullying and sexual assault is flat-out condescending and wrong, and Coleman’s behavior is more than just youthful hijinks, like vandalism or weed smoking or shoplifting would be. Instead, his behavior shows a level of cruelty that we shouldn’t want in any elected official, even if he supports M4A. And finally, yes, people can rehabilitate, but five years later and showing no remorse, he certainly doesn’t deserve a state legislative seat.
h/t Lawyers, Guns & Money blog. Link
@Monala: there are very, very few times I would favor the Republican, but assuming his opponent is just garden variety evil rather than a 19 year old sociopath… plus it’s Kansas. What do I care about Kansas?
If he felt bad about the things he did he wouldn’t be making his victims relive it. I doubt there’s any rehabilitation or redemption in his soul.
If the US Senate was hanging the balance, he might be the lesser of two evils*. But, Kansas state legislature? What’s the harm one more Republican is going to do there? He can fuck off and lose.
And Glenn Greenwood is an asshole.
——
*: I’d be willing to sell out or piss off any constituency if it was going to matter. Even LGBT folks despite being part of the B. But, it has to matter. Republicans dominate the Kansas legislature, so this little shit isn’t going to matter.
This little shit is just an opportunity for people to take free rides on their purity ponies all over his ass, and drag him through the mud so he loses big. And I think that’s a good thing at this point — we get to do the right thing and pay no real cost.