Here the reality about living in a democracy: If you did not vote for Harris, you voted for… all this. Don’t give me any bellyaching about God not magically rescuing a free people from the consequences of our choices. America, as a people, asked for this asshole, asked for the Party that enables this asshole to run both houses of Congress, asked for the civilization we chose to be in which this asshole and his party of assholes represent who we are as a people.
We can (perhaps) still change this. But the first lesson we have to learn is to stop with the lie, “This is not who we are.”. This is who we are. Nobody held a gun to our heads. We made this happen, including the people who let this happen. There are, to be sure, innocent victims. But, broadly speaking, Trump and his asshole party are the government we asked for, as most of the rest of the world is happy to tell us in their candid moments when they are not manipulating us like Putin or trying to manage a nation of proud, privileged fools as our NATO Allies are doing.
“Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa”: These are words that form almost no part of our national vocabulary, culture, or history. We have spent centuries talking about how great we are, how the world envies us, how nothing can ever equal the power and pride of America. The last time we saw it forthrightly confessed by a leader that we created our own punishments by our own free and evil choices was when Lincoln said, in his Second Inaugural,
Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, “The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
The rest of the time, humility is weakness in the American psyche. It always has been.
But until we learn that humility, we will never find our way out of the mind-bogglingly stupid situation we have freely created for ourselves. The punishment of sin is not stuck on externally like a postage stamp by an arbitrary and vindictive God. It is simply sin in fruition: the consequences of our own selfish and stupid choices playing out in real time.
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13 Responses
We, the people elected this rancid man. This is our Purgatory. It is curious to hear Trump voters who are losing their Medicaid health insurance wail about how unfair it all is. Are they really that stupid?
Trump’s whole mission is to enrich the billionaires even more. Tax cuts for the rich, cuts in Medicaid and SNAP benefits for everyone else. Hundreds of millions for a new ballroom, while people go hungry. This is what we voted for.
I agree with you to a large extent; however, some of that ire needs to be directed at the Biden administration and the Harris campaign, who knowingly, deliberately and intentionally went out of their way to hamstring their own campaign. Why? Because they prioritized staying in the good graces of Benjamin Netanyahu over actually winning the election. Even if you take the morality of the issues at hand out of the equation and look at it from a purely cynical, pragmatic and self-serving point of view, what they did was straight up political malpractice.
They clearly did not see a second Trump term as the existential threat they proclaimed it as.
Bread and circuses…except now without the bread.
“…some of that ire needs to be directed at the Biden administration and the Harris campaign, who knowingly, deliberately and intentionally went out of their way to hamstring their own campaign.”
Deliberately? I don’t know. I don’t have enough inside information to confirm or deny, but a good friend of mine used to have a saying at times like this: “Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.” (Hanlon’s Razor.)
No one is better at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory than the Democratic Party in general and the DNC in particular. There is a strain within leadership that really is elitist, that really does see millions of Americans as “deplorables,” and really does think they know better and the voters should just line up and eat their spinach. It’s why they keep trying to coronate Hillary Clinton, voters be damned.
I wish I could say they have learned their lesson. New York City’s new mayor is a huge wake up call, I hope.
Surely Lucy won’t yank the football this time! Right? Right?!?
Yeah, incompetence would be my initial assessment as well. You could also attribute many of the mishaps of the previous administration to Biden’s ideological commitment to Zionism. However, we have learned since then, that the Harris campaign had data showing that issue of Gaza was important to many voters; not just overall, but also prominent in key demographics and swing districts.
But what did they do? They stopped polling the question altogether. They banned Palestinian-American representatives from speaking at the DNC convention. A prominent lefty streamer, Hasan Piker, was evicted from the premises for doing a live interview with the people from the “uncommitted” movement. They sent die-hard Zionist democrats like Richie Torres and Bill Clinton to lecture the Arab-American communities of Michigan on the virtues of Israel.
Basically, they went above and beyond, to do everything in their power to signal to everybody who opposed the conflict in Gaza, which was the majority of their base, that they held them in utter contempt and that nothing was going to change. They couldn’t even be bothered to lie and pretend other wise, which is what Trump did. Trump, for all his faults and character flaws, was not ideologically committed to supporting Israel in same way Biden was; he is purely self-interested and transactional.
Keep in mind, that most people for whom this was a prominent issue, did end up holding their nose and voting for Harris. However, for many in key districts in key swing states, this was not an abstract issue regarding an overseas conflict that was disconnected from their daily lives; we’re talking about people whose immediate family and friends were being slaughtered on a daily basis, with the explicit support, green light and blessing of our government.
The options being presented to them was to roll the dice with Trump with very low odds, or go along with a guaranteed continuation of the massacre, in exchange for their own personal well-being and that of people who are in a relatively more privileged position, when contrasted with those in Gaza.
Now, I think they were wrong in their overall assessment, but I don’t begrudge them for making that choice under those circumstances. I’m far more angry with the people who had the most power and agency in that situation, yet chose to do nothing about it.
I watched the Youtube on Hilary. She must be bought and paid for. I wonder if they are also extorting her for all of the compromising information they have on her too.
In 2016, prominent Democrats who were considering a run for President, were told to stand down. It was Hillary’s turn. Her turn? So, she got the nomination without earning it. Ditto Kamala Harris. Neither earned the nomination. And they both lost to a malicious clown.
I wish Democrats were more concerned with the economic problems of working people, such as the minimum wage which has not moved in 15 years and were less concerned about how many left handed lesbians of color are being hired. Knock off the social engineering and focus on helping working people with real,economic assistance and health care.
A couple of things:
Keep in mind that a lot of the “social engineering” being attributed to the Democrats is actually an overblown caricature being pushed by the Right. For all her faults, and there were many, Kamala Harris did not run on culture war issues, like at all.
Nevertheless, the Democratic party establishment does have a tendency to weaponize identity politics, in either direction, as part of their messaging strategy. The biggest tell, is in the way that they will often use such identity politics as a way to shield themselves and deflect genuine criticism of their policies, especially those coming from their left flank.
In contrast, actual lefties and progressives center their politics around improving the material conditions for everybody across the board; which is why for them, advocating on behalf of marginalized communities is something flows downstream from that naturally. The way this plays out is that when push comes to shove, progressives will stand their ground to defend marginalized groups, whereas the more centrist, establishment-type Democrats will be ready to throw them under the bus at the earliest convenience.
You can see some of this dynamic play out on this clip from “The Majority Report”:
“Hillary Clinton’s Horrendous Mamdani Take Is Blowing Up In Her Face”
https://youtu.be/Jov489Z5osw?si=US3Mo-JNnDr_PswW
Correct on all counts. I saw it happen firsthand. Where I lived at the time, we had a caucus rather than a primary, with 3 delegate votes. I went to the caucus. While Clinton supports certainly had a health crowd, it was an OVERWHELMING show-up for Bernie. I never saw an official head count, but I estimate that over the thousands who showed up, maybe 20% were there for Hillary Clinton. They were wandering around with a sort of deer-in-the-headlights look. The rest of the crowd — hundreds — were there for Bernie Sanders, and they were celebrating. So many people showed up that the middle school where the caucus occurred was overwhelmed. Volunteers were not planning for such a throng.
A couple of hours into this, the election officials stood up on the stage and made an announcement. I don’t remember it word for word, but the gist of it was: “Wow. Thank you, everyone, for this overwhelming show of support. The people have spoken! But really, we cannot handle this crowd. So everyone please go home.”
The crowd dispersed, and later that night it was announced that all 3 delegates cast their votes for Hillary Clinton. Illegal? No. Not at all. They were free to vote for whoever they wanted. But anyone who thought the DNC really cares about democracy got a rude awakening that day. The DNC did not want an election. They wanted a coronation, and they insisted voters line up to take their medicine.
Did they learn their lesson? Nope.
Will they learn it in 2028. Time will tell. But I am old and crotchety enough to have lost most of my optimism on this score.
The Democrats made the mistake of catering to race pimps and militant feminists, both of whom are pretty obnoxious. Telling a white guy in a lousy $12/hr job that he owes Blacks reparations for slavery is not a winning strategy. Yes,I understand that most Democrats are not so inclined, but enough of them are to justify Republican caricature.
The Democrats blew this shutdown. You don’t play chicken with a psychopath who actually wants to wreck the car. Trump wanted the shutdown and the Democrats gave it to him. Big mistake.
You… don’t seem to have comprehended the first thing about what happened on Tuesday.
The Democrats have nothing to do with the shutdown. The Republicans can pass their budget anytime they want without a single Democrat vote. The thing is, the filibuster is not an actual rule or law; its just a convention. It was an accidental loophole, which was then weaponized by both parties to justify their inaction. After all, broadly speaking, legislative paralysis will always tend to benefit the status quo, pretty much by definition.
Point is, that at any moment, the Republicans could pass a vote to suspend the filibuster on this particular instance or just do away with it all together. The Democrats are not “playing chicken”; they’re not even in the game.
Tuesday was not so much an endorsement of Democrats as a repudiation of the toxic Trump Administration. The Democrats need to focus on economic Justice and ramp down the racial social engineering.