286 Comments

Please oh please can't he just go away!!!

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"Ought to show their cards"...my dude, "ought" never happens in politics. It scarcely happens anywhere.

The library...the books are not orphans. They are the newest treasures of devoted parents.

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The "Hunter's laptop" obsession is obvious. Now that the "the election was stolen" narrative has completely fallen apart they need another scapegoat for their failure, so it has morphed into "the FBI colluded with media to tank the Hunter Biden laptop story, which had the American public known, would have assured Trump's victory."

I mean it's obvious nonsense on a lot of levels but that is kind of the point.

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Thanks for the update

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founding

"FBI BURIED THE HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP STORY BEFORE THE ELECTION"

If that's why Trump thinks he lost, then he doesn't think that the ballots themselves were rigged. Big change in the story.

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What do you mean “now”? The Republican sedition caucus voted against certifying the election in January of 2021 and that was after seditionist attorneys general attempted to overturn the voting results of their fellow states. There has been a seditionist movement going on in the MAGA world for years already.

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Re:”Home Libraries”

Beautiful

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In his Atlantic article, Rauch writes, "Hungary has not gone from democracy to dictatorship, but it has gone from democracy to democracy-ish."

As it happens, just last night I listened to Yascha Mounk's interview with Sergei Guriev about his new book, Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century. Guriev classifies Orban as one of his "spin dictators" - a new class of populist tyrant, who maintains the rhetoric of democracy while ruling as a de facto dictator. Guriev distinguishes spin dictators from fascist dictators, who rule by fear rather than spin. In Venezuela, for instance, Chavez ruled by spin, while his successor Maduro rules by fear. In the past few months, Putin has decisively crossed the line from spin dictator to full-blown fascist. It's a fascinating interview:

https://www.persuasion.community/p/guriev#details

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I can't believe this shit.

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Re: #1 - I had none of those thoughts. To me, that would have been a category error (thanks to Mona for this one). Rationale thinking and process are too foreign to be relevant for discussion of many of his tweets, this one included. I think my first thought was "For cripes sake", best in a midwestern twang.

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founding

Ron DeSantis is just as crazy - he just cleans up better

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founding

So both his proposed remedy and his “minimal” fallback position involve overthrowing the Constitution. Just another day at the office.

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Is there anything more amusing than listening to Republicans talk about Trump's "policies"?

Remember when Trump campaigned as the "law and order" candidate? He nominates a brontosaurus for AG who starts seeking maximum sentences and nullifying consent decrees, then when his poll numbers are in the crapper along comes a wonderful piece of popular, bipartisan reform legislation for him to sign, the crafting and passing of which he had nothing to do with, and voila! Now he's the criminal justice reform president!

How about when he sounded like a progressive reformer on healthcare, promising that after killing the ACA they were going to cover everyone - despite the fact that one of the principal complaints about the ACA was its mandate for everyone to be insured? After being forced to confront that he has no idea what he's doing when it comes to healthcare (nobody could have known how hard it would be!) he settles into a pattern of undermining the existing healthcare markets while having his lawyers seek to remove requirements to cover pre-existing conditions - all while lying and saying he's working to protect them. Then later on he declares that the Republican party will be the "party of healthcare", teasing the media with non-existent yet soon-to-be-revealed proposals that are totally in the works right now ...

Oh, or when he pretended that he was all about taxing the rich and then passed a tax bill that was a giant gift to the wealthy? Or said he was going to build a wall and have Mexico pay for it, but instead had our military pay for it (under the pretense of an emergency that he admitted wasn't actually an emergency), and then never actually built it but lied and claimed he did?

Oh, and the foreign "policy" that had Republicans fighting him almost every step of the way, because it basically consisted of hissy fits with our allies (not to mention the military brass) to keep them from "screwing us over", coupled with capitulation to foreign autocrats who wrote him love letters and stroked his combover? Ask Ted Cruz what he thinks about the "policy" of wanting to pull us out of NATO or having Russia rejoin the G7.

Trump doesn't have "policies". He has pretenses, personal ambitions, and psychological tendencies regulated by intestinal disturbances. His presidency was a seat-of-his-pants work of improvisation as the Republican party repeatedly attempted to harness and control his energy and steer it toward their own ends, with diminishing levels of success as Trump learned how to game the system. That's why the RNC hasn't drafted an actual platform since bending the knee to him - what's the point of making policy promises when you're in thrall to a voter base whose only real policy goal is producing liberal tears? Writing down policy goals just makes it harder to shift the goalposts later on and bullshit justifications for Trump's mercurial behavior. After all, as far as the Republican Party is concerned, there is only one real "policy" goal - to remain in power.

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A few comments:

1) I enjoy the columns on The Bulwark website, but every now and then, one stands out as particularly insightful and meaningful. This is one of those.

2) My first thought when reading Trump’s tweet was to be reminded of the old line that “Trump supporters take him seriously but not literally, while journalists take him literally, but not seriously”. Of course, there’s no legal path for what Trump wants – but it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that he is entertaining and bombastic and gives his supporters something else to feel victimized about. No need for logic. You see this all the time from the Trumplicants. Here in Arizona, the GOP candidate for AG has publicly said that he would “decertify” the 2020 election. The press has all said that that can’t be done. Yet, no one, to my knowledge, has bothered to ask him how exactly he plans to do it. I would love to hear his answer.

This isn’t the first time that Trumplicants have argued for redoing the election. As I recall, Flynn suggested as much (at least in the swing states that Trump lost). And several lawsuits were brought alleging that some states had illegally changed their election laws before the election and wanted the court to throw out the election results. The problem was that they sought to have those rule changes overturned AFTER the election, not BEFORE it. So the courts weren’t exactly sympathetic to their pleas to void the votes and tossed the suits (and, of course, this became another example of how the courts were biased against Trump as well as fodder to amplify the talking point that Trump didn’t really lose his election lawsuits because of a lack of evidence – it was because the courts refused to hear them) as they correctly pointed out that there wasn’t a remedy available to the plaintiffs.

My guess is this won’t be the last.

3) I know that it’s dangerous (and foolhardy) to spend much time analyzing Trump’s tweets, but he seems to conveniently forget about the Comey situation right before the 2016 election. Using Trump’s logic, Clinton should have simply been declared the winner (or at least we could have redone the election). Somehow, I doubt he would be on board with that idea.

4) Cruz says that Cheney’s mind “just shattered” when “Trump came to power”. But he’s forgetting that Cheney voted for Trump in 2020 (one of life’s enduring mysteries) and her mind only “shattered” because of January 6. But then I keep forgetting that logic never mattered to Cruz either.

5) JVL’s plaint about creeping authoritarianism based on the Hungarian model is just another example of how so much of what we thought we knew about the way our system operates depends on the honor system. And how dishonorable people can take advantage of that.

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I guess I'm just feeling voluble today. But I think it's ironic that as much as it's true that TFG and many of his higher-level supporters look at their own voters as gullible, country-fried rubes, I suspect that they also look at their highly-educated opponents on the coasts as at least as naive, as also being gullible rubes. We don't sense the danger to ourselves and we continue trundling along into believing playing by the rules would save us, and academics debate coup vs. autogolpe or what an "electoral autocracy" or "partial democracy" is. "What suckers! What is it, six years later, seven, I still haven't obeyed the law compelling me to hand over my tax returns to Congress! Ha! I love the "rule of law! Openly obstructed justice, pardoned my co-conspirators, led a violent insurrection. Even Hitler went to jail for a little while after his putsch. I really am the smartest! Teeheehee!" Or we high-minded people of principle, or are we just rubes? Maybe we're both?

Another question I'd love to ask some members of SCOTUS and watch them squirm is what happens when the wording of the Constitution leads to results antithetical to the Framers' stated intent, and thus following it becomes internally contradictory. Is it truly a suicide pact for representative democratic-republican government? It's indisputable the Framers believed in majority rule with protection for minority rights. Majority Rule. Is a system that sometimes delivers a president and two chambers of Congress elected by national minorities a constitutional system? The EC as a system for indirect elections by the wise failed long ago, so shouldn't it just be a plurality winner? The House was always meant to be close to the people and reflect the popular will, so is a population imbalance that means votes in one state are far more valuable than another compatible with the original intent of the Constitution? Our system isn't proportional, true, but does a scenario where candidates winning less votes across the board govern the country really fit into the concept of democratic-republican governance? The Senate is explicitly different, so we can leave that aside. Please, solve this riddle, oh wise and learned legal scholar of pure heart and original intent! At least prior to ruling that a gerrymandered legislature that represents a minority of state voters can overturn the state popular vote! Alito or Thomas would just spit at me and laugh. They don't need to bother to answer, and they have nothing but contempt for the question and anyone who asks it.

What happens if DeSantis were to lose the governor's election to Crist and refuse to accept the vote? DeSantis will probably win, but hypothetically, if he lost, or some other R governor, and he or she rejected the outcome and the state legislature ratified that rejection, and then SCOTUS upheld the legislature's power to do so? In effect, Florida (or state X) is transformed into a little dictatorship, unquestionably. Should the federal government use the military if necessary to intervene, and ignore SCOTUS's validation? What if the Florida National Guard offers resistance? Should the US Army fight the NG and various militias? What if the federal govt. doesn't intervene? What should the federal government do? If it can't correct the situation, what does it mean for Floridians? Aside from leaving the state, is there any recourse for the citizenry? Should they continue voting in rigged elections? I hope this doesn't happen, but you wonder if some wild-eyed pol doesn't decide confronting the federal government in this way would raise his national profile and make him the hero de jour. It would be weird but maybe not irrational to see a governor tank his own re-election at some point just to establish the principle that he or she could throw out the result of the election. But without Trump's cult-like devotion, one wonders if enough state legislators would really be prepared to emasculate themselves that way. Probably not. And TFG would probably come out against it simply because little mini-dictators would be a challenge to his authority since they would have a somewhat independent power base, and he can't tolerate that. He and his backers want a strong, centralized dictatorship at the federal level. Still, it's an interesting hypothetical.

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founding

I’ve grown bored with the insurrectionists and coup supporters. They are dangerous and yet pathetic in their rank stupidity and hypocrisy. They are banal and empty of anything resembling American spirit. For that reason and many others I am committed to Liz Cheney’s determined effort to remove Orange Man from our political landscape. However, even if we rid ourselves of him, THEY will remain. We need to know that the liberal democratic project is still endangered. We must continue the fight for as long as it takes. And for that reason I enjoyed the essay on book collecting. It captures my own love for the printer and physically accessible word. While my own interests lie with history, philosophy and ideas, old books whatever their topic are examples of our best selves. Anything that lasts that long must be treasured and admired as statements of our collective culture. My own library only mesures 1000, but I add each year and hope that my grandson views them as an inheritance worth keeping; but if not, second best is that they end up on another’s book shelves, there to be read, admired and treasured.

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