President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

Excellent column from last weekend ...

Journalism fails miserably at explaining what is really happening to America

By WILL BUNCH | Philadelphia Inquirer

America is entering its most important, pivotal year since 1860, and the U.S. media is doing a terrible job explaining what is actually happening. Too many of us — with our highfalutin poli-sci degrees and our dog-eared copies of the late Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes — are still covering elections like it’s the 20th century, as if the old touchstones like debates or a 30-second spot still matter.

What we are building toward on Nov. 5, 2024, might have the outward trappings of an election, but it is really a show of force. What we call the Republican Party is barely a political party in any sense of the word, but a dangerous antisocial movement that has embraced many of the tenets of fascism, from calls for violence to its dehumanizing of “others” — from desperate refugees at the border to transgender youth.

...

These are the stakes: dueling visions for America — not Democratic or Republican, with parades and red, white, and blue balloons, but brutal fascism or flawed democracy. The news media needs to stop with the horse race coverage of this modern-day March on Rome, stop digging incessantly for proof that both sides are guilty of the same sins, and stop thinking that a war for the imperiled survival of the American Experiment is some kind of inexplicable “tribalism.”

We need to hear from more experts on authoritarian movements and fewer pollsters and political strategists. We need journalists who’ll talk a lot less about who’s up or down and a lot more about the stakes — including Trump’s plans to dismantle the democratic norms that he calls “the administrative state,” to weaponize the criminal justice system, and to surrender the war against climate change — if the 45th president becomes the 47th. We need the media to see 2024 not as a traditional election, but as an effort to mobilize a mass movement that would undo democracy and splatter America with more blood like what was shed Saturday in Jacksonville. We need to understand that if the next 15 months remain the worst-covered election in U.S. history, it might also be the last.

 

Reminds me of the Robert Frost quote: “I never dared to be radical when young for fear it would make me conservative when old.”

I’ve gone the opposite direction myself. Gotten progressively more liberal with the years.

 

We will fight transgender youth
We will fight Advanced Placement curriculum
We will fight the American Library Association
We will fight Bud Light
We will never surrender our grift

 

OK, maybe?

 

What an insult to Churchill.

 

That’s what a lot of these alleged candidates are doing: running for VP. This guy fits. Ignorance is bliss for this klan.

 

I don't know. Sometimes it all feels hopeless.

I was having some beers with a coworker I only see every few months. Last time we hung out was a few weeks after the Bud Lite saga started. He was still drinking them, though, because "I'm not going to get fired up just because I'm told to."

Flash forward to now and he can't recall ever not being mad at Bud Lite, for "the way they shoved it in our face."

He kept saying "shoved it in our face." "Shoved transgenderism in our face. It's ok if people are transgender. I don't care if you're transgender, but I don't like Bud Lite shoving it in my face."

I kept saying "how is sending a beer or six to a person you've never heard of, with an account y0u don't follow and have never seen and on a platform you don't use 'Shoving it in your face.'"

"Well, that story was everywhere."

"Yeah, so maybe it was Fox News 'Shoving it in your face, and not Bud Lite?'"

And.... he didn't want to talk about it anymore. We got on to happier topics.

I guess I've naively clung to some dumb belief that if you could just lay it out well enough, good people, smart people, would hear you and listen. And this guy is a good guy. Goofy. Funny. Kind. Sharp. And, when confronted with an argument to which there was no logical rebuttal — that Bud Lite had in no way shoved a trangendered person in his face — he didn't give an inch and changed the topic.

 

Her klan doesn’t want to be indoctrinated with libruhl stuff in no college.

 

Meh. Got off light.

 

Fatfuck will never tolerate a VP selection who has any interest (or qualifications) whatsoever in the top job -- for obvious reasons.

The eventual VP pick will be some utterly sycophantic meat slurper whose only reason for living will be to tongue Fatfuck's balls and perpetuate his rule.

Remember, this is a forever election. He's not planning to leave.

 

Churchill? LOL. Yo mama, Fucko.

 

Changing the topic was his way of giving the inch.