President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

Georgia Supreme Court sends abortion law challenge back to lower court, leaving access unchanged

 

Now the question becomes will he get torpedoed when it goes to the floor. He'd be smart to delay the floor vote and see if mending fences is possible. I wonder if the bomb throwing caucus will stand down.

 

I'm reading Gaetz is pro-Emmer, which makes absolutely no sense.

 

Washington state Sen. Jeff Wilson arrested at Hong Kong airport over gun in bag

Dipshit. "Accidently" had an unloaded pistol in his carry on bag, got through TSA with it in Portland.

 

Good. He has no 2A rights in a foreign country. Diplomatic immunity? I can't imagine it works that way.

I can't believe the Far East let it get to this.

 

Gaetz is only pro- whomever he has dirt on.

I was in a charitable mood yesterday. Today? Not so much.

 

Man is not a rational animal. He is a rationalizing animal.

‘I Mean, Is This My Party?’

 

He would go insane otherwise.

 

"A new book asks if even anti-Trumpers like Mitt Romney bear some blame for the rise of a man who has destroyed the GOP" — of course they do, they've bent over for this guy for eight years. Romney groveled at a Manhattan restaurant (and was seen doing it! he clearly was set up) for a position in Trump's cabinet. Now they're all throwing their hands up and saying "we couldn't do anything." Bull. Fucking. Shit.

 

I'll give her a quarter-Swaggart.

 

Ramaswamy considering 'reevaluating' US United Nations membership, scaling back NATO involvement: report

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/ra...membership-pulling-out-nato-reasonable-report

 

“The stuff that he was more focused on was just this idea of his rationalization,” Coppins told me. “I think he was surprised when he read it by how much attention I gave to these moments in his career when he found himself rationalizing in his own self-interest,” he said. “He felt that I was giving those moments too much weight. And I think maybe he worried that the reader would come away thinking that his entire life and political career have been one sort of downward drift into moral relativism and nihilism.”

For what it’s worth, I didn’t come away thinking that, but I told Coppins I did come away thinking that this is what makes this book so interesting, and also important. Even Romney — manifestly diligent and disciplined, apparently more self-aware, let’s say, than some of his peers, committed to his faith in a way that seems not at all fake — even Romney was and might to a certain extent still be susceptible to these kinds of rationalizations. And even for Coppins and Romney, with their shared Mormon backgrounds, values and trust, it was hard to have this conversation.

“I really do think that a huge part of this kind of crisis moment that our politics have landed in is there’s an epidemic of self-justification and rationalizing in the American political class,” Coppins told me. “So many people have internalized the idea that getting reelected is what matters, and fitting comfortably in your partisan tribe is what matters, and that it’s almost kind of like self-righteous and quaint to talk too much about your conscience and your principles.”


“In our two years of interviews, Romney’s efforts to process his party’s evolution — and his own — were halting and messy. He’d seem to confess complicity in one meeting, then walk it back in the next. He’d get angry and then cool off.” Romney’s rationalizations, “he argued, have been the exceptions in his life, not the rule, and they’re hardly unique to him. Fair enough,” Coppins writes in the epilogue. “But his rationalizations fascinate me because they’re so common in Washington. The path to this fraught moment in American history is paved with compromises made for political advantage that didn’t seem like compromises at the time.”

In one of our last conversations last week, Coppins offered additional context: “I think he has a hard time kind of accepting blame for the Trump era when he’s one of vanishingly few Republicans who did anything to try to stop it. And none of the other Republicans who are way more complicit are willing to accept blame,” he told me. “He doesn’t think that it’s his fault that Donald Trump ended up becoming president. I think the way he sees it is, in the grand ledger … by standing on that stage in 2012, he may have added a little bit of weight on the side of helping him — but then, in 2016, he added way more on the other side in trying to stop him.”