President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

From the Chait article on the previous page:

"Trump’s character flaws are so vast, and encompass so many realms of human behavior, that it poses an impossible task even to adequately summarize them.....
His relatively small offenses — faking an injury to evade the draft, cheating his way into college, committing criminal tax fraud — would have alone disqualified a normal candidate but are simply drowned out by his other flaws."

 

Diving into the GOP conversation about this cocaine thing is bad for my health. We're 15 years post-Sarah Palin and I still can't wrap my head around how people can pretend to be so stupid. (I'm sure they are stupid, but I really think you'd have to pretend for some of this stuff.)

Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) stormed out of a briefing offered to lawmakers moments after it began, calling the conclusion “bogus” and the investigation a “complete failure."

Just imagine pretending to be this mad about this. Like, what the fuck does he think happened? Hunter Biden snuck down to the visitor's area of the White House while the family wasn't there and dropped a bag of coke? I mean, obviously, that's what he's pretending to think, but holy shit that's stupid.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) told reporters. “My question to them was, have they drug-tested this list of 500 potential suspects that brought an illegal substance, or drug, cocaine, into the White House? Their answer was ‘no’ and that they’re unwilling to do so.”

She wants to track down 500 people who were at the White House last week and make them all pee in a cup? That's so fucking stupid.

“In 2022, twice while going through screening, people were caught with marijuana in their possession,” Boebert added. “So for this being the third time that drugs were found on the White House property during the Biden administration certainly poses a question: What kind of people are we allowing to go onto that premise? And what is their actual purpose there?”

"What is their actual purpose there." I'm not even sure what she's implying. That people are sneaking drugs into the White House through a visitor's entrance to... party? Is she implying someone's actively running a drug ring out of the White House?

And Trump, who keeps insisting it's Biden's personal cocaine... I mean, hopefully it's just a laugh line and no one's stupidest enough to believe if somehow the President did want some coke, the way for him to get that coke would be to have a tourist bring it in the visitor's entrance.

Hopefully, no one's that stupid, but there's strong, strong evidence that plenty of people are that stupid and quite a bit stupider.

 

We're so damned far behind other countries in math and science that it is embarrassing, so it makes complete sense that these people are concerned with Critical Race Theory and "wokeism." This country is well on its way to creating a class of citizens that will be bought by people in other countries as house pets.

 

This is my understanding of slander.

And didn't Trump have some sort of drug dripping from his nose during one of the debates??

 

The non sequitur comparison with Teach for America is a great example of what not to do.

 

I'd agree with all that.

I'd argue, too, that the school closure issue during the pandemic wasn't covered with a balanced approach - not so much because of politics, but because a press that covers the schools invariably can have a blind spot to accepting the official line of their bureaucratic sources. It's a blind spot for cops and courts coverage, too - to simply believe - of if not that, over-quote - the people who hold the pressers and officially speak.

Reporters also struggle to understand - it's an eternal struggle - that it's not really the reporter's job to convince the bureaucracy the reporter knows their stuff; it's a reporter's job to synthesize - through reporters - what the bureaucrat actually means in a way that the audience understands. And sometimes that means asking more questions than a bureaucrat likes. (Since the bureaucrat already knows what the bureaucrat knows and thinks.)

CRT is an example. The worst kind reporter wields without acknowledging the truth gap between what activists say CRT is and what CRT actually is. But it's only mediocre to report the truth gap over and over. ("District officials say there is not CRT, an academic theory mostly-taught in law school, in the district curriculum") The best approach, IMO, is to press the officials (and activists) on why there's a truth gap - and a trust gap.

 

k, l, m, n (globalists) and o (Soros) are really just code words for Jews.

 

America's deeply ingrained anti-intellectualism makes it easier for those of us who read and are curious to get cushier jobs. My ex-wife's family has been living in the same small town for generations. They love Trump. Meanwhile, her father once mocked me for spending $10 on "The History of the Ginger Man," about JP Donleavy's odyssey in getting the book published because of indecency claims. He couldn't understand why anyone would spend that kind of money on a book, I shit you not.

As a wise person once said, people don't remember you for what you made them think; they remember you for how you made them feel. Trump makes morons feel empowered. That's the long and the short of it.

But they suffer for it, too. Know a lot of MAGA guys -- some friends, mainly former friends -- whose marriages went in the shitter because of their adherence to Trump. Can't say that about too many Democratic politicians, but maybe I'm wrong.

 

These people want to be this stupid. They STRIVE to be this stupid. It’s the only way they can justify being so wrong and hateful.

It’d be more funny if it wasn’t so dangerous.

 

Willfully ignorant.

 

Trump on Trial: A Model Prosecution Memo for Federal Election Interference Crimes

https://www.justsecurity.org/87236/...emo-for-federal-election-interference-crimes/