President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

Making fun of other people at their expense is what Republicans do. Unless someone does it to them.

 

Smallhand Crappie?

 

Even the most MAGA’d out people I know can deduce that someone has special needs within a few seconds and shut down any instinct to mock or belittle that person. I don’t think she’s going to catch hell from only one direction.

 

...or not

 

You mean like -- I don't know -- Barron Trump?

 

As the father of a kid with ADHD (among other things), I can say with utmost certainty that a lot of Americans think it’s a made-up condition by people looking to excuse bad parenting.

 

You can go further and say gerrymandering has been a great boon to them for safety in Congressional seats and a growing list of high-to-super majorities in state congressional bodies. They do a great job of stacking the deck when in power at the state level and some of that trickles to Congress. They also have a majority of the safe seats in the Senate, even with the losses in Georgia. And the only reason they lost Georgia is because Trump pushed his shitty candidates like Herschel Walker, who only lost by about 99,000 votes.

So if the Republican Party had competent top leadership they would probably dominate the political landscape in America because of their ability to get the numbers in their favor.

 

I think the majority of this country is worn down by this rhetoric.

 

The right wing of the Republican party has now spent 30 years not just opposing Democrats but demonizing them as "sick," "dangerous" and a "threat." As much as Trump constitutes a unique data point, much of the ridiculous stuff like Pizzagate is the logical endpoint of those strategies (e.g., "If Hillary is as evil as we say she is, she must be a pedophile!"). The 2016 election was a case of them hitting on 20 and getting an ace.

The problem is that the strategy is very effective to your base, which is motivated to confront what they perceive as an perpetual imminent crisis, as if your grandmother was being robbed in broad daylight on your front porch.

 

Oh, it's been more than 30 years. They've been demonized as sick, dangerous, threatening, perverted, sickos and more since the 60s.

 

Possibly true, but I'm kind of tracing back to Newt Gingrich.

 

Trace it back to Rush. It doesn't go anywhere without millions of people already angry stuck in traffic listening to their radios and getting angrier.