dajoki
dajoki's JournalBeing Kyrsten Sinema
Being Kyrsten Sinema
How wonderful to be wrapped up in herself
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/being-kyrsten-sinema
Can you imagine how thrilling it is to be Kyrsten Sinema?
The President of the United States invites you for a one-on-one in the Oval Office – not once, but three times in a single day!
Senior White House officials sit in your office for hours on end!
Every Democratic senator checks in to see how you’re doing!
All official Washington is talking about you!
You’re in all the headlines. You’ve got invitations from all the talk shows.
You trend on Twitter!
Corporate lobbyists are lining up to write checks for your next campaign!
And in a city where your best friend is typically someone who stabs you in the front, no one dares cross you. You’re mollified, stroked, complemented. You’re wined, dined, courted
This is what it means to have made it!
And to think you once lived in an abandoned gas station without indoor plumbing or electricity. You were once even a social worker.
Now you’re single-handedly able to stop tens of millions of Americans from getting childcare, pre-K, health care, free community college, paid family leave!
You’ve come a long way!
How many politicians in American history start politics in the Green Party and work on Ralph Nader’s presidential election, and years later vote with Donald Trump 25 percent of the time, and are now on the verge of sinking the largest climate-change initiative in history?
How many have the power to destroy the Democratic Party?
It must give you goosebumps.
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A Trump lawyer wrote an instruction manual for a coup. Why haven't you seen it on the news?
A Trump lawyer wrote an instruction manual for a coup. Why haven’t you seen it on the news?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/sullivan-eastman-memo/2021/09/29/68d93000-211f-11ec-9309-b743b79abc59_story.html
In a normal world, the “Eastman memo” would be infamous by now, the way “Access Hollywood” became the popular shorthand in 2016 for the damning recording of Donald Trump’s bragging about groping women.
But it’s a good bet that most people have never even heard of the Eastman memo.
That says something troubling about how blasé the mainstream press has become about the attempted coup in the aftermath of the 2020 election — and how easily a coup could succeed next time.
The memo, unearthed in Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s new book, is a stunner. Written by Trump legal adviser John Eastman — a serious Establishment Type with Federalist Society cred and a law school deanship under his belt — it offered Mike Pence, then in his final days as vice president, a detailed plan to declare the 2020 election invalid and give the presidency to Trump.
In other words, how to run a coup in six easy steps.
Pretty huge stuff, right? You’d think so, but the mainstream press has largely looked the other way. Immediately after the memo was revealed, according to a study by left-leaning Media Matters for America, there was no on-air news coverage — literally zero on the three major broadcast networks: ABC, NBC and CBS. Not on the evening newscasts watched by more than 20 million Americans, far greater than the audience for cable news. Not on the morning shows the next day. And when Sunday rolled around, NBC’s “Meet the Press” was the only broadcast network show that bothered to mention it. (Some late-night hosts did manage to play it for laughs.)
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Will his supporters ever realize he hates them?
Trump's planning to run again in 2024: Will his supporters ever realize he hates them?
Trump claims to love his supporters — but his malicious and careless actions speak louder than his empty words
https://www.salon.com/2021/09/27/planning-to-run-again-in-2024-will-his-supporters-ever-realize-he-hates-them/
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Trump's humiliating defeat to Joe Biden — which he refuses to acknowledge even occurred — has fomented a yearning for redemption. Whether he actually runs again remains uncertain, but he wants his supporters to be ready, willing and primed.
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Millions of aggrieved Americans have tethered themselves to Trump's fake persona of superiority and strength. They think he is the answer to their prayers. They think he cares about their lot in life. They think he will remedy their grievances. But nothing could be further from the truth.
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Trump scorns those who are weak or foolish enough to need him. He does not want to be needed — he wants others to serve and satiate his needs. He thrives on their praise, adulation and unconditional loyalty. The whole concept of public service is foreign to him because he perceives every interaction is a transactional game that must be won. And winning, for him, inevitably means defeat and humiliation of the other person. In Trump's psyche, even his supporters need to be humiliated and defeated.
It is puzzling that Trump supporters have not realized that he does not give a damn about their grievances or station in life. His Republican Party literally has no platform or set of guiding principles — all that was abandoned during the 2020 campaign. Nor does the Republican Party have a single substantive policy initiative on the table. Other than conservative judicial appointments, Trump did absolutely nothing for his supporters during his miserable presidential term. Except, of course, to let them be killed by a virus and incite them to a failed overthrow of democracy.
Until Trump is gone and the Republican Party reinvents itself, Trump supporters are all alone to fend for themselves. Their cult leader is an illusion. He is a pied piper leading them only to destruction. He has brought them only pain and suffering and sold them a bill of goods consisting of lies and conspiracy theories.
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I found it galling to watch George W. Bush speak on Saturday
George W. Bush 2021, Meet George W. Bush 2001
Sept. 14, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/14/opinion/george-w-bush-911-speech.html
You can draw a straight line from the “war on terror” to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, from the state of exception that gave us mass surveillance, indefinite detention, extraordinary rendition and “enhanced interrogation” to the insurrectionist conviction that the only way to save America is to subvert it.
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It is with all of this in mind that I found it galling to watch George W. Bush speak on Saturday.
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Bush spoke as if he were just an observer, a concerned elder statesman who fears for the future of his country. But that’s nonsense. Bush was an active participant in the politics he now bemoans.
In 2002, Bush said that the Senate, then controlled by Democrats, was “not interested in the security of the American people.” In 2004, he made his opposition to same-sex marriage a centerpiece of his campaign, weaponizing anti-gay prejudice to mobilize his conservative supporters. Ahead of the 2006 midterm elections, he denounced the Democratic Party as “soft” on terrorism and unable to defend the United States.
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It is frankly maddening to see anyone treat the former president as if he has the moral authority to speak on extremism, division and the crises facing our democracy. His critique of the Trump movement is not wrong, but it is fatally undermined by his own conduct in office.
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As much as he has been rehabilitated in the eyes of many Americans — as much as his defenders might want to separate him and his administration from Donald Trump — the truth is that Bush is one of the leading architects of our present crisis. We may not be able to hold him accountable, but we certainly shouldn’t forget his starring role in making this country more damaged and dysfunctional than it ought to be.
I'm Beginning to Understand How It Feels to Live in a Majority-oppressed Nation
I'm Beginning to Understand How It Feels to Live in a Majority-oppressed Nation
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/node/98256
As George W. Bush was blundering his way into a minoritarian Middle East nation he did not understand, I understood from a historical perspective how its Sunnis had managed to rule over the Shia, even though, as noted, the Sunnis were a minority. The Ottoman Empire — whose official religion was Sunni — once ruled over the territory that became Iraq and which provided a buffer to the Shiite empire of Iran. Following the Ottoman Empire's fall, British colonialism reinforced Iraq's powerful Sunni minority over the Shia majority, which ultimately led to the Sunni dictatorship of Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush's blunder.
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As an American born and raised, I possessed no real understanding of any of that — until now, living, as I do, in this American nation increasingly ruled by the arrogant, unlearned, chronically dyspeptic few.
Now obviously the United States of today is not another Iraq of the early 2000s; not yet, anyway. But we the American majority are now daily experiencing the frightful sensation of being ruled by boorish political warlords hatched from sparsely populated fiefdoms of unutterable ignorance and unremitting hostility to civilized life. We are the nation's predominant centrists, moderates, liberals, progressives, socialists, Never Trumpers and Mugwumps — known broadly as Democrats — committed to civil rights, human liberty, freedom of conscience and democratic rule. And yet where we've not already lost power, we're losing it to the other guys — those Husseinlike Republicans.
So much of our growing impotence is — to use that overused word — structural, coupled with a complete and rather innovative lack of Republican scruples. Barely, just barely do Democrats now control the executive and legislative branches; yet even though their rank and file vastly outnumber the opposition, that control is at huge risk of being lost in 2022 and 2024 because of built-in, perfectly legal Republican advantages. Which means there's not a helluva lot Democrats can do about it.
The Trump Party's ruthless gerrymandering that would embarrass yesterday's Tammany leaders will almost certainly permit a fevered few to recapture the House; control of the Senate is, as always, at the mercy of voters in less populous states, where the uncivil brood; and the archaic, nitwitted and grotesquely undemocratic Electoral College, which enthroned our last two Republican presidents — both receiving less votes than their opponents — could easily present a trifecta of minority-based executive power.
As for the third branch of U.S. government? That instantly returns us to those two Republican presidents who were never democratically elected. For they appointed, for life, six of our nine Supreme Court Justices, who have ruled of late that states run by Husseinlike Republicans may pass nakedly unconstitutional laws which can then stand for months and, while they're at it, inhibit the voting rights of whatever and however many citizens they choose.
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Where is George W. Bush-- the sensitive painter of humanity-- when Biden needs him?
Ending a Debacle Is Not For the Faint of Heart
The Ex-President In The Shower
https://thiscantbehappening.net/the-ex-president-in-the-shower/
Where is George W. Bush — the post-presidential, sensitive painter of humanity — when Joe Biden needs him? As chairman of the board of the US Constitution Center in Philadelphia, on Veterans’ Day 2018 Joe Biden arranged for Bush and his wife Laura to receive the coveted Liberty Medal for their work with veterans. Biden, for certain, did this out of his famous instinct to work across-the-aisle; in this case, he seemed to want to make a warm and friendly public gesture to a Republican ex-president who clearly needed a life ring.
Of course, one of the reasons Mr. Bush needed a political life ring was that it was he who made the two fateful decisions that involved the United States in two disastrous foreign wars that quickly turned into classic quagmires. The man is branded.
I’ve been a Biden critic in the past and could be in the future, but the criticism over his messy exit from Afghanistan is either partisan nonsense or fear of the inevitable Republican backlash. The biggest strike against Biden in the military violence department is that he’s a Democrat, which means whatever he does will be fodder for relentless Republican “gotcha!” attacks.
After 241 Marines were blown up in a 1983 terrorist bombing in Beirut, Ronald Reagan somehow fled Beirut with his tail between his legs and got away with it. He was a Republican. George W. Bush, of course, was re-elected after ignoring a lot of very wise opposition (most of it from the left) and setting in motion two foreign policy disasters. Now, many of the very same people who let these Republicans get away with their military fiascos and all the dead young soldiers on their watch are now piling on President Biden. If it was a thriller it’d be titled The Benghazi Protocol.
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I can hear the ex president’s conscience in the shower bemoaning his fate:
Woe is me. I was a two-term President! Now, everybody thinks I’m a fool. After 9/11, I tried to sell myself as a war president. What was I thinking? All I ever really wanted was to be liked and to play with my dog. I did like owning a baseball team. But I had to do something. I’d been caught like a deer in the headlights reading “The Pet Goat.” I had to show gravitas. The war president thing came naturally. It worked for a while. But then it didn’t work any more. I read a bio of LBJ, but I realized other than escalate, he didn’t know what to do, either. Everything led to more confusion, more violence, more horror, more lying to the American people. Shakespeare was right. Ohhhh, woe is me!”
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If George W. Bush is an honorable man, he might consider paying Joe Biden back for awarding him that Liberty Medal on Veterans’ Day 2018 in Philadelphia. Having the guy who started the debacle defend the messy exit would be helpful. As for the Veterans Day Liberty Medal event, I was able to get inside and, by phone, help direct the Iraq veterans and Gold Star mothers outside so their chant of “Shame! Shame! Shame!” could be heard by Biden and Bush inside.
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Our worst terrorist enemies are now home grown.
Permit Me -- or Rather, Them -- to Ruin Your Day
Permit Me — or Rather, Them — to Ruin Your Day
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/p-m-carpenter/98186/permit-me-or-rather-them-to-ruin-your-day
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America is in the grip of an accelerating coup; a systematic, methodical upending of its constitutional — and constituted — fundaments; an interlaced collapse into brigandry and "official" lawlessness orchestrated by a relative handful of right-winging Robespierres and their rank-and-file lackeys. Everything is at stake, everything is at risk — and so far, everything is going to hell.
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The ruling came from a Court tilted in its heinous majority by a U.S. president of unrelenting criminality but never removed from office by a crimes-sanctioning U.S. Senate led by the presidential crime family's enforcer who had earlier shredded the U.S. Constitution in denying a legitimate president his entitled choice of a Court appointee. Three national crimes ruthlessly compounded in one day.
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Why? Because the lawful, "reasonable" and majority opposition in Congress is fucking AWOL. Two-thirds of a year have passed since a small minority staged a violent assault on the very heart of American governance — the majority's home — and yet sedition's principal engineers and chief defenders remain untouched, with some of them actually sitting in Congress and openly advocating yet another violent insurrection. Hence a felonious minority leader is a trifling.
Plus — and again — eight months now and the Justice Department still has not announced a weighty investigation into a blatantly criminal presidency and post-presidency which, by the way, is still instigating and inciting rebellion against the United States government. Oh my, such an investigation would look political — for Christ's sake, isn't rescuing our politics the whole point? — and it might displease the rebellious minority and bloody insurrectionists. Can't have that!
So we have an indictable House minority leader and a Constitution-ripping Senate minority leader quite comfortable with a lackadaisical congressional majority; a former president steeped in constant criminality and yet free as a bird; more post-presidential insurrections to come; and, above all else ...
we have Republican state legislatures rigging future federal elections — to be condoned by a runaway, fascistic Supreme Court presently occupied with assaulting 51% of the U.S. population — which will promote both minority leaders to majority leaders in 2023 and guarantee Orbánlike authoritarianism in 2025.
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Profile Information
Gender: MaleHome country: USA
Current location: PA
Member since: Wed May 11, 2005, 10:48 PM
Number of posts: 10,678
