"Will you shut up, man?" US Politics October 2020

personally i think the lincoln project are greater americans than abraham lincoln

smile when you say that, pardner, or we might not take it kindly

mcconnell might as well be sucking the marrow out of a baby with a crazy straw in public these days, what a fucking ghoul

Has anyone tried just like pouring some salt on old McThulhu?

Thank god he's old.

There was a recent New Yorker article about the Lincoln Project. This seems to be who's directing their social strategy:

In May, the Project added a new communications staffer, Keith Edwards, a thirty-five-year-old liberal who was breaking up with his boyfriend and ready for change. Edwards had moved to New York in 2005, from Detroit, after having worked in a beauty salon. In Manhattan, he no longer wanted “to do anything related to hair,” and wound up with a production job on reality shows—“The Real Housewives of Miami,” “Wicked Single.” He wasn’t a consistent voter. But after Trump was elected Edwards joined the communications staff of Corey Johnson, the Democratic speaker of the New York City Council, and, later, the Presidential campaign of Michael Bloomberg.

Edwards’s Twitter habits aligned with the OODA-loop strategy: he is always online, a habit he describes as a form of addiction. (He is eleven years sober.) He shortened and sharpened the Project’s tweets: “Something’s not white about this”; “How much is that in rubles?” He also upped the pace: in February, the Project tweeted only forty-seven times; in June, when Edwards took over the feed, the number jumped to eight hundred and fourteen. When followers asked who was behind the edgy tweets, Edwards often tweeted back “Abe.” The Project’s audience subsequently exploded, in large part because the founders amplified the official tweets: collectively, they and their top advisers have more than four million followers.

Edwards and two colleagues make up a “rapid-response” team, which monitors the Internet for exploitable material: when a tape of Trump’s sister describing him as dishonest was leaked, Edwards tweeted, “Joe Biden’s sister cherishes him.” In July, after Trump bragged, in a televised interview, about having passed a mental-acuity test by successfully repeating “person, woman, man, camera, TV,” Wilson hired Shawn Patterson, a composer who, in 2015, was nominated for an Oscar for “Everything Is Awesome,” from “The Lego Movie,” to work on a Twitter video. Using heavy synth beats, Patterson remixed the audio of the Trump interview overnight. Edwards captioned the clip with nothing but emojis. The spot has been retweeted, quoted, and liked nearly sixty thousand times.

mcconnell is a ghoul in that clip, and mcgrath can't manage to put together the basic rant against mcconnell that we've all delivered to our bathroom mirrors at some point in the last 4 years

David Roth back on the Big Wet beat at Defector, using a public tantrum by Ammon Bundy at his child's football game as part of a way to make the essay sports-relevant:

Two of Bundy’s sons play for Emmett, which was up by five touchdowns at the time the game was called. “Bundy was told before the game was stopped that he could cost Emmett a win and potentially a playoff spot,” the Idaho Statesman noted in its story.

Bundy’s exhausting public life is proof that, for some people, this country is an absolute wonderland of public places in which to become upset. But there’s something perfectly apposite about this last gratuitous, thirsty, unreasoning tantrum happening at a football game. No venue, and no tragicomic streaming meltdown, could have better anticipated or mirrored the President and his party belatedly attempting to defeat a rampaging pandemic with old-fashioned smash-mouth football.

The broader national failure to manage or even really confront the pandemic is not entering a baroque phase, really; it has had no non-baroque phases.

Trump has always responded to adversity by simultaneously quitting and declaring victory; this has, because of how things work for rich people, mostly worked out for him. ...

...When Trump emerged on what either is or isn’t the other side of his illness, vibrating and fluttering and looking even more like a photographic negative of himself than usual, he brought with him a realization. He had faced Covid and bested it, and in so doing he’d learned that the soaring collective threat of the pandemic was … exactly what he has always thought everything was all along. In proclaiming that Covid was a test of individual will and personal strength, Trump spoke with a liberation and purpose that couldn’t be credited to the various powerful steroids currently bearing him aloft on a storm cloud. He had finally found a way to care about the pandemic, which was to make it about him. He had found a solution that appealed to him, which was to make it about his lifelong fixation on fear and domination in general, and his fear of being dominated in particular. Once he had confirmed that he was in fact immortal and the pandemic was just another binary matter of winners and losers, Trump was free to live as a dumb god.

re: mcgrath, like, at the very least, at least deliver the core message, "FUCK YOU MCCONNELL!", that we all desire. if you're down 15 points and you have no chance in kentucky because everyone knows someone that was in the kkk, at least deliver the core message. jfc

Column: Make way for Slayer Pete. Buttigieg is the Biden campaign's ruthless secret weapon https://t.co/edBdBkjLCf

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) October 13, 2020

I tweeted this about Mayor Pete after his appearance on Fox News on the night of the Vice-Presidential Debate. pic.twitter.com/8f7KYqYwMW

— mark hutchison (@MarkHutch1965) October 13, 2020

re: mcgrath, like, at the very least, at least deliver the core message, "FUCK YOU MCCONNELL!", that we all desire. if you're down 15 points and you have no chance in kentucky because everyone knows someone that was in the kkk, at least deliver the core message. jfc

― president of my cat (Karl Malone)

I simple "what the hell are you laughing at? people are dying!"

Omg, could Graham sound more pathetic? I feel embarrassed watching this.

Lindsey is real mad at @harrisonjaime for out raising him

pic.twitter.com/FIgRDuLjfm

— Molly Jong-Fast🏡 (@MollyJongFast) October 13, 2020

This really is Buttigieg's sweet spot; he gets to smile a lot while being really fucking mean to someone

McGrath is so uniquely horrible at this it feels unreal

meanwhile, credit where credit’s due: Pete may have been created in a lab to specifically piss me off, but he’s admittedly decent when talking at hostile cable news toads

Omg, could Graham sound more pathetic? I feel embarrassed watching this.

Yes, but also: this could literally be the intro to any video of Lindsey Graham saying words.

Lindsey might be the only Senate Republican to truly grieve the way the party has moved - his ideal is just being in the Senate as a (not-really) moderate for sixty years, peddling influence, amassing favors and a bank account in the Caymans without most of the public ever knowing his name.

Oh I’m sure Ben’s Ass clinches up every now and again

He's just a slimy strictly political creature with no principles that will do whatever it takes to stay in/with power.

As you guys know I like Pete a lot and he is pretty good in this role but I'm bummed about him being slotted into the "gay best friend with cutting remarks" stereotype

This is as much a "passive-aggressive Midwesterner" thing as it is anything else (see also: Klobuchar)

As you guys know I like Pete a lot and he is pretty good in this role but I'm bummed about him being slotted into the "gay best friend with cutting remarks" stereotype

― Guayaquil (eephus!),

bitch, please

Like, did I miss an appearance where Buttigieg commended Trump on not hiding a face that looks like that behind a mask or something?

I mean, he's just keeping his name/face out there and making the DNC happy so he can make another primary run some day? It's not devious.

Lindsey might be the only Senate Republican to truly grieve the way the party has moved -

Awww, true grief. To his true heartbreaking grief I say "die you motherfucking maggot!"

He was for it after he was agin it

lol, that lindsey clip. love how suddenly he's very concerned about citizens united

literally, every time with republicans, it has to literally happen to them before it's real

it is literal, it is known

I feel like with a zig and a couple of zags Pete would be awaiting trial for defrauding Silicon Valley investors with his heath tech startup. and ftr, I don’t think he’s literally a CIA asset, but yeah I’ll cop to being a Obama Vocal Affect truther

Let us know how it goes, I wanted to vote as soon as possible, but realized the first couple days might be bad.

Re: Texas early voting in Austin

Was in and out in five minutes this morning at one of the two UT campus polling stations, but friends who were voting around town are reporting waits of 1.5-2 hours... I assumed campus would be quick because there aren't many students here this semester and there's no free parking within half a mile of the polling stations. Glad we got a nice cool front ahead of early voting starting... it's perfect weather, sunny and cool.

Ah, yes, parking by UT.

pete's hanging around so he can run again in 2024 or 2028, and meanwhile snag some position in the biden administration, like OMB chief or federal CTO or whatever.

he's good at talking and making arguments. he would probably be better than amy fucking mcgrath vs mcconnell, that's for sure. he'll be around for a while i'd guess.

The Obama mimicry was real and hilarious in its shamelessness

it is hard to endure

I saw a clip of him doing an impression of Mike Pence (whom he portrayed in VP debate prep), and it just sounded like Obama.

So what happens if the Dems have the house, get the WH, but fall short in the senate? Four years of nothing, extra bullshit and/or rancor?

lots and lots of Bhenghazi-style horseshit and oh hey would you look at that the SC has all kinds of time to take up whatever the Senate GOP drags their way

lots of grand bargains!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNqgGPY8Ob8

i follow dave weigel on twitter and he seems like a decent reporter most of the time, but did i just listen to him talk for FIVE STRAIGHT MINUTES about the lawn signs he's seen during his travels and what he thinks they mean for the election?

no offense because i know there's a lot of lawn sign talk in these parts, but i was kind of shocked to see him go on about like that

I break it down to, some folks are convinced that we should have paid attention to other, non-predictors like SIZES OF CROWDS and LAWN SIGNS after 2016 because they have no idea what really won the election or how MOE works.

Are you sure it was him? Because I found myself reading some Tim Alberta thing on the subject this morning, and it seemed excessively detailed.

The trauma of 2016 manifests in a myriad of ways, particularly as it intersects the ongoing trauma of 2020.

Are you sure it was him? Because I found myself reading some Tim Alberta thing on the subject this morning, and it seemed excessively detailed.

― Ned Raggett, Tuesday, October 13, 2020

I read the same thing.

So what happens if the Dems have the house, get the WH, but fall short in the senate? Four years of nothing, extra bullshit and/or rancor?

Federal courts with literally zero judges as Mitch McConnell continues to execute the responsibilities the Founders whispered in his ear

One yard sign indicator that I take as good is that when I drove through North Philly in 2016 I saw very very few Hillary signs, certainly compared to all the Obama signs I saw there in '08 and '12. But this year there are a lot of Biden signs.

Pete does seem like one of the few prominent Dems who's at least CAPABLE of cutting through the layers of bullshit smarm that coat every facet of mainstream political discourse. his campaign was exceedingly terrible because as soon as he got the tiniest bit of national recognition he just completely overcorrected in the other direction and became Captain Restoring Norms

pete's hanging around so he can run again in 2024 or 2028, and meanwhile snag some position in the biden administration, like OMB chief or federal CTO or whatever.

Pete's perfect job in the new administration would be as volunteer to be hooked up to and communicate with whatever eldritch alien technology is sitting out in Area 51.

I despise Pete with such an intense passion that his continued presence as a living being makes my blood boil.

xps re the yard sign index:

I drove up to rural PA this weekend. Relatively few yard signs compared to a similar trip in 2016, when entire rural roads were just absolutely lined with Trump signs. Most of the signs I saw this time were for Trump, but there just weren't nearly as many of them. And there were a handful of Biden signs whereas in 2016 I saw none for Clinton.

I've probably mentioned before, but my neighborhood, which skews about 60/40 rep/dem, has had a major increase in Dem signs this year, while there were just none last time and a handful of bumper stickers.

I despise Pete with such an intense passion that his continued presence as a living being makes my blood boil.

Odds are he would respond to this with a rueful smile, a sad shake of his head, and a quick phone call to increase the costs of all of your staple foods by 500%

legit lol

speaking of rueful smiles:

I had to work harder on this than any other magazine piece I’ve written. But in the end it was among the most rewarding. https://t.co/jovMMHkWAP

— David Brooks (@nytdavidbrooks) October 11, 2020