“I can hear those champagne bottle corks popping in Moscow — like it’s Christmas every fucking day": US Politics, February 2024

yes? especially among the speakers who advocate for social and economic assistance groups on the left. I have a couple coworkers who grew up in very right-leaning homes who have moved to the left in the last few years

My parents have moved to the left as I have gotten older, and they’re Boomers ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yes, there is also the trauma of growing up in a right wing home.

Yep— I had many screaming matches with my mother and father about politics growing up, and still argue with them today, at times. My husband didn’t grow up with this sort of family, and is always deeply embarrassed when these arguments occur.

We've had a truce since September 2022 and it has held.

the press conference and report look really bad for biden.

i don't think it should be that relevant. there is no comparison between biden's stable, predictable administration and the madness of trump. the problems i have with his policies are problems i have with the democratic party (i.e. they are too conservative). the idea of people voting for trump because he doesn't sound or look as old as biden is absolutely lunacy. however, i think americans might vote like this.

it does seem like we are headed toward 2016 deja vu in november.

we've had the deja vu since January 2021

Uh oh! we all forgot yet again: America’s story

the report looks bad for biden if you don't think about who wrote it

and you don't read the letter the DOJ wrote saying "you shouldn't make this shit political"

what if the ages of the candidates creeps up every election cycle from now on

i don't see the press conference as looking bad--he didn't seem any more out of it than he ever has

waterface otm. This guy clerked for Rehnquist and was a Trump guy.

there was zero reason for the interviewers to ask biden about when his son died, was total trolling

sure

when even Joe Fucking Scarborough, whose show I caught a bit of while dressing this morning, called out the questions you know it didn't play.

"I lived, for like seven months, in Hazleton"

I knew a kid from Hazleton once. His name was Zapp and he used to huff gasoline.

it all looked pretty bad but looking at that report - it's pretty nakedly partisan, like Comey level shit - starts with "we have evidence of big crimes!" and then concludes "well not really", all while editorializing a bunch about his memory, not surprising to find out the guy who wrote is is a hardcore Trumper

press conference was not great, hate all these "Biden is so senile he confused Egypt with Mexico"...like yeah, he's been making gaffes like that for 40 years, he's not a very good public speaker. I mean I'm way younger than he is and I mix up my kids' names all the time. I don't actually believe he actually doesn't know who the President of Mexico is

its definitely a problem but I'm not gonna hear about it from people supporting Donald Trump, the guy who sounds twice as brain damaged now as he did when he literally stared into a solar eclipse

trump is a dangerously insane person. it's completely different. but voters are dumb.

Apparently this emerged:

Several of the entries in Biden’s notebooks related to Afghanistan and Pakistan, areas where Biden exerted significant policy influence when he was vice president. Afghanistan in particular remained one of Biden’s chief foreign policy concerns when he became president, culminating in his decision to withdraw U.S. forces from the country in 2021.

More than a decade earlier, in 2009, Biden had strongly opposed the military’s plans to send more troops to Afghanistan and tried to dissuade Obama from committing forces to what Biden believed to be a historic quagmire, “akin to Vietnam,” the report notes.

Obama ultimately ordered the troop surge, but Biden “always believed history would prove him right,” and he “retained materials documenting his opposition to the troop surge,” including a classified handwritten memo that he sent to Obama over the Thanksgiving 2009 holiday, the report found. FBI agents found the classified Afghanistan materials in Biden’s garage and home office in December 2022 and January 2023

And he was right.

Trump said Orban was the president of Turkey. It's not that different!

the debate should just be naming current heads of state

Gore and Kerry got blasted for trivialities like knowing the heads of state.

it's going to be such a long year

there was zero reason for the interviewers to ask biden about when his son died, was total trolling

― a (waterface), Friday, February 9, 2024 10:41 AM (twenty-seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I'm not sure they were asking him that exactly. Supposedly he said he'd been hanging on to some documents because he was working on a book about Beau, but seemed confused about time frames.

only nine months to go!

xp

that one guy couldn't be president because he screamed. sometimes i see him on t.v. as a commentator. and i think of that one measly little scream of his that dashed his hopes. different times...

thinking that the exact years that things happened and not knowing what happened is important is some "memorize this list of numbers to pass your high school american history test" crap

xpost it was a little weird to me to see the shift in the reach of progressive leftists into the liberal mainstream in 2016 (not in a bad way, I was pleasantly surprised).

since candidates like Sanders often faced mockery and being relegated to the margins in previous elections. despite how toxic and destructive the Bush administration was in just a short three years, the Democrats could only consolidate around Kerry, one of the worst candidates in history. Even being "anti-Iraq war" wasn't a winning position with Dem voters, like people could only accept "I voted for the war but only because I was misled" rather than a candidate like Dean that said "the war is bullshit, oppose it" from the onset (since anybody with eyes should have seen that from the get-go).

obviously the Great Recession had a lot to do with it, many people lost livelihoods and were out of work for years, and the ripple effects from it are still being felt almost two decades later. Obama was the stand-in for a progressive candidate, who said a lot of the things that sounded progressive, but ultimately kind of fell into Dem machine politics with a few inspired moments (ACA).

I'm guessing progressives kind of seized on the passing of the ACA as "ok, this is a flawed piece of legislation, but one thought unthinkable many years ago. When we were filibuster proof, we took very little advantage of it, so clearly it's not a matter of obstruction, it's a matter of our own will", and 2016 did look like a good a time as ever to take advantage, with what looked like Republican splintering going on.

xxpost Not sure it was so much the scream as it was what had happened earlier that night: coming in third in Iowa after you'd been leading the polls for a year

My parents have moved to the left as I have gotten older, and they’re Boomers ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

My parents are just barely pre-Boomers ('41 and '43). My mom, who lives in Colorado, absolutely has moved leftward. My dad, who lives in Florida, is a right-wing crank.

its definitely a problem but I'm not gonna hear about it from people supporting Donald Trump, the guy who sounds twice as brain damaged now as he did when he literally stared into a solar eclipse

Thank you for this btw. I'm still laughing at the juxtaposition

xpost my mom is basically left on everything except for immigration which is still a byproduct of ingrained prejudices, and we argue about it all the time.

but still an impressive shift because decades ago, mom was basically leftist with women's rights and abortion, but pretty moderate to conservative on everything else.

even expressed anger at the Israeli government a few weeks ago for their treatment of Palestinians.

Dad, meanwhile, voted for Clinton in the 90s (did not like Daddy Bush), yet voted for Dubya in 2004, and voted for Trump the first time, and yet told mom "I like Biden" in 2020, and voted for Biden.

My dad "didn't like" Hillary Clinton, but could never articulate why.

It's OK, dad, I'm pretty sure I know.

the debate should just be naming current heads of state

I would actually love if one of the debates was just a straight up round of Jeopardy, with very loud buzzers for wrong answers (or air horns, even)

SNL Celebrity Jeopardy makes a comeback

people are focusing on the negatives of biden's press conference because people don't like biden. if he was more popular, he'd get more charitable treatment

I can assure you the media coverage over here is all "Can you believe this man is running for president?"

The same could be said for many, if not most, candidates for President since about 1988.

Not on the basis of them being far too old and fragile for the job.

xxxxxpost I think the best way to relate to right wingers is over shared hatred of HRC

Not on the basis of them being far too old and fragile for the job.

― The British Boy of Film Classification (Tom D.), Friday, February 9, 2024 11:52 AM bookmarkflaglink

*cough* REAGAN *cough*

oh, you said post-88, so....n/m

but hey Bush puked at a dinner once

From a UK perspective where Reagan was always considered a dimwit, it was only later on the senility jibes started

even your Iron Lady privately mocked him.

I don't know if anyone here thought he was a genius either

How dare you speak ill of dear leader

he was a deer leader

btw am I the only one who remembers Biden vowing during the primaries he'd only be a one term president if elected? weird how no one's asked him about that since.

iirc he has said he wouldn't be running if trump wasnt running