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

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

The point I was making is the UK media - including the right wing press - is almost entirely pro-Biden so people weren't saying, "Oh my God look at the state of this guy, we are so fucked" because they dislike him.

Biden never explicitly said he would serve just one term, but multiple outlets reported that he and his advisers discussed making such a pledge. His allies reinforced the notion, even as Biden himself denied it. “It is virtually inconceivable that he will run for reelection in 2024, when he would be the first octogenarian president,” Politico reported in December 2019, citing four unnamed sources who spoke regularly with Biden.

conceive the inconceivable

Never again is what you swore

inconceivable

You keep saying that word.

The point I was making is the UK media - including the right wing press - is almost entirely pro-Biden so people weren't saying, "Oh my God look at the state of this guy, we are so fucked" because they dislike him.

― The British Boy of Film Classification (Tom D.), Friday, 9 February 2024 17:19 (seventeen minutes ago) link

Oh that's interesting that even the right-wing press in the UK is pro-Biden (despite his infirmities).

Why is that - is there a single issue like Trump's threat to pull out of NATO or being chummy with dictators - or what do you think it is?

Trump's a fascist idiot, apart from a few ultra right wing columnists (and Jacob Rees Mogg) no-one's going to admit to supporting Trump, not even Boris did that.

Johnson wrote a Mail piece just the other week saying 'Trump again would be good actually'

He can say that now because he's not an MP and is free to pull in readers to his jolly japes columns.

I was reading about a Tory MP the other day who had tweeted support for Trump on 2016 and was now having to backtrack and say she was young when she tweeted and had changed her viewpoint since. You know, like she'd tweeted something racist or something!

reminiscent of the clip of Tucker asking Putin if he feels god's hand at work and Vlad just going "uh, no" - even reactionaries elsewhere think the American right-wing is weird and scary

It's certainly an odd idea to ask a former KGB officer if he feels god's hand at work.

I've seen this a lot, though: U.S. right-wingers think of people like Putin as the reincarnation of the Crusaders or the Vikings--while having no idea what the Crusaders or the Vikings were actually like, of course.

Putin actually is religious of course.

Is he? It's hard to tell. He sure hasn't taken the lessons to heart.

how many people has putin killed with his bare hands? 50? 60? he was in east germany slitting throats wasn't he? he scary.

https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/be1515a5-d7c5-4ebe-812c-6b2906dd4ffe_w1024_r1.778_fpx54_fpy39.png

hey there, lonely boy...

I'm not sure he's personally religious, but more than happy to exploit the Russian Orthodox church for political purposes

xpost just sitting here, putin about things

how many people has putin killed with his bare hands? 50? 60? he was in east germany slitting throats wasn't he? he scary.

None.

Putin actually is religious of course.

he's religious the same way Italian mob bosses are practicing Catholics

Yeah probably never murdered anyone directly, hence all the shirtless posturing

Not unless he stapled or photocopied someone to death, I think he was mostly office based.

like ordering a hit from your goomar's bed Saturday night but you make it home in time for Sunday Mass.

Remember when George W. Bush saw a crucifix around his neck and thought he was addressing a Christian?