US Politics, February 2020. They want to kill your cows.

sorry. i'm just mad at myself. i did poorly in a job interview last night, in an attempt to find some other shitty job that will pay marginally better than my current one so i try to dig myself out of shitdebt mountain.

it's hard to pivot from that back to susan collins

the obsession with trump's dementia really does drive me batty though

don't care really

― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, February 5, 2020 8:56 AM (twenty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

otm

idk, the fact that people are just talking about Pelosi ripping up the speech seems fine to me? Trump's approval is at an all-time high, he's about to get acquitted, the economy is peaking yet again, the Iowa shit was a disaster for Dems, it's not a bad thing that people are focusing on a BrEaCh Of Decorum instead

I agree with your point and also as applied to rest of the desperation that fuels resistance-porn discourse.

xps

Pelosi ripping the speech annoyed me. Not her fault—she did try to impeach him, but that failing it felt like an empty gesture, aimed at exciting #resistance idiots on twitter

it was her version of killing soleimani

IDC that much about the speech rip either.

Obsession with Trump's "dementia" is just another flavor of obsession with his "stupidity" "unfitness" "indecency" or whatever, as though there's some invisible, objective arbiter of presidentialness and if only we can make a strong enough case the judgment will be rendered from above. So long as Trump helps the Republican party and their goals more than he hurts them, he will have their unwavering support. Some resistance folks just CANNOT stop banging their head against this wall though, it's like a reflex.

speech rip will accomplish precisely nothing

like most of Grancy's career

FWIW, I don't mean for those quotation-marked things to all be in the same category. I think the reflexive "haha he misplaced Kansas City" tweets are a lot worse and more harmful than, e.g., reminding people of his abhorrent behavior towards women, which should be repeated. It's just the expectation that if only we can find the right "he went too far" item it will somehow flip enough "decent conservatives" to chang ehte political winds that makes me lose it.

ah now morbs i'll be sarcastically clapping while we drown in seawater

ahh yes, only actions that singlehandedly bring down the throne of Trump are worth discussing. it's so easy, any of us could do it. why aren't we the speakers?

. I think the reflexive "haha he misplaced Kansas City" tweets are a lot worse

Yep, because this is why his fans love him.

either you liked it, you hated it, or you didn't care, but it ain't gonna fuckin' hurt anything, so not exactly worth writing a thinkpiece about

I don't suspect many people actually gaf about the KC thing as much as enjoyed trolling because by now we all know he and his ilk will never admit he's wrong and will find hilarious ways to double down.

I mean...there is no convincing his base, and beyond that, most lifer Republicans, so maybe we can stop pretending that's our goal. it's always been about more moderate Republicans, Independents, and mobilizing our own vote for the Democrats.

She should have spit in his face.

that I might have given a standing O for

Pelosi ripping the speech annoyed me. Not her fault—she did try to impeach him, but that failing it felt like an empty gesture, aimed at exciting #resistance idiots on twitter

― treeship., Wednesday, February 5, 2020 10:34 AM (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

it was her version of killing soleimani

― Muswell Hillbilly Elegy (President Keyes)

i loled

Yep, because this is why his fans love him.

― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, February 5, 2020 11:41 AM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

And we've been here before! We did the exact same thing through two terms of W, except there was no twitter.

the idea that the KC tweets or any of this "lol look how stupid he is" posts are harmful at all is offtm. a waste of time? ok, sure. but there aren't massive scores of potential convert voters scouring Twitter and saying "y'know, these guys mocking Trump are jerks, I'm gonna vote for him in 2020".

yeah, we can all be devoting 20 hours of every day focusing on the more substantive terrible things he does and exposing everybody to them (and most of us do), but sometimes people are just tired and wanna have a cheap Nelson Muntz "haha" laugh. these things aren't mutually exclusive. focusing on them is almost as pointless as the original "haha KC" tweets themselves.

He really does deserve it. The Ukraine thing isn’t what I would have staked the impeachment on, but it really was jaw-dropping that he dangled 400 million of taxpayer money over a foreign leader’s head in exchange for (manufactured) oppo (he knew there was nothing to the burisma stuff or the crowdstrike stuff)

xpost are you familiar with 'coping mechanisms'?

yes, he absolutely deserves being spat on. otm. I wish we could start a campaign to do it, only to see his reaction on live tv.

i imagine she was thinking, during his speech, about if and how she should react to the handshake snub at the beginning of the proceedings. i don't blame her for ripping up the speech, i'm ambivalent about it. how do you respond to a bully? you can try to rise above it, ignore it, etc. she and most other democratic leaders have gone that route. sometimes you have to fight the bully, or at least stand up for yourself. that's why people hate bullies - they force you into a shitty situation you didn't want where no matter what you do, it's sort of wrong

She could have walked out before the speech

shoved pence off the edge on her way out

Endless options

yeah, exactly. i don't really dig this thing where Dems microanalyze every minor event like the speech rip or the alleged "mocking clapping" in terms of 'what it means for 2020'. It was a cool optic moment, it doesn't 'mean' anything, and who really cares?

this is Howard Dean scream level whinging.

xxxposts to Malone

I think trump gets sympathy when it seems he is the target of classist attacks on his erudition

from who?

xp -- I guess I don't really believe they are effective "coping mechanisms" so much as passive aggressive energy diversions. They seem like symptoms of a losing mindset to me, where we snicker rather than effectively confront. But at the end of the day I agree snuffing out "lol Kansas" type tweets is not a high priority.

From his supporters. They identify with the perception that the eggheads and elites of ilx and congress look down on him.

who cares about his supporters?

xp

I mean, this is the game he played—the way he got supporters. Self pity is his favorite hobby and he took his people along for the ride. It’s “done” at this point but this is a huge part of his appeal

I think it's less that he gets sympathy and more that democrats look like petty, spiteful nerds.

I understand, on the one hand, being frustrated by the futility of pointing out Trump's obvious mental decline, given how little it matters in any substantive way and the fact that he would still be a sitting president with comparable approval even if he were just constantly writhing on the ground covered in his own shit. But on the other hand, I think there's real utility (perhaps not utility with any immediate impact but something that is hopefully cumulative) in pointing out that THIS IS NOT NORMAL OR OKAY any/every time it occurs to you that this is not normal or okay, even if it's the eleventy-millionth time that someone has pointed out that instances of this particular phenomenon are not normal or okay. Because the alternative, it seems, is to eventually lapse into a defeated shrug and allow the abnormal to become normalized, if only via entropy born of exhaustion. The bar has already fallen to a dangerously low level, so I'd hate to see it plummet further because people are tired of bitching about all of the things that are obviously wrong with our Commander-in-Queef.

And we've been here before! We did the exact same thing through two terms of W, except there was no twitter.

totally forgot how we started the year on the precipice of pointless armageddon, fml

for a guy who is collapsing mentally and has no idea what he is doing or how to form sentences, he did manage to read out a very long, prepared speech to millions of people, live, without messing up too badly, which is more than i could expect of most people, including myself

I guess if the real issue is legitimate concern for his mental fitness, that's not conveyed very well by lulz tweets about "He direderd the December dersalt."

ugh meant to c&p the soleimani ref

for a guy who is collapsing mentally and has no idea what he is doing or how to form sentences, he did manage to read out a very long, prepared speech to millions of people, live, without messing up too badly, which is more than i could expect of most people, including myself

― But guess what? Nobody gives a toot!😂 (Karl Malone), Wednesday, February 5, 2020 12:00 PM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

the man technically is literate and has never experienced a second of self-doubt in his entire life. that's really all you need to pull off that feat.

His entire adult live has been played out in front of cameras. An ability to occasionally avoid stepping on and subsequently ripping off his own dick while on camera is not exactly what I'd call a high competence threshold.

he loves listening to himself

Who cares

For a dementia patient he is doing a bang up job controlling all of our lives and attention.

yeah well here are on a thread called "U.S. Politics."

alfred makes a typo about once every 4 to 5 years, so i just want to call it out

Clear signs of cognitive decline, would not vote for.

bout how often we get a change of power in Congress!