Enough of this "Dems in disarray" nonsense.
Democrats are no more in disarray than your Thanksgiving dinner is in disarray. No one will look at our table with all the different dishes for different tastes – turkey and vegan "turkey" and my world famous mashed potatoes and stuffing and vegan mac & cheese and cranberry sauce and roasted brussels sprouts – and think, oh my God, we’re doomed! We’re going to starve because it’s not all one thing, it’s a bunch of different things, and some people might want Tofurkey and taters, and some might want turkey and cranberry cause … and everyone loves sandwiches made from leftovers the next day.
It is a straitjacket, and we have a party tent big enough for Zohran Mamdani and Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill, which is also big enough for Sharon Owens and Dorcey Applyrs, who were just elected the first black mayors of Syracuse and Albany.
But you know who is not welcome at our table?
Creeps like Illinois' own Mary "Nazi" Miller, whose reaction to Tuesday’s Blue Tsunami was this
Democrats have made it crystal clear: they'll block pay and assistance for struggling American families unless taxpayer-funded healthcare is handed to illegal aliens.
Fuck You Mary Miller.
And as long as we're on the subject of Nazis, let's talk about about this story in Wired:
The GOP Civil War Over Nick Fuentes Has Just Begun
Tucker Carlson’s friendly interview with white nationalist Nick Fuentes has led to a major reckoning in the Republican party.
Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist known for his deeply antisemitic, racist, and misogynist worldview, just might be tearing the Republican party apart.
The schism was triggered last Tuesday when former Fox News host Tucker Carlson released an in-depth interview with Fuentes, the leader of the so-called America First movement who has denied the Holocaust, praised Hitler, and shared deeply misogynistic views.
During the interview, Fuentes waxed antisemitic about the threat apparently posed by “organized Jewry” in America, while Carlson slammed figures like Senator Ted Cruz and former president George W. Bush as being “Christian Zionists” who have been ”seized by this brain virus.” Carlson was criticized by, among others, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee for giving Fuentes a platform, and the argument kicked into overdrive after Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, a high-profile conservative think tank, condemned those attacking Carlson as a "venomous coalition.”
“Tucker Carlson remains and always will be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation,” Roberts said in a video posted to X on Thursday.
Then came the reaction, which was hilarious. Not "funny, ha, ha" because none of what these degenerates are doing to our country is funny in that way, but rather in the grotesque comedy way.
But even this was not the most hilarious reaction of all. We'll get to that presently/
This was Ted Cruz speaking before the Republican Jewish Coalition conference in Las Vegas last Thursday, hours after Roberts’ video was released:
In the last six months, I've seen more antisemitism on the right than I have in my entire life. If you sit there with someone who says Adolf Hitler was very, very cool and that their mission is to combat and defeat global Jewry, and you say nothing, then you’re a coward and you are complicit in that evil.
Senator Mitch McConnell, wrote on X that conservatives are not obliged “to carry water for antisemites and apologists for America-hating autocrats.” Except, of course, that's exactly what McConnell has been doing his entire career.
John Podhoretz wrote on X “My mother was a Heritage board member for 40 years. You have befouled her, you rancid wretch of an amoeba.”
He then deleted the post a few days later, presumably because he thought better of reminding everyone what a dangerous nut job mommy Midge Decter actually was.
Depending on which pundit rag you read, Ben Shapiro either "slams" or "blasts" Tucker Carlson as a "intellectual coward" for coddling Nick Fuentes.
From the Jerusalem Post:
'A conspiratorial Right is rising' in America, Ben Shapiro tells 'Post'
US political commentator Ben Shapiro in candid conversation with The Jerusalem Post: 'You get a lot more likes and clicks if you are promoting an anti-Israel, anti-Jewish agenda.'
And depending on which link you click on Mark Levin either "Slams" or "Calls Out" Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes at the Republican Jewish Convention on November 1st.
Which is the sort of absurdly selective outrage from a mob of professional bigots, hate mongers and conspiracy peddlers not seen since Blazing Saddles hit movie theaters decades ago.
Then came the inevitable backlash to the backlash, which, again, just keeps publicly escalating the dark, absurdist comedy that is the Republican party. Again from Wired:
“Excellent statement my friend. Proud to stand with you and Heritage,” Eric Teetsel, the CEO of the Center for Renewing America, which is a conservative think tank founded by Project 2025 architect and current director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought.
And then further down, there is this masterpiece, which almost makes it worth getting up in the morning
“This is the common ground we need to rescue our republic,” prominent podcaster Bret Weinstein wrote in response to Roberts’ post. “Attempting to police thought, speech, and association is anti-American, and will only deepen our divisions.”
Oh the indignity! Oh outrage at this thought-policing!
So much for the Tolerant Right!
This is the end state of a Republican party which has been playing this game for our entire adult lives. And what makes it such a rich and terrible comedy is how this dynamic keeps repeating itself.
You begin with a base of bigots and imbeciles, who are driven to the polls in election after election by the rage and racism fed to them by Conservative media. And yet, in election after election, instead of Smashing and Crushing and Wiping Out the scourge of minorities and liberals and feminists and immigrants and LGBTQ+ people who they've been told over and over again are the root of all evil... the Republicans they elect keep compromising and doing deals.
So to keep getting them to the polls and to keep them watching and listening, the rhetorical hysteria has to keep ratcheting up. Hillary is running a child sex trafficking ring out of a pizza joint. Also, she murdered Vince Foster. Obama's a Kenyan Commie sleeper cell who's gonna kick down your door and take your guns! Also Solyndra!!! And Bengghaaazi!
But they don’t call it a race to the bottom for nothing, because it is a race. Remember how Fox freaked out over Newsmax gaining on them after the 2020 election?
From the Poynter news service, November, 2020:
Should Fox News be worried about Trump supporters turning to Newsmax?
The network has become a favorite of President Donald Trump’s Twitter feed, while he occasionally claims Fox News isn't what it used to be.
…So is there anything to all this? Is Newsmax actually making a dent? Well, this is true: Fox News’ ratings for certain time slots have dipped a bit since the election, while Newsmax has seen flashes of ratings success. For example, it had a night last week when more than a million people were watching. To be clear, that’s like a third of those who are watching Fox News on a typical night, but it’s quite the leap for a network that very recently was drawing fewer than 60,000 viewers a night.
Newsmax has become comfort food for staunch Trump supporters because it shamelessly promotes baseless conspiracy theories about election fraud. For the moment, Newsmax might be causing a bit of a headache for Fox News.
And do you remember why the MAGA morons were mad at Fox? Because, for once, Fox didn't lie to them.
Fox reported the 2020 Arizona results correctly, and MAGA threw a temper tantrum because that meant Trump was going to lose. Fox told them stuff they didn’t want to hear, which violates the sacred compact they have with their viewers, and the MAGA base went shopping for another propaganda network who would tell them bigger and better lies.
And everyone involved re-learned what they all already knew: you’ve gotta keep the base happy and the only way to do that is to lie to them all the time about everything.
So ... the caravans are coming! Children are having sex change operations at recess! They're eating the dogs and cats!
But rhetoric isn't enough. The base demands someone who will publicly crush, troll and humiliate their enemies in tangible ways that make those enemies cry. And they want that someone to promise them... everything. They want their Dear Leader to make all their dreams come true. Cheap gas. Cheap groceries. Great jobs. Great health care. Free IVF.
And above all, in the name of Freedom, they want someone who will empower them to be the horrible, ignorant, loudmouth racists in public that they've always been in private.
They wanted the freedom to speak bluntly, loudly and proudly about everyone they hated, in exactly the same way US government propaganda talked about the Japanese during World War II. Sinister. Barbaric. Subhuman. Killing machines who should be wiped out wholesale.
Demonization without any limits because this was war.
This, to MAGA morons, is what “freedom of speech” means, except eventually World War II came to an end. There was a formal surrender and, 15 years later, Toyota was starting to sell cars in America.
But there is no practical end to the war that MAGA is fighting, because they’re at war with the future. They're at war with progress and tolerance and science. And as their forever war on the future drags on and on, the list of enemies they need to blame gets longer, and the rhetoric they use to attack those enemies gets uglier.
And so every time the fascist party lurches further Right to feed the base’s addiction to enemies and conspiracy, it alienates a few more loyal party members because that was the line they told themselves they’d never cross.
But the minute they try to police the speech of the ever-more-openly-Nazi Right, they become The Thought Police, and all of their own outspoken defense of LGBTQ+ hatespeech, or racist hatespeech, or xenophobic hatespeech or misogynist hatespeech gets thrown right back in their faces. I thought we were all about freedom, but Rafael Edward Cruz over here wants to DEI Thought Police us about the Jews!
So much for the tolerant Right!
And once again the ratchet is cranked one notch further towards the insane abyss… because the MAGA mob is always hungry and needs feeding.
All that being said, the most sublime reaction of all came from over in Never Trump land.
You may remember that once the Republican base handed the keys over to Donald Trump, a handful of lifelong, loyal party members got themselves run out of the place and were promptly given jobs in the legacy media and tens of millions of dollars worth of media support for their startup, Never Trump websites.
And almost without exception their alibis were identical: This was all a total shock! No one could have predicted the party base would spontaneously turn into brainwashed, racist zombies who would elect a monster like Trump. All of us Good Republicans were taken completely by surprise. If only there had been some kind of warning.
And all of us who had been involved in politics since early days and writing about what was going on with the GOP and the media for decades stood as one and yelled as loud as we could, You lying assholes! You built this thing. How dare you pretend you never knew. Your only job was to know what was going on inside your own party. You were the people who made a living feeding red meat to the base, and we could all see it because it was all happening right out in the open. Limbaugh. Gingrich. Fox News. Falwell. All of it.
But they got away with it, because way too many Liberals were willing to let them off the hook scot-free, and because the complicit legacy media needed camera-savvy people who could explain Trump without talking about the 50-year-long trajectory that led to Trump.
And now that the Ben Shapiros and Mark Levins of the Right are pretending to be shocked and horrified to learn that there are raging antisemites in their ranks, you’ll never guess what those same Never Trumpers – who swore they never knew that their party was full of bigots and lunatics – are saying now.
They’re saying “You lying assholes! You built this thing. How dare you pretend you never knew. You were the people feeding red meat and conspiracy theories to the base. And we could all see it because it was all happening right out in the open.”
And if that isn’t high comedy, I don’t know what is.
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