THE DOUBLE HARVARDS: We briefly pause our ongoing report...

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 13, 2022

...to ponder the case of Tim Scott: "Is it possible that our imploding national culture has reached an inflection point?"

We turned to the analysts and posed that question after scanning The Atlantic's web site this morning. Starting with the site's featured essay, here are five of the first dozen items to which links were provided:

“There’s No End to the Grief”
COVID is now the third leading cause of death—and therefore the third leading cause of grief—in the United States.
ED YONG 
These Dreadful Days
MOLLY JONG-FAST 
Grief, Everywhere
MARISA RENEE LEE 
Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
It’s not just a phase.
JONATHAN HAIDT 
Why American Teens Are So Sad
DEREK THOMPSON

Those titles appear among the dozen essays which top the front page of the magazine's front page. Even worse, we had already read other essays, reports and columns at other major liberal and mainstream sites

To cite one example, we had already read Colbert King's column, in the Washington Post, about Senator Tim Scott (R-SC). 

King, who is deeply experienced, tends toward being deeply sober. That said, he has little use for the way Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was treated at her recent confirmation hearings.

Mostly, though, the columnist seems to have little use for Scott:

KING (4/12/22): Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman confirmed to serve on the Supreme Court, has a well-earned place in history. Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) also deserves a footnote at the end of her story. The first African American senator to represent a southern state since 1881, Scott voted against Jackson’s elevation to the highest court in the land.

[...]

[Scott] will go down in history for what he didn’t say or do when the moment arose.

As the sole Black member in the Senate Republican caucus, Scott stood by as his GOP colleagues harangued, besmirched and badgered a well-qualified, widely respected Black woman with untruthful smears and bad faith attacks. Before Jackson’s confirmation hearing, Scott said he looked forward to “a respectful and thorough hearing process.” But when the bullying got started, Scott went missing.

Later, King refers to "the shocking insults directed [Jackson's] way" by "her attackers." Returning to his assessment of Scott, columnist King went on to offer this:

KING: Jackson was disowned by someone who looks like her and who now claims victimhood for himself.

Referring to the other Republican senator from South Carolina, MSNBC Host Joy Reid tweeted that Scott let Lindsey O. Graham “& the sheriffs dog-walk him” when it came to police reform and is going along with Graham’s “barking-dog racism” on opposing Jackson.

Scott labeled the criticism “vile” and “offensive” for suggesting “that a Black man cannot think for himself. I have to follow somebody else. That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” he said. “It reinforces the liberal elites’ approach to minorities who will not fall in line and do what they tell us to do.”

King is 82 years of age. He has had a high-end career in government, business and journalism.

With a few scripted stumbles along the way, King has tended toward sobriety in his several decades at the Post. In the passage posted above, he is quoting Joy Reid as she aggressively Uncle Toms the black senator who dared to vote against a black nominee to a very high post.

(In recent weeks, Tucker Carlson has returned to ridiculing Reid for the apparently ridiculous episode in which she claimed that her own past homophobic blog posts had surely been written by someone else. In today's climate, Reid's insults are close enough for tribal messaging work, even in King's assessment.) 

As we've noted, we had a different reaction to the treatment of Judge Jackson. On balance, we didn't think the questioning was especially "shocking." Beyond that, we were disappointed by the extent to which Jackson repeatedly chose to evade some perfectly straightforward questions.

King doesn't give examples of the ways Jackson was "besmirched with untruthful smears" during the questioning. By the norms of Senate hearings, we wouldn't say, on balance, that Jackson was "bullied" in any obvious way, or that she was subjected to "shocking insults." 

"Barking-dog" or otherwise, we didn't think that Graham put any obvious racism on display for Scott to go along with.

That said, we've reached a point, in our tribal messaging wars, where Pretty Much Anything Goes. Our nation, such as it was, has already split (at least) in two.

On balance, it's All Over Now But the Storylines. The more colorful the claims the better! 

We can't explain Senator Scott's view of the world. If we lived in South Carolina, we wouldn't be voting for Scott.

That said, we have a different view of Senator Scott that the one Reid spat out in rather typical fashion. We also think that King's new column for the Post, in which he seconds Reid's overt racial insults, is a hundred times more "shocking" than the questioning Jackson endured.

(Do those insults "reinforce the liberal elites’ approach?" It's hard to say Scott has that wrong!)

During the confirmation hearings, Judge Jackson won our support with a superb, apparently extemporaneous statement about the way children should be treated in school. Her own children have attended Georgetown Day, where she sits on the board.

As Senator Booker pointed out, Judge Jackson is a "double Harvard." Our tribal elites tend to worry about the treatment of such people, though we rush to note that this preference is manifestly not Judge Jackson's doing or fault.

Everywhere we've looked in the past few weeks, we've seen a nation imploding. That has nowhere been more true than in the nearly hysterical way our own failing tribe's elites have reacted to the Jackson hearings.

Right from the jump, CNN's haughiest pundit declared the questioning to be "shocking." It was especially "much," this particular "single Princeton" said, that Senator Graham, who is white, had dared to question Jackson.

You simply can't run a nation this way. At this point, our failed tribe barely tries.

We don't know why Scott sees the world as he does. As a matter of fact, we don't know how he sees the world. We don't know to what extent his vote against Judge Jackson was offered in good faith.

We do know this:

King is one of the very few people within the mainstream press who goes out of his way to express concern about low-income urban kids. We're all concerned about the double Harvards, much less so about those dregs of the underclass.

Tomorrow, we'll try to return to our scheduled postings about the world of the double (or triple) Harvards. Within our tribe, we currently leave no affirmation of such people behind. We'll even repeat such stirring defenses as the ones which emerged from Reid.

On the other hand, those low-income kids can go hang in the yard. This is pretty much who we are. It's pretty much who we've been over the past fifty years.

Is this one of the ways we give away votes? Dearest darlings! Of course it is!

Tomorrow: We'll attempt to try


56 comments:

  1. National culture is fine, dear Bob.

    ...well, needless to say: sans your hate-mongering braindead liberal tribe.

    ...but then, your tribe's verbal and written discharge, we wouldn't call it 'culture'. And you probably shouldn't either...

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  2. "In the passage posted above, he is quoting Joy Reid as she aggressively Uncle Toms the black senator who dared to vote against a black nominee to a very high post."

    It is tempting to call any attack on a black man by another black person an attempt to "Uncle Tom" him, but Joy Reid's words also read well if taken literally. Scott claims that he was thinking for himself, but there is no planet where anyone would look at Jackson and think of her as a pedophile. That is pure Q-Anon Republican talking point and Scott got it literally from the Republican leadership because those were the talking points for that hearing. When Reid mentioned the Sheriff and barking dog racism (note the more frequent term "dog whistle" racism) the context is police reform and the reference to the Sheriff is literal, not to the attack on MLK and others during the civil rights era. Scott followed the Sheriffs' recommendations literally in his vote with the Republicans, not figuratively in the sense of an Uncle Tom siding with those who attacked MLK and others with dogs.

    But just as Scott follows Lindsay Graham's orders (as did all of the other Republicans except Collins, Romney and Murkowski, who DID think for themselves), Somerby follows the Republican position on this himself.

    Everyone on this planet knows about the Republican party discipline and that they vote as an obstructionist bloc, following their leadership's orders down to the last word in the talking points, because their goal is to obstruct Democrats, not to consider legislation or objectively evaluate judicial nominees.

    So who does Somerby think he is fooling when he makes this racial and blames Joy Reid for stating plainly what Tim Scott did? If you substitute Lindsay Graham's name for Tim Scott's in Reid's sentences, it will make just as much sense, whereas it would not if she were merely trying to blame him as a race traitor.

    But Somerby only hears race in Reid's statement. And that is odd because he claims that he doesn't think about race, that he is color blind because race is merely a social construct. And yet he hears it loud and clear when the Republicans make that their response to criticism, and he chimes right in on cue. And no liberal behaves that way.

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  3. "King doesn't give examples of the ways Jackson was "besmirched with untruthful smears" during the questioning. By the norms of Senate hearings, we wouldn't say, on balance, that Jackson was "bullied" in any obvious way, or that she was subjected to "shocking insults." "

    Somerby doesn't notice that she was called a pedophile lover, soft on child molesters? He didn't notice the interruptions and failure to let her complete her answers? Somerby thinks it is a normal question to ask a Supreme Court justice to define what a woman and a man are?

    But perhaps Somerby is genuine in his inability to detect disrespect toward women. We know he doesn't like women much. Perhaps he thinks it is OK for men to talk over women and to interrupt them constantly? Maybe this is the way he behaves himself? We don't know because we haven't seen him in action, although I did see him being interviewed in the backstage area of a comedy club, where he introduced the male comedians waiting to go on stage and totally and completely ignored the women who were clearly on film and similarly waiting. So maybe Somerby truly doesn't believe that common courtesies of conversation (and congressional hearings) apply to women too. Or maybe he is just following the conservative talking points on this issue himself, like Scott did.

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  4. "That said, we've reached a point, in our tribal messaging wars, where Pretty Much Anything Goes. "

    No, this is not true. On the right, anything goes, but on the left there are still standards for behavior that are pretty much what has existed for decades. To equate the two sides on this matter, Somerby is engaging in pernicious bothsides-ism and that is a ploy now used by the media to make it sound like the Democrats are just as bad as the Republicans, while the Republicans are batshit crazy and the Democrats are not.

    Any pretense that the right was attempting to behave normally went out the window when Trump became the nominee back in 2015. It was all downhill on the right after that, and now all pretense has been dropped.

    It is very revealing that Somerby engages in this attempt to smear the left with the right's behavior. It suggests that my belief that Somerby is a conservative is correct.

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    Replies
    1. Our very own Mao claims that there is ZERO unique stupidity on the right. You seem to be claiming that it is ALL on the right. I believe it is you that often writes that Republicans are ALL bigots (every last one without exception).

      But here you take issue that the tribal messaging is taking place on both sides (Somerby's position).

      Well one of you three is correct and the other two are COMPLETELY off-base. I think you know where I stand on that call...

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    2. I am not saying that no one on the left has ever done anything stupid. I am saying that there is no equivalence.

      Further, I do not believe that what is coming from the right is all stupidity. I believe that much of it is politically motivated ratfucking, obstruction, and bigotry aimed at vote-getting from people who themselves may be at the wrong end of the stupidity spectrum (pause for introspection by Rationalist).

      You are exaggerating statements to the extremes and putting words in people's mouths. And you are wasting my time. Go play with Mao.

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    3. Anything Goes doesn't mean "stupidity". I think Rationalist's comment belongs after Mao's comment, not here.

      Delete
    4. Rationalist,
      Any Republican who isn't a bigot, or isn't perfectly fine with bigotry*, left the Republican Party more than two decades ago.

      *this would include owners of the mainstream media who vote Republican, who may also care about corporate tax breaks and that elections are funded privately by corporations, but can live with the bigotry and white supremacy as long as Republicans do their bidding.

      Delete
    5. Right, this is the Anon above I was talking about. Speaking in absolutes. This is tribal messaging, case in point.

      The only thing giving me pause is the depth we've sunk to in our national discourse. At some point it needs to bounce back up, so maybe we should continue accelerating to the bottom as fast as possible. Good work I guess.

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    6. I think you are confused Rationalist.

      Foundational to the modern Republican party is bigotry. It is a feature to them, not a bug.

      Delete
    7. Great reasoning. Our boat is sinking so there is no way out except to sink faster, so let's put a bigger hole in our boat. What is your plan for getting to the surface, asshole?

      Delete
    8. I think they plan to keep driving our discourse into the ground, green Anon. These things usually pendulum swing back eventually, we can only hope.

      Delete
    9. Green Anon sounds like a superhero

      Delete
    10. Bob DOES take the position that tribal messaging takes place on both sides. But he only attaches any significance to it on the left side. His obsession with the hearings is a bit of a giveaway in itself, and his judgement on what is or isn't overt racism (or in this case, not very subtle attempts to smear Judge Jackson as a promoter of pedophilia) are not trustworthy.

      Delete
    11. I don't suppose you could provide a single quote from Somerby that would support your claim that he doesn't attach "significance" to right wing tribalism?

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    12. He never mentions it. That's why there is no single quote about it. This blog is only about left wing tribalism.

      Delete
    13. I didn't think you could. If he never mentions it, how do you know that's what he thinks?

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    14. That all Republican voters are bigots is disproven by how much statements that they hurt Rationalist’s feelings.

      Delete
    15. KK, Somerby repeatedly states that both tribes engage in tribalism. He only talks about specifics for the liberal tribe. But nearly every day he says both are tribal. You should know that yourself without anyone here digging up his latest statement to that effect, which appears in today's essay.

      These games you play are annoying.

      Delete
    16. Dear 9:37,
      Try to improve your reading comprehension. I expressed agreement that Somerby finds both sides tribal. I questioned Greg’s notion that Somerby finds only the left’s tribalism “significant”.


      Delete
    17. 2;38,
      Are you the person who's posts so upset Rationalist that he can't make a reasoned argument to counter them?

      Delete
    18. Could you restate that in English?

      Delete
    19. Hmmm... were both these posts written by the same upset person suffering from a lack of reason and projecting their issues onto others? Now I am curious :)

      That all Republican voters are bigots is disproven by how much statements that they hurt Rationalist’s feelings.

      Are you the person who's posts so upset Rationalist that he can't make a reasoned argument to counter them?

      Delete
  5. "That said, we have a different view of Senator Scott that the one Reid spat out in rather typical fashion."

    Somerby's view of Senator Scott is the same as Senator Scott's view when he claims victimhood because that mean old Joy Reid said he was following Lindsey Graham's lead. Joy Reid didn't say "Uncle Tom," Somerby said it. And that is definitely racial, whereas claiming that Scott is following conservative party discipline is not racial -- it is what every single Republican (except the three mentioned) did, not just during this hearing but also during Jackson's District Court hearing and during every single other vote in which the Democrats hope to achieve something constructive.

    Scott cannot claim that he is not an Uncle Tom while simultaneously claiming that he really does consider that nice old black lady to be a pedophile-in-sheep's-clothing, and Jackson a terrorist-loving foe of America that cannot be permitted to sit on the highest court. He can't have this both ways. He clearly followed the Republican lead without consideration of Jackson's merits and that makes what Joy Reid said true -- and note that she did not use the offensive term Uncle Tom -- Somerby did that.

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  6. "During the confirmation hearings, Judge Jackson won our support with a superb, apparently extemporaneous statement about the way children should be treated in school. Her own children have attended Georgetown Day, where she sits on the board."

    1. If Jackson had Somerby's support, why is he so willing to go along with Graham's accusation that she was soft on terrorists, and Hawley's accusation that she was soft on pedophiles, and Blackburn's accusation that she is gender-confused and cannot define man/woman, and Cotton's accusation that was was soft on Nazis and terrorists?
    2. What difference does it make where Jackson's children go to school? Even if she sits on the board, that doesn't mean she micromanages what happens in the classroom or in any other aspect of the school's day-to-day running. Board members help with fund-raising and hiring the school's director, not telling teachers what to do. Nor must a parent agree with everything done at their child's school in order to support that school.
    3. If Somerby "supports" Jackson, why does he repeatedly side with those criticizing her, going out of his way to present essay after essay showcasing their attacks on her? With support like this, who needs opposition?

    I believe that Somerby is lying about supporting Jackson, just as he lies about being a liberal. He may believe that coming from a position of support, his criticisms of her other responses will be taken more seriously by any liberals still reading this blog. It is the reason why the TV announcer says "I'm not only the President of the Hair Club for Men, but also a customer." So Somerby pretends to be one of us because that will his criticism will have greater impact. It is dishonest, but what else is new for Somerby?

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  7. "King is one of the very few people within the mainstream press who goes out of his way to express concern about low-income urban kids. We're all concerned about the double Harvards, much less so about those dregs of the underclass."

    This statement is outrageous!

    First, we are not ALL more concerned about double Harvards than low-income black kids. Most of us can be concerned about BOTH groups. Second, our so-called concern for double Harvards isn't actually concern -- it is admiration for someone who has a legitimate achievement. It doesn't mean we worry about them in the same way as anyone would worry about low-income and struggling kids. Third, Somerby has no idea how King feels about double Harvards.

    Personally, I am finding that term more and more offensive coming from Somerby. He clearly intends it as a pejorative, and in that sense, he is attempting to neutralize Jackson's very real accomplishment by implying that it comes at the cost of success for low-income kids. It does not, because this is not a zero sum game. Jackson earned her success and she deserves the praise for it. She didn't rise to the top on the backs of low-income black kids. No such black kid would be any better off if Jackson had run away and joined the circus instead of going to college. But Somerby is trying to create a sense of shame among those who are educated that is in no way warranted, but would help the Republicans who oppose all of Biden's nominees, simply because Biden appointed them.

    But I have to ask what kind of man, who professes to care about black kids, would USE them as a political ploy to sabotage a successful black woman's nomination, as Somerby has been doing? Somerby is scum and I doubt he cared about the black kids in his classes any more than he does the kids he mentions today. I think he used those kids to escape the draft, and I have little doubt that he complained about them in the teacher's lounge and resented their stubborn unwillingness to learn what he wanted to teach them. I'll bet they didn't even like My Antonia, when he read passages aloud, and stubbornly refused to understand Wittgenstein too. On purpose, the little brats!

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  8. "On the other hand, those low-income kids can go hang in the yard."

    This is a reference to lynching. Why would a grown man who used to teach black kids use a highly offensive lynching reference to talk about their needs?

    If Somerby were actually employed anywhere, the appearance of a sentence like this in public writing would be grounds for firing him.

    And here we see Somerby as provocateur, trying his best to offend liberals while claiming to be one.

    I don't know Somerby and I don't know whether he hates liberals so much that he would say stuff like this, or whether he is just seeking attention, like a blogosphere Lauren Boebert or MTG, or whether he has gone around the bend and now has no filter (due to dementia or mental illness), but whatever Somerby's situation is, this is out-of-bounds wrong for anyone. He clearly should be reported to the capitol police for this, but perhaps he thinks that because he is a comedian, he can say anything, no matter how much it hurts the group he claims to care about -- lower income black kids.

    I have no words strong enough to express my objection to what Somerby has written!

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  9. "Is this one of the ways we give away votes? Dearest darlings! Of course it is!"

    No one votes Republican because Democrats have too much respect for higher education.

    ReplyDelete
  10. This is what the Republican effort to use bigotry in order to get votes leads to:

    https://digbysblog.net/2022/04/13/stranger-danger-on-a-train/

    ReplyDelete
  11. Marcy Wheeler (via Digby) connects some dots between the 2016 Russian interference in our election and today's Q-Anon garbage, all coming from the right:

    https://digbysblog.net/2022/04/12/russia-to-q-to-january-6th/

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    Replies
    1. She does a horrible job as usual. The FBI interviewee, QAnon person is talking about the contents of the Wikileaks releases which were authentic. So she is bemoaning the fact an American citizen received authentic, true information. Further, she ties it to Russia which has not been proven.

      She tries to make you think he is suffering from a Russian disinformation campaign when it is really an email dump of true information the source of which no one knows.

      And look at what he said:

      "Vladimir Putin. I was like this guy don’t seem so bad, you know"
      "Trump’s just got the absolute shaft from everything around, our own government, the media."

      These are not radical thoughts.

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    2. Don't be silly. The contents are not authentic because Podesta was not a pedophile and the references to recipes are just that, recipes, not code words for sex trafficking. And yes, the ties to Russia are proven. Just repeating lies doesn't make them true.

      This troll is missing the point. Look at what he did. He thought Trump was calling him to break into the capitol on 1/6 and he got arrested for joining the insurrection. People died, people were injured, lives were ruined, over Q-Anon-inspired disinformation.

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    3. Because of Q-Anon-inspired disinformation not because of 2016 Russian interference or disinformation. That is the point. Wheeler's assertion about Russia doesn't make logical sense.

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    4. The Q-Anon disinformation (spread by Proud Boys) came from the Podesta files which were hacked by Russia and made available via Wikileaks. Russia made it possible to read those Podesta emails, which Q-anon misinterpreted to reflect a conspiracy:

      "But most vividly, it reveals how Jensen got radicalized into QAnon. And that started — as he repeatedly describes — from the files stolen from John Podesta released by WikiLeaks in advance of the 2016 election. He planned to vote for Hillary (!!!) until he came to believe the misrepresentations he read (pushed, in significant part, by accused Proud Boy leader Joe Biggs) of the Podesta files. When the flow of Podesta files ended, Jensen was left with a void, which Q drops filled shortly thereafter. After that, Jensen came to believe Trump’s lies that he had been shafted by the Deep State, by some guy (Peter Strzok) and his girlfriend whose name he couldn’t remember. Perhaps as a result, Jensen came to believe of Putin that, “this guy don’t seem so bad, you know.”"

      Russia was a link in the chain -- that is what Wheeler said. It went from Russia to Q to Jan 6th.

      If that chain of events is not clear to you, that is your problem, not Wheeler's.

      Delete
    5. It doesn't matter if Russia was responsible for giving it to Wikileaks. It was still authentic and true information. There's nothing wrong with citizens receiving authentic, true information no matter what the source. This is her logical flaw or if she is intentionally suggesting true information should be withheld from citizens, it's really gross.

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    6. Of course there is something wrong with receiving authentic and true information, if that information is classified or confidential or personal/private, and yes the source does matter. Russia broke into personal email of John Podesta and made it public without permission and that was a crime. Podesta was a privatre person, not a government official, and he was employed to run the campaign of a distinct and separate individual, also not a governmental official. There is no right for citizens to know private things about private individuals. Only someone in an authoritarian state has no privacy rights. Further, Russia is not the US government but is a foreign country with no right to the private information of any citizen of the USA.

      Your idea of what is gross is perhaps deformed by your employment as a troll for Russia.

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    7. The theory only makes sense if one can prove Qanon disinformation would only exist because Russia was the source of WikiLeak'a release. Ridiculous.

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    8. If it was Trump's emails you would be defending their release, boring loser.

      Delete
    9. If Podesta gave his own emails to Wikileaks, the Q-Anon conspiracy theories would still be disinformation. The point is that the man was radicalized by Proud Boys to believe Q-Anon nonsense which is NOW supportive of Russia against Ukraine because of crazy-ass theories about biolabs and Fauci. Your efforts to confuse folks here are mostly just pitiful.

      Delete
    10. That is not the point of Wheeler's post.

      Delete
    11. No, it was that Russia hacked Podesta and gave the emails to Wikileaks. The Proud Boys then misinterpreted the emails using Q-Anon conspiracy theories and radicalized the poor guy who felt called by Trump to participate in 1/6. Like Q-Anon, he now thinks Russia is great, so Russia benefits from his radicalization. THAT is the point of Wheeler's post.

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    12. This comment has been removed by the author.

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    13. So Russia was responsible Hillary losing. Now gas prices have increased because of Russia, Putin's price hike. We couldn't pull out if I get Afghanistan because Russia was giving bounties. Russia, we were told was in danger of overtaking our electricity grid. Now Marcy is here to remind us that 1/6 and Qanon is Russia's fault.

      What a brilliant post by Wheeler.

      Delete
    14. Has Wheeler said Republicans are bigots because of Russia?
      That would be quite the scoop, that it wasn't because Ronald Reagan made racism great again.

      Delete
  12. Rude Pundit thinks that the Democrats go astray by not publicizing their accomplishments sufficiently:

    https://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2022/04/democrats-should-go-on-offensive-by.html

    Somerby is trying to get Democrats to deemphasize their nominee's accomplishments because lauding someone who is double Harvard is bad in some unspecified way. What do the Republicans gain by encouraging individuals to suppress and disguise their own educational accomplishments and other achievements? Is that really going to salve the ego of any Trump supporter? Is there now a politics of envy where people cannot stand up straight and be themselves for fear the have-nots (educationally speaking) will vote Republican?

    There are many people in this country who think that black and immigrant and gay people should be invisible and silent and not full participants in America. They think that about women too, except they like women to be eye candy, as long as we don't say anything. Is that any way to treat human beings?

    Somerby's theme about double Harvards is ridiculous.

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  13. Why does Somerby single out the articlers about grief? It is natural that publications are talking about grief given that it is part of everyone's experience these days. Is there something that Somerby considers wrong with such articles? I think they are helpful. I myself have two friends, a relative and a next-door neighbor who died from covid. My own life changed radically and there are things I had planned to do that are now impossible. Can I not mourn those things too? It is absurd to focus on these articles as if people should ignore what has happened to us. I suppose I should be happy that Somerby didn't compare these to the advice columns and fashion news that he usually complains about. But why shouldn't people take what comfort they can from sharing their grief?

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  14. And while we're at it (from No More Mister Nice Blog):

    https://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2022/04/the-gop-is-acting-out-party.html

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    Replies
    1. How can you have a country that is not divided when one party devotes itself to owning the other? This is where selfishness leads. Somerby is preaching to the wrong half of our country.

      Delete
    2. As Driftglass says:

      "...We cannot endure permanently half-Fox and half-free."

      Delete
  15. Bob,
    We get it. Republicans are reactionaries.
    Anyone who has paid any attention to them since the early 1970s already knows this. Where have you been?

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  16. Matt Gaetz on a cracker. How gullible do you have to be to think the party which nominated a self-admitted sexual abuser to be their standard bearer TWICE(!), was making these arguments in good faith?

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  17. We pretty much knew before the hearing that Dems and their media allies would accuse the Republican Senators of racism against Jackson. Accusations of racism are pretty much what the Dems have to offer. Democrats certainly can't get elected by arguing that their policies are working well.

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    Replies
    1. That's no excuse for the Republicans to go ahead and be racist in their attacks on her.

      There is cause and effect in this situation. When Republicans say and do racist things, they get called racist.

      By the way, our policies are working well, especially compared to Trump. That's why Dems get elected over and over. Hillary would have won without Comey and Russian interference and would have made 8 consecutive terms in which Dems were president. Trump stole his election, but that won't happen again because Trump is going to jail eventually. Meanwhile, people are happy with the way Biden is handling the Ukraine, happy with how he handled covid, and happy with the relief measures taken to help the economy. Inflation is now trending downward and unemployment is at an alltime low, and Biden has created way more jobs than Trump. So it is hard to see why Dems need to pull stunts and make false accusations the way the Republicans do. We can run on our own platform and win, unlike Trump who had no platform at all in 2020.

      Delete
    2. Why would Dems accuse repubs of racism, David, you fucking shameless treasonous bastard?

      Could it have something to do with the fact that republican senators immediately accused her of being an "affirmative action" pick, you racist prick?

      Delete
    3. D in C is beyond redemption, having had his head up Rupert Murdoch's ass for long enough to have suffocated any vestiges of objectivity. The Democrats have voted for medicare pharmaceutical bargaining power and more recently to address the 10 fold increase in the retail price of insulin. Of course neither of these have gotten past the republicans in the senate, even though the insulin bill was bipartisan in the house. One republican congressman, Gaetz, suggested that the diabetic population lose weight, being thoroughly ignorant of the fact that type 1 diabetes has no weight correlation. So let's not hear about how Democrats don't have legislation, loser. The republican congress is a shit show of clowns of epic proportion at this time. And will continue to be for as long as they put up dumbasses and habitual liars like Herschel Walker, and phony supplement hawking profiteers like Dr. Oz.

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    4. Democrats certainly can't get elected by arguing that their policies are working well.

      This coming from a guy supporting a fascist attempted insurrection and attack on the nation's capital.
      What's your party's platform, David? Oh, right, you stopped having a party platform when you fell in love with the orange abomination.

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