THURSDAY, JUNE 13, 2024
Where segregation takes us: Is it possible? In our tribal desperation, have we really reached the point where we're surreptitiously taping the spouses of those we oppose?
Where we're surreptitiously taping their wives—then refusing to release the full audiotape of what was actually said?
(Have we reached the point where we don't understand the likely meaning of the refusal to release the full audiotape? Have we really become that desperate to see our tribal preconceptions fully affirmed?)
We expect to discuss The Alito Wars during next week's posts. But good God! Are we really so desperate thar we now thrill to the surreptitious taping of Supreme Court Justices' wives?
That's part now of our own Blue America. In Red America, Candidate Trump has been criticized this week, by Nicolle Wallace, for his "crass" and "vulgar" public speech.
We're not sure if Wallace knows this, but crass and vulgar are increasingly big in Red America's discourse. Consider last evening's Gutfeld! program.
On the typical evening, the program starts with a "comedy monologue" by its host, followed by an angry "issues monologue." After that, a group of highly unqualified people are invited to recite a selection of scripts.
Increasingly, crass and vulgar are the lingua franca on this weeknight primetime program. For example, this was the very first joke in last night's comedy monologue:
GUTFELD (6/12/24): Happy Wednesday, everyone!
So, Hunter Biden is now a convicted felon.
[SMATTERING OF APPLAUSE]
Family members say he's upbeat and is already looking forward to the cavity search.
That was the alleged joke.
All in all, few people laughed. As you can see by clicking here, the second joke did somewhat better:
GUTFELD: Democrat donors will be holding events in swing states to court young voters where they'll offer free beer and emergency birth control.
Guess they're hoping to increase Joe's already substantial lead among drunken whores.
Yes, that was the joke. The third joke went like this:
GUTFELD: The governing body, World Aquatics, upheld its ban on transgender women who have been through male puberty from competing in women's races, which means that Leah Thomas will not be competing in the Olympics.
Leah responded by saying, "Fine. I'll just take my balls and go home."
The appreciative audience laughed.
The fourth joke involved the termagant's nightly claim (sometimes, his nightly claims) about how fat and ugly the women are on The View. Last evening, the joke went like this:
GUTFELD: Whoopi Goldberg suggested that Congress make a law to stop men from masturbating, prompting men who've seen The View—
[PHOTO OF THE VIEW's COHOSTS APPEARS]
—to say, "You've already done enough."
There are few specific animal species to which they haven't been compared.
The termagant opens this misogynist garbage can every night of the week. We're so old that we can remember when Blue America's news orgs were still pretending that something called #MeToo was in effect and wasn't simply performative.
(At present, such orgs avert their gaze from what's being shoveled at Fox.)
At any rate, so the "comedy" monologue started. As you can see, this small, stunted man—he's 59 years old!—possesses a stunningly limited frame of reference.
For the record, a handful of jokes remained in this opening monologue. According to the seventh joke, Seth Myers is planning to replace his program's band with "a bucket of diarrhea."
It was hard to tell how that was even supposed to qualify as a joke. The next joke concerned Larry Kudlow's supposed inflatable doll.
This small, stunted fellow—he's 59!—shovels this dreck in primetime every weeknight. In terms of ratings, he's the biggest star at Fox—in all cable news, in fact.
Also this:
Yesterday afternoon, on The Five, he said that climate change "doesn't exist." For increasingly obvious reasons, this claim has largely disappeared from Red America's propaganda mills, but the termagant is still happy to shovel it out.
Fox has worked with this manifest weirdo for many years now. Way back when, they aired his first experimental nightly program at 3 o'clock in the morning!
Just a guess! We'll guess they've found that his "humor"-laced presentations constitute a new, even more effective propaganda delivery system. At any rate, his rumination on how fat and ugly liberal women are is doing very big business.
We tape spouses, they shovel dreck! This is the way the world ends when corporate entities, seeking profits, divide the world of "news" into a thoroughly segregated land of Blue and Red—Us and Them.
It will be hard to find our way back out of this dumb, squalid mess. ("Back out of all this now too much for us.") All in all, tribal separation is amazingly easy. Reunification is hard!
"Crass and vulgar," Wallace said. It may be even worse than she knows!
"In our tribal desperation, have we really reached the point where we're surreptitiously taping the spouses of those we oppose? "
ReplyDeleteHere Somerby generalizes from a single incident to a regular practice. Alito's wife was taped because she was blamed (by Alito himself) for hanging a pro-insurrectionist flag on his home and vacation home (at different times). That is problematic because it implies he is biased on the subject of an important case before the court. Mrs. Alito became a public figure when her husband, the Supreme Court Justice, dragged her into a controversy.
No one is suggesting that people ought to be taped surreptitiously on a regular basis, that people should be taped for no good reason, or that individuals with no public responsibilities and no prior history of lying should be taped.
There are laws governing who may legally be taped, so this is not about a violation of law but about the public's right to know whether the highest officials are doing their jobs properly. So, this is not about taping "those we oppose" either, although Linda Tripp did that (breaking the law) when she taped Monica Lewinsky for political advantage. No one opposes the wife of a Supreme Court Justice unless she is doing something unethical or illegal and the spouses of officials are not typically involved in court matters, except that Alito brought his wife into the controversy.
Somerby thinks the full audiotape should be released, but what if it contains irrelevant talk by and about people who are not part of this situation? Should their words be made public when they are not involved?
And notice that Somerby is aligning himself with the right wing once again. No surprise there.
And, of course, Somerby is also aligning himself with the right wing by mercilessly mocking Fox programs like Gutfield, right?
DeleteHow is he mocking them when he repeats Gutfeld's entire routine verbatim? He is promoting Gutfeld's show while vicariously enjoying the mean things he says about women. The whole point for Gutfeld and the guys who watch his show is to be crass. It would be no fun if no one noticed or were shocked by it.
Delete"He is promoting Gutfeld's show"
DeleteCan't say reading these "jokes" makes me want to watch his show.
Perhaps you are not his demographic? Gutfeld, Fox, and Trump's campaign are aimed at undereducated men ages 20-35. Not necessarily white, not necessarily living in red states.
DeleteAnonymouse 4:00pm, you spent years demanding that Bob cover Fox and now when he does give examples of things that are said by Fox personalities on various programs , you say THAT action is a seditious act.
DeleteYou’re ridiculous and transparently disingenuous.
He didn’t need to repeat all those jokes to make the point.
DeleteWhy does he focus on a purported comedy show? Is the mainstream media supposed to debunk jokes? Why doesn’t Somerby focus on purported news/opinion shows on Fox, the way he does with MSNBC? Those shows, having an ostensibly serious purpose, are more damaging than Gutfeld.
DeleteAnonymices, Bob focuses on Gutfeld! because he knows that a comedy show is incongruous on a news channel and that it really exists in order to render up utterly execrable political content (disguised as humor), that you must see to believe.
DeleteAnonymouse 7:42pm, Bob isn’t asking the msm to debunk jokes, he wants to entire show to be exposed by the rest of the media as being a disgrace that coarsens the national culture.
DeleteAnd yet he has never said any of the words you put in his mouth.
DeleteAnonymouse 7:56pm, Bob has never voiced the thought that the show is prurient, harmful to the culture, and should be decried rather than ignored by the rest of the media?
DeleteNo, he has called it crude and bad comedy, that’s all. You added the rest.
DeleteThe mainstream media is supposed to cast itself in the role of sourpuss and chide a comic? I’m sure Gutfeld would absolutely hate that.
DeleteAnonymouse 8:16pm, so when he’s bemoaned the fact that the show exists and that the political class says nothing about it, you thought he was merely pretending to be Gene Siskel?
DeleteWtf is the media supposed to do? How dare Gutfeld tell such prurient jokes. Bad gutfeld! That’s bizarre in the highest degree. It’s stupid.
DeleteAnonymouse 8:25pm, you're not very bright to start with, why pretend to be even less so?
DeletePeid Piper, when Bob does deep dive into Gutfeld, the conclusion is always that, as a liberal his dirty minded kindergarten humor is my fault because… I don’t know enough about it or don’t complain about it or…. Something. Speaking as a liberal who has know conservatives all my life this stuff is hardly an earth shaking revelation, if it is to Bob that says something about him. When Bill Maher makes a Paul Pelosi joke it more artful, but does that make it less odious? It’s worth considering.,
DeleteThe right wants to suppress what it considers to be bad art. The left lets it sink to its proper level and succeed or fail with the audience. You are the stupid person Cecelia because you don’t recognize that Somerby reacts to Gutfeld like a prudish Republican.
DeleteAnonymouse 8:45pm, Gutfeld! is for Republicans and it’s highly popular in its time slot.
DeleteYou’re a clown.
As I said, Gutfeld has found his level. And you didn’t understand my comment at all.
DeleteAnonymouse 9:17pm, would you classify the highly critical discussion/diatribes annonymices wage against Bob’s blog and his character as being attempts to suppress him? Is that public conversation an attempt to do that?
DeleteYou and pied piper seem to want to suppress criticism of him. Sometimes, stupid blog posts require criticism.
DeleteAnonymouse 9:53pm, countering your complaints and insults is not suppressing you.
DeleteYou feel fine about doing character attacks on Bob because you don’t care for his political opinion or other position he holds, but then bogusly argue that an examination within the media of a news channel’s show with Biden poopy pants jokes and insults about Joy Behar’s weight is tantamount to suppressing art.
You’re arguing bogusly, Cecelia. Nobody pretends to be Gene Siskel. Anyone who pretends to be a film critic pretends to be the king, Roger Ebert.
DeleteAnonymouse 10:13pm, Michael Musto is more your style.
DeleteHe writes bogusly. La dolce Musto should be il dolce Musto.
DeleteSomerby thinks we won't know what he means when he calls something crass and vulgar, so he repeats Gutfeld's anti-Hunter Biden joke verbatim. Does he really believe we need to hear that stuff -- or that anyone needs to hear it -- or that it is the least bit fair to Hunter Biden (who checked the wrong box when buying a gun) to have to endure jokes like that, having nothing to do with his crime or his life? Like Trump, Somerby appears to have no empathy for the targets (victims) of such remarks. Gutfeld takes a cheap shot at Biden, while repeating a generic prison joke. Like Trump, it is unlikely that Hunter Biden will go to jail, especially given the minor nature of his convictions.
ReplyDeleteWhy would Somerby add insult to injury by gratuitously repeating Gutfeld's stupid joke, if Somerby himself did not also harbor animosity toward Hunter. And who on the left feels that way? Most of us over here in blue land feel sorry for Hunter -- except Somerby, who has about as much empathy in his soul as Cecelia does.
anonymouse 2:51, you ask, "do we really have to hear that stuff?" - I assume you mean "read that stuff" - in fact you don't. Obsessively, every day, you're here with critiques of the blogger, almost always distorting and mischaracterizing what he says. As been noted before, you don't have to hear or read him.
DeleteI pointed out that we all know what the words "crass" and "crude" mean without him having to show up 7 (count them, seven) jokes to make his point.
DeleteExcessively literal much AC/MA?
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteAnonymouse 4:02pm, no you don’t. You’ve been arguing that Bob’s focus on Gutfeld! was superfluous at best, a way to spread coarse Biden put-downs at worst Even though the show’s bathroom political brand of humor on a news channel is imminently germane to the media/public discourse that Bob has focused upon for years.
DeleteRead vs hear is a trivial nitpick of the type Somerby engages in.
Delete"The fourth joke involved the termagant's nightly claim..."
ReplyDeleteTermagant is a gendered insult aimed at women. When Somerby applies it to a man, such as Gutfeld, he is insulting women by suggesting implicitly that it would insult a man doubly to be called a term reserved for women, because being like a woman is the worst thing you can call a man. This is a vestige of sexism, when men routinely called each other pussies for lacking courage or displaying other negative traits. and called each other girly (i.e., gay) along with homophobic insults. Those days are gone on the left, where using minority groups as insults is no longer acceptable.
On the right, men still use such insults with impunity, to thumb their noses at civility, bash minorities, and show they are not woke. This is Somerby's form of crudity and he doesn't care who likes it (or doesn't) because that is the attitude Trump has taught his followers. Do what you want and fuck everyone else's feelings. Next Somerby will be calling him a c*nt, because women hate that word too and demeaning men by calling them words applied to women makes Somerby feel 10 feet tall and covered with hair.
another excellent (but depressing) piece of writing someone linked to earlier:
Delete"Thomas Edsall, whose analyses of the current state of American politics in general and the presidential race in particular are essential reading, has a new essay that is somewhere between sobering and panic-inducing, depending on one’s disposition. (Gift link).
A critical part of Trump’s support is made up of female and college-educated voters who dislike Trump’s personal style and/or his personal character, but still support him, if somewhat ambivalently, versus Biden. Why?
While these voters don’t like the way Trump behaves, Khanna pointed out, they still give him
very high marks on a series of descriptors, including “tough,” “effective,” “energetic,” “focused” and “competent” — each is selected by at least eight in 10, with “compassionate” being the only adjective we tested on which he’s underwater. And eight in 10 say he fights for people like them.
I mean what can you do with this kind of thing? Democracy is defensible to the extent that an electorate is at least minimally politically engaged and non-delusional. If elections are decided by swing voters, as essentially all national elections now are, and swing voters are this ignorant and irrational, that seems like a fundamental indictment of the entire system.
This is even more foreboding:
Trump’s strategy of openly declaring his intentions is “an age-old gambit from the authoritarian playbook,” according to Adam Parkhomenko, a Democratic political strategist, writing in Los Angeles magazine this week.
In “Trump Is Conditioning Americans With Authoritarian Statements,” Parkhomenko described Trump’s underlying calculation:
Trump, like aspiring authoritarians before him, is fostering a national environment in which his self-first vision of governance can be achieved. He is conditioning and reconditioning Americans to tolerate central tenets of authoritarianism. Sadly, the sinister strategy is thus far working.
Each time he speaks of eroding the norms of American governance, our national and individual alarm bells ring a little quieter than the time before. Numbness permeates about the grave danger he represents.
How does this process of generating tolerance for authoritarianism work? Parkhomenko wrote:
Evil intentions are floated. Reactions are assessed. Weaknesses are exploited. Intentions are repeated. Wrongs become desensitized. Scapegoats are named. Opposition is divided and conquered. Power is grabbed. Distractions are created. Dissent is squashed. Then, with the groundwork complete, what was once considered unthinkable becomes reality.
As Trump’s repeated authoritarian statements wear out moderate voters’ emotions, they also provide tantalizing red meat to his base. MAGA die-hards are thrilled by Trump’s every suggestion of upending norms in America because they wish to live in a country in which Trump is their all-powerful leader. They want Donald Trump as their Vladimir Putin or their Kim Jong-un.
Trump, Parkhomenko continued,
has told America who he admires, who he is and how he intends to destroy the foundations of our Republic. After years of conditioning, many voters will dismiss the former president’s statements as hyperbole and nothing more than “Trump being Trump.” Others will wrongly believe that sweeping changes could never come to pass in America, even if he is elected. [cont. below]
In a chilling analogy, Parkhomenko described Trump’s efforts to desensitize his audience:
DeleteHorror movies become less scary each time they are watched, and Americans have viewed the Donald Trump horror show on repeat for nearly a decade. The villain does not change, but the viewer’s response calms dramatically. No matter what Trump says or does, Americans have seen this movie before, and we’ve seen it so many times that what once shook us at our core is now just background noise.
In this sense, the 2024 election will be a test: Can the Democratic Party, with Biden at the top of the ticket, somehow reanimate and reawaken those voters who have become inured to Trump’s insatiable venality, his relentless obsession with personal enrichment, his unquenchable thirst for wealth and power, his profound lack of moral principle or ethical boundaries, his divisive and chaotic indifference, his inability to feel guilt or remorse and his manipulative and unscrupulous focus on his own advantage, to the exclusion of all others and the public good?
The desensitization point seems increasingly correct to me. It’s been more than two weeks since Trump was convicted of 34 felonies, and this fact seems to have swayed almost no voters. Joe Biden’s approval rating is now the worst of his presidency. People who say none of this means anything because polls are meaningless because no one has a landline or answers unknown numbers are in denial: A huge assortment of polls using a variety of methodologies all show the same thing: The presidential race is essentially a tossup, because it’s going to come down to turnout in a handful of swing states.
That is just an astounding statement, that ought to shock and dismay any liberal in the very broadest 19th century meaning of that word (i.e. anyone opposed to authoritarianism, fascism, and theocracy, as opposed to “liberal” in its much narrower contemporary sense).
And you may ask yourself . . . well, how did I get here?
(1) Rampant desensitization and political exhaustion, referenced above.
(2) Relatedly, I have a long-time acquaintance, a student of mine 30+ years ago now, who is an upper class white guy whose personal life is kind of a mess right now. He’s certainly going to vote for Biden, but basically he thinks everybody sounding the alarm on a second Trump term is being hysterical. He doesn’t think anything much will change if Trump is re-elected, and he may even be sort of right . . . for people like him, at least for awhile. This attitude is endemic among a certain species of upper class center left voters/pundits. Again, it’s both a cause and a consequence of (1).
(3) I think it’s difficult to overestimate the extent to which social media have corrupted political discourse in the contemporary world. I’m currently reading Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, and this quote from that 75-year-old book has become uncannily prophetic in a way that goes far beyond the Nazi and Stalinist regimes she was analyzing:
DeleteIn an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. […] under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.
That is the Trumpist base in a nutshell, and it makes up 40% of the electorate. Whether Trump returns to power depends on the whims of the fundamentally delusional swing voters described above.
I think I understand the psychology of anti-Trumpers who think the problem would just go away if Joe Biden would step aside for Johnny or Janie Unbeatable (Bret Stephens has a column making that exact claim this morning). These people at bottom think there are no monsters — no real ones — but there are.
https://bit.ly/3XhduvE
"The termagant opens this misogynist garbage can every night of the week. We're so old that we can remember when Blue America's news orgs were still pretending that something called #MeToo was in effect and wasn't simply performative."
ReplyDeleteThis paragraph shows that Somerby is unqualified to call someone else misogynist when he has such a huge chip on his own shoulder about women.
#MeToo is not over and you can ask Jeffrey Epstein or Harvey Weinstein or Kevin Spacey or any number of others whether it was performative or real. In fact, go ahead and ask Donald J. Trump whether #MeToo applied to him or not. Was E. Jean Carroll performative? Was Stormy Daniels?
It is the Republicans who don't care whether women are mistreated or not. Women care a whole lot, and that is why Trump will lose the election in 2024 because of their refusal to vote for him, including Republican women. I will say this slowly so that even Somerby can understand it: It is not OK to abuse women.
Yes, I know Kevin Spacey was accused of molesting boys. #MeToo is not solely about how women are treated. Oddly, the right wing is over-concerned about pedos (attaching that label to all Democrats) while not monitoring their own perverts closely enough. Is that perhaps why Somerby considers #MeToo performative? On the left, people who misbehave get prosecuted. Somerby, of course, defends the miscreants.
DeleteMy comment about Somerby being unfit to call others misogynists when he calls #MeToo performative was "disappeared". I mainly asked whether the prosecution of Trump by E. Jean Carroll suggested that anyone was performative, or the outcry about any of the women claiming they were assaulted by him? Trump was convicted, in part, because Stormy Daniels was persistent about her right to vacate the NDA and tell the public about Trump's behavior. How is that performative?
DeleteWhy does Somerby keep mentioning Gutfeld's age. He calls him stunted -- does he mean physically? What does his size matter?
ReplyDeleteGutfeld says climage change doesn't exist? So does Trump, who refers to it as "just weather."
ReplyDeleteBarack Obama’s seaside home tells us that he’s not worried about climate change.
DeleteRight, Trump has been saying that more people will have seaside homes due to global warming, as if flooding were funny. That really isn't what is meant by addressing global warming.
Delete@3:42 PM - it's impossible to take you seriously because you make such clueless comments like this.
DeleteThe exact date is uncertain but at some point in time DIC became a caricature of himself.
DeleteDoctor! We need a stat EEG! The commenter at 3:42 appears to have no brain activity!
Delete"We tape spouses, they shovel dreck!" They tape people too. Remember Project Veritas?
ReplyDeleteSimon Rosenberg (Hopium Chronicles) says that 5 polls are now showing movement in Biden's direction, following Trump's conviction:
ReplyDelete"Biden Gains In Five Polls Now - As I wrote on Tuesday we’ve started seeing meaningful movement to Biden in new polling. 4 polls - CBS, NYT, Morning Consult, Yahoo/YouGov - have shown movement to Biden of 2 points or more. Today we got a fifth. Echelon, a Republican pollster, found Biden gaining 4 points since their last poll, going from 46-49 to 48-47. A highly credible Democratic polling consortium, Navigator, found Biden ahead nationally this week, 48-44 (4 pts).
I think it would be reasonable for Trump’s 34 felony convictions to shift the election 2-3 points toward Biden, and that is what many polls are showing now. It’s why assertions that Trump leads or is favored can no longer be backed up by data."
Somerby repeats Gutfeld's jokes because he enjoys the way Gutfeld maligns women.
ReplyDeleteHere the filmmaker who secretly recorded Alito and his wife, explains on CNN why she did it surreptitiously (pretending to be a religious conservative herself):
ReplyDeletehttps://www.cnn.com/2024/06/11/politics/video/windsor-martha-justice-alito-recordings-digvid
I don't want to spend the effort of looking up her excuse. is it anything other than the obvious reason, that if she did do it surreptitiously, Alito wouldn't have responded to her?
Delete1. The law where the recording was made requires "one-party consent" and she was one party to the recorded conversation, so it was legal.
Delete2. There is no recording allowed within the Supreme Court itself.
3. How else do you get answers when the Supreme Court has been shrouded in secrecy and refusing to answer or be accountable?
4. This is happening in the face of serious ethical breaches (such as Clarence Thomas's acceptance of large gifts).
5. It was the only way to do it (i.e., pretending to be religious conservative herself).
6. Alito has been involved in adding religious extremists to the court, so it is important to ask him about the court remaining secular as opposed to becoming dominated by religious extremism.
AC/MA,
DeleteAlito would have most likely lied to her, like he did in his Senate Hearings.
"All in all, tribal separation is amazingly easy. Reunification is hard!"
ReplyDeleteSomerby appears to take for granted that it is healthy or desirable to unite the left and right, but perhaps the dialectic helps us test our ideas and reach a better compromise among diverse people, and thus is useful to our social discourse?
Why is unification or sameness or homogeneity good? In nature, diversity aids evolution to the point that there are mechanisms for producing anomalies or mutations in our genome and both people and animals experiment with how to achieve their goals. Why isn't our divide a normal and even a good form of difference whose resolution may strengthen our society and enrich our culture? Partly because we are struggling to accomodate our differences these days. But that implies working on ways to resolve conflict, not making everyone the same.
For example, we have the medical means today to make all people male (or to make everyone female). All it takes is a regimen of hormones at the right developmental stage. And we can go back and change existing men into women or vice versa, so that everyone is the same. Why don't we do that, instead of maintaining a two-tiered system in which one sex is second-class and required to fit into a niche while the other runs things? If everyone were the same sex, a lot of misogynist bullshit could be avoided and our society might rearrange things like child care and domestic economy, and both conflict and convenience could be rearranged. But people won't ever do that. People like that form of diversity, despite the conflicts.
Why then insist that everyone have the same personality-driven political affinities? Why not require both parties to behave better and respect each others' views while allowing the solutions that arise from divergent views to be seriously considered by Congress? We could accomplish that by eliminating elections and randomly appointing candidates to office while ensuring a 50-50 split by party. Then people could form alliances over specific issues instead of along a party identity.
But Somerby seems fixated on the idea that right and left should become identical and thereby unified. When that isn't ever going to happen because people are different.
anon 3:46,, what I said about you above - here's an example. TDH has never said that the "right and left should become united," (although perhaps if that happened, it might not be the worst thing) This is one example of how virtually everything you say is of the same bogus quality. You have no shame.
ReplyDeleteHe says "reunification is hard" and he keeps posting excerpts from Lincoln about a house divided not standing. His ongoing theme is that we are too divided for a modern nation to exist (or be governed). Of course he has been saying we need to be united.
DeleteHis recent term “consensus” has appeared amidst his disapproval of the Trump trial. He is saying that liberals are wrong to have supported the trial. He wants liberals to accept the conservative view on this and so much more. He never points out times when liberals have a valid point such that conservatives ought to attempt to see it. In fact, unless you’re completely with head in the sand, the right wing nowadays explicitly says that they will never accept liberals views. It is what they campaign on.
DeleteTrump is obviously worried about his upcoming debate with Biden. I think he is unlikely to participate. This suggestion that perhaps he will lose the debate on purpose in order to keep Biden in the race, shows his anxiety about his performance:
ReplyDelete"Former President Donald Trump claimed that he might intentionally lose the first presidential debate of 2024 in an effort to keep President Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket.
During an interview that aired Thursday on Real America's Voice, Trump sought to lower expectations for his debate performance. He argued that Biden should take a drug test before the event.
"They're going to feed him a lot of stuff, and we should do a drug test," he demanded. "I'd love to do a drug test beforehand."
"If he makes it through, no matter what, how bad, no matter how bad he is, they'll say he was great," he continued.
Trump said he did not want Biden removed from the Democratic ticket even though he polls better than other contenders.
"Well, you know, interestingly, they've done polling, and I do better against almost everybody," he opined. "And so they don't — they don't want to take him off. It depends."
"Maybe I'm better off losing the debate," Trump added. "I'll make sure he stays. I'll lose the debate on purpose. Maybe I'll do something like that."
My guess FWIW is that Biden won’t run, and his replacement will be elected.
DeleteNo Democrat will challenge Biden.
DeleteDavid will challenge him and win by a landslide.
DeleteLikely Trump is being told that he should not participate in a debate, by his advisors. He thus makes the suggestion that he may purposely lose the debate as a hedge against what he is being told is a likely outcome. If this is true, his fear may propel him to cancel.
Delete“we now thrill to the surreptitious taping of Supreme Court Justices' wives?”
ReplyDeleteSomerby really seems to be in favor of keeping the public in the dark. Powerful men deserve a Medal of Honor for shutting up inconvenient stories of sexual affairs that reveal their questionable character, and the most powerful people in the country (Alito) should be allowed to shield their true agendas from us, the inconvenient little people whose lives are profoundly affected by their decisions.
I’m reminded of Romney’s 47% remark, made in front of wealthy donors, which also came to light via an unauthorized recording.
Somerby’s reaction: shame on you liberals for intruding on private functions and sharing what these people truly believe when they think they’re protected.
Somerby headline says "surreptitious taping vs vulgar and crass"
ReplyDeleteHere is another false equivalency.
RE Gutfeld, his comments subsequent to the Jan. 6th riot were surprisingly sane. Hard to believe it's the same man as seen today on Fox.
ReplyDeletehttps://x.com/ndrew_lawrence/status
/1800677933054623749
They took the page down apparently. Wonder what the story is behind that decision.
DeleteOn recording the spouses of those we appose:
ReplyDeleteGinny Thomas wasn't taped. She was texting her weird fantasies of torturing Joe Biden to the Chief of Staff of
the President of the United States.
In a sane world, this travesty would have forced Thomas
to step down from the Court, full of apologies.
When these text came to light, along with a mountain
of similar outrages by the January 6 Committee, Bob
was unimpressed. It was all too biased, he lamely argued,
then he just pretended the committee didn't happen. No
credit to the brave Cassidy Hunchinson in Bob's world.
If Pied Piper or any of Bob's other defenders can explain
this, I'd love to hear what you have to say.
Alito has proven to be a political hack, built in the
Right Wing werido factory, who cares little for the American
People or the law. His wife is a creep too, apparently.
Yet I agree, other than the humorous aspect of her picking
fights and spitting on her neighbors, there is not much to
this.
Thomas, who now appears to have taken massive brides
from his patrons (a new story about how the Thomas's have
abandoned an adopted Son they used as a public relations
prop for awhile further illustrates their character) is something else Bob will have nothing to say about, that doesn't mean it's not important.
Somerby’s response to the outrage over Mrs Thomas was: what do liberals want, Thomas to divorce his wife??
DeleteI don’t remember that tidbit, it would not at all surprise me.
DeleteWhy would a Supreme Court Justice, with a lifetime sinecure, divorce his wife who tried to overthrow the United States of America?
DeleteWhat next, forcing him to recuse from cases that involve the overthrow of the USA, that his wife was clearly involved with?
Anonymouse 9:38pm, Bob asked a good question. What do anonymices want done with the opinionated wives ( or husbands) of SCOTUS members?
DeleteShould they not be allowed to voice a pro-abortion sentiment? To put a sign in the yard for a local candidate. Would it be taboo for a spouse to have a rainbow flag on her car during the deliberations about a certain cake baker?
This document seems to default to freedom of speech for family members as much as possible.
https://www.ncsc.org/__data/assets/pdf_file/0029/18677/politicalactivitybymembersofjudgesfamily.pdf
Agree with recusal. There cannot be even the appearance of bias for judges.
DeleteNote to Cecelia and Ginni Thomas.
DeleteFascism is a set of actions to be fought, not a set of ideas to be debated.
Note to 10:00am, if you view your fellow countrymen as being fascists for being in a rival political party, you are the problem. You’re different from the 1/6 rioters, only in that you are the ones who control the institutions.
DeleteWe control the institutions? Like the Supreme Court? How about the House of Representatives?
Delete"if you view your fellow countrymen as being fascists for being in a rival political party"
DeleteThat's a straw man that even a slight breeze could knockdown.
It's funny, because the Right are an amoral dumpster fire.
ReplyDelete
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