Don't Get Me Started
This racist is the poster child for today’s GOP. If they don’t like him as their poster child, they should kick him out of their party and primary him. Because he is a joke. A laughingstock. A parody of every KKK member and Nazi saluting clueless rube in the country.
Seriously. Why do the Republicans not understand what they are allowing to grow in their midst?
Facebook. Steve King, racist. He was finally ousted from his seat in the GOP when he was primaried in 2020. Too late, GOP.
They will take this embarrassment out on America. These are the people who can’t let abortion go. These are the people who can’t let their goddamned religion go. These are the people who can’t let Benghazi go. These are the people who remember every slight and every offense and they cannot let their overwhelming desire for revenge go. It’s nearly two hundred years, they still can’t let the Civil War go. THESE ARE THE PEOPLE WHO CAN’T LET EITHER BARACK OBAMA OR HILLARY CLINTON GO — hell, 20 years later and they are STILL determined to get even with BILL Clinton. They will learn NOTHING from this, in fact they’ll become even more secretive, intolerant, scheming, and revengeful.
Stonekettle Station
Every single argument I have with Trump supporters (even with relatives) ends up with the question, “but what about Hillary?”
I keep wanting to ask in response, who brought up Hillary? I didn’t bring her up. I wasn’t even thinking of her. I couldn’t care less about her now than I did ten years ago (Go look. Harsh? Yes, I know) I only voted for her because she was who the Democrats picked, the presumed Democratic nominee that was so certain to win that I resigned myself to voting for her two years ago when I wrote Hillary for President? I resigned myself to voting for her because I knew the Republicans would pick a lunatic. Wonder of wonders, one of my predictions came true and they did pick a lunatic from a group of ten lunatics (and Kasich) and now that lunatic is president.
They’ll make the destruction of their efforts to repeal Obamacare about Hillary too. They’ll make it about Hillary and Barack Obama at the same time if they can. It was Hillarycare that started them all down this long, deep slope into madness. I can easily see how this is all linked to Hillary Clinton somewhere in their minds.
Saying I only voted for her because she was the nominee is selling my support for her a bit short. After she won the nomination. After Donald Trump co-opted the Republican convention and Republican party and made it his own personal propaganda vehicle. After all of that, I decided I did really like Hillary Clinton after all. I mean, at least she wasn’t a lunatic. Wasn’t a fraud. Wasn’t engaged in demonstrably criminal activities that have simply never been prosecuted. I mean, the haters (now Stormtrumpers) tried to prosecute her (#Benghazi) but there simply wasn’t anything that they could get a conviction on. This is more than could be said for Donald Trump, as we are now discovering. So yeah. Knowing real estate developers the way I do, and seeing the cluster fuck that a Trump presidency was going to be, I wholeheartedly embraced Hillary Clinton in 2016. But that was 2016.
Republicans are so caught up in the past, with all these grievances that they just can’t abide, they can’t begin to think about what comes next. Which is how we find ourselves here in this mess today, them still talking about what happened in 1998, and the rest of us outraged about what is going on around us right here and now.
Donald Trump’s race baiting. His misogyny. His probable coordination with Russia during the election. His continued money laundering for the Russian mob. His uncontested control of 2/3’s of the federal government, with the last third one simple SCOTUS nomination away.
How about we, the sane 3/4’s of the United States, start talking about what comes next for a change? Let’s start now so we know where we’re going in 2018. Screw the Republicans. They’ll still be nominating lunatics twenty years from now. #SignedByTrump
Her explanation for the Gap is simple enough. “There’s a lot of behavioral science that if you attack someone endlessly — even if none of what you say is true — the very fact of attacking that person raises doubts and creates a negative perspective,” she says. “As someone Exhibit A on that — since it has been a long time that I’ve been in that position — I get that.”
Understanding Hillary – Ezra Klein – July 11, 2016
Consider, for a moment, two people. One, as a young woman at the beginning of a promising legal career, went door to door searching for ways to guarantee an education to the countless disabled and disadvantaged children who had fallen through the cracks. The other, as a young millionaire, exacted revenge on his recently deceased brother’s family by cutting off the medical insurance desperately needed by his nephew’s newborn son, who at eighteen months of age was suffering from violent seizures brought on by a rare neurological disorder.
Huffingtonpost – Larry Womack – Stop Pretending
As for the embarrassment of having their eight year long quest to repeal Obamacare ended by one of their own, on the brink of death, voting against party leadership as a final fuck you? They should learn to live with it. Live with it, because that will be the legacy that the Moral Majority and Reagan Republicans will be saddled with. The United States and the world has turned a corner now, and there is no going back to the time when the United States was a shining city on a hill, if that time ever existed in the first place. We might move forward into respectability once more, but that road is a long and hard one, and won’t be the direction that Trumpists will go if they ever return to power.
Robert Reich was more on topic for the subject in the featured image, all the way back in March of that year. I replied with Look, they are stealing our Medicare! and linking the Indivisible podcast on the subject of the AHCA. They are taking healthcare from the poor and charging more to the middle and giving all of that to the wealthy! How is this even vaguely fair? None of it was fair, and in the end it mattered not at all because John McCain threw himself on that grenade.
I was triggered by Jim’s hearkening back to the question of Hillary Clinton and the fact that Republicans haven’t been able to let their hatred of her go for thirty years now, and so consequently sold us all down the river to an known con artist rather than admit that their Qanon delusions were untrue. I can admit that now, looking at this article from the perspective of four years in the future. I was triggered and went off on the tangent of rebutting the general whataboutism rather than breathing a sigh of relief at the crisis averted by McCain’s noble sacrifice that day. It’s hard to be thankful to a loose cannon like McCain turned out to be, but there is no denying that Americans all owe him a debt of gratitude.
We took back the House of Representatives in 2018. We took back the Presidency in 2020, and took back the Senate after a highly unlikely runoff result for Georgia in January 2021. We own two-thirds of the government now, with Republicans having stuffed unqualified judges onto federal benches at a breakneck pace throughout Trump’s presidency. We’ll be a lifetime weeding them back out of the courts, but at least here and now we have the power to do something good. I hope we don’t waste the chance this time.
Wednesday’s Indivisible is a stark contrast to the other days of the week, in more ways than one. The first Wednesday show of the 100 day run started with the host saying he thought we were pretty divided after all that, and then proceeded to trash the notion of indivisible itself each and every Wednesday since then. Perhaps it is because Wednesday’s Indivisible show is run by and interviews conservatives and Republicans.
This week they didn’t even bother to talk about the subject of the week, healthcare, for half the show. Rather than let the Honorable Senator from Wisconsin, Ron Johnson, continue to mouth half-truths and outright falsehoods for the whole program, the host decided to bring on a conservative apologist and attempt to explain away the actions of the authoritarians in their midst.
A few words for the Senator first. Medicare is for the disabled, the old and poor women with children at home. It isn’t for people who could work and get insurance. There hasn’t been a welfare program to speak of in this country since Bill Clinton signed it all away in the 90’s. So your target of choice, welfare queens, don’t exist anymore. Nice try Senator. You should really try harder.
But that really wasn’t the annoying part. The annoying part of the show started about halfway through when the guest changed to Conor Friedersdorf who attempted to explain away the Nazi elephant in the room. The authoritarian problem in the electorate.
Mr. Friedersdorf first suggests that conservatives were resistant to change. That excuse is good as far as it goes, but it really doesn’t cover the half of it. I’ll get to that in a minute. He goes on to add that the second thing that conservatives don’t like is government interference. Luckily I had swallowed the mouthful of tea I had just drank because it would have been all over the wall at that point.
They don’t like government interference? Since when? They want government to be able to put pipelines anywhere they want. They want government to keep women from getting medical care that conservatives might not approve of. They want government to keep people off of drugs, etc, etc, ad nauseam. There are very few things conservatives don’t want government involved in and most of them fall into the area known as my business. Sadly, my business as it applies to conservatives is just as varied as the business of the US is; and so consequently isn’t enforceable as law in any real sense. There are some fine upstanding conservative drug dealers and pimps who would disagree with most of your social conservative stances on the subject of easy sex and profligate drugs.
Conservatives love change as long as the change is in the direction they want. They want to change healthcare back to what it was before there was healthcare. Back to when there were no cures or treatments for disease, just charlatans on soapboxes preaching the value of their snake oil. They want to change science back to religion, change the world back to christian and change the president back into a king. At least they appear to have succeeded on that last point. Conservatives are adverse to change only so far as the change that took our ape ancestors out of the trees and into caves.
Conservatives are not fans of small government. Conservatives are fans of low taxes on themselves, and they currently enjoy some of the lowest taxes on the face of the planet. Taxes will be even lower for the wealthy, lower than they’ve been since before the Great Depression, very soon now. Conservatives love authoritarians, they’ve been installing them for other democracies for several generations now. They’ve got a dictator in mind for us at the moment, too.
There is something they could do to convince me and the rest of the liberals otherwise. Convince us you aren’t the racists, fascist and authoritarians we think you are. It goes something like this; we will believe the leadership of the Republican party and conservatives in general are not fascists and racists on the day they punish Steve King for being a racist and a fascist and not one minute before that.
What King said was RACISM with a pedigree directly traceable to The Fourteen Words (Also “14” or “The Fourteen”) of White Supremacism and White Nationalism, to wit: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” The Fourteen words are directly traceable to 88 words taken from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, “What we must fight for is to safeguard the existence and reproduction of our race and our people, the sustenance of our children and the purity of our blood, the freedom and independence of the fatherland, so that our people may mature for the fulfillment of the mission allotted it by the creator of the universe. Every thought and every idea, every doctrine and all knowledge, must serve this purpose. And everything must be examined from this point of view and used or rejected according to its utility.” Next time you see a Neo-Nazi, look for the tattoos, 14/88, THAT’s what those symbols mean. 14 words. 88 words. Right there.
Stonekettle Station on Facebook
It’s real simple. Hang Steve King out to dry for his blatant embrace of eugenics and racism, his wholly transparent use of white power talking points, and I at least will believe that you are earnest in your desire to bridge the gap. Span the distance. Meet us halfway, at least. Until then I’ll be waiting here for the next shoe to drop. What will His Electoral Highness do next? Not even I am willing to guess that, and I’ve gone out on a limb for some pretty silly notions in the past.
