We’ve been watching the death throes of a banana republic for the last month. We have a president who wasn’t fit for the job in the first place thrashing about in a panic to deny the election results, and we have a couple of embarrassingly stupid “lawyers”, Sydney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, making a spectacle of themselves with a string of barely literate lawsuits, all failing. I am not a lawyer, and even I can see the ineptitude on display. It’s not just incompetence — these wackaloons are demanding that Trump throw out the election results by fiat, cancel Biden’s inauguration, and basically rule as a dictator.
Donald Trump's former lawyer literally retweets a call for a coup and "military tribunals" in the United States instead of recognizing the results of the 2020 election pic.twitter.com/HazZvXrixW
— Ben Jacobs (@Bencjacobs) December 1, 2020
None of that is going to happen. The dangerous part is that there are tens of millions of deluded citizens who think it should happen.
The interesting part is that right now, there are some cunning Republicans who enabled this whole catastrophic mess who are skulking away, trying to distance themselves from the consequences of their actions, thinking they can come back in 2024 and pick up the pieces. One of the most delusional is Mike Pence, a rat who is at least aware that he’s on a sinking ship. He’s been trying to crawl out from under the baggage of being Trump’s servant, hoping to avoid being slimed with the garbage the president is throwing around right now.
Vice President Mike Pence has been a go-to fundraising draw for the president’s campaign, and since October, no more than a day passed without his name emblazoning a fundraising email for the Trump reelect.
But that changed late last month. Since Nov. 25, not a single fundraising email from the Trump campaign or its Republican National Committee fundraising account has featured Pence’s name in the “from” field. And this week, that Republican National Committee joint fundraising committee, the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, made another subtle change: a handful of its emails swapped out the official Trump-Pence campaign logo for one featuring just the president’s name.
He’s got to be looking at the example of William Barr, though, who said that there was no evidence of significant fraud in the election, and now has Trump pissed off, considering firing him. Worse, I saw a bit of the Lin-Powell rally in Georgia, and the mob now hates Barr, and was raging about locking him up. Pence doesn’t want that. He’s daydreaming about a comeback, taming that mob to support him in a run for the presidency. So he’s walking a tightrope right now.
There’s no way a man who served as the vice president of a corrupt, treacherous regime could ever resuscitate their political career after this, is there?
Alexander Hamilton Stephens (February 11, 1812 – March 4, 1883) was an American politician who served as the vice president of the Confederate States from 1861 to 1865, and later as the 50th governor of Georgia from 1882 until his death in 1883. A member of the Democratic Party, he represented the state of Georgia in the United States House of Representatives before becoming governor.
Goddamnit, America.
It just makes sense that they can’t even spell “constitutional,” right?
Or do math – “Eighty and more million” now? Really. Maybe if you’re Joe Biden. Last I checked it was Biden’s 81 million to Trump’s 74.
Two things.
First, it was reported, I think leaked, a while ago that Trump is unhappy with Pence in general because he thinks he wants to run in 2024. Why would Trump care about that? Probably because Trump wants Ivanka to run after he is done, probably Ivanka has talked to him about that too. These guys have absolutely unlimited ego and ambitions. Second, whatever Republicans want to do, they will get away with it, 100%, at least as long as Democrats are lead by people like Biden, Pelosy and Schumer. We had a little disagreement in the political madness thread but to me it looks e.g., people like Neera Tanden who was recently nominated by Biden is a total weak-sauce Democrat who is likely a deficit-hawk. This probably shows Biden’s priorities and policy direction towards moderation and it is going to be met by Republicans who are already getting ready to be drum up their “OMG!!!! D E F I CI I T!!!!!” tactic again.
It’s been said that wild animals are most dangerous when they are wounded but not yet killed. Every hunting season, a deer or elk that is wounded manages to…kill the hunter. Those death throes are getting more and more scary. It will probably get worse.
We haven’t yet seen a lot of the usual right wingnut terrorism and violence.
The retired general Trump just pardoned, Michael Flynn, just called for the US military to overthrow the government and make Trump the
presidentdictator again. This is sedition and it can be illegal.Let’s hope Trump isn’t as dangerous as a wounded elk.
As long as you’re a racist piece of garbage, the American government will always have a place for you.
In the grand tradition of acute incompetence, she cites the incorrect date for the U.S. Senate run-off in Georgia, which is January 5, not 6. Yes, let the crazy people show up to the polls a day late.
I did read that the snatch snatcher is looking into getting post dated pardons for his family members ,or something like that .
And why do you Americans drag the whole thing out ,over here the new Mrs Prime Minister would be busy writing” No Longer Known at This Address ” on the previous tenant’s letters by now.
I know it must take time to send a new photo of the POTUS to every govt office ,and change the letter heading ,and email addresses and stuff like that.
Nope, sorry to disappoint you; if you were a banana republic, Trump would have been taken out to the WH back yard and shot weeks ago, for his antics, and a marginally competent autocrat would have taken over. Being unable to rig an election in your favor is considered a mortal sin there.
You live in a proper republic, with checks & balances that afford the unbalanced & the incompetent the protection of the law.
@6 davidc1 ~
(In answer to why it’s dragged out do much.) This is partially a result of such a significant portion of the executive branch being political appointees – several thousand, I believe. As I understand it, pretty much the entirety of 10 Downing remains with only the PM changing out. There’s also the fact that the PM is whoever gets a majority in Parliament. I believe in the UK, only the cabinet ministers are appointed by the PM, with no confirmation process à la US Senate. The simpler answer to this, though, is that everyone’s relying on it, and entire economies are built around it. I draw an analogy to the 5-day settlement period with stock trades. With electronic trading, these could be completed in milliseconds, but entire economies are built around it, and people make a lot of money because of it.
lotharloo @ #2:
She is not. And it’s pretty bad form to pop up on an unrelated thread – one about the rightwing golpistas, no less – with this.
davidc1 @ #6:
It’s in the Constitution. Rachel Maddow did a great segment last night about how Lamar Alexander was sworn in a few days early, in a rushed ceremony, as governor of Tennessee decades ago to prevent a corrupt outgoing governor from granting a bunch of irreversible pardons in exchange for bribes. She noted that state law allowed it, but it couldn’t be done for the presidency.
It’s all fun and games until the shooting starts. I wonder how many potential mass shooters in Georgia the FBI is monitoring right now.
Trump could grant Pence a pardon. Then he’d have to explain for the rest of his days what he was pardoned for. It might not be enough to scuttle his post-Trump ambitions, but it might be just enough to hamper his chances at the presidency. Strategery, ya know?
@8&10 Thanks for the replies ,over here we have a civil service that is supposed to be impartial as regards party politics .
Ministers come and go ,but permanent secretaries go on for ever .
I’m no admirer of any of those three, but I rather got the idea the Republicans wanted Trump to win re-election and serve a second term. They don’t appear to have got away with that quite 100%.
Most of the senior Republicans are not trying to distance themselves from Trump nearly as fast as I expected. After all, he is now quite clearly a loser. The explanation would seem to be that, so far at least, they think he maintains his hold on the Republican base. We’ll see how long that lasts once he’s actually out of the White House, but having been wrong on this issue once, I’m not making any further predictions!
The headline of this post suggests a really appalling graphic, which fortunately I lack the depravity and photo-editing skills to create.
@SC (Salty Current):
I have ready a lot more about her since. She is a weak democrat, it shows up even in the link you posted. She praises the racist, republican Bloomberg, she dances around the issues, utters 0 actual useful words. The quote is directly from her interview; when talking about healthcare, she says something about “ensuring that we have fiscal sanity”, which obviously means that the people to her left have fiscally insane proposals. It’s fucking stupid. Her reply on deficit is also weak, and amplifies Republican messaging:
In other words, there are times when we should worry about the deficit, it’s just that now it is not. And obviously, Republicans agree: now it is not time to worry about the deficit. It is sometime around mid 2021 when the honeymoon period of Biden presidency is gone.
Finally, it is not unrelated to the discussion here. This is how Republicans are going to get away with it. When Biden fills his cabinet with people who give in to Republican messaging and framing. When Republicans start making a lot of noise about the deficit, don’t act surprised if suddenly Biden’s team starts to agree with them and tries to meet them “half way”.
lotharloo @ #17:
This is vague blather.
From the article:
“Tanden is likely to face a confirmation fight in the Senate but if she makes it through she’ll likely push hard for even more deficit spending.”
“She co-authored a recent op-ed with a clear message: ‘Deficit and Debt Shouldn’t Factor Into Coronavirus Recession Response’. The commentary featured four authors including Tanden and Heather Boushey, who is also set to join Biden’s economic team.”
“Republicans are set to again become focused on the debt after four years of big spending under President Trump. They are unlikely to find an ally in Tanden. In 2018 she pushed back on a Republican-led budget resolution saying in a statement, ‘can we finally stop pretending that Senate Republican leaders care about the deficit?'”
“Some of the immediate response to Tanden’s pick among some Democrats has been relief that the president-elect didn’t pick more of a budget hawk. A progressive magazine recently called Bruce Reed – another contender for the job – ‘Biden’s Mr. Austerity’ (and it wasn’t meant as a complement).”
“Over the years, Tanden has discussed deficits as at least a factor her party should consider. She has also tangled with the supporters of figures like Sen. Bernie Sanders and has pushed positions that fall in a more moderate Democratic vein.
The Center for American Progress’s health care plan – which she helped develop – is less far-reaching than plans pushed by Sanders and others.”
“The reception from many Republicans was much less warm. A former top aide to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called her a ‘sacrifice to the confirmation gods’.”
“In her May 2019 Yahoo Finance interview Tanden said her approach when looking at issues from a ‘maybe 30,000-foot level’ is that ‘the policies of the Obama administration that had been the most resilient, or faced the most opposition when undermined, are really the things that actually affect the people’.”
The article also features one of her tweets in which she says, correctly, that even though “deficits are an over concern of both policy makers and voters” it’s stupid for people in Washington to pretend voters don’t care about the deficit, since it’s regularly raised in town halls. So the picture of her that emerges from the article is that she has no plans to go along with any Republican deficit bullshit for the foreseeable future, and will continue to call it out as bullshit while pushing for deficit spending; she’s someone the Republicans know has their number and fear; she’s not Bernie Sanders; she’ll factor the deficit into her considerations and messaging when the crisis is past because she recognizes that voters care about it and because she’s focused on policies that are the most effective and the least wasteful and has experience in implementing them.
She’s not a deficit hawk. She’s not a weak [D]emocrat. She’s a self-described progressive. Your claim that “she dances around the issues, utters 0 actual useful words” is laughable, and shows how little you’ve actually read about (or by) her. The crux of the criticism appears to be simply that she’s not as far left as, say, Sanders, which, yeah. Fact. From that you derive all of this nonsense about how that means she’s hostile to the left, a friend of the right, evasive, vapid, and on and on. It’s weird. It amazes me that the Bernie supporters would choose the Biden pick the Republicans hate the most to attack and misrepresent so ungenerously. …Actually, it doesn’t, given what’s become of some of them. Hope you’re proud to be joining with Tucker Carlson. (Note the chyron: “Neera Tanden is deranged: Glenn Greenwald.” I’d ask people to watch this interview on Carlson’s White Power Hour and decide for themselves who’s deranged in this scenario.)
LOL.
“Trump taint” is not a phrase I ever want to hear again, even if I am snickering like a 13 year old boy over it.
Pence isn’t walking a tightrop, he’s walking a greased tightrope. The only saving grace of his position is, Trump can’t fire him.
As for the reason for the wait until inauguration, the Electoral College still has to meet and vote, then Congress has about a week before inauguration to certify that vote. That all accounted for how long a trip to D.C. took in the past.
In other news and totally OT, foreign threats are currently attacking the COVID-19 cold distribution chain for the soon to be approved vaccines.
https://us-cert.cisa.gov/ncas/current-activity/2020/12/03/ibm-releases-report-cyber-actors-targeting-covid-19-vaccine-supply
Honestly.. If Trump could pardon himself for something he hasn’t even been convicted of yet, then things are vastly more broken than anyone realizes. Because, this makes no freaking sense. Not in the least due to the fact that you can’t just, I don’t think, grant a “blanket pardon”, which covers every possible outcome – and this is the sort of shit he would have to do, to save his ass, and that of everyone else involved, including family members. I mean, how the F would that even be legal?
Isn’t it great that, when they delusively believe it happens to them, cyber-security breaches are a real problem? I sure do love how apparently the deep state can program voting machines all over the country but Russians apparently are powerless to run some ads and make some Twitter bots.
@SC (Salty Current)
It’s funny that I read your defense of her and keep thinking “yep, weak Democrat”. Democrats should never talk about the deficit, unless it is with respect to raising taxes or cutting military spending. “The deficit” is a Republican talking point and so she is echoing Republican framing and Republican talking points for them. I am pretty sure you know what it means: “We are spending too much, we need to cut spending!” We live in a world that no Republican controlled government will ever, ever do tax increases and they will put all their effort into cutting social programs, and tax cuts. In such a world, it is stupid for the Democrats to bring up the Republican talking point, or try to meet them halfway. The Republicans have been winning the war on the tax cuts because they always go all in with the cuts to the social programs and the taxes when they are in power and the idiot Democrats try to meet them halfway when they are in power for a total net gain for the Republicans.
It is also interesting that you have completely ignored the part where she defends Bloomberg and says nice things about her, because obviously she knows that Bloomberg has a lot of money and is willing to pour it in the race for the Democrats. She’s a typical corporate-friendly big-money-loving Democrat and Biden is continuing to fill his cabinet with people like her.
lotharloo @ #23:
Yes, I’m aware that you entered the discussion with an irrationally distorted and ignorant impression (evidently influenced by Glenn Fucking Greenwald) and appear determined to stick with it come hell or high water. That is not to your credit.
Well, that’s stupid, quite frankly, as is what follows it. Deficits are a thing that exists, and Tanden has publicly countered Republican spin on the subject for years. Brian Beutler relentlessly criticizes the Democratic leadership, and he posted this the other day – “Neera Tanden or Bust”:
The idea that the head of OMB saying that at some point in the indefinite future when the crisis is over she’s going to take deficits into consideration is a terrible strike against her and makes her an enemy of the left is inane and pointless, given that, again, deficits exist and that, again, she recognizes that voters care about them. Being in denial about political realities is unhelpful for people involved in electoral politics or activism. It’s also the case, as I pointed out above, that Tanden’s approach to spending is that she wants to do it intelligently, in a way that helps people the most. She’s a wonk. To suggest that she should never utter the word deficit or consider it in any form is foolish and cedes ground to the Republicans, who want nothing more than to paint the Democrats as irresponsible. Again, Tanden has been pointing out how hypocritical and false their rhetoric is. When she starts working, we can criticize her actions and statements, but the claim that the incoming head of the Office of Management and Budget even mentioning deficits is disqualifying is bizarre.
I paid no attention to your link-free claim that she’s praised or defended him or whatever, but I’ll stipulate to it if that makes you happy since it’s of no interest to me. She’s also praised AOC, Elizabeth Warren, and many others across the Democratic spectrum on one occasion or another. In any case, you’re clearly in some Bernie-or-Bust/Tucker Carlson media bubble, and I find I’m repeating myself and we’re making little progress here, so I’ll leave the thread and leave you the last word.
The deficit problem is an entirely make up problem. Republican propaganda has been largely successful in turning it into an actual issue because most people think the government runs like a business and that you have to pay the loans.
Yes, Biden could have nominated someone worse. How is that even fucking relevant? Have you lost all sense of logic? She is not as bad as other people. Does it make her good? Jesus fucking Christ. You are so biased with someone you like on twitter that you cannot even do basic argumentation.
It is because you are biased and you do not hold people whom you like to the same standards as the people you disagree with.
No, my issue is only about her policy and it has nothing to do with “Bernie”. E.g., Paul Krugman is very anti-Bernie but I would not call him a deficit-hawk because he has written a lot against austerity policies and I would have 0 problems with having him on the job.
You are not coming up with refutations. Here, show me how deficit is a real problem that needs the Democrats to focus on.