I don’t ever watch any of that biased punditry that infests broadcast television on Sunday mornings, but if I did, I’d probably see Murc’s Law in non-stop action.
“The widespread assumption that only Democrats have any agency or causal influence over American politics.” This is famously known as “Murc’s Law,” named after a commenter at the blog Lawyers, Guns, and Money who noticed years ago the habitual assumption among the punditry that Republican misbehavior can only be caused by Democrats. Do Republicans reject climate science? Must be because Democrats failed to persuade them! Did Republicans pass unpopular tax cuts for the rich? Must be that Democrats didn’t do enough to guide them to better choices! Do Republicans keep voting for lunatics and fascists? It must be the fault of Democrats for being mean to them! Even Donald Trump’s election was widely blamed on Democrats — who voted against him, to be clear — on the bizarre grounds that Barack Obama should have rolled over and just let Mitt Romney win in 2012.
In order to be a highly paid influential thought-leader in the American news media, you have to apply the filter of Murc’s Law to everything you say. Oh, also: the “news” isn’t news, you have to suppress it until you’ve landed your lucrative book deal.
OK, so the pundit class missed the boat on Biden’s obvious mental and physical decline. They now have a chance to make amends. Start writing daily, hard hitting pieces on Trump’s obvious mental slippage. Hell, even the White House sees it. They’ve removed all transcripts of President Trump’s remarks from its website, arguing that this aims to provide a more consistent presentation of his speeches through audio and video formats instead of written transcripts. Does this make any sense? The written word is always the official history, not audio tapes or videos. Is YouTube now the official repository of the President’s words and deeds? You want to know what Trump said last week? Check out YouTube or Instagram. And he still has three and a half years left. The man will be totally incoherent long before then.
ScrupFair, GOPers are only able to do all that horrible stuff because Dems refrain from GIVING THEM TWO IN THE NOGGIN, as they have now demonstrated that they deserve.
In conclusion, only Dems have ‘agency’, but they refuse to use it. SAD.
“The Democratic Party Is Literally Dying” https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/democratic-party-connolly-gerontocracy/
Well check this out: half the country has shifted right over the past twelve years, with only tiny countervailing shifts in a few rich cities. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/05/25/us/politics/trump-politics-democrats.html?unlocked_article_code=1.J08.cGCc.EZLnzszf3PJk&smid=url-share
In just twelve years!!!
This is totally on the Dems. The Nation article I posted above points out that, for the DNC and its hangers on, our political system is basically a lifelong sinecure / grift. See also: https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-problem-goes-well-beyond-biden
PS – I no longer subscribe to the Times at full cost, but when they send me one of those $1/week promotions, I do take them up on that, then cancel until I get the next one.
Extra irony points because the Republican Party once called themselves “the party of personal responsibility.”
It’s a lot like a pattern worth noticing about Christians obsessing with the End Times Scenario according to the Book of Revelation which kicks into full high gear when a Democratic President runs the nation, yet tones it down a notch when a Republican President runs the nation. Demands people to be respectful to a Republican President only to shamelessly slander a Democratic President in spite of a passage in one of the Apostle Paul’s letters telling them to obey and respect those in authority only because God put them there. Shamelessly and loudly disruptive towards a woman leader while keeping their mouths shut in front of a male leader. The list of patterns go on and on and on.
hillaryretig1@4,
Interesting article by Nathan Robinson at your second link, with many telling points against the Democratic establishment, but…
1) If Bernie Sanders was “the most popular politician in America”, why didn’t more people vote for him in the primaries in 2016 and 2020?
2) Robinson says Biden only just squeaked a win in 2020. But he did win considerably more votes than any other candidate in any presidential election ever.
Everything is supposedly, falsely, the Democratic parties fault according to all too many people who really should know better.
That’s why Trump is dictator now and the world is, well, where it is now.
My frustration and loathing of those who keep blaming everything on the party that is NOT at fault & is NOWHERE REMOTELY NEAR as bad as it’s ONLY fucking alternative which is actually fucking Fascists knows no fucking end here.
I did try to warn them pre-election. If only those fuckers had listened. Too late now. So now what?
Now some commenters here will probly (yet again) blame me for callg this out truthfully and being the metaphorical, mythical Cassandra and actually predicting things correctly (not that hard to see really..) right and then trying to hold the non-Kamala Harris voting utter scum that made this the world we now live in thanks to them.
We could be living with a Kamala Harrris administraton now. With HER not HIM as POTUS.
With Trump in jail where he rightly belongs.
With so very mcuh so very much different than it now is.
But, no, some total fuckwits had to vote for faux “progressive” traitors and the obvs blatant already proven to be a Putin useful tool Stein instead. Even after 2016. Even after Nader. Even knowingly choosing willful ignorance.
Thus they’ve doomed us all everywher eonthis planet. Nothing I can say is bad enough for the magnitude of it and nothing I can do is even a billionth bad enough penalty for the astronomical scale of evil that they did last year when they could’ve made a diference for good and not for evil .
I don’t know how many times I referenced this video essay since this insanity began, but what’s one more time?
https://youtu.be/MAbab8aP4_A?si=dglByA6dWnXpuT9a
The reason the right keeps winning is simple: Liberalism makes people pushovers. There sanctimonious devotion to “fairness” and “the process” allows fascism to roll right over them.
@6 Owosso
That’s blind partisanship at work. Vice-versa for the resistance liberals — oh look, there’s one of them in the thread right up there!
I don’t begrudge people for waking up and noticing the evil policies Bush and Trump have been pursuing. The ones who immediately go back to sleep and snooze through Obama’s and Biden’s terms draw my ire precisely because they don’t pay attention to the bipartisan continuity of those policies. It was a popularity contest for them, not a vigilant repudiation of all the evil shit done in our name.
@9 StevoR
Cassandra wasn’t a pathological liar. Your role is closer to the metaphorical, mythical village idiot who furiously photocopies the same rambling, sanctimonious letters to the editor over and over.
Kg @7
1) If Bernie Sanders was “the most popular politician in America”, why didn’t more people vote for him in the primaries in 2016 and 2020?
2) Robinson says Biden only just squeaked a win in 2020. But he did win considerably more votes than any other candidate in any presidential election ever.
Bernie scored big early wins in 2020 until the DNC conspired with the other candidates prior to SC. They all suddenly dropped out, except for Liz Warren, who stayed to split the progressive vote, taking PAC money although she had pledged not to. This left the field open for him after that. (Clyburn, 84 years old, and quoted in the Current Affairs piece as saying he wouldn’t resign because politics was his life, was instrumental in this.)
Biden and Harris were by far the two worst performing of the major candidates in the 2020 primary. Harris got a total of 744 votes (not a typo) in 9 months of campaigning, before suspending her campaign bf she was humiliated in her own state. I was a precinct captain (for Bernie) in IA in 2020, and out of the 350ish voters in our caucus room, Biden got 8 votes (all octogenarians weirdly wearing their military garb) and Harris got 0. Yang, for reference got about 20 – they all came over to caucus with the Berners.
tl;dr Biden got a lot of votes because the DNC maneuvered it that way. He and Harris were no way fit for the ticket. He was a lifelong mediocrity / sell out who was a nonstarter in two presidential campaigns until Obama elevated him onto his ticket to appease segregationists. He was majorly responsible for Clarence Thomas and the awful 2005 Bankruptcy Bill, and his 2d presidential run ended when he was found to be a persistent plagiarist.
Harris is a corrupt prosecutor who used falsified crime lab data to convict thousands of low-level drug offenders, but somehow managed not to charge Steve Mnuchin for one of the biggest financial frauds in history. She also wanted to hold prisoners in longer to help the state benefit from their essentially slave labor, and also wanted to arrest the parents of truants. She’s also (see above) a shitty campaigner.
After the 2020 primary, the DNC announced that SC would henceforth be the first primary state. It’s the most conservative Dem state, so they’re trying to ensure that no progressives ever get on the national ticket.
Thanks for asking! Here’s my (serious) question to you: why don’t you know all this? You don’t have to answer here, but please think about where you’re getting your info. Also, please ask yourself why you’re defending an obviously corrupt and feckless political party that has failed at every level, from national down to local, for 40+ years.
The mainslime news is moribund at the least, Incomplete, deceitful, misleading and destructive in most cases. There are too many examples easily found that prove this.
OK bonus comment: Biden came to our swing MI district in 2015 and took a $200K check to campaign for the GOP candidate, while we were all out like schmucks volunteering for the Dem. Also, the GOPer happened to be a particularly vile one, someone the LA Times called “Earth’s #1 enemy in congress” due to his oil-industry shilling, and a leader in the fight to defund Obamacare, supposedly Biden’s own signature achievement. So tell me again how great the Dem party is, and also how devoted to winning it is. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/us/politics/biden-speech-fred-upton.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Ik8.Gw_v.5_oCPyYpGjkJ&smid=url-share
Sorry I need to clarify my long comment:
1) “This left the field open for him after that. ” Him = Biden
2) “Biden and Harris were by far the two worst performing of the major candidates in the 2020 primary.” This refers to the early part of the primary before the SC shenanigans.
What exactly is a “pundit”? I have always assumed it was a synonym for idiot.
Militant Agnostic, you’re on the internet.
@11. de facto Trump voter and enabler beholder : “Cassandra wasn’t a pathological liar.”
Nor am I. Pretty much everything I warned you of I’ve been subsequently proven right on. You choosing to vote for Trump via that Putin shill Jill Stein has the consequences that we are all seeing today. Which I warned you about. Far worse and more blatant genocide in Gaza for instance with, you know, whose plan for outright ethnic cleansing again? Oh yeah Trump’s.
Your arguments for third party spoiler votes and attacks on the non-Fascist alterniatiev to the Trumpist Fadscists were obvs only going to help Trump. We’ve seen this before, you were warned before. But you did what you did in the campaign and election and now you behodle r really do have metapohoricla blood on your hands. We all know that even if you refuse to accept reality yet again.
hilaryrettig1@12
And how exactly did they force the voters to support Biden, or Warren, rather than Sanders?
Nothing of what you reported adequately answers my original question: rephrasing slightly, if Sanders was “the most popular politician in America”, why did so many Democratic primary voters prefer to vote for Biden? Biden had a clear victory in the South Carolina primary, with 48.65% of the vote to Sanders’ 19.77%, before the mass drop-out and endorsement of Biden. That rescued his candidacy, and made him the obvious choice for both the DNC and Dem establishment, and voters who opposed Sanders. Obviously the drop-out and endorsements helped Biden, but voters were still free to vote for Sanders. The plain fact is, not enough of them did so to overcome the establishment determination to prevent his nomination – but they could have, if they’d chosen, and would have, if he’d been as popular as Robinson suggests (I note his claim is based on a single approve/disapprove poll taken in 2017, at which point Biden was, IIRC, not doing much of anything). After “Super Tuesday”, if I’ve added up right, Biden had a 794:660 lead in delegates, and a proportionately similar lead in individual votes cast. At that point, Warren dropped out, but Biden still beat Sanders in the next four primaries, giving him a 1145:834 lead, on which Sanders conceded defeat.
As you’d have noticed if you were reading for comprehension, I said nothing at all in defence of the Democratic Party or its establishment; I simply queried Robinson’s claims. If I’d been an American, I’d not only have voted for Sanders, in 2016 and 2020, I’d have campaigned for him. But I’m not going to acquit Democratic primary voters who foolishly preferred Biden to Sanders by blaming everything on the DNC.
Further to my #19, it is worth noting that Biden did beat Trump in 2020. We can’t know whether Sanders would have done so, or what would have happened either if he had (except that he’d have faced a lot of resistance from right-wing Dems), or if Trump had won that year.
Oh, and one further note in answer to hillaryrettig1. Over the past decade, my main sources of information on US politics have been the Guardian, DailyKos, MSNBC, The Intercept, and Mother Jones.
StevoR #9: We could be living with a Kamala Harrris administraton now.
Sure, but would that really solve anything? Look at Biden, sure he was better but did he change anything? Or was he just a stay of execution? At some point the inescapable conclusion has to be that both parties are to blame, that your only choice has been between Kodos and Kang. Voting for Kodos won’t fix anything.
Erlend Meyer@22,
What a load of crap. If you were about to be executed, I suspect you’d welcome a stay of execution. Aside from anything else, Trump has set about turning the USA into a dictatorship (if you haven’t yet realised that’s his aim, and that of those around and behind him, I can only suggest you pull your head out of your fundament), in which you won’t get the chance to “change anything” the fascists don’t want changed.
I’m not arguing for Trump, far from it. All I’m saying is that he’s not the root cause of the problems that the US have been facing for decades and that neither of the parties seem to to be able or willing to address this.
Just look at Bidens promise in 2019: https://www.salon.com/2019/06/19/joe-biden-to-rich-donors-nothing-would-fundamentally-change-if-hes-elected/
After 4 years of Trump, this was the best they could do. Act as if everything was fine the way it were.
It was better than the tariffs mess, for which Trump is 100% responsible, Erlend.
(It was better without them, no?)
Sure, but a shit sandwich with less shit is still a shit sandwich. I don’t think the democrats could ever get you more than one election away from something like Trump. Hasn’t that been their strategy all along? “Well it’s either us or THAT guy”…
I find it rather compelling, Erlend — it’s how I’ve always voted, since no candidate truly represents me.
Worst last, next-worst next, and so forth until no candidates remain.
cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimax
Possibly not that famously since I haven’t heard of it before now but it does seem to apply powerfully especially to a percentage of those commenting here. I’ll remember and use that in future.
.***
@22. Erlend Meyer :
Yes! Yes, it bloody well would solve a lot of things? Are you hiding under a rock or something NOT to have noticed?
Do you think we’d have a Fascist govt openly thumbing their nose at USA laws and court rulings and oh yeah, the Constitution now?
Do you think we’d have seen the POTUS clashing with Zelenski and South Africa’s leaders and threatening to conquer Greenland and Panama and make Canada the 51st state and, oh yeah, blatantly calling for ethnic cleansing in Gaza whilst being far more supportive of Netanyahu and oh yeah, literally banning references to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Plus sending brown people and Palestinians protestors esp to an El Salvadorian prison – incl innocent ones under Kamala?
Sure, but where would you be 4 years from now? Worse off than you were and even more willing to believe the lies from the far right. It’s a short term “solution” that is running out of steam. I don’t know what the long term solution is, but it sure as hell isn’t more of the very thing that got you into this mess.
Fair and balanced coverage of political news, with an emphasis on Australia, can be found on thesundayshot on YT, a program that runs parallel to the mainstream media Sunday morning pundit shows.
Since there is an image of Jake Tapper on the top, can I just say this guy is one of the worst people in journalism in the US, in a crowded field. Proudly genocidal zionist, arch-conservative, both-sideing PoS. At least Harwood and Acosta had the guts to leave CNN.
How the fuck are you arrogant enough to think you know that? And meanwhile, to shrug off the suffering and death of millions of people as not worth bothering about?
I don’t mean to shrug off any suffering, god knows the world was bad enough without Trump. But the US workers have been loosing consistently for 50 years now, why would the next 4 be any different? Sure, supporting the Dems is better than doing nothing, I just think they will ever fix the real issues.
don’t think…
Erlend Meyer@32,
But that’s exactly what you’ve been doing.
The question is the difference between the world as it is, with Trump in power, and the world as it would have been, without Trump in power. Trump’s win was a huge victory for fascism and oligarchy throughout the world.
Sure, supporting the Dems is better than doing nothing
That is absolutely not what you’ve been saying throughout this thread.
The penultimate line of #34 should have been quoted – it’s from Erlend Meyer.
If you have read me as supporting Trump I can only apologize, that was never my intention. But I think you’re wrong if you believe that either party work for the public. They work for the rich, and can only support policies that serve their masters.
Perhaps you would have a chance if you garrotted every politician with a stock portfolio, but I don’t think there would be any left.
Erlend Meyer, if Harris had won in November we wouldn’t have Elon’s little scriptboys destroying the federal government, randomly declaring Social Security beneficiaries as dead, destroying publicly funded research, taking our personal data for who knows what purpose. Also we wouldn’t have a bunch of know-nothings destroying our preventive healthcare.
Erlend Meyer @36: Jesus fucking christ, it’s as though you, and a few other commenters, don’t get that most of the commenters here understand that the lesser of two evils is still actually evil, and that your condescending claptrap is totally misplaced.
As long as its either dems or republicans, you are doomed to this situation.
Look at the Australian system, compulsory, preferential voting run by an independant electoral commission.
Its still possible to get the majority of voters to vote poorly but its harder, and there are more players in the game than two parties, forcing things very much to the center.