supergee: (yellow dog)
“Yellow-dog Democrat” is defined as someone who would vote for a yellow dog if it was on the Democratic ticket. (I admit that these days I am one.) By the same token, should we refer to the 44,000 people who voted for Arthur Jones as “Nazi Republicans”? [Daily News]
supergee: (liberal)
Maxine Waters will get to subpoena Trump’s tax records, but Texas will continue to be represented, in several senses, by Ted Cruz.

ETA: Last words from Charlie Pierce before he goes pay

And firsts
supergee: (rocket coyote)
Of course I hate politics. As Tim Leary said, it’s so animalistic it should be done on all fours. But there’s also Robert Heinlein’s appropriate image that it’s as unavoidable as bondage to our bowels, and voting for someone because he isn’t a politician makes as much sense as asking to be operated on by someone who isn’t a doctor, so every chance I get, I vote for the lesser of two evils.

The Right thinks important offices should go to successful businesspersons rather than politicians, which doesn’t work even if you choose a real success, as opposed to someone who played the part on television but in consensus reality was such a failure at the fixed game of capitalism that he had to be bailed out by foreign adversaries who now own him.

The Left is subtler, of course. They merely reject anyone who is political enough to compromise. Here is Charles Pierce on the people who think Nancy Pelosi is too good at the nasty business of politics to be their kind of politician.
supergee: (wink)
We’re having a special election here, and I’m getting Facebook posts from “Corrupt Shelley Mayer” and “Trump Republican Julie Killian,” each of course sponsored by the other candidate and roughly equal. I guess at worst it’s “Vote for the Crook. It’s Important.”
supergee: (darth)
JFK & the press. I remember at the time we used to hear terrible things about Kennedy:

* He had zipper issues that sometimes became national security issues.

* He didn’t write the book he got the Pulitzer Prize for.

* The missile gap that got him so many votes was a deliberate lie.

* His father, who had been an appeaser if not an actual Nazi sympathizer, bought him enough votes to beat Humphrey in the primaries.

* He was so sick that he wouldn’t have made it through two terms even if he hadn’t visited Dallas.

They were all true.

Thanx to [personal profile] conuly

Total

Oct. 6th, 2017 07:06 am
supergee: (sado)
It has been said that when Milo Yiannopoulos sings “My Favorite Things,” he starts with white racism and Black dick. Now he is telling us that has married a Black man whose face we are not permitted to see. That has stirred up a lot of anger all around, which may be something he loves even more than the two things I just mentioned.

One reply included, “It is much easier to disregard working on the most intimate display of one’s politics—love—when the narrative is that love can’t be helped.” This happened to be aimed at Milo’s husband, but the only way you can tell it’s not aimed at Milo for being a “race traitor” is that it’s too articulate.

This is why I hate politics: its claim to be at the center of everything we do. Love should drive politics: Ideally, we engage in the forms of collective force that we dignify with the P-word out of love for all human beings and desire to minimize their suffering. Doing it the other way around leads to—and is—totalitarianism.

Grim Truth

Dec. 21st, 2016 06:39 am
supergee: (sado)
One reason L.E. Modesitt sells so well is that he understands politics:
The real truth about politics is that it’s both more deadly and less obvious than anybody wants to admit. I knew a lot of people in the intelligence community. As a matter of fact, one of my neighbors was the duty officer at the CIA on the night of the Bay of Pigs. But I don’t know of a single intelligence agent of any country who was ever killed in Washington, D.C., despite what all of the movies say. On the other hand, I could not count the number of suicides. Washington will basically dry up your living, alienate you and your spouse, keep your kids from having any friends, and make sure you don’t work in your field ever again. But they won’t kill you. That’s too kind. Nobody wants that kind of hard, gritty, indirect truth in a book. It’s not suspenseful. It’s not thrilling.
Thanx to Tor.com.
supergee: (yellow dog)
Now is the time for the 50-state strategy. There should be a Democratic candidate in every House & Senate race, even the seemingly hopeless ones, asking the Republican, “Do you agree with this rich turd?”
supergee: (spy)
Paul Krugman says there are no more libertarians. (He's right that Rand Paul isn't one.) He's exaggerating, but there is a tendency for people to divide into the old left/right. The Sad Puppies started out as a libertarian movement, and now they're in bed (as it were) with a Nehemiah Scudder theocrat and a guy who screams about exterminating human vermin because two girls held hands on a TV cartoon.


ETA: Once again, File 770 provides a roundup for those who want to look away, but can't,

Politics

Mar. 23rd, 2015 07:54 am
supergee: (disgust)
There simply has to be a point at which winning an election is not worth it. There simply has to be a point at which the people who make their living in politics get so revolted by the vandals and vampires in their business that they begin to self-police it, not in the pious fashion of Danforth's eulogy, but purely out of pragmatic self-preservation. There has to be a point at which they look at the political salience of running against "government" and realize that they're spitting on themselves in a mirror. They are undermining confidence in the product that they're trying to sell, poisoning the medicine they're peddling. There simply has to be a point to it all besides winning. If there is no longer a point at which that is true, then they are lost, and we are lost, and self-government becomes a psychosis with no solution. There simply has to be that point, or faith is a sucker's game.
--Charles P. Pierce

Voting

Oct. 12th, 2013 08:07 am
supergee: (kerplop)
I wished we had the British system so we could quick call an election before vast chunks of the electorate forget what turds the Republicans are, but I learned that the British don't have the British system anymore.
supergee: (sign)
Someday, the Supreme Court should realize that giving money to candidates is action, rather than speech.

Profile

supergee: (Default)
Arthur D. Hlavaty

March 2025

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