4768

This is one of those the view is different depending on where you stand things. On the left, Bill Clinton gets very little attention. And Hillary has been fading since her big loss. Even Bernie and Biden are fading in my view. From the left, the focus is on younger more energetic personalities. However, from the right both Clinton’s still get tons of coverage, much as the Devil Himself gets plenty of coverage in a fire and brimstone church. So if even some of your information intake is from the right, even indirectly, you are going to here much more about the Clintons. On the left, they are increasingly irrelevant, much as the Devil Himself gets little exposure in the more ecumenical Christian denominations.

4769

Yeah, I haven’t heard mention of Bill in any media that I pay attention to in years. None for Hillary since the election. Of course, I see from the Fox Propaganda thread that they both get plenty of airplay there. Gotta keep stoking the fires of hatred after all.

4770

I’ve seen a few post-MeToo thinkpieces about Bill lately – that’s about it.

4771

Well on Fox News, they talk about Clinton all the time still. I agree you don’t see coverage anywhere else though.

4772

Because he woke up one day and breathed, or…?

4773
4774

They still care. They want to catch up.

4775

In the old days somebody might also have cared that a massive New York Times investigative piece unveiled decades’ worth of tax fraud in the President’s family…

4776

Small things sometimes matter, and Collins is among the smallest of things in the political world. And yet, she helped me finally to accept what I had been denying. Her speech on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh convinced me that the Republican Party now exists for one reason, and one reason only: for the exercise of raw political power, and not even for ends I would otherwise applaud or even support.

4777

As someone who went through the same thing only over a decade earlier, I always find these interesting.

4778

But does it change anything? I guess we have to wait until November.

4779

No, he’s a beta cuck.

4780

FWIW, the decline started in the 50’s - most “conservatives” just didn’t realize it until, oh, 2018?

Upon closer examination, it’s obvious that the history of modern conservative is permeated with racism, extremism, conspiracy-mongering, isolationism and know-nothingism…

…In 1964, the GOP ceased to be the party of Lincoln and became the party of Southern whites. As I now look back with the clarity of hindsight, I am convinced that coded racial appeals had at least as much, if not more, to do with the electoral success of the modern Republican Party than all of the domestic and foreign policy proposals crafted by well-intentioned analysts…

… Trump won by making the racist appeal, hitherto relatively subtle, obvious even to someone such as me who used to be in denial …

…The Republican Party will now be defined by Trump’s dark, divisive vision, with his depiction of Democrats as America-hating, criminal-coddling traitors, his vilification of the press as the “enemy of the people,” and his ugly invective against Mexicans and Muslims. The extremism that many Republicans of goodwill had been trying to push to the fringe of their party is now its governing ideology.

4781

Well it’s not a convenient truth. To admit this has been going on for decades it to admit republicans and conservatives blindly accepted this in their rank, and that puts fault on them.

4782

The very fact that Trump’s birtherism was considered a feature, not a bug, kind of gives the lie to the idea that he brought all the nasty with him.

4783

Not blindly, not for most of them.

4784

Just as Reagan gave moral sanction to greed and conspicuous consumption in the 80s, Trump has lent it to racism and xenophobia and they’ve been coming out of the woodwork since 2016.

4785

When people on the political fringe blame shadowy forces — often, as it happens, sinister Jewish financiers — for their frustrations, you can write it off as delusional. When people who hold most of the levers of power do the same thing, their fantasizing isn’t a delusion, it’s a tool: a way to delegitimize opposition, to create excuses not just for disregarding but for punishing anyone who dares to criticize their actions.

That’s why conspiracy theories have been central to the ideology of so many authoritarian regimes, from Mussolini’s Italy to Erdogan’s Turkey. It’s why the governments of Hungary and Poland, former democracies that have become de facto one-party states, love to accuse outsiders in general and Soros in particular of stirring up opposition to their rule. Because, of course, there can’t be legitimate complaints about their actions and policies.

And now senior figures in the Republican Party, which controls all three branches of the federal government — if you had any questions about whether the Supreme Court was a partisan institution, they should be gone now — are sounding just like the white nationalists in Hungary and Poland.

4786


4787

Reagan was a great racist dog whistler. Don’t sell him short when it comes to using racism to gain power.

On the stump, Reagan repeatedly invoked a story of a “Chicago welfare queen” with “eighty names, thirty addresses, [and] twelve Social Security cards [who] is collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income is over $150,000.”

Reagan frequently elicited supportive outrage by criticizing the food stamp program as helping “some young fellow ahead of you to buy a T-bone steak” while “you were waiting in line to buy hamburger.” This was the toned-down version. When he first field-tested the message in the South, that “young fellow” was more particularly described as a “strapping young buck.” The epithet “buck” has long been used to conjure the threatening image of a physically powerful black man often one who defies white authority and who lusts for white women. When Reagan used the term “strapping young buck,” his whistle shifted dangerously toward the fully audible range. “Some young fellow” was less overtly racist and so carried less risk of censure, and worked just as well to provoke a sense of white victimization.