Really? Sounds crazy. I just can’t fathom why they would do this.
Thank you folks, I am here all week! And please try the veal.
All horse-racing enthusiasts still talk in furlongs (in the UK).
Timex
10443
Cheney seems poised to make a run of it, potentially with the sole goal of destroying Trump.
I gotta say, if Trump ran and Cheney just destroyed him in debates and stuff? That would really be super sweet.
KevinC
10444
godzilla_let_them_fight.gif
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I’m all for some GOP kamikaze action.
Sadly, Trump (and his minions) have perfected the art of just spewing shit for the base and then declaring victory.
Which is also why I don’t want to see Ocasio-Cortez fall for Taylor-Greene’s bait and have a debate over the Green New Deal, no matter how soundly she would demolish Taylor-Greene in anything that requires any sort of human intelligence.
Menzo
10446
Yeah, Trump can’t “lose” a debate any more than Putin or Kim Jong-Un can “lose” a debate. The people who vote for him don’t care about what he says.
Timex
10447
All Cheney would need to do, is just spark some additional discontent and doubt in the minds of the GOP voters who aren’t the Trumpers.
Peel off some of those, and the GOP collapses, because they cannot win on ONLY the crazy base.
The Trump based GOP is very weak and fragile.
It might be more interesting than when Hillary destroyed Trump in debates, but the outcome would be the same.
Timex
10449
Maybe, but I think it’d be cool to see someone up there who didn’t even care about winning… who was just there to destroy Trump.
By the way, I’m not the world’s greatest Thomas L. Friedman fan, but this op-ed is an interesting/terrifying summation of the current moment:
We’re talking about new regulations like the Georgia law that removed the secretary of state from decision-making power on the State Election Board, clearly aimed to curb the powers of the current secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, after he rejected Trump’s request that he “find” 11,780 votes to undo Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia. We’re talking about Arizona’s Republican-led State Senate hiring a company owned by an advocate of the “Stop the Steal” movement to examine the November ballots from Maricopa County. And much more.
According to a new report by Protect Democracy, Law Forward and the States United Democracy Center, “Across the country, state legislators are proposing bills that would give partisan state legislators greater control over elections while hamstringing experienced state and local election administrators who have traditionally run our voting systems. …
“Many of the bills would make elections more difficult to administer or even unworkable; make it more difficult to finalize election results; allow for election interference and manipulation by hyperpartisan actors; and, in the worst cases, allow state legislatures to overturn the will of the voters and precipitate a democracy crisis.”
Had these bills been in place in 2020, it added, “they would have … raised the prospect that the outcome of the election would have been contrary to the popular vote.”
As Stanford University democracy expert Larry Diamond summed it all up to me, while we’re focusing on Liz Cheney and the 2020 elections, Trump’s minions at the state level “are focused on giving themselves the power to legally get away with in 2024 what the courts would not let them get away with in 2020.”
You tell me how American democracy will ever be the same again and how these people can be trusted to cede power the next time they win the White House.
And while you’re at it, tell me how America can ever again be a credible observer and upholder of democratic elections around the world — so vital to our national security and the hopes and dreams of democrats in all these countries who look to America as a beacon of democracy and the rule of law. The next time we want to question election results in Russia or Iran or Poland or Hungary, what do you suppose their elected autocrats will say?
They’ll say: “Listen to you? Your Republican Party turned a blind eye to a guy who told the biggest election lie in the history of the Milky Way Galaxy. And it wasn’t even in the service of some urgent, compelling policy. It was just so he could stay in power, salve his ego and deny he lost.”
KevinC
10451
Like Elizabeth Warren sinking the USS Bloomberg in 2020.
Timex
10452
Or Christy ending Rubio’s run.
Also not a Friedman fan, but like a Cicada every 13 years he does come out and get something absolutely right.
Totally agree with that piece, and have been saying the same thing for months.
The GOP isn’t in the process of a hostile takeover from Trumpists and other far-right radicals, it has already sold out to those people. Rank and file Republicans figured out a long time ago that their traditional base was shrinking way faster than they could ever hope to counter, so they needed a quick fix, a way to bring new voters to the booths who would reliably vote Republican. They started appealing to groups they would have shunned previously, and it worked. Then Trump came along and it not only worked, it won them the biggest surprise victory in modern election history. Then in 2020 Trump earned the most votes (74 million) of any incumbent Presidential candidate in history, and that cemented the truth into place, the GOP was going to need to be the party of Trump (and all the lunacy that comes with it) in order to survive.
Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, The Lincoln Project guys, The 100 former Republican officials who signed the “This is not our party!” grievance : they are all just late battle casualties of a war that was lost 4+ years ago. There will be no alternative 3rd party, there will be no split that rocks the GOP base, there will be no valiant senators and representatives battling to save the GOP from within. 99 out of every 100 GOP politicians has seen the writing on the wall and knows the path to power, influence and money is to ride the Trump train, appeal to it’s followers and say whatever they want to hear, no matter what the cost to Democracy and America. They don’t give a shit about any of that, as long as they stay in power.
Meanwhile as big a train wreck as the Federal-level GOP has been, the State-level GOP has been quietly and not-so-quietly working wherever it can to ensure that in 2022 and 2024 voter suppression, gerrymandering and voter intimidation are sufficient to sweep enough Republican candidates into office to move the balance of power back to the GOP, and then in 2024 they will re-elect God Emperor Trump even if it means GOP-controlled State legislatures have to overturn the popular vote in their state to hand Trump the Electoral College win.
This is the plan. Thus far it appears to be working flawlessly while we all sit around thinking the GOP is somehow going to implode. It’s not.
Timex
10455
This is not ideal for Matt Gaetz.
I wonder what will happen if Trump just suddenly dies…
I wonder if that is the Goal of people like Romney and Cheney. If Trump does die, they’ll be a huge factional infighting, because his base is only kept together by Donald Trump.
Its a Cult of Personality after all. Its not like the Tea Party, which, despite being horrible and stupid, had a platform. Its just a Strong Man that promised to hurt the “other”
Nothing. It’s just a clone anyway.
