Wednesday Open Thread

21 thoughts on “Wednesday Open Thread”

1. A quick question, my friends. Will Adam Frisch admit to being a Democrat? 

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   1. Given the fact that he is running in a Republican-leaning district against a bland, traditional Republican, I'm guessing he will continue to insist that he is an independent type of Democrat.

      He no longer has the advantage of running against a nasty lunatic.

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      1. But he has the great advantage of running against a truly nasty, lunatic Republican Party.

         You want Abortion Bans? – vote Republican.

         You liked the Jan 6 insurrection? – vote Republican.

         You like Christian Ethno-Nationalism? – vote Republican

         Those are the Republican Party values, not just a few, weird MAGA individuals. 

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         1. A lot of people here in this district like those things…..

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            1. Yeah but…

               They are very noisy; out of proportion to their actual numbers. There are a lot more people (even who identify as Republican) and particularly women, who do not want a "menstrual police", and who really do think JD Vance is weird.

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               1. "JD Vance is weird……"

                  I don't agree. Vance is "weird AND creepy."

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                  1. He reminds me, in some ways, of Ron DeSantis who is so craven he will do or say anything to get what he wants.

                     And he does it in a weird and goofy way.

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               2. Right. Sooner or later these hayseed cowboys, the Oily Boyz, the gunheads, and the Ametican Taliban will need to  get over themselves and the rest of us need to stand up to them…not pretend to be one of them. It is the Democratic party who is fighting for our Constitution here. 

                  We should be proud of that and not be afraid to say who we are. 

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      2. So…your answer is "yes"? 

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2. I wonder what wardrobe Tina has picked out for her red carpet stroll into the courtroom today?

   I hope the jury dispassionately weighs the evidence on this scoundral including the testimony of previous employees and arrives at a just decision.

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   1. "I hope the jury dispassionately weighs the evidence on this scoundral including the testimony of previous employees and arrives at a just decision."

      You are talking about a jury drawn from Mesa County. (No offense, Duke. There are many of you who are not crazy.)

      But there will be at least one True Believer who will get seated and refuse to convict.

      I'm expecting a hung jury (11 to 1 in favor of convicting) followed by a retrial followed by another hung jury followed by another retrial.

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3. Why Weirdness Messes with Republican Minds. Noah Smith

   He's basically saying that Conservatives have lost the culture wars – sex, marijuana, rock-and-roll, atheism, and even African American culture are mainstream. Conservatives are "Standing athwart history yelling – STOP!" (William F. Buckley)

   Instead, it was conservatives who felt out of place in the liberal knowledge-worker enclaves that my generation carved out. If you admitted to being gay in my hometown, you might have been shunned, or even bullied; in San Francisco in the 2010s, it would be as normal as admitting you were left-handed. But whereas if you declared that “Christ is King” in my hometown, you would have elicited nods of assent from most people, if you declared that in a room full of Silicon Valley tech workers in 2015, you might generate some uncomfortable stares.

   This inversion of ingroup and outgroup naturally dismays and rankles conservatives — especially educated ones who live in blue cities, but also those who are bombarded with liberal culture in TV, movies, and music all the time. Their everyday experience is as a counterculture and an outgroup, but they still have the cultural memory of when they were the “normal” majority. This manifests as a profound sense of loss and dispossession. 

   When Democrats like Kamala Harris call conservatives “weird”, I think it presses directly on this open wound. It’s a bitter reminder of the hegemony they’ve lost since 1990, and the exile in which they now wander. “Weird”, to conservatives, means “outgroup”, and that’s why they hate it so much.

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   1. Noah Smith Continues:

      “I do not think Democrats are using “weird” as a taunt about cultural hegemony, even if that’s how many Republicans take it. Instead, I think Democrats are using the term to represent the chaos and unrest of the 2010s — something they associate with Trump, and which they increasingly want to leave behind them. “

      Consider this op-ed by Rex Huppke in USA Today. Huppke takes the opportunity to vent about all the genuinely creepy and wacky behavior that has come to be associated with the MAGA movement:

      There are millions upon millions of American voters ‒ certainly liberals and independents, and I’d bet a decent slice of conservatives ‒ who have spent the past eight or so years watching Trump and the MAGA circus and thinking: “Wow, this is all very weird.”…

      The rise of Trumpism and the bizarre chaos it ushered in ‒ from family members lost down conspiratorial rabbit holes to the denial of facts and abandonment of shared reality ‒ has given us election lies and Trump-branded Bibles and Rudy Giuliani giving an insane news conferenceoutside a landscaping business in Philadelphia and a dude called the QAnon Shaman wearing a horned fur cap as he joined an attack of the U.S. Capitol…

      It’s certainly the most apt label for Trump and his unhinged rants, his nonsensical stories about sharks or Hannibal Lecter, his blabbering cruelty and unfiltered spouting of whatever odd thought passes through his hate-addled mind…He is supported by slavish Republicans who once openly denounced him, and their hypocrisy is weird…The GOP presidential nominee is a twice-impeached, one-term president who was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in a case involving hush money paid to an adult film star. He has had multiple bankruptcies, faces hundreds of millions of dollars in fines from a civil fraud ruling and was found liable of sexual abuse. And he is revered by the Republican Party’s evangelical base…

      Do you want to know what’s weird to a majority of Americans who are just trying to live their lives? EVERYTHING IN THOSE PREVIOUS THREE PARAGRAPHS!

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      1. I hate to pile on to all the overthinking of the word "weird" but I'm going to anyways…

         I think "weird" is a welcome scaling-back of the outrage towards MAGA and could absolutely help Democrats attract right-leaning independents and reluctant Trump voters.

         Trump attracts many different assholes: racists, anti-semites, islamophobes, misogynists, homophobes, transphobes, people who are just jerks, etc. He says and does things that are anti-democratic, criminal, hateful and literally un-American.

         But calling out those things are too specific. The Trump campaign has so successfully made the Republican Party into Team Trump that mentioning any of those specific traits is an accusation against anyone who may vote for Trump, reluctantly or proudly. It rankles people into thinking things like "I'm not <specific trait>! By saying Trump/Republicans are <specific trait>, you are calling me that! Screw you! I'll vote Republican just to spite you!"

         "Weird" invites those same rankled people to separate themselves from the… well… weird ones. It invites them to think things like "I mght not be comfortable with transgender people, and I feel bad about that but at least I'm not suggesting weird things like checking the genitals of kids before they go into a restroom. That's weird. I don't want to be that kind of weird."

         "Weird" seems to be less about identity and more about actions where "deplorables" was accusatory towards peoples' identities? That sounds close to right. "Weird" is less hyperbolic than accuations like "authoritarian" and all the specific accuations which makes people a little less likely to immediately get defensive and maybe listen a little longer.

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         1. Really good insights.

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4. Bigger than Colorado.

   J.D. Vance’s Disregard for the Rule of Law

   The senator appears willing to ignore court rulings, undermining the balance of powers.

   “J.D. Vance is unfit to be vice president of the United States for many reasons, chiefly because he has shown a disregard for the constitutional balance of powers and the rule of law.”

   https://www.wsj.com/articles/j-d-vances-disregard-for-the-rule-of-law-court-rulings-balance-of-powers-bda0d4df?st=j7ugug8jk1hqz7n&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

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   1. Can Yale rescind or revoke his law degree?

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5. Bugs Bunny vs Elmer Fudd. Mahablog.

   This whole article is worth reading.

   Big events tend to resonate with the myths deeply buried in human psyches from ancient times. U.S. presidential elections sometimes take on vibes from one of our great myths, the eternal struggle between Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd. This may not always be true. But when it is true, the candidate who most energetically channels Bugs Bunny is going to win. Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, in different ways, were clearly the Bugs Bunny candidates against Elmer Fudds — George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, John McCain, and Mitt Romney. Although he probably really didn’t win, I’d have to say that George W. Bush was more Bugs Bunny than earnest Al Gore, alas. And maybe Hillary Clinton’s real problem was that she didn’t have it in her to be Bugs Bunny.

   Donald Trump lacks the self-awareness and basic cool to ever be Bugs Bunny. On a good day, Joe Biden’s “Dark Brandon” persona was much closer. But the spirit of Bugs abandoned Joe when he most needed it. And Donald, with his weird riffs on sharks and Hannibal Lechter, might have seemed kind of Bugs Bunny-ish to his followers, although a true Bugs is never a hater or a bully. It seems to me that what’s happening now is that Kamala Harris has embodied the Bugs Bunny role, and Trump is revealed as an exceptionally ugly Elmer Fudd. If she can keep this up, she’ll win.

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6. Weird, Not Weird? Via Emptywheel.

   "Multiple outlets are publishing the forward that JD Vance did for Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, including his adoption of Roberts’ call to “circle the wagons and load the muskets” to take out government."

   Vance has deep ties to the Heritage Foundation, and in particular to Kevin Roberts, who has been president of the right-wing think tank since 2021 and is the architect of Project 2025. Vance has praised Roberts for helping to turn the organization “into the de facto institutional home of Trumpism” and has endorsed elements of Project 2025. Vance is also the author of the foreword to Roberts’s upcoming book, Dawn’s Early Light, which The New Republic has obtained in full even though the book’s publisher, HarperCollins’s Broadside Books, has apparently tried to suppress it amid the scrutiny of Project 2025 and Vance’s ties to Roberts.

   The subtitle and cover of Roberts’s book were softened as scrutiny of the Trump campaign’s ties to Project 2025 grew. The book was originally announced with the subtitle “Burning Down Washington to Save America” and featured a match on the center of its cover. The subtitle is now “Taking Back Washington to Save America,” and the match is nowhere to be seen. Promotional language invoking conservatives on the “warpath” to “burn down … institutions” like the FBI, the Department of Justice, and universities has also been removed or toned down, though it is still present in some sales pages.

   But the inspiration for that extreme language can be found in Vance’s foreword, which ends with a call for followers to “circle the wagons and load the muskets,” and describes Roberts’s ideas as an “essential weapon” in the “fights that lay [sic] ahead.” (The New Republic downloaded Dawn’s Early Light earlier this month from NetGalley, which provides advance copies of books to reviewers and booksellers. Copies were removed from the platform earlier this month.)

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7. Weird.

   

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   1. For sure. She reminds me of Jon Waters’ Divine.

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