US Politics: Shutdown Showdown

[Bironic]

It’s crazy how certain people went from largely normal political viewpoints to complete political extremes. If I could go back in time and tell my younger self in 2000 that Giuliani becomes what he is now or that Roseanne Barr and Tulsi Gabbard change the way they have I would probably not believe me…

[Tywin et al.]

43 minutes ago, Bironic said:

It’s crazy how certain people went from largely normal political viewpoints to complete political extremes. If I could go back in time and tell my younger self in 2000 that Giuliani becomes what he is now or that Roseanne Barr and Tulsi Gabbard change the way they have I would probably not believe me…

I think it still comes back to Obama's election breaking a lot white people's brains and there were also many who were willing to prey on this for their own gain.

Gabbard is a bit harder to explain. 

[Zorral]

Gross, disgusting and pathetic (and not in a sympathy evoking way).  How in hell could this sad loser have gotten anywhere, much less mayor of NYC?  (I didn't vote for him!) Though he tries and tries and tries, he can't even come up with a devastating nickname for President Biden!  And anyway, nobody pays any attention to him.

Live With Rudy Indicted, isolated, and broke, Giuliani has one comfort left: the sound of his own voice.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/rudy-giuliani-spends-his-nights-ranting-online.html

Quote

.... Despite the tumult of brutal headlines, multiple lawsuits, and cross-country court appearances, Giuliani hasn’t missed a single episode of America’s Mayor Live since it began last year. Whether he is on vacation in New England, or at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, he sets up somewhere with a camera and a microphone and goes live. After Giuliani surrendered to authorities in Atlanta and got his mugshot taken, he recorded an episode at Teterboro Airport almost the moment his plane touched down. As he loses money, friends, and what little remains of his reputation, at least he has this. Night after night, surrounded by people who work for him and still love him, baying to an audience of almost nothing. No matter where he is located, behind a microphone, Rudy Giuliani is home.

 

[Bironic]

I totally understand if you do it for political survival and gain like a lot of republican office holders like Lindsey graham McConnell or McCarthy do. It’s also quite clear in those cases that they don’t believe half of the bullshit that the maga crowd is spewing. They just like the jobs they have. But people that don’t have an elected office like Roseanne? Does she hope trump makes her the VP? Doesn’t make much sense to me…even less in the case of gabbard who probably had a reasonable chance of getting some job in the Biden/democratic  administration…

[kissdbyfire]

7 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

I think it still comes back to Obama's election breaking a lot white people's brains and there were also many who were willing to prey on this for their own gain.

Gabbard is a bit harder to explain. 

Obama being elected so broke the brain of a lot of people... and the bigots couldn't take it and birthirism and Mango comes in and says it's totes okay to be your worst possible selves.

But doesn't the crazy bigotry and general insanity starts to get really bad in the mid-90s when Newt Gingrich was Speaker? 

[Phylum of Alexandria]

11 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Gabbard is a bit harder to explain. 

Anti-establishment sentiment can take people into weird spaces. The Horseshoe theory of political extremes gets more and more relevant in the age of social media.

[Bironic]

1 hour ago, kissdbyfire said:

Obama being elected so broke the brain of a lot of people... and the bigots couldn't take it and birthirism and Mango comes in and says it's totes okay to be your worst possible selves.

But doesn't the crazy bigotry and general insanity starts to get really bad in the mid-90s when Newt Gingrich was Speaker? 

Certainly true! but imho the descent of the republicans started with Goldwater in 64 and got worse and worse over the years with no end in sight…obviously the tea party turned it up to eleven but it was bad long before that…

[kissdbyfire]

2 minutes ago, Bironic said:

Certainly true! but imho the descent of the republicans started with Goldwater in 64 and got worse and worse over the years with no end in sight…obviously the tea party turned it up to eleven but it was bad long before that…

Yeah,  I said “starts to get really bad” meaning it was bad even before Gingrich but I should have phrased it better. 

[Zorral]

O, my.  Will Adams be requesting Turkey (he's traveled there frequently; unclear whether or not we paid for it; one time he says it's just person, another time he says, it's trade for NYC -- in any case we're always paying his security detail) provide him asylum one of these days?

F.B.I. Seizes Eric Adams’s Phones as Campaign Investigation Intensifies
Days after a raid at Mr. Adams’s chief fund-raiser’s home, federal agents took the mayor’s phones and iPad, two people with knowledge of the matter said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/10/nyregion/adams-fbi-investigation-phones.html?

Quote

 

F.B.I. agents seized Mayor Eric Adams’s electronic devices early this week in what appeared to be a dramatic escalation of a federal corruption investigation into whether his 2021 campaign conspired with the Turkish government and others to funnel money into its coffers, two people with knowledge of the matter said.

The agents approached the mayor on the street on Monday and asked his security detail to step away, one of the people said. They climbed into his S.U.V. with him and, pursuant to a court-authorized warrant, took his devices, the person said. The devices — at least two cellphones and an iPad — were returned to the mayor within a matter of days, the people said. Law enforcement investigators with a search warrant can make copies of the data on devices after they seize them.

A lawyer for Mr. Adams and his campaign said in a statement that the mayor had “immediately complied with the F.B.I.’s request and provided them with electronic devices” after an event on Monday.

The lawyer, Boyd Johnson, noted that Mr. Adams has not been accused of wrongdoing and was cooperating with federal authorities. ...

 

.

Edited November 10, 2023 by Zorral

[The Anti-Targ]

5 hours ago, Zorral said:

Gross, disgusting and pathetic (and not in a sympathy evoking way).  How in hell could this sad loser have gotten anywhere, much less mayor of NYC?  (I didn't vote for him!) Though he tries and tries and tries, he can't even come up with a devastating nickname for President Biden!  And anyway, nobody pays any attention to him.

Live With Rudy Indicted, isolated, and broke, Giuliani has one comfort left: the sound of his own voice.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/rudy-giuliani-spends-his-nights-ranting-online.html

 

Still calling himself America's Mayor. About as pathetic as Al Bundy constantly re-living the glory days of his high school football career.

I wonder if a scholar of the devolution of the American right will one day watch all of his shows and be able to pinpoint the exact moment he went off the rails.

Edited November 10, 2023 by The Anti-Targ

[Larry of the Lawn]

7 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

I think it still comes back to Obama's election breaking a lot white people's brains and there were also many who were willing to prey on this for their own gain.

Gabbard is a bit harder to explain. 

Gabbard's easy to explain- she didn't change at all- she might have done and said what was convenient for a bit but it's a real "they are who we thought they were" situation.  

[House Balstroko]

8 hours ago, Phylum of Alexandria said:

Anti-establishment sentiment can take people into weird spaces. The Horseshoe theory of political extremes gets more and more relevant in the age of social media.

I’m starting to believe in the horseshoe theory as well. Both the far left and far right want to shake up the political system in whatever way possible, even through violence. 

[TrackerNeil]

8 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

I think it still comes back to Obama's election breaking a lot white people's brains and there were also many who were willing to prey on this for their own gain.

Gabbard is a bit harder to explain. 

I'll go further back and suggest that this is all still 9/11 stuff. The attack on the WTC deranged Americans in a way we've neither recovered from nor even fully acknowledged. The last relatively normal political year I can recall was 1999; most of what's come after is just craziness.

[Tywin et al.]

8 hours ago, kissdbyfire said:

Obama being elected so broke the brain of a lot of people... and the bigots couldn't take it and birthirism and Mango comes in and says it's totes okay to be your worst possible selves.

I tend to explain it like this, your average white guy can have a PoC work friend and seem normal. See watch his reaction is when a PoC becomes his boss. Same goes for men when a woman is put in charge. You can do the same thing for religion or country of birth, etc. People's true colors come out quickly.

Quote

But doesn't the crazy bigotry and general insanity starts to get really bad in the mid-90s when Newt Gingrich was Speaker? 

I might be splitting hairs, but not exactly. Gingrich injected a desire to be cruel unlike anyone else in his time. The bigotry was always there, but it exploded during the rise of the Tea Party and Trump is the final evolution. 

1 hour ago, Larry of the Lawn said:

Gabbard's easy to explain- she didn't change at all- she might have done and said what was convenient for a bit but it's a real "they are who we thought they were" situation.  

Maybe. I thought she had a real future in the party before she went to BatShitLand. 

7 minutes ago, TrackerNeil said:

I'll go further back and suggest that this is all still 9/11 stuff. The attack on the WTC deranged Americans in a way we've neither recovered from nor even fully acknowledged. The last relatively normal political year I can recall was 1999; most of what's come after is just craziness.

The first thing I really recall about US politics very clearly is Billy Boy getting a BJ in the Oval Office, so all I've known is disfunction. 

Idk if 9/11 factors in that much anymore. We now have kids with four year degrees born after it happened. You're right that some haven't fully recovered from it in various ways, but I think that's a separate issue. 

[TrackerNeil]

5 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

The first thing I really recall about US politics very clearly is Billy Boy getting a BJ in the Oval Office, so all I've known is disfunction. 

I remember those halcyon days, when a president having sex (sorry, definitely not sex) in the White House was a scandal of note. What a quaint time that was.

[Larry of the Lawn]

Horseshoe theory is garbage

[LongRider]

It's the DFH* that caused it all.  All of it.  

 

*Dirty Fuckin' Hippies

[Tywin et al.]

We really don't talk enough about how the decline in interest in ping pong correlates exactly with the decline in the public's trust of government nor are we being honest with ourselves about how the peaking interest in pickleball is happening at the same time as fascism is spreading. This is what change brings on. 

 

[Zorral]

1 hour ago, TrackerNeil said:

I'll go further back and suggest that this is all still 9/11 stuff. The attack on the WTC deranged Americans in a way we've neither recovered from nor even fully acknowledged. The last relatively normal political year I can recall was 1999; most of what's come after is just craziness.

You know, most people hardly even remember it now -- even in NYC.  It was an event so contained in space and time, and now almost a quarter of a century ago.

At the time, whenever people were going on and on and on about how we'll never forget, history-inspired cynical me thought, o yes we will.  I thought of all the big tragedies that killed large numbers of people all at once, unexpectedly, right here, and that no one knows about or remembers today, other than historians.  One of those was the General Slocum Disaster of June 15, 1904. 

https://www.nypl.org/blog/2011/06/13/great-slocum-disaster-june-15-1904

Now 9/11 has a memorial, but it's a huge tourist destination for selfies.  In fact, even while it was still going on, it was that, with people taking photos of each other and themselves at the many make-shift, spontaneous memorials that were everywhere in those first weeks, smiling posing, being 'cool'.

Nobody, other than the soldiers sent into the Middle East meat grinder by BushCheny&Co hardly remember there was a war.

 

Edited November 11, 2023 by Zorral

[Zorral]

1 hour ago, Tywin et al. said:

Gingrich injected a desire to be cruel unlike anyone else in his time.

Lee Atwater  was a cruel sob.  Reagan's advisor/political consultant fits the other criteria including loving the Blues, but would not have worked for a Black boss. And he was before Gingrich got so big on the scene.