“In any other conceivable moment in US history, this tape would result in the leadership of both parties demanding the immediate resignation of the President of the United States,” Carl Bernstein.

Yeah, he oughta be impeached again.

Comments… The “Whataboutitism”…

Actually, the only thing worse then is when conservatives act like it. If we don’t like what Trump is doing, then we should link it to the fact that in 2000, 2016, and to a lesser extent 2004 we saw the same attacks on the integrity of our elections and electoral process (with calls to alter the Constitution no less), though miraculously in 2008 and 2012 and now in 2020 everything is hunky-dory. We shouldn’t parrot the same outrageous claims being made.

Barbara Boxer was not taken seriously and last I checkef Hillary Clinton conceded.

Hawley’s gambit is a step toward undercutting and therefore, maybe, at some point eliminating the EC. Basically Hawley and Trump are asking Congress to treat certified electoral votes as mere suggestions that can easily be set aside. On that principle, any losing party in any state can hereafter do what Republicans are doing this time: appoint a bunch of people who will sign a paper calling themselves “electors” and send that in to Congress as an alternate slate. Congress can then just dump the certified votes if it wishes to. The logical upshot is that we don’t really need to hold elections and collect popular votes in the first place, we can go with our feeling or sense of the “mood” of a given state. Does it seem like Trump should be popular in Georgia? Well then, let’s just go ahead and say he won it. Because otherwise the Trump voters there will “feel” that their “voices weren’t heard,” as Hawley puts it.

It gets worse. There’s no surprise in the fact that the GOP might want to nullify the people’s votes, which is what Trump and his enablers spent much of November and the first half of December trying to do. But now they’ve gone on to trying to nullify the Electoral College votes as well. This would amount to amending the Constitution sub silentio to allow Congress to appoint presidents as it wishes. We wouldn’t really need any presidential election at all, in the same way that a parliamentary system typically has no election for prime mininster, just for legislative seats. Of course, there would still be a danger that Democrats might win control of Congress from time to time and appoint Democratic presidents. That problem could be solved by creating a kind of executive council that controlled the Congress and appointed its own members. Perhaps a good name for such a council would be the “Politburo.”

Wasn’t this how Rome moved from a Republic?

Nothing….but nothing has stopped the Democrats from systematically seeking to delegitimize the election of every Republican victory since 2000. Nothing stopped the Democrats from seeking to stop, dispute, block, overturn, remove, or deny the legitimacy of George W. Bush’s victories – either in 2000, when Gore took things all the way to the Supreme Court; (Trump tried to doso, with even less success) nor in 2004, when Democrats objected to electoral college certification. Certainly nothing stopped the Democrats and their allies in 2016 (and every day since) from throwing everything including the kitchen sink at Trump.. (Not sure what that means. Just about everyone I know in the thicket of ” Resistance” accepted the reality, with shades of perspective on “what it means”. To quite a few it seemed to provide them with an elitist glee, confirmation on the rottenness of a part of the public — ” Amerika”, as it wete.

Look at Bin Laden. Gets a few crazies on a plane to cause a disaster and the US subsequently pisses away more than a decade and like $8 trillion chasing his specter around the Middle East. If history identifies one person responsible for bringing down the American empire more than any other, my vote is on him.
Look at Putin in 2016. Sticks his finger in Hillary’s eye for meddling herself in Russian elections by hacking a few emails, most Democrats subsequently treat Trump as illegitimate and tainted and now Republicans think turnaround is fair play and are openly throwing doubt on Biden’s win. With a very small act the entire American political system is starting to wobble… this is the sort of thing Washington has wanted for 20 years in Russia, and Putin entirely turned the tables. By hacking emails.

I need to find the quote from Fiona Hill ultimately down playing any Russian role in the election of Trump — he captured a zeitgiest and everone has to grapple with his four year’s legitimacy.

some more

I’m just so sick of all of them. Every politician in every party. “Humble servants of the American people” MY ASS. I’ve barely made it through the pandemic without landing in inpatient psych (just wait two more weeks!!!!!) and I don’t want to raise my kid in any more chaos than he’s already experienced, but at this point, the whole stupid “grand experiment in democracy” just needs to burn to the ground. We suck. America sucks. And the people who run America, they especially suck. If I was allowed into the Schengen Zone I think I’d just pack our bags and move us into some abandoned stone cottage in the middle of nowhere Central Europe and stay off the grid forever, but I’m barely allowed outside my own front door at this point, so….screw them all.. All righty then.

It’s likely simpler than all this. He sees that there is a sizeable number of Americans who want someone to get in and fight. They’re tired of Republicans who charge forth with white flags waving. They also have little patience for those who live rather high on the hog saying ‘We have to accept that our best days are behind us and things will be dim in the future … excuse me, but I have to catch my next flight to the next exotic location or party with the upper crust.’
They want someone who will stand up, even if it’s a lost cause like this. I have no doubt that the election was not stolen or rigged. Gamed? Yes. But stolen in the sense of ‘truck load of ballots taken from voting booths’? No. Nonetheless, the recent conservative leadership strategy or rolling over and playing … Media biases justify any counter-move at all?

Trump is constitutionally incapable of accepting responsibility for losing the election. The media did not make him boorishly call Stormy Daniels “horse face” on Twitter and say countless other eyebrow raising and cringeworthy things until the people just got exhausted with him. The American people want a president who acts like one. He was elected on contingency, given a chance with hopes that he would grow into the position. He blew it, and has done plenty since November to confirm the soundness of his collective rejection.. Odd to select that one somewhat forgettable Stormy Daniels offense, but the case works despite itself.

Yeah, in many ways it’s the logical endpoint of the years of prattling on Fox News and elsewhere about “Real Americans”, and the clear obverse to that concept… that Democrats or liberals or ” coastal elies” or

Heh. Maybe. But it’s also the case that the Democratic Party operates on the principle that only its constituents are true members of the polity. You really think the bluebloods in Seattle have any interest in sharing power with the wheat farmers of the Palouse? Pfft.

There is no actual ‘authoritarianism’ coming from anywhere on the right except Trump’s tweets which are a clown show to rile up the base and make them feel like they’re owning the libs for real this time. His actual governance was less authoritarian than Obama’s, a point made clearly by notorious alt-right hater Glenn Greenwald. Liberals firmly control every institution in this country except elected offices which are a more evenly mixed bag. These institutions as a whole are far more influential than the government (even if it was competent and not eternally gridlocked) in terms of changing American society and culture. The more salient delusion here is liberals who don’t see how thoroughly they’ve won and use Trump as an eternally-looming Leon Trotsky figure to justify the next step in the Great Purge.
Return to normalcy the lesser of two weevils.

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