A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
VIEWED: 755368
PAGE 463 of 725
Quote:You may not have noticed it but the republican party already split - not once, but twice.
There's a once-in-a-generation chance to split up the Republican Party, and what's on the leftwing menu?
The first time was when the Tea Party split off from the SOP repubocrats, as a populist movement. But when the TPers were absorbed into the repubocrat Borg, 16 of 16 of them were rejected during the primary, in favor of Donald Trump, populist attempt part deux.
And 75M voted for the populist, again.
If democrats* don't do any different, how are they any better?
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Quote:Which is what makes the election SUCH a tempting target for manipulation!
Nearly 160 million voters cast a ballot in the 2020 presidential election, but if a total of 43,000 Biden voters had stayed at home in the states of Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin, Trump would have won a second term.
Which is why we need a .thorough. neutral. academic. statistical. analysis of the 2020 election, for example, by the CalTech/ MIT Vote Project - to determine whether or not it was a valid election.
Unless you want to equate democracy with mystery-voting?
If democrats* don't do any different, how are they any better?
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Quote:Such an excellent idea! But the Inauguration remains set in law at Jan 20th. And the law does not allow for Biden to step down and Trump to step back into the role of President until after another election has been held in 2024. The law doesn't allow an earlier election, even if Trump desperately wants a re-do immediately.
Originally posted by 1KIKI:Quote:Which is what makes the election SUCH a tempting target for manipulation!
Nearly 160 million voters cast a ballot in the 2020 presidential election, but if a total of 43,000 Biden voters had stayed at home in the states of Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin, Trump would have won a second term.
Which is why we need a .thorough. neutral. academic. statistical. analysis of the 2020 election, for example, by the CalTech/ MIT Vote Project - to determine whether or not it was a valid election.
Unless you want to equate democracy with mystery-voting?
In August 2020, Trump floats idea that fraud could lead to re-do of November election. Trump does not have the authority to reschedule an election. A national election “re-do” has never occurred in the more than 200 years the U.S. has held elections, including during the Civil War, the Great Depression and two world wars.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-trump-redo/trump-float
s-idea-that-fraud-could-lead-to-re-do-of-november-election-idUSKCN25E297
On January 23, 1845, the 28th US Congress passed "An act to establish a uniform time for holding elections for electors of President and Vice President in all the States of the Union." The act selected "the Tuesday after the first Monday in November" as the day on which all states must appoint electors.
As travel and communication methods became faster in the 19th century, potential manipulation and fraud concerns grew due to different election days in different states: “The 34-day period during which elections could be held prolonged excitement and provided time for more intrigue.” Members of the House, when debating a bill in 1844 that would set a uniform presidential Election Day across the country, declared the goal was “to guard against frauds in the elections of President and Vice President.”
https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R46413.pdf
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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G.O.P. cynics have been coddling crazies for a long time.
One striking aspect of the Capitol Hill putsch was that none of the rioters’ grievances had any basis in reality. No, the election wasn’t stolen — there is no evidence of significant electoral fraud. No, Democrats aren’t part of a satanic pedophile conspiracy. No, they aren’t radical Marxists — even the party’s progressive wing would be considered only moderately left of center in any other Western democracy.
So all the rage is based on lies. But what’s almost as striking as the fantasies of the rioters is how few leading Republicans have been willing, despite the violence and desecration, to tell the MAGA mob that their conspiracy theories are false.
Bear in mind that Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, and two-thirds of his colleagues voted against accepting the Electoral College results even after the riot. (McCarthy then shamelessly decried “division,” saying that “we must call on our better angels.”)
Or consider the behavior of leading Republicans who aren’t usually considered extremists. On Sunday Senator Rob Portman declared that we need to “restore confidence in the integrity of our electoral system.” Portman isn’t stupid; he has to know that the only reason so many people doubt the election results is that members of his party deliberately fomented that doubt. But he’s still keeping up the pretense.
Anyone shocked by the prevalence of insane conspiracy theories in 2020 should look back to “The New World Order,” published by Reagan ally Pat Robertson in 1991, which saw America menaced by an international cabal of Jewish bankers, Freemasons and occultists. Or they should check out a 1994 video promoted by Jerry Falwell Sr. called “The Clinton Chronicles,” which portrayed Bill Clinton as a drug smuggler and serial killer.
So what has changed since then? For a long time Republican elites imagined that they could exploit conspiracy theorizing while remaining focused on a plutocratic agenda. But with the rise first of the Tea Party, then of Donald Trump, the cynics found that the crazies were actually in control, and that they wanted to destroy democracy, not cut tax rates on capital gains.
You might have hoped that a significant number of sane Republican politicians would finally say that enough is enough, and break with their extremist allies. But Trump’s party didn’t balk at his corruption and abuse of power; it stood by him when he refused to accept electoral defeat; and some of its members are responding to a violent attack on Congress by complaining about their loss of Twitter followers.
And there’s no reason to believe that the atrocities yet to come — for there will be more atrocities — will make a difference. The G.O.P. has reached the culmination of its long journey away from democracy, and it’s hard to see how it can ever be redeemed.
More at https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/11/opinion/republicans-democracy.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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There will be more violence, especially if the Capitol perpetrators and those who incited them -- starting with the President -- are not held accountable
By Garry Kasparov
The correct response is the dispassionate application of the law. Not political persecution, but nor politically motivated leniency, either. We don't have to choose between unity and justice. Avoiding doing the right thing will only prolong the crisis and give aid and comfort to enemies of the state and of the peace. Our Founding Fathers failed to resolve the historical challenge of slavery, passing a bloody Civil War on to future generations. Despite Abraham Lincoln's assassination, Reconstruction allowed the South a "defeat with honor," decades of Jim Crow, and the pernicious Lost Cause mythology that persists today.
Consider the repugnant image of a Trumpist Capitol invader carrying a Confederate flag in a building that Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson only dreamed of conquering. No new mythology should be allowed to sprout from this vile transgression. The worst result would be letting the mutineers off the hook -- and this includes the elected officials who encouraged them, like Sens. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley and especially President Trump. That they, and scores of other Republicans, continued to attack the integrity of the election even now is beyond the pale.
The perpetrators won't become heroes or martyrs if the process of justice is not unduly politicized. It would be a blunder for the left to turn a clear case of criminal justice into a battleground for racial justice, which would help the Trumpist Republicans twist their illegal insurrection into the culture war they crave. White supremacy is a terrible evil of American history, and Trump and his followers' traffic in it is repugnant, but we should not overburden a clear-cut criminal proceeding with the cleansing of sins.
History teaches us the cost of well-meaning but shortsighted attempts to sacrifice justice for unity. Russians learned this in the hardest possible way after the fall of the Soviet Union. As I discussed at length in my book, Winter Is Coming, they declined to root out the KGB security state in the interest of national harmony. It would be too traumatic, our leaders said, to expose the countless atrocities the Soviet security forces committed and to punish their authors.
A feeble truth commission was quickly abandoned by President Boris Yeltsin, and soon even the Soviet archives were closed, although not before researchers like Vladimir Bukovsky revealed some of the KGB's atrocities. The KGB's name was changed to the FSB and its members quietly stayed in touch and intact. The result? A mere nine years after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Russia elected a former KGB lieutenant colonel, Vladimir Putin, to the presidency. It was the last meaningful election we ever had. We chose unity and we got dictatorship.
America should not make a similar mistake. The truth may hurt, but lies will do far greater damage in the end. Americans should be prepared for a long fight against these anti-democratic forces. The attack on the Capitol has opened every eye; there can be no more feigned ignorance of the crisis.
Many Americans were shocked by how many of their compatriots, including nearly all GOP officials, have been willing to go along with Trump's open assault on the pillars of their open society, from the free press to fair elections. As I warned early on, demagogues don't find radicals to lead, they steadily radicalize their followers one outrage at a time. The culmination, so far, was January 6.
Hemingway wrote in "For Whom the Bell Tolls": "There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes." The time has come, and we are finding them out. Fortuitously, they are inclined to boast of their transgressions on Instagram and from the Senate floor, which makes them easy to find.
The question is if the will exists to apply the just
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One of the hallmarks of these conservative movements is the idea that the United States is being betrayed by its elites. That really remains constant from America First (1918–1939) through the McCarthy era (1950–1957), and through the John Birch Society (1958–Present) and into the present day. But Joe McCarthy was not calling his followers to arms. He was saying, “Support me and I’ll make things better.” Barry Goldwater (1953–1987) wasn’t really calling for an armed uprising. If anything, Goldwater was overly optimistic in thinking most Americans believed what he believed.
I don’t think Donald Trump conservatism is a confident conservatism in that way. It’s a conservatism very much rooted in white identity. It sees the demographic decline of whites, in particular, working-class, non-college-educated whites, as a mortal threat to the country’s identity. It can’t figure out any way to reach beyond this, even though we saw in this last election evidence that Republicans and conservatism actually can be quite appealing to minority Americans. And it’s also no longer confident, I think, that the standard processes of government and democracy can be trusted to bring about a good result.
And the feeling on the part of the most extreme Trump supporters is that you have to overthrow the government if you actually want to have the proper results. So that’s really a dangerous place we’ve arrived at.
I’m surprised by the extent to which we’ve seen violence become almost part of the Republican mainstream, how at almost every Republican and conservative demonstration, you now expect to see people carrying weaponry, how it’s no longer a shocking thing when men with guns walk into a legislature and force its dissolution.
Part of this is simply the evolution over time of the Second Amendment from something that conservatives didn’t really think much about to almost a kind of sacrament. And people who might’ve had guns once now coming to identify themselves as gun owners in a way that they just really wouldn’t in the past.
More at https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22220645/trump-capitol-attack-
republican-party
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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The ‘Shared Psychosis’ Of Donald Trump And His Loyalists
“Shared psychosis”—which is also called “folie à millions” [“madness for millions”] when occurring at the national level or “induced delusions”—refers to the infectiousness of severe symptoms that goes beyond ordinary group psychology. When a highly symptomatic individual is placed in an influential position, the person’s symptoms can spread through the population through emotional bonds, heightening existing pathologies and inducing delusions, paranoia and propensity for violence—even in previously healthy individuals. The treatment is removal of exposure.
The violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol Building last week, incited by President Donald Trump, serves as the grimmest moment in one of the darkest chapters in the nation’s history. Yet the rioters’ actions—and Trump’s own role in, and response to, them—come as little surprise to many, particularly those who have been studying the president’s mental fitness and the psychology of his most ardent followers since he took office.
What attracts people to Trump? What is their animus or driving force? Two major emotional drives: narcissistic symbiosis and shared psychosis. Narcissistic symbiosis refers to the developmental wounds that make the leader-follower relationship magnetically attractive. The leader, hungry for adulation to compensate for an inner lack of self-worth, projects grandiose omnipotence—while the followers, rendered needy by societal stress or developmental injury, yearn for a parental figure. When such wounded individuals are given positions of power, they arouse similar pathology in the population that creates a “lock and key” relationship.
More at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-shared-psychosis-of-don
ald-trump-and-his-loyalists/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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In August, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pressured the U.N. Security Council to pass a ban on conventional arms sales to Iran. Only one of the council’s members, the Dominican Republic, joined the U.S. in supporting the ban; Russia and China opposed it; the others—all U.S. allies—abstained.
The episode typified, in extreme form, two of Pompeo’s most distinct traits—an obsession with regime change in Iran and incompetence at making that or any other goal happen.
Like Trump, Pompeo ceaselessly inveighed against the Iran nuclear deal; Trump pulled out of the deal and reimposed sanctions against the Islamic Republic on May 8, 2018, just 12 days after Pompeo was sworn in as secretary. (His predecessor, Rex Tillerson, had advised Trump to stay in the deal.) Pompeo claimed, with swaggering confidence, that the sanctions would compel Tehran back to negotiate a “better” nuclear deal—or possibly force a collapse of the regime. Fast forward to today: the regime survives, its hard-line factions are stronger than before, and Iranian reactors are closer than ever to churning out an atomic bomb. (President-elect Joe Biden wants to restart the nuclear deal, but Iran’s technological progress and the stiffening of its politics will make this harder to accomplish.)
This week, perhaps realizing that his “maximum pressure” campaign had been a total failure, Pompeo changed course and claimed, in a speech at the National Press Club, that Iran is the new “home base” of al-Qaida—the terrorist movement’s “operational headquarters”—and declared, “The time is now for America and all free nations to crush the Iran-al-Qaida axis.” U.S. intelligence officials say there is no evidence whatever for this claim.
Pompeo’s other big bugaboo has been China, and he has called for regime change in Beijing as well—despite the clear preposterousness of the goal. The Chinese Communist Party is a mischievous force in the world, but Pompeo is simply wrong in claiming that it is “totally separate from the Chinese people” or that it’s a “regime” imbued with “a Marxist-Leninist core”—or that the “challenge of resisting the CCP threat is in some ways much more difficult” than resisting the Soviet Union’s Communist empire during the Cold War. In fact, though it enslaves minorities and imprisons democratic activists, much, perhaps most, of the Chinese population supports the CCP, which lifted over 850 million people out of poverty in astonishingly fast time. In any case, there is nothing “Marxist-Leninist” about President Xi Jinping’s philosophy, which seeks expansion through mercantilist techniques, not ideological conformity. And while it’s important to contain China’s military aggression in the South China Sea (something the U.S. military has been doing for some time), it’s a huge stretch to compare its scope or ambition to that of the Soviet Union, which once enjoyed a truly global presence. Pompeo misunderstands the nature of China’s challenge—and, as a result, comes up with half-baked notions of how to deal with it.
His overheated rhetoric has further isolated the United States from the rest of the world—a shame since real challenges, including China and Iran, require a concerted response along with allies. As an example of his insensitivity to allies’ concerns, Pompeo made his distorted case against the CCP in a speech to the Czech Parliament in August. The speech contained just one sentence about Russia and nothing about ongoing threats to Ukraine, the recent rigged election in Belarus, the rise of illiberalism in Hungary and Poland, or the dangers of a splintered European Union. He even suggested the possibility of a Russia-West alliance against China—this to an audience, in the heart of Europe, whose members viscerally recall the 1968 Soviet coup that left their country occupied by five Red Army divisions and a harsh Moscow-installed dictatorship for the subsequent 22 years.
More at https://web.archive.org/web/20210116012416/https://slate.com/news-and-
politics/2021/01/mike-pompeo-worst-secretary-state-ever.h
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
In August, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pressured the U.N. Security Council to pass a ban on conventional arms sales to Iran. Only one of the council’s members, the Dominican Republic, joined the U.S. in supporting the ban; Russia and China opposed it; the others—all U.S. allies—abstained.
The episode typified, in extreme form, two of Pompeo’s most distinct traits—an obsession with regime change in Iran and incompetence at making that or any other goal happen.
I think a larger point is our allies abstaining. This is due to Trump and the way he has attacked them, along with other concerns. They now have doubts about American backing them up in a conflict to name one.
T
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Don't worry your little heads about it.
Biden* will waste no time in selling out the Jews to Iran.
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A government is a body of people usually, notably, governed by Mark Zuckerborg and Slack Dorsey.
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