I work by Centaurian time, so even a broken clock is right every 37 hours.
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I feel like it’s important to ask “why??” here, not just to him, but to the “rest” of the GOP who honestly know he’s obviously a crook, liar, and staggeringly self interested and harmful demagogue.
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“I’m not complaining about it”, he complained.
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They still use that?
“My God, man. We’ve become a tourist attraction. See the great Centauri Republic, open 9:00 to 5:00 . . . Earth time.”
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This. He had his ungrad at Yale, graduated magna cum laude, and got his JD at Harvard, cum laude. He’s a very smart and educated guy.
And he really is telling the truth here about the cult of Trump. Trump is a nothing compared to DeSantis in terms of accomplishments, education, and ability. But Trump has a core of fanatical believers and conservative media who want them as viewers. Trump’s background in showbiz trumps DeSantis’ much greater accomplishments. We had the same with Reagan, who also used his showbiz talents to be able to connect with his adoring followers, even when Reagan wasn’t all the way there and certainly wasn’t doing what was in his followers’ interests.
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“They don’t hold them accountable because they’re worried about losing viewers, and they don’t want to have the ratings go down. That’s just the reality. That’s just the truth. (NOW HERE COMES THE LIE) I’m not complaining about it. (NOW BACK TO THE TRUTH) I’d rather that not be the case, but that’s just, I think, an objective reality.”
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Yesterday’s NYT Daily podcast account of voters who met DeSantis in Iowa is maybe worth a listen. The profile of a farmer who swung to strongly pro DeSantis starts at 7:30. It is an account of politicking for sure, but I appreciated the voter’s perspective.
Thanks for that but wow, it took a long time for it to get around to having the Christian-supremacist, forced birther farmer guy say why he’s defected from Team Tromp – because DeSantis does a better job of (pretending) that he cares about corn and cow farmers.
I wish the narrating reporter had asked more about what’s supposed to be so gawd awful about Biden. Kinda scary how fixated farmer guy and the community he talks about would never even considering voting for a Democrat.
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They handle the voters themselves with kid gloves.
EDIT after re-reading your comment:
No reporters will be asking that right now. This is about the -republican- primary and it is a ritual for reporters to go to Iowa talking to voters to sort how they feel about various candidates who are jockeying for their -respective party’s- nomination. Iowa is the primary that sets the pace for all others so it is always watched more closely than the primaries of any other state.
This is not Biden vs. anyone yet.
And these republican voters, in general, already suspect and/or view the NY Times as being a liberal megaphone. Although this is on audio, it is audio that was gathered originally for written pieces in the Times. In that context, giving those column inches naming Biden in, a piece about the GOP race, may not come back as a good look for the Times.
Finally, it would be soliciting the same GOP anti Biden liner notes that are repeated ad nauseum in the leadup to November. The reader wouldn’t learn anything new.
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And on top of that, always left unsaid are the social/cultural issues that seem to animate Trump’s voters far more than their lip service to caring about “pocketbook” issues… I’ve seen interviews with Trump supporters asking about the neo-liberal economy, and they nearly sound like they’re on the left… but then no one ever asks the follow up questions on other related issues (racism, misogyny, tranphobia, xenophobia, and how that intersects with economic issues)… But it’s that other stuff that is driving their voting patterns, because they buy the BS that the economy does better under republicans (despite all the evidence to the contrary) and they disconnected that from the social/cultural issues, or at the very least view other groups of people “doing” better as meaning they have to do worse. And that’s pretty much why they won’t vote for a Democrat, despite them doing better with the economy, etc… Because it’s not a narrow populist improvement for white people, but when they do good work on improving everyone’s lot (think things like LBJ’s initiatives, which was broader racially speaking than the New Deal), they reject that because it doesn’t speak to their narrow concerns.
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Oh the thing about De Santis is that he’s NOT unintelligent in the sense of “capacity to learn/process large amounts of information/think abstractly and logically”. He’s just completely unempathic, cruel and thank goodness, completely without charisma or social/organisational skills.
If he DID have the ability to be a charismatic demagogue, he would probably be very dangerous. Before we all realised how completely inept he is at politics when he had a republican competitor or a media not completely beholden to his brand of politics - a lot of people were quite worried that he could be a more effective wannabe dictator than Trump.
Unfortunately, now Trump is hiring people who want a dictator AND are also competent, so we’re getting the worst of both worlds. An effective machine to place him in power and keep him there, but at the top a useful idiot who will sell out the USA for pocket change - or even for a father figure telling him he’s proud of him.
To be clear, far from the inevitable outcome, we shouldn’t be hopeless. But yeah - as to the original point. De Santis ain’t stupid, he’s just socially inept and deeply cruel.
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