Yep. Unless I magically find myself as POTUS there will always be things I don’t like about the current POTUS. But not liking a few of the policy decisions would be a breath of fresh air compared to viscerally hating the ignorant, vicious, monster we’re currently dealing with.
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It’s good news, but IIRC, here was BB list of all the people who “disavowed” Trump 4 years ago. Funny how many of them seemed to return to the pile of shit so soon after.
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Oh, what good news – I’m sure we’re completely safe.
Why not just take it for a refutation of Trump? Instead of more “Oh God look how awful Biden is”
I swear if there were a Ralph Nader in this race we’d have 2000 all over again.
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The ‘I never liked that guy’ approach is also a good explanation of John Bolton’s current positioning.
He is still very critical of the Democrats for shamelessly pursuing impeachment over an impeachable and criminal act that he had direct knowledge of but refused to testify about. But he is also trying to distance himself from the toxic president, so that he can be in a position of influence in the post Trump GOP when they try to pick up the pieces. He wants to eat the cake, but still have the cake later to eat.
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Look at the discussion on race and policing we are having currently - I think the overton window is moving in the right direction. This is unrelated to Biden.
Defeating Trump is paramount to realizing goals in the window. Biden is the alternative. All votes count. This is undoubtedly good.
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No one was enthused by Joe Biden until they thought other people were (South Carolina). He’s like a walking political stock bubble. I don’t disagree that having an adult with the capacity for basic human empathy and a sense for the value of social contracts will literally pull us back from the brink. But let’s not pretend the choice was always Biden or Bernie. Biden was pretty close to the worst of a wiiiiide field.
My beef is with him being someone Republicans will literally endorse, and what that does to his policy priorities. Honestly, I would much rather these Republicans write someone in than support Biden. Where were their protest votes during the R primary? It all feels very Lucy and the football, but instead of falling on his ass, Biden just uses the temporary false promise of bipartisanship to excuse being his most corporate-friendly self anyway.
I understand that we may not have Lincoln project or other Republican turncoats if we were “under the threat” of a Bernie president, but still, this feels like an uncomfortable precedent.
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I think this is a great point. When people get too worked up about the person at the top, we are inadvertently ceding our power to them.
I do think we need to be careful about revising history though. If Biden wins it will look inevitable in hindsight - people will be told “nobody else could have defeated Trump” but that really doesn’t stand up to empirical scrutiny. We can’t know how Sanders or Warren would have performed against Trump, but the data we had at the time suggests they could beat him too. And much of the focus on Biden has been his “electability.”
I don’t think there is a need to reject help in the battle to defeat Trump, but Democrats would be well served to start positioning themselves as the reason Trump is defeated - otherwise the Fiorinas, Boltons and Lincoln Projecters will come out ahead and that Overton Window will start shifting right again. They are getting a lot of the credit right now - it would be good to see the Democrats start launching their own attacks.
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Think of it as voting against Trump. It’s what most people do in most elections, vote against the worse candidate.
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I’m trying to tread lightly on this point because I don’t want to put this all on you, but the South Carolina primary happened to be the first primary that wasn’t overwhelmingly white. That’s not an insignificant detail, in my opinion.
The votes of the people who voted for him and supported him do not count for less due to the fact that they aren’t prominent on places like BB. That’s why all this talk about how the “DNC” selected him over the will of the voters is more than a little offensive to me, given that it contains an inherent dismissal of the value of the votes he received from the significant majority of Democratic voters.
I think my earlier point re: reality vs. the internet may bear repeating. Biden won the Democratic nomination by a pretty wide margin. We often assume that the ecosystem in the places we inhabit on the internet reflect more of reality that perhaps is the case, I think.
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Ranked choice voting would have helped here. I suspect it would have resulted in either a more dynamic centrist being selected, or maybe Warren.
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Think of it like that scene near the end of The Rocketeer when the gangsters and the Feds have a double-take when they realize they’re both shooting at the Nazis.
We don’t have to be friends to realize Trump is an evil that will destroy our entire country if left unchecked.
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That’s a good point, although when I look at the list I see for sure some people who became trump toadies, some who quit or lost elections and disappeared, and some who remain opposed to trump. However almost all of them continued to be republicans: they still want tax cuts for the rich, anti-choice laws and judges, reduce environmental protection, and to proclaim support for equal rights without wanting to actually take action against injustice and racism.
I don’t think Carly Fiorina is now a democrat or that her bad policy goals are changed. All I see is that she is saying that she can’t support Trump’s blatant racism, offensiveness, and overall incompetence. And it’s a lot easier for her since she is not actually a member of congress so even if Trump wins she won’t have to try to walk a line between directly supporting Trump and “merely” advancing bad republican policies.
So it’s a small victory. It would be better if she were also supporting ousting powerful republicans who have enabled trump and trying to elect a democratic majority. It would be even better if she were supporting more liberal policy goals in line with the democratic party. But it is still a good if very small step.
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This. It would be fantastically wonderful if a huge chunk of the Republican party actually supported Biden’s politics (rather than just opposing Trump’s rhetoric – which is what this article and most republican “defections” have been about). Imagine if the republicans started nominating people like Biden and our general elections started looking like the 2020 democratic primary. I don’t think that isn’t what is happening, but I still think republicans supporting Biden (and better yet democratic congressional challengers) is good.
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Fiorina was adding corporate jets while laying off engineers and after wrecking HP left with one of corporate history’s largest golden parachute. Character would count if she had any.
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Apart from a few BernieBros, that’s actually the consensus here at BB: he’s a crap candidate, but the alternative is much worse. So yeah, we’ll be holding our noses and voting for him (really against Biff), but that doesn’t preclude our criticising Biden’s business-as-usual Third-Way policies or worrying that he’ll screw things up and lose.
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You had me at “Think of […] The Rocketeer” It’s been too long since I took a break in that memory palace. Coincidentally, if Joe Biden started embracing his retro-ness by releasing Rocketeer parodies starring himself punching out Trump on top of a zeppelin, my enthusiasm for him would increase in a very irresponsible manner.
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Fiorina… back in your spider hole! While I appreciate that country club Rs are slowly realizing they are on a fascist log flume piloted by an absolute maniac this endorsement is only marginally positive. Sure you got your ahole judges (I mean Kavanaugh’s interview would have disqualified him from anything higher than a HOA seat). Sure you got a tax cut. But we are in a crisis on many levels and Hair Twittler is fundamentally incapable of leading (I mean other than cheating at golf).
Am disappoint that Carly didn’t get the full Beschizza… luckily I have zero real money earning work to do so please enjoy the soul sucking void that is Carly Fiorina
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Rats leaving the sinking ship.
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I’ll only care if she dusts off the Demon Sheep ads.
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