I love that she kept reaching for the ice cream every time Colbert started asking her a question.
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Also, of course, AOC’s popularity and star power furnish an opportunity for charisma-challenged people like Lieberman to ride her coat-tails back into the spotlight. “AOC is in the headlines; I’d better make a public statement about AOC!” Same reason politicians frequently attack Hollywood. Free publicity.
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I’ve been waiting all my voting life for a Democrat to talk like, you know, a Democrat: To ask why we spend so much on the military, not just to spend less. To reform electoral politics instead of continuing to raise money as an end into itself. To talk about our taxes with a complexity more detailed than “I want to to LOWER them! My opponent wants to RAISE them!”
Every Democrat in Congress should be looking at AOC to say: How can I connect with real people about real issues, not just through the media and not just with my donors?
I’m represented by Nancy Pelosi, a ‘dignified,’ ‘respectable’ party hack who’s had her position eternally, to her profit, and who has never met a military expenditure or a lobbyist’s hand out she didn’t like.
Is AOC prepped and perfect on the issues? No, but she knows what she wants to change. And compared to Nancy Pelosi – whose sole job is maintaining power and riches – AOC may not have the polish, but she’s also not as empty, either. If the whole Democratic party threw out sclerotic status-quo jokes like Schumer, Feinstein, Pelosi, Leahey and Markley and replaced them with 30-ish ex-bartenders who knew what they believed in, knew how to ask for it and won’t take the usual ‘no’ for an answer, I’d be happy as hell, and we’d win elections.
This generation of Democrats had their chance. They lost state houses, state legislatures and Congress under Obama and didn’t do a damn thing about it; they lost the Southern Civil Rights Voting Act, and they didn’t care; they love military money just as much; they did nothing to protect the Supreme Court or stop Citizens United; they made everyone take part in a flawed for-profit healthcare system and called it ‘reform.’ And they ran the worst candidate for President possible in Hillary, because someone said it was “Her turn.” Anyone in the Democratic party who presided over those failures needs to go, now.
Whatever AOC is drinking, send a case to every Democrat.
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AOC seems to be the beginning wave of Creative Disruption our Federal Government needs right now. (Well that’s what I’m hoping for anyways.)
When I hear celebrities and politicians state something to the like of how she needs to sit down, shut up, play nice, …etc., I just think to myself “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”
I hope she remains genuinely herself and continues to inspire future leaders to rise up and change the status quo.
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Jesus, from your lips to the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s audial canal. I still miss the hell out of that man and I still personally believe he was taken out to enable the greatest theft and damage to this country and possibly the world in history. The only possible thing i can say about Trump & Co. is that they aren’t Cheney & Co.
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Or just that somehow her narrative about her life has some minutely tiny misrepresentation in it, somehow. Or that, once, she did something that wasn’t entirely serious (because “gravitas”).
But keep these “scandals” coming, I say - they’re spectacular “self-owns” by the conservatives.
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Oh christ. AEI are the absolute worst. I consider them actually evil - if there’s a bad policy/position, they consistently seem to advocate for it. Voodoo economics, anti-sustainable farming, climate change denialism, creationism… Lieberman might as well have joined a holocaust denial group.
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Trying to say AOC is like Trump is just desperation to hide the fact that Trump is most similar to GWB.
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I’m just not sure that in a representational position with peers that she will have to lean on to get bills through committee … I’m not experienced in long term success in life. But I have destroyed enough of my short term successes to have something to offer to her about the nature of “you can go fuck yourself” and the fallout there of …
Well, it’s not as if a 70% marginal tax rate or a Green New Deal are going to become widespread Democratic policy goals if she and her freshman classmates do listen to the “sit down and shut up” wing of the party… Playing nice only works if you think it will make a difference. The establishment has repeatedly proven time and time again that they’re more interested in collegiality and tradition than in serving the American people’s interests. The only way things are going to change in DC is by bucking the broken-ass system that got us here in the first place.
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I thought graham linehan was a decent guy until i read tonight about his bigoted views towards the trans community, to the extent that the big lottery funding for mermaids was now under review as a result of his comments. I didn’t realise this fundraiser came about because of that so, good for them and to hell with him.
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i’m tired of relitigating 2016 but i’d like you to recall that we all lost the voting rights act because we re-elected bush 43. the democrats in the senate fought to prevent alito from joining the court but with 16 votes short of a filibuster (and by the way, schumer, feinstein, clinton, and leahy voted for the filiburster). and a republican majority in the senate there was no way to stop him. if you don’t remember those days it seemed as if the republicans were going to rule the world before it was done. and that “worst candidate for president possible” she won the democratic delegates by winning the majority of the primaries as well as winning the popular vote in the general election by 3 million votes over the moral idiot in the white house.
i love aoc and i defend her against the barbs of my fox-news-loving relatives but if you can’t get a grasp on the reality of how we got here, the voter suppression and gerrymandering we’ve faced among other things your arguments don’t carry a lot of weight.
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Mermaids might still get the lottery funding, seeing as the objections are based on pseudo-science that has already been covered here. hbomberguy has raised another £250,000 that Graham can’t touch.
Robert Webb is another celebrity FART (Feminism Appropriating Reactionary Transphobe), although he is a lot quieter about it. Graham Linehan spent most of the weekend showing that he didn’t care about the stream by not shutting up about trans children.
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Further, the Federal structure of our government has been pushing us down a slope to the point where it is becoming harder and harder to gain control of the Senate (much less 60 seats), which was only exacerbated by the return to local control / Jim Crow that Shelby v Holder unleashed.
This is part of a long chain of events that started with the Civil Rights movement 70 years ago, leading to a large-scale political realignment that has left Democrats with popular advantage, but near-perpetual Federal disadvantage.
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Linehan may be reaping some karma fairly soon.
https://twitter.com/emilygorcenski/status/1087297309388562432?s=21
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I think people are over stating the internal party struggle here. If you look at who’s publicly shit housing new congress people and progressives from within the party. It’s most center right, and moderates from pretty red States. And they’re fucking old. Rather than party leadership.
And this “establishment vs” isn’t for the most part coming from progressives themselves (including AOC). It’s coming from the news.
If you look at the negotiations over the speaker vote, progressives were the first approached, seem to have gotten more out of it, and signed on earlier than blue dogs and the moderate pro business block.
And while not much is happening in the house thanks to the shutdown but we’ve got a hard line on the wall, including a lot of active bullshit calling. And that signature first bill they’ve been talking about is comprehensive voting rights reform in the progressive mold.
It’s a nice simple narrative, but I don’t think it’s what we’re seeing at all. Progressives seem to have been invited to the table, and the center right is stamping their feet because their skittish about appealing to Trump’s voters.
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This sort of thing is also important
It’s only now, like just now, that the majority of Democrats even identified as liberal/left wing.
This county’s population underwent a huge rightward shift post 70’s peaking through the 90’s. By the point your talking about the DNC was fundementally a moderate party with an ascendant right wing (coming out of Bill Clinton’s success). And a certain amount of older people I know who came to the Democratic party during that shift still fret about anyone and everyone being too far left. Even when they themselves are pretty far fucking left. Because there was a good 25 years at least where being left wing was electoral poison, and the DNC lost significantly by tacking too far left.
The complaint about the party then was they weren’t moderate, or right wing enough.
The country’s undergoing a really rapid change in terms of demographics and the age and make up of the electorate. The situation on the ground is much much different these days.
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The Democrats won a single presidency and barely made a stir in congress with their rightward shift, it wasn’t until a perceived leftward shift they won elections. I get that Gingrich and the GOP managed to change the game and the Democrats lost he house for being “commies,” but what did their shift actually gain them in long term successes?
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Many of us are very disappointed in his bigoted views on the trans community. I adore black books, IT Crowd, Father Ted, etc, and hate that he’s been such a dick on this issue.
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