This guy seems like a real winner. /s
Put his pro-Putin shit aside and this guy is still an asshole. I would love to just laugh at these manosphere idiots like the absolute jokes they are, but they are far too dangerous. Also, I hate how they co-opted the phrase “red pilled”, this is what the Wachowski’s were really referencing…
… On CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, McConnell was asked about what the anti-Trump congresswoman Liz Cheney has called the “Putin wing of the Republican party”.
The Kentucky senator was asked: “Is there any room in the Republican party for this rhetoric and why isn’t there more discipline?
“Well, there’s some lonely voices out there that are in a different place,” McConnell said.
“But looking at Senate Republicans, I can tell you that I would have had I been the majority leader put this Ukraine supplemental [aid package] up by itself” instead of being included in a government funding bill.
“I think virtually every one of my members would have voted for it,” McConnell added. “The vast majority of the Republican party writ large, both in the Congress and across the country, are totally behind the Ukrainians and urging [Joe Biden] to take these steps quicker. To be bolder.
“So, there may be a few lonely voices off the side. I wouldn’t pay much attention to them.” …
Pay no attention to the fascists behind the curtain.
Farage Horizons
One Party After Another
Michael CrickOne of the more memorable revelations in this unauthorised biography of Nigel Farage is that his mother was partial to a spot of nude modelling. Maybe that explains why the boy turned out quite like he did. Something must have done it, because what we have here is a portrait of a really quite odd person.
Take for example the morning Harold Wilson resigned. Hearing the news, the young Farage (back then he pronounced it “Farridge”) came into school beaming from ear to ear and singing “The sun has got his hat on”. He was eleven.
Where did it all come from? Chums at school recall young Nige writing his initials on the board, NF, but merged together in the style of the National Front logo. There were Nazi salutes and an allegation that he told a classmate: “Shut up, you Jew” - an incident Farage denies. He got in trouble for singing Hitler Young songs on CCF camp and one teacher, in a spectacular act of moral contortion, remarked: “Farage was a fascist, but that was no reason why he should not make a good prefect.”
It was at around this time that young Farridge started affecting a dandyish air, with highly polished shoes, jacket and tie. A fellow pupil recalled: “He reminded me of the Secretary of an upmarket golf club.”
Nige had no time for university, and instead went straight into the money-pits of the City, where he discovered his life’s calling - getting arseholed. Farage has a terrible thirst, just like his old man, who ended up a full-blown alcoholic. But in the Square Mile, no one seemed to mind Nige’s drinking. As a result, “huge costly mistakes were often made in trades struck after lunch”, Crick reports, “when a zero might be left off, or added”. In between the piss-ups, Farage found time to set up a hard right, Eurosceptic lunch club. Some of the members “were on the extreme right of politics, sympathisers with or members of the British National Party”.
On one occasion Nige got so monstrously shit-faced they had to sack him. He started up his own trading shop, Farage Futures, but his Eurosceptic politics brought him into contact with a man named Alan Sked, founder of Ukip. Nige certainly made an impression, dragging his new party comrades out to a Mayfair strip club. Sked recalls: “He was completely blotto. As I left, I saw Nigel’s head was wedged between one woman’s breasts. He confessed later he had no idea how he got home.”
Boozing, shagging and slagging off the EU seem to have been Nige’s main interests. That and fighting with his fellow Ukippers. From the beginning, the party had a knack for attracting bumptious odd-balls, and they went at it like rats in a sack. This included men like Rodney Atkinson (Rowan’s brother), Norris McWhirter, from TV’s Record Breakers, and perhaps most infamously, Robert Kilroy Silk, the Labour MP turned perma-tanned daytime-TV outrage-peddler.
Nige managed to get rid of all of them, and through a combination of charm, guile and being a total bastard ended up in charge of Ukip, with a seat in the European parliament, which turned out to be a nice little earner. He tried standing for various Westminster seats but was never elected. In the end it didn’t matter. It turned out he was able to exert huge pressure on government from outside parliament. When the Lib Dems went into coalition with the Tories, they lost their status as a party of protest. Ukip’s share of the European parliamentary vote began to soar.
We all know how the story goes: the Brexit vote, the buddying up with Trump and now the talk show on GB News. But the most striking thing about this book is the huge void at its centre, around which everything in Farage’s life seems to orbit.
Farage has achieved colossal success banging on relentlessly about what he is against. The EU. Immigration. The Establishment. Herman van Rompuy. But at no time has he ever made a case explaining what he is for. One of his Brexit Party acolytes had a stab at an answer, saying: “I want my country back. I want seaside donkeys on the beach and little village churches.” You can see the problem.
Steve Bannon, Trump’s electoral sorcerer, also identified this vacuum when he was trying to set up a network of nationalists, including Farage. “The thing that’s missing,” Bannon said, “is the ideas.” Farage never really had anything to offer on that front. In Crick’s view, “rarely has British politics thrown up a leader who seems so little interested in policy.”
And so we come to the horrid conclusion that the most influential politician of the last decade was never an MP, had no political ideas and spent most of his time getting plastered. All those think tank reports, wonkish journalists, earnest MPs and ministers were as nothing in comparison to a half-cut sex rat from south London. The soul searching to which this realisation should lead does not appear in this book, which is a serious flaw. Oh, and in a few years, Nige will get to retire on his MEP’s pension, which is about sixty grand a year. Chances are there won’t be much soul-searching about the hypocrisy of that either.
Good God, does the woman have no shame at all? “Poking the bear” with Javelin missiles. Goes badly for the bear.
This really highlights the effectiveness of the republican propaganda machine. It’s fascinating but scares the shit out me…roughly 30% of the country lives in an alternate reality.
I don’t think Neil is going to be any help, he was one of the first rats to jump that rotting, sinking ship.
Fixed the venture name: Guaranteed Fraud
“ Putin said the goal was to ensure the independence of two regions of Eastern Ukraine from Kyiv”
And you were credulous enough to believe him?
How free are those regions looking now? When will Russia end their occupation and allow that freedom?
Like, western media is not great for being free of propaganda, but the idea that therefore we should just taken Russian statements at face value is so stupid I can’t believe it’s not a strawman of what he’s saying. Again, the gaslighting here is so obvious it’s insulting.
I guess you gotta pad that retirement account.
He could at least have the work ethic to go with it. I know it sounds ridiculous, but at this point I’m kind of nostalgic for people crafting narratives woven with subtle falsehoods, instead of just saying the most inane lies and trusting it’s good enough to be believed.
How much pride can you have as a gay Putin apologist?
