The Republican National Committee just announced that their 2024 presidential nominee will NOT participate in the presidential debate.
Hey Pukes? If our great President Joe Biden is as senile as you claim he is, why are you afraid to debate him? It couldn’t be that your Gutless Wonder, Lost King of Babble-On, Domestic Terrorist Concession Liar, Coup Sedition Instigator, Putin Butt-Kissing Traitor, nixed the prospect of having to subject himself to honest questions from a free press representing patriotic, fair-minded Americans?
Or, could it be that Fascists don’t need to debate because you rig elections?
Please share widely!
Republicans duck debates because they know that learning more about their candidates damages them in the election. The effect of participating in the debates will be to increase the number of votes they have to steal during the post-election coup.
Republicans have already committed to a 2024 strategy of overturning any states votes that they don’t like. Why bother to go through the motions of a campaign when you intend to steal the election?
The biggest risk that America faces in 2024 is that our law enforcement agencies cannot or will not move fast enough to protect the election from the powerful foreign and domestic powers that are already working overtime to subvert it.
This is the most insightful, honest, and frightening thing I have read today. Meanwhile, Merrick Garland seems to be off on a world cruise and lost his cell phone while Ginni Thomas is moping the floor with Justice Roberts, Speaker Pelosi is dragging her heels in stopping congressional stock trading, and the “liberal” media is still blaming inflation and gas prices on the Democrats.
Would the two of you stop amping each other up!?
Feel free to offer a different interpretation of the facts that continue to unfold every day.
In particular, I invite you to please share how you see the current DoJ and Congress stopping the insurrection.
My interpretation, as it has been all along, is that these attempts will continue to fail. The Republicans will not win every race necessary to pull this off. To be clear I am NOT predicting Democrats prevailing in every race, but they ARE contesting these races and I do not believe the game is already lost. I am confident we will continue to have elections and regular power-swapping for as long as any of us is alive.
Do you deny that the GOP is fomenting sedition and insurrection?
Are you aware of the changes that have already happened in Texas, Florida, Georgia, and elsewhere?
I am confident that you will not admit that these terrorists are a threat until they have already succeeded. Then you will no doubt express shock and dismay that this “unpredictable” outcome took place.
I think it’s important to recognize that we came awfully close to a coup in 2020 and that a smarter team and smarter candidate might be able to get away with it. A few things giving me hope are GA GOP voters rejecting David Perdue’s lies and locking Kemp who did the lawful thing and disobeyed Trump. I think Abrams and Warnock have a 50/50 shot in that state. AZ Republicans are also at war with each other and the pro-democracy Republicans have the majority. WI and MI are likely to keep their incumbent Governors and redistricting overall ended up being a wash instead of a route for Democrats.
My bigger concern is the GOP nominates a more credible candidate than Trump and with Biden at 40%, cruises to a lawful re-election. There is a lot Garland and they Jan 6 Committee need to do, and we should fix the Electoral Count Act immediately, but I think the best hope for preserving democracy is electing Democrats and the center right independents and left of center voters have to tolerate staying in this same coalition for a few cycles until ranked choice and/or a saner GOP can emerge.
All three states in which there are plenty of Dems contesting these elections. I’m not saying don’t be vigilant; I’m saying don’t call the results so soon.
I fear we are talking past each other.
I am under the impression that the changes to state-level election laws have already passed in the three states I mention. The changes to the state-level election counting process are already in place.
What is the point of “vigilance” when we as yet have no mechanism for acting on obvious violations? What more will we learn from “vigilance” that we haven’t already known for years?
There is no doubt that Mark Meadows and his wife explicitly violated North Carolina election laws and fraudulently voted in North Carolina in the 2020 presidential election.
I understand that the DoJ may be investigating Mr. Meadows in connection with that apparent fraud.
Suppose we assume that the DoJ successfully indicts and prosecutes that and other apparent crimes of Mr. Meadows. When do you think that might happen?
There is compelling evidence that Mr. Meadows was a key player in the criminal conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Assuming that Mr. Meadows is successfully prosecuted for his crimes during the 2020 election, how will that prosecution happen in time to avoid calamity in the 2024 elections?
And THAT is my problem with your commentary and why I respond to it in the way I don’t to Terry’s even though he is also sounding the alarm. You’ve already basically said game over, go home, voting doesn’t matter because the Republicans will “win” either way. Ironically, such attitude plays right into THEIR hands! I refuse to give up on a country that I believe still has the capacity to be a great democracy where my vote actually counts.
I haven’t said voting doesn’t matter. I’ve said instead that ignoring the clear and present threat presented by the GOP is a prescription for disaster.
So far, the only thing you’ve offered is assurances of what you refuse to admit coupled with blind faith that DoJ will somehow magically do something — while refusing to offer any speculation whatsoever about what that “something” might be.
You seem to be focused on attacking those who challenge your steadfast denial of the reality obvious to anyone paying attention.
It seems to me that if anybody is playing into their hands it is those who advocate continuing to do absolutely nothing to stop their insurrection.
I neither advocate doing nothing nor believe that nothing is being done.
So what do you advocate? I’m specifically interested in how you see the timeline playing out.
For now I’m going to stick to advocating patience. I don’t want to second-guess the timeline and I wish you would stop as well.
In other words, you have nothing to offer. I don’t care what you wish I would do or not do.
I’ve asked you in all the ways I know how to ask for SOME kind of scenario that spells out how the catastrophe of 2024 is avoided.
So far as I can tell, your response is to say you have no clue and to ask that I stop talking about it.
Please forgive me for finding that response both unconvincing and unsatisfying.
Remember when Trump first appeared on the stage and quickly rose to the top of the Republican field…and how every week all the talking heads kept telling us that he’s plateaued, won’t last, will be forgotten by election day and there was plenty of time for another Republican to take hold of the nomination?
Remember when the Mueller investigation happened, and the first impeachment, and the second impeachment, and we figured that eventually the Republicans will turn on Trump?
Remember the insurrection on January 6th when we thought, oh yeah, this is the end of Trump….
He’s still here. He’s still the frontrunner for the Republican nomination in 2024.
I’m not looking to second guess any timeline to get rid of him…I’m wondering if there is a timeline at all?
You thought the sky was falling in 2020 as well. Even with the January 6th insurrection Joe Biden was confirmed as President-elect and inaugurated on time. I don’t have a crystal ball. It is unrealistic to expect me to know exactly how things will play out, but I DO have faith that the republic will ultimately survive.
I thought that the Trumpists would attempt a coup in 2020. They did exactly that. It failed because a few tenuous connections held together.
In the two years since then, the insurrection has specifically and effectively targeted its strategy to break those remaining strands.
For example, the election outcome in Georgia in 2020 crucially depended on the ability and willingness of the Georgia Secretary of State to reject the demands from Georgia Trumpists and from Donald Trump himself that the Georgia results be changed.
The state laws in Georgia have already been changed so that if the scenario was repeated today, the Georgia GOP would simply discard the legitimate results and replace them with their own manufactured numbers.
That has ALREADY happened, and so far as I know there has been no action taken by federal authorities in response.
The clearly and explicitly illegal attempt by Donald Trump to coerce Georgia authorities into “finding” the necessary votes to change the outcome of the Georgia election has not, so far as I know, been investigated or prosecuted by federal authorities.
You have your head buried even deeper in the sand today than you did then.
I actually think there is an active investigation in Fulton County regarding the attempt you describe. In fact I’ve often seen it listed as one of the most likely ways Trump himself could find himself in legal jeopardy. I find it hard to believe that GA Republicans will be as brazen as you describe. If the voters pick one candidate and they just assign electors to the other I think the voters would have an absolute fit. Besides, Stacey Abrams is running for Governor again and has a decent shot. You insist you have not completely given up on voting, but how else to interpret this?
Thankfully I don’t live in Georgia.
I disagree with your prognosis about Georgia. The laws are already passed.
Seriously? The voters of Georgia might well have an absolute fit — so what?
Surely the evidence of the past five years shows that today’s GOP doesn’t care a whit about those disagree with them.
They can still be voted out.
By WHOM?
The voters of Georgia have already changed the law governing how votes are counted in Georgia so that Georgia Republicans can overturn any election results they don’t like.
You don’t seem to appreciate the extent to which the GOP has already changed the rules of the game.
In Georgia, every election is a “heads I win, tails you lose” proposition for everyTrumpist/Putinist.in Georgia.
How can Stacey Abrams become governor of Georgia if the state election officials discard the votes that put her in the majority?
Yet when I call you on sounding like you are saying voting doesn’t matter, you push back. Which is it? Either GA voters can rise up against people pulling these stunts and throw them out of office or voting no longer matters at all. Democrats are making a concerted effort to run candidates in positions that involves the administration and certification of elections.
I really have nothing more I can say. I clearly have a lot more patience and faith than you that our country will survive the stress test it is being put through right now. As the Prime Minister often says during Questions Time – “I refer my honourable friend to replies I have made previously on this matter.”
I’m not sure what is so hard to understand about this.
Democratic voters in Georgia are suppressed in ways that Democratic voters in Massachusetts are not. Is this hard to understand?
When organized crime pays a referee to favor one participant over another, everyone agrees that a crime is being committed. Everyone agrees that a crooked referee destroys the game.
The GOP is flagrantly, brazenly, explicitly, and continuously striving to corrupt the referees. That has been their strategy since at least 2016.
That’s why the GOP has put forward their incompetent judicial nominations. That’s why the GOP refused to allow the Merrick Garland nomination to the Supreme Court tp even be considered by the Senate. That’s why the prior administration submitted fraudulent slates of electors to seven states. That’s why the prior administration mounted dozens of fraudulent lawsuits. The list goes on and on and on.
What you call “patience and faith” appears to me to be denial of these facts that are plain as day.
An incompetent federal judge appointed by Donald Trump blocked mask mandates on travel nationwide this week, and there is apparently no recourse for removing this judge (she is 35 years old, has never argued a case in trial court, and was an associate — one step above intern — when nominated).
Clarence Thomas continues to rule on matters involving the insurrection and the abuses of seditionists even though there is compelling evidence that his wife is a leader of the conspiracy to use violence to overthrow the government.
You demand “faith”, yet refuse to offer evidence or even speculation to support your view.
We are not talking about Tinker Bell — representative democracy in America will not be saved by all of us clapping as hard as we can.
It will be saved only by taking direct, focused, and substantive action to put down the insurrection.
The only legitimate recourse any of us have is to keep voting, and keep pressuring elected officials. I’m all for that, but I still am not sure what you would realistically have us do, plus I completely reject either your premise that nothing is being done to defend democracy or that what has been done against democracy is completely irreversible. Again, do you believe Dems in GA should keep voting or just give up? I know I favor the former when Abrams and Warnock have fighting chances.
I believe that Democrats in Georgia should be considering ALL their options, including voting. It took more than voting and “pressuring elected officials” to get the first round of Jim Crow laws off the books. MLK was not the only voice speaking out about civil rights and Jim Crow during the 1960s.
The cancer of systemic racism (that so far as I know you still deny even exists) was not eradicated and has again metastasized.
Even Barack Obama sees and talks about the same threat to representative democracy in America that I’ve been harping on, MSNBC and CNN were reporting on his recent comments this evening.
I’ll promise you this: until DoJ does something concrete, extremely visible, and very effective to prosecute, convict, and punish the ongoing conspiracy to overthrow the legitimate government of the US, that conspiracy will grow, thrive and fester.
MLK of course was known for his non-violent approach which of course is most appropriate. I’ve never been personally into direct action myself, but I’m certainly fine with others holding rallies or demonstrations (which I see as falling under the umbrella of pressuring elected officials). I don’t know why you think I don’t think racism exists. That view is several years out of date and clearly contradicted by what we have seen in very recent years.
I’m glad that you’ve refined your thinking about systemic racism, I somehow missed it in our recent exchanges.
I’m on Tom’s side with this one.
Yes, I noticed. I just don’t think it does anyone any good to “entertain” each other with unlikely worst cases scenarios.
You clearly have a different view of what is “unlikely” than some of us.
What has been done to stop the right wing Trump cult from doing anything it has done in the past? What measures have been taken to guard against a more blatant power grab? Who, in the Trump cult, is presently in prison, of even at risk of being in prison for what we are seeing as a coordinated effort at all levels of government – including the wife of a Supreme Court Judge, to overturn a legitimate and fair election?
The continued investigations, the continued cycle of elections. It took a lot longer than the time that has so far passed for any Watergate conspirators to ultimately go to jail.
The Watergate conspiracy did not target representative democracy itself.
There is no evidence that Mr. Nixon was acting on behalf of any hostile foreign nation. There was never a suggestion that the Watergate conspiracy extended to include any other elected officials or any sitting Supreme Court justices. The attempt by Mr. Nixon to coerce the DoJ (the “Saturday Night Massacre”, among several) was a major story rather than a sideline.
In short, comparing the current situation to Watergate is like comparing a corner bank robbery to the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The comparison was on how quickly or not the wheels of justice spin. I’m not at all surprised that we don’t have major players behind bars yet. That’s not cynical, just realistic.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s cynical, realistic, or pure rationalization.
If the wheels of justice spin so slowly that the insurrection is thriving and spreading between 2022 and 2024, then — to mix metaphors — the wheels of the car will simply fall off.
If the only effective remedy is prosecution by the DoJ and if the legal process is so excruciatingly slow that the GOP is able to behave in 2024 with the same contempt of the rule of law that it has demonstrated since at least 2016, then representative democracy in America is dead.
The Fascist Authoritarians are fully capable of taking over America just as effectively as the same ideology took over Germany and Russia.
Bluster and blind faith are no match for guns and hundreds of millions of dollars of dirty Russian mob money.
So what do you want to do – gather some protesters to storm the DOJ building and demand action now!? In another comment you insisted you haven’t given up, but above you do say that democracy in America is likely dead of things don’t move at the speed you would like. The USA is NOT Germany or Russia for a whole host of reasons.
I’m asking you what scenario you see for getting this resolved.
My own thoughts about what to do are include:
Getting the President involved as you suggest in items 1 and 3 will dial the politics up to 11 and may backfire. I think the WH is bending over backwards to avoid the slightest whiff of that.
I agree that the WH is bending over backwards. That’s the issue — the WH is so concerned about avoiding the appearance of being political that the entire enforcement regime is paralyzed.
If somebody — ANYBODY — can offer a scenario where the DoJ somehow steps in soon enough to thwart the success of the insurrection in 2024, then I’m all ears. So far, I hear crickets and not just from you.
Your answer confirms my fundamental premise here: our political system is unable to handle this.
What would have happened if Abraham Lincoln had bent over backwards to avoid “politics” in 1861?
Admiral Zumwalt famously said: “If you’re not making waves, you’re not under way”.
It is LONG PAST time for this White House to make some waves about this insurrection.
I believe a war began in 1861, which is not what I am prepared to call January 6th. You are the one making the accusation so I turn the burden of proof to you. Can you show, other than just that you are not hearing anything, that Garland is doing nothing? There is a whole page about whom they are seeking and what they have accomplished so far.
I stipulated days ago that Mr. Garland and the DoJ is doing something (I don’t know what).
I’m asking for some scenario — ANY scenario — where whatever it is that they are doing comes to fruition in a manner and at a time when it effectively protects the 2024 election from the insurrectionists.
You continue to attack and criticize me rather than offer even the vaguest of speculation.
What DO you call it, then?
I call January 6th a riot, an insurrection, maybe even an attempted coup. I do wish that on the day itself more violent force had been used to push back against those who stormed the Capitol. I do not feel I can intelligently answer the question you are asking me, but I do think there is still enough time and enough moving parts that a little more faith is in order.
The reason I think it was more than a “riot” is that we already know that it was organized, planned, and funded.
I think “attempted coup” is as good as any.
I appreciate your candor. “Faith”, in the sense that you mean it, is something that I’ve never had very much of.
If somebody — anybody — could sketch some scenarios where this insurrection is stopped from seizing the government in 2024, than I would be more comfortable.
So far, I’ve seen nothing. Neither you nor anybody else offers even blind speculation about how these fascists are stopped.
I hope that our state officials are starting to game out how we in MA are protected when the Fascists take over the apparatus of the federal government in January of 2025.
Of course I hope it doesn’t happen. I need more more than hope, though.
Allow me to share this anecdote. I was 15 years old and heading out the door to go to a friends house on a school night when I had homework to do. My mother told me “If you go out tonight, you’re grounded for a week!”
I went out anyway.
The next night, I did the same thing and my mother said “But you are grounded, and if you go out tonight, you are going to be grounded for two weeks”.
By the fourth night, she was up to grounding me for a month, and as I left the house, I said “Looks like you haven’t figured this out yet, have you?”
She gave up and I won.
How long are Democrats going to “ground” the Republicans?
The reality is we need to work in a system that holds a lot of structural disadvantages to our party. This means we also need to recognize that preserving democracy matters more in the short and eventually long term than our pet issues, no matter how important they are. That means holding the nose for Manchin, Sinema, and other red state democrats who are preferable to Trumpist republicans. It may mean aiding pro-democracy conservatives who are wrong on many issues but right about Trump and Jan 6. Murkowski, Romney, McMullin, Cheney, and Kinzinger comes to mind. It may mean recruiting more pro-life, pro-gun, pro-Democracy candidates (not all of them big D Democrats) to run in as many districts as possible.
I fear many on the left would rather see Biden lose to give a Warren or Sanders style progressive another shot at the nomination. They’d rather a smaller tent so the most progressive position can always win. I once favored that and even argued that on these pages, at least within the context of Beacon Hill, but it’s obvious now that the authoritarian right will only be contained by a big tent. One that agrees to disagree on the non-essentials (social and economic issues) to agree on the essentials (standing up to autocracy abroad and at home). We need to focus on issues and candidates 60% of the country can get behind instead of constantly playing to the progressive Twitter choir.
Amen and six sixes.
The problem with the left is not the size of the tent, its the fact that we are a collection of tents. If we had a single unifying issue that was not partially defined by race, gender, and so on, we could deliver a simple message.
As I take a look back on the Right’s reaction to Biden’s victory, I see a mass of people unified by Trump banners, one cohesive group. Yes, sure, most all were angry white males, but they dd not call it the “Man’s March on the Capitol” . Indeed, Ashli Babbit was part of that mob.
As for the Left’s reaction to Trump’s victory? The “Women’s March” complete with pink hats. This assumes all women are against Trump and assumes that men are not? All we did was divide ourselves into more tents.
I hope the CPD holds the debates anyway and if only the Dem shows up let him have the whole time. Assuming that Dem is Biden the RNC has shot themselves in the foot since challengers usually need debates more than incumbents.
It might be a good opportunity to bring in third party candidates as well. Worked for Reagan when he debated Anderson, which ended up baiting Carter back into debates.
I don’t know to what extent there will be those, though it should only be open to those on enough ballots to get to 270.