You’d wonder are some lads here who staked their e-reputations on Trump having no ties to Russia having second thoughts.
This is the way it’s going alright. And the loons who shriek about “cancel culture” are just fine with it.
The “Deep State”, eh.
I wonder have the Trumpbots ever considered the “Deep State” might have been filled with his supporters all along?
Nah, probably not.
I see the anti-abortion, climate catastrophe denying Liz Cheney got turfed out by Republicans all because she recognised Biden won the election, which is a hanging offence now in the crazy party.
What does her defeat tell us about the future of US democracy? The clearest message is that the Republican party has become an authoritarian cult. Cheney is among the most conservative lawmakers in the US. She voted 93 per cent of the time with Trump during his term in office. She is for every tax cut, against every abortion, and in favour of every new weapons system on offer. Much like her father, Dick Cheney, the former vice-president, Liz Cheney is as close as a politician gets to personifying the Stars and Stripes. She is as far from being moderate — “Republican in name only” as they are pejoratively called — as any of her colleagues.
Cheney’s defenestration thus begs the question: what defines today’s Republican party? Its grassroots is driven by two passions: who it loves and who it hates. The party’s base idolises Trump. Everyone in Washington knows the same is not true of many if not most elected Republicans. Figures such as Florida’s Marco Rubio and Texas’s Ted Cruz were speaking their minds in 2016 when they depicted Trump as a low life con artist. Harriet Hageman, the Trump-endorsed Republican who unseated Cheney, was probably sincere in 2016 when she called Trump a “racist and xenophobic”. Ambition, and fear of the mob, have turned all these figures into hollow mini-Trumps.
Conventional parties manage their extremes. In the case of today’s Republicans, however, the extreme sets the narrative. In another time, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the congresswoman from Georgia, would be dismissed as a political freak. Greene openly avows the QAnon theory that America’s establishment is run by paedophiles. The more offensive her stances, the more money she raises. Last week she got rousing applause at a party event when she said she opposed solar panels because they only work when the sun is out. “I want to stay up later at night,” she said. “I don’t want to have to go to bed when the sun sets.”
Today’s Republican party belongs to Greene not Cheney. It is even more strongly motivated by what it hates than by admiration of Trump. I have no idea whether Greene is as stupid as she sounds. She could also be highly savvy. The key to success in today’s conservative movement is to provoke those who look down on it. It guarantees media notoriety that can be monetised. Trump devised the model. But he is not the last word on it. The key is to enrage the overeducated moralisers in bicoastal urban America. The more ignorant you sound, the more contemptuous the cultural elites, which is worth its weight in electoral gold.
Ron De Santis is one very dangerous bastard. Possibly even more dangerous than Trump, possibly much more dangerous.
by Will Bunch | Columnist
Published
Aug 21, 2022
The Republican governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, brought his act to Pittsburgh on Friday and left little doubt that he’s running for president in 2024. We need to talk about this, but first let’s look at the even more revealing event that DeSantis staged right before he boarded the jet for his Rust Belt road swing — a full-on display of what 21st-century American fascism looks like.
In heavily Democratic Fort Lauderdale, the 5′9″ DeSantis — the modern fulfillment of the Jimmy Breslin-ism about a small man in search of a balcony — elevated himself on a podium, flanked as he so often is by armed and uniformed men and women of law enforcement, to highlight his crackdown on supposed voter fraud ahead of November’s election.
“That is against the law, and now they’re gonna pay the price for it,” DeSantis declared of 20 Floridians — almost all from Democratic strongholds such as Broward County, where his campaign-rally-style announcement was staged, or Miami-Dade — accused of casting ballots despite a law barring them because they’d been convicted of murder or sexual assault.
But the event and its stench of “law and order” intimidation revealed so much more through what was left unsaid. Such as the fact that DeSantis’ Office of Election Crimes and Security — like so much that the Florida governor does, a dangerous escalation of the GOP’s long-running war on voting rights into straight-up authoritarian territory — has spent $3.9 million in taxpayer dollars to find alleged fraud in less than 0.0002% of the 11 million votes cast in the Sunshine State. The outlay is about $195,000 for each allegation.
But arguably more outrageous is the way that Team DeSantis is less exposing a systematic problem — actual voting fraud in America is extremely rare — but rather taking cynical advantage of several years of confusion in Florida over its laws regarding whether people convicted of crimes can vote. In 2018, the state’s voters overwhelmingly passed a referendum allowing most felons who’d served their time to vote, only for GOP lawmakers to muddy the waters by imposing new requirements for restitution. It’s now apparent there was widespread confusion — not just among citizens, but from government officials — over who could vote in 2020.
Indeed, Florida journalists who dug into the 20 criminal cases found a scenario rooted in benign confusion, not malicious fraud. In Orange County, Fla., the three people charged with third-degree felonies — punishable up to five years in prison — said they mistakenly believed their rights had been restored in the 2018 vote, and one man said he’d simply been sent a ballot in the mail and returned it. Nathan Hart, 49, told the Miami Herald he was renewing his driver’s license when a man at a voter registration booth convinced him, mistakenly, he was eligible to vote. “One individual guy voting when he thought he could is hardly voter fraud,” said Hart, now terrified of losing the life he’d rebuilt after his incarceration.
There are two very important things going on here — and neither of them is a real-world problem around “election integrity.” Most immediately, DeSantis — favored for re-election in November, but hardly a lock in a state he won by just 32,000 votes in 2018 — clearly seeks a chilling effect that would frighten thousands of voters who are unsure of their eligibility and now may stay home rather than risk getting arrested.
The broader implication is even more frightening. The time for mincing words is over. This is the latest and most alarming manifestation of a now barely hidden fascism by the head of America’s third-largest state, and one of the handful of serious contenders for the White House. DeSantis’ push for voter suppression and the increasingly paramilitaristic vibe of his public appearances prove the Floridian is the one we’ve been warning about: A post-Trump Republican taking a war on democracy to an even more dangerous place, minus the buffoonish narcissism of the 45th president.
DeSantis has embraced a politics that has absolutely nothing to do with traditional conservative blather about freedom and everything to do with raw power. This 43-year-old rising force has already surpassed the dark promise of Trump by going after corporations who’ve dared to criticize him, seeking to chill classroom discussions about race or gender, and even overriding the results of a democratic election for a large-county prosecutor whose offense was having a differing opinion.
In this context, DeSantis’ national campaign swing — which came to Pennsylvania this weekend with his controversial embrace of our extremist and Christian nationalist GOP gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano — marks a major turning point as America looks warily toward a 2024 election that already has a kind of 1860 feel to it. Right now, DeSantis — the only serious Republican rival to Trump, according to the polls — is demolishing the myth that The Former Guy would be challenged by a moderate. Instead, DeSantis is taking the loose ideology of Trumpism to new extremes of demonizing The Other and positioning the GOP as an anti-democracy movement.
With more than 100 protesters outside, DeSantis told a packed downtown Pittsburgh hotel ballroom, in a lame, whiny echo of Winston Churchill: “We must fight the woke in our schools. We must fight the woke in our businesses. We must fight the woke in government agencies. We can never, ever surrender to woke ideology.” The use of a cadence that opposed Nazism in 1940 to instead attack American citizens as the enemy was obscene.
Just the fact that DeSantis, the head of a state with a large Jewish population, thought it important to endorse Mastriano — despite the shocking revelations about the Pennsylvanian’s ties to the website Gab, a cesspool of anti-Semitism that inspired the 2018 mass murderer of 11 Jewish people at a synagogue just a few miles from where he spoke — was a powerful illustration of a political party’s downward spiral into madness.
In addition to the anti-Semitism flap, something else that DeSantis never mentioned once on his Pennsylvania road trip was Donald Trump — but the former president was clearly paying attention. Just minutes after DeSantis finished speaking in the 412, the FPOTUS tweeted that he, too, is coming to Pennsylvania to rally with Mastriano, as well as his endorsed U.S. Senate candidate, Mehmet Oz, on Sept. 3 in Wilkes-Barre.
Let that sink in. The radical extremism of Mastriano — who brought busloads of supporters to D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021 and marched to the brink of the Capitol during an insurrection; who organized a slate of fake electors and has made clear his hostility to counting every vote; who invokes God to promote radical views against abortion, climate change, and public education — was supposed to make the Republican establishment run for the hills. Instead, the two true leaders of today’s GOP are tripping over each other to embrace a homophobic anti-Semite bidding to run the state where the American Experiment began.
The stakes for 2024 have never looked starker than Friday as the sun set over the Ohio River.
DeSantis ended his speech with a plea for supporters to “put on the full armor of God.” It was a blatant signal that the Floridian is fully down with a Christian nationalism that not only subverts the Founders’ desire for a separation of church and state, but looks nothing like what Jesus would actually do. Because in Ron DeSantis’ vision of America, cursed are the meek — the transgender kid with a target on their back, the schoolchildren he wants to indoctrinate with false, sanitized history, the communities of color seeking to exercise their hard-fought voting rights. We who believe in free speech and free inquiry in the face of an oppressive state must also don our armor, because this, the fight for the soul of America, has been joined.
The freaks are turning on each other. 
Corruption in the Republican Party. What next?
There are lads here who would call this guy a “centrist”.
Republican candidates in the key swing state US Senate races have developed what will surely be a winning messaging strategy.
What a humiliation for Sarah Palin. First time the Democrats have won this seat in 50 years. @maroonandwhite won’t like this at all.
Takes time but read the whole thread
Greenwald
Just sounds like any other whiny right-wingnut grifter now. Pity, he had something about him in the past.
This is what happens when you hitch yourself to the likes of Alex Jones.
So when he says something you don’t agree with you scream names at him. Sounds like you want him cancelled. Why can lefties debate points?
Cry harder, mate, specifically about the things that Glenn wants you to cry about.
I put up a few of his points, you started whinging, can you debate even one? Didn’t think so.