Rick Perlstein
@rickperlstein
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The only reason I write about politics is to attract the attention of jazz musicians. I answer every email: infernaltriangle @prospect .org.
Joined February 2009
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"Take my wife's citizenship. Please."
Q: Trump wants to take away birthright citizenship. Do you agree with him on that?
JD Vance: I really do
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My Shark Tank idea is fitted sheets which indicate clearly which is the short side and which is the long side.
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My wife said this story about Trump spending more tax dollars traveling to Mar a Lago than Mueller has spent on his investigation needs to be publicized more. Take it away, friends.
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It just occurred to me that Elon Musk just threatened to sabotage Ukraine on behalf of Russia. I mean, think about that.
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"...you are acting as a convey belt to aid and abet their strategy of dominance.
If you're open to a statement about that, I can prepare something for the record.
Regards,
Rick"
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I just got an interview request from a reporter at an agenda-setting DC publication. It began, "I'm working on a magazine story about political buzzwords (i.e. 'critical race theory,' 'equity,' 'cancel culture,' etc.)"—then went on...
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"...but products of careful propaganda campaigns to seed moral panics in order to roll back human rights for everyone who is not conservative, using techniques quite similar to Nazi propagandists..."
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"This also represents atrociously biased journalism. When one side is willing to lie, cheat, and steal to achieve political dominance, and the gatekeeping media represents their efforts as one 'side' in some neutral political debate..."
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There's nothing to debate. It's a thoroughgoing fantasy. The real Hamilton was a literal plutocrat, who wanted to turn debtors into veritable vassals of a strong state, not some admirable multiculti hero.
Nearly Five Years After Hamilton's Debut, Historians Still Debate its Historical Accuracy
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We're not polarized. One party is a pluralist center-to-left coalition whose ideas are broadly popular, based in scientific consensus; the other is reality-denying, near an authoritarian cult w waning minority support, hanging onto power through cheating and and panic-mongering.
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In the summer of 2009 President Obama held two meetings with historians to impart what wisdom they could about his tasks ahead. At the first, Garry Wills told him to get out of Afghanistan because it would turn into another Vietnam. He wasn't invited to the second.
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It will be a horrifying fascination to see how much further one of America's political parties has to advance into fascist territory before agenda-setting elite political journalists start to report that one of America's political parties is advancing into fascist territory.
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"his framing is horrifying to me, the sort of thing that actively contributes to the destruction of American democracy. These are not 'political buzzwords' to which liberals and conservatives 'ascribe different meanings'...
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Fed chair Jerome Powell: we need "some pain." In other words (to simplify), for people who work for wages, to help those who live on investments. When I wrote the part of my 1976-80 book REAGANLAND on Volcker doing that in 1979, I almost cried.
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They tell me Nancy Reagan is enjoying a revival these days. Allow me to demur. She was a monster.
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This is a foundational right-wing fantasy. Phyllis Schlafly in 1964 claimed Gallup made up poll numbers to make conservatism look unpopular. A poll found 80% of Tea Partiers said their views represented the majority of Americans. It was actually 20 percent.
There’s an extremely loud 30% of the country that’s pro-Trump, anti-choice, and anti-trans. They’ve convinced a lot of people they’re half the country but they’re not. They’re 30%.
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I'm starting to grow proud of this guy. It's hard to grow and change. And yet he's doing it.
Biden: "A lot of folks are losing hope ... So I'm going to act and I'm going to act fast. I would like to be doing it with the support of Republicans ... but they're just not willing to go as far as we have to go."
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Bishop seeking to deny Biden communion caught using Grindr. No school like the old school!
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Folks finally finding out what historians already know: ain't nothing sexier than archive boxes.
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"I was wondering if you'd be willing to chat for a bit this week or next about that and how you make sense of this moment." With Eric Boehlert gone, I'm less inclined to let stuff like this slide. So I took up the invitation to "chat," with an email reading thus:
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I have friends who've spent weeks performing the equivalent of defending Germany seizing the Sudenland because of the aggression against them at Verseilles. Some serious reflection is in order.
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THIS IS AN EXTREMELY IMPORTANT TEXT TO PRESERVE AND STUDY. The refrain that "there would have been no violence had liberals not provoked it" is central to America's reactionary minoritarian traditions literally going back centuries.
Those calling for impeachment or invoking the 25th Amendment in response to President Trump’s rhetoric this week are themselves engaging in intemperate and inflammatory language and calling for action that is equally irresponsible and could well incite further violence.
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Not a word during that entire convention on banks, finance, or corporate greed. FDR wept.
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"...and how liberals and conservatives ascribe different meanings to them. I'm not as much interested in who's more 'right' about what something like 'critical race theory' means, as the ways in which the definitions differ depending on who you ask..."
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These people are not auto workers.
Incredible scene as President Trump arrives in Michigan to speak to auto workers.
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Any normal teenager will now be desperate to figure out what this forbidden "critical race theory" thingy is now... Great job, Texas, Florida, etc.
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Just hit "send" on the manuscript for the fourth and final volume in my series on the rise of American conservatism beteen 1958 and 1981. I've been working on it for twenty-two years.
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As I show n NIXONLAND, Roger Ailes invented the TV "town hall" format for the 68 Nixon campaign to bamboozle the public into believing Nixon was bravely taking all comers (when actually he was getting questioned by amateurs who didn't know how to ask tough ?s + follow up).
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@KevinMKruse
Kevin, one of my fave discoveries in research for my next book was tbe Mississippi reporter who covered an anti-ERA meeting and realized it was the same people at the White Citizens Council meetings he used to cover.
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History final exam, Fall semester 2052: compare and contrast the political, cultural, and social effect of 3,000 deaths in New York City on September 11, 2001 in the United States to that of the 3,000 deaths every day in December of 2020.
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The New Yorker interviewed me about
#AOC
. I said the reason she's great is that she knows how to speak American, and that's she teaches Democrats how to shake themselves out of their timid crouch .
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"We came out here dressed in T-shirts, using hula hoops and stuff — they started gassing us. So we came back with respirators — they started shooting us. So we came back with vests — they started aiming for the head. So we started wearing helmets. And now they call us terrorists"
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Being a liberal, I can have nothing but compassion for the victims of right-wing energy policy in Texas, AND support a federal rescue, AND recall the ubiquitous "LET THEM FREEZE IN THE DARK" bumper stickers Texans directed at the Northeast's heating oil shortage of the late
70s.
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It's so fascinating to me that the immediate collapse of the Afghan government is reported by braying horserace journalists as a terrible blunder by Biden, when then alternative was a slow collapse, which is to say a bloody civil war.
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Been researching an essay about C. Everett Koop, AIDS, and the Reagan administration. One detail that pops out at this particular juncture is the lust back then to criminalize people who irresponsibly spread viruses. Not seeing a lot of that now on the right. For some reason...
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A reporter friend in Texas wrote me of his frustration interviewing anti-"CRT" activists want, because their responses when asked what they want are so frantically incoherent. I said it's because he's touching territory incompatible with the empirical routines of journalism. 1/
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@yeselson
Yes. One is a citizen if one is born in the USA, independent of her parents' citizenship. This is called..."birthright citizenship."
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One of my favorite ass-kicking legal-world lefties, Sam Bagenstos, has been nominated general counsel fo the Office of Management and Budget. Congrats,
@SBagen
!
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Ugh, news people. Especially
@nprnews
, with which I torture myself each morning. The debt ceiling situation is a "negotiation over federal spending" in the same way Jan 6, 2021 was a "negotiation over who should be president." Please please please stop. Please report reality.
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I could try to explain the midcentury pluralism Biden and Pelosi grew up with that equated "strong two-party system" with civic health itself, but it's so alien to our reality it would be easier to explain air to a fish. Just treat it as one of those weird things old people say.
President-elect Joe Biden: "We need a Republican Party. We need an opposition that's principled and strong."
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This reminds me of the "skyrocketing" rates of divorce in the 1970s. It wasn't really true. The lion's share were marriages that had long ago functionally ended, but who could not legally get divorces because the laws previously required an elaborate finding of "fault."
Whenever I see people talking about the “skyrocketing” rates of people saying that they’re trans, I think of this chart. They used to punish children for being left-handed and force them to write with their right hand. Guess what happened after that stopped?
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I would like to hear from lawyers whether the Eastman memo, in concert with Giuliani's voicemail to a senator he thought was Tommy Tuberville to "try to just slow it down" so they could arrange things with state legislatures, represents some sort of case for sedition.
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It's totally a myth that Nixon graciously and expeditiously conceded the 1960 election. He only did after reliably informed by his operatives that he couldn't overthrow it.
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Today Biden made clear he understands that the press's posture toward him as adversarial gamesmanship, and wouldn't play their game; and that he's interested in the opinions of Republican voters, not Republican elected officials betraying those voters. I thought it was great.
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Lefties praising Tucker for feinting toward the interests of working class class whites, and against incumbent elites that patronize them, should read more European history. Study the WHOLE PACKAGE, because that's part of the basic fascist playbook.
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NPR news (1) has accepted the framing that age and vitality is a key issue in the presidential horserace; and (2) just neglected to report the fact that Trump kept falling asleep at his trial today.
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Union-busting NLRB general refused to resign, whining about fairness. Biden told him to piss up a rope, summarily firing him. Already, a far less go-along-to-get-along style being struck than under Obama.
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Beware: a main complaint of the anon NYT op-ed is that Trump betrays the conservative revolution. It's thus part and parcel of washing plain old regular conservative movement insanity in the blood of the lamb, positioning it as Washington's respectable center.
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I'm retiring. It took me 3,000 pages to say start this guy did in a tweet.
Ooh, I know this one! Your mythical Conservatism is a niche brand of elite narcissism incapable of winning national elections. So you used evangelicals/racists/gun nuts as electoral foot soldiers. But then--whoops!--they became self-aware and realized they don't need you.
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There are pundits who will still say Biden's job is to lean into conciliation with the Republicans.
“There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.” -- Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, one week after Trump lost the election to President-Elect Joe Biden
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THE public-works version of those Tea Party "Keep your socialist government hands off my Medicare" signs.
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I need to emphasize the American right HAS ALWAYS BEEN THIS WEIRD. I wish I still had copies of the freaked out campaign memos trying to figure out how to simultaneously disassociate Goldwater from all the "Americans for Goldwater" or whatever independent groups claiming...
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Even more poignant when the inflation is obviously NOT CAUSED BY DEMAND.
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If Trump, for political reasons, pushes an inadequately tested vaccine that doesn't work and causes harm, he will set back public trust of government health initiatives for generations. The harm could be incalculable. His wickedness is boundless. His enablers belong in hell.
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Report this. On the front page.
Trump: Now, If I don't get elected, it's gonna be a bloodbath. It's going to be a bloodbath for the country.
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wtf. "Why it matters: The controversial video and Hochman's dismissal are the latest instances of internal disorder inside the DeSantis campaign"; not, you know, a GOP crawling with neo-nazis? This is not political journalism fit for a democracy. "
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The entirety of this massive piece on India's descend into totalitarianism is stunning. But don't miss this part: "In the United States, newspaper columnists welcomed his emphasis on markets and efficiency." 1/x
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Trump indictments are like buses. If you don't like this one, another will be along soon enough.
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The NYT detailing 90 reporters onto the Biden deathwatch reveals yet another American civic institition in its glaring failure to stand up to the stress test of imminent fascism. Alas, it...
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Reporters are always aski g me for historical parallels. Okay, here's one: how the right thinks about gender-enemies is heart-stoppingly similar to how Nazis thought about Jews.
Kyle Rittenhouse stopped supporting Trump for 12 hours and they immediately transvestigated him
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Kids probably have no idea, it's practically History Book stuff by now, but riot cops thugging out at the first sign of public disorder is basically (at least when it comes to white people) wasn't a thing before 9/11. In my book, I call it the emergence of Bed-Wetter Nation.
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So, science fiction story about a dystopian society that suffers a horrible epidemic, and slowly divided itself into a population that respects science, gets vaccinated, and stays healthy, and one that does not, and suffers horribly. Writes itself?
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I'm now convinced they weren't foolish. People presented evidence otherwise, and I'm conviced.
These responses are foolish. Tickets you get weeks after the event, when you were following the flow of traffic on a right-of-way with no evident speed limit signs or cameras, ARE NOT AN INCENTIVE TO DRIVE MORE SAFELY.
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For almost every invocation of "polarization" among elite commentators and journalists as the cause of our woes, the better descriptor would be "Republican authoritarianism."
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How is the mayor of South Bend qualified to be transportation secretary?
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Open letter to press: I've given my last interview about the '68 election's lessons for 2020's. Given Trump's tweet on postponing it, the political media's determination to bound its discussion within the frame of normal politics is downright dangerous, and I won't be complicit.
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Dem Sen staffer told a friend they can't obstruct everything because "obstructing everything" what they fought for 8 years.
#vichydemocrats
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Rudy to Arizona house speaker: "Aren't we all Republicans here?" No plaimer way to say "we all know the GOP is a mafia" without saying "we all know the GOP is a mafia." This is stunning stuff.
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Any normal teenager will now be desperate to figure out what this forbidden "critical race theory" thingy is now...
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More stunning normalization of authoritarianism: "historic patterns" are the reason Dems need from 5-10 percent more votes than Republicans to win Congress--not the systematized democracy theft known as partisan gerrymandering. But you know this,
@peterbakernyt
.
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The most famous Dem economic advisor says rich speculators who had the poor judgement to deposit in an untrustworthy bank have to be made whole. Nothing about the moral hazard this presents, nor the message to the proles who only get $250K in protection.
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If he owns Twitter he can just shut down the information-dissimenating capacities of protest movements or disdidents he doesn't like with bs "terms of service" violations.
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Why is Bernie Sanders is insisting that a candidate with a plurality should get the nomination in 2020, when back in 2016 he was arguing that the super-delegates should vote against the candidate who had not just a plurality, but a majority of the elected delegates?
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Well that was a fun four and a half months not being depressed by the Democrats.
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What's going on is the sort of panic that it triggered when someone someone fears that, on some level, they ARE a bad person, and/or grasp that it is indeed the case that white people share collective guilt for the degradation of Black people--and find that thought intolerable.
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Uh. Some days in 1968 over a hundred American serviceman died in a day. Any random young man could be hoovered up by the draft to become one. These "this election in that election" things are always lazy and actively inhibit thought.
The head of the teamsters openly flirting with endorsing the reactionary candidate ahead of the DNC in Chicago amidst an increasingly unpopular war that is spiraling out of control
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Why is this guy respected?
It's probably foolish to think a NYC mayor will successfully translate into being a national political figure, but I still think Eric Adams would be in my top 5 for "who will be the next Democratic presidential nominee after Joe Biden?".
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The right has a new thing self-described faction, "InCons," or "involuntary conservatives," folks forced into voting for Trump by liberal extremism. Which sounds exactly like what Southerns demanding massive resistance said about their response Brown v. Board of Education.
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So, "critical race theory": right-wing strategists identifying, then exacerbating, local discontents about cultural change as an organizing tool has been utterly routinized for almost 50 years. THAT'S THE STORY! Yet somehow it comes off as novel each and every time.
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To end a day when I kept getting lectured for insufficient reverence toward the leadership of the Democratic Party past and present, just asking: did You know Bill Clinton just addressed a crypto conference in the Bahamas hosted by Anthony Scaramucci?
Truly an honor to introduce and welcome former President
@BillClinton
and former Prime Minister Tony Blair to
@CryptoBahamas
to cap off an incredible Day 3.
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The entire civilization of the antebellum South was built upon managing this. Obviously, the people building it knew their economy a rapeocracy. Thereupon, they framed their world as the apogee of refinement. The alternative--true--was psychologically intolerable.
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This is the week where (1) a state outlawed in-vitro fertization, (2) a CPAC crowd cheered "ending democracy," and (3) the Heritage Foundation started pushing the end of "recreational sex." If the Democrats can't beat that...
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One's anti-racist education can never truly end. This is a quote from a National Association of Real Estate Broker textbook from the 1940s. From a stunning book I'll be blurbing called "Freedom to Discriminate: How Realtors Conspired to Segregate Housing and Divide America"...
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When I heard Putin was calling up 300,000 reservists, I immediately thought of how DESPERATELY Lyndon Johnson fought to keep from calling up reservists, to hide the scale of the debacle in Vietnam. Russia may well and truly be fucked.
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The success of "weirdness" take on the GOP is inversally proportional to the disastrous Obamaist paradigm, and its rule that the weirder the GOP became, the more weirdness had to be treated as an exception to some notional NON-weird GOP essence: the "fever" that would "break."
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Trump's conspiracy spew isn't working because it's not getting high-level mainstream media buy-in, like, say, Benghazi got high-level mainstream media buy-in, or Hillary Clinton's server. Something seems to be changing in those rarified precincts. (Fingers crossed.)
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It was really embarrassing the way he demanded the leaders of all the NATO nations publicly vouch for him. As if they could do that freely and frankly. He holds power of them! He thus was humiliating them. He sounds palpably desperate. Whiny.
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Lefty boycott afficianados have to appreciate the irony of the baseball All-Star Game getting moved to Coors Field....
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I'll say it once. Vote for who you like, or don't vote. But Trump in the White House during a Mideast war may mean World War III, and species extinction. Which is worse than genocide. The inability of some on the Left to grasp this is a self-regarding failure of the imagination.
The whole thing is so stressful and sad, like Satan dreamed up the best possible way to make people who hate Trump hate each other... "I know! A massive Palestinian terrorist attack in Israel!!"
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Fox is fun right now. Ken Starr complaining that Roger Stone was merely convicted of a "process crime." You know, lying to before an official body. Which he's apparently totally cool with now?
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I was born in 1969. All through my childhood and adolescence, Phil Donahue was on the telly injecting progressive values into our Middle American brains in between celebrity interviews, like a cool hippie uncle in a suit. He was one brilliantly subversive motherfucker.
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Cosign. Israel's actions in Gaza was a razor blade down the center of the Democratic coalition. Despite Shapiro's many other admirable qualities, on this subject, he would just reopern the wound.
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When a teacher says --"I taught your child that housing discrimination in the past makes white people wealthier than Black people in the present"--and respond, "STOP INDOCTRINATING MY CHILD THAT BLACK PEOPLE ARE BETTER THAN WHITE PEOPLE?", what is going on?
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Howto: like the Senate Watergate Committee, slowly building case witness by witness, starting at the bottom, saving principles for last when the evidence is in the record (and on TV). And deliberately tie in as many co-conspirators, including McConnell and Pence, as possible.
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Selfishly, I want Tim Walz. Eaiser to shut down narcissistic knuckleheads on the left claiming not a dime's worth of difference between the parties. Basically began institituting Scandi-style social democracy the minute Dems took over the legislature.
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