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This week, another free-form GLoP, with topics ranging from the Bill Barr imbroglio, exotic Chinese cuisine, the prospect of a Socialist being the nominee of the Democratic party, some talk about the Oscars, and another edition of the old GLoP standard, What Are You Watching?
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To be fair, Jonah has said that were he in a place where his vote mattered, he would have voted for Trump.
Also, try to remember that he was directly attacked by Trump. That might just leave a mark.
And some of the votes will even be from live American citizens and cast by the people they are purported to be.
Unfortunately true. Jim Geraghty was discussing encountering that among his friends on the Three Martini Lunch. Those who do not pay attention to government will have government pay attention to them.
But did these people have their current jobs then?
It’s the LSD…
I don’t think that matters to them. There are a lot of people who think they could have President Bernie and the good times would continue to roll, PLUS they would get free college, etc. As I’ve mentioned before, some of my neighbors don’t even think the economic good news, low unemployment, etc, is even anything thing to do with Trump. They say, and they at least seem to be serious, that it’s “leftover Obama.” And of course, when everything tanks under President Bernie, they would believe that’s “leftover Trump.”
I know in my situation, I didn’t vote for anyone for president in 2016 — NBD in Texas, because Trump still beat Hillary by eight points. But Jonah voiced my fear that Trump wasn’t a true conservative, and I had watched him over the years be a following, not a leading indicator of popular sentiment. He’d move right or left in reaction to swing voters moving right or left.
So my fear was if the Democrats got the swing voters on their side in the midterms, Trump would follow them left after that. But to my relief, that didn’t happen. You can argue that didn’t happen because the left’s hatred made it impossible for Trump to triangulate to the left even if he had wanted to, but that’s where we are today — President Trump is now a known quantity, not a hypothetical, and your 2020 vote is based on what he has done and what Democrats say they’ll do.
That’s the key thing. Even right at the start of the current fracking boom, most of the counties where it’s occurring were among the poorest in the state, with some even qualifying for colonias funds due to the awful conditions of running water and sewer in the poorer areas. Telling people you’re going to take away their current improved lifestyles and ‘retrain’ them for new supercalifragalisticexpealadocious jobs isn’t going to fly, even if people in New York or California want to fall for that line due to their love for Gaia.
The Davis campaign in 2014 showed if you run a statewide race trying to cater to progressive media and big donors in New York and California, Latino voters in Texas will walk away or vote for the other guy (even if the progressives in Austin also swoon). That’s why Beto kept his wackier ideas to himself running against Cruz in 2018; if he had run on the things he pushed while running for president in 2019, he loses by at least 10 points, and that’s the problem for the Dems in Texas.
Houston mayor Sylvester Turner (who is black) just caught a lot of grief for endorsing Bloomberg for president due to the Stop and Frisk kerfuffle. But of the possible presidential nominees, he’s the one least into the Green New Deal and the idea of banning fracking (the nearest new generation frack zones to Houston is about 100 miles, but kill it off and you’d also devastate that city’s white collar economy). Turner gets that no matter how hard-wired some groups may seem to be with the Democrats, the majority aren’t going to pick government assistance over their jobs in the current economy if someone like Bernie wins the election.
What’s the story about Ricochet members being “banned” (expelled?) for supporting Donald Trump with, what, too much enthusiasm?
I’m done. They are so irrational regarding Trump I can’t listen any more. They are masters at ignoring the chaos and disgusting behavior on the Democratic side. Trump is incompetent and crazy. Their arguments for 3 years have been unconvinincing and tired.
They weren’t banned for supporting Donald Trump. They happened to be strong supporters who took a notion that TPTB at Ricochet were all Trump haters, and therefore Hillary Lovers, and both the ones I am thinking of then did about everything they could to get themselves banned and be martyrs. They violated the CoC multiple times, argued about it impolitely, etc. It’s very, very hard to get Scott to turn away a paying customer. You have to work hard at it.
They literally talk and write about the Democratic disaster every week. They discussed it on this very episode and this piece is from yesterday:
https://gfile.thedispatch.com/p/the-mess-the-democrats-are-in
Please name one Ricochet member who was banned (or expelled) for supporting Donald Trump. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
She misunderstood something I had written earlier. Keep reading, you’ll see I cleared it up.
His vote does matter. Just not to him.
You think the future is a straight line. I think it goes more in cycles. Guess we’ll find out who’s right.
I think it goes in spirals, like a stretched-out slinky. So actually both. Or someone said, the past doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes.
Anyway, I want to take your bet about the over/under on the AA vote. A years subscription versus a years banning?
You are talking past each other. It’s not that they don’t ridicule Democrat candidates and their policies, they are going after the serially fraudulent charges the Democrats are hurling at Trump. That I guess would look too much like they were defending him.
Yeah, we all know how ridiculous the Democrats are with their policies. That’s so last century. We are fighting them, not debating. This is like being in a war with Germany in 1944 and telling Americans how bad fascism is as a system of government, while refusing to participate in the war itself because war is wrong and bad things happen to people.
Meh, they criticize and even ridicule the things they don’t like or disagree with. Maybe they don’t hit it hard enough for your tastes. OK. Punditry is a subjective business. Some like the Rush flavor, some like theirs more subtle. Doesn’t mean either variety is wrong.
So if it rhymes, then we should get some type of political environment where the person at the top of the ladder isn’t tweeting in ALL CAPS, name-calling rivals with words better suited to a playground, and a President with some basic knowledge of history and policy that isn’t discussed first on Fox and Friends? ‘Cause I’m totally down for that.
I’ll take the bet, but only on a gentleman basis.
Man, reminds me of that 1800 election.
The future rap musical on Trump will include a duel between Mike Pence and Pete Buttigieg on the fields of Weehawken.
History repeats itself, first as a tragedy then as a farce.
That’s a quote from some guy. One of the Marx brothers, I think. The one with the really, really dark sense of humor.
I see what you did there.
BYO. Problem solved.
Agreed! Went for the first time last year. Ridiculously expensive but it was a superb tour. I had just read How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis which made it all the more vivid.
In “Indiana Jones and the Temple Of Doom,” “Snake Surprise” was a royal delicacy.
And I don’t think it’s obviously correct that if Trump would just be quiet, the left would continue to be as crazy as they are. So much of the left’s craziness is a reaction to Trump.
Go back to the fall of 1980 and you had Democrats and media outlets claiming Reagan was an evil idiot who would start World War III the moment he took his hand off the Bible on inauguration day. Trump didn’t cause the left’s reactions today, but by aggressively fighting back, he’s simply heightened their reactions to the point of comic insanity, in part because they feel compelled to one-up his hyperbole in some immediate gratification hope that the next outrageous outrage will finally be the one that permanently turns all the swing voters against Trump.
I should have been more specific. I meant their current hyper-craziness. The kind that could stop them from winning Presidential elections for decades to come, while their previous craziness wasn’t sufficient to prevent the elections of Clinton and Obama.