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Even though Jonah is off this week, Rob Long has some personal news to share concerning his health and (like Hilaria Baldwin), his ethnicity. Also, John reviews Wonder Woman ’84 and Soul, Rob reveals the most successful man in show biz (no, it’s not himself), John picks the best director working today, and both pick their top 3 of 2020. Happy New Year to all GLoP listeners of all ethnicities and political persuasions.
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And some people use a bar on a Z to make sure it’s not seen as a 2.
Yeah, I do that one too. I’ve been training myself to write the two with the loop on the bottom to make assurances doubly sure.
I don’t usually have trouble with any of this, when it comes to actual writing. But computer fonts can be very deceptive. Sometimes there’s little or no visible difference between a 1 (one), I (capital eye), and l (lower-case ell). Then you get O (capital oh) versus o (lower-case oh) vs 0 (zero) which sometimes look the opposite of what you’d expect, depending on the style.
Ace, over at the Ace of Spades blog, has gone scorched earth over the past five years on Republicans he sees as disloyal to Trump. But he went after Trump the other day in a post about him refusing to leave Twitter:
What I’d say this indicates is only someone who is seen as more focused and less into legacy/prestige media than Trump — but just as combative as Trump — is going to have any chance at all at pulling primary voters away from Trump as long as there’s a chance he runs in 2024. That might help a Hawley or DeSantis (I still think if they jump in before Trump says he’s out, they lose most of Trump’s core voters in ’24), but it’s hard to see how it works for Pence, who’d have to completely remake his image as a more restrained politician to have any chance at winning Trump’s base, and odds are they wouldn’t buy it.
Ace’s posting is actually a complaint that Trump has not (yet) moved from Twitter to Parler, so I take his comments with a grain of salt.
When George W. Bush was President, I remember wondering at his giving exclusive interviews to ABC, CBS, and NBC, while giving Fox News the back of his hand. Trump has been a lot better at recognizing and encouraging his own allies.
On the other hand, he was slow to disabuse himself of the delusion that, as a person of good will, he can make himself understood by persons of good will on the other side. His problem is that the supply of persons of good will on the other side is rapidly approaching zero.
To paraphrase Karl Marx, the journalists’ purpose was not to understand Trump, but to destroy him.
@jon1979 — P.S.: I don’t think any candidate is “going to have any chance at all at pulling primary voters away from Trump”.
I agree. But Ace — who I think you could call a relative hard-liner in recent years in the battles between the GOP party factions — seems to be leaving himself an opening to migrate over to Team Hawley or Team DeSantis, post-2022, even if Trump has yet to say he’s out of the 2024 race.
The other question, of course, it whether or not Trump’s populist appeal without his 40-plus years of celebrity would be transferable to a Hawley or a DeSantis in the first place. If Trump’s support is more about his history and his wealth than his specific positions, anyone trying to run as Trump v2.0 in 2024 (if Trump does not run) isn’t going pull in all the core voters he or she thinks they will, while setting themselves up to be negatively defined by the media to voters who aren’t political junkies and don’t know who the next round of candidates are (in fact a lot of the media’s attempts to demonize DeSantis in 2020 seems to be linked to his having such a good first year as governor in Florida, and the media eying him as a potential post-Trump threat in 2024. That would explain thy hyperbolic attempts to portray him as a miserable failure in handling the COVID-19 crisis, compared to Andrew Cuomo’s roaring success in New York — they want to try and define DeSantis negatively in their terms to people outside of Florida, before DeSantis has a chance to define himself).
I don’t agree with this. Jonah provides balance, because when he’s there with Rob, they keep Pod under control. Without Jonah, surprisingly, Rob was more likely to let Pod filibuster. I like all three at times, but each has strengths and weaknesses. Like a good role-playing game, you need all the members of the party to achieve your objective.
I actually didn’t catch this until I read your comment!
Where’s the pic?
Personally, I miss Jonah and enjoy the politics discussions on GLoP.
In addition to the liberal media doing preemptive strikes against future Republican candidates, we have to guard against them, in effect, selecting the Republican nominee.
McCain and Romney were perhaps the least conservative among the viable candidates; while Trump was also the one candidate liberals were sure Hillary could beat.
P.S.: In 2016, claiming “Trump’s populist appeal” was based on his “40-plus years of celebrity … his history and his wealth”, as opposed to his populist positions, was at least arguable. I don’t think it is any more, however, now that Trump has an actual track record to point to.
I miss the old Jonah.
It seems more and more likely that the old Jonah was some kind of simulacrum.
I think that Trump broke him and he got older and tired. It is really sad.
It just doesn’t seem possible that Trump could “break” a real conservative. It seems more likely that what was inside Jonah wasn’t ever truly conservative, and all Trump “broke” was the outer shell.
I’m assuming someone on the GOP side is looking at the voting results in both Texas at Florida, where Trump made huge gains among the Latino populations of those states, and smaller gains among the African-American voters, which helped offset losses among white, suburban voters in those same states (I know at least here in Texas, the Democrats are looking at it, because they were completely freaked out that they never saw it coming).
If you’re a soft #NeverTrump type, who hates Trump’s style but not to the point you abandoned your own personal ideological beliefs, this is a big conundrum if you’re being honest with yourself, because if you want to return the GOP to the pre-Trump era without concern about the breakdown in the 2020 vote totals, your the ones asking to trade minority voters Trump won over for those white suburban voters he lost, and that’s not going to change no matter how many times you shout ‘Charlottsville’ or ‘Q Anon’ to prove Trump’s some kind of racist. Then the question becomes was Trump more appealing to minority voters stylistically, due to policy, or due to a combination of both? (and where, here in Texas, Trump ran 6-10 points ahead of establishment Republican John Cornyn among those same minority voters, even as Cornyn ran 3-4 points ahead of Trump among white suburban voters).
I don’t know. I am so sick of Trump too, just not to the point that I will support Democrats. The Raffensperger tape is making me regret my vote for Trump. The man is a lunatic and needs to go away …. for good.
I am hoping that most people want the policies and the “but he fights” without the insanity and some erudition and dignity back. There are intriguing possibilities in the GOP like Desantis and Noem and some others. Trump must go away though or his voters will keep giving us Democrats in the White House.
I think it’s pretty easy to argue that Desantis, Noem, Cruz, and others wouldn’t have BECOME fighters as they now seem to be, more or less, without Trump. They certainly didn’t seem to be fighters BEFORE Trump.
Maybe it’s possible to retain those qualities independently, but I don’t think it’s possibly to reasonably claim that they would have moved away from go-along-to-get-along without Trump showing that people would actually support them for fighting. Even if some like Jonah thought it was awful.
There still is a difference between the hardcore and ‘soft’ #NeverTrumpers, as this exchange between Jonah and Steve Schmidt four weeks before the election showed:
Post-election, Biden’s win is more of a problem for Jonah than Steve, since Schmidt came out as a Democrat and can act as cheerleader for whatever Joe and Kamala do to his heart’s content. Jonah’s going to have to figure out a way to thread the needle and explain why Biden’s policies are terrible but why it’s better that Trump lost, and why the GOP can’t go with a Josh Hawley type in 2024, let alone another Trump run, at the same time many Republicans remember how Mitt Romney and even Maverick were Hitlerized in the 2008 and ’12 campaigns.
Jonah supporting, say, a Ben Sasse presidential run in 2024 based on the idea that Sasse would elevate the level of discourse and wouldn’t be treated by Democrats and their media allies as Ben Schicklgruber just would run head-first into the reality of how any Republican politician with a legitimate chance at winning the White House has been treated by the Dems and the friends in the media in the 21st Century. If he wants to have any influence in the 2024 cycle, he’s going to have to find some candidate(s) he likes but who also are willing to take on at least some of Trump’s combativeness and disdain for the Washington status-quo.
Probably but that is no reason to keep the crazy old Trump around. Keep the policies and the fighting spirit. Ditch the sad old loser. We owe Trump nothing.
Just dropping in here to say that for the last two or three years, the comments on this show have been consistently haranguing us to “stop talking about Trump!” or “I thought this was a pop culture show!” or most commonly, “I turned it off when they started discussing the President!”
This episode has almost no politics in it (I think Rob mentioned Trump in passing once, and then quickly apologized for it), and yet the comments have mostly been all about Trump and politics.
What a world.
If it’s true – and I think it is – that Trump is what awakened the fighting spirit in other Republican candidates and they decided it was okay to do so because they saw the popular support for Trump, then we owe him for that.
Jonah seems to be too much of a Decorum Conservative for that.
“Attention everyone: I’m now going to tell you all about the deepest, innermost thoughts and actions of a person I don’t actually know.” 😳
It’s just the… pre-emptive?… slagging of Jonah for the predictable/inevitable (he can’t seem to NOT do it) slagging of Trump (and others like him) that Jonah would have done if he’d been on the show this time.
Fine. He had 4 years in the White House. We don’t owe him anything more. And I don’t completely support your premise. Trump is not the only one who can fight and he has never been. Trump himself fights with his own party.
Jonah gives evidence of his deepest, innermost thoughts and actions on a regular basis. That’s how we know him, because he TELLS US and SHOWS US.
This show was genuinely hilarious and I loved it. “Well, as a coronavirus sufferer…”
😂😂😂
I also appreciated the discussion about the three best things of 2020.
Thanks guys, and happy new year.