The New Yorker, David Remnick Donald Trump’s ascent was hardly the first sign that Americans had not uniformly regarded Obama’s election as an inspiring chapter in the country’s fitful progress toward equality. Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House, had branded him the “food-stamp President.” In the right-wing and white-nationalist media, Obama was, variously, a socialist, a Muslim, the Antichrist, a “liberal fascist,” who was assembling his own Hitler Youth. A high-speed train from Las Vegas to Anaheim that was part of the economic-stimulus package was a secret effort to connect the brothels of Nevada to the innocents at Disneyland. He was, by nature, suspect. “You just look at the body language, and there’s something going on,” Trump said, last summer. In the meantime, beginning on the day of Obama’s first inaugural, the Secret Service fielded an unprecedented number of threats against the President’s person.
And so, speeding toward yet another airport last November, Obama seemed like a weary man who harbored a burning seed of apprehension. “We’ve seen this coming,” he said. “Donald Trump is not an outlier; he is a culmination, a logical conclusion of the rhetoric and tactics of the Republican Party for the past ten, fifteen, twenty years. What surprised me was the degree to which those tactics and rhetoric completely jumped the rails.”
For half a century, in fact, the leaders of the G.O.P. have fanned the lingering embers of racial resentment in the United States. Through shrewd political calculation and rhetoric, from Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy” to the latest charges of voter fraud in majority-African-American districts, doing so has paid off at the ballot box. “There were no governing principles,” Obama said. “There was no one to say, ‘No, this is going too far, this isn’t what we stand for.’ ”
Woulda been nice if the Press Poodles had made slightly more of a point about how Repubs had "fanned the lingering embers" over the last 50 fucking years.
It almost amazes me that everybody suddenly sees what's been going on.
As always, driftglass finds a good example of how Poodles do their little poodling thing:
On the subject of "sometimes there's only one side": That's a nice-sounding slogan, but when I drill into it, I see False Equivalence again. So yes, there are two sides. One side is the decent human being side. The other side is the unrepentant unremitting unreasonable asshole side. Both sides vote. One side votes (mostly) for Republicans. And we should be talking about all the times we heard politicians of a certain stripe spending breath and energy yammering on about how we can't appease these rotten guys - Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, Radovan Karadzic, Manuel Noriega - that if we don't shut them down (by force if needed), they'll be emboldened; they'll go further; and we'll pay a much higher price trying to stop them later. Where the fuck are you this time, Republicans? Oh right, I almost forgot - they are you and you are them. There's not a dime's worth of difference between you and the knuckle-draggers you've been courting for 40 years with all that coded language. That's the GOP now. That's who you are, and I guess I should try not to be surprised by any of this. Stop cowering, get back up on your hind legs and help us do something about it.
“No matter what happens, Steve is a honey badger,” said this person, who like others interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation. “Steve’s in a good place. He doesn’t care. He’s going to support the president and push the agenda, whether he’s on the inside or the outside.”
Bannon doesn't care.
First off, he knows he's insulated. He doesn't have to worry about the effects of shitty draconian policies on regular people cuz he's not regular people.
Guys at Bannon's level pretty much think they own the government anyway (or at least they think they should - 'course we haven't exactly been giving them whole big bunches of reasons to think otherwise). And there's always the probability that he just enjoys having the power, and the time, to dabble.
Wanting to prevent ridiculously rich and craven people from "governing" at their leisurely whim was kinda the whole point of 'The United States of America' in first place, wasn't it?
So lemme see - what might keep these assholes kinda reined in so they'd hafta spend more time minding their own goddamned business and less time fucking with the rest of us?
Anybody wanna talk Tax Reform? Be ready - cuz that's coming soon, but for now:
