My politics are very different from entyti's, but I didn't think much of this article either.
Legolas Send a noteboard - 14/01/2023 01:16:24 AM
View original postExcept, of course, the events of Jan. 6, 2021 and Jan. 3–? of 2023 are not at all unrelated. Nor are they sequential points along a continuum that is leading us to a better place. Instead, they represent the locomotive and the caboose of the same train: Each is a point along a terrifying line of governmental failure; each is a subversion of the principles of lawful transition of power. But certainly they are moving in the same direction, and there should be no joy found in watching the present and past pancaking back on itself. In many ways, the events of this week should be as frightening to us as the events of two years past, if not more so. This, too, is an insurrection. That it’s coming—quite literally—from inside the House in 2023 should no more be grounds for popcorn and selfies from Democrats than the Capitol insurrection was in 2021. This is a profoundly serious systems failure, Trumpism without the relative coherence of Trump, and a triumph of nihilist anti-government fan fiction. And this go-round, those forces have a vote that is big enough to gum up the entire operation.
This paragraph is where the article went completely off the rails. This too is an insurrection? Relative coherence of Trump? What on earth is the author smoking there?
Last week's events did have an obvious historical parallel, but it was seven years ago, not two. And in many ways it's a partial recovery rather than a further escalation - the Republicans clashing and debating internally on politics and policy unrelated to Trump and him being essentially irrelevant to the outcome.
Now 'nihilist anti-government fan fiction' is not an unreasonable description of the rebels' position and fair enough to find that scary, but I've no idea how it's supposed to be less coherent than Trump's positions that shifted on a pretty much daily basis depending on who had flattered him most that day. And it has nothing whatsoever to do with Jan 6th or with any armed insurrection - it was the system working the way it's supposed to and the way it has worked in the past, even if that seems rather suboptimal.
View original postJan. 6, 2021, was scary but inherently cartoonish, with the face paint and the faux fur and the weapons and the body armor. January 2023 comes in shiny tasseled loafers and constituent messaging. Instead of leaking floor plans to insurrectionists in advance, members of the radical wing of the GOP are demanding committee chairs.
Yeah! It's an insurrection because politicians with certain views are using the power of their votes to try to achieve their political and policy goals! Or something! Whatever, it doesn't have to make sense as long as we can get eyeballs by ranting about how this new political event is even worse than anything else that ever happened before!
View original postPerhaps one difference is that this time, the ask—what they are fighting for—is actually less clear. On Jan. 6, amid the chilling cries of “Hang Mike Pence” and “Stop the Steal,” the ask was at least coherent: reinstate Donald Trump as president. The foggy MAGA ask of 2023? I have no idea. Power, sure. Fame and celebrity, definitely. Mumble mumble debt ceiling. OK. As John Boehner wrote in his 2021 memoir, the endgame now is chaos itself:
View original postWhat they’re really interested in is chaos … They want to throw sand in the gears of the hated federal government until it fails and they’ve finally proved that it is beyond saving. Every time they vote down a bill, they get another invitation to go on Fox News or talk radio. It’s a narcissistic – and dangerous – feedback loop.
And why are we suddenly quoting John Boehner? Oh right, because it suddenly felt like we were back in 2015, not 2021. Or even back in 2010 or 1994 - Republicans using aggressive tactics and rhetoric about reducing the size of the government, though mostly in counterproductive ways that will only blow up the national debt, isn't exactly new.
Not that Boehner was wrong about the dangerous feedback loop - it just has very little to do with Jan 6th or with Trump's attempts to destabilize the electoral system.
View original postGovernance is not the point, it’s the enemy. Government is not the point, it’s the enemy. In 2021, that was on display in what we could all recognize as violence and threats of bodily harm. In 2023, it’s being done with speeches and backroom negotiations and the stand-up-sit-down whack-a-mole energy of a Monty Python sketch. Those chairs they are seeking? It’s not to do anything with them, beyond further themselves. None of it will lead to a better, healthier, more functional or stable government, even if the week doesn’t end with feces smeared on the walls.
Please tell me we're not going to start with the 'words are actual violence' stuff. And the complaints about grandstanding politicians having more selfish goals than their rhetoric suggests might be endearingly naive in another context, but here they're just annoying.
View original postFor the Democrats who’ve succumbed to the popcorn and the gleeful selfies, one wonders why this is funnier than the events of two years ago this week. The government is not working. If a national emergency were to occur in the coming days or hours, those toddler tweets wouldn’t be a great look.
Why is this funnier than people fearing for their lives, law enforcement getting assaulted, crowds chanting 'hang Mike Pence'? Is that a trick question or is the author just a psychopath?
View original postMaybe one reason why it feels funny-ish is because there is finally a great big Trump-shaped hole at the center of this week’s performances. In 2021, Donald Trump was demonstrably on the side of the insurrectionists. This week, Trump called for his followers to support Kevin McCarthy. This time, they ignored him. Because he’s irrelevant now, a vestige of the Crazypants era of lawlessness and nihilism. We’ve moved on to the next era, the post-Crazypants era, in which various unqualified gun nuts and racists vie for the empty throne, without either the purse or the limited vision of the reality-show star who came before them. None of the disruptors care about much of anything at this juncture. Whether the prospect of Trumpism without Trump chills you or relieves you, the fact is that the MAGA faction that has stymied the transition to a GOP-led House is essentially leaderless—but it is also powerful. That is not, at least to my eyes, a meaningful improvement on 2021.
A few years ago, iirc before the 2020 election, Ben Shapiro claimed that a lot of the liberal rhetoric against Trump at that time, about how he was so uniquely terrible, was overblown and hypocritical, predicting that whenever Trump started to lose power or influence, those same liberals would immediately find reasons to describe the new conservative leaders, or would-be leaders, as even worse than Trump. Unsurprisingly, he was right as we see here.
View original postIf past is prologue, this week will prove to be yet another near miss in the annals of democratic decline. The hope right now is that January 2023 is the caboose on the Jan. 6 train, and not the café car, but if the thing these people trade on is attention, I don’t see any real reason for optimism.
Yeah, repeating the train metaphor isn't going to make it any less stupid. This article was just poor clickbait, honestly.
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My politics are very different from entyti's, but I didn't think much of this article either.
- 14/01/2023 01:16:24 AM
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