We Lost the Battle for the Republican Party’s Soul Long Ago

[Overlander]

But smarter and more strategic than Giggles and the entire DNC. So, there’s that.

Speaking of mouth breathers….

If being a mouth breather is defined as being in opposition to you, I’ll wear that designation proudly.

Hehe, I fucking knew it

[Overlander]

The mouth breathers want to tear it down.

They put blind faith in The Chosen One to do just that.

Meanwhile, he wants drain the cash out of it as he leads it to a slow, profitable death.

I will admit that I overlooked what is super obvious now in hindsight.

An immigration crackdown that can be accomplished entirely on paper is MUCH more Trump’s speed than one that requires, you know, doing stuff.

And such an immigration crackdown will of COURSE be felt most acutely by the Silicon Valley class of Trump’s equityholders, who require cheap H-1B labor just as our farmers require cheap undocumented labor.

Only those equityholders are smarter than Trump, and more strategic than Trump.

Which of course is not a high bar: Trump is neither smart nor strategic.

1) get rid of immigrants who work low wage manual labor, replacing them with poor, desperate US citizens
2) dismantle the US public education system, ensuring that the children of poor taxpaying voters remain poor and uneducated, making them forever beholden to corporate billionaires for their livelihood and survival.
3) hire educated immigrants on H1B visas to work jobs thatbrequire education and learned skills so that the billionaires can pay them less and own their existence, holding their visa status over them to make them accept less money

Wealthy billionaires now completely own the GOP. Well done you fucking morons.

In a nutshell.

And all the while, they will believe they are winning.

Having never experienced an actual victory, it will be easier for Donny and Co to convince them they are.

[Sparko]

And they would have gotten away with it too if not for those principled enablers who called their possible salvation giggles. Oops.

[zsn]

https://cdn.prod.dailykos.com/images/13 ... 1735395863

Just about sums up the MAGA hilarity

[twocoach]

I will admit that I overlooked what is super obvious now in hindsight.

An immigration crackdown that can be accomplished entirely on paper is MUCH more Trump’s speed than one that requires, you know, doing stuff.

And such an immigration crackdown will of COURSE be felt most acutely by the Silicon Valley class of Trump’s equityholders, who require cheap H-1B labor just as our farmers require cheap undocumented labor.

Only those equityholders are smarter than Trump, and more strategic than Trump.

Which of course is not a high bar: Trump is neither smart nor strategic.

1) get rid of immigrants who work low wage manual labor, replacing them with poor, desperate US citizens
2) dismantle the US public education system, ensuring that the children of poor taxpaying voters remain poor and uneducated, making them forever beholden to corporate billionaires for their livelihood and survival.
3) hire educated immigrants on H1B visas to work jobs thatbrequire education and learned skills so that the billionaires can pay them less and own their existence, holding their visa status over them to make them accept less money

Wealthy billionaires now completely own the GOP. Well done you fucking morons.

In a nutshell.

And all the while, they will believe they are winning.

Having never experienced an actual victory, it will be easier for Donny and Co to convince them they are.

Congrats on winning a lifetime of picking produce in the hot sun.

[jfish26]

You could probably take out half the Republican party if you could make sufficient Vitamin C intake a "liberal" issue.

[japhy]

The Alphas will rise to the top!

My favorite....

In the press, the intra-MAGA spat pitting wealthy tech bros Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy against the larger MAGA masses has been framed primarily as an immigration fight. That's fair enough, as the tech guys want to keep high-skilled immigrants working in Silicon Valley, whereas the Steve Bannon contingent intends to kick out as many immigrants of color as they can. But one low-key aspect of the dispute is gender, as evidenced by Ramaswamy's colorful insults of the American people.

"American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long," Ramaswamy complained on Musk's X, denouncing a culture that celebrates "the jock over the valedictorian." He mentioned the "prom queen" in passing, but his examples all involved contrasting these two stereotypes of masculinity. "A culture that venerates Cory from 'Boy Meets World,' or Zach & Slater over Screech in 'Saved by the Bell,' or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in 'Family Matters,' will not produce the best engineers," he griped.

For someone who fancies himself a leader in the MAGA movement, the tweet was deliciously tone-deaf. Anxious hyper-masculinity has always been central to Donald Trump's political cult, but this past year, the trying-too-hard aspects got downright comical. Trump received a major endorsement from podcaster Joe Rogan, whose entire schtick is being the standard-issue meathead who didn't do the reading before running his mouth. Trump's sidekick, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., built his career on shunning scientific knowledge and posting shirtless workout videos. They're the two most prominent examples, but Trumpworld floats on an ocean of masculinity grifters, all hawking useless supplements and assuring followers they, too, can have pecs the size of basketballs.

To be certain, Ramaswamy isn't completely wrong. The MAGA coalition also includes a hefty population of bitter nerds, the kinds of guys who lurk on "incel" forums and complain that women are too busy dating beefcakes to notice the larger paychecks of the skinny programmers. (That a woman might care about a man's personality is assumed impossible.) Many of these guys are also big consumers of the masculinity grifters, throwing huge amounts of money away in the hope of finding manhood in a capsule.

The rift reveals the larger paradox beating at the heart of MAGA: They venerate masculinity, but cannot tell you what it is. Look closely at their manhood discourse and the contradictions are immediately apparent. They insist gender is "natural," fixed at birth, and beyond an individual's power to change. They also treat manhood as a fragile status, easily snatched away by the smallest of choices. According to Jesse Watters at Fox News, merely wishing another man "happy birthday" is enough to remove man status from a person. Manfluencer and accused sex trafficker Andrew Tate declares one emasculated for admiring a woman's beauty. As I wrote about last week, MAGA hype man Josiah Moody claims it's "gay" to have sex with your wife for pleasure. Fox News' list of foods that strip your masculinity away is long, ranging from ice cream cones to soup. MAGA tells trans women they are still "men" despite hormones, surgeries and living as women. Yet to other cis men, they insist "man" is a designation so precious that it can be lost at a moment's notice for the slightest of reasons.

The incoherence is embodied by Trump himself. In the rhetoric of MAGA, Trump is a manly man, and he's often portrayed in cartoons and AI-generated imagery as muscle-bound and virile.

In truth, Trump conceals his 78 years of age with heavy makeup and an elaborate combover. Baggy clothes do not hide his substantial girth.

I was watching "The Bird Cage" last night and thought Nathan Lane would be perfect to play the part of trumpty plumpty when they do the movie version of his presidency.

He is so hostile to physical activity that he refused to walk 700 yards with other G7 leaders in Italy in 2017. MAGA tried to use the assassin's bullet that grazed Trump's ear to build up this fantasy of a strapping action hero leader. The reality, though, is he had to be helped to his feet and kept complaining about his shoes, only doing the fist bump when he remembered the cameras were on him.

MAGA masculinity is such a hazy and contradictory concept that it mostly gets defined by what it's not: not female, not queer, not allowed to eat ice cream or say "happy birthday." This ad for a Christian nationalist content network called Canon Press is a darkly funny example. It's just a litany of images of everything that allegedly makes men "cultural cuckolds": seeing gay couples, seeing drag queens, being nice to other people, drinking Budweiser. The most they can cough up as positive attributes of manhood are working out and parenting children. The libs, the queers, and the chicks probably do both on the regular more than the straight MAGA men this ad is aimed at.

One of the most telling examples of the emptiness of MAGA manhood this year was, ironically, a story about a woman. Haliey Welch is an extremely normal 22-year-old from Tennessee who found unexpected fame this year as the "Hawk Tuah" girl after she drunkenly described how she likes to "spit on that thang" to one of those irritating man-on-the-street hosts. The joke is mildly funny to liberal America, where no one is surprised that women can have raunchy senses of humor. But more conservative men were apparently shocked like they were cavemen seeing electricity for the first time, because they sent that clip around like it was the most important moment in history captured on film.

Welch strenuously avoided partisan politics in her efforts to capitalize on her 15 minutes of fame, but that didn't stop the MAGA movement from trying to claim her as an icon, pairing her with images of Trump, and claiming falsely that she epitomized "conservative values." Instead of the relentless list of behaviors and tastes forbidden to men, this seemed like an effort to offer something substantive to define MAGA manhood. Welch was being held out as the kind of a woman a MAGA man is permitted — even expected — to be attracted to.

But even though Welch is young, blonde and conventionally attractive, even this feeble effort to put something in the "yes" column for defining MAGA manhood fell apart. There is no way to square the "Hawk Tuah" meme with the reality of the MAGA movement, which is busy banning abortion and electing leaders, like Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., who decry premarital sex and erotic self-expression as "sexual anarchy." Welch only became famous because she was enjoying hardwon freedoms the GOP wants to deny women, a contradiction that cannot be squared with trying to make her a MAGA icon. Unsurprisingly, her brand collapsed pretty quickly and she seems set on the path to return to normal, pre-meme life.

No doubt conservative readers will be angry with me, insisting I also cannot tell them what a "man" is. After all, these are the same people who thought it was a great troll to ask liberals "What is a woman?" and elicit confused responses. Of course, when asked the same question, Republicans can't answer, either. The difficulty in answering this "simple" question isn't a bad thing, however. It shows that the real answer is that human beings don't fit neatly into little boxes. A man can be muscular or not, straight or queer, tall or short. A woman can be all those things, too. Hell, a man does not — regardless of what Ramaswamy might say — have to choose between being the jock or the valedictorian. He can be both. Women, too. This is what freedom looks like, but instead of welcoming it, the self-described freedom-defenders of MAGA run as hard as they can to their never-ending list of "thou shalt nots" to define manhood, from drinking Bud to eating ice cream.

[japhy]

They elected a meme for president, why not an emoji for speaker?

When House Republicans aren’t busy seeing who can do more to make rich people’s lives easier, they like to spend time disliking whoever it is they’ve picked as their leader.

It’s for that reason that House Speaker Mike Johnson walks into Friday’s speaker election uncertain he’ll walk out with the same job title.

In theory, this should be an easy vote for a party that just won the presidency, held the House and reclaimed control of the Senate. President-elect Donald Trump has endorsed Johnson, and it would be embarrassing, bordering on calamitous, for Republicans to not have a speaker in place before the election is certified on Monday.

But these are not the Reagan Republicans of old. They’re more Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College Republicans, or Trump Republicans for short. Chaos is their oxygen, so what was once a routine blip in the process when a new Congress convenes has become a cross between high drama and sitcom absurdity.

In January 2023, it took House Republicans 15 rounds of voting to elect Kevin McCarthy as speaker.

And they booted him that October. Then they took three weeks before settling for Johnson.

Now, with reelection upon us, it seems the Louisiana Republican has done little to win over his own gang.

The main problem Johnson faces in maintaining his speakership is that a lot of Republicans and quite literally all Democrats dislike him. That’s understandable, as Johnson’s most obvious talent is being easy to dislike.

Democrats see him, accurately, as an obsequious yes-man to Trump and a far-right extremist. A number of conservative Republicans – mainly those making up the House Freedom Caucus – see Johnson as not extreme enough, which is simultaneously hilarious and frightening.

What if GOP booted Johnson and put in a real contender:

To save House Republicans from any further embarrassment or claims that they’re incapable of governing, I have a solution: Get rid of Johnson and elect an angry-face emoji as speaker of the House.

Republican lawmakers clearly aren’t going to like whomever they elect, so why not just a pick a symbol that represents the party’s overall attitude toward everything: non-specific anger.

Trump is always angry. Republican voters, if my email inbox is any indication, are always angry. GOP lawmakers in the House and Senate are constantly going on Fox News to be angry.

I can think of no better House speaker than

It’s honestly the one thing all Trump Republicans can agree on: .

It should be no problem for House Republicans to unanimously rally behind . And while Democrats will undoubtedly oppose – they’d probably be more in favor of ☮ or some such – they could certainly do worse than having leading the opposition caucus.

So why not give it a try, Republicans. Embrace who you are and introduce America to House Speaker .

As always, thank you for your debt service rubes.

[Shirley]

The Alphas will rise to the top!

My favorite....

In the press, the intra-MAGA spat pitting wealthy tech bros Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy against the larger MAGA masses has been framed primarily as an immigration fight. That's fair enough, as the tech guys want to keep high-skilled immigrants working in Silicon Valley, whereas the Steve Bannon contingent intends to kick out as many immigrants of color as they can. But one low-key aspect of the dispute is gender, as evidenced by Ramaswamy's colorful insults of the American people.

"American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long," Ramaswamy complained on Musk's X, denouncing a culture that celebrates "the jock over the valedictorian." He mentioned the "prom queen" in passing, but his examples all involved contrasting these two stereotypes of masculinity. "A culture that venerates Cory from 'Boy Meets World,' or Zach & Slater over Screech in 'Saved by the Bell,' or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in 'Family Matters,' will not produce the best engineers," he griped.

For someone who fancies himself a leader in the MAGA movement, the tweet was deliciously tone-deaf. Anxious hyper-masculinity has always been central to Donald Trump's political cult, but this past year, the trying-too-hard aspects got downright comical. Trump received a major endorsement from podcaster Joe Rogan, whose entire schtick is being the standard-issue meathead who didn't do the reading before running his mouth. Trump's sidekick, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., built his career on shunning scientific knowledge and posting shirtless workout videos. They're the two most prominent examples, but Trumpworld floats on an ocean of masculinity grifters, all hawking useless supplements and assuring followers they, too, can have pecs the size of basketballs.

To be certain, Ramaswamy isn't completely wrong. The MAGA coalition also includes a hefty population of bitter nerds, the kinds of guys who lurk on "incel" forums and complain that women are too busy dating beefcakes to notice the larger paychecks of the skinny programmers. (That a woman might care about a man's personality is assumed impossible.) Many of these guys are also big consumers of the masculinity grifters, throwing huge amounts of money away in the hope of finding manhood in a capsule.

The rift reveals the larger paradox beating at the heart of MAGA: They venerate masculinity, but cannot tell you what it is. Look closely at their manhood discourse and the contradictions are immediately apparent. They insist gender is "natural," fixed at birth, and beyond an individual's power to change. They also treat manhood as a fragile status, easily snatched away by the smallest of choices. According to Jesse Watters at Fox News, merely wishing another man "happy birthday" is enough to remove man status from a person. Manfluencer and accused sex trafficker Andrew Tate declares one emasculated for admiring a woman's beauty. As I wrote about last week, MAGA hype man Josiah Moody claims it's "gay" to have sex with your wife for pleasure. Fox News' list of foods that strip your masculinity away is long, ranging from ice cream cones to soup. MAGA tells trans women they are still "men" despite hormones, surgeries and living as women. Yet to other cis men, they insist "man" is a designation so precious that it can be lost at a moment's notice for the slightest of reasons.

The incoherence is embodied by Trump himself. In the rhetoric of MAGA, Trump is a manly man, and he's often portrayed in cartoons and AI-generated imagery as muscle-bound and virile.

In truth, Trump conceals his 78 years of age with heavy makeup and an elaborate combover. Baggy clothes do not hide his substantial girth.

I was watching "The Bird Cage" last night and thought Nathan Lane would be perfect to play the part of trumpty plumpty when they do the movie version of his presidency.

He is so hostile to physical activity that he refused to walk 700 yards with other G7 leaders in Italy in 2017. MAGA tried to use the assassin's bullet that grazed Trump's ear to build up this fantasy of a strapping action hero leader. The reality, though, is he had to be helped to his feet and kept complaining about his shoes, only doing the fist bump when he remembered the cameras were on him.

MAGA masculinity is such a hazy and contradictory concept that it mostly gets defined by what it's not: not female, not queer, not allowed to eat ice cream or say "happy birthday." This ad for a Christian nationalist content network called Canon Press is a darkly funny example. It's just a litany of images of everything that allegedly makes men "cultural cuckolds": seeing gay couples, seeing drag queens, being nice to other people, drinking Budweiser. The most they can cough up as positive attributes of manhood are working out and parenting children. The libs, the queers, and the chicks probably do both on the regular more than the straight MAGA men this ad is aimed at.

One of the most telling examples of the emptiness of MAGA manhood this year was, ironically, a story about a woman. Haliey Welch is an extremely normal 22-year-old from Tennessee who found unexpected fame this year as the "Hawk Tuah" girl after she drunkenly described how she likes to "spit on that thang" to one of those irritating man-on-the-street hosts. The joke is mildly funny to liberal America, where no one is surprised that women can have raunchy senses of humor. But more conservative men were apparently shocked like they were cavemen seeing electricity for the first time, because they sent that clip around like it was the most important moment in history captured on film.

Welch strenuously avoided partisan politics in her efforts to capitalize on her 15 minutes of fame, but that didn't stop the MAGA movement from trying to claim her as an icon, pairing her with images of Trump, and claiming falsely that she epitomized "conservative values." Instead of the relentless list of behaviors and tastes forbidden to men, this seemed like an effort to offer something substantive to define MAGA manhood. Welch was being held out as the kind of a woman a MAGA man is permitted — even expected — to be attracted to.

But even though Welch is young, blonde and conventionally attractive, even this feeble effort to put something in the "yes" column for defining MAGA manhood fell apart. There is no way to square the "Hawk Tuah" meme with the reality of the MAGA movement, which is busy banning abortion and electing leaders, like Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., who decry premarital sex and erotic self-expression as "sexual anarchy." Welch only became famous because she was enjoying hardwon freedoms the GOP wants to deny women, a contradiction that cannot be squared with trying to make her a MAGA icon. Unsurprisingly, her brand collapsed pretty quickly and she seems set on the path to return to normal, pre-meme life.

No doubt conservative readers will be angry with me, insisting I also cannot tell them what a "man" is. After all, these are the same people who thought it was a great troll to ask liberals "What is a woman?" and elicit confused responses. Of course, when asked the same question, Republicans can't answer, either. The difficulty in answering this "simple" question isn't a bad thing, however. It shows that the real answer is that human beings don't fit neatly into little boxes. A man can be muscular or not, straight or queer, tall or short. A woman can be all those things, too. Hell, a man does not — regardless of what Ramaswamy might say — have to choose between being the jock or the valedictorian. He can be both. Women, too. This is what freedom looks like, but instead of welcoming it, the self-described freedom-defenders of MAGA run as hard as they can to their never-ending list of "thou shalt nots" to define manhood, from drinking Bud to eating ice cream.

Full disclosure: I love hearty soups that act as a meal on their own, and make them all the time, and ice cream is one of the best things in life.

Guess I just outed myself.




dammit

[Sparko]

I love ice cream. Soups as well. And women. So conflicted.

[Shirley]

I love ice cream. Soups as well. And women. So conflicted.

Thanks for reminding me that I like girls, too!

Really!

[japhy]

Paletas are my kryptonite. As soon as I put down the vape, I head to the kitchen. Fresas con cream, those La Michoacana brand ones, those are the shit!

[jfish26]

Soups are a scam.

Not quite to the level of chips-as-a-side, but a scam nonetheless.

[Shirley]

Soups are a scam.

Not quite to the level of chips-as-a-side, but a scam nonetheless.

I’m not sure we can be friends

[jfish26]

Then I'm not sure we ever were.

[RainbowsandUnicorns]

[DeletedUser]

It never gets old.

[KUTradition]

https://www.kcci.com/article/state-prop ... s/63535506