Joe Biden has managed to stay in the front of the pack running for the Democratic nomination for president, despite talking about the GOP having an epiphany after Trump, and more recently saying Mitch McConnell might become “Mildly cooperative.”
This has caused some consternation in the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. Kevin Drum suggested a while back that Biden is just avoiding a confrontational approach, on the basis that while this might outrage progressives, Biden is mindful of those voters who want to believe things like this. Biden may or may not believe it, but he knows what people want to hear and his poll numbers don’t contradict this.
Driftglass is not amused.
-- Joe Biden continues to run decisively ahead in the Beltway Bubble/David Brooks/Meet the Press/Joe Scarborough primary.
I dunno which is getting to be more tediously soul-crushing: forever shouting unheeded warnings at people who drive right off the same fucking cliff over and over again, or listening to them moan and prattle after each crash about how nobody saw it coming.
Driftglass unloads in a related post.
...And so, as we stand here once again in the darkness cast across the globe by a monstrous Republican party and it's depraved leaders, we now have available to us a complete catalog of everything that doesn't work. For instance, trying to reason with Republicans fails every time. Facts are useless, even when those facts are their own words read back to them very slowly. Appeasement -- giving them anything -- only makes them more voracious because compromise is a dirty word to them. Offer them the hand of friendship and you'll pull back a charred stump.
Similarly, expecting the Mainstream Media to do journalism is a fool's errand, no matter how many times they shit the bed in public, and no matter how many times we shout "OMFG, just do your fucking job!" as one.
Driftglass remembers this from 2010 from Russell King, in which King implores the GOP to come to its senses and return to its values.
...Now the advice. You’re going to have to come up with a platform that isn’t built on a foundation of cowardice: fear of people with colors, religions, cultures and sex lives that differ from your own; fear of reform in banking, health care, energy; fantasy fears of America being transformed into an Islamic nation, into social/commun/fasc-ism, into a disarmed populace put in internment camps; and more. But you have work to do even before you take on that task.
Your party — the GOP — and the conservative end of the American political spectrum have become irresponsible and irrational. Worse, they’re tolerating, promoting and celebrating prejudice and hatred. Let me provide some examples — by no means an exhaustive list — of where the Right as gotten itself stuck in a swamp of hypocrisy, hyperbole, historical inaccuracy and hatred.
If you’re going to regain your stature as a party of rational, responsible people, you’ll have to start by draining this swamp:
What follows is an exhaustive catalog of GOP hypocrisy, hyperbole, history and hatred. Names are named; examples are given. RTWT
As Driftglass notes:
...All the clowns were accurately named and shamed. All the sin and treason and impregnable ignorance and suffocating hypocrisy of the Right (which we had all been writing about piecemeal for years) were gathered together, sorted out and nailed to the nation's cathedral door is exquisite, irrefutable detail
To this day I still go back to it and admire it as the Bayeux Tapestry of take-downs of Conservatives and their Republican party,
But here's the thing.
It didn't alter the trajectory of the GOP one iota. And it did not move the needle on the pathological Both Siderism of the American political press one scintilla. And this, I suppose, is my point.
emphasis added
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose
This video seems appropriate.