Maybe if they had expelled him over the child sex trafficking thing he wouldn’t have been able to do this.
Hell of it is, they basically had nothing on him. He’s my Congressman, so I was drooling at the prospect of seeing him in a concrete and steel box.
His buddy that got convicted, and was expected to flip, didn’t. Nada.
The girl (now a woman) involved now has an OnlyFans site. She refused to testify and the prosecution didn’t really want her because of what defense would do to her credibility on the stand. Ain’t fair, but it’s reality.
Sorry folks, he skated. Kills me to say it, but he deserved to when we couldn’t bring solid evidence. And unlike Trump, Gaetz was smart enough to STFU while the heat was on. Rest of the country probably missed it, but I didn’t. The man was real fucking quiet there for a minute. Now that he’s free and clear, the mouth is back in action.
The trafficked child grew up to do sex work and this somehow makes the Congressman who bought her look better.
Yep. Exactly how it worked out. Still doesn’t get us a legal foothold on this asshole.
(Wish you hadn’t said this. Now I’m even more, if possible, disgusted with Gaetz.)
I don’t think having an OnlyFans site would have been as impactful as rape culture isn’t as strong now as it used to be. Millennials would be in the jury box and they by and large don’t fall for such fuckery.
Yes and no. There wasn’t enough to file a legal case against him, but Republicans certainly had enough via texts and Venmo to remove him from their ranks.
Expulsion from the House doesn’t require a criminal conviction.
FFS they won’t kick George Santos, and he’s guilty as original sin. 😂
I’m an old guy, what do I know. “Grab 'em by the pussy”, would have ended a man’s political aspirations.
Then there was drama over that one guy who misspelled potatoe. “Not fit to be second in line to the Presidency!” And THAT guy had a hand in preserving our democracy! Matt Groenig and The Onion couldn’t write this shit.
Hell, guy before last had the temerity to wear a tan suit and enjoy Grey Poupon.
Scum.
Remember when “If it’s legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down,” literally ended a then-winning senatorial campaign in Missouri? That was only 11yrs ago!
For those who don’t know, that was Todd Akin ® who said that. And before he said that, he was the favorite to win against the incumbent, Senator Claire McCaskill (D), when MO was turning from purple to red. It was a landslide loss for him. Just 11 years ago, a comment like that would’ve ended a campaign and career completely.
Nowadays, that’d barely register.
Oh it’d register today.
In today’s world, that’d lead to a widely held belief among the Republican base that it was fucking true, and any disagreement with it would mean you’re a part of the vast liberal conspiracy.
Ah true. It’d be campaign slogan. Maybe even a party plank or tenet. Sigh.
And that guy who got run out of the primaries for “being excited.”
I mean, he mocked someone’s disability on stage, then insulted the parents of a Marine killed in action.
Isn’t there a financial paper trail of his crime?
“You know how you make America great again?” Graham asked in 2015. “Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.” Then, on the same day Trump essentially clinched the GOP nomination, the senator predicted, “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed…and we will deserve it.”
And he was right. Trump has completely destroyed the Republican Party. The house that Reagan and his 11th commandment built is now a structure fire.
I just want to take this time to say fuck Reagan.
fuck Reagan.
What’s wrong with his horse? I’m no Reagan-stan but we don’t need to be taking shots at his horse!
/s for those need it
I second that fuck. Can we get a burn in hell?
If the Christian god exists, Reagan is almost certainly in hell.
He’s literally the devil.
Trump has completely destroyed the Republican Party.
Not only has he destroyed the Republican Party, he has inflicted significant damage to the very fabric of the United States. He has sown
discoursediscord, conflict, and division that could take decades to undo. How sad.*discord. Discourse while sounding bad is just another word for discussion or debate.
Definitely. Writing without reviewing rarely yields a great sentence. Thanks.
Controversial opinion I don’t think he did honestly. I think his damage was short term. He busted open a lot of bullshit and made it clear why we shouldn’t be this way, and I think seeing voters in the last two elections has made that clear. We’ll see if the momentum continues but Americans made it clear tbh, we ain’t into it.
Dude, he threw wrenches into every possible governmental agency and operation he could, and we will be paying the price for decades. Having the EPA move to Kansas City so most would quit, having that puckering asshole Louis DeJoy run the USPS in order to weaponize mail delivery to blue states, including the destruction of what has turned out to be irreplaceable mail sorting machines, replacing experienced civil servants at all levels with partisan hacks or just leaving positions unfilled, giving away and/or selling state secrets that fuck US allies and relationships built over decades, gutting public health like Obama’s pandemic preparedness office, defunding the IRS to the point that it can barely keep up and is in no position to go after the biggest tax losses, (corporate tax fraud), opening up BLM protected lands for mining and sale on the very first fucking day of office . . . the list is endless at this point. It just goes on and on. I don’t think it can ever even be quantified.
Also pretty much firing all diplomats and not rehiring or filling the positions with clowns like him. Destroying decades of soft power in a record span.
Yeah, people underestimate how crucial national relationships are to national security. Far more important, IMO, than even the alphabet intelligence agencies. (I assert this with Kennedy and his backdoor phone calls with Khruschev in mind.)
When Trump gutted the State Department and the collective knowledge of its career civil service, he gutted a large chunk of our national security. Probably because it was killing two birds with one bitter stone: fulfilling Putin’s orders AND taking a big fat dump on Secretary of State Hilary Clinton’s years-long work.
He couldn’t care less that it was the heart of how the US interacts with the rest of the world, or how many allies, internal and foreign, he completely dicked in the process, or the price we will absolutely pay for that as a country, now and into the indefinite future.
I admire your optimism.
Why? Trump damaged an already disgustingly broken system all he did was cause more incentive to change it.
Fox News destroyed the republican party. Trump is a result, not the cause.
More than one thing can be true at once. Their own gerrymandering played a huge role as well by creating hundreds of districts that are so safe that the real election is the primary, not the general, so the way you win is by always tacking to the right and being more and more performatively batshit crazy.
True. I live in Ohio, the gerrymandering here is a wet dream.
The very same Lindsay Graham perpetually fighting to be first in line to lick Trump’s boot like the simpering, unctuous worm he is?
The same.
To be fair, he had a lot of help.
Reap what you sow.
The Republican party: please see us as the victims even if we’ve directly cultivated this outcome. How would we know it may cause us problems and not the Democrats? Seriously this isn’t our fault, the government is only on hold due to Democrats not voting for a speaker. Send donations so we can get more Republicans to argue with next term.
Honestly it really is the democrats fault. How could they not have done more to stop us from hurting ourselves? Vote for us again to make things all better.
'member when McConnell fillabustered his own bill because Obama and the Senate democrats agreed with it?
that is hilarious!
Dems do share some of the blame for never going for the throat when they have the chance to. They’re trying to play by the rules without acknowledging the fact that they’re playing chess against a pidgin.
Chickens coming home to roost
Made their bed and lying in it.
Sorry Kev, but no, the problem is not the crazy right, it’s endemic. You spend the last several decades assembling the most craven, ignornant, zealous voter base and now you’re acting all surprised that the loonies are running the asylum. Even your most moderate members know they can’t be seen working with Democrats or they face retribution from Trump and The Base.
I’ve been saying this for a long time, the only thing that will ever get the GOP back on a small-d democratic path again is a long, long walk in the wilderness. They need a decades-long time out to think about all the harm they’ve done to this country under the guise of ‘patriotism’ and ‘christianity’.
Yep, the problem is that the “mainstream” GOP is so off the rails that they don’t even recognize extremists for what they are and they are so deeply unpopular that they have to cheat and actually court people from every fringe to have a chance of winning.
I’ve thought this for a while. An interviewer asked him if he knew he would get Democratic votes for that 45 day funding bill. If he hadn’t, I bet Gaetz wouldn’t have triggered a recall.
The circumstances of that bill are weird af too.
They gave democrats no time to read it, and barely any time to get to the hill for the vote on the first place. Arguably, the only reason they voted for it at all is because of the congressman who pulled the fire alarm, giving dems time to read and see it was a reasonable bill.
But, if the dems hadn’t had time to read the bill, they likely would’ve voted against it on the premise of not voting on something they don’t understand hasn’t read, and someone they inherently don’t trust presented under shadycircumstances. Then McCarthy would’ve had a shutdown like Gaetz wanted, but, one he could’ve blamed on the dems, for not voting for this very reasonable extension bill.
who could have predicted that radicalising the party to the far right and fully immersing it’s members in a bubble of right wing twitter, blogs, and media would lead to this
I did but I’m just some shmuck on the internet.
I would say it was all republicans for the last 50 years that’s got us to this very bad place.
yep. Institutionalized racism, misogyny, homophobia, and white Christian separatism as party platform. No matter how “conservative” Republicans claimed to be, The Southern Strategy was the core value and singular driving force for the past 60 years. MAGA isn’t a symptom, it’s result
Why else was/is GOP leadership shitting themselves over immigration? The “other” is always an easy target to get the morons onboard, but even more so, they didn’t want to see demographic change. Their whole platform relied on it.
It was the story they told to get the morons out to the polls for them. The morons were never supposed to take controlled and yet they did, first with the tea party and then with trump
Go back further. First the Moral Majority in 1979.
right, but the elite still controlled things. the dumb rubers were meant to fall for it and vote for the tax cutters. but then the dumb rubes primaried too many republicans and the inmates now run the asylum.
Only going back to the 70s? Shit, I’d place it at the feet of the OG McCarthy from the 50s
Reagan is when things really started to go to shit, though.
Oh for sure. Reagan was the worst president of the last 100 years by miles.
Well, besides Trump.
Don’t worry, he’s tied with Bush for second place
Trump was such a horrific president he actually makes Bush look like a good president.
The whole yellowcake fantasy really messed things up for a lot of people.
deleted by creator
The swap occurred sometime between the turn of the century and the great depression. The dust had mostly settled by the fifties due to the socdem policies of the Roosevelt presidency in the 30s and 40s, furthered by the Republican Southern Strategy after the short-lived Dixiecrats campaigned on racism. Dixiecrats were purely reactionary to desegregation, it was mostly progressive liberals in the south that were racist. Nixon was basically forced to pass the NEPA due to growing unrest around environmental harm. Hippies weren’t a target of the war on drugs just because they believed in free love.
McCarthy is selling himself short here. He deserves at least a little credit for this clusterfuck as well. All of these cowards deserve credit. After January 6 they all had the chance to stand up and do the right thing and wrest control of the GOP from Trump and the crazies, but no, they were all too scared.
While I hate her politics, I have nothing but respect for Liz Cheney.
I hate that we have to give props to Cheney for not doing a fascism. Talk about low fucking bars. And assuming the country doesn’t fall apart and we somehow survive the infestation of christo fascist scum, we’re still gonna have begin the arduous process of clawing the Overton window back from the position where pieces of shit like her look somewhat normal.
Louder, for the centrists in the back.
This was incredibly predictable. The second the GOP didn’t smash the “break glass to deprogram fascists” button after the insurrection, this was always their likely path. These people are in open rebellion against democracy and we should really start treating them more like traitors.
I’ve been saying even before J6 that we should be treating them and their programming like a Fifth Column, meaning their Tokyo Rose channels - Faux, hate radio, ONAN, etc…
Dear “traditional” Conservatives:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me. (<—YOU ARE HERE)
protip: “traditional” Conservatism hasn’t existed since 1964
“Traditional conservatism” has always been explicitly racist.
“Traditional” conservatism was always the veneer to hide behind.
The entire party is literally rotten, the attempts to exclude oneself from it are laughable.
Can you point to one of these - how you say? - “attempts to exclude oneself from the party”?
You are misquoting the comment above yours. The title of this post is an example of a member trying to exclude himself from the rottenness of the party.
Thank you for granting me the opportunity to be pedantic. You are incorrect.
The entire party is literally rotten, the attempts to exclude oneself from it are laughable.
I would strongly argue that the comma in the above sentence should be a semicolon; I will treat it as one.
The subject is “party,” a noun. “The entire” describes the subject. The verb is “is,” and the predicate is “literally rotten.” The predicate here is a descriptor of the subject.
In the second part, we need to determine what “it” refers to. “It” is a pronoun. Pronouns are shorthand for nouns. There are two nouns in the entire comment: “party” and “oneself.” Context tells us that “it” cannot be a reference to “oneself,” because it is absurd to “attempt to exclude oneself from oneself,” and even if that was the meaning, it would be a complete non-sequitur from the first part of the comment.
That leaves one other noun for “it” to refer to: “party.”
Furthermore, “it” cannot be referring to “rotten,” because “rotten” is an adjective. “Rottenness” is a noun, but that’s not the word here. If @iforgotmyinstance had intended to refer to the “rotten[ness],” they would have said something like: “The rottenness of the party is overwhelming; the attempts to exclude oneself from it are laughable.”
Now let me get into your comment.
You are misquoting the comment above yours. The title of this post is an example of a member trying to exclude himself from the rottenness of the party.
In the first sentence, you refer to the “comment above [mine].” As explained above, I am not “misquoting” or misunderstanding it.
In the second sentence, you refer to “the title of this post,” in a way that suggests that the post title and @iforgotmyinstance’s comment are necessarily referring to the same specific subject: (“party” or “rotten[ness]”). They are not, and are not obliged to. They do refer to the same general subject: the rottenness of the Republican party. It is reasonable to refer to the “party” in a comment about it’s “rotten[ness].”
The post title reads:
McCarthy Says ‘We’re In a Very Bad Place Right Now’ Thanks to ‘Crazy Members Led By Gaetz’
The title (of the post and the article) is quoting Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who was briefly Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. One interpretation of that quote is that McCarthy is “trying to exclude himself from the rottenness of the party.” I would argue that the simple statement is an extremely weak attempt, but I would otherwise agree.
That was a whole lot of text to say nothing. At the end you didn’t even have a counterpoint, you just said it was a weak attempt. Do you really have this much time on your hands to not make a point?
I stopped reading their reply once he brought up the comma, like oh brother ain’t no one got time for that!
Oh, so not because of Democrats? I thought it was because of Democrats.
No it’s because of the very core of the GOP… which by their logic means it’s the Democrats’ fault…
Oh I’m sure around the quoted bits in the title he threw in plenty of references to how this is still mostly the democrats fault lol
The house is being led by Gaetz. Republicans made government a bad place.
If they can’t get their shit together, will the 2 party system finally collapse?
No, just the government. If no new spending bill passes it will be pretty not great.
The two party system is the natural result of FPTP voting. We desperately need to switch to STAR or approval.
I like ranked ballots more. Just a bunch of easy binary decisions of which candidate I like more. With the other ones, I feel like I’m betraying my favourite if I rank or approve of anyone else equally.
Ranked is definitely superior to our current system. But it still has its flaws, which is why I didn’t mention it.
The biggest flaw is with counting. Ranked isn’t a purely additive process like STAR or approval, so you only ever get the results once they’re complete rather than as you count. And that goes a long way towards trust in the system and auditing.
Ranked is also basically just FPTP, but with several layers. So the same flaws in FPTP are present within Ranked, just a bit muted.
But like I said, even ranked is better than the shit show we currently have.
Not sure I follow the “FPTP with layers” argument. After each layer, the votes go to the next choice rather than being wasted. Vote splitting gone. That’s the bad part of FPTP taken care of. There’s still one winner, but proportional voting is orthogonal to ballot type
And you only get final results when all counting is complete, but ballot counts could definitely be published as they come in (N ballots with order ABCD, M ballots with order DBA, etc)
Not sure I follow the “FPTP with layers” argument. After each layer, the votes go to the next choice rather than being wasted.
Round one is a check for a +50% majority. If there is no majority, then it eliminates the lowest voted candidate and moves on.
/\
|
This first half is identical in function to FPTP voting. So ranked choice is basically FPTP but repeated a couple times with eliminations. Like I said, it is still definitely better than FPTP, but it has the possibility of vote splitting, albeit to a much smaller degree. A strategic voter wouldn’t vote for their first pick first, but would instead vote for the closest candidate to them that has a high chance of winning. And that’s the hole we are currently stuck in as is.
but ballot counts could definitely be published as they come in (N ballots with order ABCD, M ballots with order DBA, etc)
If there are 5 candidates in a given race, something that is rather common, then there would be 120 different orders. That’s not data that is easily digestible or auditable. And that number gets exponentially worse the more candidates there are, and ideally we should have a good number of candidates to choose from to make sure we get the best one.
No, the two party ‘system’ is a natural byproduct of how our current election process works. If we saw the rise of a third party, it would eventually supplant one of the existing major parties, just like we’ve seen in the past.
Game theory favors two parties or at least two coalitions when a majority is required for something, unfortunately.
No,
If there is a legit schism in the Republican party a new party will be created. Either the new party or the current Republican party will die.
It’s unlikely that 3 parties can exist with the campaign financing and ballot access laws that were designed to hamstring all minor parties.
Neither of the post schism parties would ever compete with the Democrats on elected numbers. A schism would be a huge gift to the Democrats.
The question is whether the new conservative party would push even further right wing as a whole. The Republicans had a schism in the late 2000s when the Tea Party was formed. When that movement was absorbed back into the Republican party, their ideology was pushed further to the right.
Guess : cons. will make a deal with dems.
One of the head leopards is shocked the leopards would in fact eat his face too
Lmao eat each other
🤡
