You Will Anyway: Why bother with democracy?

Friday, January 31, 2020

Why bother with democracy?

Why not just have King Donald appoint all politicians?

GOP Rep. Thomas Massie is running for reelection in Kentucky. So why is he running TV ads in Florida?

Like most everything in Republican politics, the answer has to do with one person: President Donald Trump.

With Trump planning to go to his Mar-a-Lago club for Super Bowl weekend, Massie, a four-term Kentucky congressman, is purchasing TV advertising time in South Florida on the president’s favorite channel, Fox News. Massie’s goal: Communicate to the president that his Republican primary challenger, attorney Todd McMurtry, is a “Trump hater.”

[...]

Massie’s new commercial aims to turn the tables on McMurtry, who is branding himself as a staunch Trump ally in lockstep with the president ahead of the May 19 primary.

“He’s even worse than a Never Trumper. Todd McMurtry is a Trump hater,” says the ad, which opens with a photograph of Massie and Trump flashing grins and thumbs-ups.

[...]

Massie’s commercial then highlights a handful of critical comments McMurtry made about Trump on Facebook, mostly in 2017, the first year of Trump's presidency.

“Sad but true. Trump is the epitome of a weak male,” said one McMurtry post, read in classic attack-ad fashion by the narrator.

“Trump is an idiot,” says another.

Politico

That's great. It's like Trump's impeachment lawyer replaying Adam Schiff's parody of the Zelensky call. Voters get to hear the bad shit about Trump again.

“Hillary is right,” McMurtry writes in another comment. “He is temperamentally unqualified to be president.”

Massie’s commercial concludes by tying his primary opponent to Hillary Clinton: “Siding with ‘Crooked Hillary.’ That’s Todd McMurtry, the Trump hater.”

If he wins, I hope he has a Democratic challenger who uses this as a hammer come November: The guy who wants to be your representative presents his case to Trump instead of you. He wants to be Trump's lacky, not your representative.

Republican contests in areas from the Philadelphia suburbs to Fort Worth, Texas, are hinging on a simple factor: whether an incumbent House Republican has been sufficiently supportive of the president.

Jesus, they're throwing away our democracy. They won't be getting a king, though. They'll be getting a dictator, whose ass they'll have to kiss every day of their lives or have their head on a pike.

The McMurtry campaign responded to the ad by pointing to several pieces of legislation and recent votes on which Massie broke with Trump, including a resolution aimed at curtailing the president’s ability to wage war with Iran.

“Every time President Trump needs him, Massie stabs him in the back,” McMurty campaign manager Jake Monssen said.

[...]

Running in a district that Trump won by more than 35 percentage points, McMurtry has vowed there will be no daylight between him and the president. Earlier this month, he tweeted out a picture of the Trump Hotel in Washington.

“Hoping to see my favorite President,” McMurtry wrote.

Just embarrassing.

Amen.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

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"It takes only a bit of knowledge of history to realize how dangerous it is to think that the people who run the country know what they are doing." -- Howard Zinn

"It’s not about not having something to hide; it’s about having something to lose. What we lose when we’re under observation is our humanity...Rights are inherent to our nature, they’re not granted by governments, they’re guaranteed by governments. They’re protected by governments." -- Edward Snowden

"Terrorism is the willingness to kill large numbers of people for some presumably good cause.” -- Howard Zinn

"What we have is a foreign policy which is essentially a marketing strategy for selling weapons." -- Jill Stein

"We should always remember that the danger to societies from security services is not that they will spontaneously decide to embrace [Stasi style] mustache twirling and jackboots to bear us bodily into dark places, but that the slowly shifting foundation of policy will make it such that mustaches and jackboots are discovered to prove an operational advantage toward a necessary purpose.” ~ Edward Snowden

"America: just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable." ~ Hunter S. Thompson

"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws." ~ Mayer Rothschild

"News is what somebody does not want you to print. All the rest is advertising." ~ LACUNA

"What matters in journalism isn't politics, which are as universal and inescapable as breathing. What matters -- along with a fundamentally adversarial attitude toward government, without which "journalism" is simply public relations -- is integrity, transparency, evidence, coherence, and principle. These are the principles on which we should evaluate the quality of journalism, and their absence is why some journalists are so desperate to get you to focus on something else." ~ Barry Eisler

"There is no inverse relationship between freedom and security. Less of one does not lead to more of the other. People with no rights are not safe from terrorist attack." ~ Molly Ivins

"The brain of our species is, as we know, made up largely of potassium, phosphorus, propaganda, and politics, with the result that how not to understand what should be clearer is becoming easier and easier for all of us." ~ James Thurber

"The highest patriotism is not a blind acceptance of official policy, but a love of one's country deep enough to call her to a higher plane....When you hold up your arm and swear to uphold the Constitution, you don’t say, 'Except in wartime.'" -- George McGovern

"I’ll believe that corporations are people when Texas executes one." ~ Bill Moyers

"When did hope become a political dynamic? Hope is right below wishful thinking and right above performing a rain dance on the scale of activity." ~ Rich Hall

Life, as Explained in "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead"

GUILDENSTERN: What a fine persecution---to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.

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ROSENCRANTZ : The only thing that makes it bearable is the irrational belief that somebody interesting will come on in a minute.

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GUILDENSTERN: But for God's sake what are we supposed to do?!

PLAYER: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life questioning your situation at every turn.

GUILDENSTERN: But we don't know what's going on, or what to do with ourselves. We don't know how to act.

PLAYER: Act natural. You know why you're here at least.

GUILDENSTERN: We only know what we're told, and that's little enough. And for all we know it isn't even true.

PLAYER: For all anyone knows, nothing is. Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that which is taken to be true. It's the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honoured. One acts on assumptions.

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GUILDENSTERN : We act on scraps of information... sifting half-remembered directions that we can hardly separate from instinct.

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PLAYER: Life is a gamble, at terrible odds-if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.