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Are we witnessing the death of the Republican Party?

Fool

Fool

The Thing cannot be described
Sep 10, 2001
2,917
1,668
Brooklyn
It's like visiting a buffet of turds to figure out what political thread to put something in but JEWISH SPACE LASERS, for fucks sake ...

She's joining a House education council. What could go wrong
 
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Westy

Westy

the teste
Nov 22, 2002
55,966
22,011
Sleazattle
rideit said:
She is a good example of the ‘Trump Hangover’ effect.
Click to expand...

It's not a hangover. It is a raging addiction. We just witnessed the nation briefly ask "what the fuck is wrong with me?" after waking up pants down in a pool of someone's vomit with a bag of cucumbers and a bloody asshole. Then a few days later answer with, " I need more of that".
 
boostindoubles

boostindoubles

Nacho Libre
Mar 16, 2004
8,397
6,923
Yakistan
Westy said:
It's not a hangover. It is a raging addiction. We just witnessed the nation briefly ask "what the fuck is wrong with me?" after waking up pants down in a pool of someone's vomit with a bag of cucumbers and a bloody asshole. Then a few days later answer with, " I need more of that".
Click to expand...
Let's hope we can stave off rock bottom and get these fuckers into Q Anonymous.
 
Westy

Westy

the teste
Nov 22, 2002
55,966
22,011
Sleazattle
boostindoubles said:
Let's hope we can stave off rock bottom and get these fuckers into Q Anonymous.
Click to expand...

Normally this ailment leads to trailer parks next to the interstate. These days you end up a pillow CEO.

Which is the equivalent of having the nicest trailer park next to the interstate with all the astroturf.
 
Full Trucker

Full Trucker

Frikkin newb!!!
Feb 26, 2003
11,117
8,740
Exit, CO
Westy said:
It's not a hangover. It is a raging addiction. We just witnessed the nation briefly ask "what the fuck is wrong with me?" after waking up pants down in a pool of someone's vomit with a bag of cucumbers and a bloody asshole. Then a few days later answer with, " I need more of that".
Click to expand...
Boy they sure do want more of that sweet, sweet nectar.

www.cnn.com

McCarthy and Trump discuss Republicans' plans to win House majority at Florida meeting Thursday

Former President Donald Trump and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy met Thursday at Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, where the two Republicans discussed strategy for winning the House majority in next year's midterms, according to a readout of the meeting provided by Trump's...
www.cnn.com www.cnn.com
 
6thElement

6thElement

Schrodinger's Immigrant
Jul 29, 2008
17,207
14,674
Some of my current concern is at the state level with the fuckery going on. I think it may have been Georgia, not sure, where someone was trying to introduce legislation that the Secretary of State could be overridden from certifying the vote...

Edit: Arizona
 
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Pesqueeb

Pesqueeb

bicycle in airplane hangar
Feb 2, 2007
41,792
19,103
Riding the baggage carousel.
Remember how pretty much everyone dismissed Trump's candidacy and laughed at what a looney carnival barker he was?

Can we please not do that again?

If these last couple days/weeks have proven anything, it's that the GOP is bound and determined to double down on authoritarianism/trumpism. The last 4 years and an attempted coup have done *NOTHING* to disabuse the Right the wrongness of Trump.

Boebert, Greene, 45 senate republicans voting against even hearing impeachment articles, McCarthy's mea culpa tour to Mar-a-Lago to lick Trump's ball sack. They aren't letting this go, and it's liable to get even weirder.

theweek.com

The Capitol insurrection isn't moderating the GOP. It's making them more extreme.

The spiral continues
theweek.com


www.newsweek.com

GOP Looked Set to Divorce Trump Over Capitol Riot. Now, it's Renewing Vows

The president faced a backlash following January 6, but now looks to be cementing ties with the Republican Party ahead of 2022's House and Senate elections.
www.newsweek.com www.newsweek.com
 
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kidwoo

kidwoo

Artisanal Tweet Curator
Aug 25, 2003
42,149
13,358
Squirtin ketchup n' mustard on charred flesh
JohnE

JohnE

filthy rascist
May 13, 2005
13,545
2,166
Front Range, dude...
Hmmm, works for me. The internet cable under the ocean must be out of order.

Antrim County Michigan...Sheryl Guy...2020 POTUS election...Dominion. Google.
 
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eric strt6

eric strt6

Resident Curmudgeon
Sep 8, 2001
24,354
15,103
directly above the center of the earth
The Republican Party Is Now in Its End Stages
The GOP has become, in form if not in content, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of the late 1970s

We are living in a time of bad metaphors. Everything is fascism, or socialism; Hitler’s Germany, or Stalin’s Soviet Union. Republicans, especially, want their followers to believe that America is on the verge of a dramatic time, a moment of great conflict such as 1968—or perhaps, even worse, 1860. (The drama is the point, of course. No one ever says, “We’re living through 1955.”)


Ironically, the GOP is indeed replicating another political party in another time, but not as the heroes they imagine themselves to be. The Republican Party has become, in form if not in content, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of the late 1970s.
I can already hear the howls about invidious comparisons. I do not mean that modern American Republicans are communists. Rather, I mean that the Republicans have entered their own kind of end-stage Bolshevism, as members of a party that is now exhausted by its failures, cynical about its own ideology, authoritarian by reflex, controlled as a personality cult by a failing old man, and looking for new adventures to rejuvenate its fortunes.
No one thinks much about the Soviet Union in the late 1970s, and no one really should. This was a time referred to by the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, as the vremya zastoi—“the era of stagnation.” By that point, the Soviet Communist Party was a spent force, and ideological conviction was mostly for chumps and fanatics. A handful of party ideologues and the senior officers of the Soviet military might still have believed in “Marxism-Leninism”—the melding of aspirational communism to one-party dictatorship—but by and large, Soviet citizens knew that the party’s formulations about the rights of all people were just window dressing for rule by a small circle of old men in the Kremlin.

David Graham: Trump thinks he’s found a new defense
“The party” itself was not a party in any Western sense, but a vehicle for a cabal of elites, with a cult of personality at its center. The Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev was an utterly mediocre man, but by the late 1970s he had cemented his grip on the Communist Party by elevating opportunists and cronies around him who insisted, publicly and privately, that Brezhnev was a heroic genius. Factories and streets and even a city were named for him, and he promoted himself to the top military rank of “Marshal of the Soviet Union.” He awarded himself so many honors and medals that, in a common Soviet joke of the time, a small earthquake in Moscow was said to have been caused by Brezhnev’s medal-festooned military overcoat falling off its hanger.

The elite leaders of this supposedly classless society were corrupt plutocrats, a mafia dressed in Marxism. The party was infested by careerists, and its grip on power was defended by propagandists who used rote phrases such as “real socialism” and “Western imperialism” so often that almost anyone could write an editorial in Pravda or Red Star merely by playing a kind of Soviet version of Mad Libs. News was tightly controlled. Soviet radio, television, and newspaper figures plowed on through stories that were utterly detached from reality, regularly extolling the successes of Soviet agriculture even as the country was forced to buy food from the capitalists (including the hated Americans).

Members of the Communist Party who questioned anything, or expressed any sign of unorthodoxy, could be denounced by name, or more likely, simply fired. They would not be executed—this was not Stalinism, after all—but some were left to rot in obscurity in some make-work exile job, eventually retiring as a forgotten “Comrade Pensioner.” The deal was clear: Pump the party’s nonsense and enjoy the good life, or squawk and be sent to manage a library in Kazakhstan.
This should all sound familiar.
The Republican Party has, for years, ignored the ideas and principles it once espoused, to the point where the 2020 GOP convention simply dispensed with the fiction of a platform and instead declared the party to be whatever Comrade—excuse me, President—Donald Trump said it was.
Read: The hole where Donald Trump was
Like Brezhnev, Trump has grown in status to become a heroic figure among his supporters. If the Republicans could create the rank of “Marshal of the American Republic” and strike a medal for a “Hero of American Culture,” Trump would have them both by now.

A GOP that once prided itself on its intellectual debates is now ruled by the turgid formulations of what the Soviets would have called their “leading cadres,” including ideological watchdogs such as Tucker Carlson and Mark Levin. Like their Soviet predecessors, a host of dull and dogmatic cable outlets, screechy radio talkers, and poorly written magazines crank out the same kind of fill-in-the-blanks screeds full of delusional accusations, replacing “NATO” and “revanchism” with “antifa” and “radicalism.”


Falling in line, just as in the old Communist Party, is rewarded, and independence is punished. The anger directed at Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger makes the stilted ideological criticisms of last century’s Soviet propagandists seem almost genteel by comparison. (At least Soviet families under Brezhnev didn’t add three-page handwritten denouncements to official party reprimands.)
This comparison is more than a metaphor; it is a warning. A dying party can still be a dangerous party. The Communist leaders in those last years of political sclerosis arrayed a new generation of nuclear missiles against NATO, invaded Afghanistan, tightened the screws on Jews and other dissidents, lied about why they shot down a civilian 747 airliner, and, near the end, came close to starting World War III out of sheer paranoia.

Read: How the GOP surrendered to extremism
The Republican Party is, for now, more of a danger to the United States than to the world. But like the last Soviet-era holdouts in the Kremlin, its cadres are growing more aggressive and paranoid. They blame spies and provocateurs for the Capitol riot, and they are obsessed with last summer’s protests (indeed, they are fixated on all criminals and rioters other than their own) to a point that now echoes the old Soviet lingo about “antisocial elements” and “hooligans.” They blame their failures at the ballot box not on their own shortcomings, but on fraud and sabotage as the justification for a redoubled crackdown on democracy.
Another lesson from all this history is that the Republicans have no path to reform. Like their Soviet counterparts, their party is too far gone. Gorbachev tried to reform the Soviet Communist Party, and he remains reviled among the Soviet faithful to this day. Similar efforts by the remaining handful of reasonable Republicans are unlikely to fare any better. The Republican Party, to take a phrase from the early Soviet leader Leon Trotsky, should now be deposited where it belongs: in the “dustbin of history.”



TOM NICHOLS is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of the forthcoming book Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault From Within on Modern Democracy.
 
Pesqueeb

Pesqueeb

bicycle in airplane hangar
Feb 2, 2007
41,792
19,103
Riding the baggage carousel.
eric strt6 said:
The Republican Party, to take a phrase from the early Soviet leader Leon Trotsky, should now be deposited where it belongs: in the “dustbin of history.”
Click to expand...
I find it interesting that this article opens with a warning about "bad metaphor" and then choses to end with this one. Given what happened to Trotsky, and how much longer the Soviet Union continued on post Trotsky, I don't find a lot of comfort.
 
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