All purpose news and politics thread part VI: This Is Not The Time For Posing

[Kirby101]

I can't find a link, but I remember that Palin was the number 1 reason people did not vote for McCain. She was not vetted and McCain was enamored on how she looked. Of course now the GOP if filled with Palins.

[Tami]

He had a real shot, from his perceived spot in the centrist/moderate place. I think he went with Palin for one because she's a woman, so they were hoping to counter or co-op the momentum for Hillary as (almost) the Democratic nominee, but then also for her being seen as further to the right, and less moderate than McCain, himself -- for all those right-wing voters who might not have been very enthusiastic for him, his VP choice was meant to show them that he was on their side, after all. In theory, this wasn't such a bad strategy, really. Unfortunately for him, Palin would end up seeming so far out there that the perception of her as loony would overshadow the perception of him as a sensible moderate.

If he had gone with someone even more moderate than him, someone like Christine Whitman, he might have bled off some of the centrist Democratic voters who were on the fence. McCain headed in the wrong direction. he still would have gotten votes from the far right, since they wouldn't have voted for a Democrat no matter what. What he would have needed to do is challenge Obama in the Purple Swing States.

I mean, I'm glad he didn't win, just saying that's my thought in where he made his mistake.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Trump officials celebrated efforts to change CDC reports on coronavirus, emails show





yippee???? what are they, 5-year-olds?

How many thousands of people needlessly died because those assholes were busy fudging facts to keep Trump fat, dumb and happy?

[PwrdOn]

Oh. My foible, then. Corrected.

That's kind of my entire point though, so many people in the West are quick to get outraged at accusations of genocide or crimes against humanity without even bothering to do the slightest bit of research. And sure, you might say that there's no time to nitpick over details when people are dying, but as you demonstrated, it's not just the details that self-proclaimed human rights defenders tend to get wrong, and the long list of disastrous "humanitarian" interventions on faulty premises is far more extensive than the relatively few successful examples.

The Armenian genocide is a great example of how this language is selectively enforced against enemy nations, because Turkey is a critical ally of the US in the region whereas Armenia is regarded as a Russian client state, and so US diplomats make a point to dance around the topic and not use any language that would upset the Turks, and the general public is mostly uninformed about it. Now of course, this has been changing recently, not because some new evidence has emerged that the killings were worse than previously thought, but because Turkey under Erdogan has been drifting away from the US-aligned political sphere and therefore the geopolitical calculus now is that there are fewer drawbacks to raising these kinds of sore subjects with them.

[JCAll]

I can't find a link, but I remember that Palin was the number 1 reason people did not vote for McCain. She was not vetted and McCain was enamored on how she looked. Of course now the GOP if filled with Palins.

Palin was really a better indicator of where the GOP was going than McCain. I know everyone always says that McCain could have won if he'd had a more like-minded running mate, but I also think it's possible to say the same about her.

[Adam Allen]

If he had gone with someone even more moderate than him, someone like Christine Whitman, he might have bled off some of the centrist Democratic voters who were on the fence. McCain headed in the wrong direction. he still would have gotten votes from the far right, since they wouldn't have voted for a Democrat no matter what. What he would have needed to do is challenge Obama in the Purple Swing States.

I mean, I'm glad he didn't win, just saying that's my thought in where he made his mistake.

I mean, yeah, he didn't win, while the more moderate ticket did -- Hope and Change rhetoric aside, Obama/Biden was never like a Bernie/AOC ticket -- and true as well, those far right voters definitely were not voting Democrat, so it was McCain or nothing. I think he just didn't want to risk that they might not have come out, at all. I think they probably still would have, even if he'd picked a more moderate running mate, but I guess we can only theorize about that, at this point.

His instinct that the Republican base was to the right of him was not wrong, though. Look at where the party is, now. I mean, considering that it did look as though his picking Palin as a running mate cost him the election, we might have expected to see the Republicans slide more center, in general ... taking the message, look how well your centrist candidate was doing, before he brought on the far-right VP pick, so you guys might want to take a page from his book. But, nope. Less than a decade later, their candidate outright mocked McCain, and ... well, wouldn't say that he made Palin look like a seasoned statesman, but he definitely didn't look much better than her, imo. And not only did he win, but became the clear trendsetter, for how the party will continue styling itself, moving forward.

I don't know, maybe if he (McCain) had won, he could have helped create a less crazy-pants version of the GOP? I don't know, though. For all of my intense dislike of the last president, I don't think he created the problem of the GOP, so much as that he's just the worst expression of it. I think this is where they already wanted to be, as far back as 2008.

[Ragged Maw]

That's kind of my entire point though, so many people in the West are quick to get outraged at accusations of genocide or crimes against humanity without even bothering to do the slightest bit of research. And sure, you might say that there's no time to nitpick over details when people are dying, but as you demonstrated, it's not just the details that self-proclaimed human rights defenders tend to get wrong, and the long list of disastrous "humanitarian" interventions on faulty premises is far more extensive than the relatively few successful examples.

The Armenian genocide is a great example of how this language is selectively enforced against enemy nations, because Turkey is a critical ally of the US in the region whereas Armenia is regarded as a Russian client state, and so US diplomats make a point to dance around the topic and not use any language that would upset the Turks, and the general public is mostly uninformed about it. Now of course, this has been changing recently, not because some new evidence has emerged that the killings were worse than previously thought, but because Turkey under Erdogan has been drifting away from the US-aligned political sphere and therefore the geopolitical calculus now is that there are fewer drawbacks to raising these kinds of sore subjects with them.

Selfish reasons or no, that doesn’t mean the genocide is merely something someone dreamed up or fabricated based on coincidental events.

[Malvolio]

At the time back then, I thought McCain would choose former Pennsylvania governor and ex-head of Homeland Security Tom Ridge to be his VP. Hitching his wagon to that loon Palin was a dreadful mistake.

I remember reading at the time that McCain wanted to pick Joe Lieberman as his running mate, but the Republican Party didn't want him picking someone who until recently had been a Democrat.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

I don't know, maybe if he (McCain) had won, he could have helped create a less crazy-pants version of the GOP? I don't know, though. For all of my intense dislike of the last president, I don't think he created the problem of the GOP, so much as that he's just the worst expression of it. I think this is where they already wanted to be, as far back as 2008.

The Republican Party had already gone cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs when McCain ran for office. Had he won, Palin would've been the standard bearer for the lunatics in the party, doing all she could to make nutcases like the Tea Party a major force in Congress. Obama, being a black president, drove the right wingers apeshit insane for eight years, priming the pump for Trump and all the madness he brought into the White House.

[PwrdOn]

Selfish reasons or no, that doesn’t mean the genocide is merely something someone dreamed up or fabricated based on coincidental events.

How could it NOT mean that? Painting your enemy as bloodthirsty barbarians is a tried and true method of whipping your people into a war fervor, and this has been a tactic that we've seen repeatedly throughout history from the USS Maine to the Gulf of Tonkin incident to the WMDs in Iraq. Pointedly, this kind of rhetoric was NOT used against Nazi Germany, and even after the facts about the Holocaust were known to everyone, many former Nazis were still rehabilitated and allowed to join the West German government and military.

[Tami]

The Republican Party had already gone cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs when McCain ran for office. Had he won, Palin would've been the standard bearer for the lunatics in the party, doing all she could to make nutcases like the Tea Party a major force in Congress. Obama, being a black president, drove the right wingers apeshit insane for eight years, priming the pump for Trump and all the madness he brought into the White House.

It was a lose-lose situation either way, but at least with Obama we got the ACA (and other achievements) and the foundation for what Joe Biden is doing now.

[Zauriel]

I remember reading at the time that McCain wanted to pick Joe Lieberman as his running mate, but the Republican Party didn't want him picking someone who until recently had been a Democrat.

Some members of the Republican Party have been formerly registered democrats, including Trump.

[worstblogever]

New Developments in Gaetzgate:

- Another person who was allegedly in on the sex trafficking... former Florida GOP state legislator Halsey Beshears, who was working in Gov. Ron DeSantis' administration until January, when he suddenly resigned due to "health reasons". (They knew the investigation would eventually be catching up with him, and tried to show him the door before it got linked to the administration, would be the political chess move.)
- Gaetz is separately being investigated in an election fraud investigation regarding his friend Jason Brodeur, and it's another one of those Florida races where a Republican was aided by an "independent" candidate who pulled votes away from the Democrat in the general election by way of often having a similar name to the actual Democratic candidate and who was funded by the GOP to be on the ballot. In this instance, the Republicans are being looked at because Brodeur's third-party plant sent out mailers where they identified themselves as a Democrat, and also that they were black (they were white).
-New York Times has a report that another senior Gaetz aide has resigned.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

New Developments in Gaetzgate:

- Another person who was allegedly in on the sex trafficking... former Florida GOP state legislator Halsey Beshears, who was working in Gov. Ron DeSantis' administration until January, when he suddenly resigned due to "health reasons". (They knew the investigation would eventually be catching up with him, and tried to show him the door before it got linked to the administration, would be the political chess move.)
- Gaetz is separately being investigated in an election fraud investigation regarding his friend Jason Brodeur, and it's another one of those Florida races where a Republican was aided by an "independent" candidate who pulled votes away from the Democrat in the general election by way of often having a similar name to the actual Democratic candidate and who was funded by the GOP to be on the ballot. In this instance, the Republicans are being looked at because Brodeur's third-party plant sent out mailers where they identified themselves as a Democrat, and also that they were black (they were white).
-New York Times has a report that another senior Gaetz aide has resigned.

I don't know if this had already been mentioned, but I heard a report on my local all-news radio station that Matty Perv used a payment app (the name eludes me, but it begins with "V") to send money to one of those teenagers he allegedly did the horizontal boogie with.

[worstblogever]

I don't know if this had already been mentioned, but I heard a report on my local all-news radio station that Matty Perv used a payment app (the name eludes me, but it begins with "V") to send money to one of those teenagers he allegedly did the horizontal boogie with.

That would be Venmo.

Gaetz has left a trail of evidence a mile long and wide.