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

[BeastieRunner]

Oooooh WBE!

Please don't kill WBE.

[worstblogever]

Please don't kill WBE.

Good lord, the queue is SOOOOO long now. Like, even past the end of 2022, I think I have another 200 people lined up.

I never thought the GOP would fall this far when I started this. Like, I thought the Tea Party was the bottom, and they'd course correct. Now they have candidates who are the getaway drivers for members of hate groups assaulting people, and are anti-science in ways to help a pandemic spread... among their own followers so they can try to blame it on the left.

Like... WHAT IS WRONG WITH THEM?

[worstblogever]

In this recording, an intoxicated Carnahan is w/ another State Party Chair at an RNC event, offering to pay for a hotel for an activist's hotel. Carnahan says of her husband, Congressman Jim Hagedorn, “I don’t care… Jim’s gonna’ be dead in two years. So be it.”

This would be the same Jim Hagedorn who I've profiled before for a series of sexist and homophobic remarks he made in editorials... and who has since been linked to a child sex trafficker who was donating money to his campaign.

A lot of GOP people seem to be getting busted for that while their flock are flogging the Pizzagate/Qanon thing, y'know?

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Good lord, the queue is SOOOOO long now. Like, even past the end of 2022, I think I have another 200 people lined up.

I never thought the GOP would fall this far when I started this. Like, I thought the Tea Party was the bottom, and they'd course correct. Now they have candidates who are the getaway drivers for members of hate groups assaulting people, and are anti-science in ways to help a pandemic spread... among their own followers so they can try to blame it on the left.

Like... WHAT IS WRONG WITH THEM?

They're Qpublicans. THAT'S what's wrong.

[Tendrin]

Good lord, the queue is SOOOOO long now. Like, even past the end of 2022, I think I have another 200 people lined up.

I never thought the GOP would fall this far when I started this. Like, I thought the Tea Party was the bottom, and they'd course correct. Now they have candidates who are the getaway drivers for members of hate groups assaulting people, and are anti-science in ways to help a pandemic spread... among their own followers so they can try to blame it on the left.

Like... WHAT IS WRONG WITH THEM?

I was off looking for a Fist of the North Star Gif and to say, "He's already dead inside. He just doesn't know it yet."

[Starter Set]

There's no easy answers here. It's just a disaster to see unfold. I can't help but feel this is almost like the end of the Vietnam War. There's just going to be something like that final shot of the helicopter evacuating at the end of this.

It's exactly like Vietnam war, Taliban have defeated America, it's simple as that. 20 years, Americans are out and they are about to be back in power, GG, thanks for nothing.

[worstblogever]

I was off looking for a Fist of the North Star Gif and to say, "He's already dead inside. He just doesn't know it yet."

I mean, I can't say there isn't some resemblance.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2014, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" ran a profile of Tom Tancredo, a man who is so xenophobic in his anti-immigrant fervor that he was banned from the White House by the Bush Administration, has been tied to various white nationalist groups to deliver speeches to them, and has advocated a nuclear strike on Mecca as a tangible strategy for stopping Islamic terrorism. Tancredo has been mostly irrelevant of late, but he did make the news back during the earlier part of the 2016 presidential primary to suggest that even Donald Trump should tone down his divisive rhetoric towards illegal immigrants (which really says something about how out of control Trump is).

On this date in 2015, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" profiled Craig James, the former Southern Methodist University running back and and ESPN college football broadcaster who ran for U.S. Senate in Texas in 2012. The only real speech James had that found its way into the public eye prior to his entry into the race featured him denying the existence of climate change, and promising to do everything he could to make sure that not a single dollar went to the research into it, or what could be done to prevent it. At the GOP Primary debate, James asserted that being gay was a choice, and was overall such a spectacularly terrible campaigner that he only got 4% of the vote, including not even being able to get students of SMU to vote for him. ESPN chose not to have James back in the booth for his comments on homosexuality, and he tried unsuccessfully to sue the network for discrimination of his Christian beliefs. He was last seen playing up his supposed Christian victimhood to Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council on one of his programs, but it unlikely to ever be elected to political office.

[worstblogever]

In 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, as well as 2020, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” presented our original profile of the U.S. House Representative for Florida’s 11th Congressional District, Daniel Webster, who first got swept into office in the 2010 Tea Party Wave after having previously served as the Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives and Florida Senate Majority Leader during a 28 year career as a Florida state legislator (and not as an extra working in the background of a morgue in a horror movie, like you’d expect). Webster is, at the moment, the preferred voice of Republican leadership of the recalcitrant House Freedom Caucus, and has finished second in the past three votes for Speaker of the House as a result.

Now, given how much of a group of extremists the House Freedom Caucus is, you can bet it’s more than Daniel Webster’s resume that impresses them. His record on issues show’s he’s clearly of like mind. Case in point… how “pro-life” is Daniel Webster? Well, while we can’t be sure of if he supports exceptions for rape and incest in his anti-abortion stance, because he refuses to answer the question when asked, we do know he’s voted for virtually every pro-life measure that’s ever crossed his path, including even when Jeb Bush was working overtime in Florida to make sure a feeding tube stayed inside of the long-since brain dead Terry Schiavo, and forcing her to keep on living against her wishes… the central figure in the Florida state legislature trying to write creative laws to drag out that situation even longer was Daniel Webster, while he was in the Florida State Senate.

And that’s hardly the only conservative social position Daniel Webster had. There was also his 1990 sponsorship of a bill to legalize covenant marriage. The draconian measure would have only allowed couples to divorce if only one partner cheated on the other (if both were unfaithful, they must remain married), and did not even offer exceptions for situations involving domestic abuse.

Now, you might wonder where these extreme conservative views Webster’s got are coming from… there is a quite plain answer. Daniel Webster has close ties to Bill Gothard and Gothard’s ministry, the Institute of Basic Life Principles, repeatedly collaborating with the disgraced church leader who was revealed to have covered up scores of abuse claims from his flock, and has a disturbing habit of counseling female rape and sexual abuse victims to make them feel as though they’re to blame for what their attackers have done to them in an overall patriarchal agenda where women must submit to their husbands. One of the first legislative acts in Florida that Webster pushed for back in 1985 was to legalize homeschooling (which Gothard and his flock are big proponents of). The amount of degrees of separation between Daniel Webster and the disgraced Duggar family are also shockingly few, but is Rep. Webster a total fanatic, though? Well, according to some, he’s spoken before Bill Gothard’s flock in a way that seems to indicate he views the gerrymandering of his district as “God being on his side and opposing his opponents”.

And that’s pretty nuts. As is the rest of his voting record:

• December 18th, 2019: Webster ignores his Congressional duty to hold a president who has been proven to commit high crimes and misdemeanors accountable and votes against the first impeachment of Donald Trump.
• May 15th, 2020: Webster votes against the HEROES Act, to further support the healthcare industry and citizens affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.
• December 10th, 2020: Webster signs his name to an amicus brief to the Supreme Court, begging them to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The same election that he won re-election in.
• January 6th, 2021: Daniel Webster votes for the objection to the electoral college’s votes in the 2020 election, a failure to send any sort of message that he wasn’t intimidated or sympathetic to those who attacked the Capitol to attempt a violent coup.
• January 13th, 2021: Rep. Webster votes against the second impeachment of Donald Trump, because the Republican Party no longer feels like they should be accountable for anything, including failed coups that result in the deaths of both their participants and police officers.
• February 4th, 2021: Daniel Webster votes to keep Marjorie Taylor Greene’s committee assignments, because he wouldn’t want her to be accountable for all the bigoted reDons and conspiracy theories she’s spread online (probably because she’s a kindred spirit).
• February 25th, 2021: Webster doesn’t ever bother to vote on HR 5, the latest version of the Equality Act, that would provide workplace protections for LGBTQ Americans.
• March 3rd, 2021: Rep. Webster doesn’t bother to vote on HR 1, a bill created to prevent the corruption of money in politics, and protect voter access to the ballot box.
• March 3rd, 2021: Daniel Webster votes against the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2021.
• March 10th, 2021: Webster votes against the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, because he feels people deserve to die in poverty during a pandemic.
• March 17th, 2021: Rep. Webster votes against the re-authorization of the Violence Against Women Act, likely because they feel the 2nd Amendment remaining absolute is more important than preventing people with a history of domestic abuse from owning a firearm (which statistics show, makes them more likely to use those firearms against women in their lives).
• May 19th, 2021: Daniel Webster votes against HR 3233, the creation of a commission to investigate the Capitol Attack.

Daniel Webster won a sixth term in office in 2020, getting 67% of the vote,mostly because of the big partisan disadvantage in Florida’s 11th, sitting at a +15 Republican lean and Webster’s evangelical support base also prop him up with donations. Webster has been mostly quiet since January 6th, putting out a press release on Trump’s second impeachment vote that he wouldn’t be attending due to a “family medical obligation”, that might be that his family were asking him to get treatment for his rectal-cranial inversion problem, remove his head from his arse, and impeach the motherf***er like he deserved to be.

[InformationGeek]

Again, you do one good thing for people and you're punished for it, no matter how much of a bootlicker you are.

BREAKING NEWS: Lindsey Graham is censured by South Carolina Republicans after voting for Biden’s infrastructure bill. Proving, one again, that bipartisanship is a punishable offense in today’s intransigent Republican Party.

[worstblogever]

Again, you do one good thing for people and you're punished for it, no matter how much of a bootlicker you are.

Saying the GOP are in "no true Scotsman" mentality is a dire insult to Scotland. The Scots are WAAAAAAAAAY more able to compromise.

[Mister Mets]

Oooooh WBE!

She does not have a Wikipedia page, and they do not even ask about her in polls (where five percent say they plan to vote for someone not listed), so she doesn't seem to make much of an impact.

https://www.surveyusa.com/client/Pol...4-d1f02a9fe6e5
https://emersonpolling.reportablenew...-for-ca-voters

If the recall goes through (polls indicate it's close), the frontrunners for Governor are Lerry Elder and youtuber Kevin Paffrath (the most prominent Democrat), so the race remains ridiculous enough without Stephens being a relevant figure.

[babyblob]

I found it funny that The a Secretary from the state department Blinken said he is not worried about the Taliban aiding a terrorist group attack the USA. because it is not in their best interest. He talks about what happened after 9/11 and how bad it went for them.

My question is how did it go bad for them? They hide and attacked for 20 years and then got the country back in a matter of days after the USA with drew. They now have a huge propaganda victory and control of the same country that America took away 20 years ago.

So how is this seen as anything but a huge clustermug and mess?

I get we cant stay there forever but this is a mess and the spin on it is pretty laughable.

[PwrdOn]

Fair point, but if we paid back countries and peoples we had exploited, interfered with the politics of, bombed, etc. we'd run out of resources before we'd erased a fraction of our debts. That's not even including the people who lived here before the US was established or the millions enslaved and imported to build the country's wealth. Again, in a fair world that'd be great. In the real world I'd rather we stopped running up that tab every time it's convenient (or even when it's not, with nothing to gain as in Afghanistan since Bin Laden was hunted down and killed in another country).

Yeah I'm not suggesting that we stay there, I'm just saying that we shouldn't accept this narrative now that is emerging now that Afghanistan is just some irredeemable shithole where we tried our best to help out but that the country was just too backwards and stupid to accept our enlightened ways. We need to at the very least recognize that much of what plagues the country now is a relatively recent development that was influenced heavily by US foreign policy, and that while Afghanistan wasn't exactly a great place in the 60s and 70s, it was headed in a positive direction until it became an unwilling host of a proxy war between superpowers. And it's unclear if we have learned any lessons from this experience either, I'm sure that even now all the top brass in the military and intelligence services are trying to find ways to turn the Taliban on China and start a whole new round of these Cold War proxy battles.

I found it funny that The a Secretary from the state department Blinken said he is not worried about the Taliban aiding a terrorist group attack the USA. because it is not in their best interest. He talks about what happened after 9/11 and how bad it went for them.

My question is how did it go bad for them? They hide and attacked for 20 years and then got the country back in a matter of days after the USA with drew. They now have a huge propaganda victory and control of the same country that America took away 20 years ago.

So how is this seen as anything but a huge clustermug and mess?

I get we cant stay there forever but this is a mess and the spin on it is pretty laughable.

In all likelihood they just miscalculated about the relative strength of the forces and how long the government could hold out. They probably judged that there would be a long drawn out war of attrition and that while the Taliban would probably have the upper hand, the government would be able to at least hold onto Kabul and some of the other major cities for a few years before eventually making some kind of negotiated peace with a power sharing agreement, possibly dividing the country up with most of the social reforms in the "free" area of the country left intact. Of course, given the situation now that all looks like extreme wishful thinking driven by groupthink, in no small part due to the fact that we never bothered to ask the Afghans what they thought of that plan. The American withdrawal was just the last straw that completely crushed the morale of the Afghan military, because without American support they knew they were doomed to fight a losing battle, so why bother drawing out that process just so some American politicians can save face?

[kidfresh512]

It's exactly like Vietnam war, Taliban have defeated America, it's simple as that. 20 years, Americans are out and they are about to be back in power, GG, thanks for nothing.

All that money we poured over there all the troops that died and what we have seen this week shows it was a complete waste. We were supposed to be training the Afghan government to be independent and self sustaining. It was a complete waste of time and money. I think it also reiterates that we needed to get the **** out finally. We were not doing anything there.

If we didn't pull out what we occupy for another decade? for what?

When domestically we are told how do we pay for "free college", or Universal Healthcare. And look at the money we spent there with nothing to show for it.

I'm curious about what military arms were left there in the rapid retreat. How much did we end up supplying the Taliban with pretty much.