Just brilliant. Illustrated no less. The Carville stuff alone is worth the price of admission. I'm no fan of his but I think it would do McArdle a world of good to have a kind of Carville Clippy pop up every time she pens some mush like an unaborted fetus growing up to talk about the girl it just fell in love with. "Ah you fuckin kiddin? Thass about the fah-est Fah-est Gump shit I evah hoid! An you write fuh the Post?"
(Forgive me I don't have the master's dialect touch. Roy would have to script it properly.)
I laughed! With the dialect I'm always torn between full-on mark-up like Bernard Shaw or just daubs to give the flavor. But at the end of the week I usually go the easier way.
Either way, it's right on the mark and hilarious. Here's hoping William Bennett makes another tour de force appearance sounding like Barry Fitzgerald (as I hear it).
PS Before this moment, I have never wished for William Bennett to reappear anywhere, I swear.
Oh, heavens no! That’s the way they do it over at the neighbor church, not here! [whispers] “of course, they never know how to do things properly over there.”
The Bergman film is fine. Really one of the great ones.. Brilliant acting. Fundamental Questions. Sven Nykvist lensed. (Bergman and Nykvist spent the day in a country church just watching the light.) Ingrid Thulin ( her monologue is kinda breathtaking.)
LOL. Roy, you nailed Old Snake Head. And the Dems are *SO* bad at politics – they don’t even bring a knife, they bring a wiffle ball to a gunfight.
The centrist fixation on big box stores and more efficient appliances as the be-all and end-all of American superiority is just the weakest tea imaginable: “OK, you don’t have year-long paid maternity leave, no universal, affordable healthcare, unless you leave your job under narrow, stringent conditions you will be left to starve, and if you work at McDonalds in Europe you will earn over $20 an hour. But, but…..Whirlpool!!! Kenmore!!!”
Shit like this just reinforces the distinction between people who argue about health care because arguing is what they do for a living and people who argue about health care because THEY NEED SOME FUCKING HEALTH CARE.
Yglesias will probably write a contrarian thought piece about why A Modest Proposal should *actually* be read as a free market solution to poverty. Aren’t those Irish orphans happier as gloves, anyway?
Beyond brilliant. And that second slide took me breath away.
Of course, the real world retort is that the DLC is complicit (or worse) in bringing the nation to the state it’s in now, on the cusp the last remnants of democracy dying outside the local level. Too, the youngs and those in denial can’t or refuse to grasp the harm that resulted from DLC control of the party; this post shows it, more or less.
It's true young folks can't name the DLC or recite its history, but they know a DLC-type policy or politician when they see it, and boy, do they hate that shit. Warms the heart of an old codger like me.
Fortunately the Dems’ decrepit octogenarian leadership is still clinging to power with its bony, arthritic claws. They’ll put those young sixtysomething whippersnappers in their place! And those young women of color, those so-called “progressives”? Well, they just need to sit down and learn their place for a few decades before they’re allowed to participate!
Yes, the most important project of our time is to accurately score America on the 10-point Which Country is Better scale. And thanks to this invaluable information about dryers that Megan has provided, we can now bump the USA up from a 4 to a 4.1.
This is wonderful, however I wonder if anyone, including Roy, could capture the level of ignorance, amorality and hauteur evinced in this week’s Supremely Dumb Court’s Q&A. “If it’s about choice, why wouldn’t 15 weeks be enough?” proves that Chief Jester Roberts brings to reproductive rights the same level of intelligence and compassion he’s applied to voting rights over his entire fucking career. Only Amy Coney Island’s comparison of secular values to religious beliefs came close to that level of delusional misunderstanding of basic philosophical concepts. Carville et al may be worthless but at least they don’t hold the fate of the nation in their bigoted uninformed hands. If this week didn’t convince Joe Biden to started naming additional Justices, nothing will and we’re doomed to living in the Racistfascist Party’s dream republic, with forced pregnancies and tax supported religious education (Christians only need apply).
Indeed. And only *certain* Christians need apply. I was listening to the Writer’s Almanac this morning on Emily Dickinson’s birthday recounting her experience during the Second Great Awakening, which she alone of her schoolmates and family didn’t get swept up in.
It made a kind of sense for the Democratic party to go down that road in the late 80's. After LBJ screwed the New Deal pooch and Nixon curb-stomped the Party, the best response they could come up with was outsider Carter who was woefully unprepared and unequipped to deal with the job. The door was wide open for the Smartest Guys in the Room to walk in and offer a devil's bargain: beat the Republicans at their own game and you're back in power. All it will cost is your currently worthless soul. Why not, they thought. Who has a better offer?
And now you say you want a revolution? Well, you know, we'd all love to see the plan.
I think the question is whether the Dems needed to move right to win, or if they just realized they could win even though they moved right. Clinton's main initiative in his first term was NAFTA, was that really a big vote-winner for Democrats? Or was it that Clinton et al realized that Dem voters were so desperate to win after 12 years of the Republicans that they'd tolerate NAFTA?
I think it's possible that "Tough on Crime" and "Welfare Reform" both were net vote-gainers, winning some votes from conservative Whites while not losing an equal number of votes from African-Americans who felt trapped within the Dem party because the Republicans were even worse.
But the rest of the Clinton agenda (banking deregulation, telecom deregulation, etc.) couldn't have been vote-gaining, and they must have known that because they sure did everything they could to keep the public from knowing about it.
To be sort of fair, the public didnt want to know about NAFTA, I lived through that time and remember the sales pitch, and they pitched hard because the public wasn't paying much attention. A lot of handwaving about how the blessings of the Free Market would rain down on Mexico (it was always about Mexico, no one cared about Canada) and all that efficiency was going to make everything better. There was always a slide about "retraining", all those factory drones were gonna learn to code, go to trade school to learn HVAC, or just take off their shoes, !live in a tree, and learn to play the flute. It was gonna be great!
How much of this the Clinton administration believed we'll probably never know. I think they didnt do much follow through on retraining, but a 40-something drone with a mortgage and a few kids was never gonna be big on learning to code or going back to school with no guarantee of a job.
And the road you’re referring to is to become a GOP wannabe serving the GOP special interest for the most part. And the Dems have remained on that road to date. Including let’s say a reluctance to pass any sort of voter rights bill in response to all the GOP has been pulling.
LBJ supposedly said we've lost the South for a generation when he signed the Civil Rights act. His reward from America for doing the right thing was Richard Nixon. FDR got his New Deal in part by keeping the Negro out of its benefits, to get the South on board, or so I've read.
The Democratic Party was getting its lunch money taken daily by Nixon and then Reagan. They believed their job was to win elections, not save Democracy, so they did what they thought they had to do, and it worked. They won elections for a while, mainly thanks to Clinton. Republicans reacted the way do, by doubling down on racism and the crazy, and Democrats thought surely the voters will realize this is insane and will vote for us if we dont frighten them by pushing too hard on the status quo. That got us GWB. The Democratic party seems to have finally caught on, but if you have a Secret Plan to pass voting rights by hypnotizing Sinema and Manchin, you should pass it along to Schumer.
My point was about the choice the Democrats made in the late 80's to triangulate their way to victory, not what they should do today.
Today Democrats have no choice but to act radically if they want to survive as anything other than a punching bag. And yeah, a functional democracy, etc. Part of the party is not real happy about this, but I think it's a smaller group that it seems, because the party bureaucracy and our government were designed to delay and subvert radical change. A few well-placed Senators can grind everything to a halt for a while, and a minority party undergoing a psychotic break can make every day a death-defying leap of faith. I 'd love to see the Democratic government do a lot more now too, but I see why it's not happening as fast as I'd like.
We’re I to bet, I’d say it’s too late given all the shit the GOP has pulled with gerrymandering, voter restrictions and the recent laws passed. This is what refusing to be a vigorous opposition party when the other party is dedicated to hollowing out the nation on every level. To overly simplify, with the rare exception, the American state is the enemy of its people. And the Dems no longer are much of a solution.
Its more than a little ironic that Republicans would agree that the American state is the enemy of the people (when Democrats are in charge). The biggest problem Democrats have had is that very close to a majority of voters are in favor of hollowing out the nation, as long as their taxes dont go up or their children arent made to feel responsible for racism. In my darker moments I believe America has the government it wants.
Just brilliant. Illustrated no less. The Carville stuff alone is worth the price of admission. I'm no fan of his but I think it would do McArdle a world of good to have a kind of Carville Clippy pop up every time she pens some mush like an unaborted fetus growing up to talk about the girl it just fell in love with. "Ah you fuckin kiddin? Thass about the fah-est Fah-est Gump shit I evah hoid! An you write fuh the Post?"
(Forgive me I don't have the master's dialect touch. Roy would have to script it properly.)
I laughed! With the dialect I'm always torn between full-on mark-up like Bernard Shaw or just daubs to give the flavor. But at the end of the week I usually go the easier way.
Full markup can be too dense to read. You hit the right balance.
Either way, it's right on the mark and hilarious. Here's hoping William Bennett makes another tour de force appearance sounding like Barry Fitzgerald (as I hear it).
PS Before this moment, I have never wished for William Bennett to reappear anywhere, I swear.
God, it would make so much sense if this is what those meetings sounded like.
"Looking up from their phones as if they just heard an ice cream truck.."
That's just brilliant.
"Ordet" is the second best film about Lutherans ever made . "Winter Light" is the first.
Can't believe I have an opinion on that.
I would definitely attend a film festival about Lutherans.
I assume it would be held in a church basement?
It’s like Waiting for Godot, only centered on which committee is responsible for bringing food to a church social.
Oh come on, a film about Lutherans couldn't be nearly as exciting and action-packed as Waiting for Godot.
Now I have to see Winter Light. I haven't seen "First Reformed," are they Lutherans?
I haven’t seen either, but I’m Lutheran. If we have a film festival, I’ll bring the hot dish and jell-o salad (the fancy kind, with Cool Whip!).
I'll bring the coffee!
no celery or carrots in the Jell-O I hope
Oh, heavens no! That’s the way they do it over at the neighbor church, not here! [whispers] “of course, they never know how to do things properly over there.”
Dutch Reformed Church I think.
Schrader is from Grand Rapids Michigan. Ground Zero for the Dutch Reformed. Think Amway and Betsy DeVos and Eric Prince.
Some say the Schrader film is a straight up knock off of Winter Light. https://tropicsofmeta.com/2018/08/14/the-world-is-ending-and-im-terrible-at-my-job-winter-light-and-first-reformed/
The Bergman film is fine. Really one of the great ones.. Brilliant acting. Fundamental Questions. Sven Nykvist lensed. (Bergman and Nykvist spent the day in a country church just watching the light.) Ingrid Thulin ( her monologue is kinda breathtaking.)
There’s a ton of Dutch Reformed around here, with an epicenter in northwest Iowa. Counties vote 80%+ Repug.
Really, look at Northwestern College in Orange City, Iowa
LOL. Roy, you nailed Old Snake Head. And the Dems are *SO* bad at politics – they don’t even bring a knife, they bring a wiffle ball to a gunfight.
The centrist fixation on big box stores and more efficient appliances as the be-all and end-all of American superiority is just the weakest tea imaginable: “OK, you don’t have year-long paid maternity leave, no universal, affordable healthcare, unless you leave your job under narrow, stringent conditions you will be left to starve, and if you work at McDonalds in Europe you will earn over $20 an hour. But, but…..Whirlpool!!! Kenmore!!!”
I mean, come on.
When your entire world is corporate fealty, every solution looks like product placement
Shit like this just reinforces the distinction between people who argue about health care because arguing is what they do for a living and people who argue about health care because THEY NEED SOME FUCKING HEALTH CARE.
Doesn’t matter what they bring because they pretty much don’t fight.
"routine traffic stop"
That is the sort of one weird trick shorthand that I'm always looking for.
(Four white guys who have done less with their lives, and for the American people, than Jimmy Carter does in an average week.)
Yglesias will probably write a contrarian thought piece about why A Modest Proposal should *actually* be read as a free market solution to poverty. Aren’t those Irish orphans happier as gloves, anyway?
Aren't the kids roasts with an apple in their mouths?
Beyond brilliant. And that second slide took me breath away.
Of course, the real world retort is that the DLC is complicit (or worse) in bringing the nation to the state it’s in now, on the cusp the last remnants of democracy dying outside the local level. Too, the youngs and those in denial can’t or refuse to grasp the harm that resulted from DLC control of the party; this post shows it, more or less.
It's true young folks can't name the DLC or recite its history, but they know a DLC-type policy or politician when they see it, and boy, do they hate that shit. Warms the heart of an old codger like me.
Fortunately the Dems’ decrepit octogenarian leadership is still clinging to power with its bony, arthritic claws. They’ll put those young sixtysomething whippersnappers in their place! And those young women of color, those so-called “progressives”? Well, they just need to sit down and learn their place for a few decades before they’re allowed to participate!
Keep an eye on that Steny Hoyer, he's a young fella with a future, bringing some youthful vitality to Democratic leadership!
Some wag recently remarked that it’s getting hard to tell a Dem press conference from a LifeAlert commercial.
"My legislative agenda has fallen and it can't get up!"
Second slide scared the shit out of me. Honestly, I think Roy should delete this post ASAP
That second slide is just a somewhat slight exaggeration of what DLC was all about.
Yes, the most important project of our time is to accurately score America on the 10-point Which Country is Better scale. And thanks to this invaluable information about dryers that Megan has provided, we can now bump the USA up from a 4 to a 4.1.
You really captured the essence of that toxic Cajun goblin Carville. I literally wanted to punch him through my phone as I read it.
If someone just gave him the fucking ring would he go home and stop bothering us?
--to his Bad Smeagol wife.
Shelob.
No need for that. It’s been a long time he’s mattered.
DLC Brain Wizards: “Messaging and Graphic Design, Are My Passions!!”
Roy’s portrayal was so vividly, soul-crushingly true.
Good one Roy - gave me a good laugh.
This is wonderful, however I wonder if anyone, including Roy, could capture the level of ignorance, amorality and hauteur evinced in this week’s Supremely Dumb Court’s Q&A. “If it’s about choice, why wouldn’t 15 weeks be enough?” proves that Chief Jester Roberts brings to reproductive rights the same level of intelligence and compassion he’s applied to voting rights over his entire fucking career. Only Amy Coney Island’s comparison of secular values to religious beliefs came close to that level of delusional misunderstanding of basic philosophical concepts. Carville et al may be worthless but at least they don’t hold the fate of the nation in their bigoted uninformed hands. If this week didn’t convince Joe Biden to started naming additional Justices, nothing will and we’re doomed to living in the Racistfascist Party’s dream republic, with forced pregnancies and tax supported religious education (Christians only need apply).
Indeed. And only *certain* Christians need apply. I was listening to the Writer’s Almanac this morning on Emily Dickinson’s birthday recounting her experience during the Second Great Awakening, which she alone of her schoolmates and family didn’t get swept up in.
It's the Stench from the Bench!™
There’s been a stench from the GOP since at least Reagan. Glad Sotomayor finally noticed, mainstream media still hasn’t.
Sadly, CJ Roberts is getting a reputation as a liberal because of his recent SCOTUS votes
If you squint really hard, being slightly better than Roger Taney makes him a liberal!
According to who?
many, many Republicans and Federalist Society members
ACB: "If we'll take it off your hands when it pops out, you don't really mind carrying it for 9 months, do you?"
No ignorance, etc., just show. Oral argument is required even for a foregone conclusion so doesn’t matter what they say.
It made a kind of sense for the Democratic party to go down that road in the late 80's. After LBJ screwed the New Deal pooch and Nixon curb-stomped the Party, the best response they could come up with was outsider Carter who was woefully unprepared and unequipped to deal with the job. The door was wide open for the Smartest Guys in the Room to walk in and offer a devil's bargain: beat the Republicans at their own game and you're back in power. All it will cost is your currently worthless soul. Why not, they thought. Who has a better offer?
And now you say you want a revolution? Well, you know, we'd all love to see the plan.
I think the question is whether the Dems needed to move right to win, or if they just realized they could win even though they moved right. Clinton's main initiative in his first term was NAFTA, was that really a big vote-winner for Democrats? Or was it that Clinton et al realized that Dem voters were so desperate to win after 12 years of the Republicans that they'd tolerate NAFTA?
If you look at what the masses want, dunno that moving right is anything other than suicide electorally and here we are.
I think it's possible that "Tough on Crime" and "Welfare Reform" both were net vote-gainers, winning some votes from conservative Whites while not losing an equal number of votes from African-Americans who felt trapped within the Dem party because the Republicans were even worse.
But the rest of the Clinton agenda (banking deregulation, telecom deregulation, etc.) couldn't have been vote-gaining, and they must have known that because they sure did everything they could to keep the public from knowing about it.
To be sort of fair, the public didnt want to know about NAFTA, I lived through that time and remember the sales pitch, and they pitched hard because the public wasn't paying much attention. A lot of handwaving about how the blessings of the Free Market would rain down on Mexico (it was always about Mexico, no one cared about Canada) and all that efficiency was going to make everything better. There was always a slide about "retraining", all those factory drones were gonna learn to code, go to trade school to learn HVAC, or just take off their shoes, !live in a tree, and learn to play the flute. It was gonna be great!
How much of this the Clinton administration believed we'll probably never know. I think they didnt do much follow through on retraining, but a 40-something drone with a mortgage and a few kids was never gonna be big on learning to code or going back to school with no guarantee of a job.
LBJ didn’t screw the New Deal pooch.
And the road you’re referring to is to become a GOP wannabe serving the GOP special interest for the most part. And the Dems have remained on that road to date. Including let’s say a reluctance to pass any sort of voter rights bill in response to all the GOP has been pulling.
LBJ supposedly said we've lost the South for a generation when he signed the Civil Rights act. His reward from America for doing the right thing was Richard Nixon. FDR got his New Deal in part by keeping the Negro out of its benefits, to get the South on board, or so I've read.
The Democratic Party was getting its lunch money taken daily by Nixon and then Reagan. They believed their job was to win elections, not save Democracy, so they did what they thought they had to do, and it worked. They won elections for a while, mainly thanks to Clinton. Republicans reacted the way do, by doubling down on racism and the crazy, and Democrats thought surely the voters will realize this is insane and will vote for us if we dont frighten them by pushing too hard on the status quo. That got us GWB. The Democratic party seems to have finally caught on, but if you have a Secret Plan to pass voting rights by hypnotizing Sinema and Manchin, you should pass it along to Schumer.
Sorry, I completely do not get your point. Your answer is for the party to go full Republican? What’s the point??
My point was about the choice the Democrats made in the late 80's to triangulate their way to victory, not what they should do today.
Today Democrats have no choice but to act radically if they want to survive as anything other than a punching bag. And yeah, a functional democracy, etc. Part of the party is not real happy about this, but I think it's a smaller group that it seems, because the party bureaucracy and our government were designed to delay and subvert radical change. A few well-placed Senators can grind everything to a halt for a while, and a minority party undergoing a psychotic break can make every day a death-defying leap of faith. I 'd love to see the Democratic government do a lot more now too, but I see why it's not happening as fast as I'd like.
We’re I to bet, I’d say it’s too late given all the shit the GOP has pulled with gerrymandering, voter restrictions and the recent laws passed. This is what refusing to be a vigorous opposition party when the other party is dedicated to hollowing out the nation on every level. To overly simplify, with the rare exception, the American state is the enemy of its people. And the Dems no longer are much of a solution.
Its more than a little ironic that Republicans would agree that the American state is the enemy of the people (when Democrats are in charge). The biggest problem Democrats have had is that very close to a majority of voters are in favor of hollowing out the nation, as long as their taxes dont go up or their children arent made to feel responsible for racism. In my darker moments I believe America has the government it wants.