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So reassuring there are still people like these selfless guys, willing to give their all to save us from being controlled by those damn elites

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Apr 14, 2021Liked by Roy Edroso

J.D. Vance is about as populist as Macallan served in a crystal tumbler to a guy in a bespoke suit sitting in a leather club chair. Unfortunately, I wonder if Ohio Republicans who enthusiastically voted for Man of the People Donald Trump twice are smart enough to see through his act. Or maybe they’ll just pretend they don’t see through it – racism is a helluva drug.

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Apr 14, 2021Liked by Roy Edroso

I am in Ohio right now. Driving through the countryside, the number of "God Bless Donald Trump" billboards is both shocking and depressing. Vance has a real shot because people are eager to vote for any wealthy White man who is reasonably up-front about the fact that he's defrauding them, but winks while he's doing it so the marks think they're in on the con.

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Apr 14, 2021Liked by Roy Edroso

I think Ohio's always been kind of that way--it gave America Grant, Sherman, and Garfield, but also McKinley (via Mark Hanna), Harding and the Tafts.

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This is why Bootsy Collins needs to be president. Proud star-child of Cinncinnati.

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Apr 14, 2021Liked by Roy Edroso

We're probably doing a cross country drive from Cuomostan to Montana. Maybe I should swing by Walmart and pick up an appropriate rifle for shooting at any such billboards we see on the road.

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Apr 14, 2021Liked by Roy Edroso

Careful! These assholes are all heavily armed, extremely afraid, and pretty pissed most of the time.

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The billboards and signs are armed??

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Apr 15, 2021Liked by Roy Edroso

My understanding was that Vance has little chance to make it out of the primary because Josh Mandel

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Apr 14, 2021Liked by Roy Edroso

Gotta love how the MSM holds other fantasy that there's anything populist about the GOP beyond the subject of their bullshitting.

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“men could work out their differences over a chaw and some 'shine.”

Looks like the Hatfields and the McCoys have disappeared down the same memory hole as George Wallace and Orval Faubus.

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Apr 14, 2021Liked by Roy Edroso

Oh, come on. Enough books have been written about them by scholarly types that they're practically ivory tower elites themselves.

Shit, I think I've gotten to the point of the migraine where the wingnuts make sense.

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Apr 14, 2021Liked by Roy Edroso

Sorry to be appearance-ist, but what is it with Republicans and their jowls?

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You do realize that the National Cathedral is (horrors!) Episcopalian, don't you? (I'm sure that Dreher and Douthat are perfectly aware of that--though maybe they can get Fred Barnes to have his say on the matter.)

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author

I’ll go fix that, thanks

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Thanks, but you didn't have to. I love the notion of J.D. Vance going into an Episcopalian cathedral for a Catholic confession and nobody noticing the difference.

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Apr 14, 2021Liked by Roy Edroso

It's pretty perfect, isn't it.

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Apr 14, 2021Liked by Roy Edroso

Attacking the "elites" is a winner with the rubes. Even when you're one of them. FDR, right?

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Apr 14, 2021Liked by Roy Edroso

And The NY Times will refer to Republican grifters as “populists” even as they’re feeding the poor into the wood chipper. Their style guide defines “populist” as “vulgar lower-class white with a soupçon of racism.”

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Apr 14, 2021Liked by Roy Edroso

More like a Hungry Man soup can of racism.

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They're "populists" the same way I am a vegetarian.

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Got a beef? Try some of this pork roast. Unless you're chicken.

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Yes, I am fishing for your carnivorous sweet spot.

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to be fair that is how centrists define populists, too

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But we repeat ourselves

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Except that FDR actually did things that materially helped people less fortunate than he. Very elitist of him :)

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Class traitor! Etc.

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Apr 14, 2021Liked by Roy Edroso

Peter Thiel is the good kind of capitalist. He's not woke. He wouldn't cancel anyone. He would never interfere with someone's free speech.

He did secretly pay for a lawsuit to cancel Gawker but that doesn't count, it's covered by cancelation exemption 13-b-5.

Also he's not elite, who among us doesn't get infusions of blood to maintain eternal youth.

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Apr 14, 2021Liked by Roy Edroso

Der Blutgraf

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Apr 14, 2021Liked by Roy Edroso

Thiel gets transfusions of blood from "young people" to renew his youth, BUT . . .

It's DEMOCRATS who are harvesting adrenochrome from children to obtain eternal youth.

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Apr 14, 2021Liked by Roy Edroso

You're far, far too kind. Seriously. Thiel's beyond awful.

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Apr 14, 2021Liked by Roy Edroso

I wish I could run a perfect simulation wherein the dipshits who fall for frauds like Trump and Vance get exactly what they want electorally for, let's say, a decade: Uninterrupted Republican rule in the House, Senate, White House, and Supreme Court. And after those 10 years, when they still haven't gotten whatever it is they thought they would have gotten out of it because the grifters they elected were never intent on delivering, I'd be curious to know what percentage, if at all significant, would be willing to admit they were duped and how many would still insist that the liberals in California and New York (not to mention Muslims, Black Americans, etc.) were still the "real" problem. Hoping I never have to find out in real life.

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Apr 14, 2021Liked by Roy Edroso

Oh, they’d get what they want: permission to hate everyone they don’t accept as equally American.

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Apr 14, 2021Liked by Roy Edroso

(Oh, you mean like now?)

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heh. i came to say, 'hasn't this already happened?'

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Apr 14, 2021Liked by Roy Edroso

The base has been fed and eating gate for decades. Didn't start with Donnie. Proof is that he can't have an original idea. He mostly apes the bullshit of the rightist media.

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Haven't we already? More years than not, I'd warrant. And all its done is make them more final in their solutions

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Apr 14, 2021Liked by Roy Edroso

The GOP has been feeding the base with lies for over fifty years with no lessening of support. And we've had ~forty years of GOP domination so we know what that's like.

Sorry, been there, are there.

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Apr 14, 2021Liked by Roy Edroso

I hate to be so cynical, but it’s classic pseudoconservatism: Vance only cares about opiate addiction because his mom is an addict. If a pseudoconservative isn’t personally affected by a problem, that problem doesn’t warrant their interest. It’s the difference between empathy and selfishness. Black lung, racism, environmental degradation, police violence, predatory hedge funds and economic inequality - Vance will tackle those when his coal mining Black cousin is shot by a policeman after his house is foreclosed by Bain Capital so Mark Zuckerberg can build a hunting “cabin” on what was once the hamlet of Possum Holler.

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author

You hate to be so cynical?

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Apr 14, 2021Liked by Roy Edroso

If this is hate, I welcome his hatred of the topic

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Apr 14, 2021Liked by Roy Edroso

I'd prefer to be the all-loving embracer of humanity despite its flaws that my meditation practice encourages, but christ crucified on a cross of gold, these Republicans harsh my mellow.

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Apr 14, 2021Liked by Roy Edroso

Some men are good but cumulatively they're scum. That said, full disclosure: I'm an orthodox, well-scarred misanthrope.

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Apr 14, 2021Liked by Roy Edroso

What I has thinking. This is a goddam safe place for well earned, fact-based cynicism.

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Apr 15, 2021Liked by Roy Edroso

LMAO. For some of us cynicism is a source of joy and hope that springs eternal, right?

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Why ya gotta hate being cynical? That's right next to cleanliness. Which is next to godliness, And god is empty. Just like me

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LOL

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Apr 14, 2021Liked by Roy Edroso

"2:00 pm Visit to the National Cathedral to take confession; press photographers shoot Vance going in and out of the Cathedral."

Opus Dei? Opus Dei.

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Apr 14, 2021Liked by Roy Edroso

In and out the Vance fraud goes

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Apr 14, 2021Liked by Roy Edroso

Talking of Hillbilly Michelangelos

(Sorry, just having a strange TS Eliot interlude)

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Apr 14, 2021Liked by Roy Edroso

Great piece. So hard to tell all the made up stuff from the truthiness. Entire piece 100% credible.

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Apr 14, 2021Liked by Roy Edroso

He looks like Erickson’s slightly less doughy cousin.

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the pantload is no smaller however.

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Yeah, I'm always appalled/tickled by what mediocre white fuckers think alpha-maledom looks like.

Basically ever DL "bi-curious" married guy on Grindr looks like JDV. And assumes gay men are hitting on him all the time...

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Another opportunity to mention the ageless Onion headline “Why Do All These Homosexuals Keep Sucking My Cock?”

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Apr 14, 2021Liked by Roy Edroso

Jesus. This seems way too accurate. I'm guessing that before he nods off, Vance bones up on some Chomsky so he can use the right-wing slur du jour, "oligarchy," against Democrats and Big Tech without smirking. (The thought of "Big Tech" reminds him to deposit the latest check from Thiel.) Then, just before he enters American Dreamland, his mind spins different ways to begin sentences with "We must secure the existence of our people..."

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Apr 14, 2021Liked by Roy Edroso

“The Humility of the Hills.” Mwah!

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Apr 14, 2021Liked by Roy Edroso

"...they’ll just pretend they don’t see through it" is Republicanism 101. 60% 'believe' Drumpf won the election and that Antifa attacked the Capitol building. But no, they don't.

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Apr 15, 2021Liked by Roy Edroso

Wait, that New Haven hillbilly is a Catholic convert?! Figures.

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