Somehow, Lex Luthor as president with Braniac as his chief adviser seems less terrifying than what we currently have. LuthorCorp was a successful business and Braniac, while a Kryptonian artifical intelligence, at least loathed all humans equally.
Author Archives: Stephen Robinson
Lex Luthor for President…
What in the hell is Bernie Sanders doing?
So, Bernie Sanders, who still isn’t really a Democrat, tweeted this today:
This is bad strategy. Like, in the not-successful, really sucky, we don’t get House back, Trump gets re-elected way. Do we need to dig through tweets from Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan and other prominent Republicans during the Obama years? They never did this.
Sure, Ted Cruz went after other Republicans, but he was loathed as a result, which is his own party couldn’t rally behind him against an unhinged reality TV host. And Cruz at least focused most of his ire on Democrats and the left. He also constantly harkened back to the Reagan “Golden Years.” Sanders would be hard pressed to name one Democratic president he likes.
This is just bad messaging. Republicans control all branches of government. They aren’t going to attack themselves. Nor are they going to blame themselves for the inevitable disasters resulting from their “unified government.” So, can we expect the next four years to consist of both the right and left saying how much Democrats suck? How does that lead to victory of any kind?
This isn’t to suggest that the Democratic party shouldn’t change into a non-having-its-ass-kicked party. I’m all in favor of that. But focus on the positives of the party. I know Sanders believes Trump’s only in office because he didn’t win the nomination but this is petty and pointless.
Oh, and this was the first response to his tweet.
This is the platform for the Justice Democrats, the folks who are working to ensure a second Trump term. It’s not even really a political platform. It’s more like something scribbled onto the rolling paper of a joint. It’s so stupid and fantastical, it makes you want to french kiss Ayn Rand’s corpse.
Context…
Some historical context for the new Attorney General:
A year or so ago, when Republicans were vocal in their distaste and contempt for Trump, Jeff Sessions became the first member of the Senate to endorse Trump and the only Senator to do so during the primaries.
Sessions also enthusiastically endorsed Trump at a time when he was under scrutiny for not disavowing David Duke’s support. Republican might now lament how Elizabeth Warren hurt Sessions’s feelings by discussing his history of racist actions, but a year ago, they were all dogpiling on Trump for his “disqualifying” and “unelectable” racism: This includes Marco Rubio…
Ted Cruz…
Nikki Haley…
And Paul Ryan…
So, even during the distant past of last year when Republicans pretended to care about racism and thought that condemning someone’s even tacit support of racists was worthwhile and not a “character attack,” Jeff Sessions chose to endorse Donald Trump. The weekend before Super Tuesday, Sessions could’ve backed fellow Southerner Ted Cruz — who I’m sure was begging for his endorsement, but he instead happily put on a Make America Great Again cap and again demonstrated how outside even the GOP mainstream he was — well at the time, God knows what the GOP is now.
We should never forget how craven the Republican party has been regarding Donald Trump — openly trading any pretense of dignity and honor for total power.
B.S. on Parade…
Fortunately, for lady-putting-in-their-placer Mitch McConnell, the Sessions hearng is not an actual trial, because that is the sort of obviously impeachable statement any first year law student would know not to make if they want to prevent Coretta Scott King’s letter being admitted as rebuttal.
Coretta Scott King thinks you suck is sort of a deal breaker for any attempt to present yourself as a champion of equal protection under the law. Her mild tolerance of you is the lowest hurdle you need to clear.
Like DeVos, Sessions is not someone Rubio or even Cruz would have chosen for this very reason. That’s not to be naive enough to think they’d have selected defenders of public education and civil rights respectively but they would have bothered to pick relatively non-controversial choices with as little baggage as possible. You know, like sane politicians do.
But Trump’s picks have all demonstrated a degree of contempt for consensus and a tendency toward cronyism. Like his hero Andrew Jackson, Trump believes that to the “victor goes the spoils,” so Sessions, as an early and key supporter, gets the nod. Haley gets shipped out of state so a Trump supporter can become governor, and DeVos gets a Cabinet position as if she’d had it on her Amazon Wish List.
One point..
My liberal friends are disappointed that Republicans narrowly confirmed the incompetent billionaire Amway (no, really) heiress Betsy DeVos for Secretary of Education in what appears to be an appalling and obvious example of cronyism. I don’t blame them, but look: You can tweet, call, email, tap dance all you like, but if you want elected officials to not behave like Republicans, then you should vote for and contribute to the campaigns of Democrats. Lobbying the cannibals sprinkling paprika over you to give tofu a chance is not the most effective strategy.
Democrats let Marco Rubio — who showed up at work every once in a while when not having dollars stuffed into his speedos — win re-election in a Senate race the DNC mostly ignored. How does a political party let a guy who lost his own state’s presidential primary to Trump and then later endorsed Trump after describing him as a “madman” and “con artist” beat their candidate? Rubio isn’t McCain. It’s not like he had some honorable record and history in Florida that you couldn’t overcome if you at least tried.
They also let Toomey and Johnson win in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, states that Democrats used to win nationally. Toomey’s narrow victory was especially galling. McGinty was polling ahead of Toomey for weeks prior to the election and then lost by a little more than a percentage point.
This is why I will slap upside the head the next person who talks to me about Hillary Clinton winning the goddamn popular vote or Trump not having a “mandate.” It doesn’t matter. What matters is that if she’d carried Florida, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, it’s possible the Democrats could have taken the Senate. And if you can get two ignoramuses, a Russian stooge, and a white supremacist confirmed in the Senate, that seems pretty “mandate-like.”
But for those of you who stayed home because Hillary didn’t “inspire” you enough, just consider that one percentage point in Pennsylvania is why Betty DeVos is set to dismantle public education as we knew it.
Fake Views…
59 percent of Trump supporters also agree that the second image is an actual current photo of the president. (The dishonest media likes to take shots of him from unflattering angles.)
Rigging the Vote…
During a meeting with congressional leaders who, if actually honorable people, have the obligation to immediately remove him from office for obvious signs of insanity, Donald Trump repeated the lie that “millions” of people “voted illegally” in the election… the one he won.
I know many Sanders supporters believed Hillary Clinton “rigged” the Democratic primary, but she actually won that race. I’m not sure what’s the point of perpetuating wide-scale voter fraud that results in the tearful concession of your candidacy to a known madman you’re certain will destroy everything you’ve spent your life fighting for. But, hey, who knows how women’s minds work, right? Up top!
Or, maybe, like Catwoman on the 1960s BATMAN series, she just hired really dumb goons.
GOON: So, uh, Mrs. C, we totally rigged that election for ya real good, like, with all those illegal votes in California.
CLINTON: Wait… you rigged California? But I was always going to win California.
GOON: Yeah, but now you’ll easily win the popular vote by, like, four million votes or some such.
CLINTON: You do understand that the popular vote doesn’t affect the outcome of the presidential election, which according to Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution is determined by the Electoral College.
GOON: Uh, so what’s the purpose, Mrs. C?
CLINTON: Why can’t I get good help!
Alternative Facts
While I watched Kellyanne Conway lie her way through her latest appearance on Meet the Press, I thought about Aziz Ansari’s SNL monologue last night, where he implied that you couldn’t consider “all” Trump voters racist because, well, there were a lot of them (more than 60 million). We’ve heard this a lot recently, and it’s another form of “alternative facts.” Prior to Trump’s surprise win, the liberal punditry (and many conservatives) predicted that Trump would lose by Goldwater levels. If that had happened, right now, there’d be no question that anyone who supported a candidate who ran such a racist, misogynistic campaign was themselves culpable of racism and misogyny. Nothing really *changed* about Trump but sheer volume of his support. So, if I record an album of myself singing Kander and Ebb in the shower, it’s no less objectively awful than if 60 people buy it than if 60 million people do. But in the fact of collective madness, we must grasp at “alternative facts.” Maybe my competitors didn’t run a “good campaign.” Maybe there was something in my album that resonated with people beyond my tone deafness. Nothing really good comes of embracing “alternative facts,” no matter how unpleasant “actual facts” are.
serhasacomplaint 