The Presidency of the Joes, part II: lol documents

The thing I keep going back to is their total failure from 2008-2010 with 59/60 senate seats and a 50 seat house majority.

Always one vote short. Always great excuses. Vote for us this time, we will deliver.

Fuck you. I’m out.

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yeah if trump is the nom in 2024 I’m voting for biden, rahm emmanuel, hillary, jeffery epstein’s reanimated corpse if they win the dem nom and fuck y’all if you dont. Fuck that guy, forever and always. But for sure my days of sending $ to 90% of people who are “democrats” is over.

https://twitter.com/josh_wingrove/status/1472748821641928719?t=fasBjTAPOE3zotgFQnQEEg&s=19

People really need to focus on local politics more. Republicans run the tables because they give a shit and they get dudes out to vote against CRT or whatever at the local level while Dems keep focusing on moonshot presidential races and ignore everything else. Democracy isn’t just you voting once every four years for a president, get into local shit.

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Democratic government was never supposed to be a thing where you just show up once every four years and pull a lever for a presidential candidate. It’s actually getting involved with the decision-making process, it’s participatory government. The Republicans do this because they actually care about winning. They show up to school board meeting and scream and yell about critical race theory because they give a shit and they want to win.

It doesn’t have to be this way. It wasn’t that long ago (i.e. 2018) when left-leaning voters were mobbing local town hall events and screaming at their representatives. Republicans wouldn’t even show up to events because they were terrified of the mob, the ACA didn’t get repealed. Funny how that works. When you threaten to take away Boomer healthcare they rise up and take action. There’s a lesson in that.

Even so, I am not sure that withholding a vote will have the intended impact. US democracy is so broken that they will have an apparatus ready to respond to the fact that someone once gave them money and then stopped, but the fact that you didn’t vote for them will just get tossed in the “I guess we have to move further to the right” bucket. There is already a narrative being constructed that Manchin only pulled support for BBB because Dems were too mean to him.

They’re going to double down on doubling down on sucking up to conservatives.

LOL

How the hell has that worked for you over the last few decades?

He didn’t say it would work, he just said it was the best way. 0.1% chance of working is a better way than 0% chance.

Establishment Dems are afraid to attack Republicans in ways that burn bridges because they dream of going back to “normal” and don’t realize we’re living in the 1850s 2.0.

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Are we making America great again yet?

If they didn’t break Manchin’s arm they didn’t twist it hard enough. The man seems unscathed. Did they open a massive regulatory push against the coal industry? Did they audit all of his donors? Did they threaten his kid with every white collar criminal charge they could bring?

No?

Cool I don’t want to hear that they twisted his arm. They pleaded extra hard. I’m really tired of hearing that ‘Manchin doesn’t respond well to feeling pushed around’. Nobody likes being pushed around. The thing about pushing people around IRL is that it generally involves using your leverage to force them to do what you want irregardless of their feelings. It’s ‘do as I tell you or I will ruin you’ and then you start following through the instant they don’t do as they are told.

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The situation seems ripe for - push all of your actual effort and enthusiasm into getting progressives into any position of power that you can, and vote reluctantly for Dems when you have to just to block Rs.

One massive opportunity hanging out there is doing better in local and state elections. The Rs are really good at mobilizing deplorables to take over everything from school boards to State Senates. It’s probably more productive to fight locally then to just check out completely because national politics is so pathetic.

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Like I proposed earlier, it’s not a conspiracy theory. Opportunist dems in somewhat red leaning states see massive opportunity to profit when they can be the last vote. They aren’t all in it together, thats nonsense. Back when they had 60 votes, nobody really considered nuking the filibuster. 60 votes then was pretty much 50 votes now, with a lot more conservative senators. I actually think if we had 3-4 more decently liberal senators now they would actually do filibuster carve outs for certain things like voter rights at the very least and a lot more.

This is all hypothetical and meaningless. They’re going to get wrecked in 2022, then 2024, and voter suppression will keep them from getting a trifecta for decades. But this they’re all in on it shit is nonsense.

They’re incompetent and selfish. It’s not some grand conspiracy theory to not deliver, thats just opportunist dems in red leaning states taking advantage when dems have the bare minimum of votes. I mean a sample size of two times? lol

The less objectionable option for me at that point will be not to vote. I’m done lending support to this. Money and time outside the Federal electoral system going forward with few exceptions.

This does seem like an Occam’s razor situation, why assume a massive conspiracy when the obvious solution will do?

I do think the one way that “in on it” is in fact an explanatory factor is that there are many fundamentally conservative myths that are believed by both Republicans and establishment Dems. Joe Biden is a career long fighter for the interests for financial institutions and he primarily sees the military as a source of pride for Americans. Nancy Pelosi unhesitatingly leapt to “but we’re a free market” defenses for her indefensibly corrupt stock trading, as though “the free market” is an absolute an unquestionable good. They are basically still living in the zeitgeist of the Reagan era and in that sense their willingness to cooperate with Republicans on shared interests could be seen as “being in on it”, just without the actual implicit shame of hiding it from their constituents. They’re actually proud of the values they share with Republicans.

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Raise your hand if this at all surprises you. Boomers!

https://twitter.com/taragolshan/status/1472907682105499651?s=21

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The one small piece of good news in all this is SALT reinstatement dies too.

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Jfc. What a goddamn monster.

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They held out until they realized manchin was fine with sinking both. Is there really any benefit to sinking both bills and getting the blame for both by 90% of the population? That seems pretty stupid to me. Before when it looked like they had leverage because manchin cared about the bipartisan bill, it seemed like they could win. Seems pretty obvious his donors and him personally were fine with the way things are.

They knew this was likely to happen when they voted for it. Hope for the best expect the worst type of situation. At least this way people get some help and shitlibs eat the blame. Seems like a better outcome than people getting no help and progressive eating the blame making it way less likely new ones get elected in the future. Maybe more voters will be fed up with shitlibs after this

It sucks but I think progressive played this correctly

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If you think progressive holding out would have cracked manchin and forced him to vote for BBB and piss of his donors and hurt his coal business lol you