I don't think that Buttigieg would be a liability. The one thing I do think is that pretty much any candidate is going to be chancy and could well lose because the media is going to lean into the sports model of reporting and focus on the drama rather than on the substance. If Buttigieg did end up losing because something he did, or something about him blew up into a negative, then I'm certain that half of the pundits would have already half-written post-election analyses arguing that his gayness was just too big a feature for swing voters to get past, and they'd blame the loss on "activists" running the Dems. And then it would be a generation before the donors would have the courage to support any LGBTQ+ candidate for national office again.
Same way I don't think Harris will ever be given another chance at the presidency. Doesn't matter that she came damn close carrying a lot of baggage that had been forced upon her by the circumstances.
Meanwhile, given where we are right now in our politics, it's hard to even fathom how The Dean Scream was enough to sink a candidacy. Really? That? What a strange moment in time.
Trump's suit against the BBC looks like turning into an own goal. The BBC has filed discovery motions demanding Trump disclosure his taxes for the last decade or more (to substantiate, or not, his claims of financial harm), his medical records (to substantiate or not his claims of other kinds of harm). All that information he has been desperately trying to keep concealed.
nous is spot on with this, and it looks like a perfect description of Buttigieg. Too bad that being gay is almost certainly as big an electoral disadvantage as being female or black.
A decade or two ago, it was probably a worse handicap. But the country has changed. Not as much as one might hope, but substantially nonetheless.
Legalizing gay marriage looks (from where I sit anyway) to have brought a lot of gays out of the closet. With the result that a lot of people discovered that their friends and relatives included gay people. And the heavens did not fall. Buttigieg, himself, took things further. High profile (thanks to his Presidential run), "young-ish, charismatic, and a good communicator" -- and not particularly scary; not hitting any of the primary bigotry hot buttons.
You can argue that the country still isn't ready. But the country wasn't ready for a black President either. Obama won anyway. The bigots predictably freaked out, but he won anyway. Twice. I could see Buttigieg doing the same.
I observe that it's the Soviet/Red Army Chorus. Not a Russian Army Chorus (assuming there even is one these days).
Putin may dream of restoring the supposed glory of the Soviet Union. But his vision doesn't seem to extend beyond territory and military power. The idea that anything else might matter seems to be outside his comprehension. Economic welfare for the people? Anything resembling culture? Just no.
"I suspect that many of those low-engagement voters don’t know themselves what they are going to go for, so it’s a lot of guesswork. Most of the primary voters seem to have strong preferences and too much faith in the power of reason."
I think that's a real problem. I also think that electability IS an factor but we need to remember that elections are based on a lot of voters who think and feel in ways that we, the primary voters, don't understand very well which makes it hard to know what will make them jump one way or another.
Republicans nearly always vote Republican. There is a growing population of independents. They are a grab bag of people who arrived at independent from different directions and for different reasons. There are infrequent voters who come out for charisma or because there is a really visceral issue for them at stake. There are one issue voters who either vote for the candidate who represents their issue or don't vote at all. Democrats nearly always vote for Democrats.
So what we are really fighting for is the votes of the indies and infrequent voters--the people Dem primary activists are least likely to understand.
What this country needs is an antiTrump. That means a Democrat who is as big and boisterous an asshole as He, Trump (for "electability") but who is ruthless about deMAGAfication (a straightforward "policy") instead of milquetoast nuance. Someone who demonizes billionaires (a smaller class than trans people, let alone immigrants) and is not afraid to call MAGAts stupid. Someone who has yet to appear, alas.
I'm not kidding. For many years, I have been pointing out that "electability" is a crock. We nominated Kerry in 2004 because he was more "electable" than Dean. We nominated Obama in 2008, but not because he was The Electable One. We nominated Clinton in 2016 partly because Sanders was "unelectable". Can anybody claim with a straight face that "electability" in any but a post hoc sense was He, Trump's selling point to the GOP?
"Electability. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
wj - The challenge will be for such a person to get thru the primaries. Those tend to have a far higher concentration of, for lack of a better term, activists — people who do care, often passionately, about policy. At least some policies.
Convincing primary voters that “someone who can win a general election” should be a necessary criteria (not sufficient, but necessary) will be a non-trivial task. Not least because they, too, tend to live in an information bubble populated by others who care about policy.
We have a real structural problem with the primaries in that the voters who need to be brought on board often don't pay any attention to the election until after the primaries are done, leaving the primary voters and the donors to pick. None of the Dem coalitions in the primary seem to have any sense of what those people are looking for. I suspect that many of those low-engagement voters don't know themselves what they are going to go for, so it's a lot of guesswork. Most of the primary voters seem to have strong preferences and too much faith in the power of reason.
I think primaries are the place where ranked voting actually makes the most sense, in that ranked voting would not just take candidate support into account, but would also give a sense of crossover appeal. And if the primaries were done in two or three rounds it would also give the party a chance to see which candidates were gaining and which were losing support over time, and let the candidates adjust their approaches to some actual feedback.
Predictably, the reliably unreliable Trump has already pulled the plug on the pathetically optimistic Starmer’s elephant-trumpeted $40bn Tech Prosperity Deal, as part of his attempts to ensure access to the soggy brains of ChatGPT-ravaged Europeans for his acquiescent social media propaganda platforms, all those royal breakfasts wasted. What lemming-like impulse compelled the Labour government to agree to making Great Britain an enormous energy-draining battery to power the servers that spread unregulated lies about Europe anyway, whose liberal democracy Trump openly declared this month that he intends to destroy? Here’s $40bn, Mr Starmer. Now open the oven and stick your head in. Trump’s high-profile attempt to discredit British news providers goes hand in hand with the ongoing churn of social media accounts, many of which are just now unstaffed AI bots running helpfully from Russian addresses, mangling out unsubstantiated far-right propaganda designed to destabilise European democracies on now-unregulated American platforms. I’ve told the following story so many times even I am sick of it, and I love mind-numbing repetition: a racist auntie shared with me some Facebook flotsam in the form of an essay by an academic, explaining why Muslims are subhuman. I pointed out to her that neither the academic, nor the academic institution he belonged to, actually existed. “Yes,” she said, “but I still think the article makes a lot of good points.” This abject stupidity, combined with hi-tech nuclear-powered propaganda, is what democracy is up against. And Starmer is sleepwalking into European liberal democracy’s online accelerated death spiral, like Billy Blackberry ™ ® from the Munch Bunch ™ ® happily lowering himself into a smoothie maker and thinking it’s a tiny foam-filled jacuzzi specially designed for anthropomorphised fruit-men. Logically, Downing Street should turn itself into a massive content factory, flooding the internet with enough true stories about whatever positive news stories it can find, presented with enough wit and clarity to make them massively shareable, to counteract Musk and Putin’s propaganda. But the problem is Downing Street’s idea of working the internet is a TikTok clip of Keir Starmer standing near a tree. We’re doomed.
This is Steward Lee's latest, on Trump's war against the media, and in this case the BBC. There are various links throughout it, so I am splitting it into 2 parts in the hope that it doesn't go into moderation.
Part 1
Stewart Lee: Trump’s BBC lawsuit isn’t about money. It’s about destroying a news providerThe White House’s dead-eyed shark has monetised his presidency so well that he can pay whatever it costs to discredit institutions that may threaten him.
Donald Trump is taking legal action against the BBC for defamation. Apparently the adjudicated sex offender and pussy-grabbing serial liar still has a reputation that can be damaged. Even if all the president of the United States had ever done was that weird hand dance to Village People’s YMCA and his ill-judged playground impression of the disabled New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, it’s doubtful his reputation would have far to fall, but here goes. In other news, you can say what you like about Fred West but don’t criticise his patio-laying skills, which were exemplary. There is now a terrible risk that, should Trump win the case, the BBC’s assets will be forfeited to him. This means he may own the Doctor Who franchise, and thus the Tardis technology itself, allowing Trump to turn back time in Britain on behalf of Nigel Farage, and return us to a homogenous warm-beer world of whiteness where you can hiss gas noises at Jews and say it was harmless banter if it even happened, which Richard Tice says it didn’t anyway, and he should know, as he keeps a close watch on British affairs from a sunbed in Dubai. It doesn’t matter how much the improbable legal action costs Trump, whose pockets are bottomless, especially since he worked out how to monetise almost every aspect of the presidency. You can even buy a Donald Trump cologne for men called Fight Fight Fight, after the phrase the president cried out after surviving the near-fatal attack on his right ear. I’m bringing out a Donald Trump scent for the ladies. It’s called Fight Fight Fight Fight Fight Off Donald Trump’s Unwanted Sexual Advances. Sniff the Trump scent hard enough and it may even erase the memory of the president’s penis, which, according to the adult film actor Stormy Daniels, looks like “the mushroom character in Mario Kart”, and is rumoured to have been the inspiration for the Can song Mushroom, after the group’s vocalist, Damo Suzuki, shared a urinal trough with the 25-year-old Trump in a Manhattan nightclub in 1971. Trump’s legal action against the BBC is worth it whatever it costs, because it allows him to spend however long the case drags on for repeating claims about the unreliability of journalists, specifically the BBC. This gradual process of erosion of public trust in news providers will benefit Trump enormously should, for example, anyone ever write scathingly about his monetisation of the presidency. Cheap at half the price! Is it possible that the death of accurate news reporting is just a side-effect of the Jeffrey Epstein case, and of dark forces trying to make sure whatever happened on Paedophile Island stays on Paedophile Island? And who decided to name it that anyway? It’s like Tracey Island but instead of being full of futuristic space-copter Thunderbirds saving lives, there’s just loads of middle-aged billionaires in toupees and Speedos leering at things. Trump’s instinctive attempts to create smokescreens for his corruption don’t even have to make any sense. The son of film-maker Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle was charged with their murder last Sunday. Less than 24 hours later Trump took to social media to say that Reiner died “due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind-crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME” (capitals the president’s own) as if some vengeful Maga-supporting deity had used the Reiners’ killer as his own instrument of justice. Did Charlie Kirk, a kind of saint who only wanted to spread love and kindness to all humanity, take a bullet in the face for this? And yet Keir Starmer still seems to think he can do business with this dead-eyed great white shark of a man. He’s going to need a bigger boat.
Obvs I can't vote, but I agree with both cleek and wonkie.
First and foremost, the Dems need someone who is young-ish, charismatic, and a good communicator, and then whoever that is needs to hammer on the idea that the middle class needs saving and expanding, and that tax cuts have not done the job for that. They need to run on restoring dignity and affordability to working people and reducing the influence of corporations and donors over elected officials
nous is spot on with this, and it looks like a perfect description of Buttigieg. Too bad that being gay is almost certainly as big an electoral disadvantage as being female or black.
I'm with Cleek. I don't vote on policy except in the very broad sense that Democrats try to devise policies to solve problems and Republicans don't.
I vote for whoever wins the primary. During the primary I tend toward whoever seems the most authentic, the best public speaker, and the least likely to do something stupid during the campaign, and the one who isn't being negatively stereotyped by the msm. Those are some of the factors that contribute to election chances.
My objection to Newsome is that the msm will collaborate with the Republicans to promote a negative stereotype of him and that will significantly impair his chances.
My objections to HRC were: she started out pre-slimed by Republican slander with a 50% negative rating and had a history of stupid decisions (Iraq and her campaign decisions during the primary race with Obama).
I didn't like Bernie, but he seemed less likely to lose the election to Trump.
I thought Harris would lose because we live in a society that is pretty misogynistic and has a wide and deep disrespect for Black women.
Right now my preferred choice is Pritzker, but that's tentative. I also like Buttigieg, also tentative. FWIW.
i guess what i'm saying is: right now, anyway, i don't care about policy details; i don't care about ideological purity; i don't care about authenticity or ambition. none of that matters to me because time has taught me that my preferences are irrelevant.
i really don't need to validate my specific policy ideals. they'll never get implemented anyway.
what matters is what the general public wants.what really matters is stopping The Party of Trump. so, any Democrat will do.
The challenge will be for such a person to get thru the primaries. Those tend to have a far higher concentration of, for lack of a better term, activists -- people who do care, often passionately, about policy. At least some policies.
Convincing primary voters that "someone who can win a general election" should be a necessary criteria (not sufficient, but necessary) will be a non-trivial task. Not least because they, too, tend to live in an information bubble populated by others who care about policy.
IMO, the person the Dems need is the one who grabs the attention of that huge mass of people whose political outlooks are completely alien to those of us who think we know something about politics.
cycle after cycle we spend a year debating the number of angels on the head of each of the candidates' pins. and then when the elections happen, the mass of voters go and pick the person who discredits our scholastic philosophies.
so, my vote is for the person who can win for the Dems. and i am 100% sure my own actual criteria are 100% irrelevant.
Everyone says they vote for whoever they think is “better on the issues” but how many people have any idea what policies a candidate is committed to on those issues?
Newsome's appearance on Ezra Klein's podcast was enlightening.
https://youtu.be/PqBsRNUXWfs?si=EwDOTfV4F7dttjQM
I didn't enjoy it, but I can see he is pulling all the levers to be the next president. My main concern is that he's all ambition, and while he may be someone to beat Trump and the Republicans, he's not the person we need.
wj - I'd never call Newsom a progressive, but I agree that any reasonable CA pol would be read as a loony leftie by default because that's the trope everyone knows.
First and foremost, the Dems need someone who is young-ish, charismatic, and a good communicator, and then whoever that is needs to hammer on the idea that the middle class needs saving and expanding, and that tax cuts have not done the job for that. They need to run on restoring dignity and affordability to working people and reducing the influence of corporations and donors over elected officials - basically a pro-labor message without the high church union messaging.
wonkie - agree that policy messaging is a loser, but think that a good fight message needs some sort of big picture policy narrative that resonates and that gets to the core of the party's values. And they need to take aim at all of the tropes that have harmed us - trickle down, tax cut prosperity; tough on crime justice; making schools compete - and replace them with a focus on investing in the public good.
The labels annoy me too because there is no shared meaning. They mean whatever someone wants them to mean--largely unattached to policy responses to issues. Yet the news media and many citizens treat those labels as if they were useful analysis tools for explaining where pols are on policy. It's annoying.
I don't think elections are won on policy and certainly not on policy nuances--unless there is a very clear harm done to a large number of people that is simple to see like taking away their health insurance. I think I persistent mistake made by Dems and especially by self-proclaimed progressives is the belief that the majority of voters are moved by policy. "HRC would have won if she had run on Medicare for All" etc.
Most people vote the way they shop: brand, eye appeal, connotations they put on a product, previous experience, what their family always did, etc. I doubt if your typical voter has more than the faintest slogan level understanding of policy. They notice style, though.
Maybe I'm cynical. But I'm looking at elections that were won THREE TIMES by Republicans who cut taxes for rich people and created deficits while blaming the deficits on Democrats before electing a Republican who did it AGAIN--and yet your typical Republican voter claims to be opposed to deficits, and I doubt if many really want tax cuts for the rich. Meanwhile on Blue Sky self-identified progressives say things like, "Democrats are the party of corporate power!"
Everyone says they vote for whoever they think is "better on the issues" but how many people have any idea what policies a candidate is committed to on those issues?
Kinda sounds like Vance has been cast for that position. He probably wouldn't have won if the cultists stayed home. (In a snit because their god-king wasn't nominated in this alternate history.) But as a post-Trump successor, especially if he succeeded a deceased Trump? I can see them believing that could work. And, with a little help from the Democrats, it might.
I harbor the optimistic hope that the Democrats will resist the temptation to nominate someone who self-brands as progressive. A candidate who holds those positions is fine. But in the current culture, brand is going to be important. So, Pritzker could work, but Newsom would not -- California's image is just too radical in too much of the country.
Not a complaint about you or your posting that, wonkie, but I hate polls like the one that Emerson College put together because I don't think that they have any actual relevance to a real election. It's more about how people label political positions in their heads, and it shows us nothing about what voters actually want or what they respond to.
Who is the person being polled thinking of when they think of "MAGA Republican," of "moderate Republican," of "moderate Democrat," of "progressive Democrat?" What are the tipping point issues that make them choose one over the other? What do they like or dislike about each of them? No idea. Instead, we are left to guess what each of those labels might mean to a group of a thousand strangers.
These surveys pretend to inform, but they don't do any real work to unpack the assumptions on which they work to find any real information that might make a difference. And politicians are paying people six figure salaries to make this sort of tea and read the leaves.
A number of people have reported that the real reason Trump is dismantling NCAR is to punish Colorado's governor for not releasing Tina Peters from jail. Peters is the former Mesa County clerk and "the 2020 election was stolen" fanatic who was convicted of several state crimes associated with her providing unauthorized persons access to the voting machines in her care, and that person breaking the seals, opening the covers, and tinkering with the insides.
I skimmed some of the stories in the Wyoming press. Wyoming's Congress critters either did not respond to questions, or said that they had not heard from the administration about the fate of the supercomputer center in Wyoming.
The problem with the survey results that I posted is that, as far as I can see, there are no moderate Republicans--in terms of policy. Some are more polite than others but nearly the entire party from top to bottom is fully complicit in all of the excesses of Trumpism from Project 2025 to the DOGE rampage, to the treason, to tax cuts for rich people and the attacks on the not-rich to the ethical, moral, and financial corruption and the violations of the rule of law. Yes, there are individuals here and there and some slight breaking of ranks recently, but moderates? Even the three ladies who get called moderate are complicit with the majority of what the Trump admin has done.
I think people are reacting to style. They don't want the overt bullying (the pseudo polite hatemongering of pre-Trump Republicans who outsourced their most overt rhetoric to people like Limbaugh is probably still acceptable). They don't want the shouting and yelling and shrillness.
I've always thought that the Republicans erred in nominating Trump because he was a threat to their goal of changing the US into a one party oligarchy. They need a fascist who seems nice.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “The Wiles Interview”
I like Buttigieg. I like Booker a lot as well.
I don't think that Buttigieg would be a liability. The one thing I do think is that pretty much any candidate is going to be chancy and could well lose because the media is going to lean into the sports model of reporting and focus on the drama rather than on the substance. If Buttigieg did end up losing because something he did, or something about him blew up into a negative, then I'm certain that half of the pundits would have already half-written post-election analyses arguing that his gayness was just too big a feature for swing voters to get past, and they'd blame the loss on "activists" running the Dems. And then it would be a generation before the donors would have the courage to support any LGBTQ+ candidate for national office again.
Same way I don't think Harris will ever be given another chance at the presidency. Doesn't matter that she came damn close carrying a lot of baggage that had been forced upon her by the circumstances.
Meanwhile, given where we are right now in our politics, it's hard to even fathom how The Dean Scream was enough to sink a candidacy. Really? That? What a strange moment in time.
On “Author, author?”
Trump's suit against the BBC looks like turning into an own goal. The BBC has filed discovery motions demanding Trump disclosure his taxes for the last decade or more (to substantiate, or not, his claims of financial harm), his medical records (to substantiate or not his claims of other kinds of harm). All that information he has been desperately trying to keep concealed.
Oops.
"
Well, he does seem to be a steward of sorts.
On “The Wiles Interview”
nous is spot on with this, and it looks like a perfect description of Buttigieg. Too bad that being gay is almost certainly as big an electoral disadvantage as being female or black.
A decade or two ago, it was probably a worse handicap. But the country has changed. Not as much as one might hope, but substantially nonetheless.
Legalizing gay marriage looks (from where I sit anyway) to have brought a lot of gays out of the closet. With the result that a lot of people discovered that their friends and relatives included gay people. And the heavens did not fall. Buttigieg, himself, took things further. High profile (thanks to his Presidential run), "young-ish, charismatic, and a good communicator" -- and not particularly scary; not hitting any of the primary bigotry hot buttons.
You can argue that the country still isn't ready. But the country wasn't ready for a black President either. Obama won anyway. The bigots predictably freaked out, but he won anyway. Twice. I could see Buttigieg doing the same.
On “Weekend Music Thread music thread #09 In Russia, Christmas music sings you!”
I observe that it's the Soviet/Red Army Chorus. Not a Russian Army Chorus (assuming there even is one these days).
Putin may dream of restoring the supposed glory of the Soviet Union. But his vision doesn't seem to extend beyond territory and military power. The idea that anything else might matter seems to be outside his comprehension. Economic welfare for the people? Anything resembling culture? Just no.
On “The Wiles Interview”
"I suspect that many of those low-engagement voters don’t know themselves what they are going to go for, so it’s a lot of guesswork. Most of the primary voters seem to have strong preferences and too much faith in the power of reason."
I think that's a real problem. I also think that electability IS an factor but we need to remember that elections are based on a lot of voters who think and feel in ways that we, the primary voters, don't understand very well which makes it hard to know what will make them jump one way or another.
Republicans nearly always vote Republican.
There is a growing population of independents. They are a grab bag of people who arrived at independent from different directions and for different reasons.
There are infrequent voters who come out for charisma or because there is a really visceral issue for them at stake.
There are one issue voters who either vote for the candidate who represents their issue or don't vote at all.
Democrats nearly always vote for Democrats.
So what we are really fighting for is the votes of the indies and infrequent voters--the people Dem primary activists are least likely to understand.
"
What this country needs is an antiTrump. That means a Democrat who is as big and boisterous an asshole as He, Trump (for "electability") but who is ruthless about deMAGAfication (a straightforward "policy") instead of milquetoast nuance. Someone who demonizes billionaires (a smaller class than trans people, let alone immigrants) and is not afraid to call MAGAts stupid. Someone who has yet to appear, alas.
I'm not kidding. For many years, I have been pointing out that "electability" is a crock. We nominated Kerry in 2004 because he was more "electable" than Dean. We nominated Obama in 2008, but not because he was The Electable One. We nominated Clinton in 2016 partly because Sanders was "unelectable". Can anybody claim with a straight face that "electability" in any but a post hoc sense was He, Trump's selling point to the GOP?
"Electability. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
--TP
"
wj - The challenge will be for such a person to get thru the primaries. Those tend to have a far higher concentration of, for lack of a better term, activists — people who do care, often passionately, about policy. At least some policies.
Convincing primary voters that “someone who can win a general election” should be a necessary criteria (not sufficient, but necessary) will be a non-trivial task. Not least because they, too, tend to live in an information bubble populated by others who care about policy.
We have a real structural problem with the primaries in that the voters who need to be brought on board often don't pay any attention to the election until after the primaries are done, leaving the primary voters and the donors to pick. None of the Dem coalitions in the primary seem to have any sense of what those people are looking for. I suspect that many of those low-engagement voters don't know themselves what they are going to go for, so it's a lot of guesswork. Most of the primary voters seem to have strong preferences and too much faith in the power of reason.
I think primaries are the place where ranked voting actually makes the most sense, in that ranked voting would not just take candidate support into account, but would also give a sense of crossover appeal. And if the primaries were done in two or three rounds it would also give the party a chance to see which candidates were gaining and which were losing support over time, and let the candidates adjust their approaches to some actual feedback.
On “Author, author?”
Stewart Lee!
"
Part 2
Predictably, the reliably unreliable Trump has already pulled the plug on the pathetically optimistic Starmer’s elephant-trumpeted $40bn Tech Prosperity Deal, as part of his attempts to ensure access to the soggy brains of ChatGPT-ravaged Europeans for his acquiescent social media propaganda platforms, all those royal breakfasts wasted. What lemming-like impulse compelled the Labour government to agree to making Great Britain an enormous energy-draining battery to power the servers that spread unregulated lies about Europe anyway, whose liberal democracy Trump openly declared this month that he intends to destroy? Here’s $40bn, Mr Starmer. Now open the oven and stick your head in.
Trump’s high-profile attempt to discredit British news providers goes hand in hand with the ongoing churn of social media accounts, many of which are just now unstaffed AI bots running helpfully from Russian addresses, mangling out unsubstantiated far-right propaganda designed to destabilise European democracies on now-unregulated American platforms. I’ve told the following story so many times even I am sick of it, and I love mind-numbing repetition: a racist auntie shared with me some Facebook flotsam in the form of an essay by an academic, explaining why Muslims are subhuman. I pointed out to her that neither the academic, nor the academic institution he belonged to, actually existed. “Yes,” she said, “but I still think the article makes a lot of good points.”
This abject stupidity, combined with hi-tech nuclear-powered propaganda, is what democracy is up against. And Starmer is sleepwalking into European liberal democracy’s online accelerated death spiral, like Billy Blackberry ™ ® from the Munch Bunch ™ ® happily lowering himself into a smoothie maker and thinking it’s a tiny foam-filled jacuzzi specially designed for anthropomorphised fruit-men.
Logically, Downing Street should turn itself into a massive content factory, flooding the internet with enough true stories about whatever positive news stories it can find, presented with enough wit and clarity to make them massively shareable, to counteract Musk and Putin’s propaganda. But the problem is Downing Street’s idea of working the internet is a TikTok clip of Keir Starmer standing near a tree. We’re doomed.
"
This is Steward Lee's latest, on Trump's war against the media, and in this case the BBC. There are various links throughout it, so I am splitting it into 2 parts in the hope that it doesn't go into moderation.
Part 1
Stewart Lee: Trump’s BBC lawsuit isn’t about money. It’s about destroying a news providerThe White House’s dead-eyed shark has monetised his presidency so well that he can pay whatever it costs to discredit institutions that may threaten him.
Donald Trump is taking legal action against the BBC for defamation. Apparently the adjudicated sex offender and pussy-grabbing serial liar still has a reputation that can be damaged. Even if all the president of the United States had ever done was that weird hand dance to Village People’s YMCA and his ill-judged playground impression of the disabled New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, it’s doubtful his reputation would have far to fall, but here goes. In other news, you can say what you like about Fred West but don’t criticise his patio-laying skills, which were exemplary.
There is now a terrible risk that, should Trump win the case, the BBC’s assets will be forfeited to him. This means he may own the Doctor Who franchise, and thus the Tardis technology itself, allowing Trump to turn back time in Britain on behalf of Nigel Farage, and return us to a homogenous warm-beer world of whiteness where you can hiss gas noises at Jews and say it was harmless banter if it even happened, which Richard Tice says it didn’t anyway, and he should know, as he keeps a close watch on British affairs from a sunbed in Dubai.
It doesn’t matter how much the improbable legal action costs Trump, whose pockets are bottomless, especially since he worked out how to monetise almost every aspect of the presidency. You can even buy a Donald Trump cologne for men called Fight Fight Fight, after the phrase the president cried out after surviving the near-fatal attack on his right ear. I’m bringing out a Donald Trump scent for the ladies. It’s called Fight Fight Fight Fight Fight Off Donald Trump’s Unwanted Sexual Advances.
Sniff the Trump scent hard enough and it may even erase the memory of the president’s penis, which, according to the adult film actor Stormy Daniels, looks like “the mushroom character in Mario Kart”, and is rumoured to have been the inspiration for the Can song Mushroom, after the group’s vocalist, Damo Suzuki, shared a urinal trough with the 25-year-old Trump in a Manhattan nightclub in 1971.
Trump’s legal action against the BBC is worth it whatever it costs, because it allows him to spend however long the case drags on for repeating claims about the unreliability of journalists, specifically the BBC. This gradual process of erosion of public trust in news providers will benefit Trump enormously should, for example, anyone ever write scathingly about his monetisation of the presidency. Cheap at half the price!
Is it possible that the death of accurate news reporting is just a side-effect of the Jeffrey Epstein case, and of dark forces trying to make sure whatever happened on Paedophile Island stays on Paedophile Island? And who decided to name it that anyway? It’s like Tracey Island but instead of being full of futuristic space-copter Thunderbirds saving lives, there’s just loads of middle-aged billionaires in toupees and Speedos leering at things.
Trump’s instinctive attempts to create smokescreens for his corruption don’t even have to make any sense. The son of film-maker Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle was charged with their murder last Sunday. Less than 24 hours later Trump took to social media to say that Reiner died “due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind-crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME” (capitals the president’s own) as if some vengeful Maga-supporting deity had used the Reiners’ killer as his own instrument of justice. Did Charlie Kirk, a kind of saint who only wanted to spread love and kindness to all humanity, take a bullet in the face for this? And yet Keir Starmer still seems to think he can do business with this dead-eyed great white shark of a man. He’s going to need a bigger boat.
On “The Wiles Interview”
Obvs I can't vote, but I agree with both cleek and wonkie.
First and foremost, the Dems need someone who is young-ish, charismatic, and a good communicator, and then whoever that is needs to hammer on the idea that the middle class needs saving and expanding, and that tax cuts have not done the job for that. They need to run on restoring dignity and affordability to working people and reducing the influence of corporations and donors over elected officials
nous is spot on with this, and it looks like a perfect description of Buttigieg. Too bad that being gay is almost certainly as big an electoral disadvantage as being female or black.
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I'm with Cleek. I don't vote on policy except in the very broad sense that Democrats try to devise policies to solve problems and Republicans don't.
I vote for whoever wins the primary. During the primary I tend toward whoever seems the most authentic, the best public speaker, and the least likely to do something stupid during the campaign, and the one who isn't being negatively stereotyped by the msm. Those are some of the factors that contribute to election chances.
My objection to Newsome is that the msm will collaborate with the Republicans to promote a negative stereotype of him and that will significantly impair his chances.
My objections to HRC were: she started out pre-slimed by Republican slander with a 50% negative rating and had a history of stupid decisions (Iraq and her campaign decisions during the primary race with Obama).
I didn't like Bernie, but he seemed less likely to lose the election to Trump.
I thought Harris would lose because we live in a society that is pretty misogynistic and has a wide and deep disrespect for Black women.
Right now my preferred choice is Pritzker, but that's tentative. I also like Buttigieg, also tentative. FWIW.
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i guess what i'm saying is: right now, anyway, i don't care about policy details; i don't care about ideological purity; i don't care about authenticity or ambition. none of that matters to me because time has taught me that my preferences are irrelevant.
i really don't need to validate my specific policy ideals. they'll never get implemented anyway.
what matters is what the general public wants.what really matters is stopping The Party of Trump. so, any Democrat will do.
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The challenge will be for such a person to get thru the primaries. Those tend to have a far higher concentration of, for lack of a better term, activists -- people who do care, often passionately, about policy. At least some policies.
Convincing primary voters that "someone who can win a general election" should be a necessary criteria (not sufficient, but necessary) will be a non-trivial task. Not least because they, too, tend to live in an information bubble populated by others who care about policy.
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IMO, the person the Dems need is the one who grabs the attention of that huge mass of people whose political outlooks are completely alien to those of us who think we know something about politics.
cycle after cycle we spend a year debating the number of angels on the head of each of the candidates' pins. and then when the elections happen, the mass of voters go and pick the person who discredits our scholastic philosophies.
so, my vote is for the person who can win for the Dems. and i am 100% sure my own actual criteria are 100% irrelevant.
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Everyone says they vote for whoever they think is “better on the issues” but how many people have any idea what policies a candidate is committed to on those issues?
to a good first approximation, zero.
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Newsome's appearance on Ezra Klein's podcast was enlightening.
https://youtu.be/PqBsRNUXWfs?si=EwDOTfV4F7dttjQM
I didn't enjoy it, but I can see he is pulling all the levers to be the next president. My main concern is that he's all ambition, and while he may be someone to beat Trump and the Republicans, he's not the person we need.
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wj - I'd never call Newsom a progressive, but I agree that any reasonable CA pol would be read as a loony leftie by default because that's the trope everyone knows.
First and foremost, the Dems need someone who is young-ish, charismatic, and a good communicator, and then whoever that is needs to hammer on the idea that the middle class needs saving and expanding, and that tax cuts have not done the job for that. They need to run on restoring dignity and affordability to working people and reducing the influence of corporations and donors over elected officials - basically a pro-labor message without the high church union messaging.
wonkie - agree that policy messaging is a loser, but think that a good fight message needs some sort of big picture policy narrative that resonates and that gets to the core of the party's values. And they need to take aim at all of the tropes that have harmed us - trickle down, tax cut prosperity; tough on crime justice; making schools compete - and replace them with a focus on investing in the public good.
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The labels annoy me too because there is no shared meaning. They mean whatever someone wants them to mean--largely unattached to policy responses to issues. Yet the news media and many citizens treat those labels as if they were useful analysis tools for explaining where pols are on policy. It's annoying.
I don't think elections are won on policy and certainly not on policy nuances--unless there is a very clear harm done to a large number of people that is simple to see like taking away their health insurance. I think I persistent mistake made by Dems and especially by self-proclaimed progressives is the belief that the majority of voters are moved by policy. "HRC would have won if she had run on Medicare for All" etc.
Most people vote the way they shop: brand, eye appeal, connotations they put on a product, previous experience, what their family always did, etc. I doubt if your typical voter has more than the faintest slogan level understanding of policy. They notice style, though.
Maybe I'm cynical. But I'm looking at elections that were won THREE TIMES by Republicans who cut taxes for rich people and created deficits while blaming the deficits on Democrats before electing a Republican who did it AGAIN--and yet your typical Republican voter claims to be opposed to deficits, and I doubt if many really want tax cuts for the rich. Meanwhile on Blue Sky self-identified progressives say things like, "Democrats are the party of corporate power!"
Everyone says they vote for whoever they think is "better on the issues" but how many people have any idea what policies a candidate is committed to on those issues?
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Kinda sounds like Vance has been cast for that position. He probably wouldn't have won if the cultists stayed home. (In a snit because their god-king wasn't nominated in this alternate history.) But as a post-Trump successor, especially if he succeeded a deceased Trump? I can see them believing that could work. And, with a little help from the Democrats, it might.
I harbor the optimistic hope that the Democrats will resist the temptation to nominate someone who self-brands as progressive. A candidate who holds those positions is fine. But in the current culture, brand is going to be important. So, Pritzker could work, but Newsom would not -- California's image is just too radical in too much of the country.
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Not a complaint about you or your posting that, wonkie, but I hate polls like the one that Emerson College put together because I don't think that they have any actual relevance to a real election. It's more about how people label political positions in their heads, and it shows us nothing about what voters actually want or what they respond to.
Who is the person being polled thinking of when they think of "MAGA Republican," of "moderate Republican," of "moderate Democrat," of "progressive Democrat?" What are the tipping point issues that make them choose one over the other? What do they like or dislike about each of them? No idea. Instead, we are left to guess what each of those labels might mean to a group of a thousand strangers.
These surveys pretend to inform, but they don't do any real work to unpack the assumptions on which they work to find any real information that might make a difference. And politicians are paying people six figure salaries to make this sort of tea and read the leaves.
On “Author, author?”
A number of people have reported that the real reason Trump is dismantling NCAR is to punish Colorado's governor for not releasing Tina Peters from jail. Peters is the former Mesa County clerk and "the 2020 election was stolen" fanatic who was convicted of several state crimes associated with her providing unauthorized persons access to the voting machines in her care, and that person breaking the seals, opening the covers, and tinkering with the insides.
I skimmed some of the stories in the Wyoming press. Wyoming's Congress critters either did not respond to questions, or said that they had not heard from the administration about the fate of the supercomputer center in Wyoming.
On “The Wiles Interview”
They're looking for Charlie Baker.
I don't think he's interested in the gig.
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The problem with the survey results that I posted is that, as far as I can see, there are no moderate Republicans--in terms of policy. Some are more polite than others but nearly the entire party from top to bottom is fully complicit in all of the excesses of Trumpism from Project 2025 to the DOGE rampage, to the treason, to tax cuts for rich people and the attacks on the not-rich to the ethical, moral, and financial corruption and the violations of the rule of law. Yes, there are individuals here and there and some slight breaking of ranks recently, but moderates? Even the three ladies who get called moderate are complicit with the majority of what the Trump admin has done.
I think people are reacting to style. They don't want the overt bullying (the pseudo polite hatemongering of pre-Trump Republicans who outsourced their most overt rhetoric to people like Limbaugh is probably still acceptable). They don't want the shouting and yelling and shrillness.
I've always thought that the Republicans erred in nominating Trump because he was a threat to their goal of changing the US into a one party oligarchy. They need a fascist who seems nice.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.