Fuck Bill Maher....thought that needed a thread of it's own

[BumRushDaShow]

106. "This was a fight against fascism."

You are looking back at 2024 from the completely unprecedented current 2025, like "Monday morning quarterbacking". Attempting to bring any kind of sense to it even this soon, is a fool's errand.

It has been a conflagration of 30 years of GOP efforts since Newt Gingrich helped the GOP take the House 30 years ago, after 40 years of being out of control of it, and starting the ball rolling to today. I.e., it didn't happen "overnight". It was planned and sustained over the decades.

I post this every so often how Gingrich began the decline of the modern U.S. legislative process -

The Man Who Broke Politics

Newt Gingrich turned partisan battles into bloodsport, wrecked Congress, and paved the way for Trump’s rise. Now he’s reveling in his achievements.

Story by McKay Coppins
November 2018 Issue

Updated on October 17, 2018

[snip]

On June 24, 1978, Gingrich stood to address a gathering of College Republicans at a Holiday Inn near the Atlanta airport. It was a natural audience for him. At 35, he was more youthful-looking than the average congressional candidate, with fashionably robust sideburns and a cool-professor charisma that had made him one of the more popular faculty members at West Georgia College. But Gingrich had not come to deliver an academic lecture to the young activists before him—he had come to foment revolution.

“One of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty,” he told the group. “We encourage you to be neat, obedient, and loyal, and faithful, and all those Boy Scout words, which would be great around the campfire but are lousy in politics.” For their party to succeed, Gingrich went on, the next generation of Republicans would have to learn to “raise hell,” to stop being so “nice,” to realize that politics was, above all, a cutthroat “war for power”—and to start acting like it.

The speech received little attention at the time. Gingrich was, after all, an obscure, untenured professor whose political experience consisted of two failed congressional bids. But when, a few months later, he was finally elected to the House of Representatives on his third try, he went to Washington a man obsessed with becoming the kind of leader he had described that day in Atlanta. The GOP was then at its lowest point in modern history. Scores of Republican lawmakers had been wiped out in the aftermath of Watergate, and those who’d survived seemed, to Gingrich, sadly resigned to a “permanent minority” mind-set. “It was like death,” he recalls of the mood in the caucus. “They were morally and psychologically shattered.”

But Gingrich had a plan. The way he saw it, Republicans would never be able to take back the House as long as they kept compromising with the Democrats out of some high-minded civic desire to keep congressional business humming along. His strategy was to blow up the bipartisan coalitions that were essential to legislating, and then seize on the resulting dysfunction to wage a populist crusade against the institution of Congress itself. “His idea,” says Norm Ornstein, a political scientist who knew Gingrich at the time, “was to build toward a national election where people were so disgusted by Washington and the way it was operating that they would throw the ins out and bring the outs in.”

[snip]

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/newt-gingrich-says-youre-welcome/570832/

Right now, we are seeing the fruits of Gingrich's labor. It didn't happen overnight, It took decades to completely twist the GOP into knots. And ironically, Democrats are now at the stage the GOP was post-Watergate.

The one thing that characterizes many of the most notable politicians, is they have "an ego". And Joe Biden certainly has a healthy one that eventually propelled him to the White House (not just the 2 terms as a "2nd", but finally to the top).

But the difference between him and other politicians is that he also had humility and empathy, traits that are *supposed to be* "liberal" but that the RW MAGats eschew as "weak" and "toxic".

Focusing on one "debate", when in 2020, the fucking loon blew off the debate process after his first, and no one cared, shows how meaningless and outdated "debates" are. They were made for an era before radio, television, and the internet, where a select few of the "general public" could hear the different perspectives of candidates, and the print media would summarize the responses for the rest.

Now debates are slickly produced, over-hyped "events" that are manipulated by the networks that sponsor them, and the moderators that skew them "for ratings". After the fiasco of 2020, the RNC exited the Commission on Presidential Debates, and that organization is all but dissolved.

When the SCOTUS decided "Citizen's United", a landmark 2010 case that few seem to realize involved the-then 2008 and later 2016 Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and the RW's bogus "film" about her ( "Hillary: The Movie" ), THAT opened the floodgates of money into elections. And with enough money, a candidate can literally "buy an election" and that is what happened here.

I had wished that after Citizen's United, John McCain and Russ Feingold could have gotten together to tweak the language of the
campaign finance law that they spearheaded, that was overturned with that ruling, and that could have blunted what eventually happened after. But that didn't happen.