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l33tminion) wrote2024-01-11 06:36 pm
l33tminion) wrote2024-01-11 06:36 pm
Sort of the Obvious Answer
Busy, busy week. The solo parenting is going swimmingly. Erica went to a friend's birthday party Sunday, and I got to catch up with my favorite bartender, Fred Yarm, who's now at Josephine, right in my neighborhood. (Unfortunately, this week also came with the news that Fred's previous venue, top Boston cocktail bar Drink, closed abruptly, along with Barbara Lynch's other Fort Point restaurants, amazing counter-seating fancy Italian diner Sportello and try-hard French-cuisine Michelin-in-exile Menton.)
There are more layoffs at my employer today. I'm still employed (for now lol), but there are more dismaying cuts on my former team.
The election year buzz heightens as the prospect of another four years of Trump madness approaches, capped off with a debate between the two final also-rans. The January 6 rhetoric was also quite a bit louder this year, with Trump all but saying he'd do it again, and even a bunch of Republicans reversing course on very obvious truths said January 7 three years prior. We're in an election year where the one remaining anti-Trump Republican on the ballot is running on a blanket pardon and total impunity for Trump.
And the sort of person who can't state the extremely obvious when it's politically inconvenient, as a brief aside to another Republican scandal of the week. But of course she's speaking to people for whom it's inconvenient what their ideological predecessors were fighting for freedom to do. (Hilariously, the discourse about Haley's "gaffe" led to this response by Trump, for whom nothing is politically inconvenient.) Anyways, the Confederates have truly had their revenge on the Republican Party. I suppose if you told them the way that had come about was "strange coalition politics", they couldn't be too surprised.)
Speaking of Confederates, it's extremely strange (and seems extremely perilous) that the application of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment might have an impact on this year's election. Sort of blame the drafters of that amendment and also I guess of the Amnesty Act of 1872 for not being more forward-thinking on this one. Poorly drafted legislation is always the trouble of the courts. But in a sane world, it would be irrelevant as Trump would have been impeached, convicted, and removed and barred from office in emergency sessions of Congress on January 7, 2021. (Putting aside that in a sane world he would have been convicted and removed earlier, and also not elected in the first place.)
It's an odd situation that the President of the United States, having exhausted all legal methods of challenging those elections, sought to just throw out the elections from whichever states were his closest losses, as many as it takes, whatever it takes to get there: Maybe get Congress to ignore the states' duly cast votes, or the Vice President unilaterally, maybe it legally counts as "disputed" if you put forward some other election results that are just fake (!), or like maybe if stuff gets delayed other stuff can be done (???). Raise a mob to be there, some voicing nebulous willingness to kill someone, if that helps. (The mob never got the chance to drag Pence or whoever to Schrodinger's gallows, so it remains somewhat un-collapsed how serious that plan was.) Shambolic is the word of the day when Trump's around, but as shambolic as that coup attempt was, it was an attempt. And our nation is politically unable to deal with such an attempt when it's short of success. Still. (An attempt that comes less short is, of course, not going to be "dealt with".)
It's madness. The lack of imagination. I wish Republicans could imagine what if Gore (as VP and candidate) or Clinton (as incumbent President) did anything even remotely like that in 2001. These people will pretend they can't or say it was like that. It's deranged. Why are we doing this again?
There are more layoffs at my employer today. I'm still employed (for now lol), but there are more dismaying cuts on my former team.
The election year buzz heightens as the prospect of another four years of Trump madness approaches, capped off with a debate between the two final also-rans. The January 6 rhetoric was also quite a bit louder this year, with Trump all but saying he'd do it again, and even a bunch of Republicans reversing course on very obvious truths said January 7 three years prior. We're in an election year where the one remaining anti-Trump Republican on the ballot is running on a blanket pardon and total impunity for Trump.
And the sort of person who can't state the extremely obvious when it's politically inconvenient, as a brief aside to another Republican scandal of the week. But of course she's speaking to people for whom it's inconvenient what their ideological predecessors were fighting for freedom to do. (Hilariously, the discourse about Haley's "gaffe" led to this response by Trump, for whom nothing is politically inconvenient.) Anyways, the Confederates have truly had their revenge on the Republican Party. I suppose if you told them the way that had come about was "strange coalition politics", they couldn't be too surprised.)
Speaking of Confederates, it's extremely strange (and seems extremely perilous) that the application of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment might have an impact on this year's election. Sort of blame the drafters of that amendment and also I guess of the Amnesty Act of 1872 for not being more forward-thinking on this one. Poorly drafted legislation is always the trouble of the courts. But in a sane world, it would be irrelevant as Trump would have been impeached, convicted, and removed and barred from office in emergency sessions of Congress on January 7, 2021. (Putting aside that in a sane world he would have been convicted and removed earlier, and also not elected in the first place.)
It's an odd situation that the President of the United States, having exhausted all legal methods of challenging those elections, sought to just throw out the elections from whichever states were his closest losses, as many as it takes, whatever it takes to get there: Maybe get Congress to ignore the states' duly cast votes, or the Vice President unilaterally, maybe it legally counts as "disputed" if you put forward some other election results that are just fake (!), or like maybe if stuff gets delayed other stuff can be done (???). Raise a mob to be there, some voicing nebulous willingness to kill someone, if that helps. (The mob never got the chance to drag Pence or whoever to Schrodinger's gallows, so it remains somewhat un-collapsed how serious that plan was.) Shambolic is the word of the day when Trump's around, but as shambolic as that coup attempt was, it was an attempt. And our nation is politically unable to deal with such an attempt when it's short of success. Still. (An attempt that comes less short is, of course, not going to be "dealt with".)
It's madness. The lack of imagination. I wish Republicans could imagine what if Gore (as VP and candidate) or Clinton (as incumbent President) did anything even remotely like that in 2001. These people will pretend they can't or say it was like that. It's deranged. Why are we doing this again?