But since it’s been pointed out that the Republicans only have PR aides this should be easy peasy for them.
1 Like
Those would be the same publicity forces that gave such a lucid account of the ACA in the first place? Or the ones that stepped up to slam Trump’s millions-of-illegal-votes fantasy on every front page for day after day? Or the ones that so ably defended Hillary throughout the campaign, drowning Trump in his own vitriol?
11 Likes
What’s missing here? Just this: Republicans don’t want to replace Obamacare. They will be overjoyed just to repeal it and screw tens of millions of Americans.
11 Likes
Who’s kidding who? This is a con job. Republicans don’t care that Obamacare gets a weak replacement. The majority of the losers in this will be non-republicans.
3 Likes
Except that they can’t stop slobbering over the tax cuts. I agree, they vowed to oppose everything Obama did, thus short circuiting everything Americans voted for and reducing one of the potentially greatest administrations into a burning pile of aspirations. Rich old white men turning the entire country into the post civil war south - we all get to be carbetbagged now. It is hard to believe but a lot of the impetus for much of their destruction of this country comes from hatred still coming from the civil war and the Roosevelt New Deal. The people with unlimited resources behind the Republican Hegemony will not stop until they have stripped away income taxes and voting rights for everyone except white male property owners. It sounds ludicrous but let’s just keep watching.
11 Likes
Of course it is. The GOPers have had 6 years to craft a replacement. Have they? Now when push has come to shove they’re saying (imagine fat cigar chomping pol with thumbs in suspenders all puffed up) “now wait just a dang minute here. We’s gotta craft us a replacement bill and it’s gonna take months if not years.”
7 Likes
For Republicans repealing ACA has always been out repealing the ACA tax surcharge. Quit thinking about health care policy and follow the money.
5 Likes
I feel like we’re picking teams for World War III and Civil War II wrapped into one.
9 Likes
Thinking seriously about policy, in a detailed way is collaboration with evil. That’s really how they think now. That’s been apparent for a decade now.
They are no longer good-faith participants in the project of governance. They’re oligarch-toadying nihilists. Nothing less. It’s why all their policy proposals involve the invocation of magic asterisks and free market pixie dust described n a few hundred words in ten or fifteen page “blueprints” heavy on stock photos of happy people and devoid of math.
From a political sense, it’s easy to see why getting rid of the taxes is appealing to Republicans.
Honestly, it really isn’t. I see empirically that they keep getting rewarded by the people who are most heavily assfucked by their tax cuts on rich people, but I don’t understand why. And I certainly don’t think that continuing to please the plutocrats is a precondition to their receipt of plutocrat money. The empirical evidence shows quite the contrary on that score.
11 Likes
Why do we pretend that the GOP has any interest in governing? Their MO is always to weaken the gov’t, and they don’t care if they do so via malfeasance, incompetence, whatever. Their actual constituency (not the fools who vote for them) have more power in the economy, and so the weaker the gov’t is, the stronger they are in relation to us. Since Reagan, they have been gnawing away at the foundations of our civil society.
With Trump, they were briefly afraid that they’d gone too far, that they were breaking something that the Democrats might not be able to fix for them. But the destruction of the social safety net is too delicious a “dessert” to resist. That’s why they have it all teed up–ACA, Medicare, SS–for destruction as soon as possible. They are gambling that they can get all this through and then pivot to neutralizing Trump, as it’s no fun owning a smoking hole in the ground.
They are wrong. Conservatives in the past thought they could deal with the devil but keep control. They were wrong.
13 Likes
You might be right. I am reading Barber’s piece on Think Progress. Excellent.
4 Likes
Words games are meaningless and boring.
Take a look at Kansas. The GOP has basically evicerated the entire state. The party is unpopular, people hate what they’re doing, agree with progressive alternatives, and STILL vote the same people back in power with huge margins.
Make no mistake. The GOP doesn’t care a whit whether killing the ACA will hurt citizens in red states, because they know that they won’t pay any price at all.
13 Likes
Holy crap, that article made my head hurt. Voters simply don’t see that the stability in their lives comes from Democrats building things that the Republicans want to turn around and break. And as much as you might want to blame voters for being ignorant, it all comes down to messaging. After all, the people in this article were in fact paying attention.
The Republicans have built a messaging framework that is nearly flawless. The poor are bad because they get all the goodies that I don’t get. The rich are good because I want to be rich.
They Republicans learn from us, but we don’t learn from them. They’ve leveraged identity politics to the point where they acknowledge African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Gay-Americans, Latino-Americans because it leaves white people to think then that they are American-Americans, which is better! Four legs good, two legs better.
And I gnash my teeth every time I read “successful businessman” in relation to Trump. That we didn’t go after his strength shows that we learned nothing from the swiftboating of Kerry.
The only way we get out of this is to craft a message that stresses our commonality.
11 Likes
There’s no “maybe” about it.
That has always been their goal.
6 Likes
Josh’s question about why Trump picked Tillerson is a valid one, though the answer seems pretty clear.
I don’t think Trump is a Rand devotee, I doubt he ever reads any book that wasn’t required and doubt even less he would become a fan of anyone’s philosophy simply because it isn’t HIS philosophy.
The answer to how did Trump become aware of Tillerson lies in Paul Manafort and Mike Flynn, aka the Putin Channel. Manafort has been reported to be meeting with the transition team on a near daily basis and spends a great deal of time in Trump Towers with Trump himself. Flynn is, in my guess, the person responsible for Trump’s attacks on the CIA and the intelligence community at large; Flynn has some serious axes to grind over his perceived grievance do getting pushed out of the military. Both of them are deep in the pockets of the Russian oligarchs. Tillerson is the perfect person for both of them to recommend to Trump. He hears it from “two” sources, and away he goes.
The deeper concern of course, is this shows just how easily Trump can be,and is being, manipulated. Its a small circle he is ensconced in, and perceived loyalty to Trump is the only coin in that realm. That allows a Bannon/Manafort/Flynn type to get their agenda through, and guarantees that a Priebus/Pence/whoever will remain completely silent on any disagreements they may have with that agenda…less they lose their loyalty points.
7 Likes
The GOP Obamacare repeal is just more Fake News on the part of The Party of Lies: they will probably issue a proclamation stating that “Obamacare” is gone, but just leave the American Care Act in place.
3 Likes
Especially coming from a troll like you.
1 Like
All Republicans have to do in Kansas is say, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus” and they get elected in landslides.
2 Likes