Originally published at: Eric Adams’ Table of Success - TPM – Talking Points Memo
Hello, it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender 
NYC Mayor Eric Adams has a line that he trots out about life. It’s a clunky bit of received wisdom: “All my haters become my waiters when I sit down at the table of success.” In some sense, the drama around his case has been like…
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Trump is a pawn whom Russia and China are taking turns moving virtually every other hour to destroy us utterly with broad strategic undoings mixed with trivial insults to our values and history. He and his appointees are traitors pure and simple.
In two months we’ve been impelled by them from the peak of our prosperity and power to a trough of a disintegrating democracy that is now little more than a vassal of a dictatorship who could not even defeat a much smaller neighboring nation with no terrain obstacles whose population was one third the size and whose military was probably ten times smaller than that of that failing dictator state that now controls us.
Our alliances lay in ruins. Our scientific eminence is evaporating. The rule of law is soon to be no more than a memory. Our executive branch eviscerated and corrupted into a mob operation, and our Justice Department, federal law enforcement agencies and even our vaunted military hollowed out to be nothing more than bag boys for that mob.
And disgracefully, it’s all been accomplished by incompetent, incoherent and largely stupid petty criminals and thieves and rapists whose whole lives have been a history of squealing failures. And yet the voters gave them the keys to the kingdom.
The good people still in America will band together and eventually defeat them. But the build back will take generations, and it’s unlikely that we will ever recover the mantle of being the world leader of the planet’s democracies and its preeminent power. The best we can hope for is parity with the EU and the Asian democracies. But maybe we can put in place better guardrails to preserve our democracy at home and build societies more in line with the best of the European democracies in terms of free and fair elections, safe streets, real social safety nets, and rising standards of living and lifespans.
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Trying to hang a conspiracy on a Project Veritas video should get Zeldin fired, but it won’t. But now I see the reason DonOLD wants to personally wants to see the gold bars in Fort Knox.
I know that some folks were pissed at Garland and his approach to bringing cases from the bottom up, but since DonOLD may be large, he’s not in charge. So how do we get a case against Zeldin? It seems he too has fallen for a RW scam?
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We are in the process of learning what Germany learned in WWII. And they did indeed put up guardrails in their democracy to prevent a repeat. Those guardrails are being stressed as we speak, but so far, they are holding. When this is all done, we, too, will have to rebuild our democracy from the bottom up and institute more robust protections to make it less likely that another malefactor like TSF or Elmo can grab the reins of our government. It is extremely disheartening to see just how much of our system of governance depends on gentlemens’ agreements of how things should be done.
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To paraphrase Upton Sinclair, it is hard to ignore a conspiracy when your job depends on believing it and acting on it. That goes double if you can wrap in Stacey Abrams or any other accomplished female POC.
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The “checking on the gold bars” was just the weirdest thing to come out right field. Well that and DeSantis suing Target over their pride merch-from 2023. Does it really take two years to come up with legal objection?
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Why not just give it all… the whole package … to the already rich? After all it’s what trump wants… just scrape every last dollar, fire everybody and send their pay to the rich
… … … … … …
“House Republican leadership is trying to get its conference on board with a mammoth spending bill to extend Trump’s tax cuts, raise the debt ceiling and cut $2 trillion in federal spending. Emine Yücel reports on an area of tension that we expect will divide the conference: massive cuts to Medicaid.”
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Who knew there was this many idiots in America going back to 2016?
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If DeSantis was looking to kiss trump’s ass it does.
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Republicans suck.
That is all.
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That is how things were done when the Constitution was written.
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As always, Republicans indulge in “Schrödinger’s facts”, not to be confused with cats which are somehow missing at in this comments section so far.
“Schrödinger’s facts” are statements which are either true or false depending on how Republicans want to see it at any particular moment.
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I hope the on goinng shredding of the governmment by trump/musk+cult leads to severe buyer’s remorse from those who voted for trump. And we get a reaction at the midterm election (if it is held).
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The chiseling away of those norms or agreements has been a slow-rolling disaster - Nixon subverting the Vietnam peace talks, Reagan torpedoing the hostage release and then Iran-Contra, then Newt Gingrich and his demonization of Democrats along with the non-stop harrassment of Clinton, Bush the Lesser and Cheney walking us into war, Moscow Mitch twisting every rule to the breaking point to exercise raw power, and now TSF. Quite the progression, and pretty much all on the Republican side of the ledger. Crooks and traitors for more than 50 years.
ETA I forgot Prescott Bush and the attempted coup back in the 40’s (I think?). A family tradition - subverting government for 3 generations.
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That is such a cogent and comprehensive analysis. Thank you for sharing that. And for including the hopeful “we will recover“ coda in there.
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It is entirely possible that Scrooge McFuck is that dumb.
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Time for some MAGA gossip.
Boebert appears to attract a certain type of man and vice versa.
He’s looking very puffy and lumpy about the face and by the looks of that chain, is about to drop anchor somewhere.
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I think we are all counting on that, in the absence of which we are super-fucked.
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Good morning, Comrades.
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Does kid rock have a tattoo on his unmentionable?
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