There is an obvious mathematical fact in party politics. When you are in an exceedingly important race, which the Senate race in Maine clearly is, don’t pile a herd of mostly marginal candidates into the field to split the vote. The result will be a mediocre candidate who then struggles to pull together the opposition support to win. Pick a strong candidate with a good chance of winning, and put everything you have behind them. Ok, maybe vet them first.
This free-for-all is democracy working. It takes a disciplined, strategic party leadership to manage around the trap. A shame, because Collins’s seat may have been there for the taking.
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I am so sick of fringe creeps running our politics. I guess fringe creeps are easier than competent patriots for the billionaire bros to control and their eye candy memes write themselves.
I will take comptence any time it shows its head.
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The biannual reincarnation of “disarray?”
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@joshtpm.bsky.social on Bluesky )
IIRC, Platner and Swalwell are out.
If they need something to talk about, though, Ken Paxton is still in the running, despite having apparently fixed the legal process to protect a child rapist.
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Radical Democratic policies?
Like war with Iran… war with Greenland… war with Spain? Like inflationary policies… inconvenient voting… a national Gestapo? Like perpetual heat… choking smog… polluted water? Like stealing our Social Security savings… sky-high electric bills… suing citizens as a political strategy?
Democrats want to end the nonsense Republicans have been stuffing down our throats for forty years. The Republican Party doesn’t work.
Literally.
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GQP should’ve campaigned on a platform of building a third world economy, 19th century xenophobia with a racial and ethnic caste system and the pursuit of an 18th century foreign policy.
Truth in advertising is, unfortunately, not required in political adverts.
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Our European ancestors weren’t bald. Rather they all had flowing hair.
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Vet them first. That is clearly the takeaway. It should be the state’s party apparatus that is obliged to carry that out. It should be the national party’s obligation to finance that. So perhaps we still have a problem with a bunch of tired old senate power brokers looking after their own fortunes rather than the future of the party. When they stop offering leftovers to the voters, then perhaps some better candidates will have a chance to emerge. Until then, we get candidates that are better at drawing attention to themselves, but who are basically people who don’t belong in public life. There are a few notable (successful) exceptions, of course. Those are the ones that are so exceptional that they cannot be ignored.
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Evergreen. Marx, in Capital: “Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks”
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Vet them first… before what? Before they can legally be allowed to declare a candidacy? Welcome back to Tammany Hall, where party bosses, not voters, chose the candidates.
Face it, the fact that this didn’t come out until now means it wouldn’t have been caught by ‘vetting’ last year. Platner’s been in this since October. People were digging for dirt on him for more than 6 months before this got uncovered.
Expectations of perfect knowledge are self-defeating. You do the best you can with what you’ve got, and always have to be ready to adapt.
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Two things can be true at the same time. Platner had to go but the vehemence and disrespect the talking heads including Josh showed Maine voters was breathtakingly stupid. I’m sorry just really disappointed with the so called smart people being so contemptuous of 150000 voters.
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“I ask you a very simple question: When you come to vote in November, are you gonna vote for the pro-fraud party? Are you gonna vote for the party that is sending your tax dollars to the fraudsters?”
No, I’m going to vote for Democrats.
Every accusation is a confession.
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Yeah, this is vulture capitalism.
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Vetting needs to include background checks.
Given who has been nominated overall in the last few years, I don’t think background checks were uniformly performed.
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What would a background check have turned up? That he’s a combat vet with PTSD and a history of self-medication? Pretty sure he made that point.
It wouldn’t have turned up this. This only came out because he got the nomination. This info wasn’t out there to be dug up, it was Racicot deciding she wanted to speak up.
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It’s not just this candidate.
Look, I spent decades in the IT consulting business. Every single job I applied for required a background check.
We’ve seen over the years where stuff that would’ve been picked up in a standard issue check was ignored by the party in charge and ended up blowing up.
I don’t know what the vetting process entails, but given the idiocy we’ve seen over the last number of years, the effort is cursory at best and incomplete at worst.
Be better. Don’t put candidates with enormous baggage in front of the voters. We don’t have the tools to check out whether the candidate is legit or a problem.
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Apparently, Moody is incapable of applying the same logic to Paxton or Trump.
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Yup. And that happened after you put your name in the running for the job.
That’s called the campaign.
They put themselves there. What you are asking for is the Party to control who the voters have a chance to vote for. That produces only inoffensive party loyalists who will not upset the apple cart in terms of corporate donations and maintaining the status quo. That’s all it’s ever produced.
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Well, given the events of the last few weeks: how’s that workin’ for us?
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Pretty well, I’d say. Your system gets us Andrew Cuomo, not Zohran Mamdani. It gets us Hillary in 2008, not Obama. (And probably gives us President McCain.) It gets us Joe Crowley, not AOC.
Platner got the nomination. So what? From what we’ve heard from folks here who are in Maine, the party’s choice didn’t even show up to her own campaign. How well do you think that was gonna do against Collins?
Then unforgivable shit emerged, and now Platner’s out. The system works.
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