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Brando's avatar

This hits the nail on the head--all of this--promises of retribution, promises of "going after" career civil servants--was not just revealed during the campaign, Democrats raised the alarm over these promises and ran on opposing them. Voters decided this was fine, and there's no more copium of "he didn't win the popular vote" or "people didn't think he'd actually win so they didn't bother voting". Americans went into this with eyes open.

So Republicans are probably going to approve all of these picks, with the exception of candidates who threaten their own coalition (e.g., ones who are opposed by Big Agra or Big Pharma, or who have made a lot of GOP enemies). The idea that Republicans have anything to fear from swing voters or moderates is just outdated now--Dems took their shot, and whiffed. Now we reap the whirlwind.

It's not that Dems should give up and lay down--far from it--they need to re-examine how to fight effectively if they want a chance for a comeback at the next election, and make their message as effective as possible. But any hope that Republicans will be reined in by anything short of their own intra-party interests is just naive.

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Cheese's avatar

“The New York Times called him ‘bombastic’ although they may have been confusing him with Shaggy. The more accurate term is henchman.”

Thank you Stephen, protector and defender of the honour of Gen X.

The worst, most galling, thing for me is that holding the powerful to account became ‘partisan justice’. That this was tolerated as an argument by ‘serious people’ demonstrated how our press was unwilling or unable to deal with the dishonesty dished up by Trump.

That the question of a partisan Supreme Court defying ‘equal before law’ was not even raised. That ruling should have cost them their law degrees. The court cannot function as one arm of the Republican Party and do its job, it needed to have its credibility challenged.

The fact that the public is eagerly cheering on the prosecution of those who tried to hold power to account, to keep justice firmly in the hands of the rich and laws as only troubling the poor. (Racial dynamics, I’m sure helped white voters to shoot themselves in the dick like this.) It just - it just hurts.

To calm my nerves pre - election, I took to reading about industrial accidents. Most are caused by complacent workers taking risks believing there was an absolute fail safe they could fall back on if it went tits up.

The fail safe this election was the supposed sanity of the American voter. And like the folks of Chornobyl finding out that yes reactors can blow up, or Deepwater Horizon finding the ‘blind shear ram’ did not blindly shear’ we discovered our fail safe had a flat battery when we needed it the most.

But it should never have come down to there being just one barrier between us and the brink. VP Harris was running an election campaign while all democracies safety lights were blinking red.

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