[Discussion] What comes next? Liber-all

American liberals and progressives now face their biggest challenge in a generation: What do we do with 4 years of a trump presidency, a republican congress, a likely conservative supreme court and most states under complete republican control?

This thread is not meant as a forum for discussing HOW or WHY democrats got destroyed in the 2016 election. It's meant for finding a way forward.

Jolly Bill wrote:

Apparently Sunday, so we're both wrong there.

Why not fault them for their previous support of Moore or their failure to speak out publicly since the Thursday allegations rather than use their names on a fraudulent letter as proof of even worse hypocrisy?

Is the onus really on the victims of fraud to be aware and refuting the contents of a letter they were not aware of within 48 hours?

Yes. You fault them on all those things. They are at fault for not withdrawing their support on Friday. It's impossible to say who knew what for certain, but its very likely that any of those pastors who know him personally were already aware of his taste for girls. In fact it's not even unreasonable for Mrs Moore to assume that by Sunday, having not had any of those 50 churches withdraw their support, that those churches still support him. Her fraud was in altering the letter, not in asserting the support they had already given.

OG_slinger wrote:

They should also remember that they signed a letter vouching for Moore's religious/moral street cred just three months ago and that their reputation--and the reputation of their churches--are now linked to a man that quite a few people say was banned from a shopping mall in the 80s because he bothered high school girls too much.

Wait, he was banned from a shopping mall, but not the US Senate? Peak 2017?

Mixolyde wrote:
OG_slinger wrote:

They should also remember that they signed a letter vouching for Moore's religious/moral street cred just three months ago and that their reputation--and the reputation of their churches--are now linked to a man that quite a few people say was banned from a shopping mall in the 80s because he bothered high school girls too much.

Wait, he was banned from a shopping mall, but not the US Senate? Peak 2017?

State and local control works? Also the Senate is a pretty gross place.

boogle wrote:

Is this deserving of it's own thread?

Also I agree with this.

Mixolyde wrote:
OG_slinger wrote:

They should also remember that they signed a letter vouching for Moore's religious/moral street cred just three months ago and that their reputation--and the reputation of their churches--are now linked to a man that quite a few people say was banned from a shopping mall in the 80s because he bothered high school girls too much.

Wait, he was banned from a shopping mall, but not the US Senate? Peak 2017?

If he's elected the National Mall is the only one he'll be welcome at.

thrawn82 wrote:
Jolly Bill wrote:

Apparently Sunday, so we're both wrong there.

Why not fault them for their previous support of Moore or their failure to speak out publicly since the Thursday allegations rather than use their names on a fraudulent letter as proof of even worse hypocrisy?

Is the onus really on the victims of fraud to be aware and refuting the contents of a letter they were not aware of within 48 hours?

Yes. You fault them on all those things. They are at fault for not withdrawing their support on Friday. It's impossible to say who knew what for certain, but its very likely that any of those pastors who know him personally were already aware of his taste for girls. In fact it's not even unreasonable for Mrs Moore to assume that by Sunday, having not had any of those 50 churches withdraw their support, that those churches still support him. Her fraud was in altering the letter, not in asserting the support they had already given.

I'm not sure about that. You're making the assumption that they were contacted in the first place. We're talking about pastors, so they've generally got more important things to deal with on Saturday and Sunday.

From here(which is the source of the huffpost article): http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/201...

A pastor from middle Tennessee said he was never asked to sign the original letter.

Dr. George Grant of Parish Presbyterian Church in Franklin, Tenneessee told WSMV he hadn't had contact with Moore personally in a decade and hadn't spoken to the Senate nominee's campaign since before the election.

Grant said he has no desire to play a role in Alabama politics.

"Not my state. Not my issues," he told the news channel.

Hell, I wonder if anyone's figured out if all 53 exist in the first place.

Jolly Bill wrote:
CaptainCrowbar wrote:

The problem I have with this way of thinking is that I can easily see it leading to a lot of liberals saying, "Well, maybe if we were willing to compromise on abortion, then..."

Litmus tests like this are how we end up with Democratic versions of Roy Moore who are absolute garbage fires of human waste but force us to vote against our conscience because certain issues are more important.

Which specific individual did you have in mind as a "Democratic version of Roy Moore"? Or are you just taking for granted that there must be symmetrically bad people on Both Sides, because of course everybody knows that Both Sides are equally bad?

Way off topic here, folks. Re-read the scope and/or start a new thread if there's a digression you'd like to follow.

Actually, the Democratic party needs some strong litmus tests as in having certain standards that would *not* be compromised. I would *hope* that women's rights would be included in those standards, but women also tend to be the first to be thrown under the bus whenever bargaining chips are needed.

After Trump -
Liberals ecstatic over this month’s election must not forget: Even after this demagogue is finished, a new one will rise in his place

It is interesting to read and realize that, for all of our shock, Trump is A.) Not new and B.) A symptom, not the disease.

What we should be worrying about instead is the remarkable staying power of the American voters who put these guys in office. They’re in for the long game no matter the fate of the current administration. Trumpism predates Trump and Pence by decades and is a more powerful, enduring, and scary force than either of them. Trump learned this himself the hard way when Alabama Republicans voting in the Senate primary this fall chose the more Trumpist candidate, the gun-totin’ crackpot bigot and alleged sexual predator Roy Moore, over Mitch McConnell’s candidate, the garden-variety right-winger Trump had impulsively and mistakenly endorsed. The toxic anger that defines Trumpism — a rage at America’s cultural and economic elites in both political parties as well as at minorities and immigrants — will only grow darker and fiercer once its namesake leaves office, no matter how he does so. If Trump departs involuntarily, his followers will elevate him to martyrdom as the victim of a coup perpetrated by the scoundrels of “fake news” and “the swamp.” If Trump serves one or two full terms, his base will still be livid because he will not have bestowed the lavish gifts he promised, from a Rust Belt manufacturing comeback to a border wall. His voters won’t pin these failures on Trump but on the same swamp creatures they’ll hold responsible if he’s run out of office. They’re already blaming the cratering of “repeal and replace” and other broken Trump promises on what Bannon and his allies call “the McConnell-industrial complex.”

Right-wing nationalist populism is nothing new in America; the genealogical lines of Trump and his immediate antecedents, Sarah Palin and the tea party, trace back at least to the later years of the Great Depression, when the demagogic and anti-Semitic radio priest Father Charles Coughlin turned against the New Deal and vilified Jewish “money changers” masterminding an international conspiracy to plunder his working-class flock. The movement was rebooted with a vengeance once the civil-rights revolution took hold in the 1960s: The term “backlash” grew out of the economic columnist Eliot Janeway’s 1963 observation that white blue-collar workers might “lash back” at new black competitors entering a contracting job market. That anger coursed through the quixotic presidential campaigns of the onetime Nixon aide Pat Buchanan from 1992 to 2000, through Ross Perot’s in 1992, and, most especially, through the four presidential runs of the segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace between 1964 and 1976.

What these campaigns had in common besides a similar core of grievances is that the candidates failed to win national elections. And they lost no matter what banner they ran under; like Trump, they and their voters variously identified as Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. But Trump’s unexpected triumph in 2016, claiming the Oval Office for unabashedly nationalist right-wing populism, changed history’s trajectory. His capture of the presidency and a major political party makes it highly unlikely that his adherents will now follow the pattern of their dejected forebears, who retreated to lick their wounds and regroup in the shadows after their electoral defeats.

When Jeff Flake, the self-styled Barry Goldwater conservative from Arizona, announced he was fleeing the Senate, he told Jake Tapper of CNN, “I think that this fever will break.” If only. At each defeat in the pre-Trump history of Trumpism, the rest of the country comforted itself by concluding that this troublesome minority had been vanquished. But these radicals are not some aberrational fringe. The swath of America that has now been reinvigorated and empowered by landing a tribune in the White House for the first time is a permanent mass movement that has remained stable in size and fixed in its beliefs for more than half a century. How large a mass? At the high end, Trumpists amount to the third or so of the country that has never wavered in support of the Trump presidency. A low-end estimate might bottom out at the quarter of the nation that still approved of Trump’s hero Nixon even when he surrendered the presidency rather than face near-certain conviction in an impeachment trial.

Now that Trumpists have tasted real Executive-branch power, they are ravenous for more. Laura Ingraham, Rupert Murdoch’s new all-in Trump host at Fox News, pointedly told the New York Times on the eve of her prime-time show’s premiere last month that while Trump is “invaluable” as “the titular head of the movement,” Trumpism “is about the movement.” Bannon has called Trump “a blunt instrument for us.” Finer-tooled instruments — smarter and shrewder demagogues than the movement’s current titular head — may already be suiting up in the wings.

strangederby wrote:

Time to start buying guns.

I’ll just rely on the old standards. You know. Big stick with nails.

Hmmm... on second thought, I think I’m going to look up my local firing range.

strangederby wrote:

Time to start buying guns.

Dan Harmon brings this up on his podcast occasionally- he reflexively bought a handgun earlier this year in a fit of Trumpfear and almost immediately regretted it.

Interesting Twitter thread by Public Policy Polling.

They released the results of recent polling they've done for 36 Republican held Congressional districts.

Twenty five of those districts show a generic Democrat beating the elected Republican with the swing from 2016 often being in the double digits.

In the other 11 districts Republicans still lead against a generic Democrat, but their lead shrank from double digits to just a few percentage points.

This inauguration speech from Virginia's new Governor is pretty good.

https://governor.virginia.gov/newsro...

Wrong thread

Anyone else started receiving survey questionnaire's from the DNC/DCCC or local parties? Looking at the list of aspects of Trump's presidency and having to pick the four I am most disturbed by is rough.

I get a lot of calls I don't answer, but we are in the news, after all.

wordsmythe wrote:

I get a lot of calls I don't answer, but we are in the news, after all.

Eesh:

And he appears to have at least one powerful group in his corner: The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). The DCCC hasn’t officially taken a stance in the race, or responded to inquiries about whether it will continue to back Lipinski. But the organization has cozied up to Lipinski’s Blue Dog Coalition since the 2016 elections. The DCCC sees the Blue Dogs as the key to retaking Congress in 2018—and endorsing Lipinski’s challenger could seriously hurt that relationship.

The DCCC has made it clear that the anti-abortion views held by some Blue Dogs aren’t a deal breaker, and has accused Blue Dog opponents of setting “purity tests” by holding out for progressives. DCCC chairman Ben Ray Luján has called the caucus “incredible partners.”

Talk about the definition of madness. You have a big groundswell of support, people, don't kill it by backing the least progressive candidates in the tightest races. I really hope the volunteers and voters on the ground help overcome this in the primaries to show the DCCC which way the wind is blowing.

Lipinski is a staunch opponent of abortion rights who refuses to back a $15 minimum wage and has voted against LGBT rights, the DREAM Act and Obamacare.

Honest question. Am I the one who is out of touch here for thinking that these are very odd stances for a Democrat to take?

strangederby wrote:
Lipinski is a staunch opponent of abortion rights who refuses to back a $15 minimum wage and has voted against LGBT rights, the DREAM Act and Obamacare.

Honest question. Am I the one who is out of touch here for thinking that these are very odd stances for a Democrat to take?

The article describes him as a "conservative Democrat" and that holds up. He's also voted for LBGT rights, but against marriage.

But, no, you're not out of touch. He's as blue dog as they come.

Sounds like a DINO to me. It would be one thing if it was one or two issues but all of those issues plus the idolization of Reagan and voting against party twice as often as anyone else?
Why is this a thing and why are the unions supporting him. I don't see this as a purity test at all. If he wants to run, we will call a spade a spade and Lipinksi can run as a Republican. I mean he co-sponsored the Defense of Marriage Act for chrissakes!

If you want to talk about Lipinski, you should check out how he first got elected.

If we had more Blue Dogs, we'd have fewer Republican representatives. Socially conservative liberals have nowhere to go with today's Democratic party.

Chicago Sun-Times just endorsed him, too.

The Sun Times is traditionally the more left of the two big Chicago papers, but "left" is a big area in Chicago, where we have one Republican in city hall. Most of the fighting is usually between loose coalitions of progressives and a combination of old-line ("This Jackie Kennedy guy's alright, but a bit of a radical") sorts and get-things-done Rahm folks.

Robear wrote:

If we had more Blue Dogs, we'd have fewer Republican representatives. Socially conservative liberals have nowhere to go with today's Democratic party.

1) I don't think I believe you, and

2) I have a hard time really seeing where Lipinski is liberal. Is it that he's merely mixed on foreign wars?

If he and others like him keep getting support from offical Democrats then I guess maybe its time to find a propper pro left anti right party to support and cut all ties with the Dems.

The conspiracy theorist is me wants to ask why the DCCC seems to be actively sabotaging progressive democrats and backing the most republican of the democratic primary candidates, and who is paying them to do so.

thrawn82 wrote:

The conspiracy theorist is me wants to ask why the DCCC seems to be actively sabotaging progressive democrats and backing the most republican of the democratic primary candidates, and who is paying them to do so.

Because after the election all anyone talked about was how it could have been won if the Democrats just paid a little more attention to suburban and rural white dudes. Blue Dogs are what you get when you chase after those votes.

So, the DCCC isn't supporting him, and that's evidence that they are supporting him? Something does not compute for me here.