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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   29677 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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Run Mitt Romney again or something.

What DeSantis is today, Romney was twelve years ago. This is a dishonest request, because after Romney I can't ever trust Democrats to tell the truth about a republican candidate. They're going to go apeshit over all of them, even the Mormon former Massachusetts governor.

The long-expected fight for the soul of the party between the old-guard classical liberals and the young progressives, which has been suppressed by mutual hatred of Trump for most of a decade, could finally boil over into open conflict in the middle of an election, ensuring an easy win and Congressional landslide for Reps.

Isn't this basically what already happened in 2016? You're predicting the show we've just watched. It wasn't until after Trump's win that Democrats got their shit together and whipped their ranks into line.

They're going to go apeshit over all of them

This is very much not my recollection of that election, what are you talking about?

Like, they made a big joke out of 'binders full of women', but that's the normal tomfoolery every campaign gets up to (remember Swift Boat Veterans for Truth?). Obviously they weren't going to say that their opponent is cool and good actually, but I don't think the rhetoric was anything like what's being lobbied against Trump, and the Dem voters certainly didn't have the same visceral hatred and existential dread about him.

So I'm not really sure what you're referring to.

Romney did pretty good in that election, winning more of the popular vote than Trump did in 2020, and that was running against a historic and widely loved incumbent.

This is very much not my recollection of that election, what are you talking about?

/

The current sitting President of the United States, then VP campaigned against Romney by claiming he would put African-Americans back "in chains". Romney was campaigning against hormonal birth control, somehow. Romney's VP pick faced attack ads that had him wheeling grandma off a cliff. Ann Romney was a repeated target of pretty shitty media coverage that conveniently intersected with her multiple sclerosis. People were absolutely sure Romney-Ryan were going to ban gay sex, somehow! The IRS leaked NOM donation records that just conveniently happened to have his donations included, and just so happened to get delivered to the HRC.

Harry Reid famously and falsely claimed that Romney'd paid zero taxes on the floor of Congress, and after it had been widely distributed, widely believed, and at cost proven wrong, then years later said he had no regrets because "he lost, didn't he"!

Yes, like I said, campaigning.

This is all markedly less vitriolic and existential-threat-invoking than 'literally a fascist, literally a rapist, literally the agent of foreign powers, will end democracy as we know it'.

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