The Democrats Will Also Shit Themselves.

[Mongrel]

I was being glib, mostly.

That does bring me to a couple of purely academic questions tho. Is floor-switching a thing down there? Because when reps leave caucus to go independent up here, sometimes they later switch to the other party (or even skip the independent phase). Obviously that can be more secure up here - someone getting primaried is nearly unheard of (but not completely unheard of!) as Canuckistani party leaders typically have veto power over local party reps - but in even in your system being the incumbent provides some advantages, even if they're just the more intangibles ones, like being The Devil You Know.

I have no doubt that you're correct that in this case, even were Sinema to cross the floor to join the GOP now, she'd still get wrecked in the inevitable primary to follow; that seems like a given. But I don't know if AZGOP or AZ has any specific statutes outright barring Senators switching sides (or if that's something any individual state has laws about for that matter)?

[Thad]

There are laws limiting when you can switch your party affiliation, but that's more about registration deadlines for voting or running for office.

There's nothing to legally prevent her from registering as a Republican in the state of Arizona, or caucusing with Republicans in the Senate even though she was elected as a Democrat. People have done it in the past during party realignments (like in the '60s and '70s when the Dixiecrats became Republicans), but it's not common in recent times. The most prominent recent example I can think of is Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania senator who was elected as a Republican then became a Democrat in 2009 and then proceeded to lose the Democratic primary in 2010. Which is why it's not common.

Some states, including Arizona, do have what are called "sore loser" laws which prevent candidates from pulling a Lieberman and running as a third-party candidate after losing another party's primary. Presumably that's one of the reasons Sinema's announcing this now instead of waiting to see how the next primary plays out.

[Mongrel]

I do enjoy that sore loser law (which is the main bit I'd heard of before).

[Thad]

Sen. Feinstein makes it official: She will retire at the end of her current term

Better late than, well, late.

Katie Porter and Adam Schiff are both running for her seat, and Barbara Lee is expected to announce this month.

[Romosome]

My mom still is outraged at anyone who even implies RBG erred in not stepping down.

[Thad]

I'd say the better comparison is Ted Kennedy, since we're talking about the Senate.

As far as the SCOTUS goes, I think the real problem is lifetime appointments. Or at least one of the problems.

[Thad]

A.R. Moxon has what may be the best summary I've seen of the disproportionate focus on Biden's age and how it reflects a larger focus on bothsiderism and false equivalence. I don't know that he had Jon Stewart in mind specifically, but he very well could have.

Am I saying that Biden’s age or fitness or business dealings or the alleged crimes of his son should not be a topic of discussion? I am not. I am saying these seem to be the conversations fascists want us to have about him right now, and I'm suggesting that establishing false equivalence might just be the reason why. And I’m saying we’d be wise to realize that if Democrats treat the critique as if it were in good faith, and act to avoid these accusations by having these conversations earnestly and taking actions to demonstrate that we take the accusations seriously, they will soon learn that nobody who would vote for Trump actually cares about any of these things, and will simply use the honest dealings from the opposing side to accelerate the accusation. So perhaps we should act on these matters, but we should understand why we act, and be strategic about when.

• False equivalence lets fascists posture as if, just because their political opponents are frequently quite bad, this means that their political opponents are just as bad as them. And I know a lot of people who believe that it is true that there is no difference between the parties, and because of the many enablement of fascism the Democratic party engages in, I can easily understand why one might believe this—but one group who sure doesn’t seem to believe that the two parties are the exact same are the fascists themselves, who do everything they can, whether legal or not, to keep any non-Republicans anywhere from gaining or exercising any power whatsoever.

Is this saying that Democrats are great and mustn’t ever be criticized? It is not. It’s only saying that we should look at which criticisms Republicans and other fascist groups would most like us to levy against Democrats, and note that it’s rarely if ever for the thing that Democrats should most be criticized for, which is accommodating fascists. It’s almost always something else. Sometimes the tune fascists want us to sing is even a valid topic of criticism, but I’d recommend we notice who is changing the song, and think twice before dancing to their tune at the moment that fascists want it played. I'd recommend we focus our criticism of Democrats squarely where I think harms fascists most, which is the seemingly indestructible willingness of many Democrats—especially the older generations—to treat fascists as if they are acting in good faith, and the ways this exposes the alignment many of them have with fascism.

I think that this criticism allows us to speak about the ways we find such accommodations unacceptable, which I think we’ll need to do if we want to make it clear to younger Democrats—who we might actually still have to kick around in twenty years—that bipartisanship for its own sake, and one-sided accommodation and unstrategic aisle-reaching with Republicans and other fascists, and giving them credit for having good points when those points are offered in service of eliminationist ends, and similar concessions that treat bad faith as if it were good faith, is absolutely unacceptable. That what we expect instead is differentiation.

This might make it sound as if I’m saying let’s not vote for Democrats at all, because voting doesn't matter when both sides are complicit. If you are hoping I’m saying that, I’m sorry to disappoint. I'm not.

• False equivalence also lets fascists posture as if voting and other ways of participating in our shared government don’t matter, as if who wins elections is immaterial. And I know a lot of people who do believe that, and given chronic Democratic accommodation of fascism I can understand why—but there’s one group that sure seems to believe it matters who votes and who wins, and that’s fascists. If they didn’t think it important, they wouldn’t have spent so much time and energy and money over the decades voting to demolish the right to vote and access to voting, and fighting to prevent Democrats (many of whom definitely do pursue terrible and/or fascism-accommodating policies, whether out of political calculation or because they truly do agree with them) from doing other things that Democrats and their allies actually very often will organize together and work like hell in the face of powerful supremacist opposition to achieve—things like fair redistricting and abortion and other healthcare protection and free school lunch and expanded Medicaid and the sorts of things that people do when they believe that problems should be solved and that we can solve them.

Is this saying “just vote?” Is it saying “blue no matter who?” It is not. I think saying these sorts of thing actually participates in false equivalence. What I am saying is that before making your voting decision it's best to understand why you're making it, and what outcome you hope see as a result. And it's worth noting that keeping people from voting seems to matter a whole lot to fascists, for something that doesn't matter at all, and protecting the right to vote sure seemed to matter to a lot of very brave people who fought and sometimes died to secure that right, and in recent elections my home state of Michigan voted for Democrats, who sure aren’t great a lot of the time, but now we have fair districting and legalized weed and a statewide right to abortion, and many other things that matter as well that we simply would not have if it had gone the other way, and a great many horrible things that likely would have happened if it had gone the other way have not happened. I'm saying that I can see who is most benefitted by the notion that because both sides are bad both sides are equally bad, and it's the side that uniformly and energetically wants fascist rule, not the side that has an infuriating and devastating but not uniform tendency to validate fascist framing.

[Friday]

Don't know if you've seen the second Daily Show with Stewart yet, but in the opening minutes of the show he responds to his critics getting on him about bothsiderism in what is I can only describe as "exactly how many posters here, on these boards, responded when people pointed out that their posts were stupid and bad."

It was actually amazing to watch him say things out loud, on national TV, that verbatim I have seen many dipshit 25 year olds say on the internet when they got called out for being wrong and stupid.

I mean, Stewart is a smart guy who has done a lot of good for a lot of people and has had an inarguable net positive effect on our society. I like Jon Stewart a lot, still.

But like, less now.

[Friday]

(and yes I include myself in "many posters here" absolutely.)

[Niku]

[sei]

Not sure if watching YouTube clips or something had me miss a core part of the show as it actually aired, but wasn't the point "both Biden and Trump are old, so who gives a fuck" and "during depositions, saying you don't recall is common enough even when younger [as illustrated by including Eric Trump?]."

I didn't read it as "how you vote doesn't matter because both sides are equally bad;" I read as "don't base your decisions on this shit, because it's not unique to one side."

Also, damn, part 1 of the article Thad linked contains one a hell of a quote:

This is interesting, because the Republicans’ nominee, whose name I can’t quite recall right now but who is under I think 91? counts of federal and state crimes, is also a very elderly man, and one who has been babbling nonsense as though his marbles aren’t all in his bag for well over a decade now.

[Thad]

Not sure if watching YouTube clips or something had me miss a core part of the show as it actually aired, but wasn't the point "both Biden and Trump are old, so who gives a fuck" and "during depositions, saying you don't recall is common enough even when younger [as illustrated by including Eric Trump?]."

I didn't read it as "how you vote doesn't matter because both sides are equally bad;" I read as "don't base your decisions on this shit, because it's not unique to one side."

It's not the content so much as the form. We know what side Stewart's on, but he spent about the same amount of time talking about Biden's age and lapses as he did Trump's. That creates a sense of equivalence even though we know he doesn't actually think the two choices are equivalent.

I think I already mentioned this, but I watched Meyers' A Closer Look segment the same night and it was basically equivalent in terms of the news he covered and the points he raised, but he focused a lot more on Trump than on Biden. I don't think he and Stewart actually disagree much on the subject, but Meyers made the same point in a way that felt more proportionate to me.

[Thad]

Don't know if you've seen the second Daily Show with Stewart yet, but in the opening minutes of the show he responds to his critics getting on him about bothsiderism in what is I can only describe as "exactly how many posters here, on these boards, responded when people pointed out that their posts were stupid and bad."

It was actually amazing to watch him say things out loud, on national TV, that verbatim I have seen many dipshit 25 year olds say on the internet when they got called out for being wrong and stupid.

I thought that in his third episode, where he covered Gaza, he finally managed to make a fair criticism of the Biden Administration on stuff that it is actually perfectly reasonable to criticize them for.

(I don't really remember anything about the fourth one except that it wasn't particularly impressive, and I haven't seen last night's yet.)

I keep circling back to that Moxon post about how Republicans want us to criticize Biden because he's old when what we should be criticizing him for is his accommodation of fascists. Stewart got it wrong in that first show, and got it right in the segment about how the Biden Administration won't criticize Netanyahu.

[Friday]

Yeah his third ep was pretty good. I have strong opinions about Zionism, the IDF and the genocide, and I think Stewart could have been even more critical of Biden, but I didn't have any objections to what was said that I can remember.

And yeah the reds don't want us to criticize Biden for his accommodation of fascists, because, you know.

[Thad]

Not for nothin', the latest round of "Biden is senile" talk in the media was a result of Robert Hur's summary of Biden's deposition, which, now that we've got the transcript, doesn't really make him look as addled as Hur suggested.

I'm not sure I agree with the liberal pundit consensus that Hur was intentionally sandbagging Biden because he's in the tank for Trump; honestly he said much more damning things about Trump than about Biden, the media just chose to jump on that one sentence about Biden being old and confused.

But I do think Hur's got Cop Brain and a whole slew of unexamined biases that come with his job and his politics. I think this is less Barr-style deliberate deception and more Comey-style defensiveness.

Regardless, the media jumped on that one sentence and that was an entirely predictable result. I expected better from, say, Jon Stewart, but not really any of the rest of them.

And it's not that there's no cause for concern about Biden's age. He's 81. When LBJ was his age he'd been dead for 17 years.

But as I've said before, I've never really found any of the claims that Biden is senile to be convincing. He frequently misspeaks, but he's always frequently misspoken; they were making fun of him for it in 2008 and I expect they were probably making fun of him for it in 1988 too (though I was 5 years old during the '88 primaries and can't say as I was paying much attention at the time). I haven't really seen good evidence that he misspeaks more frequently or more seriously now than he has in the past, or that it's a sign of cognitive decline; to the contrary, I'd say he seems pretty sharp. (I didn't watch the SOTU but apparently he did a thorough enough job of refuting the caricature of a senile old man that Fox News has had to change its messaging to "well, obviously he must be on drugs to make him more focused and energetic.") And as far as actual governance goes, I've frequently been impressed by his competence. Christ knows there's a lot I don't agree with him on (Israel and Mexico in particular, and those are not small things), but I think he may actually be the best president of my lifetime in terms of understanding how Washington works and being able to navigate it.

Not to say he's been as effective as some of the others -- Reagan, W Bush, and Trump had a couple of major advantages in that it's a lot easier to tear down the government than to work within it, and Democrats have been a lot more willing to accommodate Republican presidents than the other way around -- but given the opposition he's been facing I do think it's impressive just how much Biden's actually managed to get done.