The dog appears to be a celebrity fortune teller: “Babydog says we’ll retain the house, the majority in the House. We’re going to flip the United States Senate overwhelmingly. We’re going to elect Donald J. Trump and JD Vance in November.”

https://www.newsweek.com/babydog-jim-justice-bulldog-west-virginia-rnc-elections-1926628

The FBI communicated recently saying they reviewed the (registered Republican) shooter’s online logs and found a deep and disturbing history of political commentary on the side of hardcore anti-immigration. Those are the facts.

I’ll be happy to consider whatever actually happened that day. Let’s see an actual investigation explain to us what happened that day, instead of just taking the Trump’s campaign word for it. You might be contented with the first opinion and propaganda spins that came out from that day, but I want to see what the official investigators think happened, and so far it’s not looking consistent.

I have enough patience to wait for evidence and facts, and so far it’s very hard to explain the storyline as told by Trump’s campaign. The Secret Service say they can’t justify what happened, the FBI says the whole thing is fishy, the shooter is a Republican without a known motive, Trump wasn’t hurt. That’s what’s on the docket up to this point. I’ll give it another beat for the rest of the investigation to advance.

Can we take 3 minutes to simply review what happened? Republican hardcore enthusiast shows up to a Trump rally, takes up an obvious sniper position unimpeded by the Secret Service, and is allowed to shoot the teleprompter. Trump, who is fine and left without a scar, claims he is a martyr and “took a bullet” for America, expecting a surge for his campaign.

Those are the facts. The FBI themselves say they can’t corroborate Trump’s versions of the events and can’t explain the story from the angle of “shooter there to kill Trump.” Are we sure that the known facts point to “assassination attempt” as the only possible conclusion of what happened that day?

It would make a big difference if the investigation ultimately reveals that the shooter wasn’t trying to hurt Trump.

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It’s easy to feel adrift in the sea of nonsense we’ve had to deal with the last few years. Let me recap some important developments:

Trump is easily the most hated man in America and possibly the world. He is a convicted felon on 34 counts, and the only reason he is not convicted of several other things is that Republicans are doing their darnest to jam the wheels of justice at least until the election. He is credibly accused and expected to lose trials on election interfering in Georgia, and the theft of classified documents, at the minimum. He is likely to be given severe prison sentences next year, after he loses the election and continues suffering the long list of legal troubles ahead of him.

In 2020, Trump lost by 7 million votes, and has only become more hated since then. His base shrinks by the minute and it has for a while. The number of people that call themselves “Republican” is at a generational low, not because the country has that many fewer conservatives but because so many people are done with MAGA and the Trump circus and no longer feel represented.

Do not go by polls or by mainstream media “reporting” on how Trump is doing in terms of the campaign. Polls have been a mess since the Trump era and they are far from accurate, and these days the MAGAs do everything in their power to appear as loud and supported because they know they are decidedly a minority in this country. During the GOP primaries, Nikki Haley was getting a third of the vote even after she had already abandoned the race, and that was Republicans showing up to vote against Trump for anyone, even a candidate that wasn’t running.

To recap, Republicans are a political minority in this country, and Trump doesn’t even have the support of all Republicans. No progressive would consider voting for the GOP in the current state, so all the GOP can draw votes from is their minority base, which is also splintered because of how many of their own people have grown to hate Trump and the disgusting MAGA politics.

Trump’s path to winning is to whip up every single voter he still has in a frenzy, and otherwise try to get most of the country to FEEL apathetic and defeated and stay home. Because if we all had our say on even terms, Trump and the GOP in general are going to get thoroughly rebuked by the overwhelming majority of the country that is done with their shit.

The MAGA have a vested interest in making it seem that they are proud and many. The media lets Trump get away with lies and publicity stunts because they are lazy, entangled in corporate interests, and they want the views. The reasonable people in politics don’t say clownish BS and spew vitriol, so they don’t make the big headlines. So Trump shows up everywhere in politics and that makes him look larger. The MAGAs are the only ones excited to pick up the phone when a pollster calls.

There are severe consequences for the kind of dirty, disgusting “politics” from MAGA and the GOP. They are holding on for dear life with the fraction of the electorate they still hold, and they only hold those people through malicious propaganda, by lying, misrepresenting the issues, aggrandizing single-issue voting, and keeping their base irrationally angry and hateful. And through gerrymandering and voter suppression and every dirty tactic they can muster.

The GOP is on a death spiral. MAGA has almost fully destroyed the party from within. The last few years have had deep and lethal consequences for organized conservative politics. They will not recover from this without a severe reckoning.

We just need to keep our heads cool and up, keep asking for a better quality of discourse and politicians, and vote that in when we are given the chance. Those of us that want a better country with better people at the helm are a large majority. Where we stand today, we’re more likely to send Kamala in with a blue wave than we are to having to suffer Trump again. And we need a blue wave to work on repairing the damage from the Trump admin. I’m tired of hearing a Dem president talk about how they want to do more but they don’t have the power in Congress. Let’s fix that too, and then demand performance from our elected officials. We are very close to retracing course back towards an age of reason, if we just trounce this MAGA nonsense hard this cycle.

This works in 2 levels. If they know their arguments are dishonest, it’s important to call them out on it and let them know that their BS didn’t work, and that they have further debased themselves in the discourse by attempting a bad-faith argument. We need to dispel the myth that playing dirty and arguing BS has no consequences. It has severe consequences, as the bad-faith actor loses credibility, respect, dignity and their seat at the table.

If they don’t know that their arguments are dishonest, calling them out allows an opportunity for progress, by engaging in the discussion to show them how their arguments are BS, and how they’ve debased themselves, exposing their ignorance, their bad company and sources, and pointing out how they are losing their seat at the table if they don’t sharpen up their civics.

Either way, taking the “high road” against dirty politics serves little purpose. Calling them out and holding a mirror to their dirty faces is essential if we are to have real dialog. Bullies only know strength.

The response to a low takedown attempt is a knee to the face, because it says: we saw it coming, you’ve achieved nothing and impressed nobody, and you are now concussed from the weight of your own ineffective maneuver.

Notice how the “high road” would actually be detrimental because it’s enabling. Engaging in discourse with their bad-faith BS only serves to validate their BS, legitimize their argument and show them unearned respect as participants in the discussion. When they act in bad faith, if we don’t treat them as bullies deserving of a knee to the face, we’ve embraced their BS and validated their approach. So, of course, they will do it again and again, and take it further every time. The “high road” people have made our political division worse, not better.

The bully doesn’t ponder on their bad string of choices until something shakes them up. If we want our national discourse to regain civility, since we’ve allowed it to get this bad we now must teach a bunch of people how to behave, by the way of corrective blows in response to each of their BS attacks.

And we must teach the “high road” people to cut it out and smarten up in how they deal with bullies and cultists. You are not going to Kumbaya a cultist away from racism, misogyny and religious adoration for their orange crimelord - because there’s no time and space to sit down with each broken, indoctrinated mind and cuddle it back to health. We need to set firm boundaries on how much BS we’ll tolerate (and at this point it should be near none), we need to hold a mirror up to their BS to show them how we see them and how much they’ve lost the argument and the respect, and we need to clarify why they are dead wrong and full of shit, and stress that they are the largely responsible for turning our civics into a mess and we demand that they cut it out.

An economics expert… with the Republicans? That’s hilarious. The party of horse and sparrow, massive debt and deficit, and wealth inequality. Also, what would a medical doctor bring to the administration of a government or geopolitics? These Democrats trained for the job: history, politics, economics, law. What would be the advantage of welcoming unqualified people?

I like it. Tell that to the Republican party that are currently doing the rounds pretending Kamala is some sort of incompetent dummy. Trump said that she is stupid because she had to work too hard to pass the Bar after earning a doctorate in law, while he himself never even pursued grad school and witness accounts point to his undergrad transcripts being a horror show.

Exactly. She worked for a living while paying for her education, and once she was educated she advanced to bigger things. Somehow they want to frame that as a negative mark on her, when it should be the opposite. They can’t celebrate someone working hard and doing it on her own because she plays for the opposite team.

https://www.phillymag.com/news/2019/09/14/donald-trump-at-wharton-university-of-pennsylvania/

It’s rare for a professor to disparage the intelligence of a student, but according to attorney Frank DiPrima, who was close friends with professor William T. Kelley for 47 years, the prof made an exception for Donald Trump, at least in private. “He must have told me that 100 times over the course of 30 years,” says DiPrima […] “I remember the inflection of his voice when he said it: ‘Donald Trump was the dumbest goddamn student I ever had!’” He would say that [Trump] came to Wharton thinking he already knew everything, that he was arrogant and he wasn’t there to learn.” Kelley, who passed away in 2011 at age 94, taught marketing at Wharton for 31 years, retiring in 1982.

I meant the information that they hold. If they only listen to propaganda outlets, what they actually “know” is very low information in terms of what’s true and correct, and instead they fill their heads with nonsense, hate and BS talking points.

One way to fight that is to give them real information, but that’s hard to do. There’s a reason their propaganda outlets have them convinced that experts and real journalists are “fake news,” because that way they can only get their diet of information directly from the right-wing bad-faith actors selling them the bullshit.

To them, it doesn’t matter that the internet is a click away, full of real news sources and real experts discussing the issues. They will never deliberately go read those sources, and if they ever run into any of that by accident, they’ll label it fake news and move right on.

In essence, the MAGAs are intellectually captive in the nefarious web of malicious right-wing propaganda, and have no means to break free on their own. In their world, Biden eats babies, the Democrats are trying to legalize 4th trimester abortions, Hillary Clinton abuses minors and Trump is the hero trying to stop it, and so on. They know almost nothing about facts and the real issues, and instead their brains are occupied with conspiracy theories, BS and hate.

It’s politics as a sport: My team is the best and your team sucks and we’ll beat you in the final!

But more than that, the biggest issue is the FEELING of disenfranchisement. People that FEEL mishandled or mistreated look up to a guy that holds power and seems to wield it in favor of their group. And they’ll side with that guy come hell or high water, because at least it gives them a FEELING of hope and control.

Notice I’m underscoring the FEELING aspect of it, because it doesn’t matter if these people are correct about who they perceive as their enemies and their allies. Republicans will vote for GOP candidates that actively and demonstrably oppose their interests, as long as the Republican propaganda machine has convinced them that those people are on their side, and the other political party is the bad guys. Facts and the truth have no room in it.

An important saying: You can’t reason a person out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.

Within 24 hours of Kamala Harris announcing her candidacy, PBS did a panel with MAGA women asking them what they thought about Harris. Like clockwork, these airheads repeated every bad-faith Fox “News” propaganda talking point and nothing else. Fox told them Harris is a bad candidate for A, B and C reasons, and they embraced their team’s views immediately with zero effort to look for evidence, facts or diverse views. If you ask them what’s up with politics, they’ll repeat like good zealots: Harris is bad because of A, B and C, and we have to vote for the GOP to stop Harris.

If we want to save these people from themselves, we need to address their unsubstantiated feelings, their low information on the issues that should matter to them, and their steady diet of malicious propaganda telling them to act against their own interests. Until then, they’ll keep doing politics as a sport, and Trump is their local team.

Donald Trump, June 9, 2024:

“So I said, let me ask you a question and he said, nobody ever asked this question and it must be because of MIT, my relationship to MIT. Very smart. He goes, I say, what would happen if the boat sank from its weight? And you’re in the boat and you have this tremendously powerful battery and the battery is now underwater and there’s a shark that’s approximately 10 yards over there, by the way, a lot of shark attacks lately, do you notice that a lot of shark? I watched some guys justifying it today. Well, they weren’t really that angry. They bit off the young lady’s leg because of the fact that they were, they were not hungry, but they misunderstood what who she was? These people are. He said there’s no problem with sharks. They just didn’t really understand a young woman swimming now. It really got decimated and other people do a lot of shark attacks. So I said, so there’s a shark 10 yards away from the boat, 10 yards or here, do I get electrocuted if the boat is sinking? Water goes over the battery, the boat is sinking. Do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted or do I jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted? Because I will tell you he didn’t know the answer. He said, you know, nobody’s ever asked me that question. I said, I think it’s a good question. I think there’s a lot of electric current coming through that water. But you know what I’d do if there was a shark or you get electrocuted, I’ll take electrocution every single time.”

Donald Trump, June 9, 2024:

“So I said, let me ask you a question and he said, nobody ever asked this question and it must be because of MIT, my relationship to MIT. Very smart. He goes, I say, what would happen if the boat sank from its weight? And you’re in the boat and you have this tremendously powerful battery and the battery is now underwater and there’s a shark that’s approximately 10 yards over there, by the way, a lot of shark attacks lately, do you notice that a lot of shark? I watched some guys justifying it today. Well, they weren’t really that angry. They bit off the young lady’s leg because of the fact that they were, they were not hungry, but they misunderstood what who she was? These people are. He said there’s no problem with sharks. They just didn’t really understand a young woman swimming now. It really got decimated and other people do a lot of shark attacks. So I said, so there’s a shark 10 yards away from the boat, 10 yards or here, do I get electrocuted if the boat is sinking? Water goes over the battery, the boat is sinking. Do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted or do I jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted? Because I will tell you he didn’t know the answer. He said, you know, nobody’s ever asked me that question. I said, I think it’s a good question. I think there’s a lot of electric current coming through that water. But you know what I’d do if there was a shark or you get electrocuted, I’ll take electrocution every single time.”

I didn’t change anything, my post hasn’t been edited, unlike yours. I said nominee, and I specifically explained where Trump, Biden and Harris stand in the nomination process.

You even quoted me correctly: Currently, the race is between Trump who is the oldest **nominee ** ever, and Kamala Harris.

If you need time to make sense of it, take your time.

Are you sure there hasn’t been someone older that lost?

Not for the major parties: Reps and Dems. If there has been a candidate for some BS tiny party, I can’t say because I don’t have full history on the fools and nonsense that usually adorn all political cycles. I’m only speaking for the main parties for which we have info.

Clinton was inaugurated in 1993. That’s 31 years ago. Taylor Swift was 3 years old when Bill Clinton became president.

Trump was nominated by his party at the RNC in July. The Democrats will nominate their candidate next month at the DNC, and that will be Harris. Biden is no longer running for president. Currently, the race is between Trump who is the oldest nominee ever, and Kamala Harris.

He said he aced the dementia test, he boasted to anyone that would listen. He said he has no issues spotting a cartoon giraffe or even remembering 5 words in a row.

Good vs bad is subjective and some people might disagree. For instance, many in Trump’s base are happy that he separated children at the border from their parents as a form of medieval punishment to immigrants seeking asylum.

However, here are two pages that I find important. Here is a super tiny list of Biden’s accomplishments, keeping it to only 30 for brevity: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/02/02/joe-biden-30-policy-things-you-might-have-missed-00139046

And since there’s so much negative to say about Trump, given that he is a criminal with bankrupt ideas and tons of problems, here is one link that focuses on economics: https://www.propublica.org/article/national-debt-trump

I like to summarize Trump’s ability as a president with this simple example: Trump is the only president to have ever promised to completely wipe out the US national debt. The reason other presidents don’t promise this is because it’s stupid, no country should operate without debt. An economist should know that, BTW, and he is constantly remind us that he graduated in Economics from a top school, while he doesn’t seem to understand basics of macro economics. Then, once he became president, he added the most debt in a single presidential term in history. So he campaigned on a truly stupid promise to completely wipe the national debt, yet he then added the most debt ever.

That’s the kind of president you get when you vote for Trump. As Rex Tillerson said, a man that doesn’t seem to comprehend what the adults are talking about and doesn’t even understand why the adults want to talk about it. A fucking moron incapable of presidential decisions. That’s in addition to all the horrible stuff he brings with his nasty personality, corruption, crimes, and so on.