Cursed Political Content

[TexRex]

It seems to me that a good place to start would be a conservative movement whose ideologues aren't so given to cry like a little bitch about how others live their lives.

 

[UKMikey]

https://www.gtplanet.net/forum/threads/abortion.30736/post-14199810

 

[ScottPuss20]

It seems to me that a good place to start would be a conservative movement whose ideologues aren't so given to cry like a little bitch about how others live their lives.

 

[TexRex]

No. Please. Stop.

You're probably thinking this is because of AI but it's actually because of incest.

 

[TB]

Here I thought Musk was all for the genocide of Europeans. Or is that only for Ukrainians?

 

[TexRex]

Okay but libel is a type of defamation? And that's not actually libel because libel is written? And that's not slander either because any defamation must be stated as fact and opining that one is culpable in the death of another doesn't meet the requirements?

Conservatives Understand the Difference Between Libel and Slander Challenge

Slander.

lol

 

[UKMikey]

I hope she goes for it. Bet she won't though.

 

[TexRex]

Dump.

...

THIS. IS. INSANE.

...

Huh.

...

...

 

[UKMikey]

Narrator: "Unfortunately, as it turned out, they were all Benedict Arnold."

 

[McLaren]

Black people will vote for Trump b/c black people... like sneakers?

"This is connecting with Black America because they love sneakers!" He said.

"This is a big deal, certainly in the inner-city," Arroyo commented. "So when you have Trump roll out his sneaker line, they're like 'wait a minute, this is cool.' He's reaching them on a level that defies, and is above politics. The culture always trumps politics."

Black people will vote for Trump 'because they love sneakers', says Fox News guest

Fox News contributor Raymond Arroyo remarked on The Big Weekend Show that Black people will vote for Trump because they "love sneakers."The comment was made in reference to Trump's new Sneaker collection that he promoted at Sneaker Con in Philadelphia on Saturday.The collection, with prices...

www.indy100.com

 

[TB]

Well, if budget Tony Hale says so...

 

[TexRex]

Conservative is when you cry like a bitch because of how people live their lives.

 

[TheCracker]

Because repressed emotions are a great way to not develop a disfunctional family enviroment.

Boomers: We grew up in disfunctional families and it didn't do us any harm... So we need to be creating similar toxic enviroments for children to grow up in so they can become just like us and not like the current crop of woke snowflakes. Or something.

 

[Darla Starch]

Because repressed emotions are a great way to not develop a disfunctional family enviroment.

Boomers: We grew up in disfunctional families and it didn't do us any harm... So we need to be creating similar toxic enviroments for children to grow up in so they can become just like us and not like the current crop of woke snowflakes. Or something.

Because real American way or something

 

[TexRex]

"Tall blond guys were the heroes."

It seems Dick just has a type. Conservative is when you cry like a bitch because people don't share your tastes.

What's funny is when I went to download that image so that I could repost it, I found that I had two more files that are similarly named.

...

"The kid got lucky. Who cares if he didn't consent?"

There's also this:

This Man Has The Ear Of Billionaires — And A White Supremacist Past He Kept A Secret

Hanania is championed by tech moguls and a U.S. senator, but HuffPost found he used a pen name to become an important figure in the “alt-right.”

www.huffpost.com

Connie rats are just broken beyond repair.

 

[UKMikey]

 

[Populuxe]

View attachment 1330781

I need a "sigh in exasperation because people really are this stupid" emoji.

 

[jjaisli]

Pure Bloods. Sometimes it's hard to believe we're dealing with adults.

 

[UKMikey]

Pure Bloods. Sometimes it's hard to believe we're dealing with adults.

Indeed, it's like listening to some cartoonish villain out of a Harry Potter novel.

 

[Danoff]

I need a "sigh in exasperation because people really are this stupid" emoji.

I have requested a facepalm emoji a few times.

 

[UKMikey]

I have requested a facepalm emoji a few times.

I've lost count of the number of times I've mentally appended a yawn smiley to repetitive posts but I guess it'd be pretty uncivil were one to be introduced, unlike your example.

 

[GBO Possum]

I have requested a facepalm emoji a few times.

🤦

 

[UKMikey]

🤦

Yeah, but sometimes it's nicer to be able to use a reaction smiley than just put it in a reply because then you can gauge how other people feel about a post more accurately.

 

[UKMikey]

Whoops, missed this one earlier:

Biden wrote Google's AI too? He's doing pretty well for a guy who they think is too old to be pres. Maybe he did it on Hunter's laptop.

@HouseGOP right now:

 

[GBO Possum]

Yeah, but sometimes it's nicer to be able to use a reaction smiley than just put it in a reply because then you can gauge how other people feel about a post more accurately.

Yes, however Danoff was asking for a "facepalm emoji", and that's not possible with a reaction smiley. I honored his request.

 

[UKMikey]

Yes, however Danoff was asking for a "facepalm emoji", and that's not possible with a reaction smiley. I honored his request.

I didn't get that sense from his previous posts. To me it sounds more like he was saying that he's requested the administrators of this site to add it to our list of post reactions since it looks like he knows where to find a suitable emoji for use in his own posts, judging by the one below.

I love the "Like button" emojis, use them a ton. Not just to react, but to see reactions to what I've posted.

I would like a facepalm one though. It's probably what I would use most. Something like this:

 

[TexRex]

Started:

Going:

 

[HenrySwanson]

Very pertinent:

How Donald Trump Became Unbeatable

How did we get here again?

www.theatlantic.com

 

[TexRex]

Conservative is when you cry like a little bitch about Biden eating an ice cream cone.

Biden Aggravation Disorder

 

[UKMikey]

Very pertinent:

How Donald Trump Became Unbeatable

How did we get here again?

www.theatlantic.com

Thanks for the paywalled article. Like me, not everyone has an Atlantic subscription so if you've used up your free article and want to read this focus group analysis here's the text:

How Donald Trump Became Unbeatable
How did we get here again?

By Sarah Longwell

Not too long ago, Donald Trump looked finished. After the January 6 attack on the Capitol, the repeal of Roe v. Wade, and a poor Republican showing in the 2022 midterms, the GOP seemed eager to move on from the former president. The post-Trump era had supposedly begun.

Just one week after the midterms, he entered the 2024 race, announcing his candidacy to a room of bored-looking hangers-on. Even his children weren’t there. Security had to pen people in to keep them from leaving during his meandering speech.

Today, thanks to Trump’s dominant performance in South Carolina, the Republican primary is all but over. Trump’s margin was so comfortable that the Associated Press called the race as soon as polls closed. How did we get here? How did Trump go from historically weak to unassailable?

I talk with Republican-primary voters in focus groups every week, and through these conversations, I’ve learned that the answer has as much to do with Trump’s party and his would-be competitors as it does with Trump himself. Most Republican leaders have profoundly misread their base in this moment.

The other candidates hoped to be able to defeat Trump even as they accommodated his behavior and made excuses for his criminality. They even said they would support his reelection. By doing so, they established a permission structure for Republican voters to return to Trump, all but ensuring his rise.

My focus groups over the past few years can be seen as a travelogue through the GOP’s journey back to Trump. Three key themes emerged that help explain why Trump’s opponents failed to gain traction.

First, you can’t beat something with nothing. The Republican field didn’t offer voters anything new.

Nikki Haley and Mike Pence cast themselves as avatars of the pre-Trump GOP. Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy did their best to imitate Trump, presenting themselves as younger and more competent stewards of the same MAGA agenda. None of them offered a viable alternative to Trump; instead, they spent their resources trying not to anger his supporters.

But Republican voters don’t want Reagan Republicanism. Old-school conservatives may pine for a return to balanced budgets, personal responsibility, and American leadership in the world (guilty). But a greater share of Republican voters prefer an isolationist foreign policy and candidates who promise to punish their domestic enemies.

“The feds, both parties, the elites … want everything to go back to the way it was before Trump got elected,” said Bret, a two-time Trump voter from Georgia. “And that would be the wrong direction, in my opinion.”

And voters aren’t interested in Trump-lite when they can have the real thing. Trump’s supporters see in him a leader who’s willing to fight for them. No other candidate proved they could do that better than Trump.

“We need a man that is strong as hell, a brick house,” said Fred, a two-time Trump voter from South Carolina, in May 2023. “He is that man.”

Larry, an Iowa Republican, called Trump “a disrupter. In the business world, you bring in a disrupter when everybody’s stuck in groupthink. That’s what I hired him to do: blow stuff up.”

Contrast that with how Republican voters saw his opponents. “If you want to be president, you’ve got to be hated by half the country,” said Dakota, a two-time Trump voter from Iowa, adding, about Nikki Haley: “I don’t think she can do it.”

“Does it kind of feel in a sense that he just kind of gave up?” Ashley, another Iowa Republican, asked about DeSantis before he dropped out of the race.

Pence, Chris Christie, and the other also-rans came in for much worse criticism. “I don’t know if anyone would vote for him, just his family at this point,” Justin, a two-time Trump voter from Texas, said of Pence. “I think he’s alienated everyone.”

The second theme: Trump’s competitors declined to hit him on his 91 felony counts, despite the fact that voters say they have serious concerns about them. Instead, most of them (with the honorable exceptions of Christie and Asa Hutchinson) actively defended Trump.

DeSantis called the charges the “criminalization of politics.” Haley said the charges were “more about revenge than … about justice.” And Ramaswamy promised to pardon Trump “on day one.”

By the time Haley started attacking Trump in recent weeks, it was already too late. She can call him “diminished,” “unhinged,” “weak in the knees,” and “incredibly reckless,” but voters saw her raise her hand six months ago when asked whether she would support him if he became the nominee.

If Trump’s primary opponents weren’t going to hold his indictments against him, why should GOP voters? “It’s all a witch hunt,” Dennis, a two-time Trump voter from Michigan, said of the charges. The Department of Justice and state prosecutors bringing the cases “are terrified of Trump for whatever reason … because they’re afraid he will run and they’re afraid he will win.”

Lastly, Trump started to be seen as electable. This represented a big shift from a year ago, when voters had concerns about Trump’s ability to beat President Joe Biden in a rematch.

In February 2023, Isaac, a Pennsylvania Republican, said of Trump: “I just feel he is unelectable. I think you could put him up there against fricking Donald Duck and Donald Duck will end up coming out ahead. He just ticks too many people off.”

But as they got a better look at the alternatives—and as they came to believe that Biden was too frail, weak, and senile to be competitive in the general election—GOP voters came around.

“I’m convinced that he is in the final stages of dementia,” Clifton, an Iowa Republican, said of Biden. “I mean, yeah, Trump’s an asshole and he doesn’t have a filter and he says stupid things, but it doesn’t matter.”

These voters have come to believe that the election is a choice between senility and recklessness. And they’ve decided they prefer the latter.

Desantis’s rise and fall is the clearest demonstration of how we got here. For a time, he looked like the greatest threat to Trump, leveraging culture-war issues to gin up the base while projecting an image of being, as one voter put it to me, “Trump not on steroids.”

He sent refugees to Martha’s Vineyard, went after Disney, banned books—and the base loved him for it. “For the most part, from what I hear, he’s doing a good job in Florida,” said Chris, a Republican voter from Illinois, in March 2023. “He stands for a lot of the same values that I think I do.”

But over time, DeSantis’s star began to fade. The more retail campaigning he did, and the more voters were exposed to him, the less they liked what they saw.

“I think he was a strong candidate before he was actually a candidate,” said Fred, a two-time Trump voter from New Hampshire, in December 2023. He cited “things he’s done in Florida and how big he won his last governor’s election.” But now, he said, “I think he got a little too into the social issues.”

By the time DeSantis dropped out, skepticism had turned to contempt among the Republican voters I spoke with. Sean, a two-time Trump voter from New Hampshire, put it succinctly last month: “He has a punchable face, and I just don’t like him.”

This time last year, DeSantis had a real shot at consolidating the move-on-from-Trump faction of the GOP while making inroads with the maybe-Trumpers—each of which constitutes about a third of the party. Instead, he tried to wrestle the former president for his always-Trump base, a doomed effort. He couldn’t get traction with the always-Trumpers and he alienated the move-on-from-Trumpers. It was a hopeless strategy for a flawed candidate.

Haley may hold out for a few more weeks, even though she has virtually no chance of beating Trump outright. Her only real incentive for remaining in the race is to be the last person standing in the event that he is imprisoned or suffers a major health event. Barring either of these scenarios, Trump’s path to the nomination is clear.

This outcome wasn’t inevitable; Trump was beatable. His opponents had real opportunities to cleave off his support, but they squandered them.

The reason is simple: Republican elites don’t understand their voters. They spent eight years making excuses for Trump and supporting him at every turn, sending the clear signal that this is his party. They spent nearly a decade saying that he was a persecuted martyr—and the greatest president in history. It’s frightening, but not surprising, that their voters think he’s the only man for the job.

The bolded comments by prospective Trump voters (excerpted below) are kind of chilling. Seems like they're determined to live up to Hillary's "deplorables" stereotype:

Larry, an Iowa Republican, called Trump “a disrupter. In the business world, you bring in a disrupter when everybody’s stuck in groupthink. That’s what I hired him to do: blow stuff up.”

Contrast that with how Republican voters saw his opponents. “If you want to be president, you’ve got to be hated by half the country,” said Dakota, a two-time Trump voter from Iowa, adding, about Nikki Haley: “I don’t think she can do it.”

Looks like it isn't necessary to fool all of the people all of the time to effect a disastrous Trump second term. The GOP just have to fool enough of them and count on the opposition being too apathetic to care.