Cruz Bruised by Boos
Poor Tailgunner Ted is singing the blues,
On Yelp, he only gets negative reviews.
He’s all hat and no horse,
Detested in Houston, of course,
Where, instead of cheering the Astros, they booed the Cruz.
Year: 2022
Biden Admin on Fence About Paying to Maintain Twitter ‘Blue Check’
$8
“The White House hasn’t decided whether it would pay $8 a month to maintain verification of its Twitter accounts,” Bloomberg reports. Said Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre: “I don’t believe it’s an issue that made it to the president’s desk yet, not a conversation that the president is aware of. That’s something for the president that we need to talk to the president about.”
MAGA Lies About Pelosi Attack Are Cynical Assertions of Power
Republicans’ and MAGA right-wingers’ lies about and mockery of the attack on Paul Pelosi in the face of contradictory facts are an assertion of power and the first step toward autocracy. So argues Greg Sargent in an op-ed piece in the Washington Post.
It’s a compelling argument:
In 2020, Donald Trump’s lies about voter fraud provided a fake pretext to overturn his presidential election loss. Now that has metastasized: Many Republicans in the MAGA vein are employing “big lies” on numerous fronts, but their purpose has taken a dark new turn: It’s as if all the lying is becoming an assertion of power in its own right, a kind of end in itself.
The embrace of political lying as a declaration of power — of the power to say what reality is — has long been studied by academics. Some see it as a harbinger of autocratic political tendencies.
Read the rest in this gift article here.
An Evil Place
They joked and mocked when Paul Pelosi was attacked,
They deleted their mean tweets, but did not retract.
It seems that Republicans
Have devolved into subhumans
Inhabiting an evil place from which they can’t come back.
The Dark Heart of the Republican Party
“One might think that it would be easy for America, as one nation, to condemn an attempt to kidnap the woman second in line to the presidency that resulted in the beating of her husband with a hammer. As Ernest Hemingway would say: Pretty to think so. Instead, we have seen the dark heart of the Republican Party, with a reaction so callous, so flippantly sadistic, so hateful, that it all feels irredeemable.”
— Tom Nichols
Musk Didn’t Ruin Twitter, Twitter Did
“Twitter’s problems run far deeper than a problematic owner. To begin with, it’s structurally designed to impede complex discussion by forcing users to reduce all topics to 240-character soundbites. This can be a fun way to react to Game of Thrones, but it is not a good way to litigate economic policy or geopolitical conflicts. The constricted format impedes free-flowing conversation while privileging performative sloganeering. This is why Donald Trump, who seemingly never had a complex thought in his life, loved Twitter. Why our intellectual elite has decided to yoke the public discourse to a site whose most successful users are people like Trump is less understandable.”
— Yair Rosenberg
Kinzinger, Cheney ‘Surrounded by Cowards’
“Liz Cheney and I are not courageous. There’s no strength in this. We’re just surrounded by cowards.”
— Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), on Morning Joe, on why Republicans are having such a hard time condemning the violent assault on Paul Pelosi.
One-Sided Violence
Violent rhetoric is like a rising tide,
And it’s put our democracy in a downward slide.
Republicans say, “Look,
That guy was a kook!”
But where is the violence on the Democrats’ side?
