Tuesday, May 19, 2026

Some Quality Kvetching

From 2016. He's certainly fixed all the problems on his list, hasn't he?
As a general rule, there’s value in trying to understand why those we disagree with think as they do. But there’s no reason to allow such sentiments to obscure or confuse what we are living through. The GOP has been trending this way for a long time. In 2012, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein wrote:

“The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

Mann and Ornstein correctly identified what had been the longtime drift of the GOP by that time, and felt it necessary to say so, especially in the face of a media environment that remained wedded to a “both sides” frame that muddied that reality. Led by Trump, especially in his second term, the GOP has reached the end point of that long arc, leavened by a depth of fraud, ignorance and spite that has made even veterans of that earlier era of GOP politics blanch.

End of a party, end of the Empire ...

When will these shitheels die so I can start pissing on their graves?

[Jonathan’s Quality Kvetching Newsletter, via Hackwhackers. Part of Mann/Ornstein.]

No comments: