Lessons of History and Trying To Avoid the Same Mistakes

[hadit]

You are not the topic here. Never were, and never will be.

Now back to my thread.

Oh, yes, that's right. Vote Republican. The nation you save just might be your own.

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

DOWN AND OUT IN NATIONAL HARBOR — Back in 2015, one of us was at a Republican presidential primary debate where we ran into MATT and MERCEDES SCHLAPP while waiting to do a cable news hit.

Naturally, the conversation turned to DONALD TRUMP.

The Schlapps were a power couple in Republican politics who met in the GEORGE W. BUSH White House and became successful lobbyists, political strategists and commentators. The previous year, 2014, Matt Schlapp became chairman of the American Conservative Union, best known for its annual CPAC event in Washington.

Since Trump’s first appearance at CPAC in 2011, the conference had become an early venue for him to court the base of the Republican Party.

But to the Schlapps, Trump showing up and delivering sick burns about then-President BARACK OBAMAwas one thing. Leading the party was quite another. They were appalled by Trump’s surge in the polls and dreaded him becoming the GOP nominee.

Like so many similar conversations we had with Republicans back then — MICK MULVANEY and TOM PRICE also stand out — that encounter with the Schlapps stuck with us over the years as Trump became president, CPAC became defined by MAGA, and the Schlapps became die-hard Trump supporters — “Washington’s Trump-Era ‘It Couple,’” as a 2018 headline in the NYT put it.

Now, the fate of the Schlapp-era CPAC and Donald Trump himself are tied together.

The annual event, which began yesterday in National Harbor, has been abandoned by most top GOP elected officials. Here’s a breakdown:

• Senate GOP leadership: None attending.
• House GOP leadership: Only ELISE STEFANIK is attending.
• GOP governors: Only Idaho Gov. BRAD LITTLE.
• GOP presidential candidates, declared and undeclared: Trump, NIKKI HALEY, MIKE POMPEO and VIVEK RAMASWAMY.

Outside the MAGA bubble, the event has literally become a punchline. JIMMY KIMMEL and JIMMY FALLON both mocked it in their monologues last night.

“CPAC stands for ‘Clowns Periodically Assembling in Convention Centers,’” said Kimmel.

“It’s basically Coachella for people who post on Facebook in all caps,” joked Fallon. “After each speech, there will be a QAnon — I’m sorry, Q&A.”

There are several GOP senators going (TED CRUZ, MARSHA BLACKBURN, JOHN KENNEDY, TOMMY TUBERVILLE, BILL HAGERTY, J.D. VANCE, MIKE BRAUN, RICK SCOTT and ERIC SCHMITT), but attendance at the event is shaping up as a statement about whether you want Trump as the future of the party or not.

Natalie Allison and Meridith McGraw explore the new politics of CPAC with some more takeaways about the event, which will run through Saturday night, when Trump’s speech will close out the event:

“The Republican establishment is down on CPAC,” they write. “But for Donald Trump and his campaign operation, the conservative conference is not just the main event, it’s a crucial early test of his political strength. … If this weekend’s event mimics the conferences of recent years, Trump is preparing to bask in the glow. But that also raises the stakes for him. A poor showing in the crowd or in the CPAC straw poll could feed chatter that his grip on the GOP is failing. …

“His likely top rival in a GOP primary, Florida Gov. RON DeSANTIS, is skipping CPAC along with other potential 2024 candidates and top Republican officials. Former Vice President MIKE PENCE and Sen. TIM SCOTT will gather with DeSantis and other GOP presidential hopefuls behind closed doors at The Breakers, a luxury Palm Beach resort, to address donors at a retreat hosted by the anti-tax group Club for Growth. Trump was not invited to attend. …

“CPAC’s pull on establishment Republicans appears to have waned not just because the organization has tied itself closely to Trump. The conservative group is also navigating a serious public relations crisis as its chair, Matt Schlapp, faces sexual assault allegations from a GOP campaign staffer. The alleged victim, a former employee of HERSCHEL WALKER’s Senate campaign, sued Schlapp and his wife Mercedes in January for nearly $10 million. The couple has denied wrongdoing. …

“And while a cast of Fox News stars have studded conservative conferences in recent months — SEAN HANNITY at CPAC Dallas in August, and both TUCKER CARLSON and LAURA INGRAHAM at Turning Point USA’s year-end conference in Phoenix — none of those high-profile commentators are scheduled to appear this weekend. Nor is Fox Nation, the network’s digital streaming platform, listed as a sponsor this year, as it has been previously.”

For his part, Schlapp is taking issue with the spurt of CPAC obituaries. “We have never had such a strong lineup of speakers,” he told the AP’s Jill Colvin and Michelle Price.

Playbook: How MAGA took over CPAC

An Biden addresses congressional Dems in Baltimore.

www.politico.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

On Tuesday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted out a video of testimony from the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security. The clip showed Rebecca Kiessling, a mother from Michigan, whose sons Caleb, 20, and Kyler, 18, along with a friend Sophia Harris, 17, died of accidental fentanyl overdoses in July of 2020. The two young men and teen girl believed they were taking Percocet pills, but those pills ended up being laced with fentanyl.

In Greene’s tweet, she wrote, “Listen to this mother, who lost two children to fentanyl poisoning, tell the truth about both of her son’s murders because of the Biden administrations refusal to secure our border and stop the Cartel’s from murdering Americans every day by Chinese fentanyl.” It’s hard to follow even the general conspiracy theory here—Chinese fentanyl is being brought in by people on the southern border of our country because of Joe Biden.*


But as many people pointed out, regardless of what you believe about how secure our border is, and no matter your opinion on “war on drugs” policies, President Joe Biden wasn’t even a Senator in 2019, when this poor woman lost her children to overdose. In 2019 the Senate and the Presidency were controlled by Marjorie Taylor Greene’s party.

The internet and reporters brought up this fact (even Twitter’s dubious moderation team had to flag her tweet), and the MTG team’s response was wild.

Before getting into the response, the reason that Rep. Greene wanted to showcase Rebecca Kiessling is that Ms. Kiessling has become a conservative activist on the fentanyl subject. She believes that the problem with fentanyl in the country is an issue of immigration. She also believes that the COVID-19 stimulus package, which provided financial relief to millions of families and children needing financial assistance during the pandemic, is to blame for her children having the money to buy drugs, and subsequently, tragically dying from overdose.

This story is not about arguing whether or not her thoughts on the matter make sense or are true, or are an actionable policy plan for mending our public health crisis in the field of addiction. Ms. Kiessling has suffered the kind of brutal loss that millions of Americans have suffered. It can only be an unimaginable amount of pain to endure. How she manages her grief is not something I’m interested in discussing here.

However, Marjorie Taylor Greene is interested in using Kiessling’s grief as an emotional prop to score political points. The moment she chose to blame President Biden, instead of simply pushing for her decades-tested (and failed) “war on drugs” policies, she helped cheapen Ms. Kiessling’s grief in the public sphere. She turned the deaths of these three young people into a crass and truly ignorant political statement.

Daniel Dale is a senior reporter for CNN who runs fact-checks on the president and other high-profile political figures. On Wednesday morning, he wrote, “I asked Greene’s office last night about her tweet blaming the Biden administration for these deaths in 2020 under Trump. Spokesman Nick Dyer responded by saying lots of people have died from drugs under Biden and ‘do you think they give a fuck about your bullshit fact checking?’”

But that’s not all from the classy organization of civility in discourse that is Marjorie Taylor Greene and her staff, writing, “I also gave Greene congressional spokesman Nick Dyer an opportunity to comment regarding Greene’s multiple false claims yesterday about the 2020 election, such as the lies that Trump won Georgia and that there were thousands of dead voters there. His response: ‘Fuck off.’”



(full article online)

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/3/1/2155649/-Marjorie-Taylor-Greene-says-Joe-Biden-is-to-blame-for-fentanyl-deaths-under-Donald-Trump?detail=emaildkreicymi&pm_source=DKRE&pm_medium=email

 

[hadit]

Vote Republican. The nation you save just might be your own.

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/3/2/2155893/-Texas-Republican-channels-Stalin-and-Putin-to-glorify-motherhood?detail=emaildkre&pm_source=DKRE&pm_medium=email

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[BlueGin]

The op, like many others here, skipped TDS and went full-bore TIP. TIP being Trump induced psychosis.

Too many left loon word walls…so little time or fucks to give.

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

Here’s a fact check of some of his claims.


WHAT TRUMP SAID: “Killings are taking place at a number like nobody’s ever seen, right in Manhattan.”

False. Murders declined in New York by about 11% from 488 homicides in 2021 to 433 homicides last year. It was the lowest level since 2019, according to the city’s Police Department. Murders continued to decrease this year to 30 in January (compared with 31 in January 2022) and to 26 in February (compared with 36 in February 2022).


Those numbers also pale in comparison to the height of crime in New York in the 1980s and 1990s, when Trump was a mainstay of the city and when it regularly recorded more than 1,500 murders annually. Homicides peaked in 1990 at 2,245.

WHAT TRUMP SAID: “We lost $85 billion worth of the greatest military equipment in the world.”

This is exaggerated. Trump was referring to, and overstating, the value of military equipment seized by the Taliban after the United States withdrew the last of its troops from Afghanistan last August.

According to quarterly Pentagon reports to Congress, the United States had provided $88.6 billion for security in Afghanistan from October 2001 to July 2021, and disbursed about $75 billion. That figure includes the amount spent on training, anti-drug trafficking efforts and infrastructure, as well as $18 billion for equipment. Most of the $75 billion actually went toward “sustainment,” a category that includes salaries, communications and gas for vehicles.

CNN and other news outlets have reported that the United States left behind about $7 billion of military equipment.

WHAT TRUMP SAID: “They want windmills all over the place that ruin our fields, kill our birds and are very unreliable and are the most expensive energy ever developed”

This is exaggerated. Trump has long been an ardent critic of wind turbines, but his complaints are overstated.

By one estimate, as many as 328,000 birds die each year flying into wind farms, but other things — inanimate and living — pose a far greater threat. Cats kill as many as 4 billion birds annually in the United States, fossil fuel power plants are responsible for 14.5 million and collisions with buildings as many as 988 million birds.

Wind power and other forms of renewable energy are becoming increasingly more affordable.

The Energy Information Administration estimated that onshore wind would cost about $30 per megawatt-hour by 2027, cheaper than the $52 for coal, $61 for nuclear, $41 for biomass and $47 for hydroelectric. It will remain more expensive than natural gas, solar and geothermal generation.

OTHER CLAIMS

Trump also repeated a number of other claims The New York Times had previously fact-checked:

— Trump inaccurately claimed to have “shut down” unauthorized border crossings. (The number declined during the pandemic, but began to increase again in the final months of his presidency.)

— He falsely claimed that “no other president had ever gotten anything from China, not even 10 cents.” (In the decade before Trump took office, the United States collected $8 billion to $14 billion per year from duties on Chinese imports.)

— He misleadingly characterized members of NATO as “delinquent” on payments. (All member nations pay their bills.)

— He falsely said that “no one ever heard of” the Nord Stream 2 pipeline before he raised it as an issue and halted its construction. (His predecessors all opposed the project.)

— He misleadingly claimed that the Obama administration had only supplied Ukraine with “blankets.” (It committed more than $600 million in security assistance to Ukraine.)

— He falsely claimed to have “completed” building a wall along the southern border. (It has not been finished.)

— He claimed to have presided over the “best economy in history.” (Average growth, even before the coronavirus pandemic decimated the economy, was lower under Trump than under former Presidents Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan.)

Fact-Checking Trump's Speech at CPAC

WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump revived familiar falsehoods and returned to old themes in a speech Saturday night at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Here’s a fact check of some of his claims. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times WHAT TRUMP SAID...

news.yahoo.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]