RustyVenture [he/him]

we know less about it than they do

Well that’s all depressing to learn, and (unfortunately) it makes sense

Thank you for the explanation comrade!

Possibly dumb question: couldn’t all of the countries that voted in favor just reinstate trade with Cuba anyway? If the US tries to swing its dick around, refer those saps to the infallibility of the international rules-based order, the UN charter, and threaten to cut off trade with the evil empire should it continue endangering the free movement of goods. It would be funny, likely effective, and well deserved, especially at a time where US soft power is already waning. Feel like we have a lot more to lose than most of these other nations if we tried enforcing our delirious terms on them.

ETA: Of course, I mean the larger, industrial nations with large trade networks; I can certainly understand how/why a smaller country who relies a lot on US imports/exports don’t want to set off the bloodthirsty burger empire.

Here’s how John Kasich can still win!

Holy shit right? Absolutely loved pfsc, still remember building up a bunch of new ones and then starting the story over again to catch up. I still have the book and have lent it to friends, and it’s always been interesting to see what they think of it.

Also this unlocked a memory where one year in college for a party I made an “America Is Okay I Guess Sometimes” t-shirt. Relevant comic:

Actually kinda great to look back and see how I was already on the path to by 2012 lmao

Personally I’d prefer if the campaign and party that keeps caterwauling over how much more rational, composed, and committed to truth they are than Trump would stop acting like Trump in both word and deed. It would really make their deranged, existential fears about “democracy” being “under attack” seem more credible.

and ignore the yapping mutts.

Call it KHive

He also managed to mumble this out during the debate a week ago, too. However, we can’t be sure Biden even knows what year it is, so it’s unclear if he still believes this hilarious lie or if he thinks it’s 2022.

Promise?

Damn, this made an otherwise shit day actually feel better . Truly uplifting news and a big fat Death to AmeriKKKa and everyone else who targeted and tortured him for the crime of exposing their atrocities to the world.

Same. My friends and I had a big laugh over the resurrection of Paul Bearer.

Oh well still hilarious.

Edit: Oh my god, now I’m going through his account and there are some amazing works in there. 10/10 bit.

In addition to just doing the “but Trump’s cognitive decline!!” bit, there’s also a ton of “I’m forgetful too and I’m only 38!” or “let’s cut the guy some slack! Watch his SOTU speech and tell me he’s got cognitive decline!” which is just…yeah.

“The Emperor’s New Clothes” is an instruction manual for these freaks.

This thread could’ve been its own post here imo. Just too good.

“Technically, they only had a 72-day working majority, sweaty. What did you expect them to get done? Don’t you know how long it took to get the ACA passed? Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of good!”

“Y’all there weren’t 60 pro-choice senators in 2009. There still aren’t, but there weren’t then, either, so I don’t know what you wanted from them.”

“The president is not a king no matter how much you Bernie Bros want it to be true!”

Like I really don’t want to hand it to the guy, especially in a hypothetical, especially because he is an incompetent fascist, and especially because I’m sure we’d have invariably wound up in the same place as we did under Brandon before long because the orphan crushing machine would have eventually been given more orphans to crush regardless of who was president. But there is no doubt in my mind that plenty of hogs would’ve cast their “closely held” beliefs about the nanny state aside in 2020 if the Trump White House even feigned some kind of support for taking better precautions (or just appealing to the racist heart of Amerikkka by framing it as a “protect American patriotism from the elusive China flu!!!”) instead of coming around to side with the plague rats. That’s countless lives that could’ve been saved in the process.

If the Dems still won control of Congress in 2020 I imagine they’d have become the ones reflexively acting to curtail second-term Trump’s attempts to end pandemic aid or the moratoriums, and might’ve even cared about pushing for upgraded ventilation, better testing and tracking infrastructure, remote work policies, and additional stimulus checks. It’d be funny if something good happened in this country as a result, simply because the Dems were actually engaged in harm reduction over the cheeto winning re-election. Instead they just became a new wave of plague rats under their own incompetent fascist.

He was also toast before he got the shot in the arm that was all of the other Reagan Democrats dropping out simultaneously except and we were ordered to treat the Jim Clyburn endorsement and SC primary win as if it decided the whole election. Right before all this the man was talking about leaving record players on for kids at night to help them learn, saying he didn’t care about young people’s issues, saying he’d veto M4A, and getting chewed out by his eventual VP pick for being a segregationist.

I’m still convinced that if Trump started selling cloth “Keep America Great” masks on his campaign website or worn one around for a few days he would’ve won.

See, no amount of turd polish is gonna make that turd shine. You can’t paper over the poison that the bill is laced with and expect to be praised for stumping/voting for it when people who are the unwilling recipients of the poison get strapped down to the table for no other reason than an absolutely abominable ploy to “paint the other guys as hypocrites” or to shut down “the whiny complaints of Trump”—a guy who, by the way, isn’t even in the government. The bill:

• Changed to asylum rules that would have risked removing the legal review of cases by judges (which lots of mainstream press disgustingly dressed up as “speeding up the process”)
• Included billions in additional funding for the fascist border patrol and the private companies operating the concentration camps
• Revived construction of the wall Trump wanted
• Imposing dystopian levels of round-the-clock surveillance (also run by private prison corps) on immigrant families

Then there’s the provision that would give the president unilateral power to restrict asylum whenever they get nervous around one of the White House’s maintenance workers (and of course Biden made this even more draconian in his executive order by halving the number of crossings that would allow the president to trigger the closure).

The spoonful of sugar the Democrats managed to get into the bill effectively pits different sets of traumatized groups (that we had a hand in traumatizing) against one another: The party can sing the praises of the “good” parts of the bill while anyone pointing out all of the fashy shit in it that’s actually really fuckin’ bad can be refuted by referring back to the few issues Dems didn’t agree to allow the GOP to fully steer. That Biden seemingly believes the executive order will be struck down anyway just continues to affirm he’s just as willing to toy with people’s lives, enact racist and inhumane policy out of moral cowardice, and waste time on a lark as the GOP is, while facing far less scrutiny for doing so because “it could always be worse!”

I’m old enough to remember when these policies were as sickening to the current president and his party as they were and still are to me. Democrats like Biden and Chuck Schumer were quite vocal about the the previous regime’s border policies and how needlessly harmful they were. Now that it’s more politically advantageous to jump on the mixed austerity-and-manufactured border “crisis” bandwagon, the most vulnerable people, their families, their relatives, and the advocates that do crucial work filling in the gaps the US government refuses to fill are left high and dry wondering where the party that was supposed to be there for them went and why they’re now pawns in an electoral gambit that didn’t even fucking pan out!

Now we’ll get to watch the GOP draw a new line in the sand and demand the Dems step over it so they can meet in the middle, and because they have no answer that will satisfy their base/protect the vulnerable and satisfy their business partners, friends, future and former employers, or the industries that thrive on exploitation of the most vulnerable. Or they win this year and just do this shit anyway—after all, any Democrats in Congress who get re-elected and supported the 2024 bill will be on the back foot for explaining their flip-flopping to the far-right opportunists who will absolutely drag them through the mud over it, and batting away an empowered Republican party even more eager to maximize the suffering of brown people instead of shifting things back into their own favor for once.

Hey, it would actually be a good idea for the Democrats to not pass inhumane, illegal, Republican border policies just to “own the cons.” Them doing what the GOP wants but with less pushback (and more slobbering excuse-making from their cult of pathetic dimwitted losers) is precisely why the “both sides” argument is merely a statement of fact made after observing objective fucking reality.

Next time, Democrats should actually do the opposite of what they did here and what they did with the racist bipartisan border bill instead of defaulting to hurting real people, wasting time and money over a measure that will by all accounts be shot down by the courts, and breaking national and international laws just so they could pretend they pulled off a 5D chess move that literally no one outside of their low-information cult will ever reward them for.

“What kind of slime would I marry?”