Discendo Vox posted:

I think the issue with people like Santos is that interrogating parties will just identify "conventional" lies or malfeasance which appear sufficient to show the person is a lying scumbag. At that point, the idea that the subject is also lying about literally everything else, ever becomes counterintuitive. With other responsibilities, limited resources, and a limit on how far you can leverage the mundane lies you've discovered, there's not normally a drive to dig further- and the other claims are so easy to check that, well, why would you need to check them? In this way, someone who lies pathologically about every drat thing is actually less likely to get widely exposed.

I think I'll call it the Tallarico paradox.

Young Freud posted:

He's part of the right-wing griftosphere...
https://twitter.com/theserfstv/status/1608978638996910080?s=20&t=zFKRWXEcDOhJfR5OqEPeSw

There's other photos of him with Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson for those keeping track of the UK right-wingers.

Discendo Vox posted:

Are we going to have the same exact discussion we already had 8 days ago?

Google Jeb Bush posted:

Yeah I'm quite sympathetic to "surely 'George' Santos isn't lying about his mother's death, his entire resume, and his first name"

Gyges posted:

Sodomy Hussein posted:

I wonder if Santos is one of the many that Democrats worked to get nominated.

Sodomy Hussein posted:

I wonder if Santos is one of the many that Democrats worked to get nominated.

Killer robot posted:

I'm not really a big fan of the strategy since it seems prone to backfiring, but it seems like it both wasn't what the doomsayers kept telling me it was, and yet worked pretty well anyway , so

Killer robot posted:

He wasn't in a contested primary, it sounds, so no.

I'm not really a big fan of the strategy since it seems prone to backfiring, but it seems like it both wasn't what the doomsayers kept telling me it was, and yet worked pretty well anyway , so

Google Jeb Bush posted:

Yeah I'm quite sympathetic to "surely 'George' Santos isn't lying about his mother's death, his entire resume, and his first name"

Gyges posted:

Even if it "works", you're still pushing the Republicans further to the right. So congrats, you won by pushing a fascist message and kneecapping what little remains of the non flaming underwear on their head part of the party

Killer robot posted:

He wasn't in a contested primary, it sounds, so no.

I'm not really a big fan of the strategy since it seems prone to backfiring, but it seems like it both wasn't what the doomsayers kept telling me it was, and yet worked pretty well anyway , so

Gyges posted:

Even if it "works", you're still pushing the Republicans further to the right. So congrats, you won by pushing a fascist message and kneecapping what little remains of the non flaming underwear on their head part of the party

Gyges posted:

Even if it "works", you're still pushing the Republicans further to the right. So congrats, you won by pushing a fascist message and kneecapping what little remains of the non flaming underwear on their head part of the party

quote:

Freshman orientation was a blur of propaganda and innuendo and state-sanctioned conspiracy mongering. Meijer watched, from a hotel lounge, as the president’s lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell held a deranged press conference at the headquarters of the Republican National Committee. New members listened to powerful lawmakers leveling accusations that had no apparent basis in fact. They compared the crazed voicemails they were getting from friends and family members and swapped stories of the intimidation they were subjected to by voters demanding that they overturn the presidential-election result.

Dismayed, a group of freshman Republicans asked for a meeting with Kevin McCarthy shortly after their swearing-in. According to multiple people who attended that meeting, the House minority leader refused to give them advice, explicit or implicit, about how to vote on the election certification. Whereas Mitch McConnell was whipping furiously for certification in his Senate caucus, McCarthy left his new House members without a clue as to the party’s position on whether Congress should obey the Constitution. When they pressed him—one of the freshmen asked whether Trump was crazy enough to believe that decertification would somehow keep him in office—McCarthy replied, “The thing you have to understand about Donald Trump is that he hasn’t been in government that long. He doesn’t know how these things work.”

As word got around that the freshmen were up for grabs, a lobbying blitz commenced. Some of the House hard-liners who sought to block certification—Mo Brooks, Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz—shared discredited YouTube testimonies and Fox News clips to emphasize how the issue was playing with the conservative base. Countering that influence were the likes of Kinzinger and Cheney, who sat down with rookie lawmakers for one-on-one conversations, warning them of the precedent they would set by objecting to the election results. Meijer remembers one longtime member—who confessed that he did not believe the election had been stolen but said he would vote against certification anyway—telling him: “This is the last thing Donald Trump will ever ask you to do.”

quote:

Meijer remembers straining to hear Nancy Pelosi giving a speech through a thick mask. He remembers raiding a refrigerator in the office of Kevin Brady, the ranking Republican on the committee, and drinking a beer to pass the time. And he remembers walking into a small side room and encountering two House Republican colleagues. “They were discussing the Twenty-Fifth Amendment—talking about phone calls they made to the White House, encouraging officials to invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment,” Meijer says. “Neither of them voted for impeachment a week later.”

quote:

That entire day—the vote, as much as the attack—had caught Meijer unprepared. His party’s leadership had provided no guidance to its members, leaving everyone to navigate a squall of rumor and disinformation in one-man lifeboats.

The next week, when Democrats introduced an article of impeachment and promptly scheduled a vote, seeking to hold President Donald Trump accountable for inciting the mob’s siege of the Capitol, Meijer steeled himself for some tough conversations within his party. But those conversations never happened: Most of Trump’s staunchest defenders were too shell-shocked to defend him, even behind closed doors, and the Republican leadership in the House was once again AWOL. There were no whipping efforts, no strategy sessions, no lectures on procedure or policy. Barreling toward one of the most consequential votes in modern history, everyone was on their own.

Whatever his final decision, Meijer didn’t want to blindside the people back in his district. So he began making calls. The conversations did not go well. Meijer remembers one man, “a prominent business leader in Grand Rapids,” arguing that the election had been stolen, that Trump was entitled to a second term, that Meijer was a pawn of the “deep state.” The man went “full QAnon,” spouting conspiracy theories and threatening him with vague but menacing consequences if he voted to impeach. Meijer was well acquainted with that kind of talk; one of his own siblings was fully in the grip of right-wing conspiracies. Even so, the conversation “shook me to my core,” Meijer says, “because the facade had been stripped away. It showed me just how bad this had gotten.”

quote:

“Of the 10, I’ve got the most respect for Peter—because he was brand-new,” Kinzinger, one of the GOP’s anti-Trump ringleaders, told me. “There were other freshmen who talked a big game, but the pressure got to them. Honestly, on the day before the vote, I thought we’d have 25 with us. Then it fell apart; I’m surprised we wound up with 10. But what I recognized with Peter, during our conversations, was that he never talked about the political implications. And that was rare. If someone brought up the political implications, that was a good indicator that they weren’t going to vote with us. But the people who never brought it up, I knew they would follow through. And Peter was one of them.”

quote:

Later, over beers at a nearby pub, I reminded Meijer of his burden in the aftermath of the impeachment vote: He and the other nine dissenters were supposed to be “the hope” for their party’s future. He had just spoken to a group of soon-to-be voters whose notions of Republicanism were formed by red hats and angry chants and crazed tweets. Meijer had just looked the party’s future in the eye and acted as though all of that was normal. “How do you explain to George,” I asked, “the difference between the Republican Party that fills his imagination and that scares him, versus the Republican Party that you want to represent?”

“Well, my Republican Party wouldn’t scare him,” Meijer said with a shrug.

I asked if he understood why George and his friends might be scared right now. He smirked. “The inability to affirmatively and consistently reject anti-Semitism and white supremacy?”

The fundamental problem, Meijer said, is that Republicans are offering no plans for improving lives and making the future a more promising place. Instead, the party continues to rely on grievance and fear—and misinformation—to scare voters into their ranks. But he didn’t say any of this to George.

quote:

NEWSWEEK: You've been in Congress about a year and a half. What is your assessment of that experience so far? And are you optimistic about the direction politics is going?


MEIJER: I think there's room for optimism. I think one of the challenges is, it's hard to fix a lot of governmental dysfunction in a politically polarized moment. At the same time, I think that government dysfunction has bred political polarization. There's understandable frustration from all Americans that things aren't getting done in Congress. Yet some of the ways in which those frustrations vent themselves make it harder to fix the underlying issues.

I've been focused on trying to go beneath the symptoms and focus on how can we begin to tackle some of the underlying causes, and some of the reasons why our federal government fails at its job, some of the reasons why it's hard to get things done. That has expressed itself in my efforts to reassert the legislative branch's primacy in areas of war and peace through the National Security Reforms and Accountability Act, trying to tackle the growth of the emergency powers claimed by the president through one of the titles in that act. Those are things that we can at least make progress on in a bipartisan way. And then hopefully laying the groundwork to begin to have a better balance between federal government action and state government action ... Trying to move the needle so that we, at the end of the day, have a government that can be, as functional and as affective to its goal of serving the citizens of this country. Frankly, as we should expect as a superpower.

One of the most consequential votes you took was in January 2021, when you voted to impeach Trump. Nearly a year and a half later, do you see things at all differently today compared to how you did then? Any regrets?

No. I think it's essential that we have politicians who don't put their jersey on first. My goal has been to operate in a non-hypocritical manner. I grew up watching The Daily Show where Jon Stewart would play a clip, and it didn't matter if it was a Republican or a Democrat—you know, played a clip of the same individual arguing against a four-years-later version of themselves. Because whatever they were criticizing the administration of the other party over, they were excusing what their party did.

I think that pervasive hypocrisy, you know, "My side can do no wrong and theirs could do no right," I think has led to a general dissatisfaction with our elected officials. I think in order to stop that trend, folks need to be honest and not just tell their constituents what they want to hear and not just play to the crowd, but have some fundamental principles rather than viewing everything as a subjective matter. If it had been 2012 and Barack Obama had lost that election, and had his supporters storming the Capitol, I'm pretty sure there would have been a few more Republicans voting for impeachment.

Because of that vote, you're facing a Trump-backed challenger. When you speak with voters in your district, what do you tell them sets you apart from John Gibbs?

I think one of the sad realities that have come of this moment—I've attended many events where very little of policy substance was discussed. I think we should have policy-oriented conversations rather than a conversation—rather than a politics whose goal is to channel the anger of the electorate in a way that best benefits the candidate personally.

My focus is, frankly, on running on our results, what we've delivered to the district so far, what we have been able to accomplish, even in a polarized political environment, where I have tried to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good, but try to at least drive what improvements and what positive action we can in this toxic environment today, while connecting that to where we need to be.

My goal is to make our government work. And that requires deep diagnosis, that requires deep analysis. That also requires being realistic about the political moment, rather than just nodding in agreement to whatever the crowd wants to hear. I think that it's easy to be the populist. It's much more challenging to encourage people—to say, "Your emotion, your frustration is 100 percent valid, and here's how we do something productive with it," rather than keep spinning in circles.

Discendo Vox posted:

Are we going to have the same exact discussion we already had 8 days ago?

Dull Fork posted:

That Meijer guy sounds like he had some convictions he stood by. Shame he's still a republican and therefore still a shitbag with poo poo policy positions. (Anti-abortion for example: https://sbaprolife.org/representative/peter-meijer )

Honestly, the fewer 'reasonable' republicans left, the better. It would weaken the eye-roll inducing 'both sides are reasonable' arguments you hear in the media. It'll mean less of an excuse to compromise with the right, because they'll be more mask off bout their fascism than the scheming McConnell type who has reigned for decades. Let them radicalize themselves into a despicable party that is morally repugnant to behold for the large majority of people. Let them radicalize themselves out of power.

Ravenfood posted:

If the media is determined to "both sides" everything then no, them becoming more insane as a party won't make them seem less electable, it will just normalize what are now far right positions.

Ravenfood posted:

If the media is determined to "both sides" everything then no, them becoming more insane as a party won't make them seem less electable, it will just normalize what are now far right positions.

Dull Fork posted:

Give me an enemy who says to my face 'yeah I plan on killing x minority group, they're sub-human' over the one who talks in dog-whistles and hides behind mealy-mouthed platitudes. One is far easier to rally against, even if they make some chuds brave enough to be more publicly bigoted. I'm sure a nice can of Twisted Tea will shut them up.


Edit: Also, the midterm results beg to differ about a more insane republican party being more electable. How many Trump endorsed candidates won their elections?

Dull Fork posted:

Give me an enemy who says to my face 'yeah I plan on killing x minority group, they're sub-human' over the one who talks in dog-whistles and hides behind mealy-mouthed platitudes. One is far easier to rally against, even if they make some chuds brave enough to be more publicly bigoted. I'm sure a nice can of Twisted Tea will shut them up.


Edit: Also, the midterm results beg to differ about a more insane republican party being more electable. How many Trump endorsed candidates won their elections?

Lib and let die posted:

What meaningful contribution are you making here or are you just bitching because you don't have a captive audience of unfortunate college students in front of you

Discendo Vox posted:

Are we going to have the same exact discussion we already had 8 days ago?

gurragadon posted:

This kind of thing makes sense for the layperson, but not an opposition research group. It comes off as an excuse of incompetence or laziness to me, especially with how blatant some of these lies were. If the information was given to the DCCC and they did nothing with it, then the blame is on them for not understanding the electorate enough to know what people care about.

gurragadon posted:

This kind of thing makes sense for the layperson, but not an opposition research group. It comes off as an excuse of incompetence or laziness to me, especially with how blatant some of these lies were. If the information was given to the DCCC and they did nothing with it, then the blame is on them for not understanding the electorate enough to know what people care about.

Discendo Vox posted:

The DCCC did in fact "do something" with the information they found, which was also something already discussed in the last page. I swear to god it's like the forum has Korsakoff's.

Gyges posted:

Even if it "works", you're still pushing the Republicans further to the right. So congrats, you won by pushing a fascist message and kneecapping what little remains of the non flaming underwear on their head part of the party

FlamingLiberal posted:

This year is going to be a wild ride in the House. Kevin McCarthy just conceded on a point that he had previously said he wouldn't in order to become speaker. It would allow him to be replaced more easily if the membership gets tired of him. It's also still not guaranteed that he has the votes to actually become Speaker either. To me it's beginning to feel a lot like the Paul Ryan years.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/01/politics/mccarthy-key-concession-speakership-race/index.html

pencilhands posted:

I'm really curious why mccarthy even wants the job. I'm not saying Boehner or Ryan were some kind of political geniuses or anything but they're clearly at least as talented as he is, and failed miserably with a way bigger cushion and in a time when the gop was somewhat more moderate than it is now. What does he think is going to happen?

pencilhands posted:

I'm really curious why mccarthy even wants the job. I'm not saying Boehner or Ryan were some kind of political geniuses or anything but they're clearly at least as talented as he is, and failed miserably with a way bigger cushion and in a time when the gop was somewhat more moderate than it is now. What does he think is going to happen?