I’m exasperated with my local money-grubbing Democrats, but NOTHING, I mean NOTHING compares with the freaks on the Republican side. This is from a Marjorie Taylor Greene ad. It’s insane.
She’s got a big gun. She has glowing electrified eyes with lightning flashing around her. She’s getting in a helicopter and shooting wild hogs. What does this have to do with her political work (which she doesn’t do anyway)?
Do Republican voters fall for this macho posturing nonsense? Are they all stunted children?
“Basket of deplorables”
With that quote, H. Clinton may have laid the final nail in the coffin of her chance to be elected – but she wasn’t wrong.
They’re all deplorable!
Oh.
This is a tough one.
Maybe she is a Zombie and locking up the Zombie vote.
We are talking backwoods Georgia here now.
or
She is demon possessed.
And locking up the demon/demon possessed vote.
Well, you know, backwoods Georgia.
All that most people know about US history is that Abraham Lincoln was a great ZOMBIE HUNTER. Naturally, people are displeased that the media is not also reporting any great Zombie kills by Biden. Dark Biden needs to kick it up a notch, like in some film by Simon Pegg.
The hogs = Democrats. She’s gonna take them out! Because something something guns Jeebus trucks free-dumbs!
But she’s not inciting violence or anything and you’re totally a snowflake if you say otherwise. 🙄
Perhaps she’s just upset because…according to reports I saw yesterday…her husband has filed for divorce.
But that is her political work. The scariest thing about demagogues is that they are almost always fronts for more, well, inimical self-interests. They are the magician’s assistants of the real distribution of power and the sources of ideology. Stalin and Pol Pot are just obvious examples: As repulsive as they were, the Really Scary People were those whispering sweet tyrannical plots in their ears.
And that this public image is one that would distract from the Really Scary People is what’s really scary.
I almost look back on Louie “Asparagus” Gohmert’s “career” with nostalgic fondness! Almost, that is, almost. But if you think Greene is a worthless, ignorant joke, wait until 2023 when Oz, Walker and the rest of the Third Generation grifters take the stage. In time we may look back on Marjorie as the “good old days.”
Yes.
If MTG wanted to retire from politics and devote her life to shooting wild hogs out of a helicopter (instead of for a silly politic metaphor) I could support that. That would be doing more good than she’s done as a House member. Reduce the populations of wild hogs, donate the meat, get out of politics…everybody wins.
@1- heffe7
Oh no she didn’t! Everyone forgets the other basket of Trump supporters Hillary actually said we should sympathize with. Her mistake was in not anticipating how her actual words would be distorted by emphasizing the deplorables basket. She was making a point that not all Trump supporters at the time of her speech were bad people.
This is kind of like Dan Crenshaw with his Nick Fury fantasy video.
@ Bruce, # 3: “All that most people know about US history is that Abraham Lincoln was a great ZOMBIE HUNTER.”
Nope-Abraham Lincoln was a vampire hunter, not a zombie hunter. You’re thinking of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
To quote one of the great opening scenes of any musical: “You gotta know the territory!” And the GOP does. Rural poor, small town poor, who have absorbed the terroristic propaganda of the right wing, and know that failing to embrace any of the right-wing talking points will get them kicked out of church, kicked out of their family, their business boycotted, tyres slashed, windshields broken, and other Christian ‘love the sinner, hate the sin’ idiocy.
Yup! They prefer grunting, sweating, gun-fondling portrayals of strength, bravado, and belligerence over any sort of display of intelligence or compassion. They think the former attributes are “what built this country” while the latter are signs of weakness and decadence.
She looks like a White Walker. Works on several levels.
Om the other side of the Atlantic, Britain is undergoing self-inflicted convulsions .
The Bank of England decided to buy up tend of billions of pound sterling. The pound was literally just hours away from collapse.
The market lost confidence in the pound when the government announced major unfinanced tax cuts.
You could literally see the rate for the pound drop during the speech.
The PM was expected to back down from the policies today.
Instead, she is clearly even more inflexible than her predecessor. Whatever confidence the tory MPs had in her is gone.
It may take a couple of months or a couple of weeks, but she is in her way out.
Meanwhile the lunatic fringe of the tories are supporting her policies and assigning blame to everyone else. Everything is a big conspiracy now.
Rob Grigjanis @ 15
The king of the white walkers literally had millennia of experience (admittedly of doing evil things). He was almost a Sauron-level player, or at least like a nazgul.
The crazy lady is just a crazy lady. She has no depth.
AKA supply side economics.
Oh Bullwinkle, that trick never works!!!
They always do it anyway.
Cut taxes.
Lowering taxes pay for themselves due to the magic of the free market.
Magic doesn’t work.
No problem.
Cut services to lower the budget deficit.
In totally unrelated news:
Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Husband Files for Divorce
So long as she doesn’t try hunting feral pigs from a helicopter in California. We do have a feral/wild pig problem, but hunting them from the air is illegal.
Wasn’t Georgia settled by criminals?
Just seeing that MTG ad made me go watch Randy Rainbow’s parody about her .
This is only peripherally related to the US oligarchy and its proxies but I include a link since this is a bit of positive news. 😊
”
The Blackstone rebellion; How Denmark took on the world’s largest commercial landlord
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/sep/29/blackstone-rebellion-how-one-country-worlds-biggest-commercial-landlord-denmark
@21 You’re thinking of the Carolinas, both North and South were settled by English prisoners/criminals who were sent over by ship and more or less dumped on the shore.
The Carolinas were the early version of Australia, which was also used as a dumping ground for English prisoners/criminals, especially the Irish.
Looks and sounds like a promo for a cable tv show, so it’s probably effectively targeting the old and poorly educated.
@21: Georgia was a debtor’s colony, not a penal colony.
It may be a fine distinction, since debtor’s prisons were thing in England at the time, and provided much material for Dickens.
source
whheydt @20: Actually, the California government just passed a law removing significant hunting restrictions on feral hogs. IIRC, hunting from the air was one of the ones that’s gone now. It’s supposed to take effect in 2024.
@24 silvrhalide
I stand corrected, I knew somewhere was. I guess I should’ve easily researched it on the internet.
@26 Reginald Selkirk
I read the article. I think it is a valid distinction.
Re: microraptor @ #27…
Not according to a recent article on the new law. This is from “NBC Bay Area”…
Restrictions are being lifted, such as permitting lights to be used for hunting wild pigs at night and removing bag limits.
@#16, birgerjohansson:
I can’t find direct information about it online, but apparently — I’ve seen this from multiple commentators — there can’t be a vote of no confidence on Truss for a year, although I’m not sure if that was part of the 2011 act (which was just repealed this year and therefore would no longer be true), or is part of the law anyway, or is just The Rules As The Game Has Been Played (like the filibuster in the Senate), or is a mistake because the year limit is only if the PM survives a vote of No Confidence. If it is true, if she is convinced she’s in the right and everybody else is wrong, which she apparently is, she can just stay where she is for a year at the very least, and the most that can be done is to apply pressure in other ways — pressure which she is entirely capable of ignoring, because she has rich backers with a lot of offshore money.
“Bullets are the solution to every problem”
Vicar (singular), https://twitter.com/tnewtondunn/status/1574815174057496579
(Basically, the current rules don’t allow for it, but the rules can be changed; after all, they’re internal to the party)
The tory 1922 committee can change the rules at the drop of a hat if they get really concerned with a tory PM jumping the rails.
.
The woman with aviator glasses in the helicopter reminds me of the colonial marine pilot in the dropship of Aliens … not a look to emulate, if you recall how that ended.
@#33, birgerjohansson:
The problem is that she hasn’t really jumped the rails. She’s just carrying the ERG/Brexit Ultras’ position to its logical conclusion(s), and since they’ve had, at the very least, complete veto power over everything the Tories have done for the last 5 years, that’s not really a change per se. They’ve never been satisfied no matter how much was conceded to them, every problem was always somebody else’s fault and things would have been fine if only their ideas had not been betrayed. Now they’ve got somebody in office who will do exactly what they want, which is of course really, really stupid and destructive. This would have happened sooner or later regardless — the only way the current situation could have been prevented from happening eventually would have been for Cameron to not have the Brexit referendum in the first place (or, more realistically, to have provided different options for different hardnesses and speeds of Brexit, which would have meant that Remain would have won hands down). Giving in to right-wingers is, as anybody who has watched the 20th and 21st centuries unfold would know, the first step in a political disaster.
The Vicar@30,
As usual, you are completely wrong about UK politics. As John Morales@32 points out, this “Can’t be a Vote of No Confidence for a year” is an internal Tory Party rule about Vs of NC in the party leader – not Commons Vs of NC in the government. The Leader of the Opposition (this is a formally defined position held by the leader of the largest party not in government, given statutary recognition in the Ministers of the Crown Act 1937) can demand such a Commons vote, and “by convention” it must then be given priority over most other Commons business. (Johnson refused to give a NC vote requested by Starmer time, on the grounds that it specified no confidence in him as PM, not the government. This was a dodgy thing to do, but as with a lot of important procedural matters in the UK, the legal position is unclear.) As for a vote within the Tory Party on the leader, there is a rule that there can’t be one within a year of a leader being chosen, but the “1922 Committee” of backbench Tory MPs could change the rule at any time – it’s not a legal matter. My guess is that neither of these things will happen, but that Truss will find that so many of her ministers resign that she can’t continue in office – no previous PM has ever demonstrated such rank incompetence within weeks of taking office, and one opinion poll today showed a Labour lead over the Tories of 33% (54%-21%), which is unprecedented (other polls showed leads around 20%). But it’s almost equally likely she will hang on simply because the Tory MPs decide it would be even more disastrous to change leaders again than to stick with her. What almost certainly won’t happen is a general election, because so many Tories would lose their seats, and self-interest trumps anything else with almost all of them. My guess is that many of them are praying for Putin to launch a nuclear weapon at a target in Ukraine, causing such a profound crisis that the Tories can invite Starmer to join a “National Government” under some Tory other than Truss – possibly Sunak, but Starmer would be in a position to say who he would be prepared to serve under. There’s a precedent for this in 1940: the Tories invited Labour to join such a government, Labour leader Atlee refused to serve under Chamberlain but agreed to do so under Churchill, while Chamberlain remained Tory Party leader (and a member of Churchill’s War Cabinet) for several months, and would have stayed longer if he had not happened to have terminal cancer. So this would not require ousting Truss as party leader and holding another vote.
@13: That’s a little bit more… sophisticated… than I think is appropriate for dealing with the salt of the earth. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHJbSvidohg
@33: What, you mean like being stooooooooopid enough to set down in uncontrolled territory without an established perimeter, open the doors, and wait for Murphy to show up? Like keeping no threat awareness at all? OK, I can see that.
Further to #35, the monarch is supposed to act only on the PM’s advice, so it’s possible Truss would refuse to recommend Charles Windsor to call on Sunak (or whoever) to form a government under such conditions, and instead either demand a dissolution of Parliament and a general election, or just sit tight and dare Tory rebels to vote for a Labour vote of No Confidence. Since she’s already shown that she’s completely Upminster*, I wouldn’t put either past her.
*Eight stops beyond Barking.
Thanks, KG
I have heard the expression “halfway to Barking” in relation to the London tube system, but Upminster is more apt.
BTW I will be impressed the day a politician fires a WWII 20mm antitank rifle. From the hip.
Scratch that, we are talking wingnutese.
Make it an 88mm FLAK 36 mounted on a German half-track.
@KG, #37,
She’s hopped off at Upminster and taken a train on the new Elizabeth line as far as it will go, hopped into a car, driven to Lowestoft Ness.
However, all fun about Truss being well east of Barking aside, she’s sticking a specific course. This is, as ever, deliberate and not merely the product of a mind less than fulsomely tied to reality, but of one wedded to a highly destructive set of political and economic ideologies. The next step for Truss et al (as outlined in Britannia Unchained) is the kind of supply side economics they believe will shore up the economy post tax cuts. Old, well disproven, non-functioning economics.
Well, disproven if you wish to change things like social and economic inequality…
Whilst I am all for entrepreneurship, working your way out of poverty (I wonder what my caveats will be here… ;-) ), empowerment etc, this kind of libertarian politics has many blind spots. Not least of which being “not all jobs/careers lend themselves to entrepreneurship in the narrow, profit-based sense”. Why it’s like the libertarian economic dream is contradicted by reality. Astonisherisatering!
Louis
@Louis #40:
Let’s hope she stays there. She can admire the Euroscope monument pointing to numerous European cities, assuming she can remember from her Remainer days that they exist. Anyway, it’ll be less than six hours before the tide comes in. Metaphorically speaking.
Don’t forget that Ted “Of course he’s a natural born citizen, he’s not black!” Cruz did a video a few years back where he cooked bacon by wrapping it around a rifle barrel and firing a bunch of shots.
Since ‘feral hogs’ describes the corporate funders of the Republican party, I would have thought they would have been trying to recruit them, not shoot them.
Liz Truss has a more subtle problem: Her minibudget isn’t law until passed by parliament. If enough back benchers fear losing their seats by supporting the legislation, there is a risk of it being defeated (I’ve no idea how likely this is, just pointing out the possibility). Since it is budget legislation, this would constitute a NC vote, and could precipitate an election.
For many Tory back benchers, the dilemma is defeat the government now and stand a snowball’s chance of re-election, or support it and have no chance at all. Not all Tories are ERGs.
When your life is harder than your parents was, and harder again than your grandparents life was, and it’s all your fault due to the creeps you voted for, then yes, this sort of resentment and spite works well. Otherwise you would need to admit that these problems are your fault, not the fault of the DemonRats. As long as the GOP can show you something and then say “Democrats HATE this.”, your serotonin response will be satisfied by the reciprocal hate coursing through you. And that’s mission accomplished for the GOP
Not sure, but my first association here was “Terminator arrival scene”, although I’m sure Arnie would laugh her out of the gym…
Bah I’m so tired by the rampant machismo.