It’s no comfort at all.
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They’ll find someway to ensure that people they hate the most will be hurt the most, and they’ll tell their white working class constituents that “hey, at least you’re not suffering like THOSE people”… It’s just a long standing tactic that most people can’t even see it as a tactic… 
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As someone who works in software development, I can tell you “ship it now and fix the problems later” never works. Why should it be any different with a piece of legislation?
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I’m not sure they’ll even get that far. Looking back over events in my life, at the people of similar ilk that were beset by ill fortune brought on them by conservative politicians that they absolutely believed were their only hope against those other people.
The volunteer fire department couldn’t afford the upkeep on its equipment? That had nothing to do with the budget cuts, of course, those were to save everyone from paying those evil taxes! (The ones that most of them were too far down in the tax bracket to benefit from the cuts.) Have a bake sale and get whoever could patch up the trucks to run a little longer to do it for free.
The school roof collapsed? The local library wants an encyclopedia set that doesn’t talk about going to the moon someday? It’s a shame there’s no budget for that, but it’s not anyone’s fault, these things just happen, you know?
They are the true product of American history books. Events never have a cause, they happen in a vacuum all by themselves. To suggest otherwise might require critical thinking and who knows where that might lead?
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Yep as people begin to watch their loved ones die and suffer from the guilt and cognitive dissonance they are going to need to see more blood in the streets to convince themselves they live a good life and this is what God wants for them. Facing reality and admitting they caused this for themselves and others would take bravery and intelligence and maga has none of that.
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Well, “conservative” in the dictionary sense, not in the current, reactionary, fascist sense. Nothing about these asshats is “conservative.” They are all for trashing everything that made our country, stealing everything not embedded in bedrock and leveling what’s left. Enslaving the population to serve the billionaire class, ending the Constitution, focusing education on only what it takes to be a good serf. I guess I could go on, but you get it. This is not “conservative.” It is truly barbarians inside the gates, destroying what they do not understand. It will be a while before this becomes apparent. and then no one will believe it. Just as Holocaust denial is based in “that is just not possible for people to be that evil,” so will Trump denial be based in “no one could be that stupid.” But here we are. We are truly witnessing history in the making. I hate it.
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Okay, there’s the first big flaw and a common one with “liberals.” These people are not your friends. You start down this path and it leads to trying to compromise with people that actively want many of us dead.
This dude you think is your friend seems alright to you? Well hell, that’s great. So he’s expressing regret about voting for fascism, right? He’s actively working to undo the harm he helped cause? He’s not? Well gosh, I’m certainly surprised by that.
A Nazi “lite” is still a fucking Nazi and is not your friend ever.
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If he harbors animus towards anybody, I’ve never seen it.
He was worried about the border.
It sounds like the author simply doesn’t recognize animus so long as it’s directed to those people and not someone right there, and yeah, that seems to be a very common thing for liberals/centrists not to understand. If someone is kind but still would be happy to see certain people beaten to death, they’re not actually kind.
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Agreed… but then again, the author is Michael Ian Black, so I am uncertain how much of this is actually satire?
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I can’t even imagine he’d want to, much less do it. Trump doesn’t know what’s in the bill and never will because he doesn’t care. (I mean, it’s not like he’s going to ever read it, and no one around him will tell him - or could make him understand it, even if they wanted to.) I’m pretty sure that being informed that it cuts Medicaid went in one ear and out the other (assuming he even believed them), because he fundamentally doesn’t care about Medicaid. Not that holding two contradictory positions (cutting Medicaid is a vote-loser, but congress should also vote for cutting Medicaid) ever bothers him, either.
Except this is Trump, and holding reality-ignoring positions is normal. He’ll probably claim to have saved Medicaid by having signed the bill, even as 16 million people lose health care and rural hospitals all close down.
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American institutions, I told him, are worth preserving and strengthening: Public education, scientific research, foreign aid, our national parks, space exploration, infrastructure, the arts, access to good healthcare and food for those who need it.
Yeah, I get it, let’s “conserve” what we had. (While we’re at it, let’s conserve the planet, & the organisms that live there, especially before we go plant our flag on another one.)
In my youth I used to imagine myself as both progressive and (lowercase-l) libertarian. Now I’m like, “Let’s have a government!”
(Though, here I recall an old SPUSA pamphlet [also from my youth; I can’t find the verbiage online] that suggested: “the government” picks up the trash, runs the buses, tests food for safety etc. Whereas “The State” starts wars, rounds up (& defines) “undesirables,” busts strikes, etc.)
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That’s what I’m assuming.
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GOP, afraid—or confident. Or both? Thinking out loud here, angry and fearful:
GOP Congress guessing, or explicitly assured, that one–or some combination of the following–will happen: Trump will declare the mid-terms cancelled; rigs the mid-terms to benefit all who signed on to the bbb; rigs the 2028 general election to benefit all who signed on to the bbb; will declare the 2028 general election cancelled; offer of cash bribery; thinly veiled or explicit threats of bodily harm via proxy or otherwise; explicit threats of being ‘primaried’.
Each carries some level of likelihood, and only that last one allows me some sleep. Most of the rest doesn’t, and makes the GOP Congress outright conspirators in treason.
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I imagine that if Iran does in fact have those emails and the Trump administration sees that as a major threat, then Iran would hold on to that hot hand forever if just the threat of releasing them serves their purposes. Trump, controlled by Russia and Iran. Allies. What could go wrong.
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Side note: one great take-out from that article was the description of Trump as “our gold-plated tapeworm”.
Brilliant.
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Now I want to read the article.
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