#86 Internecine warfare?

Yeah.

That full time job has been filled already.

Sadly.

Aided and comforted by the usual milquetoast "liberal" posters here.

Sadly.

Again, thank you for your recommendation.

#7 Please stop sullying this thread with your infantile and asinine comments, "effete."

But wait, there's more ...

#83

#80

#60 "Imagine your brain on the twenty-first century."

#22 "Imagine your brain on the twenty-first century."

#5 "Annoying" is only dependent on which side of the argument you find yourself.

Nothing more.

Nothing less.

snip ...

Working-class Maine is the real Maine. The boatyards, the night shifts, the people doing the hard math on the family budget at the kitchen table in January. Platner knows them because he is one of them. Collins stopped knowing them somewhere around her second term, around the time "I'm concerned" and "pearl clutching" became a gag.

She is hard to beat. I won't pretend otherwise. But her clucking about Platner's personal life doesn't begin to offset the grim arithmetic she's responsible for. Mainers are hurting, and she has empowered the man causing it at every single step, then furrowed her brow about it afterward, every time, on schedule.

The hit job assumed we'd flinch. Turns out the flaw in the plan was the same flaw it's always been. They forgot what a man looks like when he refuses to apologize for being human, and instead apologizes only for what actually warrants it.

That man is harder to kill than they think.

Postscript: Thanks for the recommendations.

#77 Rest your sphincter, Eb ...

snip ...

So when the New York Times dropped its long, carefully sorrowful piece on Graham Platner last week, I read it the way a retired safecracker watches a heist movie.

And here's the thing. The hit fell short. I knew of the woman at its center, and she was

always one of the tribe. She was a Republican operative, a DC MAGA apparatchik who ran Ladies for Brett Kavanaugh. That was always going to sully the attack, and given she was once part of Ali Alexander's circle of CPAC freaks, I wondered how credulous the Times would be.

Turns out, not as credulous as MAGA hoped.

It fell short because the playbook only works on people who agree to play the victim, and this is a sweeping lesson for Democratic candidates. It fell short because Fifield expected the Times to print her accusations verbatim without giving Platner a chance to respond and offer both a rebuttal and the testimony of other women he'd dated.

The GOP's entire theory of Democratic candidates rests on one assumption: that the left will be so delicate, so morally fastidious, so desperate to be seen as clean that the faintest smudge on the campaign escutcheon becomes a death sentence. They repurposed Alinsky against Democrats decades ago: make the enemy live up to their own book of rules, because you know they can't, and you know they'll flinch first.

It's a beautiful con, and it only requires one thing to work: cowardice.

snip ...

I know a hit job when I read one. I should. I used to build them.

There was a version of me, years back, who could take a candidate's life, lay it out on a light table, and find the one frame that ruined them. You don't need the truth. You need a true-enough fragment, a sympathetic reporter, and a Democratic Party so terrified of its own shadow that it does the rest of the work for you. That was the whole game. We didn't beat Democrats. We handed them a mirror and a magnifying glass and let them disqualify themselves over a flaw, a mistake, a misstep, a college newspaper article, a tweet.

snip ...

What would I say to an 18-year-old person struggling to understand a misalignment between their sexuality and gender, how to process it, what to call it, and what to think about everything?

I thought about the people who might judge, mock, demean or laugh at them. I thought about the bullies who would make every single simple thing in their life a never-ending existential conflict

I thought about people who might judge people who are nice to them and treat them with respect, dignity and understanding.

... because the Democratic Party is imperfect.

snip ...

Her fetish is cruelty, and she has targeted a specific person " a real person named Sarah McBride.

McBride is Delaware's Representative-elect and the first-ever openly trans woman in Congress. Mace has targeted her for real persecution, harassment and dehumanization.

Her audience is an internet mob enticed and stimulated by the practice of cruelty that gets truly frothy when viciousness is mated to Mace's venal stupidity.

What Nancy Mace proves is that one person can truly make a difference. They can make everything worse.

Denying any person the ability to go to the bathroom is a despotic and despicable act that takes dignity from humanity, and leaves humiliation in its wake. This is what is going on here, and it is awful to watch.

snip ...

Nancy Mace is a low-rent bully.

When I look at her she reminds me of the Jeff Goldblum character from "The Fly."

Goldblum, a handsome man, is so hideously disfigured by his mutation that it is difficult to maintain a gaze on him by the end of the film. The repugnancy of what he had become is so grotesque that " even through a flat screen in a sterile theater "every person could smell the stench.

snip ...

In the case of Nancy Mace the expiry of an attention-grabbing crackpot's political career is both cause to sing a joyful ballad of good riddance, and deepen our contempt towards a corrupt corporate media that couldn't keep its hands off the Palmetto wing nut when it came time to filling their airways.

Degeneracy triumphed over seriousness, and looniness became its own sort of stature.

Nancy Mace is awful.

She is cruel.