Politics & Stuff

[Vesper 28,795]

Just now, cosmicway said:

The projection exists.

 

name these new communist parties about to run riot and try and take over

 

these are the ONLY self-described communist parties in power today on the planet, and all but China (who are a strange hybrid, like I said) pose no expansionist threat

NoKo is a rogue state and a failed state, the main danger is their nukes

Cuba is a tiny island and the old Castroistas are losing power as each year rolls by

Vietnam and Laos are small states and like China have active capitalistic sectors but unlike China they are not hostile states 

[cosmicway 1,323]

Just now, Vesper said:

name these new communist parties about to run riot and try and take over

 

these are the ONLY self-described communist parties in power today on the planet, and all but China (who are a strange hybrid, like I said) pose no expansionist threat

NoKo is a rogue state and a failed state, the main danger is their nukes

Cuba is a tiny island and the old Castroistas are losing power as each year rolls by

Vietnam and Laos are small states and like China have active capitalistic sectors but unlike China they are not hostile states 

I 'm not talking about military blocks.
The economic theories are not related to the military blocks.
Communism and Trumpism-brexitism there is a secret marriage.

[Vesper 28,795]

7 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

Communism and Trumpism-brexitism there is a secret marriage.

with China?

now that I can see you making at least a decent case for, in terms of spheres of influence dividing the world up

Chi-coms in the far east

RW white nationalist christofash with oligarch support in Europe and North America (well the US for sure) and also in South America

Indian RW Modism

The Islamofash Middle East (only important because of petrol) with RW zionist Israel playing semi-puppet master, along with the US, etc, all gunning for war to wipe out Shi'ite Iran

and then the dystopian, helpless nightmare that Africa is rocketing towards (even worse than now)

[cosmicway 1,323]

1 hour ago, Vesper said:

with China?

now that I can see you making at least a decent case for, in terms of spheres of influence dividing the world up

Chi-coms in the far east

RW white nationalist christofash with oligarch support in Europe and North America (well the US for sure) and also in South America

Indian RW Modism

The Islamofash Middle East (only important because of petrol) with RW zionist Israel playing semi-puppet master, along with the US, etc, all gunning for war to wipe out Shi'ite Iran

and then the dystopian, helpless nightmare that Africa is rocketing towards (even worse than now)

The commies and the fellowtravelers create the dystopian world slowly.
The idea of making an alliance with the oligarchs did not dawn to them, or perhaps things were immature.
I don't see what could go wrong for communism in the USSR if the team was Stalin-Krupp-Opel instead of Stalin and the Volga-Moskovitch state owned factory bosses.
The Krupps were just 20-30 people plus their nephews and nieces and they could together manage the KGB state.
This time they won't make the same mistake.
It's like football you see. We never liked the Arsenal-Tottenham style of play, kicking balls high into the air. Those two were contesting cup finals and we were switching the tv off.
But what if under a manager such as Pochettino we win the champions league playing like they do ? We shout and cheer ! 
It's exactly the same thing.

[Vesper 28,795]

Liz Truss says it is fair to prioritise tax cuts that benefit high earners more

Prospective PM vows to press ahead with plans for low-tax economy despite calls for caution from Tory grandees

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/sep/04/liz-truss-energy-prices-action-plan

Liz Truss has said she will press ahead with plans for the UK to be a low-tax economy with less focus on wealth redistribution under her premiership, despite calls for caution from Tory grandees.

Truss, who is expected to be named as the new prime minister on Monday, said it was fair that her planned tax cut would benefit the highest earners 250 times more than the poorest, arguing it was wrong to view all economic policy through the “lens of redistribution”.

As analysts warned that relying on boosting economic growth to reduce income inequalities could increase disparities, Tory grandees sounded the alarm over what they said risked being an overly doctrinaire approach.

If the foreign secretary is confirmed to have beaten the former chancellor Rishi Sunak in the Tory leadership race, she would travel to Balmoral on Tuesday to be formally confirmed by the Queen as Boris Johnson’s successor in Downing Street.

In her only in-depth media interview of the two-month Tory leadership campaign, which took place after voting had closed, Truss told BBC One’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg show she would provide immediate help with energy bills if elected, but declined to say how.

“Within one week I will make sure there is an announcement on how we are going to deal with the issue of energy bills, and of long-term supply, to put this country on the right footing for winter,” Truss said.

“I understand that people are struggling, that businesses are also concerned about their energy bills and the impact it could have on their future.”

Truss nonetheless dismissed what she called fears of “an Armageddon scenario”, adding: “Britain has been through worse in the past – we have the attitude and spirit to get through it.”

Pledging to ensure secure long-term energy supplies, Truss said she did back some aspects of renewable sources, but stressed her plans to push ahead with more North Sea drilling, and fracking for shale gas.

On the economy, she emphasised her prioritisation of tax cuts, saying it was more important to grow the economy than to try to reduce economic inequalities.

Shown calculations that her planned reversal of a recent rise in national insurance would benefit top earners by about £1,800 a year, and the lowest earner by about £7, and asked if this was fair, Truss said: “Yes, it is fair.”

She said: “The people at the top of the income distribution pay more tax, so inevitably when you cut taxes, you tend to benefit people who are more likely to pay tax.

“But to look at everything through the lens of redistribution, I believe, is wrong. Because what I’m about is growing the economy. And growing the economy benefits everybody. So far, the economic debate for the past 20 years has been dominated by discussions about distribution. But what’s happened is that we have had relatively low growth.”

Truss has repeatedly stressed her focus on lower taxes, reduced regulation and a smaller state, but such explicit advocacy of what resembles the trickle-down economics of the US under Ronald Reagan marks a striking break from Boris Johnson’s often interventionist levelling up agenda.

Luke Hildyard, the executive director of the High Pay Centre, a thinktank that focuses on ideas for a fairer UK, said the country was already one of the most unequal developed economies.

“By any reasonable benchmark, we really don’t do a lot to address unequal income distribution,” he said. “Saying, ‘We need to cut taxes for the rich’ and ‘We need to generate economic growth’ is at best making two random unrelated statements and at worst actively contradictory.”

Philip Hammond, a Conservative former chancellor, told Sky News’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday show that while he was an admirer of Truss in the past, immediate tax cuts “would deliver an inflationary stimulus and that is not the right thing to do”.

The former minister David Davis, who comes from the same low-tax wing of the Conservative party as Truss, said she should in particular “think quite hard about” her plan to reduce corporation tax, warning that a failure to balance the books risked inflation, higher interest rates and a plummeting pound.

“The worst outcome is, as it were, to give low taxes a bad name,” Davis said, adding that when in power Margaret Thatcher initially increased some taxes.

Davis also urged Truss to appoint a broad range of opinions to her cabinet, including Sunak: “The greatest mistake that Boris Johnson made was that he created a cabinet of loyalists. It wasn’t the best people.”

Truss, however, has shown few signs of giving way on either points, telling the BBC: “I follow through on what I say I’ll do.”

While her campaign team is refusing to comment on possible ministerial posts, it is widely expected she will mainly appoint allies and loyal MPs from the right of the Tory party, with occasional exceptions such Tom Tugendhat, tipped for a junior role.

Thérèse Coffey, the work and pensions secretary who is close to Truss, is expected to go to health. Chancellor and foreign secretary are still tipped to go to Kwasi Kwarteng and James Cleverly.

Suella Braverman, who made a leadership bid from the party’s culture war right wing, could become home secretary, while Jacob Rees-Mogg is expected to head the business department.

Also speaking to Kuenssberg, Sunak said targeted support was needed to tackle the energy bills crisis. “I think everyone is going to need some help given the scale of the challenge,” he said. “And then two other groups of people who will need further help. That’s those on the lowest incomes, about a third of all households in the country, and then the third group of pensioners.”

Sunak said he would remain as an MP if he lost, and did not rule out another attempt at the leadership. “Oh gosh, we’ve just finished this campaign,” he said, when asked if he could stand again. “So, I’d say I need to recover from this one. But I look forward to supporting the Conservative government in whatever capacity.”

Edited September 4, 2022 by Vesper

[Fulham Broadway 16,838]

If Truss (real name Mary O Leary) can lie to her husband and children for two years, having an affair with another MP, claiming at the same time 'accommodation expenses' off us - think how she doesn't flinch at lying to the nation.

[cosmicway 1,323]

Those guys/gals are window shopping.
I knew somebody who begged all the parties to make him a candidate.
One day somebody approaches me and says "hey, I saw your friend strolling outside the offices of ms Bakoyannis today".
Was the brief period Dora Bakoyannis left the New Democracy party and made a small one of her own.
So Liz knows "if I go there I have to sell brexit - so, well, bust it - I 'm going to sell brexit".

Edited September 5, 2022 by cosmicway

[Vesper 28,795]

End of the 2nd Elizabethan Era

6 February 1952 – 8 September 2022

 

[Vesper 28,795]

The Daily Star have a live feed, seeing whether Truss will outlive a lettuce.

 

 

[Vesper 28,795]

Public Enemy - Can't Truss It

 

[Vesper 28,795]

The Perfect Candidate for a Fallen Party

Herschel Walker perfectly illustrates where Trump has taken the GOP

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/10/hershel-walker-perfectly-embodies-gop/671758/

 

There have been plenty of awful candidates in American political history; what sets Herschel Walker apart is that he’s a wreck in so many different ways.

Walker, the Republican Senate nominee in Georgia trying to unseat Democrat Raphael Warnock, is a compulsive liar, so much so that he falsely claimed he has not made false claims about graduating from the University of Georgia. Walker’s speech is often unintelligible. His argument for why efforts to address climate change are pointless goes this way: “Since we don’t control the air, our good air decided to float over to China’s bad air so when China gets our good air, their bad air got to move. So it moves over to our good air space. Then now we got to clean that back up, while they’re messing ours up.”

Walker is an absentee father who has been critical of absentee fathers. His campaign has acknowledged that he has three children by women to whom he was not married, in addition to his son Christian by his former wife, Cindy Grossman, who has alleged that Walker threatened to kill her.

“His eyes would become very evil,” she said in an interview in 2008. “I got into a few choking things with him. The first time he held the gun to my head, he held the gun to my temple and said he was gonna blow my brains out.” Walker hasn’t denied the allegations; instead, he implied it was the result of his struggle with mental illness. (Grossman filed for divorce in 2001, citing “physically abusive and extremely threatening behavior” and secured a protective order against Walker four years later.)

The most recent revelation to roil his campaign is that Walker, who has said he supports abortion bans with no exceptions, allegedly paid for an abortion in 2009 and urged the woman to terminate a second pregnancy in 2011, which she refused to do.

Walker denies that he paid for the abortion, but for him, it hardly seems to matter. He told the right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt, “If that had happened, I would have said, you know, ‘Nothing to be ashamed of there.’” So apparently Walker’s “no exception” stance on abortion actually includes one exception: himself.

As expected, Republicans rallied to Walker. “Full speed ahead in Georgia,” declared the president of the Senate Leadership Fund, the body’s leading Republican super PAC. “Republicans stand with him,” said the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Rick Scott. So does National Right to Life.

Ralph Reed, the founder and chair of the Faith & Freedom Coalition, frames Walker’s story as that of a man of past imperfections who has turned his life around. “Herschel’s story is one of redemption and hope,” according to Reed. He told The New York Times he believes that the new reports could increase Republican turnout by rallying social conservatives to defend Walker. Reed may be right. At a prayer meeting for Walker at First Baptist Church in Atlanta the day after the story was published about Walker paying for the abortion, a large crowd gave him a standing ovation. The church’s senior pastor, Anthony George, prayed, “We ask you to rebuke the devil so Satan will not get the victory.”

The Walker-Warnock race is crucial because it might decide control of the Senate next year. But the most important and instructive thing about the Walker candidacy is what it tells us about the Republican Party, starting with how thoroughly Trumpified it is.

Walker, a former Heisman Trophy winner, had no business running for political office at any level, let alone the United States Senate. The only reason he won the nomination is that he was Donald Trump’s hand-picked candidate. (Walker began his professional football career with the USFL’s New Jersey Generals, which Donald Trump owned. He later referred to Trump as a mentor and someone after whom he modeled himself.) This alone assured Walker of an easy primary victory. He is an archetypal MAGA candidate in a MAGA party.

 

Like so many who now represent the GOP, Walker displays not just a lack of interest in serious ideas but contempt for them. Benightedness is chic.

The Republican Party didn’t write a platform for its convention in 2020. And why should it have? A party platform, after all, is a formal statement of the principles and policy goals to which a party is committed. When a party becomes a cult of personality, interested in power but not ideas, platforms become extraneous.

For those of us of a certain generation, who came of age in the Reagan era, this philistinism is jarring. Conservatism has a proud intellectual tradition, and for many years its (imperfect) home was the Republican Party.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Democratic senator and brilliant scholar, wrote in 1981, “Of a sudden, the GOP has become a party of ideas.” The GOP certainly has had its share of fringe figures and obscurantists. But James Q. Wilson, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Irving Kristol, Antonin Scalia, Richard John Neuhaus, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Allan Bloom, and Thomas Sowell were people of intellectual rigor. They helped shape the party’s worldview, its intellectual underpinnings, and that had great appeal to many of us. But today’s Republican Party, more populist than conservative, has become an intellectual wasteland.

Yet it hardly ends there. Republicans once sold themselves as representing family values and tradition, concerned with moral standards and civic character. They insisted on the importance of good character and integrity in political leaders. This has been exposed as utterly cynical, most obviously in the support that Republicans—many of whom savaged Bill Clinton over his moral failings—gave to Trump, whose corruptions are peerless and borderless.

Consider just the case of white evangelical Protestants. In October 2016—not long after the notorious Access Hollywood tape was released—more than seven in 10 said an elected official can behave ethically even if they have committed transgressions in their personal life. Five years earlier, only 30 percent of white evangelical Protestants had said the same. No other group shifted their position more dramatically.

That was just one way they shifted their theology to align with Trump. Another example: In 2016, Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote, “If I were to support, much less endorse, Donald Trump for president, I would actually have to go back and apologize to former President Bill Clinton.” (Mohler had declared Clinton morally unfit to serve in office.) In 2020, Mohler stated that he would vote for Trump.

Bill Clinton is still waiting for his apology.

The right-wing media personality Dana Loesch, when commenting on the allegations that Walker had paid for his girlfriend’s abortion, expressed the view of many on the right when she said, “Does this change anything? … Not a damn thing. How many times have I said four very important words? These four words: Winning. Is. A. Virtue … I don’t know if he did it or not. I don’t even care.”

Translation: Abortion may be murder, but we stand foursquare with those who encourage and pay for abortions if they provide us the path to power. This is, in itself, a dramatic and depressing shift. Not long ago, those on the right reacted to each new Trump scandal with feeble explanations and justifications for his behavior. Now, as Trump’s imitators and acolytes produce scandals of their own, their defenders don’t even bother to generate excuses. They don’t care what anyone on their team says or does, and they essentially admit as much. Instead, they point to the failings of Democrats, and stress the importance of winning at all costs.

In her new book, Confidence Man, the New York Times writer Maggie Haberman tells about a conversation she had last year with Trump in which she asked about Walker’s “complicated personal history.”

“I don’t think it’s a problem today,” Trump told her. “Why is that?” Haberman asked. “Why do you think that’s changed?”

“Because the world is changing,” Trump answered. “He did not acknowledge that it was changing because he had helped change it,” Haberman wrote.

Donald Trump could not have changed the world without a party with which to do it. The GOP has turned on virtually every noble principle it once claimed to stand for. It has become a freak show, embodied in people like Trump and Walker, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, Ron Johnson and Josh Hawley, Blake Masters and Doug Mastriano, Adam Laxalt and J. D. Vance, Steve Bannon and Roger Stone, Michael Flynn and Mike Lindell, Tucker Carlson and Sebastian Gorka, Eric Metaxas and Paula White. They shape its sensibilities, providing the script for everyone else to follow.

To make matters worse, those who surely know better—people like Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, and especially Kevin McCarthy—turned out to be hollow men, “shape without form, shade without colour, paralysed force, gesture without motion.”

For them and for so many people in their party and the MAGA movement, with exceptions so rare that you can almost count them on a single hand, politics have been stripped of any honor. Politics, for them, is about power in the pursuit of yet more power. Politics is purely performative, nasty and brutish, a way to stoke anger and grievances, a means to exact vengeance. That the most impressive person in the Republican Party, Liz Cheney, is the most despised, says everything.

Whatever you thought about the GOP pre-Trump—and it may be that the ugliness was much closer to the surface than I wanted to acknowledge at the time—the Republican Party is today much more conspiracy minded, anti-democratic, and anti-truth. This worries me, because I love my country. And it disheartens me, because I once admired my party. Today, however, because of its diseased state, the most urgent political task is to defeat it in the hopes of eventually rebuilding it.

[cosmicway 1,323]

5 minutes ago, Vesper said:

The Perfect Candidate for a Fallen Party

Herschel Walker perfectly illustrates where Trump has taken the GOP

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/10/hershel-walker-perfectly-embodies-gop/671758/

 

There have been plenty of awful candidates in American political history; what sets Herschel Walker apart is that he’s a wreck in so many different ways.

Walker, the Republican Senate nominee in Georgia trying to unseat Democrat Raphael Warnock, is a compulsive liar, so much so that he falsely claimed he has not made false claims about graduating from the University of Georgia. Walker’s speech is often unintelligible. His argument for why efforts to address climate change are pointless goes this way: “Since we don’t control the air, our good air decided to float over to China’s bad air so when China gets our good air, their bad air got to move. So it moves over to our good air space. Then now we got to clean that back up, while they’re messing ours up.”

Walker is an absentee father who has been critical of absentee fathers. His campaign has acknowledged that he has three children by women to whom he was not married, in addition to his son Christian by his former wife, Cindy Grossman, who has alleged that Walker threatened to kill her.

“His eyes would become very evil,” she said in an interview in 2008. “I got into a few choking things with him. The first time he held the gun to my head, he held the gun to my temple and said he was gonna blow my brains out.” Walker hasn’t denied the allegations; instead, he implied it was the result of his struggle with mental illness. (Grossman filed for divorce in 2001, citing “physically abusive and extremely threatening behavior” and secured a protective order against Walker four years later.)

The most recent revelation to roil his campaign is that Walker, who has said he supports abortion bans with no exceptions, allegedly paid for an abortion in 2009 and urged the woman to terminate a second pregnancy in 2011, which she refused to do.

Walker denies that he paid for the abortion, but for him, it hardly seems to matter. He told the right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt, “If that had happened, I would have said, you know, ‘Nothing to be ashamed of there.’” So apparently Walker’s “no exception” stance on abortion actually includes one exception: himself.

As expected, Republicans rallied to Walker. “Full speed ahead in Georgia,” declared the president of the Senate Leadership Fund, the body’s leading Republican super PAC. “Republicans stand with him,” said the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Rick Scott. So does National Right to Life.

Ralph Reed, the founder and chair of the Faith & Freedom Coalition, frames Walker’s story as that of a man of past imperfections who has turned his life around. “Herschel’s story is one of redemption and hope,” according to Reed. He told The New York Times he believes that the new reports could increase Republican turnout by rallying social conservatives to defend Walker. Reed may be right. At a prayer meeting for Walker at First Baptist Church in Atlanta the day after the story was published about Walker paying for the abortion, a large crowd gave him a standing ovation. The church’s senior pastor, Anthony George, prayed, “We ask you to rebuke the devil so Satan will not get the victory.”

The Walker-Warnock race is crucial because it might decide control of the Senate next year. But the most important and instructive thing about the Walker candidacy is what it tells us about the Republican Party, starting with how thoroughly Trumpified it is.

Walker, a former Heisman Trophy winner, had no business running for political office at any level, let alone the United States Senate. The only reason he won the nomination is that he was Donald Trump’s hand-picked candidate. (Walker began his professional football career with the USFL’s New Jersey Generals, which Donald Trump owned. He later referred to Trump as a mentor and someone after whom he modeled himself.) This alone assured Walker of an easy primary victory. He is an archetypal MAGA candidate in a MAGA party.

 

Like so many who now represent the GOP, Walker displays not just a lack of interest in serious ideas but contempt for them. Benightedness is chic.

The Republican Party didn’t write a platform for its convention in 2020. And why should it have? A party platform, after all, is a formal statement of the principles and policy goals to which a party is committed. When a party becomes a cult of personality, interested in power but not ideas, platforms become extraneous.

For those of us of a certain generation, who came of age in the Reagan era, this philistinism is jarring. Conservatism has a proud intellectual tradition, and for many years its (imperfect) home was the Republican Party.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Democratic senator and brilliant scholar, wrote in 1981, “Of a sudden, the GOP has become a party of ideas.” The GOP certainly has had its share of fringe figures and obscurantists. But James Q. Wilson, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Irving Kristol, Antonin Scalia, Richard John Neuhaus, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Allan Bloom, and Thomas Sowell were people of intellectual rigor. They helped shape the party’s worldview, its intellectual underpinnings, and that had great appeal to many of us. But today’s Republican Party, more populist than conservative, has become an intellectual wasteland.

Yet it hardly ends there. Republicans once sold themselves as representing family values and tradition, concerned with moral standards and civic character. They insisted on the importance of good character and integrity in political leaders. This has been exposed as utterly cynical, most obviously in the support that Republicans—many of whom savaged Bill Clinton over his moral failings—gave to Trump, whose corruptions are peerless and borderless.

Consider just the case of white evangelical Protestants. In October 2016—not long after the notorious Access Hollywood tape was released—more than seven in 10 said an elected official can behave ethically even if they have committed transgressions in their personal life. Five years earlier, only 30 percent of white evangelical Protestants had said the same. No other group shifted their position more dramatically.

That was just one way they shifted their theology to align with Trump. Another example: In 2016, Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote, “If I were to support, much less endorse, Donald Trump for president, I would actually have to go back and apologize to former President Bill Clinton.” (Mohler had declared Clinton morally unfit to serve in office.) In 2020, Mohler stated that he would vote for Trump.

Bill Clinton is still waiting for his apology.

The right-wing media personality Dana Loesch, when commenting on the allegations that Walker had paid for his girlfriend’s abortion, expressed the view of many on the right when she said, “Does this change anything? … Not a damn thing. How many times have I said four very important words? These four words: Winning. Is. A. Virtue … I don’t know if he did it or not. I don’t even care.”

Translation: Abortion may be murder, but we stand foursquare with those who encourage and pay for abortions if they provide us the path to power. This is, in itself, a dramatic and depressing shift. Not long ago, those on the right reacted to each new Trump scandal with feeble explanations and justifications for his behavior. Now, as Trump’s imitators and acolytes produce scandals of their own, their defenders don’t even bother to generate excuses. They don’t care what anyone on their team says or does, and they essentially admit as much. Instead, they point to the failings of Democrats, and stress the importance of winning at all costs.

In her new book, Confidence Man, the New York Times writer Maggie Haberman tells about a conversation she had last year with Trump in which she asked about Walker’s “complicated personal history.”

“I don’t think it’s a problem today,” Trump told her. “Why is that?” Haberman asked. “Why do you think that’s changed?”

“Because the world is changing,” Trump answered. “He did not acknowledge that it was changing because he had helped change it,” Haberman wrote.

Donald Trump could not have changed the world without a party with which to do it. The GOP has turned on virtually every noble principle it once claimed to stand for. It has become a freak show, embodied in people like Trump and Walker, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, Ron Johnson and Josh Hawley, Blake Masters and Doug Mastriano, Adam Laxalt and J. D. Vance, Steve Bannon and Roger Stone, Michael Flynn and Mike Lindell, Tucker Carlson and Sebastian Gorka, Eric Metaxas and Paula White. They shape its sensibilities, providing the script for everyone else to follow.

To make matters worse, those who surely know better—people like Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, and especially Kevin McCarthy—turned out to be hollow men, “shape without form, shade without colour, paralysed force, gesture without motion.”

For them and for so many people in their party and the MAGA movement, with exceptions so rare that you can almost count them on a single hand, politics have been stripped of any honor. Politics, for them, is about power in the pursuit of yet more power. Politics is purely performative, nasty and brutish, a way to stoke anger and grievances, a means to exact vengeance. That the most impressive person in the Republican Party, Liz Cheney, is the most despised, says everything.

Whatever you thought about the GOP pre-Trump—and it may be that the ugliness was much closer to the surface than I wanted to acknowledge at the time—the Republican Party is today much more conspiracy minded, anti-democratic, and anti-truth. This worries me, because I love my country. And it disheartens me, because I once admired my party. Today, however, because of its diseased state, the most urgent political task is to defeat it in the hopes of eventually rebuilding it.

Brexit is the equivalent of Man United.
Any brexit prime minister has the lifetime expectancy of a lettuce.

[Vesper 28,795]

Labour opens up biggest poll lead since 1997

 

[cosmicway 1,323]

On 18/10/2022 at 00:00, Vesper said:

Labour opens up biggest poll lead since 1997

 

 

British polls are lot more volatile compared to other countries.
Hence 1969, 1974 and other elections.
Starmer will be just a new dose of a Frank O' Farrel.

 

 

 

Edited October 19, 2022 by cosmicway

[Vesper 28,795]

Liz Truss resigns as UK prime minister sparking Tory leadership race as Labour and Lib Dems call for general election – live

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2022/oct/20/uk-politics-live-liz-truss-tories-turmoil-suella-braverman-resigns-fracking

[Vesper 28,795]

lolol

[Special Juan 27,424]

I have spent longer on a sharks back than she did in power.

[Vesper 28,795]