Red Mosquito

doug rr wrote:i'd like to join the my mom is a bat shit crazy trump fan club..we don't even talk anymore

About politics or at all?

verb_to_trust wrote:

doug rr wrote:i'd like to join the my mom is a bat shit crazy trump fan club..we don't even talk anymore

About politics or at all?

pretty much at all now...i talk to my dad..he's normal

doug rr wrote:

verb_to_trust wrote:

doug rr wrote:i'd like to join the my mom is a bat shit crazy trump fan club..we don't even talk anymore

About politics or at all?

pretty much at all now...i talk to my dad..he's normal

She said something today along the lines of she didn't raise me to be a liberal. It was really fucked up.

verb_to_trust wrote:

doug rr wrote:

verb_to_trust wrote:

doug rr wrote:i'd like to join the my mom is a bat shit crazy trump fan club..we don't even talk anymore

About politics or at all?

pretty much at all now...i talk to my dad..he's normal

She said something today along the lines of she didn't raise me to be a liberal. It was really fucked up.

i think we have the same mom..i got off instagram 2 years ago because she said something very similar to that..i called her on her birthday in april and she hung up on me after a few minutes..she said she was outside talking to her neighbor that just became a US citizen from canada and she asked me if my wife has ever thought about doing that to...my wife is a candadian..I told her that we had all the paper work ready to go but then trump was elected and she doesn't want his name on her citizenship papers ever..she hung up

my dad told her last year that he voted for JFK and would she have still married him had she known back in 1960..her answer to my dad was never in a million years...

its been a fun couple years...my sister and brother in law volunteered for his campaign...

i just stay away now..anyway, sorry for the long story

So America spends hundreds of billions a year on military and Russia just went let’s buy all their politicians and some troll bots and ads for a few million and destabilise every western democracy we can and take over and cause civil war among families mother against son.

It’s a filthy tactic but it’s worked both in America and Britain

My mother is a fox news watcher. I'm pretty sure it's her only news source. Every time politics come up she tries to tell me I read fake news.

verb_to_trust wrote:

McParadigm wrote:Really wish in retrospect that we hadn’t spent the tea party and birtherism period humoring our loved ones’ free fall into insular, racist, false messaging safety on the basis of just kind of hoping it would pass on its own.

I have the same problem with some family members and, in retrospect, “he said Obama’s a secret Muslim but he’s my uncle so I just ignore it” should have been “he said Obama’s a secret Muslim and he’s my uncle, so I owe it to him to at least try to stop this ugly trajectory.”

I pushed back just a bit today on my mom. Nothing crazy. She basically went nuts on me. She tried to guilt and shame me while choking back tears, which looking back seems really toxic and manipulative. I definitely hear what you're saying but easier said than done for sure.

McP, I your post is so spot on, but the reality is we (children who talk to their parents twice a month) can't compete with the daily onslaught of talk radio and fox news. Verb, I'm proud of you for at least broaching the subject. My parents and I haven't discussed Trump since Mueller testified.

tragabigzanda wrote:

durdencommatyler wrote:

doug rr wrote:schiff is killing the closing statement..

aw huh

?? Just closing for the day, right? Aren't there more witnesses next week?

The Hill is saying today is possibly the last day of public testimony.

In what could be the last round of public hearings in the Democrats’ high-speed impeachment inquiry...

...

By all appearances, Thursday’s hearing will be the last of seven to be conducted by the Intelligence Committee in their open-interview stage of the impeachment inquiry.

...

Although Schiff has not ruled out the possibility of entertaining more witnesses, he has dismissed the notion that Democrats will pause the process while courts decide the fate of officials who have refused to testify. And Pelosi on Thursday amplified that message in no uncertain terms, saying Democrats would “absolutely not” wait for the judiciary to weigh in.

verb_to_trust wrote:My mother is a fox news watcher. I'm pretty sure it's her only news source. Every time politics come up she tries to tell me I read fake news.

verb_to_trust wrote:My mother is a fox news watcher. I'm pretty sure it's her only news source. Every time politics come up she tries to tell me I read fake news.

Have you ever asked her how does she know she isn’t watching fake news?
Maybe present her with a fact sheet of their ongoing series of lies

Like when they stopped Brexit with a PowerPoint.

I think I officially have the coolest mom in the world.
Shes gone to a Pearl Jam concert, and she thinks Trumps a moron...

Potus does stand for Pile of Totally Useless Shit right?

McParadigm wrote:

This really rings true, but at the same time I can't envision myself refusing to break with a president I voted for.

bune wrote:yeah it's even better when you can watch it over and over.

bune wrote:

ok, that's cool.

Oh my god. This is the first thing ive seen today as i was out and about. I had so much fun watching this.

McParadigm wrote:Like when they stopped Brexit with a PowerPoint.

dammit, where's the "like" button when you need it.

the only thing i have ever been so sure of more than trump is guilty and should be removed is the fact that the senate is going to let him skate and turn it all against biden and HRC

Yeah we really just need to get back to focusing on 2020. Maybe hope the frontotemporal dementia kicks in soon.

The worth of impeachment hearings was never about the hope of a senate conviction. It was about exposing publicly the extent to which the administration is willing to abuse power in order to keep power, increasing public awareness of the ways they go about doing that, and keeping them too busy trying to cover up the last transgression to immediately hop into a new scheme. Remember that the Ukraine extortion game didn't come up until the Mueller investigation was finally over and Trump believed that the pressure was off....so why take the pressure off?

Also, I think it's important to reject the (seemingly reasonable) attitude that it ultimately doesn't matter because the Republican Senate won't convict him, or that "nothing matters" because presidential misdeeds repeatedly get exposed but not consequenced. This feels painfully true, but it is a dangerous attitude...especially when it is being echo-chambered by so very many people, often on public platforms.

I believe it is dangerous for two reasons:

1. The endless exposure of wrongdoing has unquestionably been a big part of why this president's polling is the worst on record. When Republicans take major losses in Virginia, Kentucky, and Louisiana even after major White House support pushes, moments like these hearings are a part of the story of why. Our pessimism has the power to unintentionally kill that weapon. Remember how nervous House Democrats were about starting impeachment? Why was that? Because the Republican Senate won't convict, "so it doesn't matter." They internalized voters' weary frustration, and it nearly paralyzed them.

The last thing you want is for the cancer of hopelessness to metastasize in the attitudes of leadership, media, or voters.

2. The conclusion of the "what's the point if they won't convict him" attitude is ultimately that Republicans are the arbiter of whether something matters. Did they react to the terrible thing? No? Then it's decided. Move on.

This is an insane attitude to adopt, in a world where Republicans in office are responding to a voting group who consume propaganda almost exclusively. When you say "The president shot someone on 5th avenue today. Did he lose any Republican votes? No? lol nothing matters," you're saying the shooting doesn't matter because it didn't change anything among those Republicans. They got to decide whether the scandal of their creation was important or not. You gave them that. And the thing is, "does it matter" and "did it change the national political story" are not questions that will (or should) always have the same answer.

"Did it change anything?" That's a question that the current Republican party, by and large, currently controls (although the reverse is also true: if they can't find a way to change their disastrous and generational unpopularity, these are more or less their final days of power).

"Did it matter," though? You decide that. Only you. And your answer reveals who you are.

This is page 1,061 of this thread. Bet your ass it matters.