For the Record: Last Thoughts on the Persecution of Peter Meijer

Studious fox, illumination by Master of Catherine of Cleves and Lieven van Lathem, ca. 1460, via Wikipedia.

Think I already RT'd the whole thread, but this point. Why is it our job to fix the GOP by elevating Meijer over Gibbs? How would that even work? Our job is to defeat the GOP by any legal means. It's just a lot more urgent now than it was in 1952. The party needs to fix itself. https://t.co/cjCNkQESuJ

— Woke Mob Against Climate Destruction (@Yastreblyansky) August 7, 2022

... eventually armed revolt, not to mention talk of a constitutional convention designed to institutionalize minority rule), maybe then we can talk about negotiating a happy return to Queensberry days, if they ever existed.

— Woke Mob Against Climate Destruction (@Yastreblyansky) August 7, 2022

GOP really has to abjure and abandon the project to establish the perpetual rule of the all-white all-authoritarian minority before we can work on a civility project instead. I'd love to see it but I'm not holding my breath.

— Woke Mob Against Climate Destruction (@Yastreblyansky) August 7, 2022

We had top secret information, totally unknown to the GOP leadership, that the primary voters were the same, and when they saw the ad they would say, "Fuck yeah I want me some of that!"

— Woke Mob Against Climate Destruction (@Yastreblyansky) August 7, 2022

"If not for those meddling Democratic ad buys I would have gotten away with it too!" Which is probably nonsense, it's doubtful the ad made that much of a difference, but it clearly shows how wicked and unethical Democrats are.

— Woke Mob Against Climate Destruction (@Yastreblyansky) August 7, 2022

Dirty Fighting

 

The Discourse is full of this kind of thing, complaining about how Democrats aren't sufficiently like Republicans without offering any examples of what "fighting dirty" would be like. Should we be spreading Big Lies and paranoid fantasies?

Or lots of horrible little ones? Should we be ruining ordinary people's lives the way Republicans did to election workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, or to January 6 rioter Ray Epps, and even a 10-year-old girl who needed an abortion? (The latter two covered in a post last night from Steve that's absolutely combative enough, but not in any way I can see dirty—the truth is all he needs.)

What's the dirtiest thing Republicans do? 

Raising campaign money by standing for policies they know are harmful, from the fossil fuel industry to the gun industry to the payday loan industry? Should we be doing some of that? Finding ourselves a bunch of rich clients intent on destroying the world and giving them a legislative hand?

I don't think so. I do think we could use some of the partisanship with which Republicans from one interest group loyally stand behind all the ideas of all their interest groups no matter how terrible and indeed unpopular they are. 

We could just leave out the dirty part by not having any dirty policies, but we all need to get on the same page; "centrists" need to learn that the thing Republicans demonize under the name "critical race theory" actually isn't a bad thing (it's really antiracist education) and start saying so in public, and "progressives" need to understand that property taxes in New Jersey really are too high and opiate addiction among white people really is a problem. 

We should start with the assumption that if a substantial contingent of Democrats believes in something, they're likely to have a point. If Tim Ryan could figure out how many working class white people need help paying back student loans—

An estimated 38.6% of the 43 million student debtors in the United States — roughly 16.6 million people — have debt but no degree six years after first entering college, according to National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) data analyzed by the Hope Center’s Mark Huelsman. (Teen Vogue, for heaven's sake)

—and start talking about it, it would do some good. If Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez found out that most of her constituents want to see more police officers on the street rather than fewer (just police officers who don't kill unarmed neighbors, please), she could talk about that too. 

Unlike Donald Trump talking about abortion, we could be telling the truth, but it would still be fighting. That one useful thing Republicans know is that they're in an army, and armies need unit cohesion.

New York Note: More Andrew

David Paterson and Andrew Cuomo, election night 2010. Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images via Politico.

Governor David Paterson (who succeeded after Eliot Spitzer was forced to resign) on the radio talking about the Cuomo-Hochul situation tells some great stories about Cuomo, in particular:

When word began circulating that Spitzer (then attorney general) was going to choose Paterson (then Senate minority leader) as running mate in the 2006 gubernatorial election, which was a huge public surprise, Cuomo gave him a call: "You can't pick David Paterson, he's got all this baggage that's bound to come out, an African American is going to bring down the ticket," etc., etc. Then, after the choice was announced, he called back to say, "Don't tell David I said that!"

"Sorry," said Spitzer, "we already told him." Immediately Cuomo was on the phone to Paterson, saying, "David, David, it's not true, I never said that!"

Which was sort of a tell (how, in that case, would Cuomo have known that he was accused of saying it?). "I never trusted Andrew for anything after that," Paterson said. 

It's possible, IMO, and hinted at here, that in the 2010 campaign, which started off with Attorney General Cuomo investigating Governor Paterson over an incident in which Paterson may have pressured a woman to drop her domestic violence case against an aide of his, David Johnson, continued with President Obama asking Paterson to drop out of the governor race, and finished with Cuomo running, successfully, for governor himself, Cuomo played a pretty unsavory role in bringing about this result (LA Times reported after Paterson dropped out that Cuomo was "practicing cartwheels in Albany today"). He certainly didn't continue the investigation of Paterson, which he should have done if he really believed Paterson might have been tampering with a witness in a criminal case.

Paterson was unpopular (not with me!) and seemed likely to lose to Rudolph Giuliani in the November election (except Giuliani ended up not running), so in terms of the politics I guess it was OK that Paterson was forced out, but I do wonder about that. At this point there isn't much ill you can say about Andrew that I'm not willing to believe.