This is the key, and it really is just that simple.

Their hateful and ignorant ideals simply don’t have enough support to win with any significant voter turnout.

They therefore have exactly two options - to modify their positions to appeal to more people, or to hold to their positions and try to manipulate and corrupt the system so that they can win in spite of the fact that a clear majority rightly find them to be noxious. And they’ve blatantly chosen the latter.

Unfortunately, I can’t claim it - I lifted it from another poster here.

But yeah - it’s easily the best name I’ve seen yet.

So who’s going to lose more “active users” - truth.social or Vichy Twitter?

You’re arguing with a figment of your imagination.

If you have any interest in actually discussing/debating with me rather than the caricature in your mind, let me know.

the obvious conservative-media thirst for the idea of him dropping out

I see no reason to believe that the conservatives want him to drop out, and many reasons to believe they want him to stay in.

There’s absolutely no question that they’re outnumbered. With a fully engaged voting public, they can’t possibly win. Their only hope is to prevent as many people as possible from voting, and discourage as many more as possible.

Additionally, they’ve spent the last four years flogging the “Biden crime family” narrative, so all they have to do against Biden is stay the course. A new candidate would need an entirely new set of oppositional propaganda, and they wouldn’t have much time in which to get it to take root.

I would think that pretty much the last thing in the world they’d want would be for the Democrats to make an 11th hour switch to an entirely different candidate, and quite possibly a candidate who will inspire the sort of enthusiasm Biden’s candidacy is sorely lacking.

and hope that the DNC can come through in a clutch and come up with an alternate plan from scratch without tripping over their dicks and falling down as they are wont to often do.

Now that I agree with pretty much entirely, with only the proviso that, Hanlon’s Razor notwithstanding, I tend to ascribe their failures more to malice than incompetence (though it could be argued that since it appears to boil down to stultifyingly shallow self-interest, it could qualify as just a different sort of incompetence).

Also, if you are a Democratic politician or donor and you want to replace Biden with someone else, surely talking to the press about how he should drop out without anyone in particular in mind that you’re talking to them about as a replacement, and a strategy to get that person into place, should be an absolute last, last, last resort for a way to get that done. And probably not even then.

I wholeheartedly disagree.

I think that the winning strategy, rather obviously, is to throw the nomination entirely open and let it work itself out. The exact thing that’s going to inspire the sort of enthusiasm that will steamroll Trump is a very public process by which a nominee is legitimately chosen.

Coming into it with some prepared scheme by which to hopefully force the nomination of a particular candidate is just duplicating the mistakes the DNC made in 2016 and 2020, and it’s all too likely to just end us up right back where we were before the debate - with a disappointed and frustrated base that has to be guilt-tripped into voting for a candidate in whom they don’t believe solely on the strength of them being not-Trump.

While denying them to everyone else. Other than white male christofascists.

Handing out cash with no strings attached discourages people from working and reaping the rewards of individual success making some undeserving piece of shit even richer.

I sincerely think it’s broadly accurate - that, for the Republicans and especially for Trump, (most) every accusation is a confession.

There’s a simple psychological element to it, most often illustrated by moralists who rail against perversion of one form or another, only to be revealed to be perverts.

There’s another aspect to it though, and I think this is more often the case with Trump specifically - it’s a way to proactively undermine someone else’s accusation against you. If you can get your accusation out there first, then they end up sounding sort of like a child saying, “I know you are but what am I?”

If we’re going to go all conspiratorial, here’s my theory:

Both campaigns are dealing with old men with diminished faculties.

There’s some drug cocktail(s) that both campaigns have been using to pep the doddering old farts up for public appearances.

If you’ll remember, very shortly before the debate, the accusation that “Biden’s on drugs” made the rounds, and Trump made some noises about demanding a drug test.

For some reason - possibly fear, possibly determination in the face of a challenge, possibly a subtle communication that the Trump campaign had some hard evidence they would, if pushed, release publicly - that led to the Biden team withholding his customary drug cocktail.

Trump, meanwhile, was dosed to the eyeballs.

And that was the contrast we saw - Trump was on drugs, while Biden, for whatever reason, for that night alone, was not.

Remember - for the Republicans broadly and especially for Trump, every accusation is a confession.

They know very well what they are doing. It’s just that their wealth isolates them from the consequences of it. They don’t care about healthcare, climate change, education, unemployment, because that’s for the 95% to worry about. They are rich enough to don’t give a fuck, and they feel safe doing so.

And that rather obviously describes someone who’s rather obviously mentally ill.

Specifically, they lack empathy and have little to no conscience, so have little to no concern for the harm their decisions might cause to others. Those are the hallmarks of both antisocial personality disorder and psychopathy.

Mm… sort of.

The US had the enormous advantage of starting its life with material resources of which most can only dream, so it couldn’t help but achieve some fairly significant success, and as long as things were relatively easy, it generally did. But it never quite managed to pull its head out of its ass. Its material advantages made it so that it generally managed to get by in spite of the fact that it’s head was firmly lodged up its own ass, but that also meant that it never learned anything. So it just stayed in a diminishing circle of bad decisions until it reached a point at which smart decisions were necessary, and it revealed itself to be mostly incapable of making them.

And at the moment, it’s actually subject to a mass movement that lauds the days of the bad decisions as the good old days, since the people still have their heads too far up their asses and can’t recognize the reality that they were always bad decisions, that the prosperity that accompanied them was simply due to the US’s enormous material advantages and in spite of, rather than because of, the bad decisions, and that a return to those bad decisions in an era in which those material advantages have been squandered is just going to make things even worse.

Which, granted, is still sort of a “good run” - much smarter people have still failed to do even close to as well, since they were stuck starting out with pretty much nothing but disadvantages.

But one can’t help but wonder what could’ve been had we not had our heads so firmly lodged up our asses…

It’s really very, very simple.

Regulation of things like pollution serves the interests of the people broadly, but undermines the interests of a handful of obscenely wealthy sociopaths.

And much of the current Supreme Court explicitly works NOT to serve the interests of the people broadly, but to serve the interests of the obscenely wealthy sociopaths.

And that’s it, right there. Just as has happened in numerous past civilizations, the power structure in the US has become so warped and corrupted - so entirely in the control of sociopaths - that it not only no longer even pretends to serve the interests of the people, but tends to explicitly work against their interests.

And the hell of it is that the ruling class is so far gone in corruption and shallow self-interest - so sincerely deeply mentally ill - that they don’t recognize that ultimately they’re working against their own interests - that serving the interests of the people maintains the health of the society from which they benefit, and that working against the interests of the people undermines that health. Like any other mindless parasite, they’re going to destroy their host, and in so doing, ultimately destroy themselves.

And the US will just be added to the ever-growing list of societies destroyed through the machinations of a relative few profoundly mentally ill people granted undue wealth and power.

I pessimistically expected that.

If he bowed out and the Dems nominated a halfway decent candidate (which they likely wouldn’t do, but that’s a different subject), they’d demolish Trump. He’d lose so badly he couldn’t even pretend it was fraudulent (though of course he’d claim that anyway, since he has the emotional maturity of a spoiled five-year-old). The race would instantly go from a terrifying risk to a complete rout.

But between Biden’s ego and the DNC’s determination to stick with a wholly-owned establishment neoliberal hack at all costs - even if it means losing - I expected that they wouldn’t take this golden opportunity.

Transparent astroturfing.

The staff is laying a foundation so that when Trump - an arrogant, oblivious nitwit with the attention span of a five-year-old - inevitably comes out of it the obvious loser - they will already have the base primed to believe that that somehow reflects poorly on… Biden.

I don’t see any possible way it couldn’t. Every official is going to expect a “gratuity” in exchange for approving a contract, and every contractor who expects to succeed is going to go into every deal with the understanding that they’re going to be expected to pay a “gratuity” after the deal is finalized.

The upshot of it all can only be wholly institutionalized pay-to-play, with only the ultimately entirely meaningless requirement that the payment has to be deferred instead of up front.

Right. Go back and reread it - that’s what I said.

I’m fully aware that the DNC is under no legal mandate to operate legitimately or honestly.

And that’s rather obviously entirely irrelevant.

In point of fact, if the legal standing of their actions is the only thing that matters, as you imply, then the entire notion that Russia willfully acted to harm them collapses. How could Russia harm them by leaking details of things that are not illegal and therefore (purportedly) entirely acceptable?

If, on the other hand, we stick with the way that things have been presented by the DNC itself - that Russia willfully acted to bring them harm - then rather obviously even they are taking the position that the legal status of their actions is irrelevant.

Go ahead and pick either one - I don’t care. Either there was nothing wrong with their actions, in which case they could not be harmed by having the details of their actions leaked, or they were harmed by the the leak of the details of their actions, in which case their actions were self-evidently judged to be wrong, and the legal standing of them is irrelevant.

Yes - it’s pretty much a given, cynically, that a corrupt court is going to rule that corruption is legal.

As I often do, I wonder if this is going to be one of the things that future historians will point to as a notable event in the days leading up to the collapse of the US.

They called it a gratuity to try to divert attention from the bludgeoningly obvious fact that it’s just a postdated bribe.

This is what this country has come to. In the face of an ever-growing failure of the government to represent the will of the people because their influence has been bought and paid for by moneyed interests, the Supreme Court is legalizing bribery.

Of course, it’s certainly not a coincidence that one of the institutions that’s been bought and paid for is the Supreme Court itself.