I hate to tell you this Charlie, but Mike Lee was an asshole well before MAGA. He was a Tea Party candidate, and if you still can't tell that the Tea Party was a farce that used "fiscal responsibility" as a cover to chase the culture war bullshit that they really wanted to go after the whole time then I don't know what else to tell you a…
I hate to tell you this Charlie, but Mike Lee was an asshole well before MAGA. He was a Tea Party candidate, and if you still can't tell that the Tea Party was a farce that used "fiscal responsibility" as a cover to chase the culture war bullshit that they really wanted to go after the whole time then I don't know what else to tell you at this point.
The only good conservatives left are the ones who don't associate with MAGA anymore. Mike Lee hasn't been one of those since at least 2015. The party is now made up of either Jim Jordans or Lindsay Grahams all the way down. Strongman MAGA assholes, or the weak supportive subs who enable and help them with moral top cover justifications. That's the modern GOP. If Mike Lee had a spine made of principle he would have been treated like Romney and McCain were by the rest of MAGA. Instead, he's here, trying to hold on to his place in the party for dear life and by any means necessary. Because for these people, death is worse than political exodus.
At this point, anyone still associating with or running under the Republican banner has made a decision to jettison the Constitution for their self benefit. They're all opportunists of the worst kind.
Because for them, living like Christ would be too close to living like a commie so they just go with the branding and licensing rather than living up to the true ideology.
The Tea Party, bought and paid for by the Koch brothers and other fossil fuel interests, was for the explicit purpose to attack climate change as a theory. Truth and meaning having suffered grave harm, from there we get Pizzagate, QAnon and the Big Lie.
The Tea Party started with Rick Santelli's rant against government bailouts. The next element was the lead-up to the ACA, which resulted in millions of Americans losing the insurance plans they had and liked -- despite Obama's "If you like your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan" pledge, which many Americans rightly suspected was a lie. Many people lost their doctors too. I recall a substantial exodus of physicians out of the profession subsequently.
The Tea Party rallies had a lot of "Don't Tread on Me" flags, and complaints about taxes and heavy-handed regulation, and displays of the upticking federal debt.
If culture-war issues had been the whole purpose from the start, it would have been more visible. What other popular political protest movement has concealed its real agenda under a completely different one?
No doubt some (not all) Tea Partiers from back then are now culture warriors, but that doesn't prove that the original popular movement was some kind of carefully orchestrated deep fake just to get some people elected and then outlaw drag-queen story hour.
“The Tea Party rallies had a lot of "Don't Tread on Me" flags”
So do Trump rallies, including the one he held on January 6th
“and complaints about taxes and heavy-handed regulation, and displays of the upticking federal debt.”
Republicans lower taxes and cut regulations which makes lots of corporate and rich people happy at the expense of the working class people who vote for them. This never decreases the national debt or the federal deficit! But I’m willing to bet most Tea Party candidates couldn’t tell you the difference between the two. They certainly didn’t understand what raising the debt ceiling meant or care about the effects of *threatening* to shut down the government (much less actually doing so).
I’ll also bet they didn’t realize that if you ranked each President by how much they increased the deficit, Reagan would be among the top five. Turns out that decreasing revenue by cutting taxes and increasing military spending by an absurd amount - the default policy of every Republican since Reagan, ends up not to be very fiscally conservative after all. Who knew? Maybe Bill Clinton, the last President who actually left office with a budget surplus.
To this day members of The Freedom Caucus (started by the Tea Party remember) will rail against Dems for out-of-control spending. To be fair, some of the criticism *is* justified. But they would do it even if it wasn’t. They’re vestigial accusations of the old GOP. Matt Gaetz, MTG and Chip Roy have no more genuine concern about spending or debt or any greater understanding about economics than Michelle Bachman and the other Tea Party hacks. It’s just that with people like Paul Ryan gone, they can still make these hollow accusations while continuing to approve spending that their base approves of.
“If culture-war issues had been the whole purpose from the start, it would have been more visible.”
Do you remember who elevated “birtherism” from a fringe conspiracy theory to a legitimate topic for debate? Do you remember how often Tea Party members quoted scripture? This White Christian Nationalism subtext was less visible then, sure. And if you happened to be a Republican who also happened to be White, Christian and pro-America (almost all of them), it would probably have slipped under the radar. The rest of us, though found it a bit of an alarming departure from traditional politics.
“What other popular political protest movement has concealed its real agenda under a completely different one?”
I kept my healthcare plan AND it was cheaper and covered more. Best thing, my son who did not get healthcare from his work after college was able to buy health insurance in the exchange for about $150. My daughter too, which was great because she was in an accident and broke her ankle, which cost nearly $5,000, but her insurance, due to Obamacare, covered it.
Well, it was a deep fake, just not a culture war deep fake. Much of the tea party was astroturf by Koch and other very wealthy libertarians. And the answer to our debt ticking up was what? Tax cuts? Ask yourself why Republicans are so insistent on defunding the IRS, when the IRS addresses our debt, and its ROI is considerable.
I gave up being a Republican when I realized that I wasn’t their constituency, but they were trying to fool me into believing that I was. Their constituency are the .01 and 1% of the population who want to keep as much as their wealth as possible and contribute as little as possible to the running of our country and the protection of our people. The only thing happening with the defunding of the IRS would be wealthy tax skaters will continue to skate.
One day people understand that all of this political showmanship and sturm and drang are about fiscal policy and who is rewarded financially, and who suffers. The ultra wealthy know this. The rest of us think it’s about culture wars, apparently. It is not and never was about the culture wars for the donor class.
You are 100% right. And all that bullshirt about doctors quitting because of Obama care which had nothing to do with doctors and everything to do with insurance. If they don't want patients who can afford insurance then they should quit because all they care about is money not healing people.
Look at who funded the Tea Party. Freedomworks and Americans for Prosperity--both libertarian groups that were paid to do astro-turfing for the Koch Brothers. And why did the Koch Brothers want smaller government in the first place? To keep their billionaire tax rates as low as humanly possible and to kill government-mandated decarbonization programs in the crib. They got what they wanted, that's for sure.
Look at how much "fiscal responsibility" was on the table from the GOP when Trump added $7.8T to the national debt. If the Tea Party was ever sincere, they went insincere as soon as there was GOP control of government. So weird how as soon as a dem wasn't in the WH that all of a sudden all that talk of "fiscal responsibility" disappeared.
If fiscal responsibility was at the core of the Tea Party, for some reason culture wars and tax cuts for the rich were at the forefront of their agenda come 2017 when they got full control of government. Ideological conservatives were a dinner party in a larger movement that was all about a gentleman's agreement between rich libertarians and christian culture warriors, whereby the christian culture warriors promissed tax cuts for the rich libertarians as long as the rich libertarians were funding the culture warrior candidates that the christian right wanted fighting against abortion, gay marriage, and racial/sexual equality.
The "fiscal responsibility" hawks were conveniently mute during the George W. Bush administration after the Clinton administration ended with a balanced budget. W's response to ballooning deficits during our war of choice with Iraq was that Americans should "go shopping", and Vice President Cheney proclaimed that "deficits don't matter".
I sympathized with some of the original Tea Party idealism - I think the federal government does too much, in terms of breadth, and has to accept that in a (somewhat) free market society, there will be occasional major private business failures and general bad times for most - but any credibility that the Republican party would like to claim on fiscal management was annihilated during the Trump administration, with the tax cuts lacking even a whit of concurrent effort to reduce spending. For them claim to be the fiscal responsibility party now is just a sick sick joke.
You are great charlie, no criticism meant. I thought maybe you composed today's newsletter with a thought toward an easy short week, with less of us on the left gnashing our teeth on you. Have a great week & holiday!
I'd say The Bulwark hasn't been afraid to take the Israel situation on, but you can't keep hammering the same topic over and over and you gotta diversify the topics covered. Especially now when most news orgs are laser-focused on it, I ask myself what they're overlooking that could be more consequential but not as eye-drawing. The "if it bleeds, it leads" operating procedures of media is something that often gets us to miss important stories.
I hate to tell you this Charlie, but Mike Lee was an asshole well before MAGA. He was a Tea Party candidate, and if you still can't tell that the Tea Party was a farce that used "fiscal responsibility" as a cover to chase the culture war bullshit that they really wanted to go after the whole time then I don't know what else to tell you at this point.
The only good conservatives left are the ones who don't associate with MAGA anymore. Mike Lee hasn't been one of those since at least 2015. The party is now made up of either Jim Jordans or Lindsay Grahams all the way down. Strongman MAGA assholes, or the weak supportive subs who enable and help them with moral top cover justifications. That's the modern GOP. If Mike Lee had a spine made of principle he would have been treated like Romney and McCain were by the rest of MAGA. Instead, he's here, trying to hold on to his place in the party for dear life and by any means necessary. Because for these people, death is worse than political exodus.
Mike Lee is an opportunist. Therefore none of his actions is surprising.
Opportunistic = the entire Republican party.
At this point, anyone still associating with or running under the Republican banner has made a decision to jettison the Constitution for their self benefit. They're all opportunists of the worst kind.
Definitely agree on those running at national level, although plenty crazy at state and local elections too.
And he’s nominally a “good” Christian of the LDS faith. He’s a disgusting hypocrite and liar.
The phrase "good Christian" should be an example of redundancy, but all too often it is an oxymoron, or even a bald-faced lie.
Because for them, living like Christ would be too close to living like a commie so they just go with the branding and licensing rather than living up to the true ideology.
He needs to read The Pearl of Great Price another time or two at a minimum I'd say.
The Tea Party, bought and paid for by the Koch brothers and other fossil fuel interests, was for the explicit purpose to attack climate change as a theory. Truth and meaning having suffered grave harm, from there we get Pizzagate, QAnon and the Big Lie.
The Tea Party started with Rick Santelli's rant against government bailouts. The next element was the lead-up to the ACA, which resulted in millions of Americans losing the insurance plans they had and liked -- despite Obama's "If you like your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan" pledge, which many Americans rightly suspected was a lie. Many people lost their doctors too. I recall a substantial exodus of physicians out of the profession subsequently.
The Tea Party rallies had a lot of "Don't Tread on Me" flags, and complaints about taxes and heavy-handed regulation, and displays of the upticking federal debt.
If culture-war issues had been the whole purpose from the start, it would have been more visible. What other popular political protest movement has concealed its real agenda under a completely different one?
No doubt some (not all) Tea Partiers from back then are now culture warriors, but that doesn't prove that the original popular movement was some kind of carefully orchestrated deep fake just to get some people elected and then outlaw drag-queen story hour.
“The Tea Party rallies had a lot of "Don't Tread on Me" flags”
So do Trump rallies, including the one he held on January 6th
“and complaints about taxes and heavy-handed regulation, and displays of the upticking federal debt.”
Republicans lower taxes and cut regulations which makes lots of corporate and rich people happy at the expense of the working class people who vote for them. This never decreases the national debt or the federal deficit! But I’m willing to bet most Tea Party candidates couldn’t tell you the difference between the two. They certainly didn’t understand what raising the debt ceiling meant or care about the effects of *threatening* to shut down the government (much less actually doing so).
I’ll also bet they didn’t realize that if you ranked each President by how much they increased the deficit, Reagan would be among the top five. Turns out that decreasing revenue by cutting taxes and increasing military spending by an absurd amount - the default policy of every Republican since Reagan, ends up not to be very fiscally conservative after all. Who knew? Maybe Bill Clinton, the last President who actually left office with a budget surplus.
To this day members of The Freedom Caucus (started by the Tea Party remember) will rail against Dems for out-of-control spending. To be fair, some of the criticism *is* justified. But they would do it even if it wasn’t. They’re vestigial accusations of the old GOP. Matt Gaetz, MTG and Chip Roy have no more genuine concern about spending or debt or any greater understanding about economics than Michelle Bachman and the other Tea Party hacks. It’s just that with people like Paul Ryan gone, they can still make these hollow accusations while continuing to approve spending that their base approves of.
“If culture-war issues had been the whole purpose from the start, it would have been more visible.”
Do you remember who elevated “birtherism” from a fringe conspiracy theory to a legitimate topic for debate? Do you remember how often Tea Party members quoted scripture? This White Christian Nationalism subtext was less visible then, sure. And if you happened to be a Republican who also happened to be White, Christian and pro-America (almost all of them), it would probably have slipped under the radar. The rest of us, though found it a bit of an alarming departure from traditional politics.
“What other popular political protest movement has concealed its real agenda under a completely different one?”
America First? MAGA?
I kept my healthcare plan AND it was cheaper and covered more. Best thing, my son who did not get healthcare from his work after college was able to buy health insurance in the exchange for about $150. My daughter too, which was great because she was in an accident and broke her ankle, which cost nearly $5,000, but her insurance, due to Obamacare, covered it.
"Gov't: Keep Your Hands Off My Medicare."
~ Teabaggers of Boston.
Medicare was not touched and btw is govt controlled health insurance for older people because insurance companies don't want to cover old sick people.
I guess you didn't pick up on my snide...the fact that I used Teabaggers for Tea Party.
No I didn't. Duh!
No problem...😁
Well, it was a deep fake, just not a culture war deep fake. Much of the tea party was astroturf by Koch and other very wealthy libertarians. And the answer to our debt ticking up was what? Tax cuts? Ask yourself why Republicans are so insistent on defunding the IRS, when the IRS addresses our debt, and its ROI is considerable.
I gave up being a Republican when I realized that I wasn’t their constituency, but they were trying to fool me into believing that I was. Their constituency are the .01 and 1% of the population who want to keep as much as their wealth as possible and contribute as little as possible to the running of our country and the protection of our people. The only thing happening with the defunding of the IRS would be wealthy tax skaters will continue to skate.
One day people understand that all of this political showmanship and sturm and drang are about fiscal policy and who is rewarded financially, and who suffers. The ultra wealthy know this. The rest of us think it’s about culture wars, apparently. It is not and never was about the culture wars for the donor class.
You are 100% right. And all that bullshirt about doctors quitting because of Obama care which had nothing to do with doctors and everything to do with insurance. If they don't want patients who can afford insurance then they should quit because all they care about is money not healing people.
🎯
Thank you.
Look at who funded the Tea Party. Freedomworks and Americans for Prosperity--both libertarian groups that were paid to do astro-turfing for the Koch Brothers. And why did the Koch Brothers want smaller government in the first place? To keep their billionaire tax rates as low as humanly possible and to kill government-mandated decarbonization programs in the crib. They got what they wanted, that's for sure.
Look at how much "fiscal responsibility" was on the table from the GOP when Trump added $7.8T to the national debt. If the Tea Party was ever sincere, they went insincere as soon as there was GOP control of government. So weird how as soon as a dem wasn't in the WH that all of a sudden all that talk of "fiscal responsibility" disappeared.
If fiscal responsibility was at the core of the Tea Party, for some reason culture wars and tax cuts for the rich were at the forefront of their agenda come 2017 when they got full control of government. Ideological conservatives were a dinner party in a larger movement that was all about a gentleman's agreement between rich libertarians and christian culture warriors, whereby the christian culture warriors promissed tax cuts for the rich libertarians as long as the rich libertarians were funding the culture warrior candidates that the christian right wanted fighting against abortion, gay marriage, and racial/sexual equality.
The "fiscal responsibility" hawks were conveniently mute during the George W. Bush administration after the Clinton administration ended with a balanced budget. W's response to ballooning deficits during our war of choice with Iraq was that Americans should "go shopping", and Vice President Cheney proclaimed that "deficits don't matter".
I sympathized with some of the original Tea Party idealism - I think the federal government does too much, in terms of breadth, and has to accept that in a (somewhat) free market society, there will be occasional major private business failures and general bad times for most - but any credibility that the Republican party would like to claim on fiscal management was annihilated during the Trump administration, with the tax cuts lacking even a whit of concurrent effort to reduce spending. For them claim to be the fiscal responsibility party now is just a sick sick joke.
Well, that's what it morphed into, then.
Maybe Charlie was choosing to avoid Israel & Biden's age & he needed to fill space.
Maybe we don’t need to write about the same thing every day.
You are great charlie, no criticism meant. I thought maybe you composed today's newsletter with a thought toward an easy short week, with less of us on the left gnashing our teeth on you. Have a great week & holiday!
I'd say The Bulwark hasn't been afraid to take the Israel situation on, but you can't keep hammering the same topic over and over and you gotta diversify the topics covered. Especially now when most news orgs are laser-focused on it, I ask myself what they're overlooking that could be more consequential but not as eye-drawing. The "if it bleeds, it leads" operating procedures of media is something that often gets us to miss important stories.
Or it might just be that Mike Lee and a bunch of J6 conspiracy chatter was a leading news item over the weekend.
It isn't exactly unusual for Charlie to post about topics other than the two you mention.
True. I just got the feeling he didn't want to get flak from us today, so avoided some of the triggers.