Looks like they're grooming Mittens to be the puke candidate in 2024

[Eid Ma Clack Shaw]

49. Bingo!

There’s a reason the GOP are so successful, and it’s because they know how to win! One, they know the power of unity, and that it gives them a sizeable in-built advantage against a relatively flaky opposition base. Two, they know the power of swaying independent voters with simple, sharp slogans that prey on fear / jealousy of poor people ‘getting something for nothing’ and, you know what? It’s effective.

My belief is that the GOP is fundamentally about ramming its drastically unfair economic program through. Always has been, but they’ve been given opportunities they never should have so they want more. More extreme, less fair for people outside the gilded class.

The social, “moral” stuff - as we see with the embrace of a depraved huckster in Trump - is a rallying cry to dumb people who know no better. The right have been able to shape the system and tilt the board because they know the importance of winning first and nitpicking later, but there's a certain irony in the fact that the USA would have edged closer to the sort of progressive policy many on the left hold dear if they didn’t throw a huff and vote for Nader or Stein in their hundreds of thousands.

Look, I’m decidedly left wing - I’m also a pragmatist who knows that it’s much easier to blow things up than it is to put them back together again. I know not every election is winnable, but if people on our side weren’t so damn quick to register protest votes or just stay at home, we’d have won more (in each branch of government) and forced the GOP to end the culture war shit and try to win on actual ideas.