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Damn, Bill is on fire today. I love it. I hope those cowards on their all-expenses-paid-by-us jaunt to Paris are haunted by a whole bunch of angry ghosts. I'm going to light a candle and ask my deceased WW2 vet grandfather to pay them a visit. That man could lecture the Pope.

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I've been collecting buttons for over 50 years now, some political, some not. A relative new-comer in the past 10 years has become one of my favorites:

OMG GOP WTF

AZ Supreme Court upholds a mid-1800's ban on abortion? OMG GOP WTF

House Majority opens Impeachment Inquiry into Biden Crime Family? OMG GOP WTF

AL bans IVF? OMG GOP WTF

GOP Members attend 80th anniversary of D-Day? OMG GOP WTF

It ALWAYS fits - every single FFS day!

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While Ukraine burns, the following are on the agenda of the House Rules Committee on Monday afternoon 4/15 (shout out to Heather Cox Richardson for pointing this out!):

H.R. 7700 - Stop Unaffordable Dishwasher Standards Act

https://rules.house.gov/bill/118/hr-7700

H.R. 7626 - Affordable Air Conditioning Act

https://rules.house.gov/bill/118/hr-7626

H.R. 7637 - Refrigerator Freedom Act

https://rules.house.gov/bill/118/hr-7637

H.R. 7645 - Clothes Dryers Reliability Act

https://rules.house.gov/bill/118/hr-7645

H.R. 7673 - Liberty in Laundry Act

https://rules.house.gov/bill/118/hr-7673

OMG GOP WTF, indeed. They are perfectly capable of fleeing responsibility while sitting on their (ahem) hands in DC.

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Brooks article on his toaster got them all super excited.

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Where did you get that? I want one!!!

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I bet there's some place that will make custom buttons

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I honestly don't remember, but you can google it and there are places to choose from!

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Certainly not one that Trumpster is peddling.

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"Oh,oh,oh I'm on fire" *Bruce Springsteen

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"Johnson and Trump to announce coordinated “election integrity” effort"

After which Weinstein and Cosby will announce "combatting misogyny" initiative.

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Irony will be calling in sick with a migraine for the foreseeable future.

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As Charlie frequently said;"irony is dead"

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Did you see his new substack?

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I just checked out Charlie's to the contrary.I see there are many Bulwark readers there judging from the comments. Thanks.

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Welcome

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Johnson and Trump have made it abundantly clear that the only election with integrity is the election Trump wins.

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Really well put!

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Apr 12·edited Apr 12

GOP: Must. Kill. Irony.

"A bunch of House Republicans are taking more time off to visit France for the 80th anniversary of D-Day..."

The party is as dead as Reagan. His words would fall today on deaf and rotting ears.

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Reagan is a RINO now and has been for about eight years.

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The hypocrisy of celebrating D-Day but not working to ensure peace in Europe is astonishing.

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Wow...great point!

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Everybody knows that Africa is not a country. It's a song by Toto.

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Another Toto fun fact: their lead singer is John Williams' son. Yep, greatest film composer of the latter half of the 20th century John Williams.

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I didn't know that. Thanks!

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I thought Toto was as old as John Williams! Is the son an original member, I wonder?

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"You 're going to need a bigger boat" *Jaws

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This is what happens when your parents didn't subscribe to National Geographic.

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If trump made saying "the earth is flat" a litmus test, they would all say that too!

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The youths only know the cover version, not the Toto original. Now what country was it named after again?

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Apparently not.

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deletedApr 12
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The band actually named itself after Dorothy’s dog.

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"We're not in Kansas anymore"

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If any dog could....

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"House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R.-LA) announced yesterday that the House of Representatives will not be in session on June 6. Members will be going to France for the 80th anniversary of D-Day. It is fitting and proper that the United States be represented by members of Congress of both parties on that occasion."

Yes and no. I get it that optics matter, and that we should have a presence there to commemorate our role in the liberation of France and our ongoing commitment to freedom and democracy. But beyond symbolism, what actually is being accomplished? Can we not achieve the same effect via the U.S. Ambassador to France? Or the Vice President? Is their presence more important than doing the people's business back home when Congress this term largely has not been doing the people's business back home? How many Congressional leaders are going, at taxpayer expense, compared to how many are needed to make the point?

Convince me that many of them are doing it more in the cause of our nation's interests and less as a sort of paid late spring vacation out of our pockets. I'll wait. At least on the right, it likely doesn't matter what they see and do. It matters to them what one person back home, probably sitting in a courtroom while they are there, seeking to protect himself far more than the cause of liberty and justice for all, thinks about it and chooses to do if he is empowered again. There's no small irony in seeing a gaggle of our Congresspeople at an event celebrating throwing off the shackles of dictatorship when many of those same individuals are willing to enable it themselves back home. The editorials, and more than a few jokes, will write themselves in the international press no less than here.

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I'm kind of surprised Trump allowed them to go, but I guess it's easier to find one's spine in the cause of a free French vacation.

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Would one be wrong to presume that a rain shower at the time of the ceremony would cause a panic?

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"I'm melting, I'm melting..."

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"What a world! What a world!" My spray on tan is dripping.

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It did with Trump.

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Not to mention a good excuse not to legislate.

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When did the Rs recently need a good excuse?

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Then they can come back and complain about the (non-existent) “no-go areas” of Paris and its suburbs.

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I suspect that OG calculated that it helped him politically more than it hurt him; and on the surface, his decision was likely correct.

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Paris is nice this time of year.

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And how many Rs will skip those nasty cold channel beaches and just stay in Paris?

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Probably not many.I'm sure they insist on everybody speaking english.

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Many of those Congresspeople don the shackles of dictatorship on their own volition and call it freedom. They will bring that dishonor with them on their D-Day visit like Marley’s chains and money boxes.

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Great image.

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It is a lot easier to go to France and its photo op than to govern.Plus there is a lot of sightseeing in Paris.

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Maybe the Scalise delegation can meet up with some of the Vichy Descendants for tips in appropriate pandering to their conquerors while they’re there! At least they can then state that their ‘fact finding’ investigation revealed that France really wasn’t that bad under the Nazi’s….

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They are cowardly clowns. I doubt they even understand heroes.

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Apr 12·edited Apr 12

Almost 30 years ago, I had a furious discussion with a brilliant Harvard Business School professor about the internet lowering the barriers to entry for publishing. He expanded on the beauty of how media would become nearly free for all to participate. In front of nearly 90 scorning people I stood and asked, "We live in a world full of idiots, if you are right, and you probably are, where is the quality control in this new era?" He stuck to his guns about the virtues of the collapse of the institutional media silos and I to mine about how the bad would supersede the good.

And now we know. Africa is... a country.

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Everyone tends to believe that the Next Big Thing is going to be great. The NBT is going to solve all of our problems and make our lives a thousand times better.

Like the internet. o.O

If you are a porn aficianado or a conspiracy theory fan or really into cat videos, or gamer, the internet is God's Gift. Sure, there are upsides.

Not sure that the upsides outweight the downsides, so far... and it sure did not play out like people thought it would. But then, TV didn't either... nor did radio... or a host of ther things.

Because the people that think this stuff up are often the worst people to understand what people will do with what they think up. Most of them are not really all that in touch with their own humanity.

All you have to do to understand that is to listen to some of these tech bros talking up AI.

We have eneded up with a collapse in experise and trust.. two things that are actually kind of important if you want to have a functional human society.

MAYBE AI will ultimately save us by taking humans out of the loop on most things. Except we are the programmers, so my hopes are not high. I expect the quantity of porn and cat videos to go up though.

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It took 30 years, Dave, but I put forward the motion that you ultimately won that particular argument. When we had those media silos, we had fairly decent social stability. All that began the descent down the sh***er in October 1996....and it has progressively picked up speed since then.

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Pretty sure Sarah Palin thought Africa was a country.

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Next to Russia.

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She can see it from her back deck.

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She did what? Last time I checked, that took more than fluff between the ears.

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2008. Fox News’ Carl Cameron reported that McCain aides told him SP “didn’t understand that Africa was a continent rather than ‘a country in itself.”” The Guardian reported it in a story linked to HuffPost.

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I could believe that in a heartbeat, but when the source is a Faux News talking head saying what unnamed aides told him about her, I am not sure I would accept that source as unimpeachable evidence of the validity of the content.

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I’m pretty sure it also showed up in the “Game Change” book and movie about the Palin pick. HBO. Well worth the time.

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Tracey, thanks for the historical education. Being a stickler, I'd really like to know the origin of the thought, not the repetion, although, Rhett Butler said it best: Frankly, my dear, .....

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deletedApr 12
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Apr 12·edited Apr 12

If he didn't very quickly catch it as a mistake, or at least one of his producers, then he very possibly, as a talking face in front of a camera, doesn't know. I tend to attribute the lowest common denominator to the talking heads on these sort of networks. I mean, they actually have to take MTG or Tuberville seriously in their on-air talks.

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deletedApr 12
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My generosity fled a good while back

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North, too?

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Charlie was right: Irony is dead.

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deletedApr 12
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Ginny, my initial point was to mock Finnerty's comment in Cheap Shots. Somehow that bit of "irony" on my part got lost in all of the other comments before and after the basic chain. If you choose to call that trolling, that is what the word means to you. Frankly, I have never been able to come up with a workable "definition", since most people who use it think like Humpty Dumpty who opined in Through the Looking Glass "words mean what I pay them to mean, nothing more and nothing less."

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"We in America have learned bitter lessons from two World Wars: It is better to be here ready to protect the peace, than to take blind shelter across the sea, rushing to respond only after freedom is lost."

Makes one wonder what he would say about his Party not heeding the call to stopping the enemy within, ready and willing to follow trump into authoritarianism here, failing to respond both before and after freedom is lost here at home.

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I never thought I would see the day where I would come to praise Ronald Reagan, but here we are. That is a stunningly great quote and I will now read the whole speech.

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It was Peggy Noonan that wrote that speech. I wonder how she feels about her beloved R party going to Normandy this year

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Noonan was a great speech writer and Reagan knew how to strike the pose of a resolute, sober leader while speaking those words. Apparently those abilities are no longer en vogue.

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She probably doesn't give it much thought after her occasional appearances on pundent talk shows.

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That speech was one of Peggy Noonan's best. The other is the speech after the Challenger disaster. Both had me in tears.

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"the surly bonds of earth" stayed with me.

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My son read that poem at my father's memorial service. Dad was a pilot in WWII and he had a copy of "High Flight" on his office wall.

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That is quite wonderful. I'm sure that brought a tear to your eye, Carolyn.

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Noonan incorporated them well, but those specific phrases are from the first and last lines of "High Flight" by John Gillespie Magee.

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Thx!

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There was an underlying ethos in the Republican Party to follow the better angels of their nature until the Dixiecrats took over.

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We may not have thought much of him.But he gave some great speeches!

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He would have turned in his membership card and, maybe, tried to start a New Republican Party.

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That these shitbirds will visit the landing beaches is a desecration of the highest order. I have seen a good many places in my life, but few more heart-rendingly solemn and beautiful than the Normandy American Cemetery. There lie row upon row of crosses and stars marking the final repose of young men who wished nothing more than to live and raise families and grow old in peace, but who instead gave their last full measures so that we can do so. The jaundiced cowardice of this crew has no place there.

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The desecration was begun by the Orange Snake - they're just following their loser king who stepped and spat on the military all the time. More of that needs to be shouted from the hilltops.

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'The leading Republican of his day, Ohio Sen. Robert Taft, ridiculed those who expressed fears of advancing fascism. The United States could not be ranging “over the world like a knight errant,” protecting “democracy and ideals of good faith” and tilting, “like Don Quixote, against the windmills of fascism.” The world was “big enough to contain all kinds of different ways of life.”'

This is an interesting quote, because Taft sure didn't feel that way about Communism. Apparently there is a long history in the Republican Party of acquiescing to fascists while savagely attacking communists, even where there are none.

"They told a story where there was a young boy, seven years old, that was dying. And they went upstairs to the door, pounded on it and explained to Russian soldiers that they had a seven-year-old child that was dying. And the response was: “Let him die. This is war.” That’s a cruelty that I don’t believe that anybody in this country is aware of that's taking place."

In the low bar that is Madison Cawthorn, yes, his replacement is an improvement. But I get so sick and tired of conservatives not giving a damn about anything that affects other people until it affects them personally. Saying that nobody in the US is aware that this sort of atrocity is taking place in Ukraine is so fucking ignorant. Was this guy not aware until he went over there? If so, does he ever question his media diet? Because a lot of fucking people are aware this fucking shit is going on over there. When you aren't aware of something that's happening, it doesn't mean it's not happening. They have set up such an air-tight propaganda echo chamber, in a nation with free speech and free press, and there is no excuse for this much ignorance among people of a certain political persuasion. We cannot solve serious problems if half the country doesn't know about them or are told that they're being lied to about what the problems are.

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It’s so crazy. Too many people don’t want to hear anything that disabuses them of their beliefs. They don’t seek out information because they don’t want to hear it.

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There is no excuse for someone in Congress to act like Russian atrocities are some kind of revelation. It’s total dereliction.

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Bubbles are very comforting places for them to live, I guess.

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Regarding Taft: Ironically in today's NYT, another and current Ohio Senator, J.D. Vance, reprises that role and tries to make a case for a negotiated end to the war in Ukraine.

I hope to soon see many arguments against his argument there and in the Bulwark.

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But at least we can place Taft in the context of a late Victorian USA where we had little involvement in world affairs. He was wrong, but did not have the same context as we do and Mike Johnson also does. (MTG has not more context than a pack of playing cards.)

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Jokers

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Supporting Ukraine might be the one thing I wholeheartedly agree with Bill Kristol on with no caveats.

I've been binging a lot of history podcasts over the last few months to balance the soulcrushing weight of recent events and the one theme that comes up again and again- mixing established religion and politics tends to lead to violence and tragedy. Like... even more than I already thought it did. I just started the History of Byzantium so I'm pretty surprised it's already so relevant, lol.

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That is specifically why the founders of this country incorporated in the constitution the separation of church and state…..but SCOUS and the Trump tribe selectively ignore the words and its meaning when it doesn’t promote their agenda.

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Funny how history is relevant to today's world. It's because humans are humans no matter what era they lived in. Seems like we should focus more on that in the education of our children.

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Excellent piece, Bill. “The United States could not be ranging “over the world like a knight errant,” protecting “democracy and ideals of good faith” and tilting, “like Don Quixote, against the windmills of fascism.” The world was “big enough to contain all kinds of different ways of life.” Today’s Republicans have no problem with fascism. They may as well save their airfare and their empty words, for they honor nothing but themselves.

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Actually , some seem to not only have no problem with fascism , they appear to prefer it .

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Depressingly true.

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This is yet another time when we need to remind folks that if we can't learn from history we will make the same mistakes again. Sadly just like we had Lindbergh, well we have Tucker Carlson today.

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Trumpster too

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Republican congress lesson to society….”when the going gets tough, the “tough” flee.

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The Ted Cruz rule.

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Josh Hawley has also shown good fleeing technique

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That’s cause he’s a younger “Ted Cruz” and takes his lessons on how to be a shit 💩 from the guy who’s somewhat perfected the art.

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LOL!

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The minority of the minority

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He has rules? I thought he tried to wing everything, including Cancun, which supports both our points.🍻.

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Flee to Normandy for a photo op

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No matter how far elected republicans run, they can't escape responsibility. They can be derelict in exercising their responsibility, but that dereliction follows them. Wherever they go.

I've noticed a lot whistling past the graveyard among elected Rs and their media supporters lately. Whether it's downplaying the threat Putin poses to Europe, that Trump poses to the United States, or telling themselves comforting lies that all this fuss about abortion and silly things like women's basic rights will die down before election time, it's like they've all taken a collective deep breath of nitrous oxide.

The sad, entirely avoidable, bit is that reality won't land for republicans until it drops on them like a house in November. I sincerely hope Ukraine has that long..........

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