WatDabney

Chrono Trigger - SNES, 1995

As if Trump is subject to court rulings...

This is a coup.

This incident leaves the LA Times in an impossible position. How can readers trust anything published under its banner when its owner has demonstrated such willingness to corrupt the paper’s editorial integrity for his own political agenda?

They can't, and shouldn't bother trying.

That's a freedom that the internet provides that too few people exercise. There are more than enough news sources out there, so there's no reason for anyone to ever grant a single one of them a second chance.

Here's a hint:

When Harris was out giving speeches heavy on economic populism, polls consistently showed her in the lead.

When, at the behest of the donor class and their stooges in the DNC, she switched away from populism and to standard, vacuous neo-liberalism, that lead vanished, never to return.

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There's an important question though. Does the DNC actually want to win?

I honestly don't think they do. I think they've found a comfortable and profitable role as the controlled opposition, all of this hand-wringing is just for show, and what they're in fact going to do is just install another bunch of neo-liberal establishment hacks and go right back to their standard tactics of condemning the republicans while making excuses for failing to actually do anything about them, and promising that if only we give them more money, they'll surely stand up for us after the next election.

I'd love for them to prove me wrong. I would've loved that anyway, but it's especially significant now, because the US is circling the bowl, and the time for meaningfully promising anything is rapidly running out. This isn't just a moment when the DNC needs to step up to reclaim some integrity - they need to step up to do their part to save the US from the destruction the Trumpists are hellbent on bringing.

Will they?

The most amazing part of this timeline isn't just the fact that the US is turning into a third-world shithole, but the speed at which it's doing it.

Bigotry is fundamental to fascism.

It's not even enough that it has to be culturally acceptable for the in-group to hate and call for the oppression of out-groups - their right to that hatred and oppression has to be enshrined in law.

And that's not coincidentally exactly what's happening.

Actually, that was a rhetorical question

And amusingly enough, you provided an additional illustration of the real answer.

What makes you think that I'd be interested in defending a claim I didn't make?

They aren't "failing"at all. By their corrupt standards, 2024 was a resounding success.

They managed to get their establishment hack through the primaries and kept the soft money flowing. Then after the debate debacle, they managed to put off a resolution long enough to tamp down the determination of most of the party, so then, at the eleventh hour, they could jump straight from Biden's withdrawal to Harris's anointment as the candidate and avoid the risk of an open convention and a progressive getting some traction. Then they enjoyed record-breaking fundraising (which is far and away the most important thing to them), then swapped out Harris's notably successful populist rhetoric for mealy-mouthed, transparently corporate-ass-kissing pabulum, which led to her loss, and now will allow the DNC to just sit back and play their age-old game of "well, we'd like to stop the Republicans from destroying your lives, but we're the poor powerless minority, so we just can't, but if you send in your donations now, we can get them out of office in [year of next election]!"

That is, to the DNC, a success on all counts - they kept the soft money flowing, kept the progressives out of office and situated themselves so that they can dodge the blame for harm done to the American people and fundraise and run in the next election merely on the platform of being not-the-Republicans.

Even this analysis doesn't capture the real problem.

Asserting that the DNC "fails to learn" implies that they have some goal they're not meeting.

They don't.

Their goal is to rake in as much corporate soft money as possible, and by that standard, this past election was a resounding success. And nothing else, including winning elections, matters to them.

So they're not really "failing" at anything. In fact they're succeeding nicely. It's just that they're succeeding at being corrupt, self-serving and deceitful.

More Trump projection.