doing the right thing only when it's self-serving should get no credit at all

"""
six senators—Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Cindy Hyde-Smith, John Kennedy, Roger Marshall, and Tommy Tuberville—still voted to reject Arizona’s electors and thus disenfranchise the state’s voters. So did a hundred and twenty-one representatives—a majority of the Republican caucus in the House—including the Minority Leader, Kevin McCarthy, of California.

“the best way we can show respect for the voters who were upset is by telling them the truth" - Mitt Romney

What has changed is that Trump is now clearly on the losing side, and McConnell and Graham know it.

seven Republican senators—Cruz, Hawley, Hyde-Smith, Cynthia Lummis, Marshall, Rick Scott, and Tuberville—voted to reject Pennsylvania’s electors. So did a hundred and thirty-eight Republican representatives.
"""

I'm sure this is harmless

totally normal; totally complicit

is it fair to call the party undemocratic?

when admitting reality is "political suicide", the whole party is morally bankrupt, the institution as well as its voter base

former editor in chief of BuzzFeed News who leaked the Steele Dossier argues that shouldn't have been done and journalists should reprise their role as gatekeepers of information, lest discourse turn into a mess of unsubstantiated mudslinging, which is what it was in 2016.
"In 2017, I made the decision to publish the unverified “Steele dossier,” in part on the grounds that gatekeepers were looking at it and influenced by it, but keeping it from their audience... the special nervousness that many outlets, including this one, feel about the provenance of the Hunter Biden emails is, in many ways, the legacy of the WikiLeaks experience. I’d prefer to put my faith in Mr. Murray and careful, professional journalists like him than in the social platforms’ product managers and executives. And I hope Americans relieved that the gatekeepers are reasserting themselves will also pay attention to who gets that power, and how centralized it is, and root for new voices to correct and challenge them."

almost any election scenario this fall is likely to lead to popular protests on a scale we have not seen this century

“What we need is a new social contract that will enable us to get past extreme polarization to find consensus, tip the shares of economic growth back toward workers and improve government funding for public health, education and infrastructure,” Goldstone and Turchin wrote in their Berggruen Institute article.

Can that really happen in today’s combat zone of weaponized social media, in which even modest proposals to ratchet back inequality are framed as “communism”?

It’s a sign of how far we’ve fallen that the president of the United States can accuse his predecessor of “treason” based on pure fictions, and his campaign can suggest that his challenger’s candidacy is illegitimate, only to see it largely ignored as typical conduct on his part.

To be clear, the “Obamagate” ploy will almost certainly fail. According to Axios, Attorney General William P. Barr will likely not release a “report” on his “review” of the origins of the Russia investigation by Election Day. You just can’t find good corrupt co-conspiratorial help these days, apparently.

Michigan lawmaker: “My fear is real that we are creating an environment that is a powder keg, and I don’t want to see citizens of all stripes getting hurt.”

Lynn said he was frustrated after last week’s protests when he saw black Americans sharing comments that they would never be allowed to carry guns in the capitol and scream into the faces of police officers.

"There is no reason to customize the case against her nomination to the tastes of moderate Republican senators. Instead, Democrats’ intended audience must be that idiosyncratic, endangered species of American we call “swing voters.” And that means focusing on policy, not personality."

Carlos del Rio, executive associate dean at the Emory School of Medicine, told POLITICO the CDC guidelines do not make sense because individuals who have been in close contact with a confirmed case of Covid-19 for at least 15 minutes could potentially be infected and should be tested.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo slammed the change as “political propaganda.” Officials in several other states, including California, Connecticut and Washington, said Wednesday that they would not alter their testing approach to match the new CDC guidelines.

"Suggesting that people without symptoms, who have known exposure to COVID-positive individuals, do not need testing is a recipe for community spread and more spikes in coronavirus," American Medical Association President Susan Bailey said.

The abrupt — and unannounced — changes have already intensified scrutiny of the CDC's independence, and the administration's broader coronavirus response ahead of the November election.

The Associated Press reported in May that CNP Action discussed recruiting doctors who were willing to push narratives about reopening the economy before safety benchmarks were met in a May 11 phone call.

Democrats went for a soundbite that still somehow over-estimated the intelligence of the American public, while still missing the entire meal

"Trump commingled the personal and the national not just on trade questions but across the whole field of national security. I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my White House tenure that wasn’t driven by re-election calculations.

These and innumerable other similar conversations with Trump formed a pattern of fundamentally unacceptable behavior that eroded the very legitimacy of the presidency. Had Democratic impeachment advocates not been so obsessed with their Ukraine blitzkrieg in 2019, had they taken the time to inquire more systematically about Trump’s behavior across his entire foreign policy, the impeachment outcome might well have been different."

it's almost like having a racist tyrant-wannabe in power matters

"According to our interpreter, Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do. The National Security Council’s top Asia staffer, Matthew Pottinger, told me that Trump said something very similar during his November 2017 trip to China."

also someone with a "reflex to try to talk his way out of anything, even a public-health crisis"

"The NSC biosecurity team functioned exactly as it was supposed to. It was the chair behind the Resolute desk that was empty."

policy of the world's superpower is based in narcissism and weakness

"Most important of all, will Trump’s current China pose last beyond election day? The Trump presidency is not grounded in philosophy, grand strategy or policy. It is grounded in Trump. That is something to think about for those, especially China realists, who believe they know what he will do in a second term."