Your “So Let Me Clear My Throat” Thursday Open Thread

Good evening, fellow miscreants and dick joke enthusiasts. As you may have noticed, without Thursday Night Football and hobo season, we don’t have a regular Thursday night poster (is that joke out of bounds now that he’s paralyzed?). So sometimes you get tehHippo, sometimes you get DonT, sometimes you get a Karen Carpenter job, and sometimes you get the ramblings of someone who is so very tired, so very frustrated, so very disappointed, and so very mad at his fellow Americans.  If you don’t want to hear rants like this, volunteer to take over Thursday posts!  Failing that, I’m pulling out the soapbox.

Last week, I had a super long business trip back out in LA. Right before I went to the airport, I stopped off to fast charge my rental car at a station by a hotel. Mind you, it was mid-afternoon, like 2:45 or so, and there was a guy standing by the charger smoking a cigar and drinking what I assumed to be a gin and tonic. Probably mid to late 50s, sunglasses, grizzled but friendly, would probably fit right in at one of Clue Heywood’s dive bars. Anyhoodles, he started asking me questions about electric vehicles, we got to talking, he brought up the war in Ukraine, he made some vague comment about inflation and how bad the economy is and at some point mused aloud if things would be different with a different party’s President in the Oval Office. Despite later confirming my assumptions by saying he “doesn’t like to talk politics but is a Fox News guy“, I was happy to get into it.

Now, would things be different with a different party’s President?  Given that the previous President was actively rooting for Russia to take over Ukraine and wanted to solve COVID with bleach and misinformation, and thinks Kyle Rittenhouse is a hero (rather than anhero), yeah, all sorts of shit would be different.  Would a Republican President have prevented inflation? No. Do the data suggest Republicans tend to create economic messes that Democrats have had to clean up?  Yes.  Would gas prices still be high? Probably depends on how quickly Putin took Kyiv in this shitty counterfactual.

But that wasn’t the question behind the question. The smoking stranger’s frame was that Democrats had ruined the economy, and Republicans would be better for America. And the biggest difference between the parties right now isn’t one of economic policy but that one lives in reality and the other…just doesn’t. And he almost immediately went to “politicians are all terrible and none of them want to get things done for us.”

So I went right at that. We have two parties today–one that often sucks but believes in trying to govern (and democracy) and another that literally has no party platform and whose primary ethos is “own the libs” and “facts don’t exist.” Oh and fomenting white nationalism and grievance politics over any possible solutions. There are plenty of examples of how terrible the modern GOP has become, but I wanted to focus on the concrete and try and connect with rather than persuade or debate this guy. I told him I’d lived in DC for a long time and could not abide a political party that both was fine with a violent attempt to overthrow the government/overturn a democratic election AND welcomed the type of people who believed Democrats were sacrificing children beneath a pizza place in DC that I’d actually been to and indeed confirmed had no basement. Oh, and that they were willing to go shoot them based on this lie.

On actual policies, the Republican party actively opposes things it was for as soon as Democrats become for them.  Democrats wanted cap and trade for climate, but President Obama proposed a Clean Energy Standard because Republicans had supported it in the past and wanted a bipartisan energy package. Hell, even Obamacare was a product of Democrats saying “let’s take a Republican idea, RomneyCare, and bring Republicans along rather than go for Universal Health Care.” In the Recovery Act in 2009, Democrats added tax cuts and credits that Republican legislators asked for in an effort to build a bridge and bipartisan coalition.  I could be mistaken, but I believe the total number of Republicans that voted in favor of all three of those packages in Congress was zero. When was the last time Republicans tried to reach across the aisle or even gave a shit about what Democrats would vote for?  Everything Democrats do is “socialism” or “evil” and the conservative media apparatus is committed to branding “the left” as enemies of America because the ends justify the means is an easier sell when you’ve dehumanized and “othered” your political opponent.

The Atlantic article Hippo posted the other day has really stuck with me, and I referenced in in my conversation with this stranger.

“The crisis for the Church is a crisis of discernment,” he said over lunch. “Discernment”—one’s basic ability to separate truth from untruth—“is a core biblical discipline. And many Christians are not practicing it.”

Does truth matter? Is it ok for Fox News to explicitly lie and say that I hate America? Do you think I’m evil because I’m a Democrat?  Saying I’m not a patriotic American is bullshit, I very much am and it’s not very Christian to rule me out because I believe in a woman’s right to choose.  I (rightly) assumed that religion would be a sensitive but relevant point. Good news, his son-in-law is Jewish, so he was capable of the slightest bit of pausing and mulling when I asked him “do you think people want religious freedom or just the freedom for their own religion?”

When I invoked Fox News, he told me he liked Tucker Carlson because they thought similarly and that Tucker got a bad rap even though he was “a little over the top.” I paused for a beat and said “I think it’s interesting that when Tucker got sued, the defense from Fox’s own attorneys was that a reasonable person wouldn’t assume that he’s telling the truth.  What does that tell you?”  I think that resonated.

Look, I won’t belabor you with the whole conversation, and a week out, I’m downplaying and/or forgetting some of the more salient points. What I can tell you is when I finished charging my car, I shook his hand and he thanked me for the discussion. He said he wished more people would talk like this, and I said we all should look up from our phones once in a while to have a real conversation with a stranger instead of continuing to heads down plow forward in the beliefs that our neighbor was evil.  He promised me he’d read the aforementioned Atlantic piece, and I left feeling slightly less angry but not a whole lot more hopeful.

If you’re like me, sports are an occasional distraction from the painful reality that Thomas Hobbes has never been proven more right and our neighbors are idiots. So what’s on tonight?

NBA Playoffs:

Celtics @ Heat, Game 2 of Eastern Conference Finals, 7:30PM DFO Time, ESPN

NHL Playoffs:

Lightning @ Panthers, Game 2 of Eastern Conference Semifinals, 6PM DFO Time, TNT
Avalanche @ Blues, Game 2 of Western Conference Semifinals, 8:30PM DFO Time, TNT

0.6% of the MLB Season

Mariners @ Sawx, 6:10PM DFO Time
DBack DBags @ Cubbies, 6:40PM DFO Time
Rangers @ ‘Stros, 7:10PM DFO Time

Futbol:

Américav

Pachuca

I don’t understand Mexican Liga (or most of the other Ligas) but ESPN says that’s on at 8pm DFO time if you can find it televised somewhere.

Aussie Rules Football:

Stay up late enough and you can watch Carlton and Sydney, 4:40AM DFO Time, WatchAFL App or show up at WEW’s house

That’s it, I think. The exalted/exulted Rev covered it the other night, it’s hard not to be tired.  But I guess my message, if I have one, is keep talking to each other.  People are dumb and getting dumber and I probably didn’t change that guy’s mind at all, but maybe, just maybe the next time he hears some bullshit claim on Fox or one of his friends talk about “libtards” as the enemy of the state, there’s at least a chance he pauses and goes, “nah, I’m being sold a bunch of bullshit.”  And recognizing the bullshit is the only shot in hell we have to getting on a path out of this crap.