@mattyglesias This is not a marginal case that requires careful delineation. Glenn has a long and distinguished career of focusing negative attention upon individuals in order to either drive them from the public sphere or sharply reduce their willingness to engage.
@mattyglesias In this context it is fully justified to refer to his activity as harassment, even if it does not rise to either the legal definition or the platform terms of service definition.
@mattyglesias Glenn is a man who viciously attacks people that he disagrees with, usually in moralistic terms intended to generate follow on attacks by his followers. This does not make him a criminal, but it does make him a sadistic asshole who should be shunned.
@mattyglesias And that, it seems to me, is the core of the argument that folks are making on the twitters today.
As I’ve said before, it’s a bit overdue.
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And very briefly on this final bit from the anti-anti-Trump left; the idea is that serious investigation of collusion between Russia and the Trump administration would somehow benefit "corporate power," which is generally associated with the defense industrial base.
In its most crude, "Lockheed Martin wants likes the Russia investigation because it creates a new Cold War which means more F-35s." This was based on the apparent belief that Russia drives some significant portion of US defense spending.
As anyone familiar with force planning and the budget could have mentioned, the foreign (as opposed to internal) driver of the defense budget is China, and it has been for 15 years or so. The reason is that China poses a much more significant military threat than Russia.
Lotta GOPsters hoped that they could keep their heads down and get through the transition, apparently forgetting that outbidding is a thing.
And hey, I can appreciate the true level of anger that they have against Hawley and Cruz. It's one thing to get outbid by a genuine idiot like Gohmert; comes with the territory when you've decided to represent the kind of people who make up the GOP primary electorate.
Hawley and Cruz aren't dumb, they're just utterly unprincipled and are outbidding in an effort to control the future of the party. Turning a crisis into an opportunity, so to speak.
This needs to be emphasized more, because it’s not accidental. It’s the result of ideological hostility to governance that produces decision-makers who are inept at best, and view politics as a mechanism for distributing spoils at worst. Often both.
Before March I was onboard the “worse human than Bush, but not thus far a worse President” train, because Trump had been lucky enough to avoid any serious external crises. That ended in March, with predictable effect.
And while generally I’m happy that we’ve shifted to the idea that invading Iraq was a Bad Idea, and not simply Bad Execution, it’s worth remembering that it was in fact a Bad Idea that was Very Badly Executed in large part because of the way the GOP approaches governance.