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Brian Beutler Profile picture
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23 Jun, 4 tweets, 3 min read
@davidshor @mattyglesias I think this famous video speaks to the point well.
@davidshor @mattyglesias Trump is widely loathed; even where he polls evenly overall, his detractors absolutely despise him. It’s a source of immense political power, but it often goes untapped.
@davidshor @mattyglesias And even if you think the Trump name is untouchable in swing states, he and the GOP ceded a whole bunch of abstract culture-war terrain to Dems over the years (truth, patriotism, democracy) that is there for the taking.
@davidshor @mattyglesias But first they have to decide politics should be about that stuff, too, not just bills.

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More from @brianbeutler

Brian Beutler Profile picture
24 Jun
This seems correct, RE the critical race theory propaganda blitz, and should be a reminder that the whole thing is a concoction of the right, built by nutpicking and dissembling about random incidents that have no attachment to national partisan politics.
The asymmetry in how the parties prosecute culture wars reminds me of how this crazy story from almost three years ago just kinda went poof. politico.com/story/2019/08/…
The elite right had taken to blending "Nietzschean philosophy with critiques of contemporary Western society, denigrating homosexuality, Judiasm, Islam, feminism," fixating on "population genetics," and an "affinity for Slavic and northern European cultures." I.e. Nazism.
Read 6 tweets
Brian Beutler Profile picture
16 Jun
Manchin wins over @rickhasen. slate.com/news-and-polit…
My main thought here is the concessions to Republicans *have to be contingent on them voting for the bill*, and if they don’t, the filibuster has to go, and ideally those provisions have to go, too. Otherwise this is all just a bunch of suckers wasting each others’ time.
This is just basic negotiating, it’s what Republicans do, and not only that Manchin *knows* this is what they do.
Read 4 tweets
Brian Beutler Profile picture
16 Jun
Haha cool cool.
It’s ok I didn’t want to see the records anyhow and it’s not like we have a right to them or that Trump was actually the president for four years, y’know?
Seriously how do they come to this position and not feel completely self-defeated? abcnews.go.com/Politics/summi…
Read 4 tweets
Brian Beutler Profile picture
10 Jun
Similar thoughts here. mailchi.mp/crooked.com/bi…

There’s another dimension to this, which is the creation of a false dichotomy between Bold Truth Telling and Lying, as if the craft of writing made it impossible not to engage in Epic Media Lab Leak Fiasco hyperbole without lying.
The lab-leak thing in particular is an example of a line of critique that has a grain of truth to it, but has been exaggerated by critics who are very invested in the appearance of rectitude and not at all invested in whether their overwrought criticisms will spark moral panic.
I’d say intelligent critics have an ethical obligation to consider how their word choices will be exploited by propagandists, which runs right alongside their ethical obligation to tell the truth. Refusing to consider the former is actually a kind of laziness in writing.
Read 6 tweets
Brian Beutler Profile picture
9 Jun
Watching the panicky Catastrophic Lab-Leak Fiasco Failure debate continue to play out, I’ve found it useful to imagine how the WMD debate would’ve played out in 2002 if Twitter had existed, and Bush et al were widely understood to be shameless liars on the scale of the Trumpers.
My sense is it would’ve developed differently, but along similar lines. Bush would’ve asserted the existence of WMD, nearly all liberals would’ve assumed he was lying, some in media would’ve overstated their certainty about the unknowable and called the WMD allegation “debunked.”
Then, Bush-allied intelligence sources would’ve planted stories about Iraqi scientists getting mysteriously ill (or whatever) in the Wall Street Journal (or wherever), and a posse of liberals would’ve arisen to say The Media’s WMD Fiasco Is A Crisis.
Read 7 tweets
Brian Beutler Profile picture
8 Jun
Biden’s assertion that he could persuade actual Republicans to play fair was central to his campaign, which the Nates of the world fawned over as the most skillful political showcase in many years.
This voguish liberal idea that all political decisions do and rightly should flow formulaically from static polling data is one of the most insipid and destructive of the past decade.
Polling data says talking about persuasion is popular —> praise Biden for talking about persuasion

Polling data says Biden isn’t popular enough among those he needs to persuade —> absolve Biden for not being persuasive
Read 5 tweets

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