Marc Short is fully cooperating with the 1/6 committee, but he’s also insisting his boss Mike Pence shouldn’t have to testify. Reminder: this is never about who’s “good” or “bad” or “grew a conscience” or “can be trusted.” It’s about whether these pieces of shit are useful to us.
Short was a piece of shit as Pence’s chief of staff. He’s still a piece of shit for taking 13 months to finally sell out Trump over 1/6. But Short has now become a USEFUL piece of shit, because he’d rather give up Trump than get indicted for contempt, and he hates Trump anyway.
Our side always wastes so much time debating whether someone like Short has “grown a conscience” or “can be trusted” or “should be forgiven.” But that’s gibberish talk. Those concepts do not exist on me way or the other with these kinds of folks.
The way we win is to set things up such that our needs happen to match up with theirs. Which is what the 1/6 committee has done with Short. He gives up Trump so he can stay out of legal trouble, and we get his crucial testimony and evidence. It’s a transaction.
If you think your job as a liberal activist is simply to sit back and judge people like Short, you’ll never win a damn thing. That’s not how you win in political battles. You’re just making yourself feel superior to them, which is mere political masturbation and nothing more.
Short is still one of the bad guys. He will still work against us in the ways that personally suit him. But we can trust him to help us in the specific ways where it happens to also benefit him, because that’s what people like Short base their every move on.
Same thing with Pence. He’s only attacking Trump because he selfishly thinks it’ll benefit him. But let’s use Pence’s words as a tool for fighting snd winning, instead of wasting our time whining about how Pence is going to “both sides” it. WHO CARES? Take the win!
If you just sit around judging the other side all day, then you’re a complete waste of oxygen – even if your assessment of the other side is correct. You have zero interest in winning. You only want to feel superior. You are the stereotype that the other side claims we all are.
Many of you still waste your day debating whether Liz Cheney is “good” or “bad” or “can be trusted.” WHO CARES? She’s a piece of shit who can be trusted on the specific issue of taking Trump down because her goals happen to line up with ours on that one issue. Simple as that.
The bad guys in politics don’t “grow a conscience” or “grow a spine.” This is gibberish talk. Nothing ever works that way in politics. Anyone who’s even talking like that is too naive to be anywhere near political activism.
In reality, the right wing bad guys all have corrupt agendas, which sometimes just happen to line up with the good guys on specific issues – and the good guys must sometimes take advantage of it in order to get a majority and/or win a particular battle. It’s as simple as that.
Case in point: Liz Cheney has proven to be a reliable ally on the 1/6 committee, because its goals line up with her personal agenda. But she still votes against every piece of good legislation we introduce, because she’s still corrupt overall. It’s not hard to comprehend this.
But in order to understand anything about politics, you have to let go of the imaginary concepts like who on the other side is “good” or “bad” or is worthy of your praise. That’s just you fictionalizing politics so you can judge people and feel superior. Narcissistic and idiotic.
90% of the people on our “side” are only here because they want to feel superior (meaning they don’t care about winning), or they want to feel outrage (meaning they want to lose). In other words, 90% of our side is completely useless to our cause.
If you’re in the 10% of our side that actually wants to win, it’s not enough to just show up and fight and put in the work. You have to admit to yourself that 90% of our side is harmful losers, and you have to either try to convert them to winners, or shout down their bullshit.
If we can teach the losers on our side how to be winners, or just drive them out of political activism so they’ll stop harming us, we’ll never lose another political battle again. But something about our side has to fundamentally change, and fast. Stakes are too high.
Do you think we wanted to partner with Stalin in World War II? Of course not. He was evil. But working with him was the only way to take down Hitler, the greater evil. This example explains how pretty much all of politics works in general.
We didn’t waste time debating whether Stalin was “good” or “bad” or “could be trusted.” Irrelevant. He was a bad guy who could be trusted on the one specific issue of taking down Hitler, because it happened to line up with his own personal agenda, for different reasons than ours.
We knew that once Hitler was finished off, Stalin would be back to being our enemy. We didn’t care. We used him because we needed him. We knew we could temporarily rely on him for that one thing, because it was also what he wanted. Then we moved on. History judged him later.
It’s the same now. To whatever extent we can get something useable from Short, Pence, Cheney, or any other bad guy, that we can use to finish off Trump, we’ll do it. We have to. Then we’ll deal with them later. There’s no “good” or “bad” in this war, there is only winning.
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