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Varad Mehta Profile picture
Varad Mehta
@varadmehta
Jan 16 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
A lot of people will act surprised, but this is how party politics works: internal opposition and dissident factions get purged. The pre-2015 rump had a theory of the case . . . and it lost completely. Trump won. So they're finished. And out of the party for good. Forever. Like, what did people think would happen to Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney? No Republican in good standing is going to want to share a stage with them. And, let's be clear, this is a warning to anyone who wants to remain a Republican in good standing not to share a stage with them.
Jan 13 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
The funniest part of this is that the passengers on the maiden voyage of the ludicrously named "Contrarian" include some of the most loathsome members of the "legal resistance": Norm Eisen, Larry Tribe, Katie Phang, Joyce Vance, George Conway, Harry Litman, and Asha Rangappa. The Edward G. Robinson death scene in Soylent Green, but instead of him watching archival film of Earth's bygone natural wonders, it's Jen Rubin watching MSNBC highlight reels of Michael Avenatti and Robert Mueller from 2018 on a loop.
Nov 26, 2024 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Hill Editor 1: "We haven't run anything by a retard lately."

Hill Editor 2: "Say no more!" I knew this retard's name sounded familiar. He wrote this brain-wormed nonsense in August. I'm sure I ridiculed it back then, but I can't find the tweets now.
Nov 6, 2024 • 24 tweets • 7 min read
Many shibboleths of conventional wisdom, some longstanding, some of more recent vintage, died last night. I thought I'd make a list, and then dig up some tweets where I commented on some of them. A 🧵. In no particular order (save the first):

1) Trump can't break 47% of the popular vote.
2) Younger voters are uniformly moving to the left.
3) The early vote has no predictive value.
4) Trump closed the campaign badly.
5) Trans stuff is a political loser.
Jun 15, 2024 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Charlie Dent is as irrelevant to and informed about contemporary Republican politics as David Jolly. The only difference is that he still has some shreds of sanity and restraint left because he's on CNN and not MSNBC, unlike his Sunshine State counterpart. By having the likes of Dent and Jolly as "Republican" voices, CNN and MSNBC are actively keeping their viewers in ignorance about one of the country's two major parties, and therefore, by extension, in ignorance about American politics as a whole.
Jan 31, 2024 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Everyone who observed that Disney's suit against Ron DeSantis was doomed because of In re Hubbard, take a bow. It's only cited three dozen times in an opinion that's just seventeen pages long. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco…
Image We did try to warn you.
Jan 21, 2024 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
.@jawillick argues that SCOTUS should "punt" on the Fourteenth Amendment issue. If I'm reading him correctly, that means a holding which keeps Trump on the ballot because Section 3 isn't self-executing, though he doesn't spell it out in quite those terms. washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/… "If the justices affirmed the Colorado decision, they would devastate the court's standing within the GOP, which would see its voters stripped of the right to vote for their favored candidate in an unprecedented way."

Props to @jawillick for acknowledging this. He's spot on.
Jan 6, 2024 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Does John Roberts want Republicans joining with Democrats to destroy the Supreme Court? If you think the answer to that question is "yes," then it's possible he'll boot Trump off the ballot. If you believe the answer is "no," then he won't. This is just bone ignorant, ivory tower oxygen-starved brain idiocy. Why are so many law professors such absolute detached-from-reality morons? Image
May 22, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
"Youngkin faces high-stakes state legislative races in November. So an announcement about a presidential race is likely to wait until right after that, Republican sources said."

THIS IS WHERE YOUNGKIN WAS A MONTH AGO. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING HAS CHANGED. THERE'S NOTHING NEW HERE. You have to read all the way down to the ninth paragraph (or the Axios equivalent of a paragraph) to learn that Youngkin still wouldn't announce until after the November elections. Which we knew six weeks ago. And that's way too late unless the entire field implodes. Image
May 22, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
"Why isn't Scott entering the race with the same stature as DeSantis despite his conservative record and political resume?"

Because his record and resume are thin in comparison and he gives off strong whiffs of the pre-2015 Republicanism the base hates. fivethirtyeight.com/features/tim-s… "Scott has never netted more than 4 percent of the vote share. In multicandidate ballot tests not including Trump, Scott has never received more than 7 percent of the vote share. And in the past month, he’s been overtaken in polls by Ramaswamy."

I've already noted all of this.
May 21, 2023 • 18 tweets • 3 min read
Every time I watch "Black Orchid," I think they only made that story because Peter Davison's costume as the Fifth Doctor was a cricketer's outfit. "Black Orchid" was a rarity for "Doctor Who" - in 1982 and still today. The first pure historical since 1966/7's "The Highlanders" and the first two-parter since 1975's "The Sontaran Experiment"; and the last in the traditional 25-minute episode format.
May 20, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
The media coverage of Biden's handling of the debt limit isn't quite has negative as the coverage of the Build Back Better follies was for an entire year, but there's plenty of time left to get there. No one remembers it now, but this is the sort of headline Joe Biden was receiving regularly for over a year, from late April of 2021 to the eve of the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act. theguardian.com/us-news/2022/j…
May 20, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Doug Burgum thinking about running for president isn't a sign Ron DeSantis is bleeding in the water. It's a sign Doug Burgum is experiencing a midlife crisis or suffers from a previously undiagnosed psychological ailment. One paragraph: Sununu, Burgum, and Christie are thinking about running for president. Two paragraphs later: No one runs for president without "a detailed and plausible path to victory." That is a self-refuting argument. No such path exists for those three, and everyone knows it. Image
May 20, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
"Hypnotic" is totally getting those "this movie rated 'rotten' on Rotten Tomatoes is currently No. 1 on Netflix" stories in a year. Image I actually liked "Hypnotic," so I'm in the 36%. There's a lot of stuff you've seen before ("The Matrix," "Inception"), but it zigs and zags more times than a drunk doing a sobriety test, never gets bogged down, has Ben Affleck, and is over in a very efficient 92 minutes.
May 7, 2023 • 13 tweets • 4 min read
Pick the adjective you prefer - brutal, abysmal, appalling, catastrophic - but however you slice it, the new ABC News/Washington Post poll is absolutely terrible for Joe Biden. But it's so bad I wonder if they didn't just get an especially hostile sample. washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/… For those who haven't seen them already, the big topline numbers -

Biden JA
36/56 (A)
37/56 (RV)
30/60 (I)

Better on the economy
Trump: 54/53/54
Biden: 36/38/31

2024
Trump: 44/45/42
Biden: 38/39/34

2024 with leaners
Trump: 49
Biden: 42 msn.com/en-us/news/pol…
May 6, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
This is mostly a rehash of stuff that's already been chewed over plenty of times, but it does seem Team DeSantis is getting its ducks lined up and crossing its I's and dotting its T's in anticipation of a formal campaign launch sometime in the next month. washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/… An "ad blitz" that is airing only "in four early states" hasn't "change[d] the dynamics of the race at the national level"? Whoa! I guess Ron DeSantis should just pack it in and not bother getting into the race. Image
May 6, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
"But if 'freedom' or 'woke' is not enough, he will probably need a new set of issues to unite open-to-anyone-but-Trump voters."

He only needs one issue to unify them: not being Trump. Which is what the issue was always going to be. Everything else is noise. There are many words here. "Alvin Bragg," "arrest," charged," and "indictment" are not among them. How you write, let alone publish, an analysis of Republican primary polling without discussing that escapes me. nytimes.com/2023/05/05/ups…
Apr 29, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Florida's ethics commission didn't think too highly of the complaints filed against Ron DeSantis. Image This is the polite, bureaucratic way of saying, "This is manure." Image
Apr 28, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
More than enough firepower to come out guns blazing. Especially since there will be so much more where that came from. H/t @baseballcrank. nypost.com/2023/04/28/ron… "DeSantis' financial advantage looms over the Republican field: Most contenders have cash balances on orders of magnitude lower than his."

One reason the also-rans are starved of cash is the big donors are waiting for RDS, who they expect to get in. politico.com/news/2023/04/2…
Apr 28, 2023 • 13 tweets • 4 min read
The media's knee-jerk assumption that Disney has already beaten Ron DeSantis and that it's all over but the shouting is really something. You'll rarely see it being more lazy and uncurious. Is it unwilling or incapable of accepting DeSantis might win? Yes. msn.com/en-us/money/ot… I'd love for just one reporter to ask one of these "experts" if they've ever heard of US v. O'Brien and how that might apply to Disney's suit. Image
Apr 27, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
The same journos and Twitter experts who four weeks ago breathlessly insisted Disney had gotten the better of Ron DeSantis with its secret deal, are now breathlessly insisting Disney has gotten the better of DeSantis with its lawsuit against him for killing its secret deal. It's amazing how identical the coverage now is to what it was a month ago. Just inflexible, unblinking credulity. Never once will these people ask themselves why, if as they swore a month ago, Disney had gotten the last word in the matter, it needs to sue DeSantis today.