From the "Nobody Could Have Predicted!" file: ISIS fighters have moved back into Raqqa, Syria, not even a year after coalition forces allowed 250 of their fighters to leave Raqqa with their families and all the weapons they could fit into a three-mile long convoy. It sure is a good thing our new national security braintrust isn't overly preoccupied with truly ridiculous projects like regime change in Iran! Oops, sorry; I forgot which evil alternate universe I was in for a moment.
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt resigns/is fired, citing "unrelenting attacks on me personally" because waaaaaaaaaah! And our President's votaries now see Mr. Pruitt as One of Them, because he gets attacked by Those Librul Elites just like they do! Never mind that they'd never tolerate a Cone of Silence from a Democrat. (Also, a former coal lobbyist now runs the EPA, on an "interim" basis that I expect to last at least until the end of 2020.)
In the face of yet more "liberal" media hand-wringing over Just What Those Red State Voters Are Really Like, Amanda Marcotte at Salon reminds us that the glue that really binds them (and their messy lives) to our President (and his messy life which is now our messy life) is sexism. "The anti-abortion campaign is all about punishing women for sex, not men," right-wingers don't "put a 'higher value' on marriage" so much as they "stigmatize not being married," by which they mean women not being married -- all true, and as long as men are trying to get sex from women (and imagining themselves somehow disenfranchised if they don't), this'll all remain a problem.
Ho hum, privatizing IRS tax collection functions has caused our government to lose money, which Nobody Could Have Predicted! Worse, private tax collectors more typically go after low-income working families than big fish, which Nobody Could Have Predicted, Either! We talk about this kind of stuff all the time, but our elected representatives never seem to listen. That's why we need to keep talking about it. Can't some enterprising Democrat somewhere run campaign ads about this? Or would that be uncivil?
Max Boot becomes another major right-wing figure (a la George Will) to openly root for Democrats to win back the House and Senate this fall. Of course, Hillary Clinton was able to find plenty of Republicans willing to endorse her and even shoot ads for her; how did that work out? And how much pull do folks like Max Boot and George Will really have with regular Americans? Hell, how much pull do they have with other elite right-wingers, most of whom, I imagine, are saying we're getting rid of regulations and getting two Supreme Court Justices out of all of this as we speak?
Finally, leave it to Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall to point out that simultaneously telling Democrats "we have to fight or we can't win" and "if we do fight, it will backfire and we also can't win" is utterly absurd. He also approves of the "Abolish ICE" slogan because at least it's got "clarity and power," like, you know, all right-wing slogans do no matter how stupid they are, plus "(i)f your political language tip toes around what you think or shows you’re not quite sure what you think or shows that you know what you think but may not be willing to act on what you think, that has bad consequences. It signals weakness and irresolution. It shows you may not have the resoluteness to act." Which explains how Scott Walker/Sam Brownback/Paul LePage/Rick Snyder/Rick Scott somehow won all those elections -- they're wrong about everything, but they're resolutely wrong.
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