Halifax2TheMax said:

Somebody was lamenting about how it was that they could come to Sleepy Woke Joe Basement Biden's side when they had been name called and ridiculed for the past four years. Well, I would ask, how can you work with repubs or come to their side when they refuse to debate policy proposals, or have proposals of their own and reach a compromise? You know progress? How can you work with the other side that only wants to demonize dems and lead their flock to the trough of do nothing so dems fail? One would think after 8 years of watching Moscow Mitchy Baby beat the shit out of Obama and the up and comers like Cotton, voters would have learned? Nope. Fuck them. Stop blaming dems and lay the blame where it squarely belongs, at the feet of the repubs. And I hate to break it to you but the repubs are going to make this shit hole country worse because they can yell louder and are bereft of ideas.

Tom Cotton’s dumb attack on a Biden nominee hints at the future of Trumpism

Dec. 2, 2020 at 11:08 a.m. EST

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The 2024 Republican presidential primary is already underway, and the battle to inherit the mantle of Trumpism is at the center of it all. There is no clearer sign of this than the colossally stupid attacks that the would-be Trumpist 2024 hopefuls are already lobbing at President-elect Joe Biden’s nominees.

Case in point: Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas has now debuted a new attack line on Neera Tanden, Biden’s nominee to run the Office of Management and Budget.

Cotton told Fox News that Tanden would rather send relief checks to undocumented immigrants than to American families. This comes after another 2024 Republican hopeful — Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri — attracted widespread scorn for suggesting that Janet Yellen, Biden’s nominee to head the Treasury Department, is simultaneously “corporatist” and driven by “Marxist” impulses.

There is a more respectable way to advance Trumpism’s mantle — under the rubric of what’s usually called “conservative populism” — but early indications are that these folks will seek to distinguish themselves in no small part with race-to-the-bottom gutter Trumpism.

“Neera Tanden has no chance of being confirmed,” Cotton said on Fox on Wednesday morning. “This is a woman who wants Congress to hold up coronavirus relief to the American people so we can give checks to illegal immigrants.”

This is highly misleading, and when you understand how, it becomes obvious that it’s basically an attack on Tanden for the sin of … being a mainstream Democrat.

A silly attack

Cotton’s attack echoes an earlier round of GOP attacks on Democrats for blocking a woefully underfunded GOP stimulus bill this fall. Republicans offered a paltry $300 billion — Democrats wanted $2 trillion — and Democrats opposed that offering on numerous grounds, including its lack of direct payments to all individuals, never mind undocumented immigrants.

As a Reuters fact check demonstrated, Democrats did not block this bill due to its failure to send money to the undocumented.

It’s true that House Democrats did pass a $3 trillion bill last spring (the Heroes Act) that made undocumented immigrants eligible for payments. But so what? The mainstream Democratic position, which is shared by the Center for American Progress (which Tanden runs), is indeed that it would be better to include undocumented immigrants.

But this is for good reason: Many are essential workers helping the country weather the coronavirus crisis, and channeling stimulus spending through them as well will help mitigate our economic crisis.

Regardless, this isn’t the obstacle to getting help to American families. Republicans are the obstacle to this. Democratic and GOP leaders disagree on much bigger fundamentals: whether to include badly needed aid to state governments and direct payments to all individuals.

The Senate GOP leadership opposes those things right now. The idea that it’s somehow disqualifying in an OMB chief to support the widely held Democratic desire for undocumented immigrants to be included is silly. This would disqualify most mainstream Democrats.

Worse, this contains hints as to where Trumpism will be taken by its most ardent 2024-eyeing champions.

What’s next for Trumpism

On Fox News, Cotton also attacked Yellen by claiming that she presided over a “low-growth, stagnant economy that didn’t create the kind of jobs and wages that working class Americans need.”

Yellen was chair of the Federal Reserve during the Barack Obama presidency, which did see a grueling recovery after the Great Recession. Let’s put aside the fact that the Trump economy was almost entirely a continuation of trends inherited from Obama until Trump wrecked it by failing catastrophically on coronavirus.

As Paul Krugman points out, the Obama recovery cited by Cotton was harder than it needed to be in part because of austerity imposed by Republican senators who were actively trying to hurt the country to cripple the Obama presidency.

And during those years Yellen largely got it right by prioritizing fiscal policy to combat the recession and unemployment over worrying about inflation. That’s why many economists see Yellen as a pro-worker choice: While she hasn’t been perfect in those priorities, she’s widely seen as trying to get that balance right in a way that emphasizes benefits to workers.

This is something that self-styled pro-worker conservative populists like Hawley and Cotton should support. But here’s Hawley spouting utter gibberish about how Yellen will sell out American workers on manufactured culture-war grounds:

Let me explain this to you. Corporate liberals are woke capitalists. The corporatists love critical race theory and all the other warmed-over Marxist garbage. They sell out working Americans and sneer at them at the same time. That’s the New Left

Tim Miller

@Timodc

Pre-Election: Biden will appoint Marxists and must be stopped. Post-Election: Biden is appointing corporate liberals, I wish he'd break the mold. #Populisming @HawleyMO

5:02 PM · Nov 30, 2020

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Others have made short work of this (see Paul Waldman and Jonathan Chait). But I’d like to suggest something else: We could have an actual debate about whether the conservative populism championed by Hawley and Cotton and others of their ilk might find genuine crossover with Biden’s priorities.

Conservative populists, driven by nationalism, support things like industrial policy to build up American manufacturing in the face of the China challenge. Biden has offered his own version of industrial policy, including using federal procurement to stimulate demand for U.S. manufactured goods, investments in technological development, and building medical stockpiles to reduce dependence on China and on vulnerable global supply chains amid emergencies.

No, the overlap isn’t perfect — Biden’s ideas lean more toward investing in clean energy than conservatives might like, and he will seek forms of international cooperation that anti-globalists such as Hawley and Cotton won’t stomach — but there’s potential for fruitful debate here. Biden is now signaling that he may try to build consensus with conservative populists around the idea that competition with China can create common ground for agreement on such industrial policies.

But it seems likely that conservative populists’ main champions — focused on 2024 — will be more preoccupied with feeding Trumpist impulses by playing to the GOP primary bleachers with crude, bad faith nonsense. That will make such debates far less likely. It’s too bad.

Opinion | Tom Cotton’s attack on Neera Tanden hints at the future of Trumpism - The Washington Post

Halifax2TheMax said:

Any comment from the fine senator from Arkanass on Signalgate? Anyone have a mash up of his faux rage when Hillary testified before the senate on Benghazi? Is he roaring now?