Thursday Open Thread

4 thoughts on “Thursday Open Thread”

1. In a "No Sh*t, Sherlock!" explainer, the New York Times warns that if elected, Trump could certainly do exactly as he has threatened — weaponizing the DOJ and corrupting the judiciary to persecute anyone who doesn't bow to his will — starting with political opponents and of course media that don't parrot his propaganda.

    

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2. Frame Wars (SIC). via David Kurtz at TPM.

   As for puncturing the Fox News bubble, Harris’ presence essentially did that, albeit for less than 30 minutes on a Wednesday evening in October. There’s only so much you can do. I’m reminded of this smart thread on debunking v. pre-bunking from two years ago by Jennifer Mercieca, a historian of American political rhetoric at Texas A&M: “Every day our political discourse is dominated by an agenda-setting war (what issues we should talk about) and a frame war (how we should frame/understand those issues). Again, so much of our political discourse is about controlling our political discourse.”

   Harris didn’t have much control over the Fox News agenda-setting: “immigration” – by which we really mean the vilification of people of color as “other” – dominated the first 10 mins of a 26-minute interview, and abortion never came up. But she was relentless in maintaining her own framing of the issues that did come up. The tradeoff – losing an agenda-setting battle in order to fight and try to win a framing battle – is the calculation the Harris campaign made in deciding it was worth it to reach some subset of voters.

   And it never hurts to force a little bit of reality into the faces of Fox News viewers.

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3. After reading this WaPo story, I'm starting to think it might not be a good idea to elect Tr*mp after all:

   Appearing at a town hall hosted by Univision, Trump was confronted by a self-identified Republican named Ramiro González who cast Trump’s actions surrounding Jan. 6 as a dealbreaker for him. González challenged Trump to win his support.

   But Trump made no apologies for that day. What he instead did was actually link himself to the rioters — stronger than he ever has before.

   “There were no guns down there; we didn’t have guns,” Trump said, before repeating: “The others had guns, but we didn’t have guns.”

   The first thing to note is that’s false; Trump supporters did have guns and many other weapons. But also consider what Trump has done rhetorically. He cast the insurrectionists as a “we.”

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   1. "The others had guns…"  meaning the Capitol Police had guns!  They are the "others".to him.

      Yeah, that's a dealbreaker for me, too. 

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