I'm a centrist Dem who's hesitant to upset the status quo; I want our pre-Trump system back, so I worry about breaking more than we fix. But I'm also a Civil War buff and a huge Grant fan.

Basically "Be like Grant, not McClellan" feels microtargeted to persuade me personally. It's a good argument!

We are deep into dystopian sci-fi territory now. Like, this Vance quote is the twist halfway through an alternate history novel that leads to The Final War and has everybody wandering around a post-apocalyptic wasteland by 2150, trading scraps of old technology for uncontaminated food...

Keep the faith, Steve! There will always be doubters, but Christmas is a time of magic.

I have an extensive Christmas music collection (yeah, I know I'm a nerd) and I had to look this up: I have three different versions each of O Come All Ye Faithful and O Little Town of Bethlehem, but no O Holy Night. Like you, I feel like I can almost hear Elvis singing that one, but I guess not...

Counterpoint: He is, in fact, also the worst president ever. Just saying things like that is grounds for being considered the worst president ever. He represents us to the world! Behaving decently in public is part of his job! And that's before you get to January 6th and the rest of a long list.

I think the problem is that fixing "us" may not be, you know, possible. We can't just decide to have a better society, and the kinds of reforms that would bring one about would probably take years, if not generations. We need some kind of fix that works for a society of idiots, or there is no fix.

Also the prequels were a mess in desperate need of a rewrite. They wasted talented actors with bad dialogue, but at least they got it together in the last hour to do a good job with the Anakin vs Obi-Wan duel fans had waited years for, and even better Yoda-Palpatine duel. Made up for a lot of flaws.

Force Awakens and Solo might not have been so original, but they were enormous FUN. Rise of Skywalker was a patchwork because of Fisher's passing, but tried to be fun for the fans. Last Jedi wanted to be smarter than a Star Wars movie, and killed Luke without even a show of Jedi Master-level power.

Big quality skips between #3 and 4, #7 and 8, and #9 and 10. Basically my feeling is that Star Wars should be fun, it should be good vs. evil with a minimum of complication, and it shouldn't deconstruct or subvert itself, it should just be what it is. That principle explains my rankings...

* like that, not that like

Certainly seems that like's played into the last couple of cycles to some extent, at least...

I suspect it's more fundamentals than candidates. It's hard to win 3 White House terms, so once GOP treated Trump as normal / not crazy, he won 2016. Covid and Trump gave Dems the edge in '20. Inflation & post-Covid made '24 a GOP cycle again. Different candidates might not change the results much.

It's to Trump's advantage that he doesn't take governance seriously, doesn't care about policy, can wink and grin to show it's a game to him. Some people like that because they don't take politics seriously either. But we should! Hasn't that been the lesson of the last 10 years? It's not a game!

Like, if we genuinely think Trump is a dangerous wannabe fascist (and I assume most of us outside of the GOP do), it would be nice if we consistently treated him like a dangerous wannabe fascist instead of just another perspective we should listen to.

It may be good for NYC to deflect Trump's ire, but I think it's bad for the country to play into Trump's own narrative that's he's a great guy and elites don't like him because he disrupts business as usual. Having a lefty with outsider cred make nice with him in that context is supremely unhelpful.