Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said he isn’t buying all that Democratic “joy” on display at this past week’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago during a Sunday appearance with Jake Tapper on CNN’s State of the Union.
During their conversation, Tapper brought up the “disciplined” and “well-produced” DNC this week that, as the journalist put it, “conveyed patriotism and unity.” Graham didn’t see it that way.
“Well, I didn’t see what you saw,” Graham told Tapper with a laugh. “If you’re a Republican, you saw a hate fest. You saw a hate fest full of insults.”
“Americans are not joyful when they go to the gas station and fill up their car,” he continued. “They’re not joyful when they make their mortgage payment. They’re not joyful when they go to the grocery store. People are hurting, and this whole joy love fest doesn’t exist in the real world.”
To bolster his claim, Graham pointed to the gas prices, the state of the border, and inflation during Donald Trump’s presidency when “the world was not on fire.”
He’s either lying or what he said gives us a look into his shitty perspective of the world. Either way such a miserable and pathetic existence.
I think this is a great example of how a conservative mind views the world.
They are never happy or joyfull, its always a struggle and you fight for an idea despite you hating all of it. The idea that your life is not filled by misery is alien to them.
At this point being conservative is just akin to mental illness. Destructive, depressed, delusional to themselves and others. If ever there was a real social contaigion, it would be this state of being.
I grew up in a pretty conservative household and we were literally raised that life is work and work is hell. By way of the transitive property, life = hell. It’s taken a long time through various degrees of depression and I’m still not fully grown out of it.
But yes, the entire culture and identity is about being miserable and persevering through it, even if that means making yourself and everyone around you more miserable to justify the perseverance.
Like the saying “nothing good comes free.” You could say the sunrise is free, but they’ll argue it’s not because you have to wake up early and waking up early is by necessity miserable so that the sunrise can be good. They’re brainwashed into thinking the only way a good thing happens is through suffering. Except the truly lost ones who only see life as suffering.
As an extension, if the conservative sees something free that people need, they will try to monopolize that free thing and then sell it. They call this innovation.
Could also be that any time Lindsey Graham enters a room, all the people around him become miserable, so that’s why he thinks joy doesn’t exist
I feel the opposite as a Democrat. I support positivity, but I won’t smile while Palestinians are being murdered. That seems pretty tone deff. I’m happy Donald Trump is going down regardless. I’m voting Kamala. Please don’t forget to protest after we win.
I’m also worried about Armenia, Hong Kong, Myanmar, Syria, Iran, Taiwan, Tibet, Uyghurs, immegrants entering the US, UKRAINE. I am NOT smiling while people are dying and our nation is complacent.
I will tell you in advance: with that mindset, even if every issue you stated in the last paragraph is solved, you will still not be able to smile. People will still keep dying and suffering from injustice, just elsewhere or in different ways.
Try to celebrate every incremental step towards justice and use that energy towards the next step and so on.
Then I’ll continue to not smile. I refuse to pretend to be happy while people suffer. It’s natural to feel empathy. You guys can ignore it if you need to for your mental health, but as an American with the power to change things, I will continue to protest.
“This whole joy and love fest doesn’t exist in the real world,” said Lindsay Graham, from his mountaintop cave overlooking Whoville.
Yeah, but this presumes that his heart will grow and he’ll learn compassion, when we know he’s just going to remain the same joyless, miserable slug he’s always been. The grinch has more redeeming qualities than Graham ever did.
Can’t wait for these dinosaurs to go extinct.
Maybe if you’re Lindsey Graham. Pretending to be something you’re not and constantly sucking up to people who hate you to keep your job sounds miserable enough.
The state of the border is due to Republican interference on that border bill specifically requested by Trump to keep it an issue this election, and Inflation performance was better overall when compared to other Western Nations during Biden’s term and worse than during Trumps.
Republicans are full of shit when it comes to both issues.
The problem with inflation is that it’s sticky i.e. the inflation that happened under Trump didn’t go away under Biden. Inflation has been slower (although you’ll notice it’s still elevated) but the inflation that already happened is baked in to that.
People can feel that things are more expensive than they used to be. It doesn’t matter that things are getting more expensive slower, what matters is a bunch of inflation already happened and it didn’t go away (and, in fact, just kept getting worse)
Tranditionally, inflation paired with rising income isn’t a big problem.
The real terror of inflation in the modern era is that wages remain stagnant.
It’s ever present too. If inflation were to ever stop for a sustained amount of time I guarantee it would be a far worse political issue. In the meantime things always cost more tomorrow than they will today which is why I argued what I did: relative inflation control was better than it was for almost everyone else under Biden than Trump because it is one of the only ways to fairly compare administrations as each one experiences their one unique circumstances.
Well yeah, inflation is part of economic growth under capitalism. That’s just how the system functions, no argument.
What people want is prices to come back down again, and that would require price controls (which Harris is actually talking about when she talks about stopping “price gouging” - I’m tentatively interested to see if she follows through on that)
