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.
Wow… yeah I grew up this way too. But I’m not sure I ever really put it all together the way you did just now. I’m gonna have to think on this.
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.
Everything in their world is transactional
So utterly grim that it perfectly explains the entire conservative movement.
“Life is bad. Anyone who isn’t miserable and angry like me is cheating and must be destroyed.”
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
It’s hard to see any joy in the world when you’re a closeted hate-mongerer who can’t get laid for free.
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.
If you have the power to change things, why haven’t you done so?
We all are! And it’s changing! Pro Palestinian support is finally a thing! We just have to keep protesting while keeping up with the election.
Ever heard of “joy in suffering?”
Generally, the more you have, the more miserable you can be. It’s important to take time to appreciate the positive things in life even while grieving for those who don’t currently get to experience them. Joy and grief aren’t mutually exclusive feelings, and you don’t need to ignore/suppress the grief to experience the joy.
I’m happy in my free time. I’m talking about politics and the way we show ourselves in public. I’m talking about the way we influence people.
Johnny Cash is a good example. Of course he smiled, but he dressed in black and he died in black. I’m fine doing the same.
You’re terminally online and need to step away from the internet. Its not real.
“This whole joy and love fest doesn’t exist in the real world,” said Lindsay Graham, from his mountaintop cave overlooking Whoville.
“MEEMAW! GET THE SLED, WE’RE STEALING VOTES!”
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.
If your heart grows several sizes, get to the ER then a cardiologist
Can’t wait for these dinosaurs to go extinct.
Be the asteroid you wish to see in the Yucatan.
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Be the thing that drives them to extinction. Way to make me explain the joke there buddy. Literal interpretation is not the only interpretation. Vote. Organize. Inform. Educate. Have compassion when those in your life change their minds.
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I… I don’t know how to explain metaphors using crayon. So have an upvote.
A comment likened Republicans to dinosaurs, and being eager for them to be extinct, since dinosaurs are extinct. One possibility is saying they are mostly old and waiting for them to die, another is that they have outdated ideas, even the ones not that old, and to go extinct just means they don’t have power and don’t matter.
Dinosaurs were made extinct by an Asteroid in the Yucatan. So to contribute to that latter half, work toward making them irrelevant, voting and chosing your media engagements appropriately.
At this point, I would not presume someone is advocating literal lethal violence against the entire GOP, if nothing else that is wildly infeasible and as it stands much more reasonable actions are available to minimize their influence…
Woah, woah, woah!…
One of those is the natural outcome of forces set in motion—and the other killed poor innocent dinosaurs.
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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.
He clearly still hasn’t recovered from his boyfriend passing.
RIP John McCain, thanks for saving the Affordable Care Act.
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.
Republicans are full of shit.
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.
Actually, real wages are up for six years running.
Not according to the Atlanta Fed.
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)
Why do the colors on your version of that chart not match the legend?
They’re probably using a dark mode extension that’s messing with them
The OG charts have a darker legend too. I don’t know why they did that. I upped the contrast and saturation to make it even clearer than it is on the source page.
To bolster his claim, Graham pointed to the gas prices, the state of the border
Lindsey? If you’re so concerned with the border, why did you vote down the border security bill?
source on Graham’s vote on the motion where it was killed
You yourself are responsible now, Graham. You voted down legislation which would have addressed this. This is on you now.
Now who’s miserable in their lives and wants to make the rest of the country miserable too?
Heh heh heh
This is exquisite.
People who are that deep in the closet usually do lack joy in their lives
What does it matter what Graham says? His word is literally worthless by his own account
He’s not wrong. But he doesn’t mention his party is the reason for it.
He’s got the projection down though
Oh, he’s both wrong AND responsible. He’s pointing at results of policies and blaming people who set the policies that will improve the situation in the future for the results of the policies set by him and his cronies.
He’s trying to normalize a false equivalency.
It’s like blaming the current government for global warming and its effects, instead of just tasking them and empowering them to move the needle back in the right direction so it doesn’t get much worse than it already has.
Joy is not easy.
Happy can be had for the cost of a hobby, or of a friend buying another round, or jamming another game onto the screen.
But as J. D. Salinger said: “The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy is a liquid.”
Happiness needs a vessel of a certain shape and size.
Joy can fill up anything finite.
Don’t mock Graham for this. He is expressing his sadness even if he doesn’t see it. Express sorrow for his lack of understanding of our time here.
Joy is fleeting, but it is there, and it is possible to feel it with some frequency. Does everyone feel it? Well, obviously not.
Projection. If he’s not happy then how can anyone be?
during Donald Trump’s presidency when “the world was not on fire.”
Dude, where were you? Convenient amnesia? Ever heard Billy Joel’s take on “the fire”?
Yeah, it’s not like Trump’s presidency ended during a pandemic bad enough people had to stay home, with no vaccine or anything.
Like, the only way it could be remembered as being worse was if it was during a Great Depression.
“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.”
These are all great points, and he’s right! The problem is that the policies he and his party support are not helpful towards solving any of these issues.
What, banning books and preventing people from getting healthcare don’t bring down gas and grocery prices or interest rates? Surely you jest!
As someone with a good amount of privilege, I do smile when I buy snacks. I just wish we had more democrat policies so that others could feel the same way.
I smile when buying gas too… it’s still MUCH cheaper than it will be, and I’m looking forward to abandoning gasoline powered motors completely in the near future.
The smile is both for what will be, and for the increased price of gasoline driving us towards that future.
Smiling because gas prices are high? The world could use more minds like yours.
“Life is a joyless slog, and I do my best to help keep it that way.”
To be fair, that IS the face of a man who no longer believes that joy exists 🤷
