Coups, Counts and C***S, Chapter 2: The Coup that Never Was (Update from Brutus)

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

A couple of points. I think a large source of the problem with NeverAgain, is underscored by your first paragraph. It paints a very rosy picture of NeverAgain's record and ignores some things that were glaringly obvious to us across the aisle.

To begin with when he was Mideast Governor as I recall, he forgot to hold an election. - Understandable, reset was just around the corner and all.

But then...

As Speaker he went the entirety of December 9th - 22nd of 2016 without making a single post on the AFG board, while making 91 posts across the rest of the forum. Now you say he cleared a backlog, maybe he did in the joint session, but he slipped away big time in the third and fourth Congresses. I recall sending messages to you, when I was your Vice President, expressing concern over the situation in the House.

When I became President, the Fourth Congress became so bad that that we almost had secession crisis simply because Congress was so dysfunctional and unable to move forward.

The pattern continued. He became Southern Governor and then he disappeared leading to his removal from office.

NeverAgain was always very inconsistent with his focus and activity.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

As for me not running, the simple fact of the matter I was I didn't have the numbers to win. DFW won by flipping radicals that Adam had brought back to vote in October and with increased Labor recruitment since then my ability to flip old timers I had connections with was swamped. Only DFW could have had that level of success flipping the newer Laborites.

And DFW is telling the truth, he was not using "frienship wink wink" he used issues like health care, infrastructure, his non-interventionist foreign policy etc to flip voters. It didn't help Labor that both Blair and maybe NeverAgain (not as sure about him) were more interventionist compared to say Adam and this created an opening that DFW could exploit as well.

As for the 4D chess, part of that was unplanned and I was pissed both the first time he jumped in as an indy and the second time he jumped in as a Fed. The second time occurred while my hard drive was fried and by the time I got back on it was too late. That being said, I realized two important things 1) Never's inconsistent record as Speaker and 2) Only DFW had a chance at flipping the Atlasforum types and the best way that he could accomplish that was if it looked like he was f@%king me out of the Presidency.

I didn't have time either to put in the effort required for a Presidential run, but I did have such for House (only required 12/13 votes back then for quota) and could cut deep enough to maybe push us over the top, so I dropped down and worked to flip House votes to myself and the other Conservative candidates. Somehow, we pulled it off, which surprised me at the time. I expected I would have to be throwing deck chairs at the Speaker to get him to wake up, instead I ended up the Speaker. I worked with Never to revise the house rules, I created the bill format we used today with the vote links included, pressured and prodded the Senate to follow suit and we managed to dodge a bullet that could have sank the reset less than a year in.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

DFW literally was contacting everyone. He even messaged Adam as I recall, which thoroughly alarmed me because if Adam was slumbering I thought it best not to wake him up.

The whole push for Parliament during early 2017, which your PMs make reference to, was infuriating to me because a lot of it was being driven by the sheer incompetence of the fourth Congress, the same one which passed just three pieces of legislation while I was President and motivated calls for secession. Both chambers were still using Nix's pre-reset rules as a basis for their own and thus contradicted the Constitution and prevented the VP from doing his job. We carried far too much stuff over unchanged without reviewing the details. And on the other hand, we presumed a lot of stuff had carried over when it actually had not, including various election laws.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

I remembered the dates because I was Vice President at the time and was checking everyone's activity in Congress and last post made etc. The reason it wasn't forgotten along with the others is because that it was the Speaker's activity. I also did credit your help in the rules changes in a recent thread, either in one of the previous memoir threads I think, either that or the one where bore and I went several rounds.