Not asking for perfection. Just decency.
Article on CNN.Com: “Pentagon officials discussing how to respond if Trump issues controversial orders”.
This isn’t normal. This isn’t good. Military officials should not be needing to plan how to thwart illegal orders from the incoming President. Trump isn’t an unknown, the military worked with him for 4 years and they have reasonable concerns. But at least he’s mean to the people Republicans hate!
Pentagon officials discussing how to respond if Trump issues controversial orders | CNN Politics
Yep. This is going to sound simplistic, but I truly think one of the biggest weaknesses of democracy is if half the electorate wants to vote it away there’s not much the rest of us can actually do about that.
Federal law, and the constitution of course, is supposed to protect minority interests, but when you have one major political party that has done its damnedest to dismantle those protections, and seems to not be very concerned about what the Constitution actually says, what is left? I don’t know, and I wish I had an answer to that question.
People shouldn’t elect a convicted felon.
Well, not this one anyway.
I know of better.
Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those others (Churchill).
I didn’t want to be a cliche and repeat that quote but yes.
I can’t fathom how that nugget of truth is ignored by half of our country.
My father once told me that if anyone could come up with a better system than this (Canadian politics, for context) then that person would win a Nobel prize.
It all comes back to education and encouraging the ability to learn and challenge knowledge. It’s a fundamental societal shift that I don’t expect to happen any time soon, but I encourage my kid to think about. Learning, questioning testing things… it’s one of the most powerful gifts we have in life.
As long as there are words, communication, knowledge to share, there’s hope for change. Keep leaning, keep teaching, keep fighting.
Remember in 1980–81 Reagan pulled the same trick with Iran, going behind Carter’s back.
That’s not the way I’ve heard it. The whole Iran hostages ordeal was when I was in high school; just starting to pay attention to politics and world events. I even met one of them not long after they came back. I read Guests of the Ayatollah, which is a good history of the whole thing.
It’s been a while since I read that, but as I remember it, Carter had to go through indirect channels to try to negotiate a deal to release the hostages. I think the Shah was even dead by that point, so the hostage-takers’ demand that he be returned was moot. They also hated Carter so much that even once a deal was reached, the release would only happen once he was out of office. Reagan didn’t interfere, he didn’t have to. He’s been getting undeserved credit for the release ever since.
Very much this. All they had to do was get all three branches of government and then decide the law would be whatever MAGA wants. This pure Putin-ism. Russia has a constitution, environmental laws, worker protection and consumer regulations. None of it means anything.
It occurred to me today that this is the closing act of the Boomer generation. Democracy in the US is over. Whatever comes after it will be up to the Millenials and their successors, and we won’t be around to see it.
Which they had in 2017, and yet this failed to come to pass despite how many people on this board assured me that by 2020 we’d all be dead or in concentration camps.
Trump is literally planning to round up millions and put them in deportation camps.
Trump was literally"planning to make Mexico pay for the wall. How’d that go for him?
Even if he could wave a magic wand and dispense with all the legal obstacles which here in the real world will tie up his fever dreams of mass deplrtation until long after he chokes to death on a hamberder while sitting on the toilet, the money and manpower for such an operation doesn’t exist. McDonald’s can’t get people to work the drive-thru for $20 an hour and you think Trump’s gonna hire tens of thousands of prison workers to live in the desert for minimum wage?
No he wasn’t. That was always bullshit. And you’re right that ultimately Trump doesn’t really care about that sort of thing if it doesn’t benefit him personally.
But a key difference is that last time he was surrounded by people actually trying to act like responsible grownups. This time the plan is to remove anyone like that from anywhere in the executive branch. He will be surrounded by people who do want to round up immigrants and put them in camps, and who now know that a majority of Americans love that shit. How do you think that will go?
I mean, last time he was in office this was already happening:
But this time you think he’s telling the truth. Gotcha.
Which will itself be tied up in the courts for years. The legal system works slowly and the bureaucracy works even slower. Any attempted purge of the civil service will not be completed within his term, and a man who couldn’t build a wall isn’t going to be able to reconstruct the gulag archipelago.
“A majority of Americans” believe no such thing, but if you want to buy into maga propaganda at face value, go for it. It makes the fascists’ jobs easier when they know you’re too pants-shittingly terrified to even try to stand up to them.
They’re using robot dogs to guard Mar-a-lago. There was a time that the idea of machines attacking humans was horrifying to me, but somehow that’s changed. At least in specific cases.
To be fair, it took a little while for them to get the case through the courts so the Supremes could roll over for Trump.