It really is flabbergasting that this ilk is running the world’s superpower.
It couldn’t have happened back in the 19th and 20th centuries. Even if the cigar smokers in the smoke-filled rooms were as evil as the present ilk, they’d never have been so stupid.
This is false equivalence to an extreme. One candidate for the 2016 Presidential election threatened to jail his opponent, challenge the result of the election if not his fwvor (and did so even when he won the Electoral College), and transparently lied about something as trivial as the size of his inauguration. The other quietly accepted the result in order to preserve democratic norms despite being accused of unfounded crimes and subject to angry threats by paranoid, angry conspiracy nutters.
Ardent Trump supporters look like “bizarre caricatures” because they are; they deny basic facts and adopt groundless conspiracy theories in order to justify their support for person so unqualified to lead the country that he is literally a laughingstock on the international stage, too terrified to shake hands with a small German woman and outmaneuvered by a tinpot dictator a hemit kingdom.
Stranger
Yes. And furthermore the path forward involves assembling electoral super-majorities. Mathematically that means higher Dem turnout, lower Repub turnout, and some swing to the Dems. In some combination. ACLU style fights also are relevant.
Asahi’s stuff smacks of luxury. Realistically speaking. Or possibly just venting in the pit, which is ok.
Oh, I absolutely believe that he could get away with that. Hell, he could wander into a preschool , bristling with weapons, mow down everybody in the place, walk out licking the blood from his hands, and then he and his supporters would find a way to blame it all on Hillary, Democrats, Muslims, gays, or anyone whose skin is darker than a soda cracker.
I’ve heard them called cloth-coat Republicans, because they were Conservative but “of the people” (distinct from being Populist, which is its own strain in politics) enough that their wives wore coats made of cloth instead of mink, but I firmly agree with you: The reason the intelligent Republicans were so scared of Clinton was that he was intelligent enough, savvy enough, and, yes, Conservative enough to form a coalition with the people their party used to have a lock on but which they began to lose over Culture War issues.
(BTW, the term “cloth coat” in this context comes from Nixon. In the Checkers Speech. So… yeah. The stench of impropriety remains.)
So they launched a massive smear campaign against the Clintons going back decades, culminating in the Pizzagate insanity. You can trace the descent, kinda: Whitewater was, at least on the surface, an investigation into something which, legitimate or not, was at least the kind of thing it’s reasonable to investigate. Bill’s blowjob was trending to the hysterical, but they could keep screeching about perjury and hope nobody questioned the value of the underlying investigation or why Starr was more interested in that adultery than Hillary seemed to be. Pizzagate went entirely off the rails, something you can’t defend on its merits because it isn’t even minimally sane.
However, there were insane conspiracy theories current among the Republicans even back in the Whitewater era, such as the Death List and the supposed murder of Vince Foster. There were also books like “China Doll”, alleging that Bill Clinton was owned by Red China. However, Trump palled around with the people responsible for spreading Pizzagate, showing the devolution of the mainstream Republican Party and the collapse of the GOP itself into the Far-Right Conspiracy Complex of people who spread and believe Infowars-scale conspiracy theories.
I do want to introduce another friend from history, the Rockefeller Republicans:
Of all those issues, Machine Politics is completely dead. Corruption is now a Republican issue, but not in the form of Boss Tweed and the Tammany Hall Machine and so on and anon. The other issues are ones a good Democrat could run on, and should.
Uh, needless to say: Those Rockefeller Republicans? Bill Clinton would have been one of them. No question.
Well, duh. They’d say it was crisis actors hired by those you mention. And, yes, I’m stealing that line about darker than a soda cracker.
Do you have any evidence to back up that statement?
I’ll just let you be condemned by your own words.
Yeah, Der Trihs is not helping. It’s like if Asahi took some bad acid and then was put in a time machine and went back 10 years, because he’s been like this forever. 
Says the rape supporter.
They elected a guy who campaigned on blocking every member of a particular religion from entering the country. Do you really think there’s a difference in that outlook and putting people in camps?
I left something off. Trump’s supporters loved him campaigning on that ban.
Yes. We KNOW which side kept and still keeps talking about violence, and which side uses so many opportunities to show off their guns.
Thu, Aug 23rd, 2018 by Jason Easley
Rudy Giuliani Threatens The American People With Violence If Trump Is Impeached
That was JUST the latest.
Trump warns of ‘violence’ if GOP loses in midterms: A.M. News Links
Updated Aug 29; Posted Aug 29
and
But the story that a wave of left-wing terrorism threatens America is wrong. The poster child for this false narrative is antifa, a small, weak organization that protests white supremacist aggression.
The real threat of violence comes from the right. The Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism reports that right-wingers and white supremacists were responsible for 74 percent of the murders committed by political extremists in the United States over the past decade. Only 2 percent were committed by left-wing radicals. Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, has calculated that “terrorists inspired by Nationalist and Right Wing ideology have killed about 10 times as many people as Left Wing terrorists since 1992.”
and so it goes. You can include the Cliven Bundy bunch, Lou Dobbs, Alex Jones, and ALL the other rightwing lying assholes who threaten (or warn??) of violence and civil war whenever they don’t get their way. And the Charlottesville Nazis, with their “blood and soil” horse shit.
That and “Lock her up!”. Building a wall, deporting all the “bad hombres”, and imprisoning Hillary Clinton for unspecified crimes were as close as his campaign got to having actual policy statements.
Stranger
But they DO have camps. NOW.
Hundreds of immigrant children are being held in fenced cages at border facility
Trump migrant separation policy: Children ‘in cages’ in Texas
And the Trumpies love that shit.
Nazi-style death camps, as Der Trihs said? Sure I do. Keeping people out of the country isn’t the same as torturing millions of them to death. Jesus probably agrees with you, but I think the two of you failed to make proper distinctions and need to smoke a blunt together and chill.
I don’t support rape. Perhaps you ought to read that thread instead of just reading the title and watch several Dopers make complete idiots of themselves.
Pointing out that Trumpists support authoritarianism apparently makes us the problem. We’re apparently supposed to wait until it’s too late then try and do something about the fascists in our nation.
No, you don’t support rape.
But you pee your pants when anyone else calls a sexual predator a “sexual predator,” and then you have the gall to talk about the need for more civility (after you stiffed a [female] minimum wage worker on a tip because the chef’s Hollandaise sauce had “no discernible lemon.”)