But the unintended comedy is what’s keeping some of us sane!
Keep press conferences, keep Spicer, keep piling awkward lie on top of awkward lie. At least until America starts joining us in realizing the absurdity of it all.
I haven’t actually spoken to any of my relatives who voted for Trump since Nov. 8. I don’t miss them. They’re horrible people for voting for Trump. I don’t want them executed or imprisoned or anything, but I can make the choice that the fact that we share a certain percentage of DNA doesn’t outweigh that they voted to essentially send a message of “FUCK YOU!” to people like me, they voted for a preference for the destruction of my family, they voted for a compulsive liar who simply does not care about civil society and the actual machinery of government and social life.
There’s limited interaction on Facebook, punctuated by me hiding a fuck of a lot of stuff posted by them from my timeline. But I haven’t spoken on the phone or face-to-face since the election. (And that’s not even counting my uncle by marriage to my late aunt, who got blocked back around the last time there was a trampling in Mecca during the Hajj, when he posted an article about how many people had died with the comment “Best I’ve felt in a long time!”)
Comedy, yes; but they are necessary for catching the President in a lie. He should be accountable to his electorate. Period. He does not choose the format. He is not an emperor.
My mother voted for Donald Trump because she hates Hillary Clinton, believes every conspiracy about Clinton including that she personally murdered Vince Foster, and she isn’t comfortable with a female president. I vehemently disagree with her, but we just avoid talking politics.
My brother voted for Donald Trump because he “loves liberal tears”. He has stated on many occasions, that he couldn’t care less what policies Trump enacts, as long as he upsets liberals (“liberal” being defined as anyone to the left of Pat Buchanan). That is not an uncommon position among Trump supporters, and it makes him a horrible human being. I’m not writing off “half the nation”. Probably around 20%. I’m writing them off because they deserve to be written off. I stop short of the word “traitor”, but not that short.
I can handle people who voted against Clinton, but I have nothing but contempt for anyone who voted for Trump.
Just a note that, because you didn’t attribute this quote, readers might think it was posted by Merneith, who probably wouldn’t appreciate that error.
And your comment, though cogent, is rather sideways to my point. I was talking about being purposefully and perpetually lied to by politicians and their ilk, not so much by the media. The media just tend to follow politicians they like, and so to propagate those particular lies. The truth is always more nuanced and complex than anyone, politician or media maven, wants to try to explicate to the general public.
Sorry. I was going to add the name in but I forgot. :smack:
Yeah. When you get your talking points from Eric Cartman, you have some serious shortcomings as a human being.
I get that Hillary had a lot of negatives but… Trump? And the liberal tears never made any sense to me. The trumpets still have to live in this country:
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I think America is already lost. And it’s lost because it’s full of mental defectives who want me to treat them with kid gloves while they’re chanting nazi slogans and supporting a Russian agent as he dismantles our most important protections.
There is no rational argument to be made with these people. There is no moral argument that matters to them more than sticking it to the Other. It’s like arguing with the crabs trying to pull us back into the bottom of the barrel.
But I’ll tell you what. If you can convince your mom that Paul Krugman is correct about supply side economics - I’ll promise to reconsider my position that it’s a waste of time talking to her about it.
(and yes - please do, if you’re going to multiquote, attribute the quotes by name. It’s not hard. Just, when you type out the new quote tag, type it like <quote=Merneith> inside the top tag. Only with square brackets, of course.)
The Nazis only wanted to exterminate one nation of people.
The agenda of the Republican party is that the planet Earth should be rendered uninhabitable for all known forms of life, for the sake of FY 2018 earnings.
You know, I’ve been trying to come up with a clever response to this - but fuck it. Why am I the one struggling to support your argument?
I provided an actual link to an actual quote from an actual article about an actual event at which actual Republican Nazis waved actual flaming torches while chanting actual Nazi slogans in support of Donald Trump and White Supremacy. And in response, you blame the media and sniff that I’m just thoughtlessly kneejerking.
Well, fuck it. I freely admit that my imagination is failing me, here, so why don’t you, Roderick Femm, provide an actual example of a thoughtful response to real-life torch waving Nazis. What the hell would that even look like? What does one say - thoughtfully! - to a Nazi chanting “Blood and Soil!” and “We love Russia!” around a Confederate statue?
Perhaps you can point us to a historical example of a thoughtfully effective response that achieved good results when spoken to Nazis.
Perhaps you can craft for us a thoughtfully effectivel response to Republicans who are happy that we’re destroying healthcare to provide a massive tax break to the top 500 people in the country.
Perhaps you can articulate a thoughtfully effective response to Trump voters that would get them to change their minds about liberal tears.
Perhaps you can find a thoughtfully effective response to the Republicans who just stripped education funding for Democratic districts in North Carolina.
Perhaps you have an example of a thoughtfully effective response to Republicans who want to discriminate against Queer people.
Perhaps you can think of a thoughtfully effective response to Republicans who want to allow more pollution in air and water standards.
Perhaps you know a thoughtfully effective way to explain to Republicans that it’s a bad idea to allow foreign agents to bring electronic equipment into the Oval Office on the orders of Vladimir Putin.
Because, from where I’m sitting, it’s a fool’s errand and you - not the generic you, you personally, Roderick Femm, with your false equivalence and your false pearl-clutching about how, “Oh, my, you liberals are so angery…” - you, personally, are the one who caused this mess.
But hey - prove me wrong. If you think there’s a thoughtfully effective way to convince Republicans to stop acting like a pack of brain-damaged sociopaths - then put up or shut up. Tell us what you think a thoughtful, yet effective, response to the damage Republicans are causing would look like.
Don’t forget about the new “right” to kill hibernating animals. I’m interested in hearing the “thoughtful” and “moral” arguments for that one.
slow clap
Ranty. I like it.
You know, I’m not going to sit here and try to rationalize the actions of these asshole Republican congress critters. And quite frankly, I have very little interest in bridging any gaps with them.
I AM interested in bridging gaps with the folks that elected them. I won’t pretend to know how to bridge those gaps. But I do know one thing is for sure. These people, these, MILLIONS and MILLIONS of people aren’t going anywhere. And spewing hateful rhetoric with your broad brush, isn’t going to change any minds.
In fact, all it does is cement their beliefs, and prolong the frustration with folks from both parties.
And do I really need to give you examples of historical figures that chose to use NON hateful, ugly, violent ways to bridge gaps like these in the past? Seriously?
Try opening a history book.
Tax cuts for the wealthy was wildly successful, for Wall Street. Didn’t do anything but damage to the rest of the economy. The Great Recession was apparently just a temporary setback for the financial sector, and they"ve already forgotten about it.
I don’t know how to bridge those gaps either. I assume some can be shamed and ridiculed enough to crawl back under a rock. In four years perhaps it will be hard to find people who admit they voted for Trump. The extreme pro-Trump deplorable assholes aren’t going to back down, but the MILLIONS and MILLIONS of other voters who did the unfathomable in 2016 might come around.
Paradoxically, I think a lot of people voted for Trump, thinking he would never win, simply as a protest vote. If they knew Trump might actually win, they would probably have been more careful. Now, god help us, we know what can happen.
Thank you for posting this. Now that I’m looking at the coding on the page, this seems obvious, but I didn’t know this before.
I don’t think the country is lost forever. 26% of the electorate voted for Trump. Roughly half didn’t vote at all, but I’m willing to bet a good chunk of those folks regret it now and will be voting next time. When people talk about half of our country being irredeemable throwbacks to less enlightened times, it’s really more like a quarter. I don’t feel much of a need to bridge that gap. I do feel a need to make sure that apathy never brings us to this point again.
Of course not; emperors are fallible. Trump is a God-King.
Hateful rhetoric?
HATEFUL RHETORIC?
Jesus Christ. To reiterate, **Merneith **posted an actual link to an actual quote from an actual article about an actual event at which actual Republican Nazis waved actual flaming torches while chanting actual Nazi slogans in support of Donald Trump and White Supremacy.
And you now bleat and moan that he’s using HATEFUL RHETORIC about these actual torch carrying, Nazi slogan chanting ASSHOLES?
Now we’re being too mean to NAZIS???
Jesus fucking Christ on a pogo stick. This is just unbelievable.
As I expected, you assume that anyone who doesn’t share your frothing desire to assassinate a large portion of the US population must be one of “them” on the other side. Which proves, among other things, that you can’t read.
However, for the sake of other readers, I want to expand on what I mean by “thoughtfulness.” The goal of thoughtfulness is initially to understand. Conservatives make little effort to understand liberals, and vice versa, and this is one of the reasons for the depth and rancor of our current divide. Not the only reason, but it is one reason that is susceptible to improvement, if enough people make the effort.
I am not talking about seeking to understand your fringe example of “actual Nazis” because those people are almost certainly beyond help. But they are a small minority. I am talking about seeking to understand the millions of “Joe Sixpacks” who also voted for 45 and still mostly support him. Here is what I have learned by listening to some of them: their motivation was almost entirely socio-economic. They don’t care about 45’s character or his lies or misstatements or gaffes; they don’t care (or they don’t understand) how some of the country’s institutions are under threat. They care that he promised (falsely, but they don’t know that yet) to restore their old jobs and status. There’s lots of other stuff mixed in, including racism or xenophobia in some cases. They are, of course, aiming their anger at all the wrong targets, and they need to learn the truths behind those job and status losses. But they will certainly never have any incentive to learn those truths when people like you are screaming for their scalps.
You can well ask whether conservatives ever seek exercise thoughtfulness, to understand why liberals have the views they do. I think liberals are a little better at making their case to the opposition when they want to. Sadly, this seems to be one place where 45 is winning the battle, because he is the target of so much liberal hatred that too many liberals have stopped trying to communicate.
Folks need to get used to the idea that this is a long-term effort and there is no quick fix. Democrats may well take control of the government in 2018 and 2020, and if they do without any better effort to understand conservatives’ concerns things will be no better than they were the last time this happened in 2008. Temporary victory isn’t enough, as events of the past year demonstrate. If the level of mutual understanding doesn’t improve, I fear we’ll just have increasingly wild swings between liberal and conservative governments until the whole thing is completely broken.