McConnell needs to go to jail too. He’s anther one, doing Putin’s work for him.
At least one asswipe politician (guess which side) has already floated that idea, likening it to the Japanese internment of WW2 - and saying it wasn’t a bad idea. Saying THAT internment sets a legal precedent to do it again.
His book is readily available in libraries, used book stores, and bargain bins. It is his magnum opus that he shills to others and given the complete dearth of political experience, yes, I would expect any voter who wanted to be even minimally informed would at least skim the book before flinging it across the room in disgust or tossing it back into the discount bin. While most of the voters who voted ‘against’ Trump (e.g. for Clinton or another candidate) should not be surprised by his behavior, the degree of shock and disbelief at his brazen ignorance and ineptitude despite his behavior being in alignment with his professed philosophy on “dealmaking” would suggest otherwise, and of course the regretful supporters have little excuse to feel even remotely betrayed.
Clinton, on the other hand, is a known quantity and there was little information value in reading any of her books other than Stronger Together which laid out specifics of her campaign philosophy for her 2016 candidacy, including (if you read between the lines) neglect for the traditionally Democratic labor vote to which she gave lip service but few specific plans to deal with the collapse of the manufacturing sector in the Rust Belt and elsewhere. (Yes, job training…which doesn’t answer the question of dealing with relocating e tire segments of the population or attracting employers to neglected areas.)
There is a fundamental problem with the concept of democracy insofar as it requires an informed, critical electorate who aren’t scared or cowed into electing a demagogue as president and supplicants in Congress. The United States failed at that in 2016 (and it isn’t the first time by far) and all of the people glibly repeating the phrase, “Give the man a chance!” in the days after the election are complicit in that deliberate ignorance. He was a seventy-year-old celebrity with a public history of thin-skinned reflexive affront and self-aggrandizement. It should be no surprise that he lied about the size of his inauguration crowd or that the the election he won was still rigged against him (a [THREAD=19811477]prediction I made just after the election and before he insisted that there were “three to five million illegal ballots”[/THREAD], but of course, people were surprised, even those who did not vote for him.
Stranger
Vicente Fox cracks me up. It’s almost like he’s proud that Mexico is undesirable for millions and millions. Perhaps Mexico should focus on becoming a place to stay instead of a place to flee and not worry about what the USA does.
Then why are more Mexicans returning than coming into the States?
I guess we’re even worse than Mexico.
We keep hearing this “give him a chance” still. We gave him far too many chances already.
He needs to go - impeached, under arrest and facing indictments.
I’m amazed you actually expected the typical American voter to have read anything by Clinton, much less one book. As for the 0.000001% of American voters who did, how many would “read between the lines” and arrive at your same conclusions?
Or get pushed off a cliff.
I love it when people compare this to the 2013 shutdown. They pretend it’s different, but it isn’t. The parties are reversed, but for some reason, the side they take isn’t. I especially like it when someone argues “If you blamed X then, you should blame Y this time!” without any hint that they realize the implication pointed right back at them by their own logic.
So I suppose you blamed the Republicans last time, so therefore you blame the Democrats this time? I’m not even saying you have to…you’re saying it.
Nope, GOP both times. Just like you blame the Dems both times. However, I don’t remember the outrage from the GOP last time over military pay. I guess it was more important to fuck everyone over healthcare.
Something I doubt you’re aware of. A Democrat introduced a resolution to pay the military and McConnell refused to let it come to a vote.
Now it’s all on the Republicans. I guess the outrage was fake.
And perhaps Trump should focus on how to make good on his PCP hallucination of Mexico paying for a wall.
I have a dim view of humanity at large and the American electorate in general, so while I would like to think a conscious voting population would seek to inform themselves about the candidates they choose to vote for or against, I can’t express any genuine surprise at their deliberate ignorance.
Even without considering that the Democratic leadership made a compromise that gave the Republicans and Trump what they wanted in exchange for preserving DACA, which Trump then backed out of (to everyones’ consternation, Republican or Democrat), this is still a false equivalency. There may or may not be legitimate reasons to modify or repeal the ACA, but none that were posing an immediate threat to lives or well being of hundreds of thousands of people to the point of shutting down the government; there us no plausible fiscal, ethical, or security reason that DACA has to be immediately shut down and formerly protected persons subject to deportation except to satisfy the demands of xenophobes and racists.
Even if you think DACA was an abuse of executive power and immigration should be restricted for some practical reason, there is no reason to immediately reverse the policy without a public discussion, except that a public discussion would reveal that most voters do not support an immediate elimination of DACA and deportation of people in the program. The Republican party controls all branches of government, and should be able to take their sweet time assessing and drafting carefully crafted legislation, but they’re insuch a hurry to ramrod ideological objectives that many in their own party don’t even agree with that they’re like a tapdancing drunkencentipede, stumbling over their own feet to get something passed before the individual members wake up from a post-legislative orgy and realize what they’ve done.
Stranger
I do?
You do?
Do you think I’m someone else?
Is there a fiscal reason why DACA needs to be renewed/continued? If not, why is it part of an appropriations bill?
You do understand that it’s the people voting “nay” that are shutting down the government, do you not? If hundreds of thousands of people are being threatened (granted, you may not have meant that), then guess who ought to vote for the budget to pass?
Hmm. Maybe they should delay reversing DACA to a later date. March 5 work for you? That enough time for public discussion?
Wait, wait, wait. A minority party is making demands to attach a non-fiscal bill to an appropriations bill to fund the entire US government, on the threat of filibustering that very bill, and the Republicans are the ones ramrodding ideological objectives?
It’s not even a budget! It’s a CR! A “carry on as usual,” and you want to convince me that somehow the majority party, who already passed a bill through the House, is holding up the process?
Do you people even know what a filibuster is? It’s suddenly something I doubt you’re aware of.
HA!
The hell of it is that this extraordinarily important point is barely being discussed; the Stephen Millers in the Republican Party have somehow managed to keep this out of the public discourse.
I’ve never even heard anyone make a reasonably theatrical attempt at explaining why DACA should have been cancelled.
The GOP controlled the House in 2013 and controls it now. So the parties aren’t “reversed”.
There’s the notion held by some that it’s Congress’ responsibility to pass laws, and this was Presidential overreach, of Obama’s typical tyrannical nature. Bullshit, yes, but theatrical enough.
So? The Republican-dominated Congress has had a year to pass a law which the (ostensibly) Republican President could sign which would replace the supposed executive overreach (it wasn’t; the President has essentially complete discression on enforcement of immigration except as specifically proscribed in law) which could codify proctections into the legal system. That they have not speaks to either their blithe hypocrisy or utter ineffectualness, or more likely both.
This is, of course, nothwithstanding that an agreement was reached to extend DACA in exchange for funding that “fucking wall”, and then Trump decided to renig on the agreement because he is either an infantile narcissist who can’t stand to let anything from the previous administration stand or because he is beholden to openly racist elements of his base which is under the counterfactual belief that immigration as a whole is a danger and that these “Dreamers” are some particular threat or financial burden even thoug the tenets of the act require that they be enrolled in school, gainfully employed, or serving in the military with no felony or serious misdemeanors crimes on their record.
For anyone still under the illusion that Republicans like McConnell and Ryan will at some point revolt against Trump for the damage he is doing to the GOP, here is evidence to the contrary. They could organize actual Republican member of the House and Senate to draft bipartisan bills to legislatively enact the DACA provisions in US Code, make an agreement on a continuing resolution to keep Federal employees and members of the Armed Forces paid, and put together a majority to override any petulant vetos by Boss Baby Trump. That they aren’t even making the effort to attempt to reconcile tells you everything you need to know about the GOP, which could at an earlier time at least be counted on to look out for its own pragmatic self-preservation over obtuse ideology.
Stranger
So it’s all over. Democrats got nothing. Dreamers got nothing. It was all for naught. So who’s going to be the first Doper to tell me the Democrats weren’t responsible for the shutdown but can be credited with ending it? Who wants to say “Yay, Dems won” even though they could’ve just voted the exact same way on Friday? Who wants to say their strategy to cause America some pain worked out, but also that there was no pain inflicted?
C’mon, step right up, form a neat line, and let the double speak commence.
And as we all know, the filibuster in the House is what’s holding things up this time around. ::eyeroll::
Well, thinking back on the national dialog between then and now I see the following:
Conservatives on liberals:
*Knee-jerk bleeding heart liberals
*Tree-huggers
*Airheads
*Anti-American
*Wrongheaded
*Commie-lovers
*Druggies
*And worst of all, apparently - “liberals”
Liberals on conservatives:
*Selfish
*Greedy
*Hateful
*Stupid
*Ignorant
*Knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers
*Racists
*Misogynists
*Xenophobes
*Want people to die
Etc., etc., etc.
I’ve heard it said that conservatives think liberals have bad ideas while liberals think conservatives are bad people. I believe the nature of descriptors used by each side bears this out pretty well.