I doubt it. Arpaio was a personal friend of Trump’s, an early supporter and someone who has been unflaggingly loyal. All of those traits are what Trump values, so I don’t think we need to hypothesis him playing 9-Dimensional chess (or even 2-Dimensional chess) here. Plus, anyone thinking that they can trust Trump to not throw them under the bus if Trump needs to save his own ass is a fool.
I think Trump is actually playing one-dimensional chess. The pieces all move as they normally do, except that it’s played on a 1x8 board, and each side has a king with a pawn in front of it.
I don’t think it requires any dimension of chess (maybe connect 4) for him to feel that he can just overrule any judge he wants to, and whether he’s intentionally sending that message to anyone facing a possible subpoena from Mueller, the message is getting received I’m quite sure. Also, he wouldn’t need to throw anyone under the bus to protect himself if he can just preemptively pardon anyone facing pressure from the FBI. He doesn’t feel that the judicial branch has any power when it comes to himself. This is just another way he’s asserting this.
Obama never said anything comparable to repeat-birtherism, saying a judge can’t do his job due to his ethnicity, chanting “lock her up” (and associated threats to his political opponent), saying that those protesting against white supremacism are comparable to those protesting in favor, or much, much more.
The presidential ability to pardon is clearly and obviously a way to ‘poke a hole’ in the judicial branch - eradicating its power to enact its one role.
Consider a thought experiment - every morning Trump gets on TV (or twitter, I suppose) and announces, “I pardon everybody for everything!” If he did this he would effectively have shut down the federal courts - they would have no power to prosecute anyone anymore. So yeah, a pardon very explicitly is the president removing the power of the courts. And it’s explicitly designed to do that. Why did the founders write it in? I’m no mind reader of old dead guys, but it seems to me that there are precious few checks on the court system from the other branches, so this was probably meant to be one of them. But it’s an absurdly powerful check, so naturally they limited the executive branches ability to use it as much as possible - to a single man, presumed to be the best among us.
Of course now we have a senile toddler in that seat, so all bets are off. The founders handed him a judicial nuke, and he’s figured out how to push the button. This doesn’t mean that he’s going to start pressing it willy-nilly to support his criminal cohorts, of course - but it wouldn’t exactly surprise me if he did. He has the power to, after all.
I never claimed Obama did any of those things. I was responding to a post (#51) that specifically asked for examples Obama “where he encouraged his own followers to punch people he didn’t like.” He didn’t say exactly that, but there were some pretty ugly lines from him that were similar in tone. I offered those up for Gyrate to review. QuickSilver offered up a positive example from Obama, and I agreed and said “Yes, Obama only occasionally said mean and nasty things.” That brings us to your reply that I quoted above. I was being sincere in my response to QuickSilver. Obama had various flaws, but he was certainly more articulate than the president that proceeded or followed him, and the cases of him resorting to ugly rhetoric were thankfully relatively few and far between. It’s one of the things I generally liked about Obama, even if I’m also aware of times he didn’t live up to that.
I wasn’t trying to equate Arpaio with #BLM or Antifa. It was a specific response to a post (#53) that questioned whether “the left” likes cops or not. They’re obviously not monolithic on the matter, but I pointed out some examples and times when it was pretty obvious they didn’t.
I am not sure of your point - do you think the 14th Amendment supersedes the President’s pardon power? If it’s not that - and I can hardly believe it is - what exactly did you mean to prove with your Wiki cite, if anything?
In light of the above, I think you’d agree that people generally leave us with very clear impressions of who they are at their core. That’s not to say there aren’t those who leave us with ambivalent feelings as well. Hence, we tend to qualify their statements based on those lasting impressions. But overall, would you agree that on a scale of ‘bad –> good’, Obama is much more to the good while Trump is far more to the bad?
If you agree with the above, here’s where I’m going with this…
When Obama said “bring a gun to a knife fight” do you think he meant it in a “mean and nasty” way? Was he being literal or was it a figurative expression?
Similarly, when Trump said something like, “Knock the hell out of 'em! I’ll pay your legal fees!”. Was he being literal or figurative?
Who do you think deserves the benefit of the doubt with respect to character and intent?
Nonetheless, it’s fair to compare the left’s actions expressing upset with what cops do, with the actions by cops that make the left upset.
And why the hell don’t these same police abuses upset the right? And why does that absence of upset constitute ‘liking cops’? Something’s twisted there.
And in this case, I’m comparing the actions of just one cop with your catalogue of the left’s actions. Quite a difference in scale, huh? On a scale from 0 to 10, with Arpaio being a 10, the lefties in question come in at about 0.01. In a thread about Arpaio, you’re focusing on the gnat while swallowing a camel.
