I think what we’re seeing from the resident conservatives is that Donald Trump is not necessarily the disease himself, but rather the symptom of a disease that’s been festering for a while. The fact is that what passes for today’s modern American “conservatism” is really something else.
The conservatives who voted for Trump and defend him have been making room for authoritarianism in this country for a long time. Donald Trump might turn out to be just a proto-authoritarian, but our problems won’t necessarily end with his impeachment. It’s already clear that someone else with more skill could come along and dictate more effectively.
My message to Shodan and Hurricaneditka is this: take delight in making liberals throw a fit if that makes you feel better, but consider the examples of Bannon, Gorka, and Sessions carefully. All of these individuals were once advocates of the president and they’ve all fallen out of favor. That is how the mind of an authoritarian works. Nobody is to be trusted, not even your supporters.
Trump’s already screwed them. How likely is it that Trump will actually provide the cheap health insurance for all that he promised? I think it somewhat unlikely, and I’m being generous. He made the promise so people would go “Yay Trump! Lock her up! MAGA” and stroke his ego with their vote, then went to play with trucks while Republicans who were doing their job were doing so in a manner that would definitely not provide cheaper health insurance for all, but rather give the American People less for more while a few got tax breaks they don’t need.
That’s one broad example. I’m sure there are more that have a narrower scope. The clown show that is the EPA at the moment comes to mind; I’m sure gutting environmental regulations will Make America Great Again for industries that will no longer have to engage in any sort of pollution control, but I’m less sure how Great America will be Again for the people living downstream. And some of those people are probably Trump supporters.
Final thought for the night or my wife will kick my ass for keeping her up, but I just don’t understand how authoritarianism came to American shores. In most countries, there’s usually disorder, the result of a war or economic crisis. America’s been better than average, even after a major recession, and yet here we are flirting with dictatorship. I think it proves that America is obsessed with race. White America just can’t accept the browning of America. White America feels like “their” America is endangered so they’re willing to ignore our own political norms to restore order. If it means keeping blacks from voting? Good. Keeping journalists from covering news that they don’t like? Good. Preventing universities from publishing research they don’t agree with? Awesome.
Trump did not follow the law. He used his pardon power to override the law. That is why his pardon power exists. Because he used that power for no reason other than agreeing with the guy he was pardoning, this is seen as flagrantly flouting the law.
Yes, technically the pardon is also law. But it’s disingenuous not to understand how you can use part of the law to flagrantly violate another part of it when they come into contradiction.
Trump is a wannabe dictator. His using the pardon power in this way allows him to actually put the President above the law. This is a problem to those of us who didn’t support Trump, and for those of us who support law and order.
The best case scenario is that Trump is too dumb to realize what he did, and didn’t have anyone helping him. The worst case scenario is that Trump has found his way to fuck over this country and pardon every law that is broken when it happens.
What do you mean, “pardon of Dwight Loving”? Loving was not pardoned: his death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment without parole. Do you consider the two as equivalent?
Ratings. People are talking about this now, rather than the fact that his administration is crumbling internally;
He knows virtually nothing of the legal process. Someone told him he could pardon his buddy, and that would make his buddy’s problems go away, so he did. I have not a single doubt that Trump knows a pardon prevents further appeals, for example.
To rally the support of his base. In a month where he has been hit with bad press item after bad press item - the failure of Trumpcare, his response to Charlottesville, the resignations of Spicer and Bannon - he needed a big piece of red meat to give to his base. Joe Arpaio is one of the most popular figures among the redneck portion of the Trump base, so pardoning him gave them all hardons for Trump again.
For sure, Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich was bad and it is exactly the sort of pardon that understandably made people revisit the issue of whether to have pardons in the first place - unlike some I am willing to take my partisan blinders off and acknowledge that.
But Clinton’s ability to pardon was about to expire - he couldn’t have pardoned many people after that. So the timing of Trump’s pardon is much different. The timing is much earlier in his term, when he has the ability and pardon more people who show contempt for the court system. When Clinton pardoned Rich, people didn’t ask “Oh my, I wonder how many more of his cronies he intends to pardon?” But people are asking that very question of Trump right now.
The context also matters. Clinton faced political and potential legal jeopardy, but his pardons were not related to these matters in any obvious way. Trump, however, is is political and legal jeopardy. Trump’s pardoning of Arpaio potentially sends a signal to those who might be used as witnesses against him, that he has the power to protect others around him in legal jeopardy if they remain loyal. And that part of the pardon is what is OUGHT TO BE worrying everyone, because demonstrating the ability to manipulate the system of justice in exchange for loyalty is exactly the behavior of an authoritarian, and it is consistent with someone who intends to destroy the rule of law and replace it with the rule of men.
Really? You’ve taken two very mild quotes which several members of the right (including Scott Baio!) have taken out of context and imbued with a meaning never intended (one of the right-wing’s favorite practices - remember “You didn’t build that” and “What difference does it make?”?) and are claiming they are examples of Obama being “mean”. Interesting. Let’s have a look.
This was part of an exhortation to the crowd to get out and spread the message.
Firstly, if that’s “mean” then you must be horrified by pretty much everything in the right-wing media. Secondly, you are calling this “mean” in comparison to a guy who told his supporters to literally punch people in the face. That’s a helluva stretch.
Again, either some people don’t understand metaphors (or movie quotes) or are easily triggered by any mention of weaponry. There’s nothing remotely “mean” in saying that supporters should counter any negative attacks from political opponents. And for added irony the WSJ noted
And they’re still doing it, apparently.
Yes (oh look - Snopes again). They were a small nasty fringe disavowed by the organizers of the march they appeared in who were then used by multiple right-wing sources out of context to smear the entire BLM movement, including using short clips to pretend that there were people at other BLM marches chanting this. I agree that those people were wrong to say that. I disagree that they were representative of anything other than themselves. And I wonder why they are being used by so many to lie.
Welp, you got me there. Some people said this and it was mean of them. It wasn’t Obama nor BLM organizers nor even a majority of the people at the event, but some people said it and they were wrong to do so. I hereby condemn those people.
They have been duly reviewed, and your characterization of them as “mean”, “nasty” and “ugly” is pretty tenuous (although of course “mean” is in the eye of the beholder and I accept you may have been personally deeply offended by them despite their original context).
But if the examples you provided are the worst ones you could find, Obama’s done better than pretty much any president either side of Jimmy Carter. Come back when you’ve got something even remotely comparable to what the current President has been repeatedly saying about his critics.
But you don’t think these other men knew a pardon was on the table before Arpaio was pardoned?
I’m going to be honest. I do believe Trump, or at the very least, his associates, did something murky and probably illegal with the Russians. But I do not believe anything will come of it. As time goes on, people are going to get increasingly tired of hearing about Russia. The Left won’t let it go, but I think your average American doesn’t care about much about it anymore. Mueller’s probe will take months, if not a year or so, to complete.
Another thing - your average Joe American probably knows little to nothing about Joe Arpaio. It’s the Left who is the most upset about it.
I can pretty much guarantee you that barring death, resignation, or disability, Trump will be in office until at least the midterms. After that, who knows. If the Republicans are licked in the midterms, the Democrats might go ahead with impeachment. If they aren’t licked, but Trump isn’t doing them any favors, and Mueller’s probe has exposed illegalities, some Republicans may go along, but not enough to convict him in the Senate.
I do not believe that Trump will be out of office before 2021, personally.
And that’s the problem. Why aren’t more people upset about a man whose actions have literally resulted in the gruesome and unjustified deaths of several people?
For one thing, that’s an assertion that you (or anyone else) have not been able to prove in court. You’re demanding that people be upset about the guilt for a criminal accusation that hasn’t been even charged, much less proved beyond a reasonable doubt. The general public is rightly suspicious of such claims.
Because honestly, most people are worn out already by Trump. After a while, his antics just start to sound like background noise. “Oh, Trump did a stupid thing? It must be a day of the week.” Also, the Left going into hysterics with everything the man has done since January has probably worn down a-political types too. At this point, if you look at it from the view of a generally a-political nonpartisan, it would seem like Trump, and the Left, are equally ridiculous. It’s sort of like the Boy Who Cried Wolf. The Left can only be outraged at so many things before it starts to be played out.
Also, most people didn’t know about Arpaio before this pardon, to begin with.
There’s no way to divine what they knew or didn’t know, or when they knew it. Judge what happened, when it happened, and the context in which it happened, rather than speculating about things which cannot be ascertained.
I don’t necessarily disagree, and as I’ve argued before, “collusion” itself is not necessarily a crime. However, at the same time, our intelligence services, our military, our law enforcement agencies, our congress, and the voting have a legitimate interest in knowing whether a foreign power is trying to influence an election, and they have not only the authority but an obligation to investigate suspected breaches of public trust in this regard. This is true regardless of how the public feels about it. If the public is so adamantly against these investigations, I suppose they can make a statement in next year’s elections and vote to empower Trump’s allies to shutter it all. Who knows, maybe they will.
Whether the average person knows about Arpaio or not is irrelevant to the issue of the obligation that we, as a democratic society, have to maintain the rule of law. Democracy is rule by the people; giving a powerful executive branch the ability to usurp courts with pardons is undercutting the rule of law, and it increases the odds that it can be replaced with the rule of men. I agree with you that the Left is more concerned with this than the Right, and that’s probably because America’s right wing has become more sympathetic to a right wing brand of authoritarianism, oblivious to the dangers that it creates and confident that it will result in a society that is to their liking. This is not unlike how German conservatives felt in the late 1920s and early 1930s. We know how that ended.
That may be true, but that has nothing to do with the central question of this thread. The OP skeptically asks whether the pardoning of Joe Arpaio is remarkable, and I assert that it absolutely is for all of the reasons I’ve already alluded to. Some pardons can be critiqued because of the individual being pardoned; others because of the nature of the pardon itself and what it represents. Although I absolutely find Arpaio’s behavior repugnant, I would argue that his pardon is not remarkable so much because of Joe Arpaio himself, as some Left-leaning commentators have suggested; it’s remarkable because of what the pardon itself represents when taking into consideration the timing and the context. If it’s not the most egregious pardons ever, it’s right up there among them.
It’s not the Right you need to worry about. It’s the Center. The apathetic, a-political people who think it’s “all a show”, who do not bother voting, who hear news like Arpaio’s pardon and just shrug it off as another example of our broken system (which they themselves do little to fix).
I agree with you on all points as far as the public having a right to know and whatnot, but what I’m simply saying is I think there is a great Silent Majority, if you will, of Americans who simply don’t care; not about Trump; not about the Left; not about the Right; who simply don’t give a crap.
Is his pardon remarkable? From a legal standpoint and historical standpoint, yeah. But you have to understand something. Trump broke our Democracy, or he was the final crack in a shattering Democracy. His election, and his continuous antics changed things. It’s significant, and egregious if you view America as being the America you grew up in, I grew up in, our forefathers grew up in. But it’s not anymore. We’re closer to the Weimar Republic at this point, minus the inflation. In a normal functioning Democratic Republic, the Arpaio pardon would be a big issue.
I don’t disagree that a lot of people don’t see what the big deal is and don’t care. But are you saying that we should just ignore everything and accept our inevitable collapse? That’s a different subject if you want to have that discussion, but I thought we were talking about where this pardon sits in historical context. It seems like we’re shifting the discussion toward a different subject entirely.
The problem with the Left’s outrage over the pardoning of Arpaio is that it tends to be more subjective in nature, and I think they’re also failing to grasp what’s really troubling about this pardon. And once again, it shows that the Left in all of its variants (from moderate suit-and-tie progressives to tattooed social justice warriors) will take to the streets over affronts to social justice and the environment, but when it comes to protecting the fundamental machinery of democracy, like law and order, they stay at home just like their right wing counterparts.