I couldn’t even read that whole thing it got me so mad.
It’s actually frightening. Large men shoving around diminutive teenage girls. People attacking protesters. People threatening to shoot veterans in the back of the head. Non-disruptive minorities being shoved out of venues, apparently simply because they’re minorities. :eek:
I suppose that a glance at history should tell me that I shouldn’t be surprised, but somehow you always feel like “It’s different here. These things wouldn’t happen in my country.”
I actually find myself hoping that the Republicans will find a way to replace him at their convention, even if it means that Clinton could have a stronger opponent.
I know that she’ll almost certainly beat Trump, but it’s the “almost” that frightens me.
And to the Bernie supporters I used to hang with but who are now refusing to do the right thing and vote for Hillary; screw you, you stupid assholes.
I don’t believe Hillary has actually earned the support she would need yet. I can’t blame Bernie or his supporters for not getting behind her. Just you wait. She may have gotten away with it, but this e-mail scandal is going to bite her in the ass and may be the very thing that puts Trump in the White House, which would be very very bad. YUUUGELY bad.
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That can’t possibly be true - I have been assured by multiple people on this very messageboard that Trump followers are peaceful folk and it’s the liberal protesters who are responsible for all the violent behavior this cycle. Surely a Trump supporter wouldn’t lie about something like that?
In the Saunders piece, his closing paragraphs are especially chilling:
We take for granted that our country will largely always continue on the way it has for the past 240 years, but nothing’s written in stone. And this hyper-partisan hatred on both sides, a refusal to work with the “other,” embodied by Trump’s candidacy, could end up bringing the whole she-bang down eventually.
Well, in fairness, it’s not like it was 240 consecutive years of fantastic success. There was the small matter of the hideously bloody civil war.
Perhaps more pertinently, Trump is not - in my humble opinion - part of the “hyper-partisan” phenomenon we’ve seen in the last twenty years. He is more a symptom of the same New Wave Fascism we are seeing in European countries as well. Trump is a wannabe Il Duce. He’s not really a Republican. He couldn’t care less about Republicans or the GOP or any of its platforms. The last GOP president was George W. Bush and they are as different as Trump is from Hillary Clinton.
If anything, the USA is getting a slightly lucky break in that the wannabe fascist is Trump. Unlike many European fascists, Trump is not an ideologue who hates any particular ethnic groups; he’s a money-grubbing scam artist for whom a Presidential race is a way to make money from suckers. If elected he’d either resign in boredom or be impeached. He is also - again - unlike many of his foreign counterparts - not actually a skilled politician, as a result of which it appears very probably his campaign is going to run aground. Once he’s done, he’s done. (He’s also very old; Trump, if elected, would be the oldest President ever elected for the first time.) He has no party, really; he hijacked the GOP this time but they don’t like him. There’s no Trump movement to have Trump candidates run for Congress, nor is there any chance Trump would invest a minute of his time of a dime of his money creating such a thing.
That said his rise is still scary. It reveals that the broad appeal of fascism, which is frighteningly staging a comeback elsewhere, is also becoming more popular in the USA. There are many reasons for this I don’t feel like typing out right now, but there it is. I think partisanship is a different, or at most sort-of-related, issue.
Every American should and must strive to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution - not just those who have sworn an oath to do so. Democracy is not a natural state of humanity, and it takes work to maintain a civil society.
You had me until this sentence. It isn’t both sides. As long as Republicans act like petulant children and the nattering nellies on the television shake their heads and wag their fingers and say “Gee, I hate it when both sides do this” they will continue with their behavior. Both sides are NOT equally to blame. Nobody hated Bush, Cheney, or Nixon for who they were, it was what they did. Nobody invented scandals about Reagan. Nobody suggested that Ford was secretly trying to destroy the country. Only one side has stopped being honest in their political debate. Only one side incites racism and xenophobia and bigotry. If the country fails, there is only one party to blame.
The hyper-partisanship has grown stronger and more mainstream on the conservative’ side. On the liberal side, it’s still largely underground, but it’s present-- it’s just not in Congress or atop the ticket. There needs to be a vigilance on the left to make sure refusing to work with the “other” doesn’t become mainstream, even if that means not doing to Republicans what they did to us (extreme obstruction) when party power is flipped.
So now Trump is claiming that Hillary got off because she offered AG Loretta Lynch a bribe.
First: the idea that the AG can be bought is nauseating. I wish it were possible to sue his sorry ass for slander.
Second: in his pathetic pea brain, he thinks that the AG can be bought for…wait for it…the opportunity to keep her job for a while longer; as if Loretta Lynch will have trouble finding another job. The minute she leaves her position she’ll get snapped up by the private sector at 10x her current salary.
Indeed it should. There’s a reason I didn’t claim there haven’t been any incidents of violence against Trump supporters. There have been those on this board that have in fact claimed that all the violence has been on the left, however, which as the article reference demonstrates is clearly false.
He wants to get rid of the heebie-jobbies but not those weird perpendicular sticks some religious freaks wear around their necks? What about the sheriff badges and little Frisbee hats, are those going away too?
I think it’s been less on the left, and could continue to be less, because more people on the left are elected with the expectation that government can and should work. Deliberate obstruction on a wide scale doesn’t play into that as well.
But far too many people on the left want Democrats to emulate Tea Partiers for me to think that this is necessarily going to remain true.
The police have arrested some of the people who attacked Trump supporters in San Jose. They were 19 and 20 year olds with a history of trouble, probably in gangs though I haven’t seen evidence of this. They all had Latino names. I doubt any were political. They might however have not been too pleased with the supporters of a guy who wants to kick out their friends and relatives and who calls them all names. I’m not condoning it, but some haters should expect to get hated back.