And we’re already seeing that. How many GOP primary losers are screaming about fraud? They’re all playing the same game plan, and won’t stop until they are made to stop.
This may be the single stupidest idea I’ve heard in my lifetime.
ETA: that quote is from the op-ed, not from ParallelLines.
I was just shootin’ the breeze with Joe, and when I brought this up he said “What, our Donny needs pardoning? Well, what for? I mean, I can’t pardon him unless he stands up in front of the networks and the yahoos and confesses to something terrible.”
I changed the subject.
Dan
(Again, from the Op Ed, not ParallelLines)
Where’s the aftermath? There was supposed to be a powerfully reverberating aftermath!
My view is to crucify everyone who supported Trump with illegal acts, but don’t allow Trump himself to become a martyr. This might be a terrible idea, but that’s why I’m some chump on the Internet instead of making these decisions.
I take a very simple view. Those who were responsible for planning and/or participating in the insurrection on January 6th should be prosecuted. Period. This applies to everyone from Trump at the top to the Proud Boys and any others who acted to prevent the electoral college count at the joint session of Congress that day. I fail to see how pardoning Trump would bring the country together. Maybe pardoning Nixon a half century ago helped heal the country, but remember that was years before you had major media outlets dedicated to brainwashing nearly half the American public. If Nixon had engaged in Watergate antics with Fox news running interference for him, he’d have emerged unscathed.
Were I editor, I would have titled this piece “Let’s Negotiate With Terrorists”, or, perhaps, “Peace In Our Time.”
(Quote is from Akaj’s link, not from Akaj…)
Sounds like something a Republican would say. Meanwhile Trump is STILL pushing the big lie, among other lies. Fuck him period.
Pardoning that cancer on democracy puts another nail in the coffin of democracy. It is a stupid, stupid, moronic, dangerous idea. The op-ed writer should be ashamed, and move to Russia.
The only ways that I could support anything like this is if it was part of a giant Truth and Reconciliation Committe type thing. Where Trump and all of his cronies came out and fully exposed and admitted to every piece of corruption misinformation and graft for all the world to see, resulting in the utter public disgrace and popular repudiation of Trumpism and all it represented.
It is far more important that Trumpism is destroyed than that Trump is destroyed. But the chances of such a thing happening is little to none.
It’s like pardoning a murderer who is currently still stabbing the corpse. I’m tired of America being stupid. Make stupid wrong again!
It occurs to me that there’s almost no one who would like this idea.
If the reactions from this board are representative, those of us on the left hate it. Meanwhile, people on the right would probably say. “Pardon him for what? He didn’t do anything wrong.”
Just for the record, the author of the article is an English professor, not a historian, poli-sci, legal or otherwise having in any professional characteristics that would lead his POV to have any actual weight. So, no better than anyone here.
Anyway, came back (seeing all the blue circles and thanks for making sure to note I wasn’t the one spouting the lines all!) to make one last point with an additional quote from the article -
If members of his base were motivated to violently storm the Capitol to keep him in office, to what lengths would they be willing to go to keep their martyred hero out of jail? Would it lead to a civil war fought in the streets?
…
Instead, Biden can prevent the worst from happening.
This is an ivory tower academic (almost by definition, as the author is an emeritus English Professor at theCollege of Dupage) who sees the worst outcome is violence in the streets/civil war. Peace is the point regardless of the cost.
As for his claimed regret and disgust at the pardoning… well, his other essays and opinion pieces lead me to doubt… strongly. Certainly his past self would probably be disgusted based on his own stories, unless he sees the 1/6 protestors as some sort of justified patriots. One way or another, his credibility does not impress me - morally, academic, or otherwise.
Big time. Iran-Contra happened because Watergate got a pass from Ford. It’s time we put a stop to this “the nation might not soon recover” horse hockey. If America can’t stand to see justice done, then we as a nation don’t deserve to survive.
I was a Watergate junky. In grad school in 1973 a bunch of us would eat dinner early so we could return to one tv set in our dorm and watch both the 6:30 national news on one channel and a second channel that broadcast it at 7:00 just so we could glean all the day’s details of the Congressional hearings.
By 1974 Nixon was obviously guilty and he was obviously going to get impeached. That doesn’t mean the people who had voted for him in a landslide in 1972 wanted him impeached. They may have grudgingly admitted it but they didn’t want a Senate trial to find him guilty. Not then, not later.
Yet even though Ford was never forgiven for pardoning Nixon and he lost in 1976 to an outsider who promised to clean up Washington (insert big hearty laugh here) I came to believe that he was both right and courageous in doing so. For the first five years of Nixon’s reign, the right was ready to make war on the left and they had all the cards and no serious opposition. The world could have worse than it turned out to be, horrifying as that was.
So i can understand people saying the same about a Trump trial today. Understand but not oppose. Today is not 1974. If Trump had kept his loud mouth shut, if his supporters didn’t kneel to him a week after their attacks upon 1/6, if he wasn’t endorsing lunatic candidates daily, if he wasn’t planning on running again today, if he hid out at Mar-a-Lago (JUST RAIDED BY THE FBI!) like Nixon did at San Clemente, maybe - just maybe - someone not a Trump-licker could think that.
No. If you lived through Nixon and didn’t learn anything from it, you don’t have the right to be listened to today.
I just don’t understand the people who seem to think that political (and other) division is the real problem, let alone the cause of the problem. And I definitely don’t get why people think giving in is the solution to anything.
Telling people they need to give up their freedom for the purposes of peace is a horrible idea. The result is just that they lose both.
I actually am quite suspicious of such arguments. They feel more like the best defense that the Trump side can offer. It’s kinda like how a defense attorney who can’t prove their client not guilty will still try to minimize their sentence.
Really. Just what were “the right” going to do to “the left” if Ford hadn’t pardoned Nixon and let a trial go forward? Be more mean to them? Not invite them to the country clubs? Try to deport Elvis?
No. The world turned out worse and it did not have to. No More.
I was always under the impression that the whole thing was a negotiation, that Nixon resigned in part as an exchange for getting a pardon. So the bad thing would have been Nixon continuing to fight, the damage he could do in the mean time, and the politics of actually having to impeach and convict him.
It would be akin to why prosecutors give plea deals, just at a higher level.
Maybe, but the price turned out to be too high. We let a bunco artist skate, so a child rapist thought he did not have to fear the rule of law.
People always default to believing a change in the past would make the world better. I’ve never understood that. The world can always get worse and any change to the past probably has equal odds of going either way. Whenever people think things are as bad as they can be, they are off by a million miles.
Since I’m agreeing with you that Trump shouldn’t be pardoned, I don’t see a lot for us to fight about in regard to the future.
I think that there is about zero chance that the prosecution of Nixon would have in any way have deterred Trump. Trump has been living a consequence free life for over 70 years. The fact that some loser low ratings president (much smaller inauguration crowd) got put in jail some 50 years ago has nothing to do with him.
Here’s another difference…
Nixon hadn’t been previously impeached TWICE and breezed through because his party refused to convict.
This needs to be done in a court of law and he needs to be treated like any other person, otherwise the President not only has protections in office, he is completely above the law forever once elected.
That’s a fantastic precedent to set. If you want to be able to get away with anything, become PUSA. We’ll get only the best candidates that way.