If the Democrats were doing absolutely nothing, then this shutdown might hurt them. But they’re busy passing bills with funding levels the same as the bills the Republicans in the Senate already voted for just a few weeks ago. They’re taking bipartisan action to get the government open. And the Senate Republicans are doing nothing, and Trump is doing nothing but bloviating. He’s done nothing to try and actually make a deal.
The shutdown happened when the Republicans controlled the white house and both houses of congress. The Democrats just won the House. You think they will suffer in the next election if they just immediately roll over and submit to Trump? Really? Your logic seems to boil down to “Democrats are always responsible for shutdowns”. Ridiculous. The toddler owns this, he said he was proud to own it on live TV. He is the one causing the suffering because his ego will not allow him to let this stupid idea go, he even told Schumer he couldn’t accept the Democrat’s offer because it would make him look foolish. He is plainly telling us what this is all about, why aren’t you listening to him?
Not only were Republicans in charge of the WH, House, and Senate when the shutdown started, but as soon as the Democrats got the House, they immediately started passing funding bills at the same level the Senate Republicans had already voted. They’re literally working in a bipartisan fashion to open the government, while the Republican-controlled branches are doing nothing.
The Democrats are winning the messaging battle, and the gap is widening. 51% of Americans blame Trump for the shutdown (up 4 points from December), 32% blame Democrats in congress, and 7% blame Republicans in congress. So Republicans are blamed more than Democrats at almost a 2 to 1 margin.
If she’s a ‘serious’ progressive, I’d hate to see what an unserious one looks like. She’s a person who supposedly has a degree in economics, but who does not understand how unemployment is calculated. She’s a serial confabulator when it comes to facts, just like Donald Trump, and when confronted by Anderson Cooper about it basically lamented this obsession with ‘facts’ as opposed to moral truths. In other words, a little factual lie or exaggeration is not important if it supports a ‘moral truth’. That’s what every political liar in history believes.
She seems to believe that you can get a major industrial economy to a purely renewable energy economy in 18 years, and that somehow this will ‘grow’ the economy. She thinks a ‘green new deal’ for global warming must include free health care for all and a universal income, thus making an already impossible task even more impossible. When asked how to raise the 20-30 trillion dollars required, she hand-waved the problem away with ‘more taxes on the rich’.
If she’s your idea of a serious Democrat, then either the Democratic party or America is in serious trouble.
By the way, I thought her dancing video was adorable, and she may be a perfectly nice person. Unlike most Democrats, some of us can believe that a person has seriously bad ideas without also thinking they must be a monster.
High quality mass personal attack! A-. Well done.
I’m confused. Was it ‘going high’ when Harry Reid said he had proof that Mitt Romney never paid taxes, then after the election admitted gleefully that he lied and was happy to do it because Mitt lost?
Was it ‘going high’ when Mitt Romney, one of the most decent Republicans around, was accused of everything from being a bully in high school to abusing his dog to discriminating against and belittling women?
Was it ‘going high’ to insinuate that Sarah Palin was partially responsible for the shooting of Gabby Giffords because she sent out a campaign mailer illustrating which states their campaigns needed to target?
Was it ‘going high’ to describe Republicans as ‘deplorables’?
Was it ‘going high’ to attack Sarah Palin’s children, insinuating that one was a slut and the one with Down’s syndrome was the slut child’s baby being covered up?
Was it ‘going high’ to end the judicial filibuster? Or for Obama to criticize a sitting justice to his face during a state of the union address? Both breaches of long standing protocol.
One of the reasons Republicans were willing to go nasty this time around was because of the nasty way the Democrats treated Mitt Romney in the last election, smearing him with every little thing they could possibly make stick in an effort to tar him as something he wasn’t.
The notion that one side of the political fence plays by high minded rules while the other swims in the gutter is patently ridiculous. Both sides engage in whatever behaviour they think will gain them more power. Anyone who thinks otherwise needs to learn what realpolitik is.
[QUOTE=Sam Stone;21419249Was it ‘going high’ to describe Republicans as ‘deplorables’? [/QUOTE]
In the interests of accuracy, Hillary did not describe Republicans as “Deplorables”. She applied that term to half of trump’s supporters. Frankly, I think she was being charitable, QED.
That may be the case, but it’s still not ‘going high’ to call about a quarter of your own citizens ‘deplorable’.
No, but at least it was honest. So lacking in America today. Sad.
I can’t comprehend how anyone can blame the Democrats. Trump literally said that he was to blame. Are the Trump voters not even listening to what Trump himself says?
The Democrats never elevated to national office someone who spread racist evidence-free conspiracy theories for years. There is no Democratic equivalent of Trump. Not even close.
What are you defining as “national office”?
See that thing whizzing out the window? That’s almost anyone’s willingness to take this post seriously. No, really, do you honestly believe this? AOC got caught making a few mistakes which she then immediately corrected. The Washington Post has had to create an entirely new level on their Pinocchio Scale to denote that something is not just a lie but also an intentional disinformation campaign because Trump kept repeating the same lies over and over again.
Why should I take the rest of this post seriously after a nonsensical statement like this?
For anyone wondering, here’s the actual exchange:
Anderson Cooper: One of the criticisms of you is that— that your math is fuzzy. The Washington Post recently awarded you four Pinocchios—
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Oh my goodness—
Anderson Cooper: —for misstating some statistics about Pentagon spending?
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: If people want to really blow up one figure here or one word there, I would argue that they’re missing the forest for the trees. I think that there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.
Anderson Cooper: But being factually correct is important—
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: It’s absolutely important. And whenever I make a mistake. I say, “Okay, this was clumsy.” and then I restate what my point was. But it’s— it’s not the same thing as— as the president lying about immigrants. It’s not the same thing, at all.
Hmm. "[Being factually correct] is absolutely important. And whenever I make a mistake, I say, “Okay, this was clumsy.” vs. “lamented this obsession with facts”.
If one reads for comprehension, or looks into the multiple follow-ups she made on twitter, one might reach a slightly different conclusion. Like that she’s upset that people get lost in the specifics of policy, and miss the difference between “getting your figures wrong and self-correcting” and “leading a misinformation campaign”. Y’know, the reason the Washington Post included that “Bottomless Pinocchios” rating.
A thing which totally happened.
Also a thing that totally happened.
So if that’s “going low”, what’s “grab 'em by the pussy”? My god, man, a bit of proportionality, please.
So basically, this guy?
Is that what folks were saying in Canada? 
I don’t know how you define “slut,” but as I recall, Bristol Palin got pregnant out of wedlock from what seemed to be a pretty serious boyfriend. The Down’s Syndrome child was born to her 40-something mother, which is in line with the increased risk of Down’s attaching to a late-in-life pregnancy.
:rolleyes: If you want to play “They made me be mean this time because they were mean to my guy last time”, then the Democrats’ willingness to attack Romney can be attributed in its turn to Republican nastiness about Obama, including all the birther looniness.
Really, Republicans don’t seem to need a lot of external prompting to encourage their “willingness” to “go nasty”, and this isn’t a recent phenomenon. Heck, we were just reminded in another thread of FDR’s dog Fala, about whom Republican opponents in 1944 made up a completely false story claiming that “the president had left his Scottish Terrier behind on a visit to the Aleutian Islands, and spent millions in taxpayer dollars to send a destroyer to recover him”.
While I don’t support spreading lies as a political tactic by either side, it’s pretty laughable that you equate the treatment Romney received with, say, the bullshit Obama had to put up with from the beginning of his first campaign to the end of his presidency. It’s nonsensical to claim that Republican mudslinging was a response to the 2012 campaign, since they were at it (and nastier about it) long before that.
Romney never had his citizenship, loyalty or religion questioned by any significant Democrat, whereas the main driver of the obnoxious birther campaign is now the most prominent Republican of the modern era.
The Democrats would have to go exponentially lower to even approach the depths the GOP has maintained since 2008.
Yeah. Sam is putting forth a blatantly false equivalence between occasional Democratic overblowing of comparatively minor issues based in fact, and Republican manufacturing and promoting of outright lies.
Another thing to consider is the general reception of the attacks on the side that supposedly benefits from them. When some whackadoodle bandies about a ridiculous rumor that Sarah Palin pretended to be the mother of her daughter’s first illegitimate child, prominent Democrats write op-eds about what a stupid rumor it is, and the Democratic President reiterates that the press shouldn’t be prying into the private lives of candidates’ families.
But when some whackadoodle bandies about a ridiculous rumor that Barack Obama wasn’t born in Hawaii, Republicans elect that whackadoodle President.
Donald Trump is not Harry Reid - or Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi or Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump is also not George W. Bush or Mitch McConnell or Paul Ryan or Newt Gingrich.
We need to stop pretending that what Trump is doing is normal politics. It’s not. And we - not just Democrats but Republicans as well - should not act like this is normal.
This isn’t about the Democrats beating the Republicans. This is about America. If making Mike Pence President is the only solution to this problem then I can live with that. I won’t be happy with President Pence but it would be a return to normal politics.