Plot to kidnap (MI Gov) Gretchen Whitmer

Politics & Elections
181

I do think it was kinda terrible.

“He’s an Arab.”

“No ma’am, he’s a decent family man and a citizen […] He’s not an Arab.”

He refuted the laughable factual inaccuracy (that Obama was an “Arab”) and pushed back on the idea that Obama couldn’t be trusted. It would have been worse not to do those things, for sure. So that’s good. He can have credit for that, in a vacuum.

But not only did he not refute the underlying connection between those two points, he directly reinforced it. That’s kinda terrible. If he was capable of swaying that lady’s opinion, the opinion that he swayed was whether Obama was an Arab and evil, not whether Arabs were evil. In the context of him running for President, you’d have expected less from him – I agree with that. But that’s not exactly credit.

I think if McCain were running for reelection right now, and not Donald Trump, the rules about giving him credit would be different.

182

You’re absolutely right. Yet here we are.

183

I don’t know what was in McCain’s head, but when people say “Obama is an Muslim/Arab”, in addition to being bigoted they are accusing Obama of hiding who he truly is for nefarious reasons. I don’t think saying “no, he was a good man” necessarily means you think Arabs or Muslims are bad people.

184

My point is that this is a bad system of allocating credit. When President Eric Trump literally sells New York to the highest bidder and pockets the money, and Chief Justice Wohl affirms his right to do so, Donald Trump won’t retroactively have been any cooler.

Any of the people who retroactively feel fondness towards the Bushes and the McCains of the world would, I’m pretty confident, have barfed at the suggestion that this would ever come to pass, and they would barf if you suggested they’d later be giving Trump more credit.

185

Collin Powell thought that McCain could have done better:

I’m also troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say. And it is permitted to [say] such things as, “Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.” Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president?

186

86 is speak easy speak. I learned it from a bartender, not from a bouncer - I promise.

187

I think he was speaking as a reaction to what she was saying in real time and didn’t have time to nuance and elaborate further on what he was saying.

That being said, I agreed with Colin Powell in that McCain had other opportunities to really challenge his party on this issue. The fact that he didn’t and that he only reacted to the worst outbursts of republican politicians and voters, in my mind, is a concession that the party needs racists to win.

Anytime a party accepts or buys into the idea that it needs to cater to a population’s worsts instincts, that party is enabling the worst that will inevitably come in its due time. The truth is, Nixon and the Republicans actually did not have to win on appeals to segregation and anti-busing sentiment, but they chose to because they believed it would win them votes in the short term.

If someone, such as a close former aide, were to come on to this message board and say “But Asahi, you’ve got it all wrong; it was just a short-term strategy to win votes. Nixon and we were not really running on racism,” I would say “Oh, but you were indeed running on racism” and once you win an election by running on racism, you will inevitably keep running on that platform until that platform completely crumbles beneath your feet.

And therein lies the problem facing Republicans today. They are addicted to racism because they are addicted to winning on platforms of racism. It’s not something on which you can be comfortably straddled, tilting slightly one way or the other when it suits, depending on which way the wind blows. Winning with sick people requires loyalty, because these voters know that the progressive alternative will have nothing to do with them and won’t cater to them. So if, hypothetically speaking, you’re a republican running for office, you’re past the point of the gaining their trust and support with the occasional wink and nod to such voters; you’d better be there when they’re brandishing weapons, threatening anarchy on capitol grounds, or encircled around the burning cross.

188

I fully believe that once Trump is voted out, he will get air time and try to whip up his supporters to invade Washington and remove Biden. Sort of in a Wink, wink, nod, nod way. LOUD dog whistles though.

Sedition : “incitement of resistance to or insurrection against lawful authority”

He’s a cowardly bully, it’s what he does.

So tax fraud and money laundering (and a dozen or so other) charges will go on the back burner. And oddly, I think that Twitter etal, will just shut him up, by shutting him down. Or they will be charged too.

His base will make a show of it, but they are cowardly bully’s too. There will be some deaths though, they are also morons

I fully expect sedition charges against Trump.

189

Well, there’s good and then there’s good. There’s good as in “he’s an honest decent human being who strives to treat others as well as he treats himself” and then there’s good as in “he may be a selfish person that is typically horrible to other people but at least he isn’t John Gotti or David Koresh bad”.

The first definition works in normal situations, the second definition only comes into play when your counterpoint is Donald Trump.

190

Yes, I understand that’s the rule that people are applying, but that is the specific thing I’m taking issue with. It’s a mystery to me why McCain and Bush are considered to be categorically better than Donald Trump on a level that analogizes to a comparison between a normal person and (what I perceive to be your image of) the worst the country has to offer. It seems to me to be prioritizing a sort of fetishization of how bad Trump is over a fair accounting of why his politics are so dangerous.

Given the choice, I suppose I would take McCain over Trump as president to mitigate the risk of a complete catastrophe like COVID or a civil war, and so that means I think he’s a non-zero amount “better,” but that’s not a major categorical difference. I think George W. Bush was about as bad as Trump for the world, and McCain probably would have been, too.

191

In many ways, I think President Cruz would’ve done a lot more damage than Trump - at least before March 2020. His convictions go against every thing I believe in and I think he would’ve worked hard to achieve his policy goals.

I’ve never seem Trump as being more than a straight-up con artist. He actually owned and operated a business designed to separate the elderly and the desperate unemployed from their life savings -Trump University, a business that was legally ruled to be a fraud. ETA- I capitalized owned because Trump tries to pretend it was just a branding deal, while in reality it was his brainchild and he had 80% ownership.

Now, I disagree with a lot of the negative press against Trump. He knows how to work the media and plays them like a violin. They’ll fill a whole week with outrage over something nasty Trump said about a liberal icon - while Trump is sitting in the White House concocting scheme after scheme to funnel your tax dollars to his friends and cronies.

I love financial crime- I mean, I generally hate the acts themselves but I love reading about it and following the intricacies. But that stuff bores most people to tears. As such, the six crimes Trump commits daily before breakfast have gone largely unnoticed, as well as the related crimes like firing all the inspectors general.

So, in a way I feel gaslighted by all this normal campaigning - like I’d feel if I was tasked with listening to Barack Obama and Bernie Madoff pitch me on retirement strategies, then told to pick the best investment advisor on the basis of those presentations.

Because it wouldn’t matter what either person SAID in the above situation, because anything Madoff said would be a lie and there’s no way in hell he’s managing my money. Now, the Madoff supporters would probably say I’m being unfair by not listening what he has to say and making an objective decision based on the presentation.

This is why I can’t treat Trump as a “normal” opposition politician. He has no politics other than “what is most beneficial for ME, Donald J. Trump, at this moment in time”, or as Republicans say, he’s transactional. By treating him as a normal politician, even a bad one, you’re normalizing organized crime in politics.

192

Certainly plausible if one wears the right shaped blinkers.

Cruz with an R Congress could have enacted a lot of truly terrible policies that a fairly effective government would then implement. As you say, that would be bad. And as you didn’t quite say, Trump pretty thoroughly failed to do anything like that with the notable exception of the TCJA. That was a con in itself, but nothing extraordinary by mainstream R tax policy efforts. So in that sense, Trump’s been less harmful than Cruz would have been.

Here’s where Trump is different:

Trump gutted the effective part of the executive branch and it’ll take multiple administrations’-worth of time to undo that damage. To say nothing of getting sensible policies in place to replace the combination of explicit criminality and vacuum we have now.

The other way Trump damaged the country is by really taking the gloves off ref white supremacy, mob violence and election theft as routine acceptable tactics, and all the rest of that. Like you, I think Cruz is bad and would pursue bad policies. But he would not be actively vandalizing American society to nearly the degree Trump has.

So I stand by my contention that Trump is far worse than Cruz would have been when viewed holistically.

A larger question is how much Trump is just the opportunistic (paid?) front man for a much larger ongoing effort to destabilize the USA vs. how much is just him being real lucky / good at landing in the right place at the right time with the right schtick to be carried aloft on the shoulders of the mob to wherever they were already going. All the while, as you say, stuffing every dollar he lays eyes on into his / his family’s coffers.

193

I strongly disagree. This kind of thinking is what leads some conservatives to equate Democrats, socialists, and Communists.

Certainly Biden does not agree with you. He worked closely with McCain and gave many eloquent speeches about his integrity. I’m sure he would have some words for you if you tried to compare McCain to Trump.

194

I wonder and worry about this. It seems that repairing say, the State Department or Defense Department or whatever, would be a matter of Biden hiring the right people. What specific issues might arise?

Are former officials purged by Trump unlikely to want to come back to work under Biden?

Would Congress have to approve some or many of these hires, whether directly voting on them or through funding the positions?

Will some of the Trump loyalists, especially those at lower rather than cabinet levels, put up some kind of a fight by refusing to leave, threatening legal action if they are removed from their positions?

195

I’m sure Joe Biden would have a lot of words for me about a lot of things these days. I disagree with him.

The fact that “some conservatives” can’t tell the difference between things doesn’t really change my opinion about whether or not I can tell the difference between things, you know? John McCain wasn’t a good dude. He wasn’t good for the world. I don’t have to pretend he was because Trump is bad in a different way.

196

Lots of people retired and wont come back. Some got new jobs that they are happy with and won’t come back. Some new people were hand-picked by Republican appointees for mid-level positions and they will remain in their jobs to wreak havoc in the future. You can’t fire them based on their politics. Since their tenuous association with the current president can’t really be milked for much value in the lobbying/consulting/private sector games, they will be around for years,.

Current political appointees have abandoned beneficial rulemakings that must now be restarted. For example, the EPA gave up on new fuel economy regulations. Starting the rulemaking process over often means collecting new data and studying a problem for a long time before proposing something new that will withstand legal challenges.

The current administration adopted a lot of rules that will need to be unwound. So, the new administration will need to propose repealing those rules, which again requires study and comment. Otherwise, the other side will sue and say that the policy change is “arbitrary and capricious,” and will get it struck down in the courts. (For what it’s worth, that standard cuts both ways. Many of the Trump administration’s rule changes were struck down for being arbitrary and capricious, which protected America in some cases from some harm for some time at least. However, with Trump and McConnell having stacked the courts with partisan Republicans, we can expect Republicans to win more of these battles in the future than they should.)

197

I disagree. Yes, President McCain would have submitted conservative nominations to the Supreme Court and the various Federal courts, but he wouldn’t have pulled us out of the Iran deal, and he wouldn’ t have pulled us out of the Paris Accords and he wouldn’t have cut funding to WHO or threatened NATO or…

THESE are the reasons that Trump is a COMPLETE AND UTTER FAILURE as a person and as a President. I might disagree with many of the actions that W did in office, but it wasn’t a Trumpster fire like this administration.

198

https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/355396-mccain-iran-was-literally-been-getting-away-with-murder

I dunno, man. I just don’t get it.

199

My point being that policy-wise, Trump has been (more or less) a typical conservative - a bit more so in saying the quiet parts aloud. As a leader, he has been a complete failure. Every other president (at least in my lifetime) has tried to unite the country, especially in troubling times. Trump has actively tried to divide the country.

200

I just don’t think I can find common ground with those who can see Trump’s actual activities in office–especially seeing it rise to a fever pitch in 2020–and think you can remotely compare him with any previous candidate.

People have one thing they hate Bush for: the Iraq war. Which was clearly him being biased towards bad intelligence in due to having a vendetta against Iraq for his dad. But that took a terrorist attack on US soil to happen. Everyone in the country became more okay with US military action after that point.

It’s the one bad thing that we thought would be the worst thing ever, but along came Trump who literally campaigned on being worse, and he won, and he was worse than he campaigned on.

Trump’s now running on the 14 characteristics of fascism. Before now, “it could never happen here” seemed true. Now it doesn’t. I do not know if America (as a democracy) can even survive a second term with Trump. It did survive two terms with Bush. It would have survived with McCain or Romney in charge.

The only way I can see to say that the others were equally bad is to utterly downplay how bad Trump has been. You have to downplay over 100,000 lives lost because more people would die in blue states. You have to downplay cozying up with dictators, colluding to influence elections, putting children in cages, getting armed people to attack refugees, blackbagging protesters, killing our global alliances, and so, so much more.

Trump doesn’t just say the quiet parts out loud. He lets fringe, conspiracy nutters run the party. He is one of them–he is the crazy uncle who spouts the conspiracy theories, and he’s in charge. Even the Republicans were smart enough to push them to the back, before 2016.

Do you really think that any other president would have specifically pushed for these home terrorist groups to exist, like Trump did? The other Republicans weren’t above tricks like voter ID to stay in power, but they still stopped at full on treason.