Sam Stone believes Trump's tweets

The BBQ Pit
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The historical precedent is that FDR tried it, and raised such a shitstorm that he abandoned the plan. The Supremes also helped him by changing a vote (“the switch in time that saved nine”) to take the pressure off him from his base.

What Democrats and Republicans both fail to understand is that the other side gets a say, and unintended consequences abound. For example, one of the reasons you got Trump in the first place is because Democrats treated Mitt Romney like he was a Trump. So Republicans said, “Well, if you are going to treat Mitt freaking Romney like a monster, let’s see how you like THIS guy.” At the same time, the toxicity of Presidential politics (of which both sides are guilty) has scared away normal people of accomplishment and left the field to grifters, sociopaths, narcissists and idealogues. The odd decent person like Tulsi Gabbard gets squashed in that environment.

The international left tried to stir up revolution in Germany. They got Hitler instead. The right puts up Trump to ‘own’ the libs. Now they have a bumch of hard-left firebrands in Congress to deal with and are facing the loss of maybe the House, Senate, and Presidency. And now the Dems plan to take it up another notch.

Did you ever think what might happen if you pack the court, then the Republicans come back in 2022 riding a wave of public anger and win the House and Senate back, with no legislative filibuster? Or was your thinking that you’d pack the court and then use the opportunity to rig the game so you never lose again? Have you really thought this through?

Or for that matter, does it bother you that by normalizing court packing and ending the legislative filibuster you have just given Trump massive weapons if he pulls off another upset win?

What do you do if in 2024 President Haley responds to packing the court with four liberals by packing it with eight more conservatives? Who are you going to complain to, the Supreme Court?

And if Biden packs the court and then uses that to pass something the right hates such as gun bans or abolishing the electoral college so the middle of the country never gets a say in politics again, do you think they will see that as a legitimate use of power? You’re risking nothing less than destroying the country by going that way.

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I would accept all this as a cautionary tale, except the right has demonstrated that they will stop at nothing to do all those things you claim the left will do and more. Furthermore, they don’t need any excuse like a Democratic run of the table in 2020 to do so. They’ll do it if Trump wins and the senate remains under Republican control.

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He claims that he already did things all the time when it is easily fact checked that he did not.

e.g.

Trump walks out of news conference after reporter asks him about Veterans Choice lie he’s told more than 150 times

Trump, speaking at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club, had claimed again that he is the one who got the Veterans Choice program passed – adding, “They’ve been trying to get that passed for decades and decades and decades and no president’s ever been able to do it, and we got it done.”

In fact, former President Barack Obama signed the Choice program into law in 2014.

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Also worth keeping in mind is that while Trump’s election was very much a reminder that America’s right wing politics is still a force to be reckoned with, unless I am mistaken about demographics, American society is becoming more (not less) progressive. So this may well be the right wing’s last real crack of the whip. It would explain the desperate move by the right to nominate and elect an incompetent autocrat like Trump. He was the port in a storm.

85

You’re stupid.

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Not doing this stuff means the GOP wins for the next 20 years or more. A 6-3 GOP court means no worker protections, no abortion rights, no gay rights, no voting rights, no law enforcement reform, no health care improvements, etc. Yes, of course the GOP would then try and pack the court again, if they manage to get both houses plus the WH. But a 6-3 court is already all that they could ever want. So just walking away from even trying to fight it is as good as giving up any chance of progressive priorities for a generation. Better to take this risk than do nothing and just abandon progressive goals.

87

Here’s the deal though. It’s worse than Sam just believing a Trump Tweet. He not only believed that Trump had declassified documents, he believed that those documents would show that, “Russia/Collusion [was] invented by the Hillary Clinton campaign to distract from her E-mail scandal.”

The sheer amount of irrefutable evidence that one has to ignore to believe that is staggering.

Russia definitely worked to help Trump get elected, and members of the Trump campaign definitely colluded with some of the Russians involved. Hillary Clinton didn’t invent that and there is no document, classified or otherwise, that will change those facts.

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I don’t know if I’ve ever seen such a convincing explanation of how things have changed wrt conservatives online, here and probably elsewhere. It’s remarkable, and remarkably sad. I wonder what @Bricker is thinking these days, and who he’s voting for.

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:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

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My brother (a Canadian Trump supporter) told me the Democrats should have selected her. I said she’s crazy, and he acted shocked, wondering if she was crazier than Biden and Harris

I guess he was smart enough to pick the most Trump-like Democrat, or maybe he heard something while watching Tucker Carlson. (Why is a Canadian watching that drivel?)

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I’m still waiting for the promise in the other thread by Sam:

Sam, if you say something like “well, it’s not the same thread”… well, I won’t be that surprised.

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I never thought to apply Ockham’s razor.

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While I appreciate the need for balance here at the straight dope you really need to pick saner topics. Relying on Trump to tell the truth is not it.

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Sam_Stone, the problem is that your news sources are awful. Give up on right-wing news sources – they lie and distort all the time on purpose. They don’t just have a slant, like MSNBC, and they don’t make occasional innocent mistakes. They’re basically right-wing propaganda at this point and relying on them is a mistake. You relied on them for this bullshit story, which I’m sure they haven’t retracted. Did you learn anything from that?

When you talk about politics, you don’t come across as a different point of view – you come across as deluded. This is different from when you talk about, say, economics from a conservative standpoint, where I usually don’t agree with you, but at least you don’t seem off the deep end.

Or, just keep fucking that chicken, I guess. I don’t care that much either way.

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Because (1) those are all that the conservatives seem interesting in discussing and (2) they seem to increasingly do so in ways that would obviously engender anger and piss off the other side, due to the “pwn the libs” and “liberal tears” beliefs.

Conservatives are just as responsible for not wanting to discuss economics, foreign policy, and other weighty topics. They want the hot button issues, and usually talk about them in ways that would obviously get people’s defenses up.

You also bring up one of the biggest issues with having thoughtful discussions with conservatives these days, IMHO: the constant accusations of “virtue signaling” (or similar terms) because we liberals make an argument based on morality. It can’t be that we genuinely think that these things are legit–it must be that we’re doing it to look good to other people on the American left. Our morality must be performative.

It’s a thought terminating cliche, and those end discussions. I’m stuck having to once again explain why what they label virtue signaling is necessary, and how it’s being used to dismiss entire conversations by using ad hominem.

Though, again, I do think this is separate from the issue with the thread you are being Pitted for. If anything, I think the fact that you are often a very valuable conservative poster here is why a thread that defended Trump rankled so much.

Though I do agree with other posters that you make fewer constructive conservative posts than before.

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This is incredibly important. Quoted for truth.

Any mof us older than 40 have internalized the notion that the Republican Party is a legitimate political party that puts forth a set of logical policy choices to vote on, because that’s what they were for longer than any of us have been alive. For over a century, through wars and changes and the expansion of the United States, the Republicans were a legitimate alternative to the Democrats. They provided the USA with many great statesmen.

Today’s GOP isn’t like that. They are, to be quite honest, utterly fucking nuts. If you could take the Republicans of the late 1970s and bring then to 2020 in a time machine, they would all conclude today’s GOP is sick and twisted - even of the ones who were the same people today. The religious fanaticism, the refusal to accept science, the weird, single-minded bigotry would all be utterly incomprehensible, even scary, to almost all the Republicans in the history of the party.

And you know what? Some Republicans saw it coming. Barry Goldwater, an arch-Republican, totally called this; he never trusted the religious right and expected them to fuck up the party.

But some folks, including Sam I guess, whom I like and appreciate his input on a lot of subjects, cannot get past the hump of the long-standing paradigm that American politics is largely equally represented by two parties. That’s why people are also accusing the Democrats of being Communists and all that - they aren’t even close to that, and their nominees are dead centre moderates, but it’s a part of falling victim to that same paradigm; since the GOP is becoming right wing to the point of fascism, the false balance fallacy requires one pretend the Democrats are a bunch of Marxists.

To genuinely understand American politics one has to accept something that has never been true in our lifetimes; there is a centrist party and a fascist party now.

I mean, holy shit, Sam.

First of all, you’re exaggerating how Romney was treated.

SEcondly, you assignment of deliberate choice to the notion Republicans then nominated Trump as a response to Romney’s treatment is preposterous. It is in no way consistent with the fact. Trump was NOT wanted by Republican leadership and barely wanted by the rank and file; he gained fewer primary votes (in percentage terms) than any nominee in recent memory, if not ever. He was only because he was up against a large slate of equally mediocre opponents, allowing him to win early states on a plurality because he was the one most different candidate.

But most important, why don’t Democrats do the same thing? Barack Obama was subjected to eight years of overtly racist and utterly nutty abuse. The Democrats COULD have nominated an outright socialist - they had one ready to go - or someone even more extreme; instead they nominate the ultimate establishment, centrist candidate. In 2020, they somehow nominated someone even more centrist, boring, and uncontroversial. I a candidate being abused makes a party more radical, well, that appears to be only limited to the GOP. You know why? See above. The party is a radical fascist party now. There is no equivalence.

I mena, look at this statement. This is so weird and backwards.

Same, how could they normalize court packing if Trump wins? Like, you know the Democrats aren’t in power, and you know how court nominations work, so what could you possibly mean by this? How can they normalize something they’re not doing and can’t do and have never said they’d do? You know who says this in the USA in media that actually matters? Fox News. OAN. THEY say the Democrats are going to pack the USSC.

You need to get past the bothsidesism. I am not saying Democrats don’t do dishonorable things; sure they do. But there isn’t an equivalence here. The Democratic Party is a legitimate, centrist party. The Republican Party is now openly fascist. They are not equivalent; they are not two sides of the same coin.

And you’re wrong here too. If the EC were abolished the middle of the country would get a say, exactly the same say as everyone else. It’s time to retire this horseshit “Argument.” The only way they don’t get a say is if their votes are entirely removed… and could you please explain how Biden could abolish the electoral college by packing the Supreme Court? You know the SC doesn’t do that, right?

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I missed that line. What it really means is that “a specific small minority of the country could never monopolize the nation’s politics again.” The EC doesn’t balance all interests. Certain minority groups (e.g., African Americans), by virtue of living disproportionately in urban areas, have their interests counted even less than they’d otherwise be counted by the electoral college. The Electoral college just guarantees that rural whites get more say in the nation’s politics than they otherwise would. It’s a fucking travesty.

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Well, let’s say one side believes the world is flat and the other believes the world is round. Who’s got the monopoly, Moneybags?

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It doesn’t do that, either. Wyoming as a state as great electoral power for its size but the residents have zero. It got zero campaign stops in 2016, for obvious reasons–it was always going to vote Trump (California managed to get a single visit, while Florida got 71 visits).

The EC doesn’t give rural voters more influence. It gives swing states more influence. And gives swing voters within those states even more influence. There’s a reason why Biden is making no effort to normalize relations with Cuba, even though it would benefit almost all Americans: because it would piss off a very vocal group of Cuban ex-pats in Florida. This tiny group has a thousand times the influence of any rural voter in America.

Democrats and Republicans alike should be pissed that candidates can afford to ignore them, whether they live in Wyoming or California. Anyone claiming that it’s about rural vs. urban either does not understand the EC or is lying.

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You make good points, but you’re dismissing the disproportionate representation in the EC as being a problem, which it absolutely is. Some swing states would not be swing states if the Republicans did not have a disproportionately large amount of electoral votes based on disproportionate representation. The election map and strategies would be totally different. The precarious situation that allows them (in the hypothetical) to win the presidency with like 40% of the vote wouldn’t exist if not for disproportional representation.

But sure, they’re all good reasons to get rid of the EC. But just because you can identify problems other than disproportional representation, it doesn’t mean that’s not a problem.