Unfortunately, we can’t just cut off this particular addict/nephew. They have significant resources and power. The best we can do is defend ourselves and hold them at bay until they self-destruct. Maybe then we can engage with them and help them recover.
What we can’t do is treat them like any other member of the family. They’ll take any love or support we give them and turn it into fuel for their addiction, and won’t stop until they own our house and kick us out of it.
Lol, even the NY Post differentiates between Americans and Republicans:
Go ahead and make him your nominee, guys and gals. PLEASE!
That’s why we need to cut them off. “Cutting them off” means removing their resources and power.
But we both know it can’t be done through peaceful means. The gerrymandering of the nation gives them a nearly unbreakable lock on ~45% of the seats in Congress and complete control over at least half the statehouses. Not to mention a 6-3 SCOTUS majority.
Treating them like pariahs and loudly, constantly calling them out on their evilness is IMO the best way to keep winning that 55%, incrementally gaining ground in statehouses and hoping the MAGA right self-destructs. Treating them like wayward-but-beloved members of the family, OTOH, just gives them the ability to destroy our means of ever returning the country to sanity.
Yeah, I guess I should be nicer to people who call me a pedophile and want to eliminate me from the public. I guess I’m the real problem for not being more understanding of their difficulties. Why can’t we have more compassion for the genocidaires?
Have y’all forgotten what happened when this was said during his first campaign?
The people who call you a pedophile while arguing in favor of “marriage” of twelve-year-olds. Those people, specifically.
I mean, maybe they mean it as a marriage offer.
Yes. Remember what happened during his second? And 2018? And 2022?
Try turning it around. They no longer consider us their fellow citizens. Do you see how that makes a problem?
And, again, these are the same people who refuse to wear a mask knowing that their decision could kill their fellow citizens… and they didn’t give a s***, to the tune of over 1 million American deaths.
I don’t know if you intended that as a slam at liberals, but Ironically, a chief problem here is that that’s the precise assumption that so many conservatives unironically make.
They feel that when they do terrible things, they’re obeying a supreme call to “take our country back” or “save liberty from the godless socialists” or “rescue the children in dire peril” or some similar overriding moral imperative. So they’re not really to blame for the trampling on the rights of others and other “collateral damage” that they inflict on their fellow citizens in the process.
But when it subsequently becomes clear that no, actually, what they were doing was objectively terrible—setting dogs on nonviolent protestors, calling gay and trans people abominations, encouraging stochastic terrorism against abortion providers, murdering undocumented immigrants crossing the border, wrecking the Capitol building in an attempted seditious coup—then they whine about how the liberals were at fault somehow for allowing it to happen. “It’s the Left’s fault for not stopping us, for antagonizing us, for making us nominate Donald Trump by nominating Hillary Clinton, for not correcting our lying media and leaders hard enough on their lies, for hurting our feelings by calling our leaders liars.”
Yup, it’s a firm axiom of much of the Right that only the Left has agency. Moral agency, that is. The Right is entitled to run around wrecking whatever it wants in its delusional-toddler tantrums, and the Left is morally obligated to take responsibility for cleaning up the mess, and for not having successfully prevented the Right from making the mess in the first place. A very convenient attitude for the Right to adopt, at least now that they’re no longer embarrassed about having abdicated the basic responsibilities of grownups.
Pffft. Get back to me when and if you see liberals, on the Dope or elsewhere, actually taking any actions or proposing any measures to illegally interfere with MAGA Republicans’ exercise of their rights as humans and citizens.
We aren’t. We’re the ones defending the rights of everyone to vote, to have constitutionally protected free speech, to have bodily autonomy, to form relationships with whatever consenting adults they prefer, etc.
This sort of bothsidesism is just exacerbating the problems by minimizing crucially important ideological differences. When one side is actively supporting the exercise of government power to strip people of fundamental rights, and the other side is occasionally bitching in a rant forum on social media that they wish they could send all these delusional bigots off to Mars, then no, it is not valid or useful to describe both sides as “sliding toward fascism”.
“It’s Ukraine’s fault for being their own country and no longer wanting to be our puppet, we were forced to invade.”
What an interesting coincidence.
“I wouldn’t have hit her if she’d had dinner ready when I got home.”
Same psychology from top to bottom.
Just sayin’
Why should Canada have all the benefit, when we need eight paved lanes across the Darien Gap?
Dan
Compassion is fine. But it has to be clear-eyed and watchful compassion. Amputating limbs (as in taking power away from them) to save the body.
So back in the first campaign, Trump was an wacky outlier, among a field of Republicans who were very wrong but wrong within normal parameters. Some liberals hoped that they would nominate Trump because although they knew that he would be a total disaster, they thought that the rest of the nation would see that as well and he lose the general election. In retrospect they were very wrong to hope this because had the GOP nominated someone else (say Bush III, or Rubio) he would have been more likely to win but at least he would be sane.
The situation in 2028 is different. There is no sane alternative. There is either Donald Trump, or DeSantis Trump or Abbot Trump, or whatever other fascist wannabe Trump feels confident enough to come out of the woodwork and challenge the master. It isn’t clear that any of them would be any better than Trump prime, so it make sense to hope that the Republicans nominate whichever one is least like to win in the general. Because if any of the alternatives win its still likely to be “game over”.
Yeah, Miller, why aren’t you being more tolerant of their intolerance?!