I’m not surprised that it happened. That it happened so quickly, so thoroughly and so effortlessly is a little surprising and a lot demoralizing.
How quickly the people that used to scream “Won’t somebody think of the children,” and then, uh, what’s happening to the children.
What really surprised me wasn’t what Sessions did, it’s how those same people support it.
I was going to put a joke in here about getting the kids released by dropping off a copy of Grand Theft Auto for them to play, upsetting the conservatives enough for them to petition for the kids release, but it just isn’t funny considering the circumstances.
Nothing really seems funny anymore. I have met some people requesting asylum here in Oregon from drug cartel bullshit. When a grown man looks you in the eye and tells you, “They were going to kill my 13 year old daughter because she wouldn’t sleep with them,” nothing is funny anymore.
Not really. We tend to allocate our hatred on a case-by-case basis, so as to keep it rational.
Democrats and Republicans alike are guilty of using children as human props. We witnessed Trump haul out the families of people who were killed by illegal immigrants countless times and parade them before the audiences at his rallies. The Democrats do the same thing with victims of gun violence. I think it’s a cheap tactic - personalizing a complex issue into a human face - but it’s also really, really effective. There is absolutely nothing that will connect with people more than having a human face/voice to represent an idea - emotions will always have a harder hitting impact than abstract discussions of policy.
To the OP, probably two things.
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boldness and frequency of the lies. I would certainly have expected a large amount of spinning and maybe a bit of JAQing off, but I never expected the outright contradiction of verifiable facts, and the degree to which his supporters would believe him over established news organizations.
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the degree to which the GOP has been co-opted by him. Of course I figured that they would support the conservative portions of his agenda, but I thought that he would get a little more push back when he made outrageous statements or attempted to overturn the regular order. I think there was a little more push-back early on but once it became clear that nothing he could say or do would turn his supporters away from him, they decided to just go along with it.
New Republican slogan: “Won’t somebody else think of the children?”
Complaining about the killing of children is morally equivalent to the caging of children in concentration camps?
That’s a mighty strange fence you’re sitting on.
No, it’s not morally equivalent; I’m just saying that the use of human props is something that occurs on both sides.
Yeah…but when one side cages their props, the equivalency ends.
Like a few others in this thread have opined, the thing I’m most surprised is how Trump still has as many supporters as he does. It seems as though everything Hillary was accused of, Trump does in spades. He hasn’t accomplished much of anything since he’s gotten into office. He’s caging children, for cryin’ out loud.
Apparently the Crazification Factor is real, and explains his base.
In your opinion. (And in mine too, frankly.) Yet - there are many people who would say, “well, the other side murders thousands of children!” (abortion). I personally believe that there’s a hierarchy of the priority of human lives, and that unborn children - while still human lives - are simply lower on that hierarchy than adult lives, and it’s lower still when they’re insufficiently developed as to have any kind of consciousness or feeling. But a lot of people have a very, very different attitude about it.
In any case, it’s all “waving a bloody shirt.” Showing people the faces of babies and saying “how can you kill this child?” (or showing them horrific pictures of aborted fetuses), even though most abortions involve an organism that’s really a stretch to call a ‘child’; showing people the families of murder victims who were killed by illegal immigrants and saying, “how can you look these people in the face and say that we shouldn’t build a wall?”, even though the vast majority of undocumented immigrants never hurt anyone and indeed are a major asset to this country’s economy; or showing people the faces of children who were killed in school shootings and saying “how can you look at the faces of these children and still believe that Jacquernagy should be allowed to have an ‘assault weapon?’” (even though it’s locked in a safe and has never shot anything but a paper target). It’s an attempt to pull at the heartstrings and I don’t like it.
I don’t believe that protesting over the conditions of these children at the border is the same thing, because this is a case of a very legitimate problem that is well-documented and which there is no need for.
Well, the big thing that I am really surprised about is how the Republicans didn’t repeal the ACA, at least not yet. Pleasantly surprised, mind you, but I figured that the Republicans’ blood oath to anti-ACA fealty would result in some kind of terrible policy being passed.
Beyond that, though, I guess what I am really surprised about are the implications that Trump’s time in office might induce in future Congresses and administrations. Like, it’s kind of difficult to articulate, but most people seem to expect that, post-Trump, the GOP will revert back to its pro-trade, pro-plutocracy, pro-deregulation ideologies in a sort of no-harm, no-foul way. The thing is, those are the kinds of ideas that Trump EXPLICITLY ran against and that his voters soundly rejected by electing him. The message of Trump’s win is really that Republicans want the following things: less immigration, higher taxes on rich people, and more healthcare and entitlement spending. That Trump would basically abandon all of that - minus the immigration stuff - while in office, and that the GOP would widely presume that it could return to its earlier ideas in spite of the total rebuke of those ideas from GOP voters has been truly surprising to me.
I mean, the thing that drives me up the wall the most is that there is video of Trump explicitly promising “insurance for everybody” in any potential ACA replacement plan. Literally none of his administration’s actions nor any Congressional proposal would have fulfilled that promise, and yet nobody seemed to bat an eye at that or try to hold the GOP responsible for such flagrant lies. That sort of thing surprises me.
They’ve gutted funding and taken away the mandatory coverage requirement that would have stabilized it. They haven’t gotten their act together (which shouldn’t be surprising) enough to kill it, but they’ve crippled it.
Some, sure, but I don’t know how many of pre-retirement age still think so. The Eloi aren’t in charge of the party anymore, and largely no longer even exist. The Morlock Revolution is complete.
Me too. He didn’t just promise it, the mother fucker said the bill was drafted and ready to be introduced.
People who’d believe that Mexico would pay for the wall would believe that too. And still do.
It isn’t even something you can blame Trump for - the Republicans have been promising to repeal and replace (with essentially the same thing, just without Obama’s name on it) ever since ACA passed. It’s been the dumbest bluff in American history, but it’s worked.
Very little about the Trump administration has surprised me. I’d say the two things I didn’t expect have actually been positive: I expected him to nominate his personal lawyer, wormy son, or other completely unqualified toady to the Supreme Court. I also expected him to go all out in trying to prosecute Hillary Clinton and his other enemies as soon as he took office, and thankfully that didn’t happen.
The bigger surprise for me has been Congress. I expected them to be lining up non-stop votes on major conservative wishlist legislation from day one of the administration. Yes, they got their tax cut, but I expected they would be way more ambitious, even going so far as to eliminate the filibuster so they could get major legislation through without having to compromise. I’m not really sure why they’ve been so tepid about going after all these legislative goals they’ve been talking about for so long now.
He did. Gorsuch isn’t unqualified by experience, but he’s certainly proven himself to be a partisan toady.
Even his own legal people told him there was no case there. He’s repeatedly tweeted his desire for it, though.
There are still some relatively-sane members who won’t go along with the Freedom Caucus vandals, and that’s prevented a majority vote from being consistently available to the regressives. Besides, you had wrongly assumed they had competent leadership, instead of some slime that knows only how to obstruct.
That the GOP started… started… their concentration camps with children.
All of history suggested prisoners, young men… you know, the usual suspects. But the GOP? Went straight to kids.
Of course, and he specifically went after brown kids.
It’s repulsive to many, but to many others, it’s a promise kept. The sheer barbarity of such a move is proof that he is their culture warrior, and unlike many of the professional political class, he does what he says he’s going to do. He shows leadership by making controversial decisions that revolt his detractors.
But wait, there’s more: not satisfied with putting scores of children in a giant cage and separating them from parents, they have the unmitigated gall to blame their political opposition for it.
This is how a dictator behaves. And this dictator has far too many supporters for us to sleep comfortably.
You do not understand liberals or liberalism. What you know is what conservatives believe is the truth about liberalism not what liberals themselves believe.
Think about this: do you feel that the liberals on this board have an accurate view of who conservatives are and what conservatism is? My guess is your answer is no.
So now you have to think about the harder question: is the conservative view on liberalism just as distorted as the liberal view on conservatism? If you’re honest, you have to consider it’s possible.