Sorry that I don’t feel a compulsion to bump a thread from the early 2000s to tsk tsk some fossil.
And in the movie “Love Story,” the nearer Ali McGraw came to her death scene the prettier she got.
Well, the issue here is not that you aren’t “tsk tsking some fossil” from the early 2000s (not to mention the much more recent behavior of the other fossil currently occupying the White House), but that you’re trying to blame on liberals the problem that those conservative fossils caused.
I don’t think anybody here was imagining that they would. We have had ample evidence so far of Trump supporters’ awe-inspiring imperviousness to facts and rational thought, and I doubt any of us, even here at the Dope, are vain enough to believe that we can be the one to overcome it.
Or at least they don’t think of themselves as racists. But we’ve seen plenty of examples of Trump supporters who’ve been spotted in public calling Michelle Obama “an ape in heels”, say, or calling NFL anthem protestors “baboons”, nonetheless swearing up and down that they aren’t racist. So, y’know, not entirely taking their word for it about that.
Uh-huh. They voted for the shit-stirring, vitriol-tweeting, insult-spewing, Birther-conspiracy-promoting, perpetual whiner/bitcher Donald Trump because they’re fed up with insults and hatred and divisiveness and complaints. Sure, that makes sense.
Huh? Of course we understand that. We have said ourselves, over and over, that the one thing Trump’s followers really care about and require of him is Pissing Off the Liberals. As you note, they don’t care in the least how stupid or criminal or destructive his actions are as long as they make liberals angry.
The fact that this sort of attitude is less appropriate to responsible adult citizens of a democracy than to a bunch of petulant spiteful toddlers doesn’t seem to bother Trump supporters in the least.
Yeah, sorry about all the civil rights and the women’s rights and the gay rights and the peace marches and the environmental movement and the defense of civil liberties. No wonder all the racist sexist homophobic war-hawk propertarian authoritarians are cross with us.
Actually, you’re the liar. As usual.
Wow.
My sympathies to all of you in the USA. If SA’s synopsis is anything to go by, you have a long and fucking hard road to bring your country back to some sense of ‘normalcy’.
Best wishes xx
Well, that depends on whether you’re regarding it as analysis or as symptom.
No, not impervious so much as guided by different facts and different types of rational thought, as I already described.
Remember that Trump drew sixty million voters. How many would you say make up these examples you’ve seen?
Well, in issues as important as this you have to take the bad with the good. Still, Trump’s vulgarity hardly stands out from the norm, these days. Which side has their children holding up signs at protests saying “FUCK TRUMP”?
Or to put it another way, one man does not a society make. Unfortunately, fifty years of liberalism does.
This paragraph clearly shows that you don’t understand it. “Pissing off” liberals is not the goal. Defeating or undoing certain of their machinations is. I was fairly explicit as to what these machinations are, yet even at that you still miss the point.
Much more is at stake than merely pissing off liberals.
Many times I’ve said on this board that many of liberalism’s goals are laudable, but where they go off the rails is in the execution.
Most of Trump’s voters, as am I, are perfectly fine with and support things like women’s rights and racial equality, etc. What they are not fine with is that they get called racist and sexist for expressing differing ideas as to how best go about achieving them, or for failing to go along with the ridiculous lengths liberals so often go to in championing these goals.
To take women’s rights for example. Most Trump voters I’m sure support the idea of equal pay for equal work. The become incensed however, at being glared at for holding the door for a woman because lefties have promoted the idea that such behavior is men’s way of ‘keeping women down.’
Remember when I talked about people having grown resentful of hatred and divisiveness? This is a perfect example. A man holds the door for a woman in an attempt to be gracious or show respect, and he gets accused of using this practice as a tactic in service of his real goal of seeking to ‘keep women down.’ It’s this kind of ridiculous extrapolation that always accompanies leftie hot-button issues, and the deliberate villainization that results from it that has so many Trump voters pissed off.
So this is all about gallantry to you SA? And your hero, Trump, is the epitome of gallantry?
You really are a bit of a moron aren’t you?
Good luck getting a pension for your obvious intellectual disability. )
Why, of course it is!
How perceptive of you to ascertain that thwarted gallantry is why people support Trump!
Silly me, if only I’d thought to be so succinct!
:rolleyes:
How many were actually caught on social media saying such things? Probably very few. How many heard or read such things and chuckled or passed them over without objecting? Probably quite a lot.
But you don’t need to rely on my personal speculations about it: you can look at all the research that indicates quite clearly the correlation between support for Trump and racial resentment, such as the study that found
Which side displays shirts and signs at rallies calling Hillary Clinton a “bitch” and a “cunt”?
I agree that Trump is not personally that much more vulgar than the average disgusting old creepy uncle of whatever political stripe. But he is certainly much more vulgar than the average—in fact, than almost any—nationally known and influential politician. The argument that his voters chose to vote for him because they were “fed up” with vulgarity is extremely unconvincing.
Not really. You said that Trump voters are “fed up” with “insults and hatred and divisiveness”—but nobody who really opposed insults and hatred and divisiveness would choose and support Trump as a candidate.
You said that they’re “fed up with the problems caused by drugs and crime”—but in fact, crime levels have been dropping rapidly over the last couple of decades. As for illegal drugs, Trump’s administration has been significantly less active in combating problems of drug dealing and addiction than Obama’s was.
You said that they’re “fed up with the crass, vulgar and overall lowlife quality of life in America today”—but again, that’s not a convincing argument for choosing and supporting the reality-show king of crass vulgar lowlife as a candidate.
You said that they’re “fed up with what they view as crackpot judicial rulings” and attempts “to legislate from the bench in order to achieve victories it could never have won at the voting booth”. But if the Trump voters are not in fact mad about civil rights and women’s rights and gay rights and environmental protection and civil liberties and all that liberal social-justice jazz, then what are the so-called “crackpot judicial rulings” that you think they’re objecting to?
:dubious: So… you’re claiming that sixty million allegedly intelligent, rational, principled, non-racist, non-sexist, non-homophobic, pro-civility, responsible civic-minded Trump voters deliberately chose to support a nasty vulgar corrupt lying grifter for their President because… they were miffed about stuff on the order of occasionally being glared at when they held the door for a woman?
Uh-huh. Sure.
And even if they did, what could a hypothetical intelligent, rational, principled, non-racist, non-sexist, non-homophobic, pro-civility, responsible civic-minded Trump voter realistically expect that President Trump could or would do about that stuff? Or about any of the stuff you claim they’re “fed up” with?
Apology accepted. Hopefully this is the start of a change.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the book contains some nuggets that turn out to be more hearsay than fact. Woodward used the same approach to getting sources that he has used successfully in interviewing previous administrations. However, it’s clear that almost everyone in the administration lives in a climate of fear and distrust, and that’s because pretty much everyone in the administration seems to believe that there’s a certain amount of deceit that’s required in order to survive in that toxic environment. What hasn’t been discussed much, but what I sense, is that almost anyone and everyone who works in the White House believes that they have to lie on a daily basis to survive there. It’s like they have to lie, they have to spread rumors, they have to do head fakes in order survive, because the person standing next to them might be the person spreading rumors about them among other White House staff or through the press channels. The administration that most closely parallels the one Woodward’s dealing with now is the one he initially investigated: Nixon. And Nixon’s staff didn’t exactly accept Woodward’s dinner invitations. Woodward probably got duped a time or two by comments that were alleged by source A or source B but turned out not to be that credible.
Agreed.
Even if Woodward got some of his facts wrong, on the whole, it corroborates what has been said before. And Woodward, as an investigative journalist, has a pretty solid record. I don’t always agree with Woodward, but I think he shoots straight and calls it like he sees it.
As I already said in #95, racism is not the sort of thing that readily turns up in self-reported poll results. What we do know is that racists and white supremacists have been a vocal part of Trump’s base, they have constantly infested his rallies, he appeals to them in his speeches and tweets, and he notably and shamefully avoided criticism of them in his reprehensible speech after the events of Charlottesville. Not to mention the racist aspect of anti-immigration that he so successfully exploited. There has never been much daylight between Trumpists and avowed racists and white supremacists.
It certainly stands out from the norm for US presidents. It used to be the highest ideal that an American child could respect and aspire to. That office and the ideal it represented has now been totally besmirched. So has US standing in the world.
Actually, yes, one man can substantially remake a society, both subtly in contributing to shifts in political norms and values, and potentially quite dramatically through the rulings of his Supreme Court appointees.
As for “fifty years of liberalism”, you must be thinking of some other country or some other planet. The US has endured long bouts of Republicans dominating both the White House and Congress, and its politics today are far to the right of any other advanced country in the world. If you think the US is dominated by liberalism you need to explain why it’s the only first-world country on earth where no one is guaranteed the right to health care but everyone is guaranteed the right to get shot. IOW, you are delusional, but we knew that.
What you’re saying here is that liberals take the lead in social progress and Republicans are, at best, reluctant lagging followers, catching up with reality decades or generations later. Not really a ringing endorsement of enlightenment.
Trump isn’t a Nazi, that’s silly. He is a fascist though.
Just to expand further, although I’ve said it before.
Trump constantly uses fascist tactics. He constantly espouses fascist ideology/philosophy. So there’s two options:
1 - Donald Trump is a fascist. That ought to be concerning to anybody that cares about the USA.
2 - Donald Trump is not a fascist, but he does this because it appeals to a significant amount of his base. This ought to be concerning to anybody that cares about the USA, perhaps even more so than option #1.
What certainly ought to be concerning is that a significant number of non-fascist Americans are willing to support a fascist in order to get <fill in the blank>. That doesn’t bode well for the future of the USA if a more competent leader taps into this. The Republicans have, through their support of Trump, indicated they have no problem going this way.
Delegated by whom? Just half of us? *Your *half?
So we’re right but you’re having trouble admitting it, and that trouble is *our *fault? Interesting.
What intent? And intended by whom?
What you mean to say is that none of it matters because people hate this country so much.
The country is the people, not the dirt. If you hate the people, you hate the country. If you hate that we have fought to extend equality to marginalized populations, then you hate America.
You still get a vote, you still get to make your voice heard. And when your voice is a voice of hate, then you vote for people like trump.
And some of them, he’s sure, are good people.
Yeah, undiminished from 35-40 percent or thereabouts. It also isn’t likely to get any higher, really.
Just imagine how much you would have lost your freakin’ mind if Obama had actually gone full lefty and had approval ratings at Trump’s levels throughout his presidency. His average approval, during a time of economic downturn, mind you, was roughly 10 points higher than Trump’s average so far.
So you think you’d be okay with, “Hey, Obama was elected to be a Bernie Sanders kind of guy, and it’s sooooo mean to say bad things about him or his supporters – better get used to it!”
If Obama was ANYTHING like Trump, he would have been tarred and feathered by the right months and months ago. The hypocrisy is one thing that stands out as much as anything else (though the flat out corruption of this admin is hard to put in a shadow)