I quoted what I see as the relevant bit. Out of idle curiosity: How would you describe the left-wing reaction to Biden calling Vice President Pence a “decent guy”?
Not my week to speak for the hive-mind, sorry.
Would you like to hear my personal opinion on the subject?
That’s exactly what I was asking for. How would you describe the left-wing reaction to Biden calling Vice President Pence a “decent guy”? Did they applaud his statesmanship and signal appreciation for his bipartisanship and decency? Were they annoyed / upset about it? Did they “throw a tantrum”? How would you describe it?
Some were for it, some were against it, some thought it was unfortunate, some thought it was despicable, some thought it didn’t matter compared to what is going on currently, some thought it doesn’t matter because they aren’t voting for him any way etc. etc. etc.
And some(or at least I) wonder why you give a fuck about this, other than as yet another diversion from current events.
edited to add: And how you can keep bringing up “tantrums” and yet never connect the word to the Orange Marmalade In Chief is beyond comprehension.
In fact, as long as Trump is in office “tantrum” is a word you should be avoiding at all cost, because as far as you’re concerned “tantrum” is synonymous with “boomerang”.
So Kimstu posts about something that happened over a decade ago, and as a response, I post something that happened a month or two ago, and you think I’m the one creating a “diversion from current events”? :rolleyes:
As someone pointed out in your permanent Pit thread, you chastise Democrats for supporting Biden in the thread about the Mueller Report. So here you are chastising Dems for not supporting Biden and there you are chastising Dems for supporting Biden. In both cases, people start talking about your derailment and not Republican actions.
Yes.
Back to the subject-I don’t think Republicans (and Trump in particular) will give up using what works to get elected just because a few of the dirty tricks used have been exposed. There isn’t enough self-respect left in the entire Republican Party to slow down, let alone put a stop to, what has been shown to produce favorable results for their Party. Trump has shown exactly what he can get away with when morals and ethics are thrown out the window, so I predict that not only will Trump continue as usual, but that more and more Republicans will follow his lead, and if enough people see enough Republicans acting this way, they will go along with it.
Biden happens to be the front-runner for the Dems 2020 nomination, so he’s difficult to dismiss as just some crazy old nut. So when someone complains that Republicans nominated someone who had been accused of harassing / assaulting women, it’s pretty straightforward to point out to them that their current front-runner has also been accused of harassing / assaulting women. Also, when someone points out that some Republicans have “voiced their surprise” over their party’s nominee for calling Obama “a decent family man” / “decent person”, it’s pretty relevant to point out to them that their own front-runner recently called a Republican a “decent guy” and some Democrats reacted with: “some were against it, some thought it was unfortunate, some thought it was despicable”. If you can’t see how those comments were relevant to the posts they were responding to, I don’t know how to resolve that issue for you.
If you’ve got complaints about harassment / assault of women, or more-than-a-decade-old incidents at a McCain rally being brought into threads about other things, I suggest you direct those comments to the posters that first raised them, or the mods if you feel so inclined.
Yup, the Republicans have gone all in on white nationalism, a party that will work with a hostile government to undermine our democracy doesn’t just learn it’s lesson because they got caught. They will continue to suppress voting by people of color, they will continue to push their case in the Supreme Court on the census to radically undermine the fair distribution of House seats and they will continue to lock children in cages to keep their racist base mobilized. How anyone could think that they won’t, or that it’s not working is beyond me. Look at the week after the Mueller report, they are rallying around a career criminal who has been outed. The fact that his approval hovers at 42% of the general population and about 85% of the GOP is terrifying.
The problem is that the two examples you are using are not nearly equivalent, so phrasing it this way is equivocating. McCain defended Obama as a decent man - the criticism of him was that he was Arabic. First, that was a stupid criticism from the crowd that McCain was responding to because being Arabic and being decent are not mutually exclusive. Second, Obama didn’t do anything to call into question his decency so the charge was wholly unfounded.
Pence on the other hand, is a hateful homophobe. It’s entirely understandable why people would object to Pence being characterized as decent.
For your example to work, the people underlying the comparison would have to be similar. But they are not, not even close. I disagree with many of Obama’s policy positions, but the guy was pretty awesome as a person. Pence, I probably agree with many of his policy positions, but he’s an asshat. Your attempt at equivocation only works if you raise it to a level so high as to be meaningless. Like, yeah, they’re both humans. But that’s not a useful comparison.
The only thing that kept them at check was fear of what would happen if they were exposed, and through their silence and insignificant “tut-tutting” the Republicans have shown them that there is no real repercussions to be had for what they say and do, so I predict that their numbers will increase.
Ain’t none of that stuff going to matter. What’s going to sink the Democrats (if indeed they are sunk) is that they’re more scattered than the Republicans.
While you have 249 Republicans goose-stepping in lock-step on their side, having relatively uniform positions on almost everything, you then have 285 Democrats going in multiple directions. You have AOC going on about the Green New Deal, you have Nancy Pelosi pissing on her campfire. You have multiple people trying to introduce motions to impeach Trump over time, and others saying it’s pointless. You have Bernie Sanders preaching his own idiosyncratic economic ideas, and more mainstream Democrats following the party line. And that seems to only get worse at the sub-Federal levels of government.
If people aren’t in one camp or the other yet, the Republicans look like the party that’s more likely to get shit done. And if someone is not wholly opposed to the Republican party, which they aren’t if they haven’t picked a side yet, that Republican unity looks like a powerful thing. People think that basically if the Republicans are that unified, and the Democrats are not, then how are the Democrats going to act if they’re in power?
Exactly. People who work with autocracies to undermine their own democracies don’t suddenly begin to value democracy over the course of a few months. Especially when there have been zero consequences for attacking our country.
I really feel that 2016 was a great awakening for white nationalism in America. Like other fanatical movements it has to burn itself off, usually when enough of the adherents finally die off. The white nationalists who read the Mueller Report last week and doubled down on defending Trump this week are not showing any signs of introspection, contrition, or an inclination to suddenly start buying in to representative government.
Since approximately 2010, the GOP’s main purpose for existence has been to prevent shit from getting done. Unless we’re counting rolling back previous Dem legislation as “getting shit done.”
Are political rants posted in Elections now?
You cannot make this baby live. I read the opening paragraph and the criticism was explicit and absolutely correct. Why shouldn’t they criticize Pence for being a bigot?
Impeachment isn’t just a Dem strategy, it’s a major judicial deal with testimony, evidence, subpeonas, and most of all, the time it takes. It’s not a black and white issue. The process is supposed to be informative to the populace, and make democracy better.
If it doesn’t do that, it’s probably because we didn’t do it in time, and not that we did it.
It’s a problem to run a government tiptoeing around the “projected mood” of an ignorant base. (Sorry, but that “I” word is very carefully and quite reasonably placed here)
I don’t think you read it very well then. They weren’t criticizing Vice President Pence. They were criticizing Biden for calling him a “decent guy”.
When I have a few minutes, I’m going to start another thread to address the accusation of Vice President Pence as a “hateful homophobe”. Perhaps you can participate in that one. I feel like further discussing it in this thread would be too big a distraction from the political rant that is supposed to be the subject of this thread.
Mrs. Plant’s voter registration was pulled because she hasn’t voted for some time.