Conservativism has evolved over the last 40 years, but at its core, it has remained consistent in having precisely one priority: the self. Conservatives define the self, and conversely the other, and then determine which policies and priorities benefit the self. The other is anything that stands in opposition to the promotion of the self.
There is no foundational ideology and no inherent identity of the self. It is simply whoever the conservative wants to include on their team.
Viewed through this lens, every decision or statement made by conservatives is entirely rational. There is no requirement to remain internally consistent views. The only consideration for a conservative is “does this benefit me right now?”
Demonizing Biden is best for conservatives because hate is a powerful motivator for voters. Their base does not need reasons to hate the other, regardless of their choices or beliefs.
There is no hypocrisy in conservativism because there is no objective standard or ideology beyond protecting and promoting the self, and the self is whatever conservatives decide exists within the self. The self is good, and the other is bad. Everything else is negotiable.
To someone who is not conservative, this looks like hypocrisy. See: The only Moral Abortion is My Abortion, or The Card Says Moops, or Gun Control for Black Panthers, or My Daughter is a LGBTQ+ so now LGBTQ+ are People, or It isn’t “Drag” when I do it, or But my state deserves FEMA Funding, or Regulate this industry because it is a threat to me, or My sex scandal is a private matter so please respect my privacy, or Election fraud exists and I’ll prove it, or I’m a job creator so please bail me out, or just take literally any conservative talking point and you will find conservatives who are suddenly the exception to their own rule.
That’s the feature of conservativism that is so appealing. It’s like having a personal God that will forgive any transgression as long as you believe and pray for forgiveness. Being part of the self is like a warm blanket, and as long as you agree to maintain the farce, you get to stay under its protection.
This isn’t new information. Conservatives have always existed, under different banners and with different definitions of the self. Trump has laid bare the grift, abusing it past the point of credibility. That’s his hold, that to oust Trump is to abandon the ruse, and conservatives can’t do that. That’s why they will try very hard to make him a member of the Other. They will claim they were duped, that he was a secret Democrat, that he was never one of them. But he was always one of them, even when he was a Democrat.
There’s a great quote out on the Internet about how conservatism has one rule: “there are outgroups the law must bind but not protect, and in groups the law must protect but not bind”.
Same ideas as what you were saying.
Another way of looking at it is that conservatives are assholes.
I think the important points from both are salient here. Everything in that quote is true, but it’s important to include that the groups, both in and out, are nebulous and subject to change because they must always exist even as dynamics change.
There is no hypocrisy in conservativism because there is no objective standard or ideology beyond protecting and promoting the self, and the self is whatever conservatives decide exists within the self. The self is good, and the other is bad. Everything else is negotiable.
Neat paragraph, but nah. Biden just sucks. My “self,” as well as the majority of other Americans, can’t afford a house, rent, gas, groceries, or really anything that we used to be able to. Biden is POTUS, so the buck stops with him — just as it did with Trump during the COVID-related issues, which myself and most other Americans blamed him for.
On another note, it’s funny to watch so many people complain about Republicans demonizing Biden, but somehow forget about the froth that was coming out of democratic mouths for Trump’s head.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we get it. You think you're morally superior to anyone that dares equate Biden and Trump. Neato, have fun not being able to afford bread.
Gas prices when Trump left office were much higher than he now claims.
At least read your own headlines before posting nonresponsive articles. The average price of gas under Biden still has yet to come down to even the highest annual average under Trump.
Not really. I'm frankly not sure why it is that you post nonresponsive articles. It probably has something to do with cognitive dissonance and rushing to grab whatever you can that will confirm your narrow world view.
I didn't think so. If you we're actually capable of that much introspection, you'd understand that the foreign powers that support Trump & want him re-elected also have their hand on the flow of oil.
The Risk Management Program (RMP) rule implements Section 112(r) of the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments to improve chemical accident prevention at facilities. The RMP rule requires facilities that use extremely hazardous substances to develop a Risk Management Plan.
Yeah, nothing at all to do with pollutants in the air. I guess you think picking nits is a successful strategy in debate.
I'd hardly call a fundamental misunderstanding about whether or not a regulation promogulated under the CAA is required to be air-based "picking nits," but go off.
Dumping money into foreign wars, failure to solve domestic price fixing, failure to adequately enable American farming, manufacturing, and resource development.
At the end of the day though, the buck stops with the president. When you run the country, you get blamed or praised for the state of the country. Fix it or get out of office.
there are two sides to the economy that drive prices, supply and demand.
~2% inflation is baked into standard monetary policy, and its what every fed chairman for 50 years has aimed for.
Rock bottom interest rates (and government pandemic handouts to employers under the PPP) during the Trump administration have driven extreme demand for goods and services. At the same time, the Covid 19 pandemic that Trump lied about, downplayed, failed to mitigate and failed to stop, shut down global supply chains, thereby decreasing supply of goods and services.
Now back to economics 101...
HIGH demand * LOW supply = ???????
Thanks for the inflation Trump!
enable American farming, manufacturing, and resource development.
It's funny you bring that up, because Biden has been historically great on manufacturing. And US employment rates are at an all time high.
I got tired of reading this shit so I'm just going to lay it out for you:
You live in a false reality and no one can change that. it's tiring to argue with it, and more and more people are going to distance themselves from you until you die alone.
And no one is going to notice. Nor care. You're going to die alone and no one will miss you.
All that remains is how long you're going to stick around on this planet until you decide when you leave. Maybe save everyone the time and expedite it.
Georgia - Election Interference
Investigation <- You Are Here
2 new grand juries impaneled 7/11/2023.
Indictment - July 11th to September 1st.
(Grand Jury work expected July 31 to Aug. 18)
Arrest
Trial
Conviction
Sentencing
New York State - 34 felonies, Stormy Daniels Payoff
Investigation
Indictment
Arrest <- You Are Here
Trial - March 25th, 2024
Conviction
Sentencing
Florida - 40 felonies, Federal documents charges
Investigation
Indictment
Arrest <- You Are Here
3 new felonies added 7/27/2023.
Trial - May 20, 2024
Conviction
Sentencing
Other grand juries, such as for the documents at Bedminster, have not been announced.
The E. Jean Carroll trial for sexual assault and defamation where Trump was found liable and ordered to pay $5 million before immediately defaming her again resulting in a demand for $10 million is not listed as it’s a civil case and not a crimimal one.
Us plebs would’ve also been jailed pending trial. Meanwhile, this dipshit is still getting on planes and spreading disinformation with zero accountability. With 70 felony indictments, he’s still one of the most free people in the country.
If the left had sacked the capitol, a state of emergency would have been declared, a widespread and indiscriminate arrest and detainment of thousands of people tagged as ‘leftists’ would have occurred, and we would have been under martial law.
Well twitter’s rage bait algorithm pushes the right wing trolls to the top (I saw one guy called colarado"““researcher””" was so butthurt he made like 8 replies posting boomer memes) but if you load in more replies there is tonnes of people making positive comments and are getting a lot of likes.
It’s extremely intelligent. Using the other side’s words against them. Not only that, he never said a single word in it. Just actions. In a cinematic context it is a great way to tell a story without having to tell the audience.
It did for me, too, so I poked around a bit. If i search for just the YouTube video identifier (don’t know the technical term) it brings up the video on yewtube , so this should work:
They’ve been busy disenfranchising voters, gerrymandering, removing polling stations, and rigging the system in literally any way they can.
They not only have a chance, but an advantage. We almost took the Senate and House last cycle but despite record voter turnout, a HUGE number of people still stayed home.
Thinking for a second that the Left has 2024 in the bag is essentially handing the election to the Right.
Plus the GOP has a lot of people on social media talking about how terrible both sides are and how they’ll just stay home, which is squarely aimed at depressing Democratic turnout.
Yea both sides are not the same. Republicans hurts women, LGBTQ community, minorities, the poor, the middle-class, children, workers and non Christians.
Exactly. We all saw how “Hillary has this locked up, there’s no way Trump wins” worked out in 2016. Even if the Democrats are leading by a landslide in every poll leading up to election day, we should still act as though it’s a 50-50 race with every vote potentially tipping it one way or the other.
Or what? Is that supposed to be a threat? Seems to me that if a Republican is warning you not to investigate something then it definitely needs investigating.
I think he’s implying that exposing the corruption will bring to light corrupt Democrats as well.
Which is such a fucking typical conservative concept, as though the party should defend the corruption within by ignoring corruption everywhere. Jokes on you, motherfucker, because we want to expose and eliminate corruption among Democrats and Republicans.
“Vote Blue No Matter Who” *is textbook cultish behavior and has lead to some truly awful candidacies.
The post-Obama turn from casual social liberalism to BlueAnon party jingoism has been absolutely miserable for intra-party Democratic politics. The influx of Bill Kristol / Michael Bloomberg / Lincoln Project anti-Trump Republicans is a poison pill that’s going to do the same damage to the Dems that it did to the GOP under Bush.
I’m already seeing all the toxicity and nastiness in local Dem organizing meetings that I remember my parents complaining about as liberal Republicans during the 2000-era turn.
The post-Obama turn from casual social liberalism to BlueAnon party jingoism has been absolutely miserable for intra-party Democratic politics. The influx of Bill Kristol / Michael Bloomberg / Lincoln Project anti-Trump Republicans is a poison pill that’s going to do the same damage to the Dems that it did to the GOP under Bush.
This may top Mitch’s response as the dumbest take im going to read today
There’s a big difference between “always vote for the Democrat” and “always vote for Trump”.
The only reason I voted blue last time around was because my third-party vote wasn’t anti-Trump enough in 2016. And I will continue voting blue until Republicans understand what Americans truly want from their politicians, and act accordingly. I will probably be voting blue for the rest of my life, but will be pleasantly surprised if there comes a time when I don’t have to.
There’s a big difference between “always vote for the Democrat” and “always vote for Trump”.
A big chunk of the Trump electorate has been increasingly radicalized Republicans. Folks who genuinely believe Democrats are Satanic. The Trump movement works by tapping into this cohort and feeding on their intense anxiety.
Democrats are getting a similar treatment, particularly as old GOP staffers change parties.
I will continue voting blue until Republicans understand what Americans truly want from their politicians
Doggedly putting up candidates like Kristen Sinema, Eric Adams, and Dianne Feinstein to high office won’t compel Republicans to change.
One routinely sides with her conservative friends and calls it bipartisan, another feeds off blue lives matter jingoism and fuels the hysteria, and the third is too senile to present any kind of strategic opposition even presuming her politics don’t suck.
There’s no future for progressive politics in a party that can win as Republican Lite.
And the republicans will find something minor and insignificant about a democrat and make a massive deal about it as though they are equivalent issues.
Like Biden’s classified document issue compared to Trumps. Then they say, “See? Both sides are basically the same”.
Tbf, some Democrats don’t want it exposed, nor will resign when they are exposed. Some will run to their yacht to hide from angry constituents and not face intraparty opposition.
“I note the senator from Kentucky leaving the floor without justification or any rationale for the action he has just taken. That is really remarkable -- that a senator blocking a treaty that is supported by the overwhelming number, perhaps 98 at least of his colleagues, would come to the floor and object and walk away…The only conclusion you can draw when he walks away is he has no argument to be made.
He has no justification for his objection to having a small nation be part of NATO that is under assault from the Russians. So, I repeat again, the senator from Kentucky is now working for Vladimir Putin.”
~ Sen. John McCain calling Rand Paul out for what he is in 2017
He wasn’t really decent. But he sadly was the gold standard for most of the last 20 years at least. And even then he helped bring about the plague of spiteful stupid that is Palin trump et all. You can say a ton of bad things about John McCain. But somehow Republicans at large still manage to be so, so much worse.
I think what it comes down to for me personally about McCain is that even though I disagreed with a lot of his politics, I do genuinely believe he cared about the country and the people in it, and generally speaking he did what he honestly thought was best for them.
We can criticize the relative purity of every politician until we’re blue in the face, but honestly the one overriding characteristic I think it’s fair to demand of every elected official is that they’re honestly working in good faith for the betterment of the country. As long as that’s true I have no deep-seated issue with them.
Senators Glenn and McCain were cleared of having acted improperly but were criticized for having exercised “poor judgment”.
Keating and DeConcini were asking McCain to travel to San Francisco to meet with regulators regarding Lincoln Savings; McCain refused.[7][11] DeConcini told Keating that McCain was nervous about interfering.[7] Keating called McCain a “wimp” behind his back, and on March 24, Keating and McCain had a heated, contentious meeting.[11]
The regulators then revealed that Lincoln was under criminal investigation on a variety of serious charges, at which point McCain severed all relations with Keating.[7]
I’m all for shitting on McCain for some of the questionable takes he’s had in his life, but I don’t think this is the obvious “he’s corrupt” politician mic drop you think it is.
Yeah, I don’t believe McCain didn’t know what he was getting into. They gave him a slap on the wrist and told him not to do it again, even though he was clearly involved. For anyone less wealthy or connected, they would have been convicted as an accessory at the very least.
I dunno that seems pretty prejudicial. It’s literally the job of politicians to listen to their constituents and advocate for them. Obviously there’s a problem of unequal access and representation, but I’m not sure anything he did here is particularly outside that mold, certainly not criminal. Can you actually point to something concrete that he did that you think is criminal?
Business leaders have nothing in common with the rest of us, so why should we trust them to have our best interests in mind? Athletes, famous musicians, business leaders, celebrities all have one thing in common - money. They have much more of it than the vast majority of people and they generally want more of it.
Jack Dorsey doesn’t want Democrats in power because they might “take his money”, so he’s promoting a fringe candidate to be a spoiler to Biden.
It doesn't, and I doubt anyone reading this would agree.
But if you believe billionaires shouldn't have so much more influence, it's not a bad idea to emphasis the frequent moronic, out of touch decisions like this. At least Andrew Yang was an honest candidate.
Owning a significant component of public discourse and actively pushing ideological viewpoints using it is politics. The only difference between that and being a politician is that you can't vote him out.
When you own more than most people alive collectively, it makes sense that your actions are under extra scrutiny.
Owning a significant component of public discourse and actively pushing ideological viewpoints using it is politics. The only difference between that and being a politician is that you can’t vote him out.
This is more correct than I'd like to admit, fuck.
When he wants to take away my voting rights because I dont' have any kids, he's talking politics. Have you never seen a person able to buy a Congressman who doesn't like your existence???
Kennedy defended the article insisting no one has shown “one mistake” he made in the article
That's not how fact works. I can make some statement but that statement doesn't pass into "fact" just because no one has yet to provide a list of where I got it wrong. One is required to provide evidence to establish fact.
Here's an excerpt from RFK's paper.
But instead of taking immediate steps to alert the public and rid the vaccine supply of thimerosal
And here's the deal. Thimerosal is a preservative in vaccines. It's used to keep bacteria from growing in vaccines. However, the US goes through so much so quickly in terms of those vaccines that they give you at birth, that we just simply do not need to add a preservative in them. So the claim here is just baseless to begin with. The preservative just simply is not present in childhood vaccines. Where you will likely find it, is in vaccines that need to be shelf stable for long periods of time. Such as things like the flu vaccine. And absolutely NOT the COVID vaccine that needs refrigeration. There's literally no need for a preservative there because we keep it cool.
The component that likely triggers fears is the breakdown of Thimerosal into Ethylmercury C₂H₅Mg⁺ which has been shown to be toxic and indeed Thimerosal does indeed get eventually processed into this compound. However, the body DOES indeed expel ethylmercury in three to seven days. So, NO, it does not stay inside your body. We have thousands of studies that indicate this.
What one might have heard is something called methylmercury, which is very bad for humans but there is no means chemically to convert thimerosal into methylmercury in vivo. We've done studies on that too.
So with that said, does the ethylmercury in vaccines raise a cause for concern? Absolutely not. The amount required to keep a vaccine fresh is orders of magnitude smaller than what you'll likely find in your everyday food, especially fish. You will likely get thousands of times more ethylmercury in a single can of tuna than you will in a single childhood vaccine. So if vaccines prose a problem for a person, literally ALL FOOD on the planet Earth poses a much higher risk by massive values. And this is the thing that RFK's paper completely avoids if you ignore the inaccuracies of the chemical composition of childhood vaccines that he routinely makes.
So:
One, childhood vaccines DO NOT have the chemical that is routinely cited as the cause for autism.
Two, the chemical that is routinely cited is found in the vast majority of food being ingested.
Three, no person has put forward a model that accurately presents a lab repeatable process by which this chemical would cause such a condition.
Four, evidence suggests that autism is a genetic disorder and is indeed NOT an environmental disease.
And five, and most importantly, the vast majority of "doctors" hocking the vaccine-autism connection are doing so for finical gains, so literally they're just wanting to use people's ignorance for monetary gain.
RFK is no different in this regards. This paper was a precursor to his book (which I will not link here, but you can easily find it) and he commonly thumps his paper as a commercial for his book. And some might point to pharmaceuticals as just big "ad machines" and the difference is that the claims made in drug ads is peer reviewed. The claims in RFK's book are backed up by: The College of Shit Mr. Kennedy Just Pulled Out His Ass™. I fail to understand how the same people that fear "big pharma" trying to fleece the public is also the same people who gladly get fleeced by people who are distinctly "not doctors". I grant anyone that the way modern medicine is marketed is shitty. That is less a problem with science and more a problem with capitalism, but that is as far as I will open that Pandora's box. So if anyone has beef with medicine, it's likely you have more an issue with something distinctly NOT SCIENCE.
The only thing that has been proven that vaccines cause is less dead children. There are too many studies with millions of points of evidence that back this unifying claim up, for alternatives claiming the opposite to even remotely hold a candle to. Simple fact, childhood vaccines save lives and the vast ocean of evidence backing that claim up is overwhelming in comparison to the paltry offering of anecdotal conjecture offered by the opposition.
I remember watching a lecture from a microbiology professor dispelling common health-related myths. I believe it was polio he was describing and how after the vaccine was developed it went from killing one in every thousand children to causing “severe reactions” (but not necessarily killing) 2 in every MILLION. There was an antivaxxer in the audience who kept repeating “but how do we know children are better off if we are vaccinating all of them now? What if they could live happier healthier lives without it??” And the prof was just like we DO know what happens, literally 1000x more children will die. Wild stuff.
Very well said. And one small addition- you get more mercury (methyl, but irrelevant to my point) in a can of tuna than you do in multiple vaccines. I don’t hear anti-vaxxers raging against tuna.
To broaden this beyond “income level 4” (I’m using Hans Rosling’s categorization system instead of First, second, third world), banning thimerosal has a huge impact on worldwide vaccination efforts. It’s cheaper to supply multidose vials to lower income level places for numerous reasons, the major of which are: less packaging, and less infrastructure (refrigeration) required.
So it’s not even a matter of “well if ‘we’ (read: those in the US, Europe, etc) don’t really use/need it, why not just ban it anyways, just in case?” This is a common rebuttal to what you posted about the US not needing it due to the accessibility of refrigeration and speed with which vaccines are used, so it’s very important to remind people they are not the only people on Earth. “We” aren’t the only ones to consider. It’s very difficult for people to grok the worldwide impact of selfish, fear-based, seemingly small decisions, but this is why people who want to rid the world of vaccine-preventable infections are so frustrated with the antivax conspiracies. It’s not just an individual parent and their child in isolation. We live in a society. They are making decisions that impact everyone, and that’s not hyperbole.
All that being said, it DOES have an impact on the level 4 countries that ban it in childhood vaccines. It makes them more expensive because they’re single dose. Someone is ultimately paying that cost, be it taxpayers, insured folks, or private individuals.
WHO policy is clear on this issue, and the Organization continues to recommend the use of vaccines containing thiomersal for global immunization programmes because the benefits of using such products far outweigh any theoretical risk of toxicity.
Kennedy defended the article insisting no one has shown “one mistake” he made in the article
That’s not how fact works. can make some statement but that statement doesn’t pass into “fact” just because no one has yet to provide a list of where got it wrong.
If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense.
The burden of proof lies with the person making the outrageous claims - in this case with conspiracy theorist RFK Jr.
The burden of proof is not on other people to disprove whatever outrageous conspiracies a conspiracy nut job comes up with.
The whole point of things like this is to dilute the impact of the words being used. This way, when they get caught doing the exact same thing, it won’t seem “bad” in the eyes of their constituents.
It’s one of the reasons the GOP are pushing so hard to impeach Biden. So when people say that Trump was impeached twice, the MAGA crowd can just say “Yeah, so was Biden. So was Clinton. Presidents get impeached all the time. They never get removed. It’s all for political show anyway, it’s no big deal. The next guy will probably get impeached too.”
It’s why GOP politicians are trying to frame even minor incidents of protest as “insurrections” or “coups”. They know it sounds ridiculous. That’s the whole point. If you water down words like “insurrection”, “coup”, “sedition”, and “treason”, then the MAGA crowd can just say “January 6th wasn’t an insurrection. The country is still here. Quit calling every protest an insurrection. We’re not in the 1780s any more.”
Same thing with the RICO charges. Why do you think Miller and MTG were tweeting “RICO?”. Charge everybody with RICO charges and Trump being charged no longer seems like a big deal.
It’s a long term strategy. Make the idea of being charged with crimes just a normal part of the political process, and make everybody think it’s not that bad. That way, when they’re caught engaging in the corrupt acts they routinely accuse others of engaging in, it’ll be considered “normal” and “no big deal”, and make it almost impossible to remove them.
Just like we did with crony capitalist economy. It’s ok because it’s just the norm for those with capital to fuck over those without. No pitchforks required.
It’s a very insidious way to make the country more like Russia, where there’s so much propaganda there is no objective truth, words have no meaning, and rule of law of even more nebulous.
I offer as proof of your claim how Nunes kept calling things “drug deals” during the first impeachment because there was testimony that John Bolton and his moustache said he wasn’t going to be a part of the “drug deal” being cooked up in Ukraine (referring to the scheme to blackmail Zelenskyy).
This seemed to be popular information when I posted it (ahem) “elsewhere”. Thought it might be welcome to have here.
If you’re trying to keep track of where we’re at in the Trump prosecutions:
Updated 8/1/2023
Washington, D.C. - 4 felonies, January 6th Election Interference
Investigation
Indictment <- You Are Here
Arrest
Trial
Conviction
Sentencing
Georgia - Election Interference
Investigation <- You Are Here
2 new grand juries impaneled 7/11/2023.
Indictment - July 11th to September 1st.
(Grand Jury work expected July 31 to Aug. 18)
Arrest
Trial
Conviction
Sentencing
New York State - 34 felonies, Stormy Daniels Payoff
Investigation
Indictment
Arrest <- You Are Here
Trial - March 25th, 2024
Conviction
Sentencing
Florida - 40 felonies, Federal documents charges
Investigation
Indictment
Original indictment was for 37 felonies.
3 new felonies were added on July 27, 2023.
Arrest <- You Are Here
Trial - May 20, 2024
Conviction
Sentencing
Other grand juries, such as for the documents at Bedminster, have not been announced.
The E. Jean Carroll trial for sexual assault and defamation where Trump was found liable and ordered to pay $5 million before immediately defaming her again resulting in a demand for $10 million is not listed as it’s a civil case and not a crimimal one.
And there are no mysteries here. We know he did it. We saw him do it, in some cases. We have known for years about the fake-elector scheme. We’ve all seen photos of the documents at Mar-a-Lago. We’ve heard him, on tape, begging for state officials to betray our democracy.
If the law is allowed to matter, these people are simply fucked.
I try to keep it from most imminent to farther out. Georgia will jump to the top if something happens there, and the D.C. one will get updated when there’s an arrest date.
Georgia may the most important trial. He cannot be federally pardoned for it and so a conviction in Georgia puts him in jail for real ( though I am not sure if Kemp can pardon him ).
The New York trial is the same but it is too easy to spin that trial as a witch hunt. If that is the only reason he is convicted, America is in for a bad time.
Those 2 trial dates are so far in the future. He needs to be convicted and barred from holding office before the next Presidential election.
Though I do wonder at the chaos if he's convicted around June-July 2024. Only 3-4 months before the election. Is that enough time for Republicans to pivot to a new deplorable?
Even if he were convicted on all the charges we have so far, technically, none of them would bar him from office.
He could be blocked from being sworn in by, you know, being in prison, I guess. But the convictions themselves would not be blockers.
What we need is a Constitutional Amendment that bars convicted felons from higher office, and while we’re at it, maybe add an age cap as well. Nobody over 70 for President, Congress, Senate, or Supreme Court.
It’s insane to think that he could be convicted of all charges, but possibly the only thing that actually sends him to (or keeps him in) prison is losing the election and his shield to hide behind.
I think the thought is that most middle of the roads won’t ever consider a criminal. There are some hardcores that won’t ever flip. It’s about gripping those on the teeter side of the triangle.
I don’t think his chances of winning are all that good even if he had zero indictments, but let’s hope they do push him out of the running with reasonable people.
The last elections had the poll analysts throwing their hands up in the air, so I am hoping those results are heavily skewed in some way and trying not to think about it.
100% agreed. This is exactly what happened in Burma if I recall correctly. Democratically elected president removed from office as a result of criminal accusations - her crime was attending a gathering in contravention of covid restrictions IIRC.
If we make them felons they can’t vote. We could also do things like scapegoat them and find ways to disenfranchise them.
(The Rs have a whole history of this sorta shit. I wonder if half the reason they’ve been so bad lately is that they worry those tactics will get used against them. )
The education need right now is almost beyond our reach. Weve been needing it. Itd need to be grass roots fucking re education. Some media does it, music, etc. But the younger kids need critical thinking skills most of all, and learning mindfulness, self acceptance. Like classes in real fundamental life shit that they’re not getting. I don’t know how much school has changed since my days. So I dunno. But tampering w schools with the books, that’s just…the term fascist is spot on. DeSantis is dangerous. Someone will see him and even springboard off him deeper down the right wing rabbit hole as a politician.
There are a lot of different confounding factors when you set a trial date. As much as we’d like, Trump isn’t the only trial happening, so other cases have to come first.
There has also been a really big backlog on trials. Covid slowed EVERYTHING down. Here in Oregon it’s so backed up, there’s a class action lawsuit.
The Florida trial has extra issues. The number of top secret documents means having lawyers with top secret clearances, you also have two extra defendants who have to find their own Florida based lawyers.
All the added time is to make sure the defendant gets a fair trial.
Here in Oregon it’s so backed up, there’s a class action lawsuit.
A notorious gun-runner from Eastern Canada won his freedom when his trial was taking too long. He sued on a “put up or shut up” play because we have a right to a speedy trial, and since the Crown didn’t think it could build a good case in time (a fast shredder ate the evidence?) it had to release the guy and void the charges.
He has a right to a speedy trail but it’s in his political interests to delay things. So in addition to all the good reasons this will take a while (like all the extra work to deal with how classified material will be used during the trail) Trump and his team will also be doing everything they can to delay things.
I read in another article that the D.C. courts have another 800 cases just for the 1/6 rioters, that doesn’t even count “normal” D.C. crime… so there are only so many days on the calendar.
I feel the same way, but then any special arrangements (like rushing to trial) provide fodder for an appeal.
Really you want the legal proceedings to be extra measured and methodical.
I guess this means that yes we’re headed for a situation where a GOP president can pardon Trump, but that’s really a separate issue that needs to be tested by the law and by democracy.
Very worried that Trump will pardon Trump. He cannot pardon himself for the stuff in Nee York or Georgia though.
Politically, it is too bad the Stormy Daniels one comes first. He could be defending the federal charges from jail just before the election. The “porn star stuff” may not be strong enough to justify that to some people. It is going to be easy to position him as a victim of a politically motivated witch hunt.
I don’t think the populace has much appetite for revolt, but surely if these criminal proceedings are derailed in any way due to the perpetrator being the president that’s a democratic crisis.
I mean some of the charges he’s facing involve election fraud, and the perp is just going to pardon themself? What is the point of democracy if you can have yourself fraudulently appointed president and then become immune to prosecution because you are indeed president.
Even in his first term there was the investigation into interference, which was ultimately discarded because you can’t prosecute or investigate a sitting president.
Right wing media spent the entire pandemic fighting against distancing, masks, vaccines, against science. And pretending horse dewormer was a miracle solution for everything. But it turns out reality isn’t a political opinion, and millions of people died because of those lies.
When humanity was fighting against covid, Republicans were fighting on the virus’ side
Will we ever be far enough removed from the pandemic that we can talk about how the federal government lied and ignored 100+ years worth of science on the efficacy of masking (including effective mask mandates during the “Spanish”/Kansas flu pandemic), without being accused of being an antivax conspiracy theorist?
I’m vaxed, waxed and ready to party, but it is a stone cold fact that they told people not to wear masks - and caused untold numbers of deaths - because they didn’t want the general public to reduce the current supply.
(Fauci also did an absolutely horrendous, I mean historically awful job dealing with the AIDS crisis, but I guess that’s for another time.)
It was a mistake. They screwed up. Talk about it all you want and learn from it. Don’t use it to justify not wearing a mask ever again regardless of all evidence presented.
I know you are not saying that.
My problem is the second part of that, so I have no issue with you.
I get frustrated trying to figure how this should go in the future because on the one hand infantilizing the citizenry is acting in bad faith. On the other hand, I lot of people seem to be incapable of critical thinking. The answer is probably somewhere between those extremes but I am not sure where.
This is what happens when you don’t bring the fucking hammer down on violent authoritarian fascists. Who has to die to make it clear that this sack of shit needs to be bound and gagged while his trial proceeds?
Garland would have to care and treats him and other Republicans with kid gloves. The kid whom leaked documents was insta-prison. Yet Trump sold out the entire country and the DOJ is Zz z.
I’m not defending him, but it much more complicated with a former president and presidential candidate than it is for others. There shouldn’t be two systems, but realistically one could result in civil war and the other is little more than a couple of extra clicks on a website for most people.
My god, if some liberals had their way, rushed this, we’d lose this one. And this is a fight America cannot afford to lose.
I don’t want to sound like a drama queen, but I see the signs of PTSD in myself after the pandemic and 01/06. Let’s just say I have plenty of life experience, 52-years of an, uh, adventurous life, that maybe should have put a touch of PTSD on me. But those two things permanently fucked my skull.
I’ve waited for justice this long, I can wait some more. The scariest proposition is that he wins the White House and attempts to pardon himself. That would be a constitutional crisis the likes of which I’ve never seen. And people thought Watergate was such a crisis…
Playing devils advocate here, Trump has a history of wriggling out of what looked like slam dunk cases against him, and being an ex-president comes with truck loads of political baggage, so the DOJ might just be playing things extra-careful. It would make sense for them to double and triple check everything, dot all their i’s and cross all their t’s, and make sure everything is as utterly airtight as they can make it. The real danger is that they don’t go so slow that the whole thing becomes moot because they took so long that Trump managed to make himself dictator in chief.
But at the very least Biden’s job is to defend against terrorists and trump is a KNOWN national security threat who should have been immediately arrested and court-martialed already. Fuck these pissy little lower district courts; they’ll never do anything.
It would make sense for them to double and triple check everything, dot all their i’s and cross all their t’s, and make sure everything is as utterly airtight as they can make it.
absolutely. and he got impeached twice, so he’s been playing safe.
The president also is ultimately the head of the “Departments” to include the Dept of Defense. All of the clearances and document classifications exist via presidential authority, so there are some genuine questions as to if a President can snap his fingers and change a classification, and how those rules interact with other laws about unauthorized disclosures. Which is also why Trump getting elected was such a coup for the Russians, as was a strongly Republican Supreme Court (who could bail him out if/when it gets to SCOTUS).
Exactly. Imagine how the intelligence community would have to treat classified information if it could be declassified purely by a President waking up and thinking “it’s declassified.” Nobody would know what is still classified and what isn’t. Classified information might get leaked out because of a rumor that the President declassified something. Declassified information might still be treated as classified by some because nobody knows what is and what isn’t classified.
There’s a process for a reason. Trump suggesting he can just “think” it declassified is totally ridiculous.
Yeah Snowden is still hiding out in countries that don’t extradite to us. Manning is free, but it’s pretty clear that her time in prison had serious lasting damage to her mind. Both of them had good reasons to leak and did their best to minimize unnecessary damage. Meanwhile this chucklefuck is campaigning and threatening.
If democracy dies it will be because we punished those who broke the rules to strengthen it and defended those who broke the rules to destroy it.
Well, wouldn’t language have to concede that if I asked how many presidents there have been, I would be asking a different question than how many presidencies there have been?
That’s not a problem. Anyone can campaign at any time. That’s totally legal and fine.
What’s absolutely absurd is the level of support he still gets from Republicans! He owns them.
If some former Democrat president did this stuff the support from Democrats for that person would be near zero. No one would consider such a candidacy even remotely within the realm of possibility.
Republicans just don’t give a shit about corruption. Some will see this statement and say, “no, they care about it when it’s not one of their people” but that’s 100% the same thing. Corruption is all about picking winners and losers based on what your side thinks of them.
I’m curious what percentage of republicans actually support him vs what percentage only pretends to support him under duress because of violent threats from the crazies.
It’s tribalism. I went to a racetrack last weekend. These people wave Trump flags and wear profane Brandon shirts to fit in with each other. The madder you are, the “smarter” you are. Another Lemming recently said, the founding father’s failed to anticipate that voters would fail at their job, and he’s 1 million percent dead on.
They anticipated it. That, and classism, are why they instituted The Electoral College. They didn’t have access to the mathematical theories that proved that FPTP elections are always going to cause a two party system, and the people will inevitably lose to the owners. That may have influenced them to consider RCV, or some other voting methods.
He’s allowed to campaign from prison if convicted, too. Eugene Debs did it, after all. Logistically, I’m not sure how it’d work with a former president. If he’s ever locked up, it’s going to have to be in a supermax, for his own safety. The Unabomber’s old cell in ADX Florence will be the perfect fit for the needs of a former president and fellow Ivy League graduate! But at any rate, there’s no law stopping him from campaigning by mail.
Remember when politicians at the peaks of their careers resigned over a foot in their mouth, a mispronunciation (or spelling potatoe), being exposed for being a dick?
Mf is giving handjobs in front of kids talking about trans pedophiles and she’s not even reprimanded.
White people with bags of money have to be inconvenienced or die before anyone with power will/can do something about it. Same with climate change. Until the ruling class is directly affected they will do everything in their power to retain it.
Not who…rather what? It seems like it is our democracy is the one that has to die simply because we aren’t willing to absolutely hammer home the point that these fascist fucks are not welcome. Every last one of those J6 people should have been executed in public.
Its crazy how much leeway he is getting. Back during the Bush years a guy in my town had a hang bush sign on a cardboard cutout of him hanging from a tree. The dude was arrested and held for "terrorist threats." The same was not true of similar threats made toward Obama. This was in liberal western Washington. The fascists have always gotten handled with kid gloves in this country and it seriously needs to be addressed if we have any hope of coming out the other side.
I don't, it was back in like 2002-3 and the local paper doesn't have their archives up anymore. He ended up having the charges dropped, but months later.
Not that I Don’t agree with you and this orange fuck just should not be allowed to be on any form of media or government, Kathy Griffin did some tasteless stuff on Twitter about beheading Trump and wasn’t arrested. It was tasteless but literally everything trump does is classless and tasteless.
There’s no evidence that it happened due to racism… As long as you ignore every single fact about what happened there and the mountains of evidence showing that it was based on racism.
I was hoping my sarcasm was evident. What I posted is essentially what this person is doing - ignoring the mountains of evidence and facts of the situation all of which point indisputably towards it being about race. Then, having ignored all that, they cast doubt on it being about race.
It’s a typical tactic of the right. Ignore all the overwhelming evidence in a situation and then, once that’s done, declare that the conclusion obtained from all that evidence is invalid because “there’s no evidence for that.”
I saw your sarcasm was just pointing it out the same way. Our local right wing network even calls it the Tulsa Race Massacre. And they love Trump and love whitwashing the news.
But as a Tulsa news station they are at least smart enough to call it what it is.
The south didn't actually like states rights, and expressly forbid confederate states from ever banning slavery. All because Northern States chose to ban slaver in an ad hoc manner.
Conservative LGBTQ+ people make the mistake of thinking their richness or whiteness outweighs their LGBTQ±ness in the eyes of their fellow conservatives.
It does not. You are being kept around as a trophy. You are who they are referring to in “Some of my best friends are gay!”
The instant it’s no longer expedient to have a gay friend nearby, you’ll be dumped.
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