Yes, as the country prepares to charge into yet another war in the Middle East, it is vital that we not take our eye off the true crisis of our times - the corruption of the Democratic machine in Chicago.
You're being a jerk again, Dave. Thank you for illustrating my point. Now try to think rationally for a change.
You sailed into a discussion on the continuing overwhelming conservative backing for Trump with a cry of “but her emails” in support of someone fantasizing about a vast army of invisible never-Trump conservatives, claiming to be fiscally cautious, and worried about how liberals are too susceptible to evil-minded liars.
Try to not to behave like someone throwing smokebombs to distract attention from the spectacle of the present disaster in the White House.
...Try to not to behave like someone throwing smokebombs to distract attention from the spectacle of the present disaster in the White House.
You really are incapable of reading for comprehension, aren't you, Dave?
I mentioned several of the Clintons' (and, more specifically, HRC's) failings because they are relevant to the discussion. I was not "throwing smokebombs (sic)," but providing a few examples of how they have knowingly screwed up.
I didn't like her, but I still voted for her. I still urged my friends and relatives to vote for her. I still went into a depression when she lost.
That's because - as you would realize if your head weren't completely lost within your nether regions - I regard the incumbent as the greatest threat to the Republic since its beginnings. He is a narcissistic misogynist sociopath, cunning but incapable of rational thought, and a serial business failure. As far as I can tell, he takes his marching orders from Vladimir Putin and despises democracy.
Oh, and he's not a Republican. He was a Democrat until he decided to run for the presidency, and realized that it would be easier to pull the wool over the eyes of threatened (white blue-collar) workers than more liberal constituencies. That too many Republicans have shown themselves completely devoid of ethics, morals, and principles in supporting his abominable agenda is a different but closely related issue.
And I'm not a Republican either. I never have been. But don't let the facts get in the way of your mindless knee-jerk rantings against those of us who actually follow the issues and think things through.
...Try to not to behave like someone throwing smokebombs to distract attention from the spectacle of the present disaster in the White House.
You really are incapable of reading for comprehension, aren't you, Dave?
I mentioned several of the Clintons' (and, more specifically, HRC's) failings because they are relevant to the discussion. I was not "throwing smokebombs (sic)," but providing a few examples of how they have knowingly screwed up.
Why don’t you try to read for comprehension? I said “Try not to behave like someone throwing smokebombs” because I think that’s how you’re behaving, not because I think you’re a Republican or that you voted for Trump. I don’t think a reasonable evaluation of the Clintons’ flaws comes even remotely close to being a significant contribution to the current overwhelming support for Trump among Republicans.
The fact that “too many Republicans have shown themselves completely devoid of ethics, morals, and principles in supporting his abominable agenda” is exactly the issue LC and I were arguing about. As you might have realized had you been reading for comprehension.
I mentioned several of the Clintons' (and, more specifically, HRC's) failings because they are relevant to the discussion. I was not "throwing smokebombs (sic)," but providing a few examples of how they have knowingly screwed up.
You initially mentioned two alleged Hillary Clinton failings: but her emails and the "clouds" and "shadows" (as the NYT put it) of the Clinton Foundation. You've already conceded the email "scandal" involved holding Hillary Clinton to a standard applied to no one else, so let's look at the Clinton Foundation. The New York Times did an extensive investigation of the Foundation, which was a good idea given that she was Secretary of State. They found nothing, yet published a breathless piece implying some never clearly specified scandal.
We can see it in recent coverage, particularly of questions around Clinton's ethics. There's a repeated pattern to many of these stories: Some perfectly legitimate question emerges, like "Did Clinton Foundation donors get undeserved access to Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state?" or "Do a batch of newly released emails from Clinton's aides show her doing something wrong?" Then when the answer turns out to be, "Actually, no," the story is still presented in the Times as a revelation of possible malfeasance. If there's no credible evidence — for instance, an official at the foundation asked for special treatment and didn't get it — the paper will fall back on saying that even though we may not have found a smoking gun this time, the affair still "raises questions" of wrongdoing. It might be a story about a Clinton Foundation executive trying and failing to get a Hillary Clinton aide's help to obtain a diplomatic passport when he wasn't authorized to get it, or one about Clinton having a meeting with the crown prince of Bahrain, an important U.S. ally who also happens to have donated to the Clinton Foundation, but the theme is the same: There's probably something fishy going on here, even if the evidence doesn't seem to show that there is, and anyhow it just looks bad.
The problem with debunking Clinton scandals like this is that it always sends things down a rabbit hole, where the conspiracy theorist may concede that yeah, that particular scandal "weren't the best example", but whatabout Hillary Clinton not being nice to the women who slept with her husband, or the "murder" of Vince Foster, or running drugs through the Mena airport, or . . .
You get the idea. Manufacturing Clinton scandals has been a well-funded cottage industry of the American right and it's always easier to make up scandals than it is to debunk made-up scandals. There's always a next whatabout and a tenacious credulity masquerading as cynicism. So yes, I'd agree that there are different rules for the Clintons, but not in the way you're thinking of it.
Oh, and he's not a Republican. He was a Democrat until he decided to run for the presidency, and realized that it would be easier to pull the wool over the eyes of threatened (white blue-collar) workers than more liberal constituencies. That too many Republicans have shown themselves completely devoid of ethics, morals, and principles in supporting his abominable agenda is a different but closely related issue.
I'm not sure how someone who was nominated for president as a Republican, commands the near universal support of all Republicans in positions of power, and is enacting the Republican agenda of tax cuts for the wealthy and deregulation of industry is "not a Republican". By your standard neither Strom Thurmond nor Trent Lott were ever Republicans either, since they started out in the Democratic party.
Here's a thought: why don't you two get a room and work this out? Then the rest of us could get back to whatever-the-hell this thread was originally about.
I'm done. I'll just note that Trump is opposed to the traditional Republican ideal of fiscal conservatism and has given us mind-blowing deficits, while also blowing up trade and our alliances. He may be a contemporary Republican, which is sufficient condemnation in itself, but five years ago, and for decades before that, he was a registered Democrat.
As for Dave, anyone who supports voting for avatars of corruption (as in Chicago) just because they're Democrats over moderate (as they were in that time and place) Republicans is just as bad as certain contemporary leaders of the latter party. Members of both parties had better learn to negotiate and occasionally reach across the aisle, or we're going to lose our democracy.
“Certain contemporary leaders”? Trump has the support of nearly the entire party and its voters, and this “members of both parties” false equivalency blather is just ludicrous. Republicans wouldn’t even support Mitt Romney’s health care plan when it was proposed by a Democrat, or even consider Merrick Garland when Obama nominated him five days after this
Senator Orrin Hatch, President pro tempore of the United States Senate and the most senior Republican Senator, predicted that President Obama would "name someone the liberal Democratic base wants" even though he "could easily name Merrick Garland, who is a fine man."
And pointing to the flaws of Democrats does nothing to either excuse or even really explain Republican and conservative support for Trump. How is that supposed to work, anyway? Even if conservatives believed the Clintons to be corrupt, surely they don’t think it’s a contest? “We’re so outraged by the corruption of the Clinton foundation that we’re going to support Donald Trump!”
I'm not making excuses for the Republicans; as noted (and noted) above, I am not a Republican. I do worry about our democracy, with obnoxious hardliners on both sides of the aisle - and obnoxious hardliners like Dave here on the Ship, condemning even the slightest deviance from their self-declared orthodoxy in the harshest possible terms. (Yes, I know - it's Hell.) Americans of all stripes are going to have to find ways to work together, or we're going to lose our country.
I'm not making excuses for the Republicans; as noted (and noted) above, I am not a Republican. I do worry about our democracy, with obnoxious hardliners on both sides of the aisle - and obnoxious hardliners like Dave here on the Ship, condemning even the slightest deviance from their self-declared orthodoxy in the harshest possible terms. (Yes, I know - it's Hell.) Americans of all stripes are going to have to find ways to work together, or we're going to lose our country.
I'm not making excuses for the Republicans; as noted (and noted) above, I am not a Republican. I do worry about our democracy, with obnoxious hardliners on both sides of the aisle - and obnoxious hardliners like Dave here on the Ship, condemning even the slightest deviance from their self-declared orthodoxy in the harshest possible terms. (Yes, I know - it's Hell.) Americans of all stripes are going to have to find ways to work together, or we're going to lose our country.
I’m not condemning deviance from an orthodoxy - the only thing I’m condemning here is this idiotic “both sides”-ism you keep promoting. Sometimes most of the problem really is on one side. The issue isn’t “obnoxious hardliners” on either side - you could hardly expect to do away with all of those - it’s the overwhelming support on one side for a disastrously unsuitable person in the White House.
I don’t know what the answer is, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t involve attempting to meet the Republicans half way. That’s been thoroughly tried - e.g. ACA, Merrick Garland - and the responses of the Republican leadership have been obstruction, denial, and running further to the right, all richly rewarded by their primary voters.
The thing is Dave, you’re very good at shooting things down with your sassy sarcasm, like some kind of grumpy Socrates, but you rarely actually say anything constructive. It’s a lot easier to knock down than build up. Don’t get me wrong, I agree with you most of the time. I also don’t know what the answer is, but more polarisation and a lack of compassion seems even less helpful than meeting half way.
I'm not making excuses for the Republicans; as noted (and noted) above, I am not a Republican. I do worry about our democracy, with obnoxious hardliners on both sides of the aisle - and obnoxious hardliners like Dave here on the Ship, condemning even the slightest deviance from their self-declared orthodoxy in the harshest possible terms. (Yes, I know - it's Hell.) Americans of all stripes are going to have to find ways to work together, or we're going to lose our country.
I touched on this about a week ago, but one of the most irritating thing about the we all have to work together and compromise cheerleading is its complete imperviousness to history. For eight years the most recent Democratic president was almost ridiculously eager to compromise with Republicans. In the middle of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression Barack Obama watered down his recovery bill with less effective tax cuts and trimmed its size to appeal to the "fiscal responsibility" that grips the Republican party whenever there's a Democrat in the White House. The Republican response? Zero Republican votes in eitherhouse. Obama's signature issue, health care reform, was watered down repeatedly in search of one or two Republican votes. (Susan Collins? Lisa Murkowski? Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?) The result? No Republican votes from eitherhouse. I could go on (and on and on) with examples, but the point is that the experiment of trying to find compromises that Republicans would accept has been run, and that experiment was a dismal failure. It's not "Americans of all stripes" who have to find ways to work together. One party, the Republicans, has decided that any government not controlled by them is inherently illegitimate. Pretending this is not the case only contributes to the problem.
In fairness, regurgitating a chunk of Repugnican smeary bullshit is hard to not comment on. ...
Dave couldn't even understand voting for moderate (and mostly powerless) Republicans against the open criminality of the Chicago Democratic Machine. And there are problems on the other side, like Obama's own precedent-setting use of executive orders and insisting on personally choosing all the targets for drone strikes as the assassin-in-chief.
I am certainly not arguing that the Republicans are not several orders of magnitude worse. They clearly are.
Personally, I'm puzzled who the obnoxious hardliners are for the Demofails that balance out the Lovecraftian horror show that is the Repugnicans.
Nancy "You'll have to pass it to read what's in it" Pelosi has had her moments, although I'm grateful she's there. The power has now passed to the other side, of course, as the Republicans morph into the Cthulu Party.
...one of the most irritating thing about the we all have to work together and compromise cheerleading is its complete imperviousness to history. ...the point is that the experiment of trying to find compromises that Republicans would accept has been run, and that experiment was a dismal failure. ...
I'm speaking far more to the Republicans (for what it's worth) than to the Democrats. Historically, however, the Congress did manage to work together and govern through compromise.
There are lots of reasons that doesn't happen often anymore, from bubbling (thank you, Google and Facebook) to gerrymandering, and, as some columnists are starting to suggest, the loss of earmarks. If they can keep things open and transparent (no secret ballots), they give lawmakers an incentive to work together and give them something to brag about in terms of constituent services.
As Patricia Murphy wrote in Roll Call a while back,
...two months after earmarks officially disappeared from the Washington landscape, the recurring nightmare of government shutdown threats began. That was was also the same time that Congress stopped passing individual appropriations bills and started jamming funding for nearly the entire federal government into last-minute omnibus bills, negotiated by two or three congressional leaders in the dark of night, and hastily approved by Congress at the end of the year. ...
Nancy "You'll have to pass it to read what's in it"
Oh God is that old lie still circulating? I know this is a lie because I READ IT ONLINE before it even hit the floor. Because some mouth-breathing Republican insisted I go look at the Death Panels, another lie the Rethuglicans circulated (and probably still do if your post here is any indication). The bill was there. The death panels were not.
I read it in the Wall Street Journal at the time, which is normally (despite its ownership and ghastly editorial and op-ed pages) a reputable news organization. Unfortunately, Snopes.com has apparently not addressed this one. But I will take your word for it.
The thing is Dave, you’re very good at shooting things down with your sassy sarcasm, like some kind of grumpy Socrates, but you rarely actually say anything constructive.
Well, you're certainly not wrong about that last part. (If it's any consolation, I don't think I'm withholding constructive ideas out of spite.) It may be partly a personality trait, but in the present political situation I think a lot of people are struggling to come up with constructive suggestions.
I originally responded to LC because I thought she wrote something that was both stupid and insulting. Pushing back on that may seem polarizing and not especially constructive, but I'm not sorry for it. I wish there really were large numbers of never-Trump conservatives, just like I wish Obama had succeeded in his attempts at bipartisanship, but here we are; he didn't and there aren't. Left-centrists are still busy wiping Republican spittle off their faces, so maybe it's time to try something else. Not trying to repeat the thing that clearly wasn't working could be a place to start. (Though if you're hoping for a Republican epiphany, it seems you're not alone.)
Dave couldn't even understand voting for moderate (and mostly powerless) Republicans against the open criminality of the Chicago Democratic Machine.
No, I understand that. (Is that what this was supposed to be about? I couldn't tell.) In fact, I think it sounds like an eminently sensible thing to do. But I also think it's utterly irrelevant to the argument I was having with LC, which was about overwhelming conservative support for Donald Trump.
I read it in the Wall Street Journal at the time, which is normally (despite its ownership and ghastly editorial and op-ed pages) a reputable news organization. Unfortunately, Snopes.com has apparently not addressed this one. But I will take your word for it.
There is no such thing as a reputable news organisation owned by Murdoch.
Well, yes and no. The Australian, a national daily (the only national daily here) was established by Rupert Murdoch over 50 years ago. The first editor was Max Newton, renowned journalist; the second after him was Adrian Deamer, another outstanding journalist. Indeed, it was a series of editorials by Deamer which led to Australian govt support for the Bangladeshi separatists. As with Rossweisse's assessment of the Wall St Journal, the news columns are probably still the best here. You just ignore the editorials and the opinion columns.
Murdoch has got substantially worse with age. You used to be able to say the same of The Times but the corruption has been evident for a couple of decades now.
And there are problems on the other side, like Obama's own precedent-setting use of executive orders and insisting on personally choosing all the targets for drone strikes as the assassin-in-chief.
I think you're giving way more importance to process than most people would ascribe. To take an historical example the folks who put up "Impeach Earl Warren" yard signs in the wake of Brown v. Board didn't turn around and decide that segregation was wrong ten years later when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because it was passed by Congress instead of decreed by the Supreme Court. They ramped up Massive Resistance because for the most part people don't care about process, they care about outcomes.
Likewise the people who object to same-sex couples having the same hospital visitation rights as married opposite-sex couples (to pick one of Obama's executive orders at not-quite-random) are going to object regardless of whether that right is enforced via executive order or by Congressional act. Because people don't care about process, they care about outcomes.
...one of the most irritating thing about the we all have to work together and compromise cheerleading is its complete imperviousness to history. ...the point is that the experiment of trying to find compromises that Republicans would accept has been run, and that experiment was a dismal failure. ...
I'm speaking far more to the Republicans (for what it's worth) than to the Democrats. Historically, however, the Congress did manage to work together and govern through compromise.
There are lots of reasons that doesn't happen often anymore, from bubbling (thank you, Google and Facebook) to gerrymandering, and, as some columnists are starting to suggest, the loss of earmarks. If they can keep things open and transparent (no secret ballots), they give lawmakers an incentive to work together and give them something to brag about in terms of constituent services.
Historically there have been sectional divisions (North-South) in Congress in addition to partisan (Democrat-Republican) ones. So past instances of Congress "work[ ing ] together and govern[ ing ] through compromise" were mostly examples of sectional divisions trumping partisan ones. A good example is the aforementioned Civil Rights Act of 1964, where geographic region was a much better predictor of how a Congressman or Senator would vote than partisan affiliation. The reason this happens less often these days is because the regional and partisan division in the American polity have largely been aligned with each other. The Dixiecrats (or their intellectual and/or biological descendants) are now mostly Republicans and the "Rockefeller Republicans" have mostly shifted to the Democratic party. At any rate I'm not sure why an alliance between (for example) Midwestern agribusiness and white Southern racists counts as working together and compromise when those factions are in different parties but becomes "self-declared orthodoxy" when those factions are in the same party.
It may be partly a personality trait, but in the present political situation I think a lot of people are struggling to come up with constructive suggestions.
Fair enough. And I'm sure you and @Crœsos aren't wrong about the unwillingness of Republicans on a large scale to compromise.
It just seemed to me that at least here, on the Ship, we've got more moderate, reasonable Republicans who are genuinely wanting to engage (Hi, @Lamb Chopped and @Rossweisse!), and who also realise that Trump is a nightmare. That the priority then was to chastise them for being Republicans at all (I may be speaking to how the thread went as a whole, here, rather than you specifically) seemed misplaced to me.
The Cold Civil War will be won by denying it exists. Worse, it appears that the Radical Right¹ has weaponized the Moderate Right's² desire for conciliation.
The Moderate Left³, which only seems radical by comparison for 'Merkins, has grown justifiably intolerant of the Radical Right's shenanigans.
¹ Tea Party and Trumpian Republicans
² Most Democrats, Republican Classic™
³ Bernie / AOC supporters
It just seemed to me that at least here, on the Ship, we've got more moderate, reasonable Republicans who are genuinely wanting to engage (Hi, @Lamb Chopped and @Rossweisse!) . . . .
I believe that @Rossweisse has said more than once in this thread that she is not a Republican and never has been.
It just seemed to me that at least here, on the Ship, we've got more moderate, reasonable Republicans who are genuinely wanting to engage
Except that it seems that the grounds offered for such an engagement are; not examining motives too deeply, and then a theoretical commitment to compromise that ignores the politics of the last few decades.
It just seemed to me that at least here, on the Ship, we've got more moderate, reasonable Republicans who are genuinely wanting to engage (Hi, @Lamb Chopped and @Rossweisse!) . . . .
I believe that @Rossweisse has said more than once in this thread that she is not a Republican and never has been.
He may be a contemporary Republican, which is sufficient condemnation in itself, but five years ago, and for decades before that, he was a registered Democrat.
Being a "registered Democrat" means that he chooses to vote in Democratic primary elections. Trump lived in New York, a city which has tended to vote for Democrats since before he was born. He's a corrupt shyster. I don't think the fact that he was registered as a Democrat carries any information about his political opinions. He donated to political campaigns, because that's the cost of doing business.
He may be a contemporary Republican, which is sufficient condemnation in itself, but five years ago, and for decades before that, he was a registered Democrat.
Being a "registered Democrat" means that he chooses to vote in Democratic primary elections. Trump lived in New York, a city which has tended to vote for Democrats since before he was born. He's a corrupt shyster. I don't think the fact that he was registered as a Democrat carries any information about his political opinions. He donated to political campaigns, because that's the cost of doing business.
And yet he didn't vote in primaries very often according to this 2011 article:
[ New York City Board of Elections spokeswoman Valerie ] Vazquez has found voting records by Trump for only two party primaries – the 1989 GOP mayoral primary and last year’s [ 2010 ] GOP primary for several statewide races, including governor and U.S. Senate.
Remember, who you voted for is a secret but the fact that you voted (or didn't) is a matter of public record. According to Wikipedia Donald Trump has had more political parties than wives:
Trump registered as a Republican in Manhattan in 1987 and since that time has changed his party affiliation five times. In 1999, Trump changed his party affiliation to the Independence Party of New York. In August 2001, Trump changed his party affiliation to Democratic. In September 2009, Trump changed his party affiliation back to the Republican Party. In December 2011, Trump changed to "no party affiliation" (independent). In April 2012, Trump again returned to the Republican Party.
Still, given that Trump was the Republican nominee for president and commands the loyalty of just about every prominent Republican politician I think quibbling over whether he's really a Republican or not makes about as much sense as quibbling over whether or not Dwight Eisenhower was a Republican.
...No, I understand that. ... In fact, I think it sounds like an eminently sensible thing to do. But I also think it's utterly irrelevant to the argument I was having with LC, which was about overwhelming conservative support for Donald Trump.
You were attacking me for saying that I often voted for Republican candidates when living in Cook County because the Democratic alternative was infamously corrupt. "Have the courage of your bad deeds," as Nietzsche said.
Dave, you're a bully. That's fine, in this context - hey, it's Hell! - but I don't have the energy to contend with that right now. I will continue to follow my conscience and vote for the individual I find best qualified for a given office. It's highly unlikely to be a Republican these days (again, I will never vote for a Trumpista), but I reserve the right. Ciao.
It just seemed to me that at least here, on the Ship, we've got more moderate, reasonable Republicans who are genuinely wanting to engage (Hi, @Lamb Chopped and @Rossweisse!) . . . .
I believe that @Rossweisse has said more than once in this thread that she is not a Republican and never has been.
My mistake.
No worries. I am a moderate and strive to be reasonable, which these days seems to be condemnation enough.
...No, I understand that. ... In fact, I think it sounds like an eminently sensible thing to do. But I also think it's utterly irrelevant to the argument I was having with LC, which was about overwhelming conservative support for Donald Trump.
You were attacking me for saying that I often voted for Republican candidates when living in Cook County because the Democratic alternative was infamously corrupt. "Have the courage of your bad deeds," as Nietzsche said.
Hm. What was that you were saying about reading for comprehension, again?
...No, I understand that. ... In fact, I think it sounds like an eminently sensible thing to do. But I also think it's utterly irrelevant to the argument I was having with LC, which was about overwhelming conservative support for Donald Trump.
You were attacking me for saying that I often voted for Republican candidates when living in Cook County because the Democratic alternative was infamously corrupt. "Have the courage of your bad deeds," as Nietzsche said.
Hm. What was that you were saying about reading for comprehension, again?
Thre's a bucket in Hell for wilful misunderstandings and it's getting dangerously full.
You tediously boring mentally challenged coven of fuckwit left leaning heretics have completely wrecked my thread. I nearly bored my tits off reading the Yanks contributions, (made with one hand on the keyboard one suspects)
Let us Pray
Dear Lord Jesus
Bring back the Dribbles of Pomona.... she is less tedious that the earnest yanks with their horrible sincerity.
Amen.
It's a shame you didn't learn how to use punctuation while you were away, unless you find the usual rules of written English too irredeemably left-wing for you to countenance, of course.
Oh, joy. A moron who needs to persistently announce how they don't want participate. One assumes they eventually wearied of telling everyone within earshot about how they disliked stabbing themselves in the eye with a fork.
Comments
Yeah, Dave. Being the biggest jerk about being technically correct is my schtick. Now step off!
You sailed into a discussion on the continuing overwhelming conservative backing for Trump with a cry of “but her emails” in support of someone fantasizing about a vast army of invisible never-Trump conservatives, claiming to be fiscally cautious, and worried about how liberals are too susceptible to evil-minded liars.
Try to not to behave like someone throwing smokebombs to distract attention from the spectacle of the present disaster in the White House.
I mentioned several of the Clintons' (and, more specifically, HRC's) failings because they are relevant to the discussion. I was not "throwing smokebombs (sic)," but providing a few examples of how they have knowingly screwed up.
I didn't like her, but I still voted for her. I still urged my friends and relatives to vote for her. I still went into a depression when she lost.
That's because - as you would realize if your head weren't completely lost within your nether regions - I regard the incumbent as the greatest threat to the Republic since its beginnings. He is a narcissistic misogynist sociopath, cunning but incapable of rational thought, and a serial business failure. As far as I can tell, he takes his marching orders from Vladimir Putin and despises democracy.
Oh, and he's not a Republican. He was a Democrat until he decided to run for the presidency, and realized that it would be easier to pull the wool over the eyes of threatened (white blue-collar) workers than more liberal constituencies. That too many Republicans have shown themselves completely devoid of ethics, morals, and principles in supporting his abominable agenda is a different but closely related issue.
And I'm not a Republican either. I never have been. But don't let the facts get in the way of your mindless knee-jerk rantings against those of us who actually follow the issues and think things through.
The fact that “too many Republicans have shown themselves completely devoid of ethics, morals, and principles in supporting his abominable agenda” is exactly the issue LC and I were arguing about. As you might have realized had you been reading for comprehension.
You initially mentioned two alleged Hillary Clinton failings: but her emails and the "clouds" and "shadows" (as the NYT put it) of the Clinton Foundation. You've already conceded the email "scandal" involved holding Hillary Clinton to a standard applied to no one else, so let's look at the Clinton Foundation. The New York Times did an extensive investigation of the Foundation, which was a good idea given that she was Secretary of State. They found nothing, yet published a breathless piece implying some never clearly specified scandal.
The problem with debunking Clinton scandals like this is that it always sends things down a rabbit hole, where the conspiracy theorist may concede that yeah, that particular scandal "weren't the best example", but whatabout Hillary Clinton not being nice to the women who slept with her husband, or the "murder" of Vince Foster, or running drugs through the Mena airport, or . . .
You get the idea. Manufacturing Clinton scandals has been a well-funded cottage industry of the American right and it's always easier to make up scandals than it is to debunk made-up scandals. There's always a next whatabout and a tenacious credulity masquerading as cynicism. So yes, I'd agree that there are different rules for the Clintons, but not in the way you're thinking of it.
I'm not sure how someone who was nominated for president as a Republican, commands the near universal support of all Republicans in positions of power, and is enacting the Republican agenda of tax cuts for the wealthy and deregulation of industry is "not a Republican". By your standard neither Strom Thurmond nor Trent Lott were ever Republicans either, since they started out in the Democratic party.
Oh, wait . . .
As for Dave, anyone who supports voting for avatars of corruption (as in Chicago) just because they're Democrats over moderate (as they were in that time and place) Republicans is just as bad as certain contemporary leaders of the latter party. Members of both parties had better learn to negotiate and occasionally reach across the aisle, or we're going to lose our democracy.
The lie they tell the voters.
What kind of an ideal is it that one doesn't practice in 80 years, even when one has control of all 3 branches of government? "Ideal" my ass.
This.
Personally, I'm puzzled who the obnoxious hardliners are for the Demofails that balance out the Lovecraftian horror show that is the Repugnicans.
I don’t know what the answer is, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t involve attempting to meet the Republicans half way. That’s been thoroughly tried - e.g. ACA, Merrick Garland - and the responses of the Republican leadership have been obstruction, denial, and running further to the right, all richly rewarded by their primary voters.
The thing is Dave, you’re very good at shooting things down with your sassy sarcasm, like some kind of grumpy Socrates, but you rarely actually say anything constructive. It’s a lot easier to knock down than build up. Don’t get me wrong, I agree with you most of the time. I also don’t know what the answer is, but more polarisation and a lack of compassion seems even less helpful than meeting half way.
I touched on this about a week ago, but one of the most irritating thing about the we all have to work together and compromise cheerleading is its complete imperviousness to history. For eight years the most recent Democratic president was almost ridiculously eager to compromise with Republicans. In the middle of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression Barack Obama watered down his recovery bill with less effective tax cuts and trimmed its size to appeal to the "fiscal responsibility" that grips the Republican party whenever there's a Democrat in the White House. The Republican response? Zero Republican votes in either house. Obama's signature issue, health care reform, was watered down repeatedly in search of one or two Republican votes. (Susan Collins? Lisa Murkowski? Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?) The result? No Republican votes from either house. I could go on (and on and on) with examples, but the point is that the experiment of trying to find compromises that Republicans would accept has been run, and that experiment was a dismal failure. It's not "Americans of all stripes" who have to find ways to work together. One party, the Republicans, has decided that any government not controlled by them is inherently illegitimate. Pretending this is not the case only contributes to the problem.
I am certainly not arguing that the Republicans are not several orders of magnitude worse. They clearly are.
Nancy "You'll have to pass it to read what's in it" Pelosi has had her moments, although I'm grateful she's there. The power has now passed to the other side, of course, as the Republicans morph into the Cthulu Party.
I'm speaking far more to the Republicans (for what it's worth) than to the Democrats. Historically, however, the Congress did manage to work together and govern through compromise.
There are lots of reasons that doesn't happen often anymore, from bubbling (thank you, Google and Facebook) to gerrymandering, and, as some columnists are starting to suggest, the loss of earmarks. If they can keep things open and transparent (no secret ballots), they give lawmakers an incentive to work together and give them something to brag about in terms of constituent services.
As Patricia Murphy wrote in Roll Call a while back, https://www.rollcall.com/news/opinion/bring-back-earmarks-really
Let me get to my bunker now...
Oh God is that old lie still circulating? I know this is a lie because I READ IT ONLINE before it even hit the floor. Because some mouth-breathing Republican insisted I go look at the Death Panels, another lie the Rethuglicans circulated (and probably still do if your post here is any indication). The bill was there. The death panels were not.
I originally responded to LC because I thought she wrote something that was both stupid and insulting. Pushing back on that may seem polarizing and not especially constructive, but I'm not sorry for it. I wish there really were large numbers of never-Trump conservatives, just like I wish Obama had succeeded in his attempts at bipartisanship, but here we are; he didn't and there aren't. Left-centrists are still busy wiping Republican spittle off their faces, so maybe it's time to try something else. Not trying to repeat the thing that clearly wasn't working could be a place to start. (Though if you're hoping for a Republican epiphany, it seems you're not alone.)
No, I understand that. (Is that what this was supposed to be about? I couldn't tell.) In fact, I think it sounds like an eminently sensible thing to do. But I also think it's utterly irrelevant to the argument I was having with LC, which was about overwhelming conservative support for Donald Trump.
There is no such thing as a reputable news organisation owned by Murdoch.
I think you're giving way more importance to process than most people would ascribe. To take an historical example the folks who put up "Impeach Earl Warren" yard signs in the wake of Brown v. Board didn't turn around and decide that segregation was wrong ten years later when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because it was passed by Congress instead of decreed by the Supreme Court. They ramped up Massive Resistance because for the most part people don't care about process, they care about outcomes.
Likewise the people who object to same-sex couples having the same hospital visitation rights as married opposite-sex couples (to pick one of Obama's executive orders at not-quite-random) are going to object regardless of whether that right is enforced via executive order or by Congressional act. Because people don't care about process, they care about outcomes.
Historically there have been sectional divisions (North-South) in Congress in addition to partisan (Democrat-Republican) ones. So past instances of Congress "work[ ing ] together and govern[ ing ] through compromise" were mostly examples of sectional divisions trumping partisan ones. A good example is the aforementioned Civil Rights Act of 1964, where geographic region was a much better predictor of how a Congressman or Senator would vote than partisan affiliation. The reason this happens less often these days is because the regional and partisan division in the American polity have largely been aligned with each other. The Dixiecrats (or their intellectual and/or biological descendants) are now mostly Republicans and the "Rockefeller Republicans" have mostly shifted to the Democratic party. At any rate I'm not sure why an alliance between (for example) Midwestern agribusiness and white Southern racists counts as working together and compromise when those factions are in different parties but becomes "self-declared orthodoxy" when those factions are in the same party.
It just seemed to me that at least here, on the Ship, we've got more moderate, reasonable Republicans who are genuinely wanting to engage (Hi, @Lamb Chopped and @Rossweisse!), and who also realise that Trump is a nightmare. That the priority then was to chastise them for being Republicans at all (I may be speaking to how the thread went as a whole, here, rather than you specifically) seemed misplaced to me.
The Moderate Left³, which only seems radical by comparison for 'Merkins, has grown justifiably intolerant of the Radical Right's shenanigans.
¹ Tea Party and Trumpian Republicans
² Most Democrats, Republican Classic™
³ Bernie / AOC supporters
Except that it seems that the grounds offered for such an engagement are; not examining motives too deeply, and then a theoretical commitment to compromise that ignores the politics of the last few decades.
My mistake.
Being a "registered Democrat" means that he chooses to vote in Democratic primary elections. Trump lived in New York, a city which has tended to vote for Democrats since before he was born. He's a corrupt shyster. I don't think the fact that he was registered as a Democrat carries any information about his political opinions. He donated to political campaigns, because that's the cost of doing business.
And yet he didn't vote in primaries very often according to this 2011 article:
Remember, who you voted for is a secret but the fact that you voted (or didn't) is a matter of public record. According to Wikipedia Donald Trump has had more political parties than wives:
Still, given that Trump was the Republican nominee for president and commands the loyalty of just about every prominent Republican politician I think quibbling over whether he's really a Republican or not makes about as much sense as quibbling over whether or not Dwight Eisenhower was a Republican.
Dave, you're a bully. That's fine, in this context - hey, it's Hell! - but I don't have the energy to contend with that right now. I will continue to follow my conscience and vote for the individual I find best qualified for a given office. It's highly unlikely to be a Republican these days (again, I will never vote for a Trumpista), but I reserve the right. Ciao.
Thre's a bucket in Hell for wilful misunderstandings and it's getting dangerously full.
Norwich?
Bath & Wells?
Sodor & Man?
I said I didn't want the silver.
I was actually replying to a comment upstream as to whether the GOP ever had any kudos.
So not as senile as I... Tuesday.
Yeah and Ike.
David or Eisenhower?
Let us Pray
Dear Lord Jesus
Bring back the Dribbles of Pomona.... she is less tedious that the earnest yanks with their horrible sincerity.
Amen.
It's a shame you didn't learn how to use punctuation while you were away, unless you find the usual rules of written English too irredeemably left-wing for you to countenance, of course.