US Elections

Buffy Summers said:
But it's also hypocritical when the Democratic leadership and the media act like Trump is some terrible person, while ignoring their own lying and corruption. Calling people evil and racist and nazis because they don't agree. That's not being a good leader. You can't call out Trump for discrimination and then give Hillary Clinton a pass for "marriage is only between a man and a woman". Or gloss over pay to play, or her actions helping sexual predators. Or the corruption in the Clinton Foundation. Or the congressmen who lied about Russia and impeachment. Or say Trump was riling up protesters to the lockdowns, and forget Obama inciting race riots. Or go back to Adam Schiff intentionally lying about Mitt Romney when he said he hadn't paid his taxes in ten years, and when he was interviewed after the election about knowingly lying about it, Schiff said, "Well, he didn't get elected, did he?"
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I know it's against the law to just post a gif but this deserves it
 
Buffy Summers said:
It's absolutely reasonable for people to dislike him. I dislike him as a person. He is not the person I would have chosen for president. But, at the same time, and surprisingly, he has done a good job at the actual job of being president. And the intense hate of the person so much as to deny reality is not a good thing for anyone. Our government wasting time, money and the confidence of the people just for a power grab.
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He's done a terrible job of being President. What "President" refuses to take responsibility for their mistakes, spends hours on Twitter insulting people, vilifies the free media, courts the good favour of dictators over his allies, refuses to show his tax returns (hmm wonder why?), has no idea about the constitution (something Republican senators have been caught on tape sniggering about), lies more than any of his predecessors in recent memory (and that's not an opinion - that's factually proven), admits that he's going to let the countries healthcare system "implode" out of spite, rolls back clean water protections, loosens regulations on toxic air pollutions, screws over endangered wildlife protections, has an 86% turnover rate due to instability in the Whitehouse, hires reality TV stars and family members to positions of power they have absolutely no qualifications for, introduced tax cuts that allowed billionaires to pay less tax then the working class for the first time in history, insults prisoners of war etc. He's by far the worst President the US has ever had. A national and international embarrassment.

Unfortunately, we elected good people into the presidency (the Bush's), and they got jeered for it.
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The Bush's aren't "good people" - they're war criminals. Hundreds of thousands of allied soldiers, reporters, and Iraqi civilians, died during the Iraq war. Hundreds of thousands of civilians (both in the Middle East and the West) have died since the war due to Bush destabilising the region and creating a power vacuum. He invaded another country under the falsehood that they carried weapons of mass destruction despite being told that this wasn't the case and did so deliberately for nefarious reasons (oil). The fact that Bush (and Blair and Howard and any other leader that contributed to that farce) walks free after committing war crimes is utterly despicable and criminal. That aside, he was a pretty terrible president back home too, with his handling of Katrina not unlike Trumps disastrous handling of the Coronavirus.

Funnily enough, if anyone dared speak up against the Iraq war back then they were vilified as "unpatriotic." Which is a common Republican tactic still being used right now. Yet nowadays even the Republicans squabble over who did/did not support the war because even they can see that it was a disaster and they don't want to be politically attached to it anymore.

The best thing that ever happened to George Bush is Trump. Bush was a gaff-prone dumby himself but in comparison to Trump he looks like a rocket scientist. It's why public opinion has swayed more favourably to Bush since Trump took office because Bush at least had enough common sense to act like a President.

But it's also hypocritical when the Democratic leadership and the media act like Trump is some terrible person, while ignoring their own lying and corruption. Calling people evil and racist and nazis because they don't agree.
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Nah. Republicans have tried to use the moral high ground for years as a political tactic. The party of "Family Values", remember? They've always fancied themselves as righteous and godly. It is absolutely justified that their corruption and hypocrisy is turned against them when the party of "Family Values" champions a sleazy, adulterous, misogynist as their leader. A racist rapist who says grotesque sexualised things about his own daughter, who boasted about "grabbing women by their p*ssy", who is on tape boasting about waltzing into the dressing rooms of teenage beauty pageant contestants so he can catch them in a state of undress, who has called women "fat pigs" etc. There's no "acting" like Trump is a terrible person. If Trump isn't a terrible person then honestly who on earth is? What more could it possibly take? He's repugnant.

It's perfectly valid to oppose Trump's presidency purely on moral grounds. Forget his performance for a moment; he's a serial rapist and a racist. Those two things alone should disqualify him from ever holding office. What I can never figure out is how the fact that he's been consistently accused of sexually assaulting women for years is something anyone can expect someone else to turn a blind-eye too as if it's not a deal-breaker for anyone with an ounce of moral fibre. I couldn't stand to be in the same room as a rapist, let alone vote for one. And what I can't figure out is when the USA fell so badly that not wanting to support a rapist/racist as President just on moral principle is now considered a controversial stance to take and not just the most obvious, goes-without-saying position to have.

You can't call out Trump for discrimination and then give Hillary Clinton a pass for "marriage is only between a man and a woman". Or gloss over pay to play, or her actions helping sexual predators.
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1) Many leftists absolutely despise Clinton? Just like many leftists are actively campaigning against Biden in light of recent allegations. Are some Democrats hypocrites? Absolutely. But leftists don't automatically vote down the party line like Republicans do.

2) Trump actually is a sexual predator. If people are going to be morally outraged at Clinton "helping" sexual predators then they need to look inward considering that they helped elect one to the highest office in the land. As long as someone supports Trump and votes for him I am not remotely interested in hearing about their supposed moral outrage when it comes to sexual predators.

We can certainly vote or not vote for people because of how we see them as people. But this idea that someone is automatically a good person because it says "Democrat" on their voter id card and automatically evil and a racist because it says "Republican" on theirs is just not right and it's leading us to more polarization.
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Has anybody here said that though? As I said above, Republicans have demonised progressives for years for being immoral, unpatriotic, and ungodly and fancying themselves the party of Family Values. Demonising one's opponent is certainly not just a Democrat tactic. But of course you can expect Republicans who support Trump to be tarred with the same brush as him when they hitch their wagons to such a piece of human garbage. You yourself have stated you do not like the man. He ran a campaign based on division and hatred, courted white nationalists, and appealed to the ugliest underbelly of America by demonising and vilifying immigrants (and it's not surprising whatsoever that the immigrants receiving the hate all just happen to be brown). There's a long list of quotes from Republicans back during the 16 primaries who said that Trump was morally unfit for office. They only changed their tune when he secured the nomination.

Your comment implies that Democrats are only responsible for the polarisation of this country. Unless Democrats are referring to themselves as "DemoRats" and "libtards" I think it's safe to say that Republican hand's aren't exactly clean. Even on these forums Democrats have recently been referred to as brainless and "tree huggers" and there's been jokes made about fantasising or wishing death on them. Is that not polarisation?

There's plenty of Democrats who I loathe. The fact that right now the election is looking like a choice between a rapist vs another rapist is a sad reflection of how morally bankrupt the US appears to have become.
 
vampmogs said:
And then we had the Brett Kavanaugh debacle - what good person is going to sign up to have their life destroyed after that? We're reaping what we've sowed.


2) Trump actually is a sexual predator. If people are going to be morally outraged at Clinton "helping" sexual predators then they need to look inward considering that they helped elect one to the highest office in the land. As long as someone supports Trump and votes for him I am not remotely interested in hearing about their supposed moral outrage when it comes to sexual predators.
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Just out of curiosity, are you equally outraged about Biden and Tara Reade? Just seems like a lot of people, like Alyssa Milano of Me-Too fame and Kavanaugh outrage, quickly backtracked "believe all women" when that started bubbling up.

Edit: Sorry, saw your last paragraph now. It doesn't seem to get a lot of attention, at least here, so I'm curious if people even know about it in general.
 
vampmogs
vampmogs
No worries. I participate in a lot of political conversations elsewhere and every leftist I know absolutely hates Alyssa Milano and considers her a hypocrite.
Taake said:
Just out of curiosity, are you equally outraged about Biden and Tara Reade? Just seems like a lot of people, like Alyssa Milano of Me-Too fame and Kavanaugh outrage, quickly backtracked "believe all women" when that started bubbling up.
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Absolutely I am. I already addressed this in my post;

vampmogs said:
There's plenty of Democrats who I loathe. The fact that right now the election is looking like a choice between a rapist vs another rapist is a sad reflection of how morally bankrupt the US appears to have become.
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Taake
Taake
Yup, saw it later.
nightshade said:
This is to calmly and civilly discuss the current US election. This is NOT a thread to debate what President Trump has or has not already said/done. It's not a "we hate Trump" fan club.
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Ah, yes. I thought I remembered this here.
 
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I would have wanted Bernie Sanders as President. As a foreigner he's the only one who is similar to the politics of my country. I wouldn't have voted for Clinton just as I wouldn't have voted for Thatcher.
 
I can imagine students of history looking back at the US during the 20th and 21st centuries and saying, "What the hell were they thinking?"

1. The US is the only first-world country without a health-care system. Even if you have private insurance, your first heart attack or round of chemo will be paid for by insurance. Your second will cost you your house. There is a revolving door between vice-presidents in big pharma and the FDA, the most corrupt government agency in existence. Why don't insurers push back? Because they never pay the full bill and they would rather be sucking on the hind tit of a 5 trillion dollar business rather than a 500 billion dollar business. If you want a Buffy connection, Merrick was played by Donald Sutherland, who father-in-law was Tommy Douglas, the man who almost single-handedly brought universal single-payer medicare to Canada.

2. The only political choice is between Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber. The two-party system cannot work because it is far easier to make a gentleman's agreement to take contentious issues and kick the can down the road and immigration reform and offshoring have been kicked down the road for the past five decades. The kind of personality and character that can rise to the top in this political system does not correspond to leadership, it is pandering. More parties means delicate issues cannot be skirted around because the party on the bottom benefits from dredging it all up.

3. The legal liability lottery is one of the biggest businesses and it had crippled other businesses. If you want a Cessna 172 (which used to be cheap), it costs you $330,000 now - $30,000 for the aircraft and $300,000 for the legal slush fund that all companies would be wise to cover. Don't blame the lawyers - they don't decide anything. Blame juries that give away tons of other peoples' money for a hard luck story. Everything is more expensive because of it.

4. This country loves to bite the hands that feed it. We have a high standard of living due to people who are vilified as "nerds", "geeks" and "brains" and even our entertainment tells us that leaders in STEM fields are socially defective and psychologically undesirable. I can think of five shows off the top of my head in this category:

The Big Bang Theory
Bones
House
Scorpion
Numbers

where the lead character is shown to have defective social skills. You can bet none of the competing cultures in the world think this is reasonable or puts a social stigma on education.

5. When a president who was a former general in the last war America won warns America against the military-industrial complex, you know things are very wrong. When Eisenhower said that, a number of his Republican cohorts were aghast. But he was never proven wrong.

6. America is not in control of its own money supply. It does not print money (and it would be better if it did). The US government keeps a supply of about two weeks' worth of money which is obtained from the Federal Reserve Bank, a misnomer because it is not federal, it does not use reserves and it is not a bank. The US government gives Treasury Bills to the FED in exchange for money. Since it has to borrow the interest as well as the principal, the interest becomes the inflation rate, so money is reduced in value as time goes on. Fractional reserve lending (where there isn't enough in reserves to cover the amount lent) guarantees instability in the money supply as do all the financial manipulators who contribute nothing to the wealth of the country that deliberately destabilize the money markets for their own gain. Derivatives (the slope of the curve of money vs. time) is always more prone to fluctuations than the actual value of any holdings. This leads to the boom/bust economic fluctuations that are totally avoidable with a sane monetary policy. The government goes into steadily increasing debt which is now at $23 trillion which means every citizen owes $719,000 as soon as he is born.

Can the US change any of this by voting in the correct person? One of the curious things that Clinton credited with his two terms as president was his ability to take a shower in four minutes, so he could be fresh when he met people. Is this a qualification for a leader? Apparently in the US it is. Actual political competence is not important at all. All I can say is, you get the government you deserve. In future centuries, America will be regarded as a country that used to matter and was founded on a number of sound principles like a constitution and freedom but degenerated into a surveillance state and no longer does anything of interest on its own, like the many European kingdoms that no longer matter. Democracy only works if the public is intelligent and informed and can look beyond sound bites.
 
Bluebird said:
I would have wanted Bernie Sanders as President. As a foreigner he's the only one who is similar to the politics of my country. I wouldn't have voted for Clinton just as I wouldn't have voted for Thatcher.
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Ditto. It's crazy to me that Bernie is considered a "radical" in the US since the vast majority of his policies are just taken for granted as everyday life in other western countries. For that reason, I'm not as enamoured with him as a lot of his supporters are because nothing he's saying is particularly groundbreaking for me, but I can understand from an American-POV that he is and why he excites so many people.

I'm undecided as to why I think he lost momentum. Was it just because the Democrat establishment rallied around Biden and gave him the much needed boost? Did people really get scared by the Boogie Man Socialist? Or had people heard too many times that he could never win so they voted for whom they perceived to be a safer option? Or was it simply that he doesn't excite people as much as his supporters would have you believe? Perhaps a combination of all 4? At any rate, I think the US missed a real opportunity to have a great and different President. And given his age he'll never ever run again.

That said, I do think his real time was 2016. That was his window.
 
vampmogs said:
I can understand from an American-POV that he is and why he excites so many people....

I'm undecided as to why I think he lost momentum.
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Because he doesn't excite as many people as the media makes it seem he does. And the majority of the people he does excite, don't actually go out and vote. They vote with their social media accounts and not at ballots, where it, you know, actually counts.

vampmogs said:
That said, I do think his real time was 2016. That was his window.
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And that's exactly when I lost all respect for him. But that's another matter.
 
Ethan Reigns said:
Apparently in the US it is. Actual political competence is not important at all. All I can say is, you get the government you deserve. In future centuries, America will be regarded as a country that used to matter and was founded on a number of sound principles like a constitution and freedom but degenerated into a surveillance state and no longer does anything of interest on its own, like the many European kingdoms that no longer matter. Democracy only works if the public is intelligent and informed and can look beyond sound bites.
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Wow, what a tirade, this makes it sound as if the US is filled with ignoramouses who can’t think beyond a catchy slogan (similar to the opinions on Brexiters come to think of it, ”uninformed” voters works for a lot of critiques)

I would argue there are plenty of people hungry for more political substance than is currently on offer, but they may not like the substance some outlets are pushing. Either way, I doubt the US will fall into a degenerated dystopia quite yet, seems more like the wet dream of those who wish it would come to be or kind of already think it is.
 
Spanky said:
Because he doesn't excite as many people as the media makes it seem he does.
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I actually don't think the media made it seem that way at all. I think the media portrayed his "Bernie Bros" as a rabid, toxic, fringe fanbase that bullied others. I think the media was very much against Sanders and wouldn't benefit from portraying his fanbase as particularly large, just small and overzealous.
 
vampmogs said:
I actually don't think the media made it seem that way at all. I think the media portrayed his "Bernie Bros" as a rabid, toxic, fringe fanbase that bullied others. I think the media was very much against Sanders and wouldn't benefit from portraying his fanbase as particularly large, just small and overzealous.
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Really? All the media I see played it pretty much opposite of what you describe. It always seemed to me that the media was very much pro-bernie.
 
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