a private individual, trying to affect change only to the extent that it benefits him. Do you honestly think he cares about the American people?
I think a lot of the things Trump supporters espouse are perfectly reasonable reactions to a view that the Democrats have ran identity politics to an absurd level. We don't seem to be moving towards a post-racism society, we just seem to be placing the victim du jour on a pedestal, and rotating it based on what's trending. You can have all sorts of pride except white pride, that is shameful somehow, and I get how that is hypocritical as all holy hell. Neither side has a lot of room for constructive debate, and it's fucking infuriating. You can't oppose literally any measure that's poorly thought out or unclear (like defund the police?) because if you do you're a racist, sexist, ageist, homophobic whatever. Half the time, the only thing about these individuals' personality is their victimhood demographic, and they suck as people. And if being gay/black/trans/female/whatever is the only thing you have for a personality, you are going to have fucking insufferable opinions on how everything affects you, as a representative of whatever group it is. Generally speaking, white people don't do that. I can't get interviewed and go "well, as a white male" in the same vein that someone else can go "well as a trans person of color...." The most infuriating thing about the Democrats is they seem so keen on who the bad shit happened to, rather than why or y'know...fixing the bad shit. COVID is no exception: there's a ton of articles about how it's disproportionately affecting poor/latino/black, etc, as if to say the virus is prejudiced. It's fucking off-putting, and CHRIST, I need them to stop. If you vote based on your taxes, I understand. I disagree, because I've seen where that ends up: Ethiopia. And you have to acknowledge that you're better off than 85% of the country if that's a genuine concern for you. But I totally get it. The Democrats had no bench, and they still don't. The Republicans' bench is copies of the same fucking dopey asshole, and they have a hard time getting voters to distinguish between them. That's how Trump entered the scene in the first place. Accumulated power, hell they were trying for Bush 3! As a DC creature, the unchecked accumulation of power that scares me more than anything is in the form of Koch suckers, Bezos, and the ilk because we didn't vote them in and we can't vote them out. You see politicians going to jail all the time (unfortunately), but you do not see the billionaire class even in court. Harvey Weinstein is about the richest dude you'll ever see on Court TV, and before him it was fucking OJ Simpson. So somehow, they accumulate billions of dollars, some of them manage to pay about $750 in taxes on that wealth, they can crash markets by lying, and yet magically they commit no crimes?? REALLY?? And their interests are now the majority of the Supreme Court. That truly scares me, not because I am worried about abortion rights or guns, or any of the other bullshit wedge issues. It's that the highest law of the land will side with the corporations over everything else. The first words of the "Godfather" were "behind every great fortune is a crime", and now there is nothing to hold the fortunate accountable. I agree, some folks need forced retirement, especially elected officials. Term limits are one way, a fucking guillotine is another, but the end result is they are out of the picture. If we'd had term limits, Biden would have come up against his already, taken his shot, and we'd be somewhere else as a nation. That said, you think amateur hour has been better? Is this what you voted for? "Against DC" is fine, fuck, vote for Mexico, for all that matters. I get the people whose vote is simply a message going "fuck all y'all". But, can you take a different perspective and realize that once in office, they are going to do something with their time? Like...a "fuck y'all" vote, Trump is ideal...he's going to do as little as possible besides troll, shitpost on twitter and play golf. However, when he does actually have to do the job....when he can't just say "fuck it", is this what you wanted to happen? You got a tax cut, I guess, and some libs were owned, and he largely fucked off, doing as little work as possible. If "fuck y'all" is the message, Trump is fucking Hermes. The problem is "fuck y'all" is an empty gesture, because it's for a job. Kind of an important one, and having someone lazy do it has left us all worse off. It scares me that he's not saying he'd do anything different, and I'd really like it if someone did the fucking job we're "hiring" them to do. 200,000 dead. Economy in the toilet. Entire damned country is a powder keg. Heatlhcare, education, housing...at best, no change from 2011 or so. Your taxes WILL go up eventually, because this deficit has to be repaid from somewhere. And...I think more subtly, you're no longer as comfortable in this great nation of ours. If you're rural, New York isn't as exciting, it's repulsive and intimidating. If you're urban, the rural areas seem hostile, and unwelcome. The American dream is less realistic, more distant and filled with nonsense, like it almost doesn't apply to you. T This is the government that made dramatic intrusions on your personal liberty, and they felt it justified because they fucked up a basic public health response. I'm regurgitating a lot, but this shit I saw first hand, and can attest to: the pandemic response, in all it's shit-spackled embarrassment, is owned by Trump, and for no valid excuse. Biden didn't do this. Trump did. It all happened under his watch. It blows my fucking mind to see conservatives defend him, when he ran up the debt (his signature legislation), allowed the pandemic to spiral out of control, and then exercised authorities no American government had in 40 years. This all didn't magically start in 2016, but it definitely got worse. So, I get a "fuck you" vote. I have a feeling there will be a LOT of those being cast. I just wonder if you (or any of us) knew the ramifications of a fuck you vote when it was cast. And I think we're all fucking tired. You can get mad at Hillary for a year or so during a campaign. Staying mad for 4 years, especially when you're the party in power, is exhausting. I don't want the Trump presidency to end because of some loyalty to party, I want it to end because I'm sick of hearing about it. I want politics to play a minor role in my life, at best, and I'm one of the "DC swamp rats". I want to get back to our country being united, not at odds with one another. Half a million times during this campaign, I wanted to scream: "That's an American, you're talking about, asshole. That MATTERS. Respect my countryman." And you simply can't when the sitting president acts like that. I guess that's ultimately where I draw the line: respect.
The right wing is absolutely consumed by identity politics. You don't own a gun, you're a "gun owner"; you're not an obnoxious evangelical, you're a soldier in the "War on Christmas". Conservatism offers nothing but victimhood politics. The Democratic nominee for President opposes defunding the police. Can we stop comparing actual elected right wing leaders with the most radical left wing voices we can find on Twitter?
SUUUUURRE! Next thing you’re gonna tell me is that he’s gonna ban fracking too right?! /s Funny part about all that is that, while Biden actually wants to expand the police force by adding more mental health specialists and people trained in crisis management, and increasing training overall, Trump is actively reducing funding to police forces across the nation.
During the first Presidential Debate tRump repeatedly defended his COVID track record by saying that if Biden had been President 2 million people would be dead. That's how he defended his COVID response. Watch the debate, it is online. Watch it from beginning to end. tRump is destroying America with his identity politics, his narcissistic need to appear tough, his whining about how he was treated, and his attacks on the fundamental structures of democracy. He has stolen from the American people, squandered trillions so he could make millions. He has started and lost trade wars with Canada, Mexico, Europe and China. And China pushed back and hurt American farmers and industry to a potentially irreparable level. At least Canada Mexico and Europe pulled their punches with their tarrifs and focused on industries that tRump had his business tied up in. Just the idea that Canada and Mexico were able to leverage the NAFTA negotiations by threatening to tarrif industries that tRump had money tied into should have been enough to get him impeached and removed from office. But no it was withholding, illegally, military aid to Ukraine to pressure them into going after Hunter Biden that got him impeached. And Mitt Romney the former leader of the Republican party that you voted for in 2012 thought that tRump deserved to be removed from office. And another former leader of the Republican party tRump called a loser and a fake war hero. Yet you voted for him. And you're still voting for him. Because Joe Biden has been in politics for a long time? Because Joe Biden might change a system that benefits you and hurts people you don't like?
For the record, I don't think Biden will "change" anything, but he will stop the rampant corruption of the Trump administration, and hopefully bring them to justice (I know, wish in one hand, shit in the other...). I don't see ANYTHING good coming out of another four years of Trump.
It might be semantics, but I see a marked difference in being a gun owner, and being a minority/LGBT in the way the parties describe them. You can STOP being an Evangelical, or a gun owner. I agree both sides are hitting that victim note hard, but the Democrats seem to be driving towards "we need to help the black/latino/native American/LGBT/etc." and treat them a distinct and protected class. It's kind of absurd, and it leads to shit like Elizabeth Warren's Native American scandal, where people work the system to their benefit, or the fact that 90% of Puerto Ricans identify as "white", when it's probably more accurate to say "Latino". I think the goal is a post-racial world, where these notions of sexual orientation, gender, religion and skin color do not matter for opportunity. The policies of "we're tailoring assistance to x class" calcifies the differences, and some of the things we're witnessing now is an understandable (if not poorly guided) backlash to that. The objective is "opportunities gained" for everyone, not "opportunities closed off to everyone but this group". I get that Biden opposes defunding the police, and I didn't mean to insinuate anyone's position on it. It's a ridiculous notion that absolutely needs to be labelled as such, one of many that are impervious to critique because it's a "solution" to our justice issue and opposing it means you're a racist. It's every bit as reactionary as "build a wall", with the only difference being one party is dumb enough to attempt to build said wall.
The main difference in your examples and how the left runs its identity politics game is that gun owners and "war on christmas" Christians just want to be left the fuck alone* when they shriek about perceived slights. The left has turned to straight bigotry with their identity politics. If you are not actively agreeing with and participating for their causes you are a racist, bigot, homophobe, transphobe, sexist, misogynist, and on and on and on. Post modern identity theories are. straight. bigotry. Decades, neigh, centuries, of fighting to not reduce blacks to a single dismissive term only to turn around and do the same thing to anyone who disagrees on any topic? You dont want the majority to be lumped in with extremist? Pot meet kettle. *You want to say Christians are forcing their views on others? Limited government ideals and religious fundee hypocrisy is a different discussion.
KindalAss, It looks like you copy/pasted a bunch simpletonist shit from twitter; each line 140 characters or less. In all of that rhetorical drivel you haven't expanded on your assertion that lays the 200k+ COVID victims at Trumps feet. By the way, I say rhetorical drivel because you finish with a flourish. As I said in one of the earlier posts, there is no honest debate here, there is accusation. Read your last line.
Certainly some number of people would have died from COVID regardless of the federal response. However, the number that have passed away should be much lower than 200k+ with an effective response from the Trump Whitehouse. In my state (Ohio) we shut down and had the virus nearly under control in May. Then at the encouragement of the president a bunch of right wingers made a stink about the lockdown. Add in a minimal monetary response from the federal government and it forced states to open sooner than the likely should have. Then there's messaging. Trump has played down the virus everything step of the way, and since he's the president that impacts some people's response to it. So many people haven't been taking this as serious as they should. In Ohio the number of daily cases are higher now than when we shutdown, but we have restaurants open, people going to bars etc. With effective federal leadership we would have had more money for individuals and companies (big and small) to weather this, as well as stockpiling PPE and ramping up testing, contact tracing etc. These are all things we need to effectively fight a highly contagious, fairly deadly virus (3rd leading cause of death in 2020). Trump abdicated his responsibility to lead the federal government when things got tough and as a result more people died than needed to. In fact I would say he aggravated the situation by caring more about the stock markets response than peoples health.
I'm not actually here to debate you. I'm here for everyone else reading these posts. So that they can understand and learn. I also keep things short and to the point so that by biases are clear and honest and so that what I say can't be interpreted in five different ways. But there are plenty of people here who are now aware of your biases and your foundationless stances because you've finally gotten around to stating them after months and months of inferences and implied statements. And the COVID response falls directly at the feet of the White House and like any major disaster the person in charge gets credit for all of the deaths. It is just in this case we already know that the leadership and decisions that were made are objectively terrible because we can compare the American response and infection/death rate to the rest of the world and their responses. In Canada there have been 9,586 deaths for a population of 37,742,154 in the United States there have been 213,000 deaths for a population of 329,877,505 why is America's death rate 255% of Canada's but Canada's standard of living is lower then America's? Leadership. tRump has failed America and you are paying for it with your lives. So why do you support him?
Let's see if we can follow the stellar logic of Mike Pompeo: We are going to release Hillary Clinton's emails. We are going to release these emails, because they are of import to the American People. They are of import to the American People because they show Clinton's malfeasance while Secretary of State. They show Clinton's malfeasance while SoS because she hosted them on a private server. Hosting them on a private server was wrong because they contain classified information that could have been compromised due to lack of security. Again, I reiterate, we are releasing these highly sensitive and classified emails publicly. Because people need to know that Hillary could have accidentally released them through lack of security. They should never be released, which is why we are releasing them. I am Mike Pompeo and my head has both the shape and intellectual horsepower of a large ham.
Keepin’ the borders closed, boss! Trump has handled the pandemic with the sole goal of having it not make him look bad. Just drink bleach and shove a UV light up his ass. I watched that presser, and watched him suggest that. It was bad enough that public health organizations had to release warnings to STOP DRINKING BLEACH because people believed him. His head of COVID response, Pence, is an anti-vaxxor. If anyone tells me Trump handled this well, I stop listening to them, as they have no clue what they are talking about. I don’t do “alternative facts”.
I sat on the early phases of the response and worked with CDC/HHS/ASPR. The White House task force fucked this up. To this day, they are obstructing the messaging and communication on this virus. This is objective fact, from the inside. Trump is responsible for these deaths, and the state of the pandemic, directly, because he installed a task force that subverted the normal response, called it a hoax and flaunted the countermeasures, among a few other things that garner him more responsibility for how things turn out, and it goes beyond his tweets. Sky blue, water wet, covid is Trump's fault. Simple as that.
Yeah but the trend line clearly has us heading toward 0% of the world's population and 0% of the world's COVID cases. Checkmate libs!
So Lindsey Graham's debate with Harrison is off because he refuses to get a Covid test. Why? Because if he comes up positive the Republicans won't be able to shove their SCOTUS pick through. What a clown show this administration is.