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The General 'Murican Politics Thread


Tornado

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1 minute ago, Ivo the Coldsteel said:

Good fucking riddance. I hope he rots in hell with every other neocon war criminal.

 Geez dude

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25 minutes ago, Ivo the Coldsteel said:

Good fucking riddance. I hope he rots in hell with every other neocon war criminal.

John McCain was far from being a NeoCon, even after he began selling his soul around 2007 as preparation for the 2008 presidential election. Even before Trump started running ripshod over the GOP, the McCain of the early 2000s and prior had even started coming back out again.

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I know it's crass, but given the delicate balance of the Senate, the GOP monopoly on the federal government, and the fact he's from a swing state, let's get the obvious question out of the way:

The cutoff for a vacancy to force an election this year was May 30th. Arizona's Governor, a Republican, has to appoint someone of the same Party to fill the seat, and they will stay in the Senate until January 2021, after the 2020 election decides who gets the Senate seat until January 2023. Whoever wins in 2022's Senate race will serve a full six years.

So, from a Democratic standpoint, this made things worse, because now the GOP is 51-49 again rather than 50-49. Pence is back to being relevant, and Susan Collins has been knocked off her throne a little (though she can still ally with Murkowski to sink any proposal).

Odds are this will make the 2020 race in Arizona extremely competitive. Democrats will not only want to try and turn the state blue for the first time in decades, but also want to grab that Senate seat.

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Also whoever the governor puts in place is probably going to be much more reliably brought to heel than McCain tended to be over the past five years or so.

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50 minutes ago, Myst said:

I was asked to give a reason why I support Trump & I gave it. You can disagree with me all you want

I think posting a video with the word "trigger" used in a sense that doesn't refer to the psychological concept (that is, a stimulus that creates immense, crippling anxiety and panic, a la PTSD) is not exactly a good start.

Seriously. Shitheads like Richard Spencer gloat and use expressions like "We came, we triggered, we left." I don't think it's a good word to be tossing around for casual irritation.

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6 minutes ago, Bergamo (Ogilvie) said:

I think posting a video with the word "trigger" used in a sense that doesn't refer to the psychological concept (that is, a stimulus that creates immense, crippling anxiety and panic, a la PTSD) is not exactly a good start.

Seriously. Shitheads like Richard Spencer gloat and use expressions like "We came, we triggered, we left." I don't think it's a good word to be tossing around for casual irritation.

But dumping all over Trump is A-OK?

Believe me, I know all about 'triggering' due to experiences I had in my life. 

The video was never meant to offend those with PTSD. The use of the word was humorous hyperbole and nothing more.

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Just now, Myst said:

But dumping all over Trump is A-OK?

He's a politician. He is fair game, as much as Obama, Collins, Schumer, Pelosi, or McConnell would be.

That is completely different from using a term that quite frankly belittles people with mental illness.

As Tornado said, you can see cases where we reined in excessive leftism here. Saying "I greatly disagree with the GOP's policies and here are my reasons why I think they're all completely dumb" is a far cry from "all Republicans are Nazis."

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5 minutes ago, Myst said:

But dumping all over Trump is A-OK?

It certainly can be. Trump typically does more than enough that justifies it that it makes it much easier for the occasional witch hunts to be taken at face value anyway. That's not right, per se, but it's also understandable.

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Fair enough Ogilive. I don't want to make enemies here, so I'll try to restrain myself in the future.

But as a Trump supporter it does get irritating to constantly see your candidate get accused of all sorts of ridiculous and things and have so-called 'journalists' like Don Lemon call you a racist simply for voting for him.

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5 minutes ago, Myst said:

But as a Trump supporter it does get irritating to constantly see your candidate get accused of all sorts of ridiculous and things and have so-called 'journalists' like Don Lemon call you a racist simply for voting for him.

And, again, if you'll go back well to the earlier days in this thread you'll find a member who frequently posted horseshit like that that I made my personal mission to call out on a constant basis so he would stop doing it to other members and focus purely on me until he simply left the forum.

 

Whether or not you vote Republican is of little concern to me; and I'm far from being a wide eyed DNC constituent.

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20 hours ago, Myst said:

And all the sources you guys use (CNN, MSNBC) are all anti-Trump propaganda.

All right then, here's a Russia based network reporting on the South African land redistribution three weeks before Trump ever tweeted about, so there's no way it could have been falsified to make him look bad. Guess what? It says exactly the same thing as the sources I listed above.

 

20 hours ago, Myst said:

It's funny, Those very people who like to call Trump a nazi use nazi like tatics themselves against him and his supporters.

I think it bears repeating that actual Nazis, support Donald Trump because they see him and his policies as supportive of their beliefs. Even after they actually murdered someone who was protesting a march they held, using his name as a rallying cry, Trump refused to distance himself from them, and, when he was finally pressured into condemning them, he equivocated and justified their behavior like there was not tomorrow.

 

20 hours ago, Myst said:

Maxine Waters openly called for violence against Trump supporters.

No, she said, and I quote: "Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up, and if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.” In other words, she was encouraging people to exercise their first amendment right to non-violently express their dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs, even if it makes some people uncomfortable. You know, like those "very fine" Nazis were doing in Charlottesville, at least before one of them decided to turn a young woman into a hood ornament.

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On that note, Trump has mentioned he has no intention of deliver parting words to McCain, thinking that McCain had a vendetta against him and just wanted McCain to give up the Senate seat.

If he sticks to that and doesn't have solemn remarks for McCain, that could further contribute to the schism the GOP currently faces. You can bet whoever will replace McCain will be constantly reminded that Trump hated the former seat holder, and if he/she doesn't at least attempt to emulate McCain's methods, that will cause reverberations in the Arizona political landscape.

 

Arizona is steadily becoming further blue. The last thing the GOP needs is McCain's successor for his term metaphorically flipping off his grave in the process and worsen things for them.

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3 hours ago, Ivo the Coldsteel said:

Good fucking riddance. I hope he rots in hell with every other neocon war criminal.

Are you fucking kidding me dude?! 

For all the controversial political BS he may have done—and believe me, no one is going to deny the nonsense—that kind of spite is downright uncalled for. Especially when McCain’s name doesn’t come up anywhere near as much as the likes of Mitch McConnell, much less Trump who McCain has consistently criticized for good reason.

And I say this as someone who leans left.

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What? Is Trumps tax return a possible link to him being a Russian asset?

Cuz otherwise not really gleaning anything from that article.

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Seems that whenever it’s regarding the tax returns, it’s a lot of mostly guesswork, which this article doesn’t seem to be exempt from. Honestly, that concerns me that the media seems to use guessing, maybes, etc.vs hard evidence to make headlines nowadays regarding trump half the time 

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3 hours ago, Myst said:

But as a Trump supporter it does get irritating to constantly see your candidate get accused of all sorts of ridiculous and things

Obama had to deal with it for 8 years.

If Trump didn't want the heat, he should have stayed off the campaign trail.

As for you personally, this is how most political communities go. Inevitably, one side takes over discussion as one side becomes more discouraged. There are plenty of conservatives on these boards: they just do not speak up. Going by the doctrine of self-responsibility, that would mean the reason this thread leans so left is... well. On them, not the left.

Quote

call you a racist simply for voting for him.

Glancing over the subject of objective and subjective racism, let's be honest here. People are terrified of what this man and his policies are doing. That's going to provoke a lot of emotion (and indeed, this thread's enforcement of rules seems a tad more lax than others because politics can be an emotional topic). But let's go over a non-exhaustive list.

Betsy DeVos has told transgender students they are on their own when it comes to their mental and physical well-being.

Poor Americans are terrified he will take away their Medicaid. You think it's just liberals worried about that? Take Kraig Moss, a man who actively trailed the country, singing and playing songs about the greatness of the Trump Presidency. Moss supported Trump because, as Moss had lost his son to a drug overdose, he loved Trump's tougher approach to opioids. So when Trump was willing to let addiction care get cut from Medicaid services during healthcare reform, Moss jumped ship. There's a lot of people, left and right, who rallied behind Trump because his drug stance seemed stronger than Clinton's. Only to discover he's not interested in protecting addiction services.

People who use medical marijuana are now in a constant state of fear due to Jeff Sessions' refusal to commit to continuing Obama-era policies. Now sure, some Republicans have extracted promises from Trump not to interfere with medical marijuana, but those are fairly hollow promises as not supporting Trump's agenda would likely bite any Republican in the primary. There's just not very good signalling that this administration cares to leave things where they were.

Then there's the way he hand-wrings on calling out white supremacists has left plenty of non-whites a tad concerned. Never mind the incident where he said a judge could not make an unbiased decision because the judge was Hispanic.

Then let's not forget that, after everything, what seemed to piss off his supporters, who were otherwise unconditionally loyal to him, was a rumor that he had cut a deal on granting legal status to undocumented people. Besides the #BurnMyMAGAHat hashtag getting a lot of support, his loyal fans at Breitbart even took to calling him Amnesty Don. Considering we don't tend to see the legalists infuriated over all the other laws that are not perfectly enforced... that is eyebrow raising.

There's a long list of reasons to call Trump racist, to be concerned about his Presidency even if he wasn't, and finally, to make an assumption that his supporters are. Racism is, quite frankly, more than saying slurs or wearing a white hood. It is a perpetuation of policies destructive to groups of people based on their membership in a social construct. Richard Nixon did not campaign on overpolicing black neighborhoods, but that was basically a consequence of his way of doing things; his policies were objectively racist. The postbellum South did not formally bar black people from voting, but it imposed poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and arbitrary literacy tests that kept practically every black person from voting; the policies were objectively racist. Real estate agents do not technically refuse to do business with black people, they just have a coincidentally high rate of referring black people to other neighborhoods; they are behaving in an objectively racist manner.

Before you bring up the Democrats, yes, a lot of them are also objectively racist. Most people in the social justice camp are well-aware of this; for goodness' sake, the "left" media overreports crimes committed by minorities. People who are really on the left, in the social justice camp, overwhelmingly despise the Democrats, and only support them from a lesser evil point of view. Democrats largely seek to uphold the status quo, but at least they give some benefits like healthcare access. Trust me when I say plenty of people on the left dislike Clinton and Pelosi almost as much as any Trump supporter.

3 hours ago, -Robin- said:

Arizona is steadily becoming further blue. The last thing the GOP needs is McCain's successor for his term metaphorically flipping off his grave in the process and worsen things for them.

I anticipate a "oh yes, what the President did was a horrible. By the way I support all his policies still" type, as we've been getting with a lot of the "moderates."

The only real moderate Republicans in the Senate are Collins and Murkowski at this point. Most of them fall in line when push comes to shove. Collins and Murkowski have routinely stood up to him, because 1. they come from states with very interesting politics that don't fall under the standard left-right spectrum and 2. let's be frank here, they are women and are going to have a different outlook on a lot of GOP policies as well as Trump himself. 

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“John McCain and I were members of completely different generations, came from completely different backgrounds, and competed at the highest level of politics but we shared, for all our differences, a fidelity to something higher: The ideals for which generations of Americans and immigrants alike have fought, marched, and sacrificed. We saw our political battles even as something noble, an opportunity to serve as stewards of those high ideals at home and to advance them around the world. We saw the country as a place where anything was possible and citizenship as our patriotic obligation to ensure it forever remains that way. Few of us have been tested the way John once was or required to show the kind of courage he did, but all of us can aspire to the courage to put the greater good above our own. At John’s best he showed us what that means and for that we are all in his debt. Michelle and I send our most heartfelt condolences to Cindy and their family.” -Barack Obama

I miss having politicians who could be respectful despite disagreeing and competing with each other. Make America Classy Again.

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5 hours ago, Bowbowis said:

I miss having politicians who could be respectful despite disagreeing and competing with each other. Make America Classy Again.

Honestly?

I kind of pity people who will slam a figure because they supported this or that morally questionable policy.

Because when one takes that approach? Practically every significant figure in world history can no longer be admired. They are all flawed, not only because the nature of politics is you will make some morally questionable choices, but because they were human.

I'm reminded of a piece I read that went against both left and right narratives when it comes to using the word "terrorist." The right has a nasty habit of applying it towards people of color primarily. The left wants to expand it to apply to white people more frequently. And the piece? It suggested retiring the word completely. Because when we label people terrorists, it not only provokes emotional responses that let things like the PATRIOT Act pass and risk curbing our civil liberties, but it also has a more fundamental consequence: it removes our ability to understand the terrorist as a human being. We put them in an "other" category, rather than considering that at one point, they were probably just like you and me, and some factor or another led them down the path they took.

Consider the figure of Lenin. He is controversial: while all sources point to him genuinely caring about improving the lives of everyday Russians (indeed, rather than being a dogmatic Marxist, he saw the benefits of some capitalism in helping the socialist process along, hence the New Economic Policy), he was a utilitarian and more than willing to use violence and coercion to achieve this; the Red Terror and all the lives it took speaks for itself. Lenin also grew up under a repressive monarchy that murdered his brother, and that undoubtedly shaped his personality. The regime Lenin started and Stalin polished was horrid, but we should not excuse the crimes of the Romanovs whose regime laid the way for it. 

It is our gut reaction to see evil and begin dehumanizing the person responsible, when we should instead evaluate what sorts of things made them the way they are. We may not be able to rehabilitate the person, but we could keep so many others from going down a similar path.

Also, on hatred: the most effective revenge is actually forgiveness. Because when you forgive, that person no longer has any control over your thoughts. Any decisions you make going forward are entirely your own.

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16 minutes ago, Bergamo (Ogilvie) said:

Also, on hatred: the most effective revenge is actually forgiveness. Because when you forgive, that person no longer has any control over your thoughts. Any decisions you make going forward are entirely your own.

When you put it that way, maybe that's precisely why hatred and vengeance are so popular despite forgiveness being the ultimately better route. Maybe some people just subconsciously want something to control their thoughts, to make their own hateful actions not their own, so they DON'T have to take any responsibility for their own decisions. Responsibility, even when it's the right thing to do, is scary.

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1 hour ago, Bergamo (Ogilvie) said:

it removes our ability to understand the terrorist as a human being

Personally for me, I take the eye for eye mentality. To me, a Nazi or white supremacist, person cemented in their ignorance/hatred or desire for oppression, doesn’t intend to see me as a human or equal, well sorry, expecting me to sympathize and play optimist for them, isn’t gonna roll. They don’t really deserve that in my eyes. People’s actions will speak for themselves, and I’m not required to put that aside to look at some “deep down” good they may have and not look at them lowly.

i mean I respect your view on this, don’t get me wrong it’s a interesting and optimistic viewpoint,  but I guess we on a fundamental level have different ideologies regarding this, probably due to our personal experiences throughout our lives 

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