5086

That’s perhaps true.
A competent evil person today could act with the realization that nothing matters.

5087

By smarter I don’t mean more subtle, necessarily. Just more consistently focused on their agenda and not having the attention span of a three-year-old. I mean, look at the wall, which is Trump’s whole raison d’etre. It’s a joke.

Also, as venal and gross as Trump is, I do get the sense that he balks somewhat at mass loss of life (e.g. his 11th-hour turnaround on the Iran strike). I could see Tucker burning with a Robespierre-esque righteous fervor.

5088

I don’t believe for even one millisecond that Trump gives a shit about people dying.

5089

Put it another way, then. After two and a half years in office, you really don’t think any imaginable person could have done more harm?

5090

The fact that Trump is obviously an imbecile actually does hurt his re-election chances and his support in Congress. A smart guy with Trump’s policies might have kept the Republican hold on the House, and would have a much greater chance of picking the next Supreme Court justices. Trump is discrediting the Republican party by his personality much more than by his policies alone.

5091

I think that part of it is that I feel like a lot of Trump’s policies, are the direct result of his being an imbecile. They are often self-defeating nonsense… a smarter person wouldn’t have such policies, because the policies don’t achieve any real goals.

5092

??

Sorry :)

5093

I think this is manifestly untrue. Trump has two core sets of policies. The first set is intended to further enrich the wealthy, and the second set is intended to motivate dumb white people to keep him and his party in power. Pretty much everything he has done can be explained by those two motivations, and it is why the party stays with him.

5094

And indeed, those have been the two poles of GOP politics since at least 1992.

5095

It’s actually pretty hard to think of people I wouldn’t prefer over Trump.

5096

Man, I fervently hope that you’re right. I’ll vote for a fucking ham sandwich this time around as long as he or she is the Dem nominee.

5097

LOL… Trump is many, many things but he is not (yet) a mass murderer.

5098

Watching MSNBC’s post debate coverage and I wish Chris Matthews would shut up and let people talk.

5099

Evergreen post - he has always been as such. I personally enjoy Chris’ bluster but I may be in the minority for sure.

5100

Sounds like a plan, guys.

5101

They’re still beating that dead “repeal Obamacare” horse, really??

Good Lord.

5102

This article is rather interesting:

As for the Obama team’s arguments that the financial rescue was a success—the bank bailouts ultimately made a profit, a depression was averted, and GDP growth resumed faster than the aftermath of most financial crises—Warren considers them obscene self-congratulation.

“Sure, the banks are more profitable than ever, they are bigger than ever, the stock market is through the roof,” she says. “But across this country, there are people who still pay the price for a financial crisis that they didn’t cause and that they never had a chance to survive. … That’s not a success.”

The Obama administration felt more urgency to save the large financial firms than to prevent home foreclosures.

“When I raised it with Tim, he reassured me that they’d done the calculations and it was all going to work out. And what he meant was the survival of the banks,” Warren says, recalling a meeting in the Treasury building in the fall of 2009. “He says, ‘We’ve foamed the runway—enough that the big banks can land.’ And the fact that millions of families were losing their homes, that millions of people lost their jobs, you know, savings, just wasn’t part of that calculation.”

Some White House officials also brought concerns about foreclosures to Geithner, and his perspective was that saving the financial system was the necessary first step. Stabilizing the housing market was like bringing down unemployment in that “it will trail,” Geithner said, according to Axelrod’s memoir, Believer.

“Yeah, exactly,” Warren says now, scoffing. “That’s how they thought of it.”

Summers bristles at the attack on him and Geithner.

“Everyone had the same objective of preventing a Depression,” Summers told POLITICO in a statement. “Without saving the financial system we did not think that was possible. The one time when the no bailouts strategy was tried—with respect to Lehman [Brothers]—it was a catastrophe.”

Despite attempts to gloss over past disputes by focusing on areas of mutual agreement, such as the CFPB, simmering bitterness remains between Warren and large swathes of Obama administration veterans. In interviews, many former White House and Treasury officials say they consider Warren a self-serving grandstander who cast them as villains while they were trying to save the global economy from catastrophe—a job they think they did pretty well, all things considered.

5103

Yeah, that’s it, she didn’t want to prevent a catastrophe, you got her… We’ve got your number to do it again, and again, and again, don’t worry.

5104

This is petty shallow reporting, as one should expect from Politico. Did no one ask Geithner: what if you used the money to pay off the mortgages on behalf of the homeowners rather than giving it directly to the banks while hoping they were flexible with homeowners? Wouldn’t you have gotten the same outcome for the banks and a better outcome for the homeowners?

5105

I do think Obama stopped the 2nd Great Depression. He did a lot with the hand he was dealt, and I don’t know how much more he could have done realistically given his position.

That said, Obama may have been the right man in 2008, but he wouldn’t be in 2020. Quite honestly, I do think the limitations of the Obama era need to be called out, even if Obama was a good and decent man, that doesn’t mean his solutions would work today.