The decline to moral bankruptcy of the GOP

Politics and religion
5615

Is this seriously why you think GWB has damaged the country than Trump?
This is country where 7,200 die each an every day, more Americans are going to die during our silly internet discussion than were killed in the Iraq war. In bipartisan fashion, we have stood by while drug crises kills 72,000/year that’s an Iraq war every three goddamn weeks. The increase under Trump is more than were killed in the Iraq war.

But hell lets just compared stupid, unnecessary wars, which with good leadership we could have avoided. One could argue (and some seem to do) that’s every war the US ever fought in. Most people would give FDR, and Lincoln a pass for their war, but that still gives us 8-9 major and countless small wars to judge against.

Let’s take Vietnam, by every dimension, American killed 55,000 vs 4,000, civilians killed, the percentage of GDP, Vietnam not only caused more damage to America and the world, than the Iraq war but was an order magnitude worse. We lost, the Vietnam war, and the people of Vietnam and the surrounding countries suffered for a generation even after the 10,000-day war ended. In contrast. Iraq is now very flawed but functioning democracy, with a significantly improved GDP, better rights for minorities, and most importantly not being ruled by one of the worse despots of the 20th century.
Maybe you weren’t around for LBJ, or JFK presidency, but if damaging wars are your criteria for judging a Presidency, then LBJ, JFK, and Nixon are all behind Bush 43. No rational comparison between the Vietnam war and Iraq war would conclude that the Iraq war was worse.

I can give you 1/2 dozen way more stupid military actions that the US has done that killed many times more American, similar number of civilians, without even using Google.

Trump, has destroyed America credibility, given free reign to dictators to kill dissents and reporters, kept the people of North Korea under the rule of a despot and too many other things to list.

Frankly, I’m really surprised anybody who cares even a bit about the environment would dare to compare the damage that Bush 43, has vs Trump had done. Pulling out of the Paris agreement, rolling back hundreds of environmental regulations, hell the guy even is allowing hunters to shoot bear cubs. You can’t have it both ways either you all are serious that climate change is our most serious crisis that endangers tens of millions people or its just a talking point. Trump is already our worst environmental president ever, and nobody, since Nixon started the EPA, is a close second.

5616

And this might be why some are picking Bush over Trump as something akin worse than, but I think myself, and maybe a couple of others are saying it’s like the worst of both of worlds in the same shit bucket; they’re not wholly separate. One led to the other, had been leading to the other for years. So it’s not a policy decision or a who is the worst man decision, at least not for me. It’s a systematic take down of our democracy and the demonizing of the other side and just other groups/others that has been the building in the GOP, rotting in that group, long before Trump decided politics would get him what he wants more than some new failed business venture.

And this is why I basically said, eventually, I think there might be only two points of views being focused on, but there are more than two actually be presented here, today.

5617

Bush 43 was really bad for the environment, but yes I agree trump is in fact worse. However, I’m not convinced that we wouldn’t be seeing the same exact policies had someone like Rubio won - much of the bad policies after all are coming out of the House, and even during Obama’s term the House Republicans constantly tried to attach riders to further the destruction of the environment.

As far as death and wars (or gun violence for that matter), you have an odd way of looking at it, as if all deaths are equal regardless of how they are caused. Which fundamentally is true of course, I mean dead is dead. The difference I see though is how avoidable are those deaths? Unnecessary wars cause deaths that otherwise wouldn’t have happened. But as tragic as the opioid epidemic is, in some ways those deaths are the result of a choice someone made; dying as collateral damage in a war or as a victim in a mass shooting to me isn’t equatable.

**
As far as the larger discussion on Republicans, from my point of view they’ve always been bad. The problem they have had is there has never been a governing constituency for their main preferred policy agenda (make the rich richer), so they turned to evangelicals and yes racists in order to cobble together a voting bloc. For a long time, decades even, they were able to hold those core constituents at bay, and that worked until 2010 when another creature of their own creation (the Tea Party) rose to power. trump is the inevitable result.

5618

I’ll agree with that. It’s why I left the party and haven’t voted for one of them in over a decade, despite being fairly conservative on a lot of things. Cause they stopped being conservatives for the most part and those that still were turned a blind eye to the racism and authoritarianism in their ranks. Now the conservatives have left the party and all that remains is the racists and authoritarians.

5619


5620

I don’t really understand what you’re griping about, but I’m sorry to have irritated you.

5621

Strangely, GWB did all of those things too.

GWB’s much more positive climate change action:

Since taking office, the George W. Bush administration has consistently sought to undermine the view held by the vast majority of climate scientists that human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases are making a discernible contribution to global warming.

https://www.ucsusa.org/our-work/center-science-and-democracy/promoting-scientific-integrity/manipulation-of-global.html#.XAkHG4pOmhA

5622

If might makes right and I’m the good guy are the the conservative principles HW held and stuck to with all the strength of his character, why would anyone express respect for that? Every schoolyard bully holds to those principles. And surely Trump holds them as well. Again, who thinks he wouldn’t invade a country to get what he wants? It just hasn’t happened yet.

5623

This “discussion” of whether Trump or various prior Republican presidents were worse may be the dumbest thing I’ve seen on this forum, and that’s a really high bar. Of course you can make arguments for either side depending on what particular aspects of the particular presidency you care to emphasize. Trump is chaotic evil while Bush was lawful evil…still evil either way. You can more easily undo the chaos (if you survive it), while the other endures for longer with deeper effects. Are you all just repressing a real desire to argue whether Thanos or Darkseid would destroy the universe first, and transferring it into P&R?

5624

If you don’t understand why other people are arguing about something, of course it must be because they’re stupid.

(Hint: This theory will cause trouble in practice.)

5625

If an argument is stupid, that doesn’t mean the people are. I said the former, not the latter.

5626

I dunno, though hyperbolic, you’re probably right in one sense. The discussion is actually not based on which President is worse, but whether Trump is an aberration that represents some weird wrong turn taken and embraced by the modern GOP or whether he’s the inevitable current iteration of a long-running trend in that party. And maybe it’s useless to litigate that, recognizing that we all agree that the GOP as it stands is dangerous.

On the other hand, those who don’t understand history are doomed to repeat it and all that. I think the more on point discussion topic is what role conservativism should play in national politics. I can see a good case for principled conservative ideology balancing out the liberal tendency to tinker with economic and political systems, but during my whole lifetime, conservatives in this country have hitched their wagons to the GOP, which has (arguably, of course) never done any good for this country at all. In fact, it’s been characterized by propaganda, lies, and hatred as long as I can remember. It’s impossible for me to trust an ideology that has done this. I can’t see conservativism as anything but impossibly tainted and its proponents as anything but naive or disingenuous. It would be one thing if conservatives were doing any soul searching about why the GOP produced Trump, but they–like @Timex here–generally aren’t; they’re glossing Trump as something new and monstrous, a very recent wrong turn in the GOP’s trajectory. I don’t think it’s that hard to point backwards at problems the GOP has had as far as the eye can see, not just warning signs but actual evil (hence the discussion about Bush.) I think a truthful, principled conservative political bloc would be good for the US, but you can’t have it without confronting why the GOP? Why those political tactics? How to prevent something like this in the future? How can conservatives make their case without resorting to propaganda and propping up dimwitted demagogues?

5627

See, this is part of the absurdity.
Bush was not an evil man. He wasn’t doing stuff with a disregard for the United States. He actually gave a fuck about the country, while Trump absolutely does not. Bush actually exhibited some real leadership, in times of severe duress. The prior Bush held things together while the world’s other super-power collapsed in on itself.

I get that you guys apparently hated Bush with the same level of irrationality that lunatics hated Obama… but Bush was not like Trump.

I can only guess that from this conversation that some of you guys actually maxxed out your hate meters on guys like Bush, so you literally don’t have anywhere to go from there, so Trump is the same. But that’s crazy.

Anyway, as I had said previously, there’s clearly no middle ground here. We have fundamentally different views of reality, I’m not sure why I keep talking about it.

5628

I see Trump (and his maladministration) as different in degree, not kind. The formerly unspoken or quiet parts (racism, misogyny, policy in service of the 1%, wanting to rule rather than govern, etc.) are now shouted through a loudspeaker.

5629

Probably true. I misspoke above…I was trying to talk about the actions of the presidency as a whole, not the presidents themselves. Which I said in the line prior to the one you quoted, but not clearly enough. (Though I suspect Trump actually is evil.) Let me restate the point:

The actions of the Trump administration are chaotic evil while the actions of the Bush administration were lawful evil…still evil either way.

5630

This. Thanks for articulating it.

5631

See, I disagree. Bush ordered people tortured. Now, you can say he did that because he thought it was the right thing to do, that it was for the benefit of the country; but lots of very evil people can offer that same defense.

And this is nothing but an insult. People are articulating their grievances about Bush, and they are not irrational grievances. No one here is manufacturing false grievances about Bush in the way people did about Obama.

5632

Perfect example of one way that the GOP conducts its propaganda, enabled by the very #NeverTrump conservatives who are trying to excuse the GOP for Trump:

Both Siderist: Conservatives hated Obama. Liberals hated Bush. Both sides are irrational. America needs to meet in the middle.

Reality: The Bush administration engaged in torture, started an illegal surveillance program, lied us into war, had a woeful and deadly response to Katrina, and operated extra-legal black sites. Obama… tried to give more people health insurance? Liberals are actually on pretty solid moral ground when repudiating torture and America is better off if it remembers that history and repudiates it too.

5633

Just substitute Bush for “the other team”, and you have your winner. Nothing you say is going to matter. You’re dealing with people who hate “the other team.”

You might as well be asking Packers fans about the Vikings. It’s not rational. There is no nuance. The other team is bad. Everything they do is bad. They’re evil and should die.

It’s where we are in America (maybe the world, but I live here), or at least where a too large subset of people are.

5634

This is a spicy take. And I don’t agree with it completely. But the basic argument you are making is correct. George W. Bush was an awful president. I think our current nightmare leads us to forget the nightmare that was the invasion of Iraq and the death of hundreds of thousands of people, all predicated on a lie cooked up by his adminstration (and aided by the Blair administration)

The current administration has challenged political norms, broken long held political traditions, and tested the limits of our democracy. And while I think it is terrifying how close our country is coming to some sort of reckoning, the damage, right now is limited. The bodycount, is low.

I can’t reconcile with deciding that Trump is somehow not as bad as GWB, but I can understand how one could make that argument. I would say their administrations were equally bad for different reasons. One is a maniacal attack on democratic norms, the other was a calculated pro-war profiteering but civil administration.

Trump locked up children. GWB started a war where thousands of children were killed. Which is worse? One certainly feels worse now, because it happened here.

The GWB administration worked without stop to keep governmental reports about the effects of climate change from being released. Continuing the U.S. away from the path of environmental responsibility, because the administration’s rich friends and donors had relationships with the fossil fuel industry.

The GWB administration oversaw a regimented plan of torture, CIA blacksites, and a military culture that led to incidents like Abu Ghraib, the use of White Phosphorus, the Haditha killings and countless other war crimes.

The decline to moral bankruptcy of the GOP started when Dick Cheney stepped foot into the White House.

Trump is bad, and in a lot of ways worse, but held back by his own incompetence, but there hasn’t been a non-evil republican choice for president since 2000.