Well that’s why we use cost-saving gulags instead of expensive fancy prisons.
ShivaX
3550
Also Trump is worse. A lot worse. Like a threat to the Republic, not just a person you don’t like.
I mean, I get it. Reagan is idolized. As someone who likes Reagan for the most part, I can recognize that. But the solution isn’t to say Reagan was just as bad. Trump is the opposite of Reagan in so many ways, he should be a lever to use against Trump, not something to compare to him.
If you want to lose and end up in a totalitarian state run by the likes of the modern GOP, go with that then. The reality is that most people don’t even know about the bad things Reagan did, so painting him as a “monster” just devalues your position and lets Trump and company point at you and say: “Look, they say that about every one. Why would you listen to them?”
Timex
3551
Just confiscate all their wealth EVERY YEAR!
Check and mate, dude.
Nesrie
3552
Oh no calling someone a racist raises the profile for the current racist for… other racists. What will we do?
He was just as bad, if you weren’t white. If you were gay. If you were any other group he decided wasn’t human enough to care about and demonizing could get you some vote. Who does that sound like?
Look at our incarceration rates, stop and frisk policies, unarmed men being killed in the street, police brutality, telling people born in American to go back to countries they weren’t born in… this shit did not start with Trump. It was encouraged by the GOP.
Timex
3553
What’s so weird is that this is a games forum… But such obvious tactics seem totally ungraspable.
Are you guys just terrible at games?
Probably Reagan was worse in some ways, because he was far more persuasive and likable than Trump.
Maybe, but after he left, an election was held, and another after that in which the Democrats retook the White House, and so on. Laws were passed, laws were repealed. The republic stumbled along in its way.
Maybe in retrospect it will turn out to have been the same with Trump. I hope it does.
Nesrie
3556
I hope so too.
But you cannot solve Trump, cannot move past him, if we’re still arguing, about how and why he exists in the first place. Trump is not the cause. He is the symptom.
This was decades in the making and it starts a lot further back than some are comfortable admitting.
If you’re talking about the racism stuff, that is our original sin as a nation (well, one of two, if you separate out the treatment of native Americans). You would have to be profoundly ignorant of American history to think that is new.
If you’re talking about the power grab stuff, I think that is more complex. There was respect for the Republican system insofar as it extended after 1787. That is to say, the franchise was absurdly limited, but within those limitations (extended bit by bit through wars and amendments and other struggles), there seemed to be some sense of playing by the rules of an agreed-upon system. Even the Confederacy, founded upon white supremacy, followed its own republican rules, arguably to its detriment (Jefferson Davis got a lot of pushback from his Congress for exceeding his executive authority, even though they were in an existential war).
Again, yeah, white guy talking, but I still do value all that 1776 happy horseshit in spite of my awareness of the hypocrisy that stood alongside it. And I see it imperiled now in a way I have not seen in my lifetime. Partly by Trump, partly by wealth accrual, partly by the way Fox News is functioning essentially as a privately-run state media, and partly by the (to me still astonishing) willingness of other GOP members to jump all aboard the Trump train, the professions of distaste and concern that you still saw in 2016 having completely sloughed off.
Nesrie
3558
An original sin for the nation, and yet only one party continuously seems pay for it. What a mystery.
Wanna guess how much of the black vote Reagan got?
What I am saying is not my opinion alone. It did not come out of nowhere no matter how many times people here try to suggest or hint that it might be some lone wolf review. And for a part of the country, that does matter, that will not sit in the back and shut-up just because it’s not convenient to hear, this is not new; it is foreseeable, it has been damaging, and the rotten was sniffed out and pointed out decades ago. And the term nothing has changed… it’s used even today. Because… nothing has changed, but boy have some new eyes been opened. I just don’t know why those fresh baby eyes insist they’re the first ones to see.
Not to minimize the racism, but there is a broader point: conservatism is an authoritarian ideology and the GOP is and has been an authoritarian party in pursuit of achieving their goals. When the law doesn’t permit them to pursue the policy they want, they subvert or violate the law. When they think they can’t win at the polls, they subvert the electoral process. They do it repeatedly, for decades, going back to Nixon secretly bombing Cambodia and executing a number of illegal schemes designed to steal an election. There is no GOP administration not tainted with these crimes; they all either carried them out, or participated in covering them up and excusing them. The end result of that is Trump, who does what they have always done but does it openly and with contempt for any attempt to rein him in.
RichVR
3560
Not at all. I had the pleasure of watching several friends die of ‘the gay disease’ while Ronny and Nancy did nothing.
Nesrie
3561
I am not taking it that way. I mentioned other groups too like:
Like this population, the population that watched a horrible, terrifying disease rip through people leading to some of the most painful deaths imaginable, and because death is never satisfying enough for these power hungry people, our government, the Reagans, decided to throw in shame and blame and then watch it ravage people here and in other countries while yep, doing nothing… and then years later suddenly the “right” kind of people contract it and there’s that caring.
It’s almost like sitting back and watching drugs, decimate and destroy communities and populations, adding shame and blame and prison time and doing not much until a specific prescription drug hits the “right” population and now we care. What does that sound like? I wonder where they learned that from?
Yeah, don’t tell me Reagan wasn’t as bad.
Are some of you really trying to argue that the guy who is doing his level best to end your Republic is not in fact the worst American president of all time?
No he wasn’t. He didn’t take 70,000 kids away from their parents, he didn’t chuck people in concentration camps, he didn’t use Presidential power and Taxpayer money to extort allies to falsify dirt on Political opponents, he didn’t walk away from NATO meetings, he worked with Democrats on a lot of items - remember that ALL of his signature legislation was done by working with a Democratic House and Tip O’Neil. Reagan did a lot of bad crap, but he is nowhere near Trump’s league.
Oh, and he actually threatened to bomb Russia, not ask them for help!
Nesrie
3564
He is not he cause. He is the symptom. The cause is way back. Trump is an result of concentrated efforts, from years, years, of GOP building up to this. His existence, his abilities to do what he is doing, is by design… they just lost control of who they put at the wheel. They always intended to put someone there.
He’s able to do what he is doing because the GOP is letting him, and that is no accident either.
I, personally (and quite few a figures on the Left for several decades now), would argue that that has been the logical endpoint of GOP actions - they don’t want to govern, they want to rule.
The (major) difference now is they don’t try to hide it. Obvious and direct threats have a way of concentrating the mind wonderfully. Hence the sudden hair-on-fire attitude of many people who have denied the GOP’s ultimate goal for so long.
The other difference is they have a narcissistic moron as their leader and an apparent plurality of their membership who think Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia are excellent models for government.
Nesrie
3567
And the lesson we didn’t learn from Nazi Germany was don’t worry about the three times they took your neighbors, just focus on the last guy who came for you.
Timex
3568
Lenin was just as bad as Stalin
