The enemy of America. Yes, this.
They were so busy believing all the lies about an Obama communist takeover that they voted in an actual takeover. Just the 80s Wall Street version.
Everyone who voted for Trump is complicit.
Your talk about “dictatorship” is tinfoil hat lunacy. Trump won’t be exercising any powers Obama didn’t. You simply cannot abide the thought of people who disagree with you holding the same levers of power that your side exercised over the last 8 years. It’s pathetic, and contrary to every American value. Learn some tolerance, civility and respect for people that think differently than yourself. You don’t hold a monopoly on truth or goodness any more than I do.
Certainly you see the irony of saying such a thing in defense of Trump, right?
Trump is not merely different, and I pray to God that you have not allowed partisanship to blind you to such an obvious truth.
What he stands for us not what you stand for, Malathor. At least, it’s not what you stood for a few months ago.
This is very true. However, we can’t fall into the cultural relevancy trap. Not all viewpoints are equal - if the Nazi’s were voted into power (they WERE NOT, of course - just using the Godwin extreme), then asking for tolerance from their opponents wouldn’t make sense to anyone. So it becomes a question of where that line of “Oh, hell no!” is drawn.
True enough, but I’ve become convinced the “You want to turn us into Somalia” crowd is far more hostile, and utterly deaf to anything I support or believe in than the Trump crowd. I may turn out to be wrong. We will see.
Trump deserves no respect. He is a monster of depravity who has surrounded himself with criminals and goosestepping thugs. It’s absurd to complain about people being impolite to a monster. This is not a mere constitution-breaker like Reagan or a hawk like HW or even a weak-minded pawn like W. Trump even makes Nixon look good, because at least Nixon understood that he was vulgar and had to keep his personal opinions under wraps in public. This guy is worse than dogshit on Eisenhower’s boots.
Look, I want a conservative party that wants conservative values in America. I want disagreement and compromise.
The party of Trump is not that. They are working on robbing the American people and destroying the future. They are doing it right now. It isn’t some hypothetical. Our democracy as is doesn’t work when one party decides to end the country. It is based on mutual respect or at least keeping to the traditions of the political process. Instead they have covered the Constitution in gasoline and are lighting the match.
I would argue Obama’s governing though ever more expansive executive orders went a long way to accomplishing just that.
Another right wing lie.
I grew up in Texas and somehow escaped becoming a racist misogynist asshole. And I’m extremely grateful that I did. Because holy shit, many people I know fell right into the Republican flytrap of Fox, Hannity, O’Reilly, etc. I honestly don’t know how these people function on a daily basis with such complete lack of empathy for others.
Yup. Obama was remarkably restrained and never used the full extent of his executive power. His tenure was noted for repeated failed attempts to compromise and a near-universal Republican filibuster during their period of minority. Many of his predecessors made far more use of the executive order, and I still don’t know why he didn’t install Garland during recess when the Senate declined to act, but no doubt it had something to do with reluctance to override Congress despite their utter intransigence.
I’ve heard this brought up by others but generally they fail to come up with anything meaningful.
This article kinda lays to rest a lot of the misconceptions about executive orders and Obama’s use of them.
Sure Obama had fewer executive orders than most other modern presidents, but like, it feels like he’s done more because Fox News always tells me that.
That counts for something, right?
Actually there are certain things that are beyond the pale- and what Republicans are doing at the state level and somewhat in Congress is beyond the pale. Trump is just a symptom and symbol of the disease, he’s not the disease itself.
Obama’s hand was forced by a Congress that practiced extreme obstructionism that was unprecedented. The problems in America aren’t going to change until the electoral process is changed for legislatures to weed out authoritarian radicals (and that’s not entirely a Republican problem)
The Dems are going to practice the same obstructionism because it works, until the Republicans go more extreme and ban the filibuster- then the Dems will win- they’ll pack the court in response. It’s obvious that this is going to make things worse and eventually lead to one party trying to stop elections entirely. The North Carolina general assembly considered throwing out the governor’s race entirely this year- but decided to try and invalidate it instead through other means.
I’m not going to claim both sides are morally equivalent, because that’s blatantly false- one side is most definitely worse, but extreme politics will lead to dictatorship sooner rather than later- and a destructive dictatorship at that- Syria with nukes is not an impossible outcome for the US.
So now you’re not actually talking about executive orders up there in your post, but actually regulations. OK, so you charge a democrat who finalized 50% more regulations than George W. Bush, who had as one of his main goals actually eliminating regulations, as destroying the Constitution.
Sure, buddy. Sure.
The difference between Trump and the people who support him, and those who oppose him/them, is pretty simple at base. One side utterly rejects logic, reason, any semblance of verifiable data or information, or even the very concept that there is value to ideas bolstered by rational discourse, evidence, and historical experience. The other side, while often just as extreme in its demonization of the other, at least at base embraces the foundation of modern epistemology–reason, logic, evidence, argument from verifiable assumptions, and the ultimate triumph of the real over the imaginary.
That alone makes the Trump camp different from previous generations of Republicans. It’s true people went too far in their sky-is-falling rhetoric over the Bushes, for instance, but this is a whole different ballgame. In the past, everyone was working ultimately from the same basic assumptions, they were arguing over which data to use, which conclusions to draw from it, and which paths would lead us to what were, broadly, shared goals. Now, the arguments aren’t even in the same intellectual neighborhood, because one side is denying the validity of the entire post-Enlightenment intellectual framework, in favor of an atavistic, tribal, and religious fervor.
Needless to say, regulation is the formal, acknowledged responsibility of the executive branch through the cabinet departments and bureaus, sometimes under umbrella authorization by Congress. Also needless to say, the GOP almost destroyed the country’s and even the world’s economy due to deregulation. So I really can’t even begin to understand how anyone could consider increased regulation a negative, much less an abuse of power.
But…Benghazi! Emails!!!
I think the growth of executive power is indeed troubling, although I feel its disingenuous to ignore the fact that a major reason for this is that the GOP has effectively abdicated its authority in congress over the past number of years. They have entirely failed to govern effectively. Hell, they didn’t even hold judicial nomination hearings for months, which was absurdly unprecedented.
They spent their time voting to repeal the ACA over 60 times, which would be nonsensical on its face, and is revealed to be even more nonsensical when we hear talk now about, “Hey guys, what should we replace this with? You know, this thing that we voted to repeal and replace 60 times?” The fact that they actually voted to repeal it 60 times would normally suggest that they, you know, actually had a plan to replace it.
But of course they did not. All of that shit, costing millions of dollars of taxpayer money, was just political theater. It served literally ZERO purpose, and was done with the caveat that it would be vetoed. They did it with the absolute knowledge that nothing would come of it.
Congress has been entirely without merit under the GOP’s leadership over the past number of years. And honestly, I don’t really blame folks like Paul Ryan for this, as much as I blame the fringe right wing of the party who is seemly based upon the ideological pillar of NOT governing at all. The idea that the government defaulting on its debt would be a good thing. But while I don’t believe that folks like Paul Ryan or McConnel believe in such extreme views, I also believe that they (McConnel more so than Ryan) are absolute cowards with no true principles at all. To be clear, I no longer believe that McConnel is a moral or good man. His complete reversal on his own prior stances, at times a direct 180 degree reversal, demonstrates that he is arguing from an entirely partisan rather than principled position. Schumer’s sending him HIS OWN letter regarding nominations highlights this hypocrisy in impressive fashion.
I’m a libertarian, and I do not like big government, but I do not hold such views in such a dogmatic manner as to ignore the pragmatic realities of the world. I do not want to live in a third world hellhole with no government. I like things like national parks, and see no great value in allowing giant oil corporations to gain a few extra dollars by drilling there, as it will have no measurable impact at all on the price anyone pays for gas.
All too often, the modern incarnation of conservatism has seemingly abandoned all logic. It no longer considers the real world, instead choosing to favor repeated soundbytes. When those soundbytes are proven to be false beyond a reasonable doubt, they simply respond with ad hominem attacks, suggesting the fact checkers are biased against them.
Buckley once said, “conservatism implies a certain submission to reality”. When I was a kid, and developed what I consider to be my conservative principles, this was a core basis for them. Our decisions should be based upon logical and thoughful analysis. Not the bullshit we’re hearing from folks like Gingrich, where reality takes a back seat to what folks “feel” is reality. That’s exactly the kind of emotional bullshit that we used to make fun of the left wing for. No dude, your fucking feels don’t fucking matter. They don’t change the reality of the world.
The current incarnation of conservatism has seemingly abandoned everything good about itself, because they chose to throw their bet in with people who were too stupid to engage in thoughtful discourse.
It’s not that “liberals stopped debating”. It’s that the conservative movement has been hijacked by a bunch of uneducated imbeciles like Hannity and Limbaugh, who don’t even have a basic college education. Instead of engaging in the type of high minded debate and rhetoric that Buckley routinely used to defend conservatism, they appeal solely to emotions. They say things which “sound” meanginful, but seldom are. They’ve attacked the notion of truth itself, instead of ever responding to factual criticisms, actually going to far as to argue that the facts are biased, or in Gingrich’s recent case, that the facts are simply irrelevant entirely!
This is total bullshit, dude, and you know it. This is not conservatism. This is some sort of populist garbage, designed to woo those who are too weak minded to recognize how it’s wrong on both a moral and logical level.