I think you’re being too close minded in your arguments with usmccds423 but you are consistent and are showing some pragmatism. There is value in voting your principles, though. For one it’s making a tangible statement about your worldview and that you’re not going to settle. I think there’s an argument to be made for libertarians having an effect on the conservative conversation and that is b/c enough libertarians have voted their principles in the past versus voting against the democrat.
That doesn’t mean I don’t understand your argument. I also think the most important aspect of your argument is concerning future SC appointments. I have a much different world view than you and disagree with a lot of your statements. But I will say you are right to be fearful of Hillary even though you have claimed several times she has no chance of being elected.
Hillary will appoint left-leaning justices to the SC if she’s elected. The rumor in Washington right now is that Ginsburg is looking to retire and Hillary will appoint Obama should she be elected. BOOM!
I wanted to address Kasich earlier but am trying to be better about cutting the length of my posts. Yes, he is BY FAR the best candidate for the republicans and always was the best candidate. Bright political minds should have been able to realize Kasich was always their best choice from the beginning if they were dead set on being anti-Cruz. Anyone can argue against that but it’s clear the path that was chosen was not correct.
Yes, Rubio is easily more electable than Cruz in the general. I don’t debate that at all. But it doesn’t matter because Rubio is not winning the primary. Jewbacca already explained why. Cruz and Trump are the options at this point and it’s the GOPs fault and to some extent the conservative media’s fault.
I am not a political science guy so can’t strongly debate the sore loser laws but I believe it’s an overstatement that these laws would actually prevent Trump from running as an independent. From what I’ve read it’s not that cut and dry, especially for presidential elections. Further, it doesn’t stop Trump and anyone else from eviscerating the GOP for daring to defy the will of the people. It would not turn out well for the GOP and the implications would be far more reaching than the 2016 general election. I do not accept that sore loser laws would prevent Trump from running as an independent, but assuming they do, it would be ridiculous to think Trump voters would then go and vote for Rubio. It would be seppuku for the GOP without the honor.
You’re not buying the facism lable because you don’t know what fascism is. If you did know what it is, then you’d be hanging the fascist label on Trump in earnest.
Fascism isn’t necessarily the easiest thing to define, but if I may offer up a simple, perhaps insufficient definition. Fascism is the idea that the citizens of a nation exist for the betterment of the state. The citizens exist to protect the power of the state, not the other way around. Ancient Rome was the classic example.
Trump is as clear-cut a fascist as we’ve had in a presidential election in the last 50-60 years at least. His comments about making America great again are fucking laughable. For instance, his stance on China is just plain childish and beyond ignorant. Manipulating our role in a global economy in order to keep jobs here in America, at the expense of the American consumer, is pretty much the exact economic mindset from which we gained independence in 1783. Legislation like the Trade/Navigation Acts were nothing more than economic manipulations. Remember, mercantilism at its most fundamental level has NEVER been an economic policy. It has ALWAYS been a political policy used to manipulate a free-trade economy to the benefit of one nation, and only a tiny fraction of that nation. After all, the amount of manufacturing jobs lost to China is fucking MINISCULE compared to the amount of people in this country who are consumers of goods for which they’d be forced to pay a higher price if Trump got his way.
Of course, only in a country filled with fucking idiots who have no concept of this country’s history could Trump even be viable. Here we have a fascist standing in front of us saying he’s going to make America great again by resorting to the exact sorts of things that the colonists revolted against in the 18th century. Only willful ignorance and pure, unadulterated hypocrisy can explain Trump.
It’s no coincidence that someone like Trump is occurring at the exact same time that our public education system has essentially reduced American history requirements to one or two semesters, with the likelihood that A People’s History of the United States is the main text used. That’s why we have a fucking dunce like Trump and an outright fool in Bernie Sanders on the other side of the aisle.
His new “plan” to severely limit the free speech rights of the press that disagrees with him is another fascist policy. It doesn’t protect anyone but the state if one cannot freely express their ideas and so forth in the press or anywhere else. It’s not exactly indicative of someone with a strong understanding of the concept of the free market of ideas.
You stated earlier that you were having a hard time understanding why an ideologically rigid candidate like Cruz was having a hard time gaining the evangelical vote.
The answer is simple: evangelicals who support Trump are evangelical in name only and hold no ideology whatsoever, beyond hate for people who don’t look and worship like them. Everything that Trump stands for is entirely antithetical to what Jesus Christ stood for. And the evangelical “Christians” are lapping it up.
The Republican Party in general stopped being a party of ideology a long time ago. You simply CANNOT be an ideological party, or have any sort of ideological foundation, when you embrace the ideology of a fucking plagiarizing cheap rip-off of Nietzsche in Ayn Rand AND you try to court the Christian right at the same time. Think about that for a second. How the fuck would you really expect anything less from a party that openly courts Ayn Rand atheists AND Christians at the same time. How many members of the party’s own power structure are both Ayn Rand enthusiasts AND Christian?
I know Paul Ryan has been known as a huge Rand fan, but I’ve also heard him specifically repudiate her “ideology”. Rand Paul is a big Ayn Rand enthusiast, but he’s also not an atheist. How do you reconcile those two? I’ll tell you how. If you don’t really stand for either one, then you can’t be ideologically inconsistent on the matter.
Shit push, I’ve gotta believe that you haven’t even bothered to look up fascism if you think there’s any doubt about Trump’s fascist credentials. Read the fucking wikipedia page and then try to argue that Trump isn’t a fullblown fascist.
I’m also starting to wonder when someone is going to call out Trump for his embracing of the troops. There is nothing more disrespectful than claiming to support the troops and then turning around and openly advocating policies that would roll back many of the freedoms for which our troops have died protecting.
Last time I checked, this was the land of the free and the home of the brave. And we’ve got a fucking coward up there who is willing to sell out the very principles upon which this country was founded because he’s scared of a few fucking radical Islamists.
This is motherfucking AMERICA, and for more than two centuries Americans have risked their lives all over the fucking planet. And only in some of those cases were American lives directly threatened. We fight for ideas, for principles, for beliefs. Our soldiers fight and die protecting freedom, and not just freedom for Americans but freedom for Vietnamese, Germans, French, Afghani, Korean, etc.
I’m not so sure Trump is actually a fascist but I am buying the idea that he is representing himself as one.
The bottom line is that Trump is in it for himself and not for public service. He’s saying the things he does because he knows the people he’s courting want to hear it. Trump is a dick for doing what he’s doing but what can you say when clearly there’s a demand for him. Trump makes me laugh but it’s unfortunate he’s embarrassing the USA on a global scale.
I get the rant on the GOP. There’s no consistency within the party and too many arguments it makes aren’t cohesive. It’s killing itself and I don’t know what it will take for the shot callers to realize the current strategy is a failure. It really shouldn’t be this difficult to come up with a sane and modern political philosophy that embraces limited government and taxation.
Also, the GOP is being run by amateurs who were too scared and/or short sighted to realize that they had to do something a long time ago before this got out of control. And it is out of control. They waited until about a week ago to get serious. And they’re basically hoping Karl Rove and big swinging dicks like the Koch brothers will make it all better for them behind the scenes.
When Hillary’s VP is the odds-on favorite to win the 2024 election and Obama is sitting pretty as a JSCOTUS the GOP can thank itself for being a crappy party most Americans don’t want to associate with.
I’m being cheeky but only a little bit. That scenario is more probable than Rubio winning the republican primary.
There are some videos on Youtube of President Obama roasting Donald Trump at a White House dinner of some sort. I think it was the Correspondents’ Dinner or something like that. It was from 2011. Watch it.
I watched it a couple days ago and I can’t help but think after seeing it that this whole thing is just one big attempt at revenge. After watching that video, I can’t help but seriously wonder about Trump’s true motivations.
And I’ll fucking tell you guys another thing. When the fuck is someone going to realize that the best way to beat Trump is to simply call him a fucking metrosexual woman in one of these debates, and then challenge Trump to actually come on over and fucking do something about?
The political discourse is already beyond non-existent at these debates anyways. Why not just get right down to brass tacks and challenge the motherfucker on his own terms?
And another fucking thing: Why hasn’t someone called him out for being “low energy”? I mean, the motherfucker has, at best, a cursory grasp of some of the pertinent issues. He keeps saying he’s going to know more, but I would ask him why he doesn’t know more already. I would follow that question up by stating unequivocally that he is too low-energy to be able to educate himself on the issues and that it’s because his spray tan sessions and the time he spends on his hair and manicured girl hands is taking up too much of his energy.
Rubio should just flat out state that Trump is hiding his tax returns because he doesn’t want anyone to know he’s been writing off Viagra purchases for the last 20 years.
Even if Rubio instigated enough to get Trump to swing, then laid The Donald flat out on the stage- Trump still wins. He’d scoop the whole geriatric vote and Rubio would be trounced in the media as an old person beater.
And if Trump ducked Rubik’s hand would be flayed by that potato peeler like comb over.j
If Trump isn’t halfway to Rubio before the words even get out of Rubio’s mouth, Trump will look like the low-energy fraud that he is.
We already know he’s a fucking coward who’s scared of a few radical jihadists and swarthy-looking Mexicans. The reality is that Trump wouldn’t know what the fuck to do. He’s probably file a lawsuit. The point is to expose the would-be emperor for the naked, limp-dicked, limp-wristed, totally and egregiously un-American, fag that he is.
Horseshit aside, does age somehow convey advanced knowledge of complex social phenomena? Is the 60 year old dilettante more knowledgeable than the 29 year old political scientist? The whole age > painstaking application and study is about as limp dick as an argument can get.
Trump is a classic bully, and you have to bust that guy in the mouth to shut him the fuck up. Taking the higher road is worthless at this point, because Trump has shown us what the low road looks like.
I have no doubt Trump has had dealings with the mob, shit you can’t get a bag of concrete without dealing with construction Unions controlled by the mob.
Does anyone else think that every time Cruz speaks, he sounds like a Founding Father ? I mean, can the guy just unplug sometimes and talk like a human being ? I find it kind of annoying.
Long gone are the days where our politicians produce such observant maxims as “what is gov’t itself, but the greatest of all reflections on mankind” or “all previous experience hath shewn that mankind is more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolshing the forms to which they are accustomed” or “the diversity of man’s faculties, from which the rights to property originate, is not less an insuperable object to the uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the object of government”. I’m quoting these from memory so forgive me if they’re a bit inaccurate.
Trump inherited the equivalent of nearly $200 million in 1974. Had he invested it, a purely unmanaged index fund’s return would have outperformed Trump’s current net worth by a factor of 2. Warren Buffett was also worth the equivalent of $200 million in 1974 and he turned that into $67 billion today. Trump’s business acumen is a myth. Comparably, he’s done worse than the average retiree. He’s a spoiled rich kid, not a self made man.
Again, proportional and discrimate use of force via-a-via vowing to carry out war crimes in public speech acts. Not exactly rocket science.
A grand house house needs a new coat of paint and some renovations and you elect to burn it down. You think you’ll be better off in the long run?
Yeah, except that Burr won, and Trump is basically the 21st century version of Burr.
I gotta tell you, if Trump were elected President and then summarily assassinated, it would be the one time I would not consider the assassination of a sitting President to be a national tragedy.
For the most part, I can’t stand President Obama from a policy standpoint. But were he to be gunned down right now, I would be devastated, as I’m sure even the most vitriolic opponents of his on this site would as well. I can’t say the same about Trump.