This is the type of subtle "bothsides"ism that I actually give kudos to. It’s not as blatant as saying “they’re both equally bad” or “they’re both old” or “they’re both [anything]”. It’s pretending to be dispassionate, just a neutral observation, just “oh wow, the times we live in”. Oh so subtle. “Presidential candidates”, not “a Presidential candidate”. “Challenge each other”, not “challenges the Democrat”.
And not a word about the central focus of the article, that Trump is clearly off his rocker.
It’s like textual judo. Deflect from the primary purpose: Trump is a fucking whacko --> we live in a time. Equivocate: Republicans are making shit up --> candidates challenge each other.
Certainly not in the current political climate. You think a good chunk of Republicans can get on board with that when they have a 6-3 majority in the court right now?
you are the political climate. If you folks would put half the effort you put into trying to convince people everything is hopeless into fighting for reform like the people of the past who successfully achieved reform
My Democratic rep and Senators are in pretty safely blue territory. What am I/they supposed to do about the other half of Congress they have to win over a good chunk of?
And that’s an excellent segue to what I was going to bring up upstream: we only have so many resources to drive voters. There are plenty of relatable issues that can drive people to the polls so Trump doesn’t have another opportunity to appoint anyone. Removing SCOTUS lifetime appointments isn’t going to do it. But if we can keep a Democrat in the White House and control in Congress, we may still have lifetime appointments but at least there will be reasonably sane people in the court.
And before you say anything about a false choice fallacy, campaign resources and attention of the voting base are finite.
Term limits for supreme court justices is one of those issues to drive people to the polls, its a pretty popular idea. Heaven forbid democratic candidates actually try to win with popular ideas. They cant allow any reasons to support them other than not being republican.
Funny, I thought people are more likely to go to the polls over things that affect them and their families directly. Abortion and weed legalization being common examples. I’m assuming you have a source to back up the idea that supreme court justice term limits ranks up there in getting people to vote? Also, you do understand the difference between a “popular idea” and something that will motivate people to vote?
It all falls under court reform, the political viability isnt in question:
-amend the constution
-make a law restricting the courts ability to accept and decide cases
-pack the court
-retire aging justices
-have the senate subpoena clarence thomas and make him say why he won’t recuse himself from cases involving his billionaire friend
The only approach that ever works politically is the “all of the above” approach because as soon as you start taking things off the table the opposition can laser focus down the “reasonable options”. This isnt new:
thomas jefferson pioneered this strategy in the US where he kept agreeing slavery was immoral but it was “too hard” to free the slaves. In reality he loved owning people and designing his little slave town. The result of this tactic was it took a war to resolve slavery because politicians were too cowardly to address it.
What it means when something is too hard solve with politics, is that it needs to be solved with violence. What it doesn’t mean is that is that people will stop talking about it just because it “doesn’t seem politically viable”.
You have throw so many things at fox news and other propaganda outlets that they can’t just pick one and focus fire it into the ground with lies and fear. Something like an amendment will draw fire for sure but it lets all the other stuff sail by.
The former president and presumptive Republican nominee referred to Texas Republican Rep. Ronny Jackson, who was the White House physician for part of his presidency, as “Ronny Johnson.” The moment came as Trump was questioning Biden’s mental acuity, something he often does on the campaign trail and social media.
“He doesn’t even know what the word ‘inflation’ means. I think he should take a cognitive test like I did,” the former president said of Biden during a speech at a convention of Turning Point Action in Detroit.
I feel like we should make trump compete on “are you smarter than a 5th grader”. I mean, the whole accusation-is-projection thing. You know. Like how stupid people always think they’re the smartest in the room… he doesn’t know what inflation is… so of course Biden doesn’t know, either.
I found a sample test with 133 questions. I got 126 of them for 94.74%.
There were a few history questions that threw me, specifically related to the federalist papers of which I’ve got scant little memory.
I felt like the rest of it was pretty straightforward. I also think recent divisiveness has made a lot of the questions related to how the federal government is structured a lot easier.
As to your assertion that most natural Americans would fail, I’d flip a coin on that. Maybe? Probably?
Assuming most Americans couldn’t pass it, that explains a ton of politician rhetoric. They say things that are functionally impossible, but if the voter Is entirely unaware of how the government is structured and functions, then they’ll eat it up and cast their vote, frequently against their own well being.
if the voter Is entirely unaware of how the government is structured and functions
The vast, vast majority of voters have no idea how government works. And this is actually one of the few things that both sides are guilty of: incredibly uninformed voters.
The way our government works is actually pretty complicated and I'm confident in saying that most Americans have only a very basic understanding of it. That's also largely not their fault. Civics education in this country is a joke.
Seriously, how are people not seeing this??? We have liberal justices pushing 70, who refused to resign before the “most important election of our lifetimes”.
We have fascists having their old ones resign for young bootlickers while Dems are about to repeat RBG twice.
Oh let me guess, waah the dems didn’t have a majority, how could we expect them to utilize the weapons of politics, waah.
Oh except those times we did have a majority but it doesn’t count because here’s always one spoiler vote that can’t be whipped. Guess we just have to keep watching the slide into fascism as Dems claim to be the great protector of democracy no matter who wins.
And yet some people have the audacity to call it a BotH SiDeS argument.
You know what we called people like these Democrat leaders in times of strife?
Collaborators.
And yes, I am am voting blue. So fucking tell me, blue MAGA, what are the dems going to do to stop the slide into fascism?
Hell, he may name 5 if he guns down 5 of the current ones. Crime doesn’t matter when you’re the president, and the next 5 you name can agree with you. Or they can also be gunned down.
Yup. Trump refers to Ronny Jackson as Ronny Johnson.
From the article:
Seconds later, he continued, “Doc Ronny Johnson. Does everyone know Ronny Johnson, congressman from Texas? He was the White House doctor, and he said I was the healthiest president, he feels, in history, so I liked him very much indeed immediately."
Jackson was elected to Congress in 2021 and is one of Trump’s most vociferous defenders on Capitol Hill.
Seconds later, he continued, “Doc Ronny Johnson. Does everyone know Ronny Johnson, congressman from Texas? He was the White House doctor, and he said I was the healthiest president, he feels, in history, so I liked him very much indeed immediately."
All of this would be the funniest shit ever if it wasn’t so dangerous to world politics.
and despite the ridiculously bad stuff he says this type of stuff still gets me. Here he just outright says he likes people who flatters him because they flatter him. He just openly says how he is the most primitive and rudimentary of humanity.
I want an alternate reality where he got his own weird talk show but not have him be soft on republicans, with his stupid nickname skills and whatnot it would be a blast I bet
Pulling out that scare tactic again? Instead of spending time earning votes and creating an environment where people would want to vote for him, he resorts to the typical Boogeyman politics.
People like you still won’t accept that it’s your fucking fault that Trump won in 2016 in the first place, and as a direct result, completely fucked the SCOTUS over for a generation, setting us back decades.
And you’re going to do it again. Because the Dems don’t tuck you in at night and tell you that they love you.
Hillary and Co 100% gave us trump. Democrats ignoring leftists when we warned you Hillary cannot win. There’s a better chance of you and other democrats voting for a Republican than any socialist or communist voting for either right wing POS.
The Leftist vote is flaky. Trying to appease you is a exercise of futility.
If timed right, the Dems might be able to hold your vote for a single election. But done too early, you’ll find some new cause to be polarized by, done too late and you’ll have already made your decision and nothing will change it.
And by “you’ll find some new cause to be polarized by”, I mean conservatives will spoon feed you a new thing to be polarized by. It’s so damn predictable and you take the bait every time.
But sure, keep playing stupid games with the general election. You’ll be paying with the rest of us when your stupid games hand the reigns over to the fascists. Or we’ll spend the next term trying to make things marginally better while you whine that it’s not good enough the entire time.
I’m a liberal, and I sure as shit know the only ethical choice is to vote against Trump. People who demand perfection as the alternative to a fascist takeover aren’t just virtue signaling but also maliciously stupid.
So you’re willingly admitting that you deliberately increased the chance of Trump winning by not voting tactically? I know it’s a rotten system, but you have to work with what’s in front of you. The approach you espouse makes it look like you’re actually a right wing saboteur rather than anything left wing.
It’s not a “Boogeyman” or a “scare tactic” if it actually happened. Trump did appoint three justices, those justices were significantly more right-wing than the ones they replaced, and as a result they actually did overturn Roe v. Wade and a side swath of other rights and regulations. Maybe keep that very recent history in mind when you hear the same people who warned about it then warning about him trying to end democracy in America now.
As a single father to two girls (ages 8 and 10) Republicans can fuck ALL of the way off. When they didn’t call out Mitch McConnell’s hypocrisy with Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland vs Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett, you lost me for the rest of my life.
The part that really gets my goat on abortion is it only affects those without the means to travel. The rich and well connected (so basically every politician) can just fly to a country that treats its citizens with empathy when their daughter gets pregnant from a rape for an abortion, but they’ll look down from their ivory towers and tell MY daughter she somehow asked for it, and should therefore live with the consequences.
@anticolonialist The choices this next election seem to be Biden or Trump. I can’t change who is running, I can only choose who I would pick to win. Who do you plan on voting for?
Biden is older than the two oldest Supreme Court Justices, and Trump is more or less the same age, so it’s more like the next Vice President will get to name two Supreme Court Justices… :)
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