US Politics Mega-thread - Page 7056

On March 07 2017 03:55 LightSpectra wrote:
I don't think very many people genuinely liked Trump, just the racist trash that delights in seeing immigrants get deported or "snowflakes" get their comeuppance (I doubt either of those demographics constitute a huge portion of voters).

My impression is that most Trump voters say "yeah he's pretty narcissistic and I don't like the 'pussy grabbing', but he was the only choice, everybody else would've done nothing about illegal immigrants/Muslims/outsourcing & automation taking my job".

I also think there's a nuance in evangelical Christian culture that a lot of people miss. While Catholics and mainstream Protestants care a lot about a person's moral character, evangelical/fundamentalist Protestants don't really care how bad of a person you are, as long as you have accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior. Trump giving lip service to the Bible is more important to them than sexual harassment or passive racism. I can go into more depth about this if anybody is curious.

Former Central Intelligence Agency director Michael Hayden says it seems Trump forgot something during his weekend Twitter flurry.

“It looks as if the president just for a moment forgot that he was president,” Hayden said on Fox News on Monday. “Why didn’t he simply use the powers of the presidency to ask the acting director of national intelligence, the head of the FBI, to confirm or deny the story he apparently read from Breitbart the evening before?”

Hayden, a critic of Trump during the campaign, has served in national security roles in both Democratic and Republican administrations. In addition to the top job at the CIA, he has served as director of the National Security Agency and as principal deputy director of national intelligence.

On March 06 2017 09:58 Shield wrote:
A bit late, but because I wasn't paying attention to primary elections, I've been told that Sanders got screwed by his own party so Hillary Clinton could keep running for president. Is it true? If it is, then it could explain why we have Trump now.

On March 07 2017 04:10 Introvert wrote:
This is being over complicated. First, in some areas of the country, "evangelical" is more or less a cultural identity even if it's not a religious one. Second, the way the left has moved, people were driven to Trump. When you feel that you are under assault, you are going to search for that person or set of people who you think will fight hardest in your defense. Even Obama tried to do evangelical outreach (in 2008, at least). Clinton didn't even bother.

On March 07 2017 04:18 kwizach wrote:

The factual answer (as opposed to the one LegalLord gave you) is that there is zero evidence of the DNC actively undermining ("screwing") Sanders so that HRC would win the nomination. It's a false narrative, but it nonetheless gained traction among some groups for a variety of reasons, among them the fact that the DNC leaks showed that many DNC members unsurprisingly favored HRC over Sanders and/or thought that Sanders was unfairly attacking HRC and the DNC during the primary, especially when it was clear he no longer had a realistic chance of winning. Yet preferring a candidate over another is not the same as acting upon that preference to affect the primary process, and there is no evidence whatsoever the latter happened (I addressed a couple of issues that were sometimes brought up here). It's a discussion that has happened quite a lot in the thread, though, so feel free to send me a PM if you'd like a more detailed answer.

House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Jason Chaffetz said Monday that he has seen no evidence that would support President Donald Trump’s accusation that former President Barack Obama had ordered an illegal wiretap of Trump Tower during last year’s presidential campaign.

“I learned a long time ago, I'm going to keep my eyes wide open,” Chaffetz (R-Utah) said on “CBS This Morning.” “You never know when you turn a corner what you may or may not see. But thus far I have not seen anything directly that would support what the president has said.”

Trump made his explosive and unsubstantiated accusation on Saturday morning, when he wrote on Twitter that he had “just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory.” While the president leveled the charge with certainty, White House officials have not yet offered any proof to back Trump’s claims and have instead called for a Congressional investigation to verify them.

Chaffetz was seemingly open to the notion of a Congressional inquiry into Trump’s allegation, telling “CBS This Morning” that the House Intelligence Committee, chaired by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), would take the lead in checking it out. The House Oversight Committee, Chaffetz said, “will play a supporting role.”

And while he conceded that he had not yet seen any evidence to support Trump’s claim, Chaffetz seemed open to the idea that Trump might be in possession of some proof that has yet to come to light. Both Obama and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper have flatly denied that such a wiretap was ever put into place, but the Utah lawmaker said Trump likely would not have made the accusation without some piece of evidence.

If Trump’s allegation is true, Chaffetz said, “the paper trail should be there” from whatever court authorized the wiretap.
“Look, it’s a very serious allegation. The president has at his fingertips tens of billions of dollars in intelligence apparatus,” he said. “I’ve got to believe -- I think he might have something there, but if not, we're going to find out.”

On March 07 2017 04:37 LightSpectra wrote:
I agree with LL, nobody in their right mind thinks the Democratic primary was even and fair. The media coverage of Clinton versus Sanders was preposterously one-sided.

On March 07 2017 04:37 LightSpectra wrote:
I agree with LL, nobody in their right mind thinks the Democratic primary was even and fair. The media coverage of Clinton versus Sanders was preposterously one-sided.

On March 07 2017 04:33 LegalLord wrote:
It does take a special amount of cognitive dissonance (or, at the very least, conflict of interest) to look at what transpired over the course of the Democratic primaries and conclude that it was all just peachy and great and well-done. I believe it about as much as I believe DWS saying post-resignation, "I did nothing wrong and just took one for the team guys!"

On March 07 2017 04:44 LegalLord wrote:
Sanders isn't even a party loyalist! He didn't solicit donations for our party, he doesn't dine with the right people, he doesn't even accept the party's nomination for Senator. I mean, undermining his campaign for the Democratic nomination is the only reasonable path forward. We should all think up narratives about how his campaign sucked and how we should say he was actually an atheist, not a Jew, because it would help out with our Southern Baptist peeps.