US Politics Mega-thread - Page 9058

On October 25 2017 13:07 GreenHorizons wrote:


Who do you think exemplifies this politically?

On October 25 2017 13:45 xDaunt wrote:

I'd have to think about it. I can't think of any national political figures off the top of my head other than Rand Paul. Keep in mind that there's room for variation among the values. I may not agree with everything that Rand Paul says or does, but I do recognize that he is very principled.

On October 25 2017 13:45 xDaunt wrote:

I'd have to think about it. I can't think of any national political figures off the top of my head other than Rand Paul. Keep in mind that there's room for variation among the values. I may not agree with everything that Rand Paul says or does, but I do recognize that he is very principled.

On October 25 2017 14:18 IgnE wrote:


How about Emmett Tyrrel?

+ Show Spoiler +

15 minutes 50 seconds.

He's 73 now. I wonder whether his book The Death of Liberalism predicted Trump. The Libs have been cracking up for decades now I guess.

On October 25 2017 12:31 Wulfey_LA wrote:
Here we go, a Conservative who agrees with me that tossing Flake was about Kulturkampf. Flake wouldn't wage the cultural wars that the Right wanted. If you regard cultural struggle as a Conservative principle, yeah, I can see why you would hate Flake.

Of course, if you cared about (1) individual liberty, you should be recoiling in horror at the idea that elected representatives at the Federal Government should be waging a cultural struggle. One's choice of cultural identification is an essential individual liberty guaranteed by the First Amendment. But xDaunt claps as his Dear Leader fights on his behalf to ensure that others toe the line of his desired culture. Individual liberty my ass!

On October 25 2017 14:18 IgnE wrote:


How about Emmett Tyrrel?

+ Show Spoiler +

15 minutes 50 seconds.

He's 73 now. I wonder whether his book The Death of Liberalism predicted Trump. The Libs have been cracking up for decades now I guess.

On October 25 2017 14:33 Wulfey_LA wrote:


Yeah, Libs are facing serious headwinds. 55% of American whites think they are discriminated against. White butthurt >> Liberalism.

https://twitter.com/nprpolitics/status/922880642622164993

On October 25 2017 12:10 xDaunt wrote:


The central tenets of conservativism can be broadly distilled down to 1) individual liberty, 2) importance of family, 3) national strength, 4) capitalism, and 5) civic virtue and morality. The GOP has talked a very big game on Nos 1 and 4, but have badly failed to deliver.

Reckless. Thin-skinned. Not honest. Not compassionate. Not stable.

Those aren’t just the extraordinary, harsh judgments of President Donald Trump by two retiring, Republican senators on Tuesday — they are also shared by majorities of voters in a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll.

Voters’ negative views of Trump’s character aren’t new. They date back to last year’s presidential campaign. And Trump’s overall approval rating in the new survey — 42 percent approve, 53 percent disapprove — is roughly unchanged over the past few months.

More than three-quarters of Republican voters, 77 percent, approve of the job Trump is doing as president. Indeed, on most of the character questions in this week’s POLITICO/Morning Consult poll, majorities of GOP voters side with Trump, even as the broader pool of voters takes a more critical view. The new survey was conducted before Sens. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) sharply criticized Trump on Tuesday for his personal conduct as president.

Still, after a week in which Trump has sparred with the wife and family of an Army sergeant killed in action and been denounced by two high-profile senators in his own party, Trump’s negative scores on these questions raise questions about his ability to overcome voter perceptions and turn his presidency around.

Flake, in a Senate floor speech Tuesday, alluded to Trump’s “reckless, outrageous and undignified” behavior — which he said has been “excused and countenanced” by Republicans. Voters agree Trump is reckless, the poll shows, and it isn’t a new phenomenon.

"As we have seen in past polls, most voters, 56 percent, say President Trump is reckless, while 31 percent disagree," said Morning Consult co-founder and hief Research Officer Kyle Dropp. "Even among Republicans, 33 percent think this is an accurate characterization — notably higher than the percentage of Republicans that disapprove of the president overall, 20 percent."

Corker called Trump an “utterly untruthful president” in a tweet on Tuesday morning and later said in a CNN interview that Trump “has great difficulty with the truth, on many issues."

Voters mostly agree with the second-term Tennessee senator here, too. Only 35 percent call Trump honest, while 51 percent say he is not honest. Just a third say Trump is trustworthy, compared to 53 percent who say he is not trustworthy.

Trump’s feud with the family of slain Army Sgt. La David Johnson — and Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.), a friend of the Johnson family — has led some to question not just Trump’s honesty, but also his compassion. Johnson’s widow, Myeshia Johnson, says a phone call last week from Trump made her “very, very upset and hurt” and “made [her] cry even worse.”

Only 33 percent of voters in the new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll say Trump is compassionate, while 54 percent say he isn’t. A 52 percent majority says Trump is thin-skinned, and 33 percent say he isn't.

The poll was conducted October 19-23 — at the height of the controversy over Trump’s phone call to Myeshia Johnson, but mostly before Johnson confirmed the account herself in a television interview on Monday.

On October 25 2017 22:02 Plansix wrote:
We will have to see how this shakes out. From a policy standpoint, the GOP leadership is going to have to work hard muster the 50 votes they need for the tax cuts. 2018 is going to be a weird year for the GOP, since their base loves Trump, but he will likely still have a 35% approval rating.

On October 25 2017 06:44 ChristianS wrote:

I'll restate what I said a different way, and maybe you'll see how everything in this paragraph is completely non-responsive:

We've played the "is it racist?" game plenty of times in this thread. When it's a celebrity or politician or some other specific person, we can analyze their specific words and actions, and then argue about what those specific words mean, whether they could be interpreted in a non-racist way, how much benefit of the doubt the person deserves based on past behavior that may or may not also suggest racism, etc. And even when we have all that evidence to look at, the conversation is exhausting and never goes anywhere because ultimately we're trying to say something about this person's internal thoughts and beliefs that we can never directly observe. In the case of Trump supporters as a whole, the situation is even worse, because there are no specific words or actions of the group as a whole that we can analyze. There's not even a guarantee that all of them are racist or none of them are; in fact, it's almost guaranteed otherwise, because they're a huge, disparate group of people whose only defining commonality is that they voted for Trump. As such, any discussion into "are Trump supporters racist?" sounds like a useless discussion, because we can't really know for sure, and we can't really generalize about all of them anyway.

I sincerely doubt that rereading every bait xDaunt posted or every cute mimicry of a liberal you posted since June 2016 is going to change that, especially since I've read most of them already anyway. You clearly just thought I was saying something I wasn't, and then decided to get condescending about it. Maybe you thought it would make you look smart, but it just makes you seem like a dick.

Again with thinking I said something I didn't. Where did I claim a deep insight into who he is or what he thinks? I never even suggested I could distinguish between my possibilities #3 and #4, the primary difference between them being whether Trump is racist or not. I may think Trump is a racist, and we can have that conversation if you want to, but I didn't presume to prove it here. If I wanted to, I'd probably start with this: you granted the Arpaio pardon was overt racism. I assume you'd also grant the housing discrimination in the 70's, and that the "black guys counting my money" thing is pretty racist (although maybe you'd believe Trump didn't actually say it). How about Central Park Five? More importantly, after all this why is it so hard to believe that the man behind all that stuff might be a little bit racist?

You've just gone entirely off into your own world here. In the segment you quoted, what did I even attribute to Trump? Somehow you've managed to simultaneously imagine arguments I never made, and entirely skip over what I was saying, which is that for all of the stuff he said, you can conjure a non-racist policy position that he might be flailing at. The problem is, he does very little (if anything) to clarify he's talking about that nuanced non-racist policy position and not other obvious racist positions, and a racist could very easily listen to him and think he was talking about what they believe. More commonly, I expect, people who don't self-identify as racists can see his speech and take it as permission to believe racist things and convince themselves they're not "really" racist.

If you wanted to talk about legal loopholes around criminals in immigrant communities (e.g. criminals getting deported instead of tried here, then not getting tried in their own country for the crime, then being free to reenter and strike again) you could talk about trying to close those loopholes (e.g. trying the criminals here, or making sure whatever government we hand them to tries them for the crime). I never once heard Trump suggest anything close to this. It was all "look at this horrible thing a Mexican did, we need a border wall to keep them all out." The circumstances don't actually matter that much – it doesn't matter if he was Mexican or some other nationality, it doesn't matter if he wasn't tried because he was an immigrant or if he just skipped town and the cops can't find him, it doesn't matter if he was actually illegal or not. It just matters that a Hispanic male committed some unspeakable crime against a white person. This is why we need to build a wall (and make them pay for it)!

If you want to read a non-racist policy position into all that you can. But it'd be hard to imagine someone not walking away with the false impression that Mexican immigrants commit more crimes per capita than the general population. It'd be even harder not to get the impression that it's all Mexicans, not just the violent ones, that we're trying to keep out.

If you're referring to my original 1) through 4), my possibilities were basically:
-Neither Trump nor his supporters are racist.
-Trump is racist but his supporters aren't.
-Trump isn't racist but his supporters are.
-Trump is racist and so are his supporters.

What possibility is it you're saying I missed? Is Trump in some quantum superposition of racist and not racist? Have his supporters discovered some new state of mind which is neither racist nor not racist? I'd buy the idea that people can't be cleanly divided into "racist" and "not racist," so it's less 4 possibilities and more a continuum, but I'm certain that's not what you're saying. So presumably once again, you've interpreted me to say something and then, faced with arguing straight up or leaning into the condescension, you've chosen the latter. But hey, I didn't know that when you wanted to assign me a reading list before I was allowed to talk on teamliquid.net that you'd take it so personally when I declined to do the assigned homework. Pardon me while I go find 85 essays and articles on racism that I'll require you to read before you're allowed to discuss race on the internet.

I don't know how much I need to keep responding to the rest of your post, because you seem to have a version of me in your head already, and you two seem perfectly capable of carrying on a conversation without me, but let's just finish out this post.

I didn't ask if there were any Republicans that were pretty pro-amnesty, but thanks for the examples anyway I guess. I asked why when Republicans made hardline immigration arguments, but didn't phrase them in such a way that you could confuse them for blatant xenophobia, did they not get the same support Trump did? Since Pat Buchanan conservatives have been taking these positions. Where were the Trump supporters then?

Dunno why it's my job to Google for you, but here you go:




Now reading those, which of these positions sounds closer to what Trump is saying:

1) Large numbers of illegal immigrants are coming across the border, and while most of them are just peaceful people looking for a better life, a small percentage (smaller than the percentage in the American population generally) are violent criminals. And for that small percentage, our systems aren't very good at ensuring justice – either because we don't have good oversight of these communities so it's hard to track the offenders down, or because these criminals often get deported rather than tried for their crimes, leaving them free to reenter the country and strike again.

2) A bunch of Mexican drug dealers and rapists are coming across the border, the Mexican government is sending them, there's an epidemic of crimes being committed by Mexican criminals against good Americans. So I want to keep all the Mexicans out.

Do you really think it makes it much better that he only temporarily wanted to ban all Muslims from entering the country? Not, by the way, "temporarily" in that he had a specific end date in mind, just "temporarily" in that hypothetically we might start letting some of them in again at some point.

I don't think he was talking pure policy proposals either, but I'm curious what you thought he was talking about? I saw a lot of commentary on how Mexicans and Muslims are ruining our country and we need to preserve America for "real" Americans, but presumably you either didn't see those things or somehow don't think those things are incredibly creepy.

That conversation might actually be pretty interesting once we got to the point that "Communist party" would be more directly analogous to "KKK/neo-Nazis" in that parallel. I don't think the KKK and neo-Nazis were the primary racial undercurrent he tapped into; I think it was regular people who are probably pretty nice people if you ran into them in public and got to talking, but secretly harbor some racist attitudes they might not even fully recognize themselves. To try and then carry the analogy back in the other direction, Hillary might not have particularly dogwhistled at card-carrying Communists, but she might have appealed to people who didn't identify as Communist but did have a few leanings that are at least a little Communist, even if they don't recognize them as such. (Or if she didn't make such appeals, at least Bernie might have.) And at any rate, I bet you (or at least most conservatives) would say exactly that about much of the left: that they subtly or not-so-subtly appeal to Communist or Socialist attitudes that a lot of people might have without realizing they're Communist or Socialist.

To borrow a bit of your condescension, here your ignorance on racism is really showing. Even in times when the country or world were (as conservatives would widely acknowledge) in the throes of blatantly racist cultures, it wasn't really that the majority of the population were Klansmen. Most people probably harbored a few racist prejudices, turned a bit of a blind eye to oppression against other races, and just generally got uncomfortable with reforms that upset the status quo. It doesn't mean (at least to my view) that they were evil.

He barely disavowed racist positions at all! He couldn't even go so far as to apologize for previous racist actions. The response about his housing discrimination in the 70's wasn't "I was wrong to do that, I've since realized just how wrong it was, nobody should do that." It was "eh, it was the 70's, everybody was doing it." There's not even an acknowledgement that it shouldn't happen!


I'd be curious at some point to hear you reiterate a top 5 of causes you thought were so important that it warranted electing a mendacious authoritarian racist (my characterization, not yours, I know). Are there really so many crimes committed by illegal immigrants every year that you think it's worth throwing the dignity of the Republican Party and the Presidency (if not the entire United States) for a chance at achieving some reduction? Not today, though – this quote chain has gotten long enough, and I'm a little tired of being talked down to. If you feel like having a somewhat less condescending conversation in the future perhaps we can revisit it.

On October 25 2017 23:51 Mohdoo wrote:


I think it is all going to come down to the struggling and skeptical. Working whites who said "All I know is that the system we have now sucks and it needs to change" are going to play a big role in 2018 imo. Trump echoing all of their mindless complaints granted him their support, but I can't help but wonder how they will feel in 2018.

His base is really firm, but there are so many people in the middle, grasping for someone to make everything wonderful. I imagine a lot of people wanted to give him a chance and are like "Welp" at this point.

On October 26 2017 00:05 Mohdoo wrote:
So with Pence being the one to do all this tie-breaking, does that mean Democrats only need to flip 1 senate seat to bring everything to a standstill?