2020 Presidential Election

[cathexis]

Originally Posted by Martina

If it were realistic to get rid of Texas, I think I might sacrifice y'all. You could move to Georgia and turn it from purple to blue. Just a thought. I would so love to say bye bye to Texas. Just as a teacher -- the effect Texas has had on text books alone. Texas is the big stupid bully of American culture. Proudly ignorant, but unlike say, Alabama or Oklahoma, influential. And truly don't many Texans actually want to secede. My response to that is "Bye, Felicia."

Originally Posted by charley

Trump is forgetting words, couldn't remember the word "origins", so said "oranges" - twice... also said that his father was born in Germany, which was false, since his father was born in USA, it was his gf who was born in Germany (if I remember correctly), early signs of dementia ... - his reward, which he has done to himself

so, do you really think he will be able to run for a 2nd term?

Trump may be an narcissistic, a bully, ruining the US both here and abroad, and the worst president we've encountered; however, tarnishing the reputation of the entire State of Texas as refuse one wouldn't mind giving back to the Mexicans. Many soldiers died taking and defending the Louisiana Purchase, also this dishonors all the Texans who have fought and died in our country's wars. Texas is our issue to deal with. Blame a state as large as Texas for a bunch of yahoos is like saying that all New Yorkers are rude. Even if it is believed that folks from the city need a bit more civility, NY is a large state like Texas with populations of people who don't deserve that sort of sullied reputation.
If that is really how people feel, let's chop off CA, what about FL-the keys have wanted to secede for decades. Hell, we can chop up the country to politically impotent blocks. Sounds just like what Trump would love.

A person's medical problems have no business being discussed in the public arena. Personally, I think Rosenstein didn't go far enough into FBI discussion for removal of Trump. Sure, he's mentally unfit for president, and needs to go but there are procedures and committees elected by the people empowered to consult experts as witnesses for those Amendment 22 issues. Did America splash Reagan's Alzheimer's disease all over the press daily. Who here can diagnose Dementia based on film clips and interviews, I sure can't. Not certain a Psychiatrist or Neurologist could make a spot decision like that. How about FDR's physical limitations. I know the history of the 22nd Amendment, but it could have (and did) happen during our Presidential history. We probably should have written it clearer into the Constitution, but we didn't and can't act as though we had.

[C0LLETTE]

Sanders is a voracious tapeworm in the Democratic gut.

[Martina]

Originally Posted by C0LLETTE

Sanders is a voracious tapeworm in the Democratic gut.

That's unnecessary. Have some basic civility. Especially when it's not your country. He's a US Senator.

[Martina]

Obviously, Texas will not be leaving the Union. I'm not serious. Nor would I expect anyone to move. I'm aware that Houston is a relative oasis of tolerance and diversity. One of my closest friends happily lives there. ALTHOUGH -- recently she was transporting some friends of a friend when they announced they'd never met a gay person. She had to say, "Well, you have now." And she very kindly answered these Southern Baptists' questions and educated them in the gentlest way. I would have put them out of the car.

Re California, I'd be ecstatic if coastal California were its own country. People talk about it.

Originally Posted by dark_crystal

We're America's own Saudi Arabia. Primitive people made incidentally rich and powerful by a mineral coincidence, behaving primitively with great power.

My mom is a pro-life Southern Baptist young-Earth creationist, but she was also a 2nd grade teacher and not a fan of the Religious Right takeover of all school boards in the 1980s. She subscribed to their values but she thought they should leave education to educators, felt their decrees on the three R's, at least, if not science lol, should be evidence-based and were not.

But that takeover was a real thing that happened-- the religious right intentionally and methodically focused on infiltrating school boards and those people are all still in place.

The reason i spend an hour each month sitting next to a creepy pro-life Southern Baptist young-Earth creationist Board President is because he was part of that movement and actually got to be mayor, then retired to my board so he can make sure we have creationist materials. We're just lucky he doesn't notice us shelving them under religion and not science. We've had him thirteen years and we could have him thirteen more.

That was a digression.

What i came here to say is that whenever "coastal elites" bag on the red states and someone calls their attention to the always-sizeable percentage of blue voters in those states, there is always someone saying "they should just move, then."

Leaving aside the many reasons why that might not be easy for individuals (disabled parents, for us), it's a terrible idea electorally. The more we concentrate in specific states, the less electoral college votes we have access to.

Anyway--speaking of moving to more progressive places-- Houston is a place of refuge for all of Mississippi's queers, because their parents are quadruple times scarier than ours. We're very fortunate it wasn't them with the oil. Queer Mississippi needs Houston to keep being safe.

[Martina]

Re not scaring the center, we've tried accommodating them, and it didn't work. Moreover, the center SUPPORTS Bernie's policies. It's not just that the Democrats are posing as progressives to win the primary. The country supports most of the progressive program as poll after poll has shown.

This is not the Clinton era as 2016 proves. It really is time for real change. We might not get it, but it's so obvious -- the Trump victory proves it -- that Americans are sick of the government not representing their interests. And Democrats have been as guilty of favoring elites as Republicans.

[Martina]

My own plan for a California secession includes forcing the entirety of Silicon Valley to move to LA. We would keep them in the state, forcing them for the first time to pay taxes. But the outsize influence they have on the Bay Area would be dwarfed by the much bigger LA and environs. Most plans have Western Oregon and Washington included in the new country. I'm ok with that. But they are going to have to work on the lily whiteness problem.

[kittygrrl]

funny we should be talking about succession because i can see it happening twenty or thirty years from now..unless we all agree to homogenize...with artificial intelligence that might become a reality..if people begin to choose linking with ai..it would be scary in one way but our world might avoid blowing up...i doubt on our own we can actually manage not destroying ourselves at some point..a little off point...sigh...

...so, i will say Bernie has 900,000 donations or something like that...he is my least favorite candidate...he would love it if Biden decided not to run...he would be just fine if that happened..i'm not saying he doesn't have ethics, just none where politics are concerned(from what i've observed) also....

Beto is getting annoying..j/s

[C0LLETTE]

Originally Posted by Martina

That's unnecessary. Have some basic civility. Especially when it's not your country. He's a US Senator.

"The “Sanders would have won” crowd will have their chance to make their case, but forget it. Sanders is a parasitic worm eating the Democratic Party from the inside out, and Democrats should get it through their heads quickly: nominating a revolutionary Red Diaper socialist for the presidency would result in a 1984-style wipeout." RICK WILSON

Please write your complaint to the NY Daily News opinion page. I do think Wilson is an American.

And please lay off the repeated references to me being Canadian. You seem to have your own "personal" Canadian here, who posted a very nasty attack on me to which I chose not to respond and who applauds every silly post you make without any word of complaint from you or mention of nationality.

Go slam someone else. Far as I know, there is no rule here that only Americans can post or that only people you agree with or self-righteously label "civil"can post here.

Want less comment on your politics? Stop promoting regime change and political interference in just about every corner of this planet.

[Kätzchen]

Originally Posted by C0LLETTE

Sanders is a voracious tapeworm in the Democratic gut.

I happen to agree with you, COLLETTE. I fell for the Bernie charisma the first time around. It won't happen again.

[Martina]

Originally Posted by C0LLETTE

And please lay off the repeated references to me being Canadian. You seem to have your own "personal" Canadian here, who posted a very nasty attack on me to which I chose not to respond and who applauds every silly post you make without any word of complaint from you or mention of nationality.

Go slam someone else. Far as I know, there is no rule here that only Americans can post or that only people you agree with or self-righteously label "civil"can post here.

Want less comment on your politics? Stop promoting regime change and political interference in just about every corner of this planet.

I have said nothing about Canada. I have nothing bad to say about Canada. I have said that you are not a U.S. citizen, which makes your rudeness about our politics particularly rude, especially when you clearly don't even stay abreast of the news. It's just an axe you have to grind, such as your point about our promoting regime change. You didn't mention a specific event, but characterized the U.S. in general terms. That is your take on U.S. foreign policy. Whatever merit the argument has, you are using it to say the US is criminal therefore you can be as abusive as you want in your comments about it. Well, no. It's a big complex country, the news about which you barely seem to follow. Sure you can say whatever you please, but you will be recognized as rude and abusive in your discourse.

[C0LLETTE]

You characterise my posts as "rude and abusive" ( in and of itself rude and abusive ), claim that I barely seem to follow the news and clearly don't even stay abreast of the news. Well, rather than my trying to respond to those nebulous inchoate charges by taking on the impossible task of telling you everything I know about American politics, why don't you tell me everything I don't know...that should show you how empty and impossible your post is.

As for regime change, it's rather sad that I have to offer you information and examples of American foreign policy but here goes:

"They say it's a mark of insanity to do the same thing over and over again while expecting different results.

So what does it tell us about the political establishment of the United States that it repeatedly pursues the same horribly destructive foreign policy?

I'm talking about "regime change" — the idea that the proper response to a conflict with a foreign country is to overthrow its government, on the assumption that whatever follows the (sometimes literal) decapitation will be both a net improvement for the people who live there and geopolitically advantageous for the United States.

This idea is affirmed by a remarkably broad spectrum of powerful people in and around the nation's capital. You can hear arguments in its favor during Republican and Democratic administrations, among leading members of Congress and prominent senators, from the richest donors to both parties, and within the bipartisan foreign policy establishment. It shaped decisions during the hawkish administration of George W. Bush and the supposedly more restrained administration of Barack Obama. It influenced thinking in the McCain, Romney, and Rubio campaigns no less than the policy assumptions of Hillary Clinton and her leading advisers.

And now we know that it even plays an important role in the supposedly anti-interventionist Trump administration, at least when it comes to Iran. In recent days Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, National Security Adviser John Bolton, and even President Trump himself have hurled barbed threats at the Iranian leadership, indicating a strong preference to see, not the establishment of a mutually beneficial relationship, but a change of regime in the country. As Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary during the Bush administration, put it in an appearance on Fox News, "The more unstable we can help Iran become, the better it is to actually secure peace if we can get rid of that theological regime one day."

This is foolish. There is no reason to think that aiming to change the Iranian "regime" will lead to positive results.

The instinct to seek the overthrow of antagonistic governments spans not just ideologies and parties. It also stretches back in time. During the Cold War, the U.S. often pursued this strategy by using the CIA and other groups to foment coups against regimes we considered too friendly to the Soviet Union or communist China, or too hostile to American economic interests more generally. The results were often bad for the people in those countries, who frequently ended up living under dictators or contending with civil wars or other forms of unrest.

Since the end of the Cold War, we've increasingly favored a more overt and aggressive policy of regime change — first in Afghanistan, then in Iraq, then in Libya, and now, possibly, in Iran. (Along the way, a loud chorus of people during the Obama administration clamored to get Syria added to this list as well.)

Have any of these acts of military destabilization turned out well for anyone?

Overthrowing the government of Afghanistan was the most justified, since the Taliban had given refuge to Osama bin Laden and refused to turn him over after 9/11. But the U.S. military has now been stuck fighting there for over 16 years, with no end in sight, and with the Taliban constantly sowing chaos and threatening to make a political comeback (which is something we've now becoming more open to accepting). In the end, the two most likely outcomes of American involvement in Afghanistan are an interminable semi-occupation underwriting an unstable government contending with a permanent insurgency — or a return to a version of the very fundamentalist rule we deposed more than a decade and a half ago.

But that's nothing compared to the utter disaster of regime change in Iraq. Life under Saddam Hussein may have been awful, but it's hard to imagine a scenario in which the continuation of his rule would have led to the deaths of 600,000 Iraqis (along with roughly 5,000 Americans), the displacement of millions more, the destabilization of the region (including the empowering of Iran and collapse of Syria into a civil war, the latter of which has led to another half-million deaths as well as a flood of migrants and refugees that has helped to catalyze a right-wing anti-immigrant movement across Europe), and the formation of a new terrorist organization (ISIS) that managed to surpass in brutality the one that launched the 9/11 attacks (al Qaeda).

The Iraq War has been a perfect storm of unintended, awful consequences.

But that didn't keep a Democratic president who ran for office in part on his opposition to the Iraq War from making the very same misjudgments as George W. Bush before him. In Libya, Obama overthrew the tyrannical government of Moammar Gadhafi, which cheered American do-gooders, but he made few if any arrangements to guarantee order. The perfectly predictable result was chaos in the resulting power vacuum. Subsequent years have brought economic collapse, the rise of tribal warfare, instability, violence, and even the return of the slave trade — not to mention even more of those migrants and refugees headed to Europe across the Mediterranean.

Given the abysmal track record of regime change, why do our policymakers opt for it again and again?

For one thing, there's a distinctly American form of arrogance and hubris. We like to think we're entitled to rid ourselves of nuisances (instead of learning to live with them) — and we also tend to presume that we're capable of fixing every problem with a minimal exertion of effort. That second assumption is so deeply embedded in our national consciousness that every time it ends up refuted by experience, we find ourselves shocked as if for the very first time by the recalcitrance of reality.

Then there's our very American paranoia about government power and tendency to take our own stability for granted. These lead us to overestimate the awfulness of authoritarianism (the draconian imposition of order) and vastly underestimate the horror of chaos (the absence of order). As a result, we invariably presume that removing a dictator produces a net improvement.

But it often doesn't. Just ask anyone who's endured life in Iraq or Libya since we liberated them into the arms of anarchy.

Finally, there's our most unconservative national trait: an incorrigible optimism about the benefits of change and consequent refusal to entertain the possibility that a bad situation might be made even worse by overturning it.

And now, after so many foolish mistakes and so few signs of self-reflection, we're contemplating bringing our magic touch to Iran. We really must be out of our minds." THE WEEK July 2018

If you disagree with the above contentions or the source, let me know but please be specific and no more empty accusations til you have some facts and can prove you know better.

If you have some other aspects of American ( or World ) politics you'd like to discuss, I'd be happy to oblige.

[Martina]

If you disagree with the above contentions or the source, let me know but please be specific

Well I really can't respond re the source since you don't tell us the author or title or provide a URL. I looked up the periodical name, The Week, along with the date, but found nothing. So if you want me to respond, YOU'LL have to be more specific.

In any case, I didn't ask to debate you on this. Nor did I contest the truth of the point. What I said was that you are using this issue -- US intervention -- as an excuse to name us as criminals, justifying your endlessly rude comments. That is what you said.

Want less comment on your politics? Stop promoting regime change and political interference in just about every corner of this planet.

[kittygrrl]

i think every country has it's weaknesses..and even though we vote people into running the country they don't necessarily follow what they promised as a candidate to follow...so i can't take responsibility for their mistakes..i do the best i can to elect people who share my ethics and policy ideals and it's always disappointing on some level..none of us live in Utopia so we all live in glass houses. I don't think any of us need to throw rocks j/s

[C0LLETTE]

https://theweek.com/articles/786525/...-regime-change

Now you show me where I name you as " criminals".

Also please respond to my first point:

"You characterise my posts as "rude and abusive" ( in and of itself rude and abusive ), claim that I barely seem to follow the news and clearly don't even stay abreast of the news. Well, rather than my trying to respond to those nebulous inchoate charges by taking on the impossible task of telling you everything I know about American politics, why don't you tell me everything I don't know...that should show you how empty and impossible your post is."

Offer some evidence that I "clearly don't follow the news" otherwise I have to conclude that your insulting "ad hominem" posts are a waste of my time. And that's that.

[MsTinkerbelly]

We are criminals.

We took the land from the original occupants, we have the unmitigated gall to overthrow governments and destabilize world economies, we take what we want and expect everyone to fall inline with our values. We are less than 300 years old, yet we DARE to tell civilizations around for thousands of years how to treat their people or run their countries?

Yes, when asked we step in and protect the world...so there is that.

We are criminals...this is the way we are seen in the rest of the world. No matter how many times we say “yes but we did this”, we have a history of slavery, abuse of native Americans, corruption, mass killings...on and on.

Love it or leave it?

God bless the USA

Pfffft

[C0LLETTE]

Originally Posted by kittygrrl

i think every country has it's weaknesses..and even though we vote people into running the country they don't necessarily follow what they promised as a candidate to follow...so i can't take responsibility for their mistakes..i do the best i can to elect people who share my ethics and policy ideals and it's always disappointing on some level..none of us live in Utopia so we all live in glass houses. I don't think any of us need to throw rocks j/s

Oh my goodness.
No one is blaming you personally and not every discussion of policy is "rock throwing".

The above quoted article is from an American magazine, written by an American, Damon Linker, who is a senior correspondent at TheWeek.com. He is also a consulting editor at the University of Pennsylvania Press, and a former contributing editor at The New Republic.

There are many many more such views of US foreign policy out there in the ether. I just picked this one to show that I can read.

[Martina]

Offer some evidence that I "clearly don't follow the news" otherwise I have to conclude that your insulting "ad hominem" posts are a waste of my time. And that's that.

I'm not going to comb through your old posts. Good grief. Didn't you just not know about the Fox News Mexican countries thing? Not very important. Who cares about that? But it's pretty endless. If you want, I'll keep track starting now. Actually, no. I'm too lazy. But when I notice one, I'll oblige. I haven't in the past because it would be rude and petty. But if you want, . . .

[C0LLETTE]

Originally Posted by MsTinkerbelly

We are criminals.

We took the land from the original occupants, we have the unmitigated gall to overthrow governments and destabilize world economies, we take what we want and expect everyone to fall inline with our values. We are less than 300 years old, yet we DARE to tell civilizations around for thousands of years how to treat their people or run their countries?

Yes, when asked we step in and protect the world...so there is that.

We are criminals...this is the way we are seen in the rest of the world. No matter how many times we say “yes but we did this”, we have a history of slavery, abuse of native Americans, corruption, mass killings...on and on.

Love it or leave it?

God bless the USA

Pfffft

I do believe MsTinkerbelly is an American citizen. Me? I'm just sitting here and reading

[Martina]

Without a doubt, and speaking the truth is valuable. But using history as an excuse to talk trash about an entire group of people is, well, trashy.

Hell, Canada has a pretty dismal history re its Native Peoples. I don't call out the Canadian people with glee as Collette is wont to do re Americans. (And Collette, DON'T ask me to document. Good God. I've seen you demand that someone tell you where you said something when it was on the previous page.) Collette has said about a thousand rude things about Americans. More. Whatever.

Originally Posted by MsTinkerbelly

We are criminals.

We took the land from the original occupants, we have the unmitigated gall to overthrow governments and destabilize world economies, we take what we want and expect everyone to fall inline with our values. We are less than 300 years old, yet we DARE to tell civilizations around for thousands of years how to treat their people or run their countries?

Yes, when asked we step in and protect the world...so there is that.

We are criminals...this is the way we are seen in the rest of the world. No matter how many times we say “yes but we did this”, we have a history of slavery, abuse of native Americans, corruption, mass killings...on and on.

Love it or leave it?

God bless the USA

Pfffft

[C0LLETTE]

Originally Posted by Martina

I'm not going to comb through your old posts. Good grief. Didn't you just not know about the Fox News Mexican countries thing? Not very important. Who cares about that? But it's pretty endless. If you want, I'll keep track starting now. Actually, no. I'm too lazy. But when I notice one, I'll oblige. I haven't in the past because it would be rude and petty. But if you want, . . .

Why stop being rude and petty now?

BTW, is watching Fox News, or recognising your oblique references to Fox News, your standard for marking an intelligent well-informed commentator?
Yikes.