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"Age doesn't matter because Trump is worse" was the refrain on this sub for months.
That's the problem with any kind of generic critique. If you're always carving out an exception because it's a two party system where one party always sucks, then "He's too old" has no substance. You're going to vote for whatever the only acceptable party feeds you, whether its a spry young cop-loving prosecutor from California or an 80 year old Senatorial mummy from Delaware.
Age isn't relevant when you're choosing between two people who are the same age. That's no longer the case, so age is now a distinguishing factor.
Anyway, my gripe with the age talk wasn't that age doesn't matter; it was that Biden was being hammered on it as if Trump is somehow better in that regard.
Pretty much this. People kept harping about Biden's issues with speaking due to his age while somehow completely ignoring that Trump makes no sense in his blathering rambling at any point and hasn't made any sense in years, but I wonder how much of that was manufactured by MAGA hats because age is literally the only sane argument they had against Biden. Reading transcripts of Trump's bull shit was mind-numbing and he's pushing 80 too.
Are you suggesting that you'd support a Trump campaign if he'd been 20 years younger?
Hell no, and I already said it's not the most important factor. But in a sane world where both candidates are decent people, age could very well be a deciding factor for me.
The partisan divide is predicated on assuming your rivals aren't good people. That's why everyone loves calling each other Tankies and Communists/Fascists and foreign shills.
If you can't see that Trump is the opposite of a good person, then I don't know what to tell you.
You assume Trump people aren't good people, either. And they assume the same of you.
Let's not pretend that Trump is a normal politician with whom we merely have policy disagreements. That was the case for most major party candidates prior to 2015, but since then it has only been the case for one major party's candidates. The previous rules of friendly competition and debate were thrown out then. By him.
He's a celebrity-turned-politician. But he's running on a platform that's been baked into the GOP since the Eisenhower Administration launched Operation Wetback.
That's completely ahistorical.
I'm not saying the past hasn't led us to this. I'm saying that the current GOP is corrupt and rotten to a level that it never was before, and their supporters' opinion matters less than it ever did before. So
doesn't mean what it used to.
More corrupt than when Bush used the phoney threat of nuclear terrorism to commit a Holocaust in Iraq?
More corrupt than when Reagan's CIA was running cocaine through Latin America to fund death squads on behalf of the United Fruit Company and Coca Cola?
More corrupt than the multiple democracies overthrown by the Eisenhower Administration - from Brazil to Egypt to Iran?
More corrupt than Rutherford B Hayes ending Reconstruction for the House votes he needed to take the presidency?
I'm not feeling it.
Yes, because now they're not bothering to hide it. They're trying to normalize it. Worse still, they're trying to paint people who don't want their fascism as the strange ones. They're so corrupt and rotten they aren't even bothering with the thin veneer of respectability, and they're succeeding in changing the character of the entire country.
Previous GOP regimes did evil things and made Americans complicit. Now they're actively trying to make America evil.
They're absolutely worse now.
They're not coordinated and sophisticated enough to hide it.
The ones at the top of the ticket, sure. But the ones who are actually behind all of this—the Mitch McConnells and the other various GOP strategists—they're pretty devious. Smart in an evil way. They got right-wing media on their side, and then they got the mainstream media to cover them as if what they were doing was normal, and only then did they start trying to make it seem like their brand of fascism was the norm and not something antithetical to American values. At which point they could run a candidate like Trump and not be completely ruining their image.
Though it does seem like Trump was worse even than they thought; much less coordinated and completely unsophisticated.
Are increasingly being forced into the Democratic Party by the baser reactionaries in the GOP. Guys like Micheal Bloomberg and Bill Kristol and "The Lincoln Project" have largely decamped from the Republican organization and started clustering around guys like Joe Manchin.
He didn't toe the ideological line. He committed blasphemy after blasphemy - shaking hands with our nation's enemies, not offering enough lip service to The Troops, failing to keep a polite distance from Christian fundamentalists, ostrasizing too many domestic business interests and their media flaks.
He hurt the GOP coalition as much as the country overall. They're no longer even pretending to be a Big Tent, like they claimed under Bush and Reagan.
Rats sinking a leaving ship.
Here's hoping even more. They thought they could use him and found out they couldn't control him.
It's almost like you have to look at more than just what people say about each other to determine who's right.
Anyway, I was talking about Trump himself, not his supporters. I don't know how it could possibly be more clear that he's a bad person. If you can't acknowledge that fact then I can't take anything you say seriously.
Trump can't exist without an enormous base of zealous donors, canvasers, and loyal electoral disciples. Neither can any politician, particularly at the national level. At some level, Trump is a manifestation of his support. Otherwise, he'd have lost to Christie or Hailey or Pence.
You don't need to go far in the American suburbs to find people who spout all the same rhetoric and engage in a host of the same behaviors as the Cheeto Mussolini. I'm in Texas and I'm surrounded by these people. I go visit family up in Staten Island and they're all over the place. Step out to Arizona, Florida, Ohio... guys who admire and seek to emulate Trump, both in his politics and mannerisms, are all over this country.