Political Discussion Thread (With Rules)

[assault]

Back in 1964, people argued for supporting Lyndon Johnson, because Goldwater was a nutcase who would escalate the war in Vietnam.

[megaplayboy]

Put into context, the election was a couple years removed from the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Goldwater had been extremely hawkish in his statements.

[DasBroot]

I hope Trump has finally choked on his shoe leather.  He's brought nothing but ruin to my preferred party.  He's no Republican but his farce of a campaign run will solidify how people perceive the party for years to come - every stereotype wrapped into one package and paraded before the world for all to see.

 

The man doesn't have a single shred of presidential poise or dignity about him.  He just wants to be President so he can put it on his resume.  

 

If he wins I'm just going to imagine him checking his phone and getting an x-box / steam achievement pop up in the upper corner saying "Achievement Unlocked: The Prez" - and the position ultimately not meaning anything more to him than that.

[Lawnmower Boy]

You know, Simon, we can disagree without essentially calling each other stupid.

 

Soar.

No-one here thinks you're dumb, Soar. I do think that you tend to argue yourself out onto a limb for the pleasure of arguing, but this here is a community, and we've all got our quirks. Why, some of our most upstanding citizens like Aquaman. Go figure!

 

Here's the thing: America has a two-party system in which partisan identification spills over into many other social commitments. This is true both in terms of the town and state you live in, and, in constitutional terms, up-and-down ballot cohesion. The party ballot is espeically important, because electioneering is a pretty advanced art these days, and pretty much every Presidential candidate comes to the polls on the first Tuesday of November  as a damaged brand. Sure, the voter says, in the end, we have to hold our nose if we want to vote for Bush-Mondale-Clinton-Dole-Bush-Gore-Bush-Kerry-Obama-McCain-Obama-Romney, but if we don't the They will appoint the bad person to the Supreme Court, and my Representative won't be able to legislate because the bad President will veto all his bills. This kind of up-and-down cohesion is consolidated in many ways, but one of the more important of them is an ideological project. Intellectuals produce a coherent belief system in which all the issues that matter at every level of the ballot are interdepent in a worldview that shows why someone who is pro-life is also pro-guns and anti-taxes, and vice-versa.

 

That makes it really, really hard to repudiate Trump and embrace Hillary. There's down ballot, there's identity, there's belonging, there's a complete worldview to unpick. All that stuff. (Ross Douthat has a post up saying more-or-less this, and ending with "but but abortion!" I mean, seriously; for how many actual people is the current back and forth about abortion regulation at the margin a real deal-breaker? But clinging to it lets Douthat go on being a professional conservative.) But I think we can go deeper here. 

 

Consider the nomination process as it played out. Several candidates were presented as "conservatives with a track record:" Christie and Walker. Neither found favour with the electorate. Why? Well, to be brutal about this, Americans don't usually select and run fat guys or guys with weak chins. (Throw in baldness, and represent!) In the end, you have to wonder why these guys even bothered.

 

One candidate was advanced with the "aura of inevitability:" Jeb Bush. I mean, Tafts, Roosevelts, Kennedys --there are Presidential families, right? Except those guys actually have a terrible track record. Americans don't like political dynasties. Ted couldn't win on his brother's mythic coat tails! (You give me Chappaquidick, I give you Terry Schiavo. Yes, they're not comparable, but they're both skeletons-in-the-closet.) Jeb's campaign was one long, "I don't know what they're thinking." Kind of like running a weaselly-faced guy who probably is a weasel, or an overweight, bully-looking guy who actually is a bully.

 

Several candidates ran as America's Pastor: Huckabee and Santorum. There's been a lot of these guys, and not one of them has ever actually been elected. They run, to be charitable, in an evangelical spirit, to give some nice sermons on a national stage. There's an uncharitable interpretation, that they're the classic con-man/preacher. I'm happy to extend that to Huckabee. Santorum seems honest enough about most things, straight up and deeply felt.  Still, there's enough weaknesses there, that, at the end of the day, you have to wonder how he came to run second to Romney in 2012 and, more importantly, stay in the race so long. The answer, I think, is a deep dissatisfaction with Romney.

 

Which, what the heck, America? I wouldn't vote for Romney on account of his politics, and if his background as a Mormon dynast were better understood (that is, that he's part of a weirdly tangential faction of America's Natural Aristocracy , this not being a religion thing), he might suffer on that score; but apart from that, he was as good a candidate as you could ask for! And you toyed with Santorum, instead? I mean, look at Santorum! Where's your sense of decency? Did you not see Santorum on the stage, desperately pronouncing his heterosexuality while the whole freaking world was, like, "Go get a boyfriend and stop bothering us?" Prolonging Rick's day on the stage was as pitilessly unkind as making Trump dance and caper for us. (Because he's not an evil man; he's mentally ill. That will lead him to do terible things if he's elected, but he needs an intervention, not ridicule.) 

 

Then you had the True Blue Conservative candidate: Ted Cruz. Except Cruz is literally the least likeable man in America. It's a joke how unlikeable he is! His first college room-mate came forward to say that we shouldn't vote for him on character grounds, and they had classmates lined up from, you know, First Year Introduction to Prerequisites to Harvard Law lined up to say the same thing! He makes a terrible impression! It takes more than one person to run a Presidential campaign. So how did anyone look at Cruz and say, "You know what? I think this guy has a chance. I'm going to go work for him!" 

 

And, yet, Cruz ran second to Trump.

 

Then you had this term's "reasonable Conservative:" Kasich. Except that everyone who knows Kasich reports major rage issues that should rule him out as a serious candidate, and the way he ran his campaign kind of underlines the fact that he does not play well with others. Again, compare him with the "reasonable Conservative" of the 2012 cycle (Romney), and you see the weaknesses of his candidacy. 

 

Then you had the libertarian true believer, Ayn Paul Kruegerrand Buddha. I think? Anyone remember him? I know I don't! At least his Dad's got a fun kooky vibe going on. Rand Paul was just going through the motions, it seems. Or was there something else going on? Because I think the takeaway here is that, given the choice, libertarian Republicans don't actually vote libertarian. They go for Trump. And, actually, this can be extended. The evangelical vote went to Trump, not Cruz, never mind Santorum or Huckabee. 

 

We're told that the Republicans are the business party, and that various deep-pocketed Republican businessmen will back the pro-business candidate and make him a shoe-in. Except that Trump is running on autarky. (I think), and the mighty Koch machine is revealed to be helpless against him. 

 

So. What's going on? Well, it looks like the evangelical wing doesn't want a Christian, pro-life candidate; the libertarian wing doesn't want a guy who won't bomb foreigners, rein in the security state, or protect civil liberties; the business wing is fine with a tariff-curious, immigrant-expelling candidate.

 

A number of people have said that the core issue of the Trump candidacy is his outrageous racism, but I don't think that's right, either. Life history dictates who is likely to be racist (old, etc), and the Republicans win those demographics handily --they don't need to pander! Yes, Trump actually dared to explicitly appeal to racists, but that's been done in the past, and no-one who has done that has come close to winning a major nomination going back to Wilson. In the end, the fact that you have to win in November disciplines the candidates. And notice that the other candidates made gestures in the pandering direction. It had no effect whatsoever. 

 

What are we left with? In my opinion, ideological aporia. These things do happen. Berthold Brecht joked that popular discontent with communist rule in Germany ought to inspire the communist government to "dissolve the people and elect another;" the even more pungent formulation is that "Communism can never fail, only be failed." This is the downside of an ideological project. Discredited, everything fails. 

 

2008 was bad enough: no-one believes in "trickle down economics" any more, although a few people are in denial about their disbelief. Throw that out, and the suposed ideological foundations of the Republican Party becomes a bottomless pit. What most Americans want, I gather, is a reversal in course on taxes. You know, raise taxes on rich people. And there's no way to say within the Republican party. So you say that you're "against trade," instead.

 

Traditionally, evangelical Christianity has defined itself as a private world set against the public, secular sphere. This has been hard in the sense that you're compelled to at least pretend to be a Creationist, which can be hard when you're, say, an oil industry geologist in Texas. But then you get your global warming denialists, who saw this as a gravy train the could ride on. I think they were wrong, that "pretend" is key here, but maybe I'm being too optimistic. The point is, it's one thing to have funny claimed beliefs about what happened six thousand years ago. Denying the plain evidence of global climate change in front of us? That's for crazy people! And it is the official position of the Republican party. So what do you do if you want to abandon that plank without abandoning the party?

 

Evangelicals? They've been led to comprehensively identify Christianity with hostility to the icky people, and they've been routed with precious little pushback. Belonging to a church is part of belonging to a community. Do you really want to identify yourself as part of a community that hates the gays? Really? Now? How about now? How about next week? This whole thing is something that opportunistic Christians and the more left wing members of the congregation aready want to be out from underneath of. How many church ladies does that leave, and do you really want to be part of a megachurch of church ladies?

 

There's other things going on, too. The relentless drumbeat of assault rifle massacres, for example. How do you abandon Second Amendment absolutists without abandoning the party? We already "consciously disengage" from that argument because we sense we're pushing buttons that we can't unpush. Gun rights are an excellent example of how a conscious argument within the party is more likely to destroy its viability as an electoral coalition than to actually solve the problem. So how do you solve the problem? The same way that you solve every other unsolveable problem. You wait until  no-one is looking, and you walk away, accepting that it's not going to be solved, or that somebody else will solve it, their way.

 

This description should look normal to most readers. Remember how you cared so deeply about so much stuff in your early twenties? And then life got in the way, and now you see nuance, or, if you don't, you've lost the passion, or, even if you still have it, you don't really act on it? It's sort of an internal defection. 

 

This "internal defection" takes two forms in the GOP. One is disengagement; the other is casting a protest vote. That's Trump. He's a protest vote. The disengaged votes were the ones that didn't exist to elect somebody else, because all the candidates left after all the internal disengagement were the ones who didn't internally disengage.

 

When there's a reasonable way out, the people who don't take it are not reasonable. That's your 2016 Republican Presidential candidate pool in a nutshell. They're the ones who didn't see the exit door in good time. 

 

tl;dr: The GOP is tanking this election, because they have no answers to the world's current predicament.   

[Pattern Ghost]

You know, Simon, we can disagree without essentially calling each other stupid.

 

Soar.

 

 

Not on this

 

 

"3. Attacking of other forum members is subject to immediate banning."

 

Soar.

 

Easy way to handle this one.  Welcome to moderation.  Will be followed by banning if you continue down this route.

 

Instead of defusing a situation, you escalated it. Soar took offense, then you upped the ante by throwing harsh language back. Then again by sticking him in the moderation queue.

 

A while back I was banned for three months from NGD for simply pointing out that someone in another political thread was painting a group with a broad brush. You insisted in PMs that I was insulting the person.

 

But this is OK?

 

I think you let your anger get the better of you here.

[Simon]

This is not up for discussion.  

[Pattern Ghost]

Sorry, no intent to derail the thread, just leaving feedback for you do do with what you will.

[Old Man]

 

tl;dr: The GOP is tanking this election, because they have no answers to the world's current predicament.   

 

You make it sound like they're tanking the election on purpose, but I don't think that's the case.  I think the GOP's real problem is that their base has figured out that they're being used.  For over thirty years big business has been using socially conservative white voters to keep themselves in office.  Things have been quite nice for big business, as they've managed to keep their tax breaks mostly intact while minimizing new regulations, even in areas like banking and climate change.  Even Obamacare was a pretty good deal for the pharma and health insurance industries.

 

If you're a socially conservative white voter, however, your world sucks.  Gay marriage is legal.  Immigrants are immigrating.  Bathrooms have been thrown into chaos.  Businesses have to serve gay couples and provide contraception to employees.  "Progress" on anti-abortion has been minimal.  A black man is president, and he fines you a little if you refuse to insure yourself.  Your real wages haven't gone up for decades and you might not even have recovered from the Great Recession.  And these social conservatives are starting to figure out that they've been had.

 

That's where the Tea Party started and why Trump is doing so well--the GOP base is pissed off.  They're convinced that neither Big Business nor the Democrats represent their interests, because they don't, and so they have started voting to shut down and blow up Washington DC.  And the one thing that Big Business could not come up with was a presidential candidate that TPers believed would deliver on social conservatism and blowing up DC.  Bush was an insider.  Walker was an insider.  Kasich was an insider.  Rubio was an insider.  The top two GOP primary candidates were Cruz, who is publicly despised by everyone in DC, and Trump, who wasn't even taken seriously by anyone in DC until much too late.

 

What's going to be more interesting is what happens next election, assuming the country isn't a smoking ruin after a Trump administration.  The fractures in the GOP are pretty deep at this point, so it will be interesting to see if it manages to coalesce back into something like its original form, or if an entirely new party somehow arises.  Given what happened in the Democratic primary it's even conceivable that a viable party could form to the left of the Democrats.

[Michael Hopcroft]

Back in 1964, people argued for supporting Lyndon Johnson, because Goldwater was a nutcase who would escalate the war in Vietnam.

Well, Goldwater did say he was not averse to dropping a few nukes on North Vietnam. That one statement was probably why he was defeated so soundly.

 

LBJ was the ultimate pragmatist, and in the end it cost him dearly. He apparently didn't see the disconnect between his foreign and domestic agendas, neither of which he was particularly enthusiastic about. Kennedy had already set the course for the American intervention of Vietnam, and Johnson felt he had to go along with it or he would lose ground in the Cold War. He didn't so much direct policy as go along with what he thought was the best plan under the circumstances. And that lack of leadership translated into the debacle to come.

 

Actually, Trump and Clinton bear strong resemblances to Goldwater and LBJ. Trump is a demagogue, pure and simple, and his primary attribute remains sheer megalomania -- the belief that America needs a savior and it's him. Clinton also has as her underlying ideology a strong, enduring faith in Hillary Clinton, but she is also a pragmatist who thinks in terms of what she can accomplish realistically (and also what she can get away with). Fanaticism almost always leads to disaster, but pragmatism without a clear moral foundation can also lead to disaster. That is, in fact, why LBJ failed. He had no moral compass. I don't know that Clinton does either.

[Nolgroth]

What's going to be more interesting is what happens next election, assuming the country isn't a smoking ruin after a Trump administration.  

 

 

You are assuming Trump is going to win. I predict that he will get the popular vote and Hillary will get the electoral. I have very little doubt that the combination of who she is and her gender, practically assures a Hillary Clinton presidency. Gotta have two historically significant firsts after each other you know. 

 

In the meantime, there will be much ado among the Trump supporters about how they got screwed by the electoral college system. I wonder if Trump will have the grace to give a proper concession speech. I'm going to predict that he will give one, but it will barely veil his disgruntlement. 

 

This is just my own prognostication. Crystal balls are notoriously unreliable, so we'll have to see in November.  I'll check back then.

[megaplayboy]

Well, Goldwater did say he was not averse to dropping a few nukes on North Vietnam. That one statement was probably why he was defeated so soundly.

 

LBJ was the ultimate pragmatist, and in the end it cost him dearly. He apparently didn't see the disconnect between his foreign and domestic agendas, neither of which he was particularly enthusiastic about. Kennedy had already set the course for the American intervention of Vietnam, and Johnson felt he had to go along with it or he would lose ground in the Cold War. He didn't so much direct policy as go along with what he thought was the best plan under the circumstances. And that lack of leadership translated into the debacle to come.

 

Actually, Trump and Clinton bear strong resemblances to Goldwater and LBJ. Trump is a demagogue, pure and simple, and his primary attribute remains sheer megalomania -- the belief that America needs a savior and it's him. Clinton also has as her underlying ideology a strong, enduring faith in Hillary Clinton, but she is also a pragmatist who thinks in terms of what she can accomplish realistically (and also what she can get away with). Fanaticism almost always leads to disaster, but pragmatism without a clear moral foundation can also lead to disaster. That is, in fact, why LBJ failed. He had no moral compass. I don't know that Clinton does either.

The man who pushed through the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act and launched the Great Society program (medicare, welfare, et al, cut the poverty rate in half) had no moral compass? I think that's a gross oversimplification.

[Old Man]

You are assuming Trump is going to win.

Quite the opposite, although I find that his his chances are not zero. A Trump victory would actually cause the GOP to eventually accrete around him. A Trump loss, on the other hand, leaves the corporate and Tea Party wings blaming each other for the Clinton administration.

[megaplayboy]

If Clinton wins, and gets re-elected, I see her sitting in a limo smoking a cigarette ala Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction, celebrating her final victory over her political enemies.

[Ranxerox]

Okay, since the topic of just how bad would a Trump presidency be was brought up, I would like to give my two cents on the subject.

 

First, jumping to worse case scenarios, if elected president could Trump establish himself as dictator?  The answer to this is absolutely yes.  The trick is just to keep provoking crises and then use them as a pretext for ever greater expansions to the powers of the executive branch.  If he can get us in a large external war while at the same time having rioting in the streets of our major cities, and you know he is capable of this, then he will be in a positioned to establish himself as dictator.  Now do I think this is something that he would do?  Not really.  As horrible of a person as Trump is, I just don't see him intentionally piling up bodies like cord wood.  All that slaughter would get in the way of golf and beauty pageants, and I just can't see him wanting to work that hard at this point in his life.  Still, never say that it could never happen here, because of course it could happen here.  

 

So if we aren't going to embrace worse case scenarios, then what?  Well, the moment that Trump is elected (gods I hate typing that) our credit rating will be downgraded just like the UK's was following the Brexit vote.  He has just talked too much about renegotiating our debt and his history of walking away from financial obligations. The world simply won't see the US as a safe a bet as it use to.  Given the amount the amount of money that we owe, this downgrade will cost us billions and billions.

 

Second out international image will be tattered and it will become nearly impossible for us to form large international coalitions the way that we have in the past.  This will significantly hamper our ability to act on the world stage, and will likely embolden expansionist minded nations.    Of course China and Russia are the first ones that come to mind, but don't be surprised if other smaller powers get into the action.  If you think that the headlines about ISIS and fighting in Syria and Libya are depressing, you haven't seen anything yet.

 

Third, people take their cues on how to behave from the top, so expect under a Trump presidency people to think and act more like Trump.  I'm not going to elaborate on that one, because I really don't want to, but I suspect this would ultimately effect the quality of lives even more than higher interest on our debt or fighting on foreign shores.

 

Now no doubt there are a fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh totally predictable consequence to having a Trump presidency, but I will leave them for smarter, more insightful board member than myself.  Points one through three were plenty for me. 

[Lawnmower Boy]

You make it sound like they're tanking the election on purpose, but I don't think that's the case.  I think the GOP's real problem is that their base has figured out that they're being used.  For over thirty years big business has been using socially conservative white voters to keep themselves in office.  Things have been quite nice for big business, as they've managed to keep their tax breaks mostly intact while minimizing new regulations, even in areas like banking and climate change.  Even Obamacare was a pretty good deal for the pharma and health insurance industries.

 

If you're a socially conservative white voter, however, your world sucks.  Gay marriage is legal.  Immigrants are immigrating.  Bathrooms have been thrown into chaos.  Businesses have to serve gay couples and provide contraception to employees.  "Progress" on anti-abortion has been minimal.  A black man is president, and he fines you a little if you refuse to insure yourself.  Your real wages haven't gone up for decades and you might not even have recovered from the Great Recession.  And these social conservatives are starting to figure out that they've been had.

 

That's where the Tea Party started and why Trump is doing so well--the GOP base is pissed off.  They're convinced that neither Big Business nor the Democrats represent their interests, because they don't, and so they have started voting to shut down and blow up Washington DC.  And the one thing that Big Business could not come up with was a presidential candidate that TPers believed would deliver on social conservatism and blowing up DC.  Bush was an insider.  Walker was an insider.  Kasich was an insider.  Rubio was an insider.  The top two GOP primary candidates were Cruz, who is publicly despised by everyone in DC, and Trump, who wasn't even taken seriously by anyone in DC until much too late.

 

What's going to be more interesting is what happens next election, assuming the country isn't a smoking ruin after a Trump administration.  The fractures in the GOP are pretty deep at this point, so it will be interesting to see if it manages to coalesce back into something like its original form, or if an entirely new party somehow arises.  Given what happened in the Democratic primary it's even conceivable that a viable party could form to the left of the Democrats.

I don't think that the GOP has decided to throw the election. The party isn't capable of anything right now. What's happened is that no-one sees any way of riding the party to victory, nor any clear idea what victory would look like. That's why the Republican slate in the last two elections was so underwhelming --Romney apart; and why the base was so underwhelmed by Romney himself. ('Cuz he wasn't going to deliver a meaningful victory even if he won.)

 

Look at the constituencies:

 

-No-one takes actual libertarians seriously. I'm sorry, for all the strength of the movement in America, they don't. They only look like a real movement when they reach out to the slavery-curious. (Oh, hey, Jerry Pournelle. I was just talking about you!) And while I have no idea how strong the "alt right" is outside of the Internet, I'm going to guess that the Rand Paul GOTV effort captures their actual, numerical salience.  

 

-Social conservatism is identity politics. It's not about winning on abortion and gay rights. It's about signalling values, and when that signalling turns into being actually mean to actual people that you know, the strength of the movement collapses. I'm amazed at the willingness of the big evangelical  names to back Trump, but that's a case of following where their flocks lead. It's just not a good look on men who claim to be moral leaders, and you have to wonder where they go after Trump collapses into epic defeat. 

 

-"Pro-business" conservatives are, after 2008, that one guy in the car who smells really bad, but you have to give him a ride because --Wait. Why do we have to give him a ride again? I didn't agree to this!

 

So who does that leave? Not many people, and obviously not a winning coalition. The GOP have won the popular vote once since 1992, and all the demographic trends are against them getting back to a majority even before the party's ideological police lost their mojo. Add in the party's disadvantage in the Electoral College, and why in Heaven's name would an ambitious politician even try out for the GOP? There are circumstances, but absent those, it's a bunch of clowns because that's all they can get.

 

At the same time, I don't think there's much chance of the GOP breaking up. The party is in far less difficult situation than the Democratic Party after the Civil War, which similarly faced an incoherent and fractious coalition with a permanent disadvantage in the electoral college. But it clawed its way back into power eventually. 

[Ranxerox]

 

Actually, Trump and Clinton bear strong resemblances to Goldwater and LBJ. Trump is a demagogue, pure and simple, and his primary attribute remains sheer megalomania -- the belief that America needs a savior and it's him. Clinton also has as her underlying ideology a strong, enduring faith in Hillary Clinton, but she is also a pragmatist who thinks in terms of what she can accomplish realistically (and also what she can get away with). Fanaticism almost always leads to disaster, but pragmatism without a clear moral foundation can also lead to disaster. That is, in fact, why LBJ failed. He had no moral compass. I don't know that Clinton does either.

 

Hillary Clinton has changed her position many things over the years, but she has always worked to make things better for woman and children.  If you can walk in single directions and hold to a cause for your entire life then you have a moral compass.  Helping woman and children is Hillary's true north.  

[Pattern Ghost]

That, or helping women and children polls consistently well.

[Badger]

I hope Trump has finally choked on his shoe leather.  He's brought nothing but ruin to my preferred party.  He's no Republican but his farce of a campaign run will solidify how people perceive the party for years to come - every stereotype wrapped into one package and paraded before the world for all to see.

 

The man doesn't have a single shred of presidential poise or dignity about him.  He just wants to be President so he can put it on his resume.  

 

If he wins I'm just going to imagine him checking his phone and getting an x-box / steam achievement pop up in the upper corner saying "Achievement Unlocked: The Prez" - and the position ultimately not meaning anything more to him than that.

 

Actually, if I knew he'd only do that last sentence, I'd vote for him.  A do-nothing President is the best President we can hope for.

[Badger]

That, or helping women and children polls consistently well.

 

I have to admit I am to a level of cynicism that I do believe that is the sole and only reason she has done many of those things.

[Pattern Ghost]

To be fair, it's probably not her only motivation, though she's got the stigma of a career politician. We peons in the general population will probably never know the full extent of her motivations, level of sincerity and commitment to the causes she champions, etc. We'll only have her word to go on and her actions to judge her by. Frankly, we'll probably lack the perspective to adequately judge her actions.

 

I just couldn't resist the word play.

[Badger]

Maybe.  I am cynical in general, and especially towards politicians.  And it probably doesn't help having to see twice in my 30 minute break at work that sappy commercial of how Clinton cares about women and children. 

 

I know you have to in politics and all, but I've always been told that those who make such a big deal of their good works are more than likely doing it for "me" rather than for "them".   I cant help but have cynic-o-meter hit danger level on it all.

[Ranxerox]

That, or helping women and children polls consistently well.

 

 

To be fair, it's probably not her only motivation, though she's got the stigma of a career politician. We peons in the general population will probably never know the full extent of her motivations, level of sincerity and commitment to the causes she champions, etc. We'll only have her word to go on and her actions to judge her by. Frankly, we'll probably lack the perspective to adequately judge her actions.

 

I just couldn't resist the word play.

 

There is truth to that.

 

However, I would like to remind you all, that once upon a time, that Hillary was this...

 

a young, political activist with no elections in front of her and no polls to guide her and even then she was already trying to change the world.

 

I also like this picture.

 

 

She is just so adorkable!

[DasBroot]

Actually, if I knew he'd only do that last sentence, I'd vote for him.  A do-nothing President is the best President we can hope for.

 

Policy wise I agree.  His son has already basically come out and said that his VP would be handling foreign and domestic policy.

 

The other half of the presidency is world representative, though, and even if he was the most hands off president in history policy wise I can't believe he'd stay away from the UN, the G7, or anything else that will get "President Trump Meets with ...." on the front page.  He'd be the envoy to the world, the face of  America, and he's a terrible one.

[Christopher R Taylor]

Yeah she tried to change the world...

 

 

But not in a good way.

 

Trump is a jackass and Hillary is a corrupt greedy psycho.  Neither one is anyone we should admire or look up to.  I cannot get the fawning adoration that politicians get when all we should treat them with is contempt and suspicion.  They do not give a crap about you no matter what lies they tell you.

[Certified]

Yeah she tried to change the world...

 

 

But not in a good way.

 

Trump is a jackass and Hillary is a corrupt greedy psycho.  Neither one is anyone we should admire or look up to.  I cannot get the fawning adoration that politicians get when all we should treat them with is contempt and suspicion.  They do not give a crap about you no matter what lies they tell you.

 

 

While I'm not a Hillary Supporter, here are Snopes articles on those pictures

 

http://www.snopes.com/politics/clintons/zeifman.asp

 

http://www.snopes.com/hillary-clinton-blackface-photo/