President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

Which schools and teachers are doing that? Because I'm not seeing that in the social studies homework from my fifth grader. Nor am I seeing it being taught by the high school social studies/American history teacher I've known for decades.

 

To deny the many disturbing and downright horrible events of American history is to ignore reality. It is quite possible to describe the injustice and racist motivation of the internment of Japanese-Americans in WW2 while also describing how entering and winning the war was a good thing.

 

Vote GOP. They're authentic.

Sen. Kelly Loeffler Appears In 'Hunting' Video But Doesn't Actually Have A Hunting License

 

I am not going to watch the debate tonight, but it seems to me Mayor Pete and Amy K's best shot is to repeat a line Lenny Bruce said about presidential elections 60 years ago. "You're gonna take a chance on a guy when Mutual of Omaha won't?"

 

2nd Amendment doesn’t require hunting licenses. Such things are socialism

 

It's funny you wrote that, because I saw several people responding to our state Game & Fish with the exact same thing. And they were serious!

G&F made a Facebook post about how the number of declining hunters and anglers was hurting conversation efforts. Fewer license sales = less money for the agency. Folks went apeshit with conspiracy theories and complaints about how "it's not right that I have to buy a license to hunt PUBLIC land."

 

(you'll have to forgive the North Idaho accent ...)

"I hate taxes. I hate gummint ... shut it all down!"

"What d'ya mean, half the lanes on the interstate are closed? How'm I spose to get to Costco?"

 

Generally speaking, the tea party take is hyperbolic and sentimental.

 

Consider, for a moment, the amount of rhetorical investment you just put into two halves of one thing. (And frankly, not even one thing, because the internment was, yes, morally wrong, but also unnecessary and untethered to winning in the Pacific theater, which, as we know, was won with an atomic bomb, not a victory of hearts and minds or through battle attrition.)

Yes, indeed, winning the biggest, bloodiest war in human history was a good thing.

To be clear, I'm not some American exceptionalist. Far from it. But the collective bellyaching from either side of the political spectrum has, as a joint purpose, total intransigence. And the violence around us - be it on smaller-yet-tragic scales in drug wars or larger, more devastating scales with lone, often racist gunmen - is a commentary, to some degree, on the erosion of our interest in general, common good. Our interests and grievances have become so siloed that we've begun to develop one of those flow charts where, just to get to larger civic consensus, we have to check off the wants and concerns of 17 different interest groups, often taking the emotional temperature of folks I wouldn't trust make three square meals in a day.

Here's where that gets the Democratic Party: So clueless about what it wants or can even agree upon that a super billionaire, who hasn't even been in a debate yet and has repudiated many stances he held in his last political role, has a real chance of winning a nomination on sheer...advertising dollars? The party of the poor, aggrieved and put upon is going to pick...that guy? Who's the opposite of everything they are?

How shallow and nakedly transparent a power grab would that be? After years of calling for a deep American conversation on our collective, in-some-cases-centuries-old atrocities, years of lecturing moral lessors on the various tyrannies of rich, entitled, lecherous men, the plan might come down to anointing - then leveraging - one of the richest, more lecherous of these men to wave his big money wand over the country?

Tho independent, I've long caucused with the blue side, and almost surely will again, in part because I can size up a cynical, pragmatic decision for what it is and can see, clearly, Donald Trump just grinds government more to a halt. But if Bloomberg is the byproduct of the great progressive awakening, his ascension would render it largely a fraud.

 

#Resist costs money, yo.

 

I can't help but think that the Sanders campaign has made a reasoned decision that what whatever is in his post-heart attack medical record is worse for the campaign than dealing with the daily attacks over Sanders' promise to release them and then refusing to do so. Calls for them are not going to go away.