Yeah, but Trump had a bigger crowd, biggest evah!!
Yeah, but Trump had a bigger crowd, biggest evah!!
There came a time when the Old Gods died! The Brave died with the Cunning! The Noble perished locked in battle with unleashed Evil! It was the last day for them! An ancient era was passing in fiery holocaust!
Yes. I think there is very little room for argument anymore. The two worst presidents in history are widely considered to be James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson.
Buchanan, for his part, did literally nothing in the face of growing insurrectionist behavior from Southern states. Secession continued during the lame-duck period and he decided to only lament that Republicans were responsible for the dissent of the states. By the time Lincoln was inaugurated, there was no time to stop a war. It had already begun. So...historic inaction and counter-factual blaming of political opponents are the primary reasons for whit Buchanan is billed as either the second worst or the worst president in history.
Johnson, on the other side of Lincoln's presidency (incidentally, widely viewed to in the running for best presidency, if not actually the best), actively prohibited an appropriate Reconstruction. He actively stood in the way of ensuring Black suffrage in the South, leading to the passage of the 14th Amendment by Congress to ensure that the federal government had the power to prohibit Southern states from preventing suffrage towards Black folks. This, thusly, emboldened new domestic terrorist groups, like the KKK, to hunt, maim, and kill Black people with impunity. He provided amnesty for poor Confederate traitors. He, then, insisted on pardoning Jefferson Davis, the former president of the Confederacy. He made a sham of reconstruction and left Grant to pick up the pieces of an emboldened South, intent on keeping freedmen down in the new South.
Trump's inaction on COVID has taken more than 2/3rds of the lives lost in the Civil War. His administration's corruption--by having diplomats stay in his hotels (making money off of his presidency for his businesses), refusing to divest from aforementioned businesses, using his power as president to fire investigators (Comey) or those who would not stop them for him (from Sessions to Barr, for instance), the refusal to engage in foreign policy and retreat from the world except for where it only suited us (and no one else), the use of his office to put down non-sympathetic protests from Black Lives Matter while simultaneously refusing to use his status as commander-in-chief to help protectorates in chaos (Puerto Rico and then D.C. most recently), and the use of his office to extort a foreign government for dirt on his political opponent in the 2020 election--is legendary in scope and scale, trumping even presidents whose legacies were ruined by corruption merely within the administration, such as Taft and Grant. His deference to white supremacists, and his emboldening of disunionists, has no parallel in modern politics or since Andrew Johnson. And he literally committed the unthinkable act of insisting that a free-and-fair election in the country was not actually free and fair and that he won despite all evidence to the contrary.
There is literally no parallel for Trump in American history. He is a net negative in a robust, ridiculous sense.
As they should. No rules should be put in place to organize the Senate in the way that basically gives McConnell carte blanche to stop any legislation that he doesn't like from reaching Biden's desk. It is a recipe for allowing abuse. Democrats probably don't have the votes to nuke the filibuster, given Manchin and Sinema have both argued against undertaking such an action. But it would be appropriate to preserve the threat of this action to, at the very least, apply pressure to some more moderate Republican senators to stay the filibuster in order to pass legislation that Democrats want to move on desperately (such as a renewal of Voting Rights). If this isn't done, McConnell is going to have enormous influence over what policies get passed--influence he certainly wouldn't give to Democrats if the situation were reversed.
With Great Power, Comes Great Responsibility
Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Re: The assault on the Portland ICE facility -
I won't say one way or another until I know more, but I've reached out to people I know who are usually involved in leftist demonstrations here in Portland, and literally NO ONE I know was there. Add to this that we KNOW Proud Boys and Joey Gibson like using these tactics to discredit the left, that I have been at many demonstrations and never seen 'tazers' or 'pepper balls' on our side (we prefer cans of Pepsi and soup, rocks and smoke pellets from the dollar store...), and that the left in Portland has been pretty quiet since the protests about George Floyd...and this seems a little suspect to me, as a Portland leftist.
That said, if it WAS leftists, shame on them. There ARE those on the left who are only interested in idealistic purity, and for whomever Biden is not much better than Trump, but they are...easily disregarded by most leftists I know who understand that progress isn't an all at once thing...no matter how much we might wish it were. ICE is monstrous and should be shuttered, but this is not how it gets done. This only discredits us, and serves no good short or long term goal that ANYONE on the left wants...
Last edited by zinderel; 01-21-2021 at 04:04 PM.
"I love mankind...it's people I can't stand!!"
- Charles Schultz.
Don't really care for where this one seems to be heading. Between CPS and Mayor Lightfoot, it feels like someone from the "Enforcement..." corner of things will head right to their "Go To..." when it comes to dealing with working this sort of thing out...
https://chicago.suntimes.com/educati...teachers-union
CPS calls CTU proposal an ‘illegal strike’
Articles of Impeachment filed against Biden by what's her Qaname.
What really gets me is how Trump has had zero positives to his name before or during his time in office. Like even with some of the worst presidents we've had in modern history, you can point at at least one redeeming thing they did. Trump has either bungled or maliciously sabotaged everything he's ever touched, and has made our entire country weaker as a result. Even the one accomplishment his cult likes to parrot, 'keeping us out of foreign wars', was done via stabbing our Kurdish allies in the back handing money over to human-rights pariahs like Saudi Arabia. He's got nothing. Democrat, Republican, or whatever, he's pure scum to the core.
The Cover Contest Weekly Winners ThreadSo much winning!!
"When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." - Sinclair Lewis
“It’s your party and you can cry if you want to.” - Captain Europe
If one was to just call "Strikes..." and "Balls..."?
The First Step Act ain't "Nothing..."
While it didn't get the coverage, there is also this. Not one for the record books, but it's worth being honest about it if it winds up being anything like "On The Level..." -
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/19/polit...ist/index.html
'Several dozen' of Trump's pardons pushed by criminal justice reform groups, source saysSeveral dozen of President Donald Trump's final slate of more than 100 pardons and commutations will be doled out to individuals whose cases have been championed by criminal justice reform advocates, a source close to the process tells CNN.
We may not need to worry much. He quit attending the daily intelligence briefings early on and eventually they had to boil everything down to the bare minimum of information on only 2-3 pages. He couldn't be bothered to do more than skim any of it. The guy didn't take the job to work for a living.
The Cover Contest Weekly Winners ThreadSo much winning!!
"When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." - Sinclair Lewis
“It’s your party and you can cry if you want to.” - Captain Europe