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The Old Hack

Political Discussion Thread (READ FIRST POST)

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Trump is on TV, fighting for his political life, hyping a raid in Syria in which ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed. Kinda takes away the hyperbole when the target takes his own life by detonating a suicide vest. Now they're going to have to rely on "DNA and biometric testing" to make sure it was him they got.

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On 10/1/2019 at 11:41 AM, Don Edwards said:

Republicans begin impeachment investigation of next Democratic President

It's satire... but dang it sure sounds like what's going on now, with the parties flipped.

Except that Trump has, at the very least, violated the Emoluments clause of the Constitution, from day one.

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For years, I have heard people say that the President of the United States needs actual business experience

Well, now we have a president with business experience, but who's previous government experience had been largely adversarial

Before the current President, EVERY President of the United States had previously held at least One of these Five Government offices (most, two or more)

   1 Vice President of the United States (Who is also the President of the US Senate)
   2 Member of Congress (including House, Senate, Constitutional Convention, and Continental Congress) 
   3 Governor of a State
   4 General in the United States Army
   5 Member of the Presidential Cabinet

There are realities of working in politics that do not have equivalents in business

This is not to say that business experience has no value to a potential president, only that the president needs to be aware that Pennsylvania Avenue is not a corporate board room

Edited by Pharaoh RutinTutin
Oops

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On 10/29/2019 at 7:49 PM, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

For years, I have heard people say that the President of the United States needs actual business experience

Well, now we have a president with business experience,

Wait, did we need to specify *successful* business experience?  Did we really need to spell out a "no bankruptcy" clause?

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3 hours ago, CritterKeeper said:

Wait, did we need to specify *successful* business experience?  Did we really need to spell out a "no bankruptcy" clause?

Just FYI, in terms of what percentage of corporations go bankrupt, Trump-owned/controlled corporations do significantly better than corporations in general.

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6 hours ago, Don Edwards said:

Just FYI, in terms of what percentage of corporations go bankrupt, Trump-owned/controlled corporations do significantly better than corporations in general.

That's still not good enough when it comes to running the United States of America, I believe.

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There is no person alive whose qualifications are good enough for running the United States of America.

And no set of 535 people (or of 9 people) whose collective qualifications are good enough. "To assess the intelligence of a committee, divide the IQ of its stupidest member by the number of members." - R. Heinlein

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We aren't looking for the person who is "good enough"--we are looking for the best out of the pool of people who are running for the office--a pool which normally does not exceed a few dozen and tends to be whittled down to less than one dozen before the Primaries/Caucuses actually get underway. Unfortunately we occasionally get a situation in which both dominant parties utterly loathe the candidate nominated by the other party, (e.g. 2016 Prez) and the chances of any third candidate winning are non-viable because neither party's base will abandon their party's candidate unless that candidate completely implodes.

Also, no President can ever effectively run the country solo--that's what cabinets are for--to delegate the details of each department or other major subsidiary. Trying to directly manage everything is one of the reasons that the current President is unable to stay focused on anything for long.

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5 hours ago, ijuin said:

Also, no President can ever effectively run the country solo--that's what cabinets are for--to delegate the details of each department or other major subsidiary. Trying to directly manage everything is one of the reasons that the current President is unable to stay focused on anything for long.

The other reasons include short attention span, low intelligence, rampant narcissism and concordant need for constant praise and attention.

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The narcissism and need for attention are major factors for why he is trying to control it all himself--he can't allow anybody else to gain the potential praise from doing anything.

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5 hours ago, ijuin said:

The narcissism and need for attention are major factors for why he is trying to control it all himself--he can't allow anybody else to gain the potential praise from doing anything.

What it boils down to is that right now, people are running the country in spite of the president.

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1 hour ago, ProfessorTomoe said:

What it boils down to is that right now, people are running the country in spite of the president.

Yep - when neither they nor the president have any business running the country. Their job is to run the government.

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1 hour ago, Illjwamh said:

Except not at all, because that's absurd, and Trump is being impeached for actual real crimes and abuses of power.

Yep, so far it looks like everything they're accusing him of actually happened... done by the people accusing him.

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3 minutes ago, Don Edwards said:

Yep, so far it looks like everything they're accusing him of actually happened... done by the people accusing him.

You're suggesting that Congressional Democrats arranged to have military aid withheld from Ukraine unless they publicly announced an investigation into Joe Biden over nothing, then took steps to cover up this arrangement so that no one would ever know about it? Then instructed the people involved to lie about it?

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1 hour ago, Illjwamh said:

You're suggesting that Congressional Democrats arranged to have military aid withheld from Ukraine unless they publicly announced an investigation into Joe Biden over nothing, then took steps to cover up this arrangement so that no one would ever know about it? Then instructed the people involved to lie about it?

Nope. But then, the evidence that Trump did anything like - or even threatened to - that keeps falling apart.

On the other hand, the evidence that Biden threatened to have aid withheld from Ukraine unless they SUPPRESSED an investigation into him and his son, loops pretty solid.

Kind of like how the FBI failed to inform the FISA court of the origin and financing of the Steele dossier in order to get the investigation into Trump re: Russian collusion initiated, and then later leaked portions of that document to the press and took the resulting news reports to the FISA court as "new evidence" to justify extending the investigation - and Trump is accused of obstructing justice.

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7 minutes ago, Don Edwards said:

 

On the other hand, the evidence that Biden threatened to have aid withheld from Ukraine unless they SUPPRESSED an investigation into him and his son, loops pretty solid.

 

 

You mean Joe Biden who does not currently work in government and has literally no power to do that?

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3 hours ago, Don Edwards said:

Nope. But then, the evidence that Trump did anything like - or even threatened to - that keeps falling apart.

Yeah, it just keeps falling apa ... oh, wait, there went another testifier, and he directly linked quid pro quo to the president. And aren't the republicans giving in on that now, too?

No, what you've got going for you are the republicans' Moving Goalposts®. Every time one of their definitions of an impeachable/removable offense gets met, they just roll them goalposts back another 15 yards and declare a new definition. Convenient.

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I do not wish to enter the internal American political discussions but I do feel a need to describe how this looks from the Danish point of view.

We have seen the President of the United States again and again yield way to dictators and embrace their praise of him when he did. We saw President Trump in Helsinki where he praised Putin and called Putin's offer to take charge of American citizens and have his intelligence service interrogate them 'incredibly generous.' We witnessed the United States rightly demand the expulsion of Putin's Russia from the G8 when the Russians invaded Ukraine -- and now later we have beheld the sight of Trump agitating for Russia's readmission even though her attack on Ukraine is ongoing.

Now, most lately, we have witnessed how Trump withdrew his support from Kurdish allies without warning, leaving them to the untender mercies of the dictator Erdogan. And we  wonder why Trump seems to be fighting so hard for Putin's goals.

Not long ago President Emmanuel Macron declaimed that the United States could no longer be trusted to uphold its NATO obligations.

As a citizen of Denmark and a veteran of the Danish Army, I have long supported the United States. Not just out of gratitude for my life and freedom, which I owe to an America that did not embrace the craven and shortsighted 'America First' doctrine, but also later on when Danish troops, planes and naval vessels supported the US during the Iraq war, in Afghanistan and also in the second Iraq war. I believed in the 'weapons of mass destructions' claim and even after it was disproven, I would still have supported a US attack on Iraq if it had used the simple justification of Saddam Hussein being a clear and present danger to peace in the middle east. I met an Iraqi immigrant in Denmark who told me that he did not care what anybody else accused the United States of. He would forever be grateful to them for removing Saddam Hussein.

I live in a country which Russia during the Cold War considered a simple obstacle, nothing more. The presence of Denmark to them consisted of an inconvenient bottleneck in which they risked getting their fleet blocked from entering the Atlantic during a potential war. Their plan to deal with this was to drop nuclear devices on every single Danish major city and airport -- even the small local sports airfields -- as well as carpet nuke the entire width of southern Jutland to keep NATO troops from entering the country. They would have left nothing alive in the place I call home and in spite of all still love.

These are the people which Trump unhesitatingly would leave us at the mercy of, in spite of any treaty obligations.

I do not agree with President Macron on very much. I consider him repellent. But I agree with him about the United States, and that terrifies me.

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10 hours ago, Illjwamh said:

 

You mean Joe Biden who does not currently work in government and has literally no power to do that?

No, I mean Joe Biden who was, at the time of the activities in question, Vice President of the United States.

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4 hours ago, Don Edwards said:

No, I mean Joe Biden who was, at the time of the activities in question, Vice President of the United States.

Hmm, interesting. Because all reports seem to indicate that neither he nor his son did anything wrong whatsoever. Please provide any contrary evidence you have so that I can see where you're coming from.

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5 hours ago, Illjwamh said:

Hmm, interesting. Because all reports seem to indicate that neither he nor his son did anything wrong whatsoever. Please provide any contrary evidence you have so that I can see where you're coming from.

Got it. There's nothing wrong with the Vice President of the United States threatening to pull previously-committed financial assistance unless the President of Ukraine fire a prosecutor for the offense of investigating possible corruption that might include the Vice President's son.

(Please note: Joe Biden has bragged about doing this. Article. Video. So there is no room for arguing that he didn't do it, unless you want to suggest that he deliberately falsely claimed to be corrupt.)

And yet you see something wrong with the President of the United States indicating that it would be okay for said investigation to resume and he'd be interested in seeing the results, when the President of Ukraine brings up the subject.

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