BBO Discussion Forums: Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped? - BBO Discussion Forums

A white woman people have dubbed 'Golfcart Gail' called the police on a black man for cheering on his son during a soccer game

Bigot/racist Dennison has empowered other bigots and racists to come out of the closet and openly display their prejudices and hatred. Race relations continue to regress back to the 60's (it's debatable whether that is the 1960's, or the 1860's).

"Anybody can call the police at any time for any reason," one deputy said of the call. "We'll respond."

In all of the examples cited the local voters voted in the Republicans which allowed for the gerrymandering and other assorted ills. So obviously, in some sense, the outcome reflects the will of the voting public in that state. How would you arrange that differently?

Have you ever heard of the concept "unintended consequences"? This is a clear example.

Two weeks ago Bill Maher's closing monologue/rant was all about how "power begets power". Once the GOP gets control of a state or the US government, they can play the game in such a way that it's really hard for the Democrats to take over, even if that's what the majority actually wants.

https://www.youtube....h?v=1PXiINporpk

Republicans Are Still Rewriting History On Pre-Existing Conditions

It's not just Dennison who is a pathological liar.

From the article,

“I voted to protect people with pre-existing conditions,” McSally said. “We cannot go back to where we were before Obamacare, where people were one diagnosis away from going bankrupt, because they could not get access to health care.”

This is from a Republican who repeatedly voted to repeal and cripple the Affordable Care Act brokered by Obama which is the only reason insurance companies are prohibited from kicking people with pre-existing conditions off their insurance. How stupid do Republicans think the American public is? To the extent that anybody believes Republicans on healthcare, apparently pretty stupid.

Perhaps if the Dems announced that they thought the evidence of lying was strong enough to warrant an immediate investigation, or an investigation as soon as soon as they think the House could bring it, with the investigation confined to whether he did or did not lie, I might re-think. But of course no such thing is happening. You can read the posts here to get the drift. It's much more along the lines of how to make the best use of this to advance the agenda of getting a justice with different legal views confirmed. For example, maybe wait until 2020 (presumably really until January 2021).

If Dems were really all that heated over lying, Clinton's second term would have been finished with Gore in the WH. The objective here, as then, is political, the possible means are the accusation of lying. This affects how I see it. I would regard it as a disaster if a change of party in Congress would lead to politically motivated prosecution of people in the other branches. Of course I do not claim that this never happens. But I oppose it, whichever direction the ball is bouncing.
I watched a good part of the hearings and I think it is a no-brainer to decide which of the two was telling the truth. Voters might want to think back on that when they cast their votes. But I don't want a purge of Kavanaugh.

A white woman people have dubbed 'Golfcart Gail' called the police on a black man for cheering on his son during a soccer game

The country has gone crazy with racism. From the article:

Is that really true? Yes, the police or fire department are obliged to respond, but isn't there a law against calling 911 when there isn't really an emergency? Is any "feeling threatened" considered a legitimate reason, no matter how bogus the feeling is? Racists calling the cops on black people just for existing in a public place, there needs to be consequences for unprovoked calls.

When the Trump tax cut was on the verge of being enacted, I called it “the biggest tax scam in history,” and made a prediction: deficits would soar, and when they did, Republicans would once again pretend to care about debt and demand cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

Sure enough, the deficit is soaring. And this week Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, after declaring the surge in red ink “very disturbing,” called for, you guessed it, cuts in “Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid.” He also suggested that Republicans might repeal the Affordable Care Act — taking away health care from tens of millions — if they do well in the midterm elections.

One can hardly fathom the twisted psyche of a president who, after acknowledging that Jamal Khashoggi, a contributing columnist for The Post’s Global Opinions, had likely been murdered, would go before a cheering mob to lavish praise on a U.S. congressman who physically attacked a journalist. “Any guy who can do a body-slam, he’s my kind of — he’s my guy,” Trump said in a Montana campaign appearance on Thursday, referring to Rep. Greg Gianforte (R-Mont.) who pleaded guilty to assaulting the Guardian’s reporter Ben Jacobs, who had the temerity to ask Gianforte a health-care question. “I had heard that he body-slammed a reporter. And he was way up. … I said ‘Oh this is terrible, he’s gonna lose the election,’ ” Trump continued. “Then I said, ‘Well, wait a minute, I know Montana pretty well, I think it might help him.’ And it did.” And his ghoulish fans ate that up.

The Guardian’s U.S. editor responded with a statement: “To celebrate an attack on a journalist who was simply doing his job is an attack on the First Amendment by someone who has taken an oath to defend it,” said John Mulholland. “In the aftermath of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, it runs the risk of inviting other assaults on journalists both here and across the world where they often face far greater threats. We hope decent people will denounce these comments and that the president will see fit to apologize for them.”

Trump won’t apologize, of course, nor will his devoted base hold his remarks against him. To the contrary, this is what they love about him — the contempt for a free press, the celebration of male thuggishness, the mindless emotional outbursts. Somehow it empowers them, to side with brutes and bullies, to revel in the silencing of a free press.

And in case you thought such moral depravity was limited to a few thousand fans, a concerted smear campaign against Khashoggi is underway. The Post reports:

In recent days, a cadre of conservative House Republicans allied with Trump has been privately exchanging articles from right-wing outlets that fuel suspicion of Khashoggi, highlighting his association with the Muslim Brotherhood in his youth and raising conspiratorial questions about his work decades ago as an embedded reporter covering Osama bin Laden, according to four GOP officials involved in the discussions who were not authorized to speak publicly. …

While Khashoggi was once sympathetic to Islamist movements, he moved toward a more liberal, secular point of view, according to experts on the Middle East who have tracked his career. Khashoggi knew bin Laden in the 1980s and 1990s during the civil war in Afghanistan, but his interactions with bin Laden were as a journalist with a point of view who was working with a prized source.

Some claimed that Khashoggi, who had worked for multiple news organizations over the years and was allegedly slaughtered for his writings critical of the Saudi regime, was not a real journalist. The willful dissembling takes one’s breath away. The Post’s editorial board recently recounted, “[Khashoggi] was twice fired as the editor of the most progressive Saudi newspaper, Al Watan, in one case for publishing sharp critiques of Islamist extremists. A television news network he helped to found in Bahrain in 2012 was taken off the air after one day, after it broadcast an interview with a critic of that country’s authoritarian regime.”

The whisper campaign comes not only from the fever swamps and usual talk radio know-nothings, but also from those who fancy themselves as foreign policy sophisticates at the forefront of efforts to counter Iran’s nuclear ambitions and regional aggression. It is hard to know if this is water-carrying for the administration, panic over disruption to the administration’s already incoherent Iran policy or hatred of the mainstream media.


Whatever the impetus, the lack of decency on display — the willingness to defame a reportedly tortured, murdered and dismembered journalist to deflect blame from a brutal regime that snookered both the U.S. and Israeli governments into adopting it as the key bulwark against Iran — should disgust people of good will, whatever their political or foreign policy views. Proximity to and reverential treatment of an amoral, congenital liar in the White House have disabled the intellectual and moral reasoning powers of many previously respectable Republicans.

Whatever the cause, if you are falsely smearing a missing man, trying to diminish the horror of a thuggish regime’s alleged gruesome murder or yukking it up with a president celebrating violence against a reporter, it’s time to rethink your politics.

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It seems hrothgar's call to arms is heard around the country.

The Iran issue further underscores how nonsensical the current alignment is.

One thing you hear is that the Saudis are valuable allies against Iran. But that's backward. The Saudi-Iranian rivalry is very intense, and we are valuable to Saudi Arabia as allies against Iran. The leverage here is entirely in our corner. As the country that's located on another continent and that doesn't admire either country's political system, we have the option of moving to a more neutral position between these two countries unless the Saudis do what we want.

Fear that Americans would realize this is what drove think tanks funded by the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates into such a frenzy of opposition to President Obama's nuclear deal with Iran.

Resolving the nuclear issue would have set the stage to make a more neutral US posture at least theoretically possible, which, in turn, would have given the US a very strong upper hand vis-à-vis Saudi Arabia. But the Gulf states, working with Israel, got Republicans to scuttle the deal in a way that has made the world less safe from nuclear proliferation but serves their narrow regional political agenda.

So what sophisticated people like Thomas Friedman come up with are these elaborate stories about America's vital interest in pursuing domestic reform in Saudi Arabia, reform that requires us to be so intermingled with the Saudi elite that we can push and prod in just the right ways to produce the outcome we need.

Folks thinking this way ought to consider the possibility that they're looking at it through the wrong lens of the telescope. The realities of Cold War politics got us involved in deep, long-term cooperation with a Saudi state that is not otherwise a natural partner for the United States. The result is a kind of weird, complex family dynamic with a lot of money and feelings and oil going back and forth that, if you're in the middle of it, can seem very important. But the nuances of internal Saudi politics only seem important because the relationship is so thick; they're not a reason to have a thick relationship.

We don't need to topple the Saudi regime and try to put a better one in its place. But we also don't need to pretend that its leaders are these fantastic reformers and hail them as visionaries. There are a lot of autocrats in the world who may or may not control natural resources and who have to be dealt with as a reality of the global system, and that's fine. But Saudi Arabia is just a bigger version of Equatorial Guinea or a better-managed version of Venezuela; it's not crucial to anything.

First, Trump draws on the myth of American exceptionalism. He depicts the United States as the world’s best hope: there is only one chosen nation and, as president, all of his decisions work toward making America great. By tying himself to American exceptionalism – while classifying his detractors as “weak” or “dummies” – he’s able to position his critics as people who don’t believe in, or won’t contribute to, the “greatness” of the nation.

Trump also uses fallacious and divisive rhetorical techniques that prevent him from being questioned or backed into a corner.

He often uses ad populum arguments, which are appeals to the wisdom of the crowd (“polls show,” “we’re winning everywhere”).

When opponents question his ideas or stances, he’ll employ ad hominem attacks – or criticisms of the person, rather than the argument (dismissing his detractors as “dummies,” “weak” or “boring”). Perhaps most famously, he derided Carly Fiorina’s appearance when she started to go up in the polls after the first Republican debate (“Look at that face!” he cried. “Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?”).

Finally, his speeches are often peppered with ad baculum arguments, which are threats of force (“when people come after me they go down the tubes”).

Because demagogues make arguments based on false claims and appeal to emotion, rather than reason, they’ll often resort to these devices. For example, during his 1968 presidential run, George Wallace declared, “If any demonstrator ever lays down in front of my car, it’ll be the last car he’ll ever lay down in front of” (ad baculum). And Senator Joseph McCarthy resorted to an ad hominem attack when he derided former Secretary of State Dean Acheson as a “pompous diplomat in striped pants with a phony British accent.”

Have you heard this reaction to the Kavanaugh hearings: https://youtu.be/fZcHKAbl4UA

Asked whether he thought Saudi Arabia's explanation for the death of Jamal Khashoggi was credible, President Dennison said "I do. I do."

i'm not going to listen to that because i know it's pure, unadulterated garbage. Many Top Donors to “Black Americans for the President’s Agenda” Are, in Fact, Wealthy White People

Words cannot penetrate the ignorance and hate and vindictiveness of Dennison and his crowd; it is time for action, and that means vote.