Morning Ed: Muslims {2017.01.30.M}
A little under two years ago, Muslim convert “Roger” was replaced as the counter-terrorism chief. He had a number of notches in his belt, including bin Laden’s death.
Eli Lake reports on some Syrian-Americans who are not fans of the Iranian president, or the most recent former American one.
The story of Aaron Driver, a suburban Canadian turn ISIS supporter and criminal.
Meet Ali J Mohammed, Iraq native serving in our Marine Corps.
‘I know [a ban on Muslims is] very much illegal and unconstitutional. I know it’ll never be enacted. And furthermore, even Donald Trump has backed out of it,’ says Saba [Ahmed].
If we bombed you, we’re banning you. To be fair, the list of affected nations was, evidently, inherited from the previous administration. Benjamin Wittes explains just how unconscionable it is, while David French explains that it’s no big deal.
Late last year, Zar Mohammad Stanikzai was quite worried that his a visa cap preventing exfiltration of those who help our military actions overseas. And here we are, with US veterans now worried for them.
The first two refugees kept out of America by President Trump’s order are Iraqis who helped US troops survive during the war.
— Jim Cooper (@repjimcooper) January 28, 2017
Aspects of the Executive Order have been stayed, and we’ll see what happens, but it seems likely that it would be pretty hard to get credibility back with foreign agents after this sort of thing.
Zar Mohammad Stanikzai: That is the single worst thing about this whole EO. We made promises to these people in exchange for their help. We should back that up rather than leaving them to fend for themselves.
But of course, we could have prevented that if we hadn’t created the situation where we needed their help in the first damn place.Report
Doesn’t that make our culpability on going back on our promises to these people worse?Report
I’m not sure about “worse” but it’s not a good move politically or morally. But we’ve a history of bailing on people we promised to help don’t we? Perhaps I miss recall but didn’t we just bail out of S Vietnam and “let the chips fall where they may”?Report
We got a lot of the Hmong out.Report
We pulled our military out and promised to keep supporting the South financially, then cut off our support.Report
Also important to note that the stay is only about people who have already arrived here, and therefore does not affect this component of the EO at all.
If I was a Secure Borders guy who had spent years talking about how my concerns have nothing to do with legal immigration or good “dudes” (like … interpreters risking their lives to help the military) I would be absolutely *furious* right now. I would be out there with protesters making it damn clear that this order does not represent my side. It’s a bit jarring to see very little of that fury.Report
The GOP’s blase response to the green card ban is going to make it very hard to take “its about the illegality, they should have got in line and come in the right way” seriously ever again. If people believe that, they should be just as mad as the lefties right now.Report
The Secretaries of State and Homeland Security can waive (or wave) anyone through.Report
That was my understanding. We’ve temporarily gone from a rules-based system to a discretionary system. Personally, I think in countries “in which we are at war,” the DOD should largely be deciding policy and doing background checks.Report
The Secretaries of State and Homeland Security can waive (or wave) anyone through.
Actually, they can’t, because the people who came up with this thing are total fucking morons who don’t know how entry to the US works. There won’t be anyone able to show up to be waved through.
To fly to the US, *the airline has to be believe you are going to be allowed in*. They can actually be fined for knowingly flying people here if those people are not allowed in. They aren’t required to detect fake paperwork or run you against US watchlists, but they are supposed to check that you, in theory, *have* paperwork that would allow you entrance.
So…how does this extreme vetting work? At the embassies…before they get visas? That would have made sense.
But…we just *rejected* a bunch of people with visas, didn’t we? So…we’re…vetting them here instead?
Or is there some point where visas to enter the country of people from those countries *do* become valid again, because this ‘extreme vetting’ was done pre-visa? Are embassies being asked to extreme-vet? Is there even such a process existing?
And, most importantly: Are airlines supposed to fly people with visas here or not? Are airlines supposed to be checking issue dates of visas? Is there some ‘super-visa’ coming, saying ‘This person can enter the country, *and we really mean it this time*. Unlike that last time when we lied about it.’?
A visa literally is written permission to enter the country. If we do not want people to enter the country, we *must not issue them travel visas allowing them to enter the country*. This is, you know, trivially simple logic.
This entire thing is, in fact, total chaos and utter gibberish, from top to bottom. Because, again, the person writing *has no idea how entry to this country even works*.
If we want to add more discretion to the system, it has to be added *before visas are issued*.
And that’s just the *visa* side. The permanent residency part is even stupider. Green card holders are, under US law and constitutional theory, *US citizens in everything but the vote*. They are ‘US nationals’. They *have all constitutional rights* except the vote and cannot be arbitrarily banned from the country.Report
“To fly to the US, *the airline has to be believe you are going to be allowed in*.”
Which may explain the odd situation where people are reporting that aircrew were handing out I-407 forms while the plane was in the air.
“Because, again, the person writing *has no idea how entry to this country even works*.”
And, here’s the thing, I doubt he was the only one. He may, in fact, represent the majority position prior to this past weekend.
Which is the Freakonomics take on Trump. He’ll be one of the best Presidents ever, by accident, because between opposing him and correcting his ridiculous errors we’ll understand the degree to which the governance of the United States has turned into Just Let The Executive Branch Handle Everything.Report
DD,
*shrugs* I was more betting on the “wait, we can’t let the madman have drones”… but yeah, anything to reduce the executive dictatorship might do us some good.Report
@davidtc
Yeah, this is … kind of a big deal. We now have clear evidence that many of these people were prevented from seeking legal counsel. And there are some unconfirmed reports that people were coerced into signing forms that relinquished their green card, or were charged with violating INS law even though the executive order happened while they were in transit. So we’re one week into the administration and they are already detaining US nationals without representation, attempting to strip them of residency, and deporting them (to the extent, by the way, that a judge required some individuals to actually be brought *back* to the United States). So yeah, the fact that we’re not getting a full throated “what the fish were you THINKING!” from the “obey the laws on the books” borders folks is pretty damn telling.
The one upside, as you mention, is that the administration either did all of this idiocy because of fantastic incompetence heretofore unseen in the White House, or because of a fantastically incompetent misunderstanding of how to be evil in the White House. Because if your goal is to send out a trial balloon to see how well our institutions stand up to a little bit of autocratic pressure, your target should be the *most* marginalized and unrepresented people in the society, not the most empathetic. You sure as hell don’t *start* with green-card holders and Iraqi interpreters – the latter being possibly the most sympathetic subsection of refugees (literally putting their lives at risk to support the United States government against our enemies) and the former being the most institutionally-connected and nationalized subsection of foreigners. It’s like testing out your internment camp scheme on orphans and veterans. There may be an 11 dimensional explanation for passing a law with some chaos built into it, but there is absolutely no competent reason for building in *this kind* of chaos. As the events over the weekend aptly demonstrated.Report
It makes sense if you assume the Left is going to get upset no matter what Trump does.
Trump just tried to implement “asking for the moon”… when he settles for half the moon, everyone will be relieved. Imagine a Mongol general riding up and saying he’ll kill everyone man/woman/child in the city, and then after much talk he settles for just killing the soldiers.Report
The problem with asking the moon is if you have to deal with people repeatedly. Then you get the reputaton as a moon-asker and people just refuse to negiotiate at all. The Presidency isn’t like being a development CEO, you can’t burn your bridges behind you after you get what you want.
Similarly, if you want to act like a Mongol, you need overwhelming force. Otherwise the townlanders get together with some guns and start shooting you in the face rather than deal with your outrageous Mongol demands.Report
Trump really does have overwhelming force backing him up, aka the power of the gov after generations of building the imperial Presidency. Refusing to negotiate isn’t an option for most people/companies/countries.
There’s a good chance that what’s he’s doing here is legal. Similarly he can break any heavily regulated company via his minions, and probably even any company period. Given how complex our legal system is, there’s a good chance he can arrest most people for *something*.Report
The Presidency, even in its imperial form, doesn’t have all that much power in terms of giving direct orders to people. If Trump tries to rule the way he has this week, he’s going to find his power degrading fast as he gets less co-operation.
Similarly, if he bypasses long standing president on the separation of the Presidency from direct law enforcement against individuals rather than setting policy, he’s going to be in a heap of trouble fast.Report
Granted, if the people he can fire disobey and refuse to carry out his orders, then the only thing he can do is fire them. However that’s not much of a limitation.
Julian Assange might disagree with you.Report
This is probably a bad sign: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/acting-attorney-general-an-obama-administration-holdover-wont-defend-trump-immigration-order/2017/01/30/a9846f02-e727-11e6-b82f-687d6e6a3e7c_story.htmlReport
We’re past that bad sign. He fired her.
Plus he apparently fired the acting director of ICE. So its going around.Report
Brent,
You would not believe how many headaches trump is causing…
Every single Day. Three steps forward, two steps back.
What?Trump did something? There goes yesterday’s plans…Report
They *have all constitutional rights* except the vote and cannot be arbitrarily banned from the country.
Actually, I think I’m technically wrong about this: They cannot be banned from the country at all, any more than citizens can. There is no such thing as ‘exile’ in US law.
For someone with a green card to lose the ability to enter the country, they have to have their green card revoked.
This requires either a) fraud during application, b) not actually residing in the US for long enough, or c) being convicted of a crime. And only a *judge* can revoke their status.
As long as someone has a green card in their hand that has not been revoked by a legal proceedings involving an immigration judge, they can no more be barred from this country than a citizen can.Report
To fly to the US, *the airline has to be believe you are going to be allowed in*. They can actually be fined for knowingly flying people here if those people are not allowed in. They aren’t required to detect fake paperwork or run you against US watchlists, but they are supposed to check that you, in theory, *have* paperwork that would allow you entrance.
Flying to the US from Germany (just a couple weeks ago!), I can confirm that my passport was checked no fewer than 3 times when walking from my Doha->Frankfurt gate to my Frankfurt->Chicago gate.Report
#same to and from Vancouver. The only time they didn’t check was the final leg MSP – BOS.Report
Oh, and Delta checked my passport for the YVR – MSP leg, even after I had cleared the US border checks, which happen on the CA side.Report
Yup to all that.
It’s because airlines *will be fined* if you somehow manage to show up at the US without documentation that logically would allow you to enter. I am not sure exactly what the rules are, I have a feeling this doesn’t apply to *forged* documentation, or people tripping watchlists and stuff.
But airlines do have to make some sort of good faith effort that people they are carrying to the US have documentation that would *appear* to allow them valid entry to the US, or they will be fined for that…and also, I believe, have to fly, or pay for the cost of someone else flying, the people back where they came from. (I’m sure they probably try to charge the person, but who knows how often they get paid for what is, after all, an involuntary airplane ride.)
In fact, as I recently stumbled across in immigration law, they can be *forbidden from transporting people to the US* if they keep bringing invalid people in, which obviously would totally screw them over, considering how much they’ve paid for those routes and airline terminal fees and already sold tickets.Report
Agreed. Banning refugees is bad, but locking out the folks who proved themselves under fire is an order of magnitude worse.
Although, to be fair, Obama wasn’t great about this bit either.Report
Terrorists killed six people and critically injured another five at a mosque in Quebec City last night. Not much is known at this point, but two have been arrested.
I suppose I shouldn’t be any more shocked that this was in Canada, but I am.Report
This was Sunni on Shia or Shia on Sunni. Forget this. It’s not important. It’s not relevant.
Even bringing it up is evidence that you’re trying to hurt refugees. Why would you even bring this up?Report
The fish, Jaybird. Six people were killed. Six families are grieving family members. A community that has probably already seen threats and harassment is now dealing with the horror of this mass murder.
I brought it up because I was shocked and horrified by it, and it seemed relevant to the ‘morning ed’ topic at hand.Report
As it turns out, it was not Sunni on Shia or Shia on Sunni.
So it’s something that is very important for us all to discuss.
You’re right. I shouldn’t have questioned it.Report
@jaybird — There is something wrong with you.Report
“I suppose I shouldn’t be any more shocked that this was in Canada, but I am.”
Why would you say that?Report
Shootings aren’t common here. When its more than one person getting shot for whatever reason, it frequently makes the national news.
If turns out to be “political” rather than a personal or criminal activity related killing, that’s even rarer still. Its happened, but not often.Report
Because, a year before your own federal election, the governing CPC ran a campaign that was about 5% as blatantly anti-Muslim as Trump’s, which led to widespread condemnation, and probably contributed somewhat to their defeat.
Because while I recognize of course Canada is a racist society, as which one isn’t, still one of the big patriotic mumbo-jumbo views we are inculcated with is that Canada is defined by its multiculturalism and accomodation.
Because I live here. Even though Quebec, QC is barely closer to me than Victoria, TX, national borders carry a mental weight. The Quebec mosque shooting feels much closer to me than the Texas mosque burning.
Because as Brent notes, there are fewer guns and fewer shootings in Canada.
Because I’ve been lately developing a pessimism w.r.t. the course of the immigrant experience in the USA, I have apparently not extended it to the same extent to Canada.Report
“Well, I guess I shouldn’t use this to make a political statement…”
“Yeah, I guess you shouldn’t.”
“How dare you suggest that I made a political statement?!”Report
You asked. I answered.Report
Per CBC, “The two men arrested following the deadly shooting at a Quebec City mosque Sunday night are Alexandre Bissonnette and Mohamed Khadir, Radio-Canada has learned.”
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-city-mosque-gun-shots-1.3957686Report
Mohamed el Khadir is not considered a suspect, but is considered a witness. Bissonnette is not Muslim.Report
Yep. Be careful with early reports. I’m seeing a ton of stuff that Bissonnette is a total white power guy. Is he? I dunno. There is a cached version of his FB page floating around. I see nothing on it unusual for an average young dude. He evidently likes Megadeath. But whatever. Don’t believe early reports.
Did he do it? Maybe. Maybe not. We’ll find out, I suppose.Report
From what I understand, he’s a Quebec Separatist.
Which is something that Americans haven’t had to think about for decades. “White Separatism” is the closest thing that Americans have to a frame for that, I’d think.
But they shouldn’t confuse that with that frame being an accurate representation of what’s contained.Report
At this moment there is nothing to indicate he was motivated by Quebec seperatism or that he was particularly seperatist. Its not like its uncommon for a ethnically French Canadian francophone to have seperatist inclinations, or that Quebec seperatism has any but the most tenuous association with violence.Report
Well, I guess we’re learning about him, which, he is exactly what I would have predicted, so whatever: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/quebec-city-mosque-attack-suspect-known-for-right-wing-online-posts/article33833044
This takes on the notion that he’s a “lone wolf”: https://twitter.com/sazza_jay/status/826210834649079808Report
That first link, if correct, has all the hallmarks. I’ve unpacked the reasons why in the past.
That second link is reaching in a big way.Report
Not just reaching. Lone wolf explicitly means a person radicalized by a wider movement but did the specific act alone. It’s a reference to the tactics white supremicists adopted when they figured out that any organized group they put together would be infiltrated by the feds.
The term means exactly what she wants it to mean. If she doesn’t understand that, its not the fault of the term, its her fault for not knowing what she’s talking about.Report
Right lone wolfs don’t need a wider movement to act. Several things can be a trigger, if a trigger is even needed.
This doesn’t deny something about the interactions with the supremacist triggered this action, but it could have come from any of several different axis.
The SPLC started this neat trick that every lone wolf on the right is directly linked to white supremacy, and that opens the door to start parsing the anti-authoritarian right as terrorist groups.Report
I’d distinguish that, to be a lone wolf, the action has to be for a political purpose. You have to be inspired by a political cause to be a lone wolf, which is what give the term meaning distinct from other individual spree killings. The existance of a wider movement to be the inspiration is pretty much in the definition of the term.
Part of how the SPLC can use it to characterize groups like that is that it was explicitly a tactic that white supremecists were encouraging their followers to use, which created the terminology in the first place.Report
Political causes are typically of the left. It is still early to be discussing this, but do you see that he was much a political activist in his youth?
I will say no more about it.Report
Yup. We basically have two general profiles for this type of thing and this is one of them.
It’s good not to jump to conclusions, but writing down a prediction and sealing it in an envelope to be opened once the truth came out would produce some pretty clear patterns.Report
Once again, we must be reminded that there’s almost never a second shooter. The red flags were there.Report
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-30/trump-s-next-move-on-immigration-to-hit-closer-to-home-for-tech
According to this, Trump’s next target is HB-1 Visa Programs. It is going to be interesting to see how this unfolds and whether tech giants can use their money and corporate power to reign Trump/Bannon in. My guess is not.
Over at LGM, we are discussing Trump’s historically low popularity numbers but I am in a cynical and pessimistic mood. Trump still is very popular with the GOP and Chait started theorizing we would be heading to a partisan presidency long before the 2016 GOP primaries. The actions that Trump did over the weekend were massively unpopular with the country but they are popular with the GOP base and enough of the electorate that gave Trump his technical victory based on an 18th century anarchronism. I suspect the GOP is going to double down on the gerrymandering and we are headed for periods of massive social unrest.Report
You overestimate the number of people who actually like anything Trump does.
Wanting to kick washington in the balls does not mean people actually want TrumpLogic.Report
>> The actions that Trump did over the weekend were massively unpopular with the country
I would like to believe this but I don’t. The Trump fans I’ve spoken to are still in “give him a chance” mode and believe these are just kinks that will soon be worked out, but that his heart is in the right place. They do not see protests (and to be clear, I attended one myself) as any kind of repudiation but as a typical and expected liberal response.
FWIW, I think this executive order could have been the most popular thing Trump had done in his first week, and the botched roll-out gives me hope that it can be challenged in the courts and used to put the admin + GOP on the defensive. But the protests are a reflection of leftist energy, not of popular opinion as a whole.Report
@trizzlor
I said that Trump still had high approval ratings among the GOP and that might be all that matters.
Chait discussed this a while ago. There used to be an ideal that Presidents were bipartisan enough and needed to represent all Americans and Presidents took bipartisan approval seriously. But starting with Obama, the polls for Presidential approval became more and more partisan. Democrats approved of his performance while Republicans are not. Now Republicans are going to approve of Trump while Democrats do not.
Our system is not designed to function like this. Parliamentary systems have safety valves for executives/Prime Ministers with high unpopularity via notes of no confidence and the PM’s party has power to force the unpopular executive out.
Nixon lasted for a long time because we don’t have these kind of valves. He only resigned when he lost the support of elites of his party and this was with a Democratic majority in the House and Senate.Report
It takes time to turn a super tanker. Those people that supported Trump are not likely to drop that publicly in a week. That is just people. Once you publicly support something it takes a heck of a lot of stuff to push you to publicly admit you were wrong. Especially on highly emotionally charged topics like this. We shouldn’t expect Trumpets to drop him this fast. It’s a slow wearing down, a grinding away that will change views on him by some of his supporters. It will also change faster when they are the ones getting hurt instead of distant others.Report
I didn’t support Trump when he ran for President, I voted against him, I don’t support a lot of these policies…
…but there are parts of this that are entertaining and parts that might be useful. Trump was elected to break things that were broken so they might be fixed. If you’re going to have a bull in a china shop there’s going to be side effects.
Thus far he’s looking pretty effective. He picked his crew, he’s getting them past the Senate, and he’s fulfilling his campaign promises.
I wouldn’t be shocked if his popularity is going up, not down.Report
The tech companies are declaring war on the US Government. We’ll see how that turns out.Report
You’d think I’d be notified of such a development.
I mean, it’s not as if Sundar has me on speed dial, but at least he could send out a company-wide email.Report
You have to forgive Kim, she’s had a lot of her understanding of government turned upside down. See, she fully believes that when Obama took office, men held a gun to his head to explain how being President “really worked”. (They used a gun because Obama wouldn’t understand the methods used on previous Presidents, I guess. It was a new trick used just for him.).
Now Trump’s in office and he’s doing stuff that’s the opposite of how the Presidency “really works” which, i guess, means they forgot where they put their gun.
She’ll pull it together with a new unified theory sooner or later, but until then it’s gonna be erratic.Report
morat20,
Trump’s making enemies. What else is new?
The Powers that Be are marginally okay with him (they won’t be getting arrested any more than Hillary will, I’ll bet.)
Do you really need me to spell out who was so fucking desperate that they’d think blackmailing the president with a gun was a good idea?
Who did not have public opinion on their side when Obama took office?Report
v,
Why should he bother? Ya’ll are likely to approve of the new h1b “restrictions” anyway[in so far as I know what Trump is doing, and my data is a day old so it may be stale], so doing so would harm morale.Report
The gov has a monopoly on the use of force and no one short of ISIS is trying to oppose that. I think “war” is problematic.Report
The H1-B thing is fairly smart, on a tactical level. It will get the big dogs at Microsoft and Google and Amazon and whatnot all up in a tizzy while, at the same time, having tacit support from many of the current and former workers in the industry who watched what happened with H1-B visas.
We’ll see a lot of nuanced opinions explaining that, of course, they don’t support Trump but H1-B visas are terribly exploitative and if there were a better H1-B system in place, it’d actually work and result in these exploited people getting treated the way they ought to be rather than in an exploitative way.
You know that companies do this thing where they put an ad in the paper and call for DBAs with 15 years experience in technologies that have only been around for 10 years and only offer $40,000/year for them, and then when they don’t get any qualified applicants, they go to the government and say “hey, there aren’t any Americans who can do this work, we need an H1-B” and then they hire an H1-B for exploitative wages instead of paying the going market rate for a DBA with 10 years of experience.
And so on.
The actions that Trump did over the weekend were massively unpopular with the country but they are popular with the GOP base and enough of the electorate that gave Trump his technical victory based on an 18th century anarchronism.
The poll I saw said that 42% of people opposed the ban. 48% supported it.
Presumably, 10% “didn’t know”.Report
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/poll-president-donald-trump-disapproval-rating-record
Admitedly a lot of this is driven by under-35s who could have turned out to vote but did not and might not be at optimal geographical distribution.
I see your point but this is personal for me. My girlfriend has her green card now and is from presumably a low risk country (Singapore) but she was here on an HB-1 Visa for a long time after graduate school and many of her friends are on HB-1 Visas or some other visa. These are people who founded companies that created jobs. I am starting to worry about my girlfriend’s green card getting revoked and having her having to leave the U.S. suddenly. I am worried about her friends and colleagues getting kicked out.Report
Yah, but they only have to go back to Singapore.
I have an ex GF who has a green card and is from Iran. Her parents have had their visa extended for another 6 months and were hoping to get green cards. Why? They’re Christians. You listen to a elderly couple talk about living through the revolution in 79 and having to put up with all the of crap they had to for the last @ 40 years. That’s something to worry about.Report
Damon,
Iran isn’t a bad country to get deported to.They have 11 different ways out of the country, some by the conservatives and some by the liberals.
Not a walled garden like NK.Report
Nope, but worse than Singapore.Report
@damon
That’s irrelevant. Some of them are from Malaysia. Others have American spouses. Some are in romantic relationships with other immigrants from different countries. Some have children. Families will be split apart. This is not good yet your eternal desire to be laidback about everything trumps again.Report
Dude, I’m not being laid back. Frankly, I’m doubling down on your post. Frankly, everything you’ve described in your second post holds not a candle to the situation my ex’s family and maybe her, are in.
Are your friends facing the possibility of going back to a country where, if certain info were widely known, your friends would be killed? Cause mine are.Report
Oh, I’m not talking about Trump’s approval rating. I’m talking about the approval rating of the travel ban policy.
Now, this is Quinnipiac, and Quinnipiac is a known purveyor of Alternative Facts but it says:
If I had to guess, the 10% that isn’t accounted for is, in fact, “shy” about answering.
I appreciate that this is personal for you. I happen to be married to an Immigrant with a Green Card.Report
That 42-48 poll was taken two weeks ago #fakenews.
The fact that this is hitting green card holders shows that he does not care about the people who did things the right way and stood in line. While people in the know, know that “I’m not against immigrants, I’m against illegal immigrants,” is a crock of bull, there are quite a few people who voted for Trump who do feel that way. The ham-fisted targeting of people who did it the right way makes it easier to say, “Nah, he really does just hate all immigrants.” With a victory as narrow as Trump’s, he doesn’t have much room for error. If Trump 2016-2020 looks like Obama 2008-2012, he loses by a margin between McCain and Romney.Report
The polls for what happened over the weekend haven’t yet been released. I don’t know if they’ve even yet been conducted.
If the poll taken on this issue two weeks ago can’t be assumed to be operative, I guess we have no choice but to assume that the American people have changed their minds and agree with us now.
Can you believe that Trump is going against the American people like that?Report
Part of me says “well, the ACLU just got five years’ worth of donations in a weekend, so I guess that more Americans disagree with the policy than we thought’.
But then another part of me- says “maybe this is what it looks like when forty-two percent of Americans decide to do something together, and the important thing is not the number that showed up but the number that didn’t.”Report
Public opinion is a malleable and fluid thing.
People support a lot of things in the abstract that they oppose when it is up close and personal.Report
I do find it fascinating that “that poll was taken two weeks ago!” is seen as a disqualifying statement rather than one arguing that the poll is relevant.
You know what? I don’t even think it’s inaccurate. But this poll was published on January 12th.
If it’s worthless, and it might be worthless, then that means that useful information just does not exist.
Which leaves us…
Where?Report
A 2 week old poll is useful to see what support of a potential policy is, it’s a useless barometer after it has been implemented. If I pointed to some pre-ACA poll on health coverage as evidence of support for Obamacare while people were chasing down legislators at town halls, I would rightly get laughed at.Report
If I pointed to some pre-ACA poll on health coverage as evidence of support for Obamacare while people were chasing down legislators at town halls, I would rightly get laughed at.
How old would the pre-ACA poll be in this hypothetical?
To be honest, if the pre-ACA poll talked about the ACA and how 57% of the people supported it and, after the ACA passed, this poll was pointed to as relevant to the debate on public support for the ACA… I could honestly see why someone would see it as relevant.
But, you’re right.
We don’t have good numbers on this.
And won’t for a while… and the question is whether the numbers will still be good by the time we get them.Report
When there are protests nationwide about your policy, including hundreds of people in Boise, then maybe you shouldn’t rely on an old irrelevant poll and instead wait for some data.Report
“old”
“irrelevant”
I’m down. 100%.
The only polls that matter are the ones that take place on November 6th, 2018.Report
It leaves us who oppose this an opening.
When it is some nameless scary brown man inside their head, its one thing.
When we can post pictures of the actual women and children who would be shipped back to their deaths, it changes things, for a lot of people.
When we can get rabbis, bishops ministers to all join a chorus of denunciation, it changes things.Report
While I’m 100% down with rabbis, bishops, ministers helping us, as a nation, decide policy, I’m not sure that we truly appreciate where this will lead us at the end of the day.
I will say that I was exceptionally impressed by the ability of all of these folks to organize at a minute’s notice and show up where they were needed downright immediately.Report
Where do you think this is leading us?
Oh, and what is “this”?
Trump?
The opposition?
Religious leaders?Report
I think that this is leading to a Civil War.
Yes, Trump, The Opposition, and Religious Leaders all qualify. There’s more, of course. But that’s a good starting point.Report
While I’m not ready to prophesy a shooting war, I do see a period of more radical upheaval in America than we have seen in lifetimes.
It depends on who blinks, and who decides what is important.Report
It might lead to only a divorce.
If we’re lucky.Report
Wait, are you saying that letting religious leaders advocate about government policy is opening a can of worms? Haven’t ministers been talking about politics from the pulpit for as long as we’ve had pulpits and politics?Report
I think the problem is that these religious leaders are advocating issues liberals support, as opposed to ones that conservatives support.Report
“I think the problem is that these religious leaders are advocating issues liberals support, as opposed to ones that conservatives support.”
I think if the right sheds it’s social religious authority, many churches will eventually end up on the left, with only a very few churches that recognize religion as a individual construct will remaining on the right.Report
Roe vs. Wade cast a very long shadow indeed.
Even my church, when I was a kid, had a bunch of both Republicans and Democrats in it and the debate over abortion reshaped it (to be further reshaped following the debate over gay marriage).
There are a lot of things in Christianity that are “on the left”, I guess we’d say. Catholics used to be famous for them. (Then there was this thing with JPII and Communism that got people to see a particular framing.)
But, once upon a time, “religious” could have meant right or left.
Now? Religious tends (tends!) to mean one thing and going out of one’s way to describe oneself as “not religious” (or “not religious but (other things)”) tends to indicate another entirely.Report
I give it ten years or less and churches will be banning firearms, and making mandatory tithes for membership. They will implement ‘see something say something’ with their own congregations to keep them inline.
Let’s not discuss the ‘ministry of truth’ just yet.
Any bets?Report
Mmmm. There was an incident at a big church a few years back where a good person with a gun stopped an allegedly bad person with an alleged gun.
Since that was here in town, it probably is fresher in my mind (and the minds of those around me) than it is outside of my particular circle.
As for mandatory tithes for membership, our churches already had something called “Stewardship”. It was as big as Christmas, Easter, and the Summer Series devoted to the Fruits of the Spirit.
Four weeks of the pastor explaining the finances of the church and mentioning Malachi 3:8.
As for “see something, say something”, that’s why it’s important to show up on Sunday and Wednesday fellowship evenings. The sermons are shorter and the conversations in the pews a bit longer. The big topic of conversation, at my church anyway, was “the people who didn’t show up”. (Dispensations were made during football season.)
Any bets?
The churches already do these things. Well, except for the gun thing. I can see this being based on regions.Report
Joe,
your ignorance is astounding. Churches have lost influence pretty much in all demographics… except one. And you can’t name that one either.Report
Alright Kimmi, we both know tomorrow won’t look like today, so show your cards, or your dancing with yourself on this one.Report
Fat (over 180 lbs) moms are the only people that the Church still has influence with.
Now, can you figure out why this is so?Report
Ah, I can see that angle. What happens when people get skinny, and not from choice?Report
That’s later, in the grande scheme of things.Report
What did your cats tell you the answer is?Report
Nu, something that you’ll never think of yourself.
The church is left with the dregs, as its competitors steal the more profitable segments.
The church only has the fat mamas because nobody’s cared to steal ’em. Yet.Report
The idea that religion is an individual construct is limited to certain Protestants and Buddhists and that’s about it. Nearly other religious group sees itself as a communal or social construct.Report
I fully agree at this particular point in time, and am very glad you pointed that out.Report
To be honest, I’d be shocked if Trump doesn’t start applying the Johnson Amendment.
This is from the last time we discussed the Johnson Amendment:
Golly, does *THAT* joke read differently in 2017!Report
How would the Johnson amendment come into play with regards to Franklin Graham and James Dobson?Report
Depends on who is enforcing it against whom, doesn’t it?
It’s the difference between “Freedom of Speech from the Pulpit is Freedom of Religion!” and “All speech is protected? Since when?”Report
No, I don’t see how it does.
Show your work…Report
Sorry:
It seems to me like the Johnson Amendment would be applied selectively depending on who is in power.
Like it was threatened against African-American churches immediately after it passed, then it was threatened against Pro-Life Evangelical Churches under Clinton or Obama (but not threatened when Reagan, Bush, or Bush were in power).
And now, once again, I expect it to be used selectively against enemies of those who are in power and the stuff that Franklin Graham and James Dobson (the latter is pretty much entirely out of the game now, for what it’s worth) would be saying from the pulpit would qualify as “oh, they weren’t talking about politics, they were merely talking about culture and morality and our responsibilities as Christians in a secular society. Completely different.”Report
It was threatened when W was in power.Report
Man, even under Bush? Dang.
What an awful amendment.Report
I remember when that happened.
It was against a liberal church speaking out against the Iraq War.
I also remember clearly how all churches closed ranks to vehemently oppose it.Report
Pretty sure the religious right won’t want the precedent of actual prosecutions under the Johnson Amendment. They’er smart enough to know that once that genie is out of the bottle, it will be used against them. It’s really, really stupid to break out weapons that hurt you more than they hurt your opponent. It’s like the Wicked Witch of the West deciding that it’s time to go after Dorothy with Super Soakers. Even if Trump keeps most of his religious supporters, losing a decent chunk hurts him. And as I said before, he is not exactly in a position to give up some of his supporters.Report
Dunno. It might depend on whether they feel like stuff like “Little Sisters of the Poor” or the “bake the cake” thing qualifies as the Rubicon already having been crossed.
Nobody wants to be the first person to defect.
Nobody sees a problem with being the second person to defect.Report
Are you claiming these countries are running death camps and engaging in Nazi style genocide?Report
Are you claiming these countries are running death camps and engaging in Nazi style genocide?
No. Not Nazi-style genocide.
The people committing genocide in those countries usually just murder people in their houses, not ship them off to complicated death camps where they slowly kill them.
It’s not any of that fancy high-end *Nazi-style* genocide.Report
David,
and people wonder why comedians could find the Holocaust funny.
“fancy, high end Nazi-style genocide”Report
And, as I said…what if that poll is still accurate?
What if this is what 42% of Americans looks like when they all get together?Report
If you’ve got a situation where 42% of people *REALLY* care about something, and 58% only kinda care about something, so long as it doesn’t cost them anything?
The 42% will win. Pretty much every time.
Even at the ballot box! You can count on every single one of that 42% to show up. How much of the 58% do you need to show up? More than two out of three of them.
Does “only kinda care about something, so long as it doesn’t cost them anything” sound like sufficient caring to get 2 out of 3 to show up?
Heck, we can look at gay marriage in the last 40 years as a guide. The opposition to gay marriage was broad, sure. But it wasn’t deep. At the end of the day, it was pretty shallow.
How does that map to the immigration debate? Well… you’re going to need more than two out of three of the opposition to show up.
And that’s assuming that every single one of the “don’t know” 10% is a shy “opposed”. It might be safe to assume that 6% or 7% of them are shy. It’s not safe to assume that all 10% are.Report
While people in the know, know that “I’m not against immigrants, I’m against illegal immigrants,” is a crock of bull, there are quite a few people who voted for Trump who do feel that way.
Not just green card holders….refugees.
There are a lot of evangelicals that feel *exceptionally* betrayed about that, because helping refugees is…
…look, I feel rather cynical about their work in that field, because a lot of it seems to be self-aggrandizing and helping a few individual refugee families is bullshit when you’re also, politically, supporting people cutting food stamps. Going and deliberately finding some refugees and putting a face on them, and having you congregation support them, and oooo, aren’t we all Christian…while at the same time not saying anything to help the random impoverished people around you, is not any real Christian virtue. But putting *my* feelings aside…
…helping refugees is something that a lot of evangelicals work at, and there are almost certainly a few horror stories out there about how *their* refugees, the one they had sponsored and worked to the US, and were almost there, braving hardship from their country of origin…were turned away at airports by *Americans*, or now can’t even try.
Even more of them were working to get Syria refugees out, now find themselves totally blocked.
And those stories *are going to spread among that community like wildfire*. Probably already have, via email and stuff. And next Sunday, bam, people start talking about it in churches.
And do you know what is going to happen if even one of these refugee families is killed? Total fucking meltdown.Report
My FB friend that is most upset is a center-right LDS member who has been supporting Syrian and Afghan refugees*. I believe she voted for Egg McMuffin, but she is likely in the group that Josh Barro calls “Trump curious” that he needs to win over and is not.
* And she cares enough that she asks me things like, “Hey do you think X would offend a Muslim, I want to make sure their place feels homey, but I don’t want to unintentionally offend them”Report
“Going and deliberately finding some refugees and putting a face on them, and having you congregation support them, and oooo, aren’t we all Christian…while at the same time not saying anything to help the random impoverished people around you, is not any real Christian virtue. ”
Well. There’s a reason that the Parable of the Prodigal Son does not end with “…but that guy was an asshole, actually, because there were thousands and thousands of poor people that weren’t his son and he didn’t do jack shit for any of them.” It is not actually outside of Christian tradition to say “our charity is intended to make the Christian family grow, not just to throw alms out at random people in the street”.Report
For that, you would need the parable of the Good Samaritan.Report
Well. There’s a reason that the Parable of the Prodigal Son does not end with “…but that guy was an asshole, actually, because there were thousands and thousands of poor people that weren’t his son and he didn’t do jack shit for any of them.”
The Parable of the Prodigal Son…doesn’t have anything to do with charity. But, just as important, there isn’t really any hint that the father *wasn’t* an asshole for how he behaved.
The parable is trying to teach people to not be jealous of what people give other people instead of themselves, not make any statement about the guy who gave things out ‘unfairly’.
It’s the same as Parable of the Workers. God’s position on that guy’s odd labor practices is unknown within that parable. You get the sense, from other stories, that he would not approve, but that’s not actually relevant to the story so we don’t learn it.
It is not actually outside of Christian tradition to say “our charity is intended to make the Christian family grow, not just to throw alms out at random people in the street”.
That may be *well within Christian traditions*, but it is *unchristian*.
But, no, that’s not what’s going on here anyway. This is not some attempt to convert people. In fact, as Mo said, there is very often a *deliberate* attempt to respect their religion.
Now, at some point in the back of some of their minds, there might be ‘Well, if they see how caring Christians are, maybe they will convert to Christianity’, but, honestly, I can’t condemn *that* form of evangelism.
No, what’s going on here, what the problem is, is often *pride*. ‘We’re going to save the lives of people who aren’t even Christian! We’re awesome!’ (Note they usually aren’t really saving anyone’s life, but just giving them a chance to get on their feet after they get here.)
Which…look, pride is not a good thing, but if that was all of it, I could deal. The problem is that prideful people are often excited about giant gestures like this, and not actually operating at any lower level that would result in much better outcomes for much more people.
Instead of buying a house for one family, how about, oh, donating to the homeless shelter that can support hundreds of people for that amount of money?
But I don’t expect really everyone to sit there and mathematically calculate where their support would do the best. I still see idiots buying food to donate to food pantries, instead of just giving them the money and letting *them* buy food, and, whatever. Those people are dumb, but whatever.
But, worse, these refugee-helping people often condone government policies that try to help others…while what *they* are doing is also the result of government policies. Their gigantic gestures to help individuals, sure, they want the government involved there. The government spending the same amount of money on WIC, well…surely charities would provide. (No, they won’t, because charities do big flashy things like saving a refugee family instead of buying kids milk.)
But, again, this is *some* people in that movement. There are plenty of people who are not like that. But the entire thing is one the biggest, flashiest, ‘most noble looking’ charity works that people can get involved in within current Christianity…and a significant fraction of people are in for exactly that reason. Not all, not most, but I’ve managed to run across a few, and I’m not even involved in it.Report
Actually…Report
Looks like Rasmussen put something out today.
But that’s Rasmussen. There are a lot of criticisms of how they do polling.
We still don’t know anything.Report
You could also look at Trump’s disapproval digits. Sad. Like epic sad.
But this is all just the start. He could rebound or crater like no prez has ever cratered before.Report
As I told Saul when we were discussing the stale polling:
But this is all just the start. He could rebound or crater like no prez has ever cratered before.
If his policies keep getting high marks but his approval rating is in the gutter, then that strikes me as something that is unlikely to hold forever.
Maybe they’ll meet in the middle.Report
He’s a bastard. But I can dislike him but like his policies. I can even think “I’m glad he’s working for me”.
This is why he seriously over punches at the voting booths.Report
Here’s another poll. Reuters/Ipsos:
And I’ll repeat what I said earlier:
That 10% that is “don’t know”? 6-7% of that is a shy “somewhat agree”.Report
The H1-B thing is fairly smart, on a tactical level.
What you mean is that there is a *hypothetical* way to do it smartly.
I think, at this point, we should stop expecting things like ‘smart’ or ‘tactics’ or even a ‘level’ from the Trump malministration.Report
I’m expecting it to be done in a way that drives a wedge between upper and drones.Report
I agree with you that there *is* a smart way to do it… but it has to be done as you said above, in an economic context. If it gets caught-up in the 7-countries you can’t mention on Radio/Television sort of way, then he won’t get the political wedge he might want. It will be seen an as anti-brown/anti-muslim/other religion thing, which, maybe it is, too…
But ultimately, my early expectations of rank incompetence are being shown true… so I expect he’ll gain nothing and only fan the flames.Report
I’m expecting it to be done in a way that drives a wedge between upper and drones.
Is that what you’re *expecting*, or is that just what you think *would be logical*?
Because I also think what you propose is entirely logical. I just seriously doubt *it will happen*, because the White House is being operated by complete morons. And I don’t mean complete morons in the political sense, I mean actual total idiots.
They managed to completely screw this entire immigration thing up already. Cutting back on refugees…should have worked. It would have been unpopular, but they could have done it. But instead they did it in such a dumbass way it stranded people at airports, it blocked US nationals from re-entry, it was a total cock-up in every possible way.
I have a phrase I think we should start repeating as a mantra: Lower your expectations of competence.
This malministration is headed by a person suffering from narcissistic personality disorder who can barely function, and is fed information by Fox News, a white supremacist, and various other paranoid loons.
If you squint your eyes just right, Trump is a miracle. We *could* have gotten a competent and scheming demagogue, one that really could play each side against the other. We were in the perfect position for it, all lined up for some form of populist fascism. Instead…we got Trump, apparently. And Bannon.Report
Have you read Jared Berenstein’s writing about the Presidential Branch and Trump? His take is that a lot of the incompetence is because trump is trying to run everything directly out of the white house rather than through the various agencies, just like Nixon’s ratfucking operation, Iran-Contra, etc.Report
I haven’t see it. I googled him and found his blog, but don’t immediately see anything about it.
I have, however, read a few articles that pointed out that the failure wasn’t just President Bannon failing to get input from anyone who knows anything at all about immigration, but failing to let people have any time or any help to figure out what the EO even *meant*, resulting in a complete clustertrump.
It’s one thing for a leader to give stupid orders without consulting knowledgeable people or the people who will implement them. It’s another thing to give those stupid orders…to everyone under you…that take effect immediately that no one can even prep for implementation.Report
It probably didn’t help that I got the guy’s name wrong. It’s Jonathan Berenstein, and this is the piece I was referring to.Report
Thanks for the clarification.
I was busy reading about a family of cute bears.Report
I agree entirely with that piece that this what caused the blowup.
I also, oddly, agree with *both other* pieces it disagreed with. The strategic explanation, and the personality-based explanation. I think everything fits together perfectly.
My working theory is that:
(personality-based) Trump is widely unsuited to the job, having narcissistic personality disorder and unable to listen to or handle any criticism of himself,
(strategic) Bannon has no problem with chaos and protesters, because he ultimately thinks this will produce an American people on his side, because he’s a Nazi moron and think all white people secretly think like him,
(structurally), and thus neither of them have the slightest inclination to run anything past anyone else or listen to anyone attempting to explain that certain things are a bad idea. Trump can’t handle it, and Bannon loves watching everyone run around in a panic confused.
This mean, amazingly, *everything they do will be a total fuck up*.
And Reince Priebus, playing the only sane man, is probably about two weeks from snapping and punching Bannon in the face.Report
There’s been rumors he’s already wanting to resign, but then there were rumors Trump wanted to fire Spicer and that guy’s still around.
Even though, let’s face it, the media considers him to have all the credibility of Baghdad Bob.
Kellyanne Conway’s credit looks like it’s starting to run out as well.
The media likes spin. They can take spin and do she-said/he-said, get a lot of eyeballs, and feel pretty good about things. (Because they’re “smart” and understand it’s spin. wink-wink-nudge-nudge they’re on the inside, right?).
Lying straight to their faces and expecting them to believe it, not so much.Report
Here’s an approval poll from September of last year.
We’ve already said that opinion polls from two weeks ago are worthless so this one is probably only interesting as an artifact but…
Report
I guess I’m paranoid.
Because I see this spiraling out of control.Report
Because I see this spiraling out of control.
Things were always going to spiral out of control. The Republicans had been setting things up to spiral out of control for years with their building a base that rejected facts and the media.
They just now have spiraled out of control into a guy with NPD and a nazi moron who have totally stupid goals and are going to be very incompetent at reaching them.
As opposed to it spiraling out of control and ending with some firm-handed but lovable ole’ fascist that manages to get the majority of the country firmly behind him, and oppresses just enough of the country to keep a working internal enemy to justify his power grabs.
We were *that* close, apparently. Tell me you don’t think one of them wouldn’t have beaten Trump, and had the Republicans fall in line faster?
Seriously, people. Knowing Trump *could get elected* makes me sorta glad Hillary *wasn’t*.
If Hillary had been elected, we would have four or eight more years of the Republican base getting *even more unhinged*, and who know what the hell could have happened in 2020? Or later…yes, yes, at some point they, in theory, lose demographically and can’t elect a president, but that just means that would we end up with fascism imposed via gerrymandered Congress, probably via a bogus impeachment.
Instead…Trump’s going to totally blow their chance. Just tear everything to shreds. The only way the Republican party is walking out of this alive is with repudiating him and attempting to rehabilitate their base into functional members of the consensual reality.Report
David,
Yes, part of the point of electing a fake demagogue was so we wouldn’t get a REAL demagogue.Report
The weakness in Trump/Bannon is that they don’t realize that fascism has to have at least two things, one, a wide enough base to retain power, and two, a thin veneer of legality.
They are so reckless that their base, I’m convinced, is going to shrink.
When you exclude the military brass and veterans from your base, when you alienate even the milder evangelicals and Mormons, and even the mutha-effing Koch Brothers, you are going to have a hard time keeping power.
And when you fail to get even the veneer of legal process under your grasp, its impossible to put a persuasive argument together of how this is OK. A smarter guy could have enacted a Muslim ban and made it stick legally.
But Trump/ Bannon aren’t smart guys.Report
Instead…Trump’s going to totally blow their chance. Just tear everything to shreds. The only way the Republican party is walking out of this alive is with repudiating him and attempting to rehabilitate their base into functional members of the consensual reality.
That’s certainly one way to look at it.
I see all sorts of things being ripped to shreds.
One of the tweets that made me knit my brow over the weekend was from a BLM voice who said something to the effect of “Hey, BLM. This is what it looks like when White People actually care about something.”
We’re only EIGHT DAYS into this.
We’ve already established that polling data from two weeks ago is useless.
We haven’t even gotten warmed up yet.Report
I so very much hope that this is correct @davidtc . I want very much that it be correct. That’s why I’m so tempted to agree with it.
But I’m pessimistic a lot these days. Flags and crosses and othering are really powerful tools. Spain, Italy, Germany, and Argentina teach us that lots of people are perfectly happy to go along with authoritarianism being imposed on top of what once was a democracy, so long as they only see Other People being hurt by it.Report
One positive sign, I posted a link about the Koch’s concerns about Trump being an authoritarian and standing up to him and titled it, “Sometimes your foes choose your allies for you,” and none of my liberal friends, even the more left-wing of them, objected. I got a few, “The enemy of my enemy,” and things of that sort. If liberals would be willing to work with the Kochs against Trump, I’d feel pretty good.Report
Mo,
I wouldn’t work with the Kochs for the world. But then it’s not exactly a political grudge I’ve got with them.
I might take their money and screw them with it though.Report
Which is why I don’t view Trump/Bannon as being paticularly smart, politically.
The whole point of “First they came for…” is to pick off marginalized groups one by one.
The fact that they are alienating massive numbers of groups wholesale doesn’t strike me as a good strategy.
I mean, right now, 8 days in, we are at:
“First they came for the women, and gays, and black people, and Hispanics, and Muslims, and Asians, and immigrants, old people, and young people; religious liberals, evangelicals, Mormons, veterans, corporations, scientists, environmentalists, disabled people, European allies, the Royal Family, tech workers, city workers, park rangers.
Then on week 2…”Report
This makes sense to me in isolation.
But then I’m stuck wondering how Trump not only outplayed the Republicans on Republican turf, but Democrats on contested ground.
He successfully achieved something that we all knew was impossible.
But, hey. Maybe that’s irrelevant.
Maybe he’s finally got the disqualifying disaster on his hands that we knew he’d have and it only took 9 days rather than the… well, I imagine most of us would have bet that the number of days would have at least had *TWO* digits before it happened.Report
There’s a pretty clear difference here. None of their off-the-cuff barstool banter policies actually effected anything real before. They could just get the applause line and decry their sputering opposition as out of touch.
Now they are doing real things. Real people who are photogenic get effected and they get court orders in their favour.
Just because they could campaign doesn’t mean they knew how to govern. I’d say one of their huge campaign advantages is they acted unconstrained by the practicalities of following through with their ideas. You can campaign detached from reality, but reality suddenly gets teeth to to bite with when you are in office.Report
Campaigning is easy, especially if you have utter disregard for the truth.
Governing, by contrast, is hard.Report
Pied Piper Strategy?Report
yeah, Trump is doomed, for 2020, for sureReport
But I’m pessimistic a lot these days. Flags and crosses and othering are really powerful tools. Spain, Italy, Germany, and Argentina teach us that lots of people are perfectly happy to go along with authoritarianism being imposed on top of what once was a democracy, so long as they only see Other People being hurt by it.
Oh, I am not saying it will turn out well. It could, indeed, last long enough for someone *competent* to end up in charge.
But my theory, and it sounds like you sorta agree, is that this *was going to happen anyway*, or at least had a chance of that. The right-wing media has been building this base for a long time, and it was going to keep building.
And then…we got a president with a personality disorder that is going to make it extremely hard for him to actually function, and a moron in a Nazi uniform, neither who are inclined to slightly do the sort of things that would allow them to consolidate power or appease the people they need to appease.
They’re going to cause a lot of damage, probably more direct damage than competent people would cause.
But to get out from under *competent* fascists would require a rebellion, whereas our idiots are so incompetent that the only thing keeping them in power *already* (And we are ten days in.) is the fact the Republicans want things from them.Report
I suspect Burt is right in the main, but I don’t think this is about flags or crosses. It’s about solidarity. If the rest of America could trust the libs’ motivations, their actions wouldn’t be nearly as important.Report
” libs’ motivations”
Implacable unrelenting public loud opposition to everything.
Loud opposition drives down his popularity and puts the worry into Rs who are in close districts.
Implacable unrelenting opposition prevents him and the Rs from campaigning on legislative successes.
This we learned at the School of McConnell.
And as for the merits of opposition, well, he’s already shown himself to be a childish narcissistic demagogue, which is exactly how he campaigned. Except for some gibberish about changing the ACA so that everyone gets better insurance at lower cost — which would be a great idea if possible but would in fact require the states to set prices — not a single idea of his is a good one.Report
Yeah, I know a lot of libs want to think this and it could turn out that way but for now at least I don’t buy it.
A lot of it has to do with seemingly willful misunderstanding of the dynamics of the opposition to President Obama. But mostly it’s about a misunderstanding of Trump and where it fits into the jigsaw puzzle of American politics.
People are supporting President Trump because they trust his intent, not his character or his competence. This episode hasn’t let anyone down.
Let’s also note that there was a major dog that didn’t bark at all last election cycle, which was negative repercussions against other GOP candidates due to Trump. I know I expected it and was worried about it, but it didn’t happen.
The American hear Trump’s outlandish things and they don’t hold it against Republicans because Republicans don’t associate themselves with the ridiculous Trump.
I suspect that if Trump does take on water politically the first thing that will happen is the empowerment of establishment mainstream conservatives. And what happens after that is where it gets really interesting and unpredictable.Report
This actually made me laugh out loud.
Really and truly, this has to be the most left handed compliment of a politician I have seen in all my years.
Indeed.
Indeed it hasn’t.Report
That was during the campaign. He’s not running against HRC, in 2018 and 2020, he’s running against his record. If his intent is good and he fishes up, then he’s of no use. You may as well get the person who doesn’t care and things muddle along.Report
It would work that way in different circumstances, but it’s not working that way now.
There’s a huge credibility gap in American politics, and optimally, Trump is the solution to that.
I don’t have to be right about this, but politically speaking, I don’t think this EO has hurt Trump at all. If anything, the incompetence almost helps. It’s clear what Trump’s intent is, it’s clear what his opponents’ intent is. Specifically, it’s clear who’s looking out for the best interest of America.
Things will be more interesting when we run into an issue that needs better execution than what Trump has done so far.Report
The EO won’t do it, but if everything ends up a clusterfish like this, patience will run short. The hard and medium core Trump supporters won’t budge, but you can’t win elections with just them.Report
That’s true, but hopefully everything won’t end up like this.
In the medium term, the Republicans might be pretty strong. I don’t think there particularly vulnerable to Trump imploding, and they have at least a few demographics where they might look to improve.
Among others, conservative upper-middle class Romney voters. One thing that’s been overlooked is that Trump only ran ahead of Romney among white voters by like a point. Or maybe it was the other way around, I forget. In any event, the particular breakdown helped Trump a lot. He got a lot of downscale white voters that won the Rust Belt, and he hemorrhaged piles of upscale white Republicans. But if Trump is gone, or his excesses can be perceived to be contained, or if they don’t negatively impact Republicans, I think a lot of those voters will come back.Report
Speaking personally, yes, that exactly.
I can get used to (i.e. ignore) Trump the drama artist and Trump the bull in a china shop. He’s taken a lot of steps which give me pause for hope.Report
But doesn’t that mean the downscale voters that want to MAGA will leave? The Republicans need to balance on the knife edge of marginalizing Trump without alienating his base and winning back their old base. Right now that strategy involves saying, “I don’t like Trump but ‘teh media!'”Report
No not at all, at least I don’t see it that way. Ie, the one thing I’m fairly confident will happen as a result of Trump is that the GOP coalition will stabilize around the voters who voted for Trump this election plus culturally conservative/GOP upper-middle class white voters who voted for Romney and work out from there.
Frankly, it’s what was I expecting in 2012 but I was wrong on that score. In any event, there were clear reasons why the white working class were alienated from the GOP (Gang of 8, the autopsy, etc) and by now even the dullest GOP pol has figured out where the votes are and I don’t expect that they will be repeated.Report
Will they stick with him even if the steel mills don’t reopen?
If not, what do you think the odds are the mills will actually reopen?
If yes, then what do you think they really are getting out of a Trump Administration that satisfies them?Report
No, I don’t think they will.
But Trump (even though he said he would get them their jobs back) doesn’t actually have to get them exactly those jobs back to make them stick with them.
Tyler Cowen comments on this today: The Left Underestimates Trump’s Economic Plan
So, if mirabile dictu Trump pulls off this sort of redistribution, then you will be able to point out to happily employed people that he lied about getting them their jobs back… then we will realize it wasn’t about the Steel or Coal job at all.
Now, like Cowen, I don’t think Trump has the goods to pull this off… but that’s a different argument than he *has* to re-open the coal mines and steel mills to keep his coalition happy.Report
After witnessing the trainwreck of a rollout of his signature issue this week, could anyone envision Trump/Bannon successfully designing and implementing a redistributive economic plan that produces jobs in the Rust Belt?
Even with the help of Ryan/ McConnell? And why would those two want such a thing anyway?
Further, as Trump voters throughout the Rust Belt receive their cancellation notices from Blue Cross, then see Medicare benefits cut after being block granted, then see disability payments reduced…
While people like me are pointedly asking, “Hows that Trumpey-Changey thing workin’ out for ya?”Report
Looking at the EO and seeing incompetence is just your smug liberal elitism talking.
Real Americans, white working class Americans, the only Americans that count, see only unbridled success with MAYBE a few teething troubles.Report
Well, I certainly don’t… which is why I thought it useful to read Cowen’s article.Report
First of all, I was talking about the post-Trump GOP as opposed to Trump himself. That said, yes I do expect the non-college educated white voters to stay GOP after Trump, for a few reasons.
The electoral success of Trump will be an example for more mainstream GOP pols to avoid doing the things they did to alienate the white working class.
Second, the Demo’s will likely be anathema for a while, since the Demo’s are for the moment all in with multiculturalism and the lies, distortions, and antagonisms associated with that.
Finally, I suspect that GOP or Trumpish or non-“neoliberal” economic policy has the propensity for delivering economic or quality of life improvements for them that don’t necessarily include bring the steel mills back.Report
I should like to hear more of this “non-neoliberal economics” you speak of.Report
It could mean a lot of different things, that’s the point.
Basically, as things stand the rents from equalizing wage differentials between the First World and the upper-middle class of the Third World are going to a narrow band of people who command a combination of capital and regulatory arbitrage, thereby allowing them to market to First World consumption without having to employ First World labor.
My guess is the Trump-less GOP will address this through restrictions in immigration and efforts to improve cultural solidarity. Trump, if he stays in office and to the extent that he has a coherent program, will go beyond that to straight mercantilism.
But whatever it is, there’s a lot of variables in play beyond bringing the steel mills back.Report
“Efforts to improve cultural solidarity”.
I’ve never heard that phrase, and honestly have no idea what it means or how the government brings it about.
I’m also wondering where the Speaker of the House’s ideas about free market capitalism fit into this.Report
Well, the first cut is simply what I was telling David in another comment, that libs give up their rejectionist stance toward the GOP and Middle America especially, leaving aside Trump himself for a moment.
As far as what GOP government would do, it would be a matter of unwinding the governmental and cultural foundations of the Pokemon-style multicultural pointscoring that libs like to engage in. One thing I heard, not directly related, was that before sometime around 1967, Hollywood made movies on the idea that Americans were the sons of the pioneers, whereas afterward the idea was that Americans were the sons of immigrants. Well, now we’re the sons of the pioneers again.Report
You keep speaking on behalf of some “middle America” that is set in oposition to the Dems.
Sure that’s accurate?
I mean, the people of Ferguson, Missouri- are they part of this “middle America”?
The Mexican immigrants in Texas farms- are they a part? Gay people in Cincinnati?
Who exactly are you speaking for?Report
No, it’s not, I think you’re misunderstanding me. It’s not that Middle America is now and forever GOP, because it’s not.
It’s the fact that libs as a practical matter give themselves a bad license to repudiate their allegiance to America, if at some the operational authority the powers that be derives from Middle America over the objections of the liberal coastal areas. Get over it.
Most explicitly and most relevant right now, yes Donald Trump is your President. Deal.Report
Maybe you were typing from a phone or something, because I don’t understand the sentence.
But my point is that Dems ARE “middle America” and we are saying that Trump doesn’t represent us.
Trump is the one who represents values and norms that are in opposition to America.Report
If you start with the assumption that liberals aren’t really American, it all makes a lot more sense.Report
I’ve always had it explained that America was an Idea, while other countries were merely countries.
Seeing how that overlaps with some religious concepts, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that we’re entering “not *REAL* Christians!” territory.
And I’m not sure that “priesthood of all believers” will help us here. Seems to me that it’s the necessary groundwork for a dang schism, if the Babtist church is any indicator.Report
I know.
We libs need to say it loud, say it proud.
We are Americans. Its our values that the flag represents.
We are the patriots, the citizens, the families of America.
This cuts right to the heart of the battle lines that are forming.
The GOP has staked its soul on the identity politics of white Christian dominion, and cast the rest of us as outsiders.
The fights over trans bathroom access, same sex marriage, immigrants and refugees, Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays, Press 1 for English, and so on are really about whose is allowed to be part of “America”.Report
Sounds a lot like you’re headed back to “vote Dem or you’re a racist”.
Rather than continue with identity politics, or insist that’s all the other side is doing, I’d rather see ideas debated… and yeah, that might be just me.Report
Uh huh, ok.
Ideas.
Debated.
Not identity politics, but ideas.
Which ideas, exactly, form the centerpiece of Trump’s voter base?
Mexican rapists?
Being able to say “Merry Christmas”?
Muslim terrorists, and Sharia Law?
The Lugenpresse?
Repeal Obamacare and make sure everyone is covered by great insurance, really great coverage, the best?
Reduce the size of government, and negotiate great deals and force other countries to send the jobs back to America by telling corporations what to do and how?
Identity politics IS the very essence of the Trump base. Every policy aside from identity politics is a chaotic gibberish.
They have no ideas, no vision of the Great America other than white Christian identity.Its their one unifying pole star that guides them.Report
That’s one way to interpret it, but imho that’s through the Dem lens of “everyone plays identity politics” and competes to be the biggest victim with the whites as the designated losers.
I don’t think you beat him by doubling down on what didn’t work before and giving him all the white voters because they’re not black/brown/whatever. I also think White Guilt just hit a wall.
Trump is probably best viewed as a “strong man” politician, in the mold of Putin or various others like him. He defeats the “victim” game by attacking his attacker.Report
Not all white people are attracted to the White Christian Identity party Trump/Bannon are creating.Report
This line of thought spares you the burden of saying anything but “all members of the GOP are racists”. The Dems don’t need to change. Next election, you won’t need to do anything other than scream “racist” loud enough and everyone will rally to your side.
I don’t think screaming “racist” will be enough, by then we’ll have four years of Trump NOT building death camps and putting people like his daughter and grandchildren in them.
Trump is a clown, I’m going to ignore a lot of what he does and everything he says, and look at what he’s done to the economy. Clowns are fun (or scary) but Money! is important. I think for lots of people ideology comes down to voting their wallet.Report
What do the Trump fans want us to change?
They have no coherent economic policy.
They have no coherent foreign policy.
They have spent 8 years shrieking about Obamacare, and now they have fallen mute, dumbstruck into silence.
Even if we somehow said “Yes, we will meet you halfway” where would this halfway point be?
What is halfway to madness?
Everything Trump/ Bannon says is gibberish, except that they really really hate Muslims, Mexicans, and anyone who isn’t a white rural Christian male.
Oh, and they want to kick ass on bad hombres.
Seriously, have you actually talked to Trump supporters?
The ones I know spent the last few years filling Facebook and online blogs with cries of “Merry Christmas”, pressing 1 for English, demanding the government keep its hands off Medicare, and saying the Pledge of Allegiance in schools.
That is what animates them, that’s what drives them out to vote. Its all culture war and identity politics with these folks.Report
Yes, Trump’s people (and Trump) are incoherent and economically ignorant. But all this emotion is the symptom, not the cause.
Follow the money and things make sense. The recovery started almost 8 years ago, and it hasn’t delivered growth. Much of the benefits of the recovery has flowed to the coasts, which implies the non-coasts have suffered.
From that point of view:
Obama has been trying to regulate the economy into prosperity when he doesn’t go off on tangents like claiming the ACA would create jobs, or fighting with the GOP on how much of a tax increase is needed to continue to grow the gov.
Dems have been talking about how bad jobs need to be destroyed, oil, coal, and low wage. But “the fight for $15” looks very different in a low-cost-of-living county where the median wage is $30k, and destroying coal/oil looks very different in Texas or coal country.
Return the country to 4% growth and all this angst goes away.Report
I’m not sure why we should stop at promising the tax cut fairy will deliver 4% growth. 6% would be better, as would 10%, and they seem more or less equally speculative. I’m sure that there are things we could do that would improve growth, but they can’t create totally different facts of life. No matter what our regulatory or tax policies are, we won’t be the US in the 60’s or China in the 00’s.Report
If you don’t like the idea of tax cuts then I’ve got a long list of pro-growth reforms we could do, some of which Dems claim to favor.
The problem hasn’t been a lack of way to increase growth and get companies to stop wanting to flee the US. The problem has been “growth” policies has been so far down the list of priorities it hasn’t happened.
Everyone in Washington earns AT LEAST 6 figures, that growth *shouldn’t* be sacrificed for some other policy choice isn’t on their person radar.
In Trump-speak The “elites” don’t need growth, nor do the people that pay them, everyone else does.Report
If you follow the money, nothing makes sense.
His support doesn’t correlate with economic distress; and his applause lines were never economic populist ones. His fans are happy to see Wall Street and coastal elites take a commanding presence in government.
The only straight line connecting his policy to his voters is identity politics.Report
This leads to you claiming that it’s a White thing, fueled by racism, even though a lot of these people voted for Obama.
That’s a big enough problem that the underlying assumptions should be doubted.
Eh? His “new” base is voters are not non-college educated, which stacks up well with people not doing well in the modern economy. He kept most of the traditional GOP crew but not all.
Who is taking your jobs? What is preventing your pay from increasing? Free Trade and Immigration.
Note his “anti-elite” message also gets in there, i.e. the “elites” are enriching themselves at the expense of the hard-working lower-middle class (or something like that).Report
His base is perfectly content with the cabinet of elites, and his policies that favor them over the middle class.
Again, no logic explains this other than ethnic grievance.Report
I believe that Trump’s appeal has much more to do with economic populism than it does with actual economics and that economic populism involves a significant amount of identity politics. And I also believe that Trump’s policies, at least so far as he has presently enunciated them, have very little chance of leading to 4% growth.
That said, there is an alternate timeline in which Obama comes into office in 2009 and makes the economy his top priority. With a bit of shameless politicking, he could have simply refused to work with the outgoing Bush administration, distancing himself from the collapse. And then he could have made getting a bigger stimulus, a tougher version of Dodd-Frank, and a more redistributive budget the legislative priorities, instead of passing the ACA. In that timeline, if the Keynesians are right (which I don’t think they are), the economic recovery would have been quicker and would have been better felt by the median American.
If that happened, Obama would have likely had the popularity and the Democratic congress to then pass a health care reform and perhaps enough residual popularity to get Hillary into office in last year’s election.Report
With a bit of shameless politicking, he could have simply refused to work with the outgoing Bush administration, distancing himself from the collapse.
Considering how much that would have undercut the Tea Party, I wonder if that alone would have resulted in less ACA protests.
And then he could have made getting a bigger stimulus, a tougher version of Dodd-Frank, and a more redistributive budget the legislative priorities, instead of passing the ACA.
What is totally unknown there is how the Republicans would have tried to screw that up.
Reject stimulus funds to their states? That might be a bit too blatant, though. Reject THE FEDERAL TAKEOVER OF BRIDGES? Maybe that.
This alternate timeline is sorta assuming Obama is always choosing the thing it is hardest for Republicans to screw with. (Is Obama in a Peggy Sue loop living his life over?)
In that timeline, if the Keynesians are right (which I don’t think they are), the economic recovery would have been quicker and would have been better felt by the median American.
Alright, I’ll bite: What do you think should have been done by Democrats for faster economic recovery?
If that happened, Obama would have likely had the popularity and the Democratic congress to then pass a health care reform
The problems with the passage of the ACA were not ‘popularity’ or, really, ‘Democratic Congress’. The problems were that the Republicans had opposed it from the start, and made sure their base got very angry about it on mostly stupid grounds.
I don’t see why they couldn’t have done that later.
You’re basically postulating that a real recovery could have made Obama popular enough not only to not lose Congress, but to get him back up to his honeymoon levels to do the ACA later…but unless he’s *epically* more popular, the Republicans would just do exactly the same thing during the passage.
I can see it resulting in him being more popular as he leaves office, I can even see it resulting in not-Trump. (Although I think it would be most likely Trump loses the primary and some other Republicans beats Hillary.) But I don’t really see it altering the ACA much, except it’s happening two years later. (Which makes it easier to dismantle.)Report
I still have hope. Totally eliminating FreeTrade+Immigration would be nuking the economy. But some political posturing in combo with tax reform and regulation reform might be a net gain.
:Flinches: Obama tries to redistribute, tax/stim, and regulate our way to growth? That probably goes even worse than it did.
Let’s try a very different alternate timeline (which requires restructuring Obama’s personality and core beliefs but whatever).
Obama comes into office in 2009 and makes the economy his top priority.
Banks are forced to eat some (not all) of their mortgage losses, they’re also recapitalized but the top two or three levels of management are fired without golden parachutes. (The tea party never forms).
The Stim is directed towards infrastructure (which takes advantage of the unemployed construction workers). Tax reform is implemented (and yes, corp taxes are lowered so they stop fleeing the country), which shifts Trillions of dollars of money parked overseas to the US (so we have a 2nd Stim of business spending their own money).
The great recession still ends 6 months into 2009, but we get a Reagan style bounce after that instead of 2% growth. Obama implements the ACA in the context of an expanding economy.
The Trump voters stays Blue. Hillary is a shoo in.Report
That last sentence was kind of gibberish. I’ll reformulate it as the spirit moves.
Yeah Chip, I don’t believe you believe that. In any event, that would be pretty ridiculous:
http://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/presidentReport
“Middle America”?
I’m a high school dropout. My brother is a firefighter and a dad. My sister is a paramedic, who as a hobby raises rabbits in the hills of North Carolina. My father is a preacher man, born and raised in Eaton Ohio. His father worked in Dayton, on the factory floor for Frigidaire.
My mom is my mom. She used to be a hairdresser. Then she was a housewife.
Anyway, dad moved around taking different preaching jobs. I was born in Atlanta, but was then raised in the South Florida burbs. But whatever. Back in middle school I thought the rebel flag was cool. I don’t think that now.
I’ve fired a rifle. In fact, I’ve fired a flintlock rifle, with shot that I cast myself with lead tire weights. My favorite rifle, however, was my O3A3. My roommate and I used to shoot at steel silhouettes. I’ve worked in a auto shop, mostly fixing tires and easy shit like that. I certainly wasn’t a mechanic, but occasionally I throw a set of break drums on the lathe.
I’ve worked construction. Back then I drove an F150, with a toolbox that included a core drill I frequently used.
Am I “middle America”?
I taught myself mathematics from books and now I work for Google.
I dunno. I feel perfectly comfortable around “plain folks,” if they can get past the fact I’m transgender. So whatever. Some can. Some cannot. I’m also really good a math, but I’m not the first American to be good at math.
Except I might become a Canadian soon, but that’s for love. I’m not the first American to fall in love.
Donald Trump is fucking repulsive. He is the worst of us.Report
Then stop whining and leave already.Report
@notme
Coming from you, that’s as amusing as it is predictable. I see you haven’t lost that wonderfully candyass personality of yours.Report
Ah yes, it’s Dave the tough keyboard commando. What happened to that lesson you were going to teach me?Report
I put on a pretty good Second Amendment show for you individual rights apologists. I even attracted a nice little shit talker into this place for a short period of time, but sadly, he couldn’t get much farther than his opportunistic out of context historical-era quotes.
It’s funny. I have zero interest in the gun control debate and even less so in taking a position on it, but I have to say that I’ve come to the conclusion that there are interesting similarities between the gun rights crowd and the Christian Nation crowd when it comes to their preferred positions. Constitutionally speaking, both are completely full of shit.
Actually, I’d love to continue this because of all this chickenshit conservative nationalism I see here (like people that say “he’s your President. Deal”.) just doesn’t do it for me.
Keyboard warrior? Moi? Oh please. I’m a meathead. I’m too stupid to know how to do that. I just walk around looking like I can pick up a small automobile and throw it. That’s my thing, not trolling a site full of very smart decent people by posting idiotic right wing shit.Report
Ha, ole Hansberry. He threw something on the ground that looked a lot like social norms, and quietly walked off.Report
He threw a lot more on the wall than he did the ground.
I actually kind of liked him. It’s not often that someone so belligerent cites the Preamble to the Bill of Rights in a discussion. In fact, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen that anywhere.
I have a feeling that my mere mention of the Second Amendment may come across his feed so we may get to see him again and welcome him back to this fine establishment.
In the meantime, my Hater club will be one person shy 😉Report
@notme — Certainly I might leave, depending on how safe I feel here. I might soon marry a Canadian girl. She will either come live with me here, or the reverse. I have a great job. It would be logical for her to come here. But will we be safe from our own government?
I’m not yet sure. The fact is, as the Pulse shooting proved, we can’t really be perfectly safe anywhere. However, when the hatred against us is backed by the power of the state — that is intolerable.
So Canada — maybe. But then, that does nothing to change what Trump is, and what Bannon is, and what Pence is, and what the spineless Republican leadership is, and what the mass of fucking idiots who voted for Trump are. It’s not my fault these people are rotten.
They are a minority. America should be better than this.
After all, I am an American, as much as anyone here. I was born here. I’ve lived my life here. I put into the system as much (or more) than you have.
I educated myself. Now I create cutting edge technology. That is certainly a contribution.
What is happening is shameful.
#####
But then, let me ask, is my loyalty to country somehow predicated on my loyalty to Trumpism? Cuz that’s not how we do things here. In fact, such an attitude is deeply unamerican. Surely you can see that. Please explain yourself.Report
V,
You and I don’t agree on a lot of things. While I consider, at least for now, the left’s reaction to Trump to be a bit overwrought, there is reason to be concerned. Of course, I could say the same thing about Obama for different reasons. Hearing the Right’s bitching about Obama rings very similar to the current left’s bitching But here’s the point.
I don’t want you to go. The majority of people really just want to do their own thing and live their lives. Only a small minority want to change society into what they think it should be…and are willing to force everyone else to comply. You see that on both sides. So, stay, and fight for what you want. Sometimes the wheel brings you up, sometimes it grinds you down. Wait for the turn. And god, how I hate this cliché, but “it’ll get better”.
.Report
@damon — It’s the bathroom laws — not the laws themselves. After all, I can just choose not to travel to such places, although that means I cannot visit my sister and dammit I feel sorry for my friends trapped in those places. But it’s more. It’s this: http://news.wgbh.org/2017/01/31/politics-government/caustic-trumpian-tone-invades-newtons-politics
Those people live around here. No doubt I see them on the subway.
In fact, such a person threatened to murder me, face to face. (I’ve told this story before.)
I mean, I doubt he was literally one of those people at that meeting, but still, before he threatened me, he was verbally harassing a couple brown college kids, accusing them of being Muslims. (They were not. I later learned from Facebook they were medical students from India.) But in any case, I feel safe assuming he was “radicalized” by right-wing news.
It is true that Massachusetts will probably remain fairly safe for the nonce. In fact, my current (very tentative) plan is to bring her here, marry her, live with her, work at my current amazing job, and then see. But the point is, the option is there to leave, especially if the police begin to disobey the local authorities, which seems very much a part of “Trumpism.”
Anyway, you must admit, we make a cute couple.
That shot was taken in Vancouver, which is an amazing place. Objectively, British Columbia seems like a place I could thrive as easily as anywhere in the US. It lacks a Google office, sadly.Report
+1Report
Indeed. I like Vancouver too. And Victoria. Hope you got to Buchard Gardens.Report
@damon — Let me add, if Trump fucks with marriage rights, or somehow weakens if my marriage “counts” for purposes of immigration, then I won’t have a choice.
Pence certainly wants to undo my marriage rights. I have no idea how Bannon feels, except he has always been happy to publish hateful material that degrades me and mine. I don’t think Trump really cares, but I suspect Trump will sell us out sooner or later, as his political house-of-cards comes tumbling down. So who knows.Report
Here’s a picture of Trump at one of his rallies, waving the rainbow flag.
http://img.huffingtonpost.com/asset/2000_1000/581778b9190000a304c2fff1.jpeg?cache=j56clae2e7Report
Chip,
Dude. We didn’t think the odds were good that steel was coming back. What we get instead is someone to kick washington’s collective ass.Report
Increase economic growth and all sorts of sins are forgiven and all kinds of things forgotten.
The previous elites have left a LOT of growth enhancing things on the table because of ideology or incompetence or self interest. That *should* be disturbing to people because it’s opened the door to Trump.Report
Dark,
He walks into an incoming recession. Know that few presidents actually manage to turn the ship in less than four years. Obama’s attitudes and policies will cause the recession regardless, unless Trump does something major.**
**Double that if the H1B goes through, and there’s not much that the tech companies can do to prevent it. That’s executive branch wankery, and even getting the legislature to touch it will be a hot potato. And the judiciary will back out on a “this is an executive ruling on enforcement”Report
It’s about solidarity. If the rest of America could trust the libs’ motivations, their actions wouldn’t be nearly as important.
Hey, that reminds me. In our last discussion, you didn’t tell me how you thought libs *could* show solidarity with the right.Report
koz ain’t gonna tell you, but I will. Plans on the books for getting high speed internet to every single school in the country. Part of the ARRA, actually.
(yeah, I know the guy who wrote that plan. it’s kinda funny when line items in really, really large bills are someone’s personal “this is your job now”)Report
Plans on the books for getting high speed internet to every single school in the country. Part of the ARRA, actually.
…so I’m just imagining that it’s *Republican* state governments that seem to be perfectly fine with shitty ISPs, and in fact attempt to ban cities from rolling out their own high-speed connectivity?
Oh, wait, you said schools. So…why are liberals in charge of the internet, again? If states want their schools to have high speed internet, why don’t they get it?
I’m really not sure the left is holding this up.
Or do you just mean the left can do it and take credit for it?Report
David,
This was back in 2010. A plan got paid for — not sure if it ever got implemented. Please don’t assume that because a plan got made, it ever got implemented.
koz was saying that liberals should do things for everyone, not just liberals (which, okay, there’s some of that) — this is one of those “do something for the rural schools” ideas.Report
This one doesn’t look difficult from here. Conceptually speaking, the libs already have the edifice for this, they just have to flip the switch on it.
The upper-middle class SWPLs need to check their privilege, ie to work with people and institutions the conservatives and Republicans are likely to participate in, instead of trying to maneuver around them.Report
The upper-middle class SWPLs need to check their privilege, ie to work with people and institutions the conservatives and Republicans are likely to participate in, instead of trying to maneuver around them.
And some examples of these ‘people and institutions the conservatives and Republicans are likely to participate in’ *would be*?
It’s like pulling teeth with you.
State a *concrete actual thing* you’d like to see done, and while you’re at it, identify some *actual person on the left* that could hypothetically do it if they wanted to.
Like ‘The Obamas could be grand-marshals of a NASCAR race’ or something.
And, incidentally, talking about what the ‘upper-middle class SWPLs’ should do is nonsense. There’s no mainstream activity that is *just* conservatives or *just* liberals. (Barring specifically political stuff like political organizing, and even there you get weird crossover.) It simply doesn’t exist.
Granted, this is s bit difficult for me to argue, because you decided to *not* provide any examples of ‘people and institutions the conservatives and Republicans are likely to participate in’. Are you talking hunting? Being a police officer? Going to NFL games? Being elected to Congress on a Republican ticket?
Liberals do all those things.
Do you even *know* what you’re talking about?
And it’s a bit weird you’d focus on *upper-class* people. Upper-class people…hang out with each other. Conservatives and liberals. Upper-class people do not walk around among the peons.
Demanding that *liberal* ones come down and walk among the poors really just seems like an excuse for you to have something to point fingers at.Report
Really? To be honest I think I’m pretty good at spelling stuff out.
In case, for a first instance we could have a world where it’s unthinkable that a candidate for the chairmanship of the DNC, representing Idaho of all places, would self-describe her intent as being to “shut other white people down.”
Or California secession. Or the protests against Trump’s immigration EO’s. Or any number of things really.
I was reading the other day, I think it might have been here, a book review about how for all the partisan antagonism there is in politics today, there was actually much more political violence circa 1970 or so: something like 2000 domestic political bombings, blah, blah. And it occurred to me that was true, but it also glazed over the fact that separatist sentiment is much stronger now. Ie, that libs, and conservatives for that matter, are strongly motivated to manipulate jurisdictions so as not to be held accountable to partisan adversaries. Whereas before, that would not have occurred, not because of warm feeling between the adversaries, but because the whole train of thought would have been ridiculous from the outset.
That’s something that libs need to give up. Probably half of libs in NY, or SF or LA, want to think that when the shit hits the fan, they’ll just go to Vancouver, or London, or Singapore or wherever. It’s bullshit. There’s a lot of libs who work for firms with substantial overseas sales. But very few of them have meaningful personal overseas connections, to the extent that they could relocate there.
Hopefully, the GOP will bring the hammer down on this. Not as a matter of policy, but just as a matter of course. We’re all Americans. It’s time for libs to quit trying to evade their civic obligations, and start figuring out how to honor them.Report
Personally, I think that marching in the streets is honoring our civic obligations.
So is the ACLU suing the administration.
So is setting up to send Planned Parenthood a check every month.
Fearing, and quashing, dissent is a long-standing American value. It’s just not a good one.Report
Ok, I’ll bite. What bothers you about the protests against Trump’s immigration EO?Report
A few things: the fact that the energy is expended for the benefit of foreigners and we’d never see this for Trump voting demographics. IIRC, Jaybird made a similar comment from the point of view of BLM and the point is the same, just different beneficiaries.
The fact that it’s an expression of energy by SWPL’s to circumvent any offices that could be held by a mainstream Republican.
The fact that, at least among the commentary that I’ve seen, hasn’t given any consideration to the idea of how to restrict or modify the idea behind the EO so that it would go in force and benefit America. Or to put it another way, the failure to consider that limiting travel from those seven countries might be in America’s interest.Report
A few things: the fact that the energy is expended for the benefit of foreigners and we’d never see this for Trump voting demographics.
People do not protest ‘for the benefit’ of people. People protest *laws and/or conditions*.
There are plenty of protests that protest things that harm the ‘Trump voting demographics’. (Or, at least, things that they *think* harm them.)
For example, let’s take what they think is the *largest* source of harm: Free trade. The left created the TPP protests! They created the original NAFTA protests! They even did the WTO protests! Trump was literally the first Republican to even take a position, a position that grassroots Democrats (If not their leadership) had been taking for *decades*.
Oh, oh, wait, I know. We’re supposed to protest the ACA. Well, a little late for that now…the ACA repeal is now opposed by the majority, so really, shouldn’t the *right* join *the left* in protesting people trying to repeal it? I mean, we’re all Americans, it’s time Republican got on board with their civic responsibilities. (Which I assume is determined by majority poll?)
So that’s no good. What’s else…shouldn’t we be able to figure this out by looking at what the *Trump voting demographics* are protesting? I mean, surely the right has a duty to at least *start* those protests, and the left can just join in. So…what are they protesting? Well, mainly, right now, they seem to be…have rallies for Trump? That…is odd, and a bit creepy, and probably not something the left is going to join.
What were they protesting before Trump?
Let’s see….the last protest I can see from the right, pre-Trump, was Republicans…uh…protesting the president’s executive order on…um…immigration, which they claimed was unlawful.
Aaaawkward.
Heh….I just realized. Trump never got around to undoing DACA, did he? Checking, it appears he promises to do something about it ‘within four weeks’. (last week, so three week now)
So remember, altering an enforcement priority on immigration back the way it was before, something that, although heartless, won’t actually break anything…four weeks deliberation. But what he did this Friday, upheaving travel for thousands of people and stranding residents outside the county…eh, whatever. Looks good, let’s just do it. We don’t need to run it past anyone.
The fact that, at least among the commentary that I’ve seen, hasn’t given any consideration to the idea of how to restrict or modify the idea behind the EO so that it would go in force and benefit America.
So you content it is the job of *people currently trying to stop families from being broken up and lawful permanent residents with their entire lives here* to…figure out the right way to do the EO?
Forget the fact that’s they are not lawmakers or lawyers, and making laws is, uh, generally the government’s job, let me ask the obvious question: Do you have *any evidence at all* that Trump would listen to these protester’s suggestions, considering he didn’t even bother to run his nonsensical ravings though any government channels?
But, hey, they probably should have offered anyway. After all, that was how the ACA protesters acted. They interrupted town hall meetings with a list of different ways to implement health care and/or suggestions for the proposal plan, if I recall correctly.
Or to put it another way, the failure to consider that limiting travel from those seven countries might be in America’s interest.
Well, I mean, we have been debating about this bill ever since it was introduce in Congress several weeks ago, and both sides have made some very good points but ultimately-
*holds hand to ear*
Sorry, I’m being informed the reason that no one debated this at all, because it is something that Trump did without asking anyone to ‘consider’ anything at all.
Also, the fact you appear misinformed about the scope of the order is, uh, not a good sign. (I mean, it’s hardly your fault. Almost no one can understand it.) The EO did not ‘limit’ travel from those countries.
The EO *bars* travel to the US of people holding citizenship in those countries. Outright bars.
It doesn’t matter that Trump yammers about ‘extreme vetting’ and how people can get waived through. That can’t happen. (Except for the few people already physically here.) Why?
Because, as I have explained in other posts here, that is not how immigration works…people without valid visas, or whose apparently has visas that are not being accepted by the US government, will not be allowed to fly here by airlines, and thus cannot be ‘given waivers’ by the border patrol. Nor is there any system for them to get a waiver before flying here…or, in fact, there a system to get permission to visit the US, and *it’s called a visa*. (And not only will airlines not let those people fly with visas anymore, but the embassies have already stopped issuing visas to those people.)
And it’s not like this is *secret*. There were reports of people being pulled off planes and not being allowed to fly here *as soon as this started*. They are, literally, stranded outside this country, with no way to return, and some of them have been permanent residents here for *decades*.
Everyone needs to stop pretending this EO works in a way it clearly does not. There is no additional vetting, there is no process for additional vetting, there is no place for additional vetting. (Except the few already here.) Those people are just *barred*.Report
Sure they do, and it’s certainly the case here.
Yep.
I don’t know. Jeff Sessions is in the middle of a confirmation process in the Senate, you could ask him. I’d be interested in hearing what he’d have to say to be honest.
In any event, there’s a lot of people in Washington who might have their thumb in the pie, it goes way beyond Trump and his inner circle. Libs want to avoid all those who are obviously accountable to mainstream Republicans in some way.
ok
For 90 or 120 days or maybe even sooner if the EO is modified before then.Report
Yep.
I’m going to assume you realized how unjustified asking for a solution that would be by the fact you didn’t bother to justify it.
But the protesters actually have a pretty clear solution: Stop applying this to current visa holders and green card holders.
You have noticed that the actual location that is being protested at is the airport, right? The place that people *who have already been granted permission to enter the country* are trapped. The people who, in many cases, live here.
*That* is what has people outraged. People trapped at airport, unable to enter the country. Because of one decision that is illegal (when applied to people with visas) and one that is unconstitutional (when applied to green card holds) and is utterly stupid regardless (If there is going to be more vetting, it should be before visas or green cards are issued, not at entry, trapping them in some idiotic airport limbo.), and *is going to be struck down by the courts*.(Hell, the Trump administration itself already had to back off on the green cards, as that was *obviously* unconstitutional.)
You’re trying to pretend that people are mostly protesting the refugee restriction or any sort of restrictions on entry. And I’m sure there are some people pissed about that, although that also is mostly about refugees trapped at airports also. (Which is constitutional and perhaps lawful, but completely insane behavior.)
The fact is…people don’t show up at an airport to protest the State Department no longer authorizing refugees. That doesn’t have anything to do with airports. People showed up at because the airports are holding people who *were already granted permission to enter the US* in limbo.
The claim that most protesters would have any objection to temporarily stoppoing refugees, or additional screening for refugees or even for *issuing* visas, (Aka, the *non-illegal*, moderately *sane* part of Trump’s place.) has no real evidence. Maybe they would, I don’t know, but you can’t just assume it. (I actually expect the largest pushback on refugees is going to come from evangelicals.)
And, again, you’re sorta arguing as if the story is ‘Trump says we need more restrictions on immigration, the left immediately rejects that idea and takes to the streets without debating it’. That…is not what happened. It’s basically the opposite of what happened. What happened is the Trump did some very stupid thing without running it past anyone and people took to the streets. No one was even allowed to give *any input at all*, and demanding they do it *now* is completely absurd.
If Trump wants to have a reasonable discussion with the American people about who we are letting immigrate…he knows where to find us. (And, just as importantly, he knows where to find *Congress*. Man, I remember when the president unilaterally changing immigration policy when Congress ended up deadlocked was a horrible thing for a president to do. How much worse is it when Trump doesn’t even *try*, despite having Congress *on his side*? I wish I could remember who that discussion was with. Rhymes with Voz. Loz? Joz? I forget.)
Hey, is Trump aware that he probably doesn’t have four weeks to look at DACA, considering he’s being sued for it and that suit was on hold until, well, him?
I don’t know. Jeff Sessions is in the middle of a confirmation process in the Senate, you could ask him. I’d be interested in hearing what he’d have to say to be honest.
How can protesters can ask Jeff Sessions anything?
Democratic Senators on the Judicary committee were not allowed to ask any new questions of Session. We will see if they are allowed to ask questions on the Senate floor.
In any event, there’s a lot of people in Washington who might have their thumb in the pie, it goes way beyond Trump and his inner circle. Libs want to avoid all those who are obviously accountable to mainstream Republicans in some way.
I do not understand what that is supposed to mean. What do you mean, ‘avoid’? What do you mean, ‘accountable to mainstream Republicans’? (Hell, I’m not even sure what you mean by ‘libs’. The protesters? Or politicians?)
The left is, as of this moment, putting pressure on *Republican* Congressman in a pretty consistent manner to do something about this.
For 90 or 120 days or maybe even sooner if the EO is modified before then.
I’m pretty sure you can’t use ‘This might be modified later’ as evidence of it not being as harsh as it is. And I’m also pretty sure you can’t use ‘The president is forced to modify the EO to be less stupid due to massive protests’ as evidence indicating that the protesters are wrong.
But, anyway, I guess schools will understand if students on student visas miss 120 days of classes. And people on work visas will, of course, still have their jobs. And permanent residents will…find someone to watch their kids and pets and house and, uh, their entire life.
And I guess all require health screening for people will just…still be valid.
Everyone can afford to live in whatever random country they were visiting for another three or four months, right? How much do hotels even really cost? (Wait, unless they’re in *that country* on a visa too, at which point they’ll have to go somewhere else.)Report
This is the contention that underlies much of the pro-Trump/America First sentiment. And frankly, it’s stupid. It’s politics though, so to the extent that we are interested in getting thoughtful and effective people into public office, we have to take stupid beliefs seriously.
So, in the spirit of that…
This is simple. It’s not. The genesis of choosing those seven countries comes from the Obama administration having identified them, ex Iran, as places that a visit to might trigger extra scrutiny on a visa application. That makes some sense.
Trump’s total ban makes no sense. Almost none of the terrorist attacks carried out on US soil were done by nationals from any of those seven countries. The only sense that it makes any sense is that Trump’s base doesn’t particularly care to make distinctions between countries and people in the Middle East or larger Muslim word. Basically, we have policy being conducted for the benefit of people who see large parts of the rest of the world and think “Here be dragons.”Report
First of all it’s an impression, not a contention.
Really? No we know what those people’s connections to terrorists or fundraising are? Do we know if they are likely to overstay their visas? Do we know if they are likely to work without authorization and where?
Let’s recall that the EO was only intended to be in force for 90 or 120 days. The idea being we try to find answers to some of these questions and then adjust policy as new information arrives.Report
IIRC, Egypt & Saudi Arabia generate more problematic people than those 7.
Also, none of this addresses travel from places like France, that is currently having trouble with home grown & imported terrorists.Report
(Ban extends to Egypt and Saudi Arabia)
“Wait! That’s not what I wanted! Also, it doesn’t address France!”Report
Absolutely. That’s something that can be addressed, and likely will be addressed shortly. It still does nothing to mitigate the feral nature of the opposition to Trump.Report
The opposition is more rational than that.
http://nhdp.org/blog/2017/01/30/icymi-national-security-experts-oppose-president-trumps-muslim-ban/Report
I’m talking about the feral mentality ,”ZOMG we totally have to be in a state of complete resistance to Trump!!!” more than just the reaction to the EO, further elaborated in other comments.Report
koz,
Objecting to paid protestors are we?
Seems you weren’t objecting when they were on your side…
I do remember what you were like when the Tea Party was around, after all. (Koch-led, Koch-run).
Of course, I agree with you. Liberals can’t get anything done if they don’t time it right. And this is poor Public Relations, poor metabolism.Report
To be honest Kimmi, I don’t see how paid protestors factor in. For what I’m talking about, they’re pretty small beer.Report
“Feral” is such an interesting adjective to be used so often.
My immediate association is (conveniently) confirmed by google: resembling a wild animal. But not just any wild animal; we’re not talking about Bambi here. No, the synonyms include vicious, savage, predatory and the like.
Feral animals are also not sapient. So in addition to being vicious, we can add mindless.
What does one do to a mindless, vicious beast? Shoot it, of course. You certainly don’t listen to it, or respect it. That’s reserved for humans.
So, if anyone is (honestly) wondering why a certain commenter isn’t engaging with the comments being made by the more liberal members of the commentariat, the answer is right there before you:
We are not human.Report
Yeah, that’s what I’m trying to get at. The indiscriminate, mindless anger of the Left and its political and cultural protagonists, and how that filters through and shapes where we are now.
This seems to insinuate that I’m not replying to so-and-so lib, which isn’t true. Maybe it means that so-and-so lib isn’t replying to me, which is fine whoever so-and-so is supposed to be. This is enough a time suck as it is.
Like this. Are we really supposed to pretend to take the word feral that literally? That that was a fair reading of anything I wrote? I doubt it. I think it’s a pretty clear instance of bad faith.Report
No we know what those people’s connections to terrorists or fundraising are?
Objection: Refugees are some of the most vetted people on the planet, and we know exactly their connection to terrorism, specially, they are terrorized by it.
And the only terrorism we’ve really ever seen from them has been from *Cuban* refugees, and that’s because we had kinda dumb rules there.
Do we know if they are likely to overstay their visas?
Objection, your honor: It is impossible for green card holders to overstay their visas, because they do not have visas.
In fact, they are expected to permanently reside in this country, so much so that spending a lot of time out of the country can cause them to forfeit their green card.
Another objection: Refugees cannot overstay their visas, either.
Do we know if they are likely to work without authorization and where?
Objection: People with actual work visas are being blocked too, in addition to both green card holders and refugees, all of whom have authorization to work.
Opposing counsel is clearly just making up justifications as he goes along.Report
Now you’re quibbling. And the quibbles are for the moment at least irrelevant since the parts about greencard holders and presumably dual citizens are invalid from a couple of judges injunctions and the rest of it would expire in 90 or 120 days anyway.
The problem is, as I stated before, the motives and the feral nature of the opposition to Trump. Like you asked a day or so ago what the Left could conceivably do to show solidarity with the Right or the rest of America for that matter. And guess what? In the one day or however long since then, President Trump nominated Judge Gorsuch for SCOTUS.
If the Demos wanted a way to demonstrate solidarity, they could find 20, 25, or 30 Demo votes for him. It really wouldn’t cost them anything, he’s going to get confirmed anyway.
But it would show where their thinking and their aspirations are at. But this is unlikely to happen for exactly this reason. The Dems in the Senate will likely feel a strong push from Demo voters to oppose Judge Gorsuch out of spite, thereby furthering the alienation of Demos, especially Demos in Congress, away from rest of America. I don’t think this is in America’s best interest, and I don’t think it’s in the Demos political interest either, if I supported that.Report
You justify dismissing the actions of lawyers and protesters on the grounds that court orders will mitigate the worst of the executive orders.
The reason those orders exist to mitigate the damage was due to the actions of the lawyers and protesters to get those orders.
Basically, you are fine with your guy governing without any sense of responsiblity because you know the “libs” will use their blood, sweet and tears to prevent the worse of it.Report
Actually, that’s what I’m hoping for. In fact I can go beyond that even, in that I’m hoping that the maximum energy expenditure on their part gets the minimum in terms of policy change. And if for some reason it doesn’t work I’ll probably blame you for it. You’re looking at somebody who completely believes in cultural appropriation (or maybe political appropriation).
I’ve even given the libs another alternative if they don’t like that one. They can get behind the mainstream GOP and see if that works out better.
Everything the libs have done since the election has been crude grasping for power that they don’t have. This includes the obstruction of Trump’s nominees, the reaction to the SCOTUS nomination, the inaugural demonstrations, the unrest at colleges, etc. This is all an attempt to say, the election we just had, that was an optical illusion. The actual power is still here, with us, no matter who holds the federal offices.
This is especially unfortunate because the election was among other things a repudiation of multiculturalist enthusiasts and the Demo Establishment holding power, independent of whatever policies they might hold. Therefore, setting up dramas like the immigration EO works to Trump’s benefit. All the people who voted for him are likely to support him again for the purpose of putting the hammer down on the losers of the election.
If the libs would flip this, and make a big stink about approving Trump’s nominees, that we as libs are not in power, then we just have the substantive problems, and the Trump Administration would have to manage somehow. That’s what would take the starch out of the Bannon inner circle. Until that happens, he’ll probably just continue running rings around you.Report
Have we heard anything about whether those orders are still being defied, or do we still have an independent judiciary check on the executive? Because the argument, “Let him do whatever crazy stuff he wants and assume that others will keep the worst of it in check,” is a whole lot less appealing when nobody seems to be keeping him in check.
I’ll more interested in questions over Supreme Court justices and the Department of Education once I’m sure the executive branch hasn’t neutered the enforcement wing of the judiciary.Report
I never had any idea that they were being defied. From what I read, the argument that they did depended on DHS or TSA or whoever being a lot more responsive as bureaucracies that you’d expect.Report
Well, we’re now well into the week after a court order was issued over the weekend, and I still haven’t seen anything about them complying. Nobody seems to be able to respond to journalists about what’s going on or make a clear statement acknowledging the order and how they’re complying/what’s preventing compliance.
Unless everybody from the lowest tier all the way up to POTUS is not watching TV and only accepts messages by pack mule courier, it looks a lot like CBP is simply ignoring an order from a federal court. Bureaucratic delay made sense when they weren’t complying on Sunday with an order issued late Saturday night. Now it’s either stonewalling or epic incompetence. I’m willing to believe either one.Report
Have we heard anything about whether those orders are still being defied, or do we still have an independent judiciary check on the executive? Because the argument, “Let him do whatever crazy stuff he wants and assume that others will keep the worst of it in check,” is a whole lot less appealing when nobody seems to be keeping him in check.Report
Really? No we know what those people’s connections to terrorists or fundraising are? Do we know if they are likely to overstay their visas? Do we know if they are likely to work without authorization and where?
Oh, and biggest objection of all:
If we are concerned about those things for green card holders…
…*why are we only rechecking the ones that happened to be outside the country when this went into effect*?
Note this is ignoring that green cards can only be removed *via due process in a court* and until then green card holders have just as much legal right to enter the country as citizens…
…but, seriously, if we pretend for a second that administrative action by the executive was allowed to remove people’s permanent residence status…why are we only applying it to people who happened to be physically located outside the country at the time the order is passed?
In fact, considering that 95% of green card holders are probably *in the US right now*, wouldn’t it make more sense to not worry about the fraction of people outside as a specific group, and just *start a review*, in some order, of all green card holders from those locations? Just keep everything operating as normal, them going in and out if they want, and we just contact each of them at home and make each of them do some more paperwork and interviews? (Again, pretending this was allowed by law.)
‘Man, these people, many who have resided in the US for decades, are an extreme threat to our way of life! We better randomly check the 5% of them that randomly are currently located outside the US as they try to come back, and then completely ignore the 95% of people currently located here! ‘
The answer here is: Trump is a moron, and Bannon is trying to break things.Report
Again, these are small quibbles and my answer here is the same as my other comment from a minute ago.
As far as what Bannon is doing or trying to do, there’s at least a couple of possibilities it seems to me. Either in a mad rush and without a couple rounds of bureaucratic hoopjumping, they promulgated the EO so that it could apply to green card holders and dual citizens as an oversight.
Or he did it deliberately, with the intention of drawing out feral opposition, knowing that those provisions would never hold anyway. I’m not sure which it is, it might not make a difference.
But the nature of the opposition is not hurting Trump, at least not yet. So that may be an occasion for you to rethink things.Report
Again, these are small quibbles and my answer here is the same as my other comment from a minute ago.
You are complaining about protests that got results you admit need getting. So…they *shouldn’t* have happened?
Let’s have the other option. Let’s assume, for the purpose of this, that the green card thing barring *is* unconstitutional. (Trump appears to have stopped it before court, although some people with them who were deported probably still have cases.)
If the government is, blatantly, in full view of everyone, doing an unconstitutional thing…please explain what people are *supposed* to do instead of protesting and attempting to get those people access to lawyers?
As far as what Bannon is doing or trying to do, there’s at least a couple of possibilities it seems to me. Either in a mad rush and without a couple rounds of bureaucratic hoopjumping, they promulgated the EO so that it could apply to green card holders and dual citizens as an oversight.
Or he did it deliberately, with the intention of drawing out feral opposition, knowing that those provisions would never hold anyway. I’m not sure which it is, it might not make a difference.
You need to do a bit more research here. Specifically, DHS decided the EO obviously didn’t apply to green card holders, and then Bannon *overruled that*. (Not entirely sure why Bannon has that authority, but whatever.)
Basically, the point these orders hit sane people, the sane people said ‘Whoa, this says ‘aliens’, but that technically would include green card holders, and obviously that doesn’t make sense. Green card holders are US Nationals and can enter and leave the country freely.’ and Bannon said ‘Ha! Nope. They are also included!’
But the nature of the opposition is not hurting Trump, at least not yet. So that may be an occasion for you to rethink things.
Bannon is attempting to cause chaos and destruction in the government. Seriously, that is his actual goal.
http://www.gq.com/story/steve-bannon-shadow-president
This is *deliberate* behavior on the part of Bannon. He is trying to break things. As he breaks things, people who need those things are, well, going to get annoyed. At Trump.
Meanwhile, the idea that this is not hurting the president is a bit absurd. Trump dropped 10 points during all this.
Of course, in reality, ‘hurting the president’ doesn’t happen because of the public. It happens because *Congress* starts refusing to work with him.
So, funny story. Congress is not happy about having to deal with this. At all. And, on top of that, Trump’s constant claim that they were involved, only for it to turn out to be *their legislative aides*, which he had *sign an non-disclosure agreements so they couldn’t tell their boss*, is…uh…bad.
Let me put it this way: President Carter could not get anything done as president because he pissed off Congress…and he did a lot less than this. There is more partisanship now, more a requirement to stand behind the president…but that won’t last forever.Report
Exactly this. The ferality of the resistance to Trump is a large part of what’s empowering him.
Some people have claimed with greater or lesser plausibility that Bannon is doing this on purpose. That he’s deliberately provoking an overreaction to induce the Republican and otherwise apolitical people to start supporting him or continue supporting him. I don’t know if that’s exactly true, but it is clear enough that he’s leveraging it when it does happen.
Exactly. And who controls Congress? Our team does, so it’s probably more useful to start talking to us instead indulging mindless lib anger.Report
Exactly this. The ferality of the resistance to Trump is a large part of what’s empowering him.
’empowering’ him?
The guy isn’t, like, some sort of fantasy creature that feeds off our anger. He doesn’t get more powerful because we *dis*like him.
Do I need to do my little political capital speech here? Let me summarize here:
Presidents get power due to political capital, which is basically the concept of how popular they are. This is not any sort of direct equation (Unless you’re playing Democracy 3.), how it actually works is that popular presidents produce proposals that are automatically more popular. People basically *trust* the proposal because they trust the president.
When a proposal is popular, other people in the government (Mostly Congress, but sometimes cabinet members play this game too.) are more likely to support it, in the hopes that popularity will rub off on them. Thus resulting in political movement and supporting the President’s proposals.
Likewise, this works backwards: A popular president can remove or withhold his support from something, causing its popularity to drop. Thus he has leverage that he can use for policies that are less popular.
Political capital. A vague currency, but a currency.
Trump… does not understand how this works at all. I mean, I don’t think he’d be very good at it, and I sorta went into this presidency assuming he’d suck at it, because he can’t play nice…but I have realized that Trump literally does not seem to understand how this operates. He’s a guy playing monopoly that does not understand those ‘property deeds’ are important.
And thus Trump, is, in reality, *the weakest president there has ever been*, in the traditional sense, because he does not understand the currency used. (Even presidents that have gone so unpopular to be basically *negative* at least understood what was going on and the limits of possibility for them. To get philosophical: A guy who knows he has no money is richer than a guy who does not understand what money is, even if the second guy still has some bouncing around his pockets because he hasn’t thrown it all at geese or whatever the hell he thinks money is for.)
What many people missed in all this EO nonsense is that Trump just pissed off Congress for no reason. He went around Congress, he even used their people without their permission or knowledge, he got everyone really upset for nothing…no one is happy here. He could have gone to Congress, presented an argument for extra vetting from some countries (Revoking the anti-discrimination things), and less refugees, exempted green card holders, and had them make a law, and maybe gone up in popularity, at least among Republicans. (Although, again, evangelicals are pissed about the refugee thing, but that at least would be a normal trade off.)
Instead…he did this. Congress saw him do this. Congress got phone calls about this.
Now, it is possible for the president to play *some other game*. There are things he can do without Congress. For example, issue idiotic executive orders.
But Trump is, *very quickly* putting himself at the point of not being able to operate as a traditional president, limiting himself to only being able to sit in the White House and issue executive orders that the courts then blow up, or, at some point, Congress starts slapping down.
I dunno, maybe that’s what he wants, or even what he thinks the presidency is, but let’s not pretend that’s ‘power’.
Some people have claimed with greater or lesser plausibility that Bannon is doing this on purpose. That he’s deliberately provoking an overreaction to induce the Republican and otherwise apolitical people to start supporting him or continue supporting him. I don’t know if that’s exactly true, but it is clear enough that he’s leveraging it when it does happen.
It is true.
And he’s a moron who thinks he can ‘leverage’ it into people become so outraged this turns into a race war.
That’s his plan:
1) Break everything in the government.
2) Rebuilding the government with white nationalism.
He does not seem to grasp the fact that deliberately breaking everything is going to piss the rest of the government off, and they will not stand for it for every long.
And who controls Congress? Our team does, so it’s probably more useful to start talking to us instead indulging mindless lib anger.
…or we could just wait until your team either a) is forced to do something, causing them to get voted out of office by the Republican base, or b) doesn’t do anything, and the American people are so annoyed they vote them out.
Basically, we’re calling your bluff. We’re not going to be the guys that stop Trump *for you*. We refuse to be. This has actually emerged as a pretty wide consensus on the left: Do not take steps towards impeaching Trump. Do not even *bipartisanly* impeach Trump. Make the Republican party own it. (And then join in.) I even wrote a post about it, somewhere.
Because if you weren’t forced to own it, you would forever paint us as the villains, the only people who ever impeached and removed a president, for partisan reasons. And you would pretend to stop us every step of the way.
Oh no. We’re not playing that game. You guys elected him, *you* control him.
Because here’s the actual truth: You guys need to be *destroyed* in the eyes of the horrible part of your base. Your base need breaking in half, with the crazy part (Whatever size that is.) wandering off into the wildness and joining Constitutional Party and whatever else is way over there, *never to trust Republicans again* because the Republicans stabbed Trump in the back.
Because those people are *really fucking dangerous*. They elect people like Trump, and they cannot be allowed to have one of the two main political party roll over for them. (The alternative, of course, is for Republicans to no longer be one of those two parties, which is where option (b) eventually ends up.)
And, yes, this will hurt. You’re in a demographics crunch already, and losing X% of your base will cause you to lose elections until you adjust some policies. But it’s coming up, so brace yourself.
Hey, maybe it’s not only the Republicans who are operating out of spite.Report
This is all well and good, except for the fact that Obama was really popular (still is), yet here we are. GOP control of both houses of US Congress and the White House, and one nuked fillibuster away from maintaining the conservative balance on the Supreme Court.
Trump’s victory is such a fluke, he doesn’t need to play the political capital game like one usually does. (& not playing the political capital game like a normal person is large part of the fluke)
As long as the people that want their judges get their judges, the people that want their regulations lax get their regulations lax, the people that want more ships and soldiers get more ships and soldiers – everyone’s going to dance with who brought them, regardless of how much he pisses off Mexico or Australia and regardless of how much he bollocks up US points of entry.
(The thing that will get him, perhaps the only thing, is too many flights into Dover with caskets)Report
No. The political capital game is not how you get elected.
Now, there *is* a game to get elected, and Trump indeed did not play it, instead getting elected because Republicans had been trained not to listen to the traditional media, and the traditional media itself is comprised of a bunch of ratings-seeking dumbasses.
But that’s the election game.
That doesn’t have anything to do with political capital. Trump has basically about a third of the way to being completely politically impotent. (And it will be getting worse.) At some point, let’s call it the tipping point, he is not going to be allowed to have any acknowledged input on the political process, because his input will be *completely toxic* in the eyes of the public. He will still be powerful because he’s the *president*, but he will be gone from *politics*.
After that point, the Republicans in Congress will only put up with him because a) it will damage them if they oppose him, and b) he will sign their stuff and nominate their guy. The second both of those isn’t true, or one of them isn’t true and they think they can work around the other thing, he’s gone.
But he will have lost almost all his leverage at this tipping point. (And, again, the problem isn’t so much he has lost it but that he literally doesn’t know it existed or how it works.(1)) The only leverage he will end up with is the ability to threaten the Republicans.
But, of course, threatening people is a pretty unworkable way of making policy, and he can’t use the threats correctly…as he has *negative* political capital, him opposing Congressional Republican plans would make those plans *more likely*, risking *even more people* coming on board, and at some point we start talking about veto overrides. (And serious considering of removing him…which is, thanks to Trump’s entangled business connection, almost trivial to find grounds for.)
1) Incidentally, I suspect his inability to understand political capital (Which is not a very complicated idea! It’s basically ‘popular politicians make things popular, and doing popular things makes politicians popular’. It’s hardly rocket science.) is due to his personality disorder rendering him literally incapable of comprehending and integrating disapproval of himself. Either people like him, or they are jealous of him so won’t admit they like him.Report
Sure he is, I think I explained it before. The feral nature of the libs increases the need for someone to put the hammer down on them. Ie, Trump. The more mature the libs are, the less need for Trump.Report
Sure he is, I think I explained it before. The feral nature of the libs increases the need for someone to put the hammer down on them. Ie, Trump. The more mature the libs are, the less need for Trump.
You do realize you basically are arguing that Republicans nominated Trump because of Democratic opposition to Trump, and that if Democrats stopped opposing Trump, the Republicans wouldn’t nominate people like him?
You realize that doesn’t make any chronological sense, right?
If Trump was nominated because of what you say, then it is very clear that Republicans thought Democrats were ‘feral’ and needed to be stopped in *early 2016*.
If you theory is true, the only way for the left to become *non-threatening* would be to…I don’t even know? Move out of the country? Permanently agree to never protest anything again?
And the problem here is that, basically, you’re attempting to justify the right’s hatred of the left on the behavior of the left.
Except the right’s hatred of the left has *never* had any justification, and there’s very little evidence it’s *increased* recently, or that Trump’s election had anything to do with that in either direction.
Trump’s election, in fact, was due to the Republican’s base hatred increasing towards *the Republican establishment*, because the hate-mongers presenting them with all their facts had sorta run out of things to say about Democrats.
The Republican base has *always* hated the left. They hated the Democratic politicians, and they hated the Democratic voters. This has been true for *decades*.
Now they just hate the Republican politicians, also.Report
Well, ultimately of course you should simply support conservatives and vote Republican.
But before that, you could simply give up the expectation that you can make the political Establishment bend to your will. In a good number of cases, you simply can’t. And the nomination of Judge Gorsuch to the Supreme Court of the United States seems to be one such example.
And on top of that, you should also appreciate that in addition to a partisan interest in favor of liberalism, you should also be willing to defend an American interest independent of that. And mindless factional antagonism is a substantial detriment to that.Report
You have such a dry sense of humor.Report
Well, ultimately of course you should simply support conservatives and vote Republican.
Why would I do that? They’ve promised to reduce my parents (and eventually my) social security, block grant and reduce the Medicaid support my niece is getting, stop my friends from getting married, render my female friends unable to get abortions, and oh yeah, are actively trying to take away the only health insurance I’ve ever been able to get.
And that’s the stuff I could think of off the top of my head.
Seems like throwing in with the Republicans would be pretty stupid on my part.
But before that, you could simply give up the expectation that you can make the political Establishment bend to your will. In a good number of cases, you simply can’t. And the nomination of Judge Gorsuch to the Supreme Court of the United States seems to be one such example.
Let’s accept your premise that this is something that liberals think they can do.
Of course, what they *actually* want is *their representatives* to make a statement, and to make the Republicans look like hypocrites. And everyone suggesting this fully expect any blockage to almost immediately fail. But let’s pretend liberals do not know this will fail. There’s no evidence of this, but let’s pretend.
And? Why is this a concern for you? Liberals are disappointed? Oh noes!
Oh, I know, you’ve built a universe where you think liberals will go completely batshit crazy and start tearing things down when this fails.
Do you want to put *any money* on that? Because it’s a really really stupid premise.
And on top of that, you should also appreciate that in addition to a partisan interest in favor of liberalism, you should also be willing to defend an American interest independent of that.
For example, I could be willing to defend a law that provides health care to most people, or figure out how to alter it, instead of mindlessly tearing it down because the other side passed it?
Wait, sorry, thinking of something else, bad example.Report
Forgive me, but I’ve read this a couple times and I’ve got no idea what this is supposed to mean.Report
Yeah, that’s not going to fly. If the GOP takes out Trump, he’ll have deserved it. The GOP has done a good job in terms of letting Trump be who he needs to be to represent the people he represents. If and when he goes down, the GOP will get credit for letting him ride as long as they did.
And given that the open borders donorists no longer have a chokehold over the party, the Trump base will slide pretty comfortably over to the GOP.Report
Yeah, actually he does. He’s this massive disruptive force on the Left, causing them to channel their anger unproductively into shadows and straw men while Trump’s minions actually get things done.
You’re playing the bull to his matador, and he doesn’t care how many times you charge him as long as you’re focused where he wants you to be focused.Report
So….Trump is Cleek’s Law come to life?Report
Yeah, actually he does. He’s this massive disruptive force on the Left, causing them to channel their anger unproductively into shadows and straw men while Trump’s minions actually get things done.
No. Just, no.
Trump is not playing 11 dimensional chess. He’s not even playing checkers. Trump is a scared little man with a personality disorder that only cares about the approval of the masses. He has almost no idea what’s going on, and he is superbly incompetent on a hitherto unimagined scale.
And the only ‘ Trump minion’ wandering about is a racist idiot named Steve Bannon who *is the disruptive force himself* because, and I repeat myself, he’s a racist idiot. He thinks he can destroy the government and replace with a white nationalist one, and fails to notice that other branches of government exist, and what he’s actually doing is destroying, or just weakening, the executive branch…you know, the place he’s located. (Don’t get me wrong, he can do a lot of harm because the executive is stupidly powerful, but his actions, by causing random harm, are literally designed to weaken it, and he doesn’t seem to understand it’s not ‘the government’.)
There is nothing deeper there. There is nothing secret going on, there is no greater plan.
Of course, *Congress* still exists, and still can do things, and there’s always the danger that they will sneak something stupid through while everyone cares about Trump…but Congress always exists, it’s not some sort of secret, and they’re not ‘Trump’s minions’. We need to remember to look back at Congress occasionally, check on what Republican thing they’re doing, but Trump is not any sort of clever plan to distract anyone.
You’re playing the bull to his matador, and he doesn’t care how many times you charge him as long as you’re focused where he wants you to be focused.
Trump *must have approval*, it’s part of his personality disorder. If he can’t have approval of people, he has to make everyone else dismiss those people, or come up with a reason their disapprove doesn’t count, like they’re jealous of him.
This is the man who is running around introducing voting fraud claims *about his own election* because his brain will not let him accept that more people voted against him than for him!
There is no possible way he’s acting like he is in order to get people to dislike him.
Bannon, of course, is acting that way on purpose, but Bannon is one of the dumbest people on earth and thinks the President being extremely incompetent and causing chaos will cause people to rise up, en-mass, and throw off the chains of this multi-cultural government and we’ll have white power forever, when in reality it’s going to cause them to rise up, en-mass, and do something about the dumbass President. (Assuming Trump doesn’t figure out that Bannon is deliberately doing things that cause people to dislike Trump, in which case I actually fear for Bannon’s safety.)Report
You’re wasting your time. Trump MUST be a clever man baiting the left with obfuscating stupidity…..or else people elected an incompetent President.
Denial is not limited to the left, it’s just as strong on the right.
All that “Trump is secretly/Trump is winning” stuff is just pure denial.
The man’s at 40% and falling, it’s only week three, and just recently he threatened Mexico with invasion and hung up on Australia.
Look, when the US President fails at a phone call to Australia, you’re dealing with a man who can’t beat the tutorial.Report
Its civ on the chieftain level.
“That barbarian warrior took my capital! Cheating gorram game!”
“Have you considered archers, Bevis?”Report
@DavidTC
I think the best measuring stick is whether or not he gets stuff done and not personal popularity.
If in four years he’s talking about the economic mess the previous guy left him and how it’s the opposition’s fault that he can’t do anything, then no matter what his personal pop rating are, “incompetent” will be a good word.
I’ve no clue what odds to put on that.Report
I think the best measuring stick is whether or not he gets stuff done and not personal popularity.
Heh, really?
I’m already basically past the question of ‘if he gets stuff done’ and onto the question of ‘When do the Republicans impeach him to get him out of there?’ (I would say, ‘make up a reason to impeach him’, but, heh, as we’re talked about before, people with his finances cannot really function as president without conflicts, so the second Congress *cares* about that…(1))
But let’s pause that for a second:
Getting things done in Washington really does require political capital. It’s not just something I’m making up because I don’t like Trump.
At this point, Trump is verging on deficit political capital, in that him approving of or doing things makes them *less* popular than if they were just presented sourcelessly to the public.
Remember how two weeks ago the Republicans were talking about Trump was also going to come up with an ACA replacement they’d debate? Well, the Republicans have started to cool on the entire ‘replace the ACA’ thing, but pretending they hadn’t, they wouldn’t be saying that *now*, because Trump’s plan would automatically get extra dislike. Trump really is becoming so toxic that the political process will start ignoring him to whatever extent it can.
Leaving EOs. And even if we were to assume that Trump *could* make policy by EO, Congress isn’t going to let him get away with it.
Before someone points out that they let Obama do it to some level, that was because Obama was popular, and his policies were often popular, and his policies were also *often things Congress wanted to do*, but they had tripped over the minefield that is the far-right Republican challenger threat. They got to rage impotently (Somehow, despite the fact they could stopped it) against things they wanted to happen.
There were only a few of the things Obama did via EO that Congress, as a whole, were not fond of, and they couldn’t get their act together enough to really care. The biggest one was Iran, but Congress correctly understood that that was a *multilateral deal*, and trying to undo it couldn’t work.(2)
But that was Obama, and this is Trump. This is the man who, two weeks into office, has repeatedly stomped all over Congress, including his own party. Who just throw shit at the wall that Republicans have to justify. Who proposes nominees that are unqualified but they feel that have to justify.
They are *already* tired of Trump’s behavior. They’re not going to let him operate by EOs.
1) In fact, add that to the ‘weakest president ever’ pile. In addition to Trump not understanding and/or being able to collect political capital, he is *completely exposed*, due to his dumbshit financial situation. If Congress wants to get rid of him, they can spend like a week looking at finances, and *something* will look bad enough to impeach him over.
2) Something no one has bothered to explain to Trump. The *US* putting sanctions back in place against Iran *is going to do nothing* if the rest of first world countries doesn’t join back in, and, as Trump’s popularity is already rock-bottom internationally, no one is going to join in.Report
>> If Congress wants to get rid of him, they can spend like a week looking at finances, and *something* will look bad enough to impeach him over.
This was the irony of Trump feuding with the OGE on conflicts of interest. It was treated by the Trump team as them getting tough with Washington bureaucrats, when in reality the whole purpose of COI legislation is to *protect the executive* from being attacked for appearing to do something improper. Government ethics laws don’t require a very high standard of knowledge or culpability to be violated, the *appearance* of impropriety is typically enough to convict. So to deal with that we have a bunch of recommendations on the front-end that are meant to insulate the president from possible attacks by limiting the improper situations he can get into. This is done by either moving business decisions out of his control (via blind trusts) or by making those decisions transparent from the get-go. Trump, instead, decided to ignore all of these recommendations. And when the OGE folks came out and said “look, this isn’t the campaign anymore, you’re about to climb into a vat of acid so we strongly urge you to put on this hazmat suit” (first by tweeting “how wonderful that Trump has decided to put on the hazmat suit”; and then, when that didn’t work, by bluntly going to the GOP and saying “guys, everybody else has put on the suit because it’s for their *own* good, you definitely want him wearing the suit”), the Trump team responded by antagonizing these people and claiming that they were Obama hold-overs trying to sabotage the incoming president. Which was both incredible in and of itself, but also should have made people go “hmmmm, maybe this guy who doesn’t even realize when he’s being thrown a life preserver isn’t such a master tactician”.Report
Which was both incredible in and of itself, but also should have made people go “hmmmm, maybe this guy who doesn’t even realize when he’s being thrown a life preserver isn’t such a master tactician”.
A million times, yes.
This is the man who nominate DeVos, which not only forced the Senate Republicans to defend this completely idiotic choice, but is going to do *horribly*. People who actually understand how the presidency works do not put people like DeVos in charge of things. People like DeVos end up on advisory councils and *secretly* influence things.
Trump has no idea what he’s doing, and I keep trying to make clear I don’t mean that in a partisan way that I *disagree* with what he’s doing. I mean he does not know what he is doing in the literal, actual sense.
I mean, I don’t agree with the Congressional Republicans, for example, and think their Obamacare repeal thing is stupid, but they *understand politics* and just sorta painted themselves in a corner for short-term gains, and have finally reached the long-term reckoning…and they *understand that*. Hell, even when they do obvious dumb things, they do it because they want to do logical things but *misunderstand* how to reach those goals, usually because they bought some party-line nonsense.
When Trump was elected, people seemed to think the choice was between ‘Operating as a normal Republican’ and ‘Operating as a maverick president, basically like an opposition party president, but one the Republicans would work with’, or somewhere in the middle of those. And too many people are still trying to frame it as one or the other.
But Trump…doesn’t understand what rules exist, or what they are for, or even what the point of anything is. He legitimately doesn’t understand where the levers of power are, or how to use them, or what the limits of them are. (Which is, I believe, due to a personality disorder that renders him unable in integrate criticism, and demands he always think of himself as the smartest and most admired person that has ever existed.)
And I think a lot people aren’t really understanding how horrible this situation is going to get for Congressional Republicans. He has *already* done so poorly that several of them are planning to defect *on his cabinet selection*, which is almost unheard of in politics.
Whatever expectations people have of Trump…they’re too high. Seriously, they’re too high. Turn them down. Trump *can* be reasoned with into not putting certain policies forward, like that LBGT EO he’s supposed stopped. If he gets rid of Bannon, he can perhaps be convinced to just sit there and sign stuff, and maybe they can find a news channel that doesn’t have him randomly attacking people on Twitter. And maybe the government bureaucracy can keep working.
But he will become, and remain, a political non-entity, because he does not understand any game is being played at all, and even if he did, he could not play it.Report
Political capital is not “popularity”. Political capital is “can he help get me elected”.
GOP politicians did better by running to Trump than by running away from him. That’s a lesson they’re going to be thinking about for a while.
If Trump actually gets stuff done that Joe-Politician can bring back to his base, then Joe is fine no matter how unpopular Trump is in California (etc, i.e. states where Joe doesn’t live).
We’ll see. The Captain may not always be right, but he’s always the captain. That holds true for the global cop too.
I don’t think Trump is in as tough a spot as you claim but I fully admit there are challenges and it’s
going to be interesting.
As for Iran, I expect the Iranians themselves will be nasty enough that they’ll earn a fresh set of problems with everyone.Report
Political capital is not “popularity”. Political capital is “can he help get me elected”.
Yes and no. You are right, in that politicians *mainly* care about popularity among their own constituents. Depending on the district/state, this might be voters from both parties, or just their own if the other party cannot mount a credible opposition.
However, they also have to think about coming to national notice. If they piss off *enough* people in other states…this will impact their popularity in their own. And the other way around. If the nation decides they are a hero, their own constituents will love them more.
And you want to know how to attract national notice as a Republican politician? Stand up to a Republican president.
It matters how ‘the rest of the country’ or even ‘the Republicans in the rest of the country’ feel about standing up to Trump, because that controls the narrative that is going to be echoing around their constituents.
GOP politicians did better by running to Trump than by running away from him. That’s a lesson they’re going to be thinking about for a while.
Oh, they’re already thinking about it. They’re thinking about it right now, when they’re asked to cast a vote for DeVos. They’re thinking about it when they get tons of phone calls about ‘Trump’s Muslim ban’. They’re thinking about it when they open the newspaper to learn what Trump did yesterday.
Eventually, that side of the equation is going to come up short. I don’t quite know when that will be, when they will actually turn on him, that could be years. But I was more focused on the fact he’s already pretty damn close to not being any sort of *advantage*.
Even before they are willing to actively oppose, they are going to start ignoring as best as they can, trying to take no position on stuff he does. (They’re already defecting on things they *must* take a position on, like his nominees.)
If Trump actually gets stuff done that Joe-Politician can bring back to his base, then Joe is fine no matter how unpopular Trump is in California (etc, i.e. states where Joe doesn’t live).
Here’s the problem: I don’t think Trump has the slightest interest in doing things that Joe-Politician can bring back to his state. He might *incidentally* do those things, but he might incidentally do other things.
Trump just does not understand how the government operates. People have talked about how he thinks he was elected CEO, or elected dictator, but it’s much more subtle than that: Trump does not appear to understand or consider the motives of *anyone else* in government, in any manner at all.
As evidence #1: The dumbass immigration EO. There are, indeed, politicians that supporting something roughly like that would have made them more popular. (Hopefully something better thought out! But basically like that. Bar refugees for a time, more visa vetting, tada.)
AND TRUMP DIDN’T LET THEM DO IT, because it was dumb EO he sprung on the nation totally chaotically instead of a bill they were allowed to vote for! They literally have no voting record to show their support of that.
This was Trump’s first shot. His chance to step forward, with Trump-supporting Congresspeople, and, side-by-side with them, fulfill his campaign promise…and in addition to totally screwing it up in implementation, Congress was completely blindsided and ignored…and, oh, BTW, he used their staff and made them sign an NDA.
This is just…so many levels of incompetent stupidity that it is hard to process.Report
It could end up being that way, but it certainly hasn’t happened yet. The nomination of Judge Gorsuch has put the libs in a box. Trump looks Presidential, Judge Gorsuch looks reasonable and engaged, libs look feral and likely divided. I’ve read a couple of sources that there are already seven Demo votes for cloture. I don’t know how solid the sources are (or the Senators themselves for that matter), but it looks from here the libs are going to lose this one politically and substantively.
And, don’t look now, but it looks like Trump is going to win on the immigration EO. Either he’s going to win in the 9th Circuit of all places, or it will just be reissued without reference to greencard holders and dual citizens. For all the incompetence in the rollout, it appears that Trump’s reasoning, such as it is, is actually better thought out than the judge who issued the injunction.
I haven’t paid too close attention to your political capital theories, but operationally speaking it looks like there’s more than you’re giving him credit for.Report
The nomination of Judge Gorsuch has put the libs in a box. Trump looks Presidential, Judge Gorsuch looks reasonable and engaged, libs look feral and likely divided. I’ve read a couple of sources that there are already seven Demo votes for cloture. I don’t know how solid the sources are (or the Senators themselves for that matter), but it looks from here the libs are going to lose this one politically and substantively.
Man, you are *really* focused on this Gorsuch thing, something that is consuming almost none of the left, and something the American people could not even possibly care about at this point considering how little it’s made news.
You’re basically trying to argue it makes Democrats look bad *before anything has actually happened*, which shows just how absurd your bubble is.
Maybe it will make Democrats look bad. Maybe it will look principled. I suspect, mostly, it’s going to look like them trying to *get even* for the Republicans stealing the seat, and not really accomplishing anything, which…isn’t the huge political liability you seem to think it is.
And, don’t look now, but it looks like Trump is going to win on the immigration EO. Either he’s going to win in the 9th Circuit of all places, or it will just be reissued without reference to greencard holders and dual citizens.
Everyone can keep *pretending* that the EO says only the reasonable parts, and all that other stuff that being slapped down isn’t important. Sorry, but attempting a bunch of things and getting away with *two* of them is, uh, not a victory.
Likely to survive: The ban on Syria refugees.
Certainly survive if anything does: The temporary ban on all refugees
Things that either have *already* been slapped down, or will almost certainly be slapped down:
1) The government cannot randomly void large amounts of already issued visas, or deny entry to people with valid visas. (It can, obviously, do that on an individual basis if new information arises, but it can’t just void all the ones from entire countries.)
2) The government cannot bar green card holders from entering the country…and it’s worth pointing out that Trump is *still* trying to claim he can subject them to ‘extra scrutiny’. No. No he cannot. He cannot legally bar green card holders, from the country, and thus he cannot single them out for extra questions for a process *that cannot end with them being denied entry*.
Parts that probably will be slapped down:
1) Increasing scrutiny on *Muslim* refugee seekers from certain countries once refugees resume. Yes, I know the EO worded that was ‘increased scrutiny on all, but prioritize allowing in refugees from minority religions’, but the courts are not incompetent morons and can easily figure out that, in every single one of those countries, that majority religion is Islam. (And, yes, Trump shooting-off-at-the-mouth during his campaign about a ‘Muslim ban’ will be brought up and is pretty damn good evidence of what he was doing. Oh, and thanks for the statement about how you helped make a Muslim ban look legal, Giuliani…we’ll be needing you to testify…)
2) Blocking immigration of people from certain countries, considering that is explicitly against the law.
—-
Basically, Trump’s EO will be reduced down to refugees. He can almost certainly pause refugee intake, and as far as anyone can tell, he can legally stop refugees from a specific country…because refugee handling is mostly under State and doesn’t really have a lot of *laws* about it. Well, except that whole unconstitutional ‘religious test’ thing they wanted to try upon resuming refugee intake.
Anywhere there *are* laws, or immigration courts, or anything like that, though, he’s getting smacked down.
This is a very odd sort of ‘victory’ you’re trying to see.Report
I’m not buyin’ it. It seems to be the big ticket item of today, all the more so when you consider that the competition seems to be the immigration EO and the Milo riots.
To some extent it’s already made them look bad. Not much, but most of the drama therein will be unfolding later.
I don’t think “get even” is going to get any traction for anybody except committed ideologically partisan libs.Report
@koz
Saying “fact” doesn’t make thing facts… alternative or otherwise.Report
In case, for a first instance we could have a world where it’s unthinkable that a candidate for the chairmanship of the DNC, representing Idaho of all places, would self-describe her intent as being to “shut other white people down.”
She said her job is to shut them down *when they want to interupt*. (As chair, it literally would be her duty to shut *everyone* down when they want to interupt, so I am not sure why she singled out white people.)
But, hey, do I need to be bothered to find a *openly blatant racist* holding a local RNC position?
Aaaaaaand a quick google later: Dave Agema
Or California secession.
Please explain how some people trying to petition differs from the actually existing right-wing Alaskan secession movement, which actually elected a governor? Note that not only did Alaska had a petition drive, the drive *succeeded*. (The Alaska Supreme Court shot it down.)
And I feel I should note that those are, literally, two people doing things you think are bad.
Unless you think the left has some sort of magical mind control, it can’t do anything about *individual actors*, which is why I asked for examples of things *people could do*, not examples of ‘things that a single digit number of people shouldn’t be doing’.
And I feel I should point out someone on the right complaining about *individal actors* on the left is a bit rich. I’l give you exactly one post to disavow that, or I’ll conclude you’re accepting that *anything any Trump supporter does* is done by ‘the right’.
Or the protests against Trump’s immigration EO’s.
Remember, folks, the ACA is illegitimate because it was rammed through Congress over the clearly expressed will of the people (As defined by polling), despite months of protests, and continued to have protests afterwards.
Oh, sorry, I got confused for a second. Those protests were by *real Americans*.
Or any number of things really.
…basically, liberals just need to shut their goddamn traps and let real Americans talk.
Probably half of libs in NY, or SF or LA, want to think that when the shit hits the fan, they’ll just go to Vancouver, or London, or Singapore or wherever. It’s bullshit. There’s a lot of libs who work for firms with substantial overseas sales. But very few of them have meaningful personal overseas connections, to the extent that they could relocate there.
And this is the section of the post where Koz makes up total nonsense.
Hopefully, the GOP will bring the hammer down on this.
I can’t even figure out what you mean by this.
Not as a matter of policy, but just as a matter of course. We’re all Americans.
…all Americans, that is, as long as we’re not saying left-wing nonsense.
It’s time for libs to quit trying to evade their civic obligations, and start figuring out how to honor them.
Yeah! How dare the libs evade their civic obligations by protesting and petitioning the government!Report
I’m sorry, that’s so far away from the racial context of what she said, you can’t even get there from here.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/racializing-the-democratic-party/Report
I’m sorry, that’s so far away from the racial context of what she said, you can’t even get there from here.
Ah, I see. The main problem with how liberals make the white working class dislike them is that they sometimes say mean things about white people when they’re alone. well, not *mean* thing, but saying that white people often ignore the concerns of people of color, and they’re not going to stand for that.
This does seem really offensive to me. Perhaps there shoud be some sort of speech standard that people follow so as not to offend people, politically. Make sure they all speak ‘correctly’. Like, people could say things like ‘I will listen to all viewpoints’ instead of just bluntly saying ‘I’m sick and tired of white people talking over everyone else, and I will stop this if elected’.
I will pass your idea for this ‘correct politicalness’ along. (Maybe I’ll think of a better name?) We do not want white people to get upset about the truly offensive way people talk about them. Tone the language down, guys.
But, in return: I notice you *still* haven’t actually answered my question of ‘Do you have a suggestion of something that some actual people on the left should do to “show solidarity”?’ (Remember, there is exactly one person who can do anything about what she said, and that’s *her*. Likewise, I hold the Republicans blameless for the fact that one of their presidental nominees once proposed banning Muslims from the country.)
So, what is something that [generic Democratic politican] or [generic Democratic supporter] *can do* to show this solidarity?
You have suggested ‘protesting for things that would help them’, but you haven’t really produced any, and looking at that idea *seriously*, most Republican protest are for things that the left thinks *are actively harmful* to *everyone* of all social classes and parties, like the recent yearly abortion protest, or protesting the ACA. The left doesn’t think the things being protested are good for them and bad for Trump voters, they think they’re *good for everyone*. Asking them to join a protest on the other side is total silliness.
And if there have been, for example, protests demanding that coal workers get new jobs, they haven’t made it national. (And the left *did* protest, for years, all the free trade stuff that the right *finally* got around to complaining about.)
There were, for about five minutes, some Tea Party protests supposedly about taxes, and the Democrats are fine with cutting taxes for lower and middle class, so there could have been some common ground…but if you think the reason the left didn’t participate in those was because it didn’t want to, you are wrong…those protests, almost immediately, turned into attacks on Obama and the ACA.Report
The Demos could find 20-30 votes for Judge Gorsuch. Which, if Schumer actually found a way to do, I think would be really cagey. I think I’ve answered this a few times already given how topical it is at the moment.
In any case, you’re missing the bigger picture regarding the business about “resistance” and the rest of it.
President and Obama and his Administration were given carte blanche from the Republicans in terms of the routine supervision of the day-to-day responsibilities of the Executive branch (not that they had any choice in the matter really). Depending on the Republican, they opposed most or all of the other substantive things that he did. Ie, he was given leeway to make the trains run on time, and blamed to the extent that he failed.
For Trump, it’s just the opposite: if Trump is POTUS, we reserve the right to rip out the tracks at a time and place of our choosing. This is justified either because he’s Trump or because of GOP opposition to Obama. It just doesn’t fly, neither of them.
And I don’t think you’re appreciating the extent to which that changes things. As things stand people are more afraid of libs (and radicals to the extent they’re different). Without the libs determination to sabotage people might be afraid of Trump.Report
The Demos could find 20-30 votes for Judge Gorsuch. Which, if Schumer actually found a way to do, I think would be really cagey. I think I’ve answered this a few times already given how topical it is at the moment.
The opposite to Gorsuch, such that it is, has nothing to do with Trump at all. It has to do with the Republicans deciding that it is permissible to refuse to give *the last* Supreme Court nominee a vote.
And thus some Democrats are going to complain about Gorsuch.
And perhaps you should stop *guessing* what Democrats are going to do? We’ve had one or two that have said they are going to make a huge issue about this….you have no evidence the other Dems aren’t just going to treat this entirely normal, except maybe with some snide remarks.
For Trump, it’s just the opposite: if Trump is POTUS, we reserve the right to rip out the tracks at a time and place of our choosing. This is justified either because he’s Trump or because of GOP opposition to Obama. It just doesn’t fly, neither of them.
You know, I’m going to stop trying to argue with you on *fairness* grounds, because you always start with that and how Democrats are breaking social norms and stuff, and when I point out that you’re basically picking and choosing whatever you want, you then switch over to *pure power politics* and ‘how things look’. (Which really means ‘How Republicans are interpreting things’.)
Well, let’s address how things *look*:
In reality, in a month, they all will be confirmed, game over. By the next election, *no one will remember the Dems doing this*.
Whatever it is you think they’re doing. In reality, this is taking so long because Trump idiotically proposed unvetted people, and that both has resulted in added questions, and meant we had to wait for vetting. In reality, nominations have not been held up *at all*. (Well, hilariously, the Dems did manage to hold up a single committee report for a day by forcing the committee to work-to-rules and stop after two hours. This won’t actually do anything to any timeline, because it’s not like the full Senate was planning on voting on it the next day, but still, they technically did manage to hold things up a day.)
So you’re basically complaining about…Senators complaining and asking questions, and then losing a vote. (I.e, what the minority party does in the Senate 24/7…erm, I mean, 5/3, or however much the Senate actually works.)
No one is going to remember that. Well, except for the fact that Trump has, like a complete idiot, nominated a lot of poorly vetted and completely unsuited people, and odds are *at least one of them* is going to screw up, so when DeVos, for example, falls flat on her face, the Dems will then be able to turn around and say ‘Hey, look, we said that already when Trump nominated her’.
From a pure political standpoint, objecting to the nominees *but letting them get confirmed* (Which the Dems can’t stop anyway), is entirely reasonable. The only reason *not* to do that in the past is to not alienate the other side of the aisle, and that is *long past* a reality.
Or, in other words: This has become the new debt ceiling. When you’re *not* in power, and can’t stop it, opposing it lets you send out some fancy press releases. And this might end up even better if someone seriously screws up. (Whereas opposing those thing *when you are in power and can stop them from happening* is an entirely different and serious thing.)
And that is the position from the *absolute political power* view.
From the ‘fairness’ view, I will, again, point out is the job of the Senate to advise and consent to the Cabinet, and that several of Trump’s nominees are, in fact, extremely unsuited for their jobs in any objective sense, and the Democrats drawing attention to that issue is not ‘unfair’. If they were a *majority*, and managed to stop a reasonable nominee, that would be one thing…it might even be something if they managed to stop more than a few unreasonable ones, or keep a position open. But *complaining*? No. Not unfair.
And I don’t think you’re appreciating the extent to which that changes things. As things stand people are more afraid of libs (and radicals to the extent they’re different). Without the libs determination to sabotage people might be afraid of Trump.
Koz, I hate to have to point this out, but you think this because you think *the Democrats and the left presenting their positions to the public will make the Democrats unpopular*.
You are certainly free to think that, but it is not *at all* obvious, and it is exactly the opposite of what a lot of us think.
In actual reality, it’s hard to pretend the Democrats being energized for the first time in a long time is going to cause harm to the Democrats. When the Republicans did this in 2010, they got Congress.Report
I’m in the middle of reading this, and for now I’ll just not that I have no idea what this is supposed to mean.Report
Forgive me but I’ve read this whole comment a few times and frankly the whole thing makes very little sense for me. And in particular, I don’t think you’re following my argument in recent comments.
In particular, that the problems with some of the various libs protest actions is not that they’re meaningfully wrong (even though a lot of them are), it’s the fact that they exist in the first place, and what we can infer from the details about them. Eg, this:
http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/article128079854.html
You see this at the moment from all elements of the cultural Left, in and out of office. The idea that their interest in political culture is strictly conceived in partisan terms (ie, no common interest higher than that), and that above all else, they are resisting the perception and the reality that their adversaries are in power.
As far as the Judge Gorsuch is concerned, Chip and I have been corresponding briefly here and on that score he says that the Demos and their base are not in an emotionally balanced position enough to do anything except resist him, and my reading of the situation agrees with that.
The same thing for the cabinet nominees. The Demos can’t do anything substantive, so their best move by far is to lay the markers of their objections down and wave them in. But that’s exactly what they’re not doing, because that would require the unacceptable perception of defeat and surrender.
So to the point in your paragraph above, I actually agree with you, but I don’t think you imagine the context and consequences of this enough. Because, as it pertains to the last election, and the governing majority behind it, our team disagrees with your team, but maybe less than some imagine. What we are really opposed to (and by we I mean both the Trump base and GOP Establishment base and anybody else who voted or supported the Republicans last time out) is who, not what.
Specifically, what we really want is that the Clintons, the Weiners, the Zuckerbergs, those rioters in that link above, Lena Dunham, Sally Boynton Brown, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, those people out of meaningful power over us. We may even disagree with them less than you think, but the intellectual sloppiness, their corruptions, self-dealing, and their willingness to lie or misrepresent to us, we want it stopped yesterday.
Here’s something you should pay attention to: we want it stopped enough to the point where we are willing to elect Donald Trump as POTUS to do it.
Until you give up the perception that you’re in charge, or least that you have meaningful veto points that you can control to prevent what you’re really afraid of, Donald Trump (and probably me) are going to walk all over you.Report
I just want to put these two sentences side by side:
The idea that their interest in political culture is strictly conceived in partisan terms (ie, no common interest higher than that), and that above all else, they are resisting the perception and the reality that their adversaries are in power.
What we are really opposed to (and by we I mean both the Trump base and GOP Establishment base and anybody else who voted or supported the Republicans last time out) is who, not what.
You are arguing that Democrats are arguing for a partisan goal and the Republicans are arguing *out of spite*.
First, if you think that comparison portrays the *Democrats* poorly, you are confused.
Second, your problem is basically that the Democrats won’t admit they lost.
The problem is…uh, Democrats were ahead by millions of votes, and would have the House without gerrymandering. And the Republican President *and* the Republican’s tentpole policy are *both* extremely unpopular, and only becoming more unpopular.
There is absolutely no reason for the Democrats to fold and go home.
Unlike what you think, *opposing unpopular things makes parties more popular*.
Or, rather, you are *pretending* to think. I suspect that, in reality, you know damn well the impact this is having on Republican popularity, and you’d like it to *stop*. I’m not sure if you *consciously* understand that, or not, but deep down, I think you realize it, which is why the protests so offend you…it means Democrats are winning. In every one of those protests, there’s some percent of people, let’s say 1%, who were independents, or even Republicans, but really, really cared about that specific issue..and they just basically changed sides, or at least become a lot more likely to vote for Democrats.
So to the point in your paragraph above, I actually agree with you, but I don’t think you imagine the context and consequences of this enough. Because, as it pertains to the last election, and the governing majority behind it, our team disagrees with your team, but maybe less than some imagine.
Remember, everyone, it’s the *Democrats* who need to show up and play nice with the *Republicans*, even though it’s the *Republicans* that are, according to Koz, acting unreasonably and out of spite.
Specifically, what we really want is that the Clintons, the Weiners, the Zuckerbergs, those rioters in that link above, Lena Dunham, Sally Boynton Brown, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, those people out of meaningful power over us. We may even disagree with them less than you think, but the intellectual sloppiness, their corruptions, self-dealing, and their willingness to lie or misrepresent to us, we want it stopped yesterday.
Wow, you have a whole range of vague annoyance bouncing around inside your head, don’t you?
‘those rioters in that link above, Lena Dunham, Sally Boynton Brown’: none of those people have ever, in any manner at all, had any power over you.
I am completely baffled as to your problem with Zuckerberg (Who only has power over you if you let him), unless it’s because…he didn’t do enough about fake news? He did too much about fake news? …wait a minute. *Mark Zuckerberg is not a liberal*! His company, like most tech companies, is fairly progressive, and he’s made some left-sounding statements, but he’s never funded any causes or anything.
Anthony Weiner was, in fact, a Democratic politician, but none of the traits of ‘intellectual sloppiness, their corruptions, self-dealing, and their willingness to lie or misrepresent to us’ correctly describe him. Note I’m not *defending* him, he is reprensible, but it was a mostly normal sex scandal (Well, updated for the internet), and pretending that is limited to Democrats is absurd. (And Democrats then refused to elect him to anything, and he got only *4.9%* of the *primary* vote for NYC mayor.)
So of that giant list in your head, only two of them are even vaguely people who could have ‘meaningful power over you’ and could have ‘intellectual sloppiness, their corruptions, self-dealing, and their willingness to lie or misrepresent to us’.
I’m not even going to try to argue those last two, because your list of offenses is so vague, but you might want to consider the idea that you are actually just offended by the existence of liberals, period, because you seem to be concerned about a lot of people who literally have never done anything to you or anyone you know.
Here’s something you should pay attention to: we want it stopped enough to the point where we are willing to elect Donald Trump as POTUS to do it.
Oh, trust us, the nation *is* paying attention to that.
I know it’s currently in vogue to try to figure out how to blame the left for Trump, but *absolutely no one is buying that*. No one. It is a ‘no sell’, to borrow a wrestling term I was forced to learn recently.
The conclusion a *lot* of the nation is leaning towards is, instead, ‘You guys are lunatics who must never have power again, or at least not until you stop being lunatics’.
YMMV, of course.
You seem to be operating in some sort of bubble where the left is some outside force that will always have to work with the right to get anything done, and only exists because the right allows it, and *if that were true*, your conclusion about how the left should behave is nice.
But, again, I point to the ‘literally outnumbering’ thing, where Trump won only due to the electoral college and a massively unpopular candidate opposite him who screwed up in her campaigning due to bad polls. Note this is *not* to say that was not a valid election, but it does rather indicate this world you’ve built up where the left has to avoid pissing off ‘Americans’ is nonsense…Americans like the left *more* than the right last election, strictly speaking.
And it appears that a lot of the people who *liked* the right had a bit of strange awakening immediately afterward and said ‘Wait, they actually want to do that stuff they said?’.
And thus the left is perfectly capable of ending up in control of this thing, or in control of one house, in two short years. Or four, whatever. *Especially* if they obstruct at every turn…it didn’t hurt the Republicans, after all. (And ending up in control of the House means…investigations into Trump’s finances.)
Oh, and BTW…you know that Pat McCrory thing? Yeah, might want to go check how his election went. Because that’s the sort of thing that happens when Republicans end up completely in charge and start doing things the public doesn’t particularly care for.Report
This is an excellent comment. I’ll probably reply more than once. In any event, I’ll start here:
Let me reassure you on that one. I’m not afraid of Trump and his reverberations politically. I was for a while but I’m not any more. I think some people might have the Nixon aftermath of 1974 in their heads. But as it pertains to now, I’m not buyin’ it. If Trump does go down, and I think there’s a good chance that he does, I think the GOP is Teflon-ed against him. We’ve already seen that before and during the election. The GOP has demonstrated its independence of Trump and I don’t anticipate that changing in the voters’ minds.
What I am afraid of, and I’ve mentioned this before already, is the substantive risks of the Trump Presidency. On the other hand, if the Left continues as it has, I’ll have to be relying on him to bring down the hammer.
But, if the Left can give up the feral nature of its resistance, then I’m more likely to worry about Trump more and the Left less. That’s my motivation.Report
If Trump does go down, and I think there’s a good chance that he does, I think the GOP is Teflon-ed against him. We’ve already seen that before and during the election. The GOP has demonstrated its independence of Trump and I don’t anticipate that changing in the voters’ minds.
Well, yes, the Republicans can, indeed, separate themselves from Trump, although you weirdly seem to be assuming that, faced with a choice between Trump and the Republicans, the Republican base will obviously pick Republicans.
To which I respond: The nomination of Trump.
The Republican base is entirely out of the Republican establishment’s control. They are listening to media that is completely disconnected from any political establishment, and have been repeatedly told not to trust anything else.
How do you think *that media* is going to present the Republicans impeaching Trump? Especially if Trump, afterwards, makes the rounds attacking the Republicans?
What I am afraid of, and I’ve mentioned this before already, is the substantive risks of the Trump Presidency. On the other hand, if the Left continues as it has, I’ll have to be relying on him to bring down the hammer.
I appreciate your honesty that the GOP is, at this point, purely powered by hatred of the left and not any sort of political goals or willingness to challenge a lunatic, but I have to suggest that hatred would exist *regardless* of what the left does.
But, if the Left can give up the feral nature of its resistance, then I’m more likely to worry about Trump more and the Left less. That’s my motivation.
So here’s *my* question: Why are *you* worried about the left? What, exactly, do you see the left *doing*?
Not ‘the guys on the right that can be inflamed against the left’, but *you*?
You just spent a bunch of pixels, somewhere else in this discussion, about how the left was powerless and they need to admit it…and then, in the same discussion, talk about how you are ‘worried’ about them and needed to spend political energy on them.Report
I think this is a nonissue. If Trump leaves office through impeachment, resignation, or the 25th Amendment, that will be through inside game moves. Trump’s political strength is in the outside game.
Trump has no party and no organization. Trump-base Republicans are not going to have much opportunity or means for retribution against the GOP Establishment.
More importantly, this assumes that they’ll be looking for that kind of retribution, and I don’t think they will. If the GOP Establishment impeaches Trump, he’ll have deserved it, and I’m not expecting a big backlash from his fans.
This is horrible reading on your part. The GOP and its base are not acting out of hatred for the Left, they are acting out of self-defense against their cultural adversaries who have been increasingly weaponized against them.
Frankly, it’s quite surprising to me, since first of all it betrays a substantial amount of ignorance as it pertains to cultural currents, and moreover we just went over this quite a bit, like yesterday or so.
In practical effect, it means that you are substantially likely to misinterpret the moves and motives that our team is going to make.
In terms of fears, I suspect my fears are the same as those of the Trump-base. Ie, we are afraid of the ferality of the Trump resistance, the indiscriminate mindless anger, the psyche of woundedness based on a perception of a lack of power that they never had and are never going to get, so they are never going to be happy.
That’s what I’m afraid of.Report
Trump-base Republicans are not going to have much opportunity or means for retribution against the GOP Establishment.
No, they will not issue ‘retribution’ against the GOP Establishment.
They will simply *stay home instead of voting*.
The GOP and its base are not acting out of hatred for the Left, they are acting out of self-defense against their cultural adversaries who have been increasingly weaponized against them.
And by ‘weaponized against them’, you mean ‘say some mean things about’.
Not, like, actually passing laws or doing things to cause them any harm at all.
In terms of fears, I suspect my fears are the same as those of the Trump-base. Ie, we are afraid of the ferality of the Trump resistance, the indiscriminate mindless anger, the psyche of woundedness based on a perception of a lack of power that they never had and are never going to get, so they are never going to be happy.
I just remained astonished at your idea that the *left* is full of mindless anger so the *right* elected Trump, the blatant demagogue. (Meanwhile, you see to think the left *not* electing the slightly-more angry guy is evidence that…we’re angry?)
And, frankly, I’m done with this discussion. Your examples are absurd and trivial and your repeated claims that the left is mindlessly angry has no connection to reality at all.
I am willing to accept *this is what the right believes*, but I am not willing to accept someone who *claims it is true*.
The right has *actively* been drumming up anger at the left for *decades*. Actively been passing and attempting to pass laws to harm things they see as ‘the left’. I could bring up dozens of examples. Anti-gay laws. Attacking sanctuary cities. Demanding that welfare recipients pee in a cup. Complaining about having to press 1 for English.
The left…has not done this. The closest it comes is complaining about the rich, but the complaints are at the level of ‘We shouldn’t give them more tax cuts…okay, yeah, I guess we can give them tax cuts’.
The left doesn’t pick a random ‘conservative’ group (Barring the rich, who are not really ‘conservative’ per se) and say ‘How can we attack them so that our supports will cheer?’ It simply doesn’t do that. Sometimes left policies *accidentally* hurt people on the right, sure, all policies have trade-off, but no one is ruining around saying ‘We need to make those coal miners pay!’. Instead, they’re saying ‘We need to stop pollution….and, I dunno, maybe some job retraining for coal miners?’. It is, at most, carelessness, not active malice.
Unlike the right, which is often *very angry* that the left exists at all and wants to hurt them.
And I can prove the left doesn’t act maliciously pretty easily, because *you have failed to bring up any examples of the left being actively malicious or even claim it is happening*.
Instead, your examples are…people having liberal opinions. That’s it. Oh, and there was a cheating politician who (gasp!) lied about his cheating that the Dems immediately turned their back on. (Hey, David Vitter’s not in office anymore. He only won *one* reelection.)
The story you are telling is that some people, over the years, have made their liberal opinions known, and this ‘feral’ behavior of *daring to speak* so enraged the right that they elected Trump, and the left should now back off on actually saying liberal things so the right will be less angry at them.
Yeah, we’re not doing that.Report
Good grief. The Milo riots were yesterday. How would you characterize them, libs making their opinions known?Report
No, I would characterize them as what they clearly were:
A bunch of Black Bloc *anarchists* showing up and having a riot, like they have every time they’ve shown up.
– http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/01/us/milo-yiannopoulos-berkeley/Report
Oh so when libs are talking about total resistance to Trump, that’s not supposed to count?Report
At least they didn’t take over a Federal facility and aim guns at Federal agents.
Gawd, that would totally make us look like demented lunatics!Report
What’s this supposed to be about, Major Hassan? John Brown? Suffice to say, I’m not getting the relevance of this one, either the timing or the substance.
I’m sure it will all be clear in due time. I’ll be gone for a while, hopefully it will clear then.Report
I become increasingly convinced that Koz is posting from an alternate universe via a portal that reconnected to us in 2015, and the only knowledge he has of this universe is reading right-wing blogs and conservative think pieces.Report
well, this is the commenter who (iirc) wrote that the Democrats trapped the Republicans into impeaching Clinton.
Sometimes the only course of action is to agree to disagree.
(My personal take is that the commenter is terrified of the Democrats’ feral conduct, because such conduct actually works.. The Uber CEO, for example, just bailed on the White House and issued a statement about the importance of immigration.)Report
well, this is the commenter who (iirc) wrote that the Democrats trapped the Republicans into impeaching Clinton.
IIRC, he hasn’t said anything about the Clinton impeachment…he said that Obama was tricking the Republicans into saying they were going to impeach him.
Which Obama did by, apparently, during the actual events of Benghazi, writing a memo that, years later, would be discovered that appeared to contradict the conclusion of the Republican investigations right as they were done with those investigations, springing fresh cries for impeachment. Or something like that.
(My personal take is that the commenter is terrified of the Democrats’ feral conduct, because such conduct actually works.. The Uber CEO, for example, just bailed on the White House and issued a statement about the importance of immigration.)
We don’t need to look at the Democrats for an example of that.
The Democrats are directly taking a page from the Tea Party/ACA objectors in a lot of these protests, namely, how they structure them and how they deal with their Congresspeople…calling *their own* Congresspeople, showing up at their town hall meetings and asking pointing questions, etc.
And here’s the secret…Trump’s policies might be supported by a larger percentage of people than assumed at first glance, but the support for many of these policies is *extremely shallow* among most supporters. Meanwhile, they are *wildly unpopular* among the people who don’t like them.
This is basically what happened with the ACA, except the ACA objections were people repeating nonsense, whereas the left is informed as to actual facts about policy. And the ACA passed anyway, because objections to it were stupid gibberish and it had the support of the party, and because everyone assumed objections to it would fade away instead of the Republicans constantly keeping the objections in play and refusing to fix it.
Whereas Trump has already burned through his political capital…wait, no, Trump somehow managed to arrive in office with crippled political capital, and the Republican Congress is already really unhappy about what he’s done.
The left is doing exactly the right thing here, and it’s not really so much that it works, in that it’s completely destroying the political support for an utterly unfit president and getting him out of office. Which, in addition to something that cannot but benefit the left in the future, is something that *really need to happen*.Report
Oh so when libs are talking about total resistance to Trump, that’s not supposed to count?
Erm….this guy *isn’t Trump*, or part of Trump’s agenda, or anyone Trump appears to have had any interaction with(1), so I have no idea why you’d think that could possibly be what ‘total resistance to Trump’ is talking about.
But, hey, you can use google as much as me. Please indicate find anywhere that indicates that resistance to Trump should include shutting down speeches by Trump supporters.
Because I had read literally dozens of articles talking about ‘resistance’ to Trump, and not a single one mentioned that at all. Most of this ‘resistance’, in fact, is continuing to put pressure on your own Democratic (And even Republican) politicians to not work with Trump.
That is *how the left is using the word resistance*: Getting their elected officials to stand up to Trump, and a bit of organizing protests specifically against Trump.
Which I’m sure you will argue is stupid, but it is completely unrelated to some idiot giving a speech at Berkeley.
1) Well, beforehand. Of course, THPRLAI (Trump has predictably reacted like an idiot) to this at the prodding of Bannon, who *does* know Milo, and in fact hired him.Report
What enrages the right is not the actions of the left, but their very existence.
You can see this in how they talk about Real America, how anyone not in the Trump camp is an “elite” and some kind of Other.
As I mentioned the other day, a black guy in Ferguson, a gay person in Milwaukee, a Muslim in Dearborn…none of these people are legitimately American. They are exotic oddities, to be tolerated but no more.
Their votes by definition are fraudulent, their concerns are narrow and special and odd.
America by definition is white, Christian, male, suburban or perhaps rural. Americans listen to country music or classic rock, wear baseball caps forward and say “yessir” and “no Ma’am”, celebrate Christmas not “winter break”, they speak English, they play football if male and cheerlead if female.
Blood and soil the common volk.Report
I’m not buyin’ it. In that scenario (Trump is deposed) I think the Trump-base will continue to vote Republican, fairly enthusiastically even.
I’m at loss for why this should be a big surprise. I just found this on the internet a couple days ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghVSZNYPXtw
Frankly, I don’t find that the idea that libs’ opposition or “resistance” to Trump should be called feral is any kind of invention or exaggeration.Report
This isn’t true. The libs, I suspect, are afraid of being powerless politically because too much of their self-image is wrapped into politics or its associated culture and the idea that other people, possibly hostile, have control over things that they thought they controlled is profoundly unsettling for them, even if the substance of their personal circumstances is otherwise largely unchanged.
As far as the various GOP supporters goes, they are not acting out of spite. They are acting out of self-defense against their cultural adversaries who are increasingly weaponized against them. I don’t see as how you can interpret the DNC tape any other way.
It’s why the GOP was able to win as broadly as it did, and win as broadly without the base of right-leaning upper-middle class college educated white voters that they had leaned on for decades.Report
And *again* I am forced to present two statements from you side by side:
The libs, I suspect, are afraid of…the idea that other people, possibly hostile, have control over things…
[the right] are acting out of self-defense against their cultural adversaries who are increasingly weaponized against them.
So, basically, both sides think the other party, acting maliciously, will cause major harm to them while in power. It’s just, according to you, the Republicans are *right* and Democrats are *wrong*.
I feel I should point out that the Republicans just, for no obvious reason, harmed a bunch of people, stranding them at airports. This was a real thing that actually happened. (And, yes, that harmed Americans. A lot of permanent residents are spouses and parents of citizens.)
I would also point out that there was plenty of *malicious* anti-gay stuff recently, although we *mostly* seem over that.
Whereas your go-to example of Democratic harm is…someone who holds a state office ranting. (Speaking of that, you do realize that she was talking about shutting down white *Democrats*, right? She was running for the chair of the *DNC*, not president.)
You appear completely unable to calibrate harm at all.Report
If you limit your view to the L, G, and B, then this is mostly true — although do not discount how much Mike Pence hates gay people.
If, however, you expand the conversation to include transgender people, things look pretty fucking stark.Report
If you limit your view to the L, G, and B, then this is mostly true — although do not discount how much Mike Pence hates gay people.
Yes. What I probably should have said is that Republicans do not see overtly anti-gay stuff as winning anymore.
I mean, *Trump* was about to do it, but Trump doesn’t care if Republicans win elections…and somehow even he was convinced otherwise. (I think someone actually realized that letting people break the law due to ‘religious freedom’ is insanely dangerous and stupid.)
Likewise, Mike Pence might try to do something at some point (Either convincing Trump, or after Trump is gone.), but only because Mike Pence is completely and totally screwed, politically. He only took the VP slot because he had nowhere else to go, and I don’t think he quite realized that being Trump’s VP was going to destroy what was left of his career.
But, anyway, the Republicans have been burned too many times on outright anti-gay stuff.
That doesn’t apply to anti-trans stuff, which is the new anti-gay.
Nor does it apply to things they can slip past as not-anti-gay to everyone else, but anti-gay to their base, like the ‘religious freedom’ bills.Report
You’re missing the point here. The earlier point was that libs have a much stronger level of expectations as it pertains to the people in the political Establishment, and their control over them.
For example, Judge Gorsuch was nominated for SCOTUS just a day or two ago. And the libs are falling all over themselves figuring out how they’re going to be upset about him. Of course, the real answer is that they’re not upset about Judge Gorsuch directly at all. They’re upset primarily, that Trump is President and secondarily that Judge Garland was blockaded without any meaningful consideration.
And to now you have the mentality of total resistance to Judge Gorsuch even though in the present circumstances it seems much more likely that this will hurt the Demos politically as opposed to help them.
And even though this can be acknowledged by all parties, they’re probably going to go down that road anyway. Because at least that way, they can avoid the feelings of helplessness and powerlessness. Even though their actions might be some combination of spastic, meaningless, or counterproductive, at least they’re doing something.
The point being is, that’s stupid. There was never any guarantee that they would control the political process, or the actors in it. Their expectations were unrealistic and misguided from the get-go.Report
David I could give a shit about the NC gubernatorial election. I care a lot about the events on that tape, and what we can clearly infer from them.
I care about the lack of morality of the Leftists involved but even that is kinda secondary really. I care about the numbers involved, the fact that this was apparently taped and circulated by the one of the perpatrators. I care that at least some of the events continued while in the presence of the police. I care about the fact that these events occurred in a context where Pat McCrory is no longer responsible for public policy in North Carolina. I care about the general ferality of the protestors. And I care about a couple other things.Report
I care a lot about the events on that tape, and what we can clearly infer from them.
So, the most horrible example of the behavior of the left is…people following a former elected official and yelling at them. I note the police *were there*, and there is video of the incident, and yet no one was arrested. So this was, basically, just street harassment and not any sort of threatening behavior. This is…the horrible feral behavior of the left.
I’m not sure I *need* to respond to that, but let’s try this: http://people.com/politics/trump-crowds-attack-press-corps-rally-whores/
Note this wasn’t against *protesters*, where there’s always the question of who incited it. It was against the *media*.
I will also note this behavior was being *incited by and supported* by the *Republican candidate for president*, who was then elected, unlike the video you have been citing, where it was just some random people.
Yeah, the left is super-feral, isn’t it?
There is a mantra I have for times like this: With Republicans, it is always, always, always, always, always, always, always, always, always projection. Even when it’s not projection…you’re wrong, it’s projection.Report
koz,
I care about the Tea Party Protestors calling republican congressmen wetbacks (Texan, of course — lucky they didn’t get a gun drawn on them, ya?).
Yes, Indeed, I do care. And whatever you think is self-defense, calling your allies wetbacks ain’t self defense anywhere, even in Texas (and they were in DC).Report
My only input here is to say how much I’m digging that the left is now thought of as feral.
One of my complaints about them after my conversion is their general lack of passion and ferocity. So the change is nice to see.Report
Hmm, all I can say it doesn’t look as vague from here. Sally Boynton Brown apparently thinks it’s her prerogative to muzzle white people. Zuckerberg think it’s his prerogative to change immigration law to bring downward wage pressure on the tech sector. Debbie Wasserman Schultz thinks it’s her prerogative to manipulate and misrepresent Demo party laws in favor of Hillary. Though the victims of that one were primarily Bernie supporters, it should also be noted that the fact that Bernie supporters broke away from Hillary late was a factor in Trump winning.Report
Sally Boynton Brown apparently thinks it’s her prerogative to muzzle white people.
…when they interupt people of color, as her sentence literally finishes.
And still nothing to do with you, unless you’re a member of the Democratic party of Idaho. (Or you’re a member of the national Democratic party and she wins the election…which she will not.)
Zuckerberg think it’s his prerogative to change immigration law to bring downward wage pressure on the tech sector.
How dare Zuckerberg have, and advocate for, any sort of supposedly-liberal political opinion! What sort of monster is he?!
Of course, this raises the question…*is* this a liberal political opinion? Weren’t Ted Cruz and Marko Rubio in favor of Zuckerberg’s position? Isn’t Mike Pence? Whereas Clinton didn’t take a position on H1-B visas, really. She seemed to indicate she didn’t like them a few times.
So, in short…what the hell are you even talking about? Why have you decided that increasing H1-B visas is a *Democratic* position?
Actually, what the hell are you talking about anyway? Why will being anti-left do *anything about Zuckerberg at all*? How would that stop Zuckerberg from being able to preach his you’ve-decided-to-pretend-is-leftist platform?
The reason Zuckerberg has any ‘power’ is that people use Facebook and he makes a lot of money from that, and, last I checked, it wasn’t just the left using Facebook.
You are utterly incoherent on this. You’ve decided that Zuckerberg is a rich liberal elite (Which he isn’t. He’s the traditional rich ‘libertarian’ elite, to the left on social issues and to the right on economic), so you’ve somehow decided that him *taking the traditional conservative position on H1-B* is…evidence of that? And that attacking the left will somehow…make him not able to have any sort of platform, when of course he has a platform, he *owns Facebook*.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz thinks it’s her prerogative to manipulate and misrepresent Demo party laws in favor of Hillary.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz has not manipulated or mispresented anything. She, and her staff, were overtly Hillary supporters…and that’s it. They didn’t do anything wrong, in any manner at all, and in fact couldn’t have…elections happen at the state level. Her staff’s messages of overt support of Hillary, and overt dislike of the person who literally just joined the party so he could run on the ticket, offended the Democratic party (Which is their right.), who got rid of her.Report
And this is the flipside of my previous comment. GOP voters, especially the Trump-base, do not expect to control the political Establishment and the actors in it. In an ideal world they wouldn’t know or care who the Justices of the Supreme Court are.
What they care about is the fundamental social order of their own lives. It’s why your assertion a couple comments back about being motivated by hatred was such a horrible misread.
They are looking out for jobs, families, communities, etc. And in the context of what we’ve been talking about, it’s even more basic, and less to do with politics. For Pat McCrory, a guy can’t walk into a hotel with his wife without being threatened by a mob. Just yesterday, there were quite aggressive anarchist mob protests against a guy giving a lecture at Cal (to be honest the motivations for that one completely escape me). And your attempts at caveat don’t really caveat anything. If a white person interrupts a person of color, my first thought is not that Sally Boynton Brown is there to arbitrate in favor of the person of color.
Any one of these could just be isolated incidents. But it’s clear that they’re not. I may not be a student at Cal or a white Demo in Idaho, but it’s clear that a similar motivation exists in lots of places around the country and there is a need for countervailing forces to stop it.
That’s what the Trump voters are voting for at least as much as anything else. That’s why the ferality of the Trump opponents could very well be counterproductive. If the libs could dial down the antagonism, they might well find votes there. It wasn’t that long ago that they did.Report
They are looking out for jobs, families, communities, etc.
So are Clinton voters. In fact *more* voters concerned about economic issues voted for her than Trump: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/elections/2016/exit-polls (Which ONE of these four issues is the most important facing the country?)
Trump voters also cared about terrorism and immigration. (Whereas Clinton voters also cared about foreign policy.)
And I am well aware of what people *tell themselves* they think is important. This does not always translate to what they actually think is important.
And in the context of what we’ve been talking about, it’s even more basic, and less to do with politics. For Pat McCrory, a guy can’t walk into a hotel with his wife without being threatened by a mob.
Gee, if only those protesters would let him go where he needed to go.
What’s next? They pass some sort of *bill* restricting what public accommodations he can enter?
Just yesterday, there were quite aggressive anarchist mob protests against a guy giving a lecture at Cal (to be honest the motivations for that one completely escape me).
I just explained elsewhere, but they are anarchists, not anyone on the left or the right. Hint: People who show up wearing all black with black ski masks? Not actually protesters, but premeditated rioters.
I am actually a little baffled as to why the police have not started demanding those people ID themselves on sight. From what I understand, the police are allowed to do that. I’m also confused as to why places issuing protest permits do not specify that faces must be uncovered. (Note there is a vaguely paranoid talk about how, in addition to them being the people that always start violence, no one can ID them, and thus no one can tell if they are agent provocateurs or not. I am not sure to what level I believe this, but, seriously, it’s weird they just don’t get immediately targeted by police, as they are *obviously* up to something by hiding their identity.)
There were also real protesters there. They weren’t even demanding the university not let the guy speak, as far as I can tell…they were just showing up to say they opposed what he was saying.
That’s why the ferality of the Trump opponents could very well be counterproductive. If the libs could dial down the antagonism, they might well find votes there. It wasn’t that long ago that they did.
I would like you to name that time not long ago.
No, seriously. Name a time when liberals were not ‘antagonist’, and accomplished something *they wanted* due to it.Report
Oh sure they do. Or to put it more accurately, they apply to people associated with him. Check out this video from YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNgbNjYeJKY
Really one of the highlights of Breitbart’s public career. And I think there’s also the tape of Weiner’s apology afterward, wherein he apologizes basically to the whole world. And eventually even he apologizes to Breitbart specifically, but it has to get pulled out of him like a molar at the dentist’s office.Report
Well, they should fold and go home on Gorsuch, because that’s their best move.
In general, though, they need to get out of the mentality of resistance and move toward the idea of opposition.
Related to this, structurally the Demo’s are in a very weak position. The libs are despondent that Hillary lost the election, but it’s important to emphasize that that election was the one that closed the circuit. The GOP already won a pile of other elections, in 2016 and beforehand. It’s like that they’ll continue to win those elections, before and after Trump.
But with Trump, whether he ends up serving all four years (or more), it’s like that the GOP will get enough done from the Executive branch to leverage every thing it needs from Congress during and afterward.Report
In general, though, they need to get out of the mentality of resistance and move toward the idea of opposition.
noun: resistance – armed or violent opposition
And as the left is not, in fact, armed, or violent, it’s pretty clear they’re using it as a metaphor. (And before you start talking about how it’s a bad metaphor, I point out that the right has a *really long and somewhat distributing* history of using metaphors of violence, along with the word ‘rebellion’, and, yes, ‘resistance’.)
So…the left needs to get out of the mentality of metaphorically violent opposition, and instead move towards…calmer opposition? Is that what you are *intending* to say?
Because Democrats in Congress seems to be doing *calm opposition* just fine.
Likewise, the left just held one of the largest protests in American history (Let’s say top five so we don’t quibble over details.) immediately after inauguration and no one was arrested.
Now, people were arrested at the airport thing, but people do tend to get arrested at *spontaneous* protests without permit, and it wasn’t for violence, it was the lack of permits and the fact they tended to block traffic as they weren’t silly enough to try to protest *in* the airport.
The left’s protests after the election, both weekends have been much less ‘violent’ (Or, rather, less angry and dangerous sounding) than many protests in recently memory, in fact.
Which is why your entire ‘feral’ theory is just complete nonsense. Democrats are…calmly showing up places and protesting Trump and his policies. Being very calm about it.
As are Congressional Democrats, in fact. Last year they protested on the floor of Congress about a moronic gun control law and had mics cut off on them. This year has had notable fewer stunts of that sort. (The only real stunts have been some walkouts of committees.)Report
I wanna borrow that sign I saw at a Tea Party rally-
“We came unarmed- THIS TIME”
or the other one-
“Soapbox- Ballot Box- Ammo Box
WHICH WILL IT BE??”
Oh, and the ever popular “2nd Amendment Solutions”Report
You missed my favorite: Rope, Tree, Journalist. Some Assembly Required.Report
Exactly. It’s a pedantic point, but very important nonetheless. The adversaries of the “resistance” tends to be foreign occupiers, in any event inscrutable distant people for whom we have no regard or common interest. The opposition are people on the other side of a box in a hall of parliament. And next year or next week, we could be the government and they could be the opposition. More importantly, there is at least in the abstract, a crown or a republic that’s over both of us that we both serve.
Pedantry aside, the libs definitely have gotten into the mentality of resistance. To be honest, this probably bugs me more than most Trump voters. And I can’t really expect that libs should hold their adversaries good fortune to be worth as much as their own, but to think that it’s worth nothing at all, as libs tend to do, well, you suck.Report
A kernel of truth presented in the most unappealing way possible.Report
To be honest, this probably bugs me more than most Trump voters.
While I don’t doubt that *you* think it’s a problem of the left, I have to suggest you are *completely biased* in this regard.
The right has been using this sort of terminology for *years*, as I pointed out a few days ago when you absurdly complained about the left using some sort of ‘rebellion’ metaphor, and I pointed out the right often *literally waves a rebel and treasonous flag* (Even in places not in the Confederacy!) and they had an entire movement based on *the Tea Party*.
Hell, *Trump himself* called the left his ‘enemies’ in his stupid New Year’s greeting!
The left used to speak like this in the 60s. And other times before that. They *stopped*.
The right last started speaking like this in the 90s, and they have continued to this day. Since then, the right has been much more completely oppositional than the left, treating the left as some *completely invalid* thing that it is treason to work with, and doing so is a good reason to primary and remove elected Republicans.
The fact the left using language that is *slightly* past what it normally uses (But much less than what the right has used and still uses) bothers you is not an indication you dislike that sort of language…it is instead pretty clear evidence you just don’t like the left doing anything successful and you really want a reason to object to what it is doing, so have latched on to this nonsensical thing.
Which you also claim will fail, despite this sort of behavior of the right being *wildly successful* on the right, and, looking at history, the only time the right has fallen out of power at *any point* in the last two decades is when they couldn’t continue to make those attacks. (I.e, when all branches of government were controlled by Republicans.) And it worked for the left the last time the left used it.
Now, it is entirely possibly this is *shortsighted* of the Dems, in the same way it was obviously shortsighted of the Republicans because it lead to Trump, who is burning everything down.
But you don’t get to pretend it’s some new development in politics and you are outraged by *the left* doing it, nor do you get to pretend it’s not going to work.Report
Perspective and assumptions matters a lot here.
Assume Trump’s supporters view BLM as basically insane. That BLM concerns are a fantasy which they’re using to ignore their own behavior and that their problems are mostly self inflicted.
Trump’s supporters are worrying about the gov deliberately taking away their jobs, and here we have the Dems boldly proclaiming that BLM fantasies are way more important because BLM is Black and Trump’s supporters are White.
And then along comes Trump saying he’ll pay attention to them, and the Dems are basically doubling down on saying they won’t. That violent criminals being shot because they’re violent criminals is a much more important issue than their jobs being destroyed, and you have to be a racist to even consider thinking otherwise.Report
Assume Trump’s supporters view BLM as basically insane. That BLM concerns are a fantasy which they’re using to ignore their own behavior and that their problems are mostly self inflicted.
I agree entirely with everything you said there. That *is* what Trump supporters think, or close enough.
I was just taking issue with two things:
1) Koz appears to, basically, think this is true. Or, rather, that the left is using this terminology more than the right. It’s one thing to argue *that is what parts of the right thinks*, it’s another to argue it is an actual fact!
As I pointed out, Koz brought up the almost entirely fictional California secession movement, which basically consists of a few people trying to get petitions signed and no one in politics is on board with it. Meanwhile, Alaska has an *actual functioning secession movement* that has put governors in power and gotten enough petitions to get on the ballot! (It didn’t make it, because a judge ruled it was in violation of Alaska’s constitution…so the current goal is to change said constitution.)
They think every single possible hint of violence from the left is thuggishness, or violent Marxism, whereas people on the right talking about ‘second amendment remedies’ and ‘another American revolution’ just pass straight through their heads without making a dent.
In reality, pretty much any sort of ‘rebellion’, or any hints toward violence, that the left is supposedly doing is magnified ten times on the right. There’s a section of the right where *that has been their entire frame for decades*, whereas the left got rid of all those people in the 60s and 70s.
I can see why *people on the right are misinformed about what is going on*, via selection bias. Someone on the left saying they will silence white people who interrupt black people is very scary, meanwhile an entire Trump rally yelling at journalists there…well, they’re just a bit rowdy.
I’m sure this interpretation of reality is something that helps explain Trump, especially when you have entire media outlets determined to play the issues as such.
Let’s just not pretend it’s *true*.
Please note I am not accusing the right of being violent as a whole. None of this really translates to *actual violence*, and when it does everyone mostly dislikes it. I am, however, accusing the right of often framing things in those terms, much more than the left.
The only thing that can be pointed to as an exception, where the left is ‘more violent’ is *anything that involves law enforcement*, like protests, where the left somehow tends to have more violence, or, least, more people unable to deal with absurd police demands and eventually start yelling, whereas the right can act like goddamn lunatics and the police smile and put up with it.
I think you can deduce why *I* think that is happening, but that at least is debatable. What isn’t debatable, however, is who *speaks* in terms of violence.
2) And I’m not sure *any behavior of the left would stop this*. When the right doesn’t have actual things to complain about, it *makes up shit*. Look at Koz, trying to make Zuckerberg’s *support for the Republican position on H1-B visas* into some sort of horrible liberal elite thing. Look at the imaginary ‘whitey’ tapes.
And there will always, always, be some ‘liberal’ professor who says something offensive, somewhere.
The game is unwinnable. It doesn’t matter how far the left backs off, they will *always* be a bunch of extremist communist agitators that want to ship all white men off to reeducation camps, no matter what events are happening the state goals of the left. There will always be something that can be used as evidence for that sort of thing.
The left has, at this point, stopped playing the game…and actually, it turns out it’s harder to mispaint the left as calling for violence when the left is actually out and about, roaming around, doing peaceful protests, calling Congresspeople, etc.Report
How did that black Econ prof put it? Something like: The Data supports that police view shooting someone as a life altering event that should be avoided if at all possible.
Imho BLM is focused on symptoms. We’ll spend 10 years installing bodycams and we won’t move the needle.
I think not setting fires is a reasonable demand. I even think not blocking traffic is too.
Your above paragraph disagrees with this one. If the left would back off to the point where they don’t engage in violent confrontations with the police, they’d lose the rep for being violent.
That includes dealing with your anarchists, who despite what you said about them being neither left nor right, appear to believe that they’re left, i.e. they’re the modern day bombers of the 70’s.Report
Imho BLM is focused on symptoms. We’ll spend 10 years installing bodycams and we won’t move the needle.
The bodycams are not to fix the problems. I mean, they might, they do actually have an effect, but that is not what they are for.
The bodycams are *to prove the extent of the problem*, which a lot of people still constantly dismiss and attempt to justify.
Your above paragraph disagrees with this one. If the left would back off to the point where they don’t engage in violent confrontations with the police, they’d lose the rep for being violent.
‘The left’ does not engage in violent confrontations with police. The police engage in violent confrontations with the left.
Things the police do to justify arresting people that the courts have literally decided are the police violating the law:
Police in Ferguson arrested people ordered to disperse without giving them time to disperse.
Police in New York physically trapped protesters in an area and then ordered them to disperse, and arrested them when they couldn’t.
Police in New York directed protesters into disallowed areas, and then arrested them
Those are things *the police have lost court cases over*, actual legal facts of stuff that happened. There is much much lesser bullshit that goes on all the time.
In fact, whenever *any* of arrests at protests actually make it to court, charges are almost immediately dismissed, because, in almost all cases, protesters we *attempting to stay within the law* and the police either did not allow them to do so, or mislead them as to what they could do, or just made up bullshit about ‘failure to disperse’.
This is the backdrop against which people sometimes shove police and get arrested for ‘attacking a police officer’. Basically, if the police harass a large enough group of people enough, and arrest people for no reason, *some* people will eventually get pissed and do *something* the police can call violence.
This shouldn’t be a surprise…MLK’s non-violence wasn’t just some sort of weird moral stance. Protesters were supposed to be non-violent *in response to the police attacking them*.
The police just have figured out how to attack protesters *within the law*, by issuing vague and incomprehensible orders that people cannot follow, and shoving them around until people get annoyed.
That includes dealing with your anarchists, who despite what you said about them being neither left nor right, appear to believe that they’re left, i.e. they’re the modern day bombers of the 70’s.
And we will deal with them using…telepathy? Physically attacking them?
As I’ve mentioned before…there is absolutely no reason police shouldn’t be immediately detaining and demanding identification for people wearing masks at protests. Or people wearing identical black outfits that masks can be added to.
It is well within current police power for them to demand people identify themselves, and detain them if they think they’re lying, and while I do not entirely *agree* with that law, it’s very weird they’re doing it for random people walking down the street in peaceful times, but not of someone *deliberately attempting to conceal their identity* during the chaos of a protest.
It’s also really weird they’re standing there focused making sure protesters don’t cross some imaginary line, but somehow don’t bother to sent anyone to *any surrounding streets*, where this destruction of property always happens. Instead of fifty people in a line there, perhaps forty people to deal with the *organized and peaceful* part of the protest, and ten police officers on nearby streets dealing with the fringe stuff? Do I have to tell you people how to police? Isn’t this obvious?
Well, unless the people wearing masks *are working for the police*, but that’s crazy paranoid thought that only is true some of the time. (As in, the police have literally been caught doing that as few times, but I’m sure that’s *all*.)
But, hey, you want to deal with it? Make it *illegal* to wear face concealing masks at public protests, either as a law, or just as a condition of the protest permit…something that the police, despite their apparent inability to deal with this, have never bothered suggesting.
tl;dr Or, to put it another way, there are *two* forms of failure of ‘guilty-until-proven-innocence’ here. One, we accept *police claims* at face value for how violent something was, instead of asking how many people were convicted for violent act (Which almost always will be zero) and two, we accept random claims that any destruction of property that happens is *somehow connected to the protest*, when 99% of the time, we have no idea who did it and thus absolutely no evidence of that.Report
What we’re going to end up finding is what that prof already pointed out, that after adjusting for violence of the sub-culture, we don’t have a problem. Other problems upstream result in this disproportionate body count. IMHO we’re going to spend years ignoring the actual issues in favor of this diversion, but whatever, it’s what the people want to believe.
The first problem is these “protests” included burning down 17 buildings and damaging another 37. I don’t understand how that’s the police’s fault, I don’t understand how that’s not “violence”, and we tried letting the police stand back and let the Left burn stuff down and it didn’t work out well.
The second problem is the “protests” were over the shooting of an “innocent child” who turned out to be a 290 lb, high-on-drugs, thug who attacked a cop in front of witnesses and had to be [incapacitated].*
That’s not only “violence” but it’s “mindless violence”. Adjust those numbers for the size of the city and they’re mind-numbingly large.
If you don’t understand how the Left can back down any further, try not setting fires and vandalizing property, then we can talk about not blocking traffic.
You seem to be trying to limit the “Left” to the peaceful protesters, while claiming the violence you enable, start, and then leave in your wake somehow isn’t your fault. That’s simply nonsense, it’s your protest, your issues, and your people out there rioting, and then after everything has cooled down you’re using the threat of this violence to keep attention on your issues.
The Left has soundly earned it’s rep for violence and that rep is why you keep having issues with the police while complaining that other protesters don’t.
Great idea. Let’s look at who wants to do that (i.e. the law-and-order GOP), and who is shocked and outraged that it might be done (i.e. Ferguson activists, i.e. riot support)
http://q13fox.com/2017/02/02/missouri-lawmaker-wants-to-ban-masks-at-protests/
(From the link)
But Ferguson activist Rasheen Aldridge says this bill does nothing more than continue to divide people. “It’s ridiculous this lawmaker is taking the time to criminalize people for wearing a mask at a protest instead of trying to find ways to bring each other together and why were out there protesting,” said Aldridge.
So in other words, the only acceptable answer is to yield to the protesters demands, insisting they drop the threat of burning down the city is unthinkable.
* In response to a flag raised about a potential double meaning in this comment, I’ve replaced the original phrase with one synonymous with the more charitable interpretation of the commenter’s original wording. — BLReport
“…had to be put down.”
Disgusting.Report
Yes. But unfortunately also accurate.
Brown’s actions were brutal, criminal, and insane.
He kept increasing the level of senseless violence until someone died.Report
The first problem is these “protests” included burning down 17 buildings and damaging another 37. I don’t understand how that’s the police’s fault,
Really? Maybe you should ask why the police allowed the body of a man to lay in the street for four hours, and then had a dog urinate on his memorial and then drove over it. Maybe you should ask why the police showed up in riot gear and started pushing the *vigil holders* around *before* any fires were set or any looting happened.
Perhaps you should ask yourself what would have happened if Brown had been shot, and then, you know, taken away in some reasonable amount of time, and the vigil was just allowed to happen.
In fact, the violence *didn’t even start during a protest*, there weren’t any protests at all at that point. It happened, absurdly, after the police violently broke up a *vigil* (With *riot gear*) and *people were really angry at that*. (I love the police claim the vigil was ‘unruly’, which appears to be police-speak for ‘talking with each other’.)
A vigil. At night. Not blocking traffic, not doing anything at all. A bunch of people on the sidewalk at night in a group expressing sadness, and the police *felt the urge to clear them*, because the police are power-mad assholes who do not understand their job is to literally keep the peace.
But, of course, they had to deal with the loitering. The worse crime imaginable. Better send out 150 police officers in riot gear.
Oh, look, instead of everyone peaceable going home as ordered, some of them started confronting the police, and others started looting. Who could have guessed it?!
Check. The. Goddamn. Timeline. The police *always* escalate first, because crowds do not magically ramp up or down anger. If they do not start angry enough to be violent at the start, *something happens* to make them more angry.
Hell, in this case, the police managed to escalate *before any protests even started*. Managed to escalate nothing *to* a protest.
And the police continued to escalate. Again, I will point out the police used tactics *the courts literally said were impermissible*, including attacking people with gas who didn’t disperse *faster than humanly possible*. (The FBI wasn’t too fond of their behavior, either, calling it a ‘pattern or practice of unlawful conduct’.)
I don’t need to *speculate* the police in Ferguson behaved in such a way to wrongfully arrest people, it is *literally a matter of public record*.
Great idea. Let’s look at who wants to do that (i.e. the law-and-order GOP), and who is shocked and outraged that it might be done (i.e. Ferguson activists, i.e. riot support)
You will notice that the people objecting to is are objecting to it on the groups the *police are using tear gas*…and, although it’s not pointed out, the courts held they were using tear gas *illegally*.
It is also worth pointing out that the *gas masks* are the entire reason for the ban, because no one’s wearing black bloc outfits with ski masks in Ferguson.
Weird, that. Lawmakers are trying to pass laws about masks where the protesters are wearing masks so they don’t get *illegally tear gassed*, but not places where *obvious criminal vandals* repeatedly show up wearing masks.Report
Oh, sorry, according to the *official* story, the vigil ended peacefully, and some remaining people got unruly *for no reason*…and there were 150 police officers in riot gear roaming the streets *for some reason* and blocking random ones off.
It’s all very mysterious. I mean, the sequence of events makes perfect sense if police, in riot gear, started harassing people holding vigil, or at least leaving the vigil, and then continued to harass them by randomly blocking streets as people tried to leave…but we’ve been assured that, while the police somehow managed to call in other police departments and get dressed in riot gear and get out there *before* any unrest, they had nothing to do with it, they just knew it would happen, despite *everything being peaceful until this point*. Somehow.Report
You’ve got two types of answers here.
First, that the protesters didn’t do the violence, it was groups unrelated to them and unrelated to the protest. Second, that the protesters were provoked into violence by the police.
The police were incompetent at handling the protesters, and at handling Brown’s death. The later is somewhat excusable, it’s a very small town department, they’ve got roughly one murder a year. They don’t have their own medical examiner, etc.
Brown got shot after 12:02. The St. Louis County detectives were notified at 12:43 p.m. and arrived about 1:30 p.m., with the forensic investigator arriving at about 2:30 p.m. The medical examiner began his examination at around 3:30 p.m. and concluded about half an hour later.
Four hours doesn’t seem like an unreasonable amount of time for a police involved shooting where there’s a two and half hour wait from bringing in experts from another city.
What would have happened if the police had skipped multiple investigative steps and just proclaimed their guy innocent? Probably bad things.
This sounds similar to, but less well investigated than, Brown being shot in the back.
Granted that the police competence here was limited to writing traffic tickets. However the “first” escalation was lying to investigators and the public about Brown’s shooting in an effort to get someone convicted of murder.
And as long as we’re talking about who stepped up or called for violence, when Brown’s father was screaming to burn things down, who was he talking to?
Ok, Full stop. Are you claiming that if I get upset with the police, it’s ok for me to loot and burn your house? Upset people just naturally steal stuff and burn buildings down? We should simply expect it? Does that happen with the Right, or is it just the Left that is naturally violent?
I go down this list of what you say the police did and I ask on each point, “if true, is this sufficient provocation for someone to burn down my house when I’m not involved?” The answer is always “no”.Report
Brown got shot after 12:02. The St. Louis County detectives were notified at 12:43 p.m. and arrived about 1:30 p.m., with the forensic investigator arriving at about 2:30 p.m. The medical examiner began his examination at around 3:30 p.m. and concluded about half an hour later.
I think you’ve turned a single person into two people. (I did that at first, also.) The forensic investigator and the medical examiner are the same guy. We don’t know when he was called, but as the ME’s office is who called the body movers, we can assume it was right before that call at 2:01. The body was ready to be moved at 2:25 when the driver got there. (Or we can call that 2:30 if you want.)
But then they decided, somewhat randomly, that it ‘wasn’t safe’ to remove the body because onlookers were getting upset and yelling at police (And a gunshot was heard *nearby*, although the police at the crime scene certainly weren’t acting like they were under attack)…which is possibly the dumbest justification of dumb behavior I have ever heard.
‘Man, these people sure are upset that this guy got shot…we better let him lay there on the street until they cool down’.
Here’s the real story:
http://fox2now.com/2014/09/08/medical-transporter-explains-why-michael-browns-body-lay-on-the-ground-for-4-hours/
Four hours doesn’t seem like an unreasonable amount of time for a police involved shooting where there’s a two and half hour wait from bringing in experts from another city.
https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Ferguson,+Missouri/St+Louis+County+Medical+Examiner,+6059+Helen+Ave,+St.+Louis,+MO+63134
Five minutes travel time to ‘Ferguson’, according to Google. Obviously, that’s some random point in the city, and I am not sure where in Ferguson the shooting happened *at*, it could have been farther away in Ferguson (Or closer), but it’s not ‘another city’, except in the sense it is legally over a city border…it’s fricking *walking distance*.
tl;dr – Here’s the real timeline: The police, by flopping back and forth between jurisictions, and the Ferguson police not bothering to *explain things* to the St. Louis County police, managed to screw around for almost two hours, before someone manages to call the medical examiner, the person legally required to clear the scene before they can move the body. An hour and a half just *getting the police there*, and apparently another 30 minutes to call the ME, because, hey, wait, there’s a dead body here! That’s what everyone is pointing and gawking at! Holy crap!
What the actual hell? Everyone knew from the start there was a dead body. Call the ME immediately, you morons. Either St. Louis County or Ferguson! One of you call the ME! You can’t do anything to the crime scene until he clears it!
The medical examiner seems to take about 30 minutes for his travel, assuming he was indeed called at ~2. (Again, based on the fact the ME’s officer call the body mover at 2:01.) This…seems fine. In fact, that’s nice and fast, compared to the police! He then seems to finish his investigation instantly, which isn’t really odd when you think about it. The transporter gets there about the same time.
At which point the police then delay *transport* an hour and half because…who the hell knows. They apparently think people will attack the people *transporting the body*.
I dunno, maybe they would have, at this point. Seems very unlikely, but whatever. But all that really means is the police shouldn’t have been so idiotic and disrespectful at the *start* of that.
This sounds similar to, but less well investigated than, Brown being shot in the back.
Here’s a fun question for you: Why were the police using *dogs* for *crowd control* to start with? Why would putting animals that will react to *emotions* and can injure people if they feel threatened, but do not have the capability for critical thought, or any *legal accountability*, be something you’d use *when people are angry and yelling at the handlers* of those animals?
In what universe is that possibly a good idea? What *possible* outcome is expected here?
This isn’t horses, which make some sense at crowd control, allowing height and maneuverability, while not really threatening people. (They’re a little threatening, sure, but mostly by their size and the risk they might walk on someone. Horses do not attack people.)
But these are dogs. Dogs only serve two purposes for the police, and ‘drug sniffing’ wasn’t really on the table there. Those dogs were *threats*. Autonomous threats, ‘not really under my control so you guys better be really careful or he’ll attack you and I can’t be held responsible’ threats. Utterly insane.
Oh, turns out the Department of Justice thought that idea was *also* insane, and very strongly said they needed to stop (With the implication they would be ordered to stop if they didn’t)…and they did.
A lot of people have failed to notice that what I am saying about the police provoking and threatening and assaulting people is *entirely backed up by the Justice Department*, which was *very very critical* of the behavior of the Ferguson police during this, to the point of *threatening them* if they didn’t stop the nonsense, and they *did*.
(more to follow)Report
True. And he showed up at 2:30, and wiki claims he examined the body from 3:30 until 4.
The body was ready to be moved at 2:25 when the driver got there. (Or we can call that 2:30 if you want.)
So you’re claiming they should have moved the body before the forensic investigator gathered evidence? Retrospectively that they *didn’t* was a really good thing considering how much attention this case attracted and how important the physical evidence became.
Assume the local police had Never had a police involved shooting. Of course it wasn’t going to be a marvel of everyone knowing what to do, this was way outside their routine… and those guys weren’t top of the line.
I don’t see why “respect” is supposed to be the police’s first consideration, or even a consideration at all. What I’d like to see is them gather evidence so we can figure out what happened and if someone is supposed to be put in prison. The dead guy isn’t going to get any more dead, that everything is in the open is unfortunate but whatever.
The most important guy in all of this is the dead guy, and if his corpse has anything to say to the ME then that trumps everything else. The next most important guy in all this is the guy who shot him. If he’s guilty then we want him behind bars and if he’s innocent then we want the physical evidence to trump the stories of him shooting Brown in the back.
My expectation is that if these keystone cops had whisked the body off without going real slow and careful, then we’d have stories on how they deliberately corrupted physical evidence which would have proven the cop guilty.Report
Ok, Full stop. Are you claiming that if I get upset with the police, it’s ok for me to loot and burn your house?
I am not saying the left does not cause violence, or incite violence, or that the violence they cause is justified.
I am pointing out *the police do those things also*. It is a cycle. One side does something, the other escalates, so the other escalates, and so on.
The problem, one side of this cycle is being done by a group of people who are operating randomly and has no actual control and probably has a couple of people in it who want to start a fight…and the other side is *the duly appointed government officials who are supposed to keep the peace*, but are not even *slightly* trying to.
Yes, obviously, at some point some protester would escalate things farther. The police could choose not to respond to the taunt or the shove or the thrown bottle, or back off, and the crowd would not react to their lack of reaction. Or the police could respond with their crypto-fascist bullshit and throw tear gas at everyone nearby.
Do you think *throwing tear gas* is somehow used to *regain control of a situation*? No. It’s used to create panicky, angry people and confusion. Hey, look the cops won that interaction!
NO! That is not what cops are for! Cops are not supposed ‘win’ against protesters. Cops are supposed to *keep the peace*, which often means *not responding to provocation*, which in turn *doesn’t provoke more people*. If they do not respond, or if they respond *solely to the problem-causing people*, the crowd remains the same or even gets calmer. If they respond via force against everyone, the opposite happens.
Can you point to *anything* the police did in Ferguson that was intended to calm *anything* down? They’d run around in their riot gear, they’d block off streets, they’d *illegally* tear gas protesters, they’d threaten them with dogs, etc.
In fact, considering the protesters were *mostly angry at the local police* to start with, wouldn’t a logical thing to do would have been for them to fucking *step back* from the protests altogether, and ask the state police or someone to come in to watch the protesters? Watching protesters who literally are protesting *you* seems like a conflict of interest.
But, no, the police repeatedly did things that were deliberate provocations. Like they always do at protests.
But, mysteriously, the police do this *only* to the left. Even when the right-wing protesters are *blatantly breaking the law*: http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/211139-protesters-block-buses-carrying-migrants-to-california
Hell, I’m pretty sure that’s not just blocking roads, that’s interfering with Federal officials engaged in the performance of their official duties. Man, imagine if the Border Patrol or the local police had gotten in their faces with riot shields and tried to shove them back. The protesters could have attacked the bus, or the building. Oh, wait, we can’t imagine that, because *the police never do that* with right-wing protests.
—
And protests where the police *do not incite violence* do not _become_ more violent. They don’t. Some asshole does something violent, and that’s it. Nothing happens. Sometimes they get disapproved of by the crowd and outed to the police, sometimes not, but if there’s not any response to that level of ‘violence’, nothing else is going to happen.
And, because people seem to miss the qualifiers last time, I point out the qualifier of _become_…it is entirely possible for protests to *start* violent, almost always because something *horrific* just happened. Although a better term there is ‘angry mob’, not a ‘protest’. (Which is functionally what the lack of removing the body of Michael Brown eventually appears to have sorta resulted in. The *protests* came later, what happened that day was an angry street mob.)
Additionally, you get just random violence-causing groups like antifa and whatnot showing up.
You can even get individual looters or whatever taking advantage of the chaos…which is in my mind is more a reflection of the police deciding to idiotically focus 100% of their force on keeping peaceful protesters within imaginary lines instead of, you know, actually patrolling *the area around* the protest, which is where property destruction almost always shows up.
But the police *need* to get in the protesters face, need to confront them, need to constantly push back, need to figure out some reason to start arresting people. If they didn’t, if they just let the protesters be…why, then the terrorists win, or something.
—
But I remind people of an important point: The women’s march on Jan 21, where the police *for some reason did not incite violence*. I am not quite sure *why* the police didn’t incite violence there (Perhaps the crowd was just too big), but they did not.
And, tada. No violence at *one of the largest ever protests* in American history. One made up, I assume, mostly by people on the left. A protest so crowded that *people could barely move*. A protest *ripe* for something happening.
Nothing. Not a single arrest.
Because the police just shrugged and didn’t try to keep people from walking in the streets or whatever the hell excuse they usually use to disrupt the left. They just…let the protesters be, and, amazingly, the lack of confrontations with police *lead to no violence at all*.
What is *your* explanation of this? No, it’s not ‘women’…there have been plenty of protests by women that ‘turned violent’.
My explanation is that anti-Trumpism basically has reached a high enough level that it’s reached *within the police*, at least within the police of major cities. I’m not saying the police are anti-Trump in general, but *enough* of them sympathize with protesters, changing the tenor of the entire interaction between police and protesters. (Just like has always been true with the right-wing…not all cops were right-wing, but *enough* of them were to make the police not provoke those protests.)
To further confirm this, the anti-EO protests the weekend after that *did* have arrests, but mostly as deliberate actions by people who chose to block traffic and get arrested as a political act. In many cases, police worked with protesters by asking them to stay in specific areas, and the protesters did so. These protesters, I remind people, *had no permits at all* and were at *airports*, which have pretty strict rules for where people can be and are not generally consider ‘public places’. And I will also remind people that these protests were basically formed from *spontaneous anger* at something that happened between 16 and 30 hours earlier, and generally didn’t have *anyone* in control of them (being illegal), so in theory should be *least controlled* of protests.
And yet…the police just *let them be*, or gave polite requests, didn’t put on riot gear and shove them around, and, tada, no violence at all.
It’s almost like it’s goddamn magic. It turns out *the power to not have violent protests was within the police all along*. All they had to do with stand there *and let people protest*. Holy shit, who knew?
We will see what happens in the future. Maybe the *police* have turned a corner here…and,hey, everyone who denies what was going on can just assert the *left* mysteriously suddenly became non-violent, instead. (This strikes me as a weird ‘rebuttal’ to make, but whatever.)Report
/facepalm
I don’t think anybody has a real handle on what the political fallout for this is going to be yet. My instinct is that it’s going to help Trump, the Republicans, and immigration restrictionists.
The feral nature of the protests against the EO, and even the Keystone Kops nature of the EO itself, are going to have much different ramifications that you might think.
From here it looks like that the problem with the EO is its application by the BP toward greencard holders and dual citizens. Those are complicated situations, which can be resolved in favor the people involved soon enough, and maybe have.
The other parts of the EO, the idea that restrictions were applied to seven particular countries, that religion could be a factor in refugee status, other details, they don’t seem difficult for me, and I don’t think they will for others as well.Report
I don’t think anybody has a real handle on what the political fallout for this is going to be yet. My instinct is that it’s going to help Trump, the Republicans, and immigration restrictionists.
You misunderstood my comment as being about this EO.
I wasn’t talking about that. I was talking about the Trump administration *in general*.
As I’ve said before here, Trump is clearly suffering from a narcissistic personality disorder, and cannot integrate any sort of criticism into his mental map of reality. He is totally dysfunctional as a person, much less as a president, and being carefully managed.
Which seems like it would work, it worked for Reagan…but he’s being carefully managed by a racist idiot.
With this EO, this administration has made it clear it has no idea what it is doing. Like, at all. There was always a worry there was some secretly competent person hiding in there (nope) or that the infrastructure of the government would constrain them to mostly competence (No, because they don’t even bother it *use* it.)
It managed to do something that was unconstitutional (ban green card holders from reentry), something that was illegal (base immigration visas on country of origin), and something that was both legal and constitutional (Ban refugees).
Oh, and it did this just…bam. Not bothering to warn any agency or get input or anthing
The only thing it did competently was, oddly, the most stupid thing of all in the *political* sense. The banning of refugees was extremely stupid.
A lot of people are not aware of this, but helping refugees is something of a pet cause among evangelicals.
So, yeah. They’re having a meltdown. Even more than I was assuming they would.Report
David,
Pose a different scenario: “They are being unconstitutional because they don’t want to succeed. They want to look like they’re trying, but being balked by “the system” “.Report
Yeah, I get it and I don’t think it makes any difference.
What we’ve seen over 18 months or so, is that contrary to the hopes and expectations of a lot of people, the ferality of the opposition to Trump doesn’t hurt him, it helps him.
Now, this extra-feral rejection and protest is really going to get him. No, I’m not buyin’ it.
As a general matter, I do think there is a fair chance, maybe even better than 50/50, that Trump crashes and burns before his term of office is scheduled to expire. Even then, I think the Republicans are in good shape, better shape than they were pre-Trump even.Report
>>What we’ve seen over 18 months or so, is that contrary to the hopes and expectations of a lot of people, the ferality of the opposition to Trump doesn’t hurt him, it helps him.
Helps him? Based on what evidence? It is certainly true that lots of people underestimated Trump’s floor and the structure of bias in swing state polls. But there were a number of events during the primary where critics said “this is going to be bad for Trump” and his polls took a nose dive. The numbers then slowly recovered over time as attention shifted back to Clinton or the economy. But were there any such events where his polls shot up?Report
Yeah, that is true. Situations like the quasi-assault on the Breitbart reporter, the two weeks leading up to the Wisconsin primary, and the Access Hollywood tape (though that one is a little more complicated), they all hurt Trump.
But where Trump is doing or saying things in the interest of America or middle class America in particular, and there are feral howls of commentary or protest against it (like this last one), they haven’t hurt Trump yet (and may help him).
First of all, Americans like to see the aloof do-gooder types get taken down a peg. Also, they suspect (though they don’t know) that what’s going on might be a significant break in their favor.
I don’t expect it to continue that way for all time, but that’s the way it’s worked out so far.Report
Did I miss the memo on “feral” being the new conservative slur for liberals du jour?Report
Hey, I’m embracing it.
Seriously, its time we got to be the hard ass ones.
Let them be the snowflakes who need a safe space away from the mean libruls.Report
If you combine it with the previous one you get “feral snowflakes”.
Remember the term “blackwhite” from 1984? It is defined as
Like, protectionism is smart economics, rule by decree is the highest form of democracy, and getting American servicepeople killed is no big deal.Report
After the Berkley protests, Hannity dedicated a large part of his radio show to talking about how “the snowflakes were having a meltdown”. I admit I’ve lost track of what the term means if it covers everyone from safe-space cowering latte educators to armed and dangerous black bloc rioters.Report
I gotta admit, putting “snowflake” and “melt” in the same sentence is cleverer than I would have expected from him.Report
@davidtc
I suspect that this is spot on. One of the things that happened over the weekend was lefties and pundits arguing on the net about whether Trump and Company were playing 11th Dimensional Chess.
The nefarious argument is that Bannon wants the chaos and outrage because he thinks it will produce fatigue and allow them to do more. Part of me is still in this camp. Partially because I think Bannon is evil and he described himself as a Lenninist. OTOH, they don’t seem to have any Constitutional Lawyers to advise them on how you draft legislation and orders to survive scrutiny or they ignore the lawyers that they have.
So the HB-1 Visa thing will probably also be given an overly broad interpretation that boarders on unconstitutional.
Though I honestly think Bannon is gloating today for some reason. I am not sure if I can voice why but he seems to strike me as someone whose two emotions are euphoria and pure rage. For somereason, I think today is a euphoria day.Report
This seems on point: https://tompepinsky.com/2017/01/30/weak-and-incompetent-leaders-act-like-strong-leaders/
Report
Bannon and the rest of the Alt-Right really don’t care about whether their EOs or laws passed Constitutionally scrutiny because they think that’s for chumps. They believe that extreme measures are needed to restore American society to it’s proper place as they see it and are willing to burn everything down to get it.
In the early 20th century, they would be the Anglo-Saxons that feared that all those Southern and Eastern European immigrants were poisoning America with foreign ideas like socialism, trade unions, and Roman Catholicism and Judaism. They looked to the rise of urban America with discuss.Report
You know the movie Fight Club? Did you ever know anyone who saw it and got WAY too into it as a teenager? Like…tried to pattern their life around it? (And didn’t understand the stupid movie to boot?)
Yeah, that’s the vibe I’m getting.Report
Are you talking about yourself?Report
“Fight Club”, the movie, was “Catcher In The Rye” for 1990s kids.
(Note that the movie is very different from the novel, to the point where the movie could be said to undermine the novel’s thesis.)Report
Yeah, I’m not buying this. I think you’re on the right direction but the part about Constitutionality isn’t right. I don’t think they feel constrained by a bipartisan Establishment consensus for this or that. I think they’ve got know way of learning which constraints are real and which are not other than bumping into walls.Report
“I think they’ve got [no] way of learning which constraints are real.”
A. Admit that they are not in fact Masters of the Universe and ask people whose job it is to know these things. Like, for example, the most senior person left standing at the relevant agency.
B. Decide that they don’t care about ignorance and leave the DOJ hung out to dry when it has to defend the EOs.
Here’s the thing, koz. Good government (which we have, compared to the rest of the world) takes hard work. The APA (administrative procedure) and NEPA (environmental procedure) and MPEP (patent procedure) and FDA’s INDs (new drug procedure) all force both the government and the public to think.
That’s really all that is behind good government. Thinking. Has the applicant for a government license really proved up its case? Have we thought through the alternatives, and the risks involved? Are we sure? Is the track record reviewable?
The concept is easy. The execution? Well, that’s why the government is actually chock full of experts.
For 37 years now, the Republican party has ridiculed, mocked and insulted the very idea of expertise. And now, congratulations are owed. You have elected the very antithesis of expertise. And to show off just how proud he is of his ignorance, one of his very first acts in office is to jam a big stick into the gears of government. (Well, to be fair to the EO, it’s virtually entirely posturing. Trump is just pretending to jam up government.)
If he doesn’t end up getting a lot of people killed, it’s going to be a combination of luck and people doing their real jobs even if the face of administration contempt.Report
They have also trafficked in the worst forms of magical thinking, and eventually believed their own lies.
Tax cuts pay for themselves, American supremacy is as simple as talking tough, God, guts and Jesus made America great.
They have the recklessness of religious zealots.Report
It is reasonable to think that low growth, regulatory capture, expansion of gov, etc are not “Good”, and are more “self interest” than “expert thinking”.Report
Well, no, because those people aren’t trusted. As things stand, it’s more important for Trump to demonstrate credibility of intent over competence of execution. Which is exactly what he’s doing so far.Report
Again we’re seeing the difference between getting elected and actually governing. You get elected by crapping all over people who actually know what they’re doing. Whether showing enthusiasm while being incompetent is a good way of getting reelected I don’t know. But in my experience, it isn’t a great way of actually getting things done. At least, not the things you want to get done. Things will definitely happen.Report
I’m not quite following your train of thought but my sense is that I disagree.
A priori, this may or may not be the best way to get things done. But it absolutely can be effective in substantive terms. First you winnow away the people who can’t be trusted. Then among the people who are left, you push away the incompetent ones and give more responsibility to the effective ones. Just like in the campaign, where Lewandowski was effective to a point but then became a liability and was let go. Then Kellyanne Conway, who was much better, took over and ran the campaign through election day.Report
You seem to be assuming that “the public doesn’t trust this expert because politicians spin facts and dump on him” actually means, “this expert can’t be trusted.” It doesn’t. Expertise is a real thing. Objective facts exist.
What really happens is areas where there’s actual broad expert consensus (global warming is real, tax cuts don’t pay for themselves, GMOs are safe, vaccines are good, torture doesn’t work), politicians pander to the biases of the ignorant crowd and paint the experts as pointy-headed academics who don’t know anything and are just getting fat off the public dime.
“Sure, he spent his life studying infectious disease, but he’s just BSing for a paycheck. The average Joe knows the real truth. I’ll replace him with my cousin. He got a D in high school biology, but he’s a straight shooter.” Yes, that’s definitely shaking things up and getting things done, but unless your goal is, “turn this department into a smoking ruin” it’s not actually going to achieve anything good.Report
Let me rephrase the “experts” argument as it’s presented to some.
Experts agree that GW is real, therefore we need to do a lot of things which are really painful for YOU, but not for ME. Your jobs get destroyed, I don’t need to sacrifice a fish. Because, um, the planet is in danger.
Oh, and the only permissible solution is command+control which is my solution for everything. And shell out some more money for my friends “studying” all this, and we’re going to seriously fund those expensive only-for-the-rich electric cars. It’s for the good of the planet and not because they’re giving me campaign donations.
In the meantime let’s listen to some experts talk about how colleges are rape centers, and women get less, and the solution is massive tax increases to “help” the people who vote for me while I destroy your jobs.
Oh, and my pet experts also say that you’re a racist if you don’t vote for who I tell you to. Microaggressions or something. This isn’t a power grab, you’re just too stupid to see the correct way to do things so you NEED me to spend your money for you.
So cough up the taxes you racist, every dollar the gov spends is important, and there’s no fat at all, even though we’re paid a LOT more than you are to do a lot less.Report
I don’t even know where to begin here, but I hope that caricature covers basically everything you don’t like about everybody who disagrees with you about everything and makes you feel better. It was pretty thorough.Report
Me? I’m data driven. I follow the math.
However there’s a lot of truth in that “caricature”.
The words of “experts” are often misused to justify what politicians want to do anyway. Worse, there’s a lot of bad science out there which we’re supposed to treat seriously. And worse yet, good science is often misused.
I very strongly want good science to be treated seriously. However our “government filled with experts” makes that impossible with claims we need to treat all college men as rapists, and that the world is ending but only for funding green boondoggles.Report
I didn’t see any data or math in there, so I figured you were just venting. If you want to make a concrete claim about something specific that we can discuss using data, I’m in.
I just don’t see this:
as anything close to accurate our useful. If you’re describing that people “feel” that’s what government experts are saying, I suppose you’re right. If you think you’re accurately describing something that exists in the real world, I think I’m going to need to see some of that data.Report
Witness the two-for-one EO on regs.
Anyone even remotely familiar with federal admin law (like all of you here, and especially you Jaybird) would immediately figure out that the EO will grind all rule-making to a halt. Want to adopt a new rule? Find two old regulations that you can live without and go through the APA process to repeal them.
Of course, there’s an enormous difference between a rule and a regulation. To get a new rule through, how much of the old regulation has to be deleted? Here, for example is a link to the FCC’s rules and regulations. How much of it needs to go, in order for the Department of Commerce to get a new rule through regarding small business assistance? And since the underlying law isn’t changing, what’s the point?
I’m sure that the CFR in its totality could use some modernization. But the administration’s approach is that of some 15-year old overstuffed on Heinlien and Rand. This is not how adults govern.Report
This dances with Authoritarian High Modernism and also ignores the problems with ‘good government’ that Dark didn’t see the other day.
This is all top down. No one ever asks for consent, it’s determined by the social construct. Well guess what, that may work if your expectation is freedom flowing from order. It’s quite another if the prior is order flowing from freedom.
The adults in the room should have recognized that, but they were to damn busy being all important experts. This plays into the second problem, if men are no angels then all this stuff is constructed of non-angels. Your good government is only as good as the people in it and the people not in it. In fact if people were good at externalities and getting along, you don’t need government.
I can’t fathom how people who start with the priors that man are not good are so quick to build massive institutions filled with not good people and giving them a lot of authority.Report
“problems” normally goes with “bad government” which was off topic; But yes, various agent issues are definitely in there.Report
Oh, that kind of good government, no worries then.Report
David,
Yeah, I know the guy who did the think-tanking on Trump’s H1B plan (as with all things trump, this is as of yesterday). It’s reasonably solid and bulletproof. H1Bs awarded from highest pay to low. Let the “free market” decide which jobs are most necessary.
Tech companies be flipping their shit.Report
If that’s the case, that would be the most sensible thing our government has done on the topic, like, ever. If it goes through, I’m happy to give the Trump Administration virtual high fives for it.Report
tf,
Yeah, This and Trump getting Clinton’s pick for Treasury gives me cautious optimism that he’s not as stupid or ignorant as he looks.
The EO’s are creating a lot of smoke, a lot of news — but what if that’s all that the refugee one is supposed to do? He eventually turns in something that says “we’ll look harder at these people” and can pass a judge without raucous laughter.Report
Before we let our pessimism and fear get the better of us, I think a step back is in order.
Between where we stand now, a sudden shock after an unpopular guy gets elected, and an actual violent clash Civil War style, stand a lot of necessary steps.
I think a review of the Civil Rights era is useful
Then as now, after Brown decision and the decade of legislative victories culminating in the 1965 CRA there was fierce resistance, even to the point of George Wallace famously standing in front of a schoolhouse vowing to physically block any black child who dared to enter and Eisenhower calling out troops to enforce federal law.
What we saw then was not an outbreak of shooting, but a cat and mouse game of lawsuits and countersuits, sly evasive legal tactics like white academies and “social clubs” and boycotts that ground on sometimes for years.
Sometimes there were outright terrorist acts like the church bombings and murder of civil rights activists, sometimes state violence like the police beatings and firehoses turned on demonstrators.
But mostly the struggle was legal and electoral. And to be honest, it is still happening. Voter ID laws, charter schools, welfare reform, the drug war, even city planning fights- these are all things having their roots in those battles.
I would argue that Trump himself and the modern day GOP is the latest battle in the long struggle, as the losing side grows increasingly desperate to hold on to power.
To go beyond that to something where people shoot guns takes a few more steps.There has to be outbreaks of violence that go beyond the occasional deranged individual, there has to be a breakdown of the chain of command.
Because right now everyone knows that behind the local Marshal enforcing an eviction order, stand the municipal police, and behind them stand the National Guard units, and behind them stands the US Army.
In order for people to believe that violent resistance is rational, they have to see evidence that the chain of power is broken, like a National Guard unit openly refusing to enforce an order.
We’re quite a ways from that.
Not saying its impossible, its just going to take a lot more than two guys in the White House talking smack.
ETA: Jaybird’s reference to Vary’s monologue about power is spot on.
Once people realize that behind Trump stands, not the bulk of American people, but the 27% Breitbart fringers, the GOP will no longer be beholden to defend him.Report
Hallelujah, brother Chip.Report
I used to think that Trump’s election minimized the chances of a second American Civil War, and it could still work out that way.
Though let’s note that our team won the last one, and the Demo’s lost it. I wouldn’t be too confident that they’ll win the next one either.Report
The powers that be thought they might see riots if Trump lost. That’s why he won, after all.Report
From Brother ErikReport
BLM protestors are showing their true colors.
http://dailycaller.com/2017/01/30/blm-anti-trump-protest-in-seattle-we-need-to-start-killing-people/Report
Damn those kids!
They were told, repeatedly, that the proper phrase is “Second Amendment solutions”.
Commandante Soros will not be pleased.
Their protest checks will be held up for this.Report
And if these were white people talking about Obama you’d be preaching about horrible racists instead of making light of it. How sadly typical.Report
Apparently Obama still thinks he matters. He had to break tradition and comment on the ban.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/us/politics/donald-trump-administration.html?_r=0Report
Oh heavens no, we certainly wouldn’t want to break with tradition.Report
I’m sure your tune would be different if it were a Republican.Report
Well if you check in on Earth II in which a Republican had a Supreme Court vacancy stolen from him and his Democratic successor started flinging unconstitutional executive orders around like hot cakes after barely winning the election with an assist from the FBI, let me know what my parallel universe counterpart had to say about it.Report
I don’t understand why you are so quick to dismiss tradition like this so casually.Report
The only reason it’s still a tradition is simple. Let’s look at the last 5 Republican President’s
Bush II – Out of office with a 27% approval rating so the GOP wanted people to forget about him as soon as possible.
Bush I – Already hated by most of the Right, so anything he said would’ve not been helpful to Newt and friends.
Reagan – In or about to be in throes of Alzhimer’s
Ford – Honestly, probably just wanted to be out of there.
Nixon – Resigned in disgrace.
And to be fair, Clinton likely stayed quiet because he had to worry about Hillary’s political career.
OTOH, Obama has a 55-60% approval rating and the incoming administration is stumbling around like a 16 year old who just drank 1/2 a bottle of Jack Daniels.Report
And to be fair, Clinton likely stayed quiet because he had to worry about Hillary’s political career.
There’s actually not that many things that Bill Clinton would have disagreed with on Bush WRT policy. There was no obviously insane crackpot stuff.
Likewise, despite the right thinking otherwise, there was no crackpot stuff from Obama for Bush to disagree with.
Basically, we’re getting a clarification of the tradition. It turns out the tradition wasn’t really that the former president doesn’t weigh in on policies, it’s that the former president only weighs in on *obviously extremely stupid, reckless, and disastrous* policies.
It’s just…we didn’t really have any of those before now in modern history. I mean, we had some that arguably were in *retrospect*, but at that point, there’s no point in weighing in, history has already judged. We haven’t really had any that were both obviously stupid from the get-go, and *implemented*.
I know that sounds like a rather self-serving and debatable ‘clarification’ of tradition, but that really is basically what happened. There apparently was a threshold of some sort, and Trump, in Obama’s eyes, crossed it.
The tradition really being broken here, if people want to point at a broken tradition, is that Trump is a total idiot, and we traditionally have refrained from electing total idiots.Report
I mean, I was trying to give the Republican’s here a slight life preserver here.
Because we all know that if Reagan had been a decade younger, they’d have him on the Rush Limbaugh Show slamming Slick Willy within months or if Dubya had managed to get out of office with Obama-like ratings, he’d be on Fox News the day after Obama’s inauguration.
Now, honestly, maybe Dubya wouldn’t have done it since it really did seem he wanted to go and just paint somewhere for a while, so maybe not him.
But, my larger point is that the wider GOP hasn’t tried to do this isn’t because as a party they have this great tradition about it. They’d just been unlucky enough to have unpopular or physically frail ex-President’s.Report
Jesse,
if Reagan was 10 years younger, we’d have had 8 more years of Reagan. Constitutional Amendment, baby! (the last one likely to pass)Report
David,
NO INSANE CRACKPOT STUFF? Hello, we lost a good chunk of people at the CIA and FBI during Bush’s politically motivated witchhunts. By which I mean we lost the rockribbed, professional Republicans. They whose concerns could not just be pushed aside as “partisan”.
DoJ too.Report
Hello, we lost a good chunk of people at the CIA and FBI during Bush’s politically motivated witchhunts.
Talking about what Bush was doing internally to his own executive branch is probably a line that Clinton didn’t want to cross, as it would be very easy to paint that as partisan and Clinton still thinking he was in charge over there.
But, yes, you’re right, I was downplaying some of Bush’s nonsense. There was plenty of it…but most of it didn’t really effect the public. (Even the Iraq war, in a way, didn’t effect the public.)Report
Giving guns to drug dealers? Using the IRS against your political rivals? Inviting a member of the Supreme Court to a speech so you can bad mouth him?
There were lots of opportunities for political cheap shots.
Similarly I can think of things Clinton tried in the early days before he found his footing and Bush #1 didn’t take him to task. The Bushes put country above taking partisan shots, apparently Obama isn’t going to do that.
As far as I can tell, the problem is one of implementation, not “crackpot” ideology.
A good summation of what Trump is trying to do, and why, and the disconnect between that and how the media is reporting it, is here: http://thefederalist.com/2017/01/30/why-do-we-have-refugee-crisis-because-elite-failures-foreign-policy-immigration/Report
Dark,
I don’t think Trump is doing the right thing for the right reasons. I don’t think he’s looked at any of the plans we have on the books.
But I do think that we should dramatically cut immigration, and now. If in 20 years we won’t be able to feed our current population, why are we letting more people in?Report
Here is a graph of world wide food production: https://suyts.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/image_thumb26.png?w=661&h=341
GW should be making it’s effects known on the rest of the world right now (it’s clearly not). Adjusted for global population, we’re still increasing food production. https://suyts.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/image27.png
I think we need more immigration, not less. I want to brain drain the rest of the world, we should have policies which openly promote that.
For the illegals, give the bulk of them green cards and stop wasting resources trying to rip apart families. Most of them would become productive citizens, we should let them try.Report
Giving guns to drug dealers?
Bush criticizing *that* program would have been pretty stupid, considering he ‘did’ basically the same thing with Operation Wide Receiver.
(In reality, of course, probably neither of them knew the actual details of what was going on, and it was an out-of-control Phoenix office that did the gun-walking. But their blame, or lack of blame, is pretty definatively equal.)
Using the IRS against your political rivals?
Bush probably didn’t criticize that because he lived in the reality where IRS, overwhelmed with applications of bogus charity groups from both the left and right, made some dumb decisions about how to look into those both of those groups, instead of the reality you’re in, where the president maliciously directed the IRS to attack conservative groups.
Inviting a member of the Supreme Court to a speech so you can bad mouth him?
What…strange phrasing.
First of all, no, technically the president *did not* invite the Supreme Court to the State of the Union. Congress is in charge of invites to that. That’s their building, they control who is at speeches. (I think they give the president some invites, but I’m pretty certain he didn’t use his on the Supreme Court!) Secondly, he didn’t bad mouth anyone. He criticized the *decision*, not the justices.
However, that criticism *was* indeed unprecedented, and a reasonable thing to criticize Obama for if you want. Bush, however, didn’t, because former presidents don’t criticize current presidents *merely for saying things*. (That would be stupid.)
Likewise, Obama hasn’t ever *criticized anything Trump said*. (Well, not after Trump was elected.)
In fact, Obama’s statement about this didn’t technically criticize Trump or his policy at all, because Obama is not an idiot and knows how to walk a fine line.
Obama said that the protests are exactly what he expects to see from Americans when people’s lives are on the line, and that, *with regards to how it’s being compared to what he did*, that he ‘fundamentally disagrees with the notion of discriminating against individuals because of their faith or religion’.
That’s it. He didn’t talk about Trump or his policies at all. He gave vague approval to the protesters, and he addressed the idea that *he* had done the same thing by stating he had not and would not do that sort of thing.
It is possible to get a condemnation from there by reading it as Obama implying (by saying what he wouldn’t do) that Trump’s policy does discriminate. But, well, *that* sort of hint and implication of stuff they can’t say outright (By instead talking about what they have previous done or said) *is* what former presidents have been doing this entire time!
Obama’s comments are right on the line in my book, and if you think he crossed it, well, he think they crossed it. Okay.
And, really, it’s a bit absurd to worry about this when we currently have a president that cannot conceive of any lines existing and that he might not be supposed to say something he believes because of his position. The norm is *already* gone, because there is no way that Trump is going to follow it after he’s no longer president. Trump’s already broken several communication norms as president…hell, he just sent out a press release that bad mouthed the acting AG he fired!
(To be clear, regardless of whether or not the *firing* was justified, I am saying that the White House does not normally issue a press release claiming someone just fired was ‘weak on borders and very weak on illegal immigration.’!)
Similarly I can think of things Clinton tried in the early days before he found his footing and Bush #1 didn’t take him to task. The Bushes put country above taking partisan shots, apparently Obama isn’t going to do that.
Here’s something I’m going to ask you to do: Try to think of something that Clinton could have criticized Bush for.
Not because it’s particularly relevant here…Trump’s actions are pretty far outside the bounds of any modern presidential behavior in all sorts of ways.
But just because you seem to have a pretty large blind spot.Report
Just off hand (without the internet):
1) 911
2) Torture
3) Not killing BL.
4) Firing up a 2nd war before winning the first.
5) Not vetting the intel for the Iraqi war (this can be spun as “Bush lied”).
6) Gross incompetence for what happened after the war.
7) Bush basically ran the post-war via what was politically convenient in the US and not what was realistic on the ground.
8) The Iraqi war when it was expensive and unpopular (although I think Hillary voted for it so maybe not).
9) Not firing Rummy (early enough).
10) The Housing bubble (or credit bubble).
11) Trying to put an obviously unqualified Supreme on the Court.
12) Not paying for his tax cuts or his expansion(s) of gov.
A dozen is probably enough.
Some of these things are fair, some of them not fair, some are cheap shots but whatever.
However what stands out is this sort of criticism, even when deserved, typically does not happen. Old Presidents don’t normally try to undermine current ones, especially right after power switches and things are unsettled.Report
The Free Speech Peaceful Protests in Berkley have moved from campus to the Wells Fargo building.Report
That should calm things down. Who could be mad at Wells Fargo after all.Report
Is it okay to punch Nazi banks?Report
I only saw a bit of the video, but to me they looked like violent protests.Report
If there were violent protests, then there would have been a police presence to prevent anything excessive.
There was not a police presence to prevent anything excessive.
Therefore:
There were not violent protests.
Now, one or two members of the protesters might have been violent, but that’s not a reason to smear the larger group.Report
Huh, the police helicopters up last night must have been a dream.Report
And lawsuits. Lots & lots of lawsuits.Report