Commenter Archive

It's a rumor I am totally fine with spreading if it shames these stable geniuses into doing the right thing.

Yea I mean our credibility has been in steep decline at minimum since we invaded Iraq.

I'm skeptical China's is really that much better given the strings that come attached with their deals and the way the investments tend to collapse or just not pan out well for the host country. And they don't even have anything like the cultural appeal American culture at its best can.

But we're absolutely putting ourselves in terrible company with this kind of crap. We don't look tough, and as bad as looking like a hypocrite is it's looking like f*cking idiots that's the killer.

Prostitution has a cost for the prostitute too.

It's because Trump is in fact a crappy negotiator and doer of deals.

Edit to add the expression on Rubio's face in the pictures say it all. He may be insufferable but unlike Trump and Vance he isn't an idiot.

No, I disagree. I think the mainstream left is just as bad on this point and totally lacks a plausible vision for the future. It's just a lot less stupid and crazy and is therefore more likely to let us stagnate into slow but certain decline and disrepair.

The left tries to bake cookies using supplies from a slowly emptying cupboard and passes them out based on increasingly arcane rules and sophistry. This is much, much, much better than sending a bunch of maniacs running around the house with chainsaws and sledge hammers which is all the brain addled Republicans can do but it isn't anything like plan. We lose either way, just a question of speed and spectacle.

I'm thinking a little bigger than just the GOP. Say what you will about our flaws but we used to be a forward looking society.

Now all major political movements in the country are backwards looking, arguing over how to carve up the slowly diminishing spoils of past successes.

To me it's an even bigger picture question than the situation as it stands now, after 40 odd years of the government kicking the can.

There are probably 300 million people in India who could plausibly claim some kind of asylum, based on the loosey goosey way we are ready to define it. There might be a similar number in China. And maybe that number again or more across the globe. In the age of the internet and (relatively) cheap air travel I am pretty sure a lot of them could get here, and they could do it quite rapidly.

Neither that situation, nor the situation in modern, post war prosperous America, is comparable to the one that prevailed during the big waves of European immigration from, say the 1840s to the 1920s.

I don't want to be too mean about it and I understand the point to a degree. My other potato snorting ancestors made the sign of the cross before boarding rickety ships going out of some God forsaken port in a few different old countries and on arrival I doubt they got much more than a prodding by whatever passed for a doctor in the late 19th century. The policy of the United States at the time was to allow that. I'm pretty sure they then mostly got shipped off to start farms in places with low state capacity only to have their children conscripted to go back over the ocean and fight their long lost cousin Fritz.

It's all fun trivia but ultimately they had lots of policies that did or didn't make sense. None of it is persuasive one way or the other as to what policy should be a century later.

Step 1 hasn't failed. Trump was (sadly, stupidly, and unlike 2020) legitimately re-elected.

Step 2 I think you're correct about, as after 1/6 it is unclear to me what plausible scenario might occur that would result in impeachment.

However none of this is without a long history of debate and these issues are discussed in federalist 51.

Probably the most important moment in US history, and a truly seminal one in world history, was George Washington chosing not to run for president again after 2 terms.

Of course we are in dire straights with all this, though I'm not sure the threat is unique to us as Americans. With a simple majority of MPs Westminster systems allow for the jailing, drawing, and quartering of anyone who calls the prime minister a silly fart head. We at least have our piece of paper that would seem to suggest that is not allowed.

I mean, I can tell you my mom got here in 1955.

But that's really all besides the point isn't it? Do you have an answer to my question?

I don't mind answering your questions because I have the courage of my convictions. I doubt you will answer mine because you're too cowardly to state yours, which is that there should be no limiting principle, and that anyone who can make it to US territory should be immediately granted citizenship, on arrival, if they want it.

Or tell me I'm wrong! It would at least be interesting and maybe facilitate an exchange of ideas! But again, I doubt you will.

Not that it will happen but to me it just illustrates the need to clarify what 'asylum' is. Mexico I'm pretty sure is party to all the same international agreements we are and nevertheless also sent the person back. Which isn't to say Mexico sets the bar for what we do in the US. But I will say to me asylum really is (or should be) situations like Lee's example of Stalinist purges, or the Holocaust, or some kind of clear, organized, most likely state sponsored campaign against specific people. Maybe the Rohingya in Myanmar or Taliban reprisals against US collaborators are examples. I'm not convinced 'life is really bad in parts of Central America' reaches that, even if it is indeed horrific for a lot of those who live there.

Big picture what I'm curious about is the limiting principle. I think it's a fair thing to request in light of how many places and people there are whose circumstances fall well short of US norms.

This was a really good piece.

My big picture take on America is that we've been coasting on our triumph in the Cold War without any serious long term thinking since maybe the early 90s. It's allowed our politics to develop into a form of post truth self indulgence, as if everything is guaranteed to be as good as it was in 1999, forever, and anything else is an aberration. We're now at the point I'd liken to swinging a sledge hammer at random pillars and walls, without ever once checking the plans, or testing the structure. Some of them may well turn out to be cosmetic only, but others might not, and we won't find out until some or all of the building collapses.

What is going on in Guatamala that merits an asylum claim?

I don't think it's implausible or anything I just don't think it's a given. If it's at all close it's the same supreme court and same Nader factoring at the margins.

*I feel compelled to say to Chris I don't really blame Nader. He is simply part of the field. It's like blaming a missed field goal on the uprights not being a couple inches further apart.

I'm not totally convinced Gore automatically inherits Clinton's popularity. While I think Gore got an unfair wrap in a lot of ways I don't think I'm being uncharitable to say he had voter connection issues. It's an open question as to whether occupying the oval office fixes that or makes it worse.

Otherwise, excepting Kennedy whose circumstances of uh... leaving office were quite unusual, I believe you have to go back to the 19th century to find an example of 3 consecutive Democratic administrations. Maybe the dotcom boom and relative peace is enough to buck the trend. But that's kind of my point. Him winning would have been against historical currents.

Isn't there some (possibly apocryphal) quote from Winston Churchill, that the best argument against democracy is a 5 minute conversation with the average voter?

Without getting into the actual questions of right and wrong, or what should or shouldn't have happened with Clinton, I think a lot of the modern conversation about that scandal is a retcon. If Wikipedia isn't lying his popularity peaked at 73% approval after the impeachment and stayed in the 60s through all of the proceedings. I almost wonder if we've reached a point where it is so hard to imagine any president enjoying that kind of popularity that we assume it couldn't possibly have been that way, yet it was.

Someone with better memory can (and should) correct me but my recollection of that election narrative was that it was something like 'Is there a significant difference between these two politicians?' Gore still has his odd persona to contend with, Bush gets the edge by way of SCOTUS, people thinking they'd rather have a beer with him, and general thermostatic forces against a party getting a 3rd term. Always worth remembering that Bush ran in 2000 as the compassionate conservative, moderate, pro business governor of Texas, who favored a humble foreign policy. Not the post 9/11 version from 2004.

I don't know that things go that differently all things considered. Incumbent Gore loses to Bush 2, Hilary still moves to NY and is elected Senator and we're off to the races.

No matter how much Trump likes to pretend he is on Monday Night Raw the GOP remains a plutocratic party in populist clothing.

I think it is fair to assume it means whatever he feels benefits his business interests. At least until proven otherwise anyway.

I have a WaPo subscription so I guess I can be on the lookout.

Someone should tell him about the Economist.

Just to further elaborate on my own point the idea that mass immigration is a core tenet of liberalism without room for much (if any) compromise is younger than my elementary school aged son. In very recent memory the larger political left was at best conflicted and circumspect on this point. Certainly I would say there has been a championing of ethnic diversity in the specific context of the United States since the second half of the 20th century, and a greater consideration of humane treatment towards people in weakened and vulnerable situations.

But liberalism in Germany does not rest on whether they allow a few million refugees primarily from the Syrian civil war to stay in the country indefinitely. That's even moreso the case now that the war is over. Big picture we need to stop talking these crazy ways that assume everything good can be achieved by clinging to increasingly tenuous principles, regardless and in spite of clear political and factual realities.

I don't think restrictive immigration policy is inherently illiberal in the sense you are using the term. Some of rhe most liberal things that have ever happened in the United States occurred during more restrictionist periods. It's just a policy choice and in a democracy it's one that can be revisited down the road.

The way my thinking has evolved I'd limit it to GPA, SAT, with some maybe limited accounting of extra curricular and selection of major.

I used to be more open minded about trying to account for more than that. It's just become clear that left to their own devices admissions offices are apt to decide all of the Asian American students have boring personalities and should be docked while then giving a big boost to the children of well off immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean, because on a power point no one can tell them from a descendant of slaves. They're also still treating women as disadvantaged even as the ratio approaches 60/40 women to men. The former strikes me as very ugly and un-American, the latter as a sign of a worldview stuck decades behind the times that would rather move goal posts to keep discriminating than take the W.

I am more open to ideas like top 5 (or 10 or whatever) percent of high school grads are guaranteed a spot in a state college as long as the criteria is clear and easy to apply.