libertarian evil
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Chaotic greedy?
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If we’re gonna go evil, I’ll take the kind of evil that doesn’t give a shit if you wanna get gay married in Satan’s name whilst standing in the middle of a field of cannabis.
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It’s not that Dems are more liberal since Bush, it’s that the Republicans have marched ever rightward.
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I think there’s a good case to be made that Dems were even more apt to embrace conservative ideas while George W. Bush was in office. Remember, the guy they decided to run against Bush in 2004 was another rich Skull-and-Bones member who supported the invasion of Iraq, voted in favor of the PATRIOT Act and reportedly tried to get John McCain as his running mate.
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Like I’ve been saying to some friends: It really is best to impeach tRump and deal with Pence. At least we’d be fighting a guy instead of an Id with an angry orangutan wrapped around it.
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Yet he still voted yea on the various Trumpcare bills and confirmed all of Trump’s nominees.
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Agreed. Plus the “…at least Trump isn’t trying to enact a religiously-motivated regressive social agenda!” argument pretty much got blown out of the water by Trump’s new focus on persecuting trans service members.
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Precisely, Figsplainer. All talk, very little action.
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No he’s not. He’s saying, at best, half the right things. He’s correctly articulated some parts of the problem, and he has more or less correctly described his own party’s complicity in creating that problem. But he is failing entirely to acknowledge other very serious issues, and has offered no useful solutions whatsoever.
The White House is in chaos, and the GOP has betrayed its obligations to the Constitution and congressional principles of democracy in pursuit of ideological fanaticism? Yup, okay, thanks for finally noticing.
We’re well past the point where that’s the real problem, though.
The White House isn’t just “rejecting the authority of its own intelligence agencies, disclaiming their findings as a Democratic ruse and a hoax”. The White House is under criminal investigation as a result of those findings. Trump’s family and advisers have very likely been colluding with a hostile foreign power to undermine the democratic process, and the President has been personally engaged in obstruction of justice to cover that up. At this point, it would not surprise me to learn that Trump has been involved for years in using his real estate deals to launder money for Russian oligarchs whose assets were frozen by the Magnitsky Act. It would not surprise me to learn that Putin wanted Trump in office so that he could blackmail him with that information and more besides.
This isn’t about a White House in chaos or an ideologically-blinded GOP anymore. This is about the President of the United States deliberately and repeatedly obstructing a criminal investigation into his collusion with a hostile foreign government. And nobody in the GOP, Flake included, has yet show any evidence that they care about that.
“Somebody should do something!” he cries. “It’s gotta be us, this is our job to do something!” he proclaims. So what’s his answer? What is this brave paragon of democracy suggesting his party should actually do about this? “We should, like, disagree with his tweets sometimes! We should probably admit that filibusters and free trade are actually okay!”
I’m sorry, but what the actual screaming blue fuck is that supposed to accomplish?
Empty rhetoric. Useless. If he’s not going to start rallying the caucus to support impeachment then he’s just another fatuous, bliovating waste of oxygen, and he can sit the hell down.
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Could we maybe ditch both major parties and come up with some new ones? like 3 or 4 parties that have internally consistent ideas? For instance, Fans of Jesus who want to fuck over the poor is not consistent, and it’s ridiculous that this particular convergence of WTF is a major party position.
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It’s both. The most conservative Democrats – guys like Bayh and Lieberman – are out of office, for one reason or another. Of the Dems we have left, do you really expect that, say, the Iraq War resolution, the Bush tax cuts, or the PBA Ban Act would pass today with the same level of bipartisan support?
The Senate had to change the rules to get Gorsuch into the Supreme Court. It didn’t have to do that for Alito. Or Scalia, for that matter.
If you define the circumference “the rules” as “rules from the Obama era” the argument becomes more convincing.
Fair points, all. That’s more or less my point: Flake is criticizing Trump, and so are guys like McCain and Graham, but talk is cheap and they’ve done little or nothing to oppose his agenda in any useful or meaningful way. (OK, McCain gets a cookie for killing McConnell’s healthcare plan.) Collins has done a better job of voting against Trump and McConnell, but she’s still voted with them on most things.
Still, it’s early days, and it’s astounding that Trump is getting this level of even rhetorical opposition six months in. I don’t know what it’s going to take to get his party to turn on him, but I suspect losses in 2018 accompanied by the ever-increasing scandals will help to change their minds. I think Mueller has quite a few rocks left to turn over and see what scurries out.
Here’s a good [New Republic article on the money laundering allegations] (https://newrepublic.com/article/143586/trumps-russian-laundromat-trump-tower-luxury-high-rises-dirty-money-international-crime-syndicate).
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Because the US already has a centre-right party: the Democrats.
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This is it in a nutshell. The timing is right. The way Putin has only recently responded in kind to Obama’s seizing of Russian compounds, as a kind of feint, “We are sending half of your diplomats home.”
Follow the money.
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There is a certain sympathy of agenda between Bannon and Trump, though - Bannon has been more articulate about it, but they’ve both expressed a desire to cause the whole system to collapse into chaos. Trump is systematically dismantling everything that his hated opponents - both Obama and Hillary - touched, so he’s gutting large parts of the federal government and stymying much of the rest. Add to all that his lack of a consistent position and use of twitter to sow chaos rather than define policy. Definitely Chaotic Evil.
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Bigotry against the members of a religion isn’t suddenly OK because it’s a traditionally conservative denomination.
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As an adult I concluded that the evil/good part of the axis is misguided and is responsible for poorly shaping a lot people’s understanding of morality. It really ought to be selfish/altrustic. So that would make traditional republicans “Lawful Selfish” rather than “Lawful Evil” and ideal libertarians (not Koch Bros libertarians) would be “Chaotic Neutral.” Trump is definitely “Chaotic Selfish.”
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