Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/05/06/sherman-act-vs-gafa.html
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I have this bizarre bug in my mind that to be a historically shitty POTUS, one must cause hundreds of thousands or millions of gratuitous deaths. You know, like expanding and extending the Vietnam war, the “liberation” of Iraq in 2003 and so on and so forth.
This post reminds me just what a disaster for America and the world was the Reagan administration. Despite the relatively low number of deaths caused by Reagan, he’s worse in his way than Nixon and unquestionably LBJ.
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and given the actions of the contra terrorists he called “the moral equivalent of our founding fathers”, the extra casualties the extensions of the iran-iraq war he created by getting arms legally and illegally to both sides, the deaths of u.s. soldiers and civilians various deployments to lebanon and other middle eastern locales caused, plus the excess deaths his domestic economic policies caused, i’m not so sure his death toll is even relatively low.
during the course of his administration i thought he was the worst president we had suffered through in my lifetime. during the administration of george w i thought the same thing. now, of course, i am seeing what a truly awful administration can be like.
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What I said, more or less: Using gratuitous killings as the primary criterion is silly, to say the least. Meanwhile, I have a crazy old fart theory that every POTUS has failed in huge ways.
Meanwhile, not to defend Trump but a lot of what’s awful about him is little different from the GOP proper. He’s the party, just louder, cruder. And the hate mongering flows from Nixon’s Southern Strategy more than 50 years ago.
Maybe worse about Trump is the Democratic leaders’ complicity in having no respect for a system of law (again, long time GOP policy) and balance of powers. That by itself makes impeachment essential. Not impeaching the motherfucker sends the wrong message, to say the least. Then again, our entire leadership is about an above-the-law class — just like in a fiunctional democracy
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Relatedly:
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Brings a whole new meaning to the (now likely old) techy slang ‘borked’.
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That’s precisely where the term borked comes from. Borked refers to the unsuccessful SCOTUS nomination in 1987 of Robert Bork. He screwed himself with is extreme views and was vilified (some say unfairly) in the media.
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Borked; antonym Kavanaughed
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Bork’s Antitrust Paradox is cynical, but even more traditional antitrust analysis that uses consumer harm (in terms of higher prices) doesn’t fully capture all the concerns that motivated the laws. The main concern of the drafters of those laws was that big business had too much influence over our democracy. Facebook and Google can give you “free” stuff but they still warp our institutions and should be broken up for that reason alone.
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maybe the white Photoshop halo and white space between roosevelt’s legs are part of the aesthetic, but if not, again: Here, I’ve fixed it for you. (as someone who works in photoshop all day this bugs me. possibly irrationally I realize)
http://angryjim.com/forcory/rooseveltbigstick.png
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Thank you! Saved for future ref!
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Interesting! Not being super-familiar with the politics of the 1980s US judicial system, I was referring to this, more whimsical and less-likely to have been coined by conservashits, etymology:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bork#Etymology_2
Although there seems to be a lot of confluence between paleoconservatism and tech these days, so who knows?
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