To understand the future sainthood of Donald J Trump, just look at George W Bush

I really don’t want to think about it.

I sure as hell ain’t gonna debate or discuss it.

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Yeah, it almost looked like it was going somewhere for a moment.

and Tomatoes!

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Precisely. What no one wanted to admit is that most of the US wanted W to go and kill on our behalf. His “beer buddy” charm just made it that much easier to swallow.

I don’t believe that anyone actually likes trump in any way. It’s the only hope I have left, really.

Edited for redundancy. Oof.

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Der Gropenfuhrer has not made me appreciate how comparatively less evil others were, but rather how comparatively imperfect others were.

I desperately wanted Barack Obama to bring about the change on which he campaigned, but it now seems clear that this was never the plan. I wanted to believe that Obama was simply too rational to appreciate just how irrationally obsessed with hatred his opponents were. But the simple fact seems to be that there was nothing naive about the man – he knew exactly what the Republicans would do to oppose him, and he was counting on it. Obama didn’t receive the blessing of the wealthy oligarchs who run this country because he was going to change the status quo – he received it because he was going to maintain the status quo. The Republicans helped Obama maintain the illusion of potential by holding him back, and his most awkward moments were when they didn’t oppose him sufficiently.

The Bush-Cheney presidency (and let’s face it, Bush 2 was less than half a president) was glaringly, sadistically evil.

The Clinton presidency was pragmatically evil. Clinton wanted money and power, and was willing to sell the country in order to get it.

And so on, and so on.

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Militarism and imperialism are bipartisan efforts. From the perspective of the global south, there is very little difference between liberal and conservative Presidents. If anything, the liberals tend to be slightly worse.

Trump is not an aberration from American history; he is the natural consequence of it. The roots of this go all the way back to the 3/5ths Compromise.

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I’ve recently been in search of an answer on why conservatives don’t like Obama more than they do. Because his record is not that far off Bush Jr. in many ways, it’s just his lip service that diverges in a big way. That lip service wasn’t even that much (he certainly didn’t run on gay marriage and repealing DADT, and only went with them when it was clear the winds were blowing that direction).

Yeah, yeah, racism. That rings true for a chunk of the base, but some alternate takes I’ve read ring truer: namely that a black president is a symbol that liberalism is “winning” and that’s the thing they really can’t stomach. The man himself be damned.

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I’ve said that for ages - it wasn’t just the man himself that so many people right and left hated; it was what he symbolized by the very virtue of his existence.

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I definitely missed that if you posted it here. It’d have clicked much earlier if I’d read it.

I doubt it was here, because I wasn’t a member of BB back when Obama was the acting POTUS.

Most of my conversations about the 44th prez were on the now defunct right-leaning cesspool site that I came from, and even then I didn’t have conversations about him too often.

The hatred the extreme right had for Obama was damn near palpable there, and much of it was racist in nature, but a lot of it was what Obama’s being in office signified:

That the days of a rich White dude always winning and being in charge were at at end, and that “the deck” won’t necessarily be automatically ‘stacked in their favor,’ every single time.

That freaked a lot of bigots who have nothing but their inherent privilege right the fuck out.

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I listened to an interview with several AIDS experts toward the end of the Bush 2 presidency. They all said his policies were kind of a wash. A number of good things that worked, but also a number of decisions to appease the religious right that did a lot of harm.

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If you look at Nixon and Warren Harding, the two presidents who most resemble Trump, you will see that there is little evidence that Trump will ever be rehabilitated.

Even Herbert Hoover, who in my opinion deserves far more respect than he gets, is still ranked among the worst presidents by most historians. Bush and Reagan are terrible examples. Reagan remained very popular in office, and outside of a small leftist bubble, nobody much cared about his policies on AIDS, or Central America. Bush on the other hand became highly unpopular only after a policy that most Americans originally supported (the invasion of Iraq) went terribly wrong. The public was understandably forgiving of a failure that many of were cheerleading at the time.

The guy who “deported” citizens for the crime of being Mexican-ish? Fuck that asshole.

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The guy who “deported” citizens for the crime of being Mexican-ish?

A sin hardly unique to him, and one that was sadly widely supported by the left and the labour movement of the time. On the other hand, his work as secretary of commerce to provide aid to Soviet famine victims marked him out as an advocate of diplomacy and humanitarianism at a time when many Americans would have preferred to let them starve.

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It’s probably just that Terry Crews is a pretty damn likeable guy.

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I have no nostalgia for Bush. By contrast to Trump I can at least feel I may have been wrong that Bush was an extreme low point.

But that is just by the fact we kept digging for new low points.

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Jesus Christ. It feels like 18 years.

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Yeah, this. W. was a terrible president – I think he would have gone down in history as a mediocre one-termer whose administration was plagued by corporate scandals, if not for 9/11 – who caused untold damage by the bungled war in Afghanistan and the illegal invasion of Iraq, followed by a completely botched occupation. But as a person Bush seems to have been flawed but not all-around awful, unlike Trump. His work on combating AIDS in Africa has been mentioned, and he (and other Bushes, apparently) doesn’t seem to be racist or xenophobic, the way so much Republicans are these days.

Compare this to Trump, whose administration is a complete shambles of incompetence, corruption and bigotry, and who is a thoroughly repulsive parody of a venal businessman as a person. Nobody is going to feel better about Trump afterwards, or think that he wasn’t that bad.

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what about LBJ? seems he only avoided losing in the middle of a war by not running…

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I think that US Presidents get a pass as people can always say, “Well, he didn’t turn the world in to a nuclear fireball, so there is that.”

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