I don’t think you can say that they denied her service because she’s a conservative, it was because of what she, personally, has done. Namely, she has lied, repeatedly, to the American people, which is a verifiable fact, not a statement of opinion.
Unless you take the position that it’s not possible to be a conservative without constantly lying to the public, this isn’t about her being a conservative.
(To be fair, a lot of people, including a lot of conservatives, do seem to be taking that position, but we shouldn’t let the get away with not making it explicit.)
It’s a tactic used by tyrants for as long as tyrants have existed. It’s far easier to control people when they’re kept in the dark and only know what you tell them. It’s the reason why governments the world over are scrambling to lock down the Internet, it’s not about keeping anybody safe except for their own, largely personal, interests. Not even really the interests of their parties–at this point political parties are by and large a means of clumping groups of voters together to make it easier to win elections rather than an indication of the actual values held by the politician. It’s a pretty pessimistic outlook, but that has been my takeaway since I vowed to not so much as blink in the face of the endless shit-stream that Trump and his accomplices have been generating since before he even “won” the election. The bonds of party membership are largely theater for the purpose of aggregating votes, at least in the United States, but I suspect that the problem is as bad or worse most other places in the world.
Trump, just like every paranoid tyrant before him, thinks that if he can control all of the information and erode people’s trust in the basic concept of truth, he’ll be able to say and do whatever he wants. He frames anyone who points out his wrongdoing as a traitor, or some enemy of the people, and has gone so far as to flat out call the press an enemy of the people.
Meanwhile the disgusting blob of sub-mediocrity runs his mouth off on the racist version of Regis and Cathy on the goddamned White House lawn. I have begun to wonder if that’s not what this is really all about. The man needs attention from everyone, all the time, the more he gets, the more he needs. This started out as a ploy for attention, then people responded positively because they can’t differentiate reality from reality TV characters, and that was the moon stone that evolved him into his present final form. All that attention, the entire world as a captive audience, throwing campaign rallies on a weekly basis–not to help his chances of reelection so much as to feed his need to constantly be the center of attention.
Unfortunately in America today saying that she has repeatedly lied is meaningless. There is no way to have a reasonable debate between left and right anymore because the sides can’t agree on what constitutes “reality”-- so while I agree that she lies on a daily basis, like her boss, this 1.) falls on deaf ears because conservatives will never acknowledge the lies, and/or chalk it up to “liberal media bias”, and 2.) they will also play the “whatabout” game and list off all kinds of lies Obama and Clinton said.
I think that is demonstrably what it has come down to.
Trump trash-talks businesses that cross him all the time (it’s Harley Davidson’s turn now) - it seems that since he got away with it (so far) it empowers his entire team to do so too.
Heck, Sanders’ behavior is peanuts compared to Pruitt and he’s still around
Oh, I hear you, at the rate we’re going, “ethics laws” will simply be abolished by the end of the year in order to facilitate some other great aggression or theft from the world, or the American people themselves. I refuse to give up, but the outlook right now is not good. The supreme court just issued two disgustingly favorable rulings today, apparently 51% of people think he’s handling the economy well because they’ve apparently never taken a fucking economics class, and the rules are being rewritten on a daily basis, each one more blatantly contrary to the interests of the American people than the last.
And speaking of the Supreme Court, the swing vote in that disgusting ruling is retiring so we can expect to have an even worse replacement.
I used to think quite highly of Kennedy but it seems he intentionally is doing this so the replacement can be confirmed before they potentially lose their Senate majority…
So much for Supreme Court justices being above partisanship!
Yeah, I talked about having hope as recently as yesterday morning. Today I’m going to start working on getting my passport renewed. Emigration now sounds like the most reasonable course of action–whatever bridge troll he installs will make Antonin Scalia look like a hippie. Even if Trump and his cronies are all ousted, he’ll have set up probably the most extreme-right supreme court the US has ever had.
This is going to be very, very, bad. I just don’t think I can stress that enough. The supreme court is nothing but partisanship and they’ll now have an unbreakable majority that’s willing to vote in his favor on everything. Pack your bags and move away, and I wouldn’t wait too terribly long to do it.
Edit: And I’ll add, Kennedy was not a good member, he wrote Citizen’s United, his family has entanglements with the Trump family, he’s a genuinely bad choice, but he pales in comparison to what we’re almost certainly going to end up with.
Yeah, he’s more a typical “conservative” (I put the quotes because to me a responsible Burkean conservative wouldn’t be doing these sort of things) than a genuine swing vote on economics issue.
Unfortunately I’m in the slightly surreal situation of migrating to the United States. Believe it or not, unless you come from an OECD country it’s still an upgrade to be here in the US. But we’re keeping open eyes for opportunities elsewhere esp. when it gets closer to retirement times.
I wish you the best of luck. We’re trying to keep the place from going to complete shit, and trying to get our “leaders” to stop going into other peoples’ countries and just wrecking up the place, but the propaganda apparatus in the US is astonishingly effective. Half the country was briefly on board with what amounted to concentration camps at the border, and the president is openly racist. That’s not because Americans are generally bad people, but they have been fed a steady stream of garbage for decades to garner wide support for things that objectively hurt them.
As for retirement, double good luck. Most of the people I know are just planning on killing themselves when they can no longer work. That’s not a joke, sadly.
