For the obstinate dopes here or elsewhere who still refuse to get it:
The Confederacy fought the war to preserve chattel slavery.
The North fought the war to preserve the Union, and in doing so ended chattel slavery.
Regarding Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation:
Lincoln was anti-slavery, but as a lawyer and a President he felt compelled to ensure his actions could be justified under the rule of law. As such, he didn’t have the Constitutional authority to unilaterally end slavery nationwide. The legal theory behind the Emancipation Proclamation was that it fell under his broad authority to wage war as commander-in-chief because slave labor was critical to the Confederacy. That’s why the EP only applied to Southern states and why the 13th Amendment was required to end chattel slavery once and for all.
Someone said during the debates that the candidates were really auditioning to be Trump’s running mate and only Vivek Ramaswamy understood this and tailored his messaging accordingly.
Still seems like a naïve strategy to me given what kind of man we’re talking about here. Just putting their names up for consideration in the first place was an implication that they thought they might be worthy to contest Trump for the job. That kind of disloyalty is unlikely to be rewarded.
It just occurred to me she’s catering to exactly the sort of person who would want books about slavery removed from the gift shop at a former plantation.
It’s rather funny that she’s trying to backtrack while at the same time blame everything on a “Democrat plant”.
I mean, it was a town hall so anybody could show up, Democrats are voters too, and regardless he asked an extremely easy question and she made numerous unforced errors. She insinuated it was a “hard question” (narrator: it wasn’t), she didn’t answer it instead delving into nuances about freedoms (to own human property apparently) and states’ rights, and then she tried to turn the tables by asking the same question to the guy — because who cares what his opinion is.
She was the one who made numerous unforced errors when asked a completely softball question but hey let’s blame the guy who asked it.
Because dealing with the unexpected event is just not something a president ever has to do, right? How could she be expected to just answer a question from some rando? At least she wasn’t asked about climate change!
Asking about the deadliest war to ever happen to the US is not a gotcha question. She is still carrying water for an administration that caused at least 180k US deaths, so getting people killed is apparently nbd to her.
By citing American lives lost, not suggesting that they’re more important than non-american lives, but I would think preserving American lives would be part of the day job for any president.
Only 180k US deaths? While this guy was president we had dead people stacked up like cordwood in makeshift morgues in hospital parking lots FFS. This was a man who didn’t care if Americans died as long as it was the “right kind of people” dying. As awful as our healthcare is, I can’t imagine how much worse it would have been had his efforts to repeal the ACA had been successful.
But Nikki Haley is so principled she resigned because of some bullshit about term limits or something? (The real reason was Trump’s shit foreign policy had weakened US standing in the UN and accordingly she had very little influence anymore … because power and influence is all these people care about.)
In the end she’s just a younger Trump with better looks and actual intelligence. Policy-wise she’s even more extreme than Trump ever was (especially since Trump has no real beliefs outside of “what makes me more money” while Haley is a true believer).
The article is referring to US excess deaths in 2020 above what the comparable rate would be for a number of other G7 countries. It is not a total of all US COVID deaths. Or another way to state it is if the US had a healthcare system and policies like Germany in 2020 there would have been 180k fewer COVID deaths that year.
It’s likely a lot more, had the administration reacted when the experts told them to, PPE would have been cranked out quickly, and the vaccine would have been made faster for the entire planet. That’s a very conservative estimate from the first article I grabbed.
The administration was fine letting people die as long as it was in blue states. Trump is lauded for his so-called Operation Warp Speed but as far as I’m concerned it was bare minimum stuff. He could have done so much more and made a choice not to.
I think liberals are aware he dropped the ball, with lethal results, and Republicans are split between loving him for his fight against Covid and hating him for his draconian “maybe wear a mask and get a vaccine I guess” program. Warp speed was warped, but not speedy.
