Quote (Goomshill @ Jan 19 2020 08:06am)
Yes Trump has not been successful at 100% of his legislative agenda. Is that where the bar is set now? Instead of looking at whether Trump has been objectively successful and how his accomplishments stack up next to other presidents, you want to judge him on whether he's managed to enact his entire agenda, something no president has ever done. When Trump was running for president, the media, you and me alike, were all wondering if Trump as president would either blow up the country or be a lame duck who can't get anything done at all. Instead we're now debating whether Trump got a perfect score or missed one in his long list of wins. The difference is that I moved on and accepted reality.
Every president gets judged partly by the success of their major legislative goals, and if the first one they pursue ends in failure, even though they had 52 Republican senators and the Republican party had been talking about repealing Obamacare since it first passed, it counts against them. This shouldn't be hard to understand. It was an embarrassing moment for Trump. Not to mention he hasn't managed to build any new wall last time I checked. I seem to recall that being one of the major campaign promises.
This whole response from you is filled with strawmen. What rational person would believe that Trump couldn't get anything done as president with a Republican controlled Congress? Did you really believe something so absurd? And you keep ascribing to me viewpoints I've never expressed. I don't represent every anti-Trump view that you disagree with. To be honest I expected Trump to rise to the moment more than he has. I figured some of the ridiculousness of the campaign was just him playing up the moment... but it didn't take long into his presidency for me to realize that he's batshit crazy and insanely ignorant.
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A foreign policy win by modern standards is a president who doesn't get us entangled in another foreign war with boots on the ground or take a bold intervention that backfires. Trump hasn't made North Korea voluntarily throw their nukes into the sea and open their borders and agree to be slaves to western imperialist powers? Is anything short of that a failure? Because if the question is whether we're better off today on the DPRK than we were under Obama, the answer is probably a minor improvement, a defusing of tensions and open door to bring them into the international fold that didn't exist until Trump set foot across the DMZ. I'd consider a failure to be one where either US troops are getting blown up by IEDs on the streets of Pyongyang or Seoul got nuked. Because that would stack up compared to Bush, Clinton, Bush or Obama. Trump hasn't sent US bombers in to overthrow a stable government in the middle east and caused chaos and power vacuums that get filled by populist jihadi movements. Where he inherited pitched genocidal campaigns in Yemen and Syria, the conflict has been drying up. The worst you can say is that Trump's foreign policy has been moving at a glacial pace when it comes to ending the wars in Afghanistan and Syria and Iraq and Yemen, but at least they're moving in the right direction instead of accelerating again, and it does seem like he'll notch at least the end of one or two conflicts in his belt in time for the election.
If Trump was stacking up next to a modern president and wanted to just get par, he'd have to have invaded Iran with boots on the ground in a large scale intervention that has gone sour and gotten 1000+ US troops killed as we're stuck in a quagmire with the Iranian people turning against us and supporting guerrillas who rack up a death toll using IEDs on our occupation force with no exit strategy. Or he'd have to sit idly by while millions of people get slaughtered in one-sided ethnic cleansing as UN peacekeepers get overrun and refuse to reinforce them despite being able to do so without risking a wider conflict or stepping on another nuclear power. Then he'd be an average president.
You make a valid point there... W Bush really lowered the standards of what Americans should expect from our president's foreign policy. Trump hasn't made any huge errors such as Iraq, but there's been a multitude of smaller ones that could have huge ramifications down the road. Shaking the faith of many of America's allies could create serious consequences eventually. I don't view Trump giving KJU and North Korea legitimacy as a good thing, because it just normalizes them and their nuclear program on the world stage. Leaving the Iran deal was a gamble that so far hasn't turned out that bad, but let's wait and see. If America and Israel are faced with Iran pursuing the bomb again, the diplomatic solution isn't a viable option anymore.
Trump hasn't had to face some of the issues that Clinton, Bush, and Obama did. Let's just think about it, what major foreign policy crises has he had to deal with? There really hasn't been much. Tough choices create situations that inevitably lead to the criticism of a president. I'm sure if Obama allowed Gaddafi to overwhelm the opposition, Republicans would consider it a serious foreign policy failure. If Obama responded to the Arab spring with a Trumpian non-response, history would record it as a lost opportunity. That's just the way this shit works.
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The health of our society and our democracy depends upon each of the people in it, not just one man. Its pretty ironic to hold it against Trump that democrats and the media have made it their mission to virulently demonize him and pull out all stops on their reductio ad hitlerums and bring our country into major strife. You had him be targeted in the single most negative, smear-driven campaign in US history, where Clinton simply abandoned any policy messaging and went full blown character assassination. And the media gladly carried that torch and has been 95% negative, happy to throw accusations of throwing kids in cages, raping children, cozying up to neonazis, racist with a capital AIT, treason, russia russia russia, even taking time to behead him in effigy, spit on Melania and threaten Barron. And Trump is shameless? Shameless would be jumping from one smear to the next as soon as it gets discredited and debunked.
Our country is still in the grips of what will be remembered as a rather absurd chapter of US history, where democrats stirred up a monster in 2016 and inflamed the country in hopes of winning an election, and lost. And still carried their derangement to its logical maximum. Years ago I was casually discussing how Republicans stirred up the frankenstein's monster of the Tea Party and set it lurching towards the election to get some wins and then it kept rampaging on past and causing collateral damage. That was a fluffy harmless kitten compared to what I see today. Tea Partiers weren't committing suicide terrorist attacks targeting politicians and the government while screaming about healthcare or immigration. Low level republican bureaucrats and campaign staffers weren't getting arrested with regularity for threats, attacks or leaks.
This is where we're in a space where you can't accept reality. You shift all the responsibility to Trump's enemies, and think of him as a bullied toddler who has no choice but to do and say a bunch of stupid shit. What's the rationale for attacking McCain multiple times after he's six feet under? Was he haunting him from the grave?
The reality is that Trump is an incredibly divisive president. He's totally obsessed with criticism because mommy didn't love him, so he shoots himself in the foot every day. Reasonable Trump supporters like Black can at least admit this. But his more fervent cultists have to deflect all blame.
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Credibly buying into every histrionic smear campaign and accusation hook line and sinker doesn't get negated by disavowing it after the fact and just saying you're "paying attention". I paid attention to the stories, and had plenty of longwinged essays where I deconstructed the evidence and looked at what the most logical and mundane explanations were, while you kept teasing insinuations of grand conspiracies and collusion with spooky Russians in that vain hope Mueller had something to find. I regularly took the skeptical voice and debunked on the facts and logic. You regularly posited the possibility of elaborate plots, followed by insisting that even if there's no 'there' there, you hope Trump gets nailed on it because he deserves it anyway. The reality was you didn't care if Trump did anything wrong, because you were so sure he did everything else wrong.
That's a strawman of course, I don't accept every Trump criticism. I thought the Charlottesville comments were unwise but extremely misrepresented by the media. The kids in cages talking point I've never agreed with... in fact I expressed agreement with Trump's policy when it first was enacted. Again, you're grafting every Trump criticism onto me for some reason.
Goom, you take every single instance of Trump's wrongdoing and churn out sometimes ridiculous and laughable propaganda defending the indefensible. Instead of just being intellectually honest once in a while and saying "alright, Trump fucked up here", you have to create insane counter-narratives, the most recent example being the Ukraine thing. At least Hannity and Lou Dobbs get paid to shill. On Russiagate, I went over this with void before. I expressed skepticism time and time again in that thread. I was justifiably suspicious with all the revelations that came out over the years... any rational person would be.
@bold: Lol... what are you even talking about?
This post was edited by IceMage on Jan 19 2020 04:05pm