Quote (TiStuff @ Dec 20 2021 11:24pm)
make a correction where its high lighted. change it to "TDS"
I like to distinguish between the seething hatred evoked in Trump's presence and the authoritarian and totalitarian tendencies of the left. I don't think we can chalk the latter up to the former. The left has been moving more authoritarian since Obama was first elected, I think that is really the point at which this all started going downhill. It truly was not the case with either Clinton (saxophone, not pantsuit) or even necessarily Al Gore or maybe Kerry, though he made me suspicious. Obama laid these foundations with the unilateralism, the centralized power structure and complete willingness to violate every standard of good faith and democratic safeguards in the name of his political aims, whether it was legislative backdoors or spying on opponents. Clinton (pantsuit) very obviously would have been a nightmare in this regard and we have the benefit of trashtalking an inept and impotent Joe Biden right now while his party careens towards disaster, so we can't really imagine if it would have been far worse in a different timeline. But all the vitriol and hatred and demented levels of viciousness and overt embrace of violence that exist now on the left didn't exist under Obama. Its easy to look at where politics was under Obama and see how the degree of insanity we're flooded with today didn't exist then, and dismiss Obama's hand in it. But I think, like the dominos falling after the Iraq withdrawal and Arab Spring, Obama set in motion the events that led to where we are now even if he didn't intend them. When Obama and Biden met in the oval office with Comey & Co and gave the greenlight to weaponize the DoJ against Trump, could he have foreseen a few years later where his party would be after infecting it with conspiracy theories and stoking division? I've used to compare it to how Republicans intentionally enflamed their tea party base and set loose a frankenstein's monster to their own peril down the line as it became a thorn in their side, but it was years ago that the left surpassed that and its only kept accelerating each news cycle. This isn't just TDS, this isn't a response to Trump, this is ball of shit rolling downhill for about 12 years straight now. These mandates, political prosecutions, violent crime waves, mass riots, they're all just the latest iterations of one continuous trend. And we're clearly not at the low point yet