contrario said:
Jinx 2 said:
contrario said:
RebelT said:
Oh, I guess I forgot to add "attempting to delegitimize the election process" to the things I expect the president to NOT do.
You do realize the democrats have spent the past 2 years trying to delegitimize the 2016 election results, right? Please excuse me while I say "you can't be serious Clark."
If you want to have a conversation about deligitimizing elections, let's talk about the 8 years Republicans spent trying to delegitimize Obama's elections. And he won the popular vote. Twice.
The birthers, including Donald J. Trump, were just the start, and the treatment Merrick Garland received was the grand finale. It was particularly galling to hear Republicans huffing and puffing about Kavanaugh's treatment after what they did to Garland.
Plus Republicans have also engaged in sustained campaigns of voter suppression and gerrymandering, to the point where redistricting plans such as the one in North Carolina specifically engineered to minimize the impact of black voters "with surgical precision" (acoording to a Fourth Circuit opinion) have been overturned.
What Trump has been called out for is his active efforts to undermine the rule of law, to claim powers for the president that don't exist, to put in place cabinet members and other appointees who would place loyalty to Trump above loyalty to country, violating whatever oath of office they take when they're sworn in and placed on the government's (and not Trump's personal) payroll.
At least once a month someone posts a thread about dissing the flag. Trump & Co. have given the flag a golden shower and lowered the U.S.'s reputation globally. His supporters are the most unpatriotic people in our nation, because they support Trumpism over the constitution--and they lie about it by loudly proclaiming the two are one and the same.
Shame on the lot of you.
How was Obama's election deligitmized? Because a few people asked for Obama's birth certificate to prove that he was a naturally born citizen, which is a requirement to be POTUS? How exactly is requesting for him to provide that document, which he eventually did, anything comparable to the current actions of the democrats? And by requesting that document, they weren't trying to delegitmize the entire election process, they were just requesting proof that he met the basic requirements to be POTUS. I didn't think it was racist or anti-military when fringe democrats questioned whether John McCain met the requirements to be POTUS since he was born on a military base, it's an honest question to avoid a potential constitution crisis. Obama could have laid those issues to rest on day 1 if he had just provided his birth certificate; but he made the political decision to wait some time before releasing the document to get people on both sides riled up. And it worked. 10 years later you are still talking about it. It was a genius move by Obama.
This pales in comparison to the current actions of the democrats. I have no personal attachment to the outcome of the investigations other than I don't like the precedent it sets. If there was legitimate collusion with Trump and a foreign government, I absolutely would want him impeached. But I don't like the dangerous precedent the democrats are setting that any politician with any remote attachment with people from another country are automatically assumed to be guilty of collusion. And even if the argument is "we are just trying to complete an investigation to get the facts", while on the surface that may be true, but the real reason the investigations were started in the first place were to slow down or possibly stop the Trump administration from completing any major legislation. Honestly, for the democrats, the longer the investigation goes on, the better because the results of the investigations are not going to be as sensational as the Huffington Post tells you they will be. Further, the democrats are claiming that Russians significantly interfered with our elections to the point that we need to question the legitimacy of the entire election process all in the name of hating Trump. That is completely different than asking for Obama to present a birth certificate.
Garland was not treated poorly. Yes, it was bad that the republicans didn't even give him a hearing. But as the party in charge of the senate, they had every right to do that. If the American people disagreed with that decision, they would have voted every single one of them out of office and Trump wouldn't have even come close in the presidential election. We know how that played out. Compare that to the treatment of Kavanaugh, and no reasonable person can draw any comparisons. It's one thing to complain of the party in power possibly abusing their power (which is probably a legitimate claim); it's an entirely different thing to destroy a man's career and reputation over claims lacking any facts or substantiation.
"A few people" is a gross mis-characterization.It was a sustained campaign that resulted in lots of poeple--including the women McCain corrected at one of his campaign events--believing Obama was also Muslim. I wish I had a dime for everytime I saw Obama referred to as Barach Hussain Obama just on this forum, with the "Hussain" thrown in to imply that he was a Muslim.
That nasty campaign of misinformation was fanned by Fox, Breitbart and some members of the Republican establishment. And it worked: Last year, 51% of Republicans polled still believed Obama wasn't born here:
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-birther-obama-poll-republicans-kenya-744195 And Trump didn't think he had a moral obligation to refute these false claims:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-breaks-silence-on-no-response-to-obama-muslim-comments-says-not-morally-obligatedAnd I don't buy the canard the Republicans "had a right" to deny Obama a SCOTUS seat when the vacancy occured 11 months before the end of his term. When and if the same thing happens to a GOP president, you won't, either. And you shouldn't. That's not how a system with built-in checks and balances is supposed to work.
But Republicans don't like checks and balances because then they can't implement their worst policy initiatives--idiotic walls, kidnapping kids at the border, suppressing the voter, gerrymandering districts so Republicans dominate Congress while more of the population lives in heavily Democratic states, unlimited guns rights, racist policing. stacking the courts and nominating crackpots like Matt Whittaker to head the DOJ.
