10 hours ago, 0r0d said:

Did anyone read the op-ed piece in the NY Times by an anonymous Trump administration official?

It seems there are actually people inside the administration that have been considering removing Trump from office due to his unhinged, immoral, and reckless behavior.  I guess if Congress wont do their job, there is still another option.

We can only hope that one way or another this insanity ends.  Every day is a new embarrassment for this country under Trump.

I read the article. What it sounds like also is that much of what Bob Woodward wrote in his book is probably true. What's most frightening about all of that is that there are moments when Trump could've been way worse. The fact that they're actually going out of their way to hide docs from Trump to get him from not doing something excessively stupid is frightening. It means that we are literally on a razor's edge between what we have now and complete and total catastrophe. Just think about it. What we're seeing now is a restrained Donald Trump, and even that seems completely unhinged. Imagine what unrestrained Donald Trump would be....

I just can't believe that this sort of an administration is remotely sustainable. It's got to end fairly quickly. Yet here we are, 2 years later, still wondering how we got here.

On 8/28/2018 at 10:26 AM, gloven said:

Yeah by posting i haven't accounted for these issues the current administration has to work with. So i am sorry for that. I was trying to state a different point, that sides do not matter. 10 years can be a huge dip of immoral actions and the fall of the nations, the next 10 years can be the heavens of political correctness and utopian democracy.

In 50 years, it does not matter what did who, one candidate is too small of a problem in the history of a country, even more the world. It's impossible to make everyone happy, i think people going for presidency are plain crazy, they know they can't fix things, especially when a human being is observing the world subjectively. I'm entertaining the idea that short term results,, good or bad, are necessary for the long term evolvement of the nation.

Right now everything seems not like we want it to be, but i know that after 10+ years we will know why it was done. We can only see the pattern when we look into the past, not while it's happening. I am not defending anyone, i believe in bigger goals, trumpism is a short term hype and it should go away as people withdraw their emotions during the next election

"In the long run, we are all dead" 

-John Maynard Keynes.

Sure in the long run "things eventually work out", something economists of the early 20th century would always say, but as Keynes very aptly pointed out, we're all dead in the long run. So the short term does matter, since a lot can happen that affects all of us in the short term, and even going forwards in the long run. I'm pretty certain that we still don't quite know what the long run impact of this Presidency will be. We don't even know what'll happen after Trump to this movement.

But yea, I can agree that we may not really understand how this happened until later on.

Trump is a good president. The perspective that he is a disaster is not grounded in anything but highly politicised rhetoric. So, it will last until the end of his second term and for the rest of American history. Shrug

2 hours ago, Unknown33 said:

Trump is a good president. The perspective that he is a disaster is not grounded in anything but highly politicised rhetoric. So, it will last until the end of his second term and for the rest of American history. Shrug

By what metric do you think he’s a good president? 

Im genuinely curious, since he’s basically failed at everything, and the only thing he’s succeeded at are a set of tax cuts that are demonstrably economically unsustainable. 

Meanwhile, even his own staff are saying he’s utterly incompetent. 

So again, by what metric is he a good president? 

Well when your position is demonstrably hyperbole I'm not sure it's cogent to respond sincerely, and since I have no desire to engage in a hyperbolic rhetorical exchange based on arbitrary political affiliations, I will simply wish you a good rest of your day.

35 minutes ago, Unknown33 said:

Well when your position is demonstrably hyperbole I'm not sure it's cogent to respond sincerely, and since I have no desire to engage in a hyperbolic rhetorical exchange based on arbitrary political affiliations, I will simply wish you a good rest of your day.

I was trying to engage with you sincerely. I'm sorry you think that facts are hyperbole, but he genuinely has failed at pretty much everything he's attempted as president. 

That's not even a value judgement. He's failed to do things that I think are stupid (the mexican border wall) or immoral (the muslim ban), and I'm glad he's failed at that. Meanwhile, he has one of the worst approval ratings in history. 

edit: Just for the record, I didn't downvote you. I disagree with you, but I thought your first comment was a reasonable (albeit unsupported) position. 

Once people become politically motivated, they do things that are universally immoral. Lying, cheating, stealing and attacking others without provocation because "the end justifies the means".

I don't engage in politics, anymore, because I have found that few decent, good-natured people do. Politics is a moral vacuum in which people recuse themselves from any sort of self-examination, because ultimately what matters is not immutable truth but perception, which tends to be malleable.

Thus we find ourselves at a peculiar junction, wondering which way we might go. On the one hand, we can argue about Trump ad nauseum and all feel better about ourselves for thumping our political opposition... but at the other hand, we have a path where we can objectively examine what actually matters, and see that Trump's victory has given a large number of people a renewed sense of hope that a small, unelected aristocracy of wealthy celebrities, business moguls and media figureheads don't own the free world. That's something everyone should be celebrating.

That freedom of the people to elect a leader that they choose, not the one that was chosen for them. That's a victory.

All the opposition and constant assault the current administration undergoes daily is just confirmation that he was not the president that the media organizations and wealthy and powerful people desired. 

That's a great thing.

He's a good president because he reflects the people that elected him faithfully... even if you disagree with those people, they're still valid people and they're still Americans. Even if you can manage to make a semantic case that they are "immoral", it doesn't justify undermining our electoral system or committing acts of sabotage or treason... this often gets lost, that those with whom we disagree are still American and they have every right to vote.

All this talk of getting things done or succeeding and failing... anyone who is overly focused on what Donald Trump is doing is likely still angry that he won. It's not healthy to stay upset this long over something like a presidential election. People despised Obama for 8 gruelling years and you know what? Nothing changed because of that anger. They would've elected Obama again, could he have run. Sometimes we just need to distance ourselves from the TV news cycle and relax. It's a wonderful life.

I usually stay clear of political debates and discussions, because at times they get a bit out of hand. I will say this much, that I'm not a huge trump supporter. The one thing that he is doing that has caught my interest is this new space force. 

I've recently taken a huge interest in space, and the different space technologies, so I would love to see where this goes.

15 minutes ago, Unknown33 said:

 we have a path where we can objectively examine what actually matters, and see that Trump's victory has given a large number of people a renewed sense of hope that a small, unelected aristocracy of wealthy celebrities, business moguls and media figureheads don't own the free world. That's something everyone should be celebrating.

You are literally talking about an heir to an aristocratic fortune who had a reality show where he touted himself as a business mogul while losing vast amounts of his inherited fortune then took the office of commander in chief despite a majority of the country not voting for him.

24 minutes ago, krb said:

You are literally talking about an heir to an aristocratic fortune who had a reality show where he touted himself as a business mogul while losing vast amounts of his inherited fortune then took the office of commander in chief despite a majority of the country not voting for him.

His uneducated father built low income apartment buildings. Trump shadowed his father and picked up the business sense from him.

Trump was solid upper middle class to start out with, but he was not a sophisticate. Certainly not aristocratic. He attended a very affluent business school and learned to act the part.

It took a lot of smooth talking and clever dealing for him to break into some of the killer deals he landed in his prime. Luck played a huge part. But nobody ever wanted to do him any favors and often he struggled in vain for years before a deal fell through.

New York in his day was having tremendous financial troubles and property values were fluctuating wildly. Many people lost their shirts in that city in those days.

If you reduce your understanding of history and reality to little sound bytes that sound good politically, but make no sense outside of the hyperbolic realm of gotcha quotes and snarky snippets, you're missing out.

Like I said, disagreeing with others is not justification for vivisecting the Constitution and US law to eradicate the egalitarianistic electoral college, which guarantees that smaller voices are also heard (the absolute core of the Democratic worldview). 

I empathize with what it is like to be the party out of power and to be frustrated with the man in the chair, though. Just focus on something besides politics for a while and be sure to rally up come election year, that's all you can do.

To whomever is insistent upon downvoting me, despite the fact that I'm being perfectly civil and not taking any political stances... you represent the fundamental reason why your neighbors and friends and colleagues voted for Trump. Sometimes people get so fed up with the juvenile impetuosity of others that they do crazy things to get even. For many, voting for Trump was an act of passive aggression against the modern liberal. And the results have been clear. It worked. The enormous negative reaction to Trump means one thing... he will be re-elected by the same people who put him into office in the first place, for the same reasons.