I fully recognise what that second vote was for. A continuation of the same problems.
You wanted things to get worse than they did in his first term? Because that’s all that was going to happen if he got a second term: All his worst impulses would’ve been given a green light. Everything, and I do mean everything, he did to help turn this country closer to a Christian theocracy led by the worst kinds of people would have only been compounded by another four-year mandate, and you seriously believed American fascism would’ve been better than Biden?!
This is why I keep wondering who you want(ed) Old 45 to hurt: It’s clear that you really want him to hurt someone, whether it’s Clinton or Biden or “the libs” or trans people or immigrants or who-th’fuck-ever you think “deserves” to be hurt. No one votes for a man so driven by abject cruelty towards other people that he openly admits to molesting women unless they want him to deploy that cruelty onto the “right” targets.
we got a man with diminished function who would only deteriorate further in office.
The perfect puppet for the queen of darkness and her acolytes to control.
…oh my god, are you a fucking comic book villain or some shit, you sound like a poorly-written comic book villain right now, oh my fucking god that is pathetic, even Marvel movies have better written villains than you, jesus tapdancing christ aaaaaaaaaahahahahahaha—
[ahem]
It’s kind of sad that you let Hillary Clinton live rent-free in your head even after she’s lost most of her political relevance—and even sadder that you treat her as The Absolute Worst Person to Ever Exist in the History of Ever when she isn’t even close to having committed the same kind (or same amount) of atrocities that, say, Kim Jong-Un has committed as leader of North Korea. (And by the by, who kissed Kim Jong-Un’s ass so much that it gave him credibility as a world leader? Oh, right: That was Donald fucking Trump.)
Right now we don’t have Biden working on getting us out of trump’s mess. We have him generally ignoring that and making a new mess of his own.
Don’t get me wrong when I say that part of the quagmire we’re seeing from Congress right now is Biden’s fault. I’m not trying to minimize his role in this. That said: Republican obstructionism via the filibuster and the combined efforts of Manchin and Sinema to stall anything even remotely progressive(/threatening to wealthy people’s bottom lines) are far bigger roadblocks than Biden’s personal incompetence.
Also: “Trump’s mess”? Good for you, recognizing that Trump fucked over America! And if you hadn’t wanted him to make things even worse (as evidenced by your vote for him in 2020), maybe that admission would mean something.
He just says what he’s told, signs what he’s told, does what he’s told.
Now you’re starting to sound like a conspiracy nut. Inside Job is not a documentary series, dude.
I no longer care who or what. As long as SOMEBODY does SOMETHING.
Careful what you wish for, you sweet summer fetus. You may end up inviting a leopard in to eat your face.
This is as close to total chaos the country has ever come.
And the January 6th insurrection, which had a very real chance of subverting American democracy in the name of Orange Fascism—that was order?!
Hell, I’d actually consider queen Lilith right now.
For someone who says they’re an atheist, you’re sounding a hell of a lot like a Bible thumper who preaches against Satan on a busy street corner.
When I rip on Trump, I might exaggerate his personal characteristics (though not by much…) and use colorful language, but I don’t go off like he’s The Ultimate Evil Beyond Even Cthulhu. He’s a human being, not a supernatural evil borne from the pits of hell—which is what you apparently believe Hillary Clinton is. And when I tear into Trump’s failings, it’s not to point out that he is that supernatural evil—it’s to point out how his flaws drove his behavior in office and helped him fracture a country that was already breaking apart thanks to conservative ideologies rooting themselves more and more in unwarranted grievance, unproven lies, and unthinkable cruelty.
Your Grand High Savior Against the Ultimate Evil is a bumbling narcissist who built an image of success even as his business ventures failed one by one around him (and hurt innocent people in the process), an elderly game show host who ran the government like it was his game show (even when it meant staffing the government with incompetent nitwits), and an objectively cruel human being whose predilictions towards women are so creepy and repulsive that he once claimed he could “grab [women] by the pussy” without consequence because he was famous and once said he would date Ivanka if she weren’t his daughter. Even if I buy that Hillary Clinton is evil to her core, she still wouldn’t be anywhere near as evil as Donald Trump.
I mean, Hillary at least respected American democracy.
My god, you actually can point out the shortcomings of your Orange Demigod and his roving band of idiot assholes. Good for you!
…except for this:
I would have used presidential mandate to force congress to vote on a consistent method of voting for this (2020) election. … Thus eliminating the entirety of the “steal” movement before it began.
Yeah, none of that shit between (and including) those sentences was ever going to happen. And even if everything before the last sentence had happened, I guarantee—on the graves of my grandmothers, god rest both their souls—Trump still would’ve found a way to say the election was stolen from him because he wanted to have that “out” in case he lost. He wanted to have that grievance to hold onto so he could keep grifting from gullible morons and continue to build political power within the Republican party (which he has now all but taken over).
You would probably have been a better president than Donald Trump. But you got him instead. You have to own your vote for incompetence, partisan division, anti-queerness, anti-immigration, anti-abortion, and pro–Christian fascism. You have to own the fact that you elected a narcissistic sociopathic game show host without a second of public service experience into the highest office in the land. You have to own every decision he made that hurt people—maybe even people you care about—because you helped put him in the position of power that let him hurt people indiscriminately.
I own my vote for Biden—and the good, the bad, and the ugly that goes with it. I’m willing to take my responsibility for helping to put him in power when he and his administration fuck up. For what reason are you so hesitant to admit that you voted not for the Donald Trump you want me to believe he is, but for who Donald Trump really is: a hateful, spiteful, petty, violent, attention-seeking man-child who will literally hurt himself if it means someone else gets hurt worse?
trump didn’t call racists, as the intended subject, fine people.
Please note that his statement about “very fine people” referred to people on “both sides” of the Charlottesville debacle. One side was made up largely of white supremacists and racist Confederacy-defending shitheads; the other was made up of people protesting those assholes.
Tell me: Do you think white supremacists and pro-Confederacy shitheads are “fine people”? Because Trump thought so.
When half of congress spent 4 months 100% ignoring or ‘whatever’ing any concern or complaints. Then nearly two months saying ‘don’t care’ enough to even contemplate.
Any laws that Congressional Democrats may have wanted to pass to shore up election security before the 2020 election either were blocked or would’ve been blocked by the same people who are currently using the filibuster to refuse even debating such laws on the Senate floor.
Congress didn’t need to investigate the election results because the states did that—some states even did it multiple times over. (And not all of the election officials in those states were Democrats, by the by.) The only people willing to say “there are serious problems with the election results” were the same people who prevented the creation of a truly bipartisan commission into investigating the January 6th insurrection.
You think it’s Democrats who don’t care about free, fair, and secure elections? It’s Republicans who don’t care—because they’re the ones trying to deny voting rights based on whether people have the “right kind” of ID, disenfranchise voters through nationwide partisan gerrymandering that gives them fewer overall votes but more state legislatures, and force people to choose between their vote and their lives by cancelling mail-in voting (which, like in-person voting, saw no mass-scale voter fraud).
And who do you think wants Republicans to enact all this shit? It sure as shit ain’t Democrats, and it sure as shit ain’t Biden—it’s Donald “I want my Oval Office back” Trump.
Protest is a foundational right under a representative government.
Just to be clear: You’re fine with people protesting American democracy itself?
The filibuster is a balance to power to mandate discussion.
Again: Republicans used the filibuster to stifle debate on a voting rights bill last week. The filibuster isn’t a tool to “mandate discussion” any more—it’s a partisan “fuck you”, and it needs to be nuked if we’re ever going to see the Senate work again.
I’m afraid of either current party having carte blanch
Are you afraid of Trumpist Republicans voting to curtail your civil rights because you’re queer? You should be—your vote for Trump won’t save you from the face-eating leopards.
His administration is not enforcing any of the laws.
Would you prefer more concentration camps, or would you prefer he send ICE agents to shoot border jumpers?
[Yahoo News link]
How does the former CBP head know for sure what the Biden administration is doing when he doesn’t work in it? How does he know how many immigrants are carrying COVID? How am I supposed to trust someone who worked under Trump—and thus has every reason to lie about the Biden administration’s approach on immigration?
You want to tax rich people right? Start with the richest then!
Okay. I say we start with Donald Trump, since he likes to act like he’s richer than God.
"These sinister ideologies must be defeated. Hate has no place in America," [or] "In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry[,] and white supremacy”
You seem upset that Biden called out white supremacy. Nothing about those two sentences even remotely sounds like he’s “anti-white”. If anything, your conflation of “anti-whiteness” with “white supremacy” paints a pretty good picture of your thinking on the matter…and it’s not a pretty one, lemme tell ya.
[HuffPost link]
Okay, and…you’re upset that Trump was called out for being a racist asshole? That’s not being “anti-white”—that’s telling the truth.
Despite the many times I called out the violence and said all law breakers should be arrested?
Yes, because you’ve been continuously defending the crowd of Trumpists at the January 6th Rally & Riot Extravaganza of being “peaceful”. They weren’t there to be peaceful—they were there to express anger and hatred because their guy didn’t win an election. All of the people who attended the rally/stormed the Capitol may not have gone with criminal (or violent) intent, but they went with unjustified anger in their hearts all the same.
They were there to demand a full and complete review of the election process.
No they weren’t. They were there to demand that Mike Pence put Trump back in office, full fucking stop. It wasn’t a “review the election” event, it wasn’t an “audit the results” event—it was a “Stop the Steal” event. I already posted that long-as-fuck copypasta full of quotes from the speeches of Trump and his cohorts that day; do you really need a refresher on what the fuck they were all trying to say, or are you going to call me a fucking lunatic because I can read context and subtext better than you?
Let me take a page from trump’s book: I absolutely condemn the violence on Jan 6!
Yet you refuse to condemn the protest against a free and fair election that was based on what even you admit were lies from the rightful loser of the 2020 presidential election and his sycophant followers. That is your primary problem here: You’re defending an attack on American democracy itself, and you’re more than happy to do it because Trump is “your guy”.
I doubt you’ll be thinking that when Republicans have a majority.
The filibuster is a relic that needs to be nuked regardless of who has the majority in the Senate. I will stand by that statement and you can’t make me say otherwise, not even with the threat of voting into office people who will curtail queer civil rights. (Y’know, like Trump and his cronies.)
Both held majority congressional control. Both Presidents and their parties should have done something!
Like what, piss off an untold amount of voters? I’m an atheist and even I know that no politician who wants to stay in office is ever going to seriously suggest taxing churches—and that goes triple for Republicans, who only ever see the wall of separation between church and state crumbling over in favor of the church.
I absolutely denounce the far right shites and their anti vax anti mask rhetoric.
And yet you refuse to denounce the man who emboldens their rhetoric, encourages their nasty behavior, welcomes their violent tendencies with open arms.
If you want to denounce the body, you have to denounce the head as well, because it’s still part of the body.
Thanks to your selfishness and hatred of trump we have Biden destroying America.
Funny, who is it that’s threatening school board members and pushing horse dewormer as a COVID treatment and trying to ban words like “equity” from being said by teachers and continuing to push Trump’s Big Lie despite all the evidence saying it’s a Big Lie and refusing to even debate voting rights laws on the Senate floor? Because that sure as shit ain’t Democrats and “leftists” doing that.
Biden inherited a wrecked America from a man who did more to divide this country than nearly any other president in history. Don’t blame him for not being able to snap his fingers and fix the problems Trump and his Republican asskissers caused.
Actually I do.
I don’t believe you, libertarian.
In retrospect there are many things trump could have done better.
You say that, and yet…
In retrospect every pandemic could have been handled better.
…I don’t think you even meant it.
Name ten things Trump could’ve done better about his handling of the pandemic—and if you bring up Democrats or “leftists” even once, your list is invalid due to deflecting blame for his fuck-ups onto other people.
Social media services are not public fora. A Supreme Court ruling from 2019, for which Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the majority opinion, doesn’t directly address social media but still provides the logic necessary to counter any “yes they are public fora” argument:
Under the Court’s cases, a private entity may qualify as a state actor when it exercises “powers traditionally exclusively reserved to the State.” … It is not enough that the federal, state, or local government exercised the function in the past, or still does. And it is not enough that the function serves the public good or the public interest in some way. Rather, to qualify as a traditional, exclusive public function within the meaning of our state-action precedents, the government must have traditionally and exclusively performed the function.
The Court has stressed that “very few” functions fall into that category. … Under the Court’s cases, those functions include, for example, running elections and operating a company town. … The Court has ruled that a variety of functions do not fall into that category, including, for example: running sports associations and leagues, administering insurance payments, operating nursing homes, providing special education, representing indigent criminal defendants, resolving private disputes, and supplying electricity. …
When the government provides a forum for speech (known as a public forum), the government may be constrained by the First Amendment, meaning that the government ordinarily may not exclude speech or speakers from the forum on the basis of viewpoint, or sometimes even on the basis of content[.]
By contrast, when a private entity provides a forum for speech, the private entity is not ordinarily constrained by the First Amendment because the private entity is not a state actor. The private entity may thus exercise editorial discretion over the speech and speakers in the forum. This Court so ruled in its 1976 decision in Hudgens v. NLRB. There, the Court held that a shopping center owner is not a state actor subject to First Amendment requirements such as the public forum doctrine[.]
The Hudgens decision reflects a commonsense principle: Providing some kind of forum for speech is not an activity that only governmental entities have traditionally performed. Therefore, a private entity who provides a forum for speech is not transformed by that fact alone into a state actor. After all, private property owners and private lessees often open their property for speech. Grocery stores put up community bulletin boards. Comedy clubs host open mic nights. As Judge Jacobs persuasively explained, it “is not at all a near-exclusive function of the state to provide the forums for public expression, politics, information, or entertainment[”.]
In short, merely hosting speech by others is not a traditional, exclusive public function and does not alone transform private entities into state actors subject to First Amendment constraints.
If the rule were otherwise, all private property owners and private lessees who open their property for speech would be subject to First Amendment constraints and would lose the ability to exercise what they deem to be appropriate editorial discretion within that open forum. Private property owners and private lessees would face the unappetizing choice of allowing all comers or closing the platform altogether. “The Constitution by no means requires such an attenuated doctrine of dedication of private property to public use.” … Benjamin Franklin did not have to operate his newspaper as “a stagecoach, with seats for everyone.” … That principle still holds true. As the Court said in Hudgens, to hold that private property owners providing a forum for speech are constrained by the First Amendment would be “to create a court-made law wholly disregarding the constitutional basis on which private ownership of property rests in this country.” … The Constitution does not disable private property owners and private lessees from exercising editorial discretion over speech and speakers on their property. …
A private entity … who opens its property for speech by others is not transformed by that fact alone into a state actor.
I’m well aware of that. But I can’t think of any reasonable measures for “dealing with handguns” that won’t sound like “take all the guns”—not any measures that can be applied only to handguns in particular, anyway. (Hence my call for permits for all kinds of guns and proof of responsible gun ownership.)
Seems strange for a "libertarian" to be supporting such a waste of public funds that required in many areas land being forcibly taken from private citizens
Remember, Lostcause has a property/property rights fetish, so of course he’s fine with that.
… it's true that he installed incompetent sycophants and donors who had the express purpose of destroying certain domestic interests as well. Many of the people he installed were hostile to the very departments they were appointed to, and were working to make the lives of Americans worse.
he’s let hundreds of thousand into the country illegally.
Yeah, Biden personally opened the floodgates~. That’s totally what happened~.
At worst, his administration was slow to respond to a sudden surge in border crossings. That’s not the same thing as “letting people in”.
The majority believed to be infected.
Who believes this? Who told you this? What are their sources? How do those sources know whether their assertions are true? For fuck’s sake, Lozenge, be critical of the media you read instead of accepting shit you want to be true as true just because it sounds “right”.
The largest source of consolidated wealth, the Catholic Church, remains tax free.
Show me where Joe Biden is personally and singularly responsible for the laws that exempt churches from paying taxes. Go ahead. I’ll wait.
if you don’t follow federal law you shouldn’t get federal funding.
What federal laws were “blue states” not following when Donald Trump threatened to withhold federal monies from them? Be specific.
he’s used other terms for the anti-white people
Oh, by all means, list them. And be specific with quotes and their context—you have to prove he meant “anti-white” with what he said. Again: I’ll wait.
I disagree.
Of course you do. You think the crowd there on January 6th was all smiles and sunshine and puppy dog farts until, like, five “lone wolves” broke into the Capitol and forced everyone else to march into the building and storm the halls of Congress and shit.
Jesus Christ, Lostcause, do you even remember why they were there in the first place? Because it wasn’t to congratulate Donald Trump on his four years as president, it wasn’t to celebrate Joe Biden winning the election fair and square, and it wasn’t to throw a party for American democracy working as intended. The Trumpist crowd gathered at the January 6th insurrection was there to protest the results of a free and fair election because they didn’t like the free and fair results—and their Trumpian leaders, including Dear Leader himself, kept adding fuel to that fire by lying about how the election was “stolen” and “rigged” (something even you say is an outright lie!) and telling the crowd they had to “show strength” and fight back against the system (which included Mike Pence).
Keep lying to yourself about January 6th. I’ll tell you the truth about it, every time, until you get the fucking point: The Trumpists weren’t in D.C. on January 6th to sing “Kumbaya”.
He totally ignored and dismissed Trump’s plan and went with his own
The specific parameters (and execution) of the plan belong to Biden and his administration, yes—but that plan was initially spearheaded by the Trump administration, starting with the release of 5,000 Taliban soldiers as part of a deal struck between the Taliban and the Trump administration. (And if you needed reminding, Trump secretly invited Taliban leaders to Camp David on the eve of the anniversary of the September 11 attacks, presumably for negotiations for a peace deal. Do you think Biden would’ve done that?)
It’s there to protect the minority.
From what—debating voting rights bills on the Senate floor? The filibuster is an antiquated relic that should be nuked for the sake of making the legislature work again.
Like the multi trillion dollar Catholic Church?
Y’know, I have my own issues with the Catholic Church, but let’s not act like Biden is singularly and wholly responsible for its evils—or for the laws that make it exempt from paying taxes. And if you’re gonna piss all over Biden for that, why aren’t you pissing all over Trump for ignoring the Church, too? (Or does Trump get a pass because he was hurting immigrants and trans people?)
Are you delusional?
No, because I literally said that was a Biden failing.
I’ll vote for the person most likely to be most beneficial to those I care about.
You must care about conservative Christians a lot, then.
I can’t do anything about them.
Oh, but you can: You can denounce Trump, his political ideology, and his sycophantic asshole followers as being bad for America. Look at what they’ve done to this country. Look how they’ve turned basic science into something to be questioned. Is this the America you want to see in four years? In eight? Do you really want a Trumpist America—a country ruled by people who genuinely believe wearing a facemask is akin to being killed in the Holocaust and any facts that don’t fit their worldview are “alternative facts” that can safely be ignored?
I’d literally take a bullet to the brain before voting for genocidal kill kill kill Clinton.
And thanks to your selfishness in not wanting to vote for a Clinton, we got Trump giving us a preview of American fascism. Congratulations, you played yourself.
I don’t doubt for a second if someone handed [Clinton] a weapon, a free shot, and immunity, she’d pull the trigger.
I can say the same for Donald Trump. Hell, he effectively confirmed that with his “shoot someone on 5th Avenue” comment. You sure do seem okay with a violent man leading the country…so long as he’s hurting the people you think need to be hurt, anyway.
I believe in socialised capitalism.
No, you don’t. You believe in capitalism with a small bone tossed to the poor. After all, you keep saying you’re a libertarian, and those schmucks sure as shit don’t believe in socialism.
I don’t support killing thousands because the killers put money in your account.
Neither do I. But as a quick aside: Do you support a leader killing hundreds of thousands of his country’s own citizens through (possibly malicious) negligence and willful ignorance towards a viral pandemic?
…you know what, never mind—you’ve already answered that.
As long as people refuse to acknowledge that the majority of those there did not break any law: I will continue to point out that fact.
And you’ll also keep pointing out the “BLM riots” as if the overwhelming majority of Black Lives Matter protests weren’t peaceful and the few riots that did come from those protests weren’t aimed at stopping American democracy from happening.
We’ve seen your post history, Lodos. Ain’t no use in trying to hide your attempts to equivocate protests/riots against racial injustice with a riot against American democracy itself. We know you’ve done it, we know you’ll keep doing it, and I know you’ll keep trying to deflect from your having done it and your wanting to keep doing it.
Just fucking own your bullshit for once, you coward.
And yet, look at which party refuses to even debate stronger voting rights in Congress. (Hint: It ain’t the Dems.)
not having the government “your damn right we’re coming for your guns!”
…motherfucker, please, miss me with this shit.
If the government wanted your guns, it would take them. You might have guns, but they have MRAPs and tanks and drones and all manner of bombs and guns and other shit they can use to literally wipe you off the map.
I’d argue that a majority of gun control advocates don’t want to get rid of all guns (though there are obviously some that do). They want to get rid of shit like AK-47s and other such weapons of mass murder—or at least keep those kinds of guns in the hands of the American military. That’s a move with which I agree, too. As for me? My ideas on the matter skew like this: All guns should require some form of permit to own; any gun other than a handgun should require a specialized permit with stricter restrictions on who can own them; all gun sales should have background checks attached (and that includes gun show sales); no one convicted of a violent crime should ever be able to legally purchase any gun; and anyone who owns any kind of gun(s) should have to pass an annual firearms safety course and prove they are storing their gun(s) safely if they want to keep their gun(s).
I had a general idea how Biden would screw over the country.
Has Biden allowed a pandemic to flourish by pushing misinformation as fact, dismissing scientists and experts, ignoring the existence of the virus within the United States for at least a month, and urging people to try unproven/unsafe “treatments” for a viral disease? Has Biden given tax breaks to the wealthy that a majority in Congress is reluctant to roll back, thus furthering the increasingly unstable economic divide between the rich and the poor? Has Biden threatened to withhold disaster funds from “red states”, kicked trans people out of the military, referred to racists as “very fine people”, dismissed legitimate criticism of his time in office as “fake news”, pissed all over the international allies of America, all but played grab-ass with fascists and dictators, tried to ban people from entering the U.S. based on what religion they practiced, or whipped an already-angry crowd into enough of a frothing rage that they stormed a citadel of American democracy to actually interrupt American democracy?
No?
Then for whatever he’s fucked up—immigration, the Afghanistan exit (which was originally a Trump plan!), not convincing Manchin and Sinema to nuke the filibuster, not giving people another pandemic stimulus check, not getting rid of those tax breaks for the wealthy, waiting for months to staff important cabinet decisions—he’s nowhere near as bad a president as Old 45. He’s not a great president, but nobody ever believed he would be. (I should know, since I voted for that centrist dingleberry.)
I’ll never find someone who agrees with everything I believe.
Nobody will; that’s a goddamned fact of life. But the best barometer I know of for voting goes like this: Think of the most vulnerable person you know, then vote in their best interests.
I voted for Biden because he wasn’t going to lead a party of anti-queer, anti-abortion, pro-corporation, plague-spreading Christian fascist dickheads into power. Trump would’ve done all that and more—and given how the GOP has become further untethered from reality since his loss, that alone should stand as proof of what a second term would’ve done (and could still do) to this country.
My god, do you even read some of the shit being said by Trump’s sycophantic followers in Congress?
Our culture today is trying to completely de-masculate all of the young men in our culture…. They're trying to de-masculate the young men in our country because they don't want people who are going to stand up…. All you moms here—the ones who I said are the most vicious in our movement—if you are raising a young man, please raise them to be a monster. [Rep. Madison Cawthorn, R-NC]
My colleagues on the other side claim they want to protect the family but instead they've chosen to attack the very bedrock of our country, the moral principles and the traditional family that hold our families and communities together. In fact, nearly everything that plagues our society can be attributed to a failure to follow God's laws for morality and his rules and definition of marriage and family. [Rep. Bob Good, R-Virginia]
You can’t continue to stand where God puts you without the God that puts you there. And so, we’re going to continue to mention him. As for this not being a Christian nation, yes, it is! If you don’t like it, I’ll buy your plane, train, or automobile ticket right up out of here. As long as there is a remnant of his people in this place that continue to pray to him and for his wisdom, this will always be a Christian nation. It was established by him. When the founders said those words, when they wrote them down and declared them to the world and told them to a king that, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed”—by who? Their creator. Not the Congress, not the Senate, not the king, but by their creator—“with certain inalienable rights.” God Almighty heard that and said, “There’s a nation I can get behind.” So, this is still a Christian nation, and we still give him thanks because he is still worthy and always will be. [North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson]
This will be the most significant, game-changing case probably in my lifetime that affects… overturning Roe v. Wade and sets us on a new course…. I just think God has given us this opportunity to be here… the prayers, the uplifting, it’s just been incredible for myself, for the team. We know that we’ve been lifted up. We know that people have been there for us, helping us every step of the way… [Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Finch]
And that’s just a handful of examples from the past 30 days. That isn’t even a comprehensive listing of all the batshittery Republicans have been spewing in the past month alone, and Trump has enabled six years of this outlandish bullshit because he trampled all over every political norm in this country just so he could have the power to make everyone pay attention to him that he always wanted.
Donald Trump and the GOP are so closely intertwined these days that they are one and the same—the GOP even reused the 2016 platform for 2020 because why bother updating it when Trump didn’t need to update any of his own bullshit. When you support Trump, you support the assholes who keep kissing his ass to stay in power(/not get shot by his supporters)—assholes like Madison Cawthorn, Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ron DeSantis, Ted Cruz, and Mitch McConnell.
Are those the people you want running this country? Are their policies—instilling Christian theocracy into law, the elimination of abortion, harsher (and possibly more violent) treatment of immigrants, more tax cuts for the wealthy/a widening of the already vast economic divide, ignoring the climate change crisis to the point where there are no more “moderate” solutions, putting anti-queer laws back on the books/undoing Obergefell v. Hodges, literally banning words like “equity” and “intersectionality” from being used by teachers—the ones you want to support? Because that’s what you’re getting when you support Donald Trump. You’re implicitly supporting the Republican platform when you explicitly support the Trump platform, because they’re one and the same.
If you still think he and the GOP would be better rulers—sorry, leaders for this country, by all means: Say so. But have the courage to own it instead of trying to say “bUt I dOn’T sUpPoRt AlL tHaT sTuFf!” or some other deflective bullshit. All of the shit I’ve talked about is what Trump was okay with the GOP doing under his leadership. You have to own all that shit when you say you support him.
At least I don’t have to pull myself out of that moral quagmire; I voted for the spineless pissant centrists that don’t actively invite theocratic fascism to root itself into every level of government.
That’s why we have recounts and audits and other measures designed to double- and even triple-check the results so that the correct winner is determined. Even if I don’t approve of what the Supreme Court did with the 2000 election, it is also one of those measures—the final measure, if you will.
Every one of the four “battleground” states that Trump contested in his (characteristically childish) post-election hissy fit recounted and, in several cases, audited the election results well before January 6th. None of them found any significant irregularities, such that those irregularities would have been enough to change the results of the election.
My concern is for both parties. A flaw in one district can flip a state’s elector position. A fraud in one district can change the elector position.
You know what else can flip a state? Measures meant to curb voting rights for the marginalized and the “enemy” of a specific political party (hint: it’s the GOP). Gerrymandering, restrictive voter ID laws, voter roll purges, shit like Brian Kemp overseeing his own election in 2018—all of that is what Republicans have done to improve their chances of holding onto power. Not one of them—not a single goddamn one—was willing to even allow debate for either the broader voting rights bill put forth by the Democrats in general or the more narrowly constructed bill crafted by Joe “I tried to get ten Republicans to sign onto this bill and all I got was zero” Manchin.
You want to prevent democracy from being torn down? Convince Republicans to protect the franchise for people who vote against Republicans and stop gerrymandering states in a way that favors Republicans while marginalizing their “enemies”. The GOP is the party most guilty of this shit on a national basis; start with them instead of whimpering about “both parties” as Republican politicians aren’t closely aligned with people who would sooner stomp on your neck and order you to worship the Christian God than let you worship (or not worship) however you please.
The modern GOP is more closely aligned with white supremacists, violent militias, and fascist ideology than the Democrats are. Donald Trump merely sped up the process of bringing those connections into the light of day. You want to make a change? Stop kissing his spray-tanned ass and start looking at just how much the GOP has intertwined itself with the power-hungry Religious Right. One place you can start is with the current conflation of “evangelical” with “Republican”, which is credited to(/blamed on) Old 45 himself.
Or do you still want to say that Donald Trump was a great president who could’ve united the country under his powerful orange fist if not for the evil fucking Democrats and their dreams of luxury gay space communism derailing the Trump agenda of halting all immigration, fucking over trans people, hurting people who didn’t vote for him, and giving rich people even more ways to keep their money out of society?
I will never know with absolute certainty that any election result is 100% accurate unless I count every vote myself.
No one can know anything with absolute certainty; nobody is God Herself. But we can be as certain as possible about what we know to be true, and I know that there was no mass-scale voter fraud in the presidential elections of 2016 and 2020.
Let me give you an analogy—one that, like all great American analogies, is rooted in sports. There’s a concept in (American) football fandom called “Scorigami”, which refers to a football game that ends with a score that has never happened in any other prior game. Of all the possible unique scores that could conceivably happen in the NFL, only one is practically impossible to achieve: 6-1. The circumstances of that score happening are so incredibly unlikely by any stretch of the imagination that, in terms of statistical probability, it will never be achieved in any game played between now and whenever the NFL ceases to operate unless that game is 100% rigged. We can safely say that the NFL will never see a 6-1 game, even if we can’t know that with the absolute certainty of God Herself.
The same can be said for a rigged presidential election. The statistical probability of individual voter fraud in any such election is small enough to be negligible at best. Ergo, the probability of a nationally coördinated effort to commit widescale voter fraud in multiple states for the sake of rigging the election in favor of a given candidate is so small—the circumstances that I’ve mentioned are necessary for such rigging being as improbable as those needed for a 6-1 game of football—that such rigging is practically impossible to pull off. I can safely say that no free and fair American presidential election will ever be rigged in favor of a given candidate, even if I can’t know that with the absolute certainty of God Herself.
Then you’re lacking in principles, morals, and goddamned sense.
Donald Trump won the Electoral College (without winning the popular vote) in the 2016 presidential election, and no one can prove—or has proven—that said election was rigged for Trump in any way. See? Easy as fucking hell to say without any qualifications, and I hate Donald Trump with every last microscopic fiber of my soul, so telling the truth about his victory isn’t exactly something I enjoy doing.
If I can do it for Trump, what the fuck is stopping you from saying it for Biden, other than your obnoxious simping for a spray-tanned autocrat who obviously hurt some people you wanted him to hurt?
You can’t prove that mass-scale voter fraud happened in even one state, never mind all four states that were the subject of months of audits, recounts, and investigations by election officials and Trump’s dipshit legal team. You can’t expect me to believe there is even a sliver of a chance that the most closely watched presidential election in our lifetimes was marred by mass-scale voter fraud.
All I’m hearing you say is “I thiiiiiiiiiiiiiink Biden won, but there’s a small chance Trump actually won”. There is no such chance. Your refusal to admit as much is proof that you’re still hoping to have your favorite orange autocrat back in the White House to “own the libs” or shove immigrants back into concentration camps or hurt whoever you think he needs to hurt in whatever way he needs to hurt them.
Joe Biden won a free and fair election that was not, and will never be proven to have been, “rigged” in any way whatsoever. Say it without any other qualification and mean it. If you can’t do even that, just go ahead and tell me who you want Trump to hurt the most—it’ll be a far better (and far more honest) use of your time than going “but 99.99999% isn’t 100%”.
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You wanted things to get worse than they did in his first term? Because that’s all that was going to happen if he got a second term: All his worst impulses would’ve been given a green light. Everything, and I do mean everything, he did to help turn this country closer to a Christian theocracy led by the worst kinds of people would have only been compounded by another four-year mandate, and you seriously believed American fascism would’ve been better than Biden?!
This is why I keep wondering who you want(ed) Old 45 to hurt: It’s clear that you really want him to hurt someone, whether it’s Clinton or Biden or “the libs” or trans people or immigrants or who-th’fuck-ever you think “deserves” to be hurt. No one votes for a man so driven by abject cruelty towards other people that he openly admits to molesting women unless they want him to deploy that cruelty onto the “right” targets.
Oh, and Trump was the perfect picture of mental capacity? He looked directly at a solar eclipse without any eye protection, for God’s sake. Besides, Trump is only three years younger than Biden—or did you conveniently forget that fact?
…oh my god, are you a fucking comic book villain or some shit, you sound like a poorly-written comic book villain right now, oh my fucking god that is pathetic, even Marvel movies have better written villains than you, jesus tapdancing christ aaaaaaaaaahahahahahaha—
[ahem]
It’s kind of sad that you let Hillary Clinton live rent-free in your head even after she’s lost most of her political relevance—and even sadder that you treat her as The Absolute Worst Person to Ever Exist in the History of Ever when she isn’t even close to having committed the same kind (or same amount) of atrocities that, say, Kim Jong-Un has committed as leader of North Korea. (And by the by, who kissed Kim Jong-Un’s ass so much that it gave him credibility as a world leader? Oh, right: That was Donald fucking Trump.)
Don’t get me wrong when I say that part of the quagmire we’re seeing from Congress right now is Biden’s fault. I’m not trying to minimize his role in this. That said: Republican obstructionism via the filibuster and the combined efforts of Manchin and Sinema to stall anything even remotely progressive(/threatening to wealthy people’s bottom lines) are far bigger roadblocks than Biden’s personal incompetence.
Also: “Trump’s mess”? Good for you, recognizing that Trump fucked over America! And if you hadn’t wanted him to make things even worse (as evidenced by your vote for him in 2020), maybe that admission would mean something.
Now you’re starting to sound like a conspiracy nut. Inside Job is not a documentary series, dude.
Careful what you wish for, you sweet summer fetus. You may end up inviting a leopard in to eat your face.
And the January 6th insurrection, which had a very real chance of subverting American democracy in the name of Orange Fascism—that was order?!
For someone who says they’re an atheist, you’re sounding a hell of a lot like a Bible thumper who preaches against Satan on a busy street corner.
When I rip on Trump, I might exaggerate his personal characteristics (though not by much…) and use colorful language, but I don’t go off like he’s The Ultimate Evil Beyond Even Cthulhu. He’s a human being, not a supernatural evil borne from the pits of hell—which is what you apparently believe Hillary Clinton is. And when I tear into Trump’s failings, it’s not to point out that he is that supernatural evil—it’s to point out how his flaws drove his behavior in office and helped him fracture a country that was already breaking apart thanks to conservative ideologies rooting themselves more and more in unwarranted grievance, unproven lies, and unthinkable cruelty.
Your Grand High Savior Against the Ultimate Evil is a bumbling narcissist who built an image of success even as his business ventures failed one by one around him (and hurt innocent people in the process), an elderly game show host who ran the government like it was his game show (even when it meant staffing the government with incompetent nitwits), and an objectively cruel human being whose predilictions towards women are so creepy and repulsive that he once claimed he could “grab [women] by the pussy” without consequence because he was famous and once said he would date Ivanka if she weren’t his daughter. Even if I buy that Hillary Clinton is evil to her core, she still wouldn’t be anywhere near as evil as Donald Trump.
I mean, Hillary at least respected American democracy.
On the post: Chicago Court Gets Its Prior Restraint On, Tells Police Union Head To STFU About City's Vaccine Mandate
My god, you actually can point out the shortcomings of your Orange Demigod and his roving band of idiot assholes. Good for you!
…except for this:
Yeah, none of that shit between (and including) those sentences was ever going to happen. And even if everything before the last sentence had happened, I guarantee—on the graves of my grandmothers, god rest both their souls—Trump still would’ve found a way to say the election was stolen from him because he wanted to have that “out” in case he lost. He wanted to have that grievance to hold onto so he could keep grifting from gullible morons and continue to build political power within the Republican party (which he has now all but taken over).
You would probably have been a better president than Donald Trump. But you got him instead. You have to own your vote for incompetence, partisan division, anti-queerness, anti-immigration, anti-abortion, and pro–Christian fascism. You have to own the fact that you elected a narcissistic sociopathic game show host without a second of public service experience into the highest office in the land. You have to own every decision he made that hurt people—maybe even people you care about—because you helped put him in the position of power that let him hurt people indiscriminately.
I own my vote for Biden—and the good, the bad, and the ugly that goes with it. I’m willing to take my responsibility for helping to put him in power when he and his administration fuck up. For what reason are you so hesitant to admit that you voted not for the Donald Trump you want me to believe he is, but for who Donald Trump really is: a hateful, spiteful, petty, violent, attention-seeking man-child who will literally hurt himself if it means someone else gets hurt worse?
On the post: Chicago Court Gets Its Prior Restraint On, Tells Police Union Head To STFU About City's Vaccine Mandate
Please note that his statement about “very fine people” referred to people on “both sides” of the Charlottesville debacle. One side was made up largely of white supremacists and racist Confederacy-defending shitheads; the other was made up of people protesting those assholes.
Tell me: Do you think white supremacists and pro-Confederacy shitheads are “fine people”? Because Trump thought so.
Any laws that Congressional Democrats may have wanted to pass to shore up election security before the 2020 election either were blocked or would’ve been blocked by the same people who are currently using the filibuster to refuse even debating such laws on the Senate floor.
Congress didn’t need to investigate the election results because the states did that—some states even did it multiple times over. (And not all of the election officials in those states were Democrats, by the by.) The only people willing to say “there are serious problems with the election results” were the same people who prevented the creation of a truly bipartisan commission into investigating the January 6th insurrection.
You think it’s Democrats who don’t care about free, fair, and secure elections? It’s Republicans who don’t care—because they’re the ones trying to deny voting rights based on whether people have the “right kind” of ID, disenfranchise voters through nationwide partisan gerrymandering that gives them fewer overall votes but more state legislatures, and force people to choose between their vote and their lives by cancelling mail-in voting (which, like in-person voting, saw no mass-scale voter fraud).
And who do you think wants Republicans to enact all this shit? It sure as shit ain’t Democrats, and it sure as shit ain’t Biden—it’s Donald “I want my Oval Office back” Trump.
Just to be clear: You’re fine with people protesting American democracy itself?
Again: Republicans used the filibuster to stifle debate on a voting rights bill last week. The filibuster isn’t a tool to “mandate discussion” any more—it’s a partisan “fuck you”, and it needs to be nuked if we’re ever going to see the Senate work again.
Are you afraid of Trumpist Republicans voting to curtail your civil rights because you’re queer? You should be—your vote for Trump won’t save you from the face-eating leopards.
On the post: Chicago Court Gets Its Prior Restraint On, Tells Police Union Head To STFU About City's Vaccine Mandate
Would you prefer more concentration camps, or would you prefer he send ICE agents to shoot border jumpers?
How does the former CBP head know for sure what the Biden administration is doing when he doesn’t work in it? How does he know how many immigrants are carrying COVID? How am I supposed to trust someone who worked under Trump—and thus has every reason to lie about the Biden administration’s approach on immigration?
Okay. I say we start with Donald Trump, since he likes to act like he’s richer than God.
You seem upset that Biden called out white supremacy. Nothing about those two sentences even remotely sounds like he’s “anti-white”. If anything, your conflation of “anti-whiteness” with “white supremacy” paints a pretty good picture of your thinking on the matter…and it’s not a pretty one, lemme tell ya.
Okay, and…you’re upset that Trump was called out for being a racist asshole? That’s not being “anti-white”—that’s telling the truth.
Yes, because you’ve been continuously defending the crowd of Trumpists at the January 6th Rally & Riot Extravaganza of being “peaceful”. They weren’t there to be peaceful—they were there to express anger and hatred because their guy didn’t win an election. All of the people who attended the rally/stormed the Capitol may not have gone with criminal (or violent) intent, but they went with unjustified anger in their hearts all the same.
No they weren’t. They were there to demand that Mike Pence put Trump back in office, full fucking stop. It wasn’t a “review the election” event, it wasn’t an “audit the results” event—it was a “Stop the Steal” event. I already posted that long-as-fuck copypasta full of quotes from the speeches of Trump and his cohorts that day; do you really need a refresher on what the fuck they were all trying to say, or are you going to call me a fucking lunatic because I can read context and subtext better than you?
Yet you refuse to condemn the protest against a free and fair election that was based on what even you admit were lies from the rightful loser of the 2020 presidential election and his sycophant followers. That is your primary problem here: You’re defending an attack on American democracy itself, and you’re more than happy to do it because Trump is “your guy”.
The filibuster is a relic that needs to be nuked regardless of who has the majority in the Senate. I will stand by that statement and you can’t make me say otherwise, not even with the threat of voting into office people who will curtail queer civil rights. (Y’know, like Trump and his cronies.)
Like what, piss off an untold amount of voters? I’m an atheist and even I know that no politician who wants to stay in office is ever going to seriously suggest taxing churches—and that goes triple for Republicans, who only ever see the wall of separation between church and state crumbling over in favor of the church.
And yet you refuse to denounce the man who emboldens their rhetoric, encourages their nasty behavior, welcomes their violent tendencies with open arms.
If you want to denounce the body, you have to denounce the head as well, because it’s still part of the body.
Funny, who is it that’s threatening school board members and pushing horse dewormer as a COVID treatment and trying to ban words like “equity” from being said by teachers and continuing to push Trump’s Big Lie despite all the evidence saying it’s a Big Lie and refusing to even debate voting rights laws on the Senate floor? Because that sure as shit ain’t Democrats and “leftists” doing that.
Biden inherited a wrecked America from a man who did more to divide this country than nearly any other president in history. Don’t blame him for not being able to snap his fingers and fix the problems Trump and his Republican asskissers caused.
I don’t believe you, libertarian.
You say that, and yet…
…I don’t think you even meant it.
Name ten things Trump could’ve done better about his handling of the pandemic—and if you bring up Democrats or “leftists” even once, your list is invalid due to deflecting blame for his fuck-ups onto other people.
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Go turn in your homework, Koby.
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And if that actually happened, you might have a point. But it didn’t. So you don’t.
And more to the point: What speech do you believe is being censored from social media? Be specific.
On the post: Court: Congressional Reps Making Noise About Social Media Moderation Doesn't Make Platforms Extensions Of The Government
YOUR WISH IS GRANTED.
Social media services are not public fora. A Supreme Court ruling from 2019, for which Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the majority opinion, doesn’t directly address social media but still provides the logic necessary to counter any “yes they are public fora” argument:
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And Nunes files to dismiss the lawsuit in 3…2…
On the post: Chicago Court Gets Its Prior Restraint On, Tells Police Union Head To STFU About City's Vaccine Mandate
I’m well aware of that. But I can’t think of any reasonable measures for “dealing with handguns” that won’t sound like “take all the guns”—not any measures that can be applied only to handguns in particular, anyway. (Hence my call for permits for all kinds of guns and proof of responsible gun ownership.)
On the post: Chicago Court Gets Its Prior Restraint On, Tells Police Union Head To STFU About City's Vaccine Mandate
Remember, Lostcause has a property/property rights fetish, so of course he’s fine with that.
To wit: the United States Postal Service.
On the post: Chicago Court Gets Its Prior Restraint On, Tells Police Union Head To STFU About City's Vaccine Mandate
Yeah, Biden personally opened the floodgates~. That’s totally what happened~.
At worst, his administration was slow to respond to a sudden surge in border crossings. That’s not the same thing as “letting people in”.
Who believes this? Who told you this? What are their sources? How do those sources know whether their assertions are true? For fuck’s sake, Lozenge, be critical of the media you read instead of accepting shit you want to be true as true just because it sounds “right”.
Show me where Joe Biden is personally and singularly responsible for the laws that exempt churches from paying taxes. Go ahead. I’ll wait.
What federal laws were “blue states” not following when Donald Trump threatened to withhold federal monies from them? Be specific.
Oh, by all means, list them. And be specific with quotes and their context—you have to prove he meant “anti-white” with what he said. Again: I’ll wait.
Of course you do. You think the crowd there on January 6th was all smiles and sunshine and puppy dog farts until, like, five “lone wolves” broke into the Capitol and forced everyone else to march into the building and storm the halls of Congress and shit.
Jesus Christ, Lostcause, do you even remember why they were there in the first place? Because it wasn’t to congratulate Donald Trump on his four years as president, it wasn’t to celebrate Joe Biden winning the election fair and square, and it wasn’t to throw a party for American democracy working as intended. The Trumpist crowd gathered at the January 6th insurrection was there to protest the results of a free and fair election because they didn’t like the free and fair results—and their Trumpian leaders, including Dear Leader himself, kept adding fuel to that fire by lying about how the election was “stolen” and “rigged” (something even you say is an outright lie!) and telling the crowd they had to “show strength” and fight back against the system (which included Mike Pence).
Keep lying to yourself about January 6th. I’ll tell you the truth about it, every time, until you get the fucking point: The Trumpists weren’t in D.C. on January 6th to sing “Kumbaya”.
The specific parameters (and execution) of the plan belong to Biden and his administration, yes—but that plan was initially spearheaded by the Trump administration, starting with the release of 5,000 Taliban soldiers as part of a deal struck between the Taliban and the Trump administration. (And if you needed reminding, Trump secretly invited Taliban leaders to Camp David on the eve of the anniversary of the September 11 attacks, presumably for negotiations for a peace deal. Do you think Biden would’ve done that?)
From what—debating voting rights bills on the Senate floor? The filibuster is an antiquated relic that should be nuked for the sake of making the legislature work again.
Y’know, I have my own issues with the Catholic Church, but let’s not act like Biden is singularly and wholly responsible for its evils—or for the laws that make it exempt from paying taxes. And if you’re gonna piss all over Biden for that, why aren’t you pissing all over Trump for ignoring the Church, too? (Or does Trump get a pass because he was hurting immigrants and trans people?)
No, because I literally said that was a Biden failing.
You must care about conservative Christians a lot, then.
Oh, but you can: You can denounce Trump, his political ideology, and his sycophantic asshole followers as being bad for America. Look at what they’ve done to this country. Look how they’ve turned basic science into something to be questioned. Is this the America you want to see in four years? In eight? Do you really want a Trumpist America—a country ruled by people who genuinely believe wearing a facemask is akin to being killed in the Holocaust and any facts that don’t fit their worldview are “alternative facts” that can safely be ignored?
And thanks to your selfishness in not wanting to vote for a Clinton, we got Trump giving us a preview of American fascism. Congratulations, you played yourself.
I can say the same for Donald Trump. Hell, he effectively confirmed that with his “shoot someone on 5th Avenue” comment. You sure do seem okay with a violent man leading the country…so long as he’s hurting the people you think need to be hurt, anyway.
No, you don’t. You believe in capitalism with a small bone tossed to the poor. After all, you keep saying you’re a libertarian, and those schmucks sure as shit don’t believe in socialism.
Neither do I. But as a quick aside: Do you support a leader killing hundreds of thousands of his country’s own citizens through (possibly malicious) negligence and willful ignorance towards a viral pandemic?
…you know what, never mind—you’ve already answered that.
On the post: Chicago Court Gets Its Prior Restraint On, Tells Police Union Head To STFU About City's Vaccine Mandate
Voters like you—y’know, Republicans. Conservatives. Trumpists.
On the post: Chicago Court Gets Its Prior Restraint On, Tells Police Union Head To STFU About City's Vaccine Mandate
I gotta stop posting in the early morning.
On the post: Chicago Court Gets Its Prior Restraint On, Tells Police Union Head To STFU About City's Vaccine Mandate
And you’ll also keep pointing out the “BLM riots” as if the overwhelming majority of Black Lives Matter protests weren’t peaceful and the few riots that did come from those protests weren’t aimed at stopping American democracy from happening.
We’ve seen your post history, Lodos. Ain’t no use in trying to hide your attempts to equivocate protests/riots against racial injustice with a riot against American democracy itself. We know you’ve done it, we know you’ll keep doing it, and I know you’ll keep trying to deflect from your having done it and your wanting to keep doing it.
Just fucking own your bullshit for once, you coward.
On the post: Chicago Court Gets Its Prior Restraint On, Tells Police Union Head To STFU About City's Vaccine Mandate
And yet, look at which party refuses to even debate stronger voting rights in Congress. (Hint: It ain’t the Dems.)
…motherfucker, please, miss me with this shit.
If the government wanted your guns, it would take them. You might have guns, but they have MRAPs and tanks and drones and all manner of bombs and guns and other shit they can use to literally wipe you off the map.
I’d argue that a majority of gun control advocates don’t want to get rid of all guns (though there are obviously some that do). They want to get rid of shit like AK-47s and other such weapons of mass murder—or at least keep those kinds of guns in the hands of the American military. That’s a move with which I agree, too. As for me? My ideas on the matter skew like this: All guns should require some form of permit to own; any gun other than a handgun should require a specialized permit with stricter restrictions on who can own them; all gun sales should have background checks attached (and that includes gun show sales); no one convicted of a violent crime should ever be able to legally purchase any gun; and anyone who owns any kind of gun(s) should have to pass an annual firearms safety course and prove they are storing their gun(s) safely if they want to keep their gun(s).
I’m all for people owning a gun for self-defense. But there needs to be some fucking limits on it—or would you prefer to keep hearing about mass murders every other week?
Has Biden allowed a pandemic to flourish by pushing misinformation as fact, dismissing scientists and experts, ignoring the existence of the virus within the United States for at least a month, and urging people to try unproven/unsafe “treatments” for a viral disease? Has Biden given tax breaks to the wealthy that a majority in Congress is reluctant to roll back, thus furthering the increasingly unstable economic divide between the rich and the poor? Has Biden threatened to withhold disaster funds from “red states”, kicked trans people out of the military, referred to racists as “very fine people”, dismissed legitimate criticism of his time in office as “fake news”, pissed all over the international allies of America, all but played grab-ass with fascists and dictators, tried to ban people from entering the U.S. based on what religion they practiced, or whipped an already-angry crowd into enough of a frothing rage that they stormed a citadel of American democracy to actually interrupt American democracy?
No?
Then for whatever he’s fucked up—immigration, the Afghanistan exit (which was originally a Trump plan!), not convincing Manchin and Sinema to nuke the filibuster, not giving people another pandemic stimulus check, not getting rid of those tax breaks for the wealthy, waiting for months to staff important cabinet decisions—he’s nowhere near as bad a president as Old 45. He’s not a great president, but nobody ever believed he would be. (I should know, since I voted for that centrist dingleberry.)
No, he didn’t—or, at least, not any you weren’t willing to ignore. I mean, his party is decidedly anti-queer in all ways, even if Trump himself is at least ambivalent about cisgender queer people. Do you really believe trying to be one of “the good queers” by voting for Trump will save you from the GOP?
Nobody will; that’s a goddamned fact of life. But the best barometer I know of for voting goes like this: Think of the most vulnerable person you know, then vote in their best interests.
I voted for Biden because he wasn’t going to lead a party of anti-queer, anti-abortion, pro-corporation, plague-spreading Christian fascist dickheads into power. Trump would’ve done all that and more—and given how the GOP has become further untethered from reality since his loss, that alone should stand as proof of what a second term would’ve done (and could still do) to this country.
My god, do you even read some of the shit being said by Trump’s sycophantic followers in Congress?
And that’s just a handful of examples from the past 30 days. That isn’t even a comprehensive listing of all the batshittery Republicans have been spewing in the past month alone, and Trump has enabled six years of this outlandish bullshit because he trampled all over every political norm in this country just so he could have the power to make everyone pay attention to him that he always wanted.
Donald Trump and the GOP are so closely intertwined these days that they are one and the same—the GOP even reused the 2016 platform for 2020 because why bother updating it when Trump didn’t need to update any of his own bullshit. When you support Trump, you support the assholes who keep kissing his ass to stay in power(/not get shot by his supporters)—assholes like Madison Cawthorn, Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ron DeSantis, Ted Cruz, and Mitch McConnell.
Are those the people you want running this country? Are their policies—instilling Christian theocracy into law, the elimination of abortion, harsher (and possibly more violent) treatment of immigrants, more tax cuts for the wealthy/a widening of the already vast economic divide, ignoring the climate change crisis to the point where there are no more “moderate” solutions, putting anti-queer laws back on the books/undoing Obergefell v. Hodges, literally banning words like “equity” and “intersectionality” from being used by teachers—the ones you want to support? Because that’s what you’re getting when you support Donald Trump. You’re implicitly supporting the Republican platform when you explicitly support the Trump platform, because they’re one and the same.
If you still think he and the GOP would be better rulers—sorry, leaders for this country, by all means: Say so. But have the courage to own it instead of trying to say “bUt I dOn’T sUpPoRt AlL tHaT sTuFf!” or some other deflective bullshit. All of the shit I’ve talked about is what Trump was okay with the GOP doing under his leadership. You have to own all that shit when you say you support him.
At least I don’t have to pull myself out of that moral quagmire; I voted for the spineless pissant centrists that don’t actively invite theocratic fascism to root itself into every level of government.
On the post: Chicago Court Gets Its Prior Restraint On, Tells Police Union Head To STFU About City's Vaccine Mandate
That’s why we have recounts and audits and other measures designed to double- and even triple-check the results so that the correct winner is determined. Even if I don’t approve of what the Supreme Court did with the 2000 election, it is also one of those measures—the final measure, if you will.
Every one of the four “battleground” states that Trump contested in his (characteristically childish) post-election hissy fit recounted and, in several cases, audited the election results well before January 6th. None of them found any significant irregularities, such that those irregularities would have been enough to change the results of the election.
You know what else can flip a state? Measures meant to curb voting rights for the marginalized and the “enemy” of a specific political party (hint: it’s the GOP). Gerrymandering, restrictive voter ID laws, voter roll purges, shit like Brian Kemp overseeing his own election in 2018—all of that is what Republicans have done to improve their chances of holding onto power. Not one of them—not a single goddamn one—was willing to even allow debate for either the broader voting rights bill put forth by the Democrats in general or the more narrowly constructed bill crafted by Joe “I tried to get ten Republicans to sign onto this bill and all I got was zero” Manchin.
You want to prevent democracy from being torn down? Convince Republicans to protect the franchise for people who vote against Republicans and stop gerrymandering states in a way that favors Republicans while marginalizing their “enemies”. The GOP is the party most guilty of this shit on a national basis; start with them instead of whimpering about “both parties” as Republican politicians aren’t closely aligned with people who would sooner stomp on your neck and order you to worship the Christian God than let you worship (or not worship) however you please.
The modern GOP is more closely aligned with white supremacists, violent militias, and fascist ideology than the Democrats are. Donald Trump merely sped up the process of bringing those connections into the light of day. You want to make a change? Stop kissing his spray-tanned ass and start looking at just how much the GOP has intertwined itself with the power-hungry Religious Right. One place you can start is with the current conflation of “evangelical” with “Republican”, which is credited to(/blamed on) Old 45 himself.
Or do you still want to say that Donald Trump was a great president who could’ve united the country under his powerful orange fist if not for the evil fucking Democrats and their dreams of luxury gay space communism derailing the Trump agenda of halting all immigration, fucking over trans people, hurting people who didn’t vote for him, and giving rich people even more ways to keep their money out of society?
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No one can know anything with absolute certainty; nobody is God Herself. But we can be as certain as possible about what we know to be true, and I know that there was no mass-scale voter fraud in the presidential elections of 2016 and 2020.
Let me give you an analogy—one that, like all great American analogies, is rooted in sports. There’s a concept in (American) football fandom called “Scorigami”, which refers to a football game that ends with a score that has never happened in any other prior game. Of all the possible unique scores that could conceivably happen in the NFL, only one is practically impossible to achieve: 6-1. The circumstances of that score happening are so incredibly unlikely by any stretch of the imagination that, in terms of statistical probability, it will never be achieved in any game played between now and whenever the NFL ceases to operate unless that game is 100% rigged. We can safely say that the NFL will never see a 6-1 game, even if we can’t know that with the absolute certainty of God Herself.
The same can be said for a rigged presidential election. The statistical probability of individual voter fraud in any such election is small enough to be negligible at best. Ergo, the probability of a nationally coördinated effort to commit widescale voter fraud in multiple states for the sake of rigging the election in favor of a given candidate is so small—the circumstances that I’ve mentioned are necessary for such rigging being as improbable as those needed for a 6-1 game of football—that such rigging is practically impossible to pull off. I can safely say that no free and fair American presidential election will ever be rigged in favor of a given candidate, even if I can’t know that with the absolute certainty of God Herself.
Why can’t you say the same?
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Then you’re lacking in principles, morals, and goddamned sense.
Donald Trump won the Electoral College (without winning the popular vote) in the 2016 presidential election, and no one can prove—or has proven—that said election was rigged for Trump in any way. See? Easy as fucking hell to say without any qualifications, and I hate Donald Trump with every last microscopic fiber of my soul, so telling the truth about his victory isn’t exactly something I enjoy doing.
If I can do it for Trump, what the fuck is stopping you from saying it for Biden, other than your obnoxious simping for a spray-tanned autocrat who obviously hurt some people you wanted him to hurt?
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No you’re not.
Please seek help for your early onset dementia.
On the post: Chicago Court Gets Its Prior Restraint On, Tells Police Union Head To STFU About City's Vaccine Mandate
No.
You can’t prove that mass-scale voter fraud happened in even one state, never mind all four states that were the subject of months of audits, recounts, and investigations by election officials and Trump’s dipshit legal team. You can’t expect me to believe there is even a sliver of a chance that the most closely watched presidential election in our lifetimes was marred by mass-scale voter fraud.
All I’m hearing you say is “I thiiiiiiiiiiiiiink Biden won, but there’s a small chance Trump actually won”. There is no such chance. Your refusal to admit as much is proof that you’re still hoping to have your favorite orange autocrat back in the White House to “own the libs” or shove immigrants back into concentration camps or hurt whoever you think he needs to hurt in whatever way he needs to hurt them.
Joe Biden won a free and fair election that was not, and will never be proven to have been, “rigged” in any way whatsoever. Say it without any other qualification and mean it. If you can’t do even that, just go ahead and tell me who you want Trump to hurt the most—it’ll be a far better (and far more honest) use of your time than going “but 99.99999% isn’t 100%”.
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