12-08-2020, 08:32 PM
(12-08-2020, 03:25 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:(12-08-2020, 01:10 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote: Do you want to bet how long he's able to remain in office? His election was a fraud and his condition will be obvious to most within a few years. The government has little integrity and by the time we're done with the Biden/Harris years the government integrity left which will open the door for a national split or a period of government reforms which will result in the destruction of the Democratic party. I doubt the Democratic party could win a two front war.
I would bet on it. But I don't trust you where money is concerned, or much else, so I guess I won't make an offer. And since you are insane (still falling for the fraud that the election was a fraud), making a bet with an insane person is also off the table. I think you need to see a shrink. And on top of that, you seem to be blind to the fact that Trump has no integrity. Gee whiz, Classic Xer; get help!
Electoral cheating is now difficult, easy to detect, and just simply too risky for any participant. The controls over voting machines and materials are modeled after accounting practices that insure quick audits of the vote. The classic frauds of stuffing the ballot boxes, "losing" unwelcome votes, or tampering with electoral machines run into protections. Most obviously the number of voters must be very close to the number of ballots or some action of voting. Poll watchers can watch elected officials insert absentee ballots. Both major parties have agreed on reforms that give more electoral security. Know well that in most communities, the people who have responsibility for the election often have some of the best jobs in the community for the level of training that they have. Why would anyone risk such a job to falsify an electoral result which has little impact upon one's life, let alone risk a prison term?
Yes, I know: you don't like the result of this Presidential election. As polarizing a character as Donald Trump is, people on the other side of the partisan divide didn't like the result of the 2016 Presidential election. We basically had a status quo election except for the Presidency. Can you accept why people on the other side of the political debate think Donald Trump the worst President in their memory? Can you understand the offense that he does to the sensibilities of people who didn't vote for him?
Biden beat Trump by a margin in the popular vote just larger than that by which Barack Obama bested Mitt Romney in 2012. OK. Romney didn't have a personality cult behind him... but I would say that he had arguably the strongest record of any challenger ever against an above-average President. He had a record as a sitting governor, and it wasn't awful. He may have had some flaws as a person, but the worst one was having the family dog (that apparently was lost) in a crate tied to the top of his car while he made a long-distance move. Poor doggie! But let us remember that few people alleged that the 2012 election was in any way shaky. Your side acts as if the result of the 2020 election will ruin America because Donald Trump is exactly the man to save this country. He had his chance, and he
(1) committed major indiscretions, one of them resulting in an impeachment for literal "high crimes and misdemeanors". Blackmailing a foreign leader for a favor in his re-election bid is a literal crime.
(2) bungled the response to the response to COVID-19
(3) sponsored racism and religious bigotry (contrast Ronald Reagan, who consistently condemned such stuff).
He also failed to win people over. The President has the spotlight on him and gets automatic attention from the news media. An effective President uses that to support his agenda and succeeds. A good President, let us say Obama, typically has approval numbers in the middle forties or higher before an electoral campaign and with a spirited and competent campaign parlays that into a victory. Trump approval numbers were rarely that high.
You demonstrate as do many others your opinion that Donald Trump was the greatest thing to happen to America, and that without him America is headed for ruin. Trump's style of leadership is unique, all right -- which is about like saying that (serial murderer and rapist) Ted Bundy had a unique way of getting along with women. Donald Trump has become a sick joke for more than half the electorate, and as time passes people are going to like him and his style less. If you think that Trump was cheated, then you may not be alone. I have gone through areas in which everyone seemed to have a Trump banner or yard sign. I can understand how people in some places can't imagine how anyone could possibly fail to recognize the wonder of Donald Trump. I saw that in rural Ohio, but I would guess that that is not how things looked in ... let us say, Brooklyn.
The numbers do not lie. Sure, Mark Twain may have said that there are "lies, damn lies, and statistics"... but in more than a century people have gotten wise to suspect statistics, and wise people know what to trust. America has been polarizing into exclusive camps that have little to do with each other, which is a dangerous trend. We are in a 4T, and we are far enough into it that we are closer to its end than its beginning. Political polarization, one of the most dangerous tendencies in this Crisis, will abate as people want shared improvements in their lives.
The generational theory suggests what sorts of leaders take over in the 1T: "mature Reactive" types who think that the government exists largely to facilitate the best in human and institutional behavior. Let's put it this way: the next effective Conservative President of the United States will be more like Barack Obama than like Donald Trump. All that kept Barack Obama from being the conservative ideal was that he was not a conservative. Unlike Trump, Barack Obama did not start a personality cult. Trump did, and as he vanishes from the limelight I expect most Americans to hold the Trump cult increasingly in contempt. Personality cults are dangerous!
https://www.legion.org/magazine/237862/cult-castro
Surprise, Classic X'er! You may think that I am the sort who wears T-shirts with the image of Che Guevara on them. Sorry to disabuse you.
Here's a less blatant practitioner of the cult of personality. He got away with it for some time, but eventually he ended up with a disaster. Trump is more like this, except for not having the military shtick:
As the Soviet Army approached Hungary, Horthy considered breaking with his partner in crime... only to be all but overthrown. Hungary became one of the bloodiest battlefields of the war, a Nazi puppet took over the government and started deporting Hungarian Jews to murder camps in Poland... and Soviet influence replaced Nazi influence because Hitler's puppet was incompetent except at mass murder. Nice music! Hungary has one of the most glorious traditions of folk music in the world. (Other countries with particularly great folk-music traditions: Gypsies, the Poles, the Czechs, the Indonesians, the Peruvians, African-Americans)
Satan Hussein. I would not be surprised if he did much to select this national anthem with the usual fascist junk: glorification of war, pretense to revolution, mythologization of a national history...
Did FDR or Churchill get such treatment? They seem not to have needed it.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
