01-06-2022, 05:19 PM
(01-06-2022, 03:02 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(01-06-2022, 12:44 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: There's the old joke "Anyone can grow up to be President"... and I have seen Obama as an example of someone becoming President despite having an African father... well, he's smart, hard-working, honest, erudite, cautious, and moral. The other side is Donald Trump, who had everything going right for him despite his unsuitability for high office. He's immature, cruel, vindictive, selfish, corrupt, and intellectually lazy; he has connections to organized crime.
Yep. Obama proved that a decent looking, decent sounding black community organizer with little to no experience in governing can be elected President of Acirema too. He turned out to be a big dud for the most part and largely incapable of getting anything meaningful accomplished and created the divisions by openly displaying his arrogance and by getting involved in petty shit that he should have been wise enough to stay out of and by saying stupid shit that insulted millions of Americans. But, he did enough to get a Noble Peace Prize and make himself mega rich today. What do you think about the idea of him and his racist wife eating cake as you're struggling to eat and keep a roof over your head? Like I said, privileged blue folk like yourself deserve no sympathy from Americans.
I'd say that putting an end to the most dangerous economic meltdown in nearly 80 years is quite an achievement. Sure, he followed the FDR script in backing the banks, but that was the right thing to do. The first year and one half of the autumn 1929 - autumn 1932 meltdown was much like the year and a half beginning in the autumn of 2007. The protracted meltdown of 1929-1932 had the effect of facilitating the rise of Satan Incarnate in Germany.
He should have gotten a Nobel Prize for economics. He had his plan in place in January 2009.
Oh, yes, whacking the most infamous and dangerous terrorist in history? That got him re-elected. Note well what I say about the President and his powers? The Constitution grants him few powers, including the signing and vetoing of bills. He has practically no other powers other than those that he can talk Congress into granting him. When the Senate Majority Leader says first that he wants to make Barack Obama a one-term President and upon that failure was delighted to give him nothing... well, that is how the system works when the Opposition Party has both Houses of Congress.
Without having become President he would have likely stayed in the Senate until finding himself the strongest possible answer to Donald Trump in 2012 or 2016. I can hardly imagine how big a landslide a savvy pol would have had against someone both immature and senile like Trump. But this is contrafactual history. That can go all sorts of ways. I am sure that you know about The Man in the High Castle that depicts an Axis victory because FDR is assassinated. I've got my idea of an Axis victory, and it involves Germany, Japan, and an independent India defeating a KKK-dominated America. Don't worry: those are a democratic Germany that under Konrad Adenauer expresses Christian Democratic values and has the advantage of treating the Jews well and turning Britain and France against a murderous, fascistic (KKK) America.
Obama is rich, but he is a competent writer with a good story. Writers as a group struggle to make a living, but many can't really write (think of many long-term minor-league baseball players who would hit .225 with slight power or have an ERA around 6 if they pitched in the majors) or lack a coherent story. J. K. Rowling has even better stories (Harry Potter), and she is even richer. The only near-great President to have completed two high-quality terms of office before age 55, not having died in office (Lincoln, FDR) or soon after (Washington) he has stories to tell. Nothing like the Queen of England. Angela Merkel's memoirs should be interesting, don't you think? I doubt that she will have much to say about Donald Trump that flatters him.
Quote:As far as Trump, he's no worse than the Democratic related (viable alternatives would be "rubbish" or "nonsense" -- as a writer without a good story I would be a better editor than creative writer) that Americans see and hear on a regular basis these days.
Sure. Mocking the handicapped. Attempting to form a secret police. Ridiculing a well-regarded Republican US Senator for having been a prisoner of North Vietnam. Arranging his events so that his properties could turn him a profit during those events. Showing no evidence of Christian values. Pushing quack medical treatments. Pandering to dictators who feel that they finally have an unqualified friend. Cutting a sleazy deal with the Taliban that goes bad. Telling Ghislaine Maxwell that he hopes her the best (she enabled her boyfriend to deal underage girls to high-profile perverts). Contrast Obama to this, and what do I see? A spit-and-polish leader who expects the best of people and gets good results. I see someone who has a "Do the crime and do the time" attitude toward outright criminals in contrast to the juvenile-delinquent attitude that "it's illegal only if you get caught".
I heard Mitt Romney excoriate Donald Trump in April 2016 for a sleazy personal life, callous remarks toward people in bad situations through no fault of their own, and his corrupt practices as a capitalist. That resonated with me. I had hoped that conservative Americans would come to their senses and find some better alternative to Donald Trump to succeed Barack Obama. Everything that Mitt Romney said about Trump has turned all too true. Romney would have been a far-better President, but I'm guessing that with his wife's medical problems (MS) he had other things to do than to run for President in 2016. We would be in a second term of Mitt Romney as President with the expectation that some Democrat would succeed him in a pattern that had held for 24 years and would have held for longer (to 1980) with Ronald Reagan, whom the elder Bush succeeded. America got tired of the Reagan-Bush agenda after twelve years, which is stronger than eight.
Quote:Like I said, you should start paying more attention to them since your life and well being are attached to them these days. I haven't met a Democratic supporter who hasn't made a point of separating themselves from the Democratic related (see my previous advice on editing. A hint: I would use the word rubbish or nonsense that you did not use previously) America see's (the apostrophe in an uncontracted verb? That is even more egregious than the infamous "grocers' apostrophe", in "Banana's 17 cents") on a regular basis these days. I get the impression that they understand the unenviable position that they're all in these days.
Sometimes I wonder how different my life would be without Asperger's, or at least knowing that I had it. I would have taken different educational and vocational routes. Without Asperger's I might now be a retired federal judge. Knowing that I have it and living accordingly I might have been more adept at getting and holding a job because I would know enough to limit my contacts with other people. Maybe I would be a good travel writer. A hint: I love museums but hate casinos. Maybe I would be a good math teacher who has written copy on math textbooks.
This is the first anniversary of the most infamous days in American history. We recently hand the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attack and the eightieth anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack. In those, the villains were not Americans, and it was easy for Americans to unite against the Bad Guys. This time the Bad Guys were our fellow Americans, people who sought to negate an election to get their political way at the potential cost of killing American democracy. There was no partisan bickering after FDR gave his "Day of Infamy" speech. America might not have been in a war mood on December 6, but it wanted to get it all over as efficiently and quickly as possible. Not many people said anything like "We had it coming" soon after September 11, 2001.
My first responses to 9/11 were profanities, some of them having the gerund of the F-word between "God" and "damn!" Then I wondered what could possibly cause people to so hate America that they could do something like this. Oh, 72 virgins? Yes, 72 hyena souls in Hell, "virgin" to the taste of human flesh getting to tear apart the damned souls of the hijackers and their co-conspirators.
I may not have liked hypocritical Vice-President Pence, but I could only excoriate the call "Hang Mike Pence" for not being a perfect toady for President Trump. This would have been as inexcusable from the Left. There was nothing left-wing about the rioters.
America is deeply divided a year later between people who wish that the Capitol Putsch had never happened and those who still think it a good idea and would rather that Donald Trump still be President despite losing the 2020 election. In view of what I know of the histories of other countries, nullification of a valid electoral result is catastrophe to that nation's political future. We have a former President who cultivated a totalitarian-style cult of personality to cover his ethical and administrative failures. We have a President whose most obvious virtue is that he is not Donald Quisling Trump.
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.