09-21-2020, 10:54 AM
(09-21-2020, 12:18 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(09-20-2020, 06:34 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:(09-20-2020, 05:02 PM)Isoko Wrote: Geez, now Trump has said he would like to sign an executive order banning Biden from running for president. Now that is not right. Look, I don't like Biden and think he is a very weak candidate but that just draws the line for me. It is a democratic election and stating you'd like the other guy banned from running is just not right.
Disqualifying the opponent after the votes are in or are about to come in? That would be new.*
Biden is the first senile (it's blatantly obvious) Presidential candidate running for office we've ever seen.
Are you sure about Donald Trump not being senile?
Quote:By all rights, he shouldn't be running for President of The United States.
He still won the nomination the honest way. He will, I presume, win the Presidency without any question of corruption of the process. Obviously with any President we take risks with mental deterioration from organic disease. The system worked well with Ronald Reagan, who really did go senile while President, because the President had good people around him who could take on Presidential roles while limiting the President, toward the end at least, to a largely ceremonial role of saying platitudes and signing documents that he might not have fully understood anymore, but under the guidance of people that Americans could largely trust. This said, the character of Ronald Reagan as a coachable and trusting person made such possible. Even if Donald Trump has much the same ideology he is a headstrong, abrasive person who will not let others do that even for the good of America. Donald Trump is nearly pure ego, and that makes him dangerous.
I see Joe Biden more similar to Ronald Reagan in humility, wise selection of assistants (probably better!), and able to avoid insulting people. Note well that Obama's people are well rested... and if necessary they can come back in powerful roles if needed, in part because they have no scandals linked to them.
If you are wondering about the obvious: I expect Joe Biden to be a one-term President because he will see know how the stresses operate on someone who crosses age 80 while President.
Quote:In a way, I'd like to see Trump do it too (wishful thinking). I mean, it's going to be ugly to watch a senile old man making a complete fool of himself on national TV.
Donald Trump has the worst traits combined in senility and failure to mature. I've seen this in heavy drinkers toward the ends of their lives. I understand that tertiary syphilis is much like that. Considering that Trump has had a reckless sex life in the past, and that cruelty and delusional thought both go with tertiary syphilis I would not be especially surprised. I am not saying that he has tertiary syphilis, but I can think of one leader who had it: Vladimir Lenin. He died of it rather young, in the prime for most political careers.
Quote:I hate to say this, the integrity of the Democratic party is at an all time low which is why Trump can do what he does without getting into trouble.
No, this time the Democratic Party seems to be taking on the virtues that Republicans once typically claimed lacking in Democrats. Joe Biden is a man of faith; he is conservative in his family life and overall behavior; he respects our current and former soldiers, airmen, sailors, and Marines. In most elections such is true of both the Democratic and Republican nominees. This time, Donald Trump has shown himself a godless rake who holds people not 'smart' enough to dodge the draft as he did as 'losers'. I cannot say this from personal experience, but military life implies dangers and hardships that settled adults would not take readily.
He may avoid personal trouble for some of his verbal outrages, for attempting to blackmail the President of Ukraine into announcing an investigation into the business dealings of Hunter Biden in an effort to discredit the President's most likely challenger, and of course his catastrophic handling of COVID-19, which has now killed about as many people as the population of Grand Rapids (just over 200,000). That is the hometown of the late President Gerald R. Ford, who would have never made those same mistakes.
Part of leadership is insistence upon rational solutions to big problems even if the exploitation of popular animus and superstition ls catastrophic in consequences even if politically convenient.
Quote:A hallowed out party or banana republic with no core values or principles has no integrity that's mainly held together by federal funding and social programs (bureaucratic systems) and judicial activism/social justice and fear/violence isn't going to last long or end well either.
Wrong. Democrats stand on the whole for science over superstition and wishful thinking, learning over ignorance, integrity over corruption, respect for people in difficult conditions over contempt for such people, ethnic equity -- and lesser concentration of wealth, opportunity, and power. I look at Donald Trump and I see his slogan "Make America Great Again" and wonder what is so great about, for example, being black in "Kukluxistan". The one thing that I see better in the past was more equality of opportunity to prosper without being part of the elite of tycoons, executives, big rural landowners, large-scale urban landlords, or organized crime. Bad innovations such as cronyism and corruption deserve quick deaths, thank you.
*You missed the point. Disqualifying votes because they come from an opponent would have much the same effect as unanimous or near-unanimous elections and plebiscites in the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, North Korea, and Iraq under Satan Hussein. The batty Nicolae Ceausescu won such an election in Romania just a few months before he was overthrown in a popular revolution.
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.