09-23-2020, 01:59 AM
(09-22-2020, 11:38 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(09-22-2020, 10:27 AM)David Horn Wrote:He's a career politician. He's not campaigning like Trump because he's unable to campaign like Trump.(09-21-2020, 01:49 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:(09-21-2020, 12:24 PM)David Horn Wrote:(09-21-2020, 12:18 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote: Biden is the first senile (it's blatantly obvious) Presidential candidate running for office we've ever seen. By all right's, he shouldn't be running for President of The United States.
Actually, we've had several. Reagan's last run certainly qualifies, and Woodrow Wilson's may have as well. The most recent was in 2016, and Mr. Senility won. BTW, he's running again.
Yeah, BTW! Biden is speaking well now and not stumbling over his words. I don't know why, but his senility is no longer blatantly obvious. I'm not so sure about you Classic Xer, as your ideas and values are totally sclerotic.
I suspect he was less senile than a bit out of practice in the speech department. He has a serious stuttering problem, and that never totally disappears. Regular practice keeps it under control, so Biden should be as good as he'll get by debate time. Trump continues to just ramble and bluster, which is just what his followers (and no one else) prefer.
I heard a Labor Day speech by Biden. At first it was awful. Once he warmed up, he was more than adequate. Maybe he needs to rehearse a little before giving a speech, but that is fine. All good actors rehearse. Think of Ronald Reagan.
In contrast, Donald Trump sounds more like a shock jock, someone who is satisfied to offend a large part of a national audience. That takes little learning... maybe some market research onto how to excite some people. Someone like "Rash Libel" can offend or bore 70% of Americans and please 30%. Guess what that makes him? A star! Someone who can have a mansion in Beverly Hills and a getaway in Carmel. Someone able to own a fleet of expensive cars.
....
OK, Classic X'er -- Trump is unique in American politics for his style, at least within the twentieth and twenty-first century. I see a catastrophic failure as President in part because he did none of what one expects of someone who becomes President. He has never held elective office. He has never been a soldier of high rank. He has never been a cabinet official. He has been a businessman, but although we have had Presidents who had business interests before going into politics, those have little bearing on how someone did politics. Did it really matter that Jimmy Carter was a peanut grower? Did it matter that for a short time that Harry Truman was a haberdasher and had made investments in oil that he sold out too soon?
Trump is typical of tycoons and executives in operating on a "my highway or the highway" basis in relationships to others. Such people manage in part by making people dependent upon them for sustenance or for the ability to deal with an 'account'. Trump may not quite have the power of a Josef Stalin who can wield the power of life and death over a subordinate, but he can make things so that one loses a job and has to start well below where he was. Maybe an accountant that he fires for the fun of it doesn't have to live off his retirement funds before getting desperate and having to work as a store clerk, but anyone who works in the American capitalist system knows that everything that he has he can lose with an extended term of unemployment.
The government of the United States is one of the largest enterprises in existence. It is not a business. The chain of command of the President may in theory go down to the letter carrier, but for obvious reasons the President doesn't command that person down to the level of determining that letter carrier's route. Federal judges are not responsible to him; we have an independent judiciary. No elected official is responsible to the President. Your side had no loyalty to Obama, and ours has none to Trump. Loyalty to someone in our political system is to be earned. It is easy to lose.
He has earned my contempt and has kept expanding it.
I am not going to say that Donald Trump is the last of his type. Maybe in seventy-five to eighty years, when the oldest people in responsible positions will have never known him no longer heed the warning signs we will be vulnerable to a demagogue as callow as he. It could be a left-wing demagogue like the late Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, perhaps exploiting change that has moved too fast for the comfort of some, economic distress that hasn't been relieved fast enough (eighty years from now America will be in another Crisis Era), and in which people dread giving up some old habits that they can't imagine abandoning.
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.