Never underestimate the truly ugly side of American populism.
2 comments:
Nikto
said...
If you go back and search through video I'm sure you'll find questioners at Democratic campaign events who called George Bush a traitor and a war criminal for the lies he told to fool us into attacking Iraq. So I'm not particularly shocked by this kind of hyperbole. You can always find a loud-mouthed jerk in a crowd, and what purpose does it serve Romney to challenge their delusions?
But I don't know what treason the woman thinks Obama committed that George Bush and Dick Cheney hadn't already done a hundred times worse. It is Republicans who have for decades been pushing the executive branch to the point of the imperial presidency, insisting, as Dick Nixon did, that anything the president does in the name of protecting the nation is by definition legal. Even when "protecting the nation" really means covering his own ass. Reagan cut deals with terrorists, sold weapons to the Iranians and funded death squads who murdered American nuns.
But it was Bush and Cheney who really carried the whole imperial presidency to the most ridiculous extreme. When Bush held Americans without charge for years, started accessing Americans' phone records without court-approved warrants, adding signing statements to every law Congress passed, conservatives all leapt to Bush's defense and applauded his actions.
At the time I said that this was a mistake, that one day Republicans would no longer be in power and that they would have to live with these precedents under a Democratic president. But they didn't care, because the political advantage of the moment is the only thing that matters to these people. They don't really care about the Constitution, or justice, or law. They merely use those words as a rallying cry, and they have no deeper meaning to them than the colors football fans shout when rallying their teams.
Because in the end, for these people it's really all about my team vs. their team, and the country as a whole doesn't matter to them. You hear it practically every time they talk about "real" America.
Nikto, you are the champion of Democrats good and republicans evil. The idea of you throwing any stones towards the people that hold that rediculous paradigm is laughable.
Could it be that you are waking up to the reality that both of the two major political parties in the US are actually against you?
2 comments:
If you go back and search through video I'm sure you'll find questioners at Democratic campaign events who called George Bush a traitor and a war criminal for the lies he told to fool us into attacking Iraq. So I'm not particularly shocked by this kind of hyperbole. You can always find a loud-mouthed jerk in a crowd, and what purpose does it serve Romney to challenge their delusions?
But I don't know what treason the woman thinks Obama committed that George Bush and Dick Cheney hadn't already done a hundred times worse. It is Republicans who have for decades been pushing the executive branch to the point of the imperial presidency, insisting, as Dick Nixon did, that anything the president does in the name of protecting the nation is by definition legal. Even when "protecting the nation" really means covering his own ass. Reagan cut deals with terrorists, sold weapons to the Iranians and funded death squads who murdered American nuns.
But it was Bush and Cheney who really carried the whole imperial presidency to the most ridiculous extreme. When Bush held Americans without charge for years, started accessing Americans' phone records without court-approved warrants, adding signing statements to every law Congress passed, conservatives all leapt to Bush's defense and applauded his actions.
At the time I said that this was a mistake, that one day Republicans would no longer be in power and that they would have to live with these precedents under a Democratic president. But they didn't care, because the political advantage of the moment is the only thing that matters to these people. They don't really care about the Constitution, or justice, or law. They merely use those words as a rallying cry, and they have no deeper meaning to them than the colors football fans shout when rallying their teams.
Because in the end, for these people it's really all about my team vs. their team, and the country as a whole doesn't matter to them. You hear it practically every time they talk about "real" America.
Nikto, you are the champion of Democrats good and republicans evil. The idea of you throwing any stones towards the people that hold that rediculous paradigm is laughable.
Could it be that you are waking up to the reality that both of the two major political parties in the US are actually against you?
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