burrrton wrote:LOL. 5am is a little early to be drunk ranting, isn't it?
RiverDog wrote:I don't like Donald Trump, didn't vote for him in 2016, won't vote for him in 2020 (if he's re-nominated), I don't support a lot of his agenda, I feel that he's unfit for the presidency, and feel that he's perhaps one of the worst POTUS's we've had in the past 100 years.
But I'm not going to run around and act as if the sky is falling.
Another thing to keep in mind is that Trump's apparent lunacy and unpredictability has to scare the daylights out of our foes. It's not dissimilar to when Reagan was in office. Back in the 80's when the USSR was very much a threat, the Demo libs were beside themselves, were certain about that dime store cowboy starting WW3, but his tough talk had the exact opposite effect. There's just a chance that a wild eyed lunatic Donald Trump's behavior could be keeping our foes from getting cute.
RiverDog wrote:I don't like Donald Trump, didn't vote for him in 2016, won't vote for him in 2020 (if he's re-nominated), I don't support a lot of his agenda, I feel that he's unfit for the presidency, and feel that he's perhaps one of the worst POTUS's we've had in the past 100 years.
But I'm not going to run around and act as if the sky is falling.
Another thing to keep in mind is that Trump's apparent lunacy and unpredictability has to scare the daylights out of our foes. It's not dissimilar to when Reagan was in office. Back in the 80's when the USSR was very much a threat, the Demo libs were beside themselves, were certain about that dime store cowboy starting WW3, but his tough talk had the exact opposite effect. There's just a chance that a wild eyed lunatic Donald Trump's behavior could be keeping our foes from getting cute.
Hawktawk wrote:RD you are one of my favorite posters. You give everyone the benefit of the doubt and trust the system to protect us.
But it really annoys me when anyone compares this utter POS to Ronald Reagan. Sure there was the bombing starts in 10'minutes joke but it was delivered with great humor, an obvious joke. Reagan was an articulate spokesman and consistent in his beliefs. He was respected abroad and presided over the demise of the Soviet Union.
Trump sucks up to our greatest geopolitical foe who wants to bring back the Soviet Union.
He is vulgar, crude, intellectually lazy or unequipped or both.
It is a supreme insult to Reagan and guys like me who revere him to compare him to this mentally ill vulgarian.
Aseahawkfan wrote:Trump isn't nearly as gracious, well-spoken, or grandfatherly as Reagan, unless your grandfather is some overbearing narcissist drunk on his own ego.
Trump's a narcissistic, egomaniac salesman that somehow won the presidency. He runs the White House like a reality TV show showing the whole world his dirty laundry daily, while getting in incredibly stupid spats over things that shouldn't even be relevant or arguable by either side like calls to fallen soldiers or kneeling protests. Who cares about that small potato crap while we have much larger issues he should be taking care of. I'm still amazed anyone is worried about this guy becoming a dictator considering neither side really likes him that much, especially the politicians in Washington. He's even driving his "fellow" Republicans nuts. You need to have commanding military support to have any chance of a dictatorship and that just isn't the case in America for a whole lot of reasons.
burrrton wrote:Tawk, you know I *generally* share your assessment of Trump, but in one 8-sentence post, if you can't help but call him a "piece of s***", "vulgar", "crude", "intellectually lazy/unequipped", "mentally ill", and "vulgarian", I'm not sure you're the best one to be assessing the mental health of an individual.
Get ahold of yourself- it's become trite to say, but this inability to maintain composure over the guy (a characteristic you of course share with too many in this country) is going to hand him another 4 years.
I never abused women
It's telling when Nancy Pelosi says, "we would take anyone else,Reagan, Bush, MCCain, Romney, anyone.
And if mr 37% limps through the Mueller Minefield to 2020 without starting WW3 he will get drubbed.
Is he delusional?
12 women indeed came forward to confirm that a sexual predator is exactly who he is. Actually 14 if you include Ivana who stated in court filings during her divorce that he violently sexually assaulted her in a fit of rage after a scalp stretching operation. She later recanted
Trumpism is a cult at this point
burrrton wrote:
He'll be re-elected no matter who the Dems run (short of them finding the next JFK).
burrrton wrote:
He threatened to sue them, dared them to press charges, didn't settle with any of them, and they dropped the issue as far as I've heard (I know of no pending litigation- maybe you do).
Again, I wouldn't be *at all* surprised, but comparing his situation to Weinstein is silly, and throwing around the "abuser" charge as if it's been proven doesn't seem fair. I was in locker rooms virtually every day from 7th grade through college and if you think "I grab 'em by the p*ssy" talk is proof positive of rape, I could introduce you to hundreds of rapists.
Agree, and I'll add that this cult behavior has become a trait of politics in 2017. Look at the Obama and Hillary supporters for more examples.
if JFK ran today, he'd be running as a republican since his views and policies are more reflective of republican policies.
burrrton wrote:[quote
My point has nothing to do with the accuracy of the charges- it refers to the inability to have a rational discussion without regurgitating every last derogatory remark about the guy that's ever crossed your mind, accurate or not.
You sound like you have Tourette's.
I think I have Tourette's too!!!!! What's that got to do with my analysis? He's far more mentally ill than I am. Corker ripped him again this morning saying the debasement of the office will be his greatest lasting legacy and that he "will not ever rise to the stature of the office". I cant remember a Senator ever questioning the President of his own party about his fitness for office. I cant ever remember discussions about the 25th amendment or psychiatrists coming out of the woodwork questioning any president.
Who is rational here? the sheep who will put up with this? Wake up!
I don't get your point. I call him what he is and Im delusional? Im not wrong and my admitted diagnosed mental illness is not a factor in the discourse. His is...
12 women indeed came forward to confirm that a sexual predator is exactly who he is. Actually 14 if you include Ivana who stated in court filings during her divorce that he violently sexually assaulted her in a fit of rage after a scalp stretching operation. She later recanted
Trumpism is a cult at this point
idhawkman wrote:LOL, if JFK ran today, he'd be running as a republican since his views and policies are more reflective of republican policies.
Like Reagan said, "I didn't leave the democrat party, the democrat party left me."
RiverDog wrote:All true. Ronald Reagan was so respectful of the presidency that he wouldn't even take off his suit coat while in the Oval Office. Even Bill Clinton, whom I felt was a disgrace to the office, doesn't even register a blip compared to the person that now occupies it. It's a crying shame.
Aseahawkfan wrote:I don't know. Clinton was well-spoken, but he seriously disrespected the presidency, in my opinion as bad as Trump to this point. Then again I'm not a fan of Kennedy and the embrace by the Democrats of shaming your wife and child by cheating on her while you are the president. Then he lied about it while on the stand. Clinton was a well-spoken, slick lawyer fully embracing the Machiavellian leadership method of being ostensibly virtuous, while being a slimebag behind the scenes. And Democratic supporters fully embrace this because Kennedy is one of their idols. I despise the smug grins of so many Democrats dismissing Clinton's treatment of his wife and child with all the women he cheated on as "no big deal." They continue to laud the man that was a factor in Hilary losing the presidency. I guarantee not everyone was hornswaggled by what she did. A huge negative part of her character was staying with a man we all knew cheated on her purely for career gain. That is not good character in my opinion, nearly as bad as Trump. It may not have been a dramatic effect, but people remember that kind of garbage.
I seriously wonder if there have ever been two candidates with worse character than Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump.
Hawktawk wrote:The alarm needs to be sounded. The man is a clear and present danger to the entire planet.
idhawkman wrote:half the U.S. and growing
If you look at things in a vacuum, then yes, JFK's politics of the early 60's are eerily similar to today's Republican party. But that assumes that Kennedy's personal views and philosophies would have remained unchanged.
burrrton wrote:
I don't think it really assumes that at all, RD- the point is that the JFK everyone romanticizes about was a defense hawk, a deficit hawk, anti-abortion, and believed lowering taxes stimulated growth. To varying degrees, any one of those things would disqualify him.
Of course he would have evolved significantly over the ensuing decades, but I don't think that's what his fanboys/girls are pondering.
*That* JFK couldn't have so much as sniffed the Dem nomination today. Hell, Bill Clinton couldn't have, either. And yeah, Reagan probably couldn't have gotten the R nom with the nutty factions that have cropped up on that side, too.
I do not agree with your premise that the Democratic party changed and that like Reagan, Kennedy would have switched party affiliation.
RiverDog wrote:"If you look at things in a vacuum, then yes, JFK's politics of the early 60's are eerily similar to today's Republican party. But that assumes that Kennedy's personal views and philosophies would have remained unchanged"
Compared to Reagan, JFK did not have a fixed moral compass. For example, he only addressed civil rights when the issue confronted him and could ignore it no longer. IMO he became a proponent of the movement not so much because he felt it was the morally right position to take, but rather that it was the most politically viable. He was in danger of losing the left wing of his party. Additionally, he was not seen as a "defense hawk" during his presidency, to the contrary, on 11/22/63, there were numerous groups and propaganda that accused him of being soft on Communism. The candidate that would have been his opponent in 1964, Barry Goldwater, was much more of a hawk than Kennedy, and even pols with his own party, like Scoop Jackson, were more hawkish than him. He was only a hawk when you contrast him with Dems that were softer than he was, ie Adli Stevenson and Hubert Humphrey.
Kennedy liked playing both ends towards the middle, and I suspect that he would have maintained that MO throughout the rest of his political career had he survived. He had a knack for seeking the middle ground and almost certainly would have been sucked into Vietnam, at least initially. I do not agree with your premise that the Democratic party changed and that like Reagan, Kennedy would have switched party affiliation. Reagan changed relatively early in his political career. By 1963, Kennedy had a huge political machine that he would have had to leave behind.
burrrton wrote:Nothing much to disagree with there, except that maybe "defense *hawk*" was the wrong term- he was in favor of increasing defense spending, though.
And yeah, I know that may have been more appropriate at that time (I'm not going to go look up what levels he was advocating increasing from, etc).
I meant it more like if you looked back at JFK, he looked a lot more like a Republican (as we currently, or at least recently, knew them) than a Dem.
If I'd have considered it more deeply, I'm not sure I'd have agreed he'd have switched, either.
There weren't ANY major politicians of the era that were against increasing defense spending.
burrrton wrote:That doesn't change my point- I'm making no judgments about how he compared to other pols at the time (and I'm sure you know more about them than I do- I wasn't born yet), just about how his policies/attitudes compare to today.
This is rather uncontroversial.
And my point is that you could transplant nearly any major pol of the 50's or early 60's into contemporary politics and they would be viewed as a hawk, so noting that JFK would have been considered a hawk nowadays is pointless.
RiverDog wrote:Do you know who the only politician of the 1950's was NOT in favor of increasing defense spending, or at least not increasing as much as others wanted? Dwight Eisenhower. The only person within his own cabinet that was FOR his proposed defense expenditures was his Treasury Secretary. Everyone else wanted enough missiles to kill the Soviets 100 times over. Think about that for a minute: The biggest dove of the 1950's was General Dwight Eisenhower. That should demonstrate what the mood of the country was like during the period between Korea and Vietnam.
Kennedy would be without a party right now as he was fiscally a conservative and socially a democrat.JFK looked like a modern day Republican only if you removed all the other Democrats. If you kept them all in the picture, JFK is smack dab in the middle, between Scoop Jackson, Gore Sr., on the right, Hubert Humphrey, Stevenson on the left, so you would have to apply your logic to the majority of Dems in that era. JFK did not try to persuade people to his side, he followed the path of least resistance.
"Didn't they blame Kennedy for the failure in Cuba? I recall him being accused of undermining the operation in the Bay of Pigs to retain Democratic control in Cuba."
Kennedy himself accepted blame for the failure of the Bay of Pigs operation although it was an initiative that began under Ike. But the objective wasn't to retain "Democratic" control of the country. The goal was to overthrow the Castro regime, who had come to power in 1959 after overthrowing the pro-U.S. Batista government. Kennedy got cold feet, and instead of allowing a pre planned air strike to support a flailing effort, he called it off, afraid that he'd provoke the Soviets. He essentially left hundreds of CIA-organized Cubans out to dry. Many anti Castro Cubans never forgave him for that, which has been the source of several conspiracy theories involving JFK's assassination.
c_hawkbob wrote:
You mean 40% and dwindling.
burrrton wrote:But *everybody* was a deficit hawk (or whatever)" doesn't change the fact that they were deficit hawks, right?
idhawkman wrote:Kennedy would be without a party right now as he was fiscally a conservative and socially a democrat.
There's a lot of things about Kennedy that may or may not come out with the release of the documents this week. We have to wait and see.
RiverDog wrote:As I pointed out earlier, you are assuming that Kennedy's politics would have remained static.
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