Don’t forget that the Hamas leaders are living in luxury as billionaires in Qatar. If the Israeli response kills a few thousand Palestinians, then Hamas’ leaders will shrug their shoulders and say “sounds like good PR” while lounging in a hot tub.
He’ll only be a dictator for one day. In completely unrelated news, Dictator Trump has proclaimed that every day is his first day in office. Since his second day in office never officially arrives, he can remain a dictator and not have to worry about his term ending. /s
And, in any case, it’s laughable to think that a group of armed Americans could stand up to the US military if an American dictator ordered them to attack US citizens and they obeyed such an order.
The citizens would be charging in with guns blazing, but the military would send in a few drones and wipe them out. The whole “guns would let us stand against a dictatorship wielding the might of the US military” idea is a fantasy.
The fact that the right is that one that parrots this line while supporting someone who is actively saying he’ll be a dictator and send the military against US citizens blows past ironic and lands in Downright Scary territory.
Because he attacks the people that MAGA hates. That’s the only metric that they use. If Dictator Trump goes after Democrats/liberals/LGBTQ people/black people/etc then he’ll be “a good dictator” in their eyes. If he starts to go after straight, white, Christian men, then he’ll have become a “bad dictator.” Of course, by that point there will be nobody left to speak out against Dictator Trump since the rest of us would have already been rounded up.
For better or worse, laws apply from when they are enacted to when they are repealed or superseded. (Repealed includes laws with clauses that state it only applies for X years or that it needs to be renewed every Y years and the law doesn’t get renewed.)
That being said, there are all too often laws that are technically applicable but whose usefulness has long since passed. In these cases, the law still applies but the state legislature needs to pass a bill to repeal it (or supersede it).
It’s Schrodinger’s Joke. You say something awful and it’s simultaneously a joke and not a joke until the people hearing it react. That collapses the wave function. If people get offended, then it was just a joke. If people cheer for it, then it was serious.
At what point does the right ban a woman saying no to sex? After all, if contraception is redefined as abortion, then a woman refusing to have sex with a guy is “aborting” the potential baby they could have had together.
I guess I shouldn’t give the right ideas.
I love this comedian’s take on the NRA “we can take on the military with our guns” types: https://youtu.be/WOSqCjMRXWA?si=TTFMx6fLMx_akDYl
All too often, the police act like wannabe Rambos - charging in with guns drawn, willing to shoot or kill any suspects in their way. The ONE time that this might have been welcomed and they decided to sit on the side and do nothing. Okay, maybe not nothing. They harassed parents who were screaming about their kids being killed.
Clearly, the Republicans must impeach Biden now. Do you know how much this could hurt Trump if “people have to pay back their debts” catches on?!!!
Plus Frasier the show was remarkably inclusive(for an almost all white TV show that is), very openly liberal and sometimes even progressive. It just seems so fucking strange for him to come out as a trumpet.
Watch the old Rosanne episodes. Her show was very progressive for its time. She had characters who were gay and in loving relationships. The fact that they were gay wasn’t a punchline - well, not any more than the straight characters were made fun of for their sexual antics. There was even an episode where a gay woman kissed Rosanne. At the time, this was shocking to see on TV.
They had an episode where DJ refused to kiss a girl in his class (for a school play) because she was black and Rosanne and Dan were upset regarding his bigoted attitude.
If anything, Dan was the more conservative of the two in some instances. DJ once wanted to dress as a witch (IIRC) for Halloween and Dan was against it because it wasn’t manly enough. Rosanne was supportive.
The character of Rosanne should have evolved into a progressive who was supportive of LGBTQ folks, people of different ethnicities (though she would have still been blunt about it), etc. Instead, thanks to the real Rosanne, fictional Rosanne became a hard-core Trumper.
I think the biggest factor isn’t going to be Trump himself. If it was just him, he might trip over his own feet and keep himself from instituting a democracy. (Not that I’d bet our democracy on that happening.)
The bigger danger are the people who would be (and already are) working behind the scenes. I think they were caught by surprise in 2016 - both in Trump’s win and in his willingness to go further towards dictatorship than they even hoped to achieve. They weren’t prepared and we got the chaotic slip that did damage, but didn’t result in President Trump For Life.
This time, they’re prepared. If they get into power via a second Trump presidency, our best hope is that the institutions are sturdier than they seem to be and possibly that Trump is even more clumsy - to the point of sabotaging his own team’s plans. That’s not a very big hope, though. It’s about the same level as saying “I’m completely broke so I’ll spend my last few dollars on this lottery ticket to become rich.” Could it happen? Sure, but it’s much more likely that you/America lose.
And even if we somehow, miraculously, emerge from a trump presidency with our democracy intact, it would be on life support. As you said, you don’t go from 0 to Dictatorship. Trump would have turned the dial enough that some future Trump figure would get into power and turn it the rest of the way.
The only way to ensure that our democracy is safe is to keep Trump - and everyone supporting him - as far from power as possible.
Exactly. We’d still have “elections” to “prove that we’re still free,” but it would be just for show. Even if you somehow didn’t face consequences for voting against Trump, your vote would be tossed for being voter fraud. (Because all votes against Trump would be called fraudulent.)
There was a story about a woman who voted for Trump in 2016. Her husband was then deported as an illegal immigrant. Apparently, she was shocked that the guy who campaigned repeatedly on kicking out all illegal immigrants no matter what would kick out her husband because he was an illegal immigrant.
It was a real “leopards eating my face” moment and shows just how stupid some people are.
I was a Sanders supporter in 2016, but when Hillary got the nomination, I supported Hillary. Would I have preferred Sanders? Sure. Otherwise I wouldn’t have been a Sanders supporter. However, you don’t always get exactly what you want and you often need to deal with whatever hand life has dealt you.
In 2020, I again supported Sanders, but again switched - this time when Biden got the nomination. Same reason this time.
The people who refuse to support a candidate because they don’t think that candidate is 100% perfect aren’t seeing reality. You can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
By refusing to lend support to a good candidate, they risk allowing a terrible one to get into office. And when Trump is in office and decides that all Muslims aren’t US citizens anymore and must be deported, will these people say “but at least we kept Biden out of office”?
The Red State Brain Drain continues. Professors leaving Florida. OB/GYN doctors leaving Texas.
Why would you want to work in a place that criminalizes your job?
He’s already said this kind of thing. He admired the Chinese President for declaring himself President For Life and he said that he deserves a third term for the “Russia Russia Russia investigation.” His age might play into him actually going for a third term. He’d be 82 in January 2029 - assuming his lifelong bad health habits didn’t get to him first.
I could see him trying to appoint his successor, but none of his kids are as “charismatic” as he is. (Using the term “charismatic” loosely to describe the hold he has on some people. Not sure what else to call that.) A Trump Dictatorship could oddly result in a civil war as we get Trump Jr MAGAs fighting Greene MAGAs or Lake MAGAs etc. All while the tattered remnants of the Democrats try to use the chaos to right the ship.
Right. I didn’t address this in my comment because I wanted to focus on Trump himself. Whatever Trump does, he’ll likely use this plan to destroy our democracy.
If Trump gets into office again, our best hope would be that 1) the institutions can survive Project 2025 and 2) Trump and Co are too incompetent to enact their plans. I wouldn’t want to bet my life on either of these, though. A better hope is to work to keep Trump (and anyone else like him) away from any position of power all the way from President to city councilman.
I think you’re misreading what I wrote. I was saying that the best case scenario of a second Trump term is that he continues his habit of getting in his own way and fails to institute a dictatorship. But even then, he’d do so much damage that it would only be a matter of time before the next wanna be dictator used the doors that Trump opened to finish the job.
When even the best case scenario is “democracy is on life support,” we’ve got to do everything possible to stop Trump’s second term.
Of course, what I didn’t mention in my original comment - and what likely tips the scales in what will happen - is not what Trump would do, but what others would do. When Trump won, I don’t think the right was prepared for the amount of power Trump was going to let them wield.
They likely thought he would lose or would be a “typical Republican” up to that point - willing to bend the Constitution a bit but not outright shred it. By the time, they realized what they could do, they had no time to get plans together and people in place. The midterms had already occurred and Democrats controlled Congress.
Now, though, they have Project 2025. They are organized and know exactly what they need to do to fatally wound democracy. Would Trump get in their way and (accidentally) stop them from achieving their goal? It’s possible, but I’m not willing to risk our democracy on that bet.
Weren’t some hostages also drugged so they’d be “happy and smiling” for the cameras when released? I heard that, but don’t know the authenticity.
Edit: I found many news sources that said they were. I know some folks don’t trust anything Israel says so take reports like this with a grain of salt. Still, it’s been confirmed that many of the hostages were drugged while in captivity. Especially the kids - to keep them quiet. (Anyone with little kids knows they can be loud while scared and this must have been extremely scary. As a father, the reaction of “drug the little kids” makes me angry.)