While I won't defend corruption, there are orders of magnitude of difference in the intensity and harm caused by the current US government's corruption vs the type most people have grown accustomed to. Both sidesing this is insane.
And all that aside -- in what world is the appropriate response to perceived misdeeds by a political opponent to crank the dial up to 11 on running the government as your combination personal slush fund, army, and all-encompassing bureaucratic warfare organization?
> in what world is the appropriate response to perceived misdeeds by a political opponent to crank the dial up to 11
A world in the throes of absolute war against an entirely dehumanized opponent. If the enemy is definitionally maximally evil, then absolutely any action is permissible as long as it hurts the Other.
I need to the left's version of starting your own memecoin and openly taking bribes from officials and foreign countries.
I also would like the left's version of pardoning people who they directly do business with.
Those legitimately parrot the "both sides" stuff are terribly naive. No one who actually pays attention to what's happening thinks these parties are remotely similar right now.
memecoin scams: I offer up a President wearing a tan suit in exchange, and depths of depravity
taking bribes (planes) from foreign countries: I offer in exchange, a former President who dared to use Dijon mustard instead of plain yellow mustard, the monster.
I find it interesting (in a dismaying sense) how many people are perfectly comfortable or even in favor of government oversteps by “their” team that are aligned with outcomes they like but act shocked and indignant when the “other” team does it.
IMO, the solution is to demand constitutional and law-following behavior from both/all teams, but to be particularly careful to do that with your preferred side, as you might be prone to overlook those excesses.
>the solution is to demand constitutional and law-following behavior from both/all teams
This is only a solution if you can reasonably anticipate the demands being obeyed. If instead you anticipate that they won't be obeyed (by one or both parties), then it only puts your team at a disadvantage. The other team knows this, so they tend to ignore or ridicule any such demands and to whip their team into ignoring and ridiculing those demands. At which point, your team suffers.
Cooperation strategies in an adversarial system only work in a limited set of highly unusual circumstances, and those circumstances aren't currently extant.
Russia perfected the ethics of "you don't need to be good, you just need everyone else to be bad", Americans are just bringing the state of the art home.
This is what the system of checks-and-balances was supposed to enforce. Turns out that system is not effective if you vote the same party into power in each aspect of the government.
Yes, all political parties and organizations must be accountable to the Constitution and the law.
We also need to be honest with ourselves as a nation that Trumpism pushes far further into unconstitutional and law-disregarding behavior than what has come before. Pretending it is equivalent, as the starting comment does, is dangerous.
Bad governance does not justify more bad governance. Even if it's true that previous admins have done all this before (it's not) it wouldn't justify a thing.
I don’t know if it falls into the strict definition of “corruption”, but definitely falls into the broader category of “shitty”, but democrat politicians don’t seem to be above abusing their power to enrich themselves with the stock market.
I’m not a conservative, I’m pretty left-leaning by (American standards at least), but I am not going to act like my side is categorically better in this regard.
I'm sorry to break the news to you, but if you're using the phrase "democrat politicians", you're extremely conservative. This phrase does not exist and is never used outside of deeply partisan conservative circles. If this doesn't align with your understanding of who you are and what you believe, I'd urgently reevaluate your media consumption habits.
I’m on the left and I use that phrase. It took me forever to figure out what was “wrong” with it. They’re democrats, democrat politicians.
Like the other person said, this usage is extremely common and not just on extremist conservative spaces, unless your definition of “extremist” includes 80% of the USA’s overton window
I think a lot of people spend all day on leftist YouTube and live in leftist Discord servers and hang out with self-proclaimed Marxist friends, and that’s all completely fine, but as a result of people not being tuned into their specific vernacular they act like this shit is a dog whistle instead of the fact that i just don’t know (or care much about) this specific vocabulary.
I suppose I could be a useful idiot for this, but I don’t feel like saying “democrat” is really that bad as far as these things go.
To be fair, republicans are far worse with regards to “pretending to be offended”. You cannot convince me that anyone is actually offended by the term “happy holidays”, but every year I get to hear about a “war on Christmas”
It’s actually not conservative at all, they run under the democrat sticker, this is the self-prescribed label.
We can argue that the American democrats aren’t very left-leaning and I would probably agree with you, but I reject the idea that I cannot use their own labels to describe them without being described as conservative.
it isn't possible for you to be so poorly informed that you think "Joe Biden's son told people who his dad was so they'd let him do a business deal" is in the same scale as:
- taking direct bribes from Qatar
- the president and his family launching multiple cryptocurrency firms to do infinite fraud and money laundering
- demanding and accepting direct bribes from universities and using taxpayer money as the cudgel
- directly taking cash from randoms for pardons
> It seems the most of their policies are bitter reactions to perceived misdeeds from "the left"
"Perceived" is a very important word in that sentence. The "misdeeds" don't actually exist, they are only "perceived" as part of right wing manufactured victimhood.
> It seems the most of their policies are bitter reactions to perceived misdeeds from "the left".
lolwhat? “I don’t like what I imagined the left is doing so I’m going to turn our cities into police states?” In what world is that a reasonable justification? Might as well say it’s a bitter reaction to the tooth fairy.
95% of the time they are talking about the vaccine mandate and lockdowns in response to a fkn pandemic that provable killed hundreds of thousands, easily shown with the dip in average lifetime length stats of Americans for a while there. I think we're observing false equivalency here to protect a felon who currently holds the office of the Presidency.
It isn’t an explanation, because it has causality backwards. The Trump Administration wants to do some things, and so they come up with excuses to why they should be allowed to do them. Their actions aren’t the response, they’re the initial desire.
Destroying democracy has literally never been a goal of the democratic party, unlike the well laid out plan in project 2025, which is really just Stage 1 of their plan.
This is such utter BS. And also, btw, also doesn't exist in a vacuum.
The left isn't immune to feeling bitter disgust at titans of industry that openly pay bribes and tributes and lie on camera in service of political objectives in exchange for political and economic favors.
The left does not equal the democrat party.
The right does not equate to the republican party.
My point is that there is open levels of collusion with the Biden admin (and Obama earlier) and media corps which have given the Trump admin cover to openly talk about their "favored companies"
Foreign operatives were legitimately engaging in information warfare against the American people, so it makes sense for FBI and others to let American companies know when their platforms are being used for these things.
This is especially true when such content is already against the policy of those services.
"Foreign operatives were legitimately engaging in information warfare against the American people" - says the government at the time, therein lies the concern.
The Twitter Files, much like the Mueller Report is useful to determine who the disingenuous or ignorant are. The people most likely to bring them up make claims completely opposite to what is actually contained within the documents because that's what they were told was in them. They can't ever be bothered to actually read the things they are using as "evidence". They just have to point to them ominously.
To them the Twitter files proves that Democrats and Twitter collaborated to suppress conservative voices and boost liberals despite showing nothing to that effect.
To them the Mueller Report fully exonerates Trump and proves it was nothing but a Democratic smear campaign. Despite it showing the opposite.
Reality doesn't matter anymore. These are "facts" to roughly 1/3rd of the US population.
And all that aside -- in what world is the appropriate response to perceived misdeeds by a political opponent to crank the dial up to 11 on running the government as your combination personal slush fund, army, and all-encompassing bureaucratic warfare organization?