Let’s try to imagine, just for shits and giggles, what the right-wing response would have been if President Barack Obama had done these three things in one week:
1. Imposed tariffs on imported aluminum and steel without any consultation with Congress or allies.
2. Speaking to a bipartisan group of congressional leaders in the White House, recommended seizing people’s guns without worrying about due process.
3. Praised Chinese President Xi Jinping for consolidating his power and stated, “He’s now president for life. President for life. No, he’s great. And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot some day.”
Now try to imagine that 30 members of Obama’s administration lost their temporary security clearance during this same week, and one of them was Michelle’s brother who was so flat broke that he was begging Qataris, Emiratis, Turks, Russians, and Chinese to give him a billion or so dollars.
I’m just scratching the surface here, as I am sure you know. I just want to know how loud you think the howling would be if these things were done during a single week of the Obama administration.
So, how loud?
IOKIYAR. No further comment needed.
You forgot how loud the howling was when Obama killed off the public option.
It was, I believe the single biggest political issue facing us in this, the first quarter of the 21st Century.
Yes, of course there was that atrocity.
The worst part of this whole Russia business is how it’s robbed everyone of their sense of perspective, and stopped focusing on what matters, like postal banking.
Stupid hippies! It’s a good thing that the more sensible voices won the day, the ones who knew that Obamacare was so wonderful that it’d be as untouchable as Medicare, and would inevitably ‘ratchet’ toward increased coverage with not a single backward step, and would lead to us sweeping the midterms. Whew! We really dodged a bullet there.
Do you ever get tired of punching the hippies? WTF does ‘imagine the right wing response if Obama did any of this’ have to do with THOSE ASSHOLE PURIST LATTE DRINKERS RUINED EVERYTHING! Yeah, if only they’d shut the fuck up about the public option, everyone would’ve loved Obamacare, because the hippies–like college students who no-platform right-wing speakers–have all the power.
I will punch the hippies who embrace fascist aligned foreign policy, but other than that yes: the fascists have power, dear centrist libs and leftists. Time to start acting like it.
Absolutely. We should punch ‘purist’ hippies who embrace fascist-aligned foreign powers and ‘pragmatic’ Dems who embrace fascist-aligned foreign policy advisors and homegrown fascists who embrace fascism. Punch ’em all and let the antifa sort ’em out.
But ye gods, there are two or three commenters here–well, two, really–who endlessly repeat the exact same jingle just for the sake of hearing the bells. They’re both smart, too. But unwilling or unable to actually engage.
Every idiot who parroted the lie that Obama abandoned the public option has demonstrated they’re utterly incapable of understanding the most basic elements of US politics and can’t be trusted to offer advice to the local school board.
They’d still be talking about it 40 years later, like with Carter’s sweater speech or “lusting in my heart”. Actually, considering the mileage the rightwing got whining about those non-problems, they’d still be blaming the “lieberals” for it centuries from now.
Time for us to do the same. We need to hang Trump around the neck of the conservative movement for all time. They certainly deserve it for how much they have gotten behind him.
This motherfucker isn’t just implementing tariffs. His trade people Ross and Navarro are literally talking about upending the entire global supply chain in one fell swoop, including the US leaving the World Trade Organization. Make no mistake folks, this is what “America First” means: the US by itself, against the world. It’s what fascists believe.
It’s always worse than it seems from the outside. I honestly believe that we will eventually find out that the Kushner’s have been passing classified information to our `rivals’, and also to our `allies’ in the Middle East.
I would add this,
What if Michelle’s brother went begging for money from Qatar, and when refused, weeks later led a blockade against Qatar, that blockade led by Saudi Arabia, then said brother gave support for massive jailing of a Saudi Prince’s rivals…so he could extort billions from them?
Now let’s all quess where the money to bail the Kushner business will come from?
It’s ALWAYS worse than it seems from the outside.
.
.
I don’t know why you’re posing this as a what-if. At the very least it’s exactly what the Qataris believe happened.
Errrr, it’s a riff on Booman’s diary…..’what if MICHELLE OBAMA’s BROTHER did the same thing Kushner did, how would republicans react?’
sheesh.
.
We would already be at impeachment at #1. The last two would have immediately invoked charges of “high crimes and misdemeanors” and treason. The media would be breathlessly reporting the charges as evidence of democrats hating America and the Clintons, of course.
It would be a nor’easter all right – but the same reason that impeachment is infeasible with the present occupant would apply here.
Incipient tinnitus load. Blue Cheer load. Annoying Noriega loud. Crack of doom loud. Or, for Brits such as I used to be, a little irksome.
PS RIP Barlow.
The right-wing noise machine would have its amps set all the way to eleven. Memeorandum and any other news aggregating website would be drowning in sensational headlines for whatever would remain of Obama’s term.
On the Spinal Tap scale, dialed to twelve.
We know what would have happened.
My question is, what would the Right have done if, say, Hillary was elected, and Chelsea’s husband was talking to foreign banks and governments about lending him money to save a building with an address of 666?
666? The Silence of the Hams has been deafening. We should fix that.
I’m more inclined to think that the silence, not to mention the protective collusion, from the Right is so much more deafening than any chorus of outrage that they could have gurgled forth about Obama and Hillary.
Obstruction? Collusion? Conspiracy? It’s all there.
Obama would have not even gotten the nomination if he had the debt of the donald and his family.
Excuse me, didn’t Breitbart already report that Obama did this? (While decrying the report about Trump as #FakeNew.s)
I don’t know the answer to your question “How loud”, but I hope you don’t mind that I posted this to the America First Facebook page and asked THEM how loud.
“Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot some day.”
A Drumpf dynasty would not surprise me. I had this image in 2016 while hearing how novel is Trump in contrast to the Bush and Clinton families. The universe might conspire for that, with the irony that other president could have been enjoying an extra term now. Willing support is ready:
5 Reasons Why America Should Become A Real Empire (“Return Of Kings” warning… indeed)
Didn’t we have some conditioning “A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier”… “just so long as I’m the dictator” … from yet other president?
There may be problems so urgent (climate change) that dictatorship is the only way to address them in time.
If it’s any consolation, the Romans had a whole bunch of dictators before Julius Caesar made the office stick.
Yup, including the inspiration for Washington. Though I personally approve of the Empire over the Republic. Including its Greek survivor.
Could it be that Trump is the best ready for a necessary dirty job?
I can see how the right-wing nationalists would be all into that, based on the linkage you provided. That will be an impossibly hard sell among those of a, shall we say, considerably more progressive perspective. If anything, I am hoping that our experience globally with the emergence of authoritarian dictatorships in recent years and into the near future (including those disguised as “democratic” – albeit illiberal) will serve as a stark reminder of the benefits of liberal democracy and the need to reform its institutions, much as our ancestors’ knowledge of the excesses of dictatorship under the USSR and its satellites, and prior to that of the Axis powers of the 1930s through mid-1940s motivated them to defend and reform liberal democracy.
You may be too sanguine, my friend:
http://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2018/03/if-millennials-kill-democracy-their.html
Steve tends to be pessimistic, so factor that into his analysis; but those charts look hella bad.
Most of the time I do have a bias toward optimism. I looked at SteveM’s blog post. There is a commenter (Andrew Johnson) who did look at the survey analyses that Both David Brooks and Mounk are consuming to make their conclusions, and noted that there are other questions that contradict the notion that millennials are jonesing for a strongman or dictatorship. As Andrew Johnson notes, this same cohort who supposedly values democracy the least did vote disproportionately against the very sort of leader one might expect them to embrace (Trump). At some point I’ll have to spend some time getting into the weeds of that particular survey and get a feel for how complex and possibly conflicted our younger cohorts are regarding democracy.
I may stay a bit sanguine for now. If I am wrong, then I will have some real egg on my face – although I suspect that will be the least of my worries at that juncture.
The least of our worries indeed.
Next few years will be crucial. I’ll not only be watching, but doing what I can in my little corner of the US. In the meantime, I do think Mounk is interesting to read and listen to. I wish I could figure out how to square his pessimism with the very visible youth activism (e.g., the kids from Parkland after that awful shooting) and young adult voting patterns. I doubt these young folks are particularly eager to look for despots to rescue them. My own reading, and again it is perhaps somewhat iconoclastic, is that at most there is a trend to be rather jaundiced to those of us elders who have really made a mess of things. That’s not to say that our institutions are not in trouble, but I do suspect that the more immediate concern is the very elders who are able to control those institutions and degrade them from within (as our current White House “leadership” is doing). I was too young for the “never trust anyone over 30” slogans, but I see an appeal as a 50-something. Just a few thoughts. I really need to give myself some time to look through some of the data that Mounk and Brooks are apparently consuming, and in particular see if there are any useful cross-tabs (socio-economic status and whatnot). When/if life circumstances will allow that for me is anyone’s guess.
One comment on Steve’s article pointed out that there is a difference between a strong leader and a strongman leader.
The silver lining is that support of authoritarian dictatorship (which is, of course, what “strong leader” contrasted with parliaments and elections comes down to) among millennials hasn’t reached a majority . . . yet???
Yikes!
And it’s highest here?
Yikes^2!
And I thought I was cynical, jaded, and pessimistic (or, as it always seems to me, just realistic)!
Can we just hand running the world over to those Parkland high-schoolers? They at least seem to have a clue.
I think “audible on Neptune” is the right analogy.
Country would be in decent shape with Obama president for life. Probably prefer him to any other president in my lifetime.
I don’t want anyone to be President for life. Horrible thought. No way.
I care more about the results. Certainly leaders who hold on too long can fail to be nimble enough to react to changing times, can become complacent with corruption.
White privilege + Republican privilege = Trump
IOKIYAR, but mostly IYA WHITE Republican. Michael Steele, apparently, has now been told off for being Republican while black.
We all know what would’ve happened. The decibel level would be off the scale and the rightwing propaganda machine would be going nuts. And it wouldn’t be surprising if Impeachment was ON the table for Obama.
Here’s another nugget to chew on:
“After President Hillary Clinton’s 29 year old male “emotional crutch” resigned last week, she started a trade war with several European allies.”
from Laurie Killmartin’s twitter feed
Like: Really?
Trump told the Truth ONE time: he could definitely go out on 5th Avenue and start mowing down anyone in sight with his AR15,and his goon base would clap and cheer themselves hoarse, while Alex Jones lied to them that everyone killed was a dirtly LIEbrul and had it coming. And the Rs in congress wouldn’t even flinch.
What’s next? I shudder to contemplate it.
P.S. Just in case: the Laurie Killmartin quote was ironic and meant to highlight just how insane this whole situation is. Imagine, if you will, Clinton – or Obama – doing the same thing.
Imagine!
Trump told the truth a second time, to the deplorables: “I am your voice.”
I think the best one is: What if Hillary had been exposed as screwing a porn star. Get your heads around that one.
Well seeing as Hillary was “exposed” as having a steaming love affair with a UFO-type of alien… what’s a little sexxxytime with a porn star??
https:/www.motherjones.com/media/2015/04/weekly-world-news-clintons-aliens