Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[mycroft]

Because I listen to things like "Worst Year Ever", and my reading leans left (a quick reminder that the US has their centre-right party, and the Republicans) the consensus is that like most of the last 40 years, "we're" voting D because even the worst D candidate is less actively harmful than the R candidate. And if we have to accept "not actively harmful", we will.

 

Also, unfortunately, "we" did nominate the worst D candidate, so let's actually hope for "not actively harmful". And unfortunately, it looks like that's what they got.

 

So in answer to Chas_P, it is quite possible that I can not posit EVEN ONE thing Biden has done that improves the life of hoi polloi. But I guarantee that's still 5 things better than what the previous holder of the office did in any of the 4 years he had an opportunity, and at least one (fairly big!) thing better than what that same person did in 2021. And the chance that it is at least 5 things better than what would have happened if the election went differently is very high.

[y66]

Which domestic political rivals has Biden asked Zelensky to help him frame in exchange for handing over assistance?

[PassedOut]

The election was about Trump and folks with varying views backed Biden to prevent Trump's reelection. Any other benefits are gravy.

 

Biden did get a long-overdue infrastructure repair and improvement bill passed (over the protests of the beaten Trump), so that's already some gravy.

[pilowsky]

Here's a tangible benefit.

We are unlikely to see letters to foreign leaders like the one below.

Unless they've already been torn up and flushed down the toilet.

THE WHITE HOUSE WASHINGTON

October 9, 2019 His Excellency Recep Tayyip Erdogan President of the Republic of Turkey Ankara Dear Mr. President Let's work out a good deal! You don't want to be responsible for slaughtering thousands of people, and I don't want to be responsible for destroying the Turkish economy and I will. I've already gives you a little sample with respect to Pastor Brunson. I have worked hard to solve some of your problems. Don't let the world down. You can make a great deal. General Mazloum is willing to negotiate with you, and he is willing to make concessions that they would never have made in the past. I am confidentially enclosing a copy of his letter to me, just received. History will look upon you favorably if you get this done the right and humane way. It will look upon you forever as the devil if good things don't happen. Don't be a tough guy. Don't be a fool! I will call you later.

[Winstonm]

"I need ammunition, not a ride." Volodymyr Zelensky

 

That makes me a contra Ukrainian, too. Ronald Reagan

[PassedOut]

Here's a tangible benefit.

We are unlikely to see letters to foreign leaders like the one below.

Unless they've already been torn up and flushed down the toilet.

Yes, I remember that letter, one of the many times Trump embarrassed the US internationally. The damage he did to us internally was worse.

[Cyberyeti]

Yes, I remember that letter, one of the many times Trump embarrassed the US internationally. The damage he did to us internally was worse.

 

The damage he did internally to the guys that swallowed the bleach was probably worse still

[kenberg]

The damage he did internally to the guys that swallowed the bleach was probably worse still

 

There really has never been anything like him in the oval office. There are still Rs who support him, and R leaders who are afraid of him, and there is not much we can do about that. But there also still are, or I hope there still are, or I hope that there still are, some people out there who would support a traditional conservative. We should try to welcome them back to a reasonable discussion. I don't think we should require them do fifteen mea culpas, but it would really help if they would make it clear that they now recognize the threat of Trumpism and that they are ready to onsist that any R they will support must make it clear that the person they are supporting is a conservative rather than a Trumpie.

 

When I was in high school, in those ancient times in the mid 50s, we had discussions in civics class about how much funding for public schools should be federal, how much should be local. And we discussed the extent to which curriculum should be a local matter or a federal matter. These were reasonable discussions. If you asked a girl out on a date she did not base her answer on how you stood on such matters. Drinking bleach never came up for discussion.

 

Only Rs can reuse the R party. I hope they do it.

[Winstonm]

There are quite reasonable people now writing and speaking about these times as so much more than Democrats v Republicans, that it is an attempt to end liberal democracy and replace it with authoritarian nationalism. There is no law to prevent this. If whoever holds power ignores norms there is no mechanism in place to thwart those efforts. It all comes down to us, the people .

Just ask Ukraine if you think this exaggeration.

 

Here in the US that needs to begin not with defeat of Trump and Trumpism but with a total repudiation of both. In Nixon’s era John Dean warned of a cancer on the presidency. That cancer has metastasized and now threatens to kill the host. As with all cancers, it cannot be isolated and ignored but must be destroyed entirely. To leave even a scrap is to invite relapse.

[cherdano]

You boys really are amusing. Rather than continuing to flog an inanimate equine please tell us just ONE thing that your boy Joe has done to improve the lives of we plebeians. Please. Just one.

Imagine that your country gets rid of an incompetent, corrupt, misogynistic head of government who came to power with racist rhetoric, *****ed up dealing with the pandemic of a lifetime, try a pathetic attempt at a coup after he lost the election - and your only question is "What's in it for me?"

 

Just get the f* out of BBF once and for all, we don't need a resident racist troll here. I am sure you are a nicer person in real life than on here (not difficult), so just do yourself a favour and stop it.

[y66]

 

Stipulating that we have no idea how this will turn out, it is worth tallying some of the surprises thus far.

 

• Apparent lack of punch in Russian initial attack, to include on Ukrainian air forces; ineffective airborne assaults and spetsnaz raids; ferocity of Ukrainian resistance in depth.
  
• Unanimity of western response, to include arms supplies (e.g. Sweden of all places), and Germans not only participating in sanctions, but deciding to lay out double their annual defense budget. This on top of demonstrations, etc.
  
• Extent of sanctions, to include suspending SWIFT [except Energy transactions], and much more; closing of air space to Russian aircraft, and the general move to make Russia a pariah state. This includes denunciations from, e.g. Kenya and other non-European states.
  
• Western and Ukrainian superiority in the information warfare realm -- to include heartening videos and stories, pictures of Russian soldiers looting or being pushed around by Ukrainian civilians, etc. all on top of effective release of US and allied intel before the crisis
  
• What appears to be considerable Ukrainian tactical successes against Russian armored columns, and serious problems with the battalion tactical groups which we have heard so much about.
  
• A variety of forms of opposition to the war being expressed in Russia, which takes considerable courage on the part of those doing it. Including more muted criticisms from within the elite.
  
• The leadership qualities of President Zelensky, grossly underestimated by a lot of Western analysts.
  
• And I could go on. The point is that analysts who were (a) mesmerized by Russian hardware; (b) impressed by Russian doctrine; © inclined to pessimism about Western democracy in general and the willingness to push back of our leaders missed a great deal.
  
• Instead, some old truths, all found in Clausewitz and Tolstoy, viz., the moral element matters in war, as do the decisions of many individuals; that the fog of war exists; that war is the domain of surprise; and that it is about interaction, not mechanical planning.
  
• Finally: we do not know how this will unfold, but one does sense that history is moving remarkably quickly here. And - at great cost in human suffering - the outcome may be the end of the road for a brutal dictator, and renewed confidence in free institutions. One hopes.
  

[Winstonm]

Belarus is sending troops to support Russian invaders. Belarus does not have nuclear arms. Belarus should be bombed into oblivion, or be told that such will happen if they join the Russian war efforts.

[johnu]

Also, unfortunately, "we" did nominate the worst D candidate, so let's actually hope for "not actively harmful". And unfortunately, it looks like that's what they got.

:lol: The worst D candidate would have been somebody who got beat by the Manchurian President Trump. A good D candidate is anybody who would have won, and Biden won.

[kenberg]

Belarus is sending troops to support Russian invaders. Belarus does not have nuclear arms. Belarus should be bombed into oblivion, or be told that such will happen if they join the Russian war efforts.

 

I am not at all up for saying what we should or should not do, but for this I will make an exception.

If we are up for all out war then bombing Belarus could be a good way to start it. If we are not up for all out war then we should not do it.

If we recall nothing else from Viet Nam we should recall that bombing this and that but not bombing some other stuff doesn't work out.

Or there is the Korean example. Repelling the North Korean invasion, pushing the North Koreans back to the 38th parallel, worked fine.

Crossing the 38th parallel did not work out fine.

We needed to think first: Were we or were we not prepared for all out war with China. If not, maybe stop at the 38.

Short answer; Let's not do that.

[y66]

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/27/us/politics/bill-barr-trump-january-6.html?action=click&algo=bandit-all-surfaces_impression_cut_3_filter_new_arm_5_1&alpha=0.05&block=more_in_recirc&fellback=false&imp_id=552145204&impression_id=25b7fe80-989f-11ec-ab42-ddbe3cd4e1d7&index=0&pgtype=Article&pool=more_in_pools%2Fus&region=footer&req_id=165800751&surface=eos-more-in&variant=0_bandit-all-surfaces_impression_cut_3_filter_new_arm_5_1

 

WASHINGTON — Former Attorney General William P. Barr writes in a new memoir that former President Donald J. Trump’s “self-indulgence and lack of self-control” cost him the 2020 election and says “the absurd lengths to which he took his ‘stolen election’ claim led to the rioting on Capitol Hill.”

 

In the book, “One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General,” Mr. Barr also urges his fellow Republicans to pick someone else as the party’s nominee for the 2024 election, calling the prospect of another presidential run by Mr. Trump “dismaying.”

 

“Donald Trump has shown he has neither the temperament nor persuasive powers to provide the kind of positive leadership that is needed,” Mr. Barr writes.

 

The memoir — an account of Mr. Barr’s time as attorney general under President George H.W. Bush and then again under Mr. Trump — defends his own actions in the Trump administration that led to sharp criticism of a Justice Department setting aside its independence to bend to White House pressure.

 

Mr. Barr was long considered a close ally of Mr. Trump. But the two fell out toward the end of the Trump administration, when Mr. Barr refused to go along with Mr. Trump’s baseless claims that the 2020 election had been stolen.

 

In a statement last June, Mr. Trump denounced his former attorney general, calling him a “swamp creature” and a “RINO” — meaning Republican in Name Only — who “was afraid, weak and frankly, now that I see what he is saying, pathetic.”

 

For his part, Mr. Barr portrays Mr. Trump as a president who — despite sometimes displaying “the menacing mannerisms” of a strongman ruler as a “schtick” to project an image of strength — had operated within guardrails set up by his advisers and achieved many conservative policy goals. But Mr. Trump “lost his grip” after the election, he writes.

 

“He stopped listening to his advisers, became manic and unreasonable, and was off the rails,” Mr. Barr writes. “He surrounded himself with sycophants, including many whack jobs from outside the government, who fed him a steady diet of comforting but unsupported conspiracy theories.”

 

Throughout the book, Mr. Barr scorns the news media, accusing them of “corruption” and “active support for progressive ideology.” The political left, he writes, became radicalized during President Barack Obama’s second term. He compares its support for social justice issues to “the same kind of revolutionary and totalitarian ideas that propelled the French Revolution, the Communists of the Russian Revolution and the fascists of 20th-century Europe.”

 

Mr. Barr also denounces the inquiry by the F.B.I. and then the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, into links between Russia and Trump campaign aides in 2016. He writes that “the matter that really required investigation” was “how did the phony Russiagate scandal get going, and why did the F.B.I. leadership handle the matter in such an inexplicable and heavy-handed way?”

 

Mr. Barr rejects as “drivel” the criticism that his summary of the special counsel’s report that he issued before the report became public was distorted in a way that favored Mr. Trump. Mr. Barr insists that his description — including his declaration that Mr. Trump did not commit obstruction of justice — was “entirely accurate.”

 

In defending that conclusion, Mr. Barr writes that it was a “simple fact that the president never did anything to interfere with the special counsel’s investigation.”

 

But his book does not address any of the specific incidents that Mr. Mueller’s report laid out as raising potential obstruction-of-justice concerns, such as the fact that Mr. Trump dangled a pardon at his former campaign chairman, Paul J. Manafort, while urging Mr. Manafort not to cooperate with the inquiry.

 

In a chapter titled “Upholding Fairness, Even for Rascals,” Mr. Barr defends his handling of two other cases arising from the Mueller investigation. Mr. Barr writes that it was “reasonable” for him to overrule line prosecutors and seek a more lenient sentence for Mr. Trump’s ally Roger J. Stone Jr.

 

And addressing his decision to drop the prosecution of Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, for lying to the F.B.I. — even though Mr. Flynn had already pleaded guilty — he writes that the evidence was insufficient, the F.B.I.’s handling of the case had been “an abuse of power” and Mr. Mueller’s charges against him were not “fair.”

 

As he did while in office, Mr. Barr laments that Mr. Trump’s public comments about the Justice Department undermined his ability to do his job.

 

“Even though I was basing decisions on what I thought was right under the law and facts, if my decisions ended up the same as the president’s expressed opinion, it made it easier to attack my actions as politically motivated,” he writes.

 

Mr. Barr also describes resisting Mr. Trump’s bidding in some cases. He declined to charge the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey Jr. for allegedly leaking classified information; insisted that the administration had run out of time to add a question about citizenship to the 2020 census; and rejected Mr. Trump’s “bad” idea that he could use an executive order to end birthright citizenship for children born in the United States to undocumented immigrants.

 

Lawyers at the White House and the Justice Department had to talk Mr. Trump out of those ideas, which could be “bruising” and amounted to “eating grenades,” Mr. Barr writes.

 

On the scandal that led to Mr. Trump’s first impeachment, in which Mr. Trump withheld aid to Ukraine as leverage to try to get Ukraine’s president to announce an investigation into Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mr. Barr was scathing.

 

He calls it “another mess — this one self-inflicted and the result of abject stupidity,” a “harebrained gambit” and “idiotic beyond belief.” But while Mr. Barr describes the conversation Mr. Trump had with Ukraine’s president on the topic as “unseemly and injudicious,” he maintains that it did not rise to a “criminal offense.”

 

Similarly, Mr. Barr writes that he did not think Mr. Trump’s actions before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol — which he had condemned in a statement the day after as “orchestrating a mob to pressure Congress” and “a betrayal of his office and his supporters” — met the legal standard for the crime of incitement, even though they were “wrong.”

 

The book opens with a Dec. 1, 2020, meeting with Mr. Trump hours after Mr. Barr gave an interview contradicting the president’s claims of a stolen election, saying the Justice Department had “not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”

 

Mr. Trump was furious, he writes, accusing Mr. Barr of “pulling the rug out from under me” and saying he must “hate Trump.” After Mr. Barr says he explained why claims of various fraud were unfounded, he offered to resign and Mr. Trump slammed the table and yelled “accepted!” Mr. Trump reversed himself as Mr. Barr left the White House, but Mr. Barr stepped down before the end of the month.

 

His book expands on that theme, going through specific “fact-free claims of fraud” that Mr. Trump has put forward and explaining why the Justice Department found them baseless. He lists several reasons, for example, that claims about purportedly hacked Dominion voting machines were “absolute nonsense” and “meaningless twaddle.”

 

“The election was not ‘stolen,’” Mr. Barr writes. “Trump lost it.”

[Winstonm]

Bill Barr is the worst kind of scum: pretends to be someone else. At least Trump wore his sleaziness out in the open.

[PassedOut]

Barr calls prospect of Trump running for president again ‘dismaying,’ says GOP should ‘look forward’ to others

 

Barr, who had a famous falling-out with Trump late in his presidency, writes that Trump’s “constant bellicosity diminishes him and the office,” and that in the final months of the administration, he came to realize that “Trump cared only about one thing: himself. Country and principle took second place.”

What a disappointment! If there had been any evidence for that beforehand, Barr would never have teamed up with Trump...

[Chas_P]

I am not thinking that JB will be regarded as one of our great presidents.

Agreed.

But the previous guy was a lying scumbag that was and is an embarrassment to the nation.

Yes, Trump is a jerk. I truly hope the Republicans will pick DeSantis in 2024 (should he choose to run). But Trump is not dangerously incompetent. Biden is. (in my opinion)

[pilowsky]

Nothing has changed.

John J Mearsheimer is a rock star.

[y66]

With reform, peace, and integration into the European mainstream, Russia would be a richer, better place to be. On its current course, it’ll be the junior partner in an alliance with a China that has its own nationalist schemes.

A richer, better place for whom?

[y66]

“It was a lie,” the former attorney general William P. Barr writes early on in his new book — a “fabrication” that “was repeated and amplified in media coverage throughout the election and is still repeated.” Barr isn’t referring in this instance to Donald Trump’s insistent lie about “massive election fraud” in 2020, but to an event that happened nearly 30 years earlier, when Barr was doing his first tour as the attorney general, for President George H.W. Bush. The media misleadingly described Bush marveling at a supermarket scanner as if he had never encountered the technology before.

 

The suggestion that the first President Bush was some elitist patrician who didn’t know his way around a modern grocery store continues to rankle Barr three decades later. He parses the event in minute detail in “One Damn Thing After Another,” letting loose an extravagant pique that makes sense when you realize that being seen as out of touch is the kiss of death for establishment conservatives, especially now, when right-wing populism is ascendant.

 

Barr takes care in this book to present his childhood as more hardscrabble than a rarefied prep school education and an apartment on New York City’s Riverside Drive would have anyone believe. In Barr’s telling, it’s Democrats who are invariably the “smug elites,” while Republicans are the true defenders of “ordinary middle- and working-class Americans.”

 

“One Damn Thing After Another” is an intemperate culture-war treatise smuggled into a lawyer’s memoir: a seemingly sober recitation of events that’s periodically interrupted by seething tirades about “militant secularism” and a “Maoist” American left. He compares Trump’s opponents to “guerrillas engaged in a war to cripple a duly elected government” and calls the pandemic restrictions adopted by some states the most “onerous denial of civil liberties” in American history, second only to slavery.

 

Barr famously resigned as attorney general in December 2020, after he failed to find any evidence of substantial voter fraud, despite what he chronicles here as his assiduous efforts to “look into it.” (He calls allegations about voting machines “an idiotic theory that had no basis in reality.”) He ends his book by describing Trump’s postelection behavior as “puerile,” perhaps even “dangerous.” Still, as much as Barr was “disgusted” by the rampage on the Capitol, he’s “under no illusion about who is responsible for dividing the country, embittering our politics and weakening and demoralizing our nation,” he writes. “It is the progressive Left and their increasingly totalitarian ideals.”

 

Such eruptions go a long way toward explaining why he was willing to join the Trump administration in the first place, when the buttoned-up Barr, comfortably ensconced in retirement and the Republican old guard, didn’t quite fit the mold of those upstarts hoping to gain some capital (political or otherwise) by hitching themselves to the Trump train. (Barr had initially supported his former boss’s son, Jeb “please clap” Bush, in the primaries.) You might also wonder how Trump, an ostentatious, thrice-married reality television star who bragged about grabbing women’s genitals, could have been anything but repellent to Barr, a staunch Roman Catholic whose idea of a good time is playing the bagpipes.

 

But the two men happened to share one thing in common: a maximalist view of presidential power. “I agreed to join the besieged Trump administration as it careened toward a constitutional crisis,” Barr writes. He had already written an unsolicited memo voicing his skepticism about the Mueller investigation into the 2016 election, which Barr believed was consuming President Trump’s attention and distracting him from all the important work he would otherwise be eager to do.

 

Barr doesn’t make much of an effort in this book to counter assertions by his critics that even before reading the Mueller report he had mostly made up his mind. Barr says the investigation was “not so different from a witch hunt,” and the question of whether the Trump campaign sought to benefit from Russian interference in the election was “manufactured,” “phony,” “bogus”: “Russiagate specifically, and the resistance generally,” he writes, “were mendacious and fraudulent attempts to invalidate the legitimate election of an American President.”

 

A number of chapters are devoted to issues that Barr says are crucial to him, including “taking on big tech” and “securing religious liberty” (“the civil rights issue of our time”). A chapter titled “Bringing Justice to Violent Predators” offers Barr’s thoughts on the death penalty — he thinks it’s good, and his Justice Department rushed to execute 13 federal inmates in the seven months before Trump left office. As a point of comparison, the federal government had executed a total of four people in the preceding 60 years.

 

Barr offers an extended apologia that tries to square his position on putting people to death with his religious faith. Pope Francis’s revision of the Catholic Church’s Catechism, denouncing the death penalty as “inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person,” sends Barr into a paroxysm of hairsplitting: “The term inadmissible has no established meaning in moral theology, and is certainly too vague and indirect to be read as an attempt to extinguish this vast body of established teaching, even assuming it could be.”

 

This is a pattern in Barr’s book: He nitpicks his way to desired conclusions by carefully navigating a lawyerly path around finely drawn distinctions, all the while lobbing bomblets at anyone he defines as an enemy. “For all his urbane affect, Obama was still the left-wing agitator who had patiently steered the Democratic Party toward an illiberal, identity-obsessed progressivism,” Barr writes; no doubt actual “left-wing agitators,” who have regularly denounced Obama for centrism, would like to have a word.

 

Barr’s version of Trump, meanwhile, contains multitudes: The former president may have “an imprecise and discursive speaking style,” even a tendency for “madcap rhetoric,” but Barr also believes Trump has “a deep intuitive appreciation of the importance of religion to the health of our nation.” Barr muses that “the country would have benefited and likely seen more of the constructive, problem-solving style of government that President Trump previewed on election night,” if only he “had been met by a modicum of good faith on the other side.”

 

By “good faith” Barr is perhaps imagining something like his own generous interpretations of Trump’s behavior, which he goes to great and often tortuous lengths to rationalize in his book. When Barr learned about the consequential phone call between Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, who was then Ukraine’s President-elect, Barr said he argued for the swift release of the transcript — largely because it showed that Trump, according to Barr, had ultimately done nothing wrong on the call.

 

Yes, Barr allows, telling Zelensky that American military aid was conditional on a Ukrainian investigation of the Bidens was “foolish,” but “a quid pro quo is inherent in almost all diplomacy.” Besides, even if such an investigation into the president’s opponent would have yielded “political benefits” for Trump, it “would also arguably advance America’s anticorruption agenda,” Barr says. Making room for such intricate rhetorical contortions is partly why this book is nearly 600 pages long.

 

There are also numerous places where Barr offers what looks at first to be a blizzard of detail but nevertheless makes some strange omissions. He devotes page upon page to the question of voter fraud, which he repeatedly declares to be a real threat, with nary a word about voter suppression. He characterizes the inspector general’s report on the Mueller investigation as “damning” while neglecting to discuss that the same inspector general’s report declared that the F.B.I. had adequate reason to investigate ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. Barr also stays mum on the fact that a bipartisan report from the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee concluded the same thing.

 

By the end of “One Damn Thing After Another,” it’s clear that Barr has something else in common with Trump — a shrewd ability to recognize when certain people are no longer useful for his purposes, and a willingness to dispense with them accordingly. Barr slips in a description of Robert Mueller’s “trembling” hands and “tremulous” voice, wondering if Mueller “might have an illness” — a striking (and expedient) bit of gossip for Barr to float about an old friend. The last chapter has Barr throwing Trump under the bus, albeit gently and with the utmost decorum. Barr laments Trump’s stubborn problems of “tone,” faulting him for “needlessly” alienating “a large group of white-collar suburbanites,” and declares that it’s time to move on from the loser of the 2020 election by recovering “something like the old Reagan coalition.”

 

But Barr faces a quandary, which is to explain how Republicans can ditch Trump while keeping his fervent base. The result is like the deus ex machina moment in an ancient Greek play, when a hopeless situation is resolved by the sudden appearance of a god on a crane. “The Republicans have an impressive array of younger candidates fully capable of driving forward with MAGA’s positive agenda and cultivating greater national unity,” a wistful Barr insists. “MAGA’s positive agenda” combined with “national unity”? Until I got to that point in his book, I wouldn’t have pegged Barr as someone so thirsty for a fairy-tale ending.

[y66]

The dude abides.

[Gilithin]

Agreed.

Yes, Trump is a jerk. I truly hope the Republicans will pick DeSantis in 2024 (should he choose to run). But Trump is not dangerously incompetent. Biden is. (in my opinion)

I think the best GOP candidate for 2024 is Nikki Haley (she at least seems to live in the real world) but I would agree that the chances are that either DJT or RDS will end up being chosen.

[Chas_P]

Imagine that your country gets rid of an incompetent, corrupt, misogynistic head of government who came to power with racist rhetoric, *****ed up dealing with the pandemic of a lifetime, try a pathetic attempt at a coup after he lost the election - and your only question is "What's in it for me?"

 

Just get the f* out of BBF once and for all, we don't need a resident racist troll here. I am sure you are a nicer person in real life than on here (not difficult), so just do yourself a favour and stop it.

As previously stated, those like you Arend are really amusing to some extent and to be pitied to another extent. Anyone who disagrees with you is judged to be "racist", "misogynistic", "homophobic",

"islamophobic" or numerous other "phobics". I pity you. Truly I do. We are thousands of miles apart and our paths will never cross. But I wish you happiness. Please seek help.

[johnu]

I think the best GOP candidate for 2024 is Nikki Haley (she at least seems to live in the real world) but I would agree that the chances are that either DJT or RDS will end up being chosen.

The best QOP candidate for 2024 is old Jeff Davis who can lead the Confederate QOP'ers back to their Confederate roots. The QOP should spend all of their energy in trying to secede from the USA, and blue America should be encouraging and supporting their secession.