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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   27038 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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So the lesson about using the system to get the political opponents has been learned, and the other side is deciding to play now.

I say normalize the office of People's Opposition to the President. If we're going to get a special prosecutor every damned time anyway and continual allegations of wrongdoing, you might as well. Seriously, from Nixon on, we are now at four out of nine Presidents with allegations of serious malfeasance that are treated seriously by at least one faction in Congress, plus additional Presidents treated as "illegitimate" along at least some lines. If the POP had existed, we presumably would have had major inquiries conducted on the extent of Reagan's involvement in various CIA schemes and Bush's approach to Iraqi intelligence. If this is just the way things are done now, let's formalize it instead of pretending that each new President is uniquely bad in some materially important way.

I agree, parliamentary systems are good.

the extent of Reagan's involvement in various CIA schemes

I was and remain of the opinion that with Contragate, Oliver North should have been shot as a traitor to the uniform.

And I'm a conservative, so that's my view on doing things that are indeed a threat to democracy.

The Trump trials are so stupid by comparison that I have to think they're vengeful partisanship. And now the Republicans are playing the same with Joe Biden. Well, thanks guys who spent four years trying to find any stick to beat the dog with when it came to Trump, instead of letting him fade back into has-been obscurity, I'm sure the nation is the better for it!

I was and remain of the opinion that with Contragate, Oliver North should have been shot as a traitor to the uniform.

And I'm a conservative, so that's my view on doing things that are indeed a threat to democracy.

More libertarian than conservative here, but I'm with you on this one.

I still find the response of Our Nation's Leaders to Iran-Contra to be intensely surreal. The Republicans IIRC thought everything was just fine, and the Democrats were mostly upset about Ollie funneling the proceeds from the arms sales to the Nicaraguan Contras, and nobody seemed to much care that US military officers had been selling US military hardware out the back door to an enemy nation.

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