Assuming America exists in 20 years blah blah blah
Abso fucking lutely.
Bush was worse than Trump by a long shot, if they'll rehabilitate them they'll do it for anybody.
It's not that they think Trump is "worse", he is just a more relevant threat
Same. The camp who thinks that Afghanistan and Iraq were totally justified, but the Dems would have done them better, thinks that Dubya just wasn't smart enough.
TBF some also think that Iraq and Afghanistan were just "regrettable mistakes" or that they might have been crimes, but gee-shucks-oh-well-shrug, that's just how politics go.
And to be "fair" the orders of magnitude might have been different, but if they look too closely at the process of how the war machine ran, they might have to admit that Democratic presidents have also been war criminals. Like, if they get too uptight about "Bush's wars", then right around the corner is the fact that Obama took us from bombing two countries to continuously bombing like seven countries, in the span of a couple years. And similarly for executive authority, domestic spying, deportations, etc.
They can't afford to be too honestly critical. They just have to pretend that what's going on right now is different and exceptional, and no: of course it isn't exactly the same "lesser-evil" choice they've demanded you make (or at least accept) over and over and over again for generations!
So IMO some kind of at least vaguely rehabilitative amnesia is actually pretty necessary. It might take a slightly different form with Trump than with Dubya, but it's still going to have to be there.
Oh shit, SSJMarx is back? how have you been, man? I haven't seen you in months
I've been here, on different usernames, but ultimately I couldn't think of anything I liked more than SSJMarx.
I once got heavily downvoted when suggesting that Andrew Jackson, Nixon, Reagan or either Bush were all easily worse. I think you’re giving them too much credit.
Every slave owner president is worse than Trump as well but I'd be like speaking to a wall to libs
Not quite "ownership", but reminder that Bill Clinton (and almost-president Hillary Clinton) used prison slave labor in the Arkansas governor's mansion, and enjoyed it quite thoroughly according to Hillary's own writing....
and enjoyed it quite thoroughly according to Hillary's own writing....
Do you have the text where she writes this?
Nathan Robinson wrote about it. He quotes directly from her book It Takes a Village:
Clinton was, however, generous enough to allow inmates from Arkansas prisons to work as unpaid servants in the Governor’s Mansion. In It Takes a Village, Hillary Clinton writes that the residence was staffed with “African-American men in their thirties,” since “using prison labor at the governor’s mansion was a longstanding tradition, which kept down costs.” It is unclear just how longstanding the tradition of having chained black laborers brought to work as maids and gardeners had been. But one has no doubt that as the white residents of a mansion staffed with unpaid blacks, the Clintons were continuing a certain historic Southern practice. (Hillary Clinton did note, however, that she and Bill were sure not to show undue lenience to the sla…servants, writing that “[w]e enforced rules strictly and sent back to prison any inmate who broke a rule.”
See Current Affairs: The Clintons Had Slaves.
I read about it more extensively somewhere else, and I'll see if I can find it. There was a place where she was also quoted as talking about loving the murderers especially, because they were allegedly even more docile than people who had committed less-violent offenses.
were these prisoners all Black? I know Arkansas jails aren't 100% Black lol
Like, it’s hardly even fair to compare any president pre WW1 to the ones after, the ones before are sooooooo much more evil except maybe Lincoln
I mean the handsome general era was not good but those guys did at least serve the union, more than can be said for Woody who was a full lost causer
"They were a product of their time."
20 years later
"Trump was a product of his time."
You'd think every president who literally owned slaves would be worse, and yet liberals surprise us.
hard to say because bush never did an insurrection. Could end up with a reputation more like nixon.
hope america doesnt exist in 20 years though
bush never did an insurrection
The virgin January 6th versus the hanging Chad
Bush actually did steal an election in front of go's and anybody, the dems just decided to let him do it because decorum.
I'm honestly surprised liberals didn't let Trump be president after Jan 6 to "help the country move forward"
bush never did an insurrection
he doesn't know about the Brooks Brothers riot
also Trump didn't do an insurrection, he did a parliamentary coup and threatened Pence with a riot that wanted to kill him if he backed out.
No. He was extremely crass and showed open disdain for the democratic institutions of the country. Dems aren't going to rehabilitate someone who breaks kayfabe about American democracy.
I mean Bush actually carried out a coup in Florida in 2000 so idk. Was it just more respectable because the people who stopped the vote counting were in suits?
Yeah, but the Bush coup was done through the "proper" channels, rather than through a bunch of yahoos who took a shit in a trashcan and tazed their balls.
Roger stone got a bunch of polo wearing douchebags to go into where the votes were being counted and cause a recession until they stopped counting and gave up.
Eh, the Bush one did have the brooks brothers riot, but it was much easier to sweep under the rug
True, but his argument was more directly that he won and this was constitutional. Trump's followers also thought they were doing something legal, and stopping a fake election, but they fumbled hard. Brooks Brothers was to cement the votes putting Bush ahead, thus he didn't challenge the entire election. The norms could be followed so far as libs are concerned
No, I don’t think so.
Bush’s “rehabilitation” is based on Americans’ relationship to the invasion of Iraq. At the outset, most Americans supported the invasion, over the years, as victory wasn’t exactly swift and decisive, most Americans turned against the war and Bush, by extension.
But Americans don’t actually understand why the invasion was evil. They just know “Iraq war bad”. If you could do a Vulcan mind meld on them, what you probably discover is most Americans eventually turned against the war for reasons like “we didn’t win right away so why are we there?” and “everyone around me is against it now too”.
So by not being tethered to any principled anti-imperialist or anti-war stance, over time Americans have really stopped caring about Iraq - and Americans in general don’t give a shit if their military kills a million people in their name on a good day. Since the Iraq war no longer carries any significance for Americans, their reasons for disliking Bush kinda go away too. They can’t remember why they didn’t like Bush. So they see him painting pictures of dogs and sharing candy, and that’s the only thing that sticks in their brains. The same dynamics just aren’t there for Trump, totally different situation.
Btw I don’t agree that W has been rehabilitated by liberals at large. I know plenty of them IRL that still hate W. I think it’s more an “independent” or centrist thing, or libs on Reddit which is no way indicative of real life.
I kind of lean this way
W does get more points from people as well because of Cheney; it was very easy to look in on that admin and immediately assume that Cheney was actually running things, as if that should absolve Bush of things
The argument I always have with the libs in my life is when I say that I think Bush did more harm/was "worse" than Trump. The ones who think critically at all usually tepidly agree when I bring up just how many more deaths Bush is directly responsible for, but the ones who are lost in that culture war sauce just continue lamenting Trump's killing of our precious norms and respect for the way things are done.
Bush’s “rehabilitation” is based on Americans’ relationship to the invasion of Iraq. At the outset, most Americans supported the invasion, over the years, as victory wasn’t exactly swift and decisive, most Americans turned against the war and Bush, by extension.
The political class at that time blamed everything on Cheney and Rumsfeld as if Dubya wasn't their boss. It was more like people turning against the war, and Cheney and Rumsfeld by extension and Dubya by extension extension.
In 20 years all politics will be done by AI and the Blue AI will be all about reaching across the aisle while the Red AI (codename: Benito Franco Hitler) is writing and putting forth thousands of bills per minute with most of them trying to legalize enslaving everyone outside of the I-M253 haplogroup
Me waking up in 20 years to hear on the news that the us constitution has been replaced with this image
Show
Not even the document in the image, just that image
Haplogroup R1b is probably the one they'd pick honestly. Turbocrackers, and it excludes eastern european.
yea, i think when he dies they'll start scolding people for celebrating and take the "moral highground" by denouncing anyone saying a dead person could have done bad things
"Welcome to the resistance, Trump!"
Sorry, just practicing for ten years down the line when God Emperor DeSantis and Vice President AI Hitler are in charge.
I don't think they'd rehabilitate him to the extent that Bush has been, but I think that also depends on what the Dem overlords decide. I don't think people would have been as fond of Bush as they are now if not for the Obamas doing their best to help him look like the nicest war criminal you'd ever meet.
He was our first bit president. Just gaffe after gaffe. Remember covfefe? Hilarious.
Covfefe is where the timeline split. Those in the fefe universe know it as the night Trump died on the toilet tweeting
That's a really good question. I don't remember libs having the level of derangement they have over Trump with Bush, so it's hard to say, they really hate the guy but not as much as they hate leftists tho.
People weren't as online back then yet, but those libs that were, did. While everything was going on with Bush and Iraq, he also had a lot of the evangelical political activity that resulted in the new atheists as backlash.
Mother Jones, Crooks and Liars, and Daily Kos were just frothing nonstop for the last 4 years of
Yeah, DailyKos is the one that really pops out in my mind. And it's not even like they were wrong... They just stopped giving a shit about a lot of stuff when Obama took over.
Daily Kos and C&L both had that liberal brainrot wherein they call out the worst excesses of the bourgeoisie under capitalism, but never once point out that the capitalist system is the root of the problem. Terminal Jon Stewart brain.
Yeah, back then people weren't blaming capitalism yet. Now they don't because they're libs.
Definitely. I can remember the democrats starting this shit with Romney in 2012, even though he is arguably more milquetoast than some democrats. I’ve also seen random libs on tiktok (judge all you like) criticizing Nikki Haley, and I’m like, who the fuck cares, this doesn’t matter, etcetera. I think it comes from the media’s need to make everything into a crisis in order to attract attention but also the contradictions in the ruling class are approaching a point of rupture. Like the south still would have seceded even if Jefferson Davis had died before the actual secession took place.
I actually don't think so.
Trump is too crass, undignified, and the cult of personality he formed around him is too grotesque and embarrassing. He's too aesthetically distasteful to Libs for them to ever embrace him.
Well ignoring the fact that the US won't exist in 20 years:
Libs of the future (like the next 4 years or so) could absolutely end up rehabilitating Trump. Imagine a world where Biden wins again, a bunch of rural mostly cracker states withdraw from the union, and Trump dies before the secession happens
libs would jump at the chance to post-mortem idolize Trump as the crazy guy who just wanted to kick out some Mexicans, compared to the lunatic wignats running the Texas-Florida corridor in 2028.
I'm pretty sure Libs actually think he's worse
nailed it
is the menu.
