[rubecube]

Originally Posted by New Era

I thanked your post, mostly for the corrections on Bush43 and his administration. If it were not for Trump we would still be looking back at that group as the worst and most criminal administration is existence.

Now, to some of the other stuff. so much wrong.

"Putting refugees in cages" is such an over simplification and bad spin of what happened under the Obama administration. At the time temporary holding locations were established that used the chain link fencing, only because there was not enough space in fed facilities. That was quickly addressed and the practice all but eliminated. At no time did the Obama administration use the inhumane practices that the Trump administration has with the "cages." Just an absolute horrible false equivalency.

I guess I should have noted that I wasn't trying to say it was equivalent, just that the genesis began there. Hell, ICE was created back in 2003 and has always been a pretty garbage organization. My point was more that many of Trump's actions were him capitalizing on the groundwork laid by previous administrations.

I think one of the more telling admissions lately was Barbara Boxer saying she never would have voted in favour of creating the DHS if she had been able to envision its abuse against U.S. citizens, as if there's zero historical precedent for the U.S. taking egregious authoritarian actions against its citizens. Authoritarian policies are almost the Chekhov's Gun of U.S. history.

Another horrible contrast and comparison. FDR did what was deemed acceptable at the time, something that over time has obviously changed. It was also a response to an attack on American soil during a world war, but why would context like that matter?

It was still horrible, racist policy and it's not unreasonable to think that maybe clearer minds should have prevailed. Canada deserves the same amount of criticism for doing the same ####.

Trump contemporaneously endorsing a practice of subjugation of another nations people, at a time of peace, is clearly the same thing. Because it happened before Trump gets the pass. Amiright?

Where have I given Trump a pass on any of this? I've repeatedly said that Trump is a monster. My issue is with people treating the defeat of a Trump as return to the Garden of Eden. Trump represents the worst impulses of every American administration but he's still a product of those administrations, and removing him alone doesn't end the slide to authoritarianism that we've witnessed since at least the Bush years.

Yup, this was bad, and Obama got roasted for it. But this was an enemy combatant who was essentially working against the United States and killing other Americans in a military role. Context is much different, wouldn't you say? Obama never took out an America citizen on America soil.

There's a pretty good argument to be made that there still should have been due process, but I don't think you and I are in disagreement here.

Kent State was the National Guard.

If we're going to play the semantics game, it's the DHS in Portland and not the military.

Death penalty is actually a States Rights issue.

I'm not the one who brought it up on a federal level. My point was that every Republican president has been a fervent supporter of it.

Ghadafi was murdered by his own people.

Yeah, I walked that back. The Libya involvement was still as massive fiasco.

Wow. That's an ignorant statement. Full. Stop. Clinton was never involved in active targeting during any of the peace keeping activities.

It's not exactly fringe thinking that theorizes that Clinton's 1998 bombing of a pharmaceutical plant in Iraq was intentionally done to distract from the Lewisnky testimony. But I was wrong in that it wasn't a children's hospital. The U.S. has bombed a lot of ####. It's easy to get them confused.

I'm beginning to think that your wardrobe consists predominantly of hoodies, t-shirts, skinny jeans, and Chuck Taylors, all in a common shade of black.

I'm more of a pastel-blue guy and my feet are way too flat and wide for Chucks.