President Donald Trump

Oops....sorry. I didn't pick up on the sarcasm.

Different times.

Impeachment obviously is possible, if not probable, for all future presidents. But conviction by a 2/3 majority in the Senate is hard to imagine unless one party or the other had very close to a 2/3 majority of the Senate when the vote happened. If Watergate happened now, there is a 0% chance that the president would be convicted in the Senate.

I think he is against due process for murderers and other evil people.

Unfortunately, the way due process works, either everyone has it or no-one has it. If some quality disqualifies you from due process, then the government can simply accuse any person of holding that quality to strip them of legal protections.

The slippery slopes are incredibly slippery. Perhaps the only three interesting debates in this regard are emergency rights, acts of terrorism and acts of treason. "Western" response to terrorism for the last 25 years is also an excellent example of how quickly you can descend into authoritarian territory once you start removing guardrails.

I agree with all of this.

I was answering Bored500's broader claim.

The two Trump impeachments were for things everyone would agree warrent removal from iffice before they happened. The Ukraine care was mixing official powers of the office of the presidency with purely personal political goals on the individual occupying the office. Asking for a corrupt investigation announcement into a US citizen in secret with no coordination with congress.....James Madison would say yeah that's why impeachment and removal of presidents is in the constitution. And the 2nd was interfering with a coequal branch of government, again 200 years of writing on why that's not allowed. Both times the arguments that it was ok were post hoc after the fact designed only to not convict Trump. It's easy to imagine new after the fact arguments for no matter what a president may do in the future.

this guy gets it 😀

Agreed.

Anybody who calls you a Trumper for sure suffers from TDS.

This is an alluring position for people who fancy themselves to be internet smart guys because no other position allows you to feel superior to such a broad range of people.

i've always felt this way - my senior thesis in college was that if you stripped him of his party and name recognition and just looked purely at his policies, that W was a garden variety democrat if you ignored the third rail issues and identity politics

for my asian studies minor i had to write another thesis and that was that tibetans were far better off under chinese rule than the theocratic dictatorship they lived in previously which built zero infrastructure such as roads/schools/hospitals and had legal slavery

most wealthy tibetan families had skull cups which were procured from their deceased slaves

they are marketed today as "holy" things lol

overwhelming majority were the simple variety you find in the middle top - it's the gold plated ones which rise to the top on search results though

living in tibet pre communist revolution was one of the worst possible outcomes in the planet if you weren't part of the ruling theocracy - big reason why it fell with little to no resistance despite such natural defensive advantages they had

most of the "free tibet" movement is the result of the CIA, which is all declassified now - they basically took the exiled ruling class and said "hey, don't talk about wanting your slaves back, instead talk about the zen ideals of your religion and go to college campuses performing sand art - that'll win them over"

we were also paying the dalai lama 180k per year dating back to 1964 - that is the equivalent of giving him 1.8million a year today

presenting that stuff on stage was wild - given that we'd recently invaded iraq, the closing argument was that it was 100x worse to be a tibetan under the dalai lama than living under saddam

So basically just ignore half his platform and he’s a democrat? I mean I’m basically a flower if you ignore all the parts that make me an animal.

Makes sense.

W wrote the forward to Marvin Olasky's book Compassionate Conservatism.

'No Child Left Behind' another good example.

Quite so!

If you want to win the nomination you have to accept certain things that are near and dear to your party base.

I suspect the only reason Trump became pro-life is so he would have a chance to get the GOP nomination in 2016.

Similarly, no pro-lifer would have any chance of getting the Democrat nomination even if they checked the right boxes on everything else.

It's called politics.*

* 'American Style'

*Pro-life-pre-birth, of course. No handouts for babies, just for corporations.

Pretty sure No Child Left Behind was for children. I could be wrong, though.

Pretty sure No Child Left Behind has been a ****ing disaster for children and the education system as a whole. I could be wrong, but I’m definitely not.

I suspect you're right.

I was using that as an example of a policy from a pro-life President that was at least putatively pro-child.

Whether someone thinks Republicans and Democrats are mostly the same on policy issues is a separate issue from whether people dislike Trump and liberals for the same reason.

Neither issue really goes to the point of my post, which was that people who oppose everything often do so because it makes them feel superior and feeds their ego.

Lastly, whether Democrats and Republicans were mostly the same on policy in the era of W doesn't answer the question of whether they are mostly the same now. As a matter of fact, they were not the same then or now imo, but they almost certainly were closer to the same in the era of W than they are now.

Sure, but CRD was referring to Rick, not to himself. 😆

If it wasn't for the leprosy, you'd be quite photogenic.

no, this wasn't what you said

this was what you said - specifically highlighting it as an internet thing the same way we all suspect mong is far meaker and quieter irl than he is online - that is if he's not the elite troll i suspect him to be and truly genuine

hence my point, that i've always been a bit contrarian because i don't see the need to "get behind a team" the way most people do - you'll see most criticism of certain people comes with excuses for the other - ie just look at most politics posters here - they'll happily look the other way or even do the mental gymnastics of defending something from someone on their own team that they otherwise incessantly attack if it came from the other side

i'm not like that, i don't want to get behind team douche or turd sandwich - it's primarily why i became a polisci major because i found all that stuff fascinating, noam chomsky was why i chose to study that field

and... it's not just some ego stroking persona - these are valid and well researched beliefs that a panel of professors at a highly selective college were onboard with and defended on stage publicly by myself

but mostly, i think that it's really unfair of you to take a pretty rationale viewpoint of "everything sucks" and drum it down to some jerkoff ego stroking exercise - if you come over to my house and i offer you some moldy cheese or rotten apples - i wouldn't just whimsically announce that you were doing it to appear to be an intellectual

we've objectively put forward absolute trash candidates since obama and there's no way you can rationally claim that anyone who's run since him was among our best and brightest

So you 'studied' politics and still became a far righter, sounds like a lot of wasted time..

I didn't mean that that it was a faux internet personality. I meant that people who parade their "I'm a smart guy so I'm against everything" views on the internet tend to get a fair bit of ego gratification from holding those views. I didn't mean to suggest that they were merely trolling.

Mindlessly (or even consistently) supporting a "team" isn't the only alternative to being contrarian.

I made my general comment before you mentioned your undergraduate thesis, and my point about the relationship between contrarianism and ego had nothing to do with your thesis. I disagree with the conclusion of your thesis to some degree, but I don't regard it as necessarily contrarian. Also, who cares? It's an undergraduate thesis. You have to write about something, even if the argument is far from bulletproof. And doing well on your thesis isn't necessarily an indication that a panel of professors shared your views. It's mostly an indication that you put in the time, wrote the thesis clearly, and supported your thesis with the best arguments available. Professors at both the undergraduate and graduate level give good grades to social science work that they don't necessarily agree with all the time.

Also, I never said that ego gratification was the sole motivation for habitual contrarians. Human beings are complicated. We usually hold our views for multiple reasons -- some better than others. I am speculating that reflexive contrarians (and conspiracy theorists, which are subset of reflexive contrarians) have a stronger urge to service their own egos than people who are less dogmatic.

If "we" haven't put forth decent candidates since Obama it's because "we" are collectively becoming stupider and more horrible. No rational human could deduce any other reason for deciding a lying conman rapist criminal should be our leader.