Side question: what the actual fuck was the FBI doing back when he was a candidate originally back in 2015? Because it’s an open secret orangeboi had a thing for Russia and the Russian mafia since, like, the 80s.
That’s great, but they also could have gone “yeah so we have this fucking HUGE dossier on him, specifically because of his ongoing involvement with elements of the then-Soviet - now-Russian - government, as well as many suspicious ties to Russian organized crime”
It truly is maddening how feckless our political leadership has been for fucking decades.
And neoliberalism is how it got here. I think (and I myself feel this way) that Obama getting in on “change you can believe in” and then… not changing much at all was essentially the final nail in the coffin.
A reasonably large majority of the country went from super stoked about a black candidate who was promising to meaningfully make the lives of normal people better to utterly dismayed that neither he nor anyone on the ostensible left did fucking anything to materially and meaningfully help normal people - but billionaires and corporations sure as fuck made hay the whole time.
And the other infuriating aspect is that this whole game plan of the right - yes, the overwhelming majority of the right, not just the far right - was known, visible, and predictable. It wasn’t a mystery. Political foresight would have been to realize in the early 90s, with the rise of Newt Gingrich, that this is no longer a poker game, because the right stopped playing by rational rules and norms, and just decided to go all-in on populism… and the “left” didn’t fucking care, or admit that the paradigm has massively changed.
It’s also utterly dismaying to realize that a big part of the relative political stability in the US since the end of the Cold War was based solely on the fact that the USSR was the Big Bad Adversary, and that without a common enemy, the bipolar political system we’re forced to operate in would spiral out of control.
When I think about how the Obama administration helped the common man, all I can think of is getting rid of the pre-existing condition thing. But all that did was cause insurance companies to deny treatment after you pay them instead of before…
Indeed.
Side question: what the actual fuck was the FBI doing back when he was a candidate originally back in 2015? Because it’s an open secret orangeboi had a thing for Russia and the Russian mafia since, like, the 80s.
They didn’t want to seem unfair or partisan leading up to an election.
So instead they publicly announced an investigation into Hillary Clinton a few days before the election, and then retracted it a week later…
The fascist thugs did what fascist thugs do.
To busy investigating Hilary.
Yeah, and that double standard was pretty fucking deafening
They didn’t think he was a serious candidate. By the time it was apparent he was, it was too late.
At least, that’s my entirely-too-charitable theory
That’s great, but they also could have gone “yeah so we have this fucking HUGE dossier on him, specifically because of his ongoing involvement with elements of the then-Soviet - now-Russian - government, as well as many suspicious ties to Russian organized crime”
But no - that would have been partisan.
There was a dossier, everyone just ignored it
The worries of the time are all so laughable now.
It truly is maddening how feckless our political leadership has been for fucking decades.
And neoliberalism is how it got here. I think (and I myself feel this way) that Obama getting in on “change you can believe in” and then… not changing much at all was essentially the final nail in the coffin.
A reasonably large majority of the country went from super stoked about a black candidate who was promising to meaningfully make the lives of normal people better to utterly dismayed that neither he nor anyone on the ostensible left did fucking anything to materially and meaningfully help normal people - but billionaires and corporations sure as fuck made hay the whole time.
And the other infuriating aspect is that this whole game plan of the right - yes, the overwhelming majority of the right, not just the far right - was known, visible, and predictable. It wasn’t a mystery. Political foresight would have been to realize in the early 90s, with the rise of Newt Gingrich, that this is no longer a poker game, because the right stopped playing by rational rules and norms, and just decided to go all-in on populism… and the “left” didn’t fucking care, or admit that the paradigm has massively changed.
It’s also utterly dismaying to realize that a big part of the relative political stability in the US since the end of the Cold War was based solely on the fact that the USSR was the Big Bad Adversary, and that without a common enemy, the bipolar political system we’re forced to operate in would spiral out of control.
When I think about how the Obama administration helped the common man, all I can think of is getting rid of the pre-existing condition thing. But all that did was cause insurance companies to deny treatment after you pay them instead of before…
The FBI is chiefly interested in framing people and attacking environmentalists.