Trump cheats at golf - the ONE and ONLY politics thread

"Did you see that Canadian anthem at the World Series ... All-Star Game? OK. Whatever. Anyway, they sang it so beautifully. I promise when I'm in the White House we are gonna change the lyrics to our anthem to include All Lives Matter! That Francis Scott Key messed up by not including that. It's true. I'm sorry but it is true. He was a loser!"

 

Does George W. Bush have dementia? That's all I could think of watching this video.

http://gawker.com/what-exactly-was-going-on-with-george-w-bush-at-the-me-1783551893

 

He got the boogie fever.

 

I know this is a boring opinion. But norms matter. We've seen the fast erosion of general political norms over the past 20 years. And we're worse off for it. Governments trade, pretty much extensively, on their legitimacy. Norms, generally, do two things. One is they keep political actors from spiraling towards a point where the government can't function (to take a recent example to the extreme, the congress could refuse to ever hear/vote on/approve a presidential court nominee. The eventual conclusion of which would be the dissolution of the judicial branch through empty seats).
The other is to maintain the legitimacy in the eyes of the populace they govern. Judicial rules are generally accepted (Andrew Jackson aside) simply because they are. Because we all have this general agreed upon notion that the judiciary is legitimate. That its rules are deserving to be followed. (The same can be said of the leadership of the President - which also gets into military norms...but dealing with all the norms that keep the American democratic experiment together would take a while). Supreme Court (and federal court) justices maintain a norm of not commenting on presidential elections because doing so trades on this legitimacy, and that's a BIG FUCKING DEAL.
Now you can (and as I read it are) argue that this is basically the continuation of a trend, just a step further down the path that's already been started by the likes of Scalia going hunting with Cheney and Bush v Gore. And you'd be right. But it's also true that every step down this path is a step that we can't get back. Because as soon as one side breaks a norm, there's no reason for the other side not to follow suit (game theory, ftw). Now that Republicans have decided that that SC nominees can't have hearings in the final year of a president's term, why would Democrats approve a Republican's nominee in a similar circumstance? They now know for sure Republicans will no longer return the favor.
But you seem fatalistic about this. And we shouldn't take a fatalistic attitude towards norms. They're the glue that holds this all together. Any one dot of glue - like SC justices not commenting on presidential races - yeah, we can survive without. But it just makes it easier to take away that next dot of glue, and the next. And again, they are, ultimately, what keep this functional.
It's not a shitty constitution that causes democracies to fail - it's because people don't respect democratic norms. Those that fail, it's the big norms that get ignored. But once you start ignoring the small norms, it's easier to start ignoring the medium norms, and then the big norms. Filibusters were rare, until they weren't (small deal). Presidential nominations were generally voted on, because the government needed to function, until they weren't (bigger). Congress would never threaten the faith and credit of the US Government to try and win policy battles, until they did (a much bigger deal).
So we should rage against each breaking of the norms, even though some have already been broken. Because this is what presidential democracies trade on. We shouldn't take them lightly, or ever give up on them.

 

Is that my signal?

 

Back on the sauce?

 

NORMS MATTER!

 

WTF? That is so goddamned embarrassing. Did he not understand the nature of the event?

Still can't believe we put that nitwit in the White House for eight years.

 

My immediate thought was he's off the wagon (again).

 

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Federal Overreach) has come a long way from his tea party mandate.

Cornyn proposes bill to make killing police a federal crime | Dallas Morning News

 

No, I specifically stated that it was people showing up at Trump rallies to cause trouble. Yes, some people got inside Trump rallies, caused disturbances and were then treated roughly by Trump supporters. But what you do not have is Trump supporters showing up at Hillary rallies or Bernie rallies and roughing up people simply for being at those rallies. It just hasn't happened.

 

Holy shit, that's a funny list.

Most of those "promises" fall along the lines of "Said he'd eat breakfast, ate breakfast, promise kept."