President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

I'm just trying to imagine YankeeFan being similarly outraged if an article had been written about Hillary Clinton, I don't know, decades before expressing admiration for Pol Pot's writing style.

 

I came to Texas by way of the Palmetto State.

 

We're at a moment in time when the president of the United States is currying support of white supremacists, trying to undermine an independent investigation into his administration's collusion with Russia and playing stupid nuclear brinkmanship games with the second-craziest motherfucker running a country, so forgive me if I don't get terribly exercised over the commentary of an obscure state legislator, the heritage of Elizabeth Warren or the slandering of Arnold Schwarznegger.

 

But does your sailboat have a palmetto painted on it?

 

Well, that one did kind of piss me off.

 

how dare you focus on the ball. Morons like @YankeeFan need us to be distracted.

 

I always assume he got picked last for Propaganda Dodgeball, whether by the Russians or just the run of the mill wingnut conplex. After all the prestigious assignments got handed out, he was left to try and convert a bunch of crusty, sarcastic sports writers. It's the propaganda equivalent of KP duty in Greenland.

 

From a sheer, "Don't hate the player, hate the game," aspect, I was in slight awe when I checked in here last night to see everyone arguing about Elizabeth Warren's ancestry.

 

I didn't read your original post closely enough. Agreed with this.

While I agree with all five of these sentences, I'm not sure many people - outside of white nationalists/supremacists/Nazis - that would disagree with the first four sentences.

Of course it's nuanced, thorny, multi-dimensional and complicated. All good words.

But Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow wasn't written with Donald Trump in mind. Frankly, it's about all the politicians who have the savvy to nuance the conversation yet take actions that Alexander finds systemically racist. It's about Bill "I Feel Your Pain" Clinton, who fought for the 1994 Crime Bill.

Here's what Alexander wrote in an essay about the Clintons during the 2016 primary:

On the campaign trail, Bill Clinton made the economy his top priority and argued persuasively that conservatives were using race to divide the nation and divert attention from the failed economy. In practice, however, he capitulated entirely to the right-wing backlash against the civil-rights movement and embraced former president Ronald Reagan’s agenda on race, crime, welfare, and taxes—ultimately doing more harm to black communities than Reagan ever did.

Here's what Jack Brewer said just after the election about why Clinton failed to win the black vote.

As CNN contributor Van Jones and others so eloquently displayed in the Netflix documentary The 13th, Former President Bill Clinton's crime bill resulted in more blacks being sent to prison for non-violent crimes than during any other president's administration in our nation's history. Not only did he enforce and promote mass incarceration at that time, he went on to stand behind these policies for almost 20 years. If there is one thing that has stripped underserved black communities of opportunity, it is the unwarranted incarnation of non-violent black men and women that has left hundreds of thousands of families without their fathers or mothers.

and

When I finally got into the ballot booth and checked away at local, state and national Democrats on my ballot, I chose a different route for president. I voted for the hundreds of thousands and black non-violent criminals incarcerated as a result of the mandatory minimums. I voted for a more transparent system of deploying aid to underserved countries. I voted for the dream of seeing black millennial and general unemployment rates reach the levels of other races in America. I voted for the hope that entitlements will put accountability measures in place in order to keep low income black parents involved in their kids education as well as help spur job creation over well fare in some cases. I voted for a hope of making black America great again too. I voted for an end of 30 years of establishment rule in America.

I voted for President Donald Trump, with hopes that God frees his mind of the bias and division long enough to do great things for blacks and all the citizens of our great nation.

In short: The narrative among some black Americans is that Bill and Hilary Clinton are part of a systemically racist America.

An embedded irony: When liberals on Twitter rightly mocked Trump's nightmarish vision of a criminal America by pointing out crime rates are way down, they fail to point out that the numbers point, very clearly, to the crime control bills passed in the 1990s. There's a literal mountain peak in the mid-1990s, sloping sharply down after the crime bill passed.

Yeah, it's thorny, when it's quite possible that Trump is president precisely because black Americans in key states stayed home because Clinton couldn't pass a racial litmus test.

 

YF just presented five links, none of which really supports his claim. There are some vague references to people having a problem with Schwarzenegger and there are mentions of the reasons behind them, but none of the pieces accuses him of being a Nazi and they don't quote anybody calling him a Nazi.

The Slate piece does not accuse him of being a Nazi. In fact, it states the opposite. It dismisses the story about a quote praising Hitler during the filming of "Pumping Iron" as "foolish," and paints his refusal to denounce Kurt Waldheim as a political decision, part because there were rumors that he might want to run for office in Austria, where he was still a citizen, and part because of the family connection.

To be clear, pointing out that politically Schwarzenegger has a "Nazi problem" is not even close to the same thing as calling him a Nazi. There were reports of him praising Hitler in the '70s and there was an issue with Wilhelm. Also, Schwarzenegger's father was a Nazi. He applied for membership in the Nazi Party and was accepted. That is a fact.

Once again, YF presents a link that doesn't support his point. Maybe he thought we wouldn't notice. Maybe he didn't read it carefully enough. Either way, the link doesn't fit his argument. None of them does.

The fourth link also defends Schwarzenegger rather than accusing him.

The Daily News piece is shit, but it doesn't accuse Schwarzenegger of being a Nazi. It does accuse him of lying about saying something positive about Hitler back in the '70s.

The Daily Mail article from 2012 also fails to include an accusation of Schwarzenegger being a Nazi, again focusing on the lie during his campaign for governor. He said something stupid in the '70s, especially foolish for the son of a Nazi, but I don't see what YF claims here.

The last link simply exposes that Schwarzenegger's father was a Nazi.

So that makes five attempts to support the claim by YF, all of them failures.

 

Wait a minute, now, I'll own that, but it was in response to one of those "These are all the things Trump has done that are monstrous!" lists. I had/have problems with the way that one's classified, partly because I don't share that take on it, but also given all the other grotesque shit Trump has said/pulled. Anybody who thinks I was pulling some misdirection ploy there is sadly mistaken.

 

Plus when there's one (official) politics thread, it's going to involve other politicians, even with the Black Hole President around.