President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

An "untold story" which everybody knew goddamn well the day it happened.

See also Team Nixon's October treason in 1968, which cost about 20,000 American lives and probably a million or more civilians in Nam, Cambodia and Laos.

President Humphrey would have gotten out of VN within another year or so; he didn't owe the Pentagon blood and guts brigade anything. Yes, it would have been messy and embarassing and shambolic; who knows, US forces might have skeddaddled out of Saigon in a panic in helicopter fire drills. But we would have been out in 1971 0r 72, not 1974 or 75.

Even then, the accusation was the confession.

And once again notice the GOP framing: as they tell it, the Dems "manipulating events" to bring about outcomes pleasing to the voters by definition is a devious unfair surprise. The very idea Carter might get the hostages released in fall 1980 was considered something shameful.

 

Of course it happened. Nixon torpedoed the Paris Peace Talks in late Oct., 1968 when they were on the verge of a settlement, by convincing the South Vietnamese government it would get better terms under him. And the war dragged on for four more years.

 

It’s a bad day for false equivalencies on this thread.

 

Damn

 

The Team Reagan party line was, whisper whisper ... that Ronnie Raygun had told the Ayahtollah and the other freaks that the hostages were to be released by sundown Inauguration Day, or he was turning Tehran into glass. (Maybe while the hostages were still sitting there.) Amazingly enough, they were indeed released.

However in the middle of all this rough tough Clint Eastwood cowboy talk, Team Reagan decided to send Ollie North over and trade the Iranians billions in arms for the hostages. They didn't get around to mentioning that.

 

Totally agree. Trump lost in a near-landslide in 2020. He's lost a lot of Republican voters since then who are flat-out tired of the shitshows. He certainly hasn't gained any new voters (and probably lost more than a few who died of COVID, because, you know, they drank bleach). He got a lot of Dem votes in 2016 who couldn't bring themselves to vote for Hillary or sat the election out but those people turned back out for Biden, they'll be back in huge numbers in 2024 and Biden will get a huge majority of the youth vote who turned 21 since 2021. If Trump gets the nomination, the Dem turnout on a national scale will replicate the Dem turnout that showed up in Pennsylvania, Arizona and Georgia to beat MAGA candidates for the Senate and governorships.

This idea that indictments will help him at the polls is ridiculous. It will help him financially. He will grift off this and rob more of the yokels blind. Sadly, it may even foment more violence but I think they'll find the New York Cops aren't the U.S. Capitol cops.

 

For every young person who comes of voting age, a 39-year-old turns 40 and starts becoming more conservative.

 

yeah but for every one of those, five over the age of 50 die of COVID

 

True. But there’s no actual conservative running against Biden in 2024, just Trump or DeSantis.

Every actual conservative I knew in my life is dead, replaced by neo-cons, theocrats or populists who dabble in Confederate cosplay while living in the North.

My parents are actual conservatives, I suppose. But they’re so principled/arrogant that neither has ever voted.

I mean, I mock the George Will type, but I can’t tell you the last time I saw one of him in the wild. I came across them doing my job usually in recent years in small town government. They ran school boards and were on village councils, usually. Or small business owners. Budget-conscious, but civic-minded people. But just RINOs to the Republican base now.

 

“The same person you hired to inspect your home and told you he found a family of raccoons living in the walls has attempted to remove the raccoons from the walls.This is outrageous. The inspectors, and their varmin-catching allies, have done a thing never seen before. We should give the raccoons— who, granted, chewed through all the wiring and nearly burned the house down in January— more power.”