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Taking this analogy more literally, none of them faced the sort of ultimatum that Caesar did. They weren't seen as overly popular and powerful and thus a danger to the status quo in and of themselves if they returned to the public sphere.
They enjoyed the mutually agreeable reassurance that if they gracefully retire they can live out their days in ease.
Trump's Rubicon moment was probably in the vein of "If you keep up this election denialism and run again we'll burn down your entire life." Maybe he sincerely truly believed that the election was stolen from him, or he just really hates losing, or he does legitimately think he's uniquely qualified to get the country back on track, but for whatever reason he called that bluff and then survived the onslaught. Where's that leave him now?
Very curious too. How much of the coalition is genuinely tied into Trump the man. There's some who buy into "MAGA" as a broader idea, or "America First," but if Trump does die or, hell, even retires and endorses a successor, what portion of the current GOP will just stop participating for want of an inspiring leader?
Vance is positioned as a legitimate successor, but Trump could throw him under a bus too before going out. Succession fights get ugly. And a decent number of people, on both sides of the aisle, have their careers/livelihoods pinned on Trump's activities and they'll have to re-align quickly if they can't hook on to his train any longer.
I was a pretty early adopter for Trump, and my thought process went something along the lines of "There's no way the usual gang of Republican candidates are going to be anything other than (leftist-overrun) Politics As Usual, what I want is someone who'll tear up the floorboards and burn out the shit down to the foundation. Who's got the moxie to do it and the money to not be bought away from it? Trump's run before, I've kinda laughed at him running for years, but he's kinda my best bet. Plus shitposting a president into power would be an even better prank than putting dear old mootykins on top of the Time 100 poll, and it'd be a great kick of the tires to see if it's possible to get a president that isn't in The Usual Gang Of D/R Career Candidates."
So, at least for me, it's not that it's Trump the man, it's that it's /ourguy/. Which includes Vance, Elon (and I was not expecting that 12 years ago), DeSantis somewhat, and the people that are willing to play ball. Which does include some of the members of The Usual Gang, but I can work with that.
Hilariously, if you ascribe Trump's victory in 2016 in some major part to 4chan's initial interest in and support of his campaign, Moot was, in fact, the most influential person of 2009... it just wouldn't become clear why for a bit longer.
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See also how the dems started to gargle Bush's balls for some unknown to me reason that one time.
Seven years ago, I saved this @JTarrou comment, for the purpose of remembering to monitor future developments:
I'd say that Obama is probably still well-regarded, possibly having something to do with some people thinking that he was pulling the strings during the Biden Administration. I'll be interested to watch his future trajectory as years continue to pass, but I do think it might be hard for people who lean left to say much that is negative about the first black president. I suppose I've heard some criticisms from the left that he "was a Republican" in terms of his national security policies, but I certainly don't think I've seen him go through a "corrupt liar" phase. At least not as of yet.
The Republican one seems to me to have the ring of truth to it, but this one:
does not.
The Dems were fortunate to have two very popular, charismatic presidents in Clinton and Obama, but I don’t think anyone would use terms like “Star Trek Jesus” when talking about Biden or Carter. Likewise, I’ve never heard anyone say anything remotely bad about Carter as a person or call him a Republican in disguise. Before that you’ve got LBJ (a charming scoundrel, but no Republican), JFK (a different type of charming scoundrel, still deified by Democrats today), Truman (who’s too forgettable to engender any strong feelings one way or the other), and FDR (who is of course the OG Star Trek Jesus).
Which is odd, considering that JFK's main political policies were cutting taxes on the rich, beefing up military spending based on lies, and bungling regime-change adventurism.
Contrastingly, JFK's main rival, Richard Nixon, re-instituted wage and price controls and founded the EPA.
Ah, but he was sexy and had lots of sex. Women wanted him, and men wanted to be him.
One man once died
but did you know before that he could read all our minds
he was the US Adam with Jack the wife
he was a hyper-charismatic telepathical knight
Jaaaaay-ehehey Ef Kaaaay....
If that song lives in my head from now on whenever I hear JFK, I'm blaming you.
if you're not familiar with the Professor Brothers, I do recommend them. They're a goldmine of old-school internet humor.
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How would we prove if Republican presidents have in fact been getting worse by this metric? The comment kinda only applies if there isn't a trend.
That's a fair point, but I think the pure contempt with which I remember people speaking about Bush, compared with the number of times I've heard similar people point to him as a surprisingly human decent dude in the past 10 years makes me really skeptical. If he was truly so awful back then, he wouldn't be forgiven and nostolgized so easily, even if someone worse came along, at least not by an intellectually honest person.
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I don't think Biden ever had the "Jesus with Sprinkles" phase?
Maybe Biden was never truly president in anything more than a ceremonial sense, and was essentially understood consiously or not, as simply giving executive power back to the administrative state that the Obama administration installed.
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The going joke is always the "strange newfound respect" for someone that they had maligned as hitleresque before.
I am just barely old enough to remember how vicious the attacks on Bush II were (and hell, I think some was justifiable!), but hey, the guy paints now, how endearing!
Even fuckin' CHENEY gets a pass now. Probably helps that his daughter is quite Anti-Trump (which could be a bit of a tell, no?)
And I do truly believe that even Trump will be seen with some level of nostalgia once he's gone.
Seems pretty natural to think that 'man in office' is bad and 'man out of office' is decent. I mean, it was never about a judgement of innate evilness. Once you're president the judgements on you are also about the machine you stand atop of and how your personal sensibility interacts with the forces flowing through the country and world.
I actually think it's a good lesson to learn that psycho and even genocidal world leaders could be generally okay to hang out with absent their official role, and therefore not very surprising that opinions on them alter later. Just like one can be charismatic not as a result of your innate characteristics but because of your position in a society (see Randall Collins for details).
It's being in power that magnifies flaws, eccentricities or even charming character traits into problems for others.
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If it is any consolation, I was perhaps 16 in 2001 and now that I am 40 I can say that my anger at W has solidified rather than evaporated. For me he will always be the president who made torture official US policy and managed to start not one but two large scale wars which the US ultimately lost. His stupid stunt on that aircraft carrier. Mission accomplished my ass. From US-internal perspective, he was mostly fine, but his foreign policy was quite the disaster, and Trump will be hard-pressed to cause a similar loss of utility even if he decides to invade Greenland.
He was and is an idiot and the people who caused these wars went on to become the only faction that matters in foreign policy circles,with the Ukraine war being their crowning achievement.
Their crowning achievement is something Russia did?
Russia didn't use false flag attacks to stage a coup in Ukraine, disenfranchise their substantial Russian minority and started a civil war.
Ukrainian nationalists weren't getting support & cover from Russians.
Russia started the war with the invasion of Crimea (an action which, all claims to contrary, involved clashes between Russian and Ukrainian forces and thus clearly constitutes an offensive invasion of a sovereign state's territory), and the war was then escalated with the filibuster action in Eastern Ukraine by Strelkov and co, without which the protests in Eastern Ukraine would in all likelihood not have escalated to the status of military action.
Toppling a duly elected and acceptable government by force to replace it with a hostile one, to get a strategic edge is an act of war. The issue is that Russians aren't Hajnali liberals with their cuck fetish of getting shafted due to the fear of being seen as improper.
Should I post the recently closed Ukrainian court case about the Maidan snipers? Looks like a lot of people who were shot in the back by right sector guys adding heat to the confrontation did not appreciate their promotion to martyrs yo revolution, and talked.
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That's about the sum of it.
Domestically he did introduce a lot of programs for spying and policing that I CONTINUE to disagree with, but foreign policy was, as you say, disastrous, and while I think Obama had a horrible foreign policy record as well, its hard to quantify just how much damage the warmongering did in sheer human lives cost on top of the economics of it. I look back and I cannot think of a SINGULAR positive thing that came out of it.
Okay, we unseated Hussein, but that led to the rise of ISIS (man, haven't thought about them in a while) and a general upswell of sectarian violence in the region. And they can barely hold their official government together. I genuinely appreciate that Trump made his campaign to squash ISIS as limited in scope as he did. EVERY instinct in me assumed he's put boots on the ground and pull us into another boondoggle because that seemed to be SOP by that point.
The Taliban instantly taking back Afghanistan was quite the cherry on top.
If it wasn't for the destruction of libya and the spurning of Erdogan I wouldn't think the current "migrant crisis" would have happened in the EU quite the way it did, with that no rise of nationalistic parties either. They really fucked up the internationalist global consensus they had going on.
Not in the way it did, but easily in a recognizably similar way.
The Arab Spring revealed systemic issues that were underway well before 9-11, and which would have remained primed for violent escalation even without the American invasion of Iraq. People like to focus on how ISIS had an Iraq power base, but are less inclined to note the series of uprisings against the Assad dynasty or Saddam regime, or how the fruitseller in Tunisia who figuratively and literally lit the match was responding to bog-standard petty tyrants common across the region. Names and places would have changed, but the Middle East would still be a tinder box primed to start major- or even larger- humanitarian crisis. Iraq-Iran alone could light Syria in a different way, if an fruit-seller riot spreading to Iraq led to crackdown on the Shia majority when the Iranian paramilitary capability is already present across the region.
In turn, nothing about the Arab Spring divergences would have really changed the African inflows, or the Russian incentive to use humanitarian border rushes via Belarus, or so on. Deviations might change election cycles, but not fundamental drivers.
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