I understand what you're saying and I think it's a reasonable take, I just can't fathom how there could be anyone left in America who hasn't seen enough of Trump to make up their mind one way or the other. There's just so much evidence of him being a piece of shit everywhere you look that even intentional avoidance can't work for 8 years.

Politicians rarely help the average person and voters are dumb so they listen to fascists who say they can solve all of society's problems. If the status quo sucks for you then a shake up doesn't seem like a bad thing. I'd be willing to bet that most of this would go away if moderate politicians started prioritizing regular people instead of rich donors.

If an Independent can look at how the Republican party conducts itself and still be undecided on who to vote for then they aren't an Independent, they're simply a Republican that's socially aware enough to understand that calling themselves a Republican comes with more baggage than they want to take on.

it's going to look like a smear job.

He said, ignoring that conservative "news" is exclusively smear jobs dressed up as news. If Republicans don't have to care about decorum then neither do Democrats. If only we could actually learn this lesson.

You and I both know that the DNC exploits the system they created at every opportunity, often against the wishes of a majority of voters, in order to help centrists maintain control of the party. If you want to equate a closed primary process with a national general election in order to feel better about supporting anti-democrtatic power consolidation then that is your choice to make but it isn't the same and somewhere in that brain of yours you fucking know it. That's exactly why you will say stuff like "people didn't show up in the primaries" and completely gloss over all the polling that says they would have in the general election.

I'll never understand this "centrists win elections" take either. Obama ran on a progressive platform and won handily twice in a row. Yet as soon as his 2nd term was over you guys went back to saying progressives can't win elections as if the previous 8 years were a fluke instead of a roadmap for future campaigns. That makes no fucking sense at all. Now here we are getting ready to blame everyone who doesn't want to work with literal fascists for losing this election when all you guys need to do is listen to polling and get out of the god damn way.

Psalms is arguably the least exciting book in the Bible. It's like reading through a hymnal. Well, it's not like that, it is that because it's literally a book of songs.

Are you forgetting all the primaries Sanders won early? Are you intentionally ignoring the orchestrated dropouts and back room deals that allowed the centrist wing of the party to coalesce behind Biden at the exact moment he needed them to? You must be because all you're talking about here is the great liberal paradise of South Carolina. How many EC votes did Biden win for taking SC? Oh yeah, zero because it's a red state that doesn't vote for Democrats in the general election but for some reason people like you love to point at it and pretend that a black Democrat in the South is the primary target of a DNC Presidential campaign.

Call me naive if you like but that doesn't seem like a direct threat to me. It sounds like him playing into the violent antifa caricature of a leftist they're always going on about. He's saying they're going to win peacably but are prepared to defend their liberties if the evil leftists force them to. At least I think that's how most of the people he's trying to reach with those comments would interpret them.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think guys like him have any problem with using violence as a means to achieve their goals, and this is very likely part of the plan to plant the seeds of violence in people's minds. I just don't think this is him being so blunt as to state that they want to execute political opponents outright. I could certainly be wrong about that but I don't think that will happen until they're already doing it.

Illegal and anti-democratic aren't always the same thing. You can certainly be one without the other. Though to be clear there have been allegations of outright illegal activity by the Clinton campaign and the DNC as a whole during the 2016 election, but the specifics are fuzzy in my memory and that's not what you're asking about so I won't attempt to address it further here.

Here's the first article I read through after a quick search to find a source for you. If you don't like the source I'm sure you can use the timeline and references it contains to find something from a source you prefer.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/hillary-clinton-2016-donald-trump-214428/

Here's a couple relevant snippets:

So to take [Jeb] Bush down, Clinton’s team drew up a plan to pump Trump up. Shortly after her kickoff, top aides organized a strategy call, whose agenda included a memo to the Democratic National Committee: “This memo is intended to outline the strategy and goals a potential Hillary Clinton presidential campaign would have regarding the 2016 Republican presidential field,” it read. “The variety of candidates is a positive here, and many of the lesser known can serve as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right. In this scenario, we don’t want to marginalize the more extreme candidates, but make them more ‘Pied Piper’ candidates who actually represent the mainstream of the Republican Party,” read the memo.

Eleven days after those comments about McCain, Clinton aides sought to push the plan even further: An agenda item for top aides’ message planning meeting read, “How do we prevent Bush from bettering himself/how do we maximize Trump and others?"

It's easy to make her sound like a victim when you ignore the fact that she did everything in her power to rig the DNC primaries in her favor AND propped up Trump's early campaign as much as she could. The situation we find ourselves in is certainly not exclusively her fault but she definitely deserves more of the blame than any of us do. She set the board exactly how she wanted and still couldn't win the game.

Well at least so far the Trump clones haven't been able to gain any meaningful support. Of course one could argue that's only because Trump himself is still hanging around, but it does show that for whatever reason others are having difficulty gathering and maintaining support using his tactics.

He tried to get Pence killed four years ago. We've known for at least that long that this is who Trump is. Republicans don't care.

That's fair. That didn't seem like what you were getting at but I understand that point.

State sanctioned murder of political dissidents doesn't seem like a significant additional executive power to you? I'm not convinced that's enabled by this particular ruling but that's how you're framing it and the fact that doesn't seem concerning to you is pretty wild.

You make mostly good points but its stupid to call the game dead or dying. They don't currently have a bunch of players they never expected to have in the first place. They still sold their product to those people which makes it a huge net win for them. It's a wildly successful game by any reasonable metric you can choose to evaluate it against.

I hope you're right about that but I'll be legitimately shocked if that turns out to be true to any significant degree.

There are no moderate Republicans. Anyone who calls themselves a Republican in 2024 is a fascist, whether intentionally or not makes no practical difference. They will never ever vote for a Democrat. Calling them reachable voters is so hilariously out of touch that it makes me wonder where you've been the last 8 years.

Yes I'm saying that the branch of government whose job it is to craft laws should be the one crafting laws. It's amazing you can disagree with such a basic statement in such a condescending way and not even question whether or not you're a acting like an asshole. Take your shitty attitude somewhere else.

You're assuming experts are always in charge of government agencies and I don't think that's true. Government always runs at least partially on the honor system, hoping that voters will punish those who abuse the public trust. We don't do that anymore. They abuse our trust and we reelect them anyway.

Technically their interpretation is correct, laws should be explicitly enumerated by the legislative branch which has the most accountability to voters. We're all just so desensitized to the fact that Congress is a wasteland of gridlock and special interest money that we don't even expect them to do the job of creating laws anymore. If we had a working legislative branch this would be a gentle reminder for them to be thorough and use detailed language when crafting legislation, instead it's a depressing reminder that our government quite literally cannot function without outsourcing the central function of one of the main branches.