A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Quote:I could admit that I'm not sure Trump really understands enough to "substantially lie"
Originally posted by 1kiki:
If people believe that Trump is substantially lying about something so easy to uncover, it has the potential to flip people who are merely giving him a pass, though it won't change the minds of true fans.
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Quote:I could admit that I'm not sure Trump really understands enough to "substantially lie"
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
If people believe that Trump is substantially lying about something so easy to uncover, it has the potential to flip people who are merely giving him a pass, though it won't change the minds of true fans.
Are you familiar with the concept of 'bad faith'? Hiding the truth from oneself. Intentional deceit of others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_faith
Budgets, Bad Faith and ‘Balance’
Paul Krugman FEB. 15, 2018
www.nytimes.com/2018/02/15/opinion/republicans-bad-faith-krugman.html
Over the past couple of months Republicans have passed or proposed three big budget initiatives. First, they enacted a springtime-for-plutocrats tax cut that will shower huge benefits on the wealthy while offering a few crumbs for ordinary families — crumbs that will be snatched away after a few years, so that it ends up becoming a middle-class tax hike. Then they signed on to a what-me-worry budget deal that will blow up the budget deficit to levels never before seen except during wars or severe recessions. Finally, the Trump administration released a surpassingly vicious budget proposal that would punish not just the vulnerable but also most working families.
Looking at all of this should make you very angry; it certainly infuriates me. But my anger isn’t mostly directed at Republicans; it’s directed at their enablers, the professional centrists, both-sides pundits, and news organizations that spent years refusing to acknowledge that the modern G.O.P. is what it so clearly is.
Which is not to say that Republicans should be let off the hook.
To be sure, American history is full of politicians and parties that pursued what we would now call nefarious ends. After all, the pre-Civil War Democratic Party — which shares nothing but a name with today’s Democrats — was largely devoted to the cause of preserving slavery. But I can’t think of a previous example of a party that so consistently acted in bad faith — pretending to care about things it didn’t, pretending to serve goals that were the opposite of its actual intentions.
You may recall, for example, the grim warnings from leading Republicans about the dangers of budget deficits, with Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, declaring that our “crushing burden of debt” would create an economic crisis. Then came the opportunity to pass a $1.5 trillion tax cut targeted on the rich, and suddenly all worries about the deficit temporarily disappeared.
Now that the tax cut is law, of course, deficit-hawk rhetoric is back — not as a reason to reconsider those tax breaks, but as a reason to cut food stamps and Medicaid. You knew this was going to happen, although even I expected the fake deficit hawks to wait a little longer before resuming their act.
You may also recall how Republicans posed as defenders of Medicare, accusing the Obama administration of planning to cut $500 billion from the program to pay for the Affordable Care Act. The legislation did in fact seek substantial savings in Medicare, for example by ending overpayments to insurance companies. But so did Republican proposals. And Donald Trump, who promised during the campaign not to cut Medicare or Medicaid, is now proposing hundreds of billions more in Medicare cuts and truly draconian cuts in Medicaid.
Why have Republicans become so overwhelmingly the party of bad faith? (And not just about budgets, of course; remember when Republicans cared deeply about a president’s sexual morality?) The main answer is probably that the party’s true agenda, dictated by the interests of a handful of super-wealthy donors, would be very unpopular if the public understood it. So the party must consistently lie about its priorities and intentions.
Whatever the reasons for G.O.P. bad faith, however, its reality has been apparent for a long time.
Yet the gatekeepers of our public discourse spent years bei
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Quote:Budgets, Bad Faith and ‘Balance’
Originally posted by second:Quote:I could admit that I'm not sure Trump really understands enough to "substantially lie"
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
If people believe that Trump is substantially lying about something so easy to uncover, it has the potential to flip people who are merely giving him a pass, though it won't change the minds of true fans.
Paul Krugman FEB. 15, 2018
www.nytimes.com/2018/02/15/opinion/republicans-bad-faith-krugman.html
But our job, whether we’re policy analysts or journalists, isn’t to be “balanced”; it’s to tell the truth. And while Democrats are hardly angels, at this point in American history, the truth has a well-known liberal bias.
nytimes
This is where you fail.
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inocculated agenst the reality virus.
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DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early
http://www.7532020.com
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Trump ranks as worst president in poll of scholars
The survey was conducted among 170 current and recent members of the Presidents & Executive Politics Section of the American Political Science Association, which is a group of scholars dedicated to studying the American presidency.
These experts were asked to rank each president on a scale from zero (worst) to 100 (best) based on their overall performance in office. With this, Mr. Trump came in last place with an average score of 12.34.
Even among Republican respondents, Mr. Trump still ranked extremely low, earning the 40th spot for presidential greatness. These Republicans labeled James Buchanan -- whose presidency saw the secession of seven states before the Civil War -- as the all-time worst and George Washington as the best.
Coming in first place is Abraham Lincoln, who scored an average of 95.03 between both Democrats and Republicans surveyed. The top seven presidents have remained the same since the poll was last conducted in 2014: Lincoln, George Washington, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson, Harry Truman, and Dwight D. Eisenhower.
In this round of questioning, former president Barack Obama moved up in the rankings to 8th best president, whereas in 2014 he came in at 18th. Scholars identifying as Republican, however, ranked Obama 16th. Ronald Reagan, who also moved up from his previous ranking, trails behind Obama in 9th place.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-ranks-as-worst-president
-in-poll-of-scholars/ar-BBJlf3a?ocid=spartanntp
T 
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Quote:Do tell me more, JewelStaiteFan, about your excellent character: The Content of the G.O.P.’s Character
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
nytimes
This is where you fail.
Paul Krugman, FEB. 19, 2018
www.nytimes.com/2018/02/19/opinion/gop-character-bad-faith.html
Even those who have long since accepted the premise that Donald Trump is corrupt, self-centered and dishonest seem a bit shocked by his tirades over the Presidents’ Day weekend. Using the Parkland, Fla., massacre as an excuse to attack the F.B.I. for investigating Russian election intervention on his behalf — while lying about his own past denials that such intervention took place — took vileness to a new level, which is truly impressive given Trump’s previous record.
Yet if you step back a bit and think about it, Trump’s latest outbursts were very much in character — and I don’t just mean his personal character. When did you last see a member of the Trump administration, or for that matter any prominent Republican, admit error or accept responsibility for problems?
Don’t say that it has always been that way, that it’s just the way people are. On the contrary, taking responsibility for your actions — what my parents called being a mensch — used to be considered an essential virtue in politicians and adults in general. And in this as in so many things, there’s a huge asymmetry between the parties. Of course not all Democrats are honest and upstanding; but as far as I can tell, there’s almost nobody left in the G.O.P. willing to take responsibility for, well, anything.
And I don’t think this is an accident. The sad content of modern Republican character is a symptom of the corruption and hypocrisy that has afflicted half of our body politic — a sickness of the soul that manifests itself in personal behavior as well as policy.
Before I talk about that sickness, consider a few non-Trump examples of the lack of character that pervades this administration.
At the trivial but still telling end of the scale, we have the tale of Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, who keeps flying first class at taxpayers’ expense. The money isn’t the important issue here, although his spending violates federal guidelines. The revealing thing, instead, is the supposed reason he needs to fly premium — you see, ordinary coach passengers have been known to say critical things to his face.
Remember this story the next time someone talks about liberal “snowflakes.”
More seriously, consider the behavior of John Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff, whose record of slandering critics and refusing to admit error is starting to rival his boss’s. Remember when Kelly made false accusations about Representative Frederica Wilson and refused to retract those accusations even after video showed they were false?
More recently, Kelly insisted that he didn’t know the full details about domestic abuse allegations against Rob Porter until, a White House staff member said, “40 minutes before he threw him out” — a claim that seems at odds with everything we know about this story. Even if this claim were true, an apology for his obliviousness seems in order. But these guys don’t apologize.
Oh, and by the way: Roy Moore still hasn’t conceded.
So it’s not just Trump. And it didn’t start with Trump. In fact, way back in 2006 I wrote about the “mensch gap” in the Bush administration — the unwillingness of top officials to accept responsibility for the botched occupation of Iraq, the botched response to Hurricane Katrina, and more.
Nor, by the way, are we only talking about politicians. In my neck of the woods, I remain amazed by the unwillingness of right-leaning economists to admit that they were wrong in predicting that the Fed’s efforts to rescue the economy would cause runaway inflation. Being wrong is one thing — it happens to everyone, myself very much included. Refusing to admit and learn from error is something different.
And let’s be clear: Personal responsibility isn’t dead everywhere. You can ask, for example, wh
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Telling it like it iz!
That wuz the thing that Obama got rong for hiz entire tenure az prez - "our colleagez on the other side uv the ile". I dont think he really beleeved it, but he never stopped trying to make us think he did.
Woud the 2010 and later electionz hav gon better if he called them out for wut they really are insted uv covering for them?
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DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early
http://www.7532020.com
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Quote:
Originally posted by THGRRI:
Trump ranks as worst president in poll of scholars
The survey was conducted among 170 current and recent members of the Presidents & Executive Politics Section of the American Political Science Association, which is a group of scholars dedicated to studying the American presidency.
These experts were asked to rank each president on a scale from zero (worst) to 100 (best) based on their overall performance in office. With this, Mr. Trump came in last place with an average score of 12.34.
Even among Republican respondents, Mr. Trump still ranked extremely low, earning the 40th spot for presidential greatness. These Republicans labeled James Buchanan -- whose presidency saw the secession of seven states before the Civil War -- as the all-time worst and George Washington as the best.
Coming in first place is Abraham Lincoln, who scored an average of 95.03 between both Democrats and Republicans surveyed. The top seven presidents have remained the same since the poll was last conducted in 2014: Lincoln, George Washington, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson, Harry Truman, and Dwight D. Eisenhower.
In this round of questioning, former president Barack Obama moved up in the rankings to 8th best president, whereas in 2014 he came in at 18th. Scholars identifying as Republican, however, ranked Obama 16th. Ronald Reagan, who also moved up from his previous ranking, trails behind Obama in 9th place.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-ranks-as-worst-president
-in-poll-of-scholars/ar-BBJlf3a?ocid=spartanntp
T
LOL. The "Rotten Tomatoes" of American Presidents.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:The low opinion of the current president crosses party lines. Of the scholars surveyed, those identifying as Democrats put Trump last, independents put him second-last, and Republicans put him 40th, still in the bottom five.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
LOL. The "Rotten Tomatoes" of American Presidents.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
https://qz.com/1210855
https://sps.boisestate.edu/politicalscience/files/2018/02/Greatness.pd
f
This is how Republicans ranked the last few Presidents (lower numbers are better):
Reagan 5
GHW Bush 11
Clinton 15
GW Bush 23
Obama 16
Trump 40
This is how Conservatives ranked the last few Presidents:
Reagan 3
GHW Bush 10
Clinton 18
GW Bush 23
Obama 22
Trump 40
Note: Conservative column includes those who self-identified as either Conservative or Somewhat Conservative.
Both Conservatives and Republicans gave Obama a better rating than GW Bush.
If Trump keeps going the way he has, even Conservatives and Republicans might move him down below Buchanan, who was the President that didn’t want the Confederacy to take away half the country, but he didn’t feel like it was his job to do anything more than the 19th Century equivalent to “tweeting” about it. Lincoln followed Buchanan.
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The problem is that there aren't actually any Conservatives in Political Sciences. Their idea of a Conservative is anybody just a tad right of Karl Marx.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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