The Politics Thread

[DramatistDreamer]

This ethics report on George Santos is wild! Using campaign funds for OnlyFans?!

[Juliajms2]

Thank goodness for people like Pink, Le var Burton and P!nk. These book burners have gotten away with too much already insane.

It's shocking that he has managed to stay in office as long as he has. 

[DramatistDreamer]

Argentinians claimed to have been dissatisfied with both of their presidential candidates, so over half of their voting population decided to vote for the most extreme- a man who campaigned on a abolishing abortion, although the people recent voted to legalize abortion. And that isn’t even Millie’s most extreme proposition. There’s also his proposal to legalize the harvesting and sale of human organs. Millei, a man who runs neck and neck with Trump for the president with the worst hairstyle in the 21st century. We’ll see how this goes. Argentina has always had a predilection towards fascists and despots. They do, in fact, have a active legacy of providing hospitality to Nazis and their spawn, after all.

[marceline]

It's easy to criticize America but over the years we've watched voters all over the world flirt with fascism.

[Khan]

I agree.  And I don't think it's that people are knowingly choosing fascism either.  It's just that the world is changing too fast for many people and this is their response.

[janea4old]

https://twitter.com/GeorgeTakei/status/1728783473484149142

Here is the full text of his long tweet:

November 26, 2023

George Takei @GeorgeTakei

A Democrat was in the White House when my family was sent to the internment camps in 1941. It was an egregious violation of our human and civil rights. 

It would have been understandable if people like me said they’d never vote for a Democrat again, given what had been done to us. 

But being a liberal, being a progressive, means being able to look past my own grievances and concerns and think of the greater good. It means working from within the Democratic party to make it better, even when it has betrayed its values.

I went on to campaign for Adlai Stevenson when I became an adult. I marched for civil rights and had the honor of meeting Dr. Martin Luther King. I fought for redress for my community and have spent my life ensuring that America understood that we could not betray our Constitution in such a way ever again. 

Bill Clinton broke my heart when he signed DOMA into law. It was a slap in the face to the LGBTQ community. And I knew that we still had much work to do. But I voted for him again in 1996 despite my misgivings, because the alternative was far worse. And my obligation as a citizen was to help choose the best leader for it, not to check out by not voting out of anger or protest.

There is no leader who will make the decision you want her or him to make 100 percent of the time. Your vote is a tool of hope for a better world. Use it wisely, for it is precious. Use it for others, for they are in need of your support, too.

 

end of tweet

Edited November 30, 2023 by janea4old

[Juliajms2]

^ George Takei is right, of course. What's interesting is that he and I are disappointed in the left for polar opposite reasons. He doesn't think the Democrats are supporting the Palestinians enough and I'm disgusted by the antisemitism I'm seeing on the left. Luckily, 2016 prepared me for this. Once we saw the extent that extreme racial hate was alive and well in this country, no one can be surprised when crazy amounts of Jew hate surface. It's interesting to see the Germans standing up to this issue, while the U.S. is just letting it happen. The Germans know how quickly this kind of hate can lead to utter destruction.

Still, only a fool would go running to the Republicans or a third party over things that are happening in a different region of the world.  I'm hoping it's only the people who live their lives on Tik Tok that are planning to throw everyone else under the bus over the ME conflict. You have to be practical and choose the best overall leaders, instead of going Susan Sarandon on us.

[JaneAusten]

I think you can believe both things. He's may be right about the democrats, but I don't associate democrats with the left. Most of the folks on the left like Susan Sarandon are not voting for democrats so i don't consider them democrats.  And the far left has always been bigoted - so the anti semitism there is not surprising. But the democrats as a whole are pretty unified in supporting our Jewish community and Israel.  None of this garbage from the far left is shocking. It's always been there.

College campuses I see as being more generational. I don't understand I guess how people can conflate the Israeli Government who IMO is awful with Israeli civilians or particularly American Jews. THAT is a problem that a lot of younger people need to be educated on.  There in fact are many Jewish Americans and liberal leaning Jewish Israelis that are pro peace. In Israel they are being silenced by the Netanyahu gvmt. Netanyahu is and has been a horrible leader. And nothing he has done has made Israeli civilians and Jews across the world safer. His comments after the Tree of Life massacre here were frankly atrocious. How he could have even tried to rationalize it is appalling.

I'm not sure what the answer is. The GOP is certainly not pro Israeli citizen. What exactly is their answer. Let's bomb Iran? They are as anti semitic  as the far left. 

I think Biden is walking a tightrope right now, but initially he did give the Israeli Gvmt good advice. Remember what we did after 9/11. Right now Israel seems hell bent on repeating our mistakes. But let's hope this pause that I believe Biden has been crucial in pushing, leads to a cooling off. It's not that most believe Hamas is honorable or noble, they are terrorists. But there has to be a better approach than what they are currently doing.  Let's hope for the sake of everyone, cooler heads prevail, but I am afraid I don't see anyone pushing for it other than what Biden has been gently doing. It's clear Hamas and the Israeli gvmt want this war to continue.  None of that helps Israeli citizens or Palestinians or the world.

I shudder to think what would have happened had Trump been president when this happened.

[Khan]

I've been saying for weeks that people who claim they aren't going to vote for Biden next year never intended to.  They only needed an excuse not to; and sadly, the Gaza conflict has provided them with one.

I've also been saying that it's easy for people on the far-left to say, "I'm not voting for Biden, because the lesser of two evils is still evil," because, what do they really have to lose?  Even if Trump is re-elected, life can go on more or less as it's always gone for them, for obvious reasons.  For people like me, however, who are also people of color, or who are gay/trans/nonbinary people, or who are non-Christians, letting Trump back into the WH means literal death for us. 

So, basically, the message that the far-left is sending to me is, "I don't give a [!@#$%^&*] about you, you're on your own."  Which only proves that the horseshoe theory of politics is correct.

[DRW50]

So much of the support for Palestine on the left is performative and ill-informed. I have a lot of respect for Susan Sarandon as an actress, but she is the queen of performative activism, and she reminded me of that again when she retweeted Jackson Hinkle, a grifter, transphobe, homophobe, who just goes on about Palestine because he can spew bile about Jews (I recently saw a video of him ranting about how all Nazis were [transphobic slur] and [homophobic slur]). These are the same types of stunt queens who picketed Rosalynn Carter's funeral in spite of Jimmy Carter being one of the few high-profile proponents of the two-state solution for many years (they claimed it was a Biden protest). The same types of clout-chasers who spend more time screaming at people on Twitter not to watch SNL (as they made a joke about not wanting to be associated with Hamas) rather than doing anything to help anyone in Gaza. Similar to how much they poisoned the well on issues like police reform, I am never sure how many are real and how many are well-paid ops from Russia and Republicans.

[Khan]

And it was a pretty harmless joke, as far as I was concerned.  Yet, because they made the joke, SNL was somehow making light of genocide.  (Social media's gonna be the death of us all, lol).

I agree with @JaneAusten.  People, especially young people, have to stop conflating things.  Being against Netanyahu is not the same as being against Israel or against Jewish people, anymore than being anti-Hamas means being anti-Palestine as well.  The situation is far more nuanced than "Israel GOOD, Palestine BAD," or vice-versa; and those who insist we're being "cowards" for not "choosing a side" will just make the tension worse in the end.

Edited November 30, 2023 by Khan

[DRW50]

So many Republicans are (not to stereotype!) catty bitches, but they are so often hidden behind the closet door. George Santos is going to help keep that closet door locked shut for a long time to come, but at least this gave me a laugh.

Edited December 1, 2023 by DRW50

[MichaelGL]

It's now a different day and Republicans are singing a different tune. The Speaker says he will vote against expulsion. Smh. 

[DramatistDreamer]

What an absolute sociopath.

 

[Khan]

This "debate" should have had absolutely no bearing on next year's general election; and yet, it has.  Will DeSantis drop out?  Who knows?  But I can tell you this much: whoever told him to go through with this should be pink-slipped.