The difference between you and me is that you think your side is good and the other side is bad. I think both sides are equally bad.
Wrong. The difference is I haven't given into the debilitating urge to just throw my hands up and decide, welp, both sides equally bad, so it is what it is.
False equivalency is a bad habit, Shawn.
If you can find one single post where I actually claim Democrats are
good I will buy you dinner and drinks. I realize the search function seems broken, but I bet if you think about it, you will have a hard time imagining me even saying such a thing.
That said, the fact that Republicans/Conservatives have sold their soul to the extent that they are bending over backwards for
Donald J. Trump is pretty alarming. Donald Trump. Why?
We're talking about Donald Trump. We supposedly all abhor the self-dealing in DC. The corrupted exercise of governance. The avoidance of accountability for wrongdoing, often brazen wrongdoing. The arrogant elitist attitude that laws are only for the peons.
And yet, the best example of corruption, of fraud, of self-dealing, of grift, of blatant, disrespectful dishonesty, of avoidance of accountability, of arrogance of I'm-rich-you're-not-I-can-do-anything… yep, this is the guy Rs are propping up. For what?
Want to know what set the stage for this? A four-decades now beautifully-executed long-game strategy to create a Right wing media complex that delivered messaging like only the most well-managed brands. Perfect consistency, rooted in emotion, day after day after day, never deviate, never waiver, all day every day. Why does it work? Because America is a consumerist culture. We've been lab-ratted to death on how to have products and services sold to us, what works and what doesn't in terms of branded messaging. And Rs have leveraged this
incredibly well. Conservative voices in today's world who deviate from the normative messaging are ostracized quickly and efficiently.
Liberals suck at this new game, playing catch-up now is embarrassing, actually. Obama's campaigning might be the only anomaly. He was good. But the liberal/progressive "brand" is, by contrast, incredibly watered down. There are factions within factions within factions. And those of us on the ground, everyday liberals, like this—even as we understand it is self-defeating in today's political game. We like differences of opinion, truth-seeking, challenging assumptions including our own. All kinds of psychological studies of characteristics that lead people towards one end of the ideological spectrum or the other reinforce this.
Shawn I've said this many times—I was glad Trump won. I wanted the wake-up call for both Liberalism and Conservatism. I did not foresee that this country would have so many continue to defend, with fealty, Donald Trump. Vote for him versus Hillary? Fine. But the nepotism, the grift, the revelation after revelation of what a fraudulent, corrupt, opaque, dishonest, incurious, unethical, POS buffoon of a man, the self-dealing, the everything-we're-supposed-to-hate-about-people-and-politics, man, Shawn, I didn't expect three years into Trump putting this on display, unwaveringly, every day, that an entire party would basically hold his dick. This guy is obstructing
everything he can in regards to
anything unflattering or damaging to him. He paid off or threatened or both pretty much everybody in his entire damn life, be it a porn star or a school administrator or an author of one of his books or a journalist, surely an ex-wife or two, and if he can't buy or threaten someone, he smears them.
And you allow it, because you maintain a blanket equivalency.
