At Homeland Security, I saw firsthand how dangerous Trump is for America

[CJD]

It's infuriating that such an incompetent person is still only 7 to 10 points behind in polling with how horrendously awful and chaotic his first term was.

[Dill]

(08-19-2020, 08:57 AM)Crazyjdawg Wrote: It's infuriating that such an incompetent person is still only 7 to 10 points behind in polling with how horrendously awful and chaotic his first term was.

Yeah, as I mentioned above, it's the symptom of a larger problem, the contempt for democratic norms and evidence-based arguments.

But it's not like people say "Hey, I just don't like democracy and separation of powers and and all that, and I don't care about logic or facts."

Er, well, some actually might. But most see themselves as defending the Constitution and surrounded by plenty of "evidence" that it is being corrupted by a deep state (mostly what you and I would call constitutional "checks"). So they wouldn't see my statements as descriptive at all of their behavior, but "biased." The mirror image of my description of them.

So what is "bias"? How does one define it so that one can recognize it independently of one's political perspective? That's where a line appears that some are unable to cross, in that they reject any obligation to define terms and agree on examples, including what counts as logical consistency and evidence. They just claim the terms and deploy them, sometimes claiming that it's the other guy who can't be reasoned with when challenged.

No surprise then if they don't see how "horrendously awful and chaotic" Trump's first term was/is. They still think he has kept his promises in so far as he has not been blocked by the deep state. Awful and chaotic are YOUR truth. You can't make an inroad on that by quoting the NYT. But really most astonishing is that you can't make inroads by quoting Trump himself, even against himself, as evidence of "awful chaos."

This passage from Taylor's article struck me as a fine example of where "evidence" should be evident:

The president has tried to turn DHS, the nation’s largest law enforcement agency, into a tool used for his political benefit. He insisted on a near-total focus on issues that he said were central to his reelection — in particular building a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico. Though he was often talked out of bad ideas at the last moment, the president would make obviously partisan requests of DHS, including when he told us to close the California-Mexico border during a March 28, 2019, Oval Office meeting — it would be better for him politically, he said, than closing long stretches of the Texas or Arizona border — or to “dump” illegal immigrants in Democratic-leaning sanctuary cities and states to overload their authorities, as he insisted on several times.

If Trump did these things there is a record, other witnesses. No one is making this up, like Russian "fake news." And this behavior would be as much an abuse of power as halting foreign aid to the Ukraine until it produced dirt on Biden.  But I think one of the great accomplishments of Right Wing Media is to encourage an immediate and mass skepticism of such accounts, buttressed by claims this is no different from stuff Obama did, only motivated by hate (not real, actual bad behavior) and acceptance of the unethical assertion that if they did, so can/should we. Plus a diminished sense of how such actions undermine rule of law. Rule of law may often be understood as simply "law and order" resting upon the president's personal authority; "abuse of power" doesn't really exist in that scenario (though this will flip back if Biden wins). And again, we are talking about a LARGE number of people.

Yes, examples can be multiplied with reference to Trump's handling of the Coronavirus, the Floyd protests/riots, and his sabatoge of the USPS. And still, it is not a given that he will be out of office on Jan. 21.