Republican National Convention(s)

[BmorePat87]

They damaged a walkway at Fort McHenry while trying to build Pence's stage...

I wrote like 90% of my college papers on that place. I helped to rewrite their volunteer handbook as part of a local history class project.

[GMDino]

(08-24-2020, 11:57 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: Comparing your political opponents to Nazis is a low blow.  Quite honestly I expect better from you.

Eh, it's about an oath that was required to support Hitler.

Not having a Party platform but rather "we have to re-elect Trump" comes close to that.

Doesn't make Trump or his followers Nazis but its probably pretty close to what is happening.

[oncemoreuntothejimbreech]

(08-25-2020, 09:55 AM)Dill Wrote: LOL Dems are the pro opioids party.   "Death with dignity."

Death with dignity is pretty much the mission of Hospice care.

[GMDino]

(08-25-2020, 10:27 AM)BmorePat87 Wrote: They damaged a walkway at Fort McHenry while trying to build Pence's stage...

I wrote like 90% of my college papers on that place. I helped to rewrite their volunteer handbook as part of a local history class project.

Fake news.  

It was the protesters.  Trump was up all night reading about the history and construction of the Fort in order to personally oversee the group in charge of REBUILDING it better, much better many people have said, into beautiful walkway...so beautiful.  Jr and his gf will be yelling about it any minute now.

[Sociopathicsteelerfan]

(08-25-2020, 10:36 AM)GMDino Wrote: Eh, it's about an oath that was required to support Hitler.

Not having a Party platform but rather "we have to re-elect Trump" comes close to that.

Doesn't make Trump or his followers Nazis but its probably pretty close to what is happening.

Yeah, comparing a politician or political party to anything associated with the Third Reich is a low blow.  You didn't even infer it, you flat out stated it.  It's a low blow, but maybe I shouldn't have expected better? 

[Belsnickel]

(08-25-2020, 10:49 AM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: Yeah, comparing a politician or political party to anything associated with the Third Reich is a low blow.  You didn't even infer it, you flat out stated it.  It's a low blow, but maybe I shouldn't have expected better? 

Would you prefer it if we discussed how the presence of so many family member speakers at the convention makes it feel more like the DPRK than the USA?

[Sociopathicsteelerfan]

(08-25-2020, 10:55 AM)Belsnickel Wrote: Would you prefer it if we discussed how the presence of so many family member speakers at the convention makes it feel more like the DPRK than the USA?

Absolutely! 

[GMDino]

(08-25-2020, 10:55 AM)Belsnickel Wrote: Would you prefer it if we discussed how the presence of so many family member speakers at the convention makes it feel more like the DPRK than the USA?

Totalitarianism is A-Okay with some. 

[SunsetBengal]

You know it was a positive and uplifting night, when those on the other side jump straight to NAZI comparisons..

[Dill]

(08-25-2020, 10:27 AM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: I'll reiterate, comparing your political opponents to Nazis is unacceptable.  The only exception would be if they were actual Nazis.  I suppose we can file this under "it's ok if the people I like do it" file for you.  It's certainly not the first entry.

There are no such "entries."  And baseless accusations certainly don't set you on some higher moral ground for judging others' "low blows."

And now I'll do a little "reiterating" myself.

It is PERFECTLY ACCEPTABLE to make analogies between US politicians, policies, and party platforms and those of any other country, present or past--including the NS state. Analogies are by definition of unlike things, so they don't assert identification: Trump=Nazi. They are a perfectly legitimate analytic tool.

For people who can distinguish between demagoguery and analysis, the only question should be regarding the quality/validity of any proffered points of analogy.  If that discussion is not possible, then it is not possible to really have an open political discussion/critique of authoritarianism when it comes to power in the US and exercises that power.

If you really want to make a substantial contribution to this thread, then drop the moral posturing and demonstrate why the correspondences given in post #13 don't fit. It is not "unacceptable" for Americans to note, discuss and make a case for such correspondences if they are really there. It should be unacceptable to acknowledge they are there but deny the discussion.

[GMDino]

In other news about the RNC:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/diplomats-aghast-as-pompeo-set-to-address-rnc-from-jerusalem/ar-BB18ltCa?ocid=sf

Quote:Diplomats aghast as Pompeo set to address RNC from Jerusalem
Josh Lederman and Carol E. Lee and Andrea Mitchell  6 hrs ago
[/url]


WASHINGTON — Diplomats who are barred by law from mixing work and politics say they're appalled by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's [url=https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/live-blog/rnc-live-updates-day-1-kicks-trump-pence-s-formal-n1237814/ncrd1237929#liveBlogHeader]decision to address the Republican National Convention on Tuesday, breaking with long-standing traditions aimed at isolating American's foreign policy from partisan battles at home.

It would be problematic enough, current and former U.S. diplomats said, if Pompeo were simply showing up at the convention to speak. But the fact that Pompeo is using a stop in Jerusalem during an official overseas trip as the venue for his recorded speech to fellow Republicans raises even more troubling questions about the message it sends to other countries and whether U.S. taxpayers are footing the bill, they said.

"It's all just shredding the Hatch Act," a current U.S. diplomat said, referring to the federal law that prohibits government employees from political activity on the job or in their official capacities.

Pompeo's speech in service of President Donald Trump's re-election appears to violate the spirit, if not the letter, of three legal memos issued by the State Department's legal adviser.



One of the legal memos, intended to guide political appointees, says explicitly in bold letters that "Senate-confirmed Presidential appointees may not even attend a political party convention."



The prohibition on politicking, which is hammered into State Department employees in regular ethics briefings, was deemed so critical that Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun said in a February email to employees that he was even avoiding talking politics when responding "to emails from friends."

"In my case, as a Senate confirmed Department official, I will be sitting on the sidelines of the political process this year and will not be attending any political events, to include the national conventions," Biegun wrote in a letter reported earlier by Politico and obtained by NBC News.

The State Department insists that Pompeo is addressing the convention in his "personal capacity," and the Republican National Committee has said that "everything" is being paid for by the committee and Trump's campaign. A spokeswoman said State Department staff weren't involved in drafting the remarks or arranging his speech, adding that "the State Department will not bear any costs in conjunction with this appearance."

But four current and former high-ranking diplomats questioned that claim given the logistics needed to support the secretary, particularly overseas. The plane that took Pompeo to Israel, to start with, is a U.S. government aircraft.

Download the NBC News app for alerts and all the latest on the Republican convention

A State Department official with knowledge of the secretary's usual travel arrangements said that even a brief detour during Pompeo's visit to Israel to tape a convention speech would involve motorcade drivers, locally employed workers from the U.S. Embassy and traveling staff from Washington who accompany the secretary at all times, as well as his significant security apparatus, all of which is paid for by taxpayers.

"Employees supporting the secretary's trip to Israel who have sworn an oath to the U.S. Constitution, not a political party, are also forced to support these partisan activities at taxpayers' expense," the State Department official said. "It is outrageously un-American for a sitting secretary of state to participate in a political convention."

The official and others still working for the government spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. Their comments were echoed by former U.S. diplomats who said the dismay within the diplomatic community was palpable.

"People are extraordinarily upset about it. This is really a bridge too far," said former Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who spent 35 years in the foreign service. "Pompeo is clearly ensuring the State Department is politicized by using his position to carry out what is basically a partisan mission."

The State Department declined to answer specific questions about Pompeo's speech, including where he was recording it. But Israeli media reported that he was spotted with a camera crew Monday on the roof of the King David, the famed Jerusalem hotel that overlooks the Old City.

That raised the possibility that Pompeo would appear at the convention with some of the most important sites in Judaism and Christianity as his backdrop, sending a potentially powerful visual signal to evangelical voters. In his remarks, Pompeo is expected to tout the Trump administration's staunchly pro-Israel record, which includes recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital and the Golan Heights as Israeli territory while allowing relations with the Palestinians to grind to a halt.

Former Ambassador Nicholas Burns, who served in the administrations of Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, said it was particularly egregious that Pompeo was breaching the tradition that domestic politics stop at the water's edge.

"We should want to speak with one voice," Burns said. "To give the perception that one party is more supportive than the other of Israel is not smart. It's not good for the Israelis to have this relationship politicized."


No other secretaries of state in recent history have even attended their party conventions. Although a few secretaries did attend in the 1970s and the 1980s, historians could point to no example of a secretary's actually delivering a speech at a nominating convention.

In 2016, when Trump was running for his first term, John Kerry, then the secretary of state, wanted badly to get involved in the Democratic National Convention to boost his predecessor, Hillary Clinton, and he said so privately, people familiar with the matter said. In particular, Kerry wanted to call attention to concerns about a Trump presidency that U.S. diplomats were hearing from other countries.

But Kerry's staff told him that he couldn't get involved in 2016 politics at all. A former Kerry aide said the staff never concluded that it was illegal to do so but considered it to be breaking a longtime norm for secretaries. There were also concerns about using State Department funds for purposes unrelated to foreign policy, the aide said.

Even when it came up unprompted, as when a student asked Kerry about Trump during a visit to Oxford University, he demurred.

"I'm not allowed under our law to get into, actually full-throatedly, into the middle of the campaign," Kerry said in May 2016.

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said Pompeo was making "a mockery of a sacred American office," accusing the secretary of violating both the Hatch Act and State Department policy.

"No secretary of state should ever use a foreign nation as a political prop for partisan gain," he said.

[GMDino]

(08-25-2020, 11:27 AM)SunsetBengal Wrote: You know it was a positive and uplifting night, when those on the other side jump straight to NAZI comparisons..  

Did the "other side jump straight" to Nazi comparisons or did someone make a reference to an oath that may mirror the way the GOP has gone from a party platform to simply backing Trump?

Is that a bad comparison?  Why?

Please show your work.  

[GMDino]

https://apnews.com/ec38e4f85b57a77029dd25c62edecd6e

Quote:Republican convention showcases rising stars, dark warnings
By STEVE PEOPLES, MICHELLE L. PRICE and ZEKE MILLER



WASHINGTON (AP) — A rising generation of Republican stars offered an optimistic view of President Donald Trump’s leadership but was undermined on the opening night of the GOP’s scaled-back convention by speakers issuing dark warnings about the country’s future and distorting the president’s record, particularly on the coronavirus pandemic.

As Trump faces pressure to expand his appeal beyond his loyal supporters, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, the Senate’s sole Black Republican, and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, the daughter of Indian immigrants, sought to cast the GOP as welcoming to Americans of color, despite the party’s overwhelmingly white leadership and voting base.


“I was a brown girl in a black and white world,” Haley said Monday night, noting that she faced discrimination but rejecting the idea that “America is a racist country.” She also gave a nod to the Black Lives Matter movement, saying “of course we know that every single Black life is valuable.”

MORE RNC 2020:

• – Republican Convention takeaways: All Trump, all the time
• – Beyond November: At GOP convention, there's a 2024 subplot
• – WHAT TO WATCH: Melania, Pompeo and Trump at GOP convention
  

But the prime-time convention proceedings, which featured a blend of taped and live speeches, focused largely on dire talk about Joe Biden, Trump’s Democratic challenger in the November election. Speakers ominously warned that electing Biden would lead to violence in American cities spilling into the suburbs, a frequent Trump campaign message with racist undertones. One speaker called Trump the “bodyguard of Western civilization.”


Scrambling to find a message that sticks, Trump’s team tried out multiple themes and tactics over the course of the night. They featured optimism from those who could represent the GOP’s future, attempts to characterize Biden as a vessel for socialists and far-left Democrats despite his moderate record and humanizing stories about the 74-year-old man who sits in the Oval Office.
Trump and a parade of fellow Republicans misrepresented Biden’s agenda through the evening, falsely accusing him of proposing to defund police, ban oil fracking, take over health care, open borders and raise taxes on most Americans. They tried to assign positions of the Democratic left to a middle-of-the-road candidate who explicitly rejected many of the party’s most liberal positions through the primaries.


The opening night of the four-day convention reflected the rising urgency fueling Trump’s push to reshape a presidential contest that he’s losing, at least for now, with Election Day just 10 weeks away. It will continue Tuesday, when first lady Melania Trump will deliver remarks from the White House.

Biden and his running mate, California Sen. Kamala Harris, are keeping a relatively low profile this week. In a tweet Monday night, Biden told supporters to “stay focused.”

The emphasis on diversity at Trump’s convention was an acknowledgment he must expand his coalition beyond his largely white base. Polling shows that Black Americans continue to be overwhelmingly negative in their assessments of the president’s performance, with his approval hovering around 1 in 10 over the course of his presidency, according to Gallup polling.

Full Coverage: Election 2020

One of several African Americans on Monday night’s schedule, former football star Herschel Walker, defended the president against those who call him a racist.

“It hurts my soul to hear the terrible names that people call Donald,” Walker said. “The worst one is ‘racist.’ I take it as a personal insult that people would think I would have a 37-year friendship with a racist.”

But that emphasis clashed with Trump’s instinct to energize his die-hard loyalists.

He featured, for example, Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the St. Louis couple charged with felonies for pointing guns at what prosecutors deemed non-violent Black Lives Matter protesters marching past their home.

“What you saw happen to us could just as easily happen to any of you who are watching from quiet neighborhoods around our country,” Patricia McCloskey said, sitting on a couch in a wood-paneled room.

“They’ve actually charged us with felonies for daring to defend our home,” her husband said.

And Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida said Democrats will “disarm you, empty the prisons, lock you in your home and invite MS-13 to live next door.”

Trump’s political future may depend on his ability to convince voters that America is on the right track, even as the coronavirus death toll exceeds 177,000 and pandemic-related job losses also reach into the millions.

A deep sense of pessimism has settled over the electorate. Just 23% of Americans think the country is heading in the right direction, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Trump and his supporters touted his response to the pandemic while standing alongside front-line workers in the White House, although he glossed over the mounting death toll, the most in the world, and his administration’s struggle to control the disease.
Organizers also repeatedly sought to cast Trump as an empathetic figure, borrowing a page from the Democrats’ convention playbook a week ago that effectively highlighted Biden’s personal connection to voters.

Those cheering Trump’s leadership on the pandemic included a coronavirus patient, a small business owner from Montana and a nurse practitioner from Virginia.

“As a healthcare professional, I can tell you without hesitation, Donald Trump’s quick action and leadership saved thousands of lives during COVID-19,” said Amy Ford, a registered nurse who was deployed to New York and Texas to fight the coronavirus.
The first day of the 2020 Republican convention began early in the day as Trump and Vice President Mike Pence were renominated by delegates who gathered in Charlotte, the city originally selected to host the convention before the pandemic struck.

Trump paid a surprise visit to the city, where he warned delegates that “the only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election,” raising anew his unsupported concerns about Americans’ expected reliance on mail voting during the pandemic. Experts say mail voting has proven remarkably secure.

The fact the Republicans gathered at all stood in contrast to the Democrats, who held an all-virtual convention last week. The Democratic programming included a well-received roll call video montage featuring diverse officials from across the nation.
The Republicans spoke from the ballroom in Charlotte and were overwhelmingly white before the proceedings moved to Washington for prime-time.

___

America is not racist!  But I was met with discrimination.

It hurts to see people call Trump names!  But he calls people names all the time.

Throw in lie after lie about the Biden platform and DJT speaking every day/night and it's more NK than USA but some love a good "tough guy" image and will support that over an actual party platform.

Which begs the questions:  If you support Trump are you also not supporting the GOP since they all they are is a support to get Trump reelected without a platform?  Can you be "conservative" and support a party that doesn't have a conservative platform?

[BmorePat87]

(08-25-2020, 12:55 PM)GMDino Wrote: https://apnews.com/ec38e4f85b57a77029dd25c62edecd6e



America is not racist!  But I was met with discrimination.

It hurts to see people call Trump names!  But he calls people names all the time.

Throw in lie after lie about the Biden platform and DJT speaking every day/night and it's more NK than USA but some love a good "tough guy" image and will support that over an actual party platform.

Which begs the questions:  If you support Trump are you also not supporting the GOP since they all they are is a support to get Trump reelected without a platform?  Can you be "conservative" and support a party that doesn't have a conservative platform?

As I touched on earlier, the whole premise of the party that holds the WH and Senate, and had the House for 2 of the last 4 years, trying to paint themselves as the party that will save the country from the issues of the last 4 years is absurd. 

[*PhilHos*]

(08-25-2020, 10:36 AM)GMDino Wrote: Not having a Party platform but rather "we have to re-elect Trump" comes close to that.

Is that any different than the Dems' "we have to elect anyone but Trump" party platform?

Heck, Dems have tried to remove Trump from office since his inauguration!

[*PhilHos*]

(08-25-2020, 10:55 AM)Belsnickel Wrote: Would you prefer it if we discussed how the presence of so many family member speakers at the convention makes it feel more like the DPRK than the USA?

Biden has his children speak at the Dem convention: no issues whatsoever. 
Trump has his family speak at the Repub convention: Trump is Hitler.

[*PhilHos*]

(08-25-2020, 01:03 PM)BmorePat87 Wrote: As I touched on earlier, the whole premise of the party that holds the WH and Senate, and had the House for 2 of the last 4 years, trying to paint themselves as the party that will save the country from the issues of the last 4 years is absurd. 

No more absurd than Biden and the Democrats trying to paint themselves as "uniters" not "dividers".

[*Nately120*]

(08-25-2020, 01:16 PM)PhilHos Wrote: Is that any different than the Dems' "we have to elect anyone but Trump" party platform?

I think there is a difference between saying that Trump shouldn't be president versus saying that any non-republican being in office equals doom, yes.  

The fact that Trump being in power has led liberals to get starry-eyed over guys like John Kasich and even miss George W Bush should show that it's hardly symmetrical.  

(08-25-2020, 01:16 PM)PhilHos Wrote: Heck, Dems have tried to remove Trump from office since his inauguration!

Right, and now we are seeing a number of republicans, including the only living former republican president joining the anti-Trump bandwagon. I mean, to hell with Biden, but you have to admit that the "anyone but Trump" sentiment is hardly a leftist position at this point.

[BmorePat87]

(08-25-2020, 01:21 PM)PhilHos Wrote: No more absurd than Biden and the Democrats trying to paint themselves as "uniters" not "dividers".

How so? Biden has a history of working with people on both sides of the aisle, has big name Republicans endorsing him, and isn't the person who spent 8 years saying that the leader of the other party was born in Africa. 

[Belsnickel]

(08-25-2020, 01:18 PM)PhilHos Wrote: Biden has his children speak at the Dem convention: no issues whatsoever. 
Trump has his family speak at the Repub convention: Trump is Hitler.

First, I did not say anything about Hitler. Second, the ninja smiley gives away that I was being facetious. Third, the joke was a play on this image:


So half of the key speakers are Trumps. How many of the DNC key speakers were Bidens? Zero.