House Majority Whip shot at congressional baseball field

[Dill]

(06-15-2017, 01:28 PM)CageTheBengal Wrote: Trump's supporters and the Republican establishment have to take responsibility for legitimizing Trump. Trump may have taken it to 11 but his supporters said that was okay by supporting him because they have been pushed to believing more extreme action is necessary to take back their country. They have been pushed by the Tea Party, Entertainment news and Republican establishment through baseless fear mongering and it picked up steam once Obama got elected it just got worse and worse.  Obama did nothing to warrant the spewing of alternative facts and overall hate that was flung his way. He was just another president. There was no reason to deny his supreme court nominee and there was no reason why all of the obstruction the Republicans caused should have happened during his time.

Don't take my statement as a way to excuse violence on behalf of liberals but it's the root of the problem. If Republicans weren't pushed to believe their country was under siege by the men and women in power then they wouldn't find extremism necessary and Trump wouldn't have the support he did. If they spent less time fear mongering and more time doing what they said they would do we wouldn't be in this position.  Electing Trump just fostered more extremism. Trump supporters double down and everyone else that can't stand him that gets unfairly labeled a liberal resort to more extreme tendency's. I'm a registered Independent and get called a liberal all of the time.

We all should agree that the political climate needs to change and violence needs to stop but to act like both parties are equally to blame isn't true imo. While both parties have caused damage in their own way there is only one party that endorsed Trump and let him speak under their banner and jumped at the first opportunity to shift what they believed in order to adopt Trump as their own.

The swamp, Alt facts news/blogs and now Trump have all made a killing off of the manipulation of a group of people and while it isn't unheard of for politicians to manipulate supporters across the board for their own gain the boundaries have been pushed since George W's 2nd term. Not blaming him that's just when I remember the fear mongering started ramping up.

The fear mongers are the problem.

Well said, but thanks to the fear mongering, this will never cross party lines as an accurate explanation.  For many, no drama Obama is still the THE WORST PRESIDENT EVER who spent too much time playing golf and going on expensive vacations. Your version of how we got here will only register as "blame."

At the root of our broken politics is the national capacity to assess events without jumping to blame first--though it certainly may be warranted later. And our young folk are coming to adulthood in this environment.  To assess this loss of capacity, one only need compare past foreign policy disasters like the Mayaguez incident in 1975 or Lebanon in 1983 with Benghazi in 2012.