Trump Is Giving This Country Its Identity Back

[Dill]

(06-29-2017, 04:00 PM)GMDino Wrote: And it's a good point!

It would have been a good theme for a separate thread--the divide in values and standards between those for and against Trump.  You don't get a Trump presidency unless millions of people "see no evil" when Trump violates common decency as well as standards of factual reporting and professional communication--the kind expected of a world leader.

Attempts to leverage, via false equivalencies, a claim that all the other presidential candidates were just as bad, along with the blanket claim that criticism of the president is "fake news," has taken the level of public discourse first to the ground floor, then the basement, and today, finally, the sub-basement. 

No other public figure has ever sunk to this low. No other Republican candidate would have behaved this way no matter how hard or often attacked. But the Republican base preferred the indecent candidate to all others--and continues to.

This is not just a judgment problem regarding factual determination--e.g., the inability to distinguish between professional intel products and Infowars--it is an inability to value norms of public decency, perhaps even to recognize them. Puzzling is that when the Clintons were under fire in the '90s, the Republican party claimed to distinguish itself from Democrats exactly on these grounds. They stood for standards, traditional social norms, and did not eschew core values to follow polls and popular trends.