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A sober rant about liberals and the GOP

His stance on weed is absolute shit.

I tend to fault presidents what they do and do not do with the time they reasonably have available, relative to the importance of the initiative. For example, I was and am pissed that Obama didn't walk in with a more detailed plan for Obamacare. It's what the Clintons did, but it didn't work then. Perhaps he took the wrong message. He was largely elected for that plan, so it should've been there.

But we have to bear in mind that there is only so much attention, will, and time. It is not reasonable to demand a politician move on all promise/initiatives, and downright insane to expect they can. Circumstances dictate. Covid and now the war against Ukraine loom huge, and he's still done far more than I thought he'd be able.

The pot stance is absolute shit. But he's an old drug warrior, and that was one reason my only vote for him was in the general election, not the primary.



That's much briefer than either blog/post, so perhaps I'll have to go back and go through in more detail. But it really should be flagged: we all know politicians make "promises" and we all know they don't keep them, even the majority. Some is because they needed the votes. They had to get elected to do anything. But a ton of it is simply because of what is possible in politics. It's a world of wheeling and dealing, greased elbows, and a horrifically massive sprawl of interests and the people they employ to both lobby congress and infiltrate exec agencies.

"Swamp" frankly insults the situation. So does "labrynthine" and "byzantine". It's a ****pocalpyse of a mess, but it also probably couldn't work with anything approaching reasonable efficiency.
Well I feel like no small part of my post was spent critiquing their political strategy and had nothing to do with any lack of keeping campaign promises.

Well, I feel that I explicitly flagged that this is a multi-post OP and then there's the other thread that I have to go back through, so to make a complete response I'd have to go back through it all.

I also feel that when someone says. . .
Biden has quietly set aside many of his campaign promises, not with a vicious fight where the GOP and middling senators like Manchin were dragged through the dirt; made clear by the administration that it is their fault his goals weren't accomplished. No, he abandoned many of these fights almost immediately before they even began. Not only that, but he has been almost infuriatingly unwilling to drag the GOP for blocking what moderate reforms he does support.

. . . they intend to say something about campaign promises.




I don't know what the issue is. I flagged that I was responding to parts of the opening post and did that. Part of the response is to tell me you talked more about other stuff. Ok. The part I really don't get is telling me you said it all had "nothing" to do with keeping campaign promises when it mattered that he quietly set them aside.

Campaign promises depend heavily on congress.
 
Democratic party has been moving away from being "of the poor and oppressed" for decades now.
It's why they're struggling to beat a rerun of authoritarianism.
What return of imagined 'authoritarianism'?
All which has been accused doesn't meet the definition of authoritarianism. Which is nothing more than politically motivated push narratives which the media is not than willing accomplices in political propaganda.

Edit: I view the recent progressive types as an attempt to move back towards that, but it's being resisted.

Edit 2: And is not without it's own flaws.
 
Do you really think more than a few hundred GOP voters were swayed by this? They don't care about policy. And if it was a just to pay lip service to the GOP then why increase spending in proportion to that of a mid sized first world country's military budget?

It's not about winning Republican votes, it's about turnout - "defund the police" was a strong rallying cry to bring Republicans out to vote and 'centrists' to vote Republican (if you like the police vote for Republicans) and Biden is presumably trying to neuter the attack. Similarly, crime is up and trying to have police as a response to that helps reduce crime as an election issue against Democrats encouraging 'centrists' to vote Republican.
 
Democratic party has been moving away from being "of the poor and oppressed" for decades now.
It's why they're struggling to beat a rerun of authoritarianism.

Edit: I view the recent progressive types as an attempt to move back towards that, but it's being resisted.

Edit 2: And is not without it's own flaws.
Progressives are the only hope the country has not to move toward plutocracy and the associated increasing tyranny and destruction of democracy, whether fast with Republicans or slower with centrist Democrats.
 
I don't know what the issue is. I flagged that I was responding to parts of the opening post and did that. Part of the response is to tell me you talked more about other stuff. Ok. The part I really don't get is telling me you said it all had "nothing" to do with keeping campaign promises when it mattered that he quietly set them aside.
I'm sorry. I'll respond to you post broadly when I have time, but I wanted to say it wasn't my intention to misinterpret your response. I'm not approaching this conversation in an adversarial way. Thank you for taking the time to read my post and write out a thoughtful response.
 
I think BBB v Infrastructure (which you highlight above) is an excellent case study. If Biden had taken the initial stimulus and follow-on Infrastructure bill (both of which were massive) and declared victory, he would have been solidly still moderate-left, and better positioned to respond to the later inflation.

Instead, he married infrastructure to BBB, which, in a congress this close, was never likely to pass. He spent months on it, even as inflation began to climb, reinforcing in the public mind that Biden's only response was to double-down on a key driver of the problem that they consistently tell pollsters should be the first thing to fix. It also fixed in the public mind that he was captured by the left, because he was unable to let it go for so long.
A minor quibble compared to most of my criticisms, but I generally agree. I don't understand why BBB means he was captured by 'the left' though.

1. Security risk - highlighting that you aren't going to suppress VEOs.... does not, exactly, discourage them. Bullies tend rather to react badly to being informed that they can get away with their behavior.
Hard disagree. Over 20,000 civilians have been killed in US drone strikes by our own estimates. The people getting droned striked know better than we do that we have stopped. Announcing it is a domestic statement.
2. Political risk - Biden took a massive blow with the utter, complete, disaster that was the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Running explicitly on ending drone strikes against terrorists - including leaders of AQ and ISIS - reinforces the view politically that he's weak, and that this reduces U.S. national security. This will especially be true if a group is able to pull off a major attack in CONUS or Western Europe.
Again, the war on terror rhetoric just isn't popular any more. A large segment of Trump's base is isolationist and most Dems are against it. I think Afghanistan is a far stronger talking point than stopping drone strikes.

Really part of my annoyance is a failure of the Democrats to control the discussion. They are always responding to Republican attacks, but they are rarely controlling what the hot topic of discussion is.

In foreign policy, there usually are no "good" options. "Less Bad" is generally what we are hoping to achieve... if we are lucky,and things go according to plan.
We export oil. The oil we import is for us to refine and sell back to others. If you think we really need the naval bases there, something I would also disagree with, surely we can remain friendly enough with them without directly helping them commit grievous war crimes.
 
The part I really don't get is telling me you said it all had "nothing" to do with keeping campaign promises when it mattered that he quietly set them aside.
So to clarify, it nothing to do with keeping campaign promises. So much of politics is perception. It didn't matter than Mexico didn't pay for the wall or that the swamp wasn't drained. Trump gave the perception that these were important issues he cared and fought for. Biden does did not publicly fight for these issues, and in some cases even worked against a few of them.
 
A minor quibble compared to most of my criticisms, but I generally agree. I don't understand why BBB means he was captured by 'the left' though.

The reason it gives that impression is because he spent months in a position where the party he headed (and he, himself, publicly) were refusing to pass Infrastructure unless they could also pass BBB.

Flip it: if a GOP President was presented with (say) a bi-partisan tax code simplification bill that lowered nominal rates by stripping out complexity, resulting in slightly lower effective rates, especially on capital gains, but resulting in slightly higher revenues due to reduced complexity costs....

..... and spent months refusing to sign it unless Congress sent it to him along with a law that also abolished the current federal tax structure and replaced it with a flat tax.....

...I think we could safely assess that he wasn't acting as a moderate, in that scenario.


Hard disagree. Over 20,000 civilians have been killed in US drone strikes by our own estimates. The people getting droned striked know better than we do that we have stopped. Announcing it is a domestic statement.

I would disagree; these folks are highly attuned to domestic messaging about the war on terror, and would definitely see such an announcement - especially if highlighed and repeated - as an admission of surrender/retreat, especially in the wake of what they see as our generational strategic defeat in Afghanistan at their hands.

Though it's entirely possible that the administration would dismiss them if they told them so, my guess is that the intelligence and policy communites would recommend ambiguity on this question going forward.

I would, however, be interested in where you are getting the "by our own estimates" drone strikes have killed "20,000 civilians". I tried quickly searching for that, and, found independent organizations making that claim (often using datasets that were, shall we say, questionable), but, nothing that indicated USG estimates had made that claim.

Again, the war on terror rhetoric just isn't popular any more. A large segment of Trump's base is isolationist and most Dems are against it. I think Afghanistan is a far stronger talking point than stopping drone strikes.

I wholeheartedly agree that Afghanistan is going to be a far stronger talking point than stopping drone strikes. My point was that, if the Administration were to trumpet the latter, they are handing the Republicans an ability to tie it to the former, especially if there was a noteworthy attack.

And, if they did trumpet it they would get.... kudos from a portion of their base that they probably figure is going to vote for them anyway. So, from a political perspective, it's medium-high risk, with little-no reward.


Really part of my annoyance is a failure of the Democrats to control the discussion. They are always responding to Republican attacks, but they are rarely controlling what the hot topic of discussion is.

Part of that is probably the price of governing - you have to make real world decisions with real-world tradeoffs, while the opposing party (these days) feels no obligation to do anything other than sit in the rafters and jeer and throw rotten vegetables at you.

Partly, however, I think, respectfully, you may be operating from a tilted baseline. I say this because - again - I hear similar complaints about the GOP from right wingers (both tribes also like to complain about how They Always Lose because The Other Side Plays Dirty And We Are Too Nice).

We export oil. The oil we import is for us to refine and sell back to others. If you think we really need the naval bases there, something I would also disagree with, surely we can remain friendly enough with them without directly helping them commit grievous war crimes.

We were a net oil exporter and it looks like we've lost that, however, oil is a global commodity, and the global price is reflected in U.S. prices. Biden wasn't asking Venezuela and Saudi Arabia (both cruel dictatorships) to increase production for the heck of it, but, because them doing so was necessary if we wanted to continue to pressure Russia.

There are a series of both geopolitical and foreign policy requirements that keep us tied to Saudi Arabia, whether we like that (as Trump did) or no (as Biden does). :-/
 
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