msduncan wrote: ↑Sat Nov 09, 2024 10:53 amIs he truly going to divorce his wife and the mother of his children over who she decided to vote for?
I want to stress up front that I don't mean this as an attack on msduncan - you just happened to be the one that expressed this thought, that tapped into the rage monster. But this is not directed at you.
The comment here is the perfect distillation of the problem in this country right now. For one group of people, they are just deciding who to vote for. They are treating this election like deciding to vote between Clinton and Dole, or Gore and Bush, or Bush and Kerry, or McCain and Obama, or Obama and Romney. And to some extent, *maybe* you could argue Trump and Clinton.
That position, that you are just choosing between two candidates, presumes that the candidates you are selecting between are normal representatives of their respective political parties. Someone choosing to divorce their spouse because of a vote for John Kerry or GWB sounds insane. But that's because fundamentally, candidates like John Kerry and GWB are normal politicians playing within the boundaries of normal behavior. They are nominally trying to accomplish something for the country, within their ideological framework - and that framework is bound by normal party belief.
The problem here is that these aren't two normal candidates. This is one normal candidate, that wants to do normal Democratic things, within the comfortable confines of normal political behavior. And then there is the singular worst candidate in the history of this country.
I don't say that as a matter of opinion. That is a stone cold fact. He has already been impeached twice for treasonous behavior. He is a convicted felon, 31 times over. He's been found guilty of fraud countless times. His business record is one of routine failure. He's been admonished, in court, repeatedly for being found having committed the act of rape. He's strongly linked with child sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. He routinely, and PROUDLY, tries to emulate the behavior of authoritarian thugs that he looks up to. If he is not directly an asset of Russia, then he purposefully acts like one for some reason. And to top it all off - he literally spent four years demonstrating an absolutely cartoonish level of incompetence in the job. To the degree that the vast majority of his Cabinet members and his military advisors have either directly endorsed his (normal) opponent, or at the very least have said that he is unfit for office and pleaded with the electorate to not allow him back in the Oval Office.
He has built his entire identity on division, and has promised to do irreparable harm to several groups that he has turned his followers against. He is a singular avatar for everything that could conceivably be wrong with us as Americans. He is the glaring example that eradicates the notion of American Exceptionalism. He enables the worst among us, because he is the worst among them.
If my wife voted for Trump, we wouldn't be getting divorced because she decided to vote for someone different than me. We would be getting divorced because of an irreconcilable divide in values and morals. Who I am as a person means nothing to her. And who she is as a person is a direct violation of who I strive to be.
It's not just "she decided to vote for someone else". It's "if she is capable of voting for THAT, of choosing to inflict harm on those people, for the *chance* that her grocery bills might go down (despite his "plan" to raise tariffs which will likely cause those same bills to go up), then we are clearly incompatible."
way to paint the sentiment as ridiculous....
too often right when screaming into the void