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According to a poll conducted by two academic authors and published by The Washington Post, 52 percent of Republicans said they would back a postponement of the next election if Trump called for it.
If Trump and congressional Republicans proposed postponing the election to ensure only eligible citizens could vote, support from Republicans rises to 56 percent.
Pollsters found 47 percent of Republicans think Trump won the popular vote.
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Half of Republicans Would Back Postponing 2020 Election If Trump Proposed It
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QOTD:
"My life is a soap opera, but who gets the movie rights?"
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday August 11 2017, @01:50PM (11 children)
I do find it interesting that "politician lying about sex" = "OMG! Impeach him already!", while "politician lying about weapons of mass destruction, torture, and mass surveillance of Americans" = "Meh, whatever, let's not start a political witchhunt."
The fact is that most of America's presidents have had mistresses. What changed with Bill Clinton was that suddenly everybody cared.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday August 11 2017, @02:01PM
"let's not start a political witchhunt"
But, I LIKE the smell of roasting politician in the morning!!
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday August 11 2017, @02:55PM (4 children)
You've made the classical progtard mistake of confusing lying with being wrong. The two are barely even superficially similar and not remotely the same to any sentient being.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 11 2017, @06:06PM
Bush was not just wrong, but a massive liar who supported egregious violations of the highest law of the land. I don't see how anyone can claim that Bush was not a liar. Obama was also a massive liar and violated the Constitution on numerous occasions. It's clear that violating the Constitution should be a felony, but I doubt that will happen.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Friday August 11 2017, @07:43PM
None of what I mentioned among George W Bush's behaviors were honest mistakes.
* The intel on Iraq wasn't just wrong, it was demonstrably wrong. It was so wrong that when Joe Wilson demonstrated it was wrong, one of the top people in the administration (we don't know exactly who, but we do know that the VP's chief of staff took the fall for them, which means probably the VP, but possibly Bush himself) illegally leaked classified information to end the career of his wife. The stuff the Bush administration was putting out bore no resemblance at all to what UN inspectors were finding. Colin Powell called it "bullshit". There was substantial doubt in Congress from folks like Bernie Sanders and Ron Paul. The foreign diplomats at the UN who heard Powell's speech thought it about as accurate as the kinds of things spouted off by the likes of Kim Jong Un and Mahmoud Ahmadinajad. The reason why the Bush administration went to war had absolutely nothing to do with WMDs, 9/11, Al Qaida, or anything else the Bush administration was talking about, and we know this because the pro-war faction of his administration (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz) were calling for attacking Iraq back in 1998, and not once mentioned those motivations.
* As for torture, I'm not sure what you're claiming Bush was mistaken about. He has admitted, on camera and in writing, to ordering it done. He has admitted that he knew it was illegal under international law, but claims he thought it would save lives. It was not a mistake - he did it very much on purpose.
* As for the mass surveillance, again I have no idea how you think Bush might have done that by mistake. If you want to feel better about it, it's something that was and still is done with bipartisan support: Bill Clinton's administration started down that road, then Bush brought in John Poindexter to run what was called at the time "Total Information Awareness", then Obama quietly allowed it to continue throughout his 2 terms. I mean, are you trying to seriously argue "Whoopsie, I hired a bunch of people and had Congress budget a bunch of money for a project that took several years, and then when Congress defunded it I just renamed it and allowed it to continue"?
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 11 2017, @08:42PM
You are so cute when you display your naivety! Oh wait, I meant ugly. Like poop.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 11 2017, @11:07PM
You've made the classic neoconvict mistake of confusing being wrong with not lying. The two are barely even superficially similar and not remotely the same to any sentient being. In other words, the Bush administration's flimsy WMD evidence wasn't just "being wrong", it was a deliberate misrepresentation of reality far more tortured than Clinton's convolutions over the definition of "is".
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday August 11 2017, @09:10PM (4 children)
My view is that both Bush and Clinton lied. The key difference is that Clinton's lies were felony crimes because he lied under oath while Bush's lies to the public and to the world are quite legal. In addition, most of those lies were committed by plausibly deniable proxy through his subordinates. Clinton's adultery was not committed by subordinates so he didn't have access to that rhetorical dodge.
And how many of those mistresses were known at the time to the voting public? A key difference between Clinton and Kennedy, another notorious womanizer, is that Clinton got sloppy and got caught while still in office. It's real easy to claim hypocrisy. But you have to consider what the public knew then, not what we know now. Further, US presidents have always been held to have a higher moral standard than the average person. Just because the average person might betray their wives doesn't mean that the public would agree that it is similarly fine for a US president to do so.
Finally, consider the promiscuity of Clinton's adultery. We really only have one president, Kennedy who did something of similar degree. In each case, that shows a profound poor judgment on the part of the president that wasn't present in other presidents with mistresses.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Saturday August 12 2017, @12:12AM (2 children)
So Clinton engaged in illegal lies about legal activities, while Bush engaged in legal lies about activities so illegal that any signatory to the Geneva Conventions could put him on trial for them. I'll make a deal here: You get to throw Bill Clinton in jail for 5 years (the maximum federal penalty for perjury) while I get to send Bush to prison for life for his underlying crimes.
Let's see: James Buchanan's relationship with William King (yes, a guy, he might well have been gay) was the subject of insults from Congressmen. James Garfield had lots of rumors (true) about him and at least 3 women. Woodrow Wilson was caught with both Mary Peck and Edith Galt to the point where it was cause for jokes during the campaign. Warren Harding had about 5 come forward during his presidency. Franklin Roosevelt's affairs were known to at least people in Washington. A lot of people suspected Dwight Eisenhower's secretary Kay Summersby - correctly as it turned out. JFK's dalliances with Marilyn Monroe and many others were well-known at the time. Lyndon Johnson bragged about his affairs. George H.W. Bush's relationship with Jennifer Fitzgerald was the subject of a news story in 1988 and remained at least rumor until it was confirmed in 2004.
And that's just some of the better-known ones. Part of what was in play was that there was some degree of convention that reporters just wouldn't write about that kind of thing, just like they didn't report at all on FDR's polio.
I mentioned several others above: LBJ, Harding, and Garfield.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday August 12 2017, @01:51AM (1 child)
And those illegal actions were? Only one I can think of is torture and mistreatment of prisoners of war. Which apparently is still going on.
So in other words, Clinton's exposure was much more public than previous presidents as I mentioned earlier.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Saturday August 12 2017, @02:51AM
1. Torture and mistreatment of POWs, as you mention right there. Specifically, waterboarding, which is a crime against humanity as defined by the International War Crimes Tribunal for the Far East. This one would be easy to prove in a court because George W Bush, Dick Cheney, and several other members of the Bush administration have freely admitted their involvement in uncoerced statements in books and TV appearances.
2. Aggression against Iraq, which is a crime against the peace, first defined at the Nuremburg Trials. Iraq never presented any kind of real threat to the US, the US knew that, and attacked anyways, basically because we could and we wanted their oil at a discount price. This one is harder to prove, but still a war crime.
Either one could very well put Bush in jail for life if he were ever tried for his actions. I doubt he will face trial, but that has more to do with the fact that he was protected by Obama than anything else.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Sunday August 13 2017, @04:31AM
No, the key difference is that Bush's lies got the USA into an unnecessary war, which has cost the USA trillions of dollars, the lives of thousands of US soldiers and the enmity of millions of people, not to mention the lives of millions of people in the middle east. But heck, his friends made lots of money from the war, so, who cares, right?
If Clinton lied, then his lies had no consequences for the country. The fact that you are so concerned about them says volumes about you.