Yes, I know it is a subject that you really don’t want to talk about. Going back to the days of the cold war until very recently, you conservatives have always been the most hawkish and most suspicious of the USSR and then Putin’s Russia. I really don’t think that the rise of a populist business man to the White House with distinctly different views of Russia fundamentally changed your mindset. You have just managed to separately compartmentalize the two subjects.
You appear to have recently banished your vitriolic distaste of the virtual dictator who has consistently trampled on values which all America hold dear to some dusty corner of your mind, but it is still there, itching to be reinstated. You have recently tried to ignore that Putin’s stated intention is to return the former superpower to its “rightful” prominence on the world stage and restore the Russian empire which flourished first under the Czars and then under the iron fist of the USSR. Lately you have tried not to notice that the former agent of the hated KGB has engaged in undisguised aggression in the Eastern European countries formally under the thumb of the Soviet Union and has done everything in his power to weaken NATO.
More telling is your apparent willingness to not to condemn Russia’s many and varied attempts to attack the very foundations of our democracy or call into question Donald Trump’s intentions and motives behind his very public bromance with Putin. You don’t even seem to notice, or worse, you actively dispute as “fake news” the well established fact that the Russian intelligence services did any everything in their power to discredit Trump’s opponent and help him ascend to the highest office in our beloved country. You don’t even pretend to understand that Vladimir Putin entered into this shameful endeavor because Hillary Clinton had the nerve to very publicly criticize his rigged elections and because Trump was very amenable, for whatever reasons, to his desire to restore Russia as a super power.
Now you apparently support Trump in his attempts to minimize or even totally squash the investigation into Russia’s interference in our election. How can you openly dismiss as “fake news” every new revelation of Trump’s campaign staff’s cozy, if not treasonous relationships with Russian agents and Russian oligarchs with close ties to Putin. And most telling, how can you fail to notice Trump’s apparent unwillingness to never say anything critical about Vladimir Putin or Russia’s attempts to subvert Western democracies throughout the world? Do you really have any doubts that if Trump was not besieged on the Russian issue that he would have already rolled back the sanctions imposed when the Russian military invaded the Ukraine? Surely there are questions which you have unconsciously buried deep in your psychic about Trump’s motivations in the Russian affair and whether Putin has some kind of leverage on him.
I am absolutely sure that it was a Democrat instead of Trump in the exact same position that you would spend all of your free time decrying Russian actions and howling with all of the power of your lungs for that Democrat’s impeachment and jailing even before the first charge could investigated.
How can you people who most hated the Russians and their quest for world domination over the years now defend a man who, for all appearances, supports their current objective of regaining their position as a world superpower by any means necessary? How can you people who have long advertised yourselves as super patriots and defenders of the American values of freedom turn a blind eye on Russian attempts to undermine democracies around the world in the process, including our own?
There is only one answer to all of these questions – you are the biggest set of hypocrites in American history and your much vaunted patriotism takes a distant second place to obtaining your political objectives. That is truly sad. You are an embarrassment to your once proud party and your country.
Cajun 6/11/2017
I keep a copy of the Constitution here at my desk, courtesy of the ACLU which gives them away free.
Nowhere within it can I find any mention of our system of governance being limited to two political parties. Perhaps you can enlighten me?
I do agree that the current system, dominated by the two major political parties makes it difficult indeed for any third party to join the exclusive club, but difficult is neither impossible nor unnecessary.
In the US our Constitution set up a winner take all Presidential election system Doubledee. Under such a system anytime a 3rd party presidential candidate gets enough votes to be noticed, the public’s perception is that those votes came at the expense of the candidate of the major party with whom the the 3rd party is most closely aligned. If candidate of the other major party wins in such a situation, the voting public perceives that the votes for the third party candidate contributed to that win and voters become less likely to “throw their vote away” (their words not mine) on a 3rd party candidate in future elections.
Proof of this concept is found in our history. In every presidential election were the votes for a 3rd party candidate have been perceived to affect the election outcome, the number of votes for that 3rd party dropped dramatically in the next presidential election if the party survived at all.
Thus the saying “Third parties are like bees; when they sting they die”.
Again, if you want to live in country where 3rd parties can sometimes (and only sometimes) be relevant, your will need to move to a country with a parliamentary democracy.
First, Trump’s supporters are NOT true Conservatives, many of whom are rising to oppose him in fact. Trump’s support comes from America firsters, bigots and haters who have long thirsted to be free to publicly avow their hatreds, and a smaller but equally loyal group simply afraid for their jobs, their pensions, their futures.
Any progressive or leftist reading the posts on so many public forums becomes quickly aware of the selective nature of what these people read and believe. I must insert here that the left is just as guilty of such narrow and exclusionary vision in their own turn.
We have become , here in this supposed bastion of democracy, seemingly incapable of impartiality in opinion, ideas and ideals. Instead we dismiss any and all articles, editorials, speeches et al that differ from our preformed and inviolable opinions and no amount of logic, no testimony, no fact can seemingly penetrate our preformed and rigid positions.
Perhaps the fact that our two party system allows for no deviation, offers no wide spread span of ideas and ideals and, instead, has become slavish to the corporate money that finances their stranglehold on our politics and our policies, foreign and domestic has caused this phenomenon.
Doubledee, I was with you until you again started pushing the need for viable 3rd parties in this country. As we have discussed many times, the principles which prevent 3rd parties from being anything but a negative influence are ingrained in our constitution which is exceedingly difficult to change even if we wanted to. If you want to live in a country with viable 3rd parties you are going to have to move to one that has a parliamentary democracy.