Nixon was certainly a jerk but was far to the left of the modern Republican party. Someone as recent as GHW Bush would be way outside the Republican party of today. Hell, GWB said this, which, imagine if 9/11 happened while Trump was president and the sort of vile **** he would spew:



caveat: GWB destroyed several Muslim countries, which Donald Trump has not yet had the opportunity to do. However if Trump 9/11 ever happens, I'd set the line on number of Muslim countries destroyed at significantly higher than 2

in case anyone was wondering how to feel about this Khashoggi thing


anyone know if MBS loves calendars and BEER!!!?




good scientists on both sides

i also like how this strategy of governing in the exact same manner as he lived only a few years ago is effective with his supporters, apparently
like you ask him about literally subject and he just pulls **** out of his ass like when he was trolling from his office on twitter
being willfully ignorant and pretending like he doesn't have some of the best intelligence sources in the world on all of these issues
hey i'm just a regular guy with some TAKEZ here, i dunno man
hey your uncle is supposedly some great scientist, maybe ring him up and ask him some expertise here?
nah nah, i'm good, no time for that
cult be like this is fine and makes total sense


simulation going off the rails here...

Nixon created the EPA and actually enforced desegregation in Southern schools. He was also a virulent homophobe and anti-semite. I guess what I'm saying is the 60s/70s were a weird time.

Well Lincoln and I thought Teddy R was OK. I would say I found the elder Bush at least somewhat reasonable (excepting his obvious complete failure as a parent) and while he still held republican views I'm totally opposed to, not a diseased maniac psychopath cult of personality like the other last 4 elected R presidents. Ford was just a ***** who pardoned Nixon. Of course Trump is the very worst, but after that the ranking is an open question mostly depending on your definition of "war crimes" and whether sheer stupidity or contracting Alzheimers are valid categories. **** if I could kill any of them as a baby, probably Reagan. Wouldn't have the student loan debt problem for one and who knows how Latin America would have played out. At least he suffered.

But yes the thing I hate most about the R's is they literally force me to vote for the democrats.

Both were liberal republicans from a different time where the ideological split between the parties didn't resemble what it does today.

that's the joke

Ronny laid the groundwork for a lot of the worst things we associate with Repuplicans today. Not socially necessarily, but fiscally. He really leaned into the idea that government was the bad guy and deregulation was a good thing. "Get government off your back and our of your pocket". He's the reason theres even a debate about whether or not we need a regulation preventing coal waste from being dumped into streams.

Pre-Reagan/Post-Taft Republicans probably wouldn't have been this thread's choice for the office, but with a few exceptions, they weren't the abject horror shows we see now. Reagan is responsible for a lot of that. He's a truly terrible president and human being.

[QUOTE=RT;54378524
Pre-Reagan/Post-Taft Republicans probably wouldn't have been this thread's choice for the office, but with a few exceptions, they weren't the abject horror shows we see now. Reagan is responsible for a lot of that. He's a truly terrible president and human being.[/QUOTE]

I like this.

Great post by RT

Yeah the more I learn about Reagan the more I hate him. Yet he is still basically God to such a large percent...sigh...

Saying "not socially" is giving Ronny way too much credit. The famous "I didn't leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me" line is literally him talking about leaving the party during JFK's presidency due to support for the civil rights movement.

He then went on to gain national prominence as a Goldwater supporter and the far right conservative challenger to Gerald Ford.

The Reagan lionizing has been awful for this generation of politics, but even partially letting him off the hook by saying something like he wasn't that conservative socially is damaging and goes further to normalizing this ultra conservative trash.

The politics of the era from FDR to Nixon in the US are very interesting and pretty instructional to everything that has happened in the US since. The Democrats had a dominant era starting with the 1932 election on the back of economic recovery from the great depression, very liberal economic policies, expanding federal government powers, and handling of WWII. The main criticism of FDR would be that he didn't do much to advance civil rights of disadvantaged racial minorities and in the case of Japanese Americans greatly harmed them during his presidency.

Moving from this socially liberal administration we had Truman, who I think was a truly awful President. However, one redeeming quality that turned out to be of great historical significance was his early support of the civil rights movement which caused the initial split of southern segregationist democrats in the 1948 election. This would begin an interesting run of elections as the 48 election featured a moderate to liberal Democrat in Truman vs the Moderate Progressive leader of the Republican party at the time in Dewey.

The 1952 and 1956 elections were backwards compared to today's politics as the Republican won back power by running the more liberal candidate in Eisenhower and the Republicans had the more liberal platform, while the democrats had an open segregationist as the VP on their 1952 ticket.

The Democrats won back power in 1960 by running the younger, more popular, and more liberal candidate in JFK. His support of the civil rights movement and subsequent support via the Civil Rights Act from LBJ placed the final nail in the coffin of southern conservative support for the Democratic Party as they began to be courted by a far right movement led by Barry Goldwater in 1964 and perfected with the racist dogwhistling of Nixon's southern strategy in 1968.

From that point, the politics of the right in this country have essentially been a conservative revolt against the 36 year run of essentially liberal government rule at the federal level with the racist undertones of getting back a supremacy the right feels was wrongly taken from them during the civil rights movement.

"all the DEMOGRAPHICS"...in Tennessee? A state that Trump won by 25?

man, never would have expected heroball to turn straight deplorable.

Reagan was a racist POS scumbag moron, end of story. Republicans just didn’t say the quiet parts out loud back then.

John Roberts mostly sucks, but in a speech he gave in Minnesota a couple of days ago he was talking about how SCOTUS has to remain independent. He asserted that when the court has ****ed up, it has done so mostly because it was ruling based on politics of the day rather than constitutional principles. He cited Korematsu as an example. https://www.apnews.com/a539fc05fb4d4d85a22a51ce11615bee

(Of course he went right ahead and upheld the muslim travel ban which came from essentially the same unconstitutional place so fwiw)

LORD SABAN floating a 2020 trial balloon

https://mynbc15.com/news/local/saban...-for-us-senate

Huggy Bear tho

The President is tweeting out the absolutely insane conspiracy theory that George Soros is paying Hondurans to illegally immigrate to America. Exactly 0 Republicans have a problem with this.

why would they start now?


kind of amazing that (((SOROS))) has any money left after paying literally all of the billions that are opposing this clown really

related: where's my money?


and as many have mentioned before, the kind of funny thing about most of the insane stuff like this that he says is that he's actually telling on himself/them

We can’t all channel bizarre hypochondrial nihilism

:shrug:

Australian politics update: our latest new prime-minister Scott Morrison forgot to renew his official website, someone bought it and it's now just a gross pic of him with Scotty Doesn't Know from Eurotrip playing on a loop.

Only the best down here

What I said was:

Which is still true. I didn't say he was a good person (I called him a terrible president and human being) but the issues most of us have with Republicans today on the social end are some combination of Civil Rights, Reproductive Rights, and Relgious nuttery and its effect on policy.

Reagan was a ****heel, but he didn't do much as President that really pushed modern conservatives forward on that front.

What did he do? He ran saying he wanted to restrict abortion rights, but when he was Governor of California, he signed the TAA making Abortions easier in CA and when he was President he never made any push to pass legislation restricting abortion rights.

She was a conservative, but he appointed the first female Justice in O'Connor, who's vote helped on PP v. Casey (and also hurt on Bush v. Gore and others, but she was still a Conservative...).

He gave Amnesty to nearly 4 Million illegal aliens in 1986, that's nearly unthinkable for a modern Republican to do.

He had a mixed record on Civil Rights laws while in office, signing some bills while vetoing others, and was almost certainly an old racist white guy, but it's hard to argue that the modern Republican racism we see isn't a combination of Whites becoming a plurality in the country and the rise of Evangelicals in 2004 from Dubya and Rove's plan to avoid him losing the popular vote again.

If anything, Reagan's treatment of the Drug War was his most damning social strike against him, but later Democratic presidents didn't exactly do a ton of curb that either. It wasn't until late in Obama's 2nd term that he addressed it in any substantive way.

(I omitted his record on LGBT rights not because it isn't awful, which is obviously is given the AIDS epidemic at the time, but because Dems don't exactly have a great LGBT record until like 2015 so that seemed a little unfair)

Reagan gave us the idea that trickle down economics and deregulation can somehow work for middle and lower class Americans but most of the modern Republican racism is caused by that 2004 deal with evangelicals. They've always been racist since the realignment following the 1964 CRA, and Republicans have always preyed on that to a degree, but he ratcheted it up to 11, and we're still seeing those effects today.

Not like a journalist wasn't just brutally tortured and murdered or anything