No thanks. One party already does everything it can to disenfranchise voters across the country. I think I’ll stick with the pro-Democracy side of the equation.

Extremism doesn’t help anyone. Ever.

Lol, no. You can’t just make stuff up. Follow the law. If the law is an ass, change it, but not retrospectively. There is enough malfeasance to prosecute as it is.

Faith in democracy requires a belief we are all equal before the law.

Thanks, “Vlad”

Counterpoint: “Maybe the Best Way to Oppose Fascism is to Fucking Oppose It”

Sure, let’s not apply the law to ex presidents. What could go wrong.

He launched an insurrection to overthrow the US government, then gave aid and comfort to those combatants. He has then gone on record saying he plans to pardon those combatants upon taking office. He also has plans to round up his political rivals on day one of “being a dictator”, as well as using the military to lay waste to any and all protesters. He has called immigrants verman “poisoning the blood of our country”, which I’m sure wouldn’t go hand and hand with vigilante justice in rounding up and executing anyone the maga folks find to be an “immigrant” in the same vein as the Salem witch trials (or people of color).

How anyone can look at just those things, with a longer list growing by the day, and see him as a viable candidate is mind boggling.

Well we could debate taking the driver’s license for people involved in a DUI about the same as this topic in the vein of “is this the right play?” The notion is that folks who are apt to take the mechanisms of Government and use them as such to violate an oath they took to defend the Constitution, are likely folks we don’t want to hand back control of those mechanisms so they can get another crack at it. Sort of how we don’t give folks in a DUI back their license until there’s been a clear “rehabilitation” or if we want to be pure cynical “a debt to society paid”. The point of not giving them their license right away is because they could potentially do a lot of harm with it being just handed back to them.

And you’ve indicated that it seems desperate. And yeah, the whole mechanism of disqualification and the whole fact that treason is one of the very few things in criminality that’s laid out by the Constitution, is such because nobody wanted people to just randomly start firing off disqualifications. It’s made to be a really, really, really, really last resort kind of thing. It’s supposed to be something that we try all these other hundreds of things first before using. So if it feels desperate in the sense that the word is defined as Having lost all hope; despairing it’s because there isn’t a lot of hope that the GOP has pulled itself together enough to prevent someone who incited people to storm the capitol and attempt to upend an election from taking the nomination again.

None of this developed in a vacuum. Trump has done and said things that few other Presidents have said and done and all the mechanisms before have in one way or another nixed the person from returning. Those functions have stopped working and that’s getting more into a complex topic about why and it’s a long history. But I can tell you there was a transformation of the GOP and how they conducted themselves pre/post Haley Barbour and it especially came to a head with Reince Priebus and you can get even deeper on how our forcing of a two party system has led to this.

But in summary, the GOP as a political apparatus has a great deal of control ceded to them via codification in various State laws. They are absolutely not just some group of folks coming together, lots of States have laws, rules, or regulations that basically establish them that say 3rd parties don’t get to enjoy. But the GOP has lost a lot of internal control and regulation of their own apparatus, I mean look how shit show the 2016 GOP primary was. Look at the 2024 GOP primary and how the person leading the nomination isn’t even in the apparatus ran debates. There’s zero control mechanisms working within that political group. That’s problematic because the GOP gets a free pass to get on the ballot in pretty much every State, by default they show up there.

So you’ve got a group that gets to be in the election without the normal State level checks and balances but that group has lost complete control over their political machine. That’s so many red flags that it is a red flag factory. So with all of those controls failing within that party, yeah, we’ve got to pull the emergency brake here. It is a big deal.

It’s giving him even more credibility

Well I’ll say this. Trump makes the point that the political elites run the show and what not. And yeah, as far as the two party system goes being forced down us, yeah, no disagreement there. But he advocates “none” for political apparatus control and that’s too far the other direction. And that’s actually a worse direction. Ideally I’d like something in the middle, but if we’re making it binary, I’ll keep the two party system as it is (just a personal taste).

And I think that really sums up what we saw in 2020 and what we are looking at for a 2024 run. You’ve got two really bad options here. One is obscenely bad and the other is just bad in the business as usual kind of way. So with all that said, as far as granting him “credibility” yeah, it highlights something wrong with what we got. But holy shit, there’s no part of what Trump is offering that we want to replace what we got with.

You know here in Tennessee I’ve heard a saying that came about with Governor Ray Blanton. “If you think the professional politicians are bad, just you wait till the amateurs show up.” I get what Trump is spitting here, but best I can do is buy about 10% of it because the other 90% is pure madness. So he, in my book, doesn’t get points for saying something that surface level is correct but deep dive into is a sea of authoritarianism horror.

He is guilty of insurrection and there’s a phone call of him committing direct electoral fraud.

It’s very reasonable and within legal precedent for voters not to want someone committed to being a dictator and guilty of insurrection on a ballot.