On election night, Duhbya was losing Florida, until he called up his brother J. E. B. who had earlier provided his state with magic voting machines. Lo and behold, after that the machines started giving Duhbya exactly as many votes as he needed to carry the state. If those few votes that Nader got had gone to Gore, do you seriously think that those machines couldn’t have flipped enough other votes to compensate? If you do, I have some land in south Florida to sell you. Cheap.
Getting southern racists to support good things like universal health care would indeed have been a good thing. Biden never did that. Things he did collaborate with southern racists on include opposing school bussing, and making it harder for ordinary people to get relief from student loans and credit card debt.
The alternative to impeachment is giving Trump and his gang a blank check to do anything they like regardless of legality and knowing ahead of time that there can’t possibly be any accountability. I don’t get why anyone who isn’t complicit would see that as a better alternative.
The powers that be don’t want the public to have any say in policy. So they offer you other aspects of your president that you can customize. You can choose a young president to give your money to insurance companies, or if you prefer, an old president who will give your money to the same companies. In this era of multiculturalism, you have so many more choices. Do you want a white president to start wars against Iran and Venezuela, or a black one to do it? Do you want a man or a woman to prosecute marijuana users and give bank fraudsters a pass? So many choices.
Of course we have to pay for things, but it makes a big difference how we pay for them. We can pay individually, or we can pay collectively as a society.
Example, to drive our cars we need to build roads. Roads are a public service: the public pays to build and maintain them and we pay taxes to pay for it. We could imagine an alternative “every man for himself” system where if you wanted to drive on a road, you had to rent it from its owner, and if there were no road going where you needed to go you would have to pay someone to build it for you. Does anybody not see why this would work horribly? Lots of people wouldn’t be able to afford roads to their homes, there’d be incredible inefficiency because of duplication, and those few people who owned the road networks would gouge the rest of us. On the other hand, if we go in the opposite direction, we could do things like reducing cars in favor of buses and trains and such; that would mean fewer accidents, less pollution, and a whole lot of other good things.
This love affair started long, long before Trump. Republicans have been crazy about deficits since at least the Reagan years. Deficits give them an excuse to slash programs that help people while blowing much bigger amounts on Pentagon pork and tax cuts for their rich campaign donors.
Trump is unqualified, therefore we can’t question Buttigieg’s qualifications, said no logician ever.