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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
All Obama's speech did was remind me how much of a clusterfuck Trump is going to be. I can't even imagine him giving a speech where he doesn't insult anyone or commit some horrific gaffe. This may not be a fair comparison, but Obama gave a farewell address urging unity and positivity, while Trump is trying to convince people he isn't a Russian pawn who pisses on hookers.
edited 10th Jan '17 7:18:22 PM by iflewaway
somethingShould I expect a hopeful tone, a complete sidetrack, or a eulogy speech?
*For the farewell address. Didn't know this would be a page-topper.
edited 10th Jan '17 7:18:10 PM by CenturyEye
Look with century eyes... With our backs to the arch And the wreck of our kind We will stare straight ahead For the rest of our livesA hopeful tone - and a call to arms. He's asking every last one of us to stand up for democracy, equality, and justice. "Change only happens when the people demand it."
"Democracy can buckle when it gives in to fear."
"The Constitution is just a piece of parchment...we the people give it power."
Basically, Obama's final address is a deliberate rallying call for La Résistance. And I'm more than happy with that.
"We'll take the next chance, and the next, until we win, or the chances are spent."And then there's that guy who says society could collapse in ten years.
We could. Or an asteroid could hit that makes the dinosaur killer look like a pebble. Though none such is known to be on-course for us.
More likely we'll pull out of that spiral by the skin of our teeth. It seems to be a human habit. Barely surviving the worst and then bouncing back for a while before the next crisis point.
I think some folks I talked to earlier tonight summed it up best: "300,000,000 people in this country and it came down to those two?" Yup. Crisis point. We'll bounce back. People will. Maybe not the U.S. Too soon to tell one way or another. Just fight the good fight and remember: America's always been built by war. We don't function without it. Period. End of Story. So maybe a nice little culture war where it's the majority of us vs. Trump and his minority followers will actually be the boost we need to kick these stupid neocons out of power once and for all and replace them with REAL conservatives.
He could be far better for us than Clinton in the long run, actually. He can give us a common enemy to bond over and become a closer nation than we've ever been.
God, that does not bear thinking.
It's like this . . .
If the Alamo had been empty and no one had been lost in it, the Texans wouldn't have had a spirit lifting rally cry to go on to win their war for Independence (They may have won anyway, I don't know that particular part of history well enough to say). But there was a small group of people in the Alamo who fought their hardest and went down swinging, and that story gave the others a push.
Clinton winning would have been an empty Alamo. A mediocre presidency that barely, if at all, actually addresses the problems creating our divides. Hell, her stances on guns and energy sources alone would have heightened the strength of her enemies when the NRA really COULD say "the government is trying to take away our (semi-automatic and fully automatic) guns." She may have been the sensible choice, but sometimes being sensible is the wrong thing to do.
They say some people want to watch the world burn down. I say it takes a forest fire to clear the detritus clogging the forest floor, and to make some of the strongest trees grow. Keep your eyes open and be prepared to light some backdrafts of your own to keep the fire from getting out of hand and destroying the country and/or world, and let this one burn the trash in the political system so we can see who's really strong enough to stand it.
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The big issue here is that that logic runs both ways, and many Trump supporters actually look forward to future conflicts - both foreign and domestic - as effective means to weed out or cleanse the nation of weaknesses which otherwise would be "protected" by democratic bureaucracy.
edited 10th Jan '17 9:06:32 PM by FluffyMcChicken
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Putin did what no other soviet union dictator could: having a lasting harm on the EEUU.
is...impresive.
Also, I will said to those who said Trump is unsikable that isnt: is run was made by outsider status,hate of establishment and the idea is strongmen appeal could make a miracle, this hurt him.
I mean, you can tolerate corruption, you can tolerate a friendly russia, but this stupidity? this hurt, it dosent matter what Trump will do, THIS is what he will remenber.
edited 10th Jan '17 9:08:51 PM by unknowing
"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"![]()
There's no easy counterpoint to that. The way we've been going for a while now, this needed to happen eventually. In the end, we really do just need to buckle down and fight them to a standstill.
Russia wants all possible nations to go conservative or worse for some big reasons:
1. They'd side with Putin for a while and be useful to him.
2. They'd allow Global Warming to happen. Russia stands to be one of the world's top powers after a global warm up for a lot of reasons. They have a big fucking ice field in their country and next to their northern coast that blocks development. As long as they can use civil engineering to steer the flood zones, and pack their extra population inside their old Cold War bomb shelters for a while, they can bounce back as one of the pre-eminent Empires of the post-GW world.
So anyone who wants to help mitigate Global Warming is probably going to be fighting Russians the entire way.
edited 10th Jan '17 9:18:04 PM by Journeyman
They're playing a dangerous game, then. All of that permafrost might be a real life version of Sealed Evil in a Can — assuming you consider deadly pathogens to be "Evil".

So: this leak doesn't really change anything. We still know Trump is a puppet, and the Republicans looked the other way while Putin screwed with our government. But, it makes Trump look even more stupid, and it pisses him off to be laughed at. Take what you can get, I guess.