Matt Gaetz Catch-All | Ethics report released

  • Thread starter Thread starter nycfan
  • Start date Start date
  • Replies: 321
  • Views: 8K
  • Politics 
Callatoroy said:
Trump is already winning. He got gaetz to resign from congress as a disruptive figure who will be replaced with a less controversial individual.
Click to expand...
One sign of being in a cult is praising the leader as victorious even when he loses. There is no universe in which having a nominee resign in disgrace is a form of winning. It's a sign of Trump's manifest unfitness for office.
 
I genuinely don't know. Did Gaetz only resign from the 118th Congress, but will insist that the people of Florida duly elected him a member of the 119th Congress and he intends to take his seat in January?
 
superrific said:
One sign of being in a cult is praising the leader as victorious even when he loses. There is no universe in which having a nominee resign in disgrace is a form of winning. It's a sign of Trump's manifest unfitness for office.
Click to expand...
And a characteristic of people who can't detect satire often are those who can't fathom that they are ever wrong. That theory seems to be upheld here.
 
dukeman92 said:
Trump is a smart motherfucker.

He knew Gaetz nomination would stir the shit storm that would end in his eventual withdrawal. So Gaetz took a deal to resign from congress, which would get him out of the jam with the ethics committee while taking the spotlight off all of Trumps other terrible nominees.

Gaetz was the sacrificial lamb.
Click to expand...
Trump. Doesn't. Play. 4D. Chess. Don't fall into the trap of assuming that the craziness is anything other than craziness.
 
Callatoroy said:
And a characteristic of people who can't detect satire
Click to expand...
Nobody detected any of this so-called satire. Here's a tip: if you want to be satirical, then you have to at least make an effort to distinguish your satirical posts from the others. Your "sarcastic" post was basically the same as all of your posts.
 
dukeman92 said:
It's absolutely craziness. But there are people around him smarter than you give them credit for.
Click to expand...
I'm not talking about people around him - I'm talking about him. Your post said "Trump is a smart motherfucker" and purported to describe making Gaetz a "sacrificial lamb" as an intentional brilliant strategy by Trump. Not by the people around him.

I know there are smart people around Trump. Is it possible that someone manipulated him Trump into throwing out Gaetz knowing what would happen? Maybe, though I think there are lots of other possible explanations too. What I am very confident did not happen is that Trump himself though up the Gaetz nomination as some brilliant strategic move that would both help his other nominees (which, personally, I don't think will happen anyway) while bailing Gaetz out of his predicament with the House investigation (which didn't really happen anyway, because Gaetz is still out of Congress and personally disgraced).
 
Paine said:
Plays the dual purpose of allowing R Senators to look like they’re still playing their role as a check on Trump without actually doing it.

I don’t even think it was Trump’s idea. Honestly, the Republican Party has much more cunning pols than the Democratic Party. Especially on the Senate side. It’s easier for them to do stuff like this because of the systemic biases towards their coalition, but they are masters of this kind of maneuvering and have been for a long, long time.
Click to expand...
Right - because they're willing to cheat and don't mind that they're eroding public trust in government while they do it (in fact many of them see that as a benefit!) Dems, on the other hand, care more about maintaining public trust in government and so aren't as willing to do things that erode that trust and/or weaken Democracy general. It's certainly fair to cast that as a strategic weakness of Dems - the Garland nomination is the best example of a situation where pretty much everyone agrees that the Obama admin screwed up by allowing McConnell to stymie them, probably at least in part because they thought Hillary would win anyway - but I also think people tend to ignore the potential negative consequences if Dems engaged in the same sort of cutthroat maneuvering as Reps did. In my personal opinion it would likely hasten the decline of public trust, increase anti-democratic behavior and government, and send us spiraling even faster towards disaster.
 
rodoheel said:
Right - because they're willing to cheat and don't mind that they're eroding public trust in government while they do it (in fact many of them see that as a benefit!) Dems, on the other hand, care more about maintaining public trust in government and so aren't as willing to do things that erode that trust and/or weaken Democracy general. It's certainly fair to cast that as a strategic weakness of Dems - the Garland nomination is the best example of a situation where pretty much everyone agrees that the Obama admin screwed up by allowing McConnell to stymie them, probably at least in part because they thought Hillary would win anyway - but I also think people tend to ignore the potential negative consequences if Dems engaged in the same sort of cutthroat maneuvering as Reps did. In my personal opinion it would likely hasten the decline of public trust, increase anti-democratic behavior and government, and send us spiraling even faster towards disaster.
Click to expand...
I don’t really see how Democrats doing it would further erode trust in government. The average American isn’t paying attention to this appointment stuff at all. They pay attention to the results that affect their daily lives.

Like you say, Garland is the perfect example. By Democrats refusing to work around the Republicans because of “institutional norms” (same for the parliamentarian not allowing $15 min wage through reconciliation in 2021), they are hastening people’s distrust in the system. The system isn’t producing results or is actively producing negative ones.
 
rodoheel said:
I'm not talking about people around him - I'm talking about him. Your post said "Trump is a smart motherfucker" and purported to describe making Gaetz a "sacrificial lamb" as an intentional brilliant strategy by Trump. Not by the people around him.

I know there are smart people around Trump. Is it possible that someone manipulated him Trump into throwing out Gaetz knowing what would happen? Maybe, though I think there are lots of other possible explanations too. What I am very confident did not happen is that Trump himself though up the Gaetz nomination as some brilliant strategic move that would both help his other nominees (which, personally, I don't think will happen anyway) while bailing Gaetz out of his predicament with the House investigation (which didn't really happen anyway, because Gaetz is still out of Congress and personally disgraced).
Click to expand...

Trump is also smarter than you give him credit for.
 
Paine said:
I don’t really see how Democrats doing it would further erode trust in government. The average American isn’t paying attention to this appointment stuff at all. They pay attention to the results that affect their daily lives.

Like you say, Garland is the perfect example. By Democrats refusing to work around the Republicans because of “institutional norms” (same for the parliamentarian not allowing $15 min wage through reconciliation in 2021), they are hastening people’s distrust in the system. The system isn’t producing results or is actively producing negative ones.
Click to expand...
I don't really disagree with what you're saying too much, and I think there is ample room to criticize Dem failures over the last 15 years or so when they had the chance to do something a *little" naughty to serve the greater good. (Obama's insistence that Obamacare be bipartisan, and consequently unnecessarily watering it down, is another example.) But I do think people underrate how bad things could get long-term if what we end up with is the parties lurching back and forth by implementing policies not through traditional legislation, but through executive orders and other exercises of executive power in particular.

A lot of people on both the left and the right (to be clear, not saying this necessarily includes you) essentially want a president from their party to act like a king for a day and enact by fiat the stuff they think should be done, "checks and balances" and "norms" and "the constitution" be damned. Would we be better off in the short term if Biden pushed through things like $15 minimum wage? Probably, yes, but whatever is done in that matter can be easily undone (more easily than legislation) when a president from the opposite party takes power. The more we enable the exercise of executive power in that fashion, the easier it paves the way for authoritarians in the future. No matter how tempting it is to want a president from your side to do break all the rules and norms or whatever to ram through his or her agenda, that has real negative consequences in the long term, those being instability and, ultimately, authoritarianism.

Now to be fair, I think it's absolutely fair to say that the inertia of not doing things that need to be done in the other direction can be just as demoralizing for regular folks (and just as problematic long term). That's why my personal #1 policy prescription to "fix" the federal government is to GET RID OF THE FREAKING FILIBUSTER (fuck you, Manchin and Sinema) so that Congress can actually start making legislation again. The filibuster is forcing us more and more into anti-Democratic workarounds to get anything done; and it creates a powerful excuse for those in Congress to not do anything and maintain the status quo. It doesn't encourage bipartisanship; it encourages pure obstructionism by the minority party. More than anything else, it's responsible for Congress turning into a body that cares more about grandstanding stunts than actually freaking doing anything.
 
rodoheel said:
I don't really disagree with what you're saying too much, and I think there is ample room to criticize Dem failures over the last 15 years or so when they had the chance to do something a *little" naughty to serve the greater good. (Obama's insistence that Obamacare be bipartisan, and consequently unnecessarily watering it down, is another example.) But I do think people underrate how bad things could get long-term if what we end up with is the parties lurching back and forth by implementing policies not through traditional legislation, but through executive orders and other exercises of executive power in particular.

A lot of people on both the left and the right (to be clear, not saying this necessarily includes you) essentially want a president from their party to act like a king for a day and enact by fiat the stuff they think should be done, "checks and balances" and "norms" and "the constitution" be damned. Would we be better off in the short term if Biden pushed through things like $15 minimum wage? Probably, yes, but whatever is done in that matter can be easily undone (more easily than legislation) when a president from the opposite party takes power. The more we enable the exercise of executive power in that fashion, the easier it paves the way for authoritarians in the future. No matter how tempting it is to want a president from your side to do break all the rules and norms or whatever to ram through his or her agenda, that has real negative consequences in the long term, those being instability and, ultimately, authoritarianism.

Now to be fair, I think it's absolutely fair to say that the inertia of not doing things that need to be done in the other direction can be just as demoralizing for regular folks (and just as problematic long term). That's why my personal #1 policy prescription to "fix" the federal government is to GET RID OF THE FREAKING FILIBUSTER (fuck you, Manchin and Sinema) so that Congress can actually start making legislation again. The filibuster is forcing us more and more into anti-Democratic workarounds to get anything done; and it creates a powerful excuse for those in Congress to not do anything and maintain the status quo. It doesn't encourage bipartisanship; it encourages pure obstructionism by the minority party. More than anything else, it's responsible for Congress turning into a body that cares more about grandstanding stunts than actually freaking doing anything.
Click to expand...
Just get rid of the Senate altogether. No other advanced democracy does this shit.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top