POTUS/General Election Thread 2020 + Aftermath

[Montmorency]

@Montmorency

My apologies. You have been correct all along and I have been wrong.

It doesn't please me to hear it...

All I've strove to do is challenge my own preconceptions about the country and the nature of the Republican party, which has led to harsh but lucid, if not prescient, places.

All I can recommend to you is, maybe it pays to seek out the commentators who have been right on this for decades, and who have consistently called the balls during the Trump era. Why did they get it right when most others got it wrong, or were motivated to? Look to them before me.

Trump is not among the worst Presidents. He makes Buchannan look benign and Harding competent.

What decisively ratified Johnson in the consensus as WOAT (or at least worst as often as second-worst) was his wholesale pardoning of the Confederacy. Without that, despite the mortal injury he dealt to Reconstruction he might not be the worst.

How many times do I have to say that we're still living through the Cold War against the Confederacy of the Mind?

A scene out of a Harry Turtledove novel:

I am hopeful that the moderate bloc of the Senate -- those folks not rabidly Trump or hyper-progressives -- can get some legislation through, at least on practical concerns like infrastructure and the like.

I too have high hopes for Manchin and Sinema. But not that high. If you mean the Collins-Murkowski-Romney crew, well, alone they don't breach the filibuster, and as relatively self-interested as they are without the filibuster they have little incentive to work with Democrats (unless Collins thinks she can ride the maverick Maine electorate to Feinstein-tier tenure). In my view the likelihood of Dems having to go it alone in whatever it is available to them to do is similar to the likelihood of Manchin remaining a Democrat. Maybe one Republican joins Dems on pandemic relief via budget reconciliation in exchange for heavy larded pork, but never as a deciding vote in place of a Dem defector.