Honestly, my friendships with Republicans aren’t what they used to be in the age of Trump. But if any of them flip, and frankly, few if any have, I would instantly be on good terms, maybe even better than before. I think we need to offer some message that coming to your senses will have some positive impact. Because if flipping on Trump means you’ll be hated by both sides, not many are going to do it.
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Honestly I think at this point its time to accept that none of the current ones are flipping anymore. If you haven’t left yet after everything you never are. If you didn’t leave trumpism after Jan 6th you’re a lifer.
But if you were a simple pawn who got duped and fell for the propaganda and somehow still manage to snap out of it, I’m cool with offering an olive branch to that person. Depends on how much they snap out of it though. If they still support insane gerrymandering and voter suppression and fascism or his immigration ( and Bidens ) policy but just don’t like bad things Trump says out loud meh.
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I’ll give Colin Powell some minor pats on the back for at least endorsing the Democratic nominees for president the last three elections.
But what he did in the lead up to the Iraq War more than qualifies him for this thread.
Fuck him.
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Oh I didn’t know he did that. I guess he’s slightly less bad, still not off the list. Needed to do WAY more.
Powell was fully vaccinated according to his family’s Facebook post, as reported by CNN
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Yeah it was a huge deal when he endorsed Obama over McCain.
Powell endorsement of Obama. He provides a really good critique of the modern GOP. And, perhaps most famously, defended Obama on the Muslim issue not just by pointing out that Obama is not, but arguing why it would not be a problem if he was.
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I think admitting he was wrong about the Iraq war and his speech should get him some credit. Maybe it doesn’t redeem him completely, but we should be looking to incentivize public officials to own up to their mistakes, imo, or else it’s just going to further incentivize the Trump tactic of never admitting you are wrong.
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Powell was heinous and of course he knew he was lying in the cause of killing hundreds of thousands or millions of people. Jesus Christ at not being a Trumper absolving him or any of the war mongering neo-cons.
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I mean.
Mr Powell’s team removed dozens of pages of alleged evidence about Iraq’s banned weapons and ties to terrorists from a draft of his speech, US News and World Report says today. At one point, he became so angry at the lack of adequate sourcing to intelligence claims that he declared: “I’m not reading this. This is bullshit,” according to the magazine.
Presented with a script for his speech, Mr Powell suspected that Washington hawks were “cherry picking”, the US magazine Newsweek also reports today.
I think to some extent, he saw the WMD thing correctly as a pretext, and felt that he was doing his political job in putting an attractive gloss on what was going to be administration policy in any case. Given that I believe that literally any Republican apparatchik in his position would have done what he did, can I really fix any blame on him beyond the general evil of being an official in the GWB administration? It’s an interesting moral question that I don’t really have a good answer for. I guess I’m more rustled by someone like David Frum, who came up with the Axis of Evil speech using his own initiative, and is therefore more of a progenitor of evil than a guy like Powell who was ultimately a cog in the machine.
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A cog in the machine? Completely absurd. Give me a break
Describing a war criminal as such can only come from a perverse personal desire to treat everything like an intellectual game
A cog in the machine!!!
The guy who lied about wmds to the UN
Just a cog. And let’s just smooth over his crimes with some dumb puff from Newsweek about how good he was
Dumbass
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Sure, there are varying degress of evil in this world and while I would argue that Powell is a lesser evil, he is evil nonetheless. To me, he’s like a cop who knows a bunch of shady shit going on but keeps his mouth shut about it. He might not be doing it but his willful ignorance allows it to happen.
Definitely eligible for this thread imo
ChrisV’s take isn’t that surprising given his takes on free will in general. That’s fine. People have no free will and holding people responsible for what they do isn’t so simple.
But, to the rest of the Liberals here, let’s never say or think any of that absolute bullshit about him being a willing dupe. Don’t memory hole this like you did after the last time someone pointed that out to you. And quit worshiping the military as led by real men of integrity. We aren’t in elementary school.
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Hey, but at least he had qualms!
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There’s some real glossing over being a heinous war criminal ITT. Lol libs always and forever.
I’m inclined to think it probable that the Bush administration was duped by Ahmed Chalabi and co. Perhaps willingly I’ll grant, but was there intelligence on the ground there? I don’t think so.
We can agree that the droolersphere is going to totally glom onto the fact that homie was fully vaccinated and still died, right?
Will that be among Tucker’s talking points tonight, or do we think he’ll wait until tomorrow?
The Bush administration was marching through Langley demanding “evidence”.
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Derps making a big deal that he was vaxxed. They forget the multiple myeloma part and the very poor immune system as a result.
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