Todays Email from the Bulwark talks about this issue
by wpkirish (2024-03-18 14:50:04)

In reply to: This is effing scary (link)  posted by sprack

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Bill Kristol talks about the January 6 hostages portion of the speech and how it is a signal to his supporters and potntial members of his adminstration that I have your back. As Kristol writes the idea of pardons for anyone can overturn a lot of guardrails.

Andrew Egger addreses the portion being discussed here. I copied a portion below and linked the entire piece. I think he captures what some of us have been trying to say here.


But all this is beside the real point. The point here isn’t that the media was unfairly maligned, or even that Trump is perfectly willing to carelessly toss around violent rhetoric—that’s been plain since 2015! The thing to note is how Trump’s defenders continue to weaponize the discourse around Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric to obscure the obvious, unsubtle ways in which he has embraced lawlessness and violence.

As Bill noted above, Trump hasn’t been shy about his full-throated embrace of those who did violence in his name on January 6th: He’s made springing them from prison a key campaign promise. And he has made no secret of his lust for redirecting state violence toward his political enemies: Every lawmaker who served on the House January 6th committee, he wrote yesterday on Truth Social, “should go to Jail.”

When anti-anti-Trump voices natter on about subjects like a “bloodbath hoax,” this is what they’re doing: focusing attention away from Trump’s concrete authoritarian sympathies and toward his more nebulously ominous utterances, all to create a vague sense in the minds of those not following things too closely that any connection between Trump and violent authoritarianism is just media propaganda.



Well said
by Pat85  (2024-03-18 18:14:16)     cannot delete  |  Edit  |  Return to Board  |  Ignore Poster   |   Highlight Poster  |   Cannot reply

Bill Kristol, while not easy to pigeonhole, he is hardly a left leaning liberal.

In relation to Trump's loose use of violent rhetoric, don't forget his ads "Bring Back The Death Penalty" regarding the Central Park 5 in 1989.

Biden is not a quality candidate for any ideological wing of either party, but this is not a "normal" election with two competent candidates like Kennedy-Nixon, McCain-Obama....I am struggling to understand those who prefer to no-vote or choose a certain-to-lose 3rd party candidate in this particularly tight election considering the stakes if Trump is elected, but I guess I only represent roughly 45% of those likely to vote. Yikes.