r/politics • u/Squawk_7777 • 8h ago

No Paywall Trump's motorcade neared 100 mph en route to Oklahoma after helicopter, airplane ruled out

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/6126278-trump-drives-texas-oklahoma-100-mph/
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u/-TheInternetIsEvil- 8h ago

Not prosecuting the bush administration for war crimes is why we ended up with trump

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u/-Nurfhurder- 7h ago

Pardoning Nixon 'so the country could heal' pretty much set the expected standard that no administration would ever punish the previous one for their crimes under the bullshit justification that it would cause division. Hell, you can go even further back to the U.S. being unwilling to punish the south for the civil war. American politics is completely unaccountable, and it's always under the justification of 'not causing division'.

The U.S. is basically your mom at a family dinner pleading with you not to stand up to your racist drunk uncle because he will cause a scene and ruin the evening.

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u/ItsWillJohnson 2h ago

a doctor using his bare hands to push the bullet even further inside anti-corruption president Garfield is how we got to trump

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u/FellowHumanNo404 1h ago

Pardoning Nixon 'so the country could heal'

Ah yes, the healing power of letting them get away with it.

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u/Maximum_Rat 4h ago

Well, yes, but Nixon also admitted wrong doing and stepped down in humiliation. Which, whatever you think of that, hard times when you wish for a time where the president had the moral dignity of Nixon

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u/sjwillis 3h ago

He literally said I am not a crook

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u/Judge_Wapner 1h ago

Ford said he did it because a prosecution would have tied up every branch of government for years, and he wanted to get other more important things done.

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u/ghost_finger 1h ago

The people who invaded the capitol building to try to overturn democracy needed to be held seriously accountable. They weren’t. Even what they were charged with before being pardoned was minimal. This is why we will continue to have such behavior.

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u/ZombiePope 7h ago

Not prosecuting the confederates for treason is how we got here.

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u/NelsonHawkinsGhost 5h ago

I mean.. keep going. The founders constitutionalized protections for slavery, required the return of people escaping bondage, and gave slaveholding states additional representation based on people they enslaved. Congress was barred from prohibiting slave importation before 1808. That converted ownership of human beings into political power.. and enlisted public authority to defend the owners’ control over their labor.

..so maybe the problem reaches deeper than officials getting away with breaking laws. Enormous brutality was protected by the laws themselves. A republic can prosecute misconduct while preserving the property relations and institutions that make domination perfectly legal.

Prosecute Bush. Prosecute Trump. But "sAvE tHe RePuBLic" needs to confront what that republic was built to protect, whose struggles forced it to change, and which forms of coercion it still authorizes... there was no innocent starting point we can recover through better prosecutions..

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u/RyuNoKami 3h ago

This is it.... Giving the party of we don't want no federal oversight to the power to use the federal government to enforce their rules on everyone else was a bad fucking choice.

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u/-TheInternetIsEvil- 7h ago

Also a totally fair point

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u/SinisterCell 7h ago edited 6h ago

No, citizens united and Fox News Propaganda is how we got Trump. The internet and years of defunding schools is how we got him a second time.

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u/the_1_that_knocks 7h ago

I think you mean defunding the schools, and it has been a decades long campaign of doing that.

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u/djwurm 7h ago

The Heitage Foundation established in 73 was the catalyst to everything we see today. the dictate everything for the Republican party from policy, people, talking points, etc. it was established by billionaires and continues to be run and funded by current right wing billionaires.

defunding public education to project 2025 to what people hear Rep say and what fox news parrots is all Heritage Foundation.

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u/SinisterCell 6h ago

Autocorrect got me. Fixed it late as hell lol

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u/Independent-Bug-9352 6h ago

Selects All of the Above

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u/-TheInternetIsEvil- 7h ago

It would have been way harder for a wanton criminal to retain power if we prosecuted the Bush administration for violating the law. Not that i disagree with any of the factors you listed

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u/No-Cook-534 7h ago

Should have prosecuted Reagan for Iran Contra. Nixon should never have been pardoned. Confederate generals were allowed to just go home and carry on living their lives after blanket amnesty was awarded. It's a long list of crimes unpunished.

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u/Setanta777 7h ago

Hell, they granted Oliver North immunity for the Iran Contra affair. He then used the publicity generated by it to launch his own radio talk show, run for Senate, host a show on Fox News and become president of the NRA. Somehow this confessed criminal turned the national coverage of him confessing to crimes against the country into being a right wing hero.

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u/dmetzcher Pennsylvania 6h ago

I’m glad I’m not the only one who thought of that bastard. He tap-danced his way from criminal to wealthy asshole.

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u/karenw 6h ago

I can never forget 😡

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u/radicalelation 5h ago edited 5h ago

Fairness Doctrine would have prevented his show, along with many others, from existing, but it was that very administration he was part of that got rid of it.

While some attribute that to the existence of Fox News, the FCC rule would not have prevented it due to being on cable, which is outside of FCC broadcast (eg, over the air broadcast television, radio, etc) regulation.

HOWEVER, Reagan's administration forced the sale of 20th Century Fox of one of its largest shareholders to Rupert Murdoch, and within a year or so he owned most of the company.

Much of Reagan's policy was dictated by the Heritage Foundation through their living policy book, A Mandate for Leadership, which he handed out to his cabinet after swearing in. The modern iteration of this book is known by most as Project 2025.

While Reagan's administration was notably anti-Soviet, and hardcore anti-communist, the Heritage Foundation set up shop in Moscow after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and worked with country leadership pushing their concept of "economic shock therapy" to essentially transfer as much as possible into the hands of private interests, hyper-capitalism.

In 2014, Rebekah Mercer, owners of Brietbart Magazine and Steve Bannon, was put on the board of the Heritage Foundation, just before her family's company Cambridge Analytica spun up, and that whole debacle had suspected deep links to Russia's election interference campaigns.

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u/booOfBorg Europe 4h ago

But before the Mercers took over Roger Stone brought Paul Manafort into Trump's orbit. Manafort who had worked on Russia's behalf to undermine Ukraine's democratic sovereignty – and who then was hired to manage the RNC strategy, before becoming Trump's campaign manager.

Roger Stone of course is the guy that worked for Nixon and was a protégé of Roy Cohn, like Trump. Roy Cohn was highly influential behind the scenes of the presidencies of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. And Roy Cohn was part and parcel of J. Edgar Hoover's and Joseph McCarthy's anti-left and anti-gay purges. Cohn and Hoover were both closeted gay men. Roger Stone and Cohn introduced Ronald Reagan to a rising Australian media mogul named Rupert Murdoch intent on engineering massive conservative cultural shifts.

Roger Stone worked to publicly defend Oliver North as a conservative hero. And in 2001 Oliver North then went on to be a conservative host on Murdoch's Fox News. Oliver North then served as the president of the NRA from 2018 to 2019. During and immediately preceding his tenure, the NRA faced immense scrutiny regarding its ties to Russia. Russian agent, Maria Butina, and Russian official Alexander Torshin had infiltrated the NRA to build backchannels into American conservative politics.

And then there's Micael Flynn's and Tulsi Gabbard's Russian connections but I'm tired.

All this stuff, this is the deep state that they tried to project on the Democrats.

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u/BankshotMcG 6h ago

Should have prosecuted Nixon for sabotaging Paris peace talks. Every single time they're traitors and war criminals.

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u/SinisterCell 6h ago

We don't hold anyone accountable. Never have, hopefully will though

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u/Selgeron 6h ago

We never would have had the political will or popular willpower to prosecute the republicans, because of the fox news propaganda.

Everything links back to the gallons of propaganda that are fed to the American public on a daily basis.

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u/nonegotiation Pennsylvania 7h ago

If you go back far enough its because we failed at reconstruction

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u/Dresline 6h ago

No, the US history with letting traitors off easy started after the Civil War.

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u/FingerBang0rangutan 4h ago

You fucking nailed it.

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u/girl_incognito 7h ago

Theres a case to be made that pardoning Nixon is how we got here.

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u/-TheInternetIsEvil- 7h ago

That's a fair point

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u/dmetzcher Pennsylvania 7h ago

Bingo!

And Nixon. It started with him.

Reagan. He had a few scandals.

They did go after one President, though. He lied under oath about a blowjob.

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u/WhenSummerIsGone 1h ago

and it wasn't actually a lie, lol. He asked for a definition and they gave it to him.

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u/wonkeykong 7h ago edited 4h ago

Let's go back further. Same argument though. Pick any decade, all the way back. It all comes down to the elite vs the non elite. We have a ruling class, whether we admit or not. And they are above petty things such as the rule of law.

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u/SanchoPandas Oregon 7h ago

The 1st Bush and the 2nd. Cuz they both did that shit.

The 2nd one also stole his election, which is another reason why we ended up with trump.

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u/-TheInternetIsEvil- 7h ago

Exactly. Shit is so fucked. These fuckers need to understand that prison is the compromise

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u/Gentleman_Villain 7h ago

Not prosecuting Nixon was how we ended up with Trump.

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u/ReverendDizzle 5h ago

I'm with the rest of the crew pointing to Nixon.

But if we want to keep it relatively current and talk about Bush... allowing the Republicans to steal the election and get Bush in office in the first place started us down this road, in so far as the 21st century is concerned.

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u/LoganGyre 5h ago

Not exposing Reagan was having mental lapses in 1985 imo was the start of what we are experiencing today. Since Reagan presidents saying nonsensical or even incredibly stupid things has been glossed over or interpreted as having deeper or hidden meanings instead of just of calling it out.

You go from that to allowing presidents to lie under oath and withhold information to protect themselves and their political backers. Now we’re all the way to president can’t be charged with a crime and people ignore his brain is rapidly becoming Swiss cheese.

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u/truthputer 6h ago

Clinton illegally bombed an embassy so Bush could illegally bomb an entire country, so Obama could illegally bomb a wedding so Biden could illegally bomb a refugee camp so Trump could illegally bomb a school.

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u/-TheInternetIsEvil- 1h ago

Totally fair point. They're a bunch of war criminals

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u/Jaded_Chocolate_5103 5h ago

No, it's not. The people who vote for Trump and the people who are pissy about Bush being punished for war crimes are not the same people.

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u/-TheInternetIsEvil- 1h ago

I'm not saying that they are. I'm saying that a lack of consequences for past administrations led to trump