I compared Obama's approval rating in the same week of his presidency to Trump's approval rating in the same week of his presidency. My "complaint", actually my statement was that the media should be discussing approval ratings in a presidency as compared to other presidencies so that context is given. It's a pity your views on Trump are blinding you to my point about context.
Stayed the same of increased are both positives then. It clear that you're stating it has not gone down since the impeachment.
In that paragraph I was talking about the impeachment poll and your comment that 'the majority of Americans want their Senators to impeach Trump', not about the approval rating polls. But okay, fair enough that if the media reports negatively on Trump's approval rating, it should compare it to Obama or other presidents. Personally I get my info on his approval rating from FiveThirtyEight, where they are scientific enough to provide context.
And indeed, I agree impeachment hasn't done a thing to reduce his approval rating. I don't even rule out that it has marginally increased it - I'm just saying that's not clear from the data and if there is an impact, it's tiny.
I can disapprove of some of the things the President is doing and still be against his impeachment. And yes, I am against impeachment in this case. I don't think he violated the Constitution. And yes, partisanship is extremely high. In another presidency and another Congress what happened with Ukraine would likely have led to a formal censure of the President by Congress. As partisan as the Clinton impeachment was, so the Trump impeachment is.
Absolutely you can - if you reread my post, you'll see that I was basically deploring how rare a position like yours is. How scary it is, looking at opinion polls, how almost nobody who disapproves of Trump disagrees with his impeachment, while conversely almost nobody who supports him is willing to go on the record that there might be something to these allegations.
At one point, I remember reading some reports about how the most centrist Democrats in the House were trying to steer the conversation towards censure instead of impeachment. That never went anywhere because they were a small minority in their party - but also because hardly anyone on the Republican side in the House, and only very few in the Senate, dared to give any encouragement to it, at least not in public. And so the centrist Democrats were basically left with either supporting impeachment, or supporting the 'Trump hasn't done anything wrong' narrative.
I think one of the things you're not seeing is the view from within. I've lost friends because I supported due process for Kavanaugh in 2018. But they said I was supposed to reject him on the basis of a he said/she said argument because he was a Republican appointee. Many people who align with Democrats have taken to viewing people with views that deviate from the stances taken by Warren/Sanders as tantamount to being racists, Nazis, Republicans, etc. I especially love when I am called a Russian troll because I deviate from the orthodox views. Especially when it comes to immigration. It gets tiring. For instance in my exchange with Elizabeth on FB she immediately thought that people who voted for Johnson in the UK did so out of hate. Not because the thought of Corbyn and what he stood for was horrifying. And she ascribed those people who vote a certain way/support certain views of immigration and ICE as doing so for reasons of hate/xenophobia and that those views only occur in one party. And when I showed her quotes by Obama, Bill Clinton, Feinstein, and Schumer she had no response. Maybe because she didn't know. Or the media she consumes is not putting things into context. The point of this paragraph is that on so many issues when you're not ideologically pure, the side you would normally be on pushes you to the other side. And the media is not giving context. I will say this, if either Sanders or Warren get the nomination, the chances of me voting for a non-Democrat go up to 100%.
I can sympathize with that, sure. The combination of your electoral system and (social) media landscape has created a very toxic and if you ask me dangerous situation, in which moderates are perpetually having to pick their poison. I'm also concerned with how quickly and how far some things have escalated among progressives and the Democratic party as a whole. But Warren or Sanders aren't corrupt egomaniacs without the remotest regard or interest for anything but themselves like Trump is, and while you may well find them scarier than him when it comes to policy, the thing with policy is that Congress has far more influence than the White House. At least if they don't allow the president to bully them the way Trump bullies the Republicans in Congress.
Basically all of the more outlandish ideas suggested by the progressives in the Democratic primaries require Congressional approval, and they'd all be dead on arrival in Congress, regardless of whether Democrats manage to recapture the Senate or not. That should be pretty obvious to anyone who has taken a good look at the policy positions of the Democrats in the House and the Senate, it's just that it suits people on both the left and right to pretend otherwise.
Assuming a Trump re-election, then - certainly plausible at this point. *NM*
- 22/01/2020 07:38:37 PM
85 Views