Politics & Current Events
BlueBirdMB
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I'm so sad and disappointed
Florida... wow... I've never bought in the whole "people who vote for so and so are stupid" thing, but people who are voting for Trump are stupid and blind. I just have no other thoughts. I'm still trying to figure out who these Trump supporters are and I'm pretty sure they aren't regularly voting Republicans (thus the reason why none of the normal conservative lines seem to work), but wow... they are stupid as hell.
Rubio dropped out in case you hadn't heard. I'm not sure how the math works out now since Kasich won Ohio, but Cruz will need to do a ton of catching up to make anything happen. Trump just won 99 delegates from Florida alone. I'm so sad and angry.
Re: I'm so sad and disappointed
I really agree with this. I don't like Trump and I wouldn't vote for him because I don't think he is diplomatic enough to be President. But, at the same time, I think many of his outlandish comments and sensationalism have just been manufactured for the campaign trail. Because look...it's working.
My one hope I cling to, if he is elected, is that he is a business savvy, intelligent person. You can't be the buffoon he is currently pretending to be and become one of the wealthiest people on the planet. He's always had a bombastic personality but, when he is no longer striving to be elected, I think he will turn into a much more sane version of himself. At least that is my hope (sigh).
And yeah, I get really sick and tired every time there is a presidential election of the losing side acting like "the sky is falling" and "our nation is ruined". Such an eye roll. Of course, its okay to be upset and be concerned, but most people's lives go on like they always have. No reason this election would be any different than that, regardless of who ends up being elected.
At the time Obama was first elected, I worked with a lot of very conservative people. Some of them went out that same week to buy up a bunch of guns before Obama outlawed gun sales (or something like that). Sure. Fast forward 8 years and I'm pretty sure the process to buy a handgun is exactly the same as it was before Obama was elected. Or I could just go buy one at a gun show where there is no vetting process AT ALL. Maybe they are required to get my ID? I'm not even sure they have to do that. Maybe they'd only ask, for themselves, if I was paying with a credit card. Because, you know, credit card fraud.
I didn't mean to imply that everyone who didn't like Obama (or insert any other President) acted like the sky was falling, or that anyone is acting like that for the current election...even with all of our mutual great dislike for Trump...so I hope that was not the impression I gave. I was just bombarded on an almost daily basis of the "sky is falling" people when Obama was first elected and even when he was reelected. So it became one of my pet peeves.
Trump's willingness (supposedly) to throw out some of our most basic freedoms guaranteed in the Bill of Rights is very concerning. But then, I think that is some of the magic of our form of government. We also have the Legislative and Judicial branches to keep any one President inside reasonable boxes.
Today (or yesterday)-Trump said that if the GOP denies him the election in a brokered convention, there will be rioting. And I actually believe that's true.
I also agree with a lot of you that Trump is being far more extreme for the votes than he would be in real life, but his flip-flopping and failure to define any policy makes me worry that even he has no idea what he's going to do once he's in office. I feel like he's in this to win the most powerful seat in the world-but that's really it. I will not vote for him. I think that racism, bigotry, xenophobia, the promotion of violence, and the offensive tone of his so-called "leadership" is worse than Hillary's lying.
Using the media way of overreacting and overanalyzing every single piece of speech everyone uses in the process these days, Obama should have been crucified for saying the following at a speech in Philadelphia “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” Obama said at a Philadelphia fundraiser Friday night. “Because from what I understand folks in Philly like a good brawl." Using the standard applied to Trump, was Obama inciting violence? He also told people to "get in their face" and "punch back twice as hard".
I'm not a Trump supporter and I didn't vote for him but the hand wringing and overdramatized doomsaying has got me tempted to in the general election. I have several friends who initially didn't support him but due to the media driven (because it makes a good sensationalized story doesn't it?!) story about how he's practically the anti-christ has caused a backlash among people who don't want to vote Democrat but feel lied to by the current Republican officeholders. As a practical matter, maybe the GOP NEEDS to implode. What they are doing now isn't working and it's obviously not what people want.
I'd also add that some of it could be characterized as a protest vote of sorts- they are trying to send a message of sorts. Used to be most conservatives did it by voting 3rd party. Trump is a way of voting out what people see are the ones who are not living up to their promises while still voting for someone who has a snowball's chance of getting elected and upholding some basic conservative principles. There are people who have voted for dumber reasons. People vote because someone seems like a nice guy on tv or he is good looking or because he is their same race or whatever random thought that is on their mind. It just so happens that Trump allows several different interests to converge (the people who like celebrity, the people who want a political outsider, the people who want a so-called conservative but are pissed at the current conservative leadership, people who hate the media and are drawn to mount the charge against those they see wronged by the media etc) which has given him a perfect storm of numbers that makes him a viable candidate. It's not fair to discredit all of those people's reasons for voting for him which are not racist or violent and lump them in with the segment of people who *might* be. I can guarantee that there are people who are voting for Hillary solely based on the fact that she IS a woman and that right there is discriminatory.
That's why I'm going to say that most people voting for Trump are intellectually lazy. They haven't taken the time to put 2 and 2 together
I can guarantee there are a lot of people who specifically aren't voting for her because she is a woman. It is a disgusting attitude, either way.
And, unfortunately, we saw the same thing when Obama first ran. People who voted for him just because "oh cool, we'll have our first black president" and people who would never vote for him because he was black. And, going off topic again, I think that says a lot about how we view race in our country. Because actually, he is mixed race. Yet both ends of the spectrum, from the Ku Klux Klan to Al Sharpton, only describe his race as black.
Leading up to Obama's first election, one of my coworkers at the time who had literally said the phrase, "Well I'm sorry, but I'm PROUD to be racist!" (sigh). And that wasn't even in response to anything about Obama. I'm very anti-confrontational, especially in the workplace, but she'd made a racist comment in my presence and I gently chastised her that the comment was inappropriate because it was racist. At any rate, the "Proud" comment was her response.
After this experience, she did at least start qualifying her racist comments, at least to me, with "I know you don't agree with me but..." Her words at the time about Obama were, "I'd never vote for Obama. He's a black and a Democrat. I'm sorry (insert qualifier), but I'd never vote for a black man and I couldn't imagine ever voting for a Democrat." I couldn't help myself. I asked her what she would do if in a future election, the GOP candidate was black. She looked stunned and horrified, but thought about it for a moment and admitted she just wouldn't know what she would do in that situation.
But I just pray that if, whoever gets elected wants to repeal the ACA, they don't just blindly throw out the baby with the bath water. Because what we had before was barbaric.
I know I am always getting on my soapbox about this, but I've found that most people...unless they or someone very close to them has a major medical condition...just have no idea that, before the ACA, hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people could not buy independent insurance AT ANY PRICE for ANY TYPE because of a pre-existing condition. Could.Not.Buy.Insurance. NOT EVEN a "calamity" plan where at least if something major happened...not related to their condition...they would still be covered. Not even that.
Think about what your life would be like if you were unemployed and not allowed to buy any type of health insurance. But you're not feeling well. So you go to the emergency room, because you can't afford to see your regular doctor. You wait 12+ hours. But finally get to see the doctor. Bad news. You need to have your appendix removed. Pretty routine, low risk surgery. Except it is going to cost $25K-$40K. You've had health insurance most of your adult life. This incident just happened to occur in the 3 months you were in between jobs. But that doesn't matter, does it? You don't have insurance now because no one would sell you an independent policy, even before the appendix problem. Where are you going to get the money? What are you going to do?
Sure, at least the hospital will do the surgery because it is medically necessary without all or even any of the money up front. But they still expect you to pay for it. That's not the kind of money most people can just throw around. It would have a devastating effect on most people's finances for many years to come and/or wipe out much of what they have worked their whole lives for. Never mind if something really serious happened while not being allowed to buy insurance, like being diagnosed with cancer.
Thankfully, I entirely made up the story about the appendix needing to be removed. But that was exactly the kind of thing I was the most terrified about for the year I was unemployed (at the worst part of the economic downturn) and couldn't find any company to sell me even a catastrophic policy. Never mind that I haven't set foot in a hospital for 20 years. And while my scenario might have been made up, I would expect there are many many real examples of something like that happening to people in the decades before the ACA.