PN-G bamatex

BRB, making that my Facebook cover photo. You don't have to apologize to me. I've been called far worse things in my lifetime than "condescending." I've got thicker skin than that. This is based on the Homewood report, isn't it? [Hidden Content] Most of them were. If you go back through the archives of The Crimson White, the UA student newspaper, you'll find the articles about them. There's also the welcometothemachine.info website, an online archive of every article ever published in any media publication (this ranges from the CW to CNN, Time, The New York Times, and Esquire) about the Machine, the campus secret society at UA responsible for most of the corruption and nefarious activity on campus. For example, the incident I talked about with the three guys that broke into an office at the Ferguson Center, the UA student union, and wrote racial slurs all over the applications of black students for student government positions took place my freshman year. I had been on campus for less than two months. One of my closest friends on campus - not the one who got the death threat; he's two years younger than I am - was one of the black applicants whose applications were defamed in that way. His name is Ryan Campbell, and he's now, as a grad student, the Chairman of the Capstone Coalition, the first non-Machine campus political party at UA in three decades. I wrote that organization's charter. I had applied for one of those positions as well. Those three students, Machine-backed SGA Senators and members of Old Row fraternities, also altered the applications of white non-Greek students to diminish their credentials. My application was one of the ones altered. It was all an attempt by the Machine to keep members of their then all-white Greek system in all the prominent positions on campus. The University's Office of Student Conduct conducted an "investigation," if you can call it that. The three SGA senators and a few other officials were forced to resign, but never faced any other penalties. No criminal charges, no university reprimands, no community service, not even a slap on the wrist. The full report on that investigation was never released to the public; despite open protest from several prominent student legal groups around the country, including the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, that it wasn't applicable, the University cited the Federal Education Rights & Privacy Act in withholding the report from public consumption. I've included links below: [Hidden Content] [Hidden Content] You'll probably notice - and I'm sure you'll want to make an issue of this - that the reports don't line up perfectly with what I've been saying. In fact, they don't even mention racial slurs and only confirm that one application was altered. That's because the University swept in and took all the evidence before any CW reporters could see it. It didn't stop the word from getting out. Ryan Flamerich, one of the SGA officials mentioned in the first article that assisted with the investigation, is the guy who actually discovered it all. He was one of the few students at that time to run for SGA office against the Machine and win. He was two years older than I was, but we were in the same program through the Honors College. I spoke with him in the lab frequently, and he's still a good friend. He actually got a tip by text message from someone in the Machine that this was going down as it was happening, went to the Ferguson Center and caught the three Machine-backed senators in the act. He saw the racial slurs, and the applications in the trash. He made the mistake of contacting the University first and the media second. By the time he realized the mistake, it was too late. That was an important lesson I kept with me for the rest of my time at UA, and still keep in mind today. It served me well for the remainder of my time there. The racial slurs on campus buildings, sidewalks and landmarks happened twice. Here are the links: [Hidden Content] [Hidden Content] Note: The slurs were chalked. I thought they were spray-painted. Guess that's one of those details you lose in memory. Around the same time the slurs were posted, three black fraternity members visiting from another school were attacked in an all-white house. More on that here: [Hidden Content] The death threat wasn't reported, which is something I'm still mad about. That was in the spring semester of my junior year, the week before filings for campus elections were due. The friend that received it was so scared that he kept it to himself for months after it happened. I had been working with him to get ready for his SGA Senate campaign before he received it, and was shocked when he decided to back out - the kid was a born politico and it just didn't fit with how excited he'd been about running. It was totally out of place and I knew something was going on, but he wouldn't give more than the same explanation over and over again. "I just changed my mind." A few other friends and I kept trying to talk him back into running and he wouldn't budge. It wasn't until the following fall that he told me what really happened. I asked him if he still had the note, because I wanted to take it in right then and there. He told me he wadded it up and left it in the parking lot before leaving as quickly as he could. He's still at UA, and we still speak frequently. To this day, two years later, he refuses to run for anything, and doesn't like to talk about it. It's a shame. He had real potential. The segregation in the sororities persisted until fall of my junior year, more than fifty years after George Wallace made his stand in the schoolhouse door. That was one of those incidents that made it all the way into Time. That one really isn't on the sorority members, it's on the alumni and the Machine itself. The alumni donate serious cash to all of the Greek organizations, to the University and, at least according to rumor (although I fully believe it), to the Machine itself. As a result, the houses, the administration and the Machine all do whatever the alumni say. For reasons I will never understand, the sorority alumni still go to the houses and participate in sorority events decades after graduating and getting out of Tuscaloosa. They like to play an active role in the application process. And, of course, they like to keep things exactly the way they were back in the day. This means keeping the sororities all white. That year, there were about two dozen young black women who rushed all-white sororities. None of them got a bid. One of them was the granddaughter of the lone black member of the UA Board of Trustees. I've included links to the CW and Time articles about that below. The CW article starts off with a black woman who rushed Alpha Gam and didn't get a bid. Her name is Halle Lindsay, and I know her. Her boyfriend is Elliot Spillers, the outgoing UA SGA president who's the first person to run against and beat the Machine in that race since 1986. I advised his campaign. Halle went back to Alpha Gam after the administration ordered the sororities to do open rush, and is now a member. Another young black woman who rushed and didn't get a bid was a fellow Texan. Her name is Khortlan Patterson, and she's from Missouri City, near Houston. She was so disgusted after the scandal broke that she refused to participate in the open rush process the University ordered after the national media came in. [Hidden Content] [Hidden Content] That was an absolutely insane period of time on campus. Jesse Jackson came, and if I recall correctly, Al Sharpton did, too, but I can't quite remember anymore. CNN was on campus dressing up their fresh-out-of-college, newly hired reporters as frat guys to sneak them into frat parties for surprise interviews. Tensions were high, and arguments were breaking out in classrooms, dormitory hallways and dining areas. Rumors flew through the air about fights breaking out in the houses, and about the Machine cracking down hard on sorority members thinking about talking to the media (in some contexts, including this one, the Machine acts as an enforcement arm for its powerful alumni donors). For brief moments, you would have thought you'd stepped back into the '60s. One of the more visible moments was the "Stand at the Schoolhouse Door," a protest organized by Halle and Khortlan alongside Caroline Bechtel and Yardena Wolf, two women who were members of Phi Mu and AOPi, respectively, that were disgusted with the process and that I still consider close, personal friends. Caroline stuck with Phi Mu after it was all over, and showed more grace, courage and strength than I think I could ever muster. Yardena was quite literally shunned by her sisters, and dropped her sorority in an attempt to get away from the social ostracism. I've included a link to a New York Times article about the protest below: [Hidden Content] Interestingly enough, that wasn't the only scandal getting national media attention. That same month, the Machine signed up several hundred Greek students who didn't have residency in Tuscaloosa to vote in local elections, and got two former Machine-backed SGA presidents elected to the Tuscaloosa city council and school board, respectively. The Greeks were bussed, some of them in limousines, from their houses to the polling stations, and then taken to one of two bars downtown where they were served free drinks. In the process, they ousted a highly respected school board incumbent named Kelly Horwitz, someone I know well, worked with and have the utmost respect for. Her husband, Paul, is on the faculty at UA's law school, and gave me pointers when I was still applying. That whole ordeal got UA a second New York Times article, which I've posted a link to below: [Hidden Content] When Elliot was running for SGA president, ATO, one of the few non-Machine fraternities on campus, took a defiant stance and became the only house on campus to back Elliot. They put a big banner on the front of the house, something every Machine house has done for every Machine candidate for years. The Machine responded by stealing the banner in the middle of the night. [Hidden Content] I had just laid down to go to bed around 2 AM when I received that surveillance video by iMessage from the ATO president, Connor Herfurth. I was, at that time, Director of Political Advocacy for The United Alabama Project, UA's first campus watchdog group which I had founded with four other students during the desegregation and school board scandals the year before. One of the many hats I wore in that role was that of election monitor. I was the only person Connor sent that video to, because he wasn't sure how to handle it. I wrote up a Facebook post to get it out to the public immediately, put it in an email to UAPD, OSC, the CW and WVUA, and advised Connor on the steps to take moving forward. The video brought back memories of the campaign of Cleo Thomas, UA's first black SGA president, elected in 1976. Cleo's something of a mentor to non-Machine political players at UA. He's a former member of the Board of Trustees that's not afraid to use that weight against the administration when necessary. I've relied on his advice numerous times. When Cleo was elected, the Machine responded by burning a cross in the front yard of the KKG house, because KKG led a revolt among sororities against the Machine to get Cleo elected. There's a link to a PDF scan of the old CW article about that below: [Hidden Content] Halle ran for Homecoming Queen this year. The Machine ordered Alpha Gam not to support her, even though it was Alpha Gam's year to get the Machine's HQ nomination (they rotate their nominations among the sororities from year to year); instead, the Machine chose a white Phi Mu to run. The Machine made the mistake of delivering that order to Alpha Gam's executive officers in text message. My successors in UAP recovered screenshots of the orders, and sent them to the University, the CW, WVUA (the campus radio station) and a contact with HuffPo that has been a standing correspondent with us for some time, all at once. UAP also published a Facebook post with the screenshots attached, informing the public of all the steps it had taken, which was taken down the following day by Facebook for reasons which they have yet to disclose despite repeated inquiries both from UAP representatives and members of the media. [Hidden Content] [Hidden Content] The guy who runs UAP now is named Josh Shumate, another good friend I still speak with almost daily. When he got the screenshots from a source within Alpha Gam, he was so shocked he didn't know what to do. He called me, and I helped him craft the Facebook post and the disclosure emails. We knew HuffPo would run it. We were shocked when it ended up in Vogue. When it got published in Jezebel, arguably the most sorority-centric publication in the country, we were absolutely flabbergasted. Patrick Fitzgerald, a dear friend who ran the most successful Senate campaigns against the Machine in UA history, ran for president this year. His girlfriend and one of his running mates, Alex Smith, made national news last year when she became the first Machine-backed SGA senator at UA to publicly renounce the Machine. The link's below: [Hidden Content] I've spent more time than any law school student should giving them pointers in phone conversations and text messages throughout this academic year, covering everything from how to deal with the national media to defending against Machine chicanery. Unfortunately, it wasn't quite enough. They, and four of the five other running mates that collectively constituted the first full non-Machine executive ticket in UA history, couldn't pull off a win the way Elliot did. The Machine traded cases of beer to fraternity members for votes, and free manicures to sorority members. UAP managed to get some evidence of it, but not as much as I would have hoped. But, I'm optimistic that it's enough for the media to take up yet again. For four years, this consumed my life. It still does in some ways, even though I'm 780 miles removed. The irony of this post's timing isn't lost on me; I did a phone interview with a Bloomberg reporter working on a book about racism in fraternities around the country earlier this afternoon, and another one with a woman working on a documentary about all of UA's social and political problems about three weeks ago. But there's something else that isn't lost on me. You see, there was a time when my posts looked almost exactly like yours. There was a time when I would have made some of the same points you made in this thread. There was a time when, like you, I strongly suspected Obama of race-baiting. The reason? I didn't understand. I knew what racism was, and I wouldn't have argued that it didn't exist, but that was a time when I didn't get that it was something many Americans have to deal with on an almost daily basis. Back then, if racism existed, I wasn't seeing it, and wasn't afraid to talk and act like it. I developed a mentality out of that perspective. Now I've seen it. That mentality's changed. And I'm thankful that it has; in a way, I'm almost thankful that those things took place while I was on campus, because that mentality would still be the same if they hadn't. That's the other half of why I brought those experiences up in this conversation. I was hoping that maybe - just maybe - they would have had a similar sobering effect on you.

Hi, smitty! Thanks for coming back to the thread to engage the socialists, young and stupid again! Ready to answer those questions now? Or are you still trying to think of an answer?

It hasn't picked any Republican winners yet, either. Seriously, do you think any of the 2012 Tea Party picks could have won? Rick Santorum? I was personally a Newt fan, but I never really believed he could win the general. You know, I had to scour the internet to find a Silver prediction about Trump that was wrong. I finally found one. Back in September, before we had any polling data, Silver rated Trump's chances of success in the primary at about 5%. Go back and read my post. I said that Silver's general election models have never been incorrect. I didn't say anything about his primary picks, nor could that bear on Trump since we aren't in the general yet, so technically, your question was irrelevant to begin with. But since it's already been brought up, Silver makes predictions based on quantitative data such as polling and favorability numbers. His assessment of Trump at that time was, by his own admission in that very interview, purely qualitative, since we didn't have any of that data yet. The moment we had data to put in Silver's models, they started coming back in favor of Trump. As I stated earlier, his models have only been wrong about who would win the GOP primary in Oklahoma and the Democrat primary in Michigan. That's a strong record - I'd bet good money it's about a hundred times stronger than yours.

I made an assertion. Obviously, it was an expression of opinion - that's what an assertion is. I never said it was a fact. Don't get so easily worked up over it. I'm in law school. If you're really in court, you know that's what we do. Jesus Christ, are you really still going on about this? Fine. If it'll make you feel better.... Hey guys, I'm a condescending douchebag! And you know what else? I really don't care! That better? Moving on. Wow. I blew your exact words up in bold, underlined letters and you're denying it? Are you related to the Donald? You're right. I don't. Which is why I've now invited you to reveal what you've read, heard, researched and whatever else about Obama, and by proxy to give some substantiation to your accusations regarding his intentions, not once, not twice, but by my count, three times now. Each time you've failed to do so, and now you're more or less refusing to do so. So, as a result, I'm going to continue with my - wait for it - *assumption* that you have not read, heard or researched anything of real substance about him. For the fourth time, you are free to prove me wrong at any point. Wow, taking wild guesses about my motivations when you hardly know anything about me!? That is really condescending! That's right. You are guessing. And (not surprisingly) you're guessing wrong. You not only have no evidence whatsoever to sustain your suspicion, I've literally already provided the explanation for my reflection on my personal experiences for you. Here's exactly what I said, word for word: Remember that? Did you just skip that part when you were "glancing over" my posts on your courtroom breaks? Or are you just blatantly ignoring it and trying to make me out to be some kind of liar? What a coincidence! So do I. And it's not right. But it is absolutely amazing to me that you bring that up. It bears so perfectly on this situation. Labeling someone a racist over simple policy disagreements with a black man without some kind of evidentiary substantiation is jumping to conclusions about a person's intentions simply because he speaks his mind on contentious issues and expresses a view you don't like. You know what else fits the same description? Accusing a man of evilly conniving to inflame racial tensions by speaking on racial issues and expressing an opinion you don't agree with. You're literally lamenting an accusation that is in principle no different than the one you levy. You know what? Fine. Let's sit here and pretend that crosses burning, racial slurs being spray-painted on buildings, all-white sororities rejecting every single black rush applicant, death threats containing racial slurs being left on the windshield of a car belonging to a black student because he was considering a run for elected office, and applications for appointed positions being tarnished with written racial slurs by white students who broke into a school office in the middle of the night aren't significant evidence of severe, pervasive racial bias on a college campus that attracts the largest share of the nation's most talented students from all over the country of any public university, constituting a significant example of racism that puts the national racial picture in perspective and provides essential context that explains why a black man might want to discuss race on a national stage following racially controversial incidents. Instead, let's discuss Obama's own experiences. In all that reading, hearing and researching about Obama that you implied that you did but won't come down either way about in writing, did you ever find anything about Obama's own experiences with racism? Did you read the stories about him getting called by racial slurs by his peers in grade school? How about the one about the old woman who accused him of stalking her because he shared an elevator with her in the apartment complex they both lived in? Did you read the one about people assuming he was the waiter at banquets and asking him to get coffee for them? What about the one where the tennis player told him to rub up on the competition chart because some of his color might rub off? Or the one where he and his teammates were called a "bunch of [n-word]s" by the coach of a team they beat in basketball? You're right. I'm not towing the liberal line on climate change. Because I don't buy into it. I'm not a liberal. That doesn't mean I don't understand the argument, or why some people might be persuaded by it. Nor does it mean that I'm going to consider an elected official who was elected, at least in part, because people agreed with those views, somehow morally culpable for expressing those views and advocating for policies that line up with them. That's a basic role, expectation, and right of any elected official. Furthermore, it's a basic, constitutionally protected right of any American citizen. You don't get to take it away and throw someone in jail when you don't like the way one person exercises it. About that "global temperatures haven't changed in 16 years" comment.... [Hidden Content] There you go again, jumping to conclusions about a man's intentions without giving any substantiating evidence. Let's be clear about something. However bad the policy may be, Cap & Trade is not a fundamental transformation of the economy. It's not a jump from capitalism to some kind of enviro-socialism or communism or some-other-kinda-ism. Cap & Trade was an attempt to cap emissions at industrial facilities, not to change the fundamental mechanisms by which the economy works. Its negative effect would have been the increase in prices it would have brought about. Would it have strained the economy? Yes. Transformed it? You're exaggerating. Furthermore, Cap & Trade isn't new in America, by any means. In fact, it's already been implemented in specific contexts, and has been for forty years. We literally just got done discussing a lawsuit Chevron brought against the EPA over the way a Clean Air Act provision was interpreted and how a Cap & Trade style regulation was enforced against a plant in Texas City about twenty years ago. This wasn't some new, radical departure from existing American law.

Where exactly did I articulate an "end of the world" scenario? All I said was that Trump's racist, Clinton's not and we're going to lose in 2016, all of which is backed up by a wealth of statistical and empirical data. Yup, it's all that dirty ol' establishment's fault! They totally created Donald Trump and perverted the conservative message to the point that it seems insane to the average voter! It's all on them! Ignorance like that is why we're marching to a beating in November. Cool, dude. Actually, most of his state primary predictions have proven accurate. I think he missed Oklahoma for the GOP and Michigan for the Democrats, and that's about it.

Wait a minute, hold up here. I just want to make sure I have this straight. You're saying you never said that you had knew, read or researched anything about Obama? So you never said the above quote? I never said nor assumed that you were "some blowhard" that I could "talk down to." I said that about smitty in different wording, and I stand by that. But I didn't take that approach with you. You might want to go back and read my posts. If you'll recall, I expressed surprise at, admitted I was impressed by and even thanked you for the relatively substantive argument you provided. It's a welcome departure from the norm on this website, and reminds me of how this place used to be. What I did say about you was that it is evident to me that you have jumped to conclusions about Barack Obama's intentions in the face of a total lack of supporting evidence, and I stand by that as well. That is why I revealed my personal experiences. I never so much as insinuated that they have a direct bearing on Obama himself, as you seem to think I did. I related those experience to provide context - an important aspect of this discussion that we seem to be going back and forth about. It was meant merely to convey the point that racism is very much alive in this day and age, and no axiom like "most people aren't racist" is going to change the fact that it is very much alive in this day and age, or the fact that it is a constant issue that black Americans have to deal with. I made that point, in the hopes that an implied point would follow from it which I presumed you would be able to put together on your own. I can only guess that you did not, so I'll make it explicit. In light of the fact that we still have crosses burning, schools segregating, racial slurs flying through the air, and death threats being left on windshields all because of the color of the driver's skin in this country, what do you think is more likely? That when the nation's first black president speaks his mind on a racial issue he is expressing genuine concern and shedding light on a perspective with which you may not be particularly familiar, or that he is attempting to "knowingly... creat[e] a racial divide" because he is "pure evil," as you put it? That is why I believe you have severely misunderstood this man, and thus far, despite my giving you repeated opportunities to prove otherwise, you've more or less refused to give me reason to reconsider that belief. In fact, what you've done is strongly imply that you've done some research or have some rationale to justify your suspicion about Obama's intentions, and then completely renege on the assertion the moment you were asked to provide it. Call that condescension. Call it arrogant. Call it naive. Call it stupid. Call it whatever you want. I call it the truth, and I'm not about to shy away from speaking it. The entire concept of climate change is a subject of ongoing debate, including whether it's a natural occurrence, a consequence of industrialization or some combination thereof. Being a subject of ongoing scientific debate, different people believe different things based, at least in most cases, on their own evaluation of the evidence. A particular world leader holding a particular belief about climate change, and then attempting to implement policies in line with that view, isn't even controversial, much less criminal. The fact that you stated that said leader shut be thrown in jail for expressing that opinion and acting on it is truly telling in regards to how much you actually appreciate Freedom of Speech, or the will of the people that elected that leader.

It's amazing what happens when somebody holds smitty accountable for his dribble.

Drama queenish? You're telling me I'm "drama queenish" for calling Trump's rhetoric racist when y'all are running around saying Obama's trying to destroy the country because he's liberal? Right. I think I'll take Nate Silver's opinion over yours, and he agrees with me. His statistical modeling has never gotten a general election match-up wrong, by the way. Yeah, okay. You go on thinking like that. We'll just wait and see what happens in November.

Yes way Rubio would have won the general. [Hidden Content] [Hidden Content] [Hidden Content] [Hidden Content] [Hidden Content] [Hidden Content] [Hidden Content] In the polls taken over the last four months or so, Rubio runs 15-4-1 against Clinton. Of her four wins, Clinton never wins by more than three points, whereas Rubio's largest spread is a whopping nine points. I should also note that all four of Clinton's wins and the tie came from the same three polling institutions, which have traditionally favored Democrats. No, that's not the case. For the first two years of the Tea Party's existence, the entire GOP was very receptive to it, from the evangelicals to the establishment to the libertarians to the moderates to the business community. There is not some over-arching view in the party that the Tea Party is some threat to the power of any particular party faction; in fact, it was the Tea Party movement that put the party back in control of the House, which amplifies the influence of every party faction. You're assuming there's a view when the evidence directly contradicts it and I can tell you from personal experience that it's just not there. The threat the Tea Party poses is not simply to the establishment wing or even to specific individuals like Mitch McConnell. The threat the Tea Party poses is to the entire party. It's the Tea Party's chicanery - that very "no compromise" attitude that you so adroitly pointed out - that makes the "party of no" tag line so effective. The people the Tea Party elect to office never propose a real solution beyond a rhetorical goal absent a concrete plan to get there (kinda sounds like that wall, doesn't it?), and just take up time spewing hot air. Nothing gets done, and the Democrats have an easy time making the Republicans out to be fools. All the divisive, inflammatory rhetoric coming from the Tea Party, as I've pointed out a thousand times, doesn't help, either. The Tea Party is just shooting itself in the foot and, for whatever reason, is too blind to realize it. Unfortunately, it's making the rest of the party bleed with it. You don't have to prove it to me. I don't want Trump to be president, and as much as it burns me to my core that I have to live with this, I would take Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump, and I'm not even part of the establishment wing. Yeah, you heard that right. The lifelong Republican who owns a dozen or so guns, hates taxes, wouldn't mind if Texas was its own country, worked for a Republican congressman, served as president of a Tea Party student outreach group in undergrad and is about to take the vice presidency in a conservative law student org, would prefer Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump. I won't vote for her - if it's between the two of them and no independent GOP candidate jumps in, I'm voting for the libertarian candidate - but I'll take her over Trump. Why? Because she's not racist maniac that uses Hitleresque, rhetorical demagoguery to sow anger, encourage division on social lines, play on people's fears and destroy every philosophical facet of the republic we live in. But hey, like I said, it doesn't matter. We've already lost this election. Hillary Clinton is your next president. And when 2016 is in the books and the tombstone for GOP chances is erected in the graveyard of failed presidential campaigns, "They did it to themselves." will be the Tea Party's epitaph. It really is a crying shame.

Whatever. Okay, fine, let's assume just for the sake of argument that I don't know anything about what shaped about Obama's views. What is it that you've "read, heard and researched" about the man that gives you such powerful insight into his background? Because if you're going to sit here and act like he's only discussing racial issues to stoke the flames of racial divide, you better have a whole lot of real, tangible, credible evidence to back it up. Given the fact that you have, thus far, done absolutely nothing to substantiate those accusations despite the number of times I've called you out for not presenting any evidence to support them, I really don't think that you do. And I think it's pretty hypocritical - or perhaps "condescending" - to act like you're the expert on Obama's real intentions when you haven't presented any evidence to sustain your point, but then turn around and act like I'm just projecting personal experiences on Obama's racial commentary. I apologize. I assumed you could fully account for all of the context, like the numerous examples of legislation of varying types that addressed a wide variety of issues passed by LBJ and FDR which I cited as examples of presidential productivity in the exact same paragraph. I guess I figured you would read the post instead of glancing it over. I'll try not to make that mistake again. "The Obama Administration had to change the name when they figured out the sheeple weren't following along like they should. The man should go to prison for even suggesting Cap & Trade." Let that sink in for a minute. "The Obama Administration had to change the name when they figured out the sheeple weren't following along like they should. The man should go to prison for even suggesting Cap & Trade." So the man should go to prison for proposing a particular policy in the context of the duties of his office, and for expressing support for that policy both within the context of those powers and under his God-given, constitutionally enshrined Freedom of Speech, simply because you think it's a really, really bad idea? This is exactly what I'm talking about. You're elevating a difference of opinion to the level of criminal activity. That's the exact kind of polarizing, demonizing rhetoric that I've been railing against smitty for. That statement is wholly lacking in perspective, objectivity and reason. This is why American political discourse has reached such harrowing levels of toxicity. It's also why it's becoming harder and harder for the average American voter to take our party seriously. A difference of opinion is not a grave moral crime against the country.

Yeah! Everyone who disagrees with me is either young and stupid or a socialist! Rock on! Ready to answer those questions I posed yet? I'll wait.

Dude, if you think that's condescending, you've lived a charmed life. A Master's in Psych! Wonderful! You might know my mother. Racial complaints in an employment complex are seldom credible, and only infrequently plausible, in my (admittedly inferior) experience. As I'm sure you know, when people's jobs get thrown around, people get hotheaded, and accusations get made that aren't always substantiated. That doesn't mean it doesn't happen in an employment context, but it does mean that employment is by no means fully representative of the state of race relations in a their full breadth or in the social context. We've got wholesale regions of this country where racial slurs are still used in everyday conversation on every rung of the social ladder like they're nothing. I went to a highly ranked institution of higher learning that has the largest enrollment of National Merit students of any public university in the country, and it's still half segregated. One of my closest friends there walked out to his car in the student union parking lot one night and found a note taped to his windshield calling him the N-word and threatening to hang him if he ran for student government office. The black experience in America is a very real thing, and it's something that us white guys (mostly white, in my case) don't easily understand. The mere fact that a black president is willing to speak out about it when the subject comes up in national conversation does not mean he's stoking racial flames. The man's trying to express what these people feel and go through. For the most part, that wasn't a reference to people on this site besides smitty, although there are a few others I could pick out that would be right up there with him. That was more aimed at people off the site. Think locals like Phillip Klein and a couple of national bigwigs that are cut from the same cloth like Katrina Pierson. They operate in very much the same way. I wasn't confining that statement to Obamacare, or even the general healthcare issue. What I mean by that is that he could have taken a lot of action on a lot more issues if he had been more skilled. The biggest blunder of the first two years of the Obama administration was that he did nothing on immigration, and every last insider, Democrat and Republican, will tell you that. He missed a golden opportunity that he could have taken full advantage of. He only talked about climate change and got nothing done there. We're arguing on different terms. You seem to think that Obamacare was the fullest extent of his potential. What I'm telling you is that his potential was far greater, but his lack of skill became a limiting factor. More adept presidents have been much better at legislative multi-tasking. We've talked a lot about LBJ and FDR. They were both masters at this. Reagan was pretty good at it, and Bush 43 showed was great at it when he was a governor and initially showed real promise in that arena during the early days of his presidency, but kind of got derailed by 9/11. It works out to our advantage. Cap & Trade is bad policy, and I would much rather have the Republicans doing immigration reform because they'll strike a better balance. The point is merely that, with both houses of Congress controlled by the same party, a more skilled president could have been much more productive.

I've already given my opinion on this, but the prime candidate would have been Marco Rubio. You've got a real conservative that's been successful in a swing state, a likeable guy with outstanding favorability ratings and cross-party appeal, a strong policy wonk that hasn't lost touch with the average person, and an Hispanic with an incredible story and a charismatic delivery all rolled into one. That's general election gold, and the poll numbers back it up. In the alternative, Scott Walker would have been a great candidate. He shares all of the characteristics I outlined for Rubio minus the Hispanic heritage and immigrant story. I'll also take Kasich based on his poll numbers, record, swing state delivery and experience. Bush and Christie would have been acceptable, though definitely not my first choice. Nobody else really had a chance in the general. No you wouldn't. The primary and the general election are two entirely different animals. If your premise is that someone who's capable of winning the general should also be capable of winning their primary, then Ronald Reagan couldn't have won the 1976 general election simply because he lost to Gerald Ford in the primary, and none of those "real conservatives" y'all love so much, like Newt Gingrich, could have won the 2012 general because they couldn't beat out Mitt in the primary. The establishment didn't dislike the Tea Party. In fact, the Tea Party that existed in 2010 was the Republican party's dream. I considered myself a Tea Party member back then. If it was still what it was back then, I would still consider myself one. But it's not anymore. It's gone from a conservative dream to an American nightmare. There's a much longer answer that elaborates on why that is, but in an attempt to adhere to your request for short replies, I'll simply leave you with two words: Donald Trump. This isn't merely some "threat to establishment power." This is a threat to basic common sense, the conservative movement and American freedom. Trump is gaining support from Tea Party supporters, yes, but don't think for a second that it's just because "the establishment has failed to act" or because they think Trump somehow buys into the conservative philosophy. I could go into more detail about this, but there's a great study that covers this, so I'm just going to post a link to it. [Hidden Content] Regardless of our difference of opinion on Cruz, all of this anger at the establishment that's being fomented by this kind of rhetoric, whether intentional or not, is not helping him. It's just increasing this phenomenon, and sending more voters who are susceptible to it into Donald Trump's camp. For the GOP nomination? At this point, nobody. If the rest of the party had consolidated behind a single candidate earlier in the primary, or if some of our candidates had joined in the calls for him to drop out after his first few rounds of racist and sexist statements instead of going into an extended bromance with him in the hopes of one day appealing to his voters, we might have been able to stop him. Too late now. For the general election? Oh, make no mistake, the Democrats could put up a yellow dog and he'd win. Liberals, moderates, independents and a pretty strong crop of conservatives aren't going to vote for this guy, and the numbers all confirm it. The only way I could possibly see him winning is if a disaster on par with the Great Depression or 9/11 strikes between now and election day.

I would prefer that you not infer a tone in my writing that you don't know to be there. And I reiterate my statement. I have watched every single one of Barack Obama's statements on race, from Trayvon Martin to Michael Brown. I may not agree with his statements, but there is nothing there to imply that he is attempting to sow racial tension. To assume that there is, coincidentally, analogous to inferring tone in a written statement. You may or may not know this, but I attended The University of Alabama. While I was there, I directly fought an organization that quite literally burned crosses on campus, spray-painted racial slurs on campus buildings, broke into campus offices in the middle of the night to defame the applications of black applicants for student positions with written racial slurs and actively opposed the integration of campus sororities. Until I have some kind of evidence that indicates you've seen something remotely similar, I'm not going to entertain a notion that you might understand a black man's perspective on race, particularly when you infer animus on the part of the nation's first black president simply because he's spoken out about racial issues. Perhaps you should condemn Donald Trump, the man who's called for a ban on immigration from an entire class of people based solely on religion and characterized people of a particular nationality as a bunch of "rapists" and "thugs," with the same fervor if you're so concerned about national leaders sowing racial division. The idea that something was "all Obama could get" when his party controlled both houses of Congress is laughable. If he had been just a hair more adept, he could have passed much, much more. He may have taken a beating in the midterms, but that was already coming anyways. It wasn't that Obamacare was all he could get, it was that he had no idea what he was doing. Now would he have signed a single payer healthcare system into law if the bill were put on his desk? Perhaps, but it doesn't matter. That's irrelevant to the point I was making, which is simply that whatever his philosophy may be, he has not governed as far to the left as smitty likes to make him out to have done. Thank you for effectively making my point for me. He floated Cap & Trade and it went nowhere, and he's tried to get some pollution caps placed on a few other world powers through treaties. That's been about it. If anything, the pollution caps he tried to get in place with other countries would have helped level the playing field in terms of environmental regulation between the US and countries like China and India. That would have hurt their economy, not ours. Even if all of that had passed, do you really think Obamacare, which literally just tried to expand health insurance coverage albeit through terrible legislation, and environmental regulation somehow compares with Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, Food Stamps, the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, the CCC, the WPA, the Department of Housing & Urban Development, and the Department of Health & Human Services? Because domestically, that's (not quite) all of "LBJ's and FDR's crap." Obamacare and Cap & Trade look puny compared to those. The bottom line is that, at least for their time, LBJ and FDR both governed much farther left than Obama has. They passed way more legislation; LBJ is, to date, the most successful president in history at getting his legislative agenda passed. Obama has never even been in range of passing either of them. And once again, the mere fact that he attempted to pass legislation you don't agree with doesn't make him some evil overlord that's come to destroy the country. You're gonna need a little bit more than that to substantiate your accusations. He's intentionally tried to destabilize our relationship with every country around the world? You mean like Cuba? Because that relationship was so much stronger before he got into office. Aside from a dicy relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu, there is no evidence anywhere that Obama has conducted his foreign policy with malice either toward another country or the United States. I'm not going to act like his foreign policy is great - frankly, it's been a trainwreck in many areas - but failure does not equate to a culpable mental state. Much as I hated his apology tour, it's pretty hard to say that a guy who went around apologizing to a bunch of different countries was intentionally trying to hurt our relationship with them. It's hard to say he was trying to hurt our relationship with the Saudis when he bowed to their king, or that he was trying to ruin things with the Russians when they tried the reset. Actually, I limited myself to the examples that you provided, so technically, you forgot about James Rosen. But since you brought him up, however creepy it might be for a reporter's phone to get tapped, it wasn't Obama who did it. Holder did it, and he got a warrant first. You know what that means? Two words: "probable cause." Rosen's phone was tapped as part of a criminal investigation into a leak that involved classified information. At least so far as we know, it ended up being a dead end, but that still means that at some point, they had evidence that founded a reasonable belief that Rosen could be involved in criminal conduct. I don't see how following the constitutional procedure for carrying out an investigation into criminal conduct involving classified information somehow constitutes a scandal merely because the subject of the warrant is a reporter. But hey, what do I know? I'm just some law school student. Let's assume for the sake of argument that it is a scandal. If it is, it still doesn't compare to a president sending political operatives to raid the headquarters of the opposing party in the middle of the night, or using Treasury resources to fix the price of gold and crashing the entire economy in the process, or selling missiles to a sworn enemy to finance a foreign rebellion. "Laid the foundation for" as in "set the stage for." I never said he was solely responsible, I was just saying that it was his administration that accelerated the march toward civil war. I reiterate, Buchanan had opportunities to, at the very least, delay the war. He chose to pass up on them in favor of an occasional fiery speech criticizing everybody in Congress. Mighty fine leadership right there. Don't tell me you're going to go with the "faithfully execute the laws of the United States" argument.... Obama's executive order didn't grant amnesty for anyone. The only thing it did was direct the Attorney General to prioritize illegal immigration cases that involved other crimes over those that did not in a broadstroke exercise of prosecutorial discretion, citing judicial efficiency concerns. It's an abuse of the prosecutorial discretion doctrine, I grant you, and one that will be struck down as such, but it's not some outright violation of the written text of any democratically enacted law, constitutional, statutory or otherwise. I never said that I didn't consider illegal immigration a big deal. I'll thank you not to put words in my mouth. What I said was that I don't get how you think allowing people in the country illegally who haven't committed any other crime to stay here for the time being is somehow comparable to, much less more serious than, a genocidal campaign that removed an entire race from their native lands and resulted in the deaths of millions. I also said that I don't get how you think an executive order stretching a judicial doctrine beyond into legal gray area is somehow comparable, much less more serious than, to utterly defying a United States Supreme Court decision. You want to make Obama's executive order out to be in blatant defiance of the Constitution when it's not, and justify Andrew Jackson's heinous actions against the Cherokee - some of whom were my ancestors - based on "good intentions" when it shredded the Constitution. And you really think an executive order that stretches the prosecutorial discretion doctrine is somehow bigger in scope and scale than Truman's order to seize a steel plant in defiance of Congress, or FDR's executive order to create those internment camps we've been talking about? Yeah, not buying that. So an inherently heinous action is all peachy-keen if it was done with the best of intentions? There's an old saying I grew up with. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. And if I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times. You have no evidence that Obama is intentionally stoking racial tensions. You're right. It is your right to have that opinion. And as I said in the previous post, I'm appreciative of the fact that, unlike many on this site, you're at least willing to give reasons for that opinion. But I think it's an incredibly poorly founded opinion based on inferences, rushed conclusions and a selective reading of history. I think you'd do well to understand that a mere difference of opinion in politics does not equate to malicious intent. Go back and read my post. I didn't try to interpret your intentions. I kept that focused on smitty, and by intention. And I'll come out and say it: I have every reason to believe that smitty's trying to divide people along political lines and inflame tempers based on political leanings. It's hard for me to believe otherwise when, in this thread alone, he's accused two posters of being "socialists" in a derisive manner merely because they don't always agree with him, and characterized me as too young to know anything. That's just the latest example in a long line of such behavior extending back five years now - we're talking about a man who literally won't capitalize the names of most Democrats and refers to the president as a "man-child." I can no longer deduce any other possible motivation. But, like I said, it really doesn't matter. smitty's gotten his way. The establishment won't get this nomination. The party's gripped in chaos. We're going to go forth with either Ted Cruz or Donald Trump as the nominee. And you know what? We're going to get smashed in this election as a result. So, I really don't have to care. He and his ilk are gonna reap what they sow.

Before I actually answer, thank you. It's about time somebody on this site actually tried to discuss substance again. Now, with that out of the way, you had the right intentions, but you answered the wrong questions. That particular set of questions was meant to be more rhetorical than anything else. The questions I really want smitty to answer are the ones about Cruz that were blown up, emboldened and underlined. That having been said, since you've provided some substantive answers to the rhetorical questions, I'll return the courtesy. We agree that Carter was more inept than Obama was. You extended that answer to say that Carter at least had his heart in the right place, and that you don't believe Obama does. I agree that Carter had his heart in the right place. I disagree that Obama doesn't. Is Obama way, way further to the left than I am? Yes. Is he further to the left than every prior US president? Philosophically, perhaps, but in terms of the policies he's implemented and the way he governs, no. He has one signature legislative achievement to his name: Obamacare, which doesn't even remotely resemble a single payer healthcare system and really has little to do with healthcare at all and more to do with health insurance, where the goal was simply to expand coverage. However ineffective and poorly designed it may be, I can hardly put Obamacare as far left on the political spectrum as the various welfare bills passed by LBJ and FDR. In any case, that's tangential to the point I wish to make, which is that however far left Obama may be in regards to how he governs, there's no proof - not one scintilla - that he's motivated to destroy or weaken the country to any significant degree. He may have different opinions and different views than you or I do, but that alone is not enough to convict this man of some immoral desire to degrade the United States. At best, the argument could be made that he wishes to diminish our stature in the world with regard to our prominent role in world politics. That, too, is not proof of some desire to destroy the country; I vehemently disagree with it as a matter of policy, but I cannot deny - nor can anyone on this site rationally deny - that between the massive strain of our worsening domestic issues, growing tensions with rising powers such as Russia and China and the sheer extent to which we have over-extended ourselves on the world stage over the last decade and a half, we need a break from handling the rest of the world's problems for a while. In regards to corruption, I'm not going to sit here and say that Obama's administration hasn't done some seriously corrupt things, but that is specifically why I raised the Grant comparison. Grant's rap sheet is a mile long, and makes Richard Nixon look like an angel. It runs the gambit from illegal alcohol distribution rings where profits were earmarked for reelection campaigns, to bribes paid to customs officers to sneak goods into the country for political backers, to salary raises for elected officials and appointees passed by Congress and signed by the president literally in secret, to framing innocent people for crimes to prevent them from blowing whistles, to illegal price fixing using Treasury resources that literally crashed the entire economy, just to name a few. I don't see where Obama's really done anything that approaches the volume or severity of those scandals. And while we're on this subject, we can expand to look at more than just Grant. Was Fast & Furious terrible? Absolutely. But is it worse than, say, selling missiles to Iran to come up with blood money for rebels in Nicaragua? Not really. Did Lois Lerner abuse her powers of office to target conservatives? Absolutely. Was that terrible? There's no doubt about it. But is it somehow worse than firing two attorneys general and a special prosecutor to stop a probe into a presidency that ordered political operatives to break into, ransack and bug the headquarters of the opposing political party? Doubtful. The statement about Buchanan isn't "bogus." Was the Civil War inevitable? Conventional wisdom suggests it was. That doesn't mean it had to start in 1861. Buchanan was presented with multiple opportunities to, at the very least, carry out a delaying action. He responded with relative ambivalence. In regards to the Jackson comparison, has Obama abused executive authority? In my opinion, yes. But that's also pretty commonplace in American presidencies. Most presidents try to carry their executive authority to the limit. It's the nature of the office, and the very reason checks and balances exist. The question is how bad Obama's use of executive authority is in the context of all American presidents. I picked Jackson specifically because he's the worst case scenario. I really don't get how you can take a bunch of executive orders that try to interpret existing law in a manner favorable to executive power to let a bunch of people who aren't supposed to be in the country stay here if they haven't committed any other crimes, and somehow think they're even comparable to, much less more serious than, an American president blatantly, openly and intentionally defying a United States Supreme Court ruling so he could carry out a genocidal campaign against an entire race. Obama's never done anything even remotely like that. And while we're at it, if we just want to compare executive orders to executive orders, Obama's on track to issue fewer executive orders by the time he leaves office than Bush 43, Clinton, Reagan, Carter, Nixon and Eisenhower and Truman - every post FDR president except Bush 41 and Kennedy. Where the FDR comparison is concerned, once again, a difference of opinion does not equate to a difference of morality or character. There is no credible evidence - none, whatsoever - that Obama is intentionally trying to create some serious racial divide. You could make the argument that he's done a bad job of healing racial divides, and that he's inadvertently exacerbated them, and frankly, I would agree with that. But that doesn't mean he's trying to foment them, and there's still nothing he's done that even remotely approaches locking up an entire American racial demographic in internment camps, or fighting a war of extermination, as did the presidents who carried out the Indian Wars that you conveniently forgot to mention in your answer. Don't sit here and mistake your misunderstanding of a black guy's perspective on race as a sign of malice. That brings me to your last statement. I didn't "have to" pack the wrongs of several presidents into one post to try and lessen the significance of Obama's wrongs. I could, if I wanted to, do a side-by-side comparison of Obama to one or a few presidents on an individual basis. But that would be lost here. The point that smitty and so many other angry, hard right wing activists out there are trying to make is not that Obama is worse than one or a few presidents, but rather that he's worse than all of them. It's an extreme argument - frankly, it's an overt attempt at polarizing political demonization. An extreme argument that makes extreme points requires a response that brings things back into perspective. The fact of the matter is that there is no objective measure by which you can say that Obama is the worst president in history. He may a bad president - I would argue that he is - but if we, as conservatives, as Americans, and as honest, ethical people, are going to effectively make our case, we have to make one with a healthy amount of perspective. We have to make one that is genuine, and not merely overblown rhetoric that makes mountains out of mole hills and tries to take things out of context. We have to be reasonable. The less reasonable we are, the less seriously people will take us. In exaggerating things to the extent to which smitty and others like him have done so, we undermine our own cause. If you don't believe me, just wait until November, because you're going to learn this lesson the hard way when Hillary gets elected.

Wait, are you a socialist too!?

My God! Nappyroots is a socialist too! It's a conspiracy, y'all! Get your guns and make it for the town square! We gotta purge these folks from the population, and fast! So, ready to answer those questions yet, smitty? Or are you just going to dole out more rhetoric? I couldn't help but notice you took a couple days to come back to this thread, but that didn't stop you from posting in others. What's the matter? Scared to face the truth?

Socialists! You hear that, westend? You're a socialist now! You must hate America! Cowabunga, Comrade! Can't help but notice you're still not answering those questions I posed. What's the matter? Can't think of a good rhetorical one-liner to come back with? Or is calling people "socialist" just the first line of defense in the angry right-wing handbook?

I've never read any of Garland's opinions, so I can't comment on where he stands politically or philosophically in regards to how the law should be applied. That having been said, assuming his label as a moderate is accurate, this is a politically brilliant move by the Obama administration. We have numerous Republican senators facing reelection in blue and purple states this year. They already have a tough row to hoe for that reason alone, and the chaos in the GOP presidential primary isn't making that any easier. Obama throwing up a moderate and daring a GOP-dominated Senate delegation that's backed itself into a corner with its own base to go with the "we won't even take him up for consideration" strategy helps shake up GOP support among independent and moderate voters, and blows yet another hole in the hull of those GOP senate campaigns. You can say what you want about Obama, but he plays the game very well.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...." - The First Amendment to the United States Constitution Y'all are plain text folks. Where, exactly, does it say that Freedom of Religion only applies to US citizens?

You mean someone on your own side of the aisle shows some independent thought and it was praised by one or two slovenly liberals!?!?!?!? It must be wrong! He must be a RINO plant here to stop true conservatism! Burn him at the stake! Come back and respond when you're ready to provide an answer to all the questions I posed in my prior posts. Until then, you're just another political hack willing to say and do anything to blindly advance somebody else's cause.

Most of which was probably wasted.

No, Bush 41 lost during a recession. It's common for changes of power to take place in the midst of economic hardship - in fact, if there's a single variable you can link major shake-ups in the line-up in Washington to over the last several decades, it's the shape the economy's in. That was the case in 1992, where you can trace the polling data that had Bush 41 ahead of Clinton literally up until the week of the election. Economics drives elections. So Nixon gave us the EPA. Are you saying we don't need the EPA? And how his presidency ended has nothing to do with the fact that he was elected two landslides that have only been outdone by other Republicans. And no, Romney didn't lose to the worst president in history. Why? Because... *NEWSFLASH*: Barack Obama is NOT THE WORST PRESIDENT IN HISTORY!!!!! Shocking! I know! Seriously, are you actually so blindly caught up in all the rhetoric that you believe that? Do you really think Obama could compare to Jimmy Carter in ineptitude? Do you think he's as corrupt as Ulysses Grant? As lazy and indifferent as James Buchanan, the man whose inaction laid the foundation for the Civil War? As abusive of executive authority and the constitution as Andrew Jackson? As evilly caught up in racial tensions as any of the presidents that carried out the massacres of the Indians, or even FDR, the man who put every Japanese American in the country in internment camps? For the love of God, man, come to your senses. I'm not going to sit here and say that he's been a good president, because he hasn't. It's hard to make the argument that he's been a decent president. But he is not, by any means, the worst in history, and to say so is to exaggerate in the same way that so many pundits do, further driving the polarization and the demonization of the other side that is ripping this country to shreds. For the last five years, I have watched you make post after post and start thread after thread where you throw out these half-baked articles that masquerade as "journalism" from all these grassroots, far right-wing media organizations that come across normal day-to-day operations that are just part of governing, and think they've stumbled onto the next great clue Barack Obama's plot to take over the world, never bothering to even try to get some kind of opinion from someone with actual experience in governing to add context to whatever it is they're reporting on because all they want to do is jump to conspiratorial conclusions. And do you know why they're doing that? *NEWSFLASH*: Because They Want To P*ss People Like You Off, So You'll Go To The Polls And Vote For Whoever They Tell You To Vote For More shock! Seriously, how do you think we end up with crap like this? Do you think this is just coincidence? Or do you think this is the tactic of people who have turned phrases like "establishment" and "RINO" into dirty words they can use to slander elected officials who haven't really done anything wrong, but just don't go along with the hard right on every single issue? Do you actually believe that there's some great benefit to you, or any other average person, if the Republican establishment up and crumbles in the middle of this election? Do you think that's somehow going to make it harder on the Democrats? Do you actually think the people who are leading you down this path, spewing all this rhetoric and fomenting all this anger, are somehow on your side? Do you think they really have your interests at heart? Or is it really in their interest to take over an entire party and destroy the establishment political players, and they're just using you as a willing dupe? Let's forget about Donald Trump for a minute and take your conservative messiah, smitty. Ted Cruz. Do you actually think he's as anti-amnesty as he says he is? Do you really believe a guy who... SPECIFICALLY WORKED FOR THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION ON THE 2006 IMMIGRATION REFORM PACKAGE THAT INCLUDED AMNESTY ... is now all of the sudden against it? Do you believe a man who... IS ON VIDEO ADVOCATING FOR A PATH TO LEGALIZED CITIZENSHIP IN THE UNITED STATES SENATE ... is really as anti-immigration as he's telling you he is? Do you believe a man who... LITERALLY CHANGED HIS VOTE ON AN EXPENSIVE CROP INSURANCE BILL IN THE MIDDLE OF ROLL CALL ON THE SENATE FLOOR BECAUSE HE WAS REMINDED ABOUT THE IOWA PRIMARY ... is really as committed to fiscal conservatism and budget reform as he says he is? Does that sound like "consistent" conservatism to you? Or does it sound like someone's spoon-feeding you things you like hearing, and doing something totally different behind your back? But the worst part of this isn't that you're buying this rhetoric and blindly following the people who are spreading it, it's that you're helping them spread it around and pull off this whole gimmick. You've let yourself get so caught up in all the anger and the bluster that you're furthering it. Every time you post one of those articles or deliver yet another rhetorical one-liner, you're helping move people one step further along down that path anger, and hatred, and blind political rage. But hey, you know what? That's fine. I really don't care at this point. Honestly, I find it funny, because while you're pushing this narrative along with your other super conservative buddies so y'all can try and get this... ... all you're doing is stoking the flames of anger, making sure that more GOP voters sign up to nominate this... ... which is just gonna end up buying us four years of this. I just hope you finally learn your lesson when it happens.

Was my post a response to you? Nope. Pretty sure that was smitty I quoted. I'm not "fond" of the establishment. Frankly, I have a lot more reason to hate the Republican establishment than you do. But unlike some people on this site and out there in the electorate, I'm not letting my anger with the "establishment" or any other element of the party leave me politically deaf, dumb and stupid. Good horse sense counts for a heck of a lot more in politics than being upset with somebody ever will. And yes, I am very much aware that you can "study" the political environment outside a classroom. You know how you do that? Things like working on campaigna, working for a legislator, helping draft legislation and digging through mountains of polling data. When did you do any of that?

The establishment was also behind the both Bushes, Nixon and Eisenhower. And when Bush 41 ran the second time, and when Dole ran, it was against a Clinton. It's kind of peculiar how half insane billionaires have a way of popping up in the Republican primary and threatening to run third party every single time there's a Clinton in the race and stiff establishment competition on the Republican side, isn't it? But hey, what do I know? I'm just some dumb college kid, remember? I didn't spend four years studying this or anything. Y'all go ahead and keep marching to your political graves. We'll see how you feel come November.