@Finn dAbuzz,
Quote:The only problem with this is he's giving the Republican establishment a free pass.
There might be others as well. I think this speech is not much more than a clever piece of propaganda where the speaker relies on the shared values of the audience to preclude any need for backing up his claims and assumptions with proof. There's a lot of shorthand, for instance, mentioning Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, contrasting them with Charleston and Myrtle Beach and then delivering the punchline:
Quote:It’s just what happens when Democrats run a city into the ground.
I think it's a bit more complex than that. As economies mature the industries that sustained big urban centers may fade or relocate, states may be reluctant to cooperate with the cities because of the power of resentful non-urban voters, Congress may or may not decide to address the issue, etc.
Quote:Trump didn’t really win the election. Bush didn’t really win the election. Every time a Republican president won an election this century, the Democrats insist he didn’t really win.
This is so misleading. The '00 contest actually
was really close and the Florida recount was a mess. We don't know who actually received the most votes and the court
had to step in. It's not as if the Democrats just came up with the idea, "Hey, let's make the race so close that the whole thing boils down to a few thousand votes in one state!" And no one is saying that Trump "didn’t really win", no one that I've heard, anyway. It wouldn't matter how much Russian meddling occurred; as long as the vote tally was not purposely altered there is no reason to doubt the legitimacy of the result, and no proof of actual vote tampering has been produced. One of the weak aspects of "democracy" is that voters can be misled. But their votes still count.
You know, with better management Team Trump could have avoided this whole sorry spectacle. Whose great idea was it to open up the whole Russia connection? Whose idea was it to meet with Russian operatives in the hope of getting dirt on the opposition? Who tried to cover it up and told people to lie? If all the Democrats had on Trump was that he behaved like an asshole with women and paid hush money to hookers before being elected there wouldn't even be talk of impeachment.
This is a good little presentation — coherent, touching all the right buttons, and I'm sure it was well-received. But I don't find it very convincing and I certainly don't see the speaker offering much of a solution. He sounds as if he wants to stir up more partisan rancor and increase the level of animosity.