Agreed
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Where, again? He dismantled institutions right and left in unjustified, resource-seeking wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And killed millions as he did so. Shrub is a fucking monster who I think should never be normalized.
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But he has been normalised.
He was normalised by the recalibration of the meter, when a bigger monster was elected.
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Excerpts –
The following is by Jean Chrétien, who served as prime minister of Canada from 1993 to 2003. It appeared in The Globe and Mail*, Canada’s most widely read newspaper, on January 11, 2025.*
Jean Chrétien
Today is my 91st birthday.
This year, I’ve also decided to give myself a birthday present. I’m going to do something in this article that I don’t do very often anymore, and sound off on a big issue affecting the state of the nation and profoundly bothering me and so many other Canadians: The totally unacceptable insults and unprecedented threats to our very sovereignty from U.S. president-elect Donald Trump.
If you think that threatening and insulting us is going to win us over, you really don’t know a thing about us. You don’t know that when it came to fighting in two world wars for freedom, we signed up — both times — years before your country did. We fought and we sacrificed well beyond our numbers.
We also had the guts to say no to your country when it tried to drag us into a completely unjustified and destabilizing war in Iraq.
We built a nation across the most rugged, challenging geography imaginable. And we did it against the odds.
We may look easy-going. Mild-mannered. But make no mistake, we have spine and toughness.
Yes, telling the Americans we are their best friends and closest trading partner is good. So is lobbying hard in Washington and the state capitals, pointing out that tariffs will hurt the American economy too. So are retaliatory tariffs — when you are attacked, you have to defend yourself.
But we also have to play offence. Let’s tell Mr. Trump that we too have border issues with the United States. Canada has tough gun control legislation, but illegal guns are pouring in from the U.S. We need to tell him that we expect the United States to act to reduce the number of guns crossing into Canada.
Every time that Mr. Trump opens his mouth, he creates new allies for all of us. So let’s get organized! To fight back against a big, powerful bully, you need strength in numbers.
The whole point is not to wait in dread for Donald Trump’s next blow. It’s to build a country and an international community that can withstand those blows.
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I don’t think the huffpost are a token, I think they are a fake news site tbh.
I trust them as much as newsmax. They will put on a little show to represent the “left” from time to time so there’s something to argue about. And they don’t have many journalistic standards to worry about.
Others may disagree but I have had this growing conviction since the 90s and I was right about Bill Mahr etc.
Watching this shit happen over the course of my life and growing up just enough to be like “aw shiiii” defines my generation in this country after all. That and learned helplessness.
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Specifically, the institutions he broke were international: the UN, NATO to a certain degree, and of course any international court that should have brought him to justice for crimes against humanity. He did not, however, try to break the institution of the US presidency, nor the administrative structure that holds that country together.
Don’t get me wrong, he was horrible and I was on the street protesting just like most here probably were, but as @Catsidhe said, there’s always a bigger monster.
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Thank you.
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And queers, intersexes, and asexuals, apparently.
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“gender ideology extremism”
Of course, there’s no such thing as ‘gender conformity extremism’, is there? Oh, no. /s
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Oh, I totally agree that HuffPo isn’t very credible. I just meant they were the token “left perspective” so every news org given space in the Pentagon wasn’t a right-wing misinformation outlet.
And I don’t think they even really care about having a token left-wing perspective all that much. They probably just gave the spot to HuffPo and made up a story to get Mike “Lumpy” Lindel off their backs about it or something.
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HuffPo is owned by Buzzfeed.
Two of the largest shareholders in BF are Vivek & Susquehanna Capital Group. Susquehanna is owned by 3 billionaires who heavily funded Trump and conservative politicians. Especially Jeff Yass. They make Vivek look poor.
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Ah. Yeah, that makes sense. I still hope Lumpy is somewhere whining to Giuliani about not getting a spot.
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I seem to remember a lot about the unitary executive theory and suspending various civil rights. I think it’s worth being clear that Trump did not come out of nowhere – he is expanding on their work.
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The White House budget office ordered a pause on federal loans and grants, only to issue a reversal days later. Kate Shaw, professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, co-host of the Supreme Court podcast Strict Scrutiny and a contributing opinion writer with The New York Times, offers legal analysis of the move — and the Trump administration’s attempts to expand executive power in general.
In short — they are prepared to keep failing until they get something past a court. One EO at a time.
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