Merry Christmas

First things first, point taken. Trump didn’t mention Obama by name when referring to bringing back “Merry Christmas” so while you could argue the implication was strong, you could easily argue myself and others made wrong assumptions and a fair argument could be made that Trump is not responsible for such. I’ve never bought into the whole war on Christmas thing but that’s mainly because I’m able to watch 24 hour romantic comedy Xmas movies on Hallmark and it’s hard not to feel the Christmas spirit while watching Brandon Routh in The Nine Lives of Christmas.

Second, I’m not playing nice, I am nice. I believe treating people with a basic respect until they prove themselves not worth it. For me, following politics is a relatively recent thing but I long ago decided that I wouldn’t say something on a message board that I wouldn’t be willing to say to someone’s face (which was difficult when posting about a DC or Marvel movie on the old IMDB boards). I don’t call people names in my day to day life so why should I do so here? People often want the person they’re arguing with to go low because it absolves them of having to actually argue on merits and they can just return the insults. I have no desire to play that game. Or at least I do my best not to. I’m human and sometimes frustration does get the better of me (it’s almost as if I’m passive aggressive).

(continued)

As for me being moderate, I think I’ve always acknowledged that I fall on the liberal side of most issues (pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, I believe in climate change, reasonable gun control, affordable health care). When it comes to these issues, the right side of the aisle doesn’t show much appeal for me. That said, I do believe political correctness has gone too far. For example I’m a huge stand up comedy fan and seeing some jokes that are deemed offensive by some just makes me shake my head. But also keep in mind that this is the Donald Trump board and the topics all revolve around Donald Trump who I find terrible. So my posts here are largely going to be in that direction.

Low unemployment is a good thing but as for strong confidence in the stock market? Even with the Dow’s 1,000 point gain yesterday it’s still down 2,000 points from this time last year. I work with 401Ks and I can tell you there are many people not feeling strong confidence given the past couple months (including myself who’s seen a $1,500 drop in my stocks over the past 2 months). I sincerely hope it rebounds fully because I personally have a financial stake (as of 11:02 AM the Dow is down over 400 points today, fingers crossed it bounces back into the positive column).

(continued)

But even if stock market confidence was high, it takes more than those things to be a good President. I’ll say again that my main problem with this President is that he lies seemingly compulsively. Literally nothing he says, no matter how trivial, can be taken at face value. That’s how much he lies. And so often they’re easily verifiable lies that defy all reason. To find a whopper we have to go back no further than yesterday. He visited the troops in Iraq and I really thought he deserved the good press he was getting from that. But then brain surgeon that he is, he gift wraps a big present for liberals by saying in his speech to the troops “You haven’t gotten a raise in more than ten years. More than ten years. And we got you a big one. I got you a big one……you had plenty of people that came up and said, you know, we can make it smaller, I said no. Make it ten percent. Make more than ten percent because it’s been a long time.”

This is a lie, or rather two lies. First, members of our military have received a pay raise every year since 1983. And second the pay raise for the military wasn’t 10% this year. It was 2.4% and their pay will be raised by 2.6% in 2019. Why lie about something so demonstrably false? Imagine you worked for a company that had a new CEO and after his first year he made comments during a speech that he gave everyone a 10% raise since past CEO’s hadn’t given raises in the past decade and a half. Now imagine that you and everyone in that room only got a 3% raise that year but contrary to what the new CEO said, you had gotten a raise every year you’d been with the company; what would your thoughts on that CEO be?

The problem is that this type of thing isn’t isolated for this President, it’s the norm.

(continued)

I could type more but it seems pretty pointless. Aside from the fact that I've already written a novel, you and I see eye to eye on very little politically and neither of us is likely to change the other’s view. Sorry you take anything I’ve said about Trump personally, but he’s the one I have the problem with, not you. Me lightening up on Trump is as unlikely as you going harder on him (not likely in either case).

It actually was genuine because despite our political differences I've always found my most civil conversations on this board to be with you. I've viewed ackbar, bubba, Snagswolf, ThreeTen, Culburn to be either total trolls or far right extremists (possibly all the same person) but I've actually respected the exchanges I've had with you. When you recently called a different comment of mine passive aggressive and I responded by first asking how you've been, that was also genuine because I think of conversations we had on other boards here and don't see why we can't be friendly while largely disagreeing about things.

That said, I do take exception with some of the things above and will respond in full tomorrow (but it won't be too bad because I'll be my usual nice talking out of the side of my mouth self).

Most T-rumpers don't.

Merry Christmas