Oh sure, I’m not surprisingly a good father and nobody writes articles about me for doing WHAT I’M SUPPOSED TO DO FOR GOODNESS SAKE.

Yeah, it was bad. Plus, I didn’t speak Korean and nobody knew what to do with me. It was days of sitting around being very, very bored.

My grandfather (Jewish) couldn’t attend Penn because of the “Jew quotas”. I grew up being told about the “no Kikes” signs throughout their childhood (in Pittsburgh no less!) and having to be limited to the Borscht belt for vacations.

Faster than already? I swear, you’d think by now the GOP would’ve learned something, but they seem happy to just continue down the road toward abject failure.

I mean, on some level I’m for republicanism (not the American party, the theory). California shows that purer democracy can become unwieldy in practice for sure.

Exactly. This is sort of the breakdown that I think Linz and others get at, too: the president becomes the national voice, so the legislature gets ignored. It’s a bad thing.

I do and I don’t. I mean, I can’t really think of a prosperous country that doesn’t have some shitstain on its history. The world is just fucked by nature.

By “strong” I mean the president having broad power to put in place policy beyond the execution of laws set forth by the legislature.

We’ll see. I’m somewhat hopeful. There’s a shit ton of new blood out there this time, which is at least a good sign.

I dunno about 240 years. Jackson was the great founder of the spoils system. TBH, I wouldn’t call the civil service in the US remotely depoliticized until maybe 1900, or even until the Pendleton Act or even Hatch Act.

Yeah, and like I said before: that was a problem because it further emboldened the office itself. I’ve always been wary of strong presidents.

I’m actually weirdly hopeful because maybe now the same voters will realize midterm elections exist. Or that a president isn’t a solution to sweeping legislative issues. Or that the SCOTUS isn’t a good way to get what should be legislated change in place.

I mean, shit, if anything the US was more totalitarian in our grandparents’ days. Especially if you were a minority in the South.

Hell, Obama was pretty pliant toward the military-industrial complex.

This is my biggest frustration with this dialogue. It seems that so many people are so openly unaware of the gross misuse of state power even within OUR lifetimes. And that so many otherwise lionized American politicians have terrible civil liberties histories (the great FDR put people in concentration camps, for…

Sure. But let’s go through American history here:

Yeah, that’s really it.

Disgusting on so many levels, the least of which is the fact that this may be stupid politics.

Slips?

On the other hand, we gotta figure out how to get that blazing scimitar into another photo somehow, ‘cuz that shit’s rad.