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The Debate Question You’ll Never Hear
Moderator: “This question is for whichever of you have the guts to answer: The last time a Democrat nominee for president graciously accepted a losing result — that is, without claiming that they were cheated, that votes were stolen or suppressed, that Diebold rigged the outcome, or claimed that the process itself was unfair — was Michael Dukakis in 1988. If you are the Dems’ nominee and then lose the general election, will you:
- Concede graciously and immediately
- Issue a call to all Democrats for national unity, and to work with the duly elected president
- And condemn any and all continued activities by The Resistance.
“And if your answer is no, and you should in fact win the general election, explain why all the same tactics used against Donald Trump should not be applied to your new presidency.”
The election of Donald Trump represents the first time in American history that we did not have a peaceful transfer of power from one president to the next. Even though Lincoln’s election precipitated the Civil War, the seceding states didn’t say that Lincoln was illegitimate, or that he was a British spy, or anything analogous to what we have seen. They simply said they would rather not be part of a country that would elect Lincoln, which is actually more respectable than what the Democrats have been doing the last three years.
Published in General
I can’t like this enough.
Whoa. That’s a great question.
C’mon… sure you can.
Thank you, sir.
FTFY.
Not since Max fixed that bug.
Too true.
Yeah, the good old days.
I really think we need a Ricochet Debate.
Where we get to write all the questions? Yeah, that would be fun.
Barack Obama won in 2008 because:
Barack Obama won in 2012 because:
Now, apparently, the second plank is considering another run. Fortunately for Mitt, he has no difficulty whatsoever attacking anyone who isn’t a Democrat. Could he answer your question in the affirmative?
Not for the primary he couldn’t.
After the one above, I’ll let you do all the question-making. I’m happy to suggest topics, though, like: “Given that socialism has failed every time it has been tried…”
“Can you define Socialism without unicorns and rainbows…”
The issue of the peaceful transfer of power is the aspect of this whole debacle that has bothered me the most. We learned in school that this is one of the things we can be proudest of, a thing that sets us apart from so many other countries. I remember teachers showing us pictures of the violence that breaks out in banana republics, military coups, leaders being put out of office by assassination. We were taught how exceptional this makes us, and how lucky we were to have been born here.
But now they teach kids to be ashamed to be American. They have no idea. A great post. What I wouldn’t give to see this question asked of those ingrates.
This is exactly what I meant.
There goes your chance to work for CNN.
Damn. And I was so close.
🤣
Conservatives don’t have the time for that bull****. We have lives to live.
We don’t have to tell them that.
I, for one, am looking forward to twerking for the resistance. Hey, if it’s good enough for climate change…
Thanks to the many articulate comments on this post!! All I have to do is go down the row and check that I LOVE your responses!
Agree
Agree
Agree
I assume this includes my comment about twerking.
Do you remember when the pesky Bill Clinton folks stole the ‘W’ keys from the keyboards during the transition? Those days were we so innocent compared with what Obama did by weaponizing the DOJ, FBI, CIA, NSA, DOS, …. It was like going from high school to banana republic.
I remember that! What a bunch of five-year-olds.
More things I’ll never get to be.
The news headlines are going to be full of Ukraine now.
In essence, a whistleblower alleges Trump used “the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the US 2020 election,” by asking Ukraine to investigate his main rival, Joe Biden.
Typical every-story questions you’ll never hear: Weren’t the funds were already released without any Ukrainian investigation even getting started? Is there some election now underway? (how far out does this have to reach? More than a year?) Is Joe Biden a formal candidate at this point? Don’t main rivals change every week or so? Can’t Trump ask foreign governments to help find basic corruption? Must all of us look the other way in cases that could affect the opposition party?
Besides the stupid “resistance” itself, it is these lapses of getting such questions even conceived, much less asked, by the press that has dismayed me the most. (I think Republicans in congress TRY but don’t get featured in the the dumbed-down coverage that reaches people). It’s as if too many of us WANT to have information and impeachments run by 5 year olds. I hope enough adults remain to frame their own questions something like the list above.
While the hard-core people on the left have been seeking to overturn the results of 2016 since about the time they came out of their 11/8/16 shock that Hillary hadn’t won, the question for the next 13 months is how will the moderate swing voters react to their pushing the outrage button 24/7/365 against Trump for the better part of 1,500 days in a row.
Trump makes things all about him, but his angriest enemies have their own immediate gratification problems, in that they can’t go a day without claiming some major scandal about Trump in order to feed their own outrage which they hope they can get others to share, and since they have control of most of the media it means the public can’t escape their obsession. The question with the swing voters is where the burnout factor comes in, to where each additional claim simply becomes background noise, because when everything Trump does is a scandal nothing is, and how do the swing voters plan to resolve it next November?
They can get rid of Trump, either because they have been convinced to believe the accusations or just because they’re done having to listen to all the hype and will pay any price to want it gone, or they could punish the Democrats for their non-stop obsession, especially if the Dems present swing voters with a candidate who is out-and-proud about their big government plans and beliefs.
In the end, it may come back to James Carville’s comments on the economy from 1992, and the public’s perception of where America is 12 months from now, to where the swing voters ignore the hype on both sides and vote based on Reagan’s line from 1984, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” (and if you really want to get cynical, would enough crony capitalists be willing to go in with Democrats and the media in an effort to tank the economy in the run-up to 2020?)
Agree.
I do remember. And then the media started saying that was all a hoax, totally not true. And they laughed at anyone who mentioned it.
And then of course it came out that it was indeed true, but that GWB had said to just let it go, apparently in the interest of comity. And again, I shook my head in exasperation.
Why is it so hard to find the real, actual truth about anything these days? We thought that in the age of the internet, and everyman reporting/blogging/journalism, the truth would be pretty hard to hide, sun would shine through all attempts at cover-ups.
It sure hasn’t turned out that way.