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Comment by downerending

5 years ago

This is the bit I don't get. I regularly ignore the utterances of all sorts of people I'm not interested in hearing from. Is it really that hard?

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downerending

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anigbrowl  5 years ago

Given that the president is invested with enormous power and has proved both able and willing to upend others' lives for political ends, pretending that he's just another random e-celeb seems kind of disingenuous.

  • tathougies  5 years ago

    Well the problem then is the overgrowth of executive power in the past two decades. Unfortunately, literally everyone was silent on that during both the Bush and Obama administration as well, and now are complaining that their chickens have come home to roost.

    • klyrs  5 years ago

      I don't know about you but I voted for Obama and regretted it when this happened [1]:

      > National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012, Pub.L. 112–81. This NDAA contains several controversial sections (see article), the chief being §§ 1021–1022, which affirm provisions authorizing the indefinite military detention of civilians, including U.S. citizens, without habeas corpus or due process, contained in the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), Pub.L. 107–40.

      Not to mention his failures to uphold the principles that he ran on: gitmo, whistleblower protections (vis a vis Manning, Asange and Snowden), massacres of civilians ("drone strikes"), etc.

      Just because you haven't been watching, doesn't mean that this hasn't outraged the people who do. All of that stuff was covered by NPR at the time, so it's not like any of it was a secret.

      [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Authorizati...

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    • perl4ever  5 years ago

      "literally everyone was silent"

      This is such a cliche, and yet simultaneously someone in this thread is saying we don't have to worry about the current President becoming a dictator because of the zillion times previous Presidents were accused of wanting to seize power.

      How do you think these contradictory cliches thrive alongside each other?

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