I don’t view this meme in the context of the most recent election, or current administration; I view it with 40 years of political policy and context I’ve lived through. Over decades, I find this meme to be mostly accurate. I was born at the tail end of Carter’s admin, for context.
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Reagan gave us trickle down economics and destabilization of south America and the Middle East with the Nicaragua contra scandal to funnel weapons to Iraq and Iran. Our tax dollars being used to kill brown people. During the 1980s, the United States aided Saddam Hussein’s regime primarily to counter Iran, providing billions in economic aid, dual-use technology, and crucial battlefield intelligence, particularly during the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988). The U.S. supported Iraq’s military efforts, ensuring Baghdad did not lose to Iran, despite knowledge of chemical weapons usage. (Didn’t we eventually fight a war to get rid of Dadsam? Oops 😬)
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The first Bush was also involved in the contra scandal. Just before leaving office, President Bush pardoned six Reagan administration officials, including former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, who were charged with crimes related to the Iran-Contra affair.
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Clinton, Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999: Repealed the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, allowing commercial banks, securities firms, and insurance companies to consolidate. This removed controls on banks that allowed them to over speculate, and allowed consolidation of industries to be too big to fail. (This set is up for the supprime mortgage disaster that left tax payers holding the bag. Oops.) Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000: Exempted over-the-counter derivatives—including credit default swaps—from regulation. Telecommunications Act of 1996: Significantly deregulated the broadcasting and telecommunications markets. (The deregulation stipulation was that these companies would be rolling out broadband in exchange for deregulation and tax breaks. We still have communities in the USA that don’t have broadband. The telecoms laughed all the way to the bank, and jacked their prices way up. Oops.) President Bill Clinton’s administration (1993–2001) was involved in several military conflicts and interventions, primarily focused on peacekeeping in the Balkans, stopping ethnic cleansing, and responding to terrorism. Key actions included NATO bombing campaigns in Bosnia (1995) and Kosovo (1999), the failed mission in Somalia (1993), the occupation of Haiti (1994), and cruise missile strikes against Iraq and terrorist sites in Afghanistan/Sudan.
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Bush the second coming, Iraq War (2003–2011): Launched based on assertions that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and threatened peace. The invasion swiftly removed Saddam, but sparked a long insurgency and sectarian violence. There were no weapons of mass destruction. It was bullshit that helped his buddies in haliburton get rich on the tax payers dime bombing brown people. Oh, remember Guantanamo and the torture? How about the slow response to hurricane Katrina that devastated new Orleans? Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, was convicted of obstruction of justice and perjury in a case involving the leaking of CIA agent Valerie Plame’s identity. (Oops we sabotaged our ability to gather intelligence.) Dismissal of U.S. Attorneys in 2006, the Department of Justice fired eight U.S. attorneys, raising allegations of political manipulation within the Department of Justice.
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Obama gave us the affordable care act, and capitulated to the insurance industries by not pushing harder for single payer care. Authorized air strikes in Libya (2011) and later against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. The Dems had full control at the start of his presidency and wasted it trying to placate Republicans in the interests of bipartisanship. He was the tamest president in the past half century.
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We all know what utter trash the 1st trump presidency was, so I won’t rehash it here.
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Biden. His entire platform was, we aren’t trump. He honestly wasn’t that bad in terms of initiating military actions.
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House and Senate during the second coming of trump. They threw away the leverage they had during the shit down for the promise that repubs would revisit tax subsidies that made the affordable care plans affordable for Americans. The Republican administration let the tax credits expire. How about all of the Dems that voted yes on trumps cabinet pics?
Have Dems been better? Yes, but not consistently. Lately there is not much difference between the parties.
bearboiblake@pawb.social 21 hours ago
Kamala literally supported the genocide in Gaza, and Obama and Biden killed a shitload of kids. They really aren’t that different. The differences are primarily aesthetic and procedural.
Passerby6497@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
Oh geez since they’re not perfect, let’s let the Nazis take over. I’m not even trying to sarcastically mock you, that’s literally what’s happening. The fact that you’re hand waving how much worse trump actually is than either Obama or Biden is kinda telling, especially if you really think “The differences are primarily aesthetic and procedural.”
Let me ask it again, would Kamala have done the awful crimes that trump is doing, yes or no? If yes, justify it, anything short of that is tacit acknowledgement that she wouldn’t (and is exactly the kind of continued deflection I expect from this conversation) because you’d be able to do so if they were as close as you say. I keep hearing that they’re the same, yet aside from supporting Israel (to a bad, but objectively lesser extent), there’s no real argument to be made aside from purity politics. And playing purity politics is a good portion of why we are where we are.
So many people love to push accelerationist methodologies that only hurt the most vulnerable while letting the worst among us take power, and that’s basically what this is. And it’s hiding behind the intellectually lazy “well, they’re all bad so it doesn’t matter” mentality that falls apart if you actually look past a surface level. I don’t like a lot of the shit that Kamala supported, but you’re fucking high if you think that Kamala at her worst would have been anywhere near this bad. And don’t take this as me supporting Kamala, she was not someone I liked, but she could at least be worked with more than what we have now and objectively would not be doing the shit that’s going on now.
But hey, you and those like you stuck to your morals and made a difference in the world! Instead of getting someone who isn’t great but can be worked with, we chose to elect Nazis that are actively taking people off of the street, murdering civilians in the streets, and starting more wars that will lead to countless more deaths than if we had chosen to play electoral politics.
bearboiblake@pawb.social 21 hours ago
It’s fucking unbelievable to me the way you write about this, like supporting a genocide is like some little understandable human foible or something. Supporting a genocide makes you completely nonviable. Full stop. Nothing more needs to be said. You would vote for Hitler himself if he ran on a Dem ticket against Mussolini.
You can just read the rest of my comments for the answer to your questions, I’ve already explained it at least half a dozen times and I’m getting a bit tired of doing so.
Passerby6497@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
Yeah, that’s what I thought
It’s a simple question, yes or no?
See, this is why people likely find your views shallow or childish. Supporting the candidate who wanted THE LEAST AMOUNT OF SUFFERING is not the same as supporting everything they support, or even in the same fucking plane as supporting genocide. And if one supports a small amount vs a massive amount, it doesn’t take much brain power to realize that the option to reduce harm is the smaller of the two.
Also, it helps to understand electoral politics. If you have two options and you don’t choose, you’re choosing to let the majority choose for you and is a tacit vote for the opposition in an election where they were doing everything they can to suppress turnout. I can just as easily make the argument that you indirectly supported even more genocide because you couldn’t vote for the lesser option as you can for me supporting genocide because I voted for Kamala.
Yeah, this is also why your views are seen as childish, and makes it blindingly clear you have no understanding of what I’m saying and are just responding emotionally. You’re just trying to get under my skin because you know you can’t respond to my actual point.
Nah, I want you to defend yourself instead of hiding behind your purity politics.
But we both know you can’t.
Jax@sh.itjust.works 21 hours ago
Did you vote for Kamala or did you abstain/vote third party?