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dingus ,
@dingus@lemmy.ml avatar

I’ll be honest, the fact that our “justice” system is on the fence about whether or not we should prosecute a former President just shows how much of a fucking sham the entire fucking system is. The fact that the DOJ sat on it at first and only decided to go forward because he kept committing fucking crimes because he can’t help himself is fucking disgusting. They did everything they could to let him go with a slap on the wrist. Fucking sickening.

We may as well still have fucking Monarchy if they’re not willing to actually prosecute prolifically criminal motherfuckers like this.

In other words, yes, I agree with the title. It’s the most important criminal prosecution in US history because finally after 60-some fucking years of non-stop corruption, we’re finally even considering doing something about it.

Cruxifux ,

Rich people rarely pay for their crimes. It essentially is a monarchy, just with different justifications for us to serve the ruling class.

FlexibleToast ,

I would say it essentially is an oligarchy, not a monarchy.

Unaware7013 ,

Wouldn't it be more of a plutocracy since the wealthy are basically ruling us?

FlexibleToast ,

I think you could make a case for either one. Wealth isn’t really an indicator of power though although all the powerful do have wealth. What I do know is that it certainly doesn’t feel like a democratic republic. How could it when the elected get to choose the electors?

LaunchesKayaks ,
@LaunchesKayaks@lemmy.world avatar

We’re well on our way to being a theocracy

HobbitFoot ,

We’ve never really seen an American President as criminal as Trump before. There is some precedent with Nixon and Clinton, but nothing to the level that Trump did.

That said, this needs to be done.

dingus , (edited )
@dingus@lemmy.ml avatar

There’s been precedent with nearly every president since Nixon. I’d maybe leave out Jimmy Carter, but even has skeletons in his closet. Reagan, Bush, Bush II, and Obama all had scandals and criminality that were minimized. I find it odd that people don’t realize that Obama continued some of the worst aspects of the Bush administration. It’s why I pegged it at sixty years. There was absolutely corruption before Nixon, too, but it became more egregious after him.

EDIT: Getting downvotes because I guess people have rosy memories of Obama? Obama told me whose team he was on the second he said “We need to look forward, not backward” at not prosecuting anyone in the Bush admin for lying to the world about WMD’s and leading us into an illegal and wasteful war in the middle east, a war that Obama ramped up drone warfare in. As if that wasn’t a precedent of ignoring Republican crimes that lead us to exactly where we are fucking now with everyone treating Trump with kid gloves. Bush and Cheney are literal fucking war criminals, and people cooed over how cute it was that Bush shared candy with Michelle Obama. Give me a break. That shit is precisely what lead us here, treating war criminals with kid gloves.

Poggervania ,
@Poggervania@kbin.social avatar

Honestly, it just goes to show that most American citizens don’t really give a shit about politics. So long as the person in charge has the right letter by their name, that’s all that matters to the majority of the US because then they can go “the guy in charge has the same letter I support and like, they can do no wrong because I can’t be wrong!”

pingveno ,

I think most Americans would like to have a system that gives them real choice instead of the political duopoly. We just aren’t there in terms of having viable parties outside of a duopoly because of FPTP. There’s slow movement in the direction, but only very slow.

Faresh ,

I think we can say that practically all American presidents in history were despicable human beings.

dingus ,
@dingus@lemmy.ml avatar

Yeah the guys who said “all men are created equal” while giving themselves rights to own other humans as property, and only allowing land-owning white men the right to vote, those guys were “good guys?” Right? Right?? /s

It would probably be more clear to say we had a handful in the middle (like maybe one or two really) who weren’t total complete utter pieces of shit. Like LBJ and maybe Ike (mostly for his farewell address and how prescient it was), but even with the good things they did, they were also pretty big pieces of shit in their own ways.

DigitalTraveler42 ,

Leading nation-states isn’t a black and white thing, there’s always going to be decisions that have to be made based on the information those leaders have at that moment and sometimes those decisions have negative consequences.

However with that being said there has never been an American president that was an outright corrupt traitor like Trump was, he was purely out for himself and selling the rest of us out to the probably not even the highest bidder, probably more the bidder that was the best at sucking up to Trump or promising him the best stuff.

dingus ,
@dingus@lemmy.ml avatar

However with that being said there has never been an American president that was an outright corrupt traitor like Trump was

My brother in Christ, that’s literally my point. It took literally the most absolutely corrupt and endlessly shameless idiot on the planet to actually make our government consider prosecuting anyone in the upper echelons of government for clear crimes. It’s fucking sickening that it took this obscene level of criminality for it to become something worth doing something about, and they tried their hardest to softwalk it and give him chances to return the documents! Who knows if we’d even have the J6 case if it wasn’t for the documents fiasco!

Anticorp ,

He didn’t just ignore Bush’s crimes, he chose to continue them. He actively and consciously chose to continue the Patriot Act, unconstitutional imprisonment of American citizens, unconstitutional surveillance, and unconstitutional and illegal torture. Obama’s presidency was world’s better than Trump’s, but Obama was every bit the authoritarian police-state enforcer as his predecessors.

Nougat ,

We're equating Nixon and Clinton now?

HobbitFoot ,

Both had legal troubles during and after their presidencies, indicating some form of precedent.

This isn’t equating or comparing the severity of legal problems, just noting that they existed.

Offlein ,

Good point. You changed my opinion about your earlier comment.

Anticorp ,

Ice is present in both my glass of water and the Arctic circle, but they otherwise have no similarities. The same is true for Clinton and Trump’s presidencies including their legal troubles.

kroy ,

I think this attempt at comparison falls a little flat.

sudo ,
@sudo@lemmy.fmhy.net avatar

Just to clarify, they’re equating Clinton and Nixon. Top comment was saying the two of them are nothing like trump at all.

Tinidril ,

If you want to compare the Clinton and Trump presidencies, you can start with large bags of Saudi cash.

shiveyarbles ,

It’s not really we the people, it’s the rich people and the service class

TransplantedSconie ,
@TransplantedSconie@lemm.ee avatar

Honestly, it seems like just the Republicans and right-wing media are on the fence.

Any other media person and non republican is “charge his ass and if guilty, throw him in a hole”

BigNote ,

Hard disagree. Far more than anything else, this is about audience capture and the failure of Burke’s “fourth estate.” What it shows is the efficacy of segregated information ecosystems that have near total audience capture. None of this would be even remotely possible if all Americans lived and swam in the same information ecosystem.

But we don’t, and we are seeing what this means for the health of democracy and the rule of law.

Conservatives, having the luxury of an unquestioning audience that’s fully captured by an information ecosystem that’s fully on-board with anything they say, are not constrained in any way by the truth.

The Press, with a capital P, no longer serves as a check against conservative lies because, due to the nearly complete segregation of information ecosystems, any facts that run count er to the conservative agenda can simply be ignored or twisted, and will accordingly never be seen by a conservative audience at all.

All of which is just to say that while our justice system is imperfect, the real problem is the corruption of Burke’s fourth estate which was always conceived of as necessarily existing in opposition to, or at least as a check against, governmental and private commercial power.

YeeterOfWorlds ,

But we don’t, and we are seeing what this means for the health of democracy and the rule of law.

If you’re going to blame multiple news sources/commentators (that all Americans do not swim in the same information ecosystem), wouldn’t it then become a matter of whether or not democracy itself is a viable system?

As in, if the only way a democracy can remain healthy is if all citizen “lived and swam in the same information ecosystem.”, Then how would it be possible to have a democracy? Like, how do we have a free healthy democracy, and enforce the existence of a singular “information ecosystem” at the same time? That sounds impossible.

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