The Impeachment of President Donald J Trump

[Razgovory]

no matter how popular equivelentism has gotten among the intellectual lazy.

I love this line!  I will use it next time someone makes a "Both Side!" argument.

[Habbaku]

Complete with grumbleresque misspellings?

[The Minsky Moment]

The great political challenge for the US in the first half of the 19th century was generating sufficient capacity for national governance and administration to manage a rapidly expanding territory in an era just emerging from medieval-era transport and communication technology.  Jackson's policy was to reconfigure the national government to push the accelerator on territorial expansion while weakening the capacity of the national government in virtually every other domain.  The legacy of that policy was a national government in the 1840s and 1850s that with the exception of mail delivery, was unfit for organizing common national efforts and projects outside of waging war, brutalizing native peoples, and empowering interstate vigilante gangs seeking to kidnap African-Americans seeking refuge in free states.

It is of course a myth that the Civil War was caused by a conflict between national authority and "states rights" with the significant exception of the effort of slave states to employ unprecedented federal authority to run roughshod over Northern state liberties in the 1850s. However, it took the Civil War to create the political space to partially reverse the corrosive legacy of Jacksonianism and create something resembling a functional state with a proper currency and the ability to put in place a national transport and communications infrastructure.   Even then, the effort was incomplete and it would not be until the institutional and constitutional revolution spanning the two Roosevelt presidencies that the job would be completed.

[dps]

I think because Jackson screwed people who had attempted to work with the United States and adopt our ways and sought to fight for their rights in our court system. I mean the Cherokee and the Creeks and so forth were troublesome politically with their pesky insistance upon land ownership but they were certainly not dangerous by that point. I mean I don't approve what happened to the Apaches but I get that both the Mexicans and Americans were terrified of them.

Plus by evicting the Creeks, Jackson helped give birth to Alabama. What a shameful legacy.

Jackson didn't actually evict the Creeks and other tribes involved.  He allowed the states to evict them, which isn't quite the same thing.

Would have been good if he'd been as willing to stand up to the states on the issue as he was during the Nullification Crisis.

[OttoVonBismarck]

The Adamses were deeply against it personally but were political pragmatists who never would've raised serious issue about it as it'd have doomed their political careers.

Well both Adams did do that at various times (particularly JQ Adams, that was his #1 issue for the latter part of his career), but the Constitutional situation was really different for John Adams as the can had been kicked down the road by the Constitutional convention.

I barely acknowledge JQ's time in the U.S. House, no President matters once out of the office.

[OttoVonBismarck]

I don't see how the Jackson revisionists can argue that Jackson was just like every other president, no matter how popular equivelentism has gotten among the intellectual lazy.

I don't know that anyone did, other than to say that the things the left has been going after him over (usually stuff relating to Indians, sometimes slaves), was common policy of most early Presidents.

Jackson made decisions that he knew were illogical and contrary to national interests (such as destroying the value of US currency) purely for populist reasons.  He stopped essentially all infrastructure development that his own cronies were not profiting from.  He was Trumpian in his disdain for any attempts to exert the constitutional checks and balances, and his establishment of the political spoils system corrupted far more administrations than just his own.

Eh, Adams let Hamilton manipulate him heavily for the first couple years of his Presidency, including the constitutionally shameful advocacy for and signing of the Alien and Sedition Acts. Madison let profiteers in the western states more or less brain wash him into thinking a disastrous war with the United Kingdom was a good idea. The string of mostly poor Presidents (in some respects Polk being an outlier) between Jackson and Lincoln is filled with alcoholics, Confederates, and general incompetents content to fiddle and do nothing as the slavery issue increasingly incensed the country and lead to the civil war.

But at the end of the day I don't really know anyone in the real world who looks at and complains about Jackson on the sort of metrics historians normally use when analyzing a Presidency. It's always about the Indian removals, which just weren't really a thing distinct to Jackson.

[Valmy]

Well most of those guys are not celebrated as one of our greatest Presidents. That is why Jackson gets shit on. John Tyler is not on the $20 bill.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Well most of those guys are not celebrated as one of our greatest Presidents. That is why Jackson gets shit on. John Tyler is not on the $20 bill.

I don't really know that Jackson has been celebrated that way since the early 20th century. He's not on Mt. Rushmore, he has no significant national monument in D.C. etc. He is on the $20, but Alexander Hamilton is on the $10, Grant is on the $50, etc. Lot of silly people have been on the money.

[grumbler]

Complete with grumbleresque misspellings?

Sure.  If you can find them, feel free to use them. They are not copyrighted or anything.

[Legbiter]

It's a lot like being in a crowded subway when a mentally disturbed person begins ranting.  It is hard not too listen.

Yeah, Trump mostly offends me on an aesthetic level. He's too New York, too orange. Otherwise I love his brash, offensive Twitter comedy, he is the world's best heel. His enemies follow him much like he's their favourite soap opera villain. And he has this almost animalistic low cunning when it comes to unerringly honing in on his opponent's weakest point, to brutally shank between the ribs. And to top it off he's blessed with an economy that renders Obama as this rather disappointing Black Carter in retrospect. That has to sting the most for average TDS lunatic writing for the NYT, WAPO; CNN; MSDNC, etc....

Btw, if it comes down to Bernie or Trump and my dear American languishbrahs decide to renew their subscription to the Trump Show, you're still great folks in my book. Just be warned second terms kinda suck, usually.

[The Minsky Moment]

And to top it off he's blessed with an economy that renders Obama as this rather disappointing Black Carter in retrospect.

That's clearly not true.  Job growth, GDP growth and the S&P 500 growth are all slightly below the trend of the Obama presidency.

[Admiral Yi]

It's always about the Indian removals, which just weren't really a thing distinct to Jackson.

It's very distinct to Jackson.  The Civilized Nations had "gone white" in an attempt to accomodate to a nation they knew they couldn't resist militarily.  The Cherokee fought alongside whites against other Indians.  They dressed white, they planted and raised animals, they participated in the white economy.  They didn't raid or steal or kill.  They were ethnically cleansed not because they were a threat but because they were different looking and Jackson's white trash voting base wanted to grab their land.  And of course Jackson ignored a Supreme Court ruling.

Jackson should go down in infamy because it was the one significant ocaisson when Indians said we'll follow all your rules and they got fucked for it.

[Legbiter]

And to top it off he's blessed with an economy that renders Obama as this rather disappointing Black Carter in retrospect.

That's clearly not true.  Job growth, GDP growth and the S&P 500 growth are all slightly below the trend of the Obama presidency.

Obama can never get enough credit for righting the ship at just the right moment. He did just fine with what he inherited from moron Dubya. US presidents don't generally get enough credit for not wrecking things while in office.

The American public is just now feeling the effects of the recovery however. Kinda like here.

[Razgovory]

It would appear that Trumps economic pledge on the economy will be unfulfilled.  He pledged 4 consecutive quarters of 4% growth.  Maybe even 5 or 6% growth.  That hasn't happened, but he has managed to convince many of the stupider segments of the population that he has.

[The Brain]

God's greatest trick was convincing people that he exists.