I wonder if anyone has thought to check the residences/offices of other former Presidents and Veeps for documents that shouldn’t be there.
1 Like
Well, you have - so that’s at least one person…
1 Like
This is where I am at too. Is this every president? Every vp? Every senator?
1 Like
It seems like we should take a look at the classification system and standardize the rules about what is marked secret. Probably too much info is classified and it kind of cheapens the whole endeavor and people don’t take it seriously (unless they can use it for political fodder).
secret classification should only be applied to info that would actually be harmful to the country if it fell into the wrong hands. My understanding is that lots of low-level stuff gets marked classified just because it’s protocol or as a CYA. That’s unnecessary imo.
1 Like
I thought the rules were “the president classifies and declassifies by thinking about it”…
1 Like
I’m not familiar enough with the rules to know this, but I’ll assume you’re correct about this.
How can we now, in 2023, know when Biden acquired certain documents? He was a Senator before he was VPOTUS. So if a document was classified in, say, 2005 (when he was Senator) and that document was subsequently found in his house… how do we know when it got there?
Isn’t it possible that he had the 2005 document in his VPOTUS office sometime between 2009-2017 and then it was inadvertently packed at the end of his term as VPOTUS?
I hate to say it but both sides. Whatever you want to call this, it’s a consequence of just voting for your party no matter what. That mindset has now left us with very low quality people running our country. It’s going to continue to get worse IMO.
Maybe Biden learned what could happen because of Trump, so he invited the FBI rather than wait for someone to send them in. What is unknown is how often classified documents escape from where they belong. That seems to be the problem.
Biden > Trump in terms of after the fact compliance. It will be interesting to see if Obama, Bush, and Clinton find documents to turn over the coming weeks.
1 Like
The last two presidential elections have been weird, but im not sure the mindset is the issue.
16 was the outsider/entertainer/businessman against the destined first female candidate. 20 was chaos vs anti chaos (i think covid news helped Biden alot).
We had better candidates for both, but they disappeared in the primaries.
Sadly this is the way.
Joe Biden was popular in the 2020 primaries. I didn’t particularly like him, but a lot of people thought he was better than other D candidates. I think you might be a bit out of touch with the average American voter.
(Not to dump on you specifically, I think we’re all out of touch with normal people)
1 Like
Biden was the safe choice against Trump, people knew what they were getting.
3 Likes
He also crushed it with old people and black people.
I liked Obama a lot, so it’s easy to suggest something was right then, and something is wrong now.
But really I liked Obama because he was an intellectual, like myself, which is actually just a coincidence, and not how he got elected.
Something is wrong. All we’re doing is voting on the party we support regardless of the quality of the individual as a potential public servant or any ideas about the future. In the current environment the number one characteristic candidates are pushing is how terrible the other person is and that you should vote for me because I am not them.
Yes this rot happened in the Republican party first, but it’s building in the Democratic party as well. This is partially because the Republican party is so rotten, but the Dems are only about 5 years or so behind them and the continued partitioning of the media will lead to very little accountability towards any of these people.
The symptoms are evident everywhere. No one is fighting over a vision of the future, we’re fighting over our visions of the past. Look around, the most pressing issues in many jurisdictions are what we are teaching for history in school. No one cares about the future anymore they just care about being right and when they aren’t right they don’t want anyone around them bringing it up.
You say you liked Obama because he was an intellectual. I believe intellectualism is dying a slow death in the United States. My conspiracy theory is that we’re slowly being turned into disgruntled and pessimistic morons by foreign powers leveraging our social media against us.
While we know that there are foreign powers playing games in social media, I think you’re underestimating the likelihood that social media is a self-inflicted wound.
2 Likes
I am glad you recognize the rot is coming from the Republican party, but the rest of your post sounds a lot like the narrative that right wing media is constantly pushing. From school boards to presidential nominees, the Democrats run people with experience while the Republicans run people who push grievances on the latest hot topic.
2 Likes
I agree that partisan hate is driving our politics. And our media sources contribute. I agree it’s the issue of our times. And also that it means it’s impossible to elect a “good” president anymore, no matter what, half of the country has to hate him.
I just don’t think it has a lot to do with this thread, or the Biden-Trump general election. The general election is -usually- about whether to reject the incumbent, and this last case was more so because the incumbent was so awful, and so loud it was hard to think of anything else. For most of us, it wasn’t about parties, it was about Trump.
Also disagree a bit about ideas about our future. During the 2020 primaries, several major candidates were tossing around huge ideas, like Medicare for All, Taxing Billionaires, and making education free. And while Democrats chose the least radical option, Congress/Biden did pass some major legislation, such as the Inflation Reduction Act.
Which obviously did nothing for inflation. But you probably appreciate as the only time we ever tried to decrease healthcare prices, ever. But really it’s closer to a “New Green Deal”, overhauling the American economy and trade to deal with climate change. (And yes I know, as a republican yourself, you’re semi-skeptical on Climate Change stuff, but you have to admit at least that it is a “big idea about the future”.
So, brace for attack on January 6, 2026?
1 Like
Not always true. At the local level I voted for a fair number of R candidates because the D ones were hot garbage. Examples from the most recent election-
Coroner (still not sure why we vote on this) - D candidate: just graduated with degree in Biology. No experience, but “I could learn on the job”
University Regent - D candidate: renaissance fair actor and truck driver who never went to college but likes talking to people to hear their stories and wants to hear college kids stories.
County commissioner- D candidate: well they couldn’t find anyone to run so I volunteered. I’m a single mom and busy so I haven’t had the time to look into any issues yet but if I win I’ll devote time to this position.
Those are low-level local jobs with almost no relevance to big-picture national government. I think the previous post was referring to national office like representative and senator.
Not sure party matters that much for stuff like coroner.