Ted Kennedy was elected by a plurality of his constituents many, many times. There was a campaign for each one of his terms and he won. Not so much "hired" as "elected." If the Republicans of that era could have unseated him, I presume they would have. In fact, the question that you may do better to ask is, "why couldn't a conservative in Massachusetts unseat someone with that much baggage?"
RFK and Pete Hegseth, whom I presume the earlier poster was alluding to because of his confirmed alcoholism, were appointed by the current President and confirmed by the Senate. There was no campaign and they were approved largely along party lines, which is more akin to "hiring" and that is an obviously less exhaustive process.
I can only assume that your connection to this was, "haha booze... Ted Kennedy!" Maybe you could graduate to parroting a different joke from Rush Limbaugh? Why don't you sample something from the "I do not think that 12-year old Chelsea Clinton is attractive" section?"
Not surprising!
> Ted Kennedy was elected by a plurality of his constituents many, many times.
Massachusetts voters condoned Chappaquiddick. He was still a drunk and worse. Ted Kennedy was never able to overcome Chappaquiddick when running on a national level. There's no doubt that the Chappaquiddick incident was one of the primary reasons he lost the 1980 primary, when he had his best chance of succeeding.
> If the Republicans of that era could have unseated him, I presume they would have.
Why? Massachusetts voters are overwhelmingly Democrats, and all sorts of disgusting characters like Ted Kennedy are elected to high office. The Democrat voters of Massachusetts were willing to overlook Chappaquiddick and that's all there is to it.
> RFK and Pete Hegseth, whom I presume the earlier poster was alluding to because of his confirmed alcoholism, were appointed by the current President and confirmed by the Senate. There was no campaign and they were approved largely along party lines, which is more akin to "hiring" and that is an obviously less exhaustive process.
Again, this only hurts the original argument. Hegseth and RFK Jr. are mere appointments. Neither of them to my knowledge has done anything as heinous as what Ted Kennedy did at Chappaquiddick but let's assume they did. Every few years Massachusetts voters spoke loudly and clearly, affirming their support for someone who drove so drunk that a woman was killed as a result. So the DUI snark above is kind of a joke, and deserves a response.
Heck you could argue that the national scrutiny that Hegseth and RFK Jr. faced was much more of a vetting than Ted Kennedy received in his machine state, but whatever.
> I can only assume that your connection to this was, "haha booze... Ted Kennedy!"
The truth hurts. If Democrats didn't want to defend Ted Kennedy they shouldn't have elected him. I happen to be fond of drinkers who don't kill people. Honestly I care much more about the fact that he abandoned Mary Jo Kopechne to die, and that he received special treatment in court.
> Maybe you could graduate to parroting a different joke from Rush Limbaugh? Why don't you sample something from the "I do not think that 12-year old Chelsea Clinton is attractive" section?"
The most famous example of a joke at Chelsea Clinton's expense was told by John McCain, who stated that the reason for her ugliness was the fact that her father was Janet Reno. John McCain was elected by a plurality of his constituents many, many times.
thats not wrong, look what the US was willing to overlook in 2016 and 2024 when electing our president lol! I do think the US should take the DUI thing more seriously but the trouble is that in many areas a car is central to ones very economic existence.
>The most famous example of a joke at Chelsea Clinton's expense was told by John McCain, who stated that the reason for her ugliness was the fact that her father was Janet Reno. John McCain was elected by a plurality of his constituents many, many times.
poor Chelsea lol I still did not totally dislike McCain like I do trump and his boyfriend musk.
I do hope we have our version of a Numenburg trials one day, but I also wouldn't be surprised if all these people squirm under the cracks once their near octogenarian rallying point declines.
> Bondi can still be charged. Hegseth can still be held liable.
[0] https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/05/27/trumps-budget-contemp...
You are right a lot of his actions can be (and have been) stopped via legal means. That's not so much democrats as individuals and groups with standing to bring suit. The dems can't really do much except fund the lawsuits which, again, don't threaten Trump in any way.
Case study -- Kazakhstan leader, Nazarbayev introduced all kinds of immunities before leaving. Didn't help later, all the titles and privileges got stripped. The only chance is to lose power and money and become harmless (and whole family as well), or get unreachable (keep the money).
PS: Autocrats like "small" wars, something that keeps people occupied and centralized. Not a large risky wars though, with unpredictable outcomes. "Small" is relative, e.g. for China a war with Taiwan very well might become "large", if India expresses an opinion on that. So they're reluctant to start it. For Russia, war with Ukraine anticipated to be "small", although grew up larger than expected.
So as I see it for Trump, a small war would be desirable, he envies Ukraine president, as they cannot conduct an election during war (and some territories occupied), that'd be nice for Trump.
My only solace right now is that Trump probably isn't in the health to survive to 2028, maybe not even 2027 to get potentially convicted if congress shifts. He's in worse wear in 2025 when Biden in 2024.
It's Republicans that think it's alright. Not "Congress". The Republicans just happen to control what happens in Congress - the Democrats are not complicit at all.
Trump can live as long as medically possible, which could be 10 or 20 more years, nobody really knows. Then Trump Jr. is going to take his place as the figurehead, and he'll probably win the next election if there is one. If Trump doesn't make it to the end of his term, we'll have President Vance and VP Miller, or maybe VP Trump Jr. It's not looking good no matter what happens.
Signed: A person with a disability, unable to support DEI as it stands.
Are the DEI bunch radicalized? I’m not sure I get that vibe. The people who riot and are radicalized probably aren’t out there understanding nuance, being level headed and campaigning for an even playing field.
If you can also expound on why you can’t support DEI as it stands I’m open to your thoughts. I have my own reservations about DEI because as a model minority it does me no favors. But it hasn’t harmed me either, or if it has I don’t know any better.
To your other question: I perceive DEI, and most other "inclusion" efforts I've seen so far, mostly as a strawman. We basically failed with digital accessibility and more inclusion in the workplace for people with disabilities. If I am not mistaken, the US and EU still stand somewhere around 80% unemployment for people with disabilities. To me, DEI is an attempt to hide that failure by including a lot more marginalized groups, which at the end of the day do not need so much adaptation as people with disabilities do. So IMO, DEI is trying to hide the fact that inclusion of people with disabilities has already failed. And its mixing up too many groups with different needs. I have absolutely nothing in common with a LGBTQ-person when it comes to my needs as a blind guy. There is no overlap, and I dont feel represented when they have their pride month. But they are so loud that the needs of my community have been silenced by now. Which confirms my intuition with DEI. Meanwhile, teachers are telling me they are working with their classes to find a new word for "disability". If that is the outcome of DEI, people endlessly engaging in wordgames, instead of working on the actual hard problems, I don't need anything from it. Its useless waste of time and dumbing down of the actual problems at hand.
Congratulations, you are being played. In the end, the Conservatives will destroy DEI and repress LGBTQ - and you won't have any more help as a blind person, because they never really cared and just manipulated you into hating "the gays" instead of hating them. Trump HATES you deeply, you know? He despises you, as a loser, a cripple, someone less-than-human. It is just that gay people are more politically active and visible, so they are more useful as a foe for his "two minutes of hate" - for now.
If you don't believe me:
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/trump-dei-target-a...
https://www.theguardian.com/global/2025/mar/27/us-disability...
https://time.com/7002003/donald-trump-disabled-americans-all...
“Those people . . . ” Donald said, trailing off. “The shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die.”
Meanwhile while you froth at the mouth against the "DEI bunch", disabled people are ending unemployed en masse right this very moment, thanks to the crazy cuts to Federal Workforce - the only big employer who tried to do things right.
https://www.axios.com/2025/01/24/dei-orders-disabled-workers...
Damn those extremists - don't they know how women got the vote, how racial segregation was ended and how persecution of gays by the police was addressed? They really need some civics lesson!
In comparison, it seems like we're almost at a point where all WW2 vets (the last time "white men" had to confront fascist behavior) have passed away. When's the last time America as a general unit has had to properly protest authority? The Boomers didn't seem to take the right lessons about Vietnam into account when they started taking the reigns.
That said, what people call DEI today is just a reformation of Maoism based in Marxism, and its goals follow hopes, and patterns that seek to engender social collectivist indoctrination in those subjected to it; following principles of thought reform/torture unironically also coming out of mainland China during Mao (1950s).
Its particularly effective against the habitually complacent.
The big trick of communism is to induce hope in people to narrow their focus to a circular but undefined viewpoint which can be falsely claimed as truth later, but which in reality lacks a property of what's called metaphysical objectivity in philosophy; an identity you need to prove anything through logic/critical thinking. This is how double-speak and double-think work.
It also takes advantage of a lot of psychological blindspots we all have (by purposeful design), just like any other cult programming.
Its important to note: Equity isn't equality, and its not properly defined.
If you want to learn more about blindspots, I'd suggest starting with Robert Cialdini (Influence). Robert Lifton covers case studies of actual torture mechanics which can be derived (elements, structuring, clustering), which use these blindspots (albeit this material came before Cialdini published back in the 1950s).
New Discourses covers the progression of DEI in damning detail albeit he sometimes becomes too wordy.
With any regime change playbook you inherently have two roles being played simultaneously by a single cohort. You have a subgroup of antagonists, who perform and carry out acts to inflame which then are used by the other role to create a unifying narrative/platform for influence and insurgency.
The fact that violence and rioting are occurring fairly often is sufficient evidence that DEI and its other forms have had some success as a memetic contagion.
The harm always comes at you sideways without any visibility or attribution being possible. Are you better off today than you were a decade ago? Could you imagine a decade ago police firing teargas and rubber bullets indiscriminately into a peaceful assembly, or people firebombing cars with molotov cocktails? Which came first?, none of the news is saying and all the public narratives lean towards omitted lies in one form or another.
No objective signals can be discernible or come out of channels jammed to the Shannon Limit.
People go absolutely insane when they cannot maintain an internal consistent narrative/mental state and this happens without them realizing it (subliminally), and its been known for quite a long time going all the way back to the 1800s with Gustave Le Bon's The Crowd.
Which side are you talking about now? Because according to [0], DEI violence is so rare that it doesn't even merit a mention in the statistics.
[0] https://www.justice.gov/hatecrimes/hate-crime-statistics
They need riots to make their big play. I wish people got that, but unfortunately if you poke the right places you can get people to react.
Communism has always been about telling misleading deceitful lies pretending its truth, generating confusion through circular thoughts, promoting magical thinking, and narrowing focus improperly in isolation to perspectives of oppressor vs the oppressed, a perspective where there can never be equality, or the ability to change and become better/grow (i.e. The Woke, who are delusional).
The channel New Discourses on youtube has long-running coverage of this referencing these people's own publicized words, and what's been happening, and how it was rebranded by Paulo Freire and others a few decades ago.
When you have American companies and government resources going to paying for indoctrinating communism in your worker, educator, or child; and nothing has been being done to stop it... that's a serious problem which would be worthy of declaring martial law over. Failure to act is an action itself.
Communism indoctrinating and brainwashing your people towards lies, and turning them to insurgency is a serious national security issue.
You objectively aren't an American, if you don't follow the western philosophy's founding ideals laid out by our founding fathers, which was based first in objective truth, property, and a rule of law which itself has requirements codified in the constitution that no court can overrule or curtail and remain a rule of law.
The rule of law has been gone for awhile, which is how the communists have not been held to account. It was replaced by a surrogate "rule by law" which favors some small groups over others.
People are only just now realizing it.
Once the infection has spread too far, you've got to cut if you want a hope for survival. Whether that's good or it turns out to be another 1933 Germany, we will simply have to wait and see.
The cause though is irrefutably the result of communism breaking down the protections and destabilizing the system and front-of-line blocking any action from resolving the destabilizing influence.
What we are seeing are just the natural dynamics of fascism rising out of the dynamics caused by an attempted communist takeover.
Why it matters? Long-term, under non-market socialism, everyone dies from population constraint dependencies (food) where no production can occur. The population goes into a death spiral that cannot be averted because the dynamics of incentives prevent any change of direction which might pull away from that existential maelstrom.
It has long been known that Centralized power hierarchies fail predictably from failures inherent in its structure, which include corruption and front-of-line blocking to prevent action/adaptive response, and not just immediately, but over time as well through purposeful frameworks of false thinking.
Communists know this, and have used this for decades to weaken and destabilize over generations (a generation is 20 years).
Ludwig von Mises rigorously defines, and covers all the structural failures of Communism in his writing from the 1930s through to the 1960s.
These works have been aggregated into a single book since then by the Liberty Fund; titled "Socialism", and for all but two of the 23 chapters, its a damning failure analysis of the structure.
No rational person pins their and their families continued survival to system's known to fail.