I mean, I was going through college when GW Bush was elected, and here's what I remember:

1. Everyone lying about GW Bush being the "first Spanish-speaking President" (he spoke no Spanish at all), the first of many lies meant to cover up his manifest incompetence and intellectual incapability

2. Republicans shutting the government down for weeks at a time

3. A maniac, entirely fictitious scandal invented solely to hamper Al Gore's election prospects (the White House phones scandal)

What was different about that day's Republican Party than today's? We knew less about it, was all.

You're not going to like it, but the way you get over and past something like this is forgiveness. You have to forgive the pretentious twat who had the temerity to speak to you that way; you forgive him because that's how you eliminate his power over you. You forgive him because that's how you pull out the hooks. You forgive him because the alternative is, what? Carry this around in you forever? Find him and beat the shit out of him?

Just forgive him. Ultimately, he didn't have your gifts - the gift of grace, the gift of the expansive generosity of spirit that leads a person not to construe literally every social encounter as "which one of us is coming out on top? It better be me." The gift of not reflexively being a shithead to people, maybe. Whatever. You almost pity him. Almost.

Forgiveness is how you get past it. People don't like to hear it, but it is.

You don’t get “rejected”, they just hire someone who isn’t you.

I mean, yeah, even in like 2004 no less a figure than Barack Obama was opposed to the legalization of gay marriage. Of course, that's when Democrats thought conservative Republicans would permit the alternative of "civil unions" for non-religious matrimonial rights to same-sex couples, but it turned out that what Republicans opposed was equality for gay people, not actually the extension of religious matrimony to same-sex unions.

Once a week is fine. You're clean when you get out of the shower, and the towel air-dries as you're not using it. Even where I live - 65% humidity year-round - we only wash the towels once a week.

In 2020 I voted for Trump because knew Biden would be bad.

You thought that a man with decades of successful experience as a legislator and executive would be worse than the inexperienced guy who couldn't staff his own White House and presided over the loss of more jobs and lives than in any time since the Great Depression and the Civil War, respectively?

He has done better than I expected

Maybe that should prompt some self-reflection.

Trump didn’t start those and the wars didn’t start under Trump.

I didn't say that he did, but you said we weren't in conflict under Trump, and that's false.

Trump did expand the conflicts in a number of theaters, resulting in the deaths of US servicemen; you just don't remember noticing because he was responsible for so much domestic chaos, too.

The president isn’t in charge of drug addiction.

There's literally a Federal agency, reporting to the President, that regulates and interdicts drug traffic in the United States. The President literally is in charge of drug addiction.

The riots were democrats rioting.

You're saying that Trump couldn't possibly have won left-of-center votes?

Look, it strikes me that a politician - whose job is to build a popular consensus around a slate of policies and ideals - who winds up being absolutely hated by well over half of the American people, hated enough to take to the streets about it, can't be said to be very good at the job.

Neither could Biden or Europe or rest of the world.

There were three virus outbreaks during the Obama administration that you don't even remember because rapid and effective action by the administration prevented them from being national pandemics. So actually not only could Biden, but Biden did. Trump sat on his own balls on his first one. That's pretty bad! Trump was objectively bad at the job, there's just no question about it once you move beyond special pleading ("it was a virus! Who could have predicted?!" lol) and excuse-making.

He hasn’t done near as good as Trump. We are engaged in several conflicts, inflation is high, etc.

The US was engaged in a number of conflicts under Trump, including the war and occupation of Afghanistan, which were ended by Biden. Trump's administration was singularly disastrous for the United States - reductions in life expectancy, increases in the number of Americans addicted to drugs, and quite famously, fires and riots in the centers of most major cities which Trump was totally unable to control. Another thing Trump was unable to control: the spread of the novel coronavirus inside the United States.

Objectively Trump is bad at being President. I don't see how a conservative can dispute that - Trump's tenure was a riotous time in both the US and the world.

"Capitalism is when stores aren't hotels"

Did you really just tell a veteran he didn’t notice being deployed?

Did you just tell a Federal public health researcher that public health isn't a Federal responsibility? lol

The president is not. Once again that’s a state issue. The federal government is in charge of trying to stop the flow, monitoring pharmacies, etc.

Yes, but again, Trump didn't succeed at these things either. Fentanyl from China flowed over the border and caused an ongoing crisis. Trafficking of drugs is a Federal, not state, crime. Trump's DoJ should have had it in hand but under Trump, he had them spending more time on a fruitless wild goose chase for "corruption" in Mueller's investigation instead of issues that actually affected Americans. Trump was incompetent.

None of them were handle by the government.

They were all handled by the government.

Obama did nothing to stop the outbreak.

There was no "Zika pandemic." There also was no swine flu pandemic, SARS-1 pandemic, nor MERS pandemics in the United States. Oh, were those not the ones you were thinking of? Well, yes, that's my point - you don't remember them because they were objectively non-issues. They didn't "burn out naturally", they were actively and successfully stopped by rapid, effective public health action. I'm an expert in this field, remember?

I don't consider "marriage is a religious sacrament and the government should only regulate civil unions" to be a "not great" position, personally. It's fine! What happened instead is that we called civil unions "marriage" and the religious union "matrimony" and basically got the same thing. There remain churches who won't perform a same-sex wedding and that's fine.

Conservatives got everything they asked for in the gay marriage issue. It's just that what they were asking for was their motte; their bailey was actually "we want a social and legal framework that makes gay people second-class citizens in order to discourage open homosexuality."

You really do need to call someone for this, if this is a thermostat valve on a radiator you’re going to burn yourself

Well, he’s down in the polls again so why not do what works

Because the fascists are the ones who will tell you which truths are “disinformation.”

Cite the law that gives the federal authority to take control form the states.

USC 42 § 243

Sure, show me the vaccines.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3371787/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7172901/

https://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/vaccination/public/vaccination_qa_pub.htm

Any other dumbshit questions?

you claim to be an expert but keep making claims that are false.

If they're "false" how are you so completely failing to refute them?

Reading the error message wins again

I haven't had COVID due to masking and vaccination. I also haven't had "myocarditis", whatever that is.

They don't, though. Check. They can't. No independent body can operate freely in Gaza, it's under Hamas control. They know that Hamas can rescind whatever meager access they have, and so they figure that humanitarian purpose is better satisfied by preserving access by not angering Hamas.

But they don't have access to strike sites, they don't have access to morgues. Islam requires the dead be buried by nightfall, so there's simply no opportunity for independent observers to actually verify body counts. They're just demographically "verified" - "oh, we know about that many people lived in the apartment block, so X is a plausible figure for deaths." But that's not confirmation.

I assume the missing words there are "affected"?

Two things, primarily: I spent all of 2020 and most of 2021 sheltering-in-place as a result of Trump's incompetence at managing COVID-19; and he raised my taxes.

In 2016 I voted against him as one of his campaign promises was to terminate FSMA, the Food Safety Modernization Act, which funds my work. (That's not solely why, of course there was everything else, but the thing that affected me was his promise to make me lose my job. Of course he had no more competence in following through with that promise than he did any of the others, it turned out.)