Thomas Jefferson

[KUSA]

I can't wait.

[vorlon13]

Will he be bedding foreign heads of state's spouses in the Lincoln Bedroom ?

Could be entertaining . . .

[Aegon]

I'm legitimately afraid of Trump being President. Foreign leaders have already gone on record saying they don't respect him; the only one who does like him is Putin (does that not set off any red flags?) Not to mention the whole rounding up minorities bit, the whole enacting religious tests at the border bit, and, oh, just a few days ago he said he'd want to change libel laws to limit the free speech of the press. Has America really degraded enough to elect the closest thing we've seen to a fascist candidate? The thought terrifies me.

[Minimalist]

Has America really degraded enough to elect the closest thing we've seen to a fascist candidate?

Is that a trick question?

[AFTT47]

Will he be bedding foreign heads of state's spouses in the Lincoln Bedroom ?

Could be entertaining . . .

I think Kennedy and Clinton have already been there. Big deal. Anybody who begrudges that to the leader of the free world is a fool. I'm more concerned about them doing things like lieing about intelligence reports as a justification for going to war and pretending that global warming doesn't exist - thus endangering the future of humanity.

I know you're being fececious, Vorlon, I just want to make it clear: Not all "sins" are equal. I'll take Democratic "sins" over Republican "sins" anyday.

[Cecelia]

Donald Trump would set this country back even further. He'd re-ban gay marriage, his tax plan would only benefit the extremely rich (and put our country further into debt).

I'm surprised the Republicans waited so long to attack him on Trump university, but I guess they were afraid they'd appear pro-public education if they did that.

[abaris]

GWB managed to win this way but only barely and against two uncharasmatic Democratic candidates.

The first election he didn't win at all. Only because Gore stepped down from making further complaints and only because a court stopped the vote counting, did Shrub manage to park his ass in the Oval Office. It was only about 500 votes in Florida - where another Shrub ruled at the time.

[AFTT47]

GWB managed to win this way but only barely and against two uncharasmatic Democratic candidates.

The first election he didn't win at all. Only because Gore stepped down from making further complaints and only because a court stopped the vote counting, did Shrub manage to park his ass in the Oval Office. It was only about 500 votes in Florida - where another Shrub ruled at the time.

Yes, I'm well aware of this. I lived in the Florida Keys at the time.

Gore fucked up in that he pushed only for recounts in the counties he thought favored him. Had he insisted on ALL counties being recounted, he would have won.

The biggest issue was the damn butterfly ballots in Palm Beach county. A shitload of people who thought they were voting for Gore were actually marking their vote for Pat Buchanon.

The moral of this story is that every vote really does count. There were a shitload of people I know who lamented the fact that we could have swung the election if we had campaigned hard for Gore in the Florida Keys. But people never believe they could really make a difference in a nation of 300 million people. Any of us Floridians could have really made a difference if we had only known.

[Wyrd of Gawd]

"The most effectual means of preventing [the perversion of power into tyranny are] to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts which history exhibits, that possessed thereby of the experience of other ages and countries, they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes." --Thomas Jefferson 1779

Looks like we fucked that up, Tom.

Trump is certainly no Jefferson, who was a racist to the bone.  He and his buddy Washington fought a war to ensure slavery in America.  Jefferson was a great thinker, writer, and speaker.  Trump uses a 200 word vocabulary.  Trump is a racist but he has no plans to bring back slavery.  He might want to throw black people in prison but the Clintons did do that and if Hillary is elected that's what she will do again.

[TheRocketSurgeon]

That might be a bit of a stretch, regarding Jefferson and Washington... given that they were wealthy (at least for part of their lives) plantation owners in Virginia, both of them held radical views for their time, despite also holding slaves. Washington wrote extensively on the problems, both personal and economic, of maintaining the slavery system; he simply didn't see a way they could compensate people who'd invested large amounts of capital in their chattel-workers, in such a way that they could free the slaves without crashing the economy. However, Washington also lamented that the system did not allow flexibility-- you could not move individual workers around (or sell them) without breaking up families, to the moral detriment of the owner as well as to the morale blow it dealt to the workers, meaning you could not switch to a new crop easily (say, following land exhaustion or blight) because your workers only knew how to grow the previous one, and you couldn't just hire new wage-workers who knew the task for which they were being hired.

Jefferson, according to monticello.org, was quite racist (he believed that racial separation was necessary and that peaceful coexistence was impossible, and referred to the African race as "children"), but he was also fiercely opposed to the practice of slavery:

Throughout his entire life, Thomas Jefferson was a consistent opponent of slavery. Calling it a “moral depravity” and a “hideous blot,” he believed that slavery presented the greatest threat to the survival of the new American nation. Jefferson also thought that slavery was contrary to the laws of nature, which decreed that everyone had a right to personal liberty. [...]
At the time of the American Revolution, Jefferson was actively involved in legislation that he hoped would result in slavery’s abolition. In 1778, he drafted a Virginia law that prohibited the importation of enslaved Africans. In 1784, he proposed an ordinance that would ban slavery in the Northwest territories. But Jefferson always maintained that the decision to emancipate slaves would have to be part of a democratic process; abolition would be stymied until slaveowners consented to free their human property together in a large-scale act of emancipation. To Jefferson, it was anti-democratic and contrary to the principles of the American Revolution for the federal government to enact abolition or for only a few planters to free their slaves.

[Internal citations omitted.] Reference: https://www.monticello.org/site/plantati...nd-slavery

There is no possible way you can justify the statement, "They fought a war to ensure slavery in America."