There were primaries every one of those years. There was no rigging of the primaries. If people had voted differently in them we’d had different candidates.

Once again, did you put in a minimal amount of effort to educate yourself on the candidates and participate, or did you just whine about it after the fact?

What about the other primary years when the important stuff is really decided? Biden, Obama, and Clinton didn’t just magically appear and become contenders to the Democratic primaries. They spent decades as party members, working their way up from the bottom. You think Bill Clinton would’ve been President if he hadn’t been Governor? You think he would’ve been Governor if he hadn’t been Attourney General? You think he wouldn’t have been Attourney General if he hadn’t previously run for the House?

There were primary elections every step of that path, and he won them all. That’s how he became Bill Clinton. And why did he win that first nomination?

He was a coordinator for the McGovern campaign and clerked for Senator Fullbright.

People don’t magically get nominated for the Presidency. It takes decades, and the people who will be nominees in the future are running for county clerk, state rep, or city council now. But if you only show up to vote in general elections every 2-4 years, or only vote in the Presidenial primaries, you don’t get to bitch about who gets selected because you wait 20 years to give your input on a candidate.

Take part in the process and give your input when and where it matters or stop bitching about nobody listening to you.

I’m not a fan of proliferation of nukes to an unstable region.

But top-tier stealth fighters and bombers, anti-aircraft systems that can track hundreds of miles into Russia, tanks, a navy, and all the guns, bombs, armor, and electronic warfare equipment they’ll accept sounds good.

Hell - give them the classified future-tech shit.

Make the Ukraine the best-equipped military in Europe with the stroke of a pen.

Primaries during incumbent sessions are never serious for any party, so 2012 doesn’t really count.

They had a very long primary process in 2016, but Hillary won. Yes, the establishment wanted her, but she also won more primaries than Bernie by the time the convention came around, so the super delegates deciding not to overturn the will of the primary voters is hard to argue against, even though I preferred Bernie.

2020 had a primary season, and Biden won.

2024, they had an incumbent, and Biden didn’t drop out until like 2 weeks before the convention.

And there were down-ballot races in the primaries endo one of those years and more. Did you vote in all of them, or are you just bitching because the people who do get off their ass and participate don’t do what you want?

I don’t remember the model at all. I didn’t use it very long, as I ended up getting a Blackberry a few months later, and between it and my laptop I really didn’t need a PDA.

I used the Garmin iQue m3 for years though, since I had it earlier and it had a pop-out GPS antenna that kept it useful as a navigation tool in the car well into the 2010s.

Things like this were huge back in the days of PDAs. They had SDIO ports specifically for expansion. I had one for Wifi and another for Bluetooth on my Garmin PDA, so I couldn’t use Bluetooth and Wifi at the same time, and both kept you from having non-volatile storage. If your battery died, your system was wiped because all the storage was in memory.

I got a Dell at the very end of the PDA era (the iPhone was already out, but was still ATT exclusive) that was super fancy because it had a CF card slot AND an SDIO port, so I could store data AND use my SDIO digital camera.

He should transfer like a trillion dollars of military equipment. It’s an official act, so he’d be immune from prosecution.

Name one national election in the history of the US where voting third-party resulted in the goals of those voters being achieved.

We’ve had a 2-party system for over 200 years. You aren’t changing that by believing super duper hard in a third option.

What you have to do is change the parties. Party direction isn’t set by losing general electionsm It’s set by choosing better candidates at the local level and in primary elections. Voting for a third party or choosing not to vote at all will never, ever move the country in the direction you want. It’s impossible.

The GOP is cancer, and right now the Democratic party is chemotherapy. It sucks, the side effects can feel worse than the disease, but it’s the best way to fight and survive.

Voting third party is going to a spirit healer. It’s playing make-believe and letting the cancer spread.

They’ve been trying by bitching about the party every couple years when the primaries they don’t participate in select the wrong candidates.

You know what makes them win even fewer election? Allowing fucking Donald Trump to win the Presidency.

Vote dem in the general election, and change the party in the primaries. It’s literally the only path leftward in our system of government. Doing anything else moves the government further right.

You know what 5% of the electorate could do?

Ensure the GOP loses every general election and participate in primaries to move the Dems to the left.

That’s how you make change in our system. Not by throwing away votes.

Nader got nearly 97,421 votes in Florida. After the Supreme Court stopped the count, Bush won by 537 votes.

The environmentalist voters stopped Al fucking Gore from being President.

It’s entirely possible for both the Dems and you to be wrong. Yes, the Dems ran a bad campaign. But you also chose not to oppose Donald Trump. You don’t get a pass on tacit approval of escalating genocide, deportation of minorities, destructuon of Ukraine, war with Iran, oppression of trans and homosexuals, and the gutting of the w9rking class just because the not-fascist wasn’t progressive enough for you.

Any blame for what comes next lies with you as much as anyone else who didn’t oppose Trump. Every child who is separated from their family will be partly because of you. Every time someone does of a preventable disease because the medication has been banned by Kennedy, you’ll be complicit in the death.

I would hope it keeps you up at night, but your head is so far up your ass feeling superior you don’t give a fuck about the damage you’ve caused to the Palestinians you claim to be supporting that you don’teven know what you’ve done. You’ve uplifted the man who will authorize and celebrate the removal of Palestine from the map.

For the white folk like my family that are out there wondering why so many people are afraid: here it is.

You don’t have to be an illegal immigrant to get caught up in this. If you’re an American citizen who is arrested and thrown in a camp without access to communications or legal counsel, how can you prove you’re a citizen? You’ll end up being in line at a deportation hearing, get 30 seconds in front of a judge, and find yourself deported because you didn’t have the correct documentation on your body.

Or if you did and the immigration gestapo “lost” it.

I’m so white that even sunburnt I still look like a ghost, so I’m safe. But that shouldn’t be what protects me from illegal deportation.

How does being objectively better for Palestinians than Trump make the Dems the worse of the 2 options?

And there were only 2 options. Full. Stop.

Choosing not to participate is functionally no better than voting for the worst of the 2 candidates. By choosing not to vote, all you made things worse for the Palestinians.

But hey, you get to feel superior. That self-satisfaction is worth a couple million lives, I guess.

Even with all the bullshit the Court pulled, Bush ended up winning Florida by such a razor-thin margin that it would have only taken 0.5% of Nader’s Florida voters to tip the election to Gore.

Third-party voters gave the GOP the opportunity to steal the election.

In 2000 they 100% did and we’re still paying for that shit.

Yes. The Dems had a shitty, evil policy on Gaza. But the Republican policy is worse on Gaza and everything else.

But you motherfuckers decided sending a message to the Dems was more important than Gaza or the rest of the world, and now we’re about to have vaccines and milk outlawed, Ukraine will be taken over by Russia, Concentration Camps will be set up for anyone with slightly brown skin, and more.

Oh - and Israel will literally kill every Palestinian in Gaza will fully-erect support from Trump and his goons, some of whom are literally trying to bring about the end of the world by eliminating Palestine and returning the Temple to Israel, which is an important part of their Armageddon prophesies.

How did letting Trump win help to end genocide? In what way does having an administration that literally says Palestine shouldn’t exist and Israel should finish the job and kill all the Palestinians inprove the situation?

When there’s a fire, something should be done about it, absolutely. But allowing Trump to wind the Presidency is adding gasoline, wind, and dynamite to the Palestinian fire while also unleashing firebombs on Iran and murdering the fire brigade in Ukraine.

How do you reconcile allowing all this death with your principles?

No, I really am not.

I’m saying specifically that a link is a bad reference, whereas a citation to a statue, book, or other reference that doesn’t change domains and stop functioning is a good one.

A code citation is an excellent reference. A link to a Congressional site isn’t when Congress is liable renamed after Trump’s favorite donor in 6 months.