BLAST FROM THE PAST!

Flashback To A 2016 GOP Debate: Oh, How Tranquil Were Our Politics Then!

Credit: DonkeyHotey | DonkeyHotey.com | via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

I was going through older articles I’ve published, and found this lovely time capsule of a piece I wrote while watching one of the 2016 Republican presidential primary debates. It’s a play-by-play reaction of the Republican nonsense.

It kind of makes me nostalgic for the time before Trump was elected. Back then we all still thought the GOP’s primary voters were intelligent arbiters of responsible leadership, before the crowded field of Marco Rubio, Carly Fiorina, Rand Paul, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, and Jeb! Bush all refused to call Trump a dumbfuck fascist so that he ultimately divided and conquered his way to the nomination.

Here are my notes from that 2016 debate:

• Trump says America is behind and failing in EVERY category. Really? America’s economy is $7 trillion dollars bigger than the second strongest economy in the world, and America’s military is unfathomably stronger than every other military in the world.
• There’s a whole lot of doom-casting on China’s economic growth. It is not a diss on America if China’s economy surpasses ours. It’s quite possibly inevitable. China has 4x the population of America, so China clearly will eventually surpass us. It could have happened sooner if it wasn’t for China’s inept imperial governance, civil wars, and unfathomable economic mismanagement throughout the Mao era. Regardless, even when China’s GDP finally equals ours, it means that China’s people will still have a quarter of our per capita income. Therefore, if China catches up to America, their people will still be 75% poorer than Americans on average. Republicans act like China’s remarkable growth is at the expense of America, but in 1970 China’s GDP was around 90 billion dollars. It had nowhere to go but up and quickly go up.
• Jeb! Bush promises 4% growth. What a goal! For America, that would basically involve adding the economy of a Sweden or a Poland to our economy every year. Good luck. But the funny thing is that all the GOP candidates claim their budget plans will create jobs and lead to economic prosperity… but some of these candidates are members of Congress right now. What is stopping them from bringing their magical economic plans to…