Poll of the Day > On average, every former American president has been indicted 2 times

(+) Yeah! (+)

So whats the big deal about trump? Answer that, socialists

I think your statement is slightly off.

"Forty-five men have been elected president of the United States. Before Donald Trump, the average number of felonies charged per president was zero. Following Monday night's indictment, that number now stands at just over 2."

rjsilverthorn posted...

I think your statement is slightly off.

"Forty-five men have been elected president of the United States. Before Donald Trump, the average number of felonies charged per president was zero. Following Monday night's indictment, that number now stands at just over 2."

I believe that's the joke.

adjl posted...

I believe that's the joke.

My point was he said indictments, which is incorrect. Trump only has 4 indictments but it represents 91 felonies.

Ah, well then carry on. Shame on you, TC. You got the wording wrong and ruined everything.

It's the 'ol problem where "everyone eats 5 spiders through the night", when in reality it's just one person eating hundreds and throwing off the average.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]


The mean felony charges per president is 2. The median is 0. The mode is also 0, but nobody cares about mode.

rjsilverthorn posted...

"Forty-five men have been elected president of the United States. Before Donald Trump, the average number of felonies charged per president was zero. Following Monday night's indictment, that number now stands at just over 2."

The real problem is there have been multiple Presidents who probably should have been charged with one thing or another, but who never were because there was always a strong sentiment in the US that the office should be kept pure and respectable. *cough*Teapot Dome*cough*

But over the last few decades, there's definitely been a huge loss of prestige, and a shift in perception towards how the President should be judged. It predates Trump, though I leave it up to others to decide if it's mainly because of social media in general, the rise of political punditry and the 24-hour news cycle, Clinton's shenanigans in the 90s, or even going back to Nixon in the 70s.

We've reached a point where almost no one has respect for the office anymore (#NotMyPresident), so now we're far more likely to see both impeachments and indictments in situations where we wouldn't have in the past. Whereas the old impetus would have been to cover things up or deal with them in private to keep the office from being stained by scandal, now people in both parties are more than willing to fling shit at each other if it buys even a slight political advantage.

And this isn't likely to change for the better any time soon. What we're seeing is how politics are going to look for the foreseeable future, not just the aberration that some people think it is.

adjl posted...

The mode is also 0, but nobody cares about mode.

I learned about mode when I was 8 and even that young I was wondering why we even learned about something so worthless

mean mode

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/8/7/8/AAQwHjAAEwae.jpg

rjsilverthorn posted...

My point was he said indictments, which is incorrect. Trump only has 4 indictments but it represents 91 felonies.

adjl posted...

Ah, well then carry on. Shame on you, TC. You got the wording wrong and ruined everything.

Aw damn.

ill make this topic again when it averages 3 felonies. Sorry I let you guys down

It's okay, everyone makes mistakes. Just don't let it happen again.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

But over the last few decades, there's definitely been a huge loss of prestige, and a shift in perception towards how the President should be judged. It predates Trump, though I leave it up to others to decide if it's mainly because of social media in general, the rise of political punditry and the 24-hour news cycle, Clinton's shenanigans in the 90s, or even going back to Nixon in the 70s.

Honestly, it might be bc of my age and when I became politically aware...but it really seemed to start with Obama...a certain subset couldn't STAND that a (relatively) young Black man was President.

That outrage added to the nonsense w/ the Birth certificate making waves online, was picked up by Fox News and started to make them MASSIVE amounts of money so they continued to lean in...

Which gave us Trump and leads us to where we are now.

Dark-Summoner posted...

Honestly, it might be bc of my age and when I became politically aware...but it really seemed to start with Obama...a certain subset couldn't STAND that a (relatively) young Black man was President.

This makes some amount of sense. In their eyes, the fact that a black man became president inherently undermined the dignity of the position, which threw any expectation of decorum they may have had out the window and left them happy to embrace Tumpty Dumpty. It goes further back than that, of course, since obviously Clinton didn't exactly help and Nixon made a huge mess, but I can understand how, in their eyes, Trump was the natural evolution of the direction Obama represented. Meanwhile, the rest of us who don't hate black people and didn't think Obama was undignified are appalled by Trump.

Dark-Summoner posted...

Honestly, it might be bc of my age and when I became politically aware...but it really seemed to start with Obama...a certain subset couldn't STAND that a (relatively) young Black man was President.

That outrage added to the nonsense w/ the Birth certificate making waves online, was picked up by Fox News and started to make them MASSIVE amounts of money so they continued to lean in...

Which gave us Trump and leads us to where we are now.

I've seen people suggest that in the 90's Newt Gingrich was the one who pushed the conservative party of the US to refuse compromise. Just look at how close Clinton came to getting removed from office. Then there was Bush where the illegitimate court stepped in to appoint Bush president, a man known historically for being astoundingly dumb and lying to start wars that brought us ISIS. I know Bush is on record saying "History will judge me" he isn't going to get judged well.

Dark-Summoner posted...

Honestly, it might be bc of my age and when I became politically aware...but it really seemed to start with Obama...a certain subset couldn't STAND that a (relatively) young Black man was President.

It started well before Obama. At least as far back as Clinton - honestly, maybe as far back as Nixon, depending on how you want to define the start of the trend.

As I see it:

-Nixon and the "Southern Strategy" helped push Republicans to the right and tacitly acknowledged and condoned, if not promoted, the quiet (and sometimes not-so-quiet) racism that has pervaded the party ever since.

-Ronald Reagan was the first Republican president to push "hardline conservatism" and really appeal to the religious right. His reign marked the full conservative takeover of the Republican party and sowed the seeds for a lot of what happened after, and social conservatism saw a huge jump in the 80s as a result. Reagan liked to promote "sunny conservatism", but a lot of who came after him were much more hardnosed and pessimistic.

-The 1990s was the tipping point where all of the other decisions of the past started to actually show up at the presidential level. We saw the rise of Newt Gingrich, the original obstructionist congressional leader, as the Republican Speaker of the House, and he was seemingly on a personal mission to undercut Clinton as much as he could. He is generally seen to have overplayed his hand with Kenneth Starr and the impeachment efforts (while Clinton did lie to congress and that is a crime, most at the time felt it was about an embarrassing personal matter that had nothing to do with his fitness for governance and, thus, did not rise to the level of impeachable conduct; it would be interesting to see if that viewpoint would still hold up in the modern, post "Me Too" era), but really did work puncturing that aura of "untouchability" previous presidents had largely enjoyed. In a not unrelated matter, the late 90s also saw the creation of Fox News (and, therefore, the rise of a prominent conservative voice in national media) and the birth of the 24 hour news cycle with the rise of the internet. The need to generate constant content created a rise in partisanship and opinion hosts that caught on like wildfire, particularly on the right.

-George W. Bush's election in 2001 was anomalous for several reasons that the country probably could have done without. He was the first president since the 1800s who did not win a plurality of the popular vote, and his election came down to a single state which was governed by his brother at the time, with a contentious recount ultimately being settled by a conservative-aligned Supreme Court in Bush's favour. Whether you think the results were correct or not, it's not hard to see that the optics were awful and were pretty much guaranteed to fuel a spike in partisanship from the left, which they did. Bush was easily the president most reviled by citizens on the other side of the political spectrum since at least Nixon. He enjoyed a rally in the polls after 9/11, but by the end of his second term, a pair of disastrous wars in the Middle East and the worst economic crash since the Great Depression left him a pariah, hated by vast swathes of the country and even disliked by most Republicans. His approval rating at the end of his term was in 20s, an absolutely abysmal showing, and this really shattered whatever was left of that view of the president as a national leader and the great uniter.

Obama, as you observed, evoked much of the same feelings of revulsion from the right as Bush did from the left (and not a small amount of it was racially tinged), and dealt with the most obstructionist congress that a president of either party has faced in living memory. Trump then came along and, rather than even pretending to be a uniter, simply amplified the divisions of the country and took advantage of the chaos.

It's been a long road to get to the current ugly state of US politics and it has its roots in a lot of different social trends. It's not a new development, that's for sure.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

We've reached a point where almost no one has respect for the office anymore (#NotMyPresident), so now we're far more likely to see both impeachments and indictments in situations where we wouldn't have in the past. Whereas the old impetus would have been to cover things up or deal with them in private to keep the office from being stained by scandal, now people in both parties are more than willing to fling shit at each other if it buys even a slight political advantage.

And this isn't likely to change for the better any time soon.

I'm not sure a reversion to the days of the past would be a "change for the better".

Presidents - along with any other leader of similar stature - *should* be held to a high standard. The idea that a president enjoys some level of immunity for criminal conduct because "he is/was the president" is dangerous on multiple levels, as Trump himself shows.

I've never understood the American reluctance to hold their leadership accountable. Putting some people beyond reproach due to their position in society has never worked out and generally sets up everyone up for failure.

Here lies a toppled god.
His fall was not a small one.
We did but build his pedastal,
A narrow and a tall one.
-Frank Herbert