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Aardvark Cheeselog's avatar

I have to concur overall with the spirit of OP, though I think the fact that not being straightforward about the President's health has been such a thing for so very long, that fact ought to suggest something right there. There are forces at work to produce this outcome that are not easily countered. Not least of which is that we do not have an ideal electorate of rationally self-interested well-informed voters.

I really feel motivated to respond to the only-tangentially-related thing about whether FDR would really have used The Bomb had he been the one to OK the mission. I think that anyone who believes for a fraction of a second that there was ever any possibility that the Bomb would *not* be used, is profoundly delusional about politics. After the enormous resources that were dedicated to its making, to have a thing that could go "bang" and kill lots of Japanese and to not use it, that would have been thought treasonable by a great many Americans of the day.

I can only imagine what kind of hay the conservative Rs would have made of that story, after it inevitably came out. The Manhattan Project was not something that could be concealed from a hostile postwar audit.

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Cheez Whiz's avatar

A lot of great stuff packed in this post. I know you don't want to go down the 2024 rathole, so I'll just say that to me, what powers all the Democratic resentment of Biden is a sense of betrayal, that he was supposed to protect us from Trump and failed. The irony of him doing the right thing, in the face of believing he was another indispensable man, is lost on those who blame him for Trump's win, since that has to be somebody's fault, not everyone's.

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