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This ignores the fact that the country is to the left of Democratic leadership, by far, on issues polling. Sure, if our choice was between right-wing neoliberal Democrats and fascist Republicans, it wouldn't be a contest. And in the general elections, that's usually about what we get. But these arguments are used, disingenuously, to convince primary voters to support right-wing Democrats, who actually do worse against fascist Republicans, by far. It's a losing strategy, and it's designed to be a losing strategy, because right-wing capitalist Democrats are more interested in suppressing their own party's left wing, than in fighting the country's radical right. They're more motivated by maintaining power than by preventing the collapse of American democracy. We have to vote for the best viable candidate in the general election, even if that candidate is a capitalist extremist Democrat, but we should be doing everything we can to remove them in the primaries, not just in spite of the general election stakes, but because of the general election stakes.

EDITED: Changed "issues voting" to "issues polling"

The Writ of Habeas Corpus doesn't come from the Constitution, it is from common law. However, the Constitution does say "The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it." This both protects Habeas Corpus, and also allows for suspending it. It was controversial when Lincoln did it because he did so unilaterally as president, rather than Congress doing it, but the Constitution doesn't actually say who can suspend it, or specify a procedure, so Lincoln's act was within the Constitution.

Tldr: Suspending Habeas Corpus is controversial, but not the same as suspending the Constitution.

The thing is that, largely, government works because people all just kind of agree that it should. If a president says "I'm suspending the Constitution to deal with an emergency", what happens next? We have a bunch of masked fascists, at high levels in government and in Washington think tanks, who would talk a lot about the unitary executive theory. It would be presented as a done deal, as if there was no question that it was legal. Who would step in to stop it? In the best case scenario, we would have a major constitutional crisis, that would eventually get worked out between the courts, the press, the public, and hopefully some courageous civil servants. In the worst case, it would straight up end our democracy. Somewhere in between lies civil war, and whatever that leads to. If suspension is explicitly forbidden, it gets a lot harder to defend, and makes the best case scenario a lot more likely.

I'm less sure about the value of background checks for presidents. I'm not sure some routine background check would unearth anything that the other side's oppo-research wouldn't. But hey, can't hurt. I'm guessing the intelligence agencies are already digging up everything they can find; making that an official requirement and publicly reported before the election might be really beneficial, not only directly, but also to prevent rogue officials from keeping the dirt to themselves and using it against a sitting president.

I can't. Happy?

Biden is less terrible than Trump, yes. In the general election, he still has my vote. Do we need to carefully declaim this every single time we criticize him?

He's also holding onto power when he shouldn't, and likely to hand the Whitehouse back to Trump as a result, just like Clinton handed it over last time. Democrats should be demanding he step down, en masse, and let somebody with more integrity run, before it's too late. He is not helping.

But an irreplaceable liability.

The Columbine shooters did not use hunting guns. We have better access to mental health care than in the past. We also have greater access to more deadly guns. Countries with strong gun control do not have our problem with mass shootings. Implementing strong gun control has been proven to stop mass shootings. A lot of money has been spent by arms dealers to convince you the the problem is your fellow humans, and not the largely unregulated flow of machines of death supplied for capitalist profit.

Should we have better access to mental healthcare, and intervention programs? Sure. Funny, though, how the people insisting it's all about mental illness and not about the gun profiteers also usually oppose any public spending on mental healthcare as well.

It's a bit more nuanced than that. Liberalism isn't the opposite of conservatism. When monarchy was the norm, liberalism was an extremely progressive, revolutionary philosophy. Today, with liberal democracies being the norm, liberalism is essentially conservative. That's not, in itself, a bad thing - I want to conserve the core ideals of liberalism myself, and we can have an anticapitalist, progressive form of liberalism, that keeps what's most important, the real heart of liberalism - individual liberty, equality under law, consent of the governed - while also moving ahead to end warfare and establish pro-social economics. However, we can also have a liberalism that protects generational wealth and funds the war machine. It's far past time for people to decide whether liberalism, alone, is enough.

Minor correction to the description: The character identified as "other officer" is actually Roland Hedley, a journalist.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_Hedley

I read a lot of articles, friend, and I feel that you are going far out of your way to misinterpret my comment. We can't read everything, and we have to choose based on some criteria. A comment offering some summary of what is in the article is better criteria than nothing, especially if, as you seem to agree, the headline is worse than useless.

So, do you just read every article that comes across your feed? How much time per day do you spend reading? Do you ever worry you may be missing out on important information, due to not selecting articles more likely to convey newer information, more relevant information, or more in depth information?

Personally, I appreciated the question, and the answer, as it saved time that I can use on reading something more valuable to me - or, I guess, on writing this comment. A lot of articles these days use misleading or vague headlines to trick people into reading a long article that says nothing more than could have been conveyed in the headline itself.

Now, I will admit, thanks to your comment, I did click through and read this article, just so I wouldn't look like an idiot writing this comment, if it turned out to be much different from what was said above, or to provide more context, or whatever, and yes, I did find it was not so bad. It's pretty brief, and while the main point could have easily been in the headline, the article does give some additional context (most of which I knew, but it was a good refresher). Whether we choose to read or not to read, we are taking a gamble with our time and opportunity cost, but people in the comments giving at least some information is better than having nothing to go on, or trusting a headline from a source known to use misleading headlines.

I do agree with her statement.

Only quibble is, they were never the majority. It's too easy to underestimate just how imbalanced our "democracy" was, and to a large extent, remains. But, we're getting better, slowly, s l o w l y . . .

Nah. People suffer from too much just world fallacy. They'd never believe the lottery would select them, but they'd revel in seeing other people randomly get screwed. It'd be a very popular reality TV show.