xkcd #2875: 2024
xkcd #2875: 2024
Alt text:
It wasn't originally constitutionally required, but presidents who served two terms have traditionally followed George Washington's example and gotten false teeth.
Huh. "Elected twice", not "served two terms"... So, even if the insurrectionist ban doesn't pan out, Trump still has to concede that he lost the 2020 election to run again.
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It’s a fun bit, but no. The Electoral College elects the President so even if his harebrained bullshit was reality, he wasn’t “elected” twice.
You're looking for logical consistency where none exists.
So hear me out here. He can only be elected twice. But the text of Article 2 says in the event of a tie, no one reaching a majority, or fuckery, Congress "chooses" the president.
I'll be over here ordering more whiskey. I'm pretty sure I'm going to need it.
Oh and while there has to be an election every 4 years, Congress decides when to choose and call the electors. Yup definitely getting the good stuff.
Fucking gentleman's agreement of a country.
Oh yeah, that line of reasoning you're proposing has been done to death in the media etc. Hasn't changed shit. Because reason hasn't held any water in this particular case for a while now...
Even if Obama were eligible, I doubt that we could convince him to do it again.
He seems way too happy with retirement to want to deal with the militant toddlers that sprung up after he left.
This is the most stressful XKCD I've ever read...
I would have happily taken a third or fourth Obama term over the shitshow we actually got.
Heck, a third Clinton term instead of GWB would have been great.
Between war criminals and a sexual predator that maybe a pedo, and a dictator sexual predator who might be a pedo. Obama looks like an angel.
Amazing how no revolution happen in the state yet.
The ship of Theseus problem is easily solved with paperwork and IDs
Yep, Obama already faked his papers. Everyone knows he was born in Norway
That first panel was extremely relatable as a Brit.
What the fuck would you poms know about it? Like in the cricket, Australia has you beat. You've had 6 since 2000, we've had 8.
It also feels like Ponytail in this strip is a time traveller
What if Obama replaces his body with that of a robot?
Better him than Nixon.
The brain and the soul make the man, not the body. Unless we're talking about Mr. Universe champions, or other elite athletes.
Molecules aren't cells.
But mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell.
I thought it was midi-chlorian. How else could synthesis coordinate without a standard protocol?
I heard lemmy was doing good so I came by to try it out again, and after seeing this realized I haven't been seeing xkcd comics for awhile
Oh man I was just talking about this topic yesterday. How surreal! :o
The older one gets, the faster time seems to fly. For child and teenage me, a US presidential term was basically an eternity; now it seems like the 2020 election happened basically yesterday, and I'm not even old enough yet to run for president there (apart from obviously not being a citizen or resident of the US), so the presidents themselves certainly perceive their terms as even shorter than I do.
Imagine being alive from 2009 to 2017 and thinking to yourself "Wow, Obama did such a great job, I want that guy back here running things again."
God damn, I thought Randall Munroe was supposed to be smart.
I think it was more like the guy before him drug us into multiple, decades long wars - then the guy after him tried to overthrow our democracy and instill himself as president after losing an election. So having an 8 year break of semi-normalcy was refreshing.
No, tan suits and Dijon mustard are so much worse than either of those.
I think it was more like the guy before him drug us into multiple, decades long wars
We got into a shooting war in Syria under Obama. We overthrew the Libyan government with US-French joint airstrikes, too. We fostered relations with the fascist Modi regime in India and failed to secure any kind of lasting peace with Iran. We couldn't actually end the embargo of Cuba or even close down Gitmo. Instead we ended up ramping up police powers in the wake of the Baltimore and Ferguson riots.
Despite having a supermajority in the Senate, we never managed to get DC or Puerto Rico their statehoods... which is a shame because DC statehood alone could have kept Mitch McConnell out of the Senate majority position and flipped a host of federal judicial appointments including two in the SC. Extra important given that we lost the Voting Rights Act case under Obama's DOJ and a bunch of redistricting fights as well. That gave us a Republican House Majority despite those districts representing less than 45% of the total voting base.
Hell, one of the first things the Obama House, Senate, and Presidency did after a sweeping win in 2008 was.... to strip federal funds from ACORN!
Maybe some of those fuck-ups were what cost him the House, the Senate, the SCOTUS, and then the Presidency in the snowball of failure that lead up to 2016.
having an 8 year break of semi-normalcy was refreshing
Having an 8 year break of a smooth operator in office definitely blinded us to the decay of the republic that accelerated under his watch. But who did that ultimately benefit?
I guess it benefited our nation's budding crop of fascists.
Well the presidents in my lifetime were Reagan, Bush 1, Clinton, Bush 2(illegally), Obama, Trump, and Biden.
Yeah he's the best of the lot. I would prefer FDR in some kind of undead emperor setup but sadly that's not available.
Yeah he’s the best of the lot.
I mean, "best" by what standard? He's a continuation of the Reagan tradition.
I would prefer FDR in some kind of undead emperor setup but sadly that’s not available.
FDR got where he was thanks to a large popular movement that his administration ultimately undermined and dismantled. The guy that delivered Harry Truman, J. Edgar Hoover, and Allen Dulles onto the American system was a compromise at best.
Fixating on Presidents as modern day messiah figures has been uniformly bad for American politics and social progress. And its illustrated by this latent desire for a Lich-King President, a shambling corpse propped up by hagiography and revisionist history, who we're taught to venerate as the fountain of progress rather than merely the man at the helm during a hurricane who didn't sink the ship.
These guys aren't prime movers, they're consequences of much larger and more sweeping social movements. I would love to be in a country that elects a guy like FDR, but I do not believe that magically making FDR president again would result in anything remotely like the policies we got under his original administration.
Obama did do a great job compared to everyone within 8 years on either side of him.
Obama did do a great job
If he'd done a great job, the Dems would have maintained their majorities and Hillary would have won the Presidency.
He did a shit job. He sold out to the big banks. He failed to implement democractic reforms and protect civil rights. He undermined public education, health care, and social welfare. He continued to funnel hundred of billions of dollars to military contractors, heightened tensions in Europe and the Middle East, and ultimately gave us the socio-economic conditions that made Trump a viable candidate for the Presidency.
But he talked good. So, for some reason, we overlook all of that.
As someone that's been alive since Ford... Yeah, I'd love to have Obama back. I didn't agree with him all the time--or even a lot of the time--but he was reasonable and largely measured, and managed to work fairly effectively with a divided congress. Would I rather have someone like Jimmy Carter again? Sure. Would I much, much rather have another Obama than another Bush, Reagan, or--may the dark lord protect us--Trump? Absolutely.
(Am I pretending that Clinton didn't happen? Yes.)
(Am I pretending that Clinton didn’t happen? Yes.)
They were administrative repeats, minus the sex scandal.
Trade deals and bailouts and immigrant witch hunts and government shut downs and echoes of a prior war that they never managed to clean up. Both presidents focused themselves on the project of further privatization, with Clinton giving us HMOs and Obama delivering the ACA. Both presided over tech booms, which were promised as a panacea to poor wage growth. Both squandered their majorities and frittered away their executive authority, while the market economy swelled and the labor economy sagged. Both ushered in fascist televangelists because they couldn't improve the material conditions of their constituents.
The ACA is the only reason I'm alive, so fuck off.