Can someone explain something to me

[Agent]

so like, when Donald Trump says he wants to imprison and strip the citizenship of people who burn flags (i'm really happy phantomgrift is dead), and then someone says "Well Clinton sponsored a bill criminalizing flag burning 10 years ago that never got passed," what am I supposed to feel? Are they saying that it's good that Trump will be president because he's better than Clinton? Are they saying that they're equally bad and it doesn't matter which one is president? What are they trying to elicit from me? Because this keeps happening over and over and I don't get it.

[dexeron]

Anyone who argues that Clinton and Trump are "the same" or are bad in the same ways is either staggeringly ignorant or trying to sell something. It's not even that it's simple as saying "Clinton is always good and Trump is always bad." But ignoring the historical context of things, the current zeitgeist, the political atmosphere, well, it's a favored past-time of the ideologically pure (and the third-party holier-than-thous,) but it hardly lends itself to a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of American politics.

Anyway, to specifics, Clinton's law was narrowly tailored to only prohibit flag-burning if the action was done for the purpose of intimidation or to incite violence, and did not ban flag burning outright. It was a compromise bill* meant to find a middle ground between folks arguing for complete permissiveness and those seeking to pass an outright ban in the Senate. The compromise bill never even made it to committee.

Trump has said he'd want to (perhaps) revoke the citizenship of (or jail) anyone burning a flag, without mentioning any mitigating circumstances under which it would be permissible.

Anyone who can look at those two statements and say "They both are against flag-burning; they are both the same" is either a liar or an idiot. Certainly there is something to criticize in the actions of both, but to pretend that they are exactly the same, that there is no gradient between extremes, that one must be either A or Z, and there does not exist an entire alphabet of possibilities in-between? Therein either lies outright dishonesty, or an ignorance fueled by a laziness that I think is possibly, morally, even more reprehensible.

That mindset kept Democrats at home when a bunch of innocuous shit was held up as somehow equivalent to mountains of festering bile. "Yes, White Nationalists, sexual assault, and financial fraud - but emails! Both people have things we can criticize, so both must be equally bad, so I'll stay home." The fallacy of the excluded middle has been a thorn in the side of American politics for decades, and it's finally borne fruit (and, unfortunately, both sides were guilty of it, though to varying extents.)

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*Some have argued that the bill was really just pandering on Clinton's part, a way to get some of the uber-patriots on her side without too badly alienating liberals. Maybe that's true, but it's really just opinion and can't be proved either way. Regardless, it's irrelevant to the current question.

[Despanan]

I'd say just be aware that both are willing to sell free speech up the river, and maybe be a little comforted that these efforts have been made before and they did not translate into law.

At the moment, all we have is a tweet and I hope it stays this way.