2016 US Presidential Election Thread - VIII

[Oregoropa]

Tonight is when Beck crawls back into the bottle. He went Full-Mormon, he did it, you never go Full-Mormon, Romney, Huntsman, Hatch . . . White, Utah, Nice Collars. . . But you went there.

He destroyed his TV network and Radio show by going all in against Trump. First guy to Godwins Law, Priesthood Rising and whatever Moloch creature he summoned. What a sad delusional man.


Sent from my iPhone using U2 Interference

[LuckyNumber7]

Poor Glenn Beck.

[BVS]

Originally Posted by Oregoropa

Tonight is when Beck crawls back into the bottle. He went Full-Mormon, he did it, you never go Full-Mormon, Romney, Huntsman, Hatch . . . White, Utah, Nice Collars. . . But you went there.

He destroyed his TV network and Radio show by going all in against Trump. First guy to Godwins Law, Priesthood Rising and whatever Moloch creature he summoned. What a sad delusional man.


Sent from my iPhone using U2 Interference

In his defense(which won't happen much) he was the only one consistent in his reasoning; Brietbart, Hannity, Limbauch, etc all are proven hypocrites now. He went "all in", but he did it based on his principals. Trump IS not a conservative based on all the rhetoric pre and post 2008. Those guys have changed their principals, he didn't. You have to give him that.

[LuckyNumber7]

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Glenn Beck isn't a bad person. He's just insane. But he's respectable in many lights. I mean, his ardent support for Ted Cruz makes him rather unlikable at first sight, but that's just part of his lunacy if you ask me.

[DaveC]

Originally Posted by deep

Glenn Beck: Fast 1 day for God to help U.S.

The Lord has been petitioned
we will see what he decides


I think I know his answer

 

Fuck Ted Cruz.

to cancel this idiocy out i will make sure to spend an entire day feasting on drugs and prostitutes.

you're welcome, guys.

[Bluer White]

Originally Posted by phanan

I've never seen so much whining about super delegates before, especially since the end result would remain unchanged.

But because it's Clinton this year...

Yeah.

Yeah, the delicate little flower, Mrs. Clinton

The Donald has also bitched about the process on his side. But I think he's more ok with it all after tonight.

[BVS]

Originally Posted by davec

to cancel this idiocy out i will make sure to spend an entire day feasting on drugs and prostitutes.

You're welcome, guys.

thank you!

[deep]

Originally Posted by DaveC

to cancel this idiocy out i will make sure to spend an entire day feasting on drugs and prostitutes.

you're welcome, guys.

Just
another day

[LuckyNumber7]

At

the office

[Irvine511]

the article by which Andrew returns, praises elites, and has a Trump-inspired nervous breakdown

it's too long to post in full, so some quotes:

Part of American democracy’s stability is owed to the fact that the Founding Fathers had read their Plato. To guard our democracy from the tyranny of the majority and the passions of the mob, they constructed large, hefty barriers between the popular will and the exercise of power. Voting rights were tightly circumscribed. The president and vice-president were not to be popularly elected but selected by an Electoral College, whose representatives were selected by the various states, often through state legislatures. The Senate’s structure (with two members from every state) was designed to temper the power of the more populous states, and its term of office (six years, compared with two for the House) was designed to cool and restrain temporary populist passions. The Supreme Court, picked by the president and confirmed by the Senate, was the final bulwark against any democratic furies that might percolate up from the House and threaten the Constitution. This separation of powers was designed precisely to create sturdy firewalls against democratic wildfires.

...

Direct democracy didn’t just elect Congress and the president anymore; it expanded the notion of who might be qualified for public office. Once, candidates built a career through experience in elected or Cabinet positions or as military commanders; they were effectively selected by peer review. That elitist sorting mechanism has slowly imploded. In 1940, Wendell Willkie, a businessman with no previous political office, won the Republican nomination for president, pledging to keep America out of war and boasting that his personal wealth inoculated him against corruption: “I will be under obligation to nobody except the people.” He lost badly to Franklin D. Roosevelt, but nonetheless, since then, nonpolitical candidates have proliferated, from Ross Perot and Jesse Jackson, to Steve Forbes and Herman Cain, to this year’s crop of Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, and, of course, Donald J. Trump. This further widening of our democracy — our increased openness to being led by anyone; indeed, our accelerating preference for outsiders — is now almost complete.

What the 21st century added to this picture, it’s now blindingly obvious, was media democracy — in a truly revolutionary form. If late-stage political democracy has taken two centuries to ripen, the media equivalent took around two decades, swiftly erasing almost any elite moderation or control of our democratic discourse. The process had its origins in partisan talk radio at the end of the past century. The rise of the internet — an event so swift and pervasive its political effect is only now beginning to be understood — further democratized every source of information, dramatically expanded each outlet’s readership, and gave everyone a platform. All the old barriers to entry — the cost of print and paper and distribution — crumbled.

So much of this was welcome. I relished it myself in the early aughts, starting a blog and soon reaching as many readers, if not more, as some small magazines do. Fusty old-media institutions, grown fat and lazy, deserved a drubbing. The early independent blogosphere corrected facts, exposed bias, earned scoops. And as the medium matured, and as Facebook and Twitter took hold, everyone became a kind of blogger. In ways no 20th-century journalist would have believed, we all now have our own virtual newspapers on our Facebook newsfeeds and Twitter timelines — picking stories from countless sources and creating a peer-to-peer media almost completely free of editing or interference by elites. This was bound to make politics more fluid. Political organizing — calling a meeting, fomenting a rally to advance a cause — used to be extremely laborious. Now you could bring together a virtual mass movement with a single webpage. It would take you a few seconds.

The web was also uniquely capable of absorbing other forms of media, conflating genres and categories in ways never seen before. The distinction between politics and entertainment became fuzzier; election coverage became even more modeled on sportscasting; your Pornhub jostled right next to your mother’s Facebook page. The web’s algorithms all but removed any editorial judgment, and the effect soon had cable news abandoning even the pretense of asking “Is this relevant?” or “Do we really need to cover this live?” in the rush toward ratings bonanzas. In the end, all these categories were reduced to one thing: traffic, measured far more accurately than any other medium had ever done before.

And what mainly fuels this is precisely what the Founders feared about democratic culture: feeling, emotion, and narcissism, rather than reason, empiricism, and public-spiritedness. Online debates become personal, emotional, and irresolvable almost as soon as they begin. Godwin’s Law — it’s only a matter of time before a comments section brings up Hitler — is a reflection of the collapse of the reasoned deliberation the Founders saw as indispensable to a functioning republic.

This is an age in which a woman might succeed a black man as president, but also one in which a member of the white working class has declining options to make a decent living. This is a time when gay people can be married in 50 states, even as working-class families are hanging by a thread. It’s a period in which we have become far more aware of the historic injustices that still haunt African-Americans and yet we treat the desperate plight of today’s white working class as an afterthought. And so late-stage capitalism is creating a righteous, revolutionary anger that late-stage democracy has precious little ability to moderate or constrain — and has actually helped exacerbate.

For the white working class, having had their morals roundly mocked, their religion deemed primitive, and their economic prospects decimated, now find their very gender and race, indeed the very way they talk about reality, described as a kind of problem for the nation to overcome. This is just one aspect of what Trump has masterfully signaled as “political correctness” run amok, or what might be better described as the newly rigid progressive passion for racial and sexual equality of outcome, rather than the liberal aspiration to mere equality of opportunity.

Much of the newly energized left has come to see the white working class not as allies but primarily as bigots, misogynists, racists, and homophobes, thereby condemning those often at the near-bottom rung of the economy to the bottom rung of the culture as well. A struggling white man in the heartland is now told to “check his privilege” by students at Ivy League colleges. Even if you agree that the privilege exists, it’s hard not to empathize with the object of this disdain. These working-class communities, already alienated, hear — how can they not? — the glib and easy dismissals of “white straight men” as the ultimate source of all our woes. They smell the condescension and the broad generalizations about them — all of which would be repellent if directed at racial minorities — and see themselves, in Hoffer’s words, “disinherited and injured by an unjust order of things.”

And so after demonizing most undocumented Mexican immigrants, he then vowed to round up and deport all 11 million of them by force. “They have to go” was the typically blunt phrase he used — and somehow people didn’t immediately recognize the monstrous historical echoes. The sheer scale of the police and military operation that this policy would entail boggles the mind. Worse, he emphasized, after the mass murder in San Bernardino, that even the Muslim-Americans you know intimately may turn around and massacre you at any juncture. “There’s something going on,” he declaimed ominously, giving legitimacy to the most hysterical and ugly of human impulses.

To call this fascism doesn’t do justice to fascism. Fascism had, in some measure, an ideology and occasional coherence that Trump utterly lacks. But his movement is clearly fascistic in its demonization of foreigners, its hyping of a threat by a domestic minority (Muslims and Mexicans are the new Jews), its focus on a single supreme leader of what can only be called a cult, and its deep belief in violence and coercion in a democracy that has heretofore relied on debate and persuasion. This is the Weimar aspect of our current moment. Just as the English Civil War ended with a dictatorship under Oliver Cromwell, and the French Revolution gave us Napoleon Bonaparte, and the unstable chaos of Russian democracy yielded to Vladimir Putin, and the most recent burst of Egyptian democracy set the conditions for General el-Sisi’s coup, so our paralyzed, emotional hyperdemocracy leads the stumbling, frustrated, angry voter toward the chimerical panacea of Trump.

In some ways, this story contains all the elements of Trump’s core appeal. The vexing problem of tackling jihadist terror? Torture and murder enough terrorists and they will simply go away. The complicated issue of undocumented workers, drawn by jobs many Americans won’t take? Deport every single one of them and build a wall to stop the rest. Fuck political correctness. As one of his supporters told an obtuse reporter at a rally when asked if he supported Trump: “Hell yeah! He’s no-bullshit. All balls. Fuck you all balls. That’s what I’m about.” And therein lies the appeal of tyrants from the beginning of time. Fuck you all balls. Irrationality with muscle.

The racial aspect of this is also unmissable. When the enemy within is Mexican or Muslim, and your ranks are extremely white, you set up a rubric for a racial conflict. And what’s truly terrifying about Trump is that he does not seem to shrink from such a prospect; he relishes it.

Those who believe that Trump’s ugly, thuggish populism has no chance of ever making it to the White House seem to me to be missing this dynamic. Neo-fascist movements do not advance gradually by persuasion; they first transform the terms of the debate, create a new movement based on untrammeled emotion, take over existing institutions, and then ruthlessly exploit events. And so current poll numbers are only reassuring if you ignore the potential impact of sudden, external events — an economic downturn or a terror attack in a major city in the months before November. I have no doubt, for example, that Trump is sincere in his desire to “cut the head off” ISIS, whatever that can possibly mean. But it remains a fact that the interests of ISIS and the Trump campaign are now perfectly aligned. Fear is always the would-be tyrant’s greatest ally.

And though Trump’s unfavorables are extraordinarily high (around 65 percent), he is already showing signs of changing his tune, pivoting (fitfully) to the more presidential mode he envisages deploying in the general election. I suspect this will, to some fools on the fence, come as a kind of relief, and may open their minds to him once more. Tyrants, like mob bosses, know the value of a smile: Precisely because of the fear he’s already generated, you desperately want to believe in his new warmth. It’s part of the good-cop-bad-cop routine that will be familiar to anyone who has studied the presidency of Vladimir Putin.

Were Trump to win the White House, the defenses against him would be weak. He would likely bring a GOP majority in the House, and Republicans in the Senate would be subjected to almighty popular fury if they stood in his way. The 4-4 stalemate in the Supreme Court would break in Trump’s favor. (In large part, of course, this would be due to the GOP’s unprecedented decision to hold a vacancy open “for the people to decide,” another massive hyperdemocratic breach in our constitutional defenses.) And if Trump’s policies are checked by other branches of government, how might he react? Just look at his response to the rules of the GOP nomination process. He’s not interested in rules. And he barely understands the Constitution. In one revealing moment earlier this year, when asked what he would do if the military refused to obey an illegal order to torture a prisoner, Trump simply insisted that the man would obey: “They won’t refuse. They’re not going to refuse, believe me.” He later amended his remark, but it speaks volumes about his approach to power. Dick Cheney gave illegal orders to torture prisoners and coerced White House lawyers to cook up absurd “legal” defenses. Trump would make Cheney’s embrace of the dark side and untrammeled executive power look unambitious.

But elites still matter in a democracy. They matter not because they are democracy’s enemy but because they provide the critical ingredient to save democracy from itself. The political Establishment may be battered and demoralized, deferential to the algorithms of the web and to the monosyllables of a gifted demagogue, but this is not the time to give up on America’s near-unique and stabilizing blend of democracy and elite responsibility. The country has endured far harsher times than the present without succumbing to rank demagoguery; it avoided the fascism that destroyed Europe; it has channeled extraordinary outpourings of democratic energy into constitutional order. It seems shocking to argue that we need elites in this democratic age — especially with vast inequalities of wealth and elite failures all around us. But we need them precisely to protect this precious democracy from its own destabilizing excesses.

And so those Democrats who are gleefully predicting a Clinton landslide in November need to both check their complacency and understand that the Trump question really isn’t a cause for partisan Schadenfreude anymore. It’s much more dangerous than that. Those still backing the demagogue of the left, Bernie Sanders, might want to reflect that their critique of Clinton’s experience and expertise — and their facile conflation of that with corruption — is only playing into Trump’s hands. That it will fall to Clinton to temper her party’s ambitions will be uncomfortable to watch, since her willingness to compromise and equivocate is precisely what many Americans find so distrustful. And yet she may soon be all we have left to counter the threat. She needs to grasp the lethality of her foe, moderate the kind of identity politics that unwittingly empowers him, make an unapologetic case that experience and moderation are not vices, address much more directly the anxieties of the white working class—and Democrats must listen.

For Trump is not just a wacky politician of the far right, or a riveting television spectacle, or a Twitter phenom and bizarre working-class hero. He is not just another candidate to be parsed and analyzed by TV pundits in the same breath as all the others. In terms of our liberal democracy and constitutional order, Trump is an extinction-level event. It’s long past time we started treating him as such.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer...ald-trump.html

[BigMacPhisto]

Originally Posted by Irvine511

To be fair, she is a woman. It's difficult for many men -- especially older men -- to accept the legitimacy of a more powerful and accomplished woman. They often act as if she isn't there, and try to go above her head or behind her back and never afford her the courtesy and respect she'd be given if she were a man in her position.

And if she pushes back, if she were to respond aggressively as any man would in her position, well, what a bitch. Just like that man hater Lena Dunham.

Do stop. I will be voting for a woman in the fall for President and would have supported Elisabeth Warren had she been in the race. Being against foreign invasions and free trade deals must make me a sexist then?

[deep]

I really do not think Cruz is the Zodiac Killer

but I do believe it is possible if not likely there are Cuban links to the JFK assassination, if nothing else, everyone agrees with Oswalt's Cuban links, who wanted JFK dead and why??

Cruz on JFK assassination theory: 'This is nuts' - POLITICO

circumstantial at best, but it did seem odd that a Cuban would flee to Canada??
the story of the Cruz pop going to Canada to start or run some oil related business never did add up

[PhilsFan]

Originally Posted by BigMacPhisto

Do stop. I will be voting for a woman in the fall for President and would have supported Elisabeth Warren had she been in the race. Being against foreign invasions and free trade deals must make me a sexist then?

He's not talking about you, he's talking about Sanders.

[Irvine511]

Originally Posted by BigMacPhisto

Do stop. I will be voting for a woman in the fall for President and would have supported Elisabeth Warren had she been in the race. Being against foreign invasions and free trade deals must make me a sexist then?

i didn't say you were a sexist. but i'm not surprised it was read that way.

but i think Bernie's dismissal of the superdelegate process may have a degree of sexism at it's core -- and her inability to respond as she would/could if she were a man is absolutely rooted in structural sexism.

and your earlier Lena Dunham comments speak for themselves.

[deep]

Originally Posted by BigMacPhisto

. Being against foreign invasions and free trade deals must make me a sexist then?

perhaps it does, or someone manipulated by them, if you vote for someone that is against your beliefs because of (her) gender

[deep]

Lena is a jack ass regardless of her gender,

are we at a point that we can not have an opinion of someone if they are a certain gender or race?

[Irvine511]

Originally Posted by deep

Lena is a jack ass regardless of her gender,

are we at a point that we can not have an opinion of someone if they are a certain gender or race?

you were repeatedly upset by how frequently she takes off her clothes and has sex with Patrick Wilson on a ping-pong table.

BMP called her a man-hater.

decide for yourself where that point is.

[BigMacPhisto]

It's kind of bizarre that you're holding on to some comment I made months ago about Lena Dunham...jesus.

And you're basically arguing that Sanders is a sexist because he wants to be the Democratic nominee.

[deep]

here is the deal on her art,
I followed the advice of others and just stopped watching the show, please go back and look and see where I have said anything about that for?? years??
to be fair as a long time paid subscriber of HBO, I watched everything they do and liked the first couple of episodes, having gone to the theater and watched her movie, Tiny Furniture, I was a fan. Then the series went a direction not for me so I opted out. My opinion on her is based on all the stuff I see in the news and read in my daily newspaper outside of her show or art.

[Irvine511]

Originally Posted by BigMacPhisto

It's kind of bizarre that you're holding on to some comment I made months ago about Lena Dunham...jesus.

And you're basically arguing that Sanders is a sexist because he wants to be the Democratic nominee.

i think such comments are part of the larger problem of structural sexism, and double standards. i think it's absolutely true that HRC is who she is because of her gender, and that Sanders can do things that she can't. i think the same thing is true of Obama and racism -- that he has to navigate the world differently than he would if he were white.

i do find Sanders' new stance on the superdelegates -- that, somehow, they need to be released -- and his dismissal that the entire thing is "rigged" is dismissive of a candidate who is soundly beating him by most measures. by no understanding is there any basis for a contested convention. he's trailing by three million votes. the only reason he isn't trailing by more delegates is because of the caucuses. yes, we can point towards Obama's caucus victories, but we were dealing then with record turnout, whereas Sanders can make no such claim. plus, he's lost every single key swing state. and, overall, 2008 was much, much closer. there's a growing lack of respect for HRC and her voters that strikes me as vintage old man chauvinism. his refusal to recognize her accomplishments.

i did not see this, at all, by the way, in the beginning. the campaign seems to have changed as of late. these are, for me, recent developments.