U.S. Elections: The Narcissist and the Nineteenth Amendment

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

28 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

Just a little more on Republican Responsibility for Creating Donald Trump

Soon after the economy imploded the Republicans went around trying to push the story that the CRA was responsible for causing the economy to implode. I think Rush Limpdick repeated that story incessantly. According to Republicans the CRA, by trying to help minorities, evidently, was responsible for the financial implosion.

Trouble was is that the CRA story never had much empirical support. It was largely a figment of the Republican Party’s mind.

But, even if the CRA story were true, it seems that would pose some theoretical problems for the way the Republican Party likes to think about markets. If the CRA was actually causing Banks to give out riskier loans, then why wasn’t that risk priced into MBS’s?

Now maybe the CRA story wasn’t entirely motivated by racism as it was partly due to the Republican Party’s unwillingness to change their views about how markets and financial markets might actually work. Whatever the precise reason, I’m pretty sure the CRA story helped to create the idea in some people’s minds that minorities or, at least programs meant to help them, was responsible for the crash.

And if course there was always the accusations of Obama being “the food stamp president” which I’m pretty sure had some racial connotations. And then the whole birther thing.

So yeah, I’m not inclined to let the Republican Party just walk away from this thing and say,”it wasn’t us man!” without saying, “get back here”.

 I would point to the whole Birther thing as being more significant than that example. The GOP clearly started that movement, and The Orange One ran with it. Seems to me the roots of his campaign were firmly rooted in that nonsense.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

I've never understood why labeling someone as a career politician should be viewed as a legitimate smear. 

[Maester Drew]

So... #repealthe19th... wow, just wow.

Maybe Hillary was right to call Trump supporters deplorables.

[OldGimletEye]

9 minutes ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

 I would point to the whole Birther thing as being more significant than that example. The GOP clearly started that movement, and The Orange One ran with it. Seems to me the roots of his campaign were firmly rooted in that nonsense.

You may be very well right. But, the birther thing was obvious. Sometimes the way things work aren't so obvious. It's often more subtle than that. And I wanted to point to  an example that was more subtle and not so obvious to many people. And of course to give an example of how the intersection of economics and race often works.

[Zorral]

14 minutes ago, mormont said:

I think, on the 'just as bad' front, we sometimes need to remind ourselves about just how bad Trump actually is.

Racism. Incitement to violence. Mocking the disabled. Refusing to publish tax returns. 'Blood coming out of her wherever'. More racism. Mocking prisoners of war. A clearly bogus medical report. Reacting to a terror attack with a tweet saying 'appreciate the congrats for being right'. Mocking women's personal appearance. Lies about 9/11. More racism. Lauding torture - not as a technique for getting information but as an end in itself. Threats to the free press. More incitement to violence. Baseless accusations about electoral fraud. Equivocating about white supremacist support. Speaking in favour of nuclear proliferation. Insinuations about the sitting President. Attacks on a Gold Star family. Bragging about sexual assault. And all of it larded with lie after lie after lie. Not just lies: great, big blatant lies, denying that he said or did things that are indisputably on the record.

ETA - I haven't even covered half of Trump's campaign, here. And any one of these would have sunk any other politician's career for good, this shit is what Trump's run is actually based on.

Clinton isn't perfect. But I have yet to see or hear any accusation against her that is unique or even unusual in a person who has a long political career. She's made mistakes and misjudgments. But they're mistakes and misjudgments that are typical of many male politicians, none of whom get vilified the way she does. Put a male candidate with Clinton's record against Trump and there would be none of this 'just as bad' stuff going on.

Another enormous issue -- he essentially advocated genocide by apologizing to the serbs for the U.S. intervening in ethnic cleansing, a crime against humanity that brought at least one of the leaders to be tried at the Hague.  "You're good guys, good people," orange stalin stated.

 

[Kalbear]

A bit of levity: TrumpDrSeuss is trending.

 

[aceluby]

22 minutes ago, briantw said:

I meant exactly what I said.  Hillary Clinton is a terrible candidate for president.  She'd be damn near unelectable in a general election if she were going against anyone other than the guy that will probably go down as the worst presidential candidate in American history.  Hillary is corrupt to the core and a criminal.  She's bought and paid for by rich corporations and serves their best interests, not the best interests of the American people (which, to be fair, is a charge that could be leveled at a lot of politicians on both sides of the aisle).  She's actively targeted and tried to suppress the voices of women who were raped or assaulted by her husband (who she has stood by to advance her political career) in the past while trashing Trump for the same types of illicit activities.  She's definitely committed obstruction of justice by deleting emails after she was subpoenaed, and she admitted to that in the most recent debate.  Her and her husband used their foundation to exploit Haiti while it was in crisis and make money for her rich friends.  She worked under the table with the DNC to ensure that Bernie Sanders didn't get a fair shake and to make sure that she was the candidate for president this year.  And those are only the tip of the iceberg that is Hillary Clinton.  

Pretending that Hillary is anything other than the lesser of two evils is covering up for her many sins.  She's not a good person.  She's a career politician who has cared about little other than advancing herself and her own best interests throughout her career.  She's a public servant who has served herself and her rich friends rather than the public, and will continue to do so when she's president in a few months.  She's lied and cheated and covered things up and continues to do so, and she got a pass from the FBI for something any normal person would have been imprisoned for.

Again, I think Trump is a worse person and candidate and would have been an abject disaster as president, but Hillary is absolutely the lesser of two evils here.

And lest you think I'm some bitter Republican pissed that my party is imploding, I'm a Democrat and have never been registered as anything other than a Democrat in the fifteen years (approximately) that I've been eligible to vote.  Hillary Clinton, to me, represents everything wrong with American politics and the direction the Democratic Party has been heading.  It's just a shame that the Republican Party has gone completely batshit insane the past ten to fifteen years and can't nominate someone who is fucking sane enough to win a general election.

There is just so much wrong here that's it's pretty hard to digest it all.

1) There are plenty of worse candidates in US history, some that were even elected.  Saying Hillary would be the worst but for Trump is just ignorance of US history.

2) She's actually not a criminal.  To be a criminal one must commit a crime, and despite decades of investigations, she's never been prosecuted.

3) To say one is 'corrupt to the core' I think it would behoove one to explain what exactly that means.  Corruption typically means something criminal and not typical political stuff, but seeing as #2 is a thing, maybe clarification of what you mean by 'corrupt' could prove your point.

4) Going to the email thing and assuming that you know better than a GOP led FBI is absolutely ridiculous.  I mean, if she was so powerful and as good at getting stuff swept under the rug as you claim, why couldn't she avoid the investigations all together?  Yet here she is, millions of dollars investigating looking for wrong doing, and virutally nothing.

It's also very easy to say you're a registered Democrat on an anonymous.  It doesn't really matter in these discussions.  Fact is that she has most of the same views and positions as Bernie Sanders except for a few cases when it comes to military interventionism.

So you're really going to have to do better than spewing the same garbage the GOP has been for 30 years.

[Liffguard]

19 minutes ago, mormont said:

I think, on the 'just as bad' front, we sometimes need to remind ourselves about just how bad Trump actually is.

Racism. Incitement to violence. Mocking the disabled. Refusing to publish tax returns. 'Blood coming out of her wherever'. More racism. Mocking prisoners of war. A clearly bogus medical report. Reacting to a terror attack with a tweet saying 'appreciate the congrats for being right'. Mocking women's personal appearance. Lies about 9/11. More racism. Lauding torture - not as a technique for getting information but as an end in itself. Threats to the free press. More incitement to violence. Baseless accusations about electoral fraud. Equivocating about white supremacist support. Speaking in favour of nuclear proliferation. Insinuations about the sitting President. Attacks on a Gold Star family. Bragging about sexual assault. And all of it larded with lie after lie after lie. Not just lies: great, big blatant lies, denying that he said or did things that are indisputably on the record.

 

Threats to assassinate the spouses and children of suspected terrorists. Insinuations of purging the military of officers who won't participate in war crimes.

[Zorral]

11 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

I've never understood why labeling someone as a career politician should be viewed as a legitimate smear. 

Because, back in the day, our POTUSes and other high officials were almost entirely out of the wealthy classes who could afford to do politics at all.  As well the franchise was limited to their class alone -- people who actually worked for a living couldn't even vote unless the owned a certain amount of property.  The populisim of the more recently admitted western states (at that time Kentucky and Tennessee were considered 'west') began changing this -- Andrew Jackson, i.e. Jacksonian democracy, finished with the franchise for all white men, regardless of property or lack thereof.   But the idea of a career politician, i.e. someone who never held a job-job, as a negative, has never gone away.

[Kalbear]

Hillary Clinton's locker room talk is amazing

Quote

 

Mike Pence was standing in front of the mirror, softly weeping. “Do you guys really think my butt cheeks look like two wet apple pies?” he asked, with fear in his voice. If he couldn’t fill out a suit anymore, then who was he? Would people still listen to him? Paul Ryan rushed over and put an arm around his friend: “Of course I don’t think that. You have a beautiful butt, Mike. You’ve got the most squeezable ass of any governor I’ve ever met. It’s like a Koosh ball. I wish I could play with it when I’m sad.”

“You’ve got the ass of a European soccer player, Mike,” Ben Carson called out. “Seriously, I’d give anything for your ass.” Mike Pence nodded and wiped away his tears. Hillary just laughed.

 

 

[briantw]

3 minutes ago, aceluby said:

It's also very easy to say you're a registered Democrat on an anonymous.  It doesn't really matter in these discussions.  Fact is that she has most of the same views and positions as Bernie Sanders except for a few cases when it comes to military interventionism.

If I were a secret Republican I probably wouldn't be on here talking about how much better I'd feel about the direction of the country is Bernie Sanders were the Democratic nominee.  As far as the Republicans go, I'm fairly certain I made how I feel about the party right now pretty clear at the end of my last post.  I think the party put forth some gloriously awful candidates this year, with Trump being the worst of the bunch, and the country's movement toward more progressive social viewpoints will mean that the Republican Party slowly becomes more and more obsolete until they radically change their social platform.  The only Republican candidate that I might have voted for against Clinton was Kasich, and even then I'm not a huge fan.  

As far as Sanders and Clinton go, I think they were quite a bit more different than you are implying.  Hell, the core of their ideology is different.  Sanders is a politician to serve the people.  Clinton is a politician to serve herself.

[Maester Drew]

Hmm, several days ago, I said I was more likely to vote for Trump over Hillary if I was only limited with those two choices, now... I'm more likely to vote for Hillary over Trump, just to spite his "#repealthe19th" supporters.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

29 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

I've never understood why labeling someone as a career politician should be viewed as a legitimate smear. 

Many people, not me, assume you must sell you soul to be a successful politician.

[Zorral]

Thaddeus Stevens was a career politician, who periodically had to pull back from that work in order to make money.  Without his life time in politics he and his fellow radicals may never have gotten the 13th amendment and other amendments that came after the Civil War and Lincoln's assassination -- since Andrew Johnson was doing fastest best to roll all that back from the first day in office.

He died in harness, still working for the rights of African Americans.

[OldGimletEye]

Chump tries to attack Hillary on Roosevelt Security and Johnson Care.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/12/politics/hillary-clinton-donald-trump-reality-check-social-security/

Fact is that Trumps intended tax cuts are bigger threat to those programs.

[Kalbear]

9 minutes ago, briantw said:

 

As far as Sanders and Clinton go, I think they were quite a bit more different than you are implying.  Hell, the core of their ideology is different.  Sanders is a politician to serve the people.  Clinton is a politician to serve herself.

Here's the main issue I have with this idea: Clinton has a massively huge history of supporting a large amount of people in every single situation she has been in, often in ways that were absurdly unexpected. There was no need for her to do something like the switch on passports to support transgendered people, but she supported it and did it as SecState. The notion that she stood up with Bernie Sanders in the 90s to try and get UHC done implies that she is serving herself but Sanders is one of the people is frankly complete garbage too. We have countless small stories of individuals who have been directly helped by Clinton without any specific political aim, either. It really is an argument without particular merit, unless you believe all career politicians are in it for themselves - in which  case Sanders is right there, too. 

I think Sanders and Clinton are different in their methodologies, but not particularly different in their goals. Clinton is very, very pragmatic, and Sanders is very, very idealistic. This means that Clinton compromises more on things. It also means she gets more things done. But both have had a long history of supporting very progressive viewpoints. 

I really think the key to understanding Clinton is her defeat of UHC in the 90s. Before that she really truly believed that she could do UHC because it was a stupid no-brainer, and she had a lot of political support...until the insurance industry stepped in. At that point, the way she approached things changed tremendously. After that she went after things by first determining if she had the support for it, and then announced it. It meant less exciting initiatives, but it also meant she wasn't promising things she couldn't deliver. It means she's willing to hedge on shoot the moon things (with a couple of exceptions) and not be gung ho on it, because she knows that being gung ho can be used against you later when you want to get things done. 

[alguien]

10 minutes ago, briantw said:

As far as Sanders and Clinton go, I think they were quite a bit more different than you are implying.  Hell, the core of their ideology is different.  Sanders is a politician to serve the people.  Clinton is a politician to serve herself.

They voted 93% the same while in the Senate. Sanders has endorsed her, repeatedly. She has been advocating for the disenfranchised for forty years. 

I'll grant that she's more a realist and he's more an idealist, but they're both politicians. She's a little more interventionist than I'd like, but their platforms have nearly identical goals. Seriously. Read them. 

Honestly? I think you're just projecting here. You somehow just know that she's serving herself, despite no evidence of this and plenty of evidence to the contrary. 

And if you would have voted for Kasich over Clinton... well you're not a Democrat, to say the least. And you don't care about the Supreme Court, which means you don't care about the civil liberties of LGBTQ community nor the rights for women nor voting rights for minorities nor overturning Citizens United. 

[alguien]

2 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

I think Sanders and Clinton are different in their methodologies, but not particularly different in their goals. Clinton is very, very pragmatic, and Sanders is very, very idealistic. This means that Clinton compromises more on things. It also means she gets more things done. But both have had a long history of supporting very progressive viewpoints. 

Completely agree with this. 

[Ormond]

16 minutes ago, briantw said:

 

As far as Sanders and Clinton go, I think they were quite a bit more different than you are implying.  Hell, the core of their ideology is different.  Sanders is a politician to serve the people.  Clinton is a politician to serve herself.

I think this is extremely oversimplified in both directions. I don't see Sanders as having no self-aggrandizing motives at all. He seems rather arrogant to me at times, which is not a trait I associate with being simply out to "serve the people." On the other hand, I think there is plenty in Clinton's past to show that she has many motives to serve others. I really can't see her advocacy for health care reform as being primarily "self-serving", for instance. I don't believe her only motive is personal ambition -- and I think the fact that personal ambition is PART of her motivation is something which is often unfairly condemned in women politicians and not in male ones. There is nothing wrong with having personal ambition as part of one's motivation in running for office. 

[Kalbear]

And because things needed to get weirder, the Serbian story reported earlier? Being called a hoax by the Trump campaign, and I'm kind of inclined to believe them.

Quote

 

Prelevic also told BuzzFeed News: “We established the contact with the Trump campaign through Mr. Vladimir Rajcic, a Serbian American who is close to some aides of Mr. Trump. We asked him if we could send over some questions and after a couple of weeks got answers from Suzanne Ryder Jaworowski in an email.”

But Ryder Jaworowski also denied making the comments.

“Regarding the article about a media interview with a Serbian politician and Mr. Trump via my email, this is completely false,” she said. “I have never served as a conduit to interview Mr. Trump for anyone.”