2016 United States Election

[Túrin Turambar]

It's a disaster for Sanders, and it's hard to see how his campaign will recover from here. There are a few Southern states voting on Super Tuesday, and if they all go the same way (which is likely) it's difficult to see how he could make up for those sorts of losses with potential wins in states like Minnesota.

[yovargas]

It did always seem like a pipe dream that this election would provide a candidate one could actually respect.

[Primula Baggins]

I'm sorry, too--assuming this plays out as the talking heads expect.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I'll let my fellow Deadhead, Sen. Al Franken, respond, since he is so much more amusing than I could be:



Hillary Clinton is far from my ideal candidate, there is much that she has done and said that I disagree with, and that concerns me, but in my opinion she is as worthy of respect as any candidate that I have seen in my adult life, and that anyone who thinks otherwise has bought into the Kool-Aid that the right wing has been selling for decades, and the left-wing more recently.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Meanwhile, back through the looking glass:

Donald Trump Refuses to Condemn KKK, Disavow David Duke Endorsement

[Cerin]

I object to the Kool-Aid comment (just as I suspect some might object if I implied that admiration by liberals for the current occupant of the White House after his countless lies and betrayals of progressive values, requires ingestion of a delusion-inducing substance). I think the phrase is always an underhanded insult to fellow posters and a cheap attempt to delegitimize a point of view.

[JewelSong]

IAWC. And I was going to post about it, but she beat me to it. I find statements such as "Anyone who thinks *X* must be *Y*" to be both simplistic and insulting in general.

Surely there is a better way to make your point.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[Alatar]

Not to mention that I find the whole "drink the Kool-aid" insult to be incredibly insensitive given its origin.

[Inanna]

Cerin, who was it that recently made a comment about people who delve into anti Sanders' propaganda?

I think if *all of us* avoid making broad statements about what beliefs imply about us, it would be easier.


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Please bear with my typos & grammar mistakes. Sent from my iPhone - Palantirs make mistakes too.

[Primula Baggins]

What Inanna said. Feelings are running high anywhere this issue is being discussed; Twitter is a nightmare. This place can and should be a refuge from that kind of interaction.

[yovargas]

IAWC * 2

There are plenty of very legitimate reasons to not particularly respect Hillary. No Kool-aid required.

Apparently, Trump "disavowed" David Duke just a few days ago:



Why would he refuse to do so on Meet the Press days later? That's extremely strange.

[superwizard]

Why would he refuse to do so on Meet the Press days later? That's extremely strange.

Ok serious question: does anything Trump say make logical and calculated sense? I get the feeling that he just plays everything by ear and his supporters don't mind him switching positions often. I'm not trying to minimize his success, to the contrary it seems that his method is yielding very good results for him. I'm just wondering...

[River]

It makes logical and calculated sense if and only if his entire goal is to please a crowd. His shifts and slides are documented. I doubt anything that he espouses in sincere, or that the sincerity existed before the moment and lasts longer than it takes for him to have to come up with some new way to please the crowd. It's performance art. And it's revealing some very very ugly things about the American psyche.

[Frelga]

Somewhat relevant to s'wiz's post above is this editorial from the Talking Points Memo.

Inside the GOP Implosion and the War to Stop Trump

The gist is, as some posters here have already stated, that the GOP is having trouble because what he is saying outright is what the party has been implying and hinting at for years to stir up its base. Congratulations, it worked.

But [Trump's "proposal" to deport 11 million illegal immigrants] is just the hate and nonsense debt coming due from 2013. You can either let the status quo go on or you can devise a way to regularize at least the majority of people who are here illegally. There's no other option. Unless you just want to say 'No Amnesty' and pretend the problem will go away with 'self-deportation' or some other such nonsense. And that of course is precisely what Republican congressional leaders did. All Trump did was say openly, clearly, more coherently what Republicans were already saying themselves, while saying out of the sides of their mouths that somehow they'd get to the mass deportation later.

The truth is virtually Trump's entire campaign is built on stuff just like this, whether it's about mass deportation, race, the persecution of Christians, Obamacare, the coming debt crisis and a million other things. At the last debate, Trump got pressed on his completely ludicrous tax cut plan. He eventually said growth (which if you calculate it would need to be something like 20% on average) would take care of the huge budget shortfall created by his tax plan. But Republicans can't really dispute this point since all of Republican campaign economics is based on precisely the same argument. What about Obamacare? Can Marco "Establishment" Rubio really get traction attacking Trump for having no specific plan to replace Obamacare when Republicans have spent the last five years repeatedly voting to repeal Obamacare without ever specifying a plan to replace it with? On each of these fronts, the slow accumulation of nonsense and paranoia - 'debt' to use our metaphor - built into a massive trap door under the notional GOP leadership with a lever that a canny huckster like Trump could come in and pull pretty much whenever. This is the downside of building party identity around a package of calculated nonsense and comically unrealizable goals.

[Cerin]

Cerin, who was it that recently made a comment about people who delve into anti Sanders' propaganda?

I don't understand what you're getting at here. I'm guessing it relates to yov's comment about not having a candidate to respect, but I took that as a statement of his personal opinion. It's not at all similar, imo, to posting unsupported accusations about a candidate or his/her supporters, which is what I recently commented on. And I don't see what it has to do with the use of the Kool Aid phrase. (No need to go into it, if you'd rather not.)

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I apologize for the "drinking the Kool-Aid" comment. I should not have said that and it was both wrong and unhelpful. I am sorry.

[Cerin]

Ok serious question: does anything Trump say make logical and calculated sense? I get the feeling that he just plays everything by ear and his supporters don't mind him switching positions often.

This is how I feel, too. If he’s calculating this, then he’s a mad genius. But I don’t think he’s calculating it (or that he’s a genius). I think what he says makes perfect sense to him, and his confidence carries everyone along with him.

I doubt anything that he espouses in sincere, or that the sincerity existed before the moment and lasts longer than it takes for him to have to come up with some new way to please the crowd. It's performance art.

I think part of his effectiveness is the fact that he is sincere. I don’t think he espouses things to please the crowd, but that he has an unshakable belief that the crowd loves him because, well, who wouldn’t? (in his mind)

The gist is, as some posters here have already stated, that the GOP is having trouble because what he is saying outright is what the party has been implying and hinting at for years to stir up its base. Congratulations, it worked.

So true.

[superwizard]

The gist is, as some posters here have already stated, that the GOP is having trouble because what he is saying outright is what the party has been implying and hinting at for years to stir up its base. Congratulations, it worked.

Well what's interesting to me is that Donald Trump's support is quite broad and not confined to traditionally republican voters at all. In fact both Nath Silver and Nate Cohn have seen that the strongest correlation to Trump support is simply google searches for the n-word even after demographics are factored in (http://nyti.ms/1JL2wPr).

Personally (and this is just my sense of the matter), it seems to me that a large part of Trump support stems from middle class white voters who have seen very little economic improvement over the past several years and are looking for someone to blame. Trump doesn't seem to have consistent positions on many things but the strong positions he does hold often revolve around Trump blaming America's problems on 'others' and what we can do about it whether it relates to Mexicans/Mexican Americans (wall), Muslims (ban), the Chinese (new trade deals) etc. It doesn't surprise at all that Trump's approval amongst non-whites is so terrible (http://abcn.ws/1MZXv6I) as so many of us (I'm including myself in this group) fear the kind of racism he espouses and its ramification on our lives...

[Frelga]

That's similar to the map that shows prevalence of diabetes. Whether that is relevant or not, I don't know.

[Primula Baggins]

I apologize for the "drinking the Kool-Aid" comment. I should not have said that and it was both wrong and unhelpful. I am sorry.