Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

I did not have this on my fuck 2022 bingo card.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

Happy indictment week to all who celebrate!

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

When do the post office & the dmv weigh in on the wuhan virus?

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Conservatism: there are some people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

The republican caucus is already covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

Republicans in disarray!

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Consistently wrong since 2002

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

You are here: Home / Past Elections / Election 2016 / Late-Night Post-Debate Leftovers Open Thread

Late-Night Post-Debate Leftovers Open Thread

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From Guardian US columnist Richard Wolffe:

The ghost of Christmas present is clearly Donald Trump. Normally Democratic candidates following a Democratic president have trouble finding their bearings. The reason they love mentioning the Donald is because he defines who they are better than President Obama. To adapt Biden’s famous quip about Giuliani, every sentence tonight seems to have a noun, a verb and a Trump.

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From Guardian US columnist Richard Wolffe:

Hillary Clinton – in the thick of the crossfire on her Wall Street ties – demonstrated why she is such a formidable candidate. O’Malley attacked her for crony capitalism; Sanders replayed his greatest hits from the late 1990s; but Clinton managed to hit a double.

She punched back hard against both, while saying they were united against the Republicans. As fluent a speaker as Marco Rubio, as sharp a debater as Ted Cruz, and more experienced on policy than John Kasich and Lindsey Graham combined, Clinton is a better debater than anyone else running for president in this cycle, and vastly better than she was herself eight years ago.

Last of the Guardian liveblog:

Closing statements:

Bernie Sanders: Thank you first of all to the two other people on stage: we have a lot more to offer to the American people than the rightwing extremists on the other side. My father was a penniless immigrant to Brooklyn New York. My mother wanted us to get out of that rent-controlled apartment, but didn’t live to see it. My brother and I were the first to go to college. So I am dedicated to bringing about a political revolution, where people say enough is enough, the country belongs to all of us, not just a bunch of billionaires.

Martin O’Malley: Thank you, New Hampshire. It’s most important to me to ensure the security of my children. The Republicans have a lot of anger and fear, and they can keep them. Anger and fear didn’t build America. We build America with an immigration plan that welcomes people, by investing into infrastructure and education, and by defending our values and freedoms from terrorists and fearmongers alike. And we do it by confronting climate change, the biggest challenge of our times.

Hillary Clinton: In a little more than a year we’ll have a president. If heaven, forbid the next president is a Republican, we know what’s going to happen. Women’s rights, gay rights, voter rights – all will be at risk .Social security could be privatized, veterans healthcare could be privatized, Planned Parenthood could be defunded. This is a watershed election. I know how important it is that we have a Democrat succeed president Obama in the White House. I want to make sure every child has a chance to live up to their potential. If you join me we can make that happen. Thank you, good night, and may the Force be with you.

She really said “may the Force be with you.”

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Reader Interactions

43Comments

  2. 2.

    Ramiah Ariya

    I am from India and have been watching the right-wing clown parade. I would say the current media coverage is the second biggest failure after the media performance during the Iraq war. Specifically, I do not like these questions about “fear” and this point that the American people are “frightened” and therefore supporting Trump etc. This is equivalent to saying that the whites in segregation times were “frightened”. This “fear” is simply a rationalization for genocidal tendencies ever-present among the right-wing American populace. The media does a disservice by allowing right-wingers to CALL it fear and get away with racism and genocidal calls (such as carpet bombing). No rational person OUTSIDE the US would think the American populace is really frightened or has cause for fear. This “fear” term is simply used so that they can be as fascist as they can be and still blame it on others.
    There is no rational link between the Paris attacks and the rising Islamophobia in the US. It appears all that these people are looking for is excuses, so that they can let their racism fly free. The media should stop calling this “fear”. Trump and the entire right-wing calls for a Muslim registering so that they can finish them off – that is the logical conclusion. By what twisting can this be called as a result of “fear”?
    Liberal attempts to explain to their right-wing cousins about “how probable deaths by terrorism are” does not make any sense. The right-wingers are not irrational. They are not fools. They perfectly know what they are doing – they are calling for steps that would lead to a genocide. They are calling for an annihilation of Muslim populations in the other parts of the world. Not out of “fear”. But because that is what racists do. That is what 27% of America is made out of. Let us not enable them by celebrating their so-called “fears”.

  4. 4.

    magurakurin

    The Sandernistas are in full freep mode. I checked a bunch of online polls. Sanders is winning every one by 90%+.lol.

  5. 5.

    Mike in NC

    @Ramiah Ariya: Fearmongering is the #1 motivator of the American news media. Glad to be away from it for a week, though this boat gets news from CNN and BBC. The latter even went so far as to do a piece on white Americans who aren’t elderly bigoted Trump followers. One was an airhead college student in DC and the other was the ex-mayor (Republican) of some small city in Wisconsin. So there you go.

  7. 7.

    Tissue Thin Pseudonym

    @Ramiah Ariya:

    No rational person OUTSIDE the US would think the American populace is really frightened or has cause for fear.

    Fear isn’t rational. That’s where your comment misses the point. The Republican electorate really is scared. It’s tough for us to understand why they are scared, because their fears don’t make sense to us rationally, but it is very, very wrong to go from that observation to an assertion that they must not be afraid at all, and that they have a different motivation.

    Most of my fears, different than they may be than the GOP base’s, aren’t rational, either, and I’d bet that the same thing is true of you.

  9. 9.

    Amir Khalid

    @magurakurin:
    Apparently, Bernistas believe in voting early and often. Flooding the online polls like that just ruins their value, doesn’t it? It makes people who care about these things wait for the real polls a few days later.

  11. 11.

    Applejinx

    @magurakurin: That, or most people not plugged in to Beltway wisdom thought he won. I had an exchange with my own brother, who was posting screechy stuff about Debbie Wasserman Schultz on Facebook. He scolded me for prodding him to volunteer, sternly made me stop any suggestion that he should go and actually work for a campaign.

    Voting in a poll is just the sort of thing he’d do, there are a LOT of people out there like him, and they’ll also end up voting in the election (always assuming we can stay all on the same team).

    The reason Clinton is talking like a more unspecific, more campaign-promisey Bernie is that he represents what the electorate actually wants. Given that, it’s dead obvious why Bernie would be winning online polls without any freeping necessary.

    It doesn’t even mean the people wouldn’t vote for ‘any Democrat’ in support of the agenda they’re identifying. ‘winning the debate’ almost literally means ‘I prefer this one’s take on the issues’. It doesn’t even say ‘electable’, just ‘issues’.

    On the other hand if you do literally represent what people want in a leader (and win over all the Republicans running, in polls) then there’s no reason we can’t consider all our candidates electable. Hell, I’d vote O’Malley if he was the nominee. They’re ALL good.

  12. 12.

    Applejinx

    @David Koch: A person might see that as sort of shallow pandering.

    Or get annoyed upon suddenly realizing that they are NOT watching the new Star Wars movie, after all.

    Even though we do have Ewoks! :D

  14. 14.

    BubbaDave

    @Schlemazel:
    “So, she’s quoting from a religion whose most notable adherents live in the desert and wear robes…. OMGBBQ MUSLIM SLEEPER AGENT !!11!!”

  16. 16.

    Zinsky

    To put a finer point on one of Michael Grunwald’s tweets above – Democrats need to remind the electorate time and time again, how much better things are now with a Democrat in office than eight years earlier! They have allowed the GOP to push this false narrative that “Obama is a failure”, with little or no pushback! It pisses me off to no end! Let’s review where this country was in January of 2009 when Obama took office – all of the major U.S. banks were insolvent, the Big Three American car companies were bankrupt, we had a $1 trillion+ budget deficit, unemployment was 9 percent and headed upward, there were two unfunded and undeclared wars going on and Russia had just invaded Georgia. NOW THAT IS FAILURE!!

  17. 17.

    Matt McIrvin

    Before the debate, Politico was trying to pump the idea that Clinton was planning to go hard after Sanders for the data breach. Though the story implying that in its title and lead paragraph didn’t actually have any well-supported statements to the effect that it was going to happen.

    Fortunately she was not that stupid.

  19. 19.

    Baud

    @Matt McIrvin:

    Though the story implying that in its title and lead paragraph didn’t actually have any well-supported statements to the effect that it was going to happen.

    American journalism 101.

  20. 20.

    Kay

    I watched with my (grown) son who is a Clinton supporter. He thought she did great, but he was supremely confident going in and has clearly already made up his mind :)

  21. 21.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Applejinx: I actually think that electability is something of a red herring in modern Democratic presidential campaigns, simply because the Democratic Party is not sufficiently different from the general electorate that a candidate who is too left-wing to be electable can get nominated–unless it’s just not the Democrats’ year, in which case they all are. It’s not as if Gore or Kerry could have won by being further to the right; their problems were elsewhere. The Democrats were not going to nominate Dennis Kucinich by following their true hearts.

    So in the aggregate, there’s not really much practical difference between saying a candidate is not electable, and saying “I don’t like this guy.”

    For the Republicans it’s a different story because the party base has gotten so extreme.

  22. 22.

    magurakurin

    @Applejinx: So, you honestly believe that 92% say it’s a win for Bernie accurately reflects the population at large? Seriously? March 1st is going to be a major buzzkill for you.

  23. 23.

    msdc

    @Applejinx:

    I had an exchange with my own brother, who was posting screechy stuff about Debbie Wasserman Schultz on Facebook. He scolded me for prodding him to volunteer, sternly made me stop any suggestion that he should go and actually work for a campaign.

    Voting in a poll is just the sort of thing he’d do

    This is not exactly compelling evidence that freeped polls reflect a silent majority of Bernie supporters who are going to carry the election.

    (always assuming we can stay all on the same team)

    If they haven’t figured out which team they’re on by now…

  24. 24.

    David Koch

    @magurakurin: I was reading another site today. it might have been reddit, and one person said “there’s no way Hillary can win because I don’t know a single person who is voting for her”; the thread was lengthy, loaded with similar sentiments. This is the problem of bubbles. They really believe this, no different than the Romney bubble who though he would trounce Obama in a landslide.

    There’s also a ton of unskewing going on. There’s one sect that says you can’t believe any poll because they’re controlled by corporations. Another sect says online polls are superior to random samples of populations because they measure emotion. A different sect tries to unskew them by reconfiguring the internal demographics.

    It has gotten way out of hand. So when the sudden impact of reality eventually hits it’s gonna be brutal.

  25. 25.

    Kropadope

    @David Koch:

    I was reading another site today. it might have been reddit, and one person said “there’s no way Hillary can win because I don’t know a single person who is voting for her

    This is the problem of bubbles.

    This guy needs to get out there and meet more elected Democratic officials and pundits, amirite?

  27. 27.

    Matt McIrvin

    Speaking of “electability”, Huffington Post finally grouped all their head-to-head general election poll aggregations on a page:

    http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster#2016-general-election

    The pattern that emerges in the relative electability of Bernie vs. Hillary is… there is no pattern. Except that they both beat most of the Republicans by several points. In some of the questions Clinton does better and in some Sanders does better, but really they’re about the same. So to the extent that these polls mean anything, people can probably stop fretting about this.

    The head-to-head questions with Sanders are really under-polled, so the data are sparse, which contributes to averages being all over the place.

  28. 28.

    magurakurin

    @David Koch: like Resevoir Dogs torture scene brutal. I just hope they can recover by November. But it really is only a small subset of Sanders support. Most are fine with Hillary. Likewise for the Clinton people. I dont want the Devine and Weaver show running the general campaign, but if they do I will walk over coals to vote for Sanders.

  29. 29.

    FlipYrWhig

    @David Koch: It would be nice to live in an America where the majority of the population supported Bernie Sanders. It would mean that the number of liberals had increased by like 400%.

  32. 32.

    Kropadope

    @FlipYrWhig:

    or, you know, he could run into half of all Democrats.

    I mean, I live in freaking Massachusetts and I never encounter a Hillary supporter in the wild. They’re all on TV, on the internet, or (I imagine) in nursing homes scared of brown people half a world away, but also scared of that feral man with a surprisingly docile fox on his head.

  33. 33.

    FlipYrWhig

    @Kropadope: I was being serious. A country with enough liberals to deliver the nomination to Bernie Sanders would be a great place to live. Trouble is, we don’t live there.

  39. 39.

    Kropadope

    @FlipYrWhig: First poll I found has Hillary 39-57, so an overall unfavorable rating among independents. Bernie has 42-38, not only positive but higher overall support among independents with lower name recognition. This isn’t the only poll showing this trend either.

  43. 43.

    What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?

    @Ramiah Ariya: @Tissue Thin Pseudonym: The issue I have with the media is they assume, implicitly, so much of the time that what right wingers want/feel/expect is what Americans in general want/feel/expect. Yes, the right wing says they’re fearful. That doesn’t mean everyone in America is fearful but the media portrays it that way because the assumption is that we somehow have to assuage whatever hurt they feel whether it’s legitimate or not, or the rest of the American public feels the same way or not. The press always worries about the current right wing freakout du jour, and expects every politician, whether a Democrat or Republican, to soothe their feelings. They never worry about Republicans soothing liberal feelings though.

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