Betty already covered this below, but check this out:
This is from the Guardian front page a few minutes ago. The Guardian’s DC correspondent filed the story at the end of the day yesterday, and didn’t bury the lede. The Times ran the raw AP story somewhere on their site (with the lede buried) and finally addressed it in their FirstDraft section this morning.
Obviously this isn’t the story of the century, but I’ll be god-damned if I’m going to give a penny to the Times while they continue their record of prissiness coupled with inaccuracy. My cash is going to the Guardian, and I encourage you to do the same if you’re so inclined. Open thread.
raven
NYT
Donald J. Trump on Monday night mocked Hillary Clinton for using the bathroom during last weekend’s Democratic presidential debate and employed a vulgar term to describe her defeat to Barack Obama in the 2008 primary.
“She was favored to win, and she got schlonged,” Mr. Trump, using a boorish word for a penis, said at a rally in Grand Rapids, Mich.
raven
NYT
mistermix
@raven: That’s the link I posted – it was 9:20 this morning, after the story had blown up everywhere. They missed it.
Felonius Monk
Watching Trump perform at the Convocation of Morons & Assorted Idiots in Grand Rapids yesterday, one can only wonder when the Sieg Hiels will start.
SFAW
Listening to “On Point” on NPR, topic is Best and Worst journalism of 2015.
For “Worst,” they started off with the Brian Williams fiasco. No mention of The Political Press doing their horse-race thing, ignoring the substantive debates on the Dem side, etc.
Fucking awesome.
Eric U.
@Felonius Monk: they already started
MomSense
Does this mean The Clenis is forgotten?
@Felonius Monk:
I think they already did and it was at the same rally where they wanted to light a black man on fire.
Yes, they are this deranged now.
JPL
From the NYTimes article
Mr. Trump is no stranger to vulgarity on the campaign trail. But his word choice at a rally on Monday in Michigan found new linguistic territory for a businessman who has tested every boundary in modern politics.
I just had a discussion with a friend who is a republican and I mentioned that in the olden days, they refuted David Duke. Trump is far more disgusting and the candidates say they will support the winner. They won’t disavow him. I find that disgusting.
Another Holocene Human
@SFAW: NPR is the worst. I have classical station back and the urge to turn back to NPR has gradually faded. Now when they play shitty xmas music I just turn the volume down.
Ohio Mom
Growing up Jewish in the Bronx I am of course familiar with the term “schlong.” As well as “schtupped,” “schmuck,” and lots of other um, impolite language.
But I can’t ever remember “schlong” being used as a verb.
BR
Why is a Trump supporter planning a t errorist (moderation) act not front page news even at progressive blogs? The guy arrested in Richmond should be front page news everywhere and called out for what it is.
Brachiator
The Guardian story is slightly more educational:
NYT:
Guardian:
Neither story gives any indication of the audience reaction to Trump’s remarks, which might have been interesting.
Still, the Times’ editors are obviously pearl clutchers of high standing. “Boorish.” Heavens!
SFAW
@Another Holocene Human:
I don’t have as big a problem with NPR as you (or a bunch of others here) do, but I’m not blind to their failings. And since I made my first comment, they have started talking about the political coverage, so there’s hope. But it would be nice if they focused more on the press’s shilling/stenography, and less on how they deal with Trump.
Brachiator
Oh, heck, I got moderated. Hmmm
The Guardian story is slightly more educational:
Neither story gives any indication of the audience reaction to Trump’s remarks, which might have been interesting.
Still, the Times’ editors are obviously pearl clutchers of high standing. “Boorish.” Heavens!
Roger Moore
@Felonius Monk:
More than a week ago.
maurinsky
Trump also commented that it was disgusting that Clinton had to urinate.
MattF
…all this ‘snake’ stuff reminds me of the classic response to “It’s so nice that you have a Biblical name”– “Yeah, like my cousin ‘Snake'”.
mdblanche
@Ohio Mom: What’s Yiddish for “verbing weirds language”?
sigaba
@Roger Moore: I think that guy wa seig heil-ing ironically.
Origuy
When Duh Trumpster says we is the master race
We Heil! Heil! right in Duh Trumpster’s face
Not to love Duh Trumpster is a great disgrace
So Heil! Heil! right in Duh Trumpster’s face.
Apologies to Spike Jones and Donald Duck.
Gin & Tonic
@JPL: One of yesterday’s posts referenced 1964, when Goldwater was considered so extreme that at least two sitting Republican governors of electorally important states (Nelson Rockefeller and George Romney) refused to endorse him. I can’t imagine a sitting Republican governor in 2016 refusing to endorse Trump if he is the nominee.
srv
There was a time when poking Hillary was all the rage here.
WereBear
@maurinsky: Reminding me of every male who refuses to pull in at the next rest stop.
FlipYrWhig
@Gin & Tonic: I can imagine Kasich refusing.
Elie
Sorry, I know that the common “wisdom” is that his followers are blindly loyal and that Trump is a real threat. Maybe to the Republicans for sure, but more and more I see him as a very vulnerable man who will end up destroying his own reputation (such as it is) and definitely the Republican Party. He has no where to take his followers except to the hate train. He can’t give them a thing on his own and he is overdoing the boorish shtick. He and his followers are going to be very unhappy. As an American, I am extremely embarrassed that this pig is getting so much attention from the loser MSM and his followers, but I can overcome that to make sure that he is crushed if he is the nominee.He is a nasty dirty pig, getting uglier and more covered in shit each day. No one could have imagined a more disgusting creature running for the Presidency of the United States.
ThresherK (GPad)
@SFAW: I love how the most reliable way to get a liberal viewpoint on NPR is to wait for a caller to state the obvious.
WereBear
@Elie: Oh, they are telling us who they are.
FlipYrWhig
@Elie: I just don’t see how it’s a phenomenon any different from Sarah Palin ’08. Say rude things, get rubes excited, rely on celebrity, insult comedy, and braggadocio, never say anything of substance.
Zinsky
When you have a vulgar slimeball like Trump, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised when we start having discussions about “schlongs” and other vulgarities. We should avoid being dragged down to the level of this degenerate and illustrate, by example, how intelligent civil people conduct themselves, which is diametrically opposed to this shit-for-brains lowlife pervert.
FlipYrWhig
Shouldn’t the post title be “Schlongazi”?
kindness
@SFAW: re: NPR. Have you ever tried to have a conversation on their website regarding a story they aired? For years now, the web site is over-run with troglodyte Republicans who can say what ever they want. At least half the comments I leave end up being deleted. And these aren’t comments who call out an opponent or say anything vulgar. Their web people are actively working the discussion spiking progressive responses and leaving the Troglodyte ones. After a while I got to seeing that as not just an exception any longer so much as the current rule. NPR is really just Nice Polite Republicans with a Fox news webmaster and they are completely fine with that. When I’ve complained to the shows or the Omnibudsman they tell me I’m exagerating and everything is fine….except for my posts which HAVE TO GO.
Screw them. Let ’em go bankrupt.
Enhanced Voting Techinques
I do wonder if Trump might really be directing that comment to Jeb!
ThresherK (GPad)
@FlipYrWhig: Sarah Palin would have been the perfect VPnom if she were announced at the end of October 08 instead of two months earlier.
Trump is getting the coverage of the coverage, with all the “here’s what he saidv” and none of the tonal gravitas tests that our Villagers ever held Obama to.
The press are afraid to say anything bad about Trump, from my vantage point. It’s a pitiful reminder of how different their background noise is from the voters’. Let me know when a Nitely nooze report reminds us of how badly the moderater McCain or Romney were too crazy for the electorate.
Elie
@FlipYrWhig:
It isn’t any different except that as any 8 year old knows, the “bad words” and bad thoughts have to keep getting jacked up to stay effective. Sooner or later, the pig just sputters (actually I hate to impugn the character of pigs who I think way more highly of than the pink shit balloon, Trump). At some point, the failure to convey any sense of dignity pulls apart any ability to make coalitions. Who wants to be associated with that? I think pink shit balloon has a real problem that is only going to get worse.
Elie
@WereBear:
They ARE telling us who they are, but it doesn’t solve a thing for them…. Not.One.Thing. This pink shit balloon isn’t going to give them a thing. They will just continue to live in hopeless rage, continuing to die prematurely from that rage and disappointment. They could have chosen a V8 — connected with the brown and black working class to make changes, but they wanted to be the slave owners they never were. So eff em to hell. Neanderthals died off too — another unsuccessful sub species of homo sapiens which didn’t , as it turned out, have high enough functioning brains to compete.
cain
@Another Holocene Human:
I never understood this hate for NPR. I love public radio and they have some great shows that I love listening to. OK, yeah, maybe the political coverage sucks, but we complain about all the other news channels as well. Yet many of you still watch CNN and MSNBC. It just seems that you’re throwing the baby out with the bath water for sake of one part of their programming.
NPR was one of the few stations that kept coming back to Katrina even years later when nobody else did.
cain
@BR:
I know, right?! So strange.. why aren’t we talking about it?
Brachiator
@ThresherK (GPad):
Nonsense. The press has been covering Trump, which is their job. Pundits and commentators have been criticizing Trump, which is their job.
Here in Southern California, and elsewhere, even hosts on conservative leaning talk radio stations have been bashing Trump. Trump’s supporters have been ignoring all criticism and cautions.
gogol's wife
@Ohio Mom:
No, that is totally wrong. You’re right, schlong is a noun.
Brachiator
@FlipYrWhig:
Excellent.
Elie
Maybe the shit balloon’s next act will involve saying “nyah, nyhah!” while sticking out his tongue and putting his short fingers in his ears and wiggling while sticking out his flat toosh. I am convinced that nothing is too low for him. Maybe he will shoot us a moon at some point.
Keith G
Oh, please. You’re goddamned correct that this is not the story of the century (Or month, week, day, etc).
I just do not get the purity prissiness en re the Times. They do good work and they do ghastly crap, often as not displayed side by side.
If you neglect the Times then you missed this story which might be as important a domestic story as I have seen this week.
In Missouri, Fewer Gun Restrictions and More Gun Killings
On a personal note, there has been a back and forth between me and a urologist about whether I have a prostate biopsy. There is a good article today on the state of the science of prostate cancer screening. This article alone made my NYT subscription worth it.
Brachiator
@Elie:
First of all, I acknowledge the general point of your metaphorical comparison here. Good stuff.
However, you are wrong about Neanderthals. No one is sure what happened to them or why. And there is evidence that Neanderthals mated with modern homo sapiens. Most scientists have abandoned ideas that they were primitive compared to homo sapiens or that they didn’t have “high enough functioning brains.”
ThresherK (GPad)
@Brachiator: I shoulda been more.precise, but I’m on my tablet and can only go 15wpm. The press I refer,to are the tastemakers, the mushy middle moderates especially in the Village, who can’t make themselves admit that Trump is saying out loud what is supposed to be subtext, and continually invite unadorned ex-Rep operatives to make whatever Fox says one acceptable end of the magnet around which all the filings align.
I don’t have a grand unified theory, but the unwhitening of the country (and therefore the electorate) never seems to exist in the same hemisphere of the “straight” media’s brain as the rise of The Crazee on the Right clutching to power.
Hoodie
@Elie: This may be the type of remark that brings him down and may bring the GOP down with him. It is plausible that Trump’s immigrant bashing is a pose calculated to appeal to the base. In contrast, this pervy vulgarity towards women (this remark, the Megyn Kelly menstruation references, the squeamishness about female bodily functions in general, weird discussions about wanting to bang his daughter, the series of trophy wives, etc.) seems to be more an integral part of Trump’s personality, i.e., he has some sort of Howard Hughes-type obsession/repulsion syndrome about women (maybe the Donald has mommy issues). This misogyny is politically unnecessary because the base would probably be satisfied with the tribalism and is probably counterproductive because it can’t help but risk alienating GOP women.
WereBear
@Brachiator: Good points all. There are like, forty three? (cat on lap, limited keyboard) different hominid species which contributed, and I’m sure most of them had good points and bad ones.
Unlike Trump.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Ohio Mom: Stop the verbification. Perhaps Baud! can include that in the 2016 platform.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
Longer Trump: that black guy had no business beating a white person, even if she was a woman!
Brachiator
@WereBear:
WereBear
@Brachiator: LOL! In later specimens they had developed a distinctly “swoopy” sagittal crest.
JaneE
Hillary wasn’t the only person Obama beat in an election. And I now have yet another reason to hope that Trump loses his elections. I would really like to see him react to someone referring to him in the same way, or even a simple “loooooser”.
Anoniminous
@Elie:
The Infotainment Mediums will continue to show Trump as long as he keeps or increases their audience, thus provide goodly numbers of eyeballs to sell to advertisers. It’s all about the Profit for these schlubs.
Elie
@Brachiator:
Well, I used Neanderthals as the example, but could have used Cro-Magnon or Java Man — does that help? The anology holds that something happened to the Neanderthals to make them fade as a distinct sub species. Yeah, some may have mated with the homo sapiens sapiens and had their genes pulled in, but clearly, they couldn’t operate distinctly from the homo sapiens sapiens.
Elie
@Hoodie:
Its just so pointless and without regard to any advantage that it gives him as a candidate. It is so- so- obviously weak. Anyone would recognize a man in their group who said such stuff and behaved like that as a loser. Yeah, women would definitely not like it but I am sorry, people who are confident and strong do not do this kind of stuff and there is no way to make this a winning approach. As Charles Pierce says, Trump seems to be running out off words so the next phase involves giving rasberries and waving his butt in people’s faces. Its truly a mortifying spectacle for any American to see that this guy made it to even run as a candidate, much less win a nomination. It is these loser supporters who think that they can take over America with this? I go back to my initial assertion — this will not be and however one wants to think of the analogy, whether to an extinct sub species or whatever, this is desperate and doomed to crushing failure.
Elie
@Anoniminous:
Sooner or later, one has to turn one’s head in disgust and its no longer entertainment unless they mark his fall. Which they will in great detail. Its coming. Doesn’t remove all of our problems, but Trump is headed for catastrophe.
WereBear
@Elie: I totally agree with you.
Even back in the 1980’s, when I was in NYC, Trump was considered a boor and a blowhard. And now he’s much worse.
Elie
@WereBear:
Yeah. I think during that period, people may have interpreted the boorishness and crudeness as a shtick that he was playing for marketing himself as somehow an authentic persona. What is emerging in how he is being seen, however, and what spells his doom, is that he is not in control of himself… that this is not a shrewd approach cooly chosen to appeal to the rubes, but actually what HE IS. He is the nasty, filthy troll under the bridge and at the end of the day, no one is going to want to connect to the image that he is now creating. Even Hitler was not THAT crass. What’s next? Is he going to start picking his nose and waving it around to show what he thinks of so and so? There is just nowhere to go but further down…
Matt McIrvin
I did love it when he responded to Hillary’s statement that she’ll enjoy running against him with “ask Jeb how much he liked that.”
I imagine Hillary hearing that and just laughing and laughing.
Brachiator
@WereBear:
And weirdly placed hair on their heads.
Debbie
How many principled Republicans have come out to defend Hillary against this vulgarity? Yeah, I thought so.
Ironic that the GOP has learned nothing since remaining silent at Sarah’s earliest lie about death panels. That silence has led to their current predicament and clearly there is no will to change.
Schlemazel
@Elie:
Imagine that enormous asshole as POTUS. Sure, you can pretend it is not possible but it is. If he gets the GOP nod he starts at 45%, we get no help from the media but he does, he gets a lot of nutbags that don’t normally vote because they don’t find the usual GOP doofus enough of a nutbag but the Dumpster fills all the check boxes. It doesn’t take much, a little ‘pox on both their houses from some morons, bad weather in a couple key states, excellent suppression of Dem voters. No matter how awful every GOP nominee has a chance and we have to bust ass for the next year to do what we can to prevent this. I think it hurts our chances to not fully understand the Dumpster is no joke.
Debbie
@Ohio Mom:
Only a goy would.
goblue72
@Debbie: What predicament? The GOP controls every lever of government – majority of SCOTUS, both houses of Congress, majority of Governorships, majority of state legislatures. The only office they don’t control is POTUS.
Brachiator
@Elie:
Well, not exactly. Cro magnon is just another name for early modern humans, and Java Man was a variety of homo erectus, neither of which went extinct.
Yeah, but species go extinct all the time, and not always because of any deficit, certainly not an intellectual or braininess related one. But I’ve been around long enough to see Neandertals be re-evaluated from ugly primitive mindless brutes to another human sub species that may have persisted longer than scientists previously believed, and which was more like early modern humans than early scientists could ever have imagined. That Neandertals could speak and engaged in symbolic behavior (burying their dead) was a huge shift in understanding and viewing them. Also, there is some speculation that the inclusion of Neandertal genes actually helped early modern human development.
But again, this is just a pedantic side note that does not in any way knock your larger (and excellent) political observation. I just have this thing about human evolution.
beltane
@Elie: @Elie:
But Hitler was that crass, which is one of the main reasons he wasn’t taken seriously until it was too late. Mussolini, too. My father still remembers the Fascist party anti-British propaganda centered around the Brits’ alleged penchant for deviant sexual practices, propaganda that employed the crudest terms imaginable.
Elie
@Schlemazel:
Oh I agree we have to work… but I truly do not believe that the clear majority of this country find this guy acceptable. I guess I am just not that far gone and I also very strongly believe that we cannot afford that cynicism — even if some of what you say is true. You do not win by giving in to inferior ideas and ceding those ideas with more power. You move forward with OUR vision and confidence. We must not whine about how the media are all on their side. None of that helps us do what we need to do.
Elie
@beltane:
Well, you corrected me on that. Got it. Doesn’t change the conclusion one whit. Ok he is as crass as Hitler.
goblue72
@Elie: You need to read translations of Hitler’s speeches. He was that awful. It was just about Jews, instead of women or Muslims.
Elie
@Brachiator:
I see that now (the thing about human evolution)
However it happens, I am fine if these folks melt away, go away or are absorbed in whatever…
Schlemazel
@Elie:
St. Ronnie already did that
http://listverse.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/picture-1-74.png
Schlemazel
@Elie:
St. Ronnie already did that!
debbie
@goblue72:
The predicament that their party is in shambles and they have zero control.
Elie
@Schlemazel:
Yeah but he didn’t stick his tongue out at the same time and give a raspberry…
Elie
@goblue72:
The pink shit balloon will hurt them and they will lose some of those. These folks were running under the radar with their hate shtick and got away with stuff. Unless you are saying that the country is ripe for a bench clearing civiil war, I don’t think that stench from this election is going to be helpful to their “brand”.
Elie
@goblue72:
I would rather poke myself in the eyes with a fork rather than read that shit. I’ll take your word for it.
Schlemazel
@Elie:
Granted, I take a very dim view of my fellow Americans but I am not convinced a majority of those that bother to show up next fall might not be just stupid enough to pull the lever for whomever the goper is. And, to be clear, I don’t see any of them that is better POTUS material than the Dumpster. Sure, they won’t say ‘shlong’ just like they won’t pee out the window into the Rose Garden but that is a faint improvement.
Schlemazel
@Elie:
No, I believe he did stick his tongue out. I don’t recall a raspberry but this is pretty close.
Denali
Indeed, Trump is dangerous. We really do not want a a facist in the White House. The question is will he turn enough women against him to lose the election? With the suppression of the minority voters and the record of low voting of the Hispanics, the threat of Trump capturing the Presidency is very real. I cannot tell you how depressing his continued appeal to so many people is to me. Obviously, the media is profit-driven. But what about the rest of us?
beltane
@Denali: One of the scary things about Trump is that he polls well with certain groups of women. Though college-educated, middle class women may find him appalling, their less-educated, lower income counterparts do not. We cannot depend on gender solidarity to win this election.
Elie
@Denali:
Oh please do not buy into that. He aint all that but he IS getting a lot of media exposure. There is a ceiling to his appeal and we must not allow ourselves to get all down in the mouth about his real ability to win the Republican nomination, much less the White HOuse. It troubles me that so many liberal/progressives so easily cede our power and vision for outcome to the pink shit balloon and to the entertainment media that are floating his candidacy. So far, we have not seen one actual vote for Trump. Not one. Already nothing but doom and gloom and fear on our side….
Tell you what, I am not letting that asshole near the Presidency. Maybe we can send him Obama’s chair cushion to sniff cause that is at close as he is getting to that office.
Betty Cracker
@Elie: I would bet a substantial sum that Trump will never be president. But I’m not so sure he won’t win the GOP nomination. It seemed like an absurd idea to me once, but less so now, even though, as you rightly note, he hasn’t collected a single vote.
Honestly, I’m more worried about Cruz than Trump. Trump is a buffoon and an embarrassment. But Cruz is a True Believer. He scares me more.
Elie
@Betty Cracker:
The disaster will be even greater for the Republicans if Trump wins the nomination but they are both offensive to me. I hear you about Cruz but continue to assess him as less of a threat. Of course I could be wrong and we have to wait till the primaries to see what is what. Both are awful beyond imagination and just shameful to have as examples of American “political leadership”. Putin must have had a good laugh the other day when he trolled Trump. Trump is such a narcissist he didn’t even get that he was being played.
goblue72
@debbie: Again, you are a fool if you think their party is in shambles. “Shambles” is not what happens when you control that many branches of government. Why are so many GOP Presidential candidates so extreme and far to the right? Because they can afford to be.
Losing the White House results in what as worst case scenario for them? Stalemate.
Winning the White House with a far right nut job is not a crazy bet for them. If they win, they get to run the table with extremism across the board; if they lose, its just stalemate and they get to roll the dice again in 4 years. Meanwhile, they have the Democrats hemmed into a single office and forced to negotiate on their terms. Case in point – looks at the recently passed Federal budget – sequester got eased, but it primarily got eased via a goody grab bag of tax breaks.
Liberals pointing and laughing at Trump and friends are fooling only themselves. We aren’t currently winning. We’re losing. Our “best” candidate for the White House is a DLC-centrist, Wall Street-friendly 1990s retread who is probably guaranteed to get us involved in some foreign military engagement we can’t afford. And today’s income inequality is going to look like a walk in the park by 2020.
LanceThruster
Long Don Vulgar
SFAW
@ThresherK (GPad):
Interestingly, the same thing is happening at the Boston Globe since John Henry took over. Well, without the call-ins.
@kindness:
My limited experience with reading comments at other so-called news sources yields pretty much the same results re: asshole/nutcase Rethugs engaged in “scream-at-everything-they-hate therapy.” Sorry to hear about the deleted comments, there’s no excuse for that happening. But I think the let-em-go-bankrupt “solution” is a little extreme.
Elie
@goblue72:
I don’t think your pessimism offers any energy for action alternatives, goblue. Also, the self defeatism and negativity is no way to enliven our side. Do you want the outcome that you describe? If not, what are the strengths we have to build on? Why is it that in your world view, it seems only the other side has all the cards? Sure, they do have a number of governorships and control some state legislatures. That to me is a call to action for us. If it isn’t for you, then ok but I am not sure how we shift the bad stuff you are talking about by first reciting over and over how powerful they are and how hopeless it is (I guess). If you don’t think it is hopeless, then what do you think that we progressives have going for us?
waysel
@Origuy: Truh Dumpster?
Scapegoat
@kindness: NPR deleting progressive comments? This is deeply troubling.
My suspicions over the last few years appear more correct than I wish.
phoebes-in-highlandpark
@Elie: I laugh bitterly when I read about the Republicans “imploding” and that the population shifts are on our side. I see a party in control of much more than they should be at a state, local, and congressional level. And the population shifts won’t do us any good until/unless we get our voters out to vote. If we don’t do that by ground level work as well as giving them a reason to vote Democratic – and vote in every election – than we’ll lose what little we have.
As per usual – and I say this as a life-long progressive Democrat – our messaging is lousy. We’ve let the Republicans control the message and make words like “progressive” and “liberal” dirty words. The DNC, behind Wasserman-Schultz has done a piss-poor job getting the message out about our ideas and goals for the country. AND, getting out the word about the Democratic accomplishments in the past eight years. If there’s one thing I can fault Obama on it’s that he hasn’t touted his record nearly enough. And the party and it’s candidates haven’t, either.
We are getting creamed on so many levels that I fear for the future. I am for standing up to Republicans and their faulty views on our country.
Ben Cisco
Will the media wake up before or after we get our own version of the Reichstag fire?
Debbie
@goblue72:
You can go blue in the face with all your avowed certainties; what I know is that practically all of my conservative family members, friends, and acquaintances are pretty dispirited at the state of the GOP campaign.
Schlemazel
@Betty Cracker:
2-3 months ago would you not have bet that same amount of money that the little jakanape would never be the GOP nominee? I’m not trying to be negative or fear mongering I just think we don’t do ourselves any favors assume this bullshit has a sell by date in the next year.
Elie
@phoebes-in-highlandpark:
Again, we don’t need more crepe hangers. Well shit, lets just quit right now since its hopeless. Why bother with an election… you’ve already called it.
What are YOU going to do to reverse this? Seriously. It is one person at a time controlling the “3 feet” around them.
I can only point to my limited example here and that is that we have built some momentum in local two elections to seat progressives. Is it bullet proof? Hell no! We have to work constantly. One vehicle we used was to work with the coalition of communities interested in stopping the coal terminal here. We are not out of the woods yet, but that issue really energized the progressive community and packed auditoriums. Our candidates used that energy as a jump off point to coalesce the progressives to raise dough and campaign effectively ..
There is no magic. You know this of course and yet you and others with negative outlooks offer nothing but pessimism. I can go over to red state to feel bad so why is it so important to keep hitting what we don’t have? Don’t we need to start figuring out what we DO have? We for example KNOW that Hispanics are immensely turned off by Trump. That is a strength for our side dammit! The question is how to get them ready to do what they need to do come time to vote. How about the Asian and Muslim communities, blacks, etc? These people are going to be highly motivated. That is a strength!
Again, we can’t do anything about the many repubs already in office but we can work with local and state constituencies to start pushing them out. We do not give up before we battle.
I don’t understand you. How do you handle other hard challenges in life? Just give in? It is not delusional to find the strengths we need to build on for the fight ahead. It is essential!
Schlemazel
@Elie:
Exactly, we need to stand and fight. We need to not assume the asshole is unelectable or that we are going to get any help from the media or that “the American people” will suddenly wake up and realize these guys are all assholes.
Elie
@Schlemazel:
Got that. 100%. But we also can’t completely demoralize and de-energize our efforts by focusing only on the strengths of the enemy.
Can you think of a strength our side brings to take the fight to these people?
Honestly, what if all of us are on the team trying to get that Apollo mission that almost overshot the earth back safely after a malfunction of some sort (I forget). They didn’t spend all their time listing all the reasons why it wouldn’t work, even though they clearly had to come up with solutions that had a chance, knowing what was already working and what the module could do, right? Its no different. We all have our fears/doubts but at some point they have to be set down so we don’t work against our own motivation.
MCA1
@Schlemazel: I hear you, though I am comforted by the number of times I’ve heard from the self-identified “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” (i.e., I vote Republican every time because my personal tax rate outranks all other considerations combined) types that they’ll vote for any Democrat over Trump. There’s 10% of the Republican voting bloc that may have misgivings about Hillary Clinton but are cringing at what they’re seeing right now. I just don’t see any way Trump wins PA, or MI, or OH, or VA, or NM, or IA, or WI, or CO, or whatever other string of states he’d need to win to pull off an electoral college victory. Yeah, he’ll do fine in the SEC but the people he’d need to flip any of the swing states are the ones most susceptible to being turned off by his fascism.
I can’t totally put aside the possibility that the same way he’s defied conventional wisdom and gravity for this long would continue into a general election, and that’s a disconcerting possibility. But, the general election race has totally different dynamics. Including that he’d be running against just one person, so the fly-by-night twitter insults and picking on one challenger at a time but moving on after a day before anyone can call him a relentless bully won’t work. And, just as importantly, that his opponent will most likely be female, and won’t give a shit about pissing off his base, because she doesn’t need them and knows she’ll never get them anyway.
phoebes-in-highlandpark
@Elie: I’m in no way giving in and I intend to spend the next year on voter registration and GOTV programs. I’ve been working for Democratic candidates at all levels as well as abortion rights and civil rights since 1968 and I intend to work even harder in 2016.
Elie, what I am saying is that we have to recognise and acknowledge where we are as Democrats fighting to keep our country on a steady course. We CANNOT sit back and let population changes bring about the death of the Republican party because they ain’t dyin’. We have to look at races other than the Presidential and concentrate on candidates at state and congressional levels. And we have to hone our message. But most of all, we have to work. I can’t stand to see the abortion rights that I worked for 40 years ago to get being siphoned away, which is happening.
vhh
@Roger Moore: That is spelled SIEG HEIL. Important to learn your fascist salutations.
Elie
@phoebes-in-highlandpark:
sounds great and I agree completely..