I salute the people at RedState for continuing to oppose Trump, and I even think their reasoning is pretty sound:
Trump is vocally supported by white supremacists, white nationalists, and racial grievance mongers. He plays to them openly. Trump attacked the wife of a political opponent and that political opponent’s father. He drummed up internet conspiracy theories.
I see that the king of virtue feels differently:
Bill Bennett said this: “It’s not the time to be out there demanding all of these things, trying to get Trump to suddenly become Reagan. Now is the time to surround him with good people and work with him at the convention.”
Bill Bennett, to his credit, was a strong critic of Proposition 187, Pete Wilson’s cynical ploy to rile up the xenophobic masses by shitting on immigrants. Not to much to his credit, Bennett has spent the last 20 years lecturing us about morality. Now he’s asking conservatives to fall in line behind Donald Trump because that’s what pays the bills for a right-wing radio host.
Villago Delenda Est
Would that be Bill “I’m shocked, shocked to find gambling going on in here!” Bennett?
Calouste
He was supposed to use dogwhistles.
Anyone care to run up the greatest hits selection of Erick Erickson’s racist crap? I actually thought he was pretty explicit, although I must admit that I have been paying him as much attention as he deserves.
Yutsano
Dumb question: does anyone actually even listen to Bennett?
Eric U.
as usual, there is nothing there when it comes to these scolds. It’s only other people that need to be scolded
Villago Delenda Est
@Yutsano: The vermin of the Village insist that he’s a very serious person who should be given a platform to spew his hypocrisy.
Grumpy Code Monkey
It’s been fun watching Red State over the last few weeks as they latched on to Rubio and then Cruz as the Great Not-Orange Hope (but, interestingly, never Kasich). Their hatred of Trump is naked and incandescent, and yeah, they hate him for all the right reasons.
Gonna be an interesting few months, especially as Trump tacks left for the general.
Villago Delenda Est
@Grumpy Code Monkey: You know, I think that Drumpf will not be able to “tack left”, if his efforts to be “more Presidential” are any indication. The man has no discipline at all. There is no filter there to stop him from saying incredibly stupid things, mainly because his fan base eats that stuff up and he plays to the fan base because of his narcissism that makes Narcissus look self-loathing.
Hillary is going to eat him alive, with Tabasco sauce, in the debates…if he participates in them, of course. I wouldn’t put it past him to just not show up for them.
rikyrah
I’ve said this before:
Hillary Clinton wants to do the WORK of being President.
Donald Trump just wants ‘ to be’ President.
One is a serious candidate.
The other is a clown.
And, if the roles were reversed – NO WAY they would accept such mediocrity from Hillary.
They would say that she’s not a ‘ serious candidate’.
……………………
A post-policy party finds a post-policy candidate
05/10/16 12:46 PM—UPDATED 05/10/16 12:56 PM
By Steve Benen
Hillary Clinton’s campaign website features an “issues” page where visitors can read the Democrat’s position papers on 31 different issues. Each page features a fairly detailed overview of the candidate’s approach to the issue – some, including the page on climate change, lead to additional resources with even more specific information – leaving little doubt as to how Clinton intends to govern if elected.
Donald Trump’s campaign website, meanwhile, features a “positions” page with summaries of the Republican candidate’s approach to seven issues. Most of the content is vague and boilerplate, and voters hoping to learn detailed information about how Trump would govern will need to look elsewhere.
As it turns out, this isn’t an accident or the result of a bad web team. Rather, it’s the result of a deliberate decision on the part of the campaign to downplay substantive details ahead of the election. Politico reported yesterday:
A source familiar with Trump’s thinking explained that the billionaire businessman was reluctant to add new layers of policy experts now, feeling it would only muddy his populist message that has been hyperfocused on illegal immigration, trade and fighting Islamic extremists.
“He doesn’t want to waste time on policy and thinks it would make him less effective on the stump,” the Trump source said. “It won’t be until after he is elected but before he’s inaugurated that he will figure out exactly what he is going to do and who he is going to try to hire.”
Mike in NC
Bill Bennett is still alive? Sad!
Waspuppet
He says that like it’s a high bar to clear.
Fair Economist
Um – wow on Hillary
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hillary-clinton-child-care_us_57313fd7e4b096e9f09275b6
Childcare for all if its true. What a gamechanger that would be! (I mean primarily in terms of quality of life, not politics). And Clinton doesn’t put up empty plans – she puts up fundable, workable, passable plans. Here’s hoping that speech lives up to advance billing.
The one specific already released is that she wants to double home visits for at-risk children. As somebody who adopted an older child, I can tell you that’s BADLY needed. The horror stories you read in these children’s histories… As usual, Hillary identifies the crux point for making a big difference.
Jeffro
Btw Harry Reid is letting the GOP Senate have both barrels today – something along the lines of “they can’t confirm a SCOTUS judge, they can’t approve emergency aid to fight Zika, etc etc, but by god they sure can call for an investigation into Facebook’s news curating because priorities!”
I’m gonna miss that man.
Eric U.
@Grumpy Code Monkey: my republican relatives hate trump because he’s “a Democrat.” They have the casual racism of people that have never met brown person, and only hear about them on Fox. I don’t think they think of themselves as racists, and they don’t like Trump rubbing their noses in it. They are the prime example of why the dogwhistle stuff is so effective
@Calouste: Erik son of Erik has cleaned up his act now that he is mainstream. I’m sure you can go back to his past and find some nasty stuff.
Jeffro
@Mike in NC:
“Sad!” is the new “also, too”, methinks.
Doesn’t make it any less funny, though!
Formerly disgruntled Clinton supporter
That’s the Bill Bennett who suggested (back in the 90s) that marijuana users should be summarily executed? Great moral compass on that one…
Grumpy Code Monkey
Speaking of Red State, here’s an excerpt from one of the #NeverTrumpers, complaining about the Trump supporters wailing “BUT BUT BUT HIIIIILLLLLLLAAAAARRRRRRYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!!!!”
Emphasis added.
Jeffro
@Grumpy Code Monkey:
He seems to only be able to tack left, right, up, or down for about 45 seconds at a time. He’s on every side of every issue, multiple times daily.
Hamilton would vote for Burr over him, let’s put it that way…
Villago Delenda Est
@rikyrah:
It’s like we’re back in high school and the elections are popularity contests.
rikyrah
Uh huh
Uh huh
Here’s what Donald Trump thinks about voting
05/10/16 01:21 PM
By Zachary Roth
Donald Trump has said he wants “maximum voter participation,” and that he’s running a campaign “based on empowering voters, not sidelining them.” But when it comes to the voting laws that threaten to disenfranchise voters in states across the country this year, he sings a very different tune.
Trump made clear Sunday he supports voter ID laws and other restrictive rules. And, going further even than most other Republicans, he has falsely claimed there’s an epidemic of illegal voting, including by the undocumented immigrants he wants to deport en masse.
Pressed by Chuck Todd on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday, Trump discussed his views on voting rules in more detail than he has yet. Those comments, along with other remarks he made earlier this year, give us a pretty clear idea of what the presumptive GOP nominee thinks about access to the ballot.
Trump and Todd had the following revealing exchange:
Todd: Do you want to see the voting laws changed to make it easier to vote?
Trump: I want to see voting laws so that people that are citizens can vote. Not so people that can walk off the street and can vote, or so that illegal immigrants can vote–
Todd: So you’re not for same-day voter registration?
Trump: No, no. I want to make the voting laws so that people that– it doesn’t make any difference how they do it. But I don’t think people should sneak in through the cracks. You have to have – And whether that’s an ID or any way you want to do it. But you have to be a citizen to vote.
Todd: Well, of course. That is the law as it stands already. Let me ask–
Trump: No, it’s not. I mean, you have places where people just walk in and vote.
Jeffro
@Grumpy Code Monkey: I like this…I like it a lot. Let Trump keep flying his freak flag on all stations and bandwidths 24/7 for a month or so, and slowly some folks will come around that ol’ Hillz might not…maybe…I’m just saying possibly…might not be History’s Greatest Monster.
(I do love how the country ‘survived’ 8 years of Obama according to that writer, though…yes, somehow we managed to struggle through…as all those jobs came in, deficits came down, 20 million people got health care, we stayed out of wars for the most part, and so on…whew, it was close…but I think we barely survived all those horrors…)
Bitter Scribe
Bennett probably opposed Prop 187 because he realized that it would turn California blue for the foreseeable future.
But yes, he does have to pay the bills. After all, there’s only so much public-domain morality-related material out there to repackage.
Villago Delenda Est
@Jeffro: As The Onion said in 2000, “Our long nightmare of peace and prosperity is over.”
Jeffro
@rikyrah:
I know, Donald, seriously: the NERVE of these people! Voting like it’s some sort of right or something…
I’m almost shifting back towards the Performance Art theory of Trump. Unfortunately, in my heart, I know it’s no performance.
Chris
I mean, was any of that terribly worse than the “would you vote for John McCain if you knew he’d fathered an illegitimate black child?” cold-calling that the Bush campaign did in South Carolina?
cmorenc
@Villago Delenda Est:
There are way more people in this country, especially men, for whom these traits are precisely what makes Trump seem “genuine” and attractive (to them) as an anti-establishment candidate. He says the sorts of shit many of them think only to themselves, or when surrounded by folks they confidently regard as like-minded buddies. We’d like to think from Trump’s extremely high negatives that these folks are a hopeless minority, but OTOH there’s a huge discrepancy between Trump’s polling negatives on so many key matters and his polling numbers in battleground midwestern states.
We’ve got to take him seriously and GOTV – there is unfortunately a huge surplus of resentful, stupid, low-information folks whose depth of substantive familiarity with Trump is only inches deep, and what they see of it resonates with their own internal prejudices and resentments. It’s the political analogue to when guys make stupid, costly, self-destructive decisions about sex because they let the little head rather than the big head do the thinking – it’s an atavistic reaction rather than any sort of reasoning that would stand up to even minimal rational scrutiny. And despite the unquestionable large gender-gap, there are just enough shallow-thinking women out there attracted to the kind of boorishly assertive, intermittently-abusive personality like Trump that we can’t assume Hillary can coast to victory on the women’s vote.
ALL THAT SAID, IMHO the only way Hillary loses in November is if we (and she) don’t take Trump dead seriously – at least in the same sense of not taking it for granted that the turnout she needs for a decisive victory will automatically happen just because of Trump’s blatant xenophobia, racism, and shallowly stupid positions on things etc. COMPLACENCY is the enemy as much as Trump is.
NotMax
Close but no cigar, guys.
He broadcast, or disseminated, or propagated, or promulgated, or trumpeted internet conspiracy theories, but didn’t invent or create them.
Trollhattan
@Jeffro:
Boxer-Mormon-Pirate-Democrat is a combination none of us will live to see, again.
Jeffro
@Villago Delenda Est: Amen. It’s a post-Onion world, that’s for sure.
These clowns – all of them, not just Trump – make W almost look like a moderate, rational president whose administration wasn’t quite so bad. Every single one of them wants/wanted tax cuts 2-8 times bigger than W’s budget-nuking cuts. Every single one of them supports more restrictive abortion laws than W ever got behind. And so it goes. This is no defense of W, believe me. It’s just…never in my wildest dreams did I imagine they’d put up people who are even more morally bankrupt and intellectually vacant than Mr. 5-4 Ruling himself.
JPL
@Jeffro: If mentioned at all on 24/7, it will once for fifteen seconds. They don’t want to distract from Trump.
Jeffro
@cmorenc: Seconded on GOTV, GOTV, GOTV. Venting here is nice; venting AND working to GOTV is the best combo of all.
smith
@Villago Delenda Est:
Jamelle Bouie today has a piece arguing that Trump cannot tack left, because he has no right-left policies to pivot from or to. His central appeal is bigotry, and there’s no way for him to obscure it. In other words, he doesn’t know how to dog whistle and fundamentally doesn’t want to.
Jeffro
@Trollhattan: He has truly relished poking them in the eye, that’s for sure. I am going to send him a card (seriously) telling him how thrilling it’s been to be a constituent-by-proxy. I’ll offer to buy him a root beer before he leaves town, too!
rikyrah
@Fair Economist:
If true, would be an absolutely fabulous position for her to stake out.
aimai
@rikyrah: His voters love this. LOVE IT. They don’t want to be bothered with policy details. They want to leave this up to a big daddy fgture. They are used to authority figures telling them (and everyone else) to “shut your mouth or I’ll give you something to cry about” and “I’ll let you know when you need to know, you little pissant.” They are very comfortable with a secretive, hostile, bullying, authoritarian figure. And it simply gives them more room to believe whatever they want to believe about what he will do when he gets into office.
I know this is Susan of Texas’s beat but Trump politics is really the authoritarian family writ large. There are golden kids and scapegoats, there is pitting of the children against each other, there is capricious favoritism and random punishments, there is bullying and bellowing, there are moments of puckish charm followed by rages. Its like there’s a script here. And its no surprise that Trumps fans are enthralled with it. For the moment, until he turns on them, they are all being seduced by a master co man who is giving them exactly what they want.
Just Some Fuckhead, Clinton Supporter
When did Redstate start shunning white supremacists? I throw the bullshit flag on this one.
Benw
@Jeffro: dammit people, I just got out The Vote, like, four years ago and I had a hell of a time getting it back in!
Alright fine, I’ll go look in the attic.
Hoodie
Their reasoning is a smokescreen. They hate Trump because he shouts everything they’ve been advocating in dogwhistle for the last 20 years. His clownishness is no worse than theirs, he just proudly wears his clown shoes and orange hair instead of disguising himself in conservative drag. They’ve always been about hate.
Formerly disgruntled Clinton supporter
@rikyrah: Other than climate change, childcare is where I’d like to see Hillary shoot for the moon!
piratedan
just off of a facebook exchange with a North Carolinian who is convinced that Trump is what this country needs to “shake us up” because he’ll deal with the peril that is illegal immigration in North Carolina, the “go to” destination of people who have trekked from Guatemala and the Yucatan… sigh…
Chris
@smith:
If nothing else, it’s an interesting campaign simply for highlighting just how many people respond well to that non-dogwhistled version of racism. “Interesting” meaning “terrifying,” of course.
About ten years ago I remember a liberal friend asking me why Democrats didn’t work harder in attack ads to tie Republican candidates to KKK or other white supremacist groups, since the ties were blatantly there. My answer at the time: “Because if it did work, that wouldn’t delegitimize the GOP, it would just re-legitimize the KKK. There are way more outright out-of-the-closet white supremacists and people who’d be willing to hold their nose and put up with out-of-the-closet white supremacists if push comes to shove than we like to talk about.”
And, well, apparently Trump overheard me.
chopper
@smith:
generally you can’t really tack toward the center until you’ve shored up lots of support in your party. trump hasn’t, and is currently at the point where he’s arguing that he can win the general with just his own voters. meanwhile all sorts of bigwigs in the party are saying they don’t currently support him and want to see more ‘meat on the bones’. moving toward the center could be very difficult for him.
schrodinger's cat
@piratedan: Voting for Trump will achieve that because after his loan default, which will throw the global economy into a tail spin, all bets are off with regard to immigration or anything else for that matter.
Mnemosyne
@cmorenc:
Because not everyone responds to fear (and some people just shut down rather than act), I’m slightly reframing it to say that I’m working for a high turnout because I want to crush Trump like a bug. I think Hillary will win, but I want to run up the score and publicly humiliate him.
If you think fear will work to motivate the particular person you’re talking to, use that, but if it looks like fear is just causing them to freak out, use the “running up the score” metaphor instead.
Iowa Old Lady
@rikyrah:
WTF is he talking about?
rikyrah
@Hoodie:
Yep
Double Yep.
Triple yep.
Amir Khalid
Does Redstate have no copy editors? I had to mentally correct that wretchedly clumsy sentence to
@smith:
I agree with Jamelle Bouie. The Donald doesn’t know enough about any area of policy to have policy positions. So it’s meaningless to speak of him “pivoting” in any direction on policy.
aimai
@Formerly disgruntled Clinton supporter: I’d like to see her talk about Eldercare, actually, as well. These are the two bookends tht are crushing families–especially women. There needs to be a bureau like the CFPB (or maybe something inside the CFPB) that handles the crisis that is eldercare/alzheimers/nursing home care in this country. People are being crushed under the burden of caring for their elderly relatives, and people are being abandoned to the mercy of a for profit nursing home business, and the sameburden often falls on young amilies with children and child care issues as well.
gvg
at risk childrens in home visits are done by state agencies or their privatized proxies and simply aren’t funded. As soon as the latest deaths outrage becomes old news, the push to save pennies causes both types to cut back the number of workers or up their responsibilities to check so high they quit or fake it. Not that it’s not an admirable goal, it’s just it has to be taken over and funded by the feds for it to be real.
I have been a Foster mom and we will be again after we move and get recertified. one huge problem that I see that even money can’t solve is there just aren’t enough responsible people who actually do fostering. Their aren’t enough homes. Of course the agencies aren’t fun to deal with and help burn us out but even so I don’t see enough people doing it. it’s not profitable because that caused one kind of abuse, we do actually loose money on it which means some people can’t afford it but mostly it’s just really hard emotionally to do and people don’t like crying and don’t do it.
childcare costs for the general population is actually a different issue and would help the poor and even middle class alot. We don’t have enough good childcare because we pay lousy because most of us aren’t doing that well so people don’t go into the field etc. In someways I think part of the problem around here is working hours go so late or 24 hours for the poor and that makes the childcare impossible. I sure it would cause a conniption but regulating working hours might help too. less convinent for shoppers but a big difference for families.
Ken
@NotMax:
So, like with everything else in his career, Trump didn’t do any actual creative work – he just put his brand on someone else’s efforts.
Gin & Tonic
@Amir Khalid: I’ve been told repeatedly that copy editors are extinct everywhere.
Miss Bianca
@Fair Economist: This has the possibility of being every bit as significant in terms of savings and general family health as the ACA.
Barbara
@Waspuppet: He would say that about anyone, even Bozo the Clown. Bennett is a professional Republican whose claim to fame (besides outsize gambling debts) was being Secretary of Education with a goal of destroying public education in favor of private vouchers. NCLB was his brainchild, with the express goal of making it so hard for schools to meet its standards they would all fail, thus eliminating public support for education funding. That’s right, as a Secretary of Education who wanted to destroy schools support for Donald Trump probably seems like a no brainer (as in “who needs brains anyway?”). So, basically, he is among the three or four people in Washington D.C. that I would name as being least trustworthy or worth listening to on anything more serious than a restaurant recommendation. And there is a serious competition for that “honor.”
NR
@Chris: On a similar principle, this is why I don’t like people here cheering the idea of Paul Ryan losing a primary to a teabagger. We should never cheer when a mainstream Republican (who are already far enough to the right as it is) loses to a teabagger. Yes, in the short term, it might make it easier for the Democrats to win an election or two. But it also brings their ideas further into the political mainstream. Empowering anti-government nihilists and nationalists isn’t a good thing for our democracy. And sooner or later, there will be a crisis on our watch, and these people are going to get a chance at real power. When that happens, we’re going to wish we hadn’t cheered so much when the Republican party was taken over by outright fascists.
rikyrah
@aimai:
The true face, in terms of Medicaid $$$, percentage-wise – is an elderly White person in a nursing home.
Formerly disgruntled Clinton supporter
@aimai: Yes, very true.
Tim C.
@Iowa Old Lady: He’s just saying out loud something conservatives have “felt” to be true for over 20 years. An article of faith on the right is that every election there is massive vote fraud to create victories for Democrats. They’ve been looking for and not finding evidence of this fraud for a long time. When they couldn’t find evidence of any significant fraud they went ahead and passed all the voter ID laws anyway. Again and again Donald shows his whole schtick is to say in clear terms what Republicans believe to be true despite it being demonstrably untrue.
Villago Delenda Est
@Ken: The ultimate in parasitic rent-seeking.
SiubhanDuinne
@rikyrah:
Villago Delenda Est
@SiubhanDuinne: Chuckles the Toddler. Beyond useless. His head would look infinitely better on a pike than on his shoulders.
WereBear
Oh yes. This is the kind of family the Republicans are pro-.
SiubhanDuinne
@Chris:
The difference is that in 2000, the candidate himself wasn’t the one spreading the innuendo about McCain’s child. It was done in support of his candidacy, but Bush didn’t make the calls. In 2016, the attacks on Heidi Cruz were sent on Trump’s authorized Twitter account, and he himself, on a national television program, brought up the question about Cruz’s father and Lee Harvey Oswald.
Aimai
: @NR: paul Ryan is not a sane or moderate republican– if by that you mean s moderating force in the tempestuous shit pot that is republicanism. He is a well dressed, cold blooded, asshole who well deserves the insults snd sttacks he has received.
goblue72
@NR: All it could take is Clinton elected President and then a combo of the inevitable around-the-corner recession combined with an inevitable Clinton mini-scandal. Sets the table for 2020 (which also happens to be a Census year and the lead in to re-districteing) and the GOP nominating someone not batshit insane, and you can easily see the GOP running the table. And the nutbars in charge.
The odds for one party holding the White House for 16 consecutive years in the post-WW2 period are slim to none.
The un-ending focus on the White House is a circus sideshow. Where the laser beam needs to be focused in Congressional elections (as well as state).
Yutsano
@cmorenc:
THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
slag
@Jeffro:
Republicans are just trying to shrink government small enough to fit into your series of tubes.
slag
@SiubhanDuinne:
The Other Chuck
I’m sure a hundred people above me have said the same thing, but:
SO ARE THE REST OF YOUR PRECIOUS REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES
sunny raines
wingnuts do best when Democrats are in-charge and the wingnuts make their living wailing, pissing, and moaning about Democrats. When republicans are in charge, most people expect the group in charge to actually accomplish things – which is something that is not possible within the republican character and personality. The stone throwing lands on republicans when republicans are in-charge, so the cowardly scummy wingnut radio hosts don’t have as much fun.
NR
@Aimai: I never said Ryan was moderate.
Mnemosyne
@Aimai:
This. Ryan is no different than Trump in his goals and policies, only more polite in the way he states them.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@NR: Stop right there, idiot. It’s bad enough you want Dems to lose this election. Trying to move the goalposts to somehow imply that Paul Ryan, of all people, is mainstream anything merely shows you up as the ratfucker you are. He is not “mainstream”. He is well to the right of any position Donald Trump has ever espoused, for God’s sake. He was installed as Speaker by the Tea Party “Freedom Caucus”. There’s no one you could replace him with that would be worse and almost anyone would be better.
sm*t cl*de
@aimai:
Narcissists and authoritarians, it is a symbiotic relationship.
From the perspective of the bootlickers, Trump’s obvious contempt for his supporters — the casual lies and bullying — it is a sign of strength, one more reason to support him. “Yeah, he lies to us, rips us off, treats us like pawns, just as he defrauds his creditors and customers — imagine how much more ruthlessly he’ll defraud America’s Enemies (c)!”
pseudonymous in nc
It’s cruel in a way to have a thread about Bill Bennett and have his preferred recreational venue — and major Tr*mp business — be one of the banned words because of comment spammers.
Davebo
Off topic but this is really cool.
Not just for the immigration information but for the stunning way it displays it. Via LGM.
Brendan Miller
DougJ here’s one for your media files – literal quote from editor about NC anti-trans bill “We echo both sides, as is our charge.” https://twitter.com/EliottCNN/status/730092254669484032
DougJ
@Grumpy Code Monkey:
Yes