Has there ever been a bigger dumbfuck campaign strategy than making it about sexual assault when you've been groping women for decades?
— Josh Barro (@jbarro) October 13, 2016
it's the Reverse Rove – instead of going after your opponent's strength, you go after your own weakness https://t.co/HbX49p8Edn
— Atrios (@Atrios) October 13, 2016
Of course Nixon’s right-hand ratfvcker Roger Stone was gonna crawl out of the swamp for Trump, because how could either man resist such a fitting partnership? Roger Ailes’ reportorial nemesis Gabriel Sherman, in NYMag, on “How Donald Trump Decided to Make Bill Clinton’s Accusers a Campaign Issue”:
Donald Trump’s decision to attack Hillary Clinton on the broader matter of her husband’s alleged sex crimes may be a sign that Trump is losing, but for informal Trump adviser Roger Stone, it’s a victory.
For much of the past year, the notorious political operative and self-proclaimed dirty trickster has been one of the most consistent and persistent voices in Trumpworld advocating for Trump to make Bill Clinton’s sexual history an issue in the campaign…
The spectacle of the last several days — lowlighted by Trump’s pre-debate press conference featuring women who accused Hillary Clinton of covering up Bill’s unwanted sexual advances — was the product of multiple authors: Right-wing journalist-provocateur Charles Johnson[*], as well as Trump campaign CEO Steve Bannon and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, all worked to place Clinton’s accusers center stage in the campaign. But Stone says his earlier advocacy put the pieces in place for it to happen. “I forced Trump into my narrative,” Stone said….
Stone says that both Ivanka and Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway resisted the idea. “Kellyanne hates my guts. And I hate her,” Stone told me. Conway strenuously denied being against raising the women issue. “It’s a sexist remark,” she told me. “I have been attacking the Clintons for 20 years. The idea that I wouldn’t tell a presidential candidate to shame and blame this woman — and say, ‘Yeah, let’s talk about jobs’ — is complete bullshit.”…
Following his widely panned first debate performance against Clinton on September 26 — in which he alluded to the accusations against Bill Clinton but then credited himself for not discussing them — Trump called Stone for advice. Stone responded by sending Trump and Bannon a memo…
Trump’s whole campaign should’ve been titled Return of the Revenge of the Angry White Mad Men. There’s not a single person or tactic involved that doesn’t call for a return to the 1950s — or the 1850s, if you’re talking about non-white people.
* This would be permanbanned-on-Twitter ‘Rage Furby’ Charles Johnson, not the guy who runs LGF.
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So will "debt and entitlements" still be the 1st topic at the next #debate?
— Brandon English (@brandonenglish) October 13, 2016
Debt to society, entitlement as a factor contributing to sexual assault. https://t.co/cA4Zuau1uy
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) October 13, 2016
RaflW
Larry Kudlow decides he wants in on the Trump self-inflicted wound parade. Twitter has been merciless to him. Good.
RaflW
Dammit. FYWP!!!
RaflW
Larry Kudlow is a piece of shit.
And that may be all I’m allowed to say. Besides, did I mention, FYWP.
eta: Sorry for naked link, its late and WP sucks. https://twitter.com/larry_kudlow/status/786435721657593860
hitchhiker
Kellyanne Conway admitting to the world that she’s wasted the best years of her life. The Clintons are moving back into the White House in spite of all your efforts to destroy them personally through shame and blame. Eff you, ma’am. You should be ashamed of yourself.
piratedan
@RaflW: love his comment that a rising tide lifts all boats in regards to taxes… and I wanted to respond:
– except for all of us motherfuckers on the river, it simply floods our basements.
– great for boat owners, not so much the rest of us
– how about we give the money to the poor, who will spend it on services and goods?
gggrrrrr
hellslittlestangel
@hitchhiker: She’s a horrible human being, and damned proud of it!
piratedan
@hitchhiker: what is going to tremendously suck, is that we’ll STILL get dipshits like her and Johnny Maverick on every fucking Sunday show for all eternity expressly telling us how these policies don’t/won’t work without ever producing one of their own. At least the Dems are trying, the other guys, not so much.
BlueDWarrior
@piratedan: You know Kudlow is a true believer. No matter how much you show him how much tax cuts don’t work in and of themselves, he will believe they do.
He is a high-end example of epistemic closure.
Craigie
@piratedan:
Or as I like to say: sure, but it lifts the small boats first.
waysel
@piratedan: And people aren’t boats and money ain’t water.
piratedan
its actually kind of funny hearing some of the villages bemoan about why couldn’t this election have been about the issues. The scary thing is, the GOP loathes talking about the issues because they don’t have a fucking policy to address any issues. Their policy is to deny that any issues exist and the ones that do exist, the Dems can’t solve them because they’re so busy throwing spanners in the spokes.
jk
@hitchhiker:
After Election Day, Kellyanne along with Jeffrey Lord, Kayleigh McEnany and the other obnoxious Trump surrogates can crawl back into the sewers where they belong.
Boussinesque
@piratedan: Their imperviousness to empirical evidence is astounding. In a just world, all you’d have to do is point to the hell that is Brownback’s Kansas to put a hole in their argument below the waterline. How do people like this manage to function in the real world, let alone graduate from college?
At least the majority of the comments were roasting him for it.
Aleta
Another indication that they couldn’t find serious enough evidence that would actually sink Hillary, for all their thunderous hearings and headlines? Or was Trump too cheap to hire it done well, and too unorganized himself, and using the Bill’ stuff was just too easy since it was already prepared years ago and free?
JosieJ (not Josie)
@jk:
But they won’t. They’ll spend Hillary’s presidency just like they spent her husband’s: desperately trying to do something, anything to ruin it. Hillary is much more disciplined than Bill, so they’ll have to hope circumstances help them out.
Calming Influence
Kellyanne Conway is going to make a million bucks off of this, because she’s shown that she’ll take flack for a sexual preditor. Nice job.
Keith P.
Charles Johnson? Wasn’t there a Charles Johnson that allegedly took a shit on the floor of a dorm in college? Oh, yeah, right, there was!
Was inevitable that he would tie his horse to the Trump hitch, as they both have a fondness for threatening lawsuits. At least Trump can afford the legal costs, although now that he’s in the *real* big leagues, he might have to GoFund his own legal adventure against the NYTimes. Michael Cohen Esq would be a bit in over his head on that one. Think Uncle Jack Kelly going against The Lawyer (Always Sunny).*
* Weird coincidence – Uncle Jack has very small hands and is obsessed with having them look more impressive on camera.
Aleta
@hitchhiker: I think she’s lost value (future worth as a consultant) in the last week or two, and it’s not coming back. And she can’t quit. She might not even get paid at the end, after sticking it out and ruining her credibility. She had a look tonight like the ship was leaking up through the deck boards.
Mai naem.mobile
@Calming Influence: actually I read somewhere she’s making $1.9 million for her approx 2 months. KellyAnnes got a few kids and I have a feeling she wakes up each day and says ‘today will pay for Johnny’s freshman semester. Tomorrow – Suzy’s junior semester.’ etc. It’s for the $$$.
Aleta
Sounds as though they barely paid Jackson for her work, and the women who came to sit at the debate got air fare and hotel and maybe little else — which would be typical on the scale of how little they value women and how easily they get away with using them.
Keith G
I will not bother to link, but even though so much of what comes from Ross Douthat’s keyboard is drivel, his column today should be engraved on the tombstone of the 2016 GOP effort to win the presidency. It is very tight, well written and well edited – and pretty much explains it all.
Joyce H
@Mai naem.mobile:
She needs to invest it wisely, because that’s probably what she’s going to have to live on for the rest of her life. For the mainstream conservatism that she came from, she’ll be dead to them because she enabled the madman that destroyed the party. For the frothing Trumpies, she’ll be dead to them because she lost it for them.
I think Bannon and Bossie will come out of the debacle just fine, because they’ll position themselves like Confederate soldiers after the Civil War, going down in glorious defeat for the beloved Lost Cause – they’ll be venerated by their peer group. But they were already inside the wingnut bubble. She was pretty much an outsider, who came in with that nasty librul stuff like ‘expertise’ and ‘knowledge’, so she’ll be the person who takes the blame.
Mai naem.mobile
So their plan is to go after Bill Clinton. I’m just wondering how many women,especially millennial women(who weren’t around for Lewinsky) can look at the current Bill Clinton and see him as a sexual predator. To me he looks like a frail older man,not some lothario. Trump on the other hand comes across aggressive jerk. I may be seeing this through partisan glasses but Bill just comes across as a womanizer who uses his charm to get his way.
Keith P.
I tried to read the People Magazine account of Trump, but fuck all if I’m going to scroll through to shut down every autoplaying video they crammed on that page. The entire fucking web is going this route, and it’s seriously pissing me off. I don’t go to Bleacherreport any more because I’m tired of every article popping up some Von Miller cartoon ad. Then CNN now pops up videos for every single article. But People is taking it to the next level with multiple on the same page.
Keith G
@Keith P.: Ad Block Plus. I just went to the page you described and all I got was the very annoying autoplay video of the main story. Meanwhile, the ticker on the Ad Block Plus icon indicated that it blocked 17 different ads.
philadelphialawyer
@Keith G: I think not.
As virtually all of the readers’ pick comments point out, Douthat essentially gives the GOP, and he himself, who supports it, a pass from the beginning of time until The Donald showed up last year. The reality is that the choice supposedly forced on the GOP by the rise of Trump was no more than could be expected given the conscious decision of the party leadership over the last half century to be the bastion of racism, misogyny, homophobia, and bigotry in general. Mostly in service of the rich. Again, all with the approval of the estimable Mr. Douthat.
The reckoning has now perhaps come, at long last. But the sin was not merely refusing to stand up to Trump. No, the greater sin was creating the conditions for the rise of Trump. A sin Douthat fully shared in with the GOP leadership. Decency, patriotism, honor? Sure, the GOP elite which bent the knee to Trump lost whatever it had left of those things. But they (and Douthat) didn’t have much of them left by 2015.
Nothing worthwhile here at all. Just the usual ass covering from Douthat, who is as much a Trump enabler as those he condemns.
Keith P.
@Keith G: I’ve got regular ad block…its almost worthless, as too many web sites detect it. I’m going back to a killfile
philadelphialawyer
@Joyce H: Funny thing is, the period when Trump seemed to be taking Conway’s advise was his most successful post convention interlude. She actually did seem to get him to “pivot,” and he was at least somewhat closing the gap in the polls. Not that that makes her some kind of genius, but it was better (from the POV of actually electing Trump) than the full bore crazy shit that took over after the first debate, and has only gotten worse with the Machado thing, the Hollywood Access tape, the second debate, and so on.
Keith G
@philadelphialawyer: I agree that he doesn’t go into history beyond the start of the campaign. He does well state what actions during the campaign brought on the latest shitshow. Baby steps. Accept small victories on the way to larger ones, and don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good.
philadelphialawyer
@Keith G: The latest shitshow is the product of fifty years of pandering to, exploiting, and stoking racism, fear, hatred, etc. NOT merely refusing to stand up to Trump last summer, or any time since then. Trump is the Mob’s idol of the moment. But the GOP (with Douthat fully on board) created the Mob.
So, no, I don’t see his self serving bullshit as a small victory, nor as “good.” Rather I see it as deliberate obsfuscation.
As Douthat tells it, the only sin of the GOP was in not standing up to Trump. And, even at that, it is as if Trump and his Mob came out of nowhere, and the GOP leadership woke up one day and found itself in the undeservedly tough position of having to deal with them. With no good choices.
But, again, the real sin was creating the Mob. Deliberately. Over the course of decades. For their careers. And for their bankrollers’ benefit (which amounts to the same thing).
That was the important choice. Not in how they dealt with Trump and his Mob That They Had Already Called into Being.
Thoughtful David
@Mai naem.mobile:
She’ll only have that money if she got paid up front. Win or lose, if that money isn’t already in her pocket, she’ll never see a dime of it.
Thoughtful David
@philadelphialawyer:
Word.
R-Jud
This ad. I sobbed.
“Our progress is on the ballot!”
Mustang Bobby
@philadelphialawyer: Yeah, both he and David Brooks are in the “How Did This Happen?” camp. Feh. They’ll be the first to go to the FEMA Camp for Purpose of Re-Education and Self-Criticism.
Rob
@R-Jud: I was crying too. Am crying.
Montanareddog
@Thoughtful David: because she did bad work! She was a disaster!
Mustang Bobby
@R-Jud: Suddenly there’s a lot of dust here in my office. I’ll be right back…
Keith G
@philadelphialawyer: I understand what you are saying. I was not complimenting Douthat on a scholarly work outlining the half century of decline in the Republican Party. He wrote a small piece on how the enabling of Trump backfired; how cowardice in the face of a bully paid dreadful dividends. Within the small scope of the effort, he is correct. Of course that isolated bit of insight does not excuse him or the Republican Party for a list of sins longer than most people can comprehend.
TS
Old Thread
ThresherK (GPad)
@Thoughtful David: It’s the same “Beats as it Sweeps as it Cleans” strategy used to disavow themselves of GWB with the rise (renaming) of the Tea Party.
I guess my next a question is, What will the next new name of Republicans be?
Thoughtful David
@Montanareddog:
Yep.
Also too, because there won’t be any money left anywhere in Trumpworld. Campaign will be broke, RNC sure as hell won’t pay it, and the few millions the Trump business and brand actually had will be evaporating faster than alcohol as the income vanishes, debts are called in, and the lawsuits pile up.
Thoughtful David
@ThresherK (GPad):
Yeah. There probably won’t be anyone willing to call himself a Republican. That name will have to be shoved down the memory hole.
Brachiator
This sounds like a bunch of bullshit. I don’t get the idea that anyone forces Trump to do anything. But Trump going after the Clintons this way is consistent with the way his mind works. Trump loves trash, the sewer, National Enquirer level conspiracy shit. Stone at best played to Trump’s ego, although it says much that he is so proud of an anti strategy that has failed so spectacularly.
And the elephant in the room is why none of Trump’s advisers sought to immunize him from his own goddam past. Did they think that he was just making shit up when he bragged about foul stuff on the Howard Stern show? Was everyone too scared of him to ask if he had any skeletons in his closet?
Imagine if Charlie Sheen decided to run for president and his advisers said “cool. He’s successful and nobody will care about his past.”
But Stone is a special kind of weasel. So proud of his sleaze. Ugh.
philadelphialawyer
@Keith G: Sorry but it is more than that. His focus on the last year or so alone is the opposite of “insight.” It is a deliberate, conflating distortion. A phony morality tale about “not standing up to a bully,” when the real deal is creating the conditions that led to the bully.
Also, to repeat, Douthat does not actually take the GOP leadership to task that hard for not standing up to the bully. Because by the time of the Rise of Trump, as he points out, there were no good choices. Trump’s Mob is half or more of the GOP electorate. So, the real issue isn’t whether the leaders stand up to Trump per se. Rather it is whether they stand up to the bulk of their own constituents. Which, of course, they can’t. And that is not so much a moral issue as it a matter of basic politics.
Oh, they should just have told Trump to stuff it. That would have been courageous. When Trump was leading in the polls last year, when he was winning the primaries in the spring, when he got the nomination in the summer, etc. Great. But then what? Trump is what the GOP rank and file want. And they want him because, again, he is the unadulterated, unsugarcoated, embodiment of all the lies, hate, rage, cynicism, fear, etc that they, the “betters” of the GOP (including Douthat himself), have been peddling since 1964.
Douthat is intentionally distracting the reader from that last bit. From that history. The problem is not that he is merely incomplete, or that he is not a scholar. It is that he is full of shit, and letting himself off the hook.
Because it was easy for him to condemn Trump. He is not an office holder. But it would have been harder for him to not be an enabler, year after year, of the agenda of hate, fear, racism, etc. And he didn’t do it.
philadelphialawyer
@Mustang Bobby: Yeah, that puts it a lot more succinctly.
Percysowner
@Keith G: Add on Flashblock and you avoid even the autoplay of the main article. Now some sites manage to work around that, but there aren’t many.
Brachiator
@Calming Influence:
This level of political strategists will work for anyone. They will use the publicity they garner working for American politicians to get work burnishing the images of foreign authoritarian leaders.
SFAW
@Brachiator:
No shit. Lee Atwater, for all the vile things he added to modern Rethug campaigning, was still not nearly as vile as that motherfucker Stone.
There’s a story that Atwater, as he was dying, apologized for or recanted all the sleaze he foisted on the USA. No idea if it’s true. But if Stone were to ever try to pull that shit, one would hope that the priest brought in to give him absolution would think about it for a second, say “Fuck the USA? No, fuck YOU!” and strangle Stone in his bed. After punching him in the balls, of course.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
The idiocy packed into that statement.
a) Harping on a pare of politicians has been the point of her life.
b) She’s all for the dumbest political strategy since Herb Hoover’s “It’s hopeless” 1932 Campaign
Bupalos
@Mai naem.mobile: hope she’s saving some for the therapy they’re going to need.
Bupalos
@Rob: I imagine that right there is the most effective ad of the election. I can see it pulling in a bunch of Berners.
NorthLeft12
@BlueDWarrior: Ohh contraire mes ami! Those tax cuts work just great for Kudlow and his cohort of one per centers. Your evidence only shows it does not benefit the nation as a whole…..which he does not give a flying fazoola about.
OGLiberal
Did you all see the maps Nate Silver has that show how the election would look if only women voted v. if only men voted. Disgusting. White men suck. And I know the white men here will say “not all white men” but, sorry, you are in a huge minority. Disclosure – I’m a white man…very, very white. But we suck. I saw another chart recently that showed Hillary winning women overall by about 62% but had Trump winning 48% of men. If 63% of the population is non-white and we know that most non-whites are not voting for Trump, that means that a super, super majority of white dudes are voting for Trump. And while every white guy here can say that Trump’s locker room talk offends them and it’s like no other locker room talk they’ve ever heard, almost all of the other white guys don’t care or think it’s quite OK. I give the white guys here credit for being in the moral minority but folks, white guys suck. Racism persist in this country and this election has made that terribly visible. But it’s also shown how sexist our nation still is, because while white women are fleeing from Trump, white men are flocking to him. I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump gets more white male votes than McCain or Romney did….and they were running against a Commie, atheist, Muslim black dude from Kenya.
SFAW
@NorthLeft12:
Is that one o’ them Canuckistan expression, eh?
SFAW
@OGLiberal:
Bullshit. It was white men freed the slaves, led by a white Republican male (i.e., Lincoln).
SFAW
@OGLiberal:
He also had a chart showing the map if women refused to vote for Trump. I believe the EV count was 538-0
RaflW
@BlueDWarrior: He is a high-end example of
epistemic closureself-serving prickery.He wants low taxes because he and all his friends are high-income people. The rest is just bullshit window dressing for the rubes.
Ruckus
@philadelphialawyer:
This. The party of “responsible adults” is anything but.
This has been going on for a hell of a lot longer than 37 yrs.
OGLiberal
@SFAW: Yes, but all the voters back then were white men. The percentage of white male voters is much smaller today because women and brown folks can vote. So the small percentage of white men supporting Clinton today probably isn’t that much bigger than the number of white male abolitionists back around the time of the Civil War. And among the white men who fought for the North in the Civil War, I’m sure a good number of them would not have vote for a women, much less a women who supports policies that help rather than hurt brown people.
OGLiberal
@SFAW: I suspect that in the states that were red in “if only women” voted map, the margin of women voting for Trump over Clinton was probably pretty small.
SFAW
@OGLiberal:
I think she ended up with 400-plus, maybe 450, EV if only women voted.
Somehow, I don’t think Uday/Qusay (I don’t know which is which, nor does it matter) will tweet that map.
daves09
Wingnut women have to prove how tough they are by being extra nasty-think Coulter, Malkin- and Conway is just following in that tradition.
Here’s the interesting thing. If a male campaign director had said the same thing-Shame and Blame-it would be the lead everywhere, but with Conway it’s pretty much the twitterverse-why is that?
A. because it’s a woman talking about a woman?
B. it’s just the ladies-bless their hearts?
Most thinking people know how racism permeates the zeitgeist, sexism, not so much.
JustRuss
Honestly, I had to double-check that wasn’t from The Onion. I mean, just coming out and saying “I’d never advise a candidate to talk about real issues when he can slut-shame his opponent!”
Just how deep is this rabbit hole?
Juju
@ThresherK (GPad): Dung catchers.
Ruckus
@JustRuss:
Makes the Grand Canyon look like a mud pit.