2. to say that this is a red country. What they're pointing to is land, which we already know. But you should think about that.
— Fames Jallows (@FamesJallows) November 13, 2016
4. And now the media is looking at a graph of land, of essentially physical property, to convey political power.
— Fames Jallows (@FamesJallows) November 13, 2016
7. Which is basically, do you have land, do you have property? Then you are a person who has a vote.
— Fames Jallows (@FamesJallows) November 13, 2016
There is a long “Constitutional” tradition, going back to Thomas Jefferson and his fellow slave-run plantation owners, aping the worst European-aristocracy men-of-property kleptocracy. Our most perilous historical era came when the propertied “flower of Southern manhood” attempted by force to ensure that their title to outsized tracts of valuable land should not be imperiled by “stealing” their right to hold other humans in slavery. It is not a coincidence that today’s American neo-Nazis still aim so much ire at rootless money-grubbing cosmopolitans — people who don’t own land, property that can be milked for resources.
It’s unclear how much property Donald Trump actually owns, but it’s clearly important to him that his name be slapped on every physical ‘development’ for which his mortgage-holders allow him to stand as a figurehead. It’s also significant that some of his nastiest court battles have concerned his “right” to despoil such properties as he will, regardless of regulation, nuisance to his neighbors, or safety of his guests/clients. In such cases, his assertions somewhat resemble those of the Bundy clan — another bunch of dole-dependent grifters outraged at the idea that “tha gubmint” wants to prevent them from using “their” (our common) land however they will.
A slumlord like Trump’s old man, a real estate developer knocking together cheap McMansions and jerry-built office parks in hopes of a quick turnover before the basements start to subside or the parking lots to flood, is never a sympathetic figure. But a reality-tv “star” with a far-flung chain of celebrity properties — big-city skyscrapers, Palm Beach mansions, Scottish golf courses — there is a man who might gamble on becoming the closest thing America has to aristocracy. Assuming, of course, he can attract the support of the xenophobic, bigoted, socially inbred “Heartland”‘s revanchist white peasantry, living resentfully off government-paid agricultural support and federal welfare programs, and slobbering over (cosmopolitan media elite professionals’) fairy tales about the return of the Good Old Days, when only white men of property could act with impunity.
Mnemosyne
An idiot on my Facebook feed gleefully posted a map showing that areas that voted blue have more crime.
So weird that, say, metro Los Angeles, an area with about 10 million people, has more crime than Wyoming, which has a total population of about 500,000.
Total mystery there.
jenn
Guardian link: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/12/hillary-clinton-we-failed-her-sarah-churchwell
heckblazer
Speaking of property, remember how there were cries that the Clinton Foundation needed to be shutdown to about the appearance of a conflict of interest? Why didn’t we that about Trump, a man who is a walking conflict of interest as president. That new hotel in DC everyone is protesting in front of? He leases the building from the federal government! And that’s just starting with a particularly obvious and visible property.
Kryptik
@heckblazer:
Because Clinton, therefore evil.
Alternatively, IOKIYAR. Possibly both.
fuckwit
There’s a structural problem with the United States of America.
The country was designed specifically to politically favor the rural over the urban, the small town over the big city, agribusiness over industry.
This was done for reasons having to do with anything from a myth of the Noble Farmer, to defense of slave holders, to a fear of a European-style moneyed elite taking hold in cities and turning into an aristocracy, to a deep distrust of banking and other city-fied business, to a desire to intentionally remain an isolationist, backwoods backwater and not become an empire.
The Senate, the Electoral College, the locating of state capitols not in the major cities but in rural nowheres, were all done to assure America remains a rural, parochial, agricultural nation.
The founders deliberately picked a side in the culture wars 200+ years ago, and it wasn’t ours.
One could blame the Federalists, but they were more on the urban side; it was actually more Jefferson’s party that pushed hardest for a rural-based national blueprint.
Mnemosyne
Testing?
ETA: Weird. I posted a comment about the Trump Foundation and thought it posted, but then it vanished?
Major Major Major Major
@Mnemosyne: It really is funny how many maps (quality of life, income, unemployment, crime, being a democrat) cluster almost perfectly with population density.
mai naem mobile
There was somebody , I think yesterday, who mentioned increasing the number of blue folks in low population red states to turn them blue. Similar to the libertarian idea for NH. They were talking about Montana and Idaho. As a bonus thosee two also help make a contiguous country if western states decide to secede. And,yes, I know this is a radical suggestion.
WarMunchkin
@fuckwit: I don’t actually strongly disagree with at least some of the biases towards rural territories. I do think that nobody in 1789 could have predicted that urban density would get quite this high, however. The founders distrusted heavily centralized authority, and at least in my political imprinting (history teachers, experiences) I agree with the general idea. Either way, we have to figure out a way of competing in rural areas. The Democratic Party must be competitive in all 50 states, in urban, suburban and rural areas, at all times.
Dog Dawg Damn
I think the thing I keep coming back to is that we know for a certainty that Russia meddled in our election. Whether this was ultimately dispositive, we don’t yet know, but we know that they were involved in a serious campaign to elect Donald Trump.
Liberals and leftists are squabbling over Bernie Sanders and the white working class, while the bear is roaming in our mists laughing at us.
Some reporting on Twitter showing strange irregularities in ballot-only versus electronic-only precincts in Wisconsin has me concerned that they really did manage the throw this one.
And then I feel just crazy. So mission accomplished, either way.
Ultimately, it is an outrage that Donald Trump colluded with a foreign hostile power and will not denounce them.
Major Major Major Major
@Dog Dawg Damn:
I think I found your problem.
BlueDWarrior
@Major Major Major Major: it’s just another front in the ongoing urban-rural divide. I half expect someone to half-seriously propose a urban secession plan in the next 6-8 months.
Dog Dawg Damn
@Major Major Major Major: LOL. I’m not easily duped. This guy is just presenting raw facts with interactive maps. Verifiable. He’s asking smarter ppl to analyze. It’s not hair brained in slightest.
Mary G
Autocracy: Rules for Survival
Masha Gessen
I don’t know if anyone has posted this, but it’s scary shit. This writer spent a lot of time covering Putin, so she knows how it works.
Read the whole thing.
Sopa
I posted this on Facebook shortly after picking myself off the floor: ‘People have asked me if I’ll be okay after this election. Well, I’m a property owning citizen, a straight male, can pass for white, and am not a Muslim, so I’ll be fine. If you aren’t any one of these, I hope these next few years aren’t too harrowing.’ I can’t wait for the State of the Union Address.
Mnemosyne
@Dog Dawg Damn:
Never forget, one of the grievances of the Berniebros is that emails purportedly proved that the DNC was biased against Sanders.
Emails that were stolen from the DNC by Russian hackers.
But the Russians weren’t trying to meddle and sow dissension between Democrats. Nope.
Dog Dawg Damn
@Mnemosyne: connect the dots. La la la la. Connect the dots. La la la la.
oldster
Yeah, the Russian intervention is one reason why I will never recognize the legitimacy of this election.
If Putin’s Puppet wants to prove he is not a wholly-owned mole, then let him release all of his taxes, and all of his business records.
I also think we need to start a decades-long campaign to get rid of the Electoral College. It won’t happen soon, but it’s the right thing to do: it is an inherently anti-democratic institution. It is the ultimate gerrymandering, giving huge power to voters in some states and diluting the power of voters in others. We need a long-game strategy to see it eliminated.
Major Major Major Major
@BlueDWarrior: I think the California secession plan that’s been going around the last four days counts.
opiejeanne
@Dog Dawg Damn: “hare-brained”, as in crazy/dumb as a hare (or rabbit)
Eljai
@Mary G: I read that. Rachel Maddow had Masha Gessen on her show Friday night. Compelling. And scary. We can’t let the press normalize what’s been going on.
Mnemosyne
@Dog Dawg Damn:
And, of course, the fact that the media conflated every story even vaguely related to emails into “Clinton’s emails!” The State department emails were “Clinton’s emails!” The DNC emails were “Clinton’s emails!” even though she didn’t write any of them. The Weiner emails were “Clinton’s emails!” even though they were on someone else’s computer. I think there was one more “Clinton’s emails!” story between the DNC and Weiner stories, but now I can’t remember, because there were so goddamned many “Clinton’s emails!” stories that turned out not to be Clinton’s emails at all.
If it involved email, it was personally ascribed to Hillary Clinton regardless of the facts.
NotMax
Fred Trump was many things, but slumlord is a bridge too far.
Major Major Major Major
@Dog Dawg Damn: Link? I’ll take a peek.
GregB
@oldster:
No puppet, no puppet. You’re the puppet.
Raven Onthill
Right now, I just want to scream. I’ve just told a Trump defender that Trump is unconscionable, not remotely qualified for the job by experience, temperament, or morals, regardless of Hillary Clinton’s failings.
I mean, WtF people? Why is this not obvious?
Suzanne
Absolutely. I firmly believe that the most salient divide in our culture right now (and for a lot longer than we’ve been talking about being “divided”) is urban/rural. Most our other divides are really just grafted over that. This election was about rural and exurban people flipping the bird at urbanites. Nothing more.
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
@mai naem mobile:
Go right ahead. Let us know how Montana works out for you.
No, seriously, I know this would put you at great risk and I am not actually suggesting you put your life on the line. There are lots of ways we all can fight, and moving to red states is pretty low on the list. This idea just is starting to really piss me off because I’m seeing it repeated in a lot of forums by people who (unlike you) have no flippin’ idea what life would be like right about now for non-cis-white-Christians. My interracial family, including my Asian son (my husband and I are white) get enough stares already in San Francisco. It’s a gazillion times worse when my Black/Hispanic cousin and our Filipina cousins are with us. Hell, my husband’s Jewish family who’ve lived in Boise for years still get treated like exotic pets. Sorry to get all diverser-than-thou, but really, it’s too much to ask people to go be some kind of fucking human petting zoo for racists on the off chance that it will help de-racist them by 5%. Especially our kids.
No, the more I hear about random acts of bigotry across the midsection and South of this country, and the more I read about their gun-humping cretinism, the more determined I am to never spend one fucking dime in their benighted states, let alone move there with targets on our foreheads. I hate to say it, but they’ll have to redeem themselves by their bootstraps. And if these Christianist pigheads hold the perverse belief that suffering is redemptive, then let them suffer.
Dog Dawg Damn
@opiejeanne: good catch. It’s fun when learning with how far a certain idiom has strayed from its original usage.
Dog Dawg Damn
@Major Major Major Major: it’s on @davidegreenwald Timeline
i can’t figure out proper way to link tweets and storifies.
https://twitter.com/davidegreenwald
Major Major Major Major
@Suzanne: I’ve long believed that this is the case but can’t articulate it very well in person for some reason.
Mnemosyne
@NotMax:
Interestingly, the National Review disagrees with you.
If you don’t want to give them the click, the relevant paragraph is:
Eljai
Has anyone here read Jeff Sharlet’s “C Street” or “The Family”? I have not read the books — just interviews with Sharlet, but now I’m wondering if I should study them. The underlying theme with the fundies is that they believe the ends justify the means because they are right. The con-man ran his rallies like a huckster preacher. And the religious right lined up behind him, despite the divorces, etc. I was frustrated that the press didn’t seem to spend much time on his running mate’s extreme views. Now I’m truly chilled by the number of fundamentalists that not-my-president is surrounding himself with. I want to anticipate what they’ll do so we can be ready.
Mnemosyne
@Raven Onthill:
Because of 30 years of propaganda about what a horrible, evil, morally bankrupt lying liar Hillary Clinton is. You’ve seen how many people on the left believe that stuff — why are you surprised that someone on the right believed it, too? They actually do think she’s an outright murderer.
Dog Dawg Damn
What do you all think about whether Obama should pardon Hillary?
I think he shouldn’t. Make him swallow that stupid premise / promise.
scott (the other one)
Something I’ve been thinking for a while, and I’m sure there’s a way to frame it to get through to at least a certain percentage of the population that tends to vote conservative, is this: today’s conservatives are deadbeats. They’re grifters. They’re silver spoon trust fund babies living off the hard work of real conservatives, the ones who helped build this country’s infrastructure 50 years ago and have simply been living off the dividends ever since.
Major Major Major Major
@Dog Dawg Damn: Most likely there’s a voter composition difference between paper ballot counties and voting machine counties, and demographic shifts (there are Obama 2012 voters who voted for Il Douche) would explain them. Voting machines have higher % of vote share in rural areas because there’s enough voting machines for everybody so everybody uses one.
Dog Dawg Damn
@Major Major Major Major: Well, time will tell. I don’t believe it’s a county-wide situation. Precinct by precinct. If that’s true ,then the discrepancies will be less easy to gloss over.
NotMax
@Mnemosyne
Personal experience was seeing the joy on my grandparents’ faces when they moved into the newly opened Trump Village (near Coney Island) in the mid-60s and were able to spend their retirement in dignity in an affordable and pleasant (if no-frills) apartment block, with modest park-like landscaping and convenient to the boardwalk and ocean. They insisted on being driven to watch the progress of construction every weekend. And yes, among their neighbors were people of color.
Yes, the areas he built in may have been unglamorous; the land was cheap and what those buildings replaced was often far, far worse. Where Trump Village still stands was a fetid, swampy warren of weathered shanties and muddy unpaved streets. Saw it myself.
Major Major Major Major
@Dog Dawg Damn: It looked like he was using county statistics? But, y’know, twitter.
Morzer
@Mnemosyne:
Noting for the record that the DNC never gave us any reason to think that the overwhelming bulk of those emails were anything but authentic.
Major Major Major Major
@Morzer: So?
Morzer
@Major Major Major Major:
The strong likelihood being that they knew nothing about the programs/policies of either candidate, but liked the thought of change, any sort of change compared to an ongoing miserable reality. Which is exactly why we should not write off all Trump voters as misogynists and racists. Doing so is comfort food for the shocked and angry soul, but won’t help us win the votes we need.
Morzer
@Major Major Major Major:
The point being that we shouldn’t retreat into the position that the DNC were as honest or competent as they should have been. It’s fairly clear at this point that they were not, even if one doesn’t endorse the worst claims that have been made about them. The emails do paint a picture of them as out of touch, arrogant and less than impartial when they should have been. These are not traits we should want to see continued in our leadership.
Anne Laurie
@Eljai: I read The Family… back in 2008, when True Purist Progressives were using HRClinton’s attendance at their ‘prayer meetings’ as proof that she was secretly an undercover Talibangelical/Republican. (Not a charge the author agreed with, IIRC.) The book was, as I remember, quite densely written, with lots of important reporting drifting too frequently into dystopian speculation about long-term intentions. Worth reading, but not if you’re in a depressed/despairing mood.
opiejeanne
Talking about getting ID for people so that they can vote, I would contribute towards the cost of birth certificates for people who can’t afford them but need them in order to get an ID in their state.
I have now recovered from most of my flu-like symptoms and my blood pressure is down closer to normal; I had to really disconnect from news agencies this week and it helped a lot, but I’m still not ready to go back.
I realized that fear and hatred were making me physically sick, really, truly sick, and I felt like something was eating a hole in the bottom of my stomach. I was about ready to ask my doctor about some anti-depressants. Maybe it was a slow-rolling anxiety attack, I don’t know, but it was bad and I was not hungry and not interested in cooking, and only interested in junk food which made things worse, I think.
I made some plans this week to clean out closets and donate clothes and other items we don’t use, to eat healthier, to go back to walking for exercise now that the physical therapy has helped (and maybe join the gym), to get as healthy as possible, to clean house from top to bottom over a few days, and to shove any extra cash into savings to build up a bigger emergency fund.
I think we will be listing our cabin in Blue Jay, CA sometime this spring. I love the place but we live two states away now and aren’t using it as much since Dad died, and it is a drain on our income; I want to be in a better financial position if the Republicans screw up Social Security as well as Medicare.
I’ve added several organizations the group that will be getting donations from us this year: The ACLU, Planned Parenthood (I have given in the past), Electronic Frontier Foundation, for starters, as well as the local no-kill shelter we have given to for the past 4 years: Annie, our adorable kitty, came from them.
I’m having my wisdom teeth out at age 66, the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, part of the making sure we stay healthy before Medicare goes away. My oral surgeon helped me make the decision, saying that if one became infected when I’m older, it will be more dangerous at age 90 than removing them now would be.
I think having a plan in hand is part of why I’m coping better.
My adult children want to pull up stakes and move to Costa Rica, and the newly married youngest daughter is frantic about the ecological and/or nuclear catastrophe made more possible; on election night she announced that there would be no grandbabies if It was elected. We may take a vacation there next year because the airfare is so low from LAX, but I can’t wrap my head around what we would have to do in order to move to another country. I think I’d much rather stay and work on what needs to get done over the next 2 and 4 years, even though I still feel a little panicky at times.
This blog has been my refuge this week and I want to thank everyone here for helping to restore my sanity by posting useful information, nonsense to amuse, and music. 2016 has been a hell of a year and while we can’t prevent wonderful people from shuffling off this mortal coil when it’s their time to go, I believe we can do some things to make 2017 a better year.
Anne Laurie
@Dog Dawg Damn:
I see no chance President Obama will do so, because it would violate his personal tenets.
On the other hand, I’d love to see it happen, if only we could rely on enough media outlets to point out that Ford did it for Nixon’s underlings (or else we’d never have suffered under President-in-All-But-Name Dick Cheney) and Bush the First did it for Reagan’s underlings (mostly to immunize himself against their testimony). But IOKIYAR!
Amir Khalid
@Raven Onthill:
I suspect a lot of people voted for him because that black man Obama said he was unfit in every way for the presidency. They agreed with Obama on that point, but they hated Obama and his legacy more than they wanted an able and good person to succeed him.
Morzer
@Anne Laurie:
Pardoning Clinton will be seen as an admission of guilt by the media and the GOP. I would not be surprised if Clinton herself was vehemently against the idea for precisely that reason.
I will also note, for the sake of completeness, that Trump seems to have forgotten the idea of dragging Clinton before a kangaroo court and is even saying some nice things about her, although how long that will last is anyone’s guess.
Major Major Major Major
@Morzer: The DNC was unhelpful to a carpetbagger. The RNC did the same thing, except their carpetbagger won. I didn’t see Republicans let that get in the way of supporting their candidate. The Russians didn’t expose THEIR internal memoranda.
Anne Laurie
@opiejeanne:
Sound ideas all, and I should implement many of them myself.
About exercise — the local Y has a bunch of “senior health programs”, stuff like water aerobics and low-impact machines, at a reduced cost for those of us in the AARP-eligible demographic. You might want to check your local branch(es) to see if they’re doing similar programs, and if they’d be cost-effective for you.
Morzer
@Major Major Major Major:
Bernie wasn’t a carpetbagger and saying it is a deeply unhelpful insult to the members of our party who voted for him. The DNC’s job was to run the primary honestly and efficiently, not to “help” or be “unhelpful” to any candidate. They failed in that task and it’s time to clean up the mess they made.
oldster
On the one hand, I take hope from the fact that Trump is deeply unpopular with a huge portion of the country, and will start his presidency under that cloud, as well as the cloud of having lost the majority vote.
On the other hand, I remember that GWBush started under a cloud of having been appointed by Supreme Court fiat, and was not very popular in the first months.
His popularity came only after terrorists struck, and was then further bolstered by the wars he ginned up.
This worries me a great deal.
I worry that terrorists will strike, or that Bannon and co. will create the impression that terrorists have struck. I worry that if Trump has trouble in his presidency, Bannon and co. will simply start a war, following Goering’s advice.
Then things will get worse.
opiejeanne
@Dog Dawg Damn: I’m glad you took that in the spirit it was offered. :-)
As a kid I wondered why the March Hare was mad and no one I asked knew. I found out much later that it’s the idea that hares behave madly during mating season
Eljai
@Anne Laurie: I do recall the part about Hillary attending a prayer meeting, but I just figured it was her attempt to infiltrate another DC power club run by men. Yeah, I get that dystopian vibe from Jeff Sharlet. I’ll try to keep my perspective, but not fall into despair. It’s funny, but my elderly mom watched christianists for years, the late Jerry Falwell, the 700 club, Jim Baker, the guy who was caught with a prostitute. She couldn’t stand them. And I’d tell her not to aggravate herself and stop watching them. But she said they were up to something.
opiejeanne
@Dog Dawg Damn: Pardon her for what?
NotMax
@Anne Laurie
Which underlings? Ford’s sole Watergate-related pardon was Nixon. Also Robert E. Lee and Tokyo Rose.
It was Carter who commuted the sentence of G. Gordon Liddy.
Morzer
@Eljai:
I am guessing that would be Jimmy Swaggart, although he’s only the most high-profile hypocritical holy humper to be caught.
Mai.naem.mobile
@Comrade Colette Collaboratrice: I am sorry for what you and your loved ones are going through. I don’t do FB. It was the first time I saw it.I am neither white,nor Christian. I was driving down the freeway in Phoenix today and there was a billboard with a huge “Trump” on it with ‘2 chronicles’ in much smaller letter underneath. Apparently Billy Graham’s daughter says electing President Camacho is God bringing us back to God and correcting everything that is wrong with secular America.
Major Major Major Major
@Morzer: I’m sure their emails were no different than the internal memoranda or water-cooler or boss-hall discussions of yore, for any party. Do you remember 2008? That primary was really messed-up too. This is the nature of a political committee. And at the end of the day it is the duty of a partisan to support the winner.
Releasing the emails, which we can ALL agree was done by Russian intelligence, was designed to cause intra-party tensions and fuck up the election. I don’t see what we’re arguing about.
opiejeanne
@Anne Laurie: Thanks for the tip about the Y. I used their exercise program many years ago when I was trying to get back in shape after a pregnancy.
Eljai
@Morzer: Yes! They’ve probably all been with prostitutes, even if they haven’t all been caught, but that was the one I was thinking of.
Morzer
@Major Major Major Major:
Fine, fine, fine. The DNC is a magnificent organization that wins every election for the Democrats because of its strategic brilliance and we should all be deeply grateful for its role in electing President Clinton.
Happy now?
Major Major Major Major
@Morzer: Now I really don’t see what we’re arguing about.
Morzer
@Eljai:
I suspect that they’ve been with men, women, boys, girls, animals, fish and, most likely, minerals. I wonder whether some enterprising social historian might look at the statistics for handsome male baggage carriers taken on holiday by shriveled old white pastors. I would guess there’s some quality material to be found.
Morzer
@Major Major Major Major:
The best of all possible worlds and the best way to cultivate our gardens.
Ian
@Dog Dawg Damn:
Well it would not be fair to Mrs. Clinton, the thuglicans would have a real hard time getting anything else done while holding a political show-trial. It would also tank their polling numbers (if any of us can believe those every again.) Maybe we should root for the show-trials of Obama and Hillary to begin?
Dog Dawg Damn
@Ian: this. If they do that they go down hard and will ultimately lose.
Mai.naem.mobile
I was talking to a friend today – a liberal – who was asking why Hilz didn’t pick Bernie as her Veep. I frankly don’t remember why. His posit is that Hilz would have won because she would have kept BernieBros and,regardless of whether she liked him or not,winning should have been above everything. BTW,he’s older and basically says people voting against their own interests aren’t going to learn until they feel the consequences of their actions.
NotMax
@Morzer
Funny moment that sticks in the mind was coming across Swaggart haranguing the crowd at some arena in Argentina while late night channel surfing and watching for a few minutes.
He spoke in English, with a translator to Spanish at his side. At one point Swaggart went off into some weird riff which made precisely zero sense. One could see a look of abject panic pass over the translator’s face, probably thinking, “WTF did he just say? I cannot translate complete gibberish.” So what transpired? When Swaggart paused for the translation of what he’d just uttered, translator noticeably paused, then shouted out “Hallelujah!” once and snapped his mouth shut.
Lemon Kraken
@Morzer: So what’s the plan for getting their votes, if they aren’t paying attention to begin with? In terms of taking positive action, that is (without wasting energy on the debatable/untrue ‘Hillary was a terrible nominee’ sidetrack some people seem to be stuck on)? Hope and change worked for Obama as a message, but how would a comparable message work for someone who isn’t as compelling? Or whose electoral landscape includes voter suppression?
NotMax
@Mai.naem.mobile
A woman and a Jewish man on the same ticket? Yeah, sure winner there (not).
Major Major Major Major
@NotMax: Jewish atheist, no less.
Mai.naem.mobile
Speaking of prostitutes, I was talking to my sister on the phone and I told her I was going to start referring to President Camacho as Putin’s Poodle. She misheard me and said ‘Putin’s Puto’? For clarification Puto means male prostitute in Spanish. Putin’s Puto is just such a perfect NSFW nickname for President Camacho.
Mai.naem.mobile
@NotMax: that was my response to him. Also,socialist old Jewish gut from Vermont who spent his honeymoon in Moscow.
Amir Khalid
Why did FYWP just eated my comment?
NotMax
@Mai.naem.mobile
Among SF-savvy friends and acquaintances, have been referring to him as The Mule for over a year now.
As in the character in Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. Hari Seldon weeps.
(Yes, he apparently is not sterile; analogies stretch only so far and are rarely 100%.)
Raven Onthill
@Mnemosyne: sure. But it’s turtles all the way down. Dave Neiwert has written about how the hate was mainstreamed. But why? What possible reasons did the people in charge of our major media do this? What was so important to those patriots were willing to tear their own country apart to achieve it?
Raven Onthill
@NotMax: Hari Seldon was a tragic figure.
NotMax
@Mai.naem.mobile
Amazing, innit, the same cohort that celebrates a doddering fool who yelled “Tear down that wall!” now votes for another fool who promotes building one?
NotMax
@Raven Onthill
Tragedy is the fulcrum on which drama pivots.
Anne Laurie
@Amir Khalid: Dunno, but it’s not in the trash/spam/pending files either!
Amir Khalid
@Mai.naem.mobile:
My second try at replying to you.
1) Bernie would have been a mediocre White House executive at best. He has a rep for not working well with others, which is something Hillary would know about from her own time in the US Senate.
2) The diehards among the Berniebros, the 10 percent or so thereof who didn’t come over even after he conceded, wouldn’t have come over no matter what she offered them. They insisted that he was the stronger candidate despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. They wanted Bernie and not Hillary to be the nominee. Since they couldn’t have that …
I happen to believe this election was lost to a white-racist backlash against Obama and his legacy. Obama was popular enough himself to win reelection in 2012, but in 2010, 2012 and 2014 the Democrats lost everything else. Any Democratic nominee this year would have lost.
Anne Laurie
@NotMax:
Trump’s a weird political hybrid, and ‘Trumpism’ will probably not outlast Trump. It may not outlast 2017, for that matter.
Amir Khalid
@Anne Laurie:
Let’s see if the % symbol is to blame.
ETA: Apparently not.
Comrade Scrutinizer
I still can’t get past the fact that 75 years ago we were fighting Nazis; this year we’ve elected them.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@Anne Laurie: Problem is, we may not outlast 2017 either.
Brachiator
@Mai.naem.mobile:
Wow! This deity must have a cosmically wicked sense of humor. Trump may be the most profane man in history to be “chosen” to bring religion back to America. I’m surprised that he did not brag about how many commandments he had broken.
RK
Trump’s a socially liberal, more or less Democrat who conned his way to the White House. Now he has to keep that con going in office. Reprehensible and mind-blowing.
Hillary’s message won
Matt McIrvin
@Anne Laurie: We’re all thinking or hoping that Trumpism will fail once it’s revealed to immiserate the people who support it. But I think it’ll give them exactly what they really want, which is not economic security but a sense that they’re on top again and moving up in the world. If he does some theatrical, authoritarian oppression of us too, if he keeps going around doing those Nuremberg rallies as President–that’s just the icing on the cake. They’re gonna love that stuff.
Combine that with minority vote suppression in the South, and the way Congress and the EC give an advantage to land over people, and I think we could see Trump become a popular President in the ways that really count. (Reagan was not as popular as we remember him being over his whole term, but his elections were astonishing landslide victories.)
We shouldn’t think of this as just the formula of foreign dictators. It’s how large chunks of the United States were once run: herrenvolk democracy for a largely poor white population. Martin Luther King had choice things to say about how the white lower classes in the South ate Jim Crow, a “psychological bird”, instead of actual food in their bellies. You can retain power for a long time that way.
Trump is an old man and we won’t have him around forever. Even if he does succeed with the authoritarian/Jim Crow formula, the question is whether somebody else can pick up the baton after him. His one charismatic heir is Ivanka, but I’ve noticed that she’s been curiously out of the spotlight ever since the “grab ’em by the pussy” video surfaced. I suspect whoever picks up the baton will be more of a conventional Republican winger, and they may not be able to command the same personal adulation. So there’s a chance then, but we’ll probably still have vote suppression and an authoritarian-wired media to deal with.
Amir Khalid
@Matt McIrvin:
I don’t think I can ever understand a mentality that says, “It’s better that you don’t have, than that I have.”
RK
Does the word “p*ssy” put a comment in moderation?
Apparently it do.
Amir Khalid
@RK:
Yes it does, even if you happen to be talking about a cat. (FYWP doesn’t do context.)
Matt McIrvin
@Amir Khalid: It’s really less “who has” than “who’s better?” These are people who think in terms of social hierarchy. The worst thing isn’t to not have, it’s to be on the bottom. And you can be pretty far from the top as long as the guy on top lets you share in some aura, some social identification, and you can point to somebody else and say “that person is beneath me”.
All of us think like this to some extent. But the alt-rightists on the Internet build whole pseudo-intellectual structures around it. They’re obsessed with all these ideas about animal dominance hierarchies, alphas and betas. Nigel Farage was crowing after one of the debates that Trump dominated Hillary like a silverback gorilla. He didn’t consider the comparison an insult to Trump; that was Farage’s idea of a true leader.
RK
Any biblical scholar can tell you that Jesus used Tic Tacs tactically and groped a lot of p*ssy.
Matt McIrvin
@Amir Khalid:
This election was close enough that a variety of different things could have put the Democrat over the top. I don’t know if Bernie or a different nominee could have done it, but it wasn’t fated.
But the “everything else” problem, the weakness below the Presidential level, would still have been around, waiting to mess up the country the next time the Democrats lost the Presidency. Whatever came then might not have had the aesthetic trappings of Trumpism but it would have still done much of the same damage that Trumpism is going to do.
Betty Cracker
@Matt McIrvin: It’ll be fascinating, in a train wreck sorta way, to see how the GOP establishment melds or fails to meld with team shit-gibbon. Experienced GOP pols like McConnell and Ryan know how the government actually works, and they’re smart enough to play on Trump’s vanities to get what they want. But as much as he wants to offload his duties onto Pence, the shit-gibbon may soon find there’s no escaping the unrelenting scrutiny and crushing responsibility of the presidency. I suspect he won’t bear up well. He’s never had a really hard job before. He’s never had to work with opponents he couldn’t fire.
Morzer
@Matt McIrvin:
One irony is that the scientist who came up with the idea of alpha males has long since rejected it as completely mistaken. The whole “theory” people are working with is utter nonsense.
Matt McIrvin
@Morzer: Well, it’s mistaken for the case where it was originally coined, namely wolves–they were reasoning from collections of unrelated wolves in captivity, which aren’t the same as real packs of related wolves in the wild. But I get the impression that competitive dominance hierarchies are a bit more accurate as a way to describe some other social species, particularly primates.
CarolDuhart2
@Brachiator: He’s going to break the Christian Right too. Sincere believers are going to abandon him in droves.
CarolDuhart2
@Mai.naem.mobile: Not to mention that 68 + 74 doesn’t go very well. The possibility of having a President go medically south, replaced by an even older VP doesn’t have a good look to casual voters. Look at the pairings: Kennedy/Johnson, Obama/Biden, Shrub/Cheney. While the VP was old as dirt, the President was so young that health issues wasn’t likely to be a problem. (We didn’t know about Kennedy’s issues, but he was at least young). Usually older President chooses younger VP (Daddy Bush/Potatoe Boy) for age balance: to reassure voters that in case older President is slumped over his desk, younger replacement exists.
Joyce H
@Matt McIrvin:
I don’t, and here’s why, and this is what gives me a modicum of hope for the future. What we need to understand is that the Trump we saw during the campaign was absolutely the BEST version of Trump there is. People who think he’s somehow going to ‘grow’ into the office don’t understand him at all. Everyone who has worked with or for Trump over the decades have told us that Trump is at his best, his most charming, his most reasonable and persuasive, when he’s in selling mode. During the campaign he was in selling mode. That might not have struck you as particularly charming, reasonable or persuasive, but that’s the most of those qualities you’re going to see. That’s how he is when he’s still trying to get your signature (or vote).
Once he’s closed the deal, once he’s sold you the get-rich seminar or not-yet-built condo, and he’s got your money, or once you’ve performed the contracted work and now he owes YOU money – that’s when charming Dr Jekyll turns into snarling Mr Hyde and that’s when he starts screaming and threatening and suing, whatever it takes to keep your money or keep from paying what he owes you. He’s got the votes now. He doesn’t need to stay in charming sales mode. Just watch what he turns into now.
That’s the first point that gives me hope. The second point is this – he always agrees with the last person he talked to. So Paul Ryan is going to walk out of a meeting sure he has a firm commitment to privatize Medicare, or whatever other ghastly plan he picked up on the Ouija board from Ayn Rand, and go back to brag to his caucus that it’s a done deal – and a day later, it’s not a done deal because someone else got Trump’s ear. It will be pure chaos.
The third point that gives me hope is that Trump ALWAYS screws up, and always brings down his collaborators with him. He’s reckless and he tries to do too much too fast. He crashed Atlantic City as a rival to Las Vegas, and he destroyed the US Football League. He destroyed the Eastern shuttle. He’s going to crash the Republican Party and if we’re very smart and very lucky, he’ll maybe crash himself and them fast enough that he won’t also wreck the United States and the world economy.
Matt McIrvin
@CarolDuhart2:
That’s, what, twelve people?
The Christian Right is mostly a religious gloss on white supremacy and patriarchy/authoritarianism, whether the people involved admit it or not. It’s why they can forgive just about any awful behavior on the part of their leaders.
Joyce H
@RK:
So does the word ‘ca$ino’, believe it or not. I forgot that and now have a long post in moderation. And one of the things that I find irksome about the moderation practice here is that when your post is approved, it gets inserted right at the point where you wrote it. In a fast moving thread, that means it winds up way up there where no one will read it because they’ll just read from the point where they left off. Might as well not have it there at all.
Baud
@Betty Cracker: It’ll be a train wreck. It’s only a question of how many innocents are harmed along his way.
Matt McIrvin
@Betty Cracker: I don’t think he’ll actually get much scrutiny, not in the media that people actually watch and read and care about. The news from this point is going to be fluffy Style section pieces and normalizing think-pieces about how Trump really isn’t as bad as we thought he would be.
I’m wondering whether the left-wing comedians on TV, especially the really caustic ones like John Oliver and Samantha Bee, are going to be allowed to keep snarking about him. On the one hand, that’s the smart thing to do to preserve the illusion of a free, pluralistic media. On the other hand, Trump is all about settling personal scores, and he hates these people so much. He might either character-assassinate or literally assassinate them.
If anything like the Nixon pattern holds, that kind of behavior could actually be his weak spot. But Nixon had a basically hostile Congress; Trump will not.
Applejinx
@Mai.naem.mobile: It’s a powerless position but yeah, that would have done it. I think Warren as veep would also have done it, curiously. We’ll never know now.
Betty Cracker
@Matt McIrvin: We’ll see, I guess. But from the cheap seats, it looks like the presidency is a fishbowl. Even if you keep reporters out, you’re surrounded by people with competing agendas all the time who use information for leverage. I don’t think the shit-gibbon is ready for that. He thought it was the ultimate boss role, but in a way, it’s the ultimate service role.
Matt McIrvin
@CarolDuhart2: That was why I figured the Hillary-Bernie dream ticket would never happen. In 1980, George Bush was just young enough that it looked OK for Reagan to pick him (much like Trump and Mike Pence now). But Hillary would still have been one of the oldest people to start becoming President, and Bernie is even older than she is. Older than Trump.
There are people dreaming about Bernie Sanders as the Democratic nominee in 2020. He’d be 79 years old!
(This is also the problem with Elizabeth Warren as the Democrat of the future. She’s youthful-looking for her age, but she’s not that young.)
Baud
@Betty Cracker: We’ll see if anyone emerges as Trump’s Rasputin.
rikyrah
Thanks Fallows
JPL
This is very bad!
There is no sugar coating it.
rikyrah
@Amir Khalid:
I disagree. A mainstream White male Dem would have won.Bernie, however, was not a mainstream Dem.
rikyrah
@CarolDuhart2:
Are you kidding me? They are nothing but racists that hide behind Bible verses.???
Baud
@rikyrah: It was so close that there are a million different changes one can dream up that would have altered the outcome.
debbie
@mai naem mobile:
If nothing else, it might be fun to foment paranoia at the influx of the “Others.”
debbie
Did anyone watch SNL? It was the strongest show I’ve seen in decades.
Ksmiami
@mai naem mobile: that was me. Look at Colorado cuz that’s what happened there. I mean if 100k people from la and ny moved to mt and Wyoming it could radically alter the electoral college. There are some nice towns in those states…
debbie
@Suzanne:
I think the divide is between tribal (or some variation) and community. I’ve come to think humans aren’t wired for banding together. At some point, it always reverts to “but where’s mine?” Watching this past year has made that obvious to me.
NotMax
Just for fun, spurred by some comments above, list of oldest Veeps at time they entered office and the year they were inaugurated:
Alben Barkley – 71 – 1949
Charles Curtis – 69 – 1929
Elbridge Gerry – 68 – 1813
William King – 66 – 1853
Nelson Rockefeller – 66 – 1974
Joseph Biden – 66 – 2009
George Clinton – 65 – 1805
Thomas Hendricks – 65 – 1885
Levi Morton – 64 – 1889
John Garner – 64 -1933
And the youngest:
John Breckenridge – 36 – 1857
Richard Nixon – 40 – 1953
Dan Quayle – 41 -1989
John Calhoun – 42 – 1825
Theodore Roosevelt – 42 – 1901
Daniel Tompkins – 42 – 1817
Al Gore – 44 – 1993
Schuyler Colfax – 45 – 1869
Calvin Coolidge – 48 -1921
Millard Fillmore – 49 – 1849
debbie
@NotMax:
I moved into Fred Trumps NYC and yes, he was a slumlord. You’d never catch him living in one of his crappy buildings.
debbie
@Amir Khalid:
I agree with your final paragraph. It’s not so much that it wasn’t Clinton as it is that it will be Trump. I cannot get past that fact.
BellyCat
Been reflecting on the fact that Trump won Michigan by 11k votes, yet 90k people who ACTUALLY VOTED left the presidential selection BLANK!
Have to wonder what the result would have been without Comey’s eleventh hour sedition efforts among other ponderable brain-pretzels.
Matt McIrvin
@Joyce H: I think that a disturbingly large number of Americans are going to love Mr. Hyde Trump. That’s who they really voted for. They want to see people’s skulls get caved in.
NotMax
@debbie
Your definition of what constitutes a slum and mine obviously share little overlap.
And that’s fine.
Waldo
@Joyce H: Your understanding of the Trumpster is right on the mark. The question is who is he going to screw over now that he’s closed the deal. So far, it looks like his most rabid supporters — the ones clamoring for a 100-foot wall or to put Hillary behind bars — are the ones getting the shaft. Sucks to be them, of course, but the more he softens or even abandons his extreme positions, the more palatable he becomes to the folks who were rightly terrified by his campaign. He could indeed gain popularity just by being somewhat less horrible than he assured us he would be.
Of course, we could see weekly/daily/hourly Jekyll and Hyde transformations that will leave everyone more anxious and uncertain, so who knows.
Fair Economist
@Ksmiami:
And much cheaper house prices.
debbie
@NotMax:
Agreed, our definitions differ. I happen to think paying a lot of money and still having to drag groceries up many flights of stairs doesn’t meet my definition of luxury living.
JMG
Predicting anything about Trump is a waste of time. He’s impulsive with serious attention deficit problems, and he changes his mind on an hourly basis. Nothing would surprise me, from his really attempting to become a dictator to him becoming a Democrat one morning when he gets pissed at Ryan and McConnell. But we can tell how he feels. From the end of the first debate until about 8 p.m. election night, he was mad because he was losing, and he really began lashing out at his perceived enemies in very dark ways. Now he’s not mad anymore. He feels great. And so his enemies of a week ago, Obama and Clinton, are now fine by him. I would guess that not-mad Trump stays in place until the inaugural. When he has to start work, a person who cannot tolerate frustration will find he has the world’s must frustrating job. That could lead to hard times for us all.
Betty Cracker
@Waldo: My worst fear is that he uses a terrorist attack or civil unrest as an opportunity to go full-metal fascist. His supporters will applaud it, and he’ll have the full resources of the FBI, etc., to ruin and smear anyone who stands up to him.
Aimai
@Morzer: nonsense. Bernie was the very definition if a carpetbagger and permitted his followers to run an ugly campaign of resentment, innuendo, and russian disinformation about her. Daily kos was awash with links to russia today.
Iowa Old Lady
One of the most amusing things I read yesterday was that during a tour of the White House offices, one of Trump’s sons asked how many of the staffers were staying on to work for Trump.
These people have no idea of the job they’ve just taken on. (And I say “they,” because apparently it’s now the family business)
debbie
@Iowa Old Lady:
That was the son-in-law, Jared Kushner. You know, “the smart one.”
Baud
@Betty Cracker: And everyone who was bitching about metadata will stand mute.
Matt McIrvin
I think there’s also a nonzero chance that when he gets in, Trump just takes an extreme mailed-fist approach of a type we’ve never seen in this country since the Civil War: the Democratic Party outlawed, most major Democratic political and media figures shot in the head on TV pour encourager les autres, troops simply crushing, burning and machine-gunning demonstrators by the thousands, massive prison or extermination camps set up for the opposition, some sort of ethnic cleansing of the country.
I know many people say the regular military won’t follow blatantly illegal orders on that scale, but the level of support for Trump in the military, and their behavior during the Bush years, don’t encourage me. Then there are other possibilities for enforcement: mercenary companies, local police driven through their union organizations, even CIA drones. Then the military, if they aren’t simply happy that it happened, has to decide the tricky question of whether they attempt a coup.
It may not stick, but it’d obviously do tremendous damage.
bemused
@Betty Cracker:
The Trump campaign has also been a very leaky ship. The changes in senior advisors, frustrated anon staffers’ leaks to press and Trump himself with his big mouth and twitter addiction is a picture of too many cooks in the kitchen with every one cooking a different entree.
Shalimar
@Morzer: Bernie Sanders joined the Democratic party to run for president. He had always been an Independent before that. What else do you think a carpetbagger is? I’m sorry you’re hurt by Major’s word choice, but it is pretty clearly accurate.
debbie
I made the mistake of taking someone’s suggestion to go back to the NYT. I read a great piece by Teju Cole, but then erred in clicking on Maureen Dowd. I’m done with the Times.
Matt McIrvin
@JMG:
I don’t think it’s that cut-and-dried even now. When he got back on Twitter, the first thing he did was make a sour tweet about the anti-Trump demonstrators being incited by the media, and then he sort of walked it back the next morning. He also looks pretty gray in some of the recent photos of him, as if it’s already starting to sink in what a big, boring, exhausting job he’s signed up for.
JMG
@Matt McIrvin: I don’t think so. A mass campaign like that would require planning and discipline.
Shalimar
@Betty Cracker: We’re back to the Bush years. The head of our government, in charge of preventing terrorist attacks, benefits politically from terrorist attacks. Scary then, scary now.
Baud
@Shalimar: If he can’t keep us safe, we need to shout that from the rooftops.
Matt McIrvin
@JMG: Yeah, that’s the main reason the OTT totalitarian approach probably won’t happen. He’d have had to be plotting this with a significant organization for years, and that’s not Donald Trump.
We’ll probably see a lot of simple tolerance of existing cop authoritarianism, though. Obviously civil-rights investigations are going to stop and be redirected in bullshit directions just like they were in the Bush years.
Gvg
@Morzer: Bernie is and was a carpetbagger. Some democratic voters resented him from the start. Me for instance. I said so at the beginning. I did’t trust him and still don’t and I wanted a real democrat. Trump is so bad, actually all of them were, so there is no chance I would actually not have voted for him but I did not want him and there was no chance for me to vote for him in the primaries. Some percentage of other primary voters felt the same, enough so I don’t think he ever stood a real chance. I appreciate long term loyalty and work. I could never be a politician. They have to beg for votes and money and be nice to not nice people and have everybody examining every thing they ever did and make in it sound horrible. Then there is all the public speaking and coalition building. I am more of a loner, actually more like Bernie but that is not a good thing in a politician nor an effective one. To get my kind of world I need a good Democratic Party not a one man band. I care about the party even though i am not a part of the organization. Bernie was to me a threat. He didn’t put in the work in the prior years to earn my vote. And he definitely meets the definition of carpetbagger. He didn’t have a plan to overcome what he should have expected. He didn’t try to convince either the staffers or voters who felt that way that the things he had done before were helpful etc. like minorities he ignored our concerns and then called the actual party corrupt. So they are supposed to want him to be their boss? I don’t think so. Carpetbagger =out of touch unless you do something like Hillary’s listening tour when she decided to move to NYC and run for their Senate seat where she really did listen and convinced the voters she understood them. But she was still a carpetbagger by definition, it’s just she did something to fix the problem.
Mai.naem.mobile
@Iowa Old Lady: I am not worried about the family. I am guessing the family has been told to scope out if there are primo federal buildings they can buy on the cheap for hotels, bid rigging, contracts for Trump Inc. bad stuff but in the big picture penny ante stuff. The stuff I worry about is the Russian connection stuff,foreign affairs, civil rights,Medicare ,safety net stuff and environmental standard related stuff.
BellyCat
@Suzanne:
This.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: Rural and exurban, yeah.
And in some parts of the country it’s more complicated than that. One thing that made me a little leery of Bernie Sanders as a national candidate (though it might have also been a net benefit, who knows?) is that he lives in an anomalous zone of rural liberalism, without much like it elsewhere in the United States. It’s basically Vermont plus the Berkshires, with tenuous extensions into New York state and western New Hampshire.
In much of New England, hardcore conservatism is actually more a suburban phenomenon than a rural one.
Betty Cracker
@Mai.naem.mobile: I hadn’t realized the Breitbart organization, whose chief editor ran the shit-gibbon’s campaign and is on the short list for chief of staff, was ass-deep in European nationalists politics. I knew they lionized people like Farange, Le Pen, Wilders, etc., but I hadn’t realized how much material support they provided. Russia Today has been ass-deep in our politics, of course, and are even now claiming that the anti-Trump protests are funded by Soros.
Trump has authoritarian instincts, obviously, but he seems too narcissistic and unfocused to orchestrate a long game like that. He also seems very easily influenced by those around him. If the Breitbart people win out and become his gatekeeper as POTUS, dog help us.
Matt McIrvin
@Shalimar: A large terrorist attack identified as Islamist in origin, or a string of smaller ones, would definitely give the Trump administration political space to go much more hard-authoritarian. And lots of people out there are surely itching to give Trump that gift.
I figure something on the 9/11 level is still improbable, because 9/11 depended so much on a real stroke of luck combined with elaborate planning–while the plotters carefully allowed for the planes to be loaded with as much fuel as they could manage, I don’t think even they knew that would cause the WTC towers to physically collapse, which was what brought the death toll up from hundreds to thousands. Anyone seeking that level of impact would have to figure out a whole new way to do something like that.
But Trump is going to seize on any hashtag-terrorist shooting of San Bernardino or Orlando Pulse size, of course, and those are surely going to happen again. If Homeland Security is stocked with freaks and grifters like the rest of the Trump administration, more conventional internationally-plotted terrorist attacks are going to come back in a big way too.
Kay
Matt McIrvin
@Betty Cracker: Megyn Kelly’s claim that somebody from Trump’s team poisoned her before one of the debates is a really worrying tell, if it’s true. That’s straight from Putin and Yanukovych’s playbook.
tobie
@Morzer:
I haven’t read all the emails and I can’t vouch for their authenticity. I know that Donna Brazile disputes the authenticity of some the emails attributed to her.
That said–and I mean this as a genuine question–have you read the emails of other political campaigns in the past 12 years? I’m not trying to defend the DNC one bit, though I think its influence on this election and the Democratic primary is overstated. But I am concerned that we’re talking about selectively leaked and possibly fabricated information in much the same manner that GOPers talked about the leaked emails from the climate scientists at the University of East Anglia. If you have a foregone conclusion (of the sort, climate change is fake, the DNC was in the tank for HRC), you’re going to find evidence for it no matter what.
That’s what the leakers want. That’s how they select what to make public. They’re banking on the fact that most of us haven’t participated at this level of a campaign to be able to judge the material presented.
Juice Box
@fuckwit: Not that I want to in any way disagree with AL’s analysis, but the founders weren’t completely evil when choosing to favor rural interests over manufacturing — which they did explicitly do. However, in the context of the time, it wasn’t the same decision. The industrial revolution was just beginning in the UK and it was pretty terrible for the lower classes. Many of the artisans who were thrown out of work and left to starve, many of the small farmers who were pushed off their land, immigrated or were transported to the Colonies. At that time, the Industrial Revolution looked like a terrible assault on the lower classes. Jefferson particularly wanted to avoid the same problem in the new country.
Matt McIrvin
@Matt McIrvin: …Of course, there’s also the option of false-flag attacks, but those may not even be necessary. I don’t think it’s clear to this day whether the Reichstag fire was false-flag or not; a lot of historians think it wasn’t.
Kay
It’s coddling Trump to say “we don’t know” what he really thinks. It’s not our job to figure out what he “really” thinks.
He should be judged on what he says and does like every other adult in public life would be. Dismissing what he says as not an indication of what he “really” thinks and substituting some unexpressed better meaning is a lower standard.
I didn’t tell him to run for President. I refuse to set special, lower standards for Donald Trump.
DivF
@JMG:
Actually Truman was probably wrong about this – managing the war in Europe was an intensely political job. But it definitely applies to Trump, who is used to having his orders followed.
Peale
@Kay: on a slightly related note, that’s why I’m going to have a very difficult time letting the so-called progressive “foreign policy is most important to me” brigade back in when inevitably they realize that Trump is actually a torture promoting war monger and that they’ve actually been attacking the wrong party. Again. They like to point to those e-mails to prove lots of things but seem to ignore Trump’s actual statements.
Kay
I think people still aren’t getting the scope of how bad this will be.
Trump is still Tweeting:
This will work. He’ll bully them into favorable coverage. They’re not prepared for this- not up to covering this President. They don’t have a frame or an approach so they’ll treat this as ordinary- what people are calling “normalizing”.
They’re normalizing because they don’t know what to do and when people don’t know what to do they revert to an approach they’re familiar with.
It’ll go downhill really fast- they’ll be racing to the bottom to meet him there. I really think all bets are off.
Baud
@Kay: They could respond that they know they are losing subscribers because of how they covered Hillary. But they won’t, for multiple obvious reasons.
debbie
@Kay:
The real tell is that it’s the “Trump” phenomenon, not conservative Christian, American or anything else. People show you who they are.
Matt McIrvin
@Peale: On the one hand, the people preoccupied with drones and surveillance are going to be able to say “we told you so”, when they argued that Obama was opening the door for future abuses by not dismantling this stuff. Trump now has access to the full powers of the NSA, and they called it.
On the other hand, some of their (former?) heroes actively colluded with the Russians to put Trump in office. You don’t get to have anti-authoritarian cred and do that.
mai naem mobile
@Betty Cracker: after the Brexit vote it came out that the Russians had been partly funding UKIP and Farage. We desperately need better civics and history classes in this country.
martian
Bernie supporters are everywhere I read on the net bitterly ranting that Trump won because the DNC stole the nomination from Bernie, but they never itemize. This is not snark: can someone tell me how it was supposedly done?
My impression was that there was some shit talking, but that doesn’t move millions of votes. People shit talking seems really normal to me.
Kay
@Peale:
He sure is. Not to mention his enthusiasm for executing black teenagers. Do they need to be hit over the head with a brick? He called for the execution of teenagers as a private citizen. He’ll be MORE restrained with huge power?
This is delusional. It’s childish. NOTHING this person has ever done would suggest he would be a good President. It is much more likely he stays the same than magically transforms.
Tenar Darell
Last night on SNL, Weekend Update said something about liberals not getting out to meet people unlike themselves & used a map of county level returns. That bugged me because basically it was showing the urban/rural divide. And this morning I woke up knowing why.
1. The people who left the suburbs & countryside leave for lots of reasons, but one is because they aren’t fully accepted there. They’ve already been rejected.
2. They’re actually mocking cities which is where all the most different people are!!!!
3. And like the above shows they’re equating empty land as actual people.
No wonder it bugged me. It felt like they were arguing once again that at Thanksgiving we should listen to the racist Uncle Jimbos of the world before we listen to our Pakistani upstairs neighbor, the Mexican couple who live next door, the gay couple from downstairs who helped us carry all our boxes in…well you get the picture.
FYI
Dave Chapelle & Chris Rock were also in a skit together.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Just like how Republicans say government can’t work and then actively cause it to fail to prove their point.
Anyone who blames Democrats first for Republican actions should be treated with the same respect as we show to David Brooks.
martian
Also, the talk about how Bernie should have been veep, how would he pass the vetting? Hilz people would have needed to see all his financials.
Baud
@martian: As much as I hate to reduce our coalition further, we need to let them go. They are poison.
DivF
@martian: the DNC put the fix in for Hillary by giving “too much” weight to black primary voters in southern states that she had no chance of winning in the general.
That’s what they think, let’s see if they admit it.
Betty Cracker
@Matt McIrvin: Anyone who thinks WikiLeaks is a credible “transparency” organization after the role Assange played in helping a foreign government install an unstable demagogue in the Oval Office is too goddamned stupid to live. The pasty rapist tweeted out Breitbart and Gateway Pundit links throughout the campaign and is still gloating about it. I assume he’s not worried about offending liberals who supposedly funded his enterprise during the GWB years. Maybe Putin is directly meeting his payroll, but who knows? WikiLeaks isn’t transparent about its funding.
Kay
@debbie:
wow. Good catch.
I’m not “scared”- that’s the wrong word. I’m apprehensive because I don’t think people are appreciating the full scope of this. I think they’re choosing to “normalize” because that’s a kind of safe haven- if his behavior is normalized then it’s ordinary and we don’t have to be concerned.
I go into houses where there is child abuse sometimes in my work. It is amazing what people can excuse and explain away and “normalize”. It becomes everyone in the family’s job to pretend it isn’t happening and they’re really good at it.
martian
@DivF: How would a Bernie supporter describe that, though? I mean, a vote is not a vote suddenly? What is their explanation? The rules should have been altered for Bernie somehow? Still not trying to snark. I want to understand this beyond my own reflexive reaction.
YellowDog
I have a co-worker who likes to point to that map. He did it in 2008 and 2012, expressing disbelief over the results of the presidential race. Both times, my response was “cattle don’t vote, but if they did, why would they vote for the people who steal their milk and send them to the slaughterhouse.” He can’t process that level of snark.
martian
@Baud: Letting them go isn’t really our job or within our power now, though. It’s not the primaries, and it’s too late for them to vote for Hillary against the rancid, rotting fascist in the general. They’ll be around if they want to be around.
Peale
@martian: it was just all over the place nonsense. Caucuses shouldn’t count until he won some then caucuses were better because he lost primaries then he won an open primary and those became the gold standard of choosing a president until he lost a few of those and we were back to caucuses again being best. Then she should have just stopped running and let him win. As if going into the general election with a candidate who only won because the winning side conceded to him would have made him a stronger candidate.
Baud
@martian: There are lots of people who aren’t our allies who still exist in the world. Treat them the same way.
DivF
@martian: the argument is that states should be weighted by their overall level of support for democrats. Also, that the front-loading of southern states gives the winners of those momentum.
A separate argument is that big primary states unfairly disenfranchise insurgent movements that have less access to money.
Just to be clear, I think these arguments are a load of crap.
Matt McIrvin
@martian: The most rational theory they have is that some sense of Hillary Clinton’s inevitability, promoted by Democratic insiders, discouraged people from voting for Bernie Sanders. That’s probably even true to some extent, though I doubt it made the difference.
The less rational version is that the presence of the superdelegates, who were assumed to be in Hillary’s pocket, discouraged people from voting for Bernie Sanders. That assumes that voters know way more about the inside details of the nominating process than even Democratic primary voters do (but that they nevertheless don’t believe the superdelegates would flip to a strong earned-delegate leader, even though they did exactly that against Hillary Clinton in 2008).
And then there are all the claims that the DNC was somehow involved in vote suppression in Republican-governed states, which, no.
Barbara
@Morzer: If they were all of that they could have kept Sanders effectively out from the start. They did not. They made mistakes, sure, but your posts are too close to criticizing the troops in the trenches for not keeping their buttons polished just as the mustard gas is being released by the enemy. It is hard to take this kind of analysi as useful for fighting the actual battles we face.
Kay
Important factual note for reporters: Hillary Clinton wasn’t charged or convicted of anything.
We’re now going to pretend she got off scot-free for the crime they invented. It’s ass covering. They spent 20 months on emails so they will now pretend they found something. This is why this country is insane. There’s no objective reality.
tobie
@mai naem mobile: Do you have any links for this? I really want to read up on it because I think western and western-styled democracies are going to be challenged by Russian involvement on a massive scale. Someone said we need to keep on asking for the tax returns and that is absolutely right. Trump’s conflicts of interest threaten the republic.
Kay
@Matt McIrvin:
They can’t come up with who would have run, though. Which candidates didn’t enter because of the “invisible primary” where Clinton was the favorite? We need names.
Juice Box
@Amir Khalid: Parties rarely win a third term. The Rs won a series of terms after the Civil War and the Ds held the WH after the Great Depression. GHWB won a third term and even after a successful little war failed to earn his second term.
Barbara
@Matt McIrvin: I think Sanders would not have run if someone more serious than O’Malley and more progressive than Webb had been running. To the extent the DNC kept that from happening it was a mistake because it is always a mistake.
Peale
@YellowDog: that does explain why even after we passed the Bovine Rights Bill in 2009, the cattle didn’t come out to the polls in herds like we expected them to and we lost the mid terms anyway. If we want that vote, and I’ve been saying this for years, we need to run a vegetarian. Having Bill Clinton stand in for one this cycle wasn’t good enough. He’s not actually running and he’s just a recent convert anyway. The cattle want someone who has been with them from the beginning. Noting that the other candidate actually sold steaks couod’nt offset that mistrust.
The good news is that our current disarray offers a new path forward for reaching that community. The other side doesn’t appear to want that vote either and while they are going to be saddled with Trump again in four years, we can be out with our dogs making a better case for ourselves.
Baud
The DNC is our side’s OMG EBOLA ISIS!!!
Tenar Darell
@Matt McIrvin: Watch out for Tom Cotton. He’s a smoother version of Ted Cruz, according to everything I’ve read. & I bet he’s studying up right now.
Barbara
@Kay: Al Franken, Sherrod Brown, Andrew Cuomo (gag). Perhaps others but those come to mind.
Kay
@Barbara:
I know someone who works for Sherrod Brown. He didn’t want to run for President. He said that over and over.
Chris
@fuckwit:
I would say “the myth of Noble Farmer, used to justify the real goal of defending slave owners.” In the same way that modern conservative rhetoric is all about empowering small business owners, when the reality is all about protecting racism and megacorporate power.
That would be an odd rationale, to say the least. In Europe as in America, the stronghold for the aristocracy was in the country, not the cities.
I’d believe that.
Jake the antisoshul soshulist
I have a lot of trouble deciding which is more deplorable (I prefer despicable),
those who voted for Trump because of his rhetoric, or those who voted for
him despite his rhetoric.
D58826
I’m tired of reading about how the democrats failed the so called ‘deplorables’. Now I agree that when the urban folks look down on the ‘hicks’ its wrong but Hillary didnot invent that. And the rural folks have their own putdowns of people who live in urban areas. I also agree that we should not lump conservative voters who disagree with gay marriage on religious grounds with the KKK. On the other hand, the very folks who are saying that we should understand their perspective are quite willing to pass laws stripping people they disagree with of their rights. There are all manner of tweets and articles about how the democrats should respect the Trump voters. These come from the same people who either spent the last eight years depicting the Obamas as monkeys or remained silent as others did it. Most of the leadership of the GOP were not birthers but they looked the other way because it was a good way to motivate the base and win elections. What is the old saying evil can only flourish when good people remain silent.
All of that being said I think the democrats and Hillary supporters should follow Michelle’s advise – when they go low we go high. As hard as it might be I think we should live up to our ideals and set a better example. That doesn’t mean not to protest but keep it civil AND peaceful.
Chris
@Mary G:
This. “Stop telling us it’s going to be okay” is easily the statement I agree with the most that I’ve heard all week.
Kay
yup. You can. There isn’t more discussion of it because it’s frightening and outrageous so we’re all going to pretend it’s normal and write 5 million words on white working class voters who are really fashionable right now.
And Comey is still in charge. Of the national police.
D58826
@Barbara: Sorry I think he would have run regardless. It was an ego trip and the others you mentioned would not have passed the Sanders purity pony test
martian
@DivF: I guess I could see how someone might espouse those views, but I don’t get how the system already in place was a conspiracy to stop Bernie Sanders. Serious question: was there a remedy suggested that didn’t involve a time machine? Was the DNC supposed to throw out the results?
@Peale: All over the place nonsense is pretty much my impression, but the supporters are so vehement about the injustice that I wanted to spend some time understanding their logic. These same people will be around for future elections, and now Bernie is making noise about reforming the DNC, so I want to have an idea of where they’re going.
Baud
@D58826:
That’s how it works. We need to respect them, but if they don’t respect us, it’s because we failed to lead and meet them halfway.
Kay
@Chris:
Or, worse, stop telling is it is up to us to make it okay.
I want this 70 old man held accountable for his words and actions. It’s not my fucking duty to soften the effect or make it all better. It’s his. 100%. He did it. He should have to fix it. Not me.
Barbara
@Kay: Okay. But it is hard for me to believe that NO ONE else would have wanted to run. And if there really was no one else, why was that?
Baud
@martian:
Yes. In the end, the superdelegates were supposed to elevate Bernie over Hillary.
Chris
@oldster:
At this point, I’m less worried about war (though that’s an option too, to be sure) than I am about civil liberties crackdowns. There will be a terrorist attack by a Muslim at some point in the next four years, and when the usual crowd of fascists starts up their hysterics about how we need to take the political correctness gloves off and really lay down the law on These People, this time they’ll have a sympathetic ear in the White House.
Peale
@Matt McIrvin: oh I don’t think trump will be popular. He will poll higher now than he did in the election because new presidents always do. But I also think if the GOP is smart, they might be able to keep him popular even as they’re walking back promises. I think it’s smart if they really want to gut Medicare to do it early. Then keep the “wins” for him coming at a steady trickle. Lots of small “wins”. This week they shutter the “anti bullying” group at DOE, next week, there’s a new factory opening in boontown that would have opened anyway, and Trump is there to point out how he’s revitalizing the country, then dump civil service employment protections for gays, then made move on to vote fraud prevention.
Tenar Darell
@Iowa Old Lady: @debbie: I started calling him the idiot quisling the other day. Because he’s a real “shanda fur die goyim.”
Iowa Old Lady
@Baud: Remember how just a week ago, all the talking heads said the Ds were going to have to reach out to Trump’s voters after the election?
ETA: Actually, they’re STILL saying it.
Chris
@Mai.naem.mobile:
I would not have wanted Sanders for VP, but I could never grok why she didn’t pick a vice-presidential candidate who spoke to the part of the party that voted for him – what you’d think would be the normal way to end a primary. Who did Tim Kaine fire up who wasn’t already in the Hillary camp?
Baud
@Iowa Old Lady: Yes! Unify the country!
Timurid
@Major Major Major Major:
Will they let us live there when it happens?
More seriously, that’s going to be one of the biggest wedges between progressives in the years to come… the competition for scarce jobs and space in blue states or cities. Anyone who’s experienced the academic job market… and the society and culture it has produced… knows that there are many people who will push others out of the nest without a second thought. And they’ll talk about how it’s perfectly logical that a couple of lines on your CV or a few spots in the ranking of your grad school are the difference between being someone whose life and aspirations have meaning and someone who will get what is coming to them, and hard. It’s going to be even more fun when ‘Plan B’ and ‘alt ac’ consist of ‘dodging bricks in Alabama.’
martian
@Baud: “There are lots of people who aren’t our allies who still exist in the world. Treat them the same way.”
True. But there will be future primaries and future candidates, dog willing, and all this will resurface, so I want to understand. My own opinions on this would be considered really inflammatory, and the least I can do is make sure I’m really, really clear on what I’m criticizing before I let fly.
Barbara
@Chris: It is sometimes lost that Jefferson’s vision had a highly romantic view of certain images of America that still haunt us. The noble agrarian, the utility of having the wherewithal to use violence to counter tyranny — the irony is that his policies actually jump started the industrialization that he claimed he hated, while his agrarian romance undermined the mental habits necessary for the scientific exploration that he claimed to love. Saying he was complex is not enough. Critiquing the inherent conflicts in his vision is necessary, and it goes well beyond his dependence on slaves for the kind of life he wanted to lead even as he claimed to hold liberty as the highest virtue.
D58826
@Kay: I’ve said before I think there are a number of reasons that Hillary lost. Different reasons for different voting blocs and areas of the country. If a couple of different things had gone Hillary’s way she would have won. Comy’s act of treason (or is it sedition) simply pushed some of those wavering factors in Trumps direction without the time for the Hillary team to respond and win them back
Baud
@martian: That’s fine. Even noble. But while I’m happy to compromise with others on policy, I can’t countenance anyone who falsely calls us liars and cheats. That’s why this stuff makes me angry.
Chris
@Brachiator:
There’s… a horrifying movie from the Great Depression era (I’ve never actually been able to bring myself to see it; just know the story) called “Gabriel Over The White House,” that’s about a corrupt and godless president who nearly dies, wakes up having had a revelation from God, and then proceeds to basically install a fascist dictatorship that cleans up the country of all its crime and corruption.
I think that movie plot is basically exactly what a ton of religious right voters believe is happening or about to happen with Trump.
Juice Box
@Kay: That makes Comey head of the Gestapo.
Chris
@Matt McIrvin:
I think your Jim Crow analogy is on point. The white South spent decades and decades after the Civil War in desperate poverty, and yet still supported and voted for the ruling elites that made their country that way, because those elites kept telling them it was blacks and Yankees’ fault, and they preferred to believe that than to blame the elites. When Trump’s policies screw his supporters, that’s what they’ll do.
D58826
@Peale: Right it will be the reverse of the 2009 obstruct Obama plan. A steady stream of wins for Trump to show that that he can govern and that the gridlock of the past 8 years was all the fault of Obama who failed to reach out to the GOP. (remember that line from the talk shows. Obama didn’t have Mitch over for schmoozing and drinks). It won’t matter how bad the legislation is, it will just a positive story about the government working. And it will succeed. After all the GOP paid no price for obstruction so they will get all do credit for no long obstructing.
Tripod
The Democratic Party is what it is – way, way more JC Penney than Che Botique. But that don’t stop the unicorn dreamers. Which is all fine, just don’t claim it is the fault of the elites or the system, when the rank and file declines on the performance package upgrade.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay:
One I’ve heard named is Kirsten Gillibrand, and I can see that. She seems like a younger Hillary in many ways, though (with a different backstory), not a starkly super-progressive alternative. Clinton’s loss may actually make her a less likely national candidate.
The most obvious one is Joe Biden, and then you get into the question of whether he was only kept out by his son dying of cancer and not by the threat of Hillary. But, again, not a Sandersite left alternative at all; in many ways he’s like a male Hillary.
The person they’re probably really thinking of is Elizabeth Warren. It’s questionable whether Warren would have ever wanted to run for President under any circumstances, though.
martian
@Matt McIrvin: That’s all so inside baseball. An “air of inevitability” was enough to move millions of votes? I can’t grasp how people believe that.
@Baud: Things started getting really authoritarian when they wanted millions of votes ignored in favour of anointing the losing candidate because he was so obviously the right choice to his followers. I wonder if all populist movements are authoritarian under the skin.
Betty Cracker
@Kay:
Truth. It’s also why we’re ripe for the picking. Oh the irony: the party that still crows about Ronald Reagan defeating communism is busily selling its soul to the puppet of a dead-eyed ex-KGB revanchist.
Kay
@Mai.naem.mobile:
That’s how I feel too, sadly. After the financial crisis, I realized the consequences didn’t hit people as hard because of safety net programs- food stamps, Medicaid, unemployment. free and reduced school lunches, heating vouchers, rent vouchers. They really take the edge off 16% unemployment. The problem is they take that for granted, that it’s there if and when they need it, and that isn’t true. It was hard to get and it’s hard to keep. None of this infrastructure we all rely landed from outer space. people put it in and people can dismantle it. It’s fragile.
Chris
@Betty Cracker:
This is why Charles Johnson of LGF, originally America’s greatest Islamophobe, ultimately switched sides. He went to some big conference in Europe about the dangerous Islamic threat, and was shocked to discover that most of his fellow Islamophobes were out-of-the-closet fascists; even more shocked when his readers didn’t give a shit and thought he was just slandering the good holy warriors of fundamentalist anti-Islam.
As for George Soros, it’s not hard to see the implications behind “everything that happens in this country is the work of the rich Jewish financier pulling everyone’s strings behind the curtain.”
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
We’re going to “get thru this” by pretending it isn’t happening. That’s the plan!
Matt McIrvin
@Peale: I just heard that Trump is proposing some incredibly liberal student debt-relief program. I guess he’s going the Huey Long route, though I doubt that will sit well with the Republicans who now control Congress. Instead with this stuff he’ll be trying to bamboozle the Democrats into playing nice with him. (We know what happens when you try to collect on Trump’s deals.)
But it means there’s going to be some interesting intra-Republican fighting if he keeps up with it.
Denali
If they do try to charge Hillary with anything, I will be out in the streets. She won the popular vote.
Matt McIrvin
@Chris: It took him a looooong time to figure that out. Hell, I was a pretty big sucker in the post-9/11 era, and even I could tell that guy’s comment section was a fascist/revanchist cesspit.
Peale
@Matt McIrvin: if warren had wanted to run for president, she picked a strange way of doing it.
Chris
@Baud:
It’s also funny that all the NeverTrumpists I know have been saying for ages that Trump is not a real conservative and is really just another Democrat and this election is a choice between a Democrat and a Democrat… And yet everything I’ve read from them for the past five days has been them emphatically waggling their finger at the Hillary Democrats and how appalling it is that they’re being so mean to the Trump “Democrats.” As opposed to the way they treated Clinton and Obama.
D58826
@Betty Cracker: It was many years ago in PolySci 101 in an article descriping the Article II powers of the presidency. There was a quote from 1952 in which someone said Ike was going to be very disappointed as POTUS. As a general he was used to giving orders and having things happen. As POTUS he will give orders and nothing will happen. Trump will learn that lesson but unlike Ike he will lash out and blame that the system is rigged and fixed against him.
Matt McIrvin
@martian:
The idea was that, after the Sanders camp had spent months railing against the superdelegate system as an undemocratic fix-up, the superdelegates were supposed to turn around and anoint Sanders even though Clinton had won more delegates.
Matt McIrvin
@Peale: The “Draft Warren” movement basically morphed into the heart of the Bernie Sanders movement, though.
Chris
@Matt McIrvin:
The best-case scenario for Trump (also incredibly unlikely) is that he ends up as a poor-man’s-Teddy-Roosevelt, a racist and nationalist psycho who, however, is at least better than the old guard on economics.
I am dubious as all get-out, though.
Chris
@Matt McIrvin:
Likewise. Even as a teenage Republican, the Islamophobia was always a bridge too far for me.
In LGF’s case, I choose to celebrate the happy ending when he finally woke the fuck up, because as his comments section indicates, there are a lot of people who wouldn’t even have had that much sense: they’d see all the literal Nazis and go “oh, well. I guess Nazis aren’t so bad then.”
But there are a lot of people who can’t forgive him for his past, and I can’t blame them. LGF spent seven long years trying to be Radio Rwanda before its owner finally had his road-to-Damascus moment.
D58826
@Kay: True but maybe better than a political show trial. Trump may be having second thoughts (and the operative word is ‘may’) but the mob wants blood.
Procedural/legal question – can Obama issue a full pardon for past/present/future charges but not release it to the public? Just give it to the people at risk. If the blood lust/lynch mob dies down and nothing happens then it is something the Clinton’s can show their grandkids. If the mob is still braying for blood and Rudy appoints a grand inquisitor, she can pull it out, wave it in Rudy’s face and flip him the bird. Sure they will howl and accuse Obama of all kinds of thingamajigs but they have been doing that any way. And Obama will be in super NMFTG mode.
Matt McIrvin
@D58826:
I remember “liberal” turning into the dirtiest word in the world during the 1980s. Nobody outside our bubble has ever made the slightest fricking move toward respecting and understanding liberals–we’re assumed, I guess, not to need it because we supposedly already control all mainstream cultural outlets. We get it from the right and from the left, too.
Matt McIrvin
@Chris: There was another blog called Balloon Juice that I seem to remember. Though Cole flipped before Johnson.
I think I eventually formulated a rule that the later you wised up, the angrier you were.
D58826
@Matt McIrvin: Which is why the term progressive came into common use. Less baggage. And why for all his faults Bill ran as a centrist third way democrat.
martian
@Matt McIrvin: A lot of them still think the fix was in and are really wedded to the idea that Bernie was cheated and Trump is the (deserved) consequence. That opinion has been all over the threads here, and I found dKos unreadable in the aftermath of the election. So, where is all that going to go? It’s like the majority of Democratic voters aren’t legitimate Democrats and they want to push us out or shut us up somehow. There’s no common ground. And now Bernie Still Not A Fucking Democrat Sanders is going to propose reforms. Can one of those reforms be that all official candidates must submit their tax returns, pretty please?
BellyCat
@Timurid:
Truth. But the part that most people don’t realize is that in many (larger?) academic institutions, those who are “approved” today are now the ones who are the most compliant with blindly following directives from above. Scholarship and inquiry are imperiled in academia like never before.
D58826
@Kay: Hmmm Maybe Harry Reed is going to need one of those pardons also. According to KellyAnnne Conway on fox today – Harry Reeds comments are beyond the pale and advises him to be careful in the legal sense.
Matt McIrvin
@D58826: Yes, though to some extent “progressive” was adopted more as a less-loaded replacement for “socialist”, for leftists to the left of liberals (who may have thought of the term “liberal” in the classic economic sense).
jenn
@D58826: I think Harry’s response to that will be: “Bring it.”
WTF
The term “conservative” used to be an epithet in the 30’s.
“He was using abusive and obscene language, calling people Conservatives and all that.”
When I read that about Peter Viereck in 2006, it set me on a course of inquiry that has landed me where I am today. I’m back to being a conservative republican. I can’t seem to find any genuine conservatives on the other side. An actual republican ceased to exist sometime between Lincoln’s assassination and TR and FDR. Liberalism has probably lost its way as well along the road to here. Neoliberalism certainly has made a mockery of it.
DesertFriar
@Morzer:
Given Obama Derangement Syndrome (which should have been covered by ACA), He should:
Pardon Trump from Trump University
Pardon Melania for being an undocumented worker
Pardon Trump for using illegal workers to build his hotels
Pardon Trump for barging into women’s dressing rooms
Pardon Trump’s business dealing with the mafia
Pardon Trump for racial housing discrimination
Pardon Trump for all the Sexual Assault allegations
Pardon Trump for undocumented Polish workers working Trump Towers
Pardon Trump for breaking casino rules in New Jersey
Pardon Trump for antitrust viovations when he tried to take over Bally
This will show the media how the Democrats/Liberals are trying to put the past behind us in a unite as a nation.
And if the past is any indicator, it will make sure the Republicans do the opposite.
WTF
I still can’t find any people who have any idea what a republican actually is.The Irish and the Scots had a handle on it.
misterpuff
@NotMax: So Trump Senior was a “Gentrifier”. Who lived in the shantytowns…poor people. Where did they go?
J R in WV
@Matt McIrvin:
Last New Year’s Eve we were at a party, and I overheard on guest’s outburst hating on African-Americans, calling out how much he hates “Ni**ers, Can’t stand them!”
This guy is a heavy equipment operator doing major construction work, probably making $75K a year in a rural impoverished county. He may never have met a Black guy, really, except perhaps on the job…
I’ll never understand this kind of ignorant hate. And being on top or others, even if poor enough to have trouble feeding the kids!