Study after study (example) has shown that Hillary received unusually negative coverage from the media. Some of that is probably the effect of twenty-five years of slo-mo swiftboating.
But here’s a question: did Hillary receive such negative coverage in large part because Trump generated so much justifiably negative coverage? (The study I linked to showed 75% negative for Trump, 56% for Hillary but others show that Hillary’s percentage of negative coverage was as high or higher than Trump’s). Have we reached a point where both-sides-do-it is so strong that if one candidate is bat shit crazy, the other candidate most also be trashed constantly because balance? I think we have.
JPL
This is what I know, 24/7 covered all of Trump’s rallies, and often would cover Hillary’s events for a few minutes. If they were on at the same time, guess who they showed. Hillary spoke about issues, and policy is so boring. In fact, I received notification from CBS a few minutes ago, that Trump is speaking now.
Corner Stone
If it had been Romney or Kasich the overall level of negative coverage would have balanced out about the same as HRC.
They lowered every possible bar for Trump and so they had to drag HRC down by holding her to the highest scrutiny possible.
Patricia Kayden
Some media outlets like NYT had a special hatred of all things Clinton so that played a role in her negative coverage. It’s hard to believe that Obama or another candidate would gave generated as much toxic coverage as Clinton.
taylormattd
Yep.
raven
I thought the Times article on how the Russian see her was pretty interesting (and I don’t give a fuck if you read the damn paper or not so save it).
Baud
The most negative media story about Trump I remember was that he wasn’t campaigning well enough to beat Hillary.
Emerald
Yes. We have. Add to that the NYT’s 25-year smear campaign against the Clintons and the fact that the media spent essentially no time reporting policy and you have the recipe for this disaster.
Even with the obvious sexism, the voter suppression, Comey and the Russians, without the media vendetta against Hillary this doesn’t happen.
And she’s still going to get more votes than any other candidate in history once they finish counting (2.9 million ahead currently).
JPL
Are there studies on the amount of time that Trump was covered by 24/7, compared to Hillary. That’s what I want to see.
Baud
@Emerald: She’s going to get more votes than Obama 2008?
Emerald
@Baud:
So says Charlie Cook. We’ll see.
Baud
@Emerald: Population really grew more than I realized.
Kryptik
I think that’s part of it. But only part.
Part of it was just how unprecedentedly reviled Hillary was among the media castes. Where even positive coverage had to begin with some snide backhanded comment about how bad or evil she was.
Part of it was the Trump obsession by the media, positive or negative. Regardless of how they covered him, they covered him many times at the expense of Hillary. That not only meant that her policy talk simply never penetrated, but it also meant the only way she could really receive coverage was by making Trump the subject.
Finally, part of it was the way they covered both. Not just positive or negative framing, but in who decided how the stories were framed. Anything covering Trump, the media usually allowed Trump to decide the frame for it. Anything covering Hillary, the media usually allowed…Trump to decide the frame for it. Regardless of how the story was or who it was about, the media basically danced to Trump’s tune willfully, despite (and often times, because) of the sheer amount of abuse and scapegoating they received and STILL receive to this day.
lollipopguild
@Baud: Gird your loins. Baud! 2020!
Patricia Kayden
@Emerald: You’re correct that Secretary Clinton did well given the outrageously negative media coverage. Unfortunately, a few swing states did her in.
Emerald
@Baud:
It wasn’t a low-turnout election, despite what everybody said.
gogol's wife
The whole thing is so depressing it’s ruining my Christmas. I realize that’s a small blip on the scheme of things.
How did this happen just overnight? How could that many people vote for this creep? And his evil was right there for all to see, no matter what the coverage of Hillary was. If it had been him running against Romney I would have voted for Romney, enthusiastically — anyone to stop Trump. How could they not vote for Hillary?
Baud
@Emerald: I’ll like to see the stats once all the dust settles.
@gogol’s wife: I’m with you.
Emerald
@Patricia Kayden:
It was fewer than 80,000 votes strategically placed in five crucial counties.
Yeah, uh huh.
And that overcomes 3 million votes.
Corner Stone
As Kate at SNL said, “Has the whole world gone crazy?”
Yes. Yes it has.
gogol's wife
@Emerald:
And they act as if they won in a landslide.
I just keep imagining how they’d act if the situation were reversed, if Hillary were becoming president based on the EC and Trump had 3 million more votes. Then I get even more depressed.
Corner Stone
“He..he just kissed Putin! On live TV!”
“Sorry, Secretary. That could mean anything. Now back to the real story. Your emails.”
“AAAAAWWWWWWWWWW!!!……”
Corner Stone
@gogol’s wife: They would be assassinating people. And the media would treat it as a both sides issue.
joel hanes
The media, and the NYT in particular, have had it in for the Clintons for thirty years.
And the media is wired (by Broderism, false equivalence, and an utter terror of right-wing accusations of bias) for Republicans. They trashed Gore. They trashed Kerry. Neither of those was justifiable.
Baud
@gogol’s wife: You know, I never get depressed with how they act. The only thing that depresses me is how we respond.
Emerald
@gogol’s wife:
If this situation were reversed there is no way Hillary would be inaugurated. The media would be in 9/11 mode.
Emerald
@joel hanes:
They tried to trash Obama too with Jeremiah Wright, but Obama foxed ’em.
Nicole
Yes.
And it was absolutely impossible to try to talk to on-the-left Hillary haters about how the media has attacked her for 25 years because they just wouldn’t believe it. Especially ones under about 35 years old because they couldn’t remember a time when the Clintons weren’t being painted as corrupt for something or other. Even when she said something unassailably true and positive, the media could find a negative spin. I remember being in my early 20s, listening to how disgraceful and inappropriate it was that the First Lady would have made SUCH a political speech at the UN (this was the “Women’s rights are human rights” speech). Everyone wants to think that they are a special snowflake immune to the effects of advertising.
On another level, I think the Clintons are easy for White folk to resent because he was born poor and she was born barely middle class and through sheer force of their formidable intellects and ambitions, rose to the very top of American politics. If they’d been born rich, White America could shrug and say, “Well… if I’D been born rich, too…” The Clintons can make average White Americans feel like failures.
Kryptik
@gogol’s wife:
And whenever people point out the popular vote, they tend to harp on how we can’t let ‘California and NYC decide for everyone’. But apparently it’s alright for votes in Bumfuck Arkansas to mean expressly more than the ones in LA and NYC. And no one brings up the idea that if a candidate was simply that much better, then ‘real America’ would vote for them that much more to cancel out the supposed ‘liberal Dem’ floor in the large metro areas.
Instead, it’s about how winning land and property and acreage means more than actual people.
Corner Stone
“The Trump supporters are executing elected D officials but the HRC supporters are saying it’s criminal and should be prosecuted. So, both sides.”
Davis X. Machina
@Emerald: Do. Not. Mess. With. Narrative. (I’m not warning you twice.)
RepubAnon
@efgoldman: – Yes, the press has always hated the Clintons , especially Hillary. They desperately wanted to have a Democratic scandal to balance the Watergate scandal, and hoped the Clintons would provide it. This resulted in the media blowing every Drudge-provided molehill into a media mountain.
Besides, nothing generates clicks like a good Clinton scandal – real, overblown, or completely faked. Remember, network news is a profit center first, last, and always.
Nicole
@gogol’s wife: I think Patton Oswalt put it well when he said this election we discovered that America is even more sexist than it is racist, and we’re REALLY racist.
Emerald
@Davis X. Machina:
(literally lol-ing here)
Baud
@Corner Stone: “Dems need to stop sneering and figure out how to reach out to the assassins.”
Davis X. Machina
@gogol’s wife:
Original sin. The fundamental depravity of mankind. Au fond, people are shits.
Occasionally we’ll all not be shits, for a while, temporarily. And then some people are never shits (saints) and some people are shits all the time (assholes).
St. Augustine is the only political philosopher — well, maybe Thomas Hobbes, too — you really need.
Corner Stone
@Baud: “So what if they could only afford the Chinese model AK to riddle you and your family with bullets. Doesn’t that make them the Real Americans ™ here?”
Davis X. Machina
@efgoldman: Everything in politics is over-determined. There are two effects (win, lose) and a veritable plethora of causes. It’s like sports in that regard.
Come to think of it, without Democratic politics, and American League baseball, my life would be an empty shell….
liberal
@Davis X. Machina: I’d say some mixture of ever-present stupidity and ever-present antisocial shitbaggery.
Emerald
@efgoldman:
But all of that was driven by the coverage. The Comey letter, for example, was a non-story. Sure wasn’t treated that way.
James E Powell
@Nicole:
That’s what I said back in 2008 when Clinton lost to a black guy with the middle name Hussein.
Voters may say things like corrupt, or emails, or Clinton Foundation, or whatever, but these are just words they choose to express their uneasiness with the idea of a woman in the top spot. Was this all or even most of Clinton’s problem? No, but it was larger than generally acknowledged and it was certainly large enough to cost her the swing states that Obama won.
Baud
@Emerald: I agree. Media was cause #1.
Corner Stone
@Emerald: How about 11 days of endless loops of a woman taking her time with some assistance getting into a waiting vehicle?
schrodinger's cat
@Baud: He is an affront to kindness, decency, knowledge and wisdom. In Sanskrit there is a saying whose rough translation is, when one’s destruction is imminent one is unwise
Corner Stone
“She’s so secretive! Why wouldn’t she just get ahead of this!? Most secretive ever!”
“Tax returns? Who gives a shit who he owes money to or what he has paid the federal government. NON-STORY. He tells it like it is!”
Emerald
@Corner Stone:
Because pneumonia! After she stood in the heat for an hour in a black suit while wearing a kevlar vest.
The woman is badass!
Baud
@Emerald: Agree. I’m still struggling with my own weakness in comparison.
Davis X. Machina
@Corner Stone:
That’s what they said. But the guy lies like a whole village of Persian rug weavers. Is there anybody in public life who tells it less like what it is?
What they mean is “He says shit I wish I could say without getting divorced, fired, or laughed at.”
Mnemosyne
@Nicole:
Add in the report from Russia that Raven linked to above, particularly:
It’s like Clinton Derangement Syndrome metastasized around the globe and made her into this larger-than-life evil figure in both Russia and the US.
I have this theory that recent immigrants to the US are prone to becoming quite racist because they don’t have any of the filters for the 24/7 racist bullshit that white liberals try to develop. I’m wondering if a similar thing happened with Russia when they got involved with the US right wing and Republicans, heard nonstop declarations and conspiracy theories about the Clintons, and had no way to tell whether or not they were true because, hey, even the New York Times is repeating the same things!
hovercraft
@Corner Stone:
Her portrayal of Hillary as a cold, calculating, ambitious, say anything, cynical bitch, did not help, SNL has a habit/history of creating/perpetuating caricatures of candidates, that do influence voters perception of candidates. Before anyone says Sarah Palin, let me remind you that they used her own words almost exclusively.
Kate crying after the fact, doesn’t change the fact that like many others who bitched about everything she did and didn’t do, helped to turn many voters off this election cycle. @Emerald: not withstanding, many people did stay home, or voted third party, because reasons.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
Well, the real reason she lost is that she’s evil made flesh. I still hear about it all the fucking time from people I know who voted for Trump. Somebody brought up only last night about how she said she landed under sniper fire in Bosnia, and that things like that are why people don’t trust her. I didn’t know what the fuck to say to that. What can you say to that?
cosima
Rhetorical question, right?
My impression, from the beginning, was that the media was attempting to throw their weight around in regard to Clinton. They’d whined for the last 8 years about Obama being mean to them, not giving them enough access, blah blah blah. So, they wanted to send a message to Clinton about how she was reliant upon their goodwill, and when she was elected she’d better remember that, and be nicer to them than mean Obama was.
And so they cut off their nose to spite their face. As far as I’m concerned, President Obama held them in disdain because they earned every bit of that disdain (and then some). And now their lives are in (literal) danger, their jobs are in danger, their access is limited and in danger. And those are the minor repercussions.
Baud
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.): Nothing. Respect their choice to focus on only those things that support their world view.
misterpuff
Drumpf: “800 hundred Billion Trade Deficit! Who made that Deal?”
Me: “All your billionaire friends and the Trump Company itself. Dumbass.”
O. Felix Culpa
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
Thank God Trump won by a landslide? //post-truth society
raven
@Mnemosyne:
Baud
The most apples-to-apples example of media bias is how they treat the failure to hold press conferences. It’s the exact same issue, and the coverage is completely different.
Oldgold
The media knew Hillary would win. This gave the media license to eschew serious substantive matters in favor of equivalence entertainment.
I think the same certitude as to the outcome of the election led to Obama’s nonchalant reaction to the Russian intervention.
Because so many, including me, did not believe such a political calamity could possibly occur, it did. I could have come more, I did not.
Baud
@Oldgold: There was a progressive blogger who said the same thing in defense of why he was only going after Hillary. Can’t remember the name right now.
Corner Stone
Well, if there is a standard one holds oneself to, then I guess this is as good as any.
Patricia Kayden
@Nicole: Then 53% of White women who voted are sexist too? That figure still shocks me. Trump was horrendously sexist but he still got the majority of White women to vote for him. His SCOTUS will overturn Roe v. Wade and restrict access to contraception. I guess the women who voted for him could give a damn about that.
Mnemosyne
@raven:
I still think that a LOT of that was sexism. That’s why you had 20 percent of African-American men voting for Trump — sexism.
There was a larger contingent than I expected of people who didn’t care (that much) what color the president is, as long as he has a peni$.
cosima
@hovercraft: I was thinking about that just yesterday, about their b.s. skit (not funny) where she & her staff were dancing & drinking to celebrate the release of the ‘p*ssy’ tape. Was thinking about their tendency to demonise Dems.
It’s possible that I missed all of the Zombie Eyed Granny Starver skits, or Yertle the McConnell Turtle skits, or Trey Gowdy skits, etc etc etc., as I don’t regularly watch SNL (being in the UK). But I doubt it.
Iowa Old Lady
I can’t read discussions like this. It’s too depressing and too late. She won’t be the candidate next time.
O. Felix Culpa
@Mnemosyne:
Sadly, yes. Throughout the campaign I couldn’t fathom the chasm between the poised, intelligent, dedicated, somewhat wonkish Hillary I saw and the archetypal emasculating Gorgon-Medusa-Witch other people saw.
Baud
@Iowa Old Lady: True. But the media brought down Gore and Kerry too. I don’t know what we do about that in 2020.
Mnemosyne
@Patricia Kayden:
As a white woman, I can tell you that many white women are pretty damn sexist, especially (but not only) the ones in the 65+ demographic. Plus you have the megachurch women who hate abortion and will vote for anyone who promises to end it.
There is a not-uncommon phenomenon among some professional women in Hillary’s age group where they liked to be the sole woman in their professional group, because it proves to them that they are special and exceptional. So, as someone else referenced above, to see another woman do even better than they did? Unacceptable.
Nicole
@Patricia Kayden: Yes, they are. I have a friend of 30+ years, living in Florida, who has explained to me more than once that she does not feel that it’s right for a woman to be President.
We live in a deeply, deeply patriarchal society. It’s folly to think that women are immune to the effects of being told we’re second best over the course of our lives.
In the children’s book Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (one of the two most influential books I read in my life, the other being Black Beauty), one of the characters has a very powerful speech to the 9-year-old protagonist that there are certain Whites in the country who hold onto being White because they have little else to hold onto. The book was set in the 1930s, written the 1970s, and sometimes I think little has changed since either the setting or the period in which it was written. Certainly this year a lot of women chose to hang onto their racial identity above their own well-being.
O. Felix Culpa
@Mnemosyne:
E.g., my in-laws. We don’t see each other much.
hovercraft
@raven:
Sadly there are far too many examples of people who decided that they hated the she devil enough that they were willing to cast their lot in with the shitgibbon, number one on that list white women. These people have been indoctrinated by the relentless attacks on her by the media and the GOP, and they jumped on board with the circus performer, because he was new and different and an outsider.
Davis X. Machina
@Patricia Kayden: We aren’t surprised, really, when people vote against their economic self-interest, and vote their identity instead. Because there are multiple self-interests in play.
Presidential lections aren’t referenda. A generalized preference for the status quo may lead a voter to put up with gross sexism, to get the rest of the package. Remember the story about the 2008 canvasser — in PA — who had a husband in the depths of the house call out to the woman she was talking on the stoop with “Tell her, we’re voting for the nigger.”
Starfish
@Mnemosyne: Your theory is gross. A lot of immigrants are highly educated, and they came to the US legally. They draw a big distinction between legal and illegal immigration and feel that it is unfair if a process that was very expensive and time consuming for them is simplified for people that they see as less deserving.
If they are medical professionals, they have eye balls and can see that some patients that are on Medicaid are dressed better than their own families; and they assume that those people are scamming the system. There may not be a lot of patients like that, but doctors who are seeing 30-40 patients a day are going to see someone like that occasionally.
HeleninEire
When I was young. Let’s say 12 years old; so 1974. Gloria Steinem was asked if a woman would become president before a black man. Her answer was that all types, sizes, colors of men would become president before a woman. I thought YOU BE NUTS! A BLACK MAN BEFORE A WHITE WOMAN??? Turns out she was right.
O. Felix Culpa
@Davis X. Machina: Wanted to ask you a question: any recommendations on books about successful resistance movements of recent decades? You mentioned recently that you were doing some reading on that topic.
Another Scott
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.): She got the “sniper fire” story right in her book, published years before her 2008 run. There was obviously no intent on her point to pull the wool over people’s eyes. She garbled the story (there were snipers in the area, but not around the airport), probably as a result of exhaustion and of saying roughly the same thing to hundreds of groups and trying to make it sound interesting each time.
It’s a nothing-burger. But there’s this mania for finding out what she’s “really” like even though she’s been in the public eye for roughly 30 years, has a record of speeches and votes in the Senate, has a record of speeches and actions as SoS, etc., etc…. :-/
Cheers,
Scott.
Mnemosyne
@efgoldman:
Sorry, I don’t think I was clear — I was really only talking about the Russians adopting the right wing’s view of Hillary and using that as a parallel to something I’ve witnessed about racism.
Out here in So Cal, we have not infrequent problems with Russian/Eastern European immigrants who commit hate crimes against African-Americans, so, yeah, there’s a history. It was not a huge shock in So Cal that Bill Cosby’s son was murdered by a Russian immigrant who was pissed that a black man was driving a better car.
Davis X. Machina
@O. Felix Culpa: See butt end of thread on Eric’s kibosh of Ivanka’s ‘coffees’.
O. Felix Culpa
@Starfish:
Really? Any documentation for these hypothetical immigrant medical professionals seeing hypothetically well-dressed Medicaid patients drawing unsubstantiated conclusions about hypothetical scamming?
Davis X. Machina
@O. Felix Culpa: It’s true in a narrative way. It doesn’t have to be literally true.
O. Felix Culpa
@Davis X. Machina: Will do! Checked a couple of times and concluded that I had (as usual) killed the thread (such power!) and you had moved on. :)
JPL
So is the post going to turn in to a shoulda, coulda, discussion on Hillary’s campaign.
The news media failed everyone, when they didn’t mention Trump creating jobs overseas 24/7. They failed when they didn’t discuss tax returns and Russian ties 24/ 7. They discussed Hillary’s emails. For those who thought Joe would have easily won, good luck with that. Trump basically said Obama lost their factory jobs, even the ones that disappeared in the seventies and eighties.
Mnemosyne
@Starfish:
I’m not talking about highly educated professionals. I’m talking about shopkeepers and people like that. There has been some healing here in LA, but there were some pretty famous cases of Korean immigrant shopkeepers killing African-American teens they suspected of shoplifting.
Or I can just say that immigrants are just as prone to being naturally racist as American-born white people are and leave it at that.
gogol's wife
@hovercraft:
And now she’s depicting Kellyanne as an unwilling victim of Trump’s craziness.
gene108
@Emerald:
Only the frail and elderly get pneumonia. A real he-man, like we want for President, would not so much as get a cold.
The pneumonia really did hurt her. It dovetailed with the “lack of stamina” jibe launched by the Republicans.
And coupled with the sexist belief that since women are not as physically strong as men, on average, that they lack the inherent stamina and toughness of men.
hovercraft
@Patricia Kayden:
From an article by Emily Crockett at Vox, from November, titlled Why Misogyny Won.
It’s a long read, but worth the time.
schrodinger's cat
@Mnemosyne: Your anecdata does not jibe with actual data. Naturalized citizens went for Obama overwhelmingly in both 2008 and 2012. He got around 70% of that vote.
Aleta
@Another Scott:
Funny you mention that. Saw this in a Drs office the other day.
Time magazine cover August 2016: http://time.com/magazine/us/4416656/august-1st-2016-vol-188-no-5-u-s/
Starfish
@Mnemosyne: Stuff like that happens in urban areas, and I was not really aware of it until I went to college.
gene108
@JPL:
The media failed here too. Manufacturing has made its biggest comeback in decades under Obama. But no one bothered to point this FACT out.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Yes, but… There was a special contempt for HRC, greater I think than even that they had for her husband– because she’s a woman, because she’s “wooden” and/or “robotic”, because she’s secretive (even taking the last twenty years into account, I will never understand how not one Villager, that I ever saw, expressed even a glimmer of interest of what might’ve been in Colin Powell’s emails in the run up to the Iraq War), and… “Ambitious!” unlike everyone else who ever ran for president…
And she had some baggage that was, if not unique to Clintons, at least highly unusual. And they thought that there was no way Trump could win, so they never treated him like a real candidate. They, and the Clintons, and I, were not the only ones who thought that
(but he’s a billionaire, really)
O. Felix Culpa
@Davis X. Machina:
Oh, so it’s true in the manner of young bucks and t-bone steaks. I get it now.
raven
@JPL: “The Post”? The whole fucking blog.
Starfish
@O. Felix Culpa: So immigrants don’t talk to you because you want proof from them that their reality does not mesh with your own beliefs about reality?
rikyrah
@Mnemosyne:
13% of Black men voted for Ferret Head
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@hovercraft: there was also the sketch with Kate/Hillary and Val, the Bartender, and by the time they brough Alec Baldwin in to trump, I think McKinnon’s portrayal became more sympathetic.
The Weekend Update segments were much more bitchy about HRC, as I recall, and I’d be curious to see exactly who writes those jokes.
O. Felix Culpa
@Starfish: Curious that you are able to draw the conclusion from my comments that immigrants don’t talk to me.
Steve in the ATL
@Davis X. Machina:
American League baseball? With a DH? You poor soul–your life really is empty.
Mnemosyne
@schrodinger’s cat:
I have a feeling that what I’m trying to say is not coming across right. It’s meant to be a comment on speech and language, not necessarily behavior. It’s more akin to the Twitterbot that started spouting white supremacist garbage after being exposed to the Internet for 48 hours. We humans are somewhat immune to that toxic stew because we’re so used to swimming in it, but an algorithm picked right up on it.
What makes it a parallel is that the Russians similarly wouldn’t have a good guide to which sources about the Clintons were trustworthy and which ones aren’t, so when every media source available to them plus all of their business and political contacts tell them that Hillary is a corporatist shill who just wants to destroy everything that Wall Street can’t buy and is willing to bomb innocent people to get it, of course they’re going to believe it. They don’t really have a better way to judge it.
schrodinger's cat
@Mnemosyne: May be Russians in Russia but I don’t think what you say would necessarily apply to someone who has actually lived here.
Nicole
@rikyrah: Damon Young, at verysmartbrothas. com wrote a piece about this:
http://verysmartbrothas.com/why-13-of-black-men-voted-for-donald-trump-explained/
Mnemosyne
@schrodinger’s cat:
Right, that’s what I think Raven’s article is showing: the Russians in the Russian government have been getting so much anti-Clinton propaganda from American sources for so long that they actually believe it. Considering how many purported Democrats seem to actually believe that Hillary is a horrible, lying, conniving person who will do anything to get her way, why would we be surprised that the Russians would see her the same way? The Russians really are getting people from “both sides” telling them that she’s corrupt.
Davis X. Machina
@Steve in the ATL: I left Atlanta and never looked back with a velocity approaching c in 1983, and the National League was part of it. Plus no opera, lousy bookstores, the best sub shop in town was a Blimpies, etc, etc. And the traffic. (I say this last this as a Bostonian.)
If it weren’t for a bar in Little Five Points I’d have balled earlier. As it is, I make snowmen named Chamblee and Tucker, and run them over with my snowblower.
Bostonians are like Italian white wines — we really don’t travel well.
Davis X. Machina
@Nicole: Thank you — day-saving quality material.
Quinerly
@Nicole:
Excellent observation. Thank you.
Steve in the ATL
@Davis X. Machina:
This is every bit as good as your classic sparrow on a curtain rod post.
Mnemosyne
@Nicole:
Last I saw, it was 20 percent, but I think that was the first set of stats after Election Day. Phew!
I think I ran into one of those guys when I was doing voter registration in Nevada. He came across as a little … bipolar? Not quite sure how to express it. I let my male coworker try to talk him around to voting for Hillary because it didn’t seem like he was very open to having me say it.
Mnemosyne
@efgoldman:
I hope you’re right, but considering that you live 3000 miles further away from Russia than I do, it’s pretty easy for you to remain unconcerned.
Juice Box
@Patricia Kayden: I’m an engineer turned physician. I’ve heard both woman engineers and woman doctors say “I’m not a feminist.” Seriously, woman doctors and engineers who think that women should not be doctors and engineers.
Nicole
@Davis X. Machina: The Damon Young piece? Yeah; he’s a really sharp, funny writer. Verysmartbrothas has become a daily site visit for me; a lot of good pieces on it.
Villago Delenda Est
My nym. Again and again.
Wipe them out. All of them.
ruemara
@Nicole: actually, I disagree. I think if HRC had not given voice to the issues of systemic racism and maintained a fractious relationship with Obama, she would have done better. And if Obama had used his presidency to slap down BLM, protests and particularly black people, those 2x Obama voters wouldn’t have turned to Trump out of spiteful tribalism. In the end, America is misogynist but fucked up in the head racist.
debbie
@Corner Stone:
I hope they’ll keep up the Alec Baldwin Trump performances. It’s great watching something, knowing he’s also watching it and having a cow.
Nicole
@ruemara: I guess I file it under “Why Not Both?”
dopey-0
said efgoldman:
So Putin’s not going to nuke his new BFF. At least in the first year.
And China has a trillion dollars in Treasury Bonds, so they’ll (hopefully) think twice before launching their nukes our way.
So that leaves Trump. He will definitely get us killed.
Laura on Kaua'i
@efgoldman: I taught ESL for many years, to refugees and immigrants, and EVERY term I had Russian students I had to tell them to knock it off with the racism, that it wasn’t tolerated in my classroom. Twice it was so bad I had to call in the dean to let them know they either needed an attitude adjustment or they were out of the program.
The Russians cheated like crazy too, and were quite blatant about it as well. I understood some of the underlying cultural reasons for it, but couldn’t get them to grasp that it wouldn’t fly in a U.S. classroom – I wasn’t going to be their only instructor.
joel hanes
@Davis X. Machina:
St. Augustine is the only political philosopher — well, maybe Thomas Hobbes, too — you really need.
Interesting. I’d go with Lao Tsu and Niccolo Machiavelli
SiubhanDuinne
@Nicole:
I was incredibly fortunate in the late 1970s, when I was the cultural affairs producer for the NPR station in Flint, MI, to interview the author of ROTHMC Mildred Taylor for an hour. (I still have my autographed/inscribed first edition.) Powerful book.
Nicole
@SiubhanDuinne: Oh my god(dess); I am soooo envious. I read it about five years after it was published, in 4th grade. I grew up in a conservative, racially homogeneous area, but my excellent public school teachers did everything they could to try to broaden their students’ horizons. That book completely blew my 9-year-old world view apart. I imagine Mildred D Taylor was a fascinating and insightful interviewee.
I remember my teacher commenting that Ms. Taylor received death threats after the book came out and that also really stuck with me.
I still have my dogeared copy from 4th grade, tucked in a drawer at my stepmom’s house.
Monala
@Mnemosyne: 20% of Black men did not vote for Trump. 80% of Black men voted for Clinton. Only about 10% voted Trump (The rest, presumably voting 3rd party or leaving it blank).
LongHairedWeirdo
That’s part of it, but keep in mind that the Republicans always do their best to generate scads of bad press for the opposition. And since the reporters can’t say that a party who puts the full faith and credit of the US government at risk are batshit crazy, they have to take them seriously.
Hillary is good clickbait, also too.
(Am I misusing that meme?)