I had to run an errand a while ago and was listening to an interview with Bloomberg’s Josh Green on public radio. Green just released a book on Steve Bannon called “Devil’s Bargain,” and in the segment I heard, Green described Bannon’s worldview, allowed as how only a maroon like Trump would have given Bannon the time of day and detailed how Bannon harnessed Trump’s, uh, unique qualities to win.
I assume most here are familiar with Bannon’s white nationalist views. One insight Green attributes to Bannon is that the GOP could win at the presidential level in 2016 if it focused on concerns (read: prejudices) prevalent in the South. That is the exact opposite of what GOP establishment types were saying after the defeat of Romney. Turns out Bannon was right, with dumb luck and more than a little help from his friends (Russians, voter suppression, media incompetence, Comey, etc.).
I almost switched stations because hearing a rehash of the 2016 election is about as appealing to me these days as a double root canal. But then the interviewer asked Green if he thinks Bannon is pleased with how things are panning out now. Green replied that Bannon is almost certainly frustrated as hell to have overcome huge odds to get a shot at enacting his agenda, only to discover that Trump doesn’t have the focus or discipline to do the job.
That sounds about right. Bannon is a kook, but he is also a true believer, and to have labored mightily to construct the levers and weights necessary to smash the state, only to have the recalcitrant child who must push the buttons lose interest and wander off to watch Fox News and rage-tweet, must be absolutely enraging.
Trump is crooked enough to swallow a nail and shit a corkscrew, but beyond a talent for grift, he just isn’t very bright. He’s a bigot, so Bannon’s views of a glorious Aryan past and future are no doubt appealing. Trump’s a crook, so the possibility of fleecing marks on a global scale is irresistible. But he’s also susceptible to flattery and dependent on family enablers, so he surrounds himself with schemers and hangers-on who can’t coalesce around a coherent approach.
It’s an ongoing outrage and horror that such a person is president of the United States. But in a way, we may have, if not dodged a bullet, at least sustained a wound that is likely survivable. A competent person in Trump’s position almost certainly would have successfully swept the Russia investigation under the rug. A focused and disciplined person would have made the effort to understand and advocate for his own healthcare reform plan.
The best-case scenario in the short term is that Trump keeps stepping on his own dick. The best-case scenario in the long term is that he utterly discredits GOP “populism.” Forever, hopefully, or at least until after I’m dead. Open thread!
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
At least Ted Cruz isn’t president.
Ian G.
I’ve been saying since day one that Shitgibbon is too much of a lazy incompetent imbecile to establish a fascist dictatorship. Putin, Erdogan, Pinochet, these guys had brains, balls, and discipline.
Shell
Now THAT belongs to the ages!
Mnemosyne
It’s been fascinating to watch the MSM slowly wake up to the fact that Trump won on racism. Enraging, but fascinating.
The Dangerman
The only two things about the healthcare plan that Trump gives a shit about are, one, is it a taxcut for him, and, two, that it is called Trumpcare. The latter is probably far more important to him than the former. Democrats should offer to work with moderate Republicans on Single Payer, make sure it is called Trumpcare, and get it passed.
ETA: I’m operating under the assumption that Obamacare needs some fixes, not the least of which is it needs protection against intentional sabotage from someone like Trump.
rikyrah
You have a way with words.
LurkerNoLonger
And we can all take turns kicking him in the nuts every day until he resigns or is kicked out.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
A competent person would have never let a an acholic interntubes troll be his chief of staff that such a transparent, self important, puffed up winbag that his own party told him to get stuffed when Bannon threatened the House Republicans. Bannon is part of the Trump admin failure.
Kay
We lost a round today. A privacy org had filed for an injunction against voter suppression panel meeting tomorrow. Denied.
But. There will be a lot of lawsuits so don’t despair. They’re just warming up :)
randy khan
The only people on Team Trump who seem to be happy these days are the ones who think they can get bits of the grift. The NY Times Magazine this weekend had a piece on how Trump has confounded the usual ways of Washington, and the only person in it who came off as satisfied was Corey Lewandowski.
randy khan
@LurkerNoLonger:
My first response to that was to wonder how that was possible given his tiny fingers.
Brachiator
A metaphor for the ages!
Villago Delenda Est
It’s the last gasp of white assholes who are being outbred by all those brown people.
SiubhanDuinne
This … THIS … is why we love you, Betty.
TenguPhule
An incompetent idiot can still get a lot of people hurt and killed by starting a war or two and/or wrecking the entire financial system.
Best to keep that in mind.
ruckus
@Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD):
You know, you can’t make cheese with what you find in a cesspool.
Villago Delenda Est
@Mnemosyne: This is just one of the many reasons for my nym.
Kay
MattF
Well, Bannon got to know Trump and still thought that he’d be able to manage Trump’s policies. So, that’s a huge error right there.
ThresherK
It took you that long to tune away from public radio today?
I checked out during the previous hour, when the host asked “What’s your take on the Republicans’ health care tactic: Continue with “Repeal and replace”, or just repeal?”
Mike in NC
You can pretty much sum up this entire administration with a Hulk-like bellowing of “Trump smash Obama”! There’s really no more sophisticated agenda.
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
tfw when a chinchilla gets its ass by everyone on Reddit
@ruckus: Comment was made in the spirit of Betty’s post.
Villago Delenda Est
@ThresherK: NPR. Utterly worthless. Villager owned and operated. Fuckem.
LurkerNoLonger
@randy khan: He boasted about his dick size at one of the Republican debates, and since we know everything he says is the exact opposite, we can be sure he’s hung like a mosquito.
Yutsano
I love how Betty is being given credit for an old Southern saying.
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Bannon helped get Dolt45 elected. Dolt45 felt obligated to Bannon. Bannon knows how easily manipulated Dolt45 is. I’m almost certain Bannon whispered his name into the White House and stays there because Dolt45 feels some obligation to him.
(Blockquote fail emergency fixed)
jl
Thanks for another Lady Cracker blog art masterpiece. It fills a badly needed gap.
Bannon said, in supporting Trump’s proposed scam infrastructure fiasco and money toilet that he wants to bring back the excitement of the 1930s!
Maybe that will give Cracker some ideas for her next piece.
Suzanne
Eh. Dude’s a bigot, but I am not convinced that he has any sort of grand nationalist vision of a white utopia. Not because I think he’s not that bad, but because I think he’s unimaginative and doesn’t really care. He doesn’t give a shit about anyone as long as he has power and money to buy that gaudy gold shit he buys. He just allies himself with these true believer white supremacist shitbags out of expediency. Which makes him craven AF.
SiubhanDuinne
@Kay:
Somebody in a thread earlier today posted side-by-side photos of Trump playing truck driver/fire engine driver. The first was taken last March, hours before the House health care bill collapsed. The other was taken yesterday, hours before the Senate health care bill collapsed. In both of them, he has a kind of five-year-old “Vroom vroom vroom, I can be anything I wanna be when I grow up!” look on his face. He truly is a manbaby.
trollhattan
@Shell:
Will it fit on a red baseball cap?
Brachiator
Since this is an open thread, just wanted to note that the UK Guardian has given Christopher Nolan’s upcoming movie, “Dunkirk,” 5 stars.
The Hollywood Reporter just straight up calls it a masterpiece.
Apparently, the film is a brisk 106 minutes and Nolan wrote the screenplay himself.
Opens July 21
Sigh. I can imagine Obama attending a screening and having insightful things to say about it. Trump, not so much.
efgoldman
@randy khan:
Many of whom will themselves be fitted for orange jump suits later on.
trollhattan
@Suzanne: What Trump and Kushner both learned from their crooked daddies is that minorities are a path to success via slumlordhood. They don’t love them, they may or may not hate them, but they value them as marks.
Jeffro
Bannon’s the one who said he wanted to “throw a trillion dollars into infrastructure…shipyards, etc…and see what sticks
A trillion, Steve? Just throw it around and that’s that?
Maybe he and Trumpov aren’t too far apart on the IQ scale, they just have different (un)skill sets and connections, that’s all…
germy
@trollhattan:
And scapegoats.
Betty Cracker
@Yutsano: Yep. I first heard it from Papa Cracker, though he substituted “crap.”
mai naem mobile
Dolt 45 supporters want a more socialistic Obamacare,more soak the rich and a pinch of not giving it to non-whites. Also too, don’t call it Obamacare.
If Dolt45 had a brain and was willing would work,je could have pulled off an FDR like New Deal for the rural poor and his GOP pals couldn’t have done crap. Nobody would have given a crap about his grifting. He’s really not all that smart.
Mike in DC
I think when the government is on the brink of collapse and Trump leaves to go golf, it may dawn on Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell what an absolutely shitty deal they made.
trollhattan
@mai naem mobile: He has the attention span of a [smack!] you know, thing that flies around and annoys…hey, fire truck!
jl
Oh great, so now the GOP is going after Medicare, which is even more popular, and for elderly, maybe more important than Medicaid.
What are they thinking? I guess that people are exhausted from calling to protect PPACA and will let this one slip by? I hope that doesn’t happen.
We need to make constituent protest and communications to Congresscritters a pastime, a sport.
Back to the phone, emails, and letter writing desk, to the townhalls, field office protests and demonstrations!
Organized leagues, competitions for best letter, best phone call script, best convos with staffers, best Congressperson’s response elicited.
Medals and service ribbons for attendance at protests and service citizen on delegations to Congressional offices.
Regional and national championships.
I think the BJ has the front poster and commenter talent to produce some good ideas.
After Obamacare Repeal Fail, GOP Eyes New Health Care Program To Gut
Tierney Sneed, TPM
” On Tuesday morning, hours after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) had pulled the plug on an Obamacare repeal bill that imposed a massive overhaul on Medicaid, the House Budget Committee unveiled a 10-year budget blueprint that would seek to transform and privatize Medicare. ”
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/medicare-cuts-budget-2018-document
O. Felix Culpa
Any tech-savvy people out there? My laptop just suffered some Windows 10 and McAfee Antivirus updates, and now I can’t get Chrome to connect to anything. I’ve rebooted computer, rebooted internet modem, and…nothing. I just get that circle circle circle thing on the Chrome tab.
Internet signal seems fine and my computer says I’m connected (typing this on smartphone). What do I do now? Are there settings I should change? Thanks for whatever wisdom you can share.
Tenar Arha
@Kay: One of the people who I follow on Twitter has been helpful in figuring out wth is going on some days, mostly because her comments are incisive and her threads have a combo of pragmatic realism and a kind of just keep plugging away-ed-ness that I find soothing but energizing. (Highly recommended: read @alexandraerin on Twitter you guys). Anyway, Alexandra Erin pointed out that they would use the unofficial/official nature of the “commission” to hide behind until they were ready to use its “findings.” Sounds like that’s started.
And of course, the faux-mission is already having a negative effect on Democratic voters, because if there’s any local or state elections coming up in the fall, even the small number of people who’ve removed themselves from the voting rolls may lose their window to get back on in time and this could change the balances for school boards etc.
Iowa Old Lady
I heard some of the same interview. Green said both campaigns targeted voters who were “double haters,” ie hated both Clinton and Trump. Comey reopening the Clinton email investigation drove them to vote for Trump.
TenguPhule
@Mike in DC:
I think you’re too optimistic.
different-church-lady
These two things are intractable: only a berserker — a person who did not give a shit about anything — could win on a platform of Bannon’s toxic stew. Someone with an ounce of rational thought would never even entertain the idea of Bannon’s world view. Trump is so disconnected from reality that he could make a Superfund site like Bannon seem like fun.
It’s a pretty ugly kind of fail-safe, but the thought that it’s like that is a bit of cold comfort.
WTF
@Kay:
I am slower than a Senaturtle, but I did respond to your comment down below. I may have spilled too many beans.
different-church-lady
@Brachiator: I think (on scanty evidence) Nolan is a different kind of blockbuster director. The little I’ve seen of his work, there is clearly brains and soul in his films that the other big-budget kings just don’t have.
Brachiator
@O. Felix Culpa:
Can you connect using the default Edge browser?
this search term [win 10 cant connect using chrome] provided a lot of possible checks, some quite recent
germy
Steve Bannon Reportedly Called Paul Ryan a ‘Limp-Dick Motherfucker’
different-church-lady
@Mnemosyne: Well, that and misogyny.
Suzanne
@trollhattan:
Yes. I really think we need to be more incisive about the way we describe racist behavior, because most people who say and do racist things don’t feel like that term applies to them. And that allows them to let themselves off the hook. Trump is a narcissist and doesn’t care enough about other people, even his own in-group, to care if they are dominant—as long as he personally is dominant. He views minorities as marks, but he also is using the true believer hail whitey people to his own ends, as well.
jl
Trump’s idea of a good pitch to the voters is to broadcast that he will blow up PPACA and they will get so angry about it that he will tell them to elect more GOPers, who tried to blow up PPACA (and failed), and that the voters will do just that in 2018 and 2020.
I like that pitch. It seems totally moronic, but maybe that is just me.
Mike in DC
@TenguPhule:
You’re right. May not happen until after we default. Or after Ryan loses reelection.
efgoldman
@germy:
Stopped clock and like that
Mike in NC
@Brachiator: Trump is said to have kept a book of speeches by his nightstand. They weren’t speeches made by Churchill.
rikyrah
@Brachiator:
I was thinking of taking a pass on Dunkirk, but with this kind of praise, I think I will probably see it in the movie theater.
jl
@efgoldman:
” Steve Bannon Reportedly Called Paul Ryan a ‘Limp-Dick Motherfucker’ ”
We need to know how many people he calls that before we impute meaning to it. Might be a term of endearment. It is Bannon, he don’t think or talk like most people do.
O. Felix Culpa
@Brachiator: Nope. No connection on Edge either. Trying to run your query, but no response so far. Sigh.
Frankensteinbeck
@mai naem mobile:
Unfortunately, I think you have that backwards. Trump supporters want more racist healthcare, with a lot more punishing minorities and maybe a pinch of soaking the rich. Since Democrats are not going to sign onto ‘socialism for white men’, that idea was never going to happen.
The sad truth of our political situation is that half of white people are single issue racism voters.
Mnemosyne
@Yutsano:
Bannon was neck-deep in the Russia shit. Trump has to keep him close because it would be disastrous for Bannon to turn on him.
@Suzanne:
This. Trump is a racist, but he’s too lazy to actually have a plan to create a white supremacist empire. He’ll go along if someone else has a plan, but he doesn’t care enough to do more than token support.
Gravenstone
Site question. I’ve seen the odd troll or three pop in recent threads, but when I go to follow the reply links back to them, their post is typically gone. I’ve only seen one official notice of the ban hammer (Adam reinstating it on a repeat offender) and aren’t actively pieing anyone on this computer. So, where are they disappearing to? Not that I’m complaining, mind – just curious.
Leaving Texas
The reason the country elected a black man twice but not a woman is….racism. Right. No other reason.
Mnemosyne
@different-church-lady:
Nolan is a tad overrated — he’s not as deep as he or his fanboys seem to think — but he at least tries to put challenging stuff into his blockbusters, unlike, say, Michael Bay.
FWIW, I think Jon Favreau is vastly underestimated as a director of blockbusters.
Roger Moore
@mai naem mobile:
I doubt it. The Republicans in Congress haven’t managed to repeal Obamacare because there’s too big a difference between the wings of their party in Congress. Good luck trying to do any real legislating that involves building something new. There’s a hard wingnut core that takes money from crazy libertarians like the Koch brothers and genuinely wants to dismantle the whole welfare state. They aren’t going to support new entitlement programs, even if they explicitly leaves out blacks. Without the wingnuts, you’re not going to get anything through Congress without Democratic help*, and that’s not going to be forthcoming if you try to leave minorities out.
*And quite possibly not with it, since Paul Ryan is a Randian motherfucker.
rikyrah
@Frankensteinbeck:
They want White Socialism.
Never forget…
Obamacare was the first expansion of the American Social Safety Net, that DID NOT, have in its design..
the EXCLUSION of huge swaths of our populace (unlike SS and Medicare)
It took the John Roberts Court to do that.
MisterForkbeard
@Mnemosyne: Right? It’s been obvious to the left (or anyone paying attention) for quite some time, but the MSM is just finally getting around to it now… and even then, in bits and pieces. They can’t even say “Racism was a major factor in the Trump victory”, they say “Some in Trump’s coalition may have been motivated by traditional Southern concerns.”
Chris
@Frankensteinbeck:
More than that, I’d say. I don’t think Democrats have won the white vote once at the national level since LBJ signed the civil rights legislation.
jl
@Mnemosyne: Trump talks like thoroughgoing white bigots and racists that I know who have convinced themselves that they are not bigots or racists at all. Just, they say that they ‘understand’ things and are telling the rest of us hard truths we don’t want to hear. They say that they all have dear African-American, Hispanic, Asian, Muslim friends who tell them that they are right, and though sometimes hard to listen to the truth it is important that someone say it.
They say that they are the voice of reason. When they freak out and go frothing batshit insane over some bigot panic trigger, they feel sorry for me and tell me I have to face up to hard truths.
From what he says, Trump seems to be that kind of person.
TenguPhule
@MisterForkbeard:
Such as kill the blacks, punish the jews and exploit the Mexicans.
different-church-lady
@Mnemosyne: I suppose it’s all relative. The few times I see a blockbuster, I’m kind of grading on a curve, and on that curve Nolan scores higher that I expect out of a blockbuster.
Mnemosyne
@different-church-lady:
@Leaving Texas:
Racism and misogyny, the toxic stew we all swim in. There absolutely were people who switched from Obama to Trump because Obama may have been Black, but at least he has a peni$.
But racism also played a huge part in the anti-Hillary feeling. People felt she was a race traitor and would keep allowing Black and brown people into positions of power, which of course she did and would have continued doing. People who hated Black Lives Matter hated Hillary just as virulently, and not only because of misogyny.
Both/and.
different-church-lady
@MisterForkbeard:
Boll weevils?
TenguPhule
@Mnemosyne:
When Michael Bay dies, there is a very special hell waiting for him for what he did to the Transformers.
different-church-lady
@TenguPhule:
He has to watch his own films on a loop for all of eternity?
jl
@TenguPhule: There are white bigot ‘concerns’ all over the country. So, I think a mistake to characterize Trump solely in a Southern white bigot framework.
Major Major Major Major
@TenguPhule: He did make that one good movie though.
@different-church-lady: Kudzu, obviously.
p.a.
Meanwhile, they own the judiciary. Sorry to be a downer.
Brachiator
@O. Felix Culpa:
Do you have a smartphone or other device handy? You could run the query and maybe follow the steps.
Win 10 is still too new to me, so I don’t have a possible solution to offer.
Mnemosyne
@Leaving Texas:
Also, too — in my experience with white people (being one myself), racism and misogyny usually go hand-in-hand. It’s pretty rare to find someone who’s only one or the other.
SiubhanDuinne
@Gravenstone:
I wondered exactly the same this morning. Saw a response to someone (Amusing Myself to Death, I think), clicked to see what AMtD had said, and the link just sat there. And then I saw that various commenters were talking about a troll — and even mentioned the “Death” part of the troll’s nym — so I assume AMtD had said something banworthy, but there was no announcement of it. Very confusing.
Villago Delenda Est
@Brachiator: Trump: “Where are the boobies?”
Aleta
The media doesn’t expose this, and I think it’s important. Bannon isn’t an accidental entanglement leading him astray. Trump’s comfort with Russian rulers isn’t only about financial corruption and mutual love of theft and bullying and blackmail. He’s racist to his 50’s roots and his ugly core. His religion is the form of white supremacy practiced by libertarians, the wealthy, and boarding school cliques. His first choice for world friends in his comfort zone would be British royalty and leaders and Germans, but they don’t accept him and too many are women. Almost everywhere in the world is either too socialist or isn’t Caucasian. So racist pale-skin sexist nihilist Russian leaders it is, for him and for the NRA. That’s why Bannon’s his guy and also why he loses it even more than usual around blonde women.
Tracy Ratcliff
@O. Felix Culpa:
Sounds like broken winsock.
From an administrative command prompt type in
netsh winsock reset
And restart when prompted
MisterForkbeard
@Iowa Old Lady: I think there was an interview soon after the election (Dec/Jan) with the polling heads of each campaign. This is basically what they said, too: All their polling indicated that there was a large group of voters who’d been convinced that Hillary and Trump were both awful but leaned one way and would come home in the final 10 days of the campaign. This was in progress for both candidates and Hillary’s progress was even better than Trump’s – and then Comey interfered.
Immediately, Hillary’s wavering people stopped coming home and she lost some of the ones she’d already gotten. Trump’s waverers were energized and showed up in higher numbers than expected, perhaps even taking some of Hillary’s.
I’ve always been amazed this didn’t get more traction, but then it would have explicitly shown that Comey’s interference on behalf of Trump carried the election, and I don’t think that’s somewhere the media wanted to go.
O. Felix Culpa
@Brachiator: A miracle happened! It is fixt! Not sure why, but whatevs. I tried rebooting the @#$%& modem again, so maybe that was the trick. I will definitely keep that query in mind for future events. Thanks so much for your help!
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. This movie blows. This movie is so bad that decency almost demands that not only would you walk out on it, you’d blow the theater away with mortars. Sadly, we are the theater, so decency can’t come into play here. All we can do is walk out and picket the theater until they get sick of it, pull this movie and put a better one on.
germy
Mike in NC
@trollhattan: Fire truck. Cowboy hat. Two scoops of ice cream. Really all a 5-year-old wants in life.
different-church-lady
@Mnemosyne: I think we fundamentally misunderstand how these things work. The hatred comes first. Then comes the search for an outlet. Racism and misogyny are two very popular, ready-made outlets. It’s like asking a kid if they want chocolate or vanilla, when they can have both.
geg6
@Kay:
And that’s literally true. The Flying Spaghetti Monster help us all.
O. Felix Culpa
@Tracy Ratcliff: Thanks. It seems to have fixed itself without that, but I will bookmark your solution for future reference. So much knowledge out there, so little of it mine. :)
MisterForkbeard
@O. Felix Culpa: If I had to guess, I’d say your computer is connected to the router but the router is failing to connect to the internet.
If you have a cable modem, turn it off and wait 30 seconds and try again. Then shut down your router for the same period of time. Give your computer a minute or so and then try to connect again and see what’s up.
EDIT: nvm, I see you fixed it while I was typing that out. If you leave the cable modem off for a long enough period of time, it has to try and get an entirely new connection rather than ‘repairing’ an old one. That might have been what happened here.
Mnemosyne
@MisterForkbeard:
Kevin Drum showed the graph right after the election, but nobody listened to him. There is very good evidence that Comey tipped the election to Trump.
Betty Cracker
@Gravenstone: There’s one lugubrious repeat incarnation that was banned (with notice by another front-pager). He or she goes to the trouble of making up new nyms, etc., to comment but neglects to change another marker that makes it obvious it’s the same banned troll. So, whack-a-mole.
O. Felix Culpa
@different-church-lady:
It’s two, two hate-mints in one.
Roger Moore
@Mnemosyne:
I think there’s a little bit more to it. Trump is a racist, but he’s also a rich guy who was taught that his wealth was proof that he’s a superior human being. He hates blacks and browns, but he doesn’t think much better of any non-rich white person. He knows how to talk to racists poor and middle class whites, but he’s not going to do anything good for them. He’s too focused on helping himself.
Quinerly
@Iowa Old Lady:
I, too, heard the same Terry Gross interview. What you pulled from it in your comment is the core of what I got out of it. The Mercer and Cambridge Analytics stuff was interesting too.
O. Felix Culpa
@MisterForkbeard: Thanks! The BJ community is a treasure.
hueyplong
I don’t see much news in the reported Bannon quote about Ryan. Ryan probably IS a limp-dick motherfucker, Brave Sir Robin hitching a ride on Colonel Kilgore’s chopper and fancying himself a badass so long as the village isn’t firing back effectively.
Iowa Old Lady
@Quinerly: Yes! The Cambridge Analytics stuff made me sit up and take notice given that there’s some suspicion the Trump campaign gave data to the Russians on who to target. It would be wonderful if the Mercers got caught up in Mueller’s net.
MisterForkbeard
@Mnemosyne: The proper response to this is that people claim that “If Hillary wasn’t such an awful candidate, it wouldn’t have mattered”.
I mean, this is obviously a stupid response. It’s true that if any number of other factors had changed, it wouldn’t have been the final nail in the coffin. But it WAS, and many of the other factors were beyond Hillary’s control, such as: Republican propaganda, our awful media and their Clinton fixation, a lack of willingness to see what Russia/Wikileaks were clearly up to, complicit Republicans in russian efforts, vote suppression, etc. It’s even more valid to say that Hillary would have won if our media wasn’t awful.
And in any case, something like the Comey Intervention would damage a candidate severely no matter how ‘good they were. The last two weeks of a campaign is when you convince soft or reluctant voters to come in, but it’s also when you’re organizing a ton of your lazier voters to even show up. Someone like Obama would have been hit really hard by this too.
Yarrow
@O. Felix Culpa:
I’ve had to fix this “limited wifi connection” problem on my dad’s Windows 10 computer several times. It looks like you’re connected but you’re not really. Apparently it’s common with Windows 10. This video walks you through the simple fix. Hope that helps.
MisterForkbeard
@O. Felix Culpa: We ARE awesome, aren’t we? I blame Cole. And possibly the other front pagers. And the regular commenters.
But not Major, since he’s continually making jokes two minutes before I make the same one :P
@Iowa Old Lady: Isn’t the “some suspicion” coming largely from Democratic pols and operatives right now? It would make a lot of sense, but there’s no evidence beyond the suppositional yet.
Also, “suppositional” is totally a word. I swear.
raven
@Brachiator: The cast is awesome.
Leaving Texas
@Mnemosyne:
I’m not saying that Trumpsters aren’t racists, just that the vitriol, disparagement and double standard hurled at Clinton for decades wasn’t from racism. And it’s the culmination of that misogynistic vendetta that gave us a punchline for President.
Quinerly
@Iowa Old Lady:
I guess you caught how Joshua Green (author) is convinced that Bannon has nothing to do with the Russia stuff. Came on too late in the campaign.
Roger Moore
@Betty Cracker:
Sounds like whack-a-troll.
Major Major Major Major
@MisterForkbeard: what’d I do now?
MisterForkbeard
@Major Major Major Major: You frequently makes jokes right before I make them. You’re that guy. :)
Suzanne
@Mnemosyne:
I don’t even think he actively wants a white supremacist empire. That presumes an ideological position that I don’t think he cares enough or is intellectual enough to hold. I think he wants a Trump supremacist empire, and racist white people will help him with that, so he tells them what they want to hear. I honestly don’t think that he sought the presidency in order to forward the interests of white people. He sought the presidency to make himself rich and famous and to get the Russians to save his ass.
Yes, of course, this is racist, but it’s different from true believer shit. I am sure he scorns white people that live in trailers as much as he scorns black “thugs”, as he calls them.
Remember, the man is a developer. Developers, by nature, are pragmatic and self-interested.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Leaving Texas: If you read “The Hunting of the President”, the folk in Arkansas were more worried about a Madame President Clinton than they were about President Bill Clinton 40 years ago. Slimming Hillary has been going on for 40 years.
Yarrow
@Quinerly: @Iowa Old Lady: I didn’t hear the interview, but Cambridge Analytica microtargeted people via Facebook. Kushner was directly involved with that and the Mercers were funding it. I hope they all go down for it. Facebook and Zuckerberg have a lot to answer for with it as well.
Roger Moore
@Leaving Texas:
A lot of it was. The Clintons are viewed as race traitors, which doesn’t make sense except in the context of racism.
OzarkHillbilly
@MisterForkbeard:
And humble too. Have you told us lately how humble we are? We are very humble.
Leaving Texas
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Thanks for the recommendation. I will check that out.
Brachiator
@jl:
@Mnemosyne:
@TenguPhule:
Yes. Trump is a classic American bigot and he has attracted all the racist from all corners of this country, like a political Pied Piper calling rats.
Trump has a history of bigotry learned from his daddy, culminating in housing discrimination suits that he settled to avoid being legally branded a bigot. And he shamefully continued to label the accused Central Park rapists to be criminals long after they had been exonerated, emphasizing the racial aspects of the case. And there is of course his vile birtherism, along with his insinuations that Obama had faked his intellectual credentials, because he could not possibly be as intelligent or accomplished as someone like Trump.
And the people that he has attracted and give aid and comfort to fundamentally believe that the white race, and the white race in America, needs to be made secure against mixing with deficient races, and that these inferior groups should not even be allowed to become citizens. Vermin like Ann Coulter has openly called for restricting the nonwhite immigration. The “Bell Curve” pseudo-intellectuals that love Trump assemble in reddit groups to blather about how Neanderthal ancestry made white people better than other races, and that East Asians who otherwise excel on various intelligence tests still lack that certain something that you only get from Caucasians. Other commentors are correct that Trump lacks the focus to implement these plans himself, but he will encourage and sign off on any legislation that comes his way, and will give state and local expressions of bigotry his blessing.
Yarrow
Is this the meeting where he gave away Alaska?
T S
@Brachiator: Waiting for #NeandertalPride hashtags now.
trollhattan
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
She’s down to 115; I blame Jane Fonda. :-P
Also, too, you are correct she’d been in their sights since the Arkansas Project. Michelle surely understands this.
Leaving Texas
@Roger Moore: I was a teenager with a RWNJ father during the Clinton years. I heard Rush Limbaugh shitting all over Hillary and Chelsea Clinton daily. All that Chelsea is a dog, feminists are just ugly women and Hillary is unelected and should just sit down garbage was not due to the Clintons’ position on race relations, IMHO.
Editted for grammar. Probably still got it wrong.
Chris
@Mnemosyne:
BLM alone was definitely enough to freak out some white people enough to get back to the other side.
The Moar You Know
@Yarrow: Yes, they do, and you’re the first person I’ve seen mention it. Anywhere.
Facebook and Twitter got Trump elected. I don’t know how you fix a problem like that, and it is a huge problem, worse even than the grossly corrupt media, because at least it’s relatively easy to see that the media has their filthy fingers on the scale (it’s just a question of who they’re for among those, left and right, who’ve figured it out). Facebook? Most people will die having no idea that they’ve been grossly manipulated by that platform every single day. Greatest threat to democracy ever seen if you ask me (you didn’t).
Tenar Arha
@Roger Moore: @Leaving Texas: IMHO I think that it’s both. It’s a toxic brew based on her continuing her career and by continuing her activism even after she was married. I mean, Hillary Clinton used to act as a prospective parent to hunt for segregation academies! I don’t think the people that hated her for that
ever forgot.
Major Major Major Major
@MisterForkbeard: Ah, I see, well, I suppose there’s not much I can do about that, sorry.
lgerard
@Suzanne:
I think you are 100% correct. He has no ideology or true beliefs.
The only reason he embraced birtherism is because it got him on fox and friends every day.
Same with the anti-immigrant stuff.
Spider-Dan
@The Dangerman:
Let’s suppose that we could pass a new Voting Rights Act with broad protections for minority votes, but in order to get it to pass, we had to call it the Jefferson Davis Preservation of Confederate Honor Act. Is that a fair and reasonable trade? What about the Bull Connor Race Integrity Act to address police violence against minorities? Or the Nathan Bedford Forrest Medicare For All Act?
There is a non-zero cost to (officially?) naming a law. Glorifying a man who rode white nationalism to victory (in 2016!) in order to get single-payer is not quite the free lunch you imply.
jl
@Brachiator: I think the self-aware knowing bigots and racists will stick with Trump past the bitter end, and after he is removed from office, one way or another, will continue to defend him and search for conspiracy theories that will convince others that Trump was wronged.
Many of the white bigots who have convinced themselves they are just fair minded people who can tell the rest of us their useful wisdom on how to achieve harmony and what equality that is feasibly achievable among all humanity, will desert him as his record gets ever worse, like the knuckleheads who voted for him.
The knucklehead Trump vote might be educable, but the self-deluding bigots will just look for another white savior who has their secret knowledge. Or they will unhappily settle for some RINO like another Mitt, who will serve as a sad sack stop-gap for a while.
Doug R
Anyone who has wit and discipline wouldn’t have gotten as many votes.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@trollhattan:
That was the 90’s, this started when Bill first became Governor of Arkansas, almost 40 years ago. It went national with the Arkansas Project.
hueyplong
We’re defining racism down if we pretend Trump isn’t racist.
WTF
Trump is Leona Helmsley with a deep-seated need to be loved and admired and respected. Leona just didn’t give a damn.
White, black or rainbow, the rest of us are just “little” people to Trump.
Quinerly
@Yarrow:
Yep. Been following it. Big Fortune mag piece shortly after the election on Kushner and Cambridge.
jl
@lgerard:
” I think you are 100% correct. He has no ideology or true beliefs. ”
Probably true, at least in terms of ‘ideology or true beliefs’ as most people understand those words.
Trump does have long standing habitual and very stable impulses that have been on display for years. I think there are two that stand out:
1) all-purpose white bigotry
2) every business transaction and public policy is viewed from the swindler’s perspective.
Yarrow
@The Moar You Know:
Really? We must be reading very different things, then. I’ve been reading about it since the election.
There’s the issue of social media manipulation in general, but there’s also the issue of “weaponizing” social media that was done by Russia troll farms and bots to promote certain issues. For Trump, against Hillary, for the VT Senator. Etc. It’s been shown that certain issues bubbled up to the top not naturally but by promotion by bots and trolls.
There’s also the issue that Facebook info was stolen or perhaps compromised somehow (not sure of the particulars, and I hope it comes out in Mueller’s investigation) and given to Cambridge Analytica. That allowed microtargeting of people based on their specific interests, issues and voting patterns. It’s unprecedented in American campaigns, to have that level of personally targeted propaganda come right to one’s phone, computer, tablet, eyeballs in general. That was a whole different level of influencing of the campaign done by a foreign government (Russians tied to Cambridge Analytica) along with the Mercers who have their own agenda.
In general, though, it’s going to continue to be a problem going forward. Facebook has been exceptionally wishy washy about their role in the whole thing and Zuckerberg seems to want to run for some office himself. Why would he make any moves toward changing it if its going to benefit him? He’ll have to be made to change it via legislation.
O. Felix Culpa
@OzarkHillbilly: We also have the best brains. The very best brains.
d58826
This is not going to end well :
bolds mine
This is insane. The Russian translator could have told Der Fuhrer anything.
http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/342589-ian-bremmer-trump-and-putin-held-second-informal-meeting-during-g-20
Betty Cracker
@Leaving Texas: I don’t think anyone here disagrees that sexism played a huge role in Clinton’s defeat. Personally, I think the search for a single cause is a mug’s game. There were so many causes. Sexism. A well-coordinated, decades-long character assassination project. Celebrity worship. Voter suppression. Comey. Russian interference. Media manipulation/incompetence (legacy media and social media). Apathy. Stupidity.
And yeah, racism played a part, IMO. I’ve said before, I suspect if the BLM movement had been going full steam prior to 2012, Romney might have squeaked out a win. I’ve gotten mildly dragged on Twitter for saying that by people who think I mean to silence BLM, which I do not. But I am a white person in a red area of a swing state, and I can report that the BLM protests, Kaepernick’s kneeling down for the PoA, etc., really pissed off a lot of white people — even ones I thought would know better. It was definitely a factor, IMO.
d58826
@Roger Moore: Remember Bill was sometimes referred to as America’s first ‘black’ president.
A Ghost to Most
I don’t think Twitler is generating all of this fascist shit. He’s Howdy Doody to Bannon’s Buffalo Bob.
Doug R
@O. Felix Culpa: Same thing was happening to me with Chrome and Firefox. There’s a couple of things you can type in the command line window that clear your DNS cache. I also unclicked hardware acceleration on Chrome. Look up Windows 10 is connected but browsers can’t connect.
Mike in DC
@d58826:
That looks…bad. Would not put it past Trump to pardon everyone, fire Mueller, lift sanctions unilaterally and dare Congress to lift a finger against him. There are reasons it (probably) wouldn’t work out so well for him, but we should be vigilant.
trollhattan
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
I was referencing the anti-Clinton campaign while he was governor, was that not the effort’s name at the time?
schrodingers_cat
@Mnemosyne: White supremacist empires existed well into the 20th century. That was the rationale behind colonization, the so called white man’s burden.
Patricia Kayden
Is that your drawing, Betty? If so, you’re really good at artwork. Perfect depiction of an awful man — no head, no brain and orange as hell.
@Betty Cracker:
That’s pretty amazing. My girlfriend and I were talking last night about how tame Black protests have been in this country lately. All we Black people are doing now is walking around with our hands above our heads appealing to cops to not shoot us down. And Kaepernick’s kneeling during the national anthem was no biggie and should be no biggie in a country where White people walk around with the traitor rag which stands for slavery and anti-blackness all the dang time.
Perhaps we need a full blown return to the Civil Rights movement days when Blacks shut down stores and businesses to protest. If White people can’t sympathize with what is going on with their fellow citizens then I really don’t know what to say and quite frankly I do not care. Black people will continue to protest until things get better. It’s the least that we can do.
Betty Cracker
@Yarrow: Yep — there was a terrific article in New York Mag about it more than a year before the election, and I’ve read a shit-ton about it since.
schrodingers_cat
Has any intrepid journalist checked out the sources of Brietbart’s funding? Are we sure there is no Russian connection. Putin has been the right’s darling since at least the second Obama term.
Mnemosyne
@different-church-lady:
I’m not sure if this is a “yes, but” or a “yes, and” but IMO that hatred starts at home. There’s a reason why all of the idiot kids who do stupid racist and/or misogynist shit at school have parents standing behind them saying, “What’s wrong with what my kid did? Everybody knows that Blacks/Mexicans/Muslims/chicks are like that!”
Betty Cracker
@Patricia Kayden: That is my online finger painting — thank you! I agree with what you said about protests. Honestly, I think it’s a wonder black people aren’t blowing shit up. Seriously.
Chris
@lgerard:
No ideology or true beliefs in anything but his own profit, true.
The interesting thing, though, is that while all ideologies have adherents who are really in it for nothing but their own selfishness, Rand-style conservatism is special in that for them, the selfishness is the ideology.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@trollhattan: No, don’t think it had a name. The Arkansas Project was the Richard Mellon Scaife thing.
Mike in DC
@schrodingers_cat:
Last one ended early 90s. South Africa.
misterpuff
@Brachiator: I don’t like losers….even if they came back with OUR help! /Cheeto Furball
WTF
Trump is also the embodiment of what Jefferson called the pseudo-aristocracy in this letter to Adams: A vulgar person with no sense of public virtue or capacity for shame, concerned only with ostentatious luxury and comfort.
Yarrow
@schrodingers_cat: The Mercers are part owners of Breitbart. They’re way in deep with the Russians. That info just hasn’t become widely known yet.
Ridnik Chrome
@germy: Isn’t that kind of a contradiction in terms?
Leaving Texas
@Betty Cracker:
I know some Obama voters who are also white who had a problem with BLM’s tactics, if not their message per se. But that opinion didn’t make them vote for Trump or sit out the election.
It may be that most commenters here think sexism played a part in our national nightmare, but it is rarely mentioned in the comments.
schrodingers_cat
@Mike in DC: The bastard who coined that term (Kipling), raised money for the butcher of Jalianwala Bagh , who opened fire on unarmed non-violent protesters. I don’t need to hear lectures about civilization from their intellectual heirs.
Jeffro
@WTF: Exactly…one of the very reasons that an Electoral College was supposed to be a good idea. “Innovative”, they said. (Actually, I think it was “how ye olde innovative this be”.
Fuck that – let’s get rid of it stat.
Jeffro
@Betty Cracker:
Seconded. Especially the “even ones I thought would know better” part.
jl
@Mike in DC: The rationales of the leaders and the white racist citizens have to kept separate. Many of the leaders could not afford to indulge themselves with the luxury of actually believing racist nonsense, at least not to the degree that the ordinary white bigot citizen did. The leaders needed to concentrate on maintaining power by dividing and conquering the people of all varieties whom they wanted to exploit.
One of the problems of the old South Africa was that the measures that needed to be taken in order to keep blacks and whites separate and divided in every way became increasingly draconian, offensive, unjust and unworkable. The South African apartheid that was ended with Nelson Mandela’s election to president was consciously implemented from the 1920s to 1940s as a means of social control of all races. It is true that it was a white person’s world, and whites got by far the better deal, if they behaved.
Yarrow
@Leaving Texas: Sexism is mentioned in the comments here on a regular basis. It’s certainly mentioned a lot more here than in the media when any discussion of Why Hillary Lost comes up.
schrodingers_cat
@Jeffro: Obama’s reelection made many soft racists abandon their inhibitions and become hardcore, since we were post racial and all that.
Betty Cracker
@Leaving Texas: I don’t know how any regular reader of the blog could conclude that; it comes up here a lot, and rightly so.
schrodingers_cat
@lgerard: He has been pretty consistent about his racism and xenophobia.
Jeffro
@schrodingers_cat: Someone – pretty sure it was Charles Blow – recently said that Obama’s re-election in 2012 ‘made it real’ to them (‘soft racists’, as you put it, and I think that’s accurate) that a coalition of women, minority, working-class, and other voters shocked folks into understanding that Obama’s 2008 win was no fluke, that times really had changed. And that pushed many – or at least, enough – soft racists the other way or helped them justify staying home.
Just more for the truth & reconciliation committee to consider in 2019…
Brachiator
@schrodingers_cat:
Also, Obama’s election and re-election and very presence in the White House angered white bigots, who now feel unleashed. One news story quoted a person (in Middle America of course) saying, “Now that Trump is president, we don’t have to kiss Obama’s ass anymore.”
Note how personal this is, how the white fool (sorry, can’t be unbiased) felt directly and personally stifled by Obama, as though he had somehow made him or her bow down to him. You also see this kind of thing in white dopes who absolutely refuse to admit that Obama was in any way trying to help them. They had to find a way to project their own hostility onto Obama.
And for many of these people, the mere fact that Hillary Clinton had willingly served in Obama’s administration made her suspect, made her the enemy. Also, curiously, you had a number of conservative pundits who wrote about Hillary as though she acted independently of Obama. This was the double racist sexist twist. They could not admit that Obama set the direction of US foreign policy, that this white woman was really in charge, but she could not be trusted because she openly consorted with Negroes.
Chris
@Brachiator:
I have a relative in the Army who, apparently, personally knows a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who was there in the room when Hillary Clinton vetoed the rescue mission to Benghazi.
Where the fuck Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State, appeared in the chain of command of any soldier, sailor, airman or Marine who would’ve been charged with the rescue mission, the story doesn’t tell.
schrodingers_cat
@Jeffro: Soft racists, like my travel ban defending, Indian food loving Yoga teacher ex- friend, who voted for JS after voting for Obama twice. Every communication with her ended with her asserting that she was not a racist. I never used that r word to describe her ever. But not once did she find any thing to criticize about T.
jl
@Brachiator:
” how the white fool (sorry, can’t be unbiased) ”
What bias? It’s very obvious.
Mnemosyne
@Tenar Arha:
Quoted for truth. Hillary is a both/and activist who has worked for BOTH racial equality AND gender equality her whole life. That’s why people hate her, and it’s very difficult to tease out the people who hate her solely based on misogyny or the ones who hate her solely based on racism. They hate her for both reasons.
Leaving Texas
@Yarrow:
That is not my perception and I lurk here daily. Opinions differ.
Leaving Texas
@Betty Cracker: I read the comments here almost daily (although I did take a break Nov. 9 through Jan. 27) and that is not my perception. I’m not trying to be negative, just pointing out my experience.
Mnemosyne
@schrodingers_cat:
Yep. The more I read about the Napoleonic Era, the more obvious it seems that the push for greater democracy in Europe required a new group to be inferior since the former peasants and lower classes were starting to get political power, and those groups were the people who got colonized in Africa and Asia. Before that, there was a fair amount of race prejudice, but nothing like it became around the time Victoria ascended the throne.
It’s been one of the weirder things about writing historical fiction: realizing that attitudes about race have ebbed and flowed throughout history. The lives of some of the Black generals in the French Revolution were already worse by the 1840s as “scientific” racism gained in popularity. It’s all a little depressing to read about. ?
enplaned
It’s like Spectre finally succeeds in taking over the US, but it turns out it’s run by Mr Bean.
We are lucky, in a silver lining on a horrible dark tornado kind of way.
But look beyond. We have discovered that the US election system can be hacked. It took a moron to find that out, but now that it’s known, many far-more-evil-non-morons will try to exploit the same issue. In other words, we won’t be lucky (at least this way) a second time.
O. Felix Culpa
@Leaving Texas: Presumably dead thread, but I have called out sexism and misogyny in many of my own comments about the election. So have Mnem and other regular commenters. Sorry you missed them.
ETA: Granted, a lot of conversation is about racism, but the misogyny has not been overlooked either.
randy khan
@MisterForkbeard:
This drives me crazy. Leaving aside that she won the popular vote by 3 million, and that no actual bad candidate can get nominated for President by a major party, it turns out that many of the criticisms of her as a candidate were just wrong – she actually did a pretty good job of reaching people, gave a good speech when she needed to give one, and was killer at the debates. If your standard is that she didn’t run a perfect campaign, then we’ve never had a good candidate from either party.
Of course, what these people mean is that her baggage dragged her down. I can’t completely disagree with that, but every candidate has some burden to deal with; that was hers.
Mnemosyne
@Leaving Texas:
It ebbs and flows because, as I keep saying, it’s a both/and situation. Some days we emphasize the racism; some days we emphasize the misogyny. But I think most people here acknowledge that both issues played into the election.
Chris
@enplaned:
And now foreigners know. Both our allies and our enemies. Our allies know we can’t be relied on anymore, and our enemies know we’re open to this.
Jeffro
@schrodingers_cat: Wow that is just nuts…
Held to a higher standard, we Dems, but still…
TenguPhule
@enplaned:
You take that back! Mr. Bean has empathy and good will and although a complete comedy cascade of errors has not a single fascist bone in his body.
J R in WV
@Chris:
The people who went crazy over BLM – I had a hard time at first understanding that.
Then I had a flash of insight, and realized they were all bigots who wanted cops to be able to shoot or otherwise discipline “colored folks” on demand.
Booger
@O. Felix Culpa: Well, when connection things are wonky you can always try the old (command line) ipconfig /release followed by ipconfig/ renew, and/or ipconfig /flushdns.
J R in WV
@Yarrow:
I never saw any of this, because I refused to join Facebook or Twitter, I barely use email.
Bupalos
@hueyplong: absolutely. One thing I really can’t stand about the evolving conception of the race myth is that racism is like an on/off switch, some people have it, some are innocent, it’s one or the other.
It’s one of the things that rankled for me about the “basket of deplorables” comment, the way that adopted the language of individual guilt and innocence in regards to these broad social realities. That language is self-defeating in the effort to overcome the reality of racism or sexism, which as concepts are really more like original sin both in prevalence and in the way they require an ongoing, neverending effort to overcome.
Jim
“I almost switched stations because hearing a rehash of the 2016 election is about as appealing to me these days as a double root canal…”
I’m actually getting a root canal in a couple of weeks. Am using the daily news to prepare me. The dental work will be a piece of cake compared to that.