This wouldn't pass as a grade schooler's Book Report. pic.twitter.com/mNOk52lWHy
— Randy Prine (@randyprine) December 31, 2016
Back last October, when we could still joke about it, Samantha Bee ‘mischievously’ suggested that Donald Trump might not actually be able to read. In all seriousness, he may just never have been able to read easily. As someone who’s both (mildly) dyslexic and ADHD, I can understand a skittishness about committing to labor through weighty blocks of ‘serious’ text — and Trump’s scholastic history, his spotty attention and apparently unprovoked rages, combined with his perennial insistence that he is so a smart person, are classic signs of an undiagnosed (unadmitted) learning disability.
Of course, someone with such problems isn’t going to find literary fluency any easier as they move into their senior years. Perhaps a (growing) incomprehension of the written word in bursts larger than 140 characters might explain Trump’s weird understanding of ‘the cyber’?:
President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly questioned whether critical computer networks can ever be protected from intruders, alarming cybersecurity experts who say his comments could upend more than a decade of national cybersecurity policy and put both government and private data at risk.
Asked late Saturday about Russian hacking allegations and his cybersecurity plans, Trump told reporters that “no computer is safe” and that, for intelligence officials, “hacking is a very hard thing to prove.”
“You want something to really go without detection, write it out and have it sent by courier,” he said as he entered a New Year’s Eve party at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida resort.
“I think that computers have complicated lives very greatly,” Trump said earlier last week. He tweets prolifically but says he rarely uses any other communications technology more advanced than the telephone. “The whole age of computer has made it where nobody knows exactly what’s going on. We have speed, we have a lot of other things, but I’m not sure you have the kind of security that you need.”…
***********
Apart from fruitless speculation on the scope of the upcoming disaster, what’s on the agenda as we stutter-start another (holiday-shortened) week?
.
Happy New Year to all, including all the future presidents who 54% of voters rejected, and have record-low approval ratings. Love!
— Jon Favreau (@jonfavs) December 31, 2016
I'll never get my head around the fact that 62 million people wanted this emotionally stunted man-child to be president https://t.co/csfxfbF3DQ
— Michael Cohen (@speechboy71) December 31, 2016
And of the 2 groups, the worse were the those more obsessed w Hillary than responsible to the nation and the world. https://t.co/vk46npu2Zx
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) December 31, 2016
Mart
I am desperate to be optimistic for the New Year, so I am hoping this will lead Trump to open new educational channels for my brilliant daughter who learns from doing, not reading. Or maybe not.
Major Major Major Major
I still have a hard time believing this happened.
Speaking of Signal, that’s the name of an easy to use, fully encrypted, free messaging app that everybody should start using.
James Powell
People who claim – as Dana Houle tweeted – that they didn’t want Trump to be president but the just didn’t want Hillary to be president are assholes and they are lying. They had a choice, they made it. Now they want to avoid the opprobrium they richly deserve for a vote that cannot be defended. Dana Houle is right – they are worse. I wish every misery upon them.
Major Major Major Major
@James Powell: agreed.
guachi
When you go into a voting booth, you can only vote for someone. (Unless it’s one of those “retain the judge” kind of things)
Damien
For me, the worst are the people who say “the election’s over, it’s time to move on, no matter who you voted for.” No, motherfucker, you did this, and the scope and scale of the disaster you unleashed means we’re living with your stupid decision forever, not just the next four years.
m.j.
I not sure I understand Woodward’s question. I would have asked what he meant by, “succeeded.”
Here we are well into the 21st century and we struggle with the idea that certain members – fellow citizens – of our society are less than other members. We also see the vestiges of Lincoln’s and slavery’s era, like the 2nd Amendment, taking it’s daily toll of lives. We also see that Jim Crow is not dead, but in fact, has been revived and updated through the law.
I simply don’t understand the question.
M. Bouffant
Also terribly obvious he has no idea whatsoever about actual computers & their use & operation (What’ll you bet he could figure out the on/off button, but would have no idea how to get to the iNternet once the thing was on?) & may know just enough to realize how dumb this will make him look when it becomes more widely known.
Back to the’50s, w/ couriers!
BillinGlendaleCA
Trump might want to ask Bin Laden about couriers.
BillinGlendaleCA
Trump might have a learning disability, or he just could be not all that smart. In life I’ve found that really rich folk and really smart folk don’t tell you how smart or rich they are.
M. Bouffant
@BillinGlendaleCA: He certainly isn’t “book-smart”.
Major Major Major Major
@BillinGlendaleCA: he’s probably just stupid, incurious, tacky, and has a learning disability.
greennotGreen
@BillinGlendaleCA: Really smart folks are usually smart enough to know how little of the universe they (and humankind in general) understand, and therefore they don’t believe they’re really all that smart.
cmorenc
@M. Bouffant:
First: I voted for Clinton, would have voted for Bernie had he been our nominee, and agree Trump is a disgraceful disaster and those stupid or vile enough to vote for him are not easily forgiven.
Nevertheless, Clinton’s own technophobia about computers was among of the prime factors that led her down the garden path toward setting up a private email server – she was astonishingly so inept at using a personal computer and instead stubbornly insisted on using a particular version of the Blackberry she had managed to become familiar with. That the GOP blew the server thing from a tiny benign bump into an alleged mountain range filled with terrible beasts doesn’t change that her own stumbling personal technophobia was such a big factor in leading her onto needlessly troublesome territory.
Poopyman
@M. Bouffant:
Hey, don’t knock it. Jobs.
Spanky
Hmmmm. Apparently been a while since I’ve commented from the Chromebook.
BillinGlendaleCA
@cmorenc: I’m not sure about her technophobia, though I’ve worked with lawyers her age and it wouldn’t surprise me. But she asked for a similar solution to what the President got and was told to “Go Pound Sand”, so her options we limited.
TS
Because all courier messages get delivered to the nominated receiver and never pass through other hands and no-one would ever read a courier message not meant for themselves. Illiterate, dumb and stupid.
@cmorenc: Hillary was smart – she knew the available department computers were way out of date with limited security and sophistication. The advice she received suggested her own server would be preferable and more secure (as it was). She was not and never should be described as “Inept”. The GOP and the media spewed lies and hate about – that they would elect the dumbest of the available candidates proves how stupid they were and are.
sunny raines
@James Powell: ditto
sunny raines
@cmorenc: republicans were only the match; corporate media was the tinder and fuel only too happy to keeping nothing raging, against the interests of the American people.
Frank McCormick
Translated from the original Palinese: “Lincoln was just like me!”
ixnay
@greennotGreen: Dunning-Kruger.
OzarkHillbilly
Carol Mosely-Braun where are you?
Keith G
Sizeable numbers of voters in both parties wanted changes in approach. For them, this was not a “support the status quo” election year. In such an environment, Hillary’s worst enemy was Hillary herself and her inability to successfully combat the image that has been created about her with her own help.
In some universally pure sense, what happened to Hillary was unfair. Politics is never fair. One of the keys of being a successful politician is to understand how the enemy is going to fight you and countering those plans on the go. Hillary never seemed able to do that.
She ran the campaign that she started before Trump was a factor. I don’t think they ever shifted strategies enough to deal with the new type of warfare that Donald Trump was bringing to the battle. She was the establishment candidate and that was considered to be a strength at a time when many voters did not see that as a strength at all.
Bernie Sanders did the Hillary a favor by demonstrating the weakness in that approach during the primary process. However, it seems to me that the Clinton campaign thought they could power through with their original conception of how to run the campaign, but just enough voters in just enough important areas of the country felt otherwise. They chose to vote for who they considered the most probable agent of change.
And, sadly, change there will be.
Baud
@Keith G: Oh stop sugarcoating what Trump voters voted for. That’s so offensive. Are you next going to say gay haters really only care about their religious freedom?
JGabriel
Donald Trump: “Well, I think Lincoln succeeded for numerous reasons. He was a man who was of great intelligence, which most presidents would be. …”
Unlike the current President-Elect Grift.
OzarkHillbilly
So what happened with Teen Vogue?
Elaine Welteroth did.
JGabriel
M. Bouffant:
I’m not taking that bet, but only because I don’t Trump could find the on/off button.
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly: Interesting. Too bad about the cutbacks, although I assume it’s readers probably prefer the digital format.
hellslittlestangel
This almost makes me feel sorry for Sarah Palin. She got shredded for blabbering out nonsense like that.
Gvg
@Keith G: exactly how was Clinton supposed to change to react to Trump? She can’t change herself, she is too well known. If being establishment was a problem this year because of some of the electorate, well she is establishment. And the majority of us approved of the establishment and voted for her and a significant part of our coalition would have found someone else if she had decided to run against Obama and the increasing security we liked. I don’t buy anti establishmentism as an overwhelming cause for this result. I like sanity. That’s why I hate Trump. I hate those voters too.
I think the problem is the Republican Party has acquired voters who don’t actually care about significant traditional GOP planks and different factions haven’t given up affiliation yet. It hasn’t sunk in to all the real religious types that “their” party doesn’t actually have any Christan values. Electing adulterers repeatedly ought to have taught them that.
They all seem insane to me.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: I suspect so. For this 58 year old male I found it very interesting that on a # of occasions I heard of political news involving Teen Vogue. I was like “Teen Vogue????”
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly: Elaine found an opening, given how low traditional media has fallen. Good for her.
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone ???
Baud
@rikyrah: Good morning.
Russ
The issue with Donny is he knows of things, understanding things he’s a little short on.
NotMax
T minus 18 and counting.
HoustonAmerica, we have a problem.rikyrah
@James Powell:
Tell that truth.
OzarkHillbilly
@Gvg:
I think the problem is the Republican Party has acquired voters who don’t actually care about anything other than “Fuck them Libtards!” They don’t even know why.
rikyrah
@Damien:
Nope. You will be held accountable for what happens in this country. Every vote-is totally your responsibility.
Ryan
He may be on to something. The greatest threat in the Age of Computer may be The Cyber. Why he doesn’t want to boost our tremendous, beautiful defenses big league is beyond me.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: Nature abhors a vacuum. She, being young and black, saw that and filled it. Yes, good for her.
JGabriel
Gvg:
And if not the from adultery, then you’d think the religious types might have at least learned something when the Republican Senators they elected gave a standing ovation to a GOP colleague’s proven extra-marital whoremongering.
Keep in mind this was in 2007, around the same time the same Republicans were chasing Eliot Spitzer out of the NY governorship for his own use of an escort service. The obviously self-evident hypocrisy speaks for itself.
Keith G
@Baud: I think broad brushes are very ineffective ways to categorize information. I remember when we used to be the party at accepted the fact that nuance existed in the world and that the shades of grey existed more than pure black and white. I am comforted by the fact that some of the sharper minds among the operatives of the Democratic Party (those who actually do things on the ground and not just talk on the television) are saying similar things.
Baud
@Keith G: Great. So religious freedom it is.
Snarki, child of Loki
C’mon Obama!
Time to drop that new Executive Order “banning Stupid Tweets“.
I just can’t wait to see what Trump tweets in response!
OzarkHillbilly
@Keith G: Here’s what I can not get past: Every single Trump voter is either an ignorant, racist, misogynistic, truth challenged, authoritarian, OR they are OK with an ignorant, racist, misogynistic, truth challenged, authoritarian in the White House because….. reasons.
One can not nuance a way around that fact.
Keith G
@Gvg: You do raise an interesting problem that I think affected the key decisions early on in this campaign, but to address your central question I don’t think Hillary had to do much since the margins were quite thin.
Until the insider books on this event come out, I guess we won’t know all the decisions that were made. It does seem to me that both coasts of the United States are awash with people who are very good at marketing products in such a way that Americans buy crap things they don’t really want or need. Donald Trump is a fucking hot mess but one thing he seems to have a talent for is promotion. His ability to connect simple phrases with the names of his opponents and then essentially rebrand those opponents was an act of genius. None of his opponents ever put forward energy to counteract that since they thought it was all silly silliness, but that silliness came back to bite them in the ass…… including Hillary.
I refuse to believe there wasn’t a way to counteract this. I think that decisions were made to attempt to muscle through this and those plans backfired.
Gindy51
@JGabriel: On/off button, how about the fucking electrical plug and the outlet! That’s the first question we asked the office staff whenever they’d call us IT nerds about wtf was going on with their printers/desktops/copy machines, etc. Is. It. Plugged. In? Nine times out of ten it was not as the cleaning staff would regularly unplug random shit to fuck with the sobs who messed up their cubicals.
And no, they never, ever learned….
low-tech cyclist
@Keith G:
Bullshit. You remember right before the first debate, Trump had closed the gap in the polls? And she demolished him that night. In a way that had everything to do with Trump specifically. Same for the other two debates. And she won the last one definitively enough that people were talking landslide once its effects started showing up in the polls.
She was a solid six points ahead nationally with less than two weeks to go when James Comey upended the race. Maybe her campaign could have found a better way to deal with that, but fuck-all if I know what it was.
I’m really tired of the ‘blame Hillary’ crowd. She ran a good campaign. It wasn’t perfect, but no campaign ever is. Absent Comey’s intervention in the final week and a half, she would have won comfortably. And if anyone thinks they know how Team Hillary should have dealt with that, I hope they posted it somewhere during that last eleven days. I don’t remember much brilliant advice at the time.
OzarkHillbilly
Best put-down of 2016
ThresherK (tablet)
In third grade after being taught tiny-tots’ US history a friend of mine said that Lincoln was better than Washington because freeing the slaves was more difficult and important than beating the British military.
(The setting was kids who were basically white, largely Irish, Italian, or Polish, in Catholic school.)
Not that he was wrong or right, but we simply didn’t get the whole story back then, as we were in second grade. Nobody told us things like blacks fighting for the Royals in the revolution, the Whiskey Rebellion, the balance of free and slave states’ admission to the Union, or the Reconstruction and Jim Crow.
Trump’s words remind me too much of that. I’d like to see if he could write two pages about US history from either era.
satby
@low-tech cyclist: this. Clinton didn’t lose, she was robbed. As were we all.
Betty Cracker
@Keith G: You’re overthinking this, IMO. The 2016 election involved many unique factors and bizarre circumstances that will never happen again. Yes, it makes sense to analyze it and take what lessons we can. But there’s also the danger of fighting the last war if we interpret the 2016 election as a template for future contests. It’s not.
Keith G
@OzarkHillbilly: Well, the masses are asses, but then where does that leave us? Barack Obama himself has mentioned that we need to reach at least some of those voters.
When I started my teaching career almost 30 years ago I was a young kid in a much older staff. The ongoing hobby was for the old guns to complain about how the current crop of students were under-prepared and certainly not motivated to be successful students. I remember the meeting where these issues were discussed and the principal of the building looked at them and flatly said, “…and yet they are the students you are given to work with, and work with them you must, and that is how you will be judged.” There was a few moments of silence. I was inwardly smiling because that type of impossible challenge was why I wanted to teach in the first place.
There are a bunch awful critters who voted for Trump. Then there are some number that are not actually awful as much as they are unthinking or misguided. I agree with the President. We need to to make a solid effort to win their votes.
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
@cmorenc: As a netadmin who has to deal with corporate cell phone accounts, let me just say that if insistence on a particular brand qualifies as technophobia, Clinton is only one of LEGION.
Of course, none of my users ran for president…
Baud
@Keith G: I look forward to hearing about your accomplishments in reaching out to those voters.
@Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant): Tech savviness is only a requirement for Democrats.
OzarkHillbilly
@Keith G:
In a word? Fucked.
Patricia Kayden
@James Powell: Ditto those who refused to vote at all because “both of them were so bad”. No, one was considerably worse and more dangerous and much less qualified than the other. Common sense and human decency would have led you to vote for the better candidate even if you didn’t want to share a drink with her.
But here we are. Purity voters will suffer along with the rest of us. Sigh.
Keith G
@Betty Cracker: Possibly.
And yet, I’m not alone. Most of my comments above are, in part, an aggregation of ideas presented by folks who know a lot more about this than I do – some of whom have very recent real world experience in the current political environment. Treading on dangerous ground here, let me put forward that there does seem to be a bit of a Balloon Juice bubble here. There is a lot of real good information circling around these days and not all of it is focused on the slim Twitter feeds often presented here.
In the end, because I am certain of little, I am constantly reaching out to find new information to try to make sense of what has happened and is happening. I get the feeling that some folks here feel they have all the answers. Interestingly enough, none of the smart people I am reading feel they have all of the answers either. They too are groping around trying to find ways to make sense of what is going on.
Paul in KY
@low-tech cyclist: That POS Comey definitely changed the arc of the race. I so wish Pres. Obama would have fired him or would still fire him.
Edit: Will say that I misunderestimated the appeal of the Cheeto Benito. I think maybe the Clinton Team at some point began measuring the drapes, etc.
Keith G
@Baud: I’m sorry but that’s a pretty fucked-up way to deal with it. We have serious issues and snide comments of what I’m able to do or not do does not address the fact that there are real problems that have to be addressed and we have to be successful in dealing with the problems.
I find comfort in the fact that of people who matter, opinions like yours seem to be in the minority. When I hear conversations with the folks who want to be the DNC chair, they are saying very different things. Thank whatever God happens to be around these days for that.
permafrost
@cmorenc: LOL, this is just a ridiculous bunch of shit. No wrongdoing found. No, Hillary didn’t just need to know more about computers to avoid Republican efforts to find something, anything that she did to make a stink about.
debbie
@Major Major Major Major:
What I can’t get over is that conservatives are shocked that Democrats would even ponder not supporting Trump or the GOP’s agenda. It’s like the eight years of 100% obstruction never existed in their minds.
ETA: This is the FB post I woke up to this morning: So in the waning days, the President decides to take action – even if it makes the transition difficult for the new administration? I don’t really care what his rights are, or what other presidents have done. What happened to the idea of doing what will be best for the nation?
Baud
@Keith G: I’m not the one preaching to us how we should behave. And I’m not the one whose first comment was bitching about Hillary. By all means, do what you think is best. And I’m more than happy to accept evidence of successful outreach. But if the basis for you condescension is that other people who have also produced no results have different opinions, then you are going to be the subject of my derision every time.
debbie
@M. Bouffant:
I loved his suggestion about using couriers. What next, ravens?
Baud
@debbie:
It lost the last election.
Patricia Kayden
@Keith G: Perhaps Trump will mess up so badly that enough of his supporters will skip the 2020 election. Or be so disgusted by him that they switch their vote to the Democratic Presidential candidate.
The media and Republicans won’t have Secretary Clinton to kick around so our next candidate has a good chance of winning. I don’t anticipate Trump’s favorability ratings going anywhere but down.
debbie
@cmorenc:
It is a generational thing. When Colin Powell first got to the State Department, they didn’t have a single computer.
zhena gogolia
@James Powell:
Right.
I have such a sense of impending doom. Jan. 20 is not going to be a happy day. The idea that that asshole is going to have ANY power over me just outrages my soul.
debbie
@zhena gogolia:
I’m not feeling doom so much as unhappiness at having to go through this again. The country survived Reagan. I think the country is strong enough to survive whatever Trump, Putin, and Ryan have in store. There will be just as many impediments for the GOP and Trump as there were for Obama (though not the same kind of impediments).
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
@debbie:
That’s b/c they expect Dems to roll over. They ALWAYS expect Dems to roll over.
raven
@debbie: FIDO
TS
@JGabriel:
And then there was Mark Sanford
Kay
Trump’s a product of his time, right? He sees everything as celebrity. In that quote he goes on to say the Nixon wasn’t likable and that’s why Nixon was a failed President. “Criminal, but likable” would have succeeded, apparently.
Trump’s incredibly shallow but he’s more a reflection of our political culture than a creator of it. I think the “elites’ bear some responsibility for creating an atmosphere where Trump’s talents are over-valued.
Aimai
@cmorenc: bullshit. So, so, stupid. She simply did what previous sec. of state did. She was not a technophobe any more than colin powell was.
Shantanu Saha
@ThresherK (tablet): I’d like to see Trump write two pages of… anything. I don’t think he can. He can’t get past a paragraph without repeating himself, if he is speaking on his own. This is why twitter is his perfect medium. It masks how stupid he really is.
raven
@Kay: likable to who?
MomSense
@debbie:
Between his refusal to receive the intelligence briefing and his asinine comments, he is broadcasting to all our potential threats that he is completely unprepared to handle them. If I lived in a major city or other important location, I’d be pretty frickin nervous.
MomSense
@debbie:
The country survived but lots of people didn’t and I would argue that a lot of the issues the Republicans used to scare voters (ISIS!) into voting for the idiot trump were created by Bush and Reagan.
debbie
@raven:
The polite form, right? ;)
Bmaccnm
@debbie: Owlpost.
debbie
@Kay:
I wonder if Trump will walk through fog and low-lighting when he arrives at the Inauguration to take his oath.
Baud
@MomSense: It’s not talked about enough how the people most at threat of terror attacks are the most Democratic. We put on a grand dog and pony show for the people who are the most safe.
Betty Cracker
@Keith G: This clip explains what I mean better than I can express it in words.
Kay
@debbie:
There was a huge residual middle class when Reagan arrived. They’re still passing thru the system. It will be much worse when the people who are 40’s, 50’s and 60’s and economically insecure make up the majority of retirees. I see 2 distinct groups in my practice now- the haves and the have nots. There will be many more have nots. The “haves”, the people who retained traditional pensions and have actual assets are IMO making it look better than it is. Once we burn thru them it gets much poorer. “Middle class”, the concept, ripples. It’s generational. It pays benefits further out than the direct beneficiaries. You need seed corn.
raven
@debbie: Why do I think “It don’t mean nuthin, drive on” is not proper englich?
Kay
@debbie:
Reagan ate the seed corn of the next middle class. We haven’t seen the empty fields yet, but they’re coming. You can’t just skip a couple of generations of upward mobility and not pay for that. The thing needs replenishing or it dies.
raven
@Kay: And the “have nots” voted for?
Kay
@debbie:
I’ll have to read about it. I’m not watching that. Did you see one of them said they want Clinton “punished”? These people are wackos. They’re deranged.
debbie
@Kay:
I agree. What Reagan really did was destroy the concepts that long-term thinking and strategy were best. It’s all right here, right now. That’s why companies can destroy their customers and banks can destroy their markets. Hurry up and get it now, then get out, and screw any damage done.
debbie
@raven:
Cause it ain’t!
Keith G
@Betty Cracker: Betty & Others…A headline
From the article:
Another Scott
@BillinGlendaleCA: Yup. As with that video clip of Donnie laughing, what he (as opposed to his Twitter minions) chooses to tweet about tells us more about what’s going on in that damaged head of his than what KAC or Leroy or whoever says is important to him.
He’s insecure about his manhood, his stamina, his intelligence, is competence, his wealth, and the people around him (except for his kids and in-laws). He can’t keep to a schedule (showing up late to his events; not releasing information when he says he will). He doesn’t know how anything works except for getting people around him not to tell him “no”.
Someone on the BBC this morning was saying that Vlad was quite happy that Donnie was appointing lots of business MoTUs because they know nothing about how diplomacy works and he’ll basically be able to roll them when it comes to doing what’s best for Russia vs what’s best for the USA. If Donnie’s people don’t listen to the civil service experts (and there’s no indication that they’re going to thus far), I fear he will be right.
Cheers,
Scott.
debbie
@Kay:
I did see that. Let them try. It’ll be one of the many overreaches that will make them look like the buffoons they are. Besides, I’m sure Hillary could find sanctuary in someplace punitive like the Riviera.
Kay
@raven:
Trump, but honestly most of them don’t vote. They’re pretty focused on surviving :)
It really is generational, though, the concept of “middle class”. It pays benefits for a lot more than the original “class” or people. They better start building low income housing, is all I can say. I don’t know where these people are gonna live when they can’t work anymore.
MJS
@Patricia Kayden: At some point, we’ll get over the unwarranted optimism re: Trump. First, he was a joke. Then he couldn’t win the nomination. Then the Rs would get him to relinquish the nomination. Then he would drop out after the audio with Billy Bush came out. Then he would skip the debates. Then he would get crushed in the election. Then he would lose the election. Then the stuff with Russia would derail his inauguration. We will all be best served to assume there will be 8 years of a Trump administration, and be happy for any day less than that full 8 years.
raven
@Kay: I guess maybe there has to be even more widespread pain if people are going to wake up. That’s one reason I’m rooting for Trump to murder the fucking VA.
OzarkHillbilly
@Keith G:
The problem with this analysis is that it is 6 1/2 years too late. The reason we are in this situation is to a large extent because of the 2010 electoral losses.
mai naem mobile
I cannot believe I’m going to have to look at this ugly face for the next four years
donnah
My mother, who is 82, decided not to vote, despite immense pressure from my husband and me. She said both candidates were not worthy, but when I asked her why she thought Hillary wasn’t worthy, she had no reason. Sad to say, I think she was reluctant to vote for a woman for president. I was really upset with her, but short of physically dragging her to the car, there was nothing to be done.
I mentioned to her the other day that trump and the republicans are going to do their best to demolish health care, and her Medicare might be stripped down. After many, many medical issues over the years, something like that will devastate her. She’s probably had over a million dollars in medical bills. And she’s a Sears retiree, so the CEO, a republican, is basically trashing Sears/Kmart, so her retirement money might be in danger.
When people don’t vote, it’s a vote for the bad guys.
Botsplainer
@Keith G:
His fundamental optimism is also his greatest weakness, because he is naively assuming that impoverished whites of Appalachia, the Deep South and Texas are better people than they are.
There is a genuine cultural defect in terms of their personal ordering of interests. Destruction of “others” will always be number one, facilitating moneyed interests which can best assure that destruction is number two, authoritarian devotion to swaggering white guys in nice suits is part of that bracket. They don’t care about their personal security, as they’re content to live in squalor so long as those basic cultural requirements are met.
Betty Cracker
@Keith G: Well, speaking for myself, I’ve long agreed with the 50-state strategy, and I think there’s general consensus here that Democrats should focus more on local races, have a presence in every district, etc. What prompted me to wonder if you’re overthinking it was statements like, “[Trump’s] ability to connect simple phrases with the names of his opponents and then essentially rebrand those opponents was an act of genius.”
No, it wasn’t. It really, really wasn’t. “Crooked Hillary” stuck because it was preceded by a quarter-century wingnut media campaign against the Clintons, the interference of the FBI in the election and the assist from Russia via WikiLeaks.
You can call that excuse-making for a bad campaign if you want, but my sincere belief is that if we try to apply lessons like learning from Trump’s “genius” rebranding to future elections, we’ll be fighting a war that is already over and won’t be fought on the same terms again. And we’ll look like asshole bullies, which isn’t really a good look.
Shalimar
If I had given that answer on a test, the teacher would have written in the margin, “you don’t know who Lincoln was, do you?”
Elizabelle
@mai naem mobile: That’s why I think we need a pet picture, every morning and during the day as well.
Trump ain’t gonna wear well. And I’m not going to be some defeatist jackass and assume we’re stuck with him for eight years.
Get a grip, jackals.
Zinsky
@BillinGlendaleCA: Well said, Bill. You never hear Noam Chomsky talk about how smart he is or Warren Buffett talk about how rich he is. Trump is an unintelligent failure of a human being on so many levels. I just about spit my coffee all over the kitchen this morning when I read that Trump had said, “I know a lot about hacking…”. Yeah, right.
Botsplainer
@Betty Cracker:
All the 2009-10 sniping from the left at blue dogs fucked everyone pretty damned badly. Those town halls on health care (when “they wouldn’t even fight for a public option”) could have used an assist from Our Progressive Betters in terms of presence and a counter narrative to the Tealiban. Instead, we got Jane Hamsher, Michael Moore and a host of sniping.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Sorry to bring this up, but you have to add our own primary.
Another Scott
@OzarkHillbilly: Dunno. In normal times, it takes a majority to win. Donnie won the nomination because the brainiacs at the RNC decided to make lots of their contests “winner take all”. Donnie didn’t win 50% of the actual primary votes. Hillary won more general election votes than Donnie. Democrats won more votes in the House than the GOP, but the way the boundaries are drawn they didn’t get most of the seats.
The problem is the way the system has been corrupted. The GOP should have had a contested convention. The states should have non-partisan redistricting once every 10 years (not partisan redistricting whenever the GOP manages to get a majority in the state). Roberts and the SCOTUS should not have decided they knew better than 90+% of the Congress about what the purpose and implementation of the VRA should be. Etc., etc. But things aren’t going to change until we have solid majorities of the important seats in the Congress, federal courts, and state houses. It’s going to be a very long process to have a stable majority again.
There were lots of “unique” aspects of this election that won’t be repeated the same way in the future. In a sensible election system, Hillary would be taking office on the 20th. But the system has been twisted and bent to favor the GOP. We need to work around those twists and bends by increasing voter registration and increasing turnout.
When Democrats vote, Democrats win.
Cheers,
Scott.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Me too. But if we want to get real, we need to call but the “50-state, less progressive strategy,” because that’s what it means, as @Botsplainer alluded to.
bemused
@donnah:
What was her reaction, if any, to that?
Baud
@Baud: but = it
Patricia Kayden
@Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant): Hell, I expect Dems to roll over and I’m a staunch liberal. It feels as if they always do. Perhaps they’ll shock me and actually oppose Trump. Perhaps.
JMG
Every election is different from the last one. Every one. This is why post-mortems are of limited utility. As was clear both before and after the election, a decisive section of Trump’s support came from the voters who didn’t like either candidate. They took a flier on Trump, so they are up for grabs next time, just as they were this time. It’s a small group, maybe 3-4 percent of voters. But that’s the difference between winning and losing. If they think Trump’s doing a bad job in 2018, or if they’re just disappointed none of his ludicrous promises came true, they may be the ones who don’t show up at the midterms, not the Dem. base.
OzarkHillbilly
@Another Scott:
You do realize you agree with me in (near) total? Nearly everything you cite there is a direct result of the 2010 election.
daveNYC
@Baud: What’s annoying is that all the posturing and conservative positions taken by the Blue Dogs seem to end up doing roughly jack and squat as far as helping them win re-election.
The 50 state strategy is great because it lets us have someone in place to run and take advantage of things like GWB’s administration being a smoking hole in the ground, but I think we need to realize that gains in those states will tend to be temporary, and those seats will go back to Republicans as soon as the Democrats have managed to patch up the situation. Ideally that’d mean that the next crop of Blue Dog types would be willing to go balls out on progressive issues, but I doubt you’d be able to find a lot of candidates willing to run for office on an explicit expectation of being one-and-done. Never mind that it’s pretty likely they’d be one-and-done regardless of their voting pattern.
Jeffro
@Damien:
AY-MEN
If they have trouble grasping the concept, ask them to picture the situation only ‘flipped’ – i.e., if China had hacked the RNC and dribbled out info for the press to gobble up & regurgitate endlessly, with a last-minute slam of Trump by the CIA, resulting in Hillary getting elected, praising/defending China all the while and surrounded herself with China sympathizers (and ignoring our own intelligence services’ info on China as well)
Alternatively, you could ask them to picture Dems rallying behind some moronic Hollywood star-president, who was filling his/her cabinet with inexperienced folks bent on destroying capitalism, and see if they’d take it well when told to “move on”. The only problem with this scenario is, even a Hollywood star-president would a) be smarter than and b) have a better work ethic than the Man-Baby.
Jeffro
@daveNYC:
True. And yet, it’s still worth it to have a D in a seat for whatever time they can win and hold it. Keeps the Rs tied down, makes them spend time and money to keep their own ‘turf’ instead of ours. And it helps remind red-district Ds of what’s possible.
Baud
@daveNYC:
I don’t know. We controlled Congress for only four years since 1994, and the last two of those years were fairly progressive, despite what some would have you believe. But much to go on in making predictions.
GrandJury
@James Powell: The Sandernistas would fall into that group.
Another Scott
@OzarkHillbilly: It’s a difference in emphasis.
Tom Delay and his minions redistricting Texas in 2003 wasn’t a result of the 2010 election. Winner take all has been a problem in the GOP since at least 2008.
Off year elections have been an on-going problem, and the results in 2010 certainly didn’t help. But this isn’t all (or maybe even mostly?) on Democrats. If the system were structured fairly, Democrats would be increasing their majorities in 2017.
I don’t object to Obama’s framing very much, because if one accepts it then it is empowering. Our future really is (mostly) in our hands if we’re willing to work for it. The Teabaggers will fight us using every underhanded technique they can dream up, but they won’t win unless we don’t fight back. We out number them, and we have the facts and our ideals on our side.
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
OzarkHillbilly
@Jeffro:
I think I see a flaw in your analogy.
donnah
@bemused:
She shrugged and said she’s going to die soon anyway.
Jeffro
@OzarkHillbilly: Yes…it’s difficult to make even apples-to-Orangemandias comparisons with this clown, I know…
Spanky
@Kay:
Oh, Kay! You are such an optimist! These people are not wackos. They’re evil. Quite evil. This will not end well for a lot of people before the evil is eradicated.
Kay
@raven:
My father loves the VA. He goes for a check up and spends the whole rest of the day in the cafeteria drinking coffee- coffee is a quarter, apparently. It’s like the highlight of his month, that trip.
I think sometimes people don’t know what they had because of that same generational “snapshot” quality. I see it with public school parents, most of whom are younger than me. I tell them “we used to have field trips and an art teacher in this school back in the day!” They only know what they experience.
MomSense
@Baud:
I have to hand it to Dean because he definitely picked a catchy slogan but winning back Congress in 2006 had a lot more to do with Rahm Emmanuel at the DCCC than anything Dean did. The DNC doesn’t actually do a whole lot and certainly didn’t in an off year election. Their big tasks are to sponsor 5-6 debates, organize the platform committee, run the Convention, and raise money. The DNC didn’t turn into this all powerful Democratic machine organization until the 2016 primary season. Thanks, Vlad!
Mike McCarthy
@M. Bouffant: He’s in his 70’s. I’ll cut him slack on his computer gibberish. It’s the Lincoln word salad that disturbs me. That’s complete nonsense.
MomSense
@Kay:
Was the poor art teacher reduced to pushing a cart from class to class? That’s usually what happens to us for the last few years before the budget cuts and consultants finally get rid of us.
BillinGlendaleCA
OT: Getting my camera ready for the Rose Parade flyover, they make the turn to line up to Colorado Blvd. right above the cave. The weather will not be as cooperative as last year when it was clear and chilly, it’s overcast with occasional drizzle here in LALAland.
Patricia Kayden
@Damien: Plus, their side didn’t adopt a “let’s all just move on” philosophy after Obama’s two wins. Pretty bold of them to be so hypocritical now that their guy has won.
Kay
@Spanky:
“Lock her up” enrages me. I’m sensitive to that. That Chris Christie thinks he can judge anyone’s ethics is just outrageous. The nerve of these people.
BillinGlendaleCA
@MomSense: After Prop 13 here in CA, they got rid of the Art and Music programs, they’ve only come back in the wealthier areas where the parents can raise the cash to pay for them outside of the school budget.
Manyakitty
@raven: He can murder the VA, and every patient under its care, and the jack ass talking heads wI’ll blame Obama.
Spanky
@Kay: Doesn’t take a whole lotta nerve when you can see how free of consequences your behavior is. It’s behavioral training of the worst sort.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Patricia Kayden:
They’re Republicans, it’s what they do.
Kay
@MomSense:
The art cart! Then we went to a volunteer. She’s lovely but she’s a retired social worker. It’s not the same thing.
Woodrowfan
@Gindy51: I worked IT in the 90s. When we found something was not plugged in we jokingly called it “adjusting the electrical interface”.
OzarkHillbilly
@Another Scott:
Republicans exist in the same system as Dems and the system does not have a GOP or DEM bias. It has a “Who won the last election” bias**. The GOP won in 2010, the census year, the redistricting year. They have been able to leverage that victory into a long term lock on the House of Representatives. This is the 2nd time during Obama’s Presidency more people voted for DEMS than voted for GOP and yet Paul Ryan remains Speaker.
** the Senate has a rural bias and rural = GOP
Baud
@Kay: We need to reach out to them, Kay. Let’s put her in a halfway house. Compromise!
MomSense
@BillinGlendaleCA: @Kay:
It’s so frustrating. My mom used to tease me because she pushed a music cart before she finally decided to leave education. Can you imagine trying to push a whole orchestra worth of instruments on a cart?
The sad part is that music, fine art, and performing arts are so good for students.
OzarkHillbilly
@Jeffro: You should have just said “Sean Penn”. ;-)
Betty Cracker
@Kay: The “lock her up” thing enrages me too. Spicer, the incoming press secretary, invoked it this weekend, but in that case, it seemed to me a pretty flagrant attempt to deflect from questions about the Russian hacking. They must be pretty anxious about the Russia hacking questions if the most senior officials are talking about “punishing” Clinton.
Also, Trump said he’ll reveal something about the hacking on “Tuesday or Wednesday.” Correct me if I’m wrong, but when he delays announcement of something, isn’t that always an attempt to kick the can down the road until the media loses focus? Like the immigration press conference Melania never had, or the secret plan to defeat ISIS, etc.
germy
@Kay:
Same in the workplace. Young people are astounded when I tell them back in 1977 you could find a million “entry level” jobs: file clerk, clerk typist, etc., “No Experience Necessary – Will Train” and then once you got the job they’d pay for your continuing education and contribute to a pension. There are quite a few conservative white men in their early ’60s occupying corner offices as middle managers who got their start filing paper.
I remember working for a company like that; it was so laid back. And then sometime in the 1980s, all of a sudden all the benefits faded away, and middle and upper management suddenly was always In A Hurry, obsessing over quarterly profits and laying people off by the dozens if they didn’t meet quotas their bosses had concocted. It was around that time the culture of business/bullshit/MBA talk really swelled, and meetings became bullshit fests.
Baud
@germy:
I blame NAFTA.
ericblair
@Another Scott:
The GOP has spent the last forty years corrupting the voting system, courts, and media, to grease the skids for one for a Mitt or Jeb. Instead, the too-clever-by-half assholes got rolled and it was Trump. The Republicans compromised our electoral immune system and Trump is the opportunistic infection.
From the data about who the Trump voters mostly are (not the poor, but middle class rural/exurb), and the general state of the economy with low unemployment and Obamacare as a new social service, my theory is that the bigotry and purity tantrum that led to Trump is essentially a luxury good, the exact opposite of “economic anxiety”. When the shit hits the fan like in 2008, people are worried enough about their own future to listen to facts. The poor and vulnerable minorities voted for Clinton. It’s only when things are going OK and people have time and energy to play with their hobby horses that we get this sort of populist rage.
germy
@MomSense: In the 1950s and ’60s, folks were still benefitting from the early 20th century Progressive Era. Beautiful things were built in small towns. Parks, town squares, bandstands (free music) libraries, municipal buildings.
Nowadays, sprawl and brutalist box government buildings. The government building in the exurb we used to live in looked like a detention center. And no sidewalk to walk to it, just a road that never got potholes fixed.
germy
@Baud: I blame Raygun and the mentality he ushered in.
germy
@Patricia Kayden:
Oh my god they went nuts, as I predicted they would when Obama won. Cosplay, disrupting town halls. They made the yippies look like the local PTA.
OzarkHillbilly
@germy:
January 20, 1981.
Betty Cracker
@ericblair: I agree. It’s a Maslow’s hierarchy thing.
germy
@OzarkHillbilly: Yup.
dnfree
@M. Bouffant: I don’t think Trump is knowledgeable about computers, but his statement that “No computer is safe” is 100% true. Even if your computer isn’t connected to the Internet, you could find a USB drive in a parking lot and plug it into your computer and put it in danger.
You can lock the door of your house and even buy a security system and someone still might be able to get in. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t bother locking your door. But in fact there is no way to guarantee your house won’t be broken into, or your computer.
When my family first got email capabilities back in the mid-1990s, I told my teenage kids never to put anything in an email that they wouldn’t want to see posted on the big advertising billboard on the outskirts of town. That still applies and it’s astounding to me that politicians don’t heed that warning.
Это курам на смех
@Shalimar: Any answer Trump gives to any question will come from the Miss Teen South Carolina playbook. Such as.
Jeffro
@OzarkHillbilly: Yeah, probably. =)
But even Sean Penn has half a fucking brain and an ounce or two of empathy for fellow citizens. iL Douche? not so much.
daveNYC
@Baud: 2008-2010 was pretty progressive, but all the negotiating down the ACA to get every Democrat on board because we needed 60 votes followed by the Democrats getting voted into the minority while running as far away from Obama as possible was pretty damn shambolic. Ideally, the Democratic party will have learned a thing or two from that. Namely:
1) If the President is a Democrat, you’re going to be on the hook for his policies regardless of whether you voted for them or amended them in any way.
2) Red states are going to regress to the mean after a wave election, which means they’ll probably boot your blue ass out, so strike while the iron is hot.
3) Fuck Joe Lieberman.
dnfree
@cmorenc: I agree about Hillary’s email folly. That was one of the things she did that I couldn’t defend even though I supported her, and it also made me wonder about the quality of her advisers that they “let” her do something that virtually anyone could see would look bad if revealed.
The other thing was the Clinton Foundation. She pledged there’d be a wall between it and the State Department, and there wasn’t. There were those stories about not only foreign donors, but even Bill Clinton’s ties to (and money from) that for-profit educational group. Just imagine if the Clintons had run their foundation cleanly. Then when Trump’s foundation revelations came out, a clear contrast could have been drawn. As it was, the best Democrats could do was say that the Clinton Foundation wasn’t found to be outright illegal, some things just looked bad. Not exactly a ringing endorsement.
Those who claim that the United States is now a “stan” in terms of cronyism have to consider that the Clintons contributed to that.
ThresherK
@BillinGlendaleCA: My wife and I watch it each year. She likes it more than I do (she has a brown thumb but enjoys others’ horticulture), and I have a weird fascination with watching floats and marching bands make, or fail to make, that one incredible 115-degree right-hand turn.
Another Scott
@OzarkHillbilly:
Yes.
Eh???
Off-year redistricting was unheard of (AFAIK) until DeLay and the GOP did it in Texas in 2003.
Shutting down the federal government and threatening to default on the debt was unheard of until the Teabaggers made it an acceptable tactic.
Striking down the VRA enforcement provision was unheard of until Roberts did it in 2013.
Breaking Medicare expansion the way Roberts did was unheard of until he did it in 2012.
The GOP refusing to have hearings for a SCOTUS nominee was a beyond the pale until 2016.
The MSM and DC is wired for the GOP.
Democrats and the GOP exist in the same system, but the GOP has a habit of bending it and breaking it to their advantage, destroying norms and traditions in the process.
The bias in the system toward the GOP didn’t change with Carter’s (“Georgia mafia”) or Clinton (“draft dodger” “Bubba” “trashed the place, and it’s not his place”) or Obama (“Hell no you can’t!” “You lie!” ).
(sigh)
Cheers,
Scott.
catclub
@Gvg: I find reading The Authoritarians enlightening and appalling.
dnfree
@Keith G: I agree that even though the Clintons were relentlessly targeted by the right for decades, they contributed to her defeat. The email server at home and the running of the Clinton Foundation to “do well while doing good” were avoidable pitfalls that they should have been able to see coming. One can say Trump will be a terrible and scary president and still also say that Hillary’s campaign had flaws. Those aren’t mutually exclusive.
Yes, the state department computers were insecure, as it appears many government agencies’ computers are. But had she used them, she wouldn’t have been able to be targeted as she was. (And maybe she could have worked to improve their security, you know, being Secretary of State and all.)
catclub
@Betty Cracker:
Astonishingly successful attempt to kick the can down the road till the media loses focus.
Corrected.
Baud
@dnfree: FWIW, most people here believe the email “scandal” as much bullshit as the attack on Kerry’s war record.
I guess we should criticize Kerry for volunteering.
dnfree
@Aimai:
She didn’t do exactly what Colin Powell or anyone else did. That’s obfuscation. And technology had changed significantly in the intervening years. I don’t know what advisers she ran that idea past before setting up a private server, but if they didn’t advise her against it at the time, they should have been “drawn and quartered”, as Podesta’s hacked emails indicate.
“Do we actually know who told Hillary she could use private email?” wrote Neera Tanden, who now co-chairs Clinton’s transition team, in July of last year. “And has that person been drawn and quartered? Like the whole thing is fucking insane.”
dnfree
@Baud: Well, I would say that if “most people here” believe that, then most people here are incorrect. I worked in IT for 45 years, all the way since the 1960s. Had Hillary asked me, or many other people, if she should set up a private email system (open to a select few, housed in her home or in various other places) and use it instead of the system provided by her employer, I would have told her no. A lower-level employee could be fired if it were found out they were using an outside system or private email.
In what way does that resemble swift-boating?
Baud
@dnfree: Election is over so no point debating it.
Elizabelle
A suggestion for BJuice in 2017: NO pictures of Trump above the fold. None. This one would have Abraham Lincoln by his lonesome, with Trump further down.
Put up a pet or landscape, if you must.
LAC
@Botsplainer: exactly! A whole lot of “we’ll show Obama what fer!” led by a bunch of loudmouth purity ponies who had their safety nets nicely secured already. That they are given any airtime disgusts me.
And it do not think that Obama meant for outreach to be an abandoning of our principles. A 50 state strategy means you soak up what you can get in every state – show up, campaign. Now if some WWC is going to continue to vote against his/her interests, that is not under our control. But showing up and offering up our agenda unapologetically is under our control.
Hillary did try to do this – she was dogged by bullshit media campaign that broadcasted every lie the trump campaign slithered out of its piehole. To the point that by the time comey shit the bed, it was nothing but emailsssss all damn day. Coupled with a resentful white base and you have the makings for an electoral disaster.
In my view, all this Batman vs Superman analysis of Obama and Clinton is just dead end stuff for bitter PUMAs and Hillary haters to argue about. The lessons learned about 2016 can not be summed up by these groups – neither is useful for our future strategy. Both can die a painful death over on a Kos blog.
J R in WV
@ThresherK (tablet):
You ask “Trump’s words remind me too much of that. I’d like to see if he could write two pages about US history from either era.”
You postulate that Drumpf can write? Really?
Elie
@dnfree:
Oh for chrisakes! We are about to have a fucking nutjob autocrat and you are still litigating Hillary and the server. Got fuck yourself. People like you helped bring what we have and I donot accept that you have the interest of progressives in mind when you argue anything different than she and we were robbed. A lot of stuff contributed to this election outcome and most of it was pre-saged by Republican behavior in the last 8 years or so. If I fault Hillary and Obama for anything is underestimating the strength of this movement — as many did. It cost us big time. So get off your hobby horse. There are bigger fish to fry and what remains of our at least somewhat liberal democracy is at stake.
Jeannedalbret
@debbie: Owls?
J R in WV
@Patricia Kayden:
Perhaps; perhaps.
But if Trump keeps the hate and fear burning hot, maybe not.
And without Hillary, they will treat the next candidate like Kerry, a hero with purple hearts that they mocked with purple bandaides, or Jimmy Carter, who was afraid of a rabbit and failed to personally free the hostages – oh wait, Reagan and his minions committed treason, colluding with the Iranian revolutionaries, but that didn’t matter.
Sorry, I have trouble not imagining a world where Republicans can slur any Demoncrat candidate, if they can twist Black Lives Matter into “Want to Kill Cops” there is nothing they can’t twist into a hate slogan. It is who they are.
Larkspur
Semi-random musings:
Seed corn: I’ve read that during the Nazi siege of Leningrad, some of the scientists in charge of maintaining the seed banks died of starvation rather than break into the seed banks and cook that stuff up to eat. They were looking at the end of the world and decided to stay the course, just in case the world didn’t end, and that there might be new generations in need of those banked seeds. Those people were heroic.
Art classes: I remember those, and I remember the musical instruments that were made available for us to borrow at no charge. The history books we boomers got were jingoistic and superficial; many of the teachers were barely qualified because we needed so many teaching bodies in the classrooms so quickly (I know this first-hand because my father, having done poorly in the family business, was recruited to be an elementary school teacher on condition that he take some night school education classes concurrently. He was not a very good teacher), but we always had the supplies. Art classes were taught by the art teacher in the art room and we didn’t have to bring or buy our own materials.
Technology knowledge: A lot of what everyone is saying is pertinent about HRC’s decision making skills in regard to tech. But we have to remember that everything has changed so quickly that our policies and practices have been made up as we go along. To compare today’s world with that of, say, Eisenhower’s, is to downplay how profoundly everything has changed: a million different cable news channels, 24 hour news cycle, the huge advances in on-line community-formation, most people owning a camera-phone, damned Twitter. As in medicine, our technology races away much faster than our ability to create an ethical framework to understand it. It doesn’t excuse mistakes, but again, as in medicine, sometimes you have to include the pertinent “standard of care” at the time when assessing or judging an action.
When I was working in plaintiffs’ personal injury law (as a paralegal), we considered taking the case of a man who lost his wife to a sudden heart attack. She had been to see her doctor several times before, complaining of pain. She was told it was GERD. She was given one test (I don’t remember which test it was) which was inconclusive, but she was not given another, more definitive test that would have revealed the problem and very likely have saved her life. We sent out the medical records to experts, but in the end we had to decline the case, because although more information was being assembled to show that women’s heart disease presents differently from men’s, it wasn’t yet the “standard of care” to have prescribed that additional test – for men, yes, but not for women. That is, most physicians would have treated this woman in the same manner, and it would have been considered reasonable. Although there would mostly likely be grounds for a malpractice case now, there weren’t for this woman and her surviving husband.
What I mean is, handling tech things in a way that seems careless, even criminally careless, now doesn’t necessarily mean that two or five or ten years ago, everyone should have already known this.
Good morning, rikyrah.
Paul in KY
@debbie: Good one, debbie! LOLing!
Paul in KY
@debbie: IMO, Reagan compared to Trump is like Bismarck compared to Eric Cartman.
No One You Know
@Keith G: I find it likely that people identify with specific problems that are especially offensive to them. Not that they think they have all the answers. Attempting to analyze a community is not the same as actually engaging with it. This isn’t just an intellectual exercise, either.
I’ve come to believe this electoral outcome is about identity politics. Not about a shared value of improving the choices everone can make for their lives.
I knew not everyone thought those ideals important.
It feels to me as if I seriously underestimated the amount of envy, malice, and indifference there is in my larger society. That’s a possibility that no amount of armchair strategizing will get around: it’s primal, tribal, and extinguished by centuries of living with diversity. And even Europe hasn’t fully pulled it off.
The most I can do is continue to “hold these truths to be self-evident, that all…are created equal” until we all actually are treated that way. To be able to talk about a specific Constitutional right and question why discomfort with it means that it is wrong, or less, than another Constitutional right.
I think Trump is dangerous because he will try to ignore what he cannot understand: the rule of law. I don’t know how to resist that without taking the law into my own heart, not my own hands.
Another Scott
@Larkspur: Well said. Thank you.
Cheers,
Scott.
(Who occasionally thinks that people will look back with fondness at the “good old days” when antibiotics still worked…)
Hob
Betty, I really appreciate how you wrote this part:
I’ve known severely dyslexic and ADHD people who are 10,000 times smarter, more articulate, and more focused than Trump. Some of them grew up with money and got specialized training from the start; others grew up with nothing and had a harder road. Either way, the key is to acknowledge what kinds of things don’t work so smoothly for you, and learn how to work around them. And that’s never going to happen for someone who is determined (by nature and/or by upbringing) to defend their own awesomeness as a first priority.
Trump is like a guy who was born with a bad leg and decided that legs are stupid and walking is for suckers because why not just take a limo.
dnfree
@Elie: Thank you for your thoughtful and well-reasoned response. It’s important to alienate anyone on your side who doesn’t see things exactly your way.
Yes, our liberal democracy is at stake. Important to look at what Democrats need to do differently. Also important (my view anyway) to recognize that two things can be true: 1) Republicans and the media exaggerated the importance of the emails, and 2) one could have seen that coming and avoided at least that particular problem. One could also have refrained from giving high-paid speeches to Wall Street and then refusing to release them. One could have run the family foundation in a way that didn’t also result in the Clintons also making money from for-profit education providers. http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/bill-clinton-laureate-for-profit-college-pay-226971
Having watched the Clintons for many years (and voted for both of them), I still think that their focus on making money was part of what turned “average” people against her.
Emma
@dnfree: No. What did it was the relentless drumbeat of lies from Republicans about how they made their money and how they spent it and and how different that jumped-up white trash was from all those good Republican plutocrats. And super-liberals didn’t help by adopting the framing because they believe that money is evil no matter what and that democrats should be held to different standards of purity.
Elie
@dnfree:
I don’t have to alienate someone who by his obsession alienates him or herself. What a ridiculous concept! That you are so clueless and fragile that by reminding you to stop knee capping and pulling us down that you will be less than enthusiastic opposing the authoritarian Putin lover who is gonna be sworn in soon. That anyone would have to watch your fee fees in this situation! Hey you know what? Fuck you again, stupid fuck. Who wants you on their team anyway. You’d be too busy attacking us. Go curl up next to the Trumpites with whom you seem to share values and beliefs that synch up.
dnfree
So far you have sworn at me and told me I don’t have the interests of progressives in mind (“Got fuck yourself. People like you helped bring what we have and I do not accept that you have the interest of progressives in mind when you argue anything different than she and we were robbed”), then called me obsessed, said I have alienated myself, and called me clueless and fragile. (Bonus reference to my “fee fees”.) More swearing at me, more claiming I have the same values as Trumpites. (“Hey you know what? Fuck you again, stupid fuck. Who wants you on their team anyway.”)
Apparently I come from the part of the progressive movement that is more dedicated to reason and less prone to insult anyone who expresses a different opinion or concern. All you have done is hurl standard insults, nothing that responds to my comments other than that I shouldn’t make them and if I do it means I support Trump. I seldom comment here, but I am concerned about the outcome of the election and what the Democratic party should do going forward. I’m still not sure how attacking those who mostly agree with you forwards progressive values.
dnfree
@Emma: You’re putting words in my mouth that I never said or intended. That makes three commenters on here so far who have chosen to exaggerate what I supposedly said rather than to engage with it. Yes, the Republicans have unfairly targeted the Clintons for decades. BUT the Clintons have also fed into some of that even after they should have known better.
Did you read some of the articles on how they profited from the Clinton Foundation? And the controversy over how even Chelsea thought that it wasn’t being handled well? Just imagine if, when Trump’s Foundation was found to be doing illegal things, the Clintons had been able to contrast how cleanly theirs had been run. Well, they couldn’t. The best they could say was that theirs hadn’t done anything proven to be illegal. That made it harder to point out to the average voter how truly appalling Trump’s foundation handling was.
When I read that article about how much Bill made from the for-profit education group, I threw the paper on the floor in disgust. When it turned out that there was contact between the foundation and the state department, despite Hillary assuring a line would be clearly drawn–I shook my head. When she gave highly compensated speeches to Wall Street AND wouldn’t release the transcripts, I sighed. Did you just excuse all of that? None of that had any impact on the election, it was all the fault of Republicans?
Sometimes the Clintons, for all their talent and good intentions, have handed the ammunition to the Republicans. That doesn’t make me a super-liberal who adopted the framing or who believes money is evil.
Groucho48
Using a private server, at the time, was the least bad of the very few options. The SD system was a primitive, disorganized mess and wasn’t available 24/7.
She used her server only for routine, non-classified communication, and only a few people had access to it. For her needs, and the needs of the SD, it got the job done.
Hob
@dnfree: Please explain how the Clintons “profited from the Clinton Foundation.” If there are so many articles, it shouldn’t be hard for you to find one. I’ve certainly seen plenty of bullshit articles that did their best to imply that we should suspect such a thing, while somehow never getting around to showing any evidence.
For instance, that Politico article you just linked to. It’s about Bill Clinton making money from a for-profit education provider. It also says that that company donated to the Clinton Foundation. But how you got from that to complaining that they should have “run the family foundation in a way that didn’t also result in the Clintons also making money from for-profit education providers” is a mystery, since there is nothing in the article to indicate that the way they ran the foundation was somehow the cause of Clinton getting paid by Laureate. How would that work, and why?
I’m sure you know that many people here agree with individual points you’ve made— like, for-profit educational companies are generally bad news, and creeps with money often donate to charity to improve their image. But the way you’re putting them together is bullshit, and not just any bullshit, but the exact line that was being pushed in Republican propaganda. When you do that, people who are very familiar with that propaganda will be hostile to you. If you’re sincere and you’re just someone who hangs out here a lot but rarely comments, well, I’m kind of surprised you don’t understand this since we’ve seen lots and lots of identical concern trolls over the years. If you’re not… well then you’re getting the reaction you asked for.
dnfree
@Hob: Thank you for the courteous reply.
I’m not saying that the Clinton Foundation was run corruptly or did things that were outright illegal, but knowing how they have been attacked in the past, they should have been much more careful than they were. Some of the memos that were leaked via WikiLeaks give evidence that Chelsea was uncomfortable with the appearance of impropriety (and actual monetizing of the Clinton connection). Here’s one example, which also mentions Laureate (the for-profit school).
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/inside-bill-clinton-inc-hacked-memo-reveals-intersection-of-charity-and-personal-income/2016/10/26/3bf84bba-9b92-11e6-b3c9-f662adaa0048_story.html
(No, I don’t approve of WikiLeaks and the Russian connection targeting our election process.)
Probably you have also seen articles about contacts between the Clinton Foundation and staff at the State Department. More balanced articles indicate that either people didn’t get what they were asking for, or what they were asking for would have normally been given anyway. The point here is that Hillary assured us that there would be not even the appearance of a conflict of interest, and yet there was.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/02/what-hillary-clinton-promised-about-the-clinton-foundation
The Wall Street speeches for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and refusal to release them, was just something else that someone planning on running for president should have thought through.
And regardless of where the emails were housed, their method of distinguishing personal from public and deleting based on questionable criteria left room for a lot of questions.
Part of the reason I supported Obama over Hillary in 2008 was that I was tired of the Republican-generated scandals. (The other part was that I’m from Illinois and was already impressed by Obama.) Then, of course, I found out that Republicans would generate scandals about Obama as well. But knowing all this, the Clintons seem to have been oblivious to appearances. I voted for Hillary but I found some of this stuff infuriating. That doesn’t mean (as one of the commenters above said) that I’m practically the same as a Trump supporter.
Hob
@dnfree: Again I ask: please explain how the Clintons “profited from the Clinton Foundation.” And please explain what you mean by “run the family foundation in a way that didn’t also result in the Clintons also making money from for-profit education providers”. If you’re going to just change the subject again to other topics that you’d prefer to argue about, and act as if you didn’t say those other specific inflammatory things, I’ll assume I was wrong to be courteous the first time.
Hob
@dnfree: And if you meant that last Washington Post link to be a response to those two questions… it isn’t. It’s more of the “appearances” stuff – no explanation of how the personal profit part was supposed to actually work. “I will do X for you, and you give $Y to me or my friend” is a quid pro quo. “I want you to give $X to this charity, and I also want you to give $Y to my friend” is… I’m not sure what you or the Washington Post writer think that’s supposed to be, but there seems to be a total lack of “quid”. (I guess you could say that the public-relations karma accruing to the foundation donor is a benefit… but it’s one that the donor can get anyway without agreeing to do anything else. Similarly, companies may pay a famous person to speak at their events, or give them honorary titles, because they’d like to borrow some of their aura of prestige… but if that works, it works regardless of whether they’ve also donated to a charity or not. The supposed causal connection makes no sense.)
dnfree
@Hob:
Did you read the first Washington Post link?
Yes, “appearances” is a lot of what this is about. The email server and deleting of personal emails is about appearances as far as we know, since no one outside of the Clinton circle reviewed the emails to see which were personal and which were professional. The money for the Goldman speeches that the public couldn’t read is about appearances. The promise to avoid even the impression of a conflict of interest, and then the failure to do so, is about appearances. The ties between money for the Clintons and donations to the Foundation is about appearances (again, as far as we know). The fact that even Chelsea was concerned about the appearance of impropriety (and the possibility of actual impropriety) should mean something.
The Clintons could have run their Foundation (and kept it separate from the State Department) in a way that made it clear there was no conflict of interest or quid pro quo. On some level I think they believe that their good intentions mean that everyone should just trust them to be honest. But the history of Republican targeting of them should have clued them in by now. When thanks to David Fahrenthold’s reporting, all the flaws of the Trump Foundation were laid bare, the public couldn’t really tell the difference. Sure, I can tell the difference and so can you, but it’s hard to explain to people who don’t follow politics as closely. What they see is exactly those APPEARANCES, magnified by the Republican scandal machine.
Here’s my belief about showing people courtesy–I try to show courtesy to everyone. It’s how my parents raised me, I guess. It’s very easy on the Internet to start tossing insults at people one doesn’t even know (not you, a couple of the other commenters). How is that supposed to advance the progressive cause, if there’s some kind of mandatory belief that Hillary can’t be criticized for anything?
Hob
@dnfree: Yes, I read the article. Again, you are flat-out refusing to answer the questions I asked you about specific claims you made— claims that weren’t about appearances. You said the Clintons themselves profited from the Foundation. I asked you how, twice. You changed the subject twice. There’s a name for that.
You also pretended that the hostility you’ve encountered is due to “some kind of mandatory belief that Hillary can’t be criticized for anything”, which anyone who’s spent any time here knows is bullshit.
So I’m done talking to you. If that means I’ll miss out on your wisdom about how to “advance the progressive cause”, that’s too bad.
dnfree
@Hob: Apparently you are looking for evidence that would stand up in a court of law? I find the emails between Chelsea and Doug Band pretty damaging. We wouldn’t know about those if not for hacks that shouldn’t have occurred, but Band is pretty clear that he’s trying to raise money for both Bill Clinton personally and the Foundation. “We have dedicated ourselves to helping the President secure and engage in for-profit activities,” Band wrote. He also said he had “sought to leverage my activities, including my partner role at Teneo, to support and to raise funds for the foundation.” Chelsea wasn’t too happy about it. Of course the corporations in question say the donations were separate from the payments to Bill Clinton. What would you expect them to say?
Then we have contacts between Foundation staff and Huma Abedin and others when Hillary was at the State Department, which Hillary had said wouldn’t happen. Sure, not all the requests were fulfilled, but they weren’t even supposed to be made, according to Hillary’s promises.
My point is that the Clintons, with both the emails and the Foundation, made decisions that increased the appearance of “sleaze”. And the belief that the Clintons are dishonest is found even among Democrats.
I’ve commented here in the past and never experienced the level of hostility that even the mention of a concern about Hillary just generated (not from you). Check out what Elie said. Telling people to fuck off because of some fairly mild-mannered comments indicating that even a little of the recent election debacle could be attributed to the Clintons, and that consequently I should go hang out with the Trump supporters I supposedly share values with, seems to imply nothing negative can be said about Hillary, at least as far as Elie is concerned. He/she is pretty clear that only Republicans can be blamed.
(Oh, and this isn’t a “gish gallop”. Check the definition again. I’m not “drowning your opponent in a flood of individually-weak arguments in order to prevent rebuttal of the whole argument collection without great effort.” I’ve only made a couple of points. You disagree that I have substantiated them, but it depends on the level of evidence you require.)