Taken by itself, asahi’s comment doesn’t seem that bad. I was suggesting to some friends earlier that we should do an Election Party. They were reluctant, in case the election went to Trump. I think that is unlikely, but then I thought, I guess there’s little victory in narrowly avoiding putting a wannabe dictator in office. I have tried mightily not to catastrophize about the election, but the man, and the public support he represents, is fucking scary. When fifty GOP national security experts express their fear of a Trump presidency, you stand up and listen.
I think most people get that, though. Let the GOP fuck themselves over. They seem incapable of learning. The old racist dog-whistles and paternalistic song-and-dance is no longer an effective strategy for winning votes. Trump is a monster of the GOP’s own making, an inevitable consequence of pandering to the lowest common denominator for support. They should have gone for his jugular before the primaries, but they failed to do so out of some misguided obligation toward party unity. Their failure to act decisively gave him legitimacy. Hillary will curbstomp Trump on November 8th, Trump will go on to further embarrass the Republican party, and with any luck the Republican party will continue to embarrass itself into obscurity.
I have a tiny, tiny bit of hope that sensible conservatives will rise out of the ashes and form some new sort of alliance that isn’t based on pure battshittery. But the only way to effectively do that is to completely and utterly denounce candidates and politicans like Trump and everything they (fail to) stand for.
I’m guessing you mean the Wallace interview. To be honest, this is one thing I don’t give much of a damn about. If South Korea wants nukes, South Korea can build 10,000 of them for all I, personally, care.
And Hillary doesn’t? See link later in this post regarding her thinking it’s fine to have different “public” and “private” positions. If Hillary wants to raise taxes on the wealthy, or even keep them the same, then I’m fucking Chance the Rapper. Not in the “I’m Chance the Rapper” sense, but that I’m literally fucking him.
Frankly, as much as I wish that were true, it ain’t.
He’s Donald Trump, what do you expect? Actual positions?
So?
Don’t care either way about NATO.
I’m for the wall.
Meh.
So is Bill Clinton. Both the Clintons are racist. Despite me being a civilized citizen, I’m sure that if Hillary saw me at the grocery store or whatever, the word “superpredator” would pop into her brain. Racist attitudes like that are, for the most part, permanent. Very rarely does such a thing change.
Hillary’s just as in bed with the mega-rich elite as Donald Trump is, for starters. Both of them will lead us further down the road of corporatism. The U.S. social safety net is in tatters already, but she wants to cut it up even further. “Free trade” bullshit? She’s cool with it. So is Trump. Both, however, are “secretly” for it “behind the scenes”, since it’d blow two massive holes in both of their campaign “ships”, respectively, to say “I wanna hose down the lower-middle-class and poor even more than they already have been!” I don’t trust either of these jackasses to put a stop to TPP.
Donald Trump is a bona-fide racist. Which is bad, of course. So is Hillary, though–see above.
Remember Honduras a few years ago? Can anyone say “war crimes”? We can expect much more of that shit if (unfortunately, probably more like “when”) she becomes Prez.
She is pro-fracking and is overall anti-environment. Climate change is the biggest issue of our time, and she’d sit on her thumbs about it just as Trump would.
Her husband presided over an exponential increase in incarceration in the U.S., especially of Black people; he not only did nothing to stop the trend; he actively helped make it happen! And he’s proud of it. Sure, they “apologized” for it last year, but considering the Clintons’ record of having “seekrit positions”, I don’t trust they’ve changed. The police state we live in will not change under her or Trump.
What’s the Clinton Foundation hiding? Considering her cronies in the current administration blocked FBI attempts to investigate it, probably a hell of a lot. If they weren’t hiding shit, they’d have let the FBI probe it.
I’ll stop here, as it’s time to wrap up today’s house work. Bottom line is, no matter which one of these two are elected, we will be looking at more inaction on environmental crises, more corporatism, more overall corruption, a continuation of the police state, a further enrichment of the super-elite 1% and the “lesser” elite majority at the expense of those of us in the remainder, and more lovely bullshit. We’re overall Fucked - capital “F” intended.
I, unlike Clothahump and company, can’t stand her–and for that matter most people calling themselves “progressives” here in U.S.–from the left, not from the right. Here is where I am on the Political Compass, for the record. So they ain’t by any stretch my “buddies”. I supported Bernie Sanders in the primaries, but even he is too right-wing for my tastes. He was juuuuuuust enough to the left for me to consider him a decent candidate, however. Just barely.
At least one of the articles you linked to (i haven’t read them all) seemed to conflate Bills’ record with Hillary’s, which is an easy thing to do but not particularly fair. I despise TANF and NAFTA myself and while I was too young to vote for him at the time, I would not ever vote for Bill Clinton. My impression of him is that he’s a fucking sleazebag not much better than Trump in the ‘total lack of respect for women’ department. Incidentally, he is not the one running for office.
One thing that I think is curious is that some people really seem disturbed by Hillary’s alleged corruption. Even the worst allegations against her are not meaningfully different than things politicians have done in the past. None of this is excusable on an ethical level but I don’t understand the mentality that she would somehow be dangerous and radical for doing the things politicians have always done. From my perspective she is just more of the same.
Another curious thing is that a lot has been made about Hillary’s corruption and Trump’s moral reprehensibility, but few people have really addressed the issue of competence. As a liberal or a conservative, Trump’s level of incompetence frightens me far more than any corruption on Hillary’s part. He genuinely does not seem to grasp the gravity and consequences of his actions and that is really fucking dangerous on a whole new level. I don’t believe we’ve ever had anyone this incompetent as a serious candidate for president.
I remember asahi’s posts from the primary season. Most of them predicted that Sanders would eventually capture the superdelegates and the nomination. Sanders would do much better in NY than anyone expected, would probably win PA and CT, would crush Clinton in CA. Sanders would win a majority of states (what this had to do with anything I never figured out), would have the coveted Momentum going into the convention, would have victories in some of the largest states, and it would prove impossible to deny him the nomination with all of that.
Of course, asahi’s crystal ball proved to be deeply flawed. Interestingly, I assumed after the first few posts that s/he was a Sanders voter. I was very surprised to read a post a little later on that began “As a Clinton supporter…” I had a hard time distinguishing “oh my God this is terrible” from “oh boy look what wonderful thing is going to happen.”
I haven’t noticed asahi’s doom-and-gloom so much vis a vis Trump. Probably I’m just not reading the right threads. But if it’s happening, well, it sounds exactly like what asahi was posting during the primaries as well. Clearly s/he comes by it honestly.
In fact, as US senator, Clinton voted on a number of occasions to shift tax burdens toward the wealthy, and voted likewise to eliminate or sharply cut back some of the deductions that benefited the richest Americans.
No, she didn’t introduce any bills to create marginal tax rates of 95% or anything (bills that would certainly have failed), but her overall record was clearly in favor of raising taxes on the wealthy.
Ah, but that’s her primary sin: She’s not a Utopian.
She doesn’t believe, and, therefore, she has the utter temerity to focus on what she can accomplish, instead of focusing on what is capital-P Perfect.
She compromises to get results. That means compromising with evil, which is, itself, evil, especially if it has a good result: If you get good results from compromise, it encourages further compromise, and rather takes the wind out of the sails of the tear-it-all-down both-sides-are-the-same people who know that they, and they alone, have the wisdom to be completely above the fray; to be, in fact, so far above it they don’t need to condescend to understand any of it whatsoever. They can, with a magisterial wave of their hand, declare a pox on all extant houses and condemn the whole lot.
Lemme tell you a secret: Being a political extremist, including a Radical Moderate or Extreme Centrist or whatever, is easy. It means you never have to think any hard thoughts. Why should you? You know The Answer, nobody else comes close, so you don’t have to engage with their definitionally imperfect ideas. And, when something goes wrong, it isn’t your fault. After all, if they weren’t following your plan, they were doing bad things, and bad things happen to people who do bad things. Add in a few conspiracy theories about how voting doesn’t change anything because ballots don’t structurally re-frame society from the ground up so therefore the same people are in power regardless, and you can sit at home, knowing what to do so perfectly you never have to do anything at all.
That, and Bernie Sanders self-described as a Socialist. The fact most of his economic policies are the same as Clinton’s doesn’t matter, because he used the Magic Fix-Everything Word, so he’s better and he only lost because a nasty woman cheated.
Thank you. It took me a while to really crystallize those thoughts, too, and I used to be one of those perfectionists (Libertarian sub-type): I thought I was engaging with the political world, and that it was easy. Of course, the only thing that was easy was declaring both of the parties which actually won elections to be insane on one or more major issues, and therefore unworthy of my time.
Well, I’m now one of the snarkiest anti-Libertarians on the board, I think, and firmly in the Democratic Party. It’s funny: The Libertarians bang on about how economic they are, how much they’re the only party with a sound economic footing, and the more I learn about economics, the crazier all of their economic ideas sound. Especially game theory, which is technically distinct from economics but is commonly used to understand economic concepts, such as how negative externalities can persist even if nobody actually wants them to, pollution being a prime example. The upshot is, the economic world creates incentive structures, which create game-theoretic equilibria, which can only be broken by a powerful entity outside of those incentive structures. That’s a government. That’s why regulations are necessary.
So we come back to easy versus hard: Are governments perfect? No. Is every regulation good? No. Does regulatory capture exist? Sometimes. The easy answer is to throw up your hands, say “Government is never the solution” like a latter-day Reaganite, and insist that any system with an active government is fatally flawed. The hard solution is to try to fix the system, to accept that the fixes won’t be easy, and to keep going with things that empirically work, even if it means changing course later on.
FDR said it best: “It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.” Being an extremist means being absolved from trying.
“In our new poll, just out, Mrs. Clinton’s lead has shrunk to 3 points in a four-way race (from 45% to Trump’s 39%, now 44% to 41%) and 5 points in a two-way (from 49% to Trump’s 42%, now 49% to 44%). Both numbers are noticeably down as you can see from our poll last week.”
Extrapolating the graph at 538 “polls only” to Nov 8th, it looks like a Clinton 80% to the Orange maniac’s 20%. I’ll take a Trump loss no matter how it’s served. Then we can all start working on 2020 and someone we can truly support.
Hillary will be a one term president. She’s too old, has too much baggage and too many people are voting for her because the other option is much worse. The only reason she’s even close to winning this is because the Orange maniac is way worse.
