Without taking any position regarding either the accuracy of such accusations or the effect such reports may have on the election, here is a story from July that has not gotten any serious traction in the manner of the Bill Cosby accusations. (This is the status of the lawsuit by the person claiming to have been raped at age 13.)
It’s always amazing to me how, when a man is accused of doing something sexist, so many men will defend him by saying that all men do the same sexist thing. Men have a more vile opinion of other men than the most “man hating” feminist.
I hope this finally kills his campaign, his career, and his brand. It might not, but there’s always a chance that people were hoping for something that gave them sufficient cover to blast him, and that such a thing can snowball.
Unlike a couple of people upthread, I think Pence could potentially do himself a world of good by quitting. I think staying in hurts him and cutting free hurts him much less and potentially helps him. Of course, I have been wrong so many times this season that I’m obviously rather stupid, so there’s that.
I’ve said this before…you can’t go around sticking your dick into every available supermodel – like Trump’s done for the past god-knows-how-many years, probably starting back when he was a teenager and used his allowance to pay for them – without footing the bill for many, many abortions. You can’t raise two slimy sons like Donald Jr. and Eric without paying for THEIR abortions.
This is going to be one of the next bombs dropped. “You think Donald Trump hates abortions? Here’s a list of all the abortions he’s PERSONALLY RESPONSIBLE for! Meet his many, many lady friends!”
How ironic his Twitter address is now… (not going to put in an actual link to that disgusting pig)
@ realdonaldtrump
That was one of my first thoughts, as well, when I’ve seen people talking about the next shoe.
An inability to predict the unpredictable is not a sign of dumbitude, or stupidification.
Sam Wang has an article up today saying that it’s the smell of flop sweat coming off the Trump campaign that’s driving the rats away. It’s become way too obvious that Donald is going to lose and his Reality Distortion Field is going down.
http://election.princeton.edu/2016/10/08/what-color-is-the-swan/
Also: My apologies to the Governator for linking him to The Donald but I suspect Gropenfuhrer is a throne with a never-ending parade of pretenders. Uneasy rests the head and all that.
There’s this thing pollsters do, when they want to figure out how racist a respondent is: they ask something like, “Would your neighbors be willing to vote for a black man for president?” The less a person says their neighbors would be willing to do so, the pollsters have found, the less that individual would actually be willing to do so.
And I think something similar happens here. The more a person says, “everybody does it,” the more I think the person means, “I do it.” There’s strength in numbers, nobody wants to think their own actions are reprehensible, so they assume it’s something everyone does so they’re not singled out.
Which is yet another reason for men to tell other men, “No, NOT everybody does it, and if your friends do it, your friends are terrible, and if ‘your friends’ do it, ‘your friends’ are terrible.” That strength-in-numbers defense needs to be removed.
As I read elsewhere, when Trump brags, it’s an asshole bragging. When Billy Bush laughs along, that’s rape culture. And when dudes on the Straight Dope say everybody does it, they need to take a hard look at what they’re really saying.
Edit: to be clear, I’m not leveling an accusation at John Mace or anyone else in this thread. What I’m describing, I think, holds true on a general level, but can’t precisely predict an individual’s actions. It’s very dismaying, though, to hear fellow dopers engage in that sort of “everyone does it” defense.
Hey, remember the bombshell that was Trump violating the Cuba embargo?
It’s amazing. There are probably 15 or 20 things Trump has done that are worse than anything any candidate has said in my lifetime and he’s still somewhat viable.
I’ve been on the SDMB since the 2004 election. Every election, there are a few hypothetical threads about a candidate’s death or needing to be replaced. This is the first election where I could actually see either Trump or Pence leaving the race.
Joe Heck is my Rep. and will likely be my Senator after the election, unfortunately. He is a toe-the-line kind of guy with no real convictions other than “how will this benefit/advantage me or the people who provide me with benefits/advantages?” They use a picture of Joe Heck to illustrate the word ‘lickspittle’. The fact that he withdrew his support from Mr. Trump is a pretty big deal.
I quoted in another thread, though I couldn’t say exactly when or where, a study that came out that showed (very VERY loosely paraphrased and approximated) that conservatives think everyone really believes as they do, and liberals think they are alone. I feel like if you asked me about where I live now (MD suburb of DC), I’d say yes, of course my neighbors would vote for a black man. But if you’d asked me about it when I lived in a village in SE Ohio? I wouldn’t have been so sure.
Then he is merely changing who’s spittle he is licking.
Just to be clear, no one here has said every guy does it. No one has even said most guys do it. I, for one, just said that “more than a handful” of guys do it. And I called all those guys assholes who do do it. If that’s sanctioning it in some way, then so be it.
They’re waiting to see what happens in the debate tomorrow night before deciding whether or not to make the halt permanent.
John, you didn’t just say “more than a handful.” You said,
You said,
So yeah: you’re saying it’s the norm among powerful men of his generation to commit sexual assault, and that guys talk like this “all the time.”
That’s sanctioning it. And it’s reprehensible, and you shouldn’t do that.
I don’t remember hearing anyone brag about outright vagina groping assault, but they did brag about getting women very drunk so they could bed them. It seemed to be amusing when a woman couldn’t remember anything. These days we call it date rape.
It was mostly objectifing women, reducing them to body parts … but this was in the early days of the Iraq war, before the military got serious trying to re-educate soldiers about gender equality and respect.
This is off topic, but while I’m at it I would like to say how much I detest the word “pussy” being used to insult a man as cowardly, or weak. I’m not a Politically Correct Nazi, but as the proud owner and operator of one of these delightful marvels, I object to the term being used to imply the greatest possible contempt.
Pussy-cat is just fine though …
(Bolding mine)
Except that we have many women coming forward to say that Mr. Trump did indeed grab them, kiss them, etc. in exactly the manner he described employing. In fact, at least one of them said so BEFORE this video was made public. Years before, in fact.
Timelines matter.
Not every guy, just “lots.” And you think sexual assault is so commonplace that for rich guys “it would be odd if they didn’t, at some time, behave in that manner.”
No, not rich guys. Rich “men of his generation, in his position of power.”, which is what I said. Yes, I think it would odd if they didn’t behave in a similarly reprehensible manner. Because they are privileged assholes who are used to getting what they want and used to treating women as sex objects. You disagree?