Did we cover Donald’s claim of having been endorsed by Hannibal Lecter, a (checks notes) murderous cannibal who is not real?
It is indeed shitty stand-up, and yet the rubes roared with laughter when Trump wittily ad-libbed: I didn’t know you had flies in Iowa. Hilarious! Do they sell lead paint chips in Pringles cans in Magaland?
Reminds me of how often, after hanging up the phone, I have to remind coworkers that, while I’m happy to tell the someone you’re not here right now, you can’t keep talking that loudly while I’m doing it. They hear you loud and clear in the background.
Does anyone know who he thinks he was referring to, with the Hannibal Lector comment? Some prominent politician with a vaguely similar name?
He referred to Lecter as “a great actor”, so in his addled mind he probably confused Lecter with Anthony Hopkins.
All the actors who’ve played Lecter have all come out as anti-Trump, though.
Hopkins doesn’t trust anyone? That sounds just like Trump!
If any of us ever wondered where intelligent, informed, non-voters come from Hopkins is a great example.
Somehow they see a big difference between them having a (teeny tiny) hand is who’s in charge and sitting it out. It’s more psychologically / emotionally comfortable to them to say “I didn’t touch it” no matter how the election turns out than to say “I at least pushed for the lesser of two evils as I saw it.”
It’s the same sort of blinkered mindset that has trouble with trolley problems because they refuse to see that deciding to do nothing is exactly physically and morally equivalent to deciding to do something.
It’s a decisional blind spot that a hefty fraction of humans suffer from.
A coworker who lives in key swing state Wisconsin writes in joke celebrity names on his ballots because he considers the party candidates “terrible.” Not sure why he votes at all, but he may as well not. He’s quite smart but refuses to acknowledge one candidate being less terrible than the other if they don’t hew closely to his libertarian views.
Also, from interviews I get the impression that Hopkins sees himself as a pretty emotionally volatile guy, with a lot of alcoholic rage under a certain amount of impassive facade, and contemplating political issues just genuinely upsets him to a degree he doesn’t find tolerable. So, he ignores them.
Being an actor may also have something to do with it. Anecdatally, all the people I know or know of who refrain from voting as a matter of policy are actors of some sort, from community theater all the way up to Anthony Hopkins. Certainly not all actors eschew voting, but I wonder if the profession fosters the tendency.
Lots of single-issue voters are that way. The person on their side of their pet issue may be admittedly truly horrid on many other attributes, but their correct stance on that one issue absolutely positively overrides any/all other concerns. Much of that kind of thinking is what got us trump in 2016 and almost did in 2020.
The problem for a capital-L Libertarian (or a Communist or a hard core Green) is that their views on their pet issue(s) are so far from mainstream that both major party candidates are miles from their happy place. Viewed from 100 miles away, trump and Biden both just look like tiny specks barely the size of a pixel.
It’s a blindingly stupid POV to have, but blinding stupidity seems to be a popular frame of mind these days.
It’s not just Trump or Biden – this guy writes in joke names for governor and senator, too.
But I suspect that if you put a gun to his head and made him vote for major party candidates, he’d vote GOP. So maybe it’s best that he throws his votes away.
Many years ago I used to work with a guy who would boast about how he’d go to vote, get his ballot, then walk straight down to the other end of the table and turn it in. I guess he felt that by going through the motions, he was just a wee bit superior to the people who didn’t even bother. But other than the poll workers, nobody’s going to know or care.
Oh yeah. Not surprising. He’d do it for dog catcher if that was an elected office.
I just used those two as familiar exemplars of two avowedly very different politicians who can be viewed as indistinguishable if you measure them by a stupid enough ruler from far enough away.
Spoiled or blank ballots have a long and storied history in sham democracies and/or places where voting is mandatory. In the absence of real actual opposition parties, the pundits would look to the spoiled / blank numbers as a measure of actual voter discontent with the only real name on the ballot.
Your pal may be trying to adopt some of that mantle of principled protest in the face of what he mistakenly labels a sham democracy with only one real party on offer: the party of the evil elite.
IIRC the several US jurisdictions I’m familiar with do put out counts of blank and spoiled ballots. The numbers are so tiny as to be risible, but they are recorded.
The problem is that some people mistakenly think of voting as a form of self-expression, instead of what it actually is: an exercise of political power, no matter how minute. Voting is force, not speech.
Yes, if you want to “send a message” to your party, withholding your vote is not a good way to do it. Your lack of vote doesn’t come with a little tag that says “You lost this vote due to not holding corporations accountable”. All it comes with is a little tag that says I didn’t want to prevent Trump from winning.
Welp, the GOP has lost the Catturd vote.
Now we wait and see if they are smarter than a catturd.
I’m sure catturd will be registering as a Democrat first thing in the morning.
Any sane person would see losing catturd as a good thing.