:dubious: You would think that some of those gun owners would be sufficiently embarrassed about the failure of their hysterical predictions of similar assaults on the Second Amendment by Obama, both in 2008 and 2012, that they’d be willing to give the hysterical-prediction schtick a rest. Realistically, Hillary Clinton is no more likely to “make the Second Amendment a dead letter as far as individual gun ownership goes” than Obama did.
Aleppo isn’t exactly a liberal heartbreak out of nowhere . It’s one of the oldest cities in the world, and also host to arguably one of the world’s bitterest civil wars. Knowing that Aleppo is shredding a hundred people a day is different from knowing that Montpelier is the capitol of Vermont. If he doesn’t know what Aleppo is, why should I care who he is?
I used to be a card-carrying Libertarian and was glad to use them as my third-party alternative when other partisans came up short. Nowadays… not so much. C’mon goobers, all you need to do is be fluent in the language of small-government. You should be aware of foreign entanglements if for no other cause than to avoid them. You should be aware of how enemies are using your opponents to their own ends.
Quoted for truth. If we want to sandbag SCOTUS according to our own views, then let’s admit that. I hereby admit, on my own behalf, that this is why I have always supported Hillary. Don’t lurk behind some paper-then veneer of States’ Rights or something that sounds like Libertarianism.
Disclaimer: I can’t stand Trump, and if I were in the U.S. I would be voting for anyone but him.
That said, this is yet another tiresome, “What’s the matter with Kansas” type post where a bunch of liberals get together and ‘fairly’ describe every Republican they know as a sexist, misogynistic ass or as a nice but uneducated buffoon.
I know some people who are voting for Trump, and none of them fit the descriptions above. Here are some REAL arguments for Trump:
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Both Hillary and Trump are awful, but if Hillary is elected she will have the media covering for her and possibly a Senate who will rubber stamp anything she does. She’s corrupt and will sell out the country, and get away with it. Trump, on the other hand, would be a President hated by both parties and the media, and therefore would be neutered right out of the gate. If both choices are terrible, go with the one who will have the most checks on his or her behavior.
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Electing Trump would be a thumb in the eye of the media who have clearly been deep in the tank for Hillary, and would send a message to the establishment that they can no longer get away with ignoring their constituents while scratching the backs of the powerful. I believe this is what motivated a lot of Bernie Sanders people as well.
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Hillary will elect liberal justices to the Supreme Court, which will become yet another partisan arm of the Democratic party. Trump won’t.
There are some other motivations as well that have nothing to do with accepting Trump as anything other than a sleazebag. But Democrats should be very familiar with the concept of forgiving egregious behavior when it comes from ‘their’ candidate. Bill Clinton certainly got away with much worse than what Trump has done.
But again: Trump sucks. Worst.Election.Ever.
You’re wrong. I started the OP by describing 7 real-life Trump supporters. There’s nothing about trying to describe “every republican”, nor castigating anyone’s level of education. If you find it so tiresome, go take a nap. Life is too short to skip naps in favor of participating in tedious political threads.
Sam Stone, for #1 and #2:
To that one has to add and mention the close to 2 billion dollars of free publicity Trump got early.
I can grant you that just recently the tables have been turned and it is Trump turn in the grill. But this has been the result of many more bad things found about Trump now. And as it was reported, a lot of the fallout is happening because Trump did not bother to be prepared for the attacks that everybody else would had been prepared for.
As for your #3 item:
The Republicans had control of that branch of governmentfor 45 years, I think that what would happen is that it will be just a fair result and a deserved break from decisions that have many times delayed change, prevented change or even sent back years of progress.
This is something that blows my mind. Trump is formerly the architect of what is arguably one of the most successful urban legends of all time (birtherism) and is now running for the highest office in the land. And apparently he never once thought “Let me think about every time I ever talked about ‘pussy’ or nailing some model just because I could. Any competent opponent would call this out from the get-go.”
Ironically, I have little objection to her policies. The part that stuck in my craw is that she got influence and an actual position of responsibility simply because she was married to Bill. At the time, that’s what buged me and still does. In present times this bothers me much less because I’ve been able to see her political behavior as an agent separate from Bill, and as a necessary phenomenon compared to her opponents.
I’m supporting her for POTUS and I’m glad she will get inside information from Bill, but I will never be entirely comfortable with people gaining political power via marriage or family ties. (Sorry JEB!, and Chelsea too).
Oh, it’s easy to expect Trump to be ineffectual - practically useless as a president, in fact - but if the basis for electing Trump is unreasoning hatred of Hillary Clinton… that’s not an argument, just a rationalization. Who do the Trump supporters you know think Clinton will sell out the country to?
Well, he’s an idea - vote out members of the establishment who one believes are ignoring their constituents, including state and congressional officials. If the Trump supporters you know don’t like back-scratching and such of the powerful, they should look at Congress, where these big-money deals are actually made. The President, no matter who they are, can’t unilaterally award military contracts to a particular company or decide to build a dam in a particular district, or keep open a military base in a particular state. If the complaint is about how government money is spent and pork distributed, the issue is with congress, not the president.
Certainly, Trump won’t “elect” (the word is “appoint”) liberal justices. I suppose this alone is a reasonable concern for conservative Americans. The first two are based on faulty premises. I get that some Trump supporters might believe these premises are valid, though. That’s not really praise.
Heck, I’m happy to argue that Trump’s personal behaviour is completely irrelevant. My concern is that he has absolutely no experience in public service or the military and wants to start out in the highest, most stressful office (and has toyed with the idea since 1988). He will not be able to sue his way or “deal” his way out of major issues as President, and shows little or no coherent understanding of foreign policy.
I get that voting for Trump is a big “FUCK YOU” to all the woes that some Americans feel betide them, but choosing a president (indeed, voting in general) isn’t really the place for grand showy gestures of defiance, unless you truly are prepared to burn the system down and rebuild.
Your friends, if as described, are probably indeed uneducated buffoons. They might also be short-sighted nihilists. At the very least, they’re letting the grand contest for President blind them to the more important, if banal, actions of congress.
Repeating myself from a concurrent thread:
This posturing about “the media” and “the establishment” being biased toward Hillary, while ignoring the large and highly influential segment of “the media” and “the establishment” that are biased toward Trump, is getting stupider by the minute.
FFS, you’ve got the guy who up to July was running all of Fox News actively coaching Trump on his campaign, and you’re still whining about “the media” being too pro-Clinton? Oh, you poor little oppressed underdogs, you. :rolleyes:
I suggest that’s due in large part because in 1993 it was a lot more difficult to look up a public figure’s background, but a casual modern skip to wikipedia suggests she was almost certainly OVERqualified to chair a health care reform task force. She’d already done similar work at the state level in Arkansas.
I’m wondering if you may have the causality backwards here. Do you really think that if Bill Clinton had been married to, oh, say, a quarter-century-younger Slovenian fashion model instead of to a qualified attorney and law professor with decades of experience in public service, he would still have made his wife Chair of the Task Force on National Health Care Reform?
Bill Clinton during his campaign made no secret of his position that the voters would be getting “two for the price of one” if they elected him, and that he and Hillary were a policy team. This suggests that Hillary Clinton didn’t “get influence and an actual position of responsibility” just as a perk of being First Lady. On the contrary, she got to be First Lady largely because she had “influence and an actual position of responsibility” in the political career that she and her husband shared. I don’t see why she should be expected to abdicate that influence and responsibility once her husband became POTUS.
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I’m supporting her for POTUS and I’m glad she will get inside information from Bill, but I will never be entirely comfortable with people gaining political power via marriage or family ties. (Sorry JEB!, and Chelsea too).
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While I agree with many of the objections to political dynasties, given that they’ve existed in this country at least since the days of John Quincy Adams, I think it’s unrealistic to expect them to disappear. I also think that what with women’s rights and higher education and all, the political “power couple” phenomenon is probably here to stay.
It doesn’t make sense to me to want a competent political advisor relegated to some kind of zero-responsibility lockbox just because they happen to be the spouse of an elected official. Especially when the spouses have consistently been transparent about the fact that they are a team on policy issues.
I was politically naive at the time, and it’s totally possible that I got this whole cause/effect thing backward. It’s possible that the whole Clinton phenomenon is rooted out of Hillary and not Bill. I have no issue with Hillary nor definitely not Michelle Obama. I just feel like it’s a big red flag to political democracy when I see immediate family being appointed to key political positions. Where does it all stop?
Well, if it’s any comfort, I’m not sure “Task Force Chair” actually counts as such a “key” political position: not like Cabinet secretary or House speaker or something like that.
But if we want to rein in the political-dynasty phenomenon, ISTM that we’re going to have to face up to the need for public financing of elections. Under a private campaign funding system where you need to be either independently wealthy or a well-known public figure or well connected to wealthy donors, or some combination of the above, the person who’s closely related to somebody who’s already got the exposure and name recognition of a high elected official is always going to have a significant advantage.
If you hear some of Bill’s recent speeches/interviews, he pretty much says that the whole Clinton phenomenon is rooted in Hillary. I think it’s obvious when you think about it, I just never thought about it before. Sure, he’s definitely the better frontperson, but it’s pretty easy to see her being the real brains behind the scene.
Here’s an excellent article (from Cracked of all places) talking about Trump supporters.
Although that article is kind of weird in its constant insistence on urban/coastal areas being “islands” or otherwise detached/elite enclaves. Actually, as the article does admit early on and then ignores for the rest of the discussion, significantly more than half of the population, both elite and non-elite, lives in those so-called “islands”. Population-wise, it’s rural America that consists of the islands and tiny atolls in a scattered archipelago bounded by large population continents.
The article also completely ignores the role of conservative white panic over the issue of the demographic shift of the US to a majority-nonwhite nation. A lot of self-described non-racists, who up to a decade or so ago proclaimed that they “didn’t see color”, are now freaking right off their rockers at the prospect of white people in the US being outnumbered.
That Cracked article also doesn’t address the people on my semi-affluent suburban street who have Trump signs in their yards. These aren’t rural working types whose small town has dried up around them, they’re economically successful conservatives whose loyalty their party, and the hatred of Hilary that goes along with it, overwhelms what should otherwise be an obvious decision.
The article was good in helping me understand that one segment, but it doesn’t even attempt to address the people that I actually run across who support Trump.
I keep waiting for the four people on my street to finally be humiliated enough to remove the signs, but so far they’re still up. It’s interesting to me that one person who lives on my street is our Republican representative in the Texas legislature, but even she doesn’t have a Trump sign.
I’ll be candid with you and admit that I’m not sure if Aleppo is the capital or just a major city in Syria*. What I do know that it’s at the center of a brutal civil war that has been running for 5 years and has had huge international consequences. For Johnson to ask “What is Aleppo” shows that he doesn’t follow the news. It is not OK for the President of the US to be this unfamiliar with current events.
- looked it up, it is indeed the capital
I had no idea about Aleppo until the Johnson thing. I’d heard about Syria, but no specific locations. What got me is that I think a Presidential candidate should know it, and that, even if he didn’t, he should have been able to talk about it afterwards, having known the situation but not the specific name.