Wrong. Completely wrong. The only way a Floridan Nader voter can look at his face in the mirror without wanting to vomit or commit suicide is the excuse that Gore would have still lost by 499 votes instead of 500 had the voter retained his sanity.
I’ve never been much of a Nader fan, but whatever he’s done that was so wonderful, multiply it by 10,000 and it still won’t begin to balance his evil indulgence of 2000.
Family values strikes again.
I wasn’t having an affair with that woman, my wife just happens to be divorcing me, I just happened to fire that cop claiming he refused to help me cover up my affair. And that recording of me going into lurid details of what I did, I’ll get back to you on that.
Cruz Sr’s Cuban history has been embroidered. He may have protested Batista but his battle experience is nil. And he fled before Castro won.
As a Houstonian, I wonder where those “Muslim neighborhoods” are. Sure, there are some areas with a high Muslim percentage–but our ethnicities tend to mix. So there’s no way to fence them in–even with police patrols. What about the black Muslims? The white ones? (My office manager is American born & bred–but married a Turkish fellow. She doesn’t look Muslim, but is.) What about the Muslims who live in River Oaks? (I think Cruz lives in a high rise near that ritzy neighborhood.) Or the Muslim couple I know–both doctors–who live in the area near Rice University that was elegant when River Oaks was a swamp?
Opportunities to succeed in business & educate their children help Muslims “integrate.” Trying to keep them out of the mainstream–which some Europeans nations did in the past–is counter-productive.
Here’s to you, North Carolina and your “predators will claim they’re transgender” logic.
You tell me that Gun Free Zone signs don’t deter criminals, but now you expect me to believe the only thing stopping a male pervert from waltzing into the women’s restroom is the sign that says it’s for women?
Clothing can be removed. Nothing will do but cheek-brands.
Barcodes, barcodes tatooed in the arms, I’ll say numbers but that’s so 1940s…
RFID chip implants, so that LEOs can identify Muslims without having to get close to them, or even look at them.
Not a Nader fan, but this is idiotic. Unless you are being facetious, in which case, I apologize.
Pretty sure the Nader voters are just fine in their self appraisal. Having a voice and running for President is not an evil indulgence. The votes belong to the person who gets them. Voting for a dark horse is not taking away votes from another candidate. Anyone who has a problem with another voter casting their vote for who they like best can fuck right the fuck off.
If we want to drive this hijack all the way, what about the AUMFI? Who in the Capitol voted for that, and why should we forgive them that, vs. the Nader voters in Florida? Without that, Saddam Hussein/Ba’ath would probably still be running Iraq, and there would be no crISIS in the levant. Why should the blame not be more proximal?
There are two points of view on this that polar opposites from one another but that I believe are both valid and logical.
The first set of people would vote for Nader in a contest of Nader vs Gore, but realize that with Bush in the mix, they end up supporting Bush with every vote cast towards Nader. They determine that they’d much rather choose the lesser of their favorite candidates rather than risk that someone they do not support at all assumes office. The stakes are too high this election cycle. They understand that the immediate needs trump ideology.
Then there’s the second set of people who also favor Nader over Gore. They also understand that they’d be supporting Bush with a Nader vote. But they vehemently disagree with the two party system that America has. This first-past-the-post setup is what put them in the very position where they’re forced to give up their voice and not vote for who they want to. And what kind of democracy is that? So they reject it. They understand there’s a risk in having the Bush come into office, but feel it is more important to make their voice heard. They’re willing to potentially lose this election cycle if the result of doing so is a party that in the future will listen to their desires and produce platforms that better align with their values.
And that’s exactly what’s happening right now. Instead of Bush, Gore, and Nader you have Trump, Clinton, and Sanders. If Clinton secures the nomination, there will be a number of people who are supporters of Sanders who will not be voting for Clinton. Is that insane? Aren’t you just ceding your vote to Trump? This is an important election. Think about what’s at stake!
But the thing is that EVERY election is an important election. Every cycle the stakes get higher. There will never be a time when who the President is, is not of extreme importance.
The question becomes do you wish to compromise or not? Are you thinking short term or long term?
I don’t think either belief, if sincerely held, is wrong or irrational.
Flipped a coin and Stupid Republicans won over Trump’s special thread.
Are these the beans Trump threatened to spill on Cruz’s wife? He is an unmitigated ass. So offensive and childish he makes Cruz likable and sympathetic.
Trying to come up with a Rich Kitchen-like description of the link and all I keep coming up with are things like ‘Trump acts like a four year old’ and ‘Trump is a twitter twat’.
How badly must a woman hate her gender to vote for that asshole?
Maybe Trump is secretly working for Cruz, because in that Twitter exchange, my esteem for Cruz shot up exponentially. Of course, I’m not entirely sure how exponents work but I do know that counting up from .00001 doesn’t go that far, but it’s the thought that counts.
If you hate the two party system, the place to start is electing third party candidates on local ballots where they have a shot. You don’t start at the top.
Since I can’t wrap my head around why any real progressive would opt for this second choice, I suppose I shouldn’t try to say that it’s “wrong” or “irrational.”
I *can *say that I have no understanding of it, and no sympathy for it. And I’ll say again that anyone who is willing to put an anti-progressive in the White House (because in the future there MIGHT be a party more in line with their values) is not, fundamentally, on my side.
How did that old lefty song put it? “You’ll have pie in the sky when you die.” The “long-haired preachers” of the song, who give you nothing right now but promise the possibility of eating well at some point in the future, when everything has changed? They’re the Nader voters of 2000. The Sanders people of today who refuse to vote for Clinton this time around. (That isn’t, by the way, all Sanders voters by any means.) “You’ll have pie in the sky when you die.” It’s the same damn thing–let’s not do what we *can * do in the here and now, because the goal is to wait and wait and wait because something better will surely come along someday. (Won’t it?)
So, Clinton isn’t “progressive” enough for some because she’s in Wall Street’s pocket and she thinks fracking is great and she won’t support a decent minimum wage hike and hates single payer health insurance*. So, they won’t vote for her. Fine. But if Cruz or Trump is elected, and they appoint people who think like them to Supreme Court seats, as they will, then a ton of progressive principles are going to be violently under attack or eliminated–the ACA, marriage equality (and gay rights in general), reproductive freedoms, the list goes on. We’ll have people in power who prefer carpet bombing to negotiation, people who want to roll back whatever racial progress we’ve made, people who think gun control is some kind of commie pinko plot…Read the thread if you want to know what could–and in some cases, will–happen.
Am I interested in living in that world for the potential of “pie in the sky, by and by”? Absolutely not. Am I willing to sacrifice the rights of gay people and racial minorities and women because things might be better someday if I do? Not on your life. And anyone who is, anyone who does, isn’t an ally of mine.
*None of this is actually true the way it’s put, but this is the kind of thing I see on news article comments.
This is correct but so many people won’t do that because they are too lazy to spend the time and effort to do it.
As I said in my post above, if you want to make a point, if you want to change the system, then work to elect local representatives that will eventually move on to higher office. Elect the Ralph Naders of the world to the local city council, to mayor, to the County Board. Elect them on school boards, as judges, as District Attorneys. Pretty soon, you’ll have a bunch of them controlling a town or municipality. Leverage that to higher office like a State legislature or State Secretary of something. This is hard and slow, but its lasting power because it depends on a foundation of people and ideas that have been thoroughly vetted and isn’t dependent on one person.
When Nader was beaten, what did the Green Party have left? Nothing, nobody here can even name his VP, or someone else in the Green Party other than Nader. All of their eggs were in that one basket and when that basket broke, they had nothing left. This will be the same thing if Sanders people choose to ignore Clinton if she’s the nominee. They will have no representation they can stand behind and they will grow powerless and bitter.
Work from the bottom, don’t fuck shit up in a presidential election by not voting or not voting for Clinton out of spite. You’ll get Trump (or Cruz) and they are a thousand times worse than how you imagine Clinton would be.
Lindsay Graham went on The Daily Show and said some funny stuff about Donald Trump. So, yay? But he’s endorsing Ted Cruz solely on the basis that he’s not Trump (admitting that he’d prefer that the Republicans would nominate neither).
In the process, he tries to slag Obama as a terrible President – a failed joke that gets absolutely no reaction from the Daily Show audience. I have to pit the guy for having just a slight vague moment of clarity about his party, but still clinging to the party line that Obama is a terrible President when, at worst, he’s been an average to above-average President facing a recalcitrant legislature during a particularly volatile political and economic period. And it’s always just “Obama is a terrible President and everything is awful.” Either give some damned specific reasons why you feel the Obama Presidency has failed, or just shut the fuck up.
And, btw, show some backbone. Ted Cruz is a terrible candidate and a terrible person. Hating Trump is not an adequate reason to get on the “Ted Train”.
I copied this from a Fark comment and posted it originally on my FB page. I’m going to paste it here too;
The important thing is that because Trump loves America, and White Power folks love America, that their intersection of interests is just fine, and not worth the thought process, because it’s a limbic response. That’s just context He is just telling us that America can be great again, **because right now, we’re just doing so-so with that record breaking stock market, the plummeting joblessness numbers, servicing the debt and reducing our deficits, while decreasing our dependence on foreign oil and brokering a nuclear deal with Iran with some of her greatest allies and our own to keep an eye on things, and with our gay and lesbian citizens finally able to join their families equally, and Cuba who we’ve frozen out of the world community can be brought back into the fold. I mean, who wouldn’t look at those things and think: "Damn, this is some freeze-dried bullsht! We need to fix this!"**
I get it. There ARE issues we do need to address. Income inequality, education, the War on Drugs, increasingly unfair regulation that is designed to freeze out competition from new players that keeps the economic playing field tilted in the favor of market players already in the game, and already invested in, those are starts. We need to address the rage issue that comes with an increasing inability to see our fellow Americans as being our own people, but instead filtered through ethnic, class, geographic, and party terms. We might want to likewise take a look at how, even with violent crime statistics dropping, there are still punctuated incidents, as well as intrinsic corruption in many of our police forces, as well as look at how education “standards” have shifted a fair amount of state dollars into testing company coffers for a lack of increase in anything save that more students are tested, and without any real metric if that does anything at all, save pad out the bonus structure for testing companies, and the golden parachutes for those pols who insist that testing is a number one priority. We have sh*t to look at, but the rage that we see is oddly disproportionate for the issues that we still have to face, and oddly enough, some of the rage seems to be directed at the fact that we are looking at a society that is attempting to become more fair for a broader number of people, and therein seems to lie the rub. It’s going to be too expensive, too inclusive, too fair for some people.
Because apparently, without a certain degree of privilege, life in America can suck balls, and we can’t have too much fairness, because damned if folks won’t stand for that…
I happen to agree. But as I’ve said previously, those we are talking about are either so optimistic that they believe that a Democratic loss will shift the party to the left, or so pessimistic that they figure that even if Hillary is elected, she’ll be as bad for the common man as Trump or Cruz, so why fight for the status quo?