The Batshit Crazy Republicans Roundup

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Re: The Batshit Crazy Republicans Roundup

Post by The Swollen Goiter of God »

Mal Shot First wrote:Trump's showmanship and willingness to shout the bigotry and hatred at the top of his lungs was what carried him to victory there and is still keeping him afloat. I still don't buy that a vote for Trump is primarily a vote for a non-establishment candidate.
Adam54 wrote:Neither do I. That's 10% of it, tops. The rest is bigotry and hatred.
I definitely think that the holy trinity of bigotry, racism, and xenophobia (with a bit of a boost from the Blessed Virgin Sexism) are a huge part of his appeal for many of those who will be voting for him. I'd probably even go as far as to say that it is--both directly and indirectly--the major contributing factor in terms of his overall appeal. Then again, for a large chunk of the Republican base, these things are givens. They're things they look for in every candidate. I still subscribe to the "Trump as Perfect Storm" idea. He's these bad things so much of the conservative voting base looks for plus the showmanship, plus the (misled/mistaken) idea of obscene wealth and business savvy, plus the supposed outsider status (though, if Big Business truly runs the government and Trump is Big Business, can he really be an outsider? A non-politician? Sure. Non-establishment? Maybe. But not really an outsider, especially since he's been pretty involved in politics since the last election cycle), plus the anti-intellectualism, plus the Big Two white male running against the Big Two woman in the wake of a black president, plus the Big Two white male running against Clinton in specific, plus a celebrity, plus the guy who won the conservative ticket and is painted as being the most likely shot the conservatives have at tipping the Supreme Court toward conservatism.

Adam54's claim that ninety percent (or potentially more, as the "tops" bit suggests) of those voting for Trump are voting for him specifically because he's a hateful bigot seems high to me. It could be mistaken for rhetoric designed to suggest that ninety percent of those voting for Trump (the majority of which are probably Republicans) are like-minded hateful bigots, though I don't think Adam54 means it to be taken thus. Still, I feel the ninety-percent claim dismisses as trivial too many of the other factors that have contributed to Trump's ascent. I think many of those who are voting for him would acknowledge that he is a hateful bigot but would argue that this is not the reason they are voting for him. Granted, there would probably be plenty of hateful bigots who wouldn't acknowledge Trump's hateful bigotry simply because they don't recognize it in themselves.

* * *

Zizek, that wacky Slovenian coke-headed darling of Academe, would apparently vote for Trump if he had a vote:

https://www.facebook.com/Channel4News/v ... 377601939/

I don't post the link to try to further the dialog about what kinds of people are voting for Trump or why they're voting for Trump. I just wanted to take a second out of my day to inflict on Huffy Flounce the same Zizek clip that was inflicted on me.
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Re: The Batshit Crazy Republicans Roundup

Post by Mal Shot First »

The Swollen Goiter of God wrote:I think many of those who are voting for him would acknowledge that he is a hateful bigot but would argue that this is not the reason they are voting for him.
Yes, they're voting for him because they're hateful bigots. ;)
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Re: The Batshit Crazy Republicans Roundup

Post by The Swollen Goiter of God »

I tried to cover that with the "Granted" line, though I was careful not to suggest it applied to all those who might acknowledge his hateful bigotry.

Would it apply to some of them? Definitely. Most of them? Possibly. All of them? Probably not.
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Re: The Batshit Crazy Republicans Roundup

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It was practically joke!
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Re: The Batshit Crazy Republicans Roundup

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In Mother Russia, joke practicallies you!
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Re: The Batshit Crazy Republicans Roundup

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(I, for one, welcome our new Russian overlords.)
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Re: The Batshit Crazy Republicans Roundup

Post by The Swollen Goiter of God »

Adam54 wrote:People are not voting FOR the orange baboon.
Baboon? Are you saying Trump's not smart?
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Re: The Batshit Crazy Republicans Roundup

Post by Adam54 »

Oh no, I stand by that. Evil, but smart.

I was just using Dalty's moniker for Orange Hitler.
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Re: The Batshit Crazy Republicans Roundup

Post by The Swollen Goiter of God »

Smart or not, Sandra Bee and her writing team think Trump may be illiterate:



(Note: a smart person can be illiterate.)
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Re: The Batshit Crazy Republicans Roundup

Post by The Swollen Goiter of God »

I'm not sure I approve of Hey-gaiz-mebbe-he-can't-read! slander just before the election, but I suppose enough supporters on both sides have engaged in so much slander at this point that any further slander gets lost in a sea of slander.

I don't think Trump's all that bright, and I've joked about his clear aversion to reading in the past, but the guy can almost certainly read. He's just incredibly lazy and probably thinks his time is too valuable for reading.

It's my understanding that he has aides put together one-page briefs/summaries of longer texts with large fonts and roomy spacing so he doesn't have to do lengthy reading. These briefs can sometimes be seen in shots with him sitting at his various desks. At least, I've seen them in the past and have been told that this is what they were. I could have been lied to. If you want to attack him for something, attack him for being a lazy reader and for being one among the many Americans who refuse to read regularly and whose ability to reason is demonstrably compromised by this refusal.

Saying Trump is probably illiterate is nowhere near as nasty as suggesting he's had people murdered in the past--as many on the right have done when regarding to the according-to-them mysterious circumstances surrounding the deaths of some of Clinton's "opponents" in the past--but it's still at least a little nasty. Many are probably going to take it the way I assume it's supposed to be taken: as a humorous bit of snark that isn't really proposing that Trump is illiterate. The snark's built into the segment, and Bee goes out of her way at the beginning to show that they're just having some fun at Trump's expense.

On the other hand, Bee's having gone out of the way to say it's all just fun and games could be something done for legal purposes. (It also has an air of the stock bully's assurances that he's "just playing" as he's going about his bullying.) There's a good chance that the meat of the segment might end up being circulated without the framework/introductory apologia, anyway, since that kind of thing often happens.

It's been back-and-forth nastiness for a long time. Trump supporters could probably be said to have started it, but Clinton supporters were already primed for nastiness thanks to the back-and-forth nastiness of the Clinton/Sanders standoff. It should be noted that Trump's been consistently nasty for years, so nastiness is par for the course with him. Still, it's a shame professional politicians keep taking his bait. "He started it!" may be true, but it's still playground talk.

(It just occurred to me that I may want to use some word other than "nasty," since it has become something of an occupied term following the last Trump/Clinton debate. I don't mean it to invoke anything specifically anti- or pro-Clinton. I don't have time to go back and consider edits right this minute [I'm about to leave to pick up a very sick Jubbers from work], but I'll come back to this post before the night's over.)

I look forward to things calming down a bit on both sides--maybe by March or April, since I don't see it being over right after the election. That seems to be when the calming down started following the 2000 election. Until things started back up following the 9/11 attacks, at least. With any luck, there's nothing to rival or surpass the 9/11 attacks on the immediate horizon.
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Re: The Batshit Crazy Republicans Roundup

Post by The Swollen Goiter of God »

Assange says Trump "would not be permitted" to win (the video's title uses "won't"):



Assange also says other stuff. I guess this could have gone in the other thread, too, since it concerns Clinton.

I talked Assange fairly recently on the other page. If he feels Clinton will get pushed through regardless of whether or not she wins legitimately (and she'll probably still get the majority vote, despite the recent hit her numbers took), he may not worry that much about the impact the WikiLeaks will have on the actual election. He may be more concerned with casting a pall over the supposedly inevitable winner's win.

Again, as I think I mentioned on the other page, I'm not sure that the leaks were calculated to hit at a specific point. It could be that the WikiLeaks team got them out there as soon as they were combed through and vetted. Or they may just be dumping onto the public whatever they get their hands on for the sake of giving people a peek behind the curtain. (I guess the question as to whether or not this is right or could be seen as journalistic integrity [or its opposite] is the same now as it was with the Manning and Snowden situation. There will probably always be a fine line when it comes to [what the public needs to know/what the news needs to report] about its government's doings.) Or it may be that they calculated very carefully in hopes of doing the greatest amount of damage possible. I don't know that we'll ever find out, one way or another.

It hasn't seemed to me that Assange has any love for Trump, whatever the case. I've heard him say that they'll release any dirt on him if they uncover it but that it's unlikely to be any worse than any of the pretty awful stuff that's already coming out of his mouth. My guess is that he doesn't like Clinton or Trump very much but that he doesn't see Trump having (or being allowed to have) much of a political future.

Of course, political future or no, Trump's presence on the political scene has done plenty of damage. Maybe some of it will be good damage. Maybe it'll help dismantle the Republican party somewhat. Or, you know, maybe it'll embolden the worst of the right (both in the political sphere and in the public sphere) to get louder and louder and more and more evil. Or maybe it'll all just peter out and we'll go back to being the quietly seething divided nation we've been for so long already.

* * *

Have we talked much about faithless electors within the context of the 2016 election? I know I've brought them up in the past when talking about Wallace's bid for the presidency.

Are people expecting faithless electors (in the states that don't have laws against them) this time around? It wouldn't surprise me to see more of it than we've grown accustomed to seeing.
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Re: The Batshit Crazy Republicans Roundup

Post by Dalty »

Maybe one of the crowd got whipped up into a fervour and was just uncontrollably yelling out his favourite thing in pleasure.

http://news.sky.com/story/donald-trump- ... y-10647294
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Re: The Batshit Crazy Republicans Roundup

Post by Dalty »

Just think...... this will all be over soon!
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Re: The Batshit Crazy Republicans Roundup

Post by The Swollen Goiter of God »

Maybe. There's a chance it could go on for a few months after the election.
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Re: The Batshit Crazy Republicans Roundup

Post by Dalty »

Gore/Bush all over again?
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Re: The Batshit Crazy Republicans Roundup

Post by The Swollen Goiter of God »

It wouldn't surprise me. This, also, doesn't surprise me:

Trump Kept away from Twitter by Staff

What a cartoon of a human being.
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Re: The Batshit Crazy Republicans Roundup

Post by Space Tycoon »

The Swollen Goiter of God wrote:.Trump's presence on the political scene has done plenty of damage. Maybe some of it will be good damage. Maybe it'll help dismantle the Republican party somewhat.
It absolutely will. The lapsed conspiracist in me wonders if that wasn't the point all along.

Maybe when all this is done, President Clinton will meet with Trump in some back room somewhere, shake his hand, and say, "Well done Donald. You played your part brilliantly." And he'll respond, "Just don't ever forget our deal...Ms. President."
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Re: The Batshit Crazy Republicans Roundup

Post by Adam54 »

The Swollen Goiter of God wrote: Adam54's claim that ninety percent (or potentially more, as the "tops" bit suggests) of those voting for Trump are voting for him specifically because he's a hateful bigot seems high to me. It could be mistaken for rhetoric designed to suggest that ninety percent of those voting for Trump (the majority of which are probably Republicans) are like-minded hateful bigots, though I don't think Adam54 means it to be taken thus. Still, I feel the ninety-percent claim dismisses as trivial too many of the other factors that have contributed to Trump's ascent. I think many of those who are voting for him would acknowledge that he is a hateful bigot but would argue that this is not the reason they are voting for him. Granted, there would probably be plenty of hateful bigots who wouldn't acknowledge Trump's hateful bigotry simply because they don't recognize it in themselves.
I need to start keeping track of how many times I skim Goiter's posts, only to days later, while scrolling to the bottom of a thread, catch that he name dropped me somewhere around paragraph nine. Happens more than it should.

I'm suggesting that at least 90% of those voting for Trumps are both hateful bigots and voting for him because he's a hateful bigot. Whether they're as open about their hateful bigotry as he is or not is an entirely different thing. Maybe 20%, if you were to force me to put a number on it, would be my guess as to how many are open about their bigotry and ignorance and contempt.

So basically, everything you surmised is correct. How often does that happen and I miss it?
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Re: The Batshit Crazy Republicans Roundup

Post by The Swollen Goiter of God »

At least 90% of the time.
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Re: The Batshit Crazy Republicans Roundup

Post by The Swollen Goiter of God »

Space Tycoon wrote:
The Swollen Goiter of God wrote:Trump's presence on the political scene has done plenty of damage. Maybe some of it will be good damage. Maybe it'll help dismantle the Republican party somewhat.
It absolutely will. The lapsed conspiracist in me wonders if that wasn't the point all along.
I think the dismantling may already be happening, to some degree, on the state level. I don't know how it is outside of St. Louis and Missouri, but I've noticed a lot of the people running are leaning heavily on Trumpian anti-"career politician" platforms. Every single time I've looked into a candidate attacking an opponent for being a "career politician," the attacker has been a Republican with little-to-no experience running against either an incumbent Democrat or a Democrat with some (though sometimes very little) experience.

Maybe "dismantling" isn't exactly right. Maybe it's more of a "swap out." Republicans on the state level--again, in my particular state--appear to be getting a lot of traction simply by declaring themselves proudly unexperienced. (The Democrats tend to respond to this by saying that X position shouldn't be considered an "entry level position." In most cases, they're probably right to say this.) They're replacing experienced candidates with un-experienced and extremist candidates, but it's still keeping the Republicans going.

I suppose there were shades of this, already, back in 2008 with Palin and her talk of being a "rogue." And then, of course, there was the Tea Party. It seemed like the Republicans were moving away from that a bit with people like Ryan and Rubio, but Trump's success seems to have redirected the shift back in the earlier direction.

The amount of traction Trump got as a first-timer and the amount of traction Sanders got with the party switch probably crystalized for a lot of people how much easier being a part of the machine makes things. Declaring yourself Democrat or Republican does a lot of your work for you. I guess you vaguely need to reflect the professed party's platforms when you run, but it also appears you can go somewhat afield without a number of the party's adherents noticing or caring all that much.

I suppose the Republicans need to strike while the iron is hot when it comes tothe anti-"career politician" fad. It's not a sustainable model. If you continue replacing the people in the system with new people, the new people become a part of the system and have a more difficult time claiming not to be a part of the system. And if you just keep swapping out and keep swapping out to prevent this from happening, the people who might otherwise have felt called to the position will cease to look at it as a viable career choice. (The biggest problem is probably the most obvious: nobody ever gets any real experience, so nobody really ever knows what the fuck is going on.)

Despite what I say above about the difficulty of claiming not to be a part of the system once you're in the system, the anti-"career politician" tack is so popular at the moment (on the right, at least) that it's even being taken, somewhat astonishingly, by Roy Blunt, an incumbent senator for the Republican party who is up for reelection against Jason Kander. Ads approved by Blunt, who has been in politics since 1980, have referred to Kander, who has been in politics since 2009, as "just another career politician." Kander was born in 1981. Blunt has been in politics since before Kander's birth. It's just fucking bizarre.

I've come to the conclusion that "just another career politician" is being used as barely disguised code for "Democrat." The same thing is being done in the governor race with Eric Greitens, the Republican candidate, and Chis Koster. In this case, it's more apt, since Greitens is somewhat young, has been in the military since 2001, and is just now getting into politics. (Side note: Kander enlisted after 9/11 and stayed in until 2011, so there are two fairly young guys--one a Republican and one a Democrat--running for pretty big positions in Missouri politics.) Even here, though, it's a little misleading, since Koster has only really been in politics since 2004. He was a prosecuting attorney before that. He was forty when he held his first public office.

Speaking of Koster, he's also openly proposing a fiscally conservative approach with his financial plan. His campaign ads even mentions his fiscal conservatism by name.

It seems like the left in Missouri continues to shift center-right, and it seems like the right keeps shifting more toward the extreme right. (There was a big shift to the right following 9/11, but I don't see the current shift as part of an uninterrupted shift. The current shift is related to the earlier shift, probably, or it's a modified version of the earlier shift that was put on hold thanks to the mismanagement of the Bush administration.)

Of course, I don't mean to suggest that "career politician" necessarily equals "good." There's a mix of good and bad, as is true of most things. Hands tend to get dirtier and dirtier the longer they man the shovel. Unless they're the hands of Jimmy Carter. That guy's hands have stayed remarkably clean. Maybe even suspiciously clean. (Only kidding. I think they're genuinely impressively clean.)

It occurs to me that the names "Kander" and "Koster" look a bit alike. It wouldn't surprise me if Blunt and Greitens were hoping that right-leaning voters would just sort of think of Kander and Koster as an indefinite mass of liberalism and be unable to distinguish the supposedly bad things one did from the supposedly bad things the other did. ("Now was Kander the guy who voted for Obamacare, or was it the other guy? Which one was the one who was pro-Union? Fuck it. I'm just voting against both of 'em.")

"Indefinite mass of liberalism" does sort of describe another tactic in the attack adds against various Democrats. Sometimes, the voice on the radio will take on a derisive tone and say simply that X candidate is a Democrat. Sometimes, that's more or less all there is to the ad. The ad may also connect the candidate by name to "career politicians," or the ad may claim that the candidate is "just like" Clinton and/or Obama, but a lot of the time, they just sneer and call the person a Democrat.
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Re: The Batshit Crazy Republicans Roundup

Post by Jubbers »

The Swollen Goiter of God wrote:
Space Tycoon wrote:
The Swollen Goiter of God wrote: I suppose there were shades of this, already, back in 2008 with Palin and her talk of being a "rogue."
She was a "Maverick", gosh-darn-it.
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Re: The Batshit Crazy Republicans Roundup

Post by The Swollen Goiter of God »

For a maverick, she sure laid a goose egg.

They did use "maverick" to describe Palin a bit during the 2008 election, but I associate the term more closely with McCain.

This is where I was going with the "rogue" comment:

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Re: The Batshit Crazy Republicans Roundup

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I think she misspelled "rouge."
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Re: The Batshit Crazy Republicans Roundup

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Was that a sexist comment?
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Re: The Batshit Crazy Republicans Roundup

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The Swollen Goiter of God wrote:The amount of traction Trump got as a first-timer and the amount of traction Sanders got with the party switch probably crystalized for a lot of people how much easier being a part of the machine makes things. Declaring yourself Democrat or Republican does a lot of your work for you. I guess you vaguely need to reflect the professed party's platforms when you run, but it also appears you can go somewhat afield without a number of the party's adherents noticing or caring all that much.
I want to respond to this in some detail, but it's late and I need to go to bed, so I'll just say for now that I agree with this and I'm surprised that this hasn't happened sooner in a political system dominated by two parties. More on this to come soon, I hope.
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