Taibbi on Trump

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    Avatar photozn
    Moderator

    President Trump: How America Got It So Wrong

    Journalists and politicians blew off the warning signs of a Trump presidency – now, we all must pay the price

    Matt Taibbi

    http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/president-trump-how-america-got-it-so-wrong-w449783

    Tuesday, November 8th, early afternoon. Outside the Trump Tower in Manhattan, a man in the telltale red Make America Great Again hat taps me on the shoulder.
    “You press?” he says, looking at a set of lanyards around my neck.
    I nod.

    Win, lose or drop out, the Republican nominee has laid waste to the American political system. On the trail for the last gasp of the ugliest campaign in our nation’s history
    “Fuck yourself,” he says, thrusting a middle finger in my face. He then turns around and walks a boy of about five away from me down Fifth Avenue, a hand gently tousling his son’s hair.
    This was before Donald Trump’s historic victory. The message afterward no doubt would have been the same. There’s no way to overstate the horror of what just went down. Sure, we’ve had some unstable characters enter the White House. JFK had health problems that led him to take amphetamine shots during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Reagan’s attention span was so short, the CIA had to make mini-movies to brief him on foreign leaders. George W. Bush not only didn’t read the news, he wasn’t interested in it (“What’s in the newspapers worth worrying about?” he once asked, without irony).
    But all of these men were just fronts for one or the other half of the familiar alternating power structure, surrounded by predictable, relatively sober confederates who managed the day-to-day. Trump enters the White House as a lone wrecking ball of conspiratorial ideas, a one-man movement unto himself who owes almost nothing to traditional Republicans and can be expected to be anything but a figurehead. He takes office at a time when the chief executive is vastly more powerful than ever before, with nearly unlimited authority to investigate, surveil, torture and assassinate foreigners and even U.S. citizens – powers that didn’t seem to trouble people much when they were granted to Barack Obama.
    Shunned during election season by many in his own party, President-elect Trump’s closest advisers are a collection of crackpots and dilettantes who will make Bush’s cabinet look like the Nobel committee. The head of his EPA transition team, Myron Ebell, is a noted climate-change denier. Pyramid enthusiast and stabbing expert Ben Carson is already being mentioned as a possible Health and Human Services chief. Rudy Giuliani, probably too unhinged by now for even a People’s Court reboot, might be attorney general. God only knows who might end up being Supreme Court nominees; we can only hope they turn out to be lawyers, or at least people who played lawyers onscreen. And sitting behind this fun-house nightmare of executive-branch worthies (which Politico speculates will be one of the more “eclectic” cabinets ever) will be a rubber-stamping all-Republican legislature that will attract the loving admiration of tinhorn despots from Minsk to Beijing.
    Trump made idiots of us all. From the end of primary season onward, I felt sure Trump was en route to ruining, perhaps forever, the Republican Party as a force in modern American life. Now the Republicans are more dominant than ever, and it is the Democratic Party that is shattered and faces an uncertain future.
    And they deserve it. The Democratic Party’s failure to keep Donald Trump out of the White House in 2016 will go down as one of the all-time examples of insular arrogance. The party not only spent most of the past two years ignoring the warning signs of the Trump rebellion, but vilifying anyone who tried to point them out. It denounced all rumors of its creeping unpopularity as vulgar lies and bullied anyone who dared question its campaign strategy by calling them racists, sexists and agents of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
    But the party’s willful blindness symbolized a similar arrogance across the American intellectual elite. Trump’s election was a true rebellion, directed at anyone perceived to be part of “the establishment.” The target group included political leaders, bankers, industrialists, academics, Hollywood actors, and, of course, the media. And we all closed our eyes to what we didn’t want to see.
    Former New York City Mayor Rudolf Giuliani introduces Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Greenville, North Carolina, U.S., September 6, 2016.
    Rudy Giuliani could be attorney general in the Trump administration. Mike Segar/Reuters
    The almost universal failure among political pros to predict Trump’s victory – the few exceptions, conspicuously, were people who hailed from rust-belt states, like Michael Moore – spoke to an astonishing cultural blindness. Those of us whose job it is to cover campaigns long ago grew accustomed to treating The People as a kind of dumb animal, whose behavior could sometimes be unpredictable but, in the end, almost always did what it was told.
    Whenever we sought insight into the motives and tendencies of this elusive creature, our first calls were always to other eggheads like ourselves. We talked to pollsters, think-tankers, academics, former campaign strategists, party spokes-hacks, even other journalists. Day after day, our political talk shows consisted of one geek in a suit interviewing another geek in a suit about the behaviors of pipe fitters and store clerks and cops in Florida, Wisconsin, Ohio and West Virginia. We’d stand over glitzy video maps and discuss demographic data points like we were trying to determine the location of a downed jetliner.
    And the whole time, The People, whose intentions we were wondering so hard about, were all around us, listening to themselves being talked about like some wild, illiterate beast.
    When 60 Minutes did its election-eve story about the mood of the electorate, they had to call up a familiar Beltway figure, pollster Frank Luntz, to put together a focus group. Luntz’s purpose was to take the white-hot rage and disgust hurled at him by voters on both sides of the aisle during the “focus group” portion, and translate it all into a media-speak during the sit-down. Luntz did his job and gave Steve Kroft his sound-bite diagnosis of The People’s temperature. “That’s not blowing off steam,” he said. “That is a deep-seated resentment.”
    Deep-seated resentment. There was a catchy, succinct line, over which we could all collectively stroke our chins in quiet contemplation. That’s as opposed to what the voters intended, which was to sock us all so hard for our snobbism and intellectual myopia that those very chins of ours would get driven straight through the backs of our skulls.
    There was a great deal of talk in this campaign about the inability of the “low-information” voter to understand the rhetoric of candidates who spoke above a sixth-grade language level. We were told by academics and analysts that Trump’s public addresses rated among the most simplistic political rhetoric ever recorded.
    But that story cut in both directions, in a way few of us silver-tongued media types ever thought about. The People didn’t speak our language, true. But that also meant we didn’t speak theirs.
    Beavis and Butthead creator Mike Judge’s Idiocracy, ostensibly a comedy but destined now to be remembered as a horror movie, was often cited this past year as prophecy. The film described a future dystopia of idiot Americans physically unable to understand the tepid grammatical speech of a half-smart time traveler from the past. Many reporters, myself included, found themselves thinking about this film when we heard voters saying they were literally incapable of understanding the words coming out of Hillary Clinton’s mouth.
    “When [Trump] talks, I actually understand what he’s saying,” a young Pennsylvanian named Trent Gower told me at a Trump event a month ago. “But, like, when fricking Hillary Clinton talks, it just sounds like a bunch of bullshit.”
    So these Trump voters had a comprehension problem. But we were just as bad. We couldn’t understand what they were saying to us. We refused to accept every signal about whom they hated, and how much. Why? Because Trump’s voters were speaking a language that has been taboo in America for decades, if not forever.
    Nobody in this country knows how to talk about class. America is like a giant manor estate where the aristocrats don’t know they’re aristocrats and the peasants imagine themselves undiscovered millionaires. And America’s cultural elite, trained for so long to think in terms of artificial distinctions like Republicans and Democrats instead of more natural divisions like haves and have-nots, refused until it was too late to grasp the meaning of the rage-storm headed over the wall.
    Just like the leaders of the Republican Party, who simply never believed its electorate wouldn’t drop and roll over on command when the time came, we media types never believed all that anger out there was real, or at least gathered in enough force to matter.
    Supporters of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump rally in front of the White House in Washington, U.S. November 9, 2016.

    Most of us smarty-pants analysts never thought Trump could win because we saw his run as a half-baked white-supremacist movement fueled by last-gasp, racist frustrations of America’s shrinking silent majority. Sure, Trump had enough jackbooted nut jobs and conspiracist stragglers under his wing to ruin the Republican Party. But surely there was no way he could topple America’s reigning multicultural consensus. How could he? After all, the country had already twice voted in an African-American Democrat to the White House.
    Yes, Trump’s win was a triumph of the hideous racism, sexism and xenophobia that has always run through American society. But his coalition also took aim at the neoliberal gentry’s pathetic reliance on proxies to communicate with flyover America. They fed on the widespread visceral disdain red-staters felt toward the very people Hillary Clinton’s campaign enlisted all year to speak on its behalf: Hollywood actors, big-ticket musicians, Beltway activists, academics, and especially media figures.
    Trump’s rebellion was born at the intersection of two toxic American myths, the post-racial society and the classless society.
    Candidate Trump told a story about a conspiracy of cultural and financial elites bent on finishing off a vanishing white middle-class nirvana, first by shipping jobs overseas and then by waving hordes of crime-prone, bomb-tossing immigrants over the border.
    These elites lived in both parties, Trump warned. The Republicans were tools of job-exporting fat cats who only pretended to be tough on immigration and trade in order to win votes, when all they really cared about were profits. The Democrats were tools of the same interests, who subsisted politically on the captured votes of hoodwinked minorities, preaching multiculturalism while practicing globalism. Both groups, Trump insisted, were out of touch with the real American voter. Neither party saw the awesome potential of this story to upend our political system.
    Republicans had flirted with racist (and sexist) rhetoric for decades, refusing to the last to understand how dangerous this behavior was. They never imagined their voters would one day demand that they act on all this race-baiting talk. They believed their own pablum about racism being a thing of the past and reverse discrimination being the true threat to the American polity.
    Meanwhile, the Democratic leadership, even as it was increasingly indebted to banks and corporations, never imagined that it could be the target of a class uprising. How could we be seen as aristocrats? We get union endorsements! We’re the party of FDR! We’re pro-civil rights! And so on.
    Trump drove his tens of millions of followers right through each of these major-party blind spots. He called the Republicans’ bluff on race almost from the start with his crazy Mexican wall idea, which instantly positioned the rest of the party field as nationalist pretenders. As for the Democrats, he lucked into a race against a politician he would portray as a 30-year symbol of a Beltway-insider consensus, one he said had left Middle America behind through trade deals like NAFTA.
    Way back in February, after following Trump in New Hampshire, I guessed at the probable nominee’s general-election strategy: “Trump will surely argue that the Clintons are the other half of the dissolute-conspiracy story he’s been selling, representing a workers’ party that abandoned workers and turned the presidency into a vast cash-for-access enterprise, avoiding scrutiny by making Washington into Hollywood East and turning labor leaders and journalists alike into star-struck courtiers.”
    Back then, I thought Trump had a real chance at the presidency. But later I made the same mistake most every other reporter did. I listened to polls and media outlets, instead of people. I thought Trump’s maladroit and ridiculous general-election campaign, in which he went back on virtually every major primary-season promise while being revealed through seemingly hourly scandals as one of the world’s most corrupt and personally repulsive individuals, would do him in. He would lose and lose huge, ending up a footnote to history, having served no purpose beyond the destruction of the Republican Party. Conventional wisdom said so, and wasn’t conventional wisdom always right?
    Not quite. We journalists made the same mistake the Republicans made, the same mistake the Democrats made. We were too sure of our own influence, too lazy to bother hearing things firsthand, and too in love with ourselves to imagine that so many people could hate and distrust us as much as they apparently do.
    It’s too late for any of us to fix this colossal misread and lapse in professional caution. Now all we can do is wait to see how much this failure of vision will cost the public we supposedly serve. Just like the politicians, our job was to listen, and we talked instead. Now America will do its own talking for a while. The world may never forgive us for not seeing this coming.

    #58489
    — X —
    Participant

    Not quite. We journalists made the same mistake the Republicans made, the same mistake the Democrats made. We were too sure of our own influence, too lazy to bother hearing things firsthand, and too in love with ourselves to imagine that so many people could hate and distrust us as much as they apparently do.

    It’s too late for any of us to fix this colossal misread and lapse in professional caution. Now all we can do is wait to see how much this failure of vision will cost the public we supposedly serve. Just like the politicians, our job was to listen, and we talked instead. Now America will do its own talking for a while. The world may never forgive us for not seeing this coming.

    Way too much text to get to the point (which, thankfully, came in the last coupla paragraphs).
    Well, Matt, here’s some solace. I’m sure the world will forgive Rolling Stone Magazine for being too self-serving.
    100% sure, in fact.

    You have to be odd, to be number one.
    -- Dr Seuss

    #58505
    Avatar photoZooey
    Moderator

    I have waited a week to see what Taibbi would say.

    And I don’t know what that was.

    Kind of like watching somebody scratch his head, and wonder. And both take credit for seeing things, and take blame for not seeing things. And leaving us without a handle.

    Okay.

    #58514
    PA Ram
    Participant

    I have waited a week to see what Taibbi would say.

    And I don’t know what that was.

    Kind of like watching somebody scratch his head, and wonder. And both take credit for seeing things, and take blame for not seeing things. And leaving us without a handle.

    Okay.

    Yeah–what I got out of it is that no one saw this coming in any real way and now that it has–they are all shocked. To his credit, Taibbi is a very good journalist who does a great job of covering subjects. I think he’s genuinely stunned at how much he and others missed here. It’s almost a self- autopsy of the whole thing. But what he doesn’t discuss is the role the media played in building Trump. They fed off Trump this year, for ratings, for sales articles, etc. Trump meant profit. That’s a subject that interests me that I hope he writes about some day.

    "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. " Philip K. Dick

    #58523
    Mackeyser
    Moderator

    Yeah… he eviscerated Wall Street.

    He needs to eviscerate the media in the same vein.

    Sports is the crucible of human virtue. The distillate remains are human vice.

    #58530
    Avatar photoZooey
    Moderator

    I have waited a week to see what Taibbi would say.

    And I don’t know what that was.

    Kind of like watching somebody scratch his head, and wonder. And both take credit for seeing things, and take blame for not seeing things. And leaving us without a handle.

    Okay.

    Yeah–what I got out of it is that no one saw this coming in any real way and now that it has–they are all shocked. To his credit, Taibbi is a very good journalist who does a great job of covering subjects. I think he’s genuinely stunned at how much he and others missed here. It’s almost a self- autopsy of the whole thing. But what he doesn’t discuss is the role the media played in building Trump. They fed off Trump this year, for ratings, for sales articles, etc. Trump meant profit. That’s a subject that interests me that I hope he writes about some day.

    I have faith in Taibbi, even though that wasn’t a very good article.

    But he will have a perspective on it later that will add dimension, I think.

    He is still processing, and the deadline got there before he finished thinking. That’s okay.

    I dunno.

    To me, Trump tapped into something very real. Both he and Bernie tapped into the sense of disenfranchisement that many working Americans feel. Bernie was more intellectual about it, whereas Trump was more emotional about it. They were both describing the same problem, but from different angles.

    And Bernie got muscled out of the picture. So there was only Trump’s appeal left to stand against Hillary’s algorithmic posturing that addressed sound bite issues instead of what many Americans see and feel is wrong.

    And, yeah, he’s disgusting personally in many ways, and unreliable, and contradictory, and just plain dicktory. But as erratic as he is, he at least spoke to something closer to the truth than Hillary did. Hillary in her shitty pantsuits, trying to crack prepared “zingers.” In the end, she got more votes, but in the wrong places. She lost in what should have been Democrat heartland. But her husband sold those people out, and she never recognized it, or admitted it if she did.

    #58539
    Avatar photonittany ram
    Moderator

    Not quite. We journalists made the same mistake the Republicans made, the same mistake the Democrats made. We were too sure of our own influence, too lazy to bother hearing things firsthand, and too in love with ourselves to imagine that so many people could hate and distrust us as much as they apparently do.

    It’s worse than that. They were complicit in Trump’s victory because they gave him a free soapbox throughout his campaign. And down the stretch they decided covering Hillary’s emails was more important than uncovering Trump’s many skeletons.

    So, it’s disingenuous to say “we didn’t see it coming” as if they were innocently duped like everyone else when in fact they helped make it happen through their actions/inaction. They didn’t do their jobs. Well, not the job they are supposedly there to do anyway. They did make a lot of money for their parent corporations, so kudos for that.

    #58540
    Avatar photowv
    Participant

    “… Trump’s voters were speaking a language that has been taboo in America for decades, if not forever.
    Nobody in this country knows how to talk about class.
    America is like a giant manor estate where the aristocrats don’t know they’re aristocrats and the peasants imagine themselves undiscovered millionaires. And America’s cultural elite, trained for so long to think in terms of artificial distinctions like Republicans and Democrats instead of more natural divisions like haves and have-nots, refused until it was too late to grasp the meaning of the rage-storm headed over the wall….

    Most of us smarty-pants analysts never thought Trump could win because we saw his run as a half-baked white-supremacist movement fueled by last-gasp, racist frustrations of America’s shrinking silent majority. Sure, Trump had enough jackbooted nut jobs and conspiracist stragglers under his wing to ruin the Republican Party…

    …Trump’s rebellion was born at the intersection of two toxic American myths, the post-racial society and the classless society.”

    w
    v

    #58556
    Mackeyser
    Moderator

    You’re so right Zooey. And don’t get me started on those pantsuits. Holy Jesus.

    It was so damned transparent that every appearance was micro-targeted…as if she was dressed by an analytics algorithm. It was stunningly disingenuous.

    Bernie was Bernie. Same suit. So much so that Larry David made the joke that he only had one pair of underwear…and Bernie ran with it and said he bought a second pair.

    Trump was Trump. He oozed wealth. Now one can focus on oozed or wealth, but even as he donned that red cap, totally out of character, it was like that moment in My Cousin Vinny…”I wore this ridiculous thing…for you”

    Hillary? Every appearance was a combination Rorschach test and puzzle, “who is Hillary pandering to/trying to manipulate/trying to relate to only with clothes?”

    The critiques came across as misogynistic, but they weren’t.

    You’d never see Elizabeth Warren do that. You’d never see Tulsi Gabbard to that. You’d never see Nina Turner do that.

    There were PLENTY of strong Democratic Party women who wouldn’t have done anything remotely like this.

    Sports is the crucible of human virtue. The distillate remains are human vice.

    #58558
    bnw
    Blocked

    Taibbi is a butt sore punk. I laugh at what he laments: his insignificance.

    The upside to being a Rams fan is heartbreak.

    Sprinkles are for winners.

    #58568
    Avatar photowv
    Participant

    You’re so right Zooey. And don’t get me started on those pantsuits. Holy Jesus.

    It was so damned transparent that every appearance was micro-targeted…as if she was dressed by an analytics algorithm. It was stunningly disingenuous.

    Bernie was Bernie. Same suit. So much so that Larry David made the joke that he only had one pair of underwear…and Bernie ran with it and said he bought a second pair.

    Trump was Trump. He oozed wealth. Now one can focus on oozed or wealth, but even as he donned that red cap, totally out of character, it was like that moment in My Cousin Vinny…”I wore this ridiculous thing…for you”

    Hillary? Every appearance was a combination Rorschach test and puzzle, “who is Hillary pandering to/trying to manipulate/trying to relate to only with clothes?”

    The critiques came across as misogynistic, but they weren’t.

    You’d never see Elizabeth Warren do that. You’d never see Tulsi Gabbard to that. You’d never see Nina Turner do that.

    There were PLENTY of strong Democratic Party women who wouldn’t have done anything remotely like this.

    ————

    Yeah, i agree.

    But will the Dem-Machine EVER allow a true progressive to be at the head of the Ticket?

    Whens the last time that happened? 1972? McGovern?

    w
    v

    #58577
    Avatar photoZooey
    Moderator

    Yeah, i agree.

    But will the Dem-Machine EVER allow a true progressive to be at the head of the Ticket?

    Whens the last time that happened? 1972? McGovern?

    w
    v

    Let’s see who emerges as DNC chair.

    #58581
    bnw
    Blocked

    Yeah, i agree.

    But will the Dem-Machine EVER allow a true progressive to be at the head of the Ticket?

    Whens the last time that happened? 1972? McGovern?

    w
    v

    Let’s see who emerges as DNC chair.

    Then why do democrats still vote democrat? Or I suppose what is a democrat bent or philosophy?

    The upside to being a Rams fan is heartbreak.

    Sprinkles are for winners.

    #58585
    Mackeyser
    Moderator

    I dunno.

    Why did establishment Republicans vote for Trump?

    Partisan bullshit politics and because it’s too hard for too many to put down the banners and do the much harder work of actually paying attention to issues.

    It’s SOOOO much easier to simply root for a TEAM. You don’t have to KNOW anything to root for a team.

    Countless videos and interviews regarding constituencies for both parties have found that far too many of the “rank and file” know little to nothing regarding any issue with any depth…whatsoever. It’s all about team.

    If politics were football, most people barely rank as “girlfriends” on the knowledge scale. That’s not a Dem or Rep thing. That’s an American thing, subverted by the corporate media and the ruling class and reinforced by the political class, most folks don’t understand why they have to learn the game…so they just cheer for the helmets. They don’t know who’s inside the helmets, what they do, why they do it or even if it’s good or bad or good or bad for them.

    So, yeah… if you’re gonna try that partisan schtick around here, like, “woo, us Republicans are star spangled awesome”… well, don’t be surprised if the response isn’t all that great.

    Oh, and to be fair, Waterfield got a heckuva reception a while back with tons of challenge, so most here just don’t do the partisan thing.

    Sports is the crucible of human virtue. The distillate remains are human vice.

    #58586
    Mackeyser
    Moderator

    Yeah, i agree.

    But will the Dem-Machine EVER allow a true progressive to be at the head of the Ticket?

    Whens the last time that happened? 1972? McGovern?

    w
    v

    Let’s see who emerges as DNC chair.

    Well, Tulsi Gabbard didn’t re-up for Chair. I’d love for Keith Ellison, Rep from Minnesota to get it. In the face of a Donald Trump Presidency to have a solid progressive, with a record of working for the working class and the poor who happens to be Muslim would be outstanding.

    I hate politics, but in politics you have to send messages. Donald Trump sent the message with the appointment of Steve Bannon.

    I think the DNC should counter with Keith Ellison.

    Oh, and if these assholes actually pass a Muslim registry, I think we should ALL register and render it moot.

    Sports is the crucible of human virtue. The distillate remains are human vice.

    #58588
    Avatar photozn
    Moderator

    Oh, and if these assholes actually pass a Muslim registry, I think we should ALL register and render it moot.

    There’s a big movement for that. If there’s a Muslim registry, non-Muslims should register. Choke the machine.

    #58589
    bnw
    Blocked

    I dunno.

    Why did establishment Republicans vote for Trump?

    Partisan bullshit politics and because it’s too hard for too many to put down the banners and do the much harder work of actually paying attention to issues.

    It’s SOOOO much easier to simply root for a TEAM. You don’t have to KNOW anything to root for a team.

    Countless videos and interviews regarding constituencies for both parties have found that far too many of the “rank and file” know little to nothing regarding any issue with any depth…whatsoever. It’s all about team.

    If politics were football, most people barely rank as “girlfriends” on the knowledge scale. That’s not a Dem or Rep thing. That’s an American thing, subverted by the corporate media and the ruling class and reinforced by the political class, most folks don’t understand why they have to learn the game…so they just cheer for the helmets. They don’t know who’s inside the helmets, what they do, why they do it or even if it’s good or bad or good or bad for them.

    So, yeah… if you’re gonna try that partisan schtick around here, like, “woo, us Republicans are star spangled awesome”… well, don’t be surprised if the response isn’t all that great.

    Oh, and to be fair, Waterfield got a heckuva reception a while back with tons of challenge, so most here just don’t do the partisan thing.

    Establishment republicans didn’t vote for Trump. Trump ran against the establishment. They tried to torpedo his run from the start.

    BTW I don’t have a “schtick”. I asked a sincere question. Apparently you thought there was more to it?

    The upside to being a Rams fan is heartbreak.

    Sprinkles are for winners.

    #58593
    Avatar photoZooey
    Moderator

    Oh, and if these assholes actually pass a Muslim registry, I think we should ALL register and render it moot.

    There’s a big movement for that. If there’s a Muslim registry, non-Muslims should register. Choke the machine.

    There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.

    #58594
    Avatar photonittany ram
    Moderator

    Oh, and if these assholes actually pass a Muslim registry, I think we should ALL register and render it moot.

    There’s a big movement for that. If there’s a Muslim registry, non-Muslims should register. Choke the machine.

    There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.

    As-salāmuʿalaykum.

    #58595
    Mackeyser
    Moderator

    Yeah, i agree.

    But will the Dem-Machine EVER allow a true progressive to be at the head of the Ticket?

    Whens the last time that happened? 1972? McGovern?

    w
    v

    Let’s see who emerges as DNC chair.

    Then why do democrats still vote democrat? Or I suppose what is a democrat bent or philosophy?

    As you know, the DNC and corporate media conspired to successfully rig the Democratic primaries. Had the process been unadulterated, Democrats and independents would have voted for Sanders. So, while in many cases, it’s a case of pure partisanship, in this case, I think it was the party establishment selling out the base. Dems wouldn’t have had Clinton as the nominee in a fair process.

    Oh, and most establishment Republicans did vote for Trump. He got 60 million votes. Alex Jones doesn’t have that big of a following.

    • This reply was modified 8 years, 1 month ago by Mackeyser.

    Sports is the crucible of human virtue. The distillate remains are human vice.

    #58598
    PA Ram
    Participant

    At first the media tried to dismiss Bernie as a fringe candidate. They kind of laughed at him. Then they tried to discredit him and label him as some sort of radical socialist out of touch with America. He wasn’t treated particularly well, and I can even remember seeing him being challenged by Colbert(who clearly was in the tank for Clinton).

    But Bernie would not go away. And he had success.

    Still, they didn’t get into Clinton’s baggage the way they did when it was her against Trump. They may have touched on things, but it was a whole other level once she clinched the nomination.

    And yes–add to that the DNC help she got along the way, and he had an uphill battle.

    The one problem Bernie did have, however, was making inroads with the black community. Clinton had the churches, the local government connections with black leaders, and a history with that group that made things very difficult for them to hear and trust his message. They didn’t know Bernie. He may have been well served by starting a couple years earlier trying to introduce himself to them but he may not have known he was running at that time. But by the time of the campaign it was too late.

    Still, as time went on the African-American community became less thrilled with Clinton anyway and they did not show up in big numbers to support her in the general election.

    Clinton was a terribly flawed candidate in a time when the electorate was screaming for change.

    If the Dems go back to the same plan, feeling they still know better, that it was all just because of Clinton, that a Tim Kaine can win next time, that four years of Trump will cause everyone to come running back anyway, that they just can’t let go of their donor obsessions, and that the answer(as I heard one of them say) is just better messaging, they are doomed.

    Mr. Wall Street Chuck Schumer has already got the leadership of the senate(and though Bernie supported him when announced, I am sure there are pragmatic reasons for it, and perhaps even a deal in it for progressives) and Nancy Pelosi, whose average salary in her constituency is about 120,000 dollars is claiming the House leadership so not much change at the top there.

    I don’t know what will happen yet at the DNC. Ellison has a lot of support.

    But it will be interesting to watch what they do over the next few years. Either the party will change, or it will simply be obsolete.

    The media(which will be under assault for the next few years like never before) will have to look at itself as well. The scary part is if they bow to the pressure and become useless.

    • This reply was modified 8 years, 1 month ago by PA Ram.

    "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. " Philip K. Dick

    #58601
    Avatar photowv
    Participant

    <

    Then why do democrats still vote democrat? Or I suppose what is a democrat bent or philosophy?

    —————
    Probly the whole ‘lesser of two evils’ thing for a lot of dem-voters. They want a more ‘left’ leaning party than the Dems but they think voting for the Green party is a ‘wasted vote’.

    Its the same reason so many righties keep voting for the Reps. They want something different but think a third-party vote is a wasted vote.

    Both parties have a nice racket going.

    w
    v

    #58602
    Avatar photowv
    Participant

    Oh, and if these assholes actually pass a Muslim registry, I think we should ALL register and render it moot.

    There’s a big movement for that. If there’s a Muslim registry, non-Muslims should register. Choke the machine.

    There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.

    ————-
    LoL.

    I’d like to see Mr Science Nittany type that.

    w
    v

    #58613
    Avatar photonittany ram
    Moderator

    zooey wrote:

    There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.

    wv wrote:

    LoL.

    I’d like to see Mr Science Nittany type that.

    w
    v

    “There is no god…”

    Damn.

    Close though.

    #58614
    Avatar photowv
    Participant
    #58615
    bnw
    Blocked

    President-Elect Trump will be an agent of change as president.

    The upside to being a Rams fan is heartbreak.

    Sprinkles are for winners.

    #58616
    — X —
    Participant

    I hate politics, but in politics you have to send messages. Donald Trump sent the message with the appointment of Steve Bannon.

    What message was that?

    You have to be odd, to be number one.
    -- Dr Seuss

    #58617
    bnw
    Blocked

    I hate politics, but in politics you have to send messages. Donald Trump sent the message with the appointment of Steve Bannon.

    What message was that?

    Change is coming.

    The upside to being a Rams fan is heartbreak.

    Sprinkles are for winners.

    #58639
    Mackeyser
    Moderator

    I hate politics, but in politics you have to send messages. Donald Trump sent the message with the appointment of Steve Bannon.

    What message was that?

    Steve Bannon actively sought to be make Breitbart the platform of the alt-right, the white nationalist movement.

    He’s the antithesis of William F Buckley who used his intellect to drive back the Birchers and make the case successfully that anti-semitism had no place in the Republican party nor American discourse.

    Steve Bannon, through his personal and business dealings has proven to be an anti-Semite, a bigot, a racist and a misogynist.

    I have a daughter who’s working on a math degree. I’ve not only worked in tech, I invented something that impressed Steve Jobs. I went to an engineering school. I’ve worked with all sorts from exceptional artists to literally rocket scientists. And I don’t pay my kids compliments. So when I say that I’ve never met anyone who better articulates mathematical concepts than my daughter, that’s not hyperbole. She wants to teach, but I’m hoping she goes corporate first because unfortunately, schools administrators tend to screw teachers if they don’t think you have options. So, the idea that ANYONE would say that someone like my daughter couldn’t be successful in tech “because she sucks in interviews” as opposed the rampant sexism and structural organizational impediments to diversity in tech that I’ve seen and experienced personally as well as have been witnessed and reported thousands of times and admitted to by every single large tech firm…is beyond me.

    Apparently, Steve Bannon and the troglodytes know more about the issue than every tech company on the planet.

    Moreover, I remember William F. Buckley, Jr.

    The appointment of Steve Bannon is an offense to Buckley’s legacy and contribution.

    The fact that he doesn’t foam at the mouth or belch fire isn’t the point.

    Note: Here’s the horrible, obligatory equivocation that has to be inserted…cuz…one can’t just make a point and let that stand… I said the same things about that real piece of shit, Sydney Blumenthal, the Clinton confidant. He’s another entitled, racist asshole. It’s not a partisan thing.

    Sorry. Bad headache tonight. I’m not moderating my tone well. Doesn’t change my stance, but I’m not meaning to jump anyone’s business.

    Sports is the crucible of human virtue. The distillate remains are human vice.

    #58642
    Avatar photoZooey
    Moderator

    Steve Bannon actively sought to be make Breitbart the platform of the alt-right, the white nationalist movement.

    He’s the antithesis of William F Buckley who used his intellect to drive back the Birchers and make the case successfully that anti-semitism had no place in the Republican party nor American discourse.

    Why do we call them the alt-right? They’re nazis. We can call them nazis. It’s okay. Nazis are really hard to offend. I guess a different term will help historians keep their eras straight, and avoid confusion.

    William F. Buckley. I used to hate that guy. He used to be the worst of the Republican party. Right now, I can’t think of a single Republican I would prefer to William F. Buckley.

    This country has tacked so far to the right that it is arguable we have a fascist government starting in January. Heck, it’s arguable it became fascist long ago. I will have to pull out my handy Cheat Sheet on the 14 characteristics of fascism, if I can find it.

    But to think…William F. Buckley seems reasonable by today’s standards.

    OMG.

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