Countdown to Extinction: The 2016 Presidential Election

[(poco) Sforzando]

Donald Trump is now saying that the "crooked media . . . . are the lowest form of humanity." Does that mean they're lower than Mexican rapists or the Muslims who cheered on the 9/11 attacks?

[Daverz]

Donald Trump is now saying that the "crooked media . . . . are the lowest form of humanity." Does that mean they're lower than Mexican rapists or the Muslims who cheered on the 9/11 attacks?

"I'm great, great friends, the greatest, with Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, Bill O'Reilly, Alex Jones, Ann Coulter, Breitbart News, and the National Enquirer.  Believe me, I know from crooked."

[Herman]

He must have meant 7 years and miscounted. He sounds old and senile.

I don't think so. It's part of the GOP brainwash.

Everything bad is Obama's fault. He started ISIS, too, by invading Iraq.

[drogulus]

     How We Killed the Tea Party

Greedy super PACs drained the movement with endless pleas for money to support "conservative" candidates—while instead using the money to enrich themselves. I should know. I worked for one of them.

By Paul H. Jossey

August 14, 2016

     Yes, that's part of it. Repubs feed money to donors, gods and gays and guns to the base, who when they rebel are preyed on again!

     Now, they finally get it right with Trump, who is refreshingly honest and a straight shooter.

     OooooooooooooNooooooooooooooo...........!!!!

[Brian]

Donald Trump is now saying that the "crooked media . . . . are the lowest form of humanity." Does that mean they're lower than Mexican rapists or the Muslims who cheered on the 9/11 attacks?

Wonder what he thinks about himself, accepting every single media interview request that's offered to him.

[(poco) Sforzando]

Wonder what he thinks about himself.

You have to ask?

[Karl Henning]

Could Gary Johnson qualify for the first presidential debate?

[André]

A weird assumption, since we were talking about when a major party was crushed because its voter base was split. I mean 1993 when the Tories were reduced to 2 seats and Reform became a significant vote-getter for former Tory voters.

Going from consecutive majorities to 2 seats is getting crushed.

Well, I didn't expect that you got your facts from prehistoric times (the Reform Party was born in 1987, and dissolved in 2000).  The fortunes, vagaries and different avatars of the Progressive Conservative Party 1987-2003, before it morphed into the right-wing Conservative Party are of no interest here. Let's just say that a great, slightly right of centre party was taken over and became a beacon of christian conservatism until it was defeated last year.

[Ken B]

He must have meant 7 years and miscounted. He sounds old and senile.

Here is the video of his speech, not a tendentiously edited partial transcript. https://youtu.be/aD2CC3rcTbw

Start at 8:20 mark. He mentions 9/11 and the 1993 attack. The much ballyhooed quote comes about 30 seconds later. A couple sentence later! Further he dates the beginning of "those eight years" from when Pence visited Ground Zero and worked for the Patriot Act.

Can we agree an unedited video gives better context than the snippets some have quoted above?. He didn't forget or deny 9/11.

[Brian]

Here is the video of his speech, not a tendentiously edited partial transcript. https://youtu.be/aD2CC3rcTbw

Start at 8:20 mark. He mentions 9/11 and the 1993 attack. The much ballyhooed quote comes about 30 seconds later. A couple sentence later! Further he dates the beginning of "those eight years" from when Pence visited Ground Zero and worked for the Patriot Act.

Can we agree an unedited video gives better context than the snippets some have quoted above?. He didn't forget or deny 9/11.

Good grief. I watched the video. I know. From the Patriot Act to Obama is still 7 years. Like I already said, he meant 7 years and miscounted.

[Ken B]

Good grief. I watched the video. I know. From the Patriot Act to Obama is still 7 years. Like I already said, he meant 7 years and miscounted.

Technically it depends on what "those eight years" refers to, and it's possible he meant, as the context suggests, until the next Islamist attack on American soil, which is about 7 years 8 months. To the inauguration 7 and 4. Is that 7 years or 8? Like with birthdays people sometimes use either. saying 2009 is eight years after 2001 doesn't seem a big deal to me. But in either case it's a long way from the claim originally made there were no such atttacks before Obama, full stop. I don't really care if people think Rudy is an idiot for saying 8 when maybe 7 is a fairer number, but if you do so you should report accurately what he said, not "sex it up".

[Parsifal]

Here is the video of his speech, not a tendentiously edited partial transcript. https://youtu.be/aD2CC3rcTbw

Start at 8:20 mark. He mentions 9/11 and the 1993 attack. The much ballyhooed quote comes about 30 seconds later. A couple sentence later! Further he dates the beginning of "those eight years" from when Pence visited Ground Zero and worked for the Patriot Act.

Can we agree an unedited video gives better context than the snippets some have quoted above?. He didn't forget or deny 9/11.

I'm not interested in the snippets, which are generally edited to be click-bait. I'm interested in what he said, "and bye the way, in those eight years, before Obama came along, we didn't have any successful radical islamic terrorist attacks."

The statement is explicitly false. The 8 years before Obama "came along" contained 9/11 as well as several small scale terror attacks with varying levels of success, such as the shoe bomber, an attack at LAX, several attacks on Jewish community centers. If he had said 7 years, 9/11 would have been technically excluded, but the fact that he was too unhinged to count is the main thing I take from it. The "Patriot Act" argument is disingenuous, since Obama did not cancel the Patriot act, but continued to make use of its provisions and Obama signed a reauthorization of its important elements. And apparently U.S. anti-terror operations under Obama were sufficiently successful to actually track down and kill bin Laden, an accomplishment which eluded the Bush Administration, for all their use of torture, dark prisons and other abuses of human rights.

[Ken B]

I'm not interested in the snippets, which are generally edited to be click-bait. I'm interested in what he said, "and bye the way, in those eight years, before Obama came along, we didn't have any successful radical islamic terrorist attacks."

The statement is explicitly false. The 8 years before Obama "came along" contained 9/11 as well as several small scale terror attacks with varying levels of success, such as the shoe bomber, an attack at LAX, several attacks on Jewish community centers. If he had said 7 years, 9/11 would have been technically excluded, but the fact that he was too unhinged to count is the main thing I take from it. The "Patriot Act" argument is disingenuous, since Obama did not cancel the Patriot act, but continued to make use of its provisions and Obama signed a reauthorization of its important elements. And apparently U.S. anti-terror operations under Obama were sufficiently successful to actually track down and kill bin Laden, an accomplishment which eluded the Bush Administration, for all their use of torture, dark prisons and other abuses of human rights.

1. The original snippet presented was "before Obama came along, we didn't have any successful radical Islamic terrorist attacks." 

2. Whether 7 or 8 is accurate, it was represented as Giuliani forgetting 9/11 or the earlier attacks happened. That is false as the tape shows. If you think rounding up or down matters I won't argue with you.

3. I agree Giuliani's argument about why the attack came when it did and the alleged role of Obama in undoing all the alleged good work of the Patriot Act is a crock.  I doubt Pence was a key figure in getting the act passed either. Does either matter?  You have to agree with a politician to represent him fairly?

[Madiel]

Oh God. How many pages are we going to face of you arguing whether Giuliani has no memory or no mathematics?

Neither option gives him a great deal of credit.

[drogulus]

     Paul Manafort is having a terrible day.

     Not only was Manafort effectively dumped as Trump's campaign manager (he still technically holds the title of campaign chairman), but two separate new articles have added more insight into Manafort's shady ties to Russian interests. All of this comes on top of Sunday's story that Manafort was allegedly slated for undisclosed cash payments of $12.7 million from Ukraine's defunct Party of Regions, the pro-Russian party of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.

     Donald Trump's hire of Breitbart News chief is a middle finger to the GOP establishment

     In politics I don't have a particularly weak stomach. How could I accept Her Beastness if I did? It's a judgment call, the emails, political shapeshifting, against my hunch that she will make a good President, good enough until a better one, and possibly the better one herself.

     This guy Trump hired, from Breitbart, seems to leave a slime trail in his wake, and I don't mean that critically ( ) as much as from a sense of wonder, with maybe some sense of the decline and fall of a formerly great and now rotten thing.

[Pat B]

Even if he had said 7 years he still would have been wrong.

[Wendell_E]

Leaving aside this really fascinating discussion of whether Guiliani meant what he actually said, most of the attacks during the Obama administration have been perpetrated by one or two people with guns. What could any president do to really prevent such acts, and imagine the howls of protest if Obama had done anything to try. Of course, there were mass shootings during the Bush administration, but since they weren't committed by Muslims, they apparently don't matter as much.

I'm boldly predicting that whoever wins the election in November, we'll have more terrorist attacks.  Anyone wanna bet?

[Karl Henning]

Whatever else history will report about the present election cycle, it brought us these 26 gloriously side-splitting seconds:

What it's like to report on 2016, in 26 torturous, hilarious seconds

[North Star]

Whatever else history will report about the present election cycle, it brought us these 26 gloriously side-splitting seconds:

What it's like to report on 2016, in 26 torturous, hilarious seconds

Brilliant.

[Karl Henning]

Portrait of a campaign in militant denial.