Countdown to Extinction: The 2016 Presidential Election

[San Antone]

Point taken, if your point is that the election is not rigged but he just feels like everyone in the intelligentsia & power circles hates him.

Yeah, that's what I mean.  I have come to believe that Trump makes rhetorical gestures on a grand scale that have little to do with objective facts.  You know, going for the "larger truth".

[snyprrr]

Elections ARE rigged. Period. Feel good that your vote matters... just believe it does...maybe it really does?

And all he has done was say that he has suspicions about the possibility.  But what I think he really means is something like this:  the press is working to sink his campaign, the FBI gave her a pass, and insiders in his own party are undermining his candidacy. IOW, elites are rigging the outcome through dirty tricks.

Yes, of course - and I doubt it will be close anyway.

have you been on the common sense side the whole time? Weren't we arguing about something earlier?... was it about gunz? Anyhow, glad to see there's actually some blowback in this Thread.

I'm at the "I think we need to see some traitors hanging from lampposts" stage of this republic.

I've also been implementing my new "Hillary Rules" in my life. That's where i use her type of bullshit in response to anyone who has a problem with anything I do or say. I can turn the tables pretty quick and make it your fault all of a sudden. I might have you considering suicide if you give me enough time.

Hurt People for Hillary

[snyprrr]

"I will give you a blow job if you vote for Hillary. I'm not a douche. I'm not a tool. I'm really good at it. I make lots of eye contact, and I do swallow."
                               Madonna, pop singer

[drogulus]

Yeah, that's what I mean.  I have come to believe that Trump makes rhetorical gestures on a grand scale that have little to do with objective facts.  You know, going for the "larger truth".

     Trumps hurt feelings don't justify telling the public that the the election and their vote is a sham and a fraud unless he wins. It's not a larger truth, it's a very big lie regardless of "what he really meant" interpretations.

[Parsifal]

The point is that it does not challenge the American democracy, the exaggerated claim by the press, for anyone - candidate or otherwise - to call allege election fraud or voting irregularities.  Nor does it matter if it occurs before or after the voting has taken place.  It would be a problem if Trump were to still not accept the results after a legal challenge proved Clinton won fair and square.

Do you think the reputation of the United States is of no practical value? We have a major candidate for president telling the world that the U.S. federal election "is rigged." You think it is just fine to hand this propaganda point to Russia, China, and other countries that would like to see the legitimacy of the United States undermined?

[zamyrabyrd]

She will most likely be thrown out of a balcony window and eaten by dogs.

Rather fall out one.

[zamyrabyrd]

Do you think the reputation of the United States is of no practical value? We have a major candidate for president telling the world that the U.S. federal election "is rigged." You think it is just fine to hand this propaganda point to Russia, China, and other countries that would like to see the legitimacy of the United States undermined?

Wow, did you just copy that from Pravda? A better reputation is served by exercising the right to criticize. It's human nature that is flawed. Taking advantage of or working the system is nothing new. It's just being done at such a massive scale. Outlets like NHK News (Japan) that knows beans about US politics are fed the direct party line that CNN gets. NHK for instance prioritizes on the level of the carnage in Syria and Iraq,  unsubstantiated accusations of a political candidate in the US groping women 11 years ago and oh my gawd, that same person, Donald Trump, saying he would wait and see before accepting the results of the election as some kind of desecration.

The media is not rigged? Whom should favoritism benefit? Those who concocted the Manchurian Candidate, Barack Obama, bestowed on him a Nobel Prize within days of his inauguration are the same ones pushing Hillary. Does George Soros ring a bell? There are plenty more behind the scenes unnamed. Who's a puppet when you get this kind of money?

https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/business/alatheia-nielsen/2016/10/20/soros-gives-61-million-media-groups-promoting-clintons

[Herman]

And all he has done was say that he has suspicions about the possibility.  But what I think he really means is something like this:  the press is working to sink his campaign

You can bend the facts in so many ways it's funny. Only too recently Trump was bragging that he had gotten three billion worth of free publicity because the media loved him. There was that time that Clinton was giving a speech somewhere, which wasn't run on tv because the cameras were trained on an empty stage where "Mr Trump" was about to appear, when he felt like it.

And now it's all the fault of the media.

I bet it's great gymnasistics to bend all those different ways to reproduce the Trump shtick.

elites are rigging the outcome through dirty tricks.

Same story. The GOP establishment (that is, people who weren't Democrats only a couple of years ago, like Trump) has sought many ways to accommodate Trump, among which was putting up Pence as the guy who would actually do the work. But Trump is basically an Independent trying to use the GOP apparatus, so how can you expet the GOP to support him when it's not working?

[Karl Henning]

Yeah, that's what I mean.  I have come to believe that Trump makes rhetorical gestures on a grand scale that have little to do with objective facts.  You know, going for the "larger truth".

Thanks for conceding that he's just a bullshitter 

[Karl Henning]

In this regard, certainly, El Tupé outdoes even any GOP candidate I've yet run across:

Trump's Views on Science Are Shockingly Ignorant

(I know that especially in this, snypsss gives him a BIIIIIG pass.)

[Karl Henning]

Since the message of so many of El Tupé's supporters is "Not Hillary" and/or "Not Political Business As Usual," it is fair at this point to ask if the GOP would not have done better nominating an actual gorilla, rather than the present gorilla-in-human-guise.  The gorilla would not have had a ceiling as low as El Tupé's.

[Karl Henning]

Krauthammer:

A case so strong that, against any of a dozen possible GOP candidates, voting for her opponent would be a no-brainer. Against Donald Trump, however, it's a dilemma. I will not vote for Hillary Clinton. But, as I've explained in these columns, I could never vote for Donald Trump.

The only question is whose name I'm going to write in. With Albert Schweitzer doubly unavailable (noncitizen, dead), I'm down to Paul Ryan or Ben Sasse. Two weeks to decide.

[San Antone]

Only too recently Trump was bragging that he had gotten three billion worth of free publicity because the media loved him.  And now it's all the fault of the media.

Both are true: Trump did benefit from media coverage in the primary but once he was the nominee against Clinton the media decided (and this is on record) to depart from the pretense of being balanced and actively seek to sink his campaign.  According to the public editor of the NYT, for the sake of the US democracy ... blah, blah, blah.

The GOP establishment (that is, people who weren't Democrats only a couple of years ago, like Trump) has sought many ways to accommodate Trump, among which was putting up Pence as the guy who would actually do the work. But Trump is basically an Independent trying to use the GOP apparatus, so how can you expet the GOP to support him when it's not working?

The GOP found itself in a bind: supporting their candidate despite his outsider status and huge flaws and, for many, questionable conservative principles.  As in all cases where someone tries to split the difference - no one is happy.

There may still be enough angry voters who have been underestimated by the polls and Trump may be a 21st century Truman.

It ain't over till it's over.

[James]

More of the same Career Politician vs. Highly Successful Private Sector Billionaire Businessman

I often ask myself why would someone in Trump's position in life want to go thru all of this aggravation .. he's already got it all. He's living the dream.

[(poco) Sforzando]

Paul Krugman in today's New York Times, quoted complete. Ezra Klein said something similar on MSNBC last night, pointing out "over-prepared" Hillary's mastery in pushing Trump's buttons to get him to make a total fool of himself on all three occasions. And before the usual suspects start the usual knee-jerking, they might try actually reading what Krugman says:

Hillary Clinton is a terrible candidate. Hey, that's what pundits have been saying ever since this endless campaign began. You have to go back to Al Gore in 2000 to find a politician who faced as much jeering from the news media, over everything from claims of dishonesty (which usually turn out to be based on nothing) to matters of personal style.

Strange to say, however, Mrs. Clinton won the Democratic nomination fairly easily, and now, having pummeled her opponent in three successive debates, is an overwhelming favorite to win in November, probably by a wide margin. How is that possible?

The usual suspects are already coalescing around an answer — namely, that she just got lucky. If only the Republicans hadn't nominated Donald Trump, the story goes, she'd be losing badly.

But here's a contrarian thought: Maybe Mrs. Clinton is winning because she possesses some fundamental political strengths — strengths that fall into many pundits' blind spots.

First of all, who was this other, stronger candidate that the G.O.P. might have chosen? Remember, Mr. Trump won the nomination because he gave his party's base what it wanted, channeling the racial antagonism that has been the driving force for Republican electoral success for decades. All he did was say out loud what his rivals were trying to convey with dog whistles, which explains why they were so ineffective in opposing him.

And those establishment candidates were much more Trumpian than those fantasizing about a different history — say, one in which the G.O.P. nominated Marco Rubio — acknowledge. Many people remember Mr. Rubio's brain glitch: the canned lines about "let's dispel with this fiction" that he kept repeating in a disastrous debate performance. Fewer seem aware that those lines actually enunciated a crazy conspiracy theory, essentially accusing President Obama of deliberately weakening America. Is that really much better than the things Mr. Trump says? Only if you imagine that Mr. Rubio didn't believe what he was saying — yet his insincerity, the obvious way he was trying to play a part, was surely part of his weakness.
   
That is, in fact, a general problem for establishment Republicans. How many of them really believe that tax cuts have magical powers, that climate change is a giant hoax, that saying the words "Islamic terrorism" will somehow defeat ISIS? Yet pretending to believe these things is the price of admission to the club — and the falsity of that pretense shines through.

And one more point about Mr. Rubio: why imagine that a man who collapsed in the face of childish needling from Mr. Trump would have triumphed over the woman who kept her cool during 11 hours of grilling over Benghazi, and made her interrogators look like fools? Which brings us to the question of Mrs. Clinton's strengths.

When political commentators praise political talent, what they seem to have in mind is the ability of a candidate to match one of a very limited set of archetypes: the heroic leader, the back-slapping regular guy you'd like to have a beer with, the soaring orator. Mrs. Clinton is none of these things: too wonky, not to mention too female, to be a regular guy, a fairly mediocre speechifier; her prepared zingers tend to fall flat.

Yet the person tens of millions of viewers saw in this fall's debates was hugely impressive all the same: self-possessed, almost preternaturally calm under pressure, deeply prepared, clearly in command of policy issues. And she was also working to a strategic plan: Each debate victory looked much bigger after a couple of days, once the implications had time to sink in, than it may have seemed on the night.

Oh, and the strengths she showed in the debates are also strengths that would serve her well as president. Just thought I should mention that. And maybe ordinary citizens noticed the same thing; maybe obvious competence and poise in stressful situations can add up to a kind of star quality, even if it doesn't fit conventional notions of charisma.

Furthermore, there's one thing Mrs. Clinton brought to this campaign that no establishment Republican could have matched: She truly cares about her signature issues, and believes in the solutions she's pushing.
 
I know, we're supposed to see her as coldly ambitious and calculating, and on some issues — like macroeconomics — she does sound a bit bloodless, even when she clearly understands the subject and is talking good sense. But when she's talking about women's rights, or racial injustice, or support for families, her commitment, even passion, are obvious. She's genuine, in a way nobody in the other party can be.

So let's dispel with this fiction that Hillary Clinton is only where she is through a random stroke of good luck. She's a formidable figure, and has been all along.

[Karl Henning]

First of all, who was this other, stronger candidate that the G.O.P. might have chosen?

And one more point about Mr. Rubio: why imagine that a man who collapsed in the face of childish needling from Mr. Trump would have triumphed over the woman who kept her cool during 11 hours of grilling over Benghazi, and made her interrogators look like fools?

Bingo.

[Karl Henning]

If the argument is that El Tupé is an entertainer rather than a politician — a weak argument at best IMO — he is extraordinarily tone-deaf, and has no sense whatever of time and place, for an "entertainer":

[El Tupé] Manages to Get Booed at the Al Smith Dinner

The crowd booed some more. Someone shouted, "You're not so funny."

"Thank you," [El Tupé] replied.

[San Antone]

Paul Krugman in today's New York Times

Delusional Liberal.

[(poco) Sforzando]

Delusional Liberal.

Thank you for your insightful analysis.

[San Antone]

Thank you for your insightful analysis.

I could have continued:  It is my belief that Liberals will experience buyers remorse from a Hillary Clinton presidency.  Which is why I think this kind of laudatory commentary is delusional.