I’m trying to reconcile myself to the likelihood that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee, when along comes an announcement from a horrible fellow.
Conservative economist Ben Stein revealed on Wednesday that he was considering voting for Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders because Donald Trump was going to “sink” the Republican Party.
“I went to law school with Ms. Clinton so I’ve always had a kind of fondness for her, she was always a very nice young woman,” Stein told CNN’s Carol Costello. “I admire the fact that Bernie Sanders has a single-payer national health plan.”
I think he’s trying to scuttle everyone.
Can’t wait to have another neocon-in-chief on the other side of the Pacific supporting more bloodthirsty dictators and more wars, with even less scrutiny from the public because she’s not a Republican. Obama docet.
I am starting to wonder if Trump wouldn’t be better, because at least we have no fucking clue what he’s actually going to DO and if he starts bombing the shit out of places he’ll be at least face some sort of public outcry.
“Goldwater?” “Here.” “Thurmond?” “Here.” “Wallace?” “Here.”
“Stein?… Stein?…Stein?…”
I don’t pay too much attention to endorsements, unless they are from bigots who endorse The Donald.
The Donald doesn’t appear to have a clue about the limitations a president has, or how to govern except by fiat. For example, he can’t fire the Speaker of the House or the Senate Majority Leader, who tells him to quit trolling for bigots.
The far, far, lesser of the evils will get my vote in November.
Get out the vote, Democrats. Please help us, Obi Wan Kenobi. It’s our only hope. Signed: the rest of the adult world.
It is far from over on the democratic side: only a quarter of pledged delegates have been assigned.
DSW front loaded the confederacy on super tuesday as yet another electioneering tactic. It wasn’t this way in 2008.
Hillary’s best days are behind her.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Tuesday#/media/File:Image-Super_Duper_Tuesday_2008.svg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Tuesday#/media/File:Super_Tuesday_2016.svg
It would be great if Ben Stein didn’t call Hillary a nice girl, and then praise Bernie on policy. That will be step two in the feminist revolution.
For now, it is enough to watch this particular little pig fly.
Should it really take an endorsement from Ben Stein to see the red streak in the Clinton program? Compared to Drumpf, of course conservatives are going to see her as the legitimate successor of post-Reagan establishment politics. Ms. Clinton is not much farther left than her husband. She’s a centrist at best, destined to take less chances with her approval ratings than a Hollywood producer. Certainly we should have every expectation she’ll achieve less in Washington as President than she has as a senator. In our crystal balls all we can see for her are re-election, smiles, and more ghostwritten memoirs, tacitly supportive of continued Republican house majorities. What a legacy. We just had a president push a health care reform plan through congress, and sure it got stonewalled into crap, but it’s better than the Clinton plan the Democrats were advocating only a few years earlier. Are we forgetting the appeal of Obama’s plan in comparison to hers is what lost her the primary the first go around? Now we’re really going to put the person with the worse plan in 2008 in office in 2016 on the basis of health care? Are there only two candidates in that awful party and we’re just going to swap em out every few years? How unoriginal can this country get?
Oh right, we already do that with wealthy families. And every one of us ought to have at least as much of a problem with two people named Clinton in the last 20 years as with two people named Bush, and in a democracy that’s got to be a far bigger “flaw” than Sander’s old white tackle can ever be. I’m still writing in Warren at this point, but Sanders looks like the only inoffensive candidate in the field. It’s a national travesty that Clinton was able to buy all the big union endorsements. This is still a country whose political process revolves around money and backscratching. When she first ran for election in NY it was patently obvious to us locals she was buying rather than earning her seat. We were all quite sure she would have chose any other Democratic majority northeastern state if any neighboring ones had a senate seat free that year. Look at the list, and you’ll see the only sure things were the race in Washington or New York. Consummate politicians do what is easy, not what is right.
Just to dispel any accusations of Sanders favoritism, I have distrusted Clinton as a politician and as a human being for years. She spoke at my commencement years ago – I didn’t attend. There simply isn’t an honest bone in her body and I want to know who spiked the Kool-Aid. I’d have almost any other democratic senator than Clinton. Likewise I am a member of a minority socialist party, and will still vote Jill Stein (or Warren if she were running) over Sanders.
As a non-American, President Trump disturbs me greatly. In a weird sort of way I’d like to see Trump become President. Just so all those lunatics will realise why you should think what you are doing through. But alas, the lesson will be lost on them, and they’ll be steadfast in their devotion to Trump, even as the homes burn around them, and the the ocean laps against their knees.
@gijoel 8:
Actually, if Bush is anything to go by, us Americans would be steadfast in our devotion to Trump for only 7 years. Then we’d spend his last year in office steadfastly declaring that we never supported him and always knew he’d be a disaster from the start. And the minute he leaves office, we’ll pretend he never existed.
“Trump supports the Hawley-Smoot Tariff. Hawley-Smoot Tariff.”
Gotta love watching the supposed liberals attacking a woman with recycled Repub bullshit. It’s impossible to tell the Repubs and the Bernieboys apart, because they hate women so vehemently there’s no difference but the pretense. She voted with your beloved slacker loser 93% of the time and you’re attacking her for shit she never voted on, but, go ahead, tell me how your recycled Repub crap is somehow totally evil.
Like, sure, he’s a grade-A douchebag, but honestly the kind of self-awareness that leads to someone looking at their cohort, all cheering for a crypto-fascist, and realising they’re in the crazy boat, is the kind of self-awareness we need to be encouraging. Last thing we need is for the Democrats to proclaim that Drumpf is the perfect opportunity to get some cheap shots in at the Republican party. Drumpf’s a threat to everyone, right now. There’ll be time for capitalising on the breakdown of the conservative consensus right after the most dangerous demagogue the West has seen in a generation is nowhere near the nuclear codes.
Hey, thanks, taraskan and any others who are determined to fuck American women so you can show off how morally superior you are! While American women die from exhausting accidental pregnancies and illegal abortions, are those deaths going to feed your superiority or just make you feel sorry for yourselves? Excuse me while I do NOT apologize for my rage because my mother endured 12 pregnancies while only FIVE kids survived. Sort of.
Given Obama’s record on foreign affairs, I question anyone who seriously thinks Sanders would be better. Sure he was radical left, but odds are he’d do the same as Obama and avoid spend on political capital on ending America’s war crimes so he could focus on his domestic agenda. He hasn’t said he’ll stop the drones, or condemned the use of vaccines as cover for espionage. I voted for him, but he’s not going to dismantle the Ameican war machine.
When the Republican governor of Massachusetts says he won’t vote for Trump, despite the fact that Trump came in first in that state’s GOP primary on Super Tuesday, it’s clear we’re seeing a meltdown of politics as usual on the Republican side. Since Ben Stein contributed to this state of affairs, he can accept his share of the blame for Trump. But I’d be o.k. with him voting for Hillary Clinton anyway as a vote’s a vote, no matter the voter.
Some other interesting endorsements coming out for Hillary. This really ought to beef up her foreign policy portfolio.
I wonder if this is connected with Ben Stein somehow.
I don’t believe any Republican who says they’re going to vote for either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. If they say they’re going to stay home on election day, yeah, that’s plausible, but Republicans don’t cross party lines. Democrats do. (Heck, Hillary Clinton does so at the most unexpected times, and her number one fan does the same.) That’s why the Democrats keep losing ground, and the Republicans know it.
@13 ginmar
I think you’re looking for that Conspira Sea cruise thread. Seriously, you really think a vote against Clinton is a vote against abortion? I am pro-abortion. I will be voting for a woman in 2016. Sanders does not threaten birth control or abortion rights laws or the budget for Planned Parenthood. You are tacking into the wind, here.
So do you, if you vote for the nonviable (viable meaning at least competitive in an election, which is shown by polling at least in double digits at this point in the cycle) Stein. You are essentially voting rethuglican. You just can’t/won’t grasp that concept. So stop complaining about democrats voting rethuglican, if you essentially do so.
@#19, Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls
A vote for someone other than a Democrat or a Republican does not change their relative vote counts any more than not voting at all, and yet you aren’t going after the people who don’t vote with anything like this level of vitriol. The only possible conclusion is that you sincerely believe that voters somehow owe the Democratic Party loyalty, no matter how much the Democratic Party screws them over and actively hands control of the government over to the Republicans. Fuck that.
If the Democrats want my vote, then they can very easily get it. All they have to do is run a candidate who isn’t a Republican running under false colors. Even after the DLC spent 3 decades trying to eliminate those people, there are still quite a number of them around — but the Democrats aren’t running them, for whatever reason. If the party wants to be to the right of Ronald Reagan, nobody can stop them — but I see no reason to lend them any legitimacy by voting for them. When offered a choice of a quick death by cyanide in your coffee or a slow death by thallium in your coffee, the correct answer is not “thallium, because it will let me live a little longer”, it’s “neither one, thank you”.
Gotta love how ridiculous the Bernie vs Hillary thing has become. or The idea that maybe both types of supporters are real progressives with different weighting of priorities is not even considered anymore.
@ck,
Greetings from the US Left, eating its own since at least 1865!
Vicar
Unfortunately we do not live in a perfect world, and we will be forced to elect whichever candidate is A.) actually in the running for, and B.) most qualified for the job.
The GOP candidate, despite all your convictions, is going to be a fascist narcissist named Donald Trump. Voting for a candidate who has no chance of winning as a way to voice your unhappiness with the Dem party/ Clinton is both foolish waste of your vote, and selfishness.
Trump as President is a real and present danger. Wake the fuck up, and quit stating that the D party is exactly the same as this evil asshole who has hijacked the political process, and the broken, sexist, racist bigot, money worshipping greed GOP that has utterly failed. Trump is in fact the embodiment of everything they hold dear, and have worked to create.
I hope the same fucks who have worked so hard to take over the media, and also defund education for the past 3 decades are now shitting their pants when thousands of uneducated white Americans cheer for fascism and nominate it for president.
@#21, ck, the Irate Lump
About Clinton supporters I won’t comment. I’m told that it is rude to diagnose psychiatric disorders over the Internet (rimshot!).
About Clinton, though: I do not admit that anyone who wants to start wars is a progressive. Anyone who chooses to start a war is not a feminist. Anyone who chooses to start a war is not a defender of civil rights. Anyone who chooses to start a war does not want to help the poor. Anyone who chooses to start a war can’t even claim to be fiscally responsible.
Being anti-war is the progressive value — if you aren’t anti-war, nothing else can stick. Between the abolition of the draft and the more or less coincidental fact that all our battles for the last century have been outside the mainland U.S., and also the fact that most Americans lack the intelligence and imagination and empathy necessary to think about it in a realistic way, Americans have by and large ceased to realize how horrible war is. That doesn’t make war any less horrible.
Some people are willing to forgive Clinton for her vote to invade Iraq — we know that she was warned by two separate people who were in the know that Bush’s casus belli was a pack of lies, so she wasn’t uninformed, and that her constituents were polling roughly 60% against war, so it wasn’t even a case of going against her ethics to be a good representative. Whether or not you think she should be forgiven for Iraq, her actions on Libya (to say nothing of the cluster bomb ban amendment I linked to above) show that she is unquestionably pro-war. (And that she didn’t learn a damned thing from Iraq, for that matter.)
This being the case… well, first off, this being the case her campaign platform is distinctly scary. She says she’s going to “confront” Russia and China and Iran. The word “confront” in the mouth of someone who can laugh about assassinating the leader of another country (as Clinton did about Gaddafi) is horrifying, something right out of Dr. Strangeglove. People think I hate nuclear bombs. It’s not true; I love nuclear bombs — I would never want to give one of them a reason to hit me. Not so Clinton, apparently.
But aside from that: Clinton starts wars. The rest of her claims to being on the left are irrelevant (although they are also flimsy, given that her action are usually well right of center) in the face of her willingness, even her enthusiasm, to start wars.
@#23, Tethys
If you really mean “B”, then everyone needs to stay home from the polls if Clinton gets the Democratic nomination. She isn’t qualified in any sense of the word which would disqualify Trump.
Fine. Then I’ll stay home. I’m not going to vote for Clinton no matter what. According to you (and Nerd of Redhead), staying home is apparently okay, but voting for someone who actually represents me is somehow a betrayal. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the modern Democratic Party: discouraging actual democracy whenever possible.
So is Clinton as President. Trump might start World War III, inadvertently. Clinton thinks that policies to destabilize other governments are good “experience”, and seems eager to start World War III. Intent not being magic, I don’t give a shit whether the bomb which vaporizes me was launched by someone trying to stop the deranged Trump or whether it was launched by someone who was being driven to desperation by Clinton. I probably won’t have time to read the fine print on the side explaining their motivation before it goes off.
And Clinton has been key to enabling them for decades now. The Overton Window was not merely dragged to the right by the Republicans, the Democrats were pushing from the other side, and the Clintons were at the head of the pack.
I doubt it very much. The outrage at Trump, you will find, will magically melt away after he (presumably) gets the Republican nomination. The brash statements against other Republicans will mostly stop, to be replaced with brash statements against Democrats (which the other Republicans will not object to). Trump will embrace some (possibly not all, but enough) of the standard Republican talking points, he’ll stop making the more extreme claims and calm down except when arguing with the Democratic nominee (when he’ll talk over them), the would-be brownshirts will assume that he really meant what he said before the nomination and is now tracking centrist to get more votes, the rest of the Republican Party will assume that he didn’t really mean what he said before the nomination and is now being more truthful, and the party machinery will pull itself back together. Turnout for the Republicans may be a little low, but it was a little low in 2012 and the contest was still reasonably close (by percentage, if not raw vote count).
Meanwhile, the Democrats, patting themselves on the back for not being a bunch of ignoramuses like those Republicans, will try to unify the party to back their candidate. Presuming that this candidate is indeed Clinton, they will find that, oddly enough, there are few voters who have any enthusiasm, and those few who do don’t actually care about getting Clinton into office, but rather care about keeping Trump out. If the Republicans pull an end-run around Trump using a third party, or by changing the rules to keep him locked out of the nomination even though he has enough delegates (which is apparently a possibility — the delegates are required under the rules to stand for the candidate who won them, but are also permitted to change the rules of the convention), it will if anything depress Democratic turnout even more because “everyone knows the Republican vote is split, so we’re safe”. Even the low Democratic turnouts in the primaries won’t be as low as turnout in the general, since the primaries so far — according to accounts I’ve seen from people who were there — included a surprisingly large number of people who registered solely to vote for Bernie Sanders, and who won’t care enough to show up once Sanders is eliminated by a series of southern primaries which show Clinton is popular in states which will never go blue in the presidential election anyway. The race will probably, considering how universally detested Trump is by the establishment on both sides, be close.
Whether they win or lose, the Democratic Party will take the result as justification to move further to the right. If they win with Clinton, it will be claimed that “people wanted the rightmost of our nominees, so moving right will win more elections”. If they lose with Clinton, this will be blamed on Clinton’s laughably fake movement left to compete with Sanders, and so future candidates won’t bother even making the pretense. Furthermore, there will be a wave of voter registration changes which shift even more voters to “Independent”, as voters on both sides are coming to realize that the party machines on both sides despise the voters they nominally represent. And of course, once again, we will have the Democratic Party’s most enduring exigology: “young voters easily give up on voting Democratic, so we don’t bother to enact the policies they want when we get into office”.
I figure that by 2032, Dick Cheney would be able to run for president as a Democrat, and Clinton supporters would whitewash his history to claim he’s been a liberal all along.
Hillary Clinton is a war monger who wants to start WW3 and is also an evil mastermind who has created the GOP and enabled them to be run over by Donald Trump? That doesn’t even make any sense. I declare it complete sexist rubbish.
Come to think of it, I suspect that Trump is a right-wing mirror image of Obama. He looked at 2008 and took away the right lessons.
To wit: you need the party’s base on your side to get the nomination, after that you can screw them over indefinitely and there’s nothing they can do, so anything goes until you are the nominee. Statements made to key up the base can be dismissed as “not promises”. People who expect you to behave as you said you would before getting the nomination can later safely be dismissed as unrealistic dreamers and nobody will see this as an incredibly cynical admission that your party is a bunch of opportunist liars (even though that’s what it is when all is said and done).
The difference is that where Democrats mostly want the country to get better, and so responded to a (false) promise of hope and change, later betrayed by bringing in a bunch of DLC “New Democrats” (like Rahm Emanuel and Hillary Clinton) to run everything, Republicans want to be at the top of the heap even if it means dragging everyone else down, so they respond to a (hopefully false) promise of destruction and hatred. Just as Obama made a lot of claims which he had no intention of fulfilling and thus managed to beat Clinton in 2008, Trump is making a lot of claims which he has no intention of fulfilling (and which are actively impossible in some cases) and it is probably going to give him the nomination. Once he has it, he can walk things back — he can blame the Democrats (heck, the Democrats have been blaming the Republicans for their own failure to initiate any liberal action for five years now, so the strategy clearly works) or he can blame the Republican Party Establishment, or he can pull an Obama and say “I didn’t actually say the words ‘I promise’ so that wasn’t technically a campaign promise”.
@#26, Tethys
Yeah, I’m going to vote for Jill Stein — for the second time, I might add — because I’m sexist and prefer a woman to… a woman. Huh. That’s odd.
And objecting to Hillary Clinton’s history of actual actions is rubbish. Instead I should be listening to the positions she didn’t hold — and in some cases actively opposed — until the primaries. Because of course politicians always do what they tell their constituents they’re going to do before the election, and a long history never gives any indication of future behavior.
Do you realize how stupid you sound?
I am not the person who just wrote several paragraphs of bullshit about Hillary Clinton. The fact that she voted for the Iraq war is not proof of anything. Voting for Jill Stein does not render you free of sexism, and even though I am so very stupid, I have noticed that most of your complaints consist of baseless fears about her evil scheming political take-over and plans for world domination.
There are valid complaints against Clinton, but the fact that she is a Democrat that has had to work with some of the worst elected officials ever to hit Washington DC is not one of them.
The Vicar, #20
But “neither one” is not an option. You’re getting either thallium or cyanide.
Maybe you should have thought that analogy through.
Famous Argentinean actor Federico Luppi voted for our former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner twice and said he would vote for her a third time if he had the chance. He’s also known to have abused at least one of his wives, and he refers to her with contempt to this day. Likewise, I’ve seen in the past some of her supporters in social media using mysoginistic slurs against women who opposed her.
So yeah, seconding Tethys @#29: being willing to vote for a female president says nothing about whether you’re sexist or not.
Being willing to vote for Jill Stein, who hasn’t a chance of actually winning, rather than Hillary Clinton who has a very good chance of winning, is tokenism. It’s merely paying lip service to feminism.
Congress is busy convening hearings to eliminate planned parenthood, based on the completely discredited ‘they sell baby parts’ video. Reality, and the fact that the people who made the video have been convicted of slander/libel, and are currently getting their asses sued off by PP in civil court is not a factor.
Once again, just to emphasize how important this is; Real fascists are currently in control of congress. They are working hard to take away birth control and other very basic and necessary health care for an enormous number of the poorest US population
Meanwhile the vicar is going to ignore those religious fascists because that doesn’t infringe on his civil rights, and risk allowing Trump to become President and nominate people (for life) to the Supreme Court. Sounds pretty fucking sexist to me.