Comments

  5. Mark Dowd says

    Do not forget that the DNC was rigging the primary against Bernie. They bet on the most unlikeable and most smeared Democrat in existence, and ended up losing everything for us.

    The Democratic party is not progressive. They may be the closest thing we can get, but they are shills for the oligarchs just as much as the Rethuglicans are.

  6. some bastard on the internet says

    @4

    I dunno, maybe we deserve to get knocked down a few pegs so that the average citizen might get a fucking clue.

    Although, if the Bush era couldn’t do that…

  9. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Do not forget that the DNC was rigging the primary against Bernie.

    I keep hearing this, but haven’t seen any evidence that he was effectively blocked from anything. He did lose the primary by 3 million votes total. That was what blocked him.

  10. Ariaflame, BSc, BF, PhD says

    Well of course she was unlikeable. You can’t be a woman in power and be likeable. Didn’t you know that? It’s not allowed. You’re not allowed to admit you liked all the work she did for women and children, all the charity and good works she’s done, all the grace with which she’s put up with all the shit that has been flung her way over the years that wouldn’t even have been thought of if she had been a man.

    And will you FUCKING STOP WITH THE DNC WAS RIGGING AGAINST BERNIE CRAP! Oh my, establishment people in the privacy of their own emails didn’t like the newcomer coming and joining just to get on the ticket and speculating about what weak points he might have. If you have actual fucking proof of any active vote rigging then that’s one thing but if you are still going on about the leaked DNC emails then FUCK RIGHT OFF because it’s not that that lost. It’s that half of the USA is either gullible or deplorable and now chances are the world is going down with you and I’m heartsick.

  11. vytautasjanaauskas says

    @9 who said he was blocked? He just wasn’t supported by his own party. Instead they promoted the worst possible candidate in this situation, but hey, as long as Wall Street’s happy.

  12. Greta Samsa says

    Well, they’ve done it. Now all those destroyed economy nightmares in the Right pundit’s heads will come true.

  14. alkisvonidas says

    Btw, if I’m reading the stats correctly, Hillary actually got slightly *more* votes than Trump. But then again, not all votes have been counted yet.

    Still, what a screwed up system.

  15. says

    ragove314:

    I am so depressed!
    America deserves better than that pile of orange BS as president.

    It’s white fucking America that elected this utter piece of isht.

  16. Larry says

    I am stunned and sickened beyond belief. I have nothing but utter despair over what we will become in 4 years.

  18. mnb0 says

    Perhaps you should build a supply of whiskey large enough to help you through the next four years.

  19. numerobis says

    Caine: how are the water protectors taking the news?

    I’m worried the ND authorities will have a supportive fed (instead of a generally do-nothing fed) and will then crack down hard.

  20. Vivec says

    Don’t worry, we’ll have plenty of smug commenters telling us how badly we fucked up by not nominating Bernie and how now we just have to endure 4 years like it’s some easy fucking thing.

    Meanwhile my family’s literally having the conversation of “If the ACA goes, do we sell the car or give away our elderly dog to afford my mom’s medicine”

  21. Saad says

    ragove314, 3

    America deserves better than that pile of orange BS as president.

    They chose him. He didn’t carry out a military takeover or inherit the throne. He made all his views and actions plainly visible. They embraced it all and chose him.

  22. says

    @Caine #15: Perhaps, but perhaps only because the majority is white. I suspect the once-middleclass-now-working-poor tipped the scale. For decades the middle class has been robbed, people that grew up in a single-income home now have trouble making ends meet with two incomes. Then they got tricked into investing their future in their house, just to get robbed again. Something had to give sooner or later.

    What I don’t fully understand is why this ends up with a rich f*ck like Trump in charge. Now Clinton might have been more of what got you into this mess in the first place, but what are the odds of Trump setting things straight for the working people? I suspect people believe that the only way to change anything is to tear the system to the ground. They might be right, but even so I fear things will need to get a lot worse before they get better. Perhaps 4 years of Trump will make people try someone like Bernie next time around?

  24. AndrewD says

    Ok,
    Youv’e been here before, some music
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbzsmn9fHsU
    Now stop panicing and start fighting back=do a Tea party on the Democratic party and take over from inside then build an alternative. Fight every election-even the Assistant dog catchers assistant if its elected, show that democrats can run things. The way to win is to play a long game and ORGANIZE .
    Fight every Republican action through the courts-you might not win but will get publicity and slow things down. Both you and we in the UK have a press problem, how do we fight this?
    Find a candidate for 2020 very soon, if possible avoid the primary farce-the electorate will thank you.
    Do not wait fight.

  25. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    He just wasn’t supported by his own party.

    Oh, he was running for the socialist party, not the democratic party? He didn’t support the democratic party with fundraising, etc.

  26. alkisvonidas says

    @Vivec

    Don’t worry, we’ll have plenty of smug commenters telling us how badly we fucked up by not nominating Bernie

    Why is pointing out that Sanders was a much better choice than Clinton any more smug than pointing out Clinton was a much better choice than Trump? If we can call out people for voting for Trump in the presidential election, why can’t we do the same for people voting for Clinton instead of Sanders in the primary?

  27. multitool says

    I keep thinking there will be some naturalistic justice for Americans who supported this. I mean, how long can something build on destroying itself be sustainable? At some point marketing can’t convince us we’re eating food when we’re eating sand.

    But the worse our plutocrats make things for everyone else, the more they all blame outsiders, and the more support the destroyers keep getting. Maybe this can’t stop until America is just a vast field of bones, waiting to be re-colonized by someone not quite so stupid.

  29. keithb says

    vytautasjanaauskas@11
    It wasn’t his party. He has been an independent for most of not all his tenure in politics.

  31. says

    Raw emotions aside, what are the chances that establishment Republicans, now shunned by their own party, will for a coalition with the Dems? Possible, I think, once it becomes clear that The Donald views the constitution as so much tissue paper.

  32. Vivec says

    Why is pointing out that Sanders was a much better choice than Clinton any more smug than pointing out Clinton was a much better choice than Trump?

    Because gloating that things would have gone so better if we voted for Bernie (which I did, by the way) does fuck all for any of us actually about to be fucked by a Trump presidency.

    Does it not occur to any of you fuckers that maybe it might not be the best time to be a smug piece of shit? That people like me are literally on the precipice of losing family members and houses because of what this fucking presidency will entail?

  33. says

    It’s not Trump you need to worry about. He’s just a narcissistic attention whore not a ideologue. But Pence and some of the people who Trump will appoint are. They are chomping at the bit to attack women, public school and regulation. Say hello to a thousand more exploding fertilizer factories, back room abortions and stupid children.
    Oh ya, and his sons will be suckling on the public’s teat for life.

  34. alkisvonidas says

    @32. Yes. Yes, it does. It also occurs to some of us fuckers that this fucking presidency will fucking fuck the lives of millions who, like me, have had zero votes on this matter, unlike non-smug people like, say, you, who had one vote.

    How unbearably smug of me to bring this up, though.

  35. lesherb says

    I guess posting here is as good of a place as anywhere. I only have health insurance because of the ACA. My husband is retired. I’m 9 years away from Medicare. I have a pre-existing condition. I don’t expect anyone to fix my problem. It’s just cathartic to post it.

    I hope the adverse effects of this election are not visited on anyone else. As if….

  36. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    25 what are you talking about?

    Sanders is a independent-socialist who caucused with the democrats to get committee chairs. He didn’t do much to support the democratic party prior to running in the primary.

  37. patrickmccormick says

    #10, the salient factor in Hillary Clinton’s unlikeability may have something to do with her 2011 Libya intervention, which resulted in 50,000 – 100,000 civilian casualties (http://www.globalresearch.ca/destabilizing-and-destroying-countries-hillary-clinton-hearings-on-benghazi-and-the-nature-of-imperialism/5484740). Or her vote as a senator for going into war in Iraq (a vote which has minor qualitative differences from a singular comment on a titty-jock radio program), which resulted in a half-million documented civilian casualties (though to be honest, nobody’s really sure). You might think about not nominating a war criminal next time ’round, instead of whining about muh-soggy-knee. Just a thought. (Actually, on second thought, let’s wait until Trump’s 24 years in office are over, before you start nominating actually competent politicians without blood on their hands).

  38. Vivec says

    How unbearably smug of me to bring this up, though.

    I’m glad that you’re self aware enough to admit it.

  39. wzrd1 says

    What’s that?
    Oh, not yet. That’s for after the inauguration.

    Here’s the open question, the one that will bake your noodle later on.
    What do you think will be the first official act by a man who gets his intelligence and political advice from Russia Today?

  40. slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) says

    09-nov-2016
    Drumph has won the election.
    Welcome to the new world order. It’s the end of the world as we know it.
    —-
    Popularity of “reality TV” resulted in voting for a star of a popular “reality” show getting elected. “Unscripted” is the producers preferred label for such programming. People seem to think that working “within the system” is just “following a script”, that making the government “unscripted” is advantageous, that the POTUS is just a figurehead who is a showman only, that everything that actually happens occurs by skilled people behind the scenes.
    So many people would rather have a blowhard making a big show of himself to distract everyone watching from all the skilled work occurring behind the scenes. Too many people seem to think that TV shows and films show things as they really work.
    —
    Analogy time: Imagine the federal government is your automobile: a complicated device one uses to get from place to place. Many mechanisms within it that all have to work together to enable one to get from place to place easily. Being such a complicated device it requires a large number of skilled people to maintain it in operable condition. When it starts to malfunction it has to be taken to a skilled auto-mechanic to get it fixed. There are so many people who claim to be skilled mechanics it is frequent for some to be charletains who just take ones money and return a still broken vehicle. This results in many disliking mechanics, as thieves.
    Even so, is it better to take one’s broken vehicle to an “outsider” down the street, who claims he can “fix it” while providing no history of accomplishment? Next door, to that person, is one who has a long track record of working on cars and repairing them frequently. While maybe not perfectly, has may references from people who got their cars worked on and repaired adequately.
    Of those two people, one is a woman and one is a man. Guess which is which. Would one really refuse to take ones broken car to a mechanic with a history of working on cars simply because she’s a woman, preferring to take it to the man down the street with no record of repairs, simply because he’s a man, and all auto-mechanics are supposed to be male?
    —
    So we just did that, took our car with lots of complaints to the outsider for repair. He’ll talk a lot about how it’ll get fixed letting us tinker with it while he blusters. We’ll find other forms of transport while he bangs it around.

  41. Ogvorbis: I have proven my humanity and can now comment! says

    patrickmccormick @37

    . . .the salient factor in Hillary Clinton’s unlikeability may have something to do . . .

    with the right wing noise machine, the right wing news, right wing radio, right wing talking heads, and right wing politicians having been on a 25+ year campaign to lie about basically everything to do with Hillary and Bill Clinton. Hell, the Arkansas press starting going after Hillary in the late 1970s — more than 35 years ago.

    Think about all the “investigations” that the right wing has fomented — Whitewater, Travelgate, Benghazi, emails, etc. — all of which turned up some weird shit but never anything really bad. The GOP investigated Benghazi more than 5 times, five separate investigations, five separate partisan investigations, and they found nothing.

    There are things I do not like about Hillary Clinton. She is too ready to use the military for my tastes (by the way, disabled veteran typing here), but in terms of domstic policy she is right in line with my moderate progressive values. And if the right wing noise machine had not spent the last 25 or 35 years domonizing her as the devil incarnate, a succubus, a witch, a demon worshipper, a murderer, a thief, and all the other accusations thrown at her, she would have won this election.

    Note that all of the adverts, all of the speeches by Trump and his allies, all of the attacks during this election, were about spurious charges. None of them accused her of being a war criminal. And I doubt very much that that was in the mind of more than a handful of voters. What was in their minds, though, was 25 or 35 years of lies promulgated by a right wing propaganda machine that would have done Goebbels proud.

  42. alkisvonidas says

    What do you think will be the first official act by a man who gets his intelligence and political advice from Russia Today?

    I keep telling myself that other, relatively saner people around him would make sure he doesn’t go through with it. I keep telling myself that, but I’m not at all convincing me.

  43. futurechemist says

    What happened in the rust belt? Yeah Trump winning FL &NC wasn’t that surprising. But MN WI MI and PA?

    This result confuses me. Americans chose Trump and a Republican Congress full of incumbents. Other than Trump it wasn’t a victory for political outsiders.

    My heart goes out to anyone who stands to lose their health care. I’m in a binational gay marriage and we’re worried about my husband losing his green card and being denied eventual citizenship.

    The Democrats need fresh blood. No more older people like Clinton Biden Warren and Sanders.

  44. damien75 says

    I have to say I am in shock and incredulous.

    I cannot quite understand that such a thing is possible.

    I am sorry for all Americans.

  46. Saganite, a haunter of demons says

    We have wrecked our own country.

    I worry it might be more far-reaching than that.

  47. birgerjohansson says

    Looking at the mess from overseas, my two cents of wisdom is that the Democrats need to get as confrontational as the Republicans have been since forever.

    Obama spent the first years of his presidency trying to build bridges to the crook party. And Trump and the Republicans in Congress will make overtures about some cosmetic cooperation.
    I fear the Democrats will lose their nnerve like they did when Ronald Reagan won, and basically surrender, re-inventing themselves as a nicer brand of Republicans.
    We saw British Labour do something similar after Thatcher.

    It is up to American voters to make sure their Democrat representatives do not go yellow on them.
    In regard to “establishment” Democrats- in terms of income and education they are distant from those who will suffer most during Trump Machtubernahme. Do they have the determination to use the filibuster and other tools to full effect?

  48. Saganite, a haunter of demons says

    @#42 alkisvonidas
    Remember who his vice-president is, an unabashed authoritarian theocrat. Remember who his congress is, a bunch of theocrats and corporatist elites who shut down the government. Remember who his SCOTUS is, waiting for another candidate right now and who knows how many more during his tenure. All three branches of government are/will be in Republican hands. I fear the US is utterly fucked and the rest of the world will be going along for the ride.

  49. taraskan says

    I posted this on the political madness thread, and people will continue to think what they want anyway, but we are probably not losing Obamacare and not building walls around Mexico.

    Obamacare has made a lot of money for insurance companies because millions now pay $1-3K annually for health insurance who weren’t paying a dime before. Those companies are a strong lobby, it is good for the country, and so long as they aren’t running for anything, there are repubs who agree. Trump was in favor of national health care before he had to start lying through his teeth to get elected. He also said he’s Christian and a pro-lifer, and if you believe either of those things I have a timeshare in Aspen to sell you.

    You also don’t get to talk about impending nuclear war while at the same time recognizing he’s in Putin’s pocket. You can have both, or neither.

    Finally who the hell are people directing their comments at that begin with “You…!” Nobody who voted for Trump is reading this. I wonder if any citizens who didn’t vote at all are reading this.

  50. says

    What happened in the Rust Belt?

    I’ll quote Michael Moore, from his movie “Michael Moore in Trumpland”, explaining (a while ago) pretty much exactly what happened last night:

    MICHAEL MOORE: Donald Trump came to the Detroit Economic Club and stood there in front of the Ford Motor executives and said, “If you close these factories, as you’re planning to do in Detroit, and build them in Mexico, I’m going to put a 35 percent tariff on those cars when you send them back, and nobody is going to buy them.” It was an amazing thing to see. No politician, Republican or Democrat, had ever said anything like that to these executives.

    And it was music to the ears of people in Michigan and Ohio and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—the Brexit states. If you live here in Ohio, you know what I’m talking about. Whether Trump means it or not is kind of irrelevant, because he’s saying the things to people who are hurting. And it’s why every beaten-down, nameless, forgotten working stiff who used to be part of what was called the middle class loves Trump. He is the human Molotov cocktail that they’ve been waiting for, the human hand grenade that they can legally throw into the system that stole their lives from them.
    And on November 8th, Election Day, although they’ve lost their jobs, although they’ve been foreclosed on by the bank—next came the divorce, and now the wife and kids are gone, the car has been repoed, they haven’t had a real vacation in years, they’re stuck with the [bleep] Obamacare Bronze Plan, where you can’t even get a [bleep] Percocet—they’ve essentially lost everything they had—except one thing, the one thing that doesn’t cost them a cent and is guaranteed to them by the American Constitution: the right to vote. They might be penniless, they might be homeless, they might be [bleep] over and [bleep] up. It doesn’t matter, because it’s equalized on that day. A millionaire has the same number of votes as the person without a job: one. And there’s more of the former middle class than there are in the millionaire class.
    So, on November 8th, the dispossessed will walk into the voting booth, be handed a ballot, close the curtain and take that lever, or felt pen or touchscreen, and put a big [bleep] X in the box by the name of the man who has threatened to upend and overturn the very system that has ruined their lives: Donald J. Trump. They see that the elites who ruined their lives hate Trump. Corporate America hates Trump. Wall Street hates Trump. The career politicians hate Trump. The media hates Trump—after they loved him and created him, and now hate him. Thank you, media. The enemy of my enemy is who I’m voting for on November 8th. Yes, on November 8th, you, Joe Blow, Steve Blow, Bob Blow, Billy Blow, Billy Bob Blow—all the Blows get to go and blow up the whole goddamn system, because it’s your right. Trump’s election is going to be the biggest “[bleep] you” ever recorded in human history.
    And it will feel good—for a day, yeah, maybe a week, possibly a month. And then, like the Brits, who wanted to send a message, so they voted to leave Europe, only to find out that if you vote to leave Europe, you actually have to leave Europe. And now they regret it. All the Ohioans, Pennsylvanians, Michiganders and Wisconsinites of Middle England—right?—they all voted to leave, and now they regret it, and over 4 million of them have signed a petition to have a do-over. They want another election. It ain’t gonna happen, because you used the ballot as an anger management tool. And now you’re [bleep]. And the rest of Europe? The rest of Europe? They’re like, “Bye, Felicia.”
    So, when the rightfully angry people of Ohio and Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin find out after a few months in office that President Trump wasn’t going to do a damn thing for them, it will be too late to do anything about it. But I get it. You wanted to send a message. You had righteous anger and justifiable anger. Well, message sent. Good night, America. You’ve just elected the last president of the United States.

  52. briquet says

    #10, the salient factor in Hillary Clinton’s unlikeability may have something to do with her 2011 Libya intervention

    No one who has watched her career and how she was treated–in the popular media and punditry–over 20 years could possibly think this is true. Offers about electoral strategy from people who ignore real world voters are not going to have much influence.

    Trump supporter who gave a damn about this are like zero people. That is why the only Libya dialogue was something-something-“Benghazi” which was left behind for something-something-“email” whenever that became more useful. Clinton opponents voted en masse for a guy that likes the idea of waterboarding; they weren’t put off by US bombing runs.

  53. patrickmccormick says

    #41 The “vast right-wing conspiracy” theory has always been a popular religious devotion. With 0 newspapers endorsing Trump, I’m having trouble locating these leprechauns. But let me get this straight: Putin runs the F.B.I., and Wikileaks was good when Edward Snowden released material on spying, but now it’s bad, because reasons. And the F.A.A. flight logs showing Clintons riding on Epstein’s plane, those were also faked by the conspiracy, I take it? I provided evidence of Clinton’s role in 50,000 – 100,00 civilian casualties during the last 8 years, and you responded by telling me how great she’d be for families. Go tell that to LIbyan fathers who buried their children. Moderate progressive? Maybe if your point of reference is Joseph Stalin.

  54. Dave, ex-Kwisatz Haderach says

    Local radio station is playing End of the World by Great Big Sea on a continuous loop. Almost right, but I feel nauseous, not fine.

  55. patrickmccormick says

    #52 So you’re willing to step over 50,000 – 100,000 dead bodies because Clinton’s treated unfairly by these demons and specters in this media? I might need to see your evidence about this media bias — aside from Faux News, my impression’s been that the media’s solidly anti-Trump. So it’s okay she’s a war criminal, since she was impeached in the court of public opinion for other reasons that seem to you less important? I’m sorry if I’m not following your moral “reasoning.”

  56. Ogvorbis: I have proven my humanity and can now comment! says

    So, patrickmccormack, you claim that there were not multiple and blatantly partisan investigations into what happened at the US Embassy in Benghazi? The Whitewater investigations never happened? Travelgate investigations are imaginary? Comey’s blatant politicization of the FBI during the campaign never happened? The news coverage of the last decade in which, almost anytime that Hillary Clinton’s name came up in a story, the writer put in a paragraph about Whitewater, or Travelgate, or whatever never happened? What colour is the sky in your world?

  57. Ogvorbis: I have proven my humanity and can now comment! says

    And I never argued that her being a possible war criminal does not matter. I did argue that, in this election, it was a non-issue while all the other almost non-existent shit became the focus.

    I apologize for trying to point out some nuance. I defer to your black-and-white absolute knowledge of what I have seen, experienced, read and understand. I bow to you.

  58. Dunc says

    With 0 newspapers endorsing Trump, I’m having trouble locating these leprechauns.

    Newspapers? Which century are you visiting us from?

  59. dick says

    Americans have voted into office an obnoxious, mendacious, racist, misogynistic, climate-change denying bully, who didn’t even bother to try to hide those flaws, & who hasn’t adequately explained how he will achieve his stated policy objectives.

    Putin, who is trying to destabilize Europe, must be really pleased.

    Did the vote go for Trump because many middle class & working class Americans thought he’d do something to improve their lot? Of course. I just don’t see it happening. He’ll almost certainly try to improve his lot rather than that of the workers, so they’ll probably get even more screwed.

  60. cubist says

    Clinton has been investigated incessantly, to within an inch of her life, for the past few decades now.

    And yet, somehow, she manages to remain a free woman rather than, say, rotting in prison.

    Hmm.

    Where there’s decades of smoke… and no discernible increase in temperature… there’s a GOP-branded smoke machine.

    There is something to the notion that Clinton was widely hated, though. But not because of anything Clinton did, or is/was responsible for; rather, because 30 years of the GOP’s consistent “she’s EVIL i tell you, evil-evil-EVIL!!!” messaging was always going to have some effect.

  61. says

    the salient factor in Hillary Clinton’s unlikeability may have something to do with her 2011 Libya intervention, which resulted in 50,000 – 100,000 civilian casualties (http://www.globalresearch.ca/destabilizing-and-destroying-countries-hillary-clinton-hearings-on-benghazi-and-the-nature-of-imperialism/5484740). Or her vote as a senator for going into war in Iraq (a vote which has minor qualitative differences from a singular comment on a titty-jock radio program), which resulted in a half-million documented civilian casualties (though to be honest, nobody’s really sure).

    The idea that either of these things caused her to lose is idiotic in the extreme. Almost as idiotic as the idea that she somehow caused either of these things to happen.

  62. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    the salient factor in Hillary Clinton’s unlikeability may have something to do with her 2011 Libya intervention,

    Funny how Clinton is always blamed for the decision of others. As SoS, she had no power over the military. She can only give advice to POTUS, with lots of other people, and POTUS must make that call. So the intervention is on Obama, not Clinton. Some folks are too ready to blame HRC, which brings up their honesty into question.

  63. rickeyemiller says

    Now, with the Graven Horror of NXESO2 terms in a row for the same party securely bound for 8 years, the 2020 elections can be allowed to run off the leash a little bit. Hillary will then have a real chance to win the White House. Let the Campaign of 2020 Begin! (let’s keep it clean. no low blows. no weapons of mass destruction. and…let’s keep it in the ring. OK?! Shake hands and come out fighting!)

  64. says

    As SoS, she had no power over the military. She can only give advice to POTUS, with lots of other people, and POTUS must make that call. So the intervention is on Obama, not Clinton.

    I also heard somewhere that Libya was in a state of civil war before the western powers intervened to bring it to a faster resolution, but that’s just my crazy unreliable memory. The same flawed memory that recalls the Iraq War being started by George W. Bush and supported almost unanimously by Congressional Republicans who controlled both houses at the time. I’m pretty sure that Clinton was to blame for the Iran-Contra affair though. Or at least the Democrats.

  66. WhiteHatLurker says

    This reminds me of “Space Viking” – “You had a wonderful civilization here on Marduk. You could have made almost anything of it. But it’s too late now. You’ve torn down the gates; the barbarians are in.”

  67. wzrd1 says

    the salient factor in Hillary Clinton’s unlikeability may have something to do with her 2011 Libya intervention,

    Why, you’re absolutely right! Hillary should have had State Department Security invade the White House, gun down Obama, announce that she’s in charge, then set her own policy.

    The US Secretary of State does not now, nor has he or she ever, set policy. That’s the exclusive domain of the POTUS. The SecState may not order US Armed Forces into our out of a conflict, that’s the exclusive domain of the Commander in Chief, aka the POTUS.

    So, it’s obviously her fault for not staging a coup, murdering the POTUS and VP, then assuming Imperial control.

    This ignorance is precisely why progressives lose always.

  68. rickeyemiller says

    “””WARNING””” The Propaganda being passed around in the theater is laced with extreme viral/bias and is capable of damaging rationality, unbeknowingly, to the 3d and 4th generations!!!***WARNING***

  69. multitool says

    I heard of a phenomenon where drivers sometimes steer *into* road workers because they become fixated on the spectacle by the highway.

    Trump’s big orange face was on TV all day long, month after month, because the press couldn’t take their eyes off the trainwreck that was his campaign.

    This kind of marketing costs a fortune, and he got it all for free. Virtually every time I saw a public TV screen since January that idiot was on it. I’ve never seen that before with any election.

  70. Holms says

    #21
    No they didn’t they chose Clinton by popular vote. The electoral college however happens to favour low population states, i.e. states with a largely rural, decentralised population. In other words, conservative states.

    Meanwhile, I’m hearing some 11,000 or more people voted for Harambe. Fucking millennials.

    #25
    Wrong, he was running on their ticket but against their Chosen One.

  71. ffakr says

    I heard an interesting theory recently. At this point, it’s little more than a conspiracy theory but it’s an interesting possibility.
    Perhaps the Republican long-game was to distance themselves from Trump only as much as needed, only where needed.. with the hope that he’d get elected with the far-right nut job Pence in tow.

    Oddly downplayed in the media, Donald J Trump (or at least his representatives) will be in court facing fraud charges within the next two weeks. At this point, I suspect the woman accusing him of raping her as a child will be too afraid to pursue her case, but the Fraud case marches on but the Trump U case marches on. NY is also running criminal investigations against Trump that could lead to other criminal charges in the near future.

    What are the odds the Republican establishment, when it became clear they couldn’t derail the unpredictable and uncontrollable Trump, saw him as a vehicle to get an otherwise unelectable right-wing crusader like Pence in striking distance of the Presidency? Do Republicans have the guts, or maybe the intention to impeach him before or soon after he’s sworn in?

    Rational me says they wouldn’t risk alienating the mass of rabid Trump supporters but maybe they’re putting enough faith in their ability to frame the action in terms of their love for the Country and their respect for the rule of law. Maybe they’re also weighing in the long-term affect on the Party that a fully realized Trump term might have.

    Before you dismiss this as hopeful speculation by a sore loser, let me point out that I’m not sure Pence wouldn’t be more disastrous than Trump. At least with Trump, we have the hope that he’s so much the crass opportunist that he has no intention of doing most of the things he promised. Pence has got the right-wing religion though. He’d push through every awful plan in the Republican hope chest with utter confidence and self-righteousness.

    As for how disastrous this new Republican stewardship will be.. what will be truly telling is whether or not the Senate kills or neuters the filibuster at the start of the next legislative session.. when they have the opportunity to amend Senate rules without debate. That’ll be the naked power grab that will signal the death of the ACA, Civil Rights legislation, Social Security, Medicare as we know it, the Post Office (they’ve been trying to bankrupt it for years), the EPA, and a number of other safety nets and services provided by our government.
    My real fear is that this will be, to the entire nation, what the Republican State leadership did after the 2010 mid-terms.. but it will be far more damaging and far more long lasting, especially if they succeed in packing the court with partisans.

    Maybe we are living in a simulation.. did it ever occur to anyone that this is playing out like a barely plausible season finale where the bad-guy looks like he won in a cliff-hanger?

  72. KG says

    You also don’t get to talk about impending nuclear war while at the same time recognizing he’s in Putin’s pocket. – taraskan@49

    Oh yes, I do. First, the two might easily fall out – indeed, I’d bet on it, within the next four years. Putin is a lot cleverer than Trump, probably thinks he will be easily manipulated, and may well something on him that he thinks will keep him in line. But you can be Trump’s friend for life one minute, and a treacherous enemy the next. Second, who says the nuclear war has to start with an attack on Russia? Or even involve Russia? Trump has made multiple verbal attacks on China. And if you can’t envisage Trump threatening to nuke Mecca if there’s an Islamist terror attack in the USA, or on American troops or diplomats abroad, you’re sadly lacking in imagination. He’s already made clear he sees no point in having nukes if you’re not going to use them.

  74. KG says

    Jennifer Smith@73, I’m genuinely puzzled as to which sort of idiot you are: the sort that thinks no-one should ever vote for the lesser of two evils, or the sort that thinks everyone should have pretended the sun shines out of Clinton’s fundament. Do tell.

    By the way, I’ll let you into a secret: those primarily at fault are those who voted for Donald Trump.

  75. KG says

    ffakr@71,

    Do Republicans have the guts, or maybe the intention to impeach him before or soon after he’s sworn in?

    No.

    Maybe we are living in a simulation.. did it ever occur to anyone that this is playing out like a barely plausible season finale where the bad-guy looks like he won in a cliff-hanger?

    I already raised the possibility, before the election, that if Trump won it would mean we were living in one of the U-Xperience-It Corporation’s “Wacky, wacky pasts that just might have happened!!! series. Unfortunately, now it has happened, it’s far too realistic for me to even pretend to believe that.

  76. brucegee1962 says

    Maybe Bernie could have done better that Hillary. Maybe he would have done worse. Being beaten with the socialist stick might have been just as damaging to him as the emails were for her. As it stands now, we’ll never know, so why point fingers?

    As progressives, please please please let’s not turn on each other. Let’s be better than that. We’re going to need to stick together more than ever to survive this.

  77. says

    Fuck you USA.
    The current destabilisation the world is experiencing is the result of the last time you voted for a Republican, a guy who looks competent, decent and reasonable compared to the one you elected now.
    Want something really depressing? Hitler wasn’t actually elected by the majority in the last elections of 1932. He won just 33%. In March of 33 he go 43%. WWII and the Shoa still happened.

  78. slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) says

    re @69:

    I heard of a phenomenon where drivers sometimes steer *into* road workers because they become fixated on the spectacle by the highway.

    aside from the implications of “fixation”, it is quite common that our hands follow our eyes and with hands on a steering wheel the car will follow. When dealing with slippery roads, the best thing to do is to look at where one wants to go, not at what one wants to avoid.
    So yes, it is paradoxical that road workers want to avoid getting hit by making them hard not to look at.
    ~
    unfortunately that metaphor doesn’t work with regard to voting. People didn’t vote for Drumph cause they disliked him. I think they chose him because they dislike the system even more, and thought that putting in an incompetent blowhard might shake the system up into getting competent people to fix everything he farks up.
    I hope. oh well. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

  80. says

    @#62, Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls

    Funny how Clinton is always blamed for the decision of others. As SoS, she had no power over the military. She can only give advice to POTUS, with lots of other people, and POTUS must make that call. So the intervention is on Obama, not Clinton. Some folks are too ready to blame HRC, which brings up their honesty into question.

    As usual, you are delusional. We have multiple people from the Obama administration, including Obama himself in an interview back in May, saying that the only person in the administration who wanted to bomb Libya was Clinton, and she barely managed to convince everyone else. She also gave the speech full of lies (see the UK government’s report on it) to NATO which got them to vote effectively 52-48 to bomb, after Congress refused. (Practically the only smart thing Congress did in that session.) It really, really is her fault, and she had the nerve to laugh about it on TV.

    @#64, Area Man

    I also heard somewhere that Libya was in a state of civil war before the western powers intervened to bring it to a faster resolution, but that’s just my crazy unreliable memory.

    That’s what Clinton claimed in her NATO speech. See the aforementioned UK investigation: it was a lie.

    Just like the lie that we need to intervene in Syria, another Clinton saber-rattling maneuver.

    Just like the lie that we’re supporting “freedom” or “democracy” in the Ukraine.

    And the lie that the Russians are responsible for everything going wrong, up to and including Chelsea stubbing her toe against a chair, which the Democrats have been doing for the last month or so.

    It’s simple: Clinton failed to provide any enthusiasm among her base, and energized turnout among the Republicans. You know, like many of us were saying she would all along. All that baggage which people like you claimed didn’t matter because it was based on lies turns out to have mattered, after all.

    Folks, at the height of Islamaphobia she lost the nomination to a black man with a “foreign-sounding” name. She almost lost to a septugenarian Jewish self-described socialist who was running from outside the party, and increasingly appears only to have managed to beat him because there was a thumb heavily on the scale pushing in her favor. At a time when everyone was screaming for change, she repudiated populism and told us we’d all be fine if the status quo was maintained. It’s not a surprise she lost; she was born to lose, she had a history of losing. The only surprise is that her loss this time meant Trump’s win.

    It’s important to remember this, because even as we speak the people running the DNC are busy trying to construct a narrative whereby Clinton’s loss is somehow the fault of someone else, rather than a direct result of 30 years of Democrats running as hard to the right, as far from their populist New Deal legacy as they could. For 30 years, now, the DNC has used every win and every loss as an excuse to get more corporate and less economically populist — if they won, their strategy was succeeding, if they lost, clearly they hadn’t pushed far enough to the right yet. If you’re serious about trying to fix things, now is the time to hold their feet to the fire.

    (Oh, and incidentally: sure is scary to imagine Trump with the nuclear launch codes, right? Good thing Obama acted on his campaign promise to reduce our nuclear arsenal! Oh, wait, no, he did no such thing, and Clinton actually helped him compose his request for $1 trillion for new nukes, a request which was granted by the Republican Congress who we’re supposed to pretend can’t approve of anything. And, thanks to the recommendation of war-hawks like Clinton, those new nukes will be “tactical”, designed to be used in battle rather than sitting in a bunker as a deterrent. Clinton is truly a fractal screw-up, wrong at every level and scale of magnitude.)

  81. brucegee1962 says

    Raw emotions aside, what are the chances that establishment Republicans, now shunned by their own party, will form a coalition with the Dems? Possible, I think, once it becomes clear that The Donald views the constitution as so much tissue paper.

    The chances are precisely 0.0000000000000000000%. They had their chance before their elections, and they showed their colors. A paltry handful took a stand, then looked around and realized the voters weren’t with them, said “Look, a squirrel!” and snuck over to Trump’s side. With the voters at his back, the only thing he’s going to hear from the GOP congress is “How high would you like me to jump, sir?”

  82. prae says

    When I read about it today morning, this song was the first thing that came to my mind:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptP0OR-e7rI

    I tweaked the lyrics a little, too:

    Death to the world! The Trump has come:
    Let Earth abhor this thing.
    Let every mind prepare for doom,
    As anguish and woe he’ll bring.

    Up from the polls, the Trump did rise:
    The voters awestruck dumb.
    With ancient views so wretched and perverse,
    The Donald’s time has come.

    Death to the world! The Trump now reigns.
    The Republicans Destroy
    With wrath and doom, so cruel and foul,
    Replete with obscene joy.
    He rules the States with dreadful might,
    And through our ghastly dreams
    His twisting turning little fingers
    Elicit from us maddened screams.

    Also, I’m not that sad that the Trump got elected. I think the USA is too powerful for a country with that many douchebags, some destabilisation will probably turn out to be good for everyone in the long run.

  83. npsimons says

    To paraphrase both H.L. Mencken and “The Dark Knight” (and I’ve been saying this going on about a year now), Trump isn’t the president America needs, he’s the president America deserves, and deserves to get good and hard. Maybe now you fuckers (in *both* parties) will think harder about who you nominate to the ballot.

    > No, the salient factor is that a significant number of old white Americans are as racist and sexist as all fuck.

    This, I think, is what makes me saddest of all: not that Trump was elected, but that I truly feel a deep sense of mistrust and revulsion towards my fellow countrymen. Thanks, America, for reminding me every four years that I’m still not cynical enough, apparently.

  85. Saad says

    Holms, #70

    #21
    No they didn’t they chose Clinton by popular vote. The electoral college however happens to favour low population states, i.e. states with a largely rural, decentralised population. In other words, conservative states.

    Sorry, you’re right. Technically, my sentence was wrong.

    But seeing that Hillary got 0.3% more popular vote than Trump, the people made this happen. You can’t make a statement like ragove314 did that America deserves better.

  86. Akira MacKenzie says

    cazfans @ 23

    What were we suppose do? Were we supposed to placate them by stopping social progress? Were we supposed to ban abortion, keep LGBTQs in the closet, and teach Creationism in public schools just to make the backward happy? Were we to make sure those scary brown-skinned people acted, dressed, and sang those quant negro spirituals as the rural whites expect them to? Were we to continue to embrace a culture of authoritarian religion even though the very concept of theism is a ridiculous superstition that has absolutely no place in the 21st Century?

    It’s not our fault that we arrogant urban elites want to have an actual civilization while the redneck shit-kickers (Awwwww, did I make fun of them? Maybe white conservatives need to stop being so “hypersensitive” and “politically correct?”) want to wallow in an idea of America that never was and should never become. I refuse to let the willfully stupid and unquestionably bigoted to be a millstone around our necks.

    So fuck the rednecks, fuck Trump, and fuck David Wong!

  87. Gregory Greenwood says

    Welcome to the club of stupid nations that have made self destructive decisions (and screwed over chunks of the world in the process), America. We over in the UK have saved a nice space for you right next to the bonfire of hopes and dreams. You know, the two of us will be legends in this place. I mean, when we screw up, we go big, don’t we? We set up the world by undermining global markets and weakening the EU at a critical juncture with Brexit, and, and you have knocked it down by electing a vile orange haired bigoted troll to the most powerful political office in the world.

    We make quite, the team don’t we?

  88. Matrim says

    Also, I’m not that sad that the Trump got elected. I think the USA is too powerful for a country with that many douchebags, some destabilisation will probably turn out to be good for everyone in the long run.

    Oh yeah, except for the people who would be dropped from their insurance company if the ACA were repealed…cause, y’know, death and whatnot.

  89. millssg99 says

    Seems like Clinton lost the popular vote in about 30 states including MI, WI, PA, and OH and they aren’t just small states. She lost a lot of big states or else she wouldn’t have lost the electoral vote so badly. Even nation wide it was 0.5 a percentage point or less popular vote. A lot of damn people voted for Trump and they weren’t all old white people. If he’d only gotten old white votes he would have lost. A lot of white women didn’t vote for him.

    It speaks to how bad of a candidate Clinton was that Trump was able to win. Let’s blame everyone but her for the Trump win. A lot of people don’t like Clinton and they voted against her not necessarily for Trump.

  90. wzrd1 says

    You also don’t get to talk about impending nuclear war while at the same time recognizing he’s in Putin’s pocket. – taraskan@49

    Because all nukes are hard locked onto Russian targets?
    Here’s a news flash for you; nuclear guidance systems take seconds to minutes, depending upon the model, to reprogram to anywhere on the globe.
    Trump’s made more threats than we have missiles as well, ranging from North Korea, PRC, Mecca, ISIL, hell, I’m amazed that he didn’t threaten to nuke US targets. That’s especially true, as he not only won’t rule out first use – a first since the Cold War began, but stated outright that having a weapon and not using it doesn’t make sense to him.
    He also fails to comprehend, targeting a city in a foreign land, just to ensure a few hostiles are killed, is a war crime and the sanctions inevitable.

  91. Hairhead, Still Learning at 59 says

    Ah #83 finally mentioned HL Mencken. The full quote is, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

    Cynical, but right now, it fits.

  92. Saad says

    millssg99, #89

    It speaks to how bad of a candidate Clinton was that Trump was able to win.

    Bullshit. It speaks to how racist, sexist and gullible the majority of white voters (especially men) were.

    A lot of damn people voted for Trump and they weren’t all old white people.

    Exactly. Thanks for making my point.

  94. prae says

    Oh yeah, except for the people who would be dropped from their insurance company if the ACA were repealed…cause, y’know, death and whatnot.

    There are people dying all the time, all around the world. I don’t know how you are doing it, but I think you have to stop caring at some point, or you’ll go insane.

    You could also start comparing the amount of deaths which happened because that weak attempt at a health insurance got cancelled vs the deaths which didn’t happen, because the US army couldn’t buy enough bombs because all funds went to the Great Mexican Wall.

    tl;dr I don’t care.

  95. says

    @#89, millssg99

    Seems like Clinton lost the popular vote in about 30 states including MI, WI, PA, and OH and they aren’t just small states. She lost a lot of big states or else she wouldn’t have lost the electoral vote so badly. Even nation wide it was 0.5 a percentage point or less popular vote. A lot of damn people voted for Trump and they weren’t all old white people. If he’d only gotten old white votes he would have lost. A lot of white women didn’t vote for him.

    A lot of white men didn’t vote for him, either. The key seems to be that hatred of Clinton brought out all the white troglodytes from rural areas, but that isn’t all of it. Trump’s support was weird. Contrary to the “it’s all sexists and racists” meme that Democratic tribalists are pushing, Trump actually got increased support from minorities over Romney, according to the New York Times, albeit not by a huge amount: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CwzO4JvXAAEgU2R.jpg.

  96. says

    So, Clinton won the popular vote, half the country didn’t vote (many because of restrictions, long lines, etc. after the Voting Rights Act was culled) but tell me again how your electoral system is halfway working and how burning it to the ground and sowing it with salt isn’t actually reasonable…

  97. says

    If he’d only gotten old white votes he would have lost. A lot of white women didn’t vote for him.

    Yeah, it was just some 78% or so of white dudes and 66% of white women or something. White people suck. Stop acting as if it were the 3% or so black women voting for Trump who did this.

  98. tomh says

    @ #89

    “It speaks to how bad of a candidate Clinton was that Trump was able to win.”

    You can blame whoever you want. Since she won the popular vote, you can blame the electoral college system for Trump’s win, same as when Bush won against Gore. Since in Florida, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, third party candidates tipped the balance in close votes I can easily blame idiot third party voters for Trump’s win. And I do.

  99. Bruce Gorton says

    To those of you saying he wasn’t a real Democrat – I think you’re part of why this happened.

    Seriously think about what you’re saying – you’re saying that the guy who got a whole lot of young people excited enough to come out and support him in the primaries, who gave Clinton a serious run for the nomination even as subsequent evidence shows the DNC was ratfcking him and she really was getting questions leaked to her before the debates, that guy is nothing to do with you.

    You couldn’t carry Sanders support into the general in part because you repeatedly disavowed Sanders. He couldn’t convince people that Clinton’s policies were only slightly less good than his because the people who supported Clinton kept saying “He’s not really one of us”.

  100. multitool says

    re @78:
    People didn’t vote for Drumph cause they disliked him.

    You misunderstand. The press focused on Drumph because they disliked him. People voted for him because every dark nook and cranny of America knew his name and face like he was a family member.

  101. wzrd1 says

    The press focused on Drumph because they disliked him.

    Bullshit, the press *loved* him, born click bait. Instant hyperbole headline to grab attention, even if he was all form and no substance.

    So, the press gave him well over a year and change of free advertisement time.

  102. Jake Harban says

    I must say, I’m completely surprised by the election result.

    I mean, I honestly believed that nominating a warmongering, Wall Street toadying Bush Republican and then saying: “You have to vote for her or else you’re immature/sexist/stealing votes from her” was totally a winning strategy. Who could possibly have predicted that pointing to the letter after her name and insulting anyone who didn’t consider that sufficient reason to vote for her might not convince anyone who wasn’t chanting “vote blue no matter who” from the outset?

  103. Akira MacKenzie says

    In Bernie’s defense, since Gore’s defeat, the right-wing Dems have urged Left wingers not to be spoilers and “come home” and support their party rather than a third.

    And Bernie did just that. He could have run Green, or Socialist, or create his own party, but instead he “came home.” And in return the DNC gave him such a warm welcome. /sarcasm

    (OTOH, this doesn’t excuse the Bernie Bro hypocrites for not swallowing their pride and voting “NOT TRUMP.”)

  104. says

    @#97, Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk-

    Yeah, it was just some 78% or so of white dudes and 66% of white women or something. White people suck. Stop acting as if it were the 3% or so black women voting for Trump who did this.

    Although I haven’t seen a breakdown by gender and I’m willing to bet that white men were worse than white women, the overall white turnout for Trump was less than 60%. (It still dominated the election because white people had high turnout, particularly in rural areas.)

    There is, however, a broader point: Clinton lost states which Obama won. Sexism is at least an accusation that is consistent with the numbers, but racism just plain isn’t. And those states? Were all ones which were decimated by trade agreements like (surprise!) NAFTA which the Clintons supported, and the TPP which Hillary Clinton helped write and supported until Sanders forced her to make an unconvincing flip-flop. Clinton’s loss was at least attributable to multiple causes, and at least some of it was purely down to people hating Hillary Clinton, the person, regardless of what her identity is.

  106. Bruce Gorton says

    tomh

    The Greens only got 1%, the biggest third party was the Libertarians with 3%. If they were going to go for “lesser evil” voting, they would have probably supported Trump.

  107. voiceoreason says

    This win comes down to a few things.

    First off, as this result obviously shows, the current establishment is very much hated. Most of this comes from actions such as NAFTA and the shipping out of jobs. These are things that are the fault of amoral businesses not being policed by the government; you know, the thing that is supposed to police them.

    Second, I have a figure: 9%. That’s the total percentage of America who voted for either Hillary or Trump in the primary. Less than a tenth of the nation was able to give us two of the worst candidates in history to vote for.

    Third, Hillary’s campaign methods. By all rights, even with the establishment hatred that has been stewing, she should have had this in the bag. Instead, the Clinton Campaign has spent at least half of the last year and a half “doing an endzone dance at the 50 yard line”, as Michael Moore aptly put it. Not only that, but as soon as she got the nomination, she started the old Swing Right trick that hasn’t worked in this century. In doing so, the millennials, who got excited about Bernie Sanders, realized something: Hillary hasn’t done ANYTHING this election cycle that would make us want to vote for her. Granted, that’s a tiny exaggeration, but when you almost lost to a more liberal candidate who was unheard of before the election, you shouldn’t decide that appearing on the same stage as Bush Neocons is a good idea.

    Fourth, Hillary’s history. Hillary Clinton has plenty of things that uninformed people can hate her for: Benghazi, Emails, etc. That’s not good when my fifth point is considered, which I’ll talk about in a bit. However, she has a history of flip flops. bad votes, and corruption that informed people can dislike her for as well. While Secretary of State, she never met with anyone who had not donated to her foundation (which does do good things, but is still an example of Pay-to-Play corruption). I shouldn’t have to mention her TPP flipping here, but did you know that it took until this decade for her to proclaim the Iraq War as bad? Not to mention that the Iraq War vote itself was a bad thing.

    Fifth, Media Failure. AKA the same thing that got Hillary to the General. If our Media wasn’t half a broken PC outrage machine and half a system built on lies, then I would wager that Sanders would be our President Elect right now.
    Let me dig a little deeper. Trump said many, MANY things this campaign that were either lies or things that went against the Constitution. If the media had reported more stringently on these things, especially during the debates, then maybe voters would be informed. Instead, 3/4ths of the media was reporting on Trump’s Naughty Language, even before the bragging about Sexual Assault incident, and how he demeaned women. Whether that’s true or not isn’t the point, the point is that such a strategy DOES NOT WORK when Trump had a faux anti-PC aura. Instead, comment on how he’s a terrible businessman and how he was advocating torture and terrorism. How he is a pathological liar. Those things could have taken him down a peg.

    Of course, this is all academic now because the failure has already occurred.

    The last point for this comment is that millions of people changed their votes in both Primary and General for a few reasons, and due to this we nominated the worst person to take on Trump.
    “Hillary is a better candidate to take on Trump.” Polls showed then that it wasn’t true, and Clinton’s loss shows us this idea was incorrect.
    “Sanders is a socialist who’s out of touch with the American People.” Every single one of Sanders’ policies polled at over 50% in polls that included plenty of all parties, with most polling above 70%.

    Simply put, a combination of the wrong candidate, a broken system, a broken media, the electoral college, and a campaign that consisted of a year of celebrating Hillary Clinton’s victory to come led to Donald Trump being the President Elect of the United States.

    That said, I’m not saying Hillary was/is worse than Trump, goodness no. She’s much better. That does not make her good, and that in itself was a problem.

  108. Pierce R. Butler says

    tomh @ # 98: Since in Florida, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, third party candidates tipped the balance in close votes I can easily blame idiot third party voters for Trump’s win.

    Easily, sure. Accurately? Hell no.

    Here in Florida – I haven’t dug into the numbers for those other states yet – the idiot third party that got the most votes was the idiot Libertarians (few if any of whom would’ve voted for any Democrat ever): even if every one of the idiot Greens had inked in the HRC bubble, the effective difference would’ve been exactly zero.

    Stop going for the “easy” scapegoating – THAT in itself has more to do with the present crisis than any personality.

  109. drizzt says

    I blame this fuckup on the ones that didn’t get out and vote… I’m not an American citizen and don-t even live in the US so no vote from me, but to the mofos that stayed home jerking off : this is on you. Own it. Now where is my plane ticket to Australia…

  110. a_ray_in_dilbert_space says

    The Vicar: “Sexism is at least an accusation that is consistent with the numbers, but racism just plain isn’t.”

    That is not necessarily true. Clinton was widely being seen as running for Obama’s 3rd term, and Obama was vocal in trying to assist her with black voters. There are a lot of a$$holes in white America who would like to erase the Obama years and pretend there had never been an eloquent, decent black man occupying the WHITEhouse.

  111. says

    @#103, Akira MacKenzie

    And Bernie did just that. He could have run Green, or Socialist, or create his own party, but instead he “came home.” And in return the DNC gave him such a warm welcome. /sarcasm

    Yup. You can’t reconcile actual populist or leftist (the two are not necessarily always synonymous) policy with the modern-day DNC, because the modern-day DNC is right of center and contemptuous of the people.

    (OTOH, this doesn’t excuse the Bernie Bro hypocrites for not swallowing their pride and voting “NOT TRUMP.”)

    Ah, so this is going to be the new DNC fantasy about how they lost? Like blaming Nader for 2000? Show me even one exit poll or vote count which suggests that this happened in large enough numbers to spoil the election. There were practically no write-ins for Bernie in any swing state, and the only places third parties made any inroads, it was the Libertarians — who, exit polls are now confirming, stole Republican votes, not Democratic ones — who had the overwhelming majority. The Democratic Party lost because they nominated Clinton, and she brought out all the yahoos and angry conservatives on the other side, while not inspiring any confidence on her own side. That’s it. That’s the truth, the lesson which needs to be learned.

    In one of the old Tick spin-off comics, there was a guy at a doctor who asks “tell me, can you remove the cancer?” And the doctor says something along the lines of “well, I could remove the cancer, but it would mean picking you up off the operating table, moving you to the side, and then putting you down again. You are the cancer, it is everywhere.” The Democratic Party’s upper echelons have been loaded with right-of-center DLC corporatist and warmonger appointees over the last several decades. They comprise most of the party now. They chose Hillary Clinton, who lost, when Sanders could plausibly have won (first by tapping into the rage that Trump tapped into, but also by not having 25 years of Republican rage premade against him to drive Republican turnout.) They need to be kicked out, and frankly it will be easier for Democrats just to take over the Greens than it will be for them to prize these idiots out of their leadership positions, after letting the Clintons cement them in place so long ago. You tribalists done screwed up, and now we all will pay the price.

  113. wsierichs says

    The Vicar has summed up very well the big reasons Clinton lost. I know that the raging Hillbots will always blame everyone else but her – the mean media, the Bernie bros and, of course, sexism, but that’s all nonsense. I and millions of non-Clinton voters like me ignored the nonstop right-wing propaganda nonsense over the decades. I’m not a Bernie bro, an insult based on nothing but political calculation, and if I’m a misogynist, why did I vote for Stein?

    I’ll answer that: I voted for Stein despite her flaws – I wish another, better candidate had been available – because she was the last Democrat, that is, she was from the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. Clinton was from the corporate wing of the Reptilian Party, and I do NOT vote for Reptilians.

    Of course, we had a much better Democrat, but the DNC rigged the nomination against him. Anyone who denies that needs to explain the many, massive problems of the Democratic primaries. Simple incompetence is not remotely enough. It was blatantly election fraud, and the only people who could have committed it were the Democratic leaders. Since they’ve been visibly corrupt for decades, I am not surprised in the least. Clinton would have been another gravy train for them, just like that corporate-owned, right-wing Reptilian Barack Obama. Sanders would have started us down the road to a nation not ruled by amoral, hyper-greedy obligarchs.

    The only way we the people can stop another disaster like this (if we survive this disaster as a nation) is to take control of the Democratic Party back from the oligarchs. Use the machinery not time for someone like Bernie Sanders. Make the Clintons and their ilk very very unwelcome.

    I’ll add some thoughts I wrote elsewhere:

    I’m not in the least bit surprised that he won – I could see months ago that he had a realistic shot because both Democrats and Reptilians hated the Establishment and Clinton was queen of the Establishment. She represented all of the rotten, middle-class-destroying corruption that infuriated so many liberals. I know Trump won in part because so many Reptilians hate Clinton, but Clinton herself was for all practical purposes a Reptilian – she represented the corporate wing, he the bigoted/populist wing. So I think enough liberals stayed home or did not vote for her because they can’t vote for a Reptilian that it cost her enough votes to lose.

    I’ll have to see how the pro-Clinton votes compare with previous elections before I’ll know if my analysis is valid. If Clinton lost a lot of people who had voted for the D in 2012, 2008 etc., then I’m right.

    I’ll add that I think Obama did a lot of damage to her because he talked like a traditional, FDR-type Democrat in his two campaigns yet governed like a Reptilian. I pegged him as a corporate-owned, right-wing Reptilian before the 2008 election, so I’ve never voted for him. I’ve been seeing a lot of bitterness toward Obama for his betrayal of his promises, or at least liberal-sounding statements, on left-leaning websites. I think people saw Clinton as just another Obama. The fact that she tried to position herself as his third term, while at the same time openly seeking/gaining support from war criminals like Kissinger and the neofascist warmongers amplified hostility to her on the left.

  114. Beatrice, an amateur cynic looking for a happy thought says

    Yeah, yeah, Clinton is the devil because she wouldn’t have brought world peace, ended hunger and cured cancer (ALL cancer). I think we all get that, we’ve been hearing it enough.

    To repeat what I wrote elsewhere, I’m not all that afraid of Trump himself. He can personally do limited damage. The most danger comes from his supporters and all the people in power who now feel encouraged and vindicated in their conservative, hateful views.

    I’m not exactly shivering in fear of a nuclear war, but I am afraid how much Trump winning is already destabilizing the world in numerous smaller but nevertheless destructive ways. Europe has been steadily moving to the right. What are these people doing today? Celebrating. If someone with their views can win the US presidency, how many more wonderful things can they achieve? They feel emboldened.

  115. wsierichs says

    Giliell, #112
    Stop defending corruption by calling hatred of corruption racism. That’s lying.

  116. Saad says

    Once Clinton was nominated, the best way to keep Trump from becoming president was to not vote for Clinton. So many people voted for her that Trump won. People like me kept telling you guys Hillary is not a good candidate to vote for, but you had to go do it anyway. Now look what you’ve done!

  117. tomh says

    @ #106
    You’re talking about the national vote, which as the popular vote totals show, is irrelevant. In Wisconsin, Clinton lost by about 1% of the vote, if Stein’s supporters had voted Clinton, she wins the state. In Michigan, Clinton loses by about 0.3% of the vote, if half of Stein’s supporters had voted Clinton, she wins the state. In Pennsylvania, Clinton lost by about 1.1% of the vote, if Stein’s supporters and half of Johnson’s voters had voted Clinton, she wins the state. Same thing in Florida. She doesn’t even need all these states.

  118. voiceoreason says

    How was that being an apologist for racism, exactly?

    One more thing, Sanders would most likely have won the election.
    Trump lost the popular vote to a candidate he was built to take down; someone who had no principles, was part of the establishment he was railing against, and had corruption in her past.

    Sanders was an actual populist, as opposed to a faux populist, and didn’t have any dirt in his past that people could go, “SEE THIS IS WHY THE CANDIDATES ARE BOTH EQUALLY BAD NOW VOTE FOR TRUMP”.

    He got 47% of the vote in the primary versus a candidate with all the advantages, including having the people in charge of the election itself tipping the scales in her favor, and the biggest advantages, media bias and the aforementioned DNC shenanigans, would have been at worst a wash in an election versus Trump.

  119. says

    Right, KKK celebrating has nothing to do with racism.

    You know what, if you (generic and personal combined) couldn’t get yourself to prevent a Trump presidency that was based on white supremacy because nasty crooked Hillary was not perfect enough then you were at best indifferent to white supremacy. You chose to ignore people of colour arguing, asking, pleading to prevent a white supremacist presidency. You chose your high moral sense over the actual lives of people of colour. Yes, that’s fucking racism.

  120. congenital cynic says

    I’m in a state of stunned disbelief. In a country of 300+ million people, this loathsome thing gets elected as president? Unfuckingbelievable. We here in Canada may get some really smart people in the coming immigration wave, but I’d have preferred an outcome that didn’t make them want to flee.

  121. bojac6 says

    According to the BBC, 53% of Men went to Trump, while 42% of Women did, meaning the male vote for Trump was lower than predicted and the female vote was higher. The White vote was 58% for Trump and surprisingly, the Hispanic vote was the next highest, at 29%. The most surprising thing I heard was on NPR this morning. 54% of Trump voters said they approve of Obama’s presidency.

    But it looks to me like the big deciding factor was voter turnout. Rural and poor areas had much higher turn out than expected, and those areas seemed to go Trump regardless of race, age, or gender. Meanwhile, cities had pretty poor turnout, so much so that turnout overall was low. I get the people who voted 3rd party, I even understand a lot of the issues that would make a person vote Trump, but I really can’t understand the people who don’t care enough to vote.

  122. tomh says

    @ #108
    In Florida, Hillary Clinton lost by about 1.4% of the vote, if Stein’s supporters and half of Gary Johnson’s backers had voted Clinton, she wins.

  123. ibyea says

    As much as I hate to say it, Vicar is right on the reason why Clinton lost. Racism was part of it, don’t get me wrong, but the problems he detailed was also a contributor.

  124. multitool says

    | | The press focused on Drumph because they disliked him.
    | Bullshit, the press *loved* him, born click bait. Instant hyperbole headline to grab attention,
    | even if he was all form and no substance.
    | So, the press gave him well over a year and change of free advertisement time.

    Oh whatever. You’re still supporting my point, which is that he got huge all-expenses-paid publicity from our mindless fourth estate.

    We’ve had racists run for president before (eg David Duke) but they were never openly juvenile enough to turn into a love-hate reality show.

  125. unclefrogy says

    in my opinion for the world to come together in any functional way in cooperation to really solve the various very serious problems we are facing we need to come together as equals. That is a condition that we are a long way from achieving.
    We as Americans can not accept that because we are the “most powerful country in the world” “We are the Greatest country in the World”.
    If you doubt it just make some salient accurate mild criticisms of our history even here and see the reaction.
    So in the long run it may turn out to be a necessary fall power and influence. How long long term turns out to be is anybodies guess how far and how bad it will be. Probably too long and far too bad.

    we were never going to voluntarily get down from the “High Horse” of American Exceptionalism instead we appear to have had to shoot it in the head first.
    One of the things that most irritated the right wing reactionary about Clinton’s message was the always fall back to “We” not me. I am remembering the insane reaction to her “it takes a village to raise a child” .
    That reaction is just the reflection of the resistance to the reality of our equality and interdependence as human beings not inferior and superior . I do recognize that that reaction comes from a history of abuse by those exercising in power over us both collectively through societal and political means and individually by being bullied and coerced by individuals personally.
    It is the policies that are important not any fucking individual human that is going to solve things it is we who must do it united with our fellows. It will take all of us.
    uncle frogy

  126. Beatrice, an amateur cynic looking for a happy thought says

    Looking from the outside, it is so incredibly obvious that a person like Trump should have lost against pretty much anyone except maybe a textbook villain (you know, Hitler and co.).

    There is NO excuse for this atrocity of an election. You can try to put it all on Hillary, but she pretty much should have been able to kick puppies on the street and push old ladies into bushes and still win over fucking Trump.
    Something is seriously wrong with the United States. Hillary Clinton being the least of it.

  129. voiceoreason says

    @119
    Seriously? Where did he do that? At the very least, he did not celebrate the KKK on this comment thread. Not only that, but I voted for Hillary. The fact that you can’t see her flaws as a reason why people wouldn’t vote for her? That’s your problem.

    Seriously, Trump is worse than Clinton, but that doesn’t make her good.

  130. ibyea says

    Here is the thing. In order to win an election, you can’t just appeal to their better side of them and hope they are going to make the moral choice. That is straight up fantasy. You have to appeal to their self interest, and Democrats failed to do that. As much as it had to do with racism, it also had to do with that. And it is a sobering lesson to learn.

  131. tomh says

    @ #121
    “I really can’t understand the people who don’t care enough to vote.”

    And yet, typically in a presidential election, 40-50% of eligible voters don’t vote. Even less people vote in midterm elections.

  132. a_ray_in_dilbert_space says

    The DNC is right of “center” because that is what it takes to get elected in this country. In part this is because they have come to realize they cannot count on votes from the left–who evidently feel that supporting mainstream candidates would compromise their purity.

    As much as I hate to rain on Vicar’s and Jake’s gloating, I would point out that this election highlights a very real problem. Jobs really have gone away, and it has caused a lot of suffering in regions where there are a lot of white people who are used to being privileged. This group (low-education, white and mostly male) has actually experienced a precipitous drop in life expectancy even as other groups have life expectancy has improved for most other groups. The reason for this is even more disturbing–it’s largely attributable to substance abuse and suicide. Of course they are angry.

    Drumpf–or at least those who “control” him was at least smart enough to pick this up. Where he’s wrong–or at least lying–is that those jobs aren’t coming back. Most of them were lost to technology, and even if new factories were built, they’d invest in technology rather than new hires.

    Democrats (starting with Bill Clinton) embraced free trade out of hopes for growing the economy and replacing these lost jobs with new jobs. Unfortunately, be it because unions are dead or because it is difficult to unionize service sectors, free trade has proven much better at making a few folks obscenely wealthy rather than making workers prosperous.

    So, the question is not whether or not you reject free trade, but if you reject it, how do you foster economic growth? Tariffs and protectionism don’t work–as evidenced by plenty of experience. And if you do embrace free trade, how do you ensure benefits are shared more broadly?

    As long as we don’t have an answer to that, there will be a lot of angry voters. The voting of angry people is often indistinguishable from that of dumbasses.

  133. handsomemrtoad says

    Well I was supporting Hillary but … three points:

    1. This is not anyone’s fault, not Comey’s, not the media’s, not Hillary’s, not ours. There is a fundamental force at work world-wide. Brexit, Duarte, Marine Le Pen (majority of French voters approve of her).

    2. It’s not obvious to me that Hillary’s victory, if she had gotten it, would have done more than delay the disaster four years. In 2020, the Republicans would still have the House of Reps (gerrymandered beyond all hope), and the Senate (in 2018 far fewer Republican Senate seats will be on the line than Dems), and the Presidency (the last time the same party held the White House four terms in a row was…FDR) and, quite possibly, the Supreme Court too, if the Republican Senate had maintained the confirmation blockade on all Hillary’s appointees, which I could easily see them doing, terrified of being primaried if they confirmed one. So everything bad now would likely have happened equally badly in 2020 if Hillary had won in 2016. And the 2020 Republican President might easily have been worse than Trump. I’d much rather have President Trump than President Ted Cruz, for example. Because…

    …3. We don’t know how bad Trump will really be. Will he really overturn Roe/Wade, or was it an empty pander? We don’t know. Will he really deport masses of people? We don’t know. Will he really take health insurance away from millions of people? We don’t know. Will he really bomb the sht out of someone? We don’t know. Will he send a special prosecutor after Hillary, or withdraw from NATO, or torture people, or go after terrorists’ families? In fact we don’t know whether he will follow through seriously on any of his promises and threats, or whether he’ll content himself with symbolic gestures. There’s really nothing he could do either way which would surprise me. (In fact I can only think of one thing he could conceivably do at all which would really surprise me: I would be genuinely surprised if he were to cross Putin, take Putin on on any serious issue.) This doesn’t mean he WILL be better than he seems, but he MIGHT, and, if Hillary had won in 2016 and then been beaten by someone like Cruz in 2020, ruination would be assured.

    PG Wodehouse wrote:

    I was reading in the paper the other day about those birds who are trying to split the atom, the nub being that they haven’t the foggiest as to what will happen if they do. It may be all right. On the other hand, it may not be all right. And pretty silly a chap would feel, no doubt, if, having split the atom, he suddenly found the house going up in smoke and himself torn limb from limb.

    That’s us now. We’ve split the atom and we’ll have to see what happens. It may be all right. On the other hand, it may not be all right.

  134. consciousness razor says

    Pierce R. Butler:

    tomh @ # 98: Since in Florida, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, third party candidates tipped the balance in close votes I can easily blame idiot third party voters for Trump’s win.

    Easily, sure. Accurately? Hell no.

    Here in Florida – I haven’t dug into the numbers for those other states yet – the idiot third party that got the most votes was the idiot Libertarians (few if any of whom would’ve voted for any Democrat ever): even if every one of the idiot Greens had inked in the HRC bubble, the effective difference would’ve been exactly zero.

    Nonsense. To the extent the popular vote matters at all…. People who voted for Trump are responsible for Trump winning, which is a fucking disaster. And so are people who did not vote for Hillary, the only other option who had a chance of being elected by the electoral college. If you say Libertarians “would not” have done it, who the fuck cares? They should have. It was their responsibility to make sure a non-Trump candidate was chosen in the popular vote (and hope the electors don’t fuck it up after that), because Pres. Trump and VP Pence would be (and thanks to them, will be) a fucking disaster.

    Vicar:

    There were practically no write-ins for Bernie in any swing state, and the only places third parties made any inroads, it was the Libertarians — who, exit polls are now confirming, stole Republican votes, not Democratic ones — who had the overwhelming majority.

    More of the same nonsense. They “stole” no votes from anybody or anything — stop talking like a fucking pundit. They were responsible for making a better choice, rather than a worse one. Voting in Hillary (with all her problems) would’ve been much better. Only MI and PA libertarians voting for her (or several other combinations of states) would’ve made a difference in the electoral college outcome. They all should’ve been doing that, whatever state they were in, and they didn’t.

  135. Pierce R. Butler says

    tomh @ # 122: In Florida, … if Stein’s supporters and half of Gary Johnson’s backers had voted Clinton, she wins.

    You left out the leprechauns.

  137. says

    @96, Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk-

    So, Clinton won the popular vote, half the country didn’t vote (many because of restrictions, long lines, etc. after the Voting Rights Act was culled) but tell me again how your electoral system is halfway working and how burning it to the ground and sowing it with salt isn’t actually reasonable…

    Still too extreme of a conclusion for such a weak analysis to support.

    The USA voting system needs to be fixed, not “burning it to the ground and sowing it with salt” whatever that is even supposed to mean. It’s like a horoscope, any unhinged radical can interpret it however they like. In fact it sounds precisely like advocacy for violence (“burning”) and anti-democracy (“sowing it [every part of it, even the voting part] with salt”).

  138. Pierce R. Butler says

    consciousness razor @ # 134: If you say Libertarians “would not” have done it, who the fuck cares? They should have.

    Well, goddamn, the scales have fallen from my eyes! We don’t need to analyze anything, we can just scold more!

  140. consciousness razor says

    Pierce, do you agree with the following statement?
    “People who voted for Trump are responsible for Trump winning, which is a fucking disaster. ”

    What do you think must be “analyzed” here?

  141. futurechemist says

    I think turnout was a big factor. Turnout in Wisconsin was about 66%. A third of eligible voters didn’t vote. Rural vote was way up, urban vote not so much. The margin was much less than 34%. So we could blame Wisconsin millenials for not voting and/or people in Milwaukee. And Detroit. And Cleveland And Philly. And Miami…

    But I think that infighting won’t help in the future. In 2008, there was the meme that it was black people in California who took away same-sex marriage. How was that helpful? Blaming Greens won’t help us here. The Democratic party needs to make a sober assessment of what went wrong. Why weren’t young people turning out? And how do we get them to turn out in 2018 and 2020?

  142. says

    Brian Pasky
    Just kindly go fuck yourself. The majority of your country didn’t vote for Trump. A lot of people who would have voted against him couldn’t vote because the Voting Rights Act was culled. And that doesn’t even touch the point that felons are barred from voting, a demography that is, who would have thought, pretty black. But really, using a set phrase is too violent for you? Don’t give me that tone trolling shit.

  143. consciousness razor says

    Pierce:

    If you tell me they would not have done so, they why would they have not done so? What makes that the case? Are they, as mentally competent, non-coerced, eligible voters, responsible for the fact that they would not have done so? Should we not hold them accountable for that? Is there something wrong with doing that?

    Does making a moral claim that someone should have done something always consist of “scolding”? Am I supposed to believe that there a problem with saying clearly that someone should have done something, and that they are responsible (and can accurately be “blamed,” if you want to use that word) for doing what they do, when it is something that is under their control and when there is no coercion and so forth?

  144. wsierichs says

    As long as Clinton supporters refuse to look at all the reasons she lost – and the election was hers to lose, not Trump’s to win – and do nothing but scream “racism” and “sexism,” then the Democrats will continue to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. The Democratic leadership – not the membership – is nothing but a bunch of corporate-owned, corrupt, moderately right-wing Reptilians Light. The Democratic base is well to their left (i.e., center and center-left). A good bit of the base will vote Democrat simply out of fear of a real Reptilian, but a lot will not. That’s why Sanders would have crushed Trump or any other Reptilian. And Sanders would have brought a wave of young voters and independents into the party. Clinton was just another Establishment clone.

    And both Reptilians and Democrats were bitterly angry at the Establishment. So playing little games of, if only Stein’s people had voted for Clinton, she’d have snatched victory from Trump. But the Democratic Party and Clinton did not offer anything to people who were not Democrats in the first place. Name-calling anyone who did not vote for her a racist or sexist is both dishonest and idiotic. The racists and sexists voted for Trump. People who did not vote for Clinton did so because they had some principles, some lines they could not cross. They could not vote for someone they did not see as the lesser evil. If Clinton supporters do not understand that, they will never understand why she lost and why anyone else like her will lose a lot of otherwise sympathetic voters. Don’t nominate a corporate-flunky warmonger with the blood of millions of people murdered or injured because of policies she promoted and actively pushed for. Libya, Syria, Ukraine and Honduras did not have to happen. She was one of the people strongly pushing Obama to adopt the policies that caused those horrors.

    As an FYI, because I live/vote in Louisiana, my vote did not count as I was not going to vote for the Orange Goblin. So I was free to vote my conscience. I’m sure a lot of other non-swing-state voters did the same. But I’ve also been an independent all of my 40-plus years as an adult voter. That was mainly for ethical reasons, but also because I realized during the 1990s that the Democratic Party leadership was becoming as corrupt as the Reptilians. I would be a Democrat if it was the party of FDR. I can’t be a DLC/Third Way/DNC supporter. That’s impossible.

    Finally, here’s a blog post on another website that sums up part of my anger today: http://caucus99percent.com/content/you-were-warned-yet-you-still-drove-us-away

  145. says

    @#131, tomh

    “I really can’t understand the people who don’t care enough to vote.”

    And yet, typically in a presidential election, 40-50% of eligible voters don’t vote. Even less people vote in midterm elections.

    I don’t understand you people who don’t understand the non-voters. We have poll after poll where people have asked why they don’t vote. Some of them are too clueless to find their way to the polling station, it’s true, but the majority of them don’t vote because they believe it will make no difference.

    They are absolutely right. Bush lost the popular election. So, apparently, did Trump. Obama got in with both popular and electoral votes, and promptly demonstrated that he was more interested in making concessions to the Republicans — who had lost — than in actually addressing the main issue he had campaigned on.

    Want non-voters to vote? Run some fucking populists! Stop giving us horrible back-stabbing triangulators like the Clintons, who waffle and make hundred-thousand-dollar speeches to the banks where they say “what I say in public is lies, what matters is the backroom deals I make with people like you”.

    @#132, a_ray_in_dilbert_space

    The DNC is right of “center” because that is what it takes to get elected in this country. In part this is because they have come to realize they cannot count on votes from the left–who evidently feel that supporting mainstream candidates would compromise their purity.

    You’re dead wrong. The only right-of-center technocrat who has managed to win the presidency since Clinton showed us what that meant in practice was Obama, and he only managed to do it by pretending he wasn’t a right-of-center technocrat until after he had the nomination. All the other right-of-center presidential candidates that the Clintons have assured us we needed failed. And meanwhile, by moving to the right of center, the Democrats lost Congress, which they basically held for 40 years by being populist leftists. Moving to the right was a losing strategy, and you’re still trying to prop it up — what next, a defense of trickle-down economics?

    As much as I hate to rain on Vicar’s and Jake’s gloating, I would point out that this election highlights a very real problem. Jobs really have gone away, and it has caused a lot of suffering in regions where there are a lot of white people who are used to being privileged. This group (low-education, white and mostly male) has actually experienced a precipitous drop in life expectancy even as other groups have life expectancy has improved for most other groups. The reason for this is even more disturbing–it’s largely attributable to substance abuse and suicide. Of course they are angry.

    And your solution to that is to run people like the Clintons, who were the ones who backed NAFTA which destroyed those jobs and helped write the TPP which will destroy even more? It’s. Not. Going. To. Work.

    Drumpf–or at least those who “control” him was at least smart enough to pick this up. Where he’s wrong–or at least lying–is that those jobs aren’t coming back. Most of them were lost to technology, and even if new factories were built, they’d invest in technology rather than new hires.
    Democrats (starting with Bill Clinton) embraced free trade out of hopes for growing the economy and replacing these lost jobs with new jobs. Unfortunately, be it because unions are dead or because it is difficult to unionize service sectors, free trade has proven much better at making a few folks obscenely wealthy rather than making workers prosperous.

    Yes, so it’s time to abandon it — which. Means. Getting. Rid. Of. The. Clintons. And. All. Their Cohort.

    So, the question is not whether or not you reject free trade, but if you reject it, how do you foster economic growth? Tariffs and protectionism don’t work–as evidenced by plenty of experience.

    On those grounds, the crash of 1929 shows that capitalism doesn’t work and should be totally abandoned. And the election of Trump shows that democracy doesn’t work and we should seek another form of government. You have the same ideas about history as a sententious 6th-grader giving an oral report in class based on their textbook.

    And if you do embrace free trade, how do you ensure benefits are shared more broadly?
    As long as we don’t have an answer to that, there will be a lot of angry voters. The voting of angry people is often indistinguishable from that of dumbasses.

    The voting of people who are willing to support the lesser of two evils is apparently indistinguishable from that of the Green Party, in that neither group was able to win control of any part of the federal government. Congratulations, your strategy — which is precisely what the Clinton campaign embraced — is working!

  146. rpjohnston says

    cf Facebook

    I know there’s a temptation to think that, when Trump starts fucking everything up, that America will wake up and overthrow him or something.
    It will not.
    When he drops nukes on Mecca and Tehran, America will not be horrified at the genocide of millions. Americans will cheer in the street at the cleansing of million of “dirty sandn-“.
    When the rest of the world declares war on us and he nukes Paris and Berlin, the flags will wave and millions of americans will sign up for the military to fight the invasion
    When the blood of LGBT people and POC and disabled people and so many others run in the streets, it will be the Jesustanners hacking us to pieces.
    When Trump crashes our economy through defaulting on debts, breaking deals, and sending our credit into the pit, when there’s a second Great Depression, they’ll simply point their guns at the Jews and the Liberals.
    All of my people: There will be no waking up. We have to understand something, something that we have been sticking our head in the sand for a long time:
    We have to know who our enemy is. It is the right wing, the Jesustanners. They declared war on us at Trump’s rallies, as if our decades, century-long slow genocide wasn’t direct enough. We are at war with them, unavoidably so, and the stakes are our lives.

  147. voiceoreason says

    Cynic, I think we’re talking past each other. I don’t see anyone here being an apologist for racism.

    Explaining why something happened is not the same as supporting it. I, and Vicar, and others, are explaining why Hillary lost. Not celebrating Trump’s Victory. That shouldn’t be difficult to understand.

  149. says

    voiceofreason

    Cynic, I think we’re talking past each other.

    Who’S Cynic?

    I don’t see anyone here being an apologist for racism.

    White people never do

    Explaining why something happened is not the same as supporting it. I, and Vicar, and others, are explaining why Hillary lost.

    Denying the obvious facts that many people voted for Trump because they voted for White Supremacy and that many people didn’t stop him from becoming president is being an apologist for racism.

    Not celebrating Trump’s Victory.

    Not a claim anybody made, but I must say some people sound like they’re gloating.

    That shouldn’t be difficult to understand.

    Stuff your condescension where the sun doesn’t shine.

  150. logicalcat says

    Clinton had the lead until the FBI got involved, and as per usual her numbers goes down every time a fucking scandal breaks out. Trump won because of bigots and the gullible. Plain and simple. Everything else being said here about Clinton was never even a talking point in this election so you are all clearly in the extreme minority.

    Anti-Hillary people remind me of anti-vaxxers. They rally and cry about a known institution that for sure contains corruption (BigPharma/Clinton and DNC), but instead of actually focusing on the real shit they choose to focus on fake shit. Just like fears against vaccines are a whole lot of nothing those emails were also nothing. Benghazi was nothing, Clinton foundation was nothing, her deteriorating health was nothing, her emails were nothing, the DNC rigging the election+voter fraud+ assassinating lawyers were nothing, her emails were also nothing. And yes I repeated myself with the fucking emails because of how many times it came up.

    Oh sure, there are some people who, rightly so, attack big pharma just as there are people who criticize Clinton for her real faults, but if you think any of these issues, none of which were actual nation wide talking points- are what actually cost her the election then I’m just going to throw you in to the Gullible category along with the rest of the idiots who believe in the bullshit above.

  152. voiceoreason says

    Here’s the question, Weiss. How do you know which of us have watched Fox News or not? You don’t. You don’t know whether we are thinking for ourselves, or if we have come to this place for like minded people because we need a bubble (which would be a funny idea considering how much argument has risen).

    Here are my honest thoughts on the current state of affairs, that I got to from my own research, looking at many different places on both sides of the aisle.

    This country’s politics have moved to the right, and that is to the detriment of everyone who wants a good display of a variety of ideas.

    Is it really that difficult to believe that multiple people can’t come to that same conclusion?

  153. says

    @#141, futurechemist

    I think turnout was a big factor. Turnout in Wisconsin was about 66%. A third of eligible voters didn’t vote. Rural vote was way up, urban vote not so much. The margin was much less than 34%. So we could blame Wisconsin millenials for not voting and/or people in Milwaukee. And Detroit. And Cleveland And Philly. And Miami… But I think that infighting won’t help in the future. In 2008, there was the meme that it was black people in California who took away same-sex marriage. How was that helpful? Blaming Greens won’t help us here. The Democratic party needs to make a sober assessment of what went wrong. Why weren’t young people turning out? And how do we get them to turn out in 2018 and 2020?

    Millennials were really enthusiastic about this election. Then the Baby Boomers boot-stomped them by supporting Clinton, told them they were unrealistic to have voted for Sanders, and called them crybabies. Now you’re surprised they didn’t bother to turn out, after all?

    What makes this even more unforgivable is that it’s a lesson the Democrats should have learned in 2010. Obama got in on a platform of “doing something about the banks”. Polls were reliably showing that over 90% of the population agreed that this should be done. If it had been tried, and the Republicans had tried to stop it, they would have been facing mobs with pitchforks and torches, comprised of their own former voters. Instead, Obama refused to attack the banks, and used the ACA — now turning out to be not so great after all, who knew that Mitt Romney’s healthcare proposal wouldn’t contain costs? — as a red herring to distract everyone, and the Democrats promptly lost control of Congress because voters saw that they had been lying about wanting to do anything in the first place, and turnout nosedived once again.

    Everyone sing along, because it’s time to learn a new tune:

    ♪ The Clinton Campaign was a bad idea ♫
    ♪ Clinton was a lousy candidate ♬
    She had ♪ contempt ♫ for anyone who was not ♩ unthinkingly loyal to her
    ♬ Both in the ♪ primaries and ♩ in the general
    And she couldn’t ♫ be bothered ♪ to conceal it
    ♪ Her bad choices ♩ were many
    ♫ Her baggage ♬ was colossal
    ♪ Democrats who supported her ♫ were ♬ delusional
    ♩ It’s time ♫ to kick ♬ the DLC ♩ to ♪ the ♩ curb
    ♫ Or else ♬ we’ll have another ♪ loser like Clinton ♬ again in ♫ 4 years

    Chorus:

    ♩ No more fucking ♫ trade agreements
    ♬ Stop coddling ♩ the banks
    ♫ You’ve been coasting ♬ on a reputation for ♫ populism ♪ for three decades
    ♬ It’s time to ♩ actually do something ♫ to earn it

  154. jack lecou says

    “People who voted for Trump are responsible for Trump winning, which is a fucking disaster. ”
    What do you think must be “analyzed” here?

    I can’t speak for Pierce, but the answer is obviously “lots”.

    “People who voted for Trump are responsible” is essentially a tautology. It’s a lot like saying “it rains because water falls from the sky.” It’s not untrue exactly, and if that’s as far as you want to try to understand the issue, fine.

    But there’s obviously a lot of other things going on in there, and if you want to actually understand something — like the hydrological cycle, or Trump voters/Clinton non-voters — it’s worth trying to unpack those things. For one thing, understanding a thing is usually a good first step if you want to try to alter it or influence it in future.

  156. Pierce R. Butler says

    consciousness razor @ # 140 & 143: What do you think must be “analyzed” here?

    Jeezus fuck.

    Start with the points raised in this thread. Continue on to, say, Michael Moore’s comments, and Digby’s.

    Or just nag some more, if that somehow makes you feel better.

  157. says

    Hey, remember how Brexit is also totally not a xenophobic white supremacist project and how it’s totally unfair to claim that just because people voted for it they have some responsibility for it? Sure, there’S a 400% increase in hate crimes and Polish people get beaten to death in the streets, but really, people voted for Brexit because they’re anti establishment!

  158. voiceoreason says

    Giliell, I wonder why I sounded condescending? Could it be that I don’t enjoy it when someone calls me an Apologist for racism, of all things? Seriously. Racists have always voted, sexists have always voted, and those votes probably went against Clinton, but claiming that those two things are the only factors that swayed the election is ill-informed at best.

    And the reason I called you Cynic is that I wasn’t sure I would be able to spell your name correctly.

  159. voiceoreason says

    Honestly? I left the racism and sexism out of my Why Clinton Lost analysis, because most people (on this thread at least) seem to know that Trump appealed to racists and sexists, not because they didn’t account for votes. I was trying to sum up my thoughts of what people weren’t talking about.

  160. says

    @#150, logicalcat

    Clinton had the lead until the FBI got involved, and as per usual her numbers goes down every time a fucking scandal breaks out. Trump won because of bigots and the gullible. Plain and simple. Everything else being said here about Clinton was never even a talking point in this election so you are all clearly in the extreme minority.
    Anti-Hillary people remind me of anti-vaxxers. They rally and cry about a known institution that for sure contains corruption (BigPharma/Clinton and DNC), but instead of actually focusing on the real shit they choose to focus on fake shit. Just like fears against vaccines are a whole lot of nothing those emails were also nothing. Benghazi was nothing, Clinton foundation was nothing, her deteriorating health was nothing, her emails were nothing, the DNC rigging the election+voter fraud+ assassinating lawyers were nothing, her emails were also nothing. And yes I repeated myself with the fucking emails because of how many times it came up.
    Oh sure, there are some people who, rightly so, attack big pharma just as there are people who criticize Clinton for her real faults, but if you think any of these issues, none of which were actual nation wide talking points- are what actually cost her the election then I’m just going to throw you in to the Gullible category along with the rest of the idiots who believe in the bullshit above.

    You are quite right, as far as you go! I was really angry with the Republican Party all through the election because their focus on made-up scandals made it all the easier for Clinton’s supporters to pretend their candidate was spotless.

    But here’s something you, and all the others who kept whining about how Benghazi was made up, are missing: elections are driven by perceptions, not by facts. It’s a horrible truth, faintly Lovecraftian, but even a horrible truth is still a truth. Clinton’s baggage may have been mostly smoke and mirrors, but it was still baggage, and it cost her the election. Nominating her was a really, really stupid move. We need to hammer that point well in now, while it’s still fresh, so we don’t repeat the mistake. Otherwise, we’ll have the DNC nominating Rahm Emmanuel for president in 2020 because anyone who isn’t a Clinton right-of-center triangulator is “obviously impossible”.

  161. says

    voiceofreason

    Could it be that I don’t enjoy it when someone calls me an Apologist for racism, of all things?

    I don’t give a toss. People never enjoy being called out.

    And the reason I called you Cynic is that I wasn’t sure I would be able to spell your name correctly.

    That’s the single most stupid thing I’ve read today and that means a lot.

  162. says

    @#149, Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk-

    Not a claim anybody made, but I must say some people sound like they’re gloating.

    I don’t just sound like I’m gloating. I’m gloating. Not over Trump’s win, because nobody sane would gloat over that, but because Hillary Clinton finally lost, and we can maybe just possibly stop the rightward drift of the Democratic Party which she and her idiot husband were largely responsible for.

    I stopped posting here a few months back, because I foresaw that Clinton would quite possibly lose, and I couldn’t stand constantly arguing with people who were too stupid to see that Clinton was her own worst enemy as well as that of the future of the party. Now that the madness has run its course, and we no longer have to defend a warmonger who was in the pockets of the very rich — just admit it, folks, her speech to the banks about “public and private” stances was as much as an admission that her platform was a bunch of lies to enthrall the gullible; admitting you were wrong is part of the healing process — maybe we can actually make some progress. Admittedly, the Democratic Party’s stupidity has set us all back a long, long ways from where we were, but that was inevitable.

  163. Beatrice, an amateur cynic looking for a happy thought says

    Pierce R. Butler & consciousness razor,

    The thing about learning from one’s mistakes is… you have to figure out what the mistakes were.
    So of course it’s important to know why people voted for Trump, why some people didn’t vote at all and how to avoid such things in the future. I don’t really understand how Pierce can be considered in the wrong here?

  164. tomh says

    @ #145
    “majority of them don’t vote because they believe it will make no difference.”

    According to Pew Research, the US ranks 31st out of 35 developed countries in voter turnout. The #1 reason is that it takes work to register – in most countries registration is automatic, if you’re a citizen, you’re registered. In the US, one in four eligible voters aren’t registered. In the two previous elections, one stop registering and voting increased turnout.

    Another big reason is laziness. In many places it takes work to get to the polls and looking at delays when you get there. This goes hand in hand with apathy. If you tell yourself that your one vote won’t make a difference, (how many elections are decided by one vote), it’s easy to skip it. So you’re right that some people don’t vote because they think it won’t make a difference, but it’s not because they don’t have a populist to vote for. It’s simply a rationalization for laziness.

  165. voiceoreason says

    Vicar, I wish that were true.
    That said, I wish to bring up a quote from a man I wish was still on TV.

    “By acknowledging that, and seeing it for what it is, we still won’t do jack sh!t. Yeah. That’s us.”

    Jon Stewart wasn’t wrong then (we still haven’t done anything nationwide about guns), and I don’t think he’ll be wrong now. And Cynic, I understand you’re upset about the election, but racist and sexist pigs are not the only reason Clinton lost. Instead of lashing out at people saying otherwise, maybe learn. Realize why people think the way they do.

  166. consciousness razor says

    jack lecou:

    I can’t speak for Pierce, but the answer is obviously “lots”.

    It’s not as if I disagree. So tell me one specific or definite thing.

    I agree that we can unpack it some more to understand what it means, as I’ve already done for Libertarians above. They’re responsible for their own votes, and we can blame them for that. If they had voted for Clinton in at least several key states where the race between Trump/Clinton was very close (or in all states, but I don’t need all states), then it would’ve changed the electoral college outcome. That is something that could’ve happened.

    Telling me simply that they “would not” do so, without further analysis, isn’t telling me anything of any use. It in fact is the case, when you actually analyze the vote distribution and the electoral college, that their votes (or some fraction of their votes in some states) would’ve been sufficient for a Clinton win. Saying effectively that “oh, Libertarians can’t help themselves and aren’t responsible for their votes,” or simply that they “would not” do it for whatever mysterious reason you may feel like conjuring up if you ever say anything about why they would not, does not look like it’s analyzing anything in any depth at all.

    There are of course a lot of reasons why this happened, and the fucked up nature of the electoral college is one of them. But given that, one question to ask is what would have had to be different (not the same) in order to get the other result. If for some reason I’m forced to conclude that if they had not voted for the Libertarian candidate, those Libertarian voters could only have voted in favor of Trump and not Clinton (and it’s somehow just plain obvious that I shouldn’t hold them responsible for that), then I want to know what that reason is and be able to explain it to myself. Because I can’t do that right now.

  167. says

    The Vicar

    I don’t just sound like I’m gloating. I’m gloating. Not over Trump’s win, because nobody sane would gloat over that, but because Hillary Clinton finally lost, and we can maybe just possibly stop the rightward drift of the Democratic Party which she and her idiot husband were largely responsible for.

    This is incredible. Fucking idiot, Trump is going to be president. People will die. And you’re happy about it because it may drive the Democrats left? Sure, what’s 4 years* of possible fascism compared to that?

    *People have posted lots of evidence about how minority voters were kept from the polls. Do you believe that in 4 years they will have an easier time? Apart from the effin’ supreme court, of course.
    Bye marriage equality, bye Roe v Wade, bye Obamacare, but hey, you showed the b***, that’s what counts, right?

  168. says

    @#164, tomh

    Another big reason is laziness. In many places it takes work to get to the polls and looking at delays when you get there. This goes hand in hand with apathy. If you tell yourself that your one vote won’t make a difference, (how many elections are decided by one vote), it’s easy to skip it. So you’re right that some people don’t vote because they think it won’t make a difference, but it’s not because they don’t have a populist to vote for. It’s simply a rationalization for laziness.

    So, you’re saying that they have no motivation to overcome the barriers which are in place? Sounds to me very like an admission that I was right.

    And now, I’m going to follow my own advice from the past — “if you’re making a majority of posts in a thread, you’re talking too much” — and shut up for a while. I guess Nerd of Redhead and Giliell can come back and give us apologetics for Clinton, and tell us whose fault it was that she lost because it isn’t — can’t possibly be — hers. (Probably by now the official scapegoat is Wikileaks… oh, wait, no, I bet the official excuse has moved on to “people who personally took bribes from Putin to vote for Trump” by now, because every problem the party has suffered for the last few months has been blamed on Putin sooner or later. I’m surprised we haven’t seen accusations that Clinton’s pneumonia attack was bioterrorism from Russia.)

  169. says

    @142, Giliell

    A lot of people who would have voted against him couldn’t vote because the Voting Rights Act was culled.

    Not sure why you repeated this. I just responded to this.

    And that doesn’t even touch the point that felons are barred from voting, a demography that is, who would have thought, pretty black.

    Nothing here makes your position* more reasonable than mine. So why say it?

    Same response: the system very much needs to be fixed.

    *Not that I can really tell what your position is. Like I said, “whatever that is even supposed to mean”, and “horoscope”.

    (by the way: I’m Canadian)

  170. wsierichs says

    I’m not going to keep banging my head into a brick wall. A lot of Clinton supporters seem determined to do anything but understand what happened.

    Knee-jerk name-calling of people who could not vote for either Trump or Clinton isn’t going to change their minds. They’ll just see you as a jerk, no knee involved.

    Pretending that all scandal accusations against the Clintons were just right-wing propaganda is dishonest and won’t change anyone’s mind. “Benghazi!” was a phony non-scandal (except for the part that it was Congress that refused to spend adequately on embassy security and the part that Clinton and Obama played in blowing up Libya, creating another Somalia – which is the real Benghazi scandal). About 90 percent of all “scandals” about the Clintons were phony. But the email issue and the Clinton Foundation questions are not. Clinton clearly committed crimes in handling her emails. Pretending otherwise just means that people who understand why it’s a genuine scandal will simply ignore you.

    There are still some websites that draw Sanders’ supporters. Some bloggers offer intelligent thoughts and explanations about this disaster. Look them up and read the blogs and comments and you might being to comprehend what happened and why.

  171. wzrd1 says

    (Exihibit A: the number of times I’ve been banned here).

    Exhibit B: The number of times I’ve not been banned here, but should have, assuming what was said was accurate.
    Followed by “watch Fox” and give it credence, seriously? This nation doesn’t make enough booze for me to suspend disbelief that much!

    As for other arguments, one of the best described it well.
    The FBI jumped in, then jumped out after seeing to it that the latest nontroversy took root.
    Alas, yet another missed opportunity there, as before, while Trumpettes waxed long and loudly with all previous nontroversies over the Clintons. There can be no surprise within the Clinton campaign that many, many, many red state folks were going on about “the long string of bodies behind Hillary” and every other BS conspiracy theory on the Clinton family. Never addressed, but the campaign in the ass bulldog hard.
    One has to either address a rumor or ignore it, ignoring it gives it its own strength, as you’re not witnessed to be challenging it.
    Instead, nobody challenged the rumors, they dismissed them, rather than pointing out the Snopes pages and citations. For shit’s sake, the biggest warning should have been an innuendo driven campaign, with zero policies openly discussed, non-strategies that are announced as secret strategies, false information presented as facts and rectally procured “facts” being presented as reality. It wasn’t an issue based campaign, it was a smear campaign from start to finish and the smears, ignored. After all, that’s beneath our dignity to address.
    So, the one with no dignity won the election.

    In four years, if this is the best that I can expect again, *I* might toss my hat in the ring and I honestly don’t want the job.
    But, at least I understand what the other fucker thinks and what the followers think. I went out of my way to be sure that I learned that firsthand.
    Of course, I had an advantage toward the end of the campaign. A Yankee in NW Louisiana, obviously a man to be respected and confided to, right?
    Actually, yeah. People are worried, they’re scared and the divisive nature of our politics have them even more scared and worried, but they have one thing in common with all of you.
    They also care about this nation.
    Addressing those fears converts foes to friends, ignoring those concerns and fears simply reinforces them.

    But no, we get pointing between the aisles in all directions, never conducting a true, realistic after action review and then taking lessons learned to advance forward.
    Here’s a hint, if you’re pointing your finger, realize that three fingers are pointing right back at you, as it takes two to make an argument.

  172. says

    voiceofreason

    And Cynic,

    Fuck you.

    I understand you’re upset about the election,

    Fuck you double.
    Yes, I’m fucking upset. And I’m not even ‘Murican. My grandparents survived Hitler. There’s people in my family whom I never got to know because they died in the concentration camps.

    but racist and sexist pigs are not the only reason Clinton lost.

    No, people not caring enough about stopping fascism are also a big reason. They don’t look very different from where I stand.

    Instead of lashing out at people saying otherwise,

    You haven’t given a single reason that would be actually a convincing argument for “this was more important than preventing the election of an actual fascist. Gods, you people learned nothing from 33-45.

    maybe learn.

    Hey, I learned that people will always defend the fascism enablers

    Realize why people think the way they do.

    I’ve had enough of “try to understand the fascists” lately.

  174. voiceoreason says

    CYNIC.

    Since you appear not to understand any of my comments…
    I WAS EXPLAINING WHY PEOPLE WOULD VOTE AGAINST HILLARY AND FOR DONALD TRUMP. NOT WHY HILLARY CLINTON WAS A WORSE CANDIDATE THAN TRUMP, AS A MATTER OF FACT, I SPECIFICALLY SAID THAT I VOTED FOR CLINTON! AND I LIVE IN CALIFORNIA, A STATE I COULD CONCEIVABLY GET AWAY WITH VOTING 3RD PARTY!

    Let’s try this again: Clinton is better than Trump. Since she is better, people should have voted for her over Trump. Above and below are reasons why people did not.

  175. says

    @#167, Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk-

    Okay, I saw this and had to reply. Now I’ll shut up.

    This is incredible. Fucking idiot, Trump is going to be president. People will die. And you’re happy about it because it may drive the Democrats left? Sure, what’s 4 years* of possible fascism compared to that?

    Nope. As I said on the other thread, I’m using this silver lining to keep me from despair.

    Let me let you in on a little secret, you monstrous imbecile: I have a preexisting healthcare condition which is only being treated because of the Affordable Care Act. In 4 years, I will most likely be either dead or slowly dying (it’s under control for now) because I can’t afford to treat it otherwise. Unless there’s a major change, I’m half-expecting to be dead by 2018. I’ve been avoiding saying it out loud because our personal circumstances shouldn’t matter to our argumentation.

    I got over my fury at all this months ago, when it became clear that Clinton was the nominee and was likely to lose.

    But I remember the line from Terry Pratchett: “personal isn’t the same as important.” If the world would be genuinely and unquestionably better off as a result of a course of events which would remove me from it, then so be it. People like you claim the Democrats are the only way out, but the Democrats aren’t a way out if they’re running people like Hillary Clinton. My sacrifice, willing or not, will only not be wasted if the DLC strain is totally eradicated from the Democratic Party. So as a consolation prize, I’m celebrating the removal of the core of the pathology. The cancer has spread, so maybe there’s no hope, but at least the first step has been taken.

    So get off your high horse, you offensive dipshit.

    *People have posted lots of evidence about how minority voters were kept from the polls. Do you believe that in 4 years they will have an easier time? Apart from the effin’ supreme court, of course.
    Bye marriage equality, bye Roe v Wade, bye Obamacare, but hey, you showed the b***, that’s what counts, right?

    Do you believe that in 4 years, they would have had an easier time if Clinton had won? Voters were being suppressed in 2004, 2006, and 2008, and the Democrats refused to act in 2009 when they had the Presidency and a majority in Congress.

    My theory, and I have seen nothing which suggests it is wrong, is that the Democrats were hoping that voter repression would cause outrage which would end up boosting turnout overall — you know, the same way that Republicans didn’t try to outlaw abortion when they had the Presidency and both houses of Congress under Bush because it would rob them of one of their greatest recruitment tools if they succeeded.

    It’s like the idea that we shouldn’t demand a left-leaning candidate “because the Supreme Court!!!!” That problem is never going to go away; using that argument just means we support mediocre candidates like Clinton forever.

  176. npsimons says

    @ #98 re: White people suck.

    Fuck you. I voted for Jill Stein, and Cynthia McKinney before her, because I believed both of them to be the best candidates for the job. And you would judge me based purely on the color of my skin?

    And before anyone gives me shit for “stealing votes” from “legitimate” candidates, I’m in one of the reddest counties of one of the bluest states in the union; thanks to the electoral college and winner takes all, my vote for pres won’t change the outcome, so I feel justified in voting my conscience.

    I will admit, I mainly keep voting because if I don’t fill out my vote by mail card two times in a row, they stop sending it to me. We really need to hammer home getting more people on vote by mail. I don’t think I’d put up with waiting in line at the polling station, so I don’t blame others.

  177. DanDare says

    So the crazies are in control of all branches of government now. Fuck. Bloody dominionists are winning.

  178. jack lecou says

    If for some reason I’m forced to conclude that if they had not voted for the Libertarian candidate, those Libertarian voters could only have voted in favor of Trump and not Clinton (and it’s somehow just plain obvious that I shouldn’t hold them responsible for that), then I want to know what that reason is and be able to explain it to myself. Because I can’t do that right now.

    It’s not that you shouldn’t “hold them responsible.” It’s that “holding them responsible” — “scolding” was Pierce’s term — is not actually productive.

    Finding causal factors which can be productively addressed is helpful. Assigning blame is not.

    This reminds me very much of the usually conservative wont to dismiss various social problems — crime, substance abuse, unintended pregnancy, even poverty — as simply issues of individual vice. Their “solutions” are then to either just exhort people to be less morally defective (“just say no”, “abstinence only”), lock the “defective” people up (or, umm, eliminate them in some other way), or ignore it and hope it goes away.

    Even on a personal level, that doesn’t really work: If your brother-in-law, say, is getting into trouble somehow, it’s unlikely that castigating him for his ostensible moral failings is going to fix much of anything. He needs targeted intervention, which digs in and addresses whatever conditions are actually at the root of his particular problem.

    And on a policy level, simply chalking things up to personal moral failings is obviously a total disaster. If one person is doing something, maybe that’s just a personal problem. If tens of millions are, then you need to look for the common factors, and try to find ways to change conditions to reduce those factors, and/or mitigate the harm.

    So, are Libertarians bad people for voting for Johnson or Trump instead of Hillary? Yes. But that’s not helpful.

    Would Clinton have one if all the Libertarians had voted for her? Probably. She also would have won if all the Republicans had voted for her. Or if all the women had. Or if a couple hundred thousand extra millennials had gotten off there butts and voted. But those are all pretty empty counterfactuals. We might as well say “if the molecules in a tablespoon of salt were separate instead, then I’d have a handful of elemental chlorine and sodium.” True, but so what?

    The questions to ask are the “whys”. Why didn’t a few more minorities or millennials turn out? Why did Trump get so much support with less educated white people in the rustbelt? Etc.

  179. DanDare says

    @176 thats why US needs preferential voting. You You could give those guys your 1 vote and Clinton your 2 so Trump would not be advantaged.

  180. says

    Fuck you. I voted for Jill Stein, and Cynthia McKinney before her, because I believed both of them to be the best candidates for the job. And you would judge me based purely on the color of my skin?

    Oh my god, reverse racism!

    wussofeazon
    I notice you learned from Trump already: calling women names and yelling at them.

    tHe Vicar
    I’m sorry about your health. The rest remains unchanged. Thanks for the ableism, though.

    America, seeing your “progressives” you probably really deserve Trump. I’m just wondering what the rest of us did that we have to suffer alongside…

    Bye.

  181. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    This professor has predicted every presidential election since 1984. He’s still trying to figure out 2016.

    But Lichtman, a distinguished professor of history at American University, doesn’t use polling, demographics or sophisticated analysis of swing states. He makes his predictions based on 13 true/false statements that he says indicate whether the incumbent party will retain the White House or lose it in a given election.
    Lichtman and Russian scientist Volodia Keilis-Borok came up with the keys — a series of true/false statements — in the early 1980s. The idea is that if more than half of the keys are true, the incumbent party will stay in power, and if more than half are false, the challenging party will win the White House.

    I saw Litchman on an MSNBC segment just prior to the election. Only 6 of the keys were true for the democrats in 2016, predicting they would lose the presidency. At the time, Clinton was slightly ahead in the polls, which was surprising to Litchman, except Trump’s negatives were so great. He said any normal republican standard-bearer would handily win a “normal” election.
    The problem may not have been with Clinton per se, but she happened to be the democrat in this election. History was working in Trump’s favor, and eventually took him over the top.

  182. logicalcat says

    Vicar, I agree she should not have been the nominee. If you are discussing what the DNC should do for now and into the future, go for it. But to say that any of that baggage cost her the election is simply not true. People did not vote for her because of bullshit. Especially millennials most of whom did not even know any of the points you mentioned earlier. No, they voted against her (or not at all) because of bullshit. They would rather trade memes on Facebook, than actually look at the real facts of the matter. Because they are gullible. And I’m saying this as a millennial myself. Nobody talked about her issues with Libya, or wallstreet(weird, since it should have come up more often), or anything else mentioned here. No, people were talking about her health, her fucking emails, and apparently she assassinated some lawyers that were totally going to expose the very real election rigging and fraud that this criminal mastermind executed. As well as other lines of bullshit.

    No, seriously. They think she is some highly intelligent mastermind in line with some fucking anime or comic book villain capable of manipulating so many variables and not get caught. She lost the election because of bigotry and the gullibility of conspiracy theorists. And just like how those baby-boomers who told those millennials that Bernie was never going to happen, well I’m saying that Clinton was never meant to be. Even if all of those faults of hers you rightly point out did not exist, she would still have lost because a lot of time, energy, and money was spent building a straw man caricature that would still exist independent of any of the shit you mentioned. All out of fear of a woman president. For a bunch of people who are suppose to be liberal and totes not sexist, they fall very easily to republican propaganda spurred from sexism. All of that, plus the fact that this country is a lot more bigoted than it was pre-Obama with the surge of anti-sjws. Because this country is filled to the brim with the gullible, and the bigots. This country deserves Trump, except innocent people would get caught in the crossfire and all because some millennials did not want to be a grownups, and participate in the election (both the primary and the general). So excuse me if I am not exactly trilled with the generation that I am apparently a part of.

    As for the DNC, they are going to the right. Because the new right wing party is now going to be the even more right wing “alt-right” party, everything will shift to the right. That’s where the votes are. And the DNC, who aims to be at the centrist because they need to be in order to stay competitive, will shift along with them since now that new centrist position will be even more right than ever. Trump needed to lose, and lose big in order for any change in shifting the nation’s politics to the left, and because a Trump victory would mean that all of those horrible deplorables are now feeling empowered to run for office themselves. Maybe I’m wrong. I hope I am, but I don’t think I am.

    And that’s all I have to say about this shit show for now.

  183. ibyea says

    Vicar, there is one thing where I think you are wrong, and that is that you underestimate the spinelessness of the Democratic party. They will move to the right, like they have done back when Reagan won.

  185. a_ray_in_dilbert_space says

    Vicar, so I see you’ve got squat to suggest as well. Good to know.

    Oh, and the Dems lost Congress in 2010, because you lefties couldn’t be arsed to get out and support Obama, Obamacare or anything else that didn’t meet your grade of purity. I never did get to thank you. I won’t now.

  187. Beatrice, an amateur cynic looking for a happy thought says

    Pierce R. Butler,

    Reactions of various world politicians are interesting to read. The list of those who seem genuinely happy to have him is very indicative.

    There was a lot of mentions of Israel in most recent news about Trump, which makes me worry about the Palestinian people. For all the fear USAmericans feel , I’m afraid it’s people outside of US who might suffer the most. For all the ill that often brings, US still has individual states. There is still opposition and progressive people at various levels of power. With their efforts being spent on internal problems and trying to keep the status quo (because for once, that would be preferable to the alternative), will Trump have an easier time doing damage outside of US?
    It’s all just speculation, of course. He’s really a total wild card. Who know what the hell he wants or thinks.

  188. says

    “The truth is, most of Trump’s voters voted for him despite the fact that he said/believes awful things, not because of it. That in no way excuses it, but I have to admit I’ve spent eight years quietly tuning out news stories about drone strikes blowing up weddings in Afghanistan. I still couldn’t point to Yemen on a map. We form blind spots for our side, because there’s something larger at stake. In their case, it’s a belief that the system is fundamentally broken and that Hillary Clinton would have been more of the same. Trump rode a wave of support from people who’ve spent the last eight years watching terrifying nightly news reports about ISIS and mass shootings and riots. They look out their front door and see painkiller addicts and closed factories. They believe that nobody in Washington gives a shit about them, mainly because that’s 100-percent correct.” – http://www.cracked.com/blog/dont-panic/

  189. consciousness razor says

    jack lecou:

    It’s not that you shouldn’t “hold them responsible.” It’s that “holding them responsible” — “scolding” was Pierce’s term — is not actually productive.

    At the moment, I’m not intent on producing anything except a conclusion (which Pierce said is inaccurate) that Clinton would’ve won if Libertarians had voted for her. They are a third party, so it is not in any sense wrong for tomh or anybody else to attribute some responsibility to them for voting as they did, or for those votes having the effects that they did in the electoral college.

    Finding causal factors which can be productively addressed is helpful. Assigning blame is not.

    We could productively address it by making Libertarians less inclined to vote for right-wing assholes. What made you think that there is no productive way to address this problem? They could be swayed, and we should try whatever we can to do so.

    It is helpful to note, as a matter of fact, how the election would’ve been different if they were not so inclined, because we can use that information for something. It would have made a difference, if some fraction of Libertarians in some places had been inclined to vote for Clinton. They could have done that because they understood (1) the dangers of a Trump presidency (2) the widely known fact that their state races were going to be very close and would be critical for a Trump victory, making it very likely that Clinton needs their votes to win, and (3) voting for their most-preferred Libertarian candidate, who was also a fucking mess and shouldn’t have been preferred, would not productively address that problem. What do we need to do to get them productively address problems like that in the future, given that they weren’t doing it and were part of the problem this time?

    Would Clinton have one [won] if all the Libertarians had voted for her? Probably. She also would have won if all the Republicans had voted for her. Or if all the women had. Or if a couple hundred thousand extra millennials had gotten off there butts and voted. But those are all pretty empty counterfactuals.

    I don’t know what would make something a “full” or “non-empty” counterfactual. It isn’t asking for all Republicans to have chosen differently. Indeed, much less would have had to change to get this counterfactual result — it is pointing to a place where a very small number of people behaving differently would have made a very real and very productive difference. A fairly minimal change of the conditions we actually had would’ve given the counterfactual result we should’ve had. It’s generally much easier for us to make those kinds of changes as compared to bigger ones, so in the future we should realistically should focus not only on Libertarians but on other groups as well, who also would have the biggest relative impact.

    If you’re saying that I haven’t yet said everything that we need to do, given that information, then I guess I’m guilty as charged. I certainly don’t have all of the answers. But it should be clear that I’m not opposed to doing stuff about it, and only want to point a finger at people. Let’s first agree that there is a problem with the way they voted, so we’ll have a reason to do something about that. And then of course let’s do something about it.

    The questions to ask are the “whys”. Why didn’t a few more minorities or millennials turn out? Why did Trump get so much support with less educated white people in the rustbelt? Etc.

    Okay, then why didn’t Libertarians vote for Clinton? I wanted to establish in the first place that it would make a difference in the electoral college. That was apparently under dispute, but if it’s not anymore, then I will happily move on to other questions.

  190. tomh says

    “Sounds to me very like an admission that I was right.”

    Only in your own head. The #1 reason is work to register. Laziness is another reason, but neither one has anything to do with a “populist,” (whatever you think that is, heck Trump has been described as a populist), running.

  191. Silver Fox says

    The young black women in one of my wife’s colleague’s classes begged to be allowed to stay home today. They said they were afraid. They were terrified of what was to come. Class was cancelled, but only after a long consultation with my wife. It will be resumed on Friday and the topic of racism under a fascist government will be discussed.

  192. krsone says

    I have to apologize to Gilliel. I reprimanded her and others for devoting time to gardening while more important things were happening and there was more to be done to address injustice, but I see that she’s one of the people here who have gotten it right. Trump is the candidate of the KKK and of white supremacists, and he’s planning a quiet genocide of non-white people.

    Black people need your money now more than ever. Now it’s not even a matter of justice, it’s a matter of survival. Trump is going to take away everything that benefits black people in any shape or form and leaves us to die of hunger in the streets or to be killed by platoons of white supremacists. It’s a new genocide that will slip past white people’s minds because it won’t have concentration camps.

    If you have a shred of moral decency after racist white people (the vast majority of them) elected the white supremacist genocidal trump you HAVE to donate money and time to black people as much as you can. Otherwise you’ll be accomplices in a genocide, and when Trump is hopefully asked to answer for his crimes you’ll be judged guilty too.

  193. tomh says

    @ #189

    Don’t leave out the Stein voters, in WI and MI they could have swung the vote by themselves.

  194. npsimons says

    @ #188 re: http://www.cracked.com/blog/dont-panic/

    That was refreshing. Also, it strikes me that the more I read, the more I feel that there are problems that many on the left (myself included) are not even remotely aware of, and debating why Clinton lost is not going to solve those problems. I’m talking problems of people without jobs or money, desperate for anyone who will promise to fix the system that caused those problems and worse than that, doesn’t care about their problems.

    So I guess my question is, how can we address these people’s problems? Because it seems to me, if we fix that, maybe these people wouldn’t be desperate enough to vote for someone like Trump.

  195. consciousness razor says

    Don’t leave out the Stein voters, in WI and MI they could have swung the vote by themselves.

    I can believe that. I haven’t looked so closely at all of the numbers, but the Libertarian case was obvious to me last night. I’m sure we’ll still hear the same bullshit from third party voters, facts be damned.

    Everybody: it was a close election. Clinton apparently won the popular vote, yet we’ve been denied our rights because of a fucked up system we implicitly accept for no good reason at all. But anything predicated on the idea that Clinton was very unpopular looks suspicious to me — it seems to be counting something other than people. Of course, roughly half of the country didn’t even vote, which is depressing as always. But about a quarter of the country voted for the Trump/Pence hate-smothered dumpster fire in a trainwreck, while another half decided not to do shit about it. That’s fucking terrifying. I don’t know how you could be in a frame of mind where you’re stressed about the less shitty things (but still very shitty) that Clinton would’ve done. We’ve got bigger fucking problems here — maybe that hasn’t quite hit you yet because of the shock of how awful Trump is, but you better come to realize it pretty fucking fast.

  196. voiceoreason says

    Oh goodness. We’ve lost 4 years, maybe 8 years, on Climate Change. They’re going to gut Obamacare. They’re going to cut taxes for the rich, raise them for the poor, and this is what a quarter of the country voted for.
    F.

  197. krsone says

    But about a quarter of the country voted for the Trump/Pence hate-smothered dumpster fire in a trainwreck, while another half decided not to do shit about it.

    A quarter of the country voted for the KKK candidate, but in the half of the country that you mention there are many black people who COULDN’T vote because of laws passed by racists to limit the vote of black people. It’s impossible to do shit about the KKK if you can’t vote against the KKK.

  198. Pierce R. Butler says

    npsimons @ # 194 – In what sense could a person “not even remotely aware of” unemployment and poverty describe themselves as “on the left”?

    (Still – I think you’ve come up with the most concise constructive suggestion here so far…)

  199. jack lecou says

    At the moment, I’m emperor if the United States was an not intent on producing anything except a conclusion (which Pierce said is inaccurate) that Clinton would’ve won if Libertarians had voted for her.

    I mean, I haven’t done the math, but sure. “Clinton would have won if Libertarians had voted for her” is (assuming the basic math checks out) a true enough counterfactual. So is “Clinton would be Emperor of Australia, if Australia were an Empire, Clinton were born into its ruling class, and rose to become the top claimant to the throne.” Neither is interesting though, because they’re also discarding much of the practical contingencies that would link them to the real world.

    Pierce was objecting to a statement that you could pin the blame on third party candidates or voters, saying no, there just weren’t that many of them, at least not many that are ideologically compatible with Clinton. There were a handful of Greens and whatnot who we can assume probably would prefer Clinton to Trump, sure, but — and I’m adding context here — not anything like Nader’s numbers in 2000 or Perot’s n ’92, where you can actually make a case for spoiler effects.

    As far as I can tell, that’s true.

    Now, why should you expect Libertarians to vote for (or at least accept) right wing assholes over centrist/liberal Democrats? Because…Libertarians are (mostly) right wing assholes! Libertarianism has right wing roots, and rigid tenets and assumption that often take it into pretty racist territory to boot. If anything is surprising, it’s that more Libertarians weren’t straight up in the Trump camp.

    So “Libertarians could have voted for Hillary” has just about the same semantic content as “KKK members could have swung the election by voting for Clinton.” True? Very possibly. Any useful takeaways? Probably not. We’re basically in “if wishes were fishes” territory.

    The more interesting groups are probably those like rust belt working class whites, especially historically democratic labor blocks. To the extent any of them were tipped over by Trump’s economic populist message (rather than straight racism alone) they are likely much more gettable with an alternative left wing populist message, if some Democratic candidate were ever to actually come up with such a thing at some point in the future.

    (Should we call such people racists and hold them accountable for supporting a racist orange fuckwit like Trump? Yes. But I’d still reach out to them and accept their vote in 2018 or 2020 if possible, and it’s more likely to be forthcoming than a typical Libertarian’s.)

  201. jack lecou says

    Wow, I really paste mangled that quote somehow. More proofreading needed. Top of 199 should be:

    At the moment, I’m not intent on producing anything except a conclusion (which Pierce said is inaccurate) that Clinton would’ve won if Libertarians had voted for her. They are a third party, so it is not in any sense wrong for tomh or anybody else to attribute some responsibility to them for voting as they did, or for those votes having the effects that they did in the electoral college.

  202. feministhomemaker says

    Just now logging in. Thank you #10, Ariaflame! Thank you so damn much for your comment. I needed that. I am so sick of that lazy lie. Thank you for knocking it down so fully.

    I just had to read a male family member explain how he voted for Trump even though he has no economic angst, makes good money and is well educated, because he had to support the innocent, defenseless life of babies (fetuses). He denied any misogyny involved in his choice. His righteous head in the sand regarding women’s history and forced breeding, an actual badge of slavery, sickened me. His educated, nonsexist mind chose a man, Trump, who mouthed anti-choice words he desperately wanted to hear out of obvious expediency, while dismissing Trump’s clearly sincere words indicating he believed he had a right to sexually assault the women that male family member wants to deny reproductive rights to.

    So please, don’t tell me anything about how bernie was better and could have won even though he lost to Hillary by 3 million votes and she won the popular general vote. Injustice exists in intimate spaces, within the men who say they love us but who show over and over that women’s lives just don’t matter to them. Whether it is dismissing the urgency of our reproductive rights while slobbering over emails purposefully mischaracterized and released by a woman-hating, specifically Hillary-hating man, Assange, or just not caring about giving any attention to the actual phenomenon of history, women in it, and why so many people might be so dismissive of Hillary and instead be so gullible to lap up every republican smear about her, it doesn’t matter. Bros did not come out for us, their sisters, their mothers, their daughters, their wives, their fucking girlfriends. Don’t ever talk to me about how Bernie Bros are progressive. Eat Shit!

    Thank you for your comment. So much. I needed that!

  203. consciousness razor says

    krsone:

    Yes, certainly. I don’t know how many disenfranchised voters there were (in some sense we all were, because the popular vote won’t matter). Incidentally, I was nearly one of them yesterday because of the laws you mentioned, but eventually things worked out for me. Anyway, I’m sure it’s a large group in some critical swing states that went to Trump. If that’s not a rigged election, then I don’t know what is.

    All of that shit needs to change in a serious way, and it has not a fucking thing to do with how untrustworthy or conservative Clinton is (not that you’ve argued this, krsone). Her fucking email server or her conservativeness didn’t do that. Do you plan to do anything to change it? When? After you’re done complaining about her today? So it will be tomorrow? When?

  204. consciousness razor says

    To that end: Instruct the electoral college to vote in accordance with the popular vote

    There’s also this:
    http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/written-explanation

    The bill has been enacted by 11 jurisdictions possessing 165 electoral votes—61% of the 270 electoral votes necessary to activate it, including four small jurisdictions (RI, VT, HI, DC), three medium- size states (MD, MA, WA), and four big states (NJ, IL, NY, CA). The bill has passed a total of 33 legislative chambers in 22 states—most recently by a bipartisan 40–16 vote in the Arizona House, a 28–18 vote in the Oklahoma Senate, a 57–4 vote in New York Senate, and a 37–21 vote in Oregon House.
    […]
    The National Popular Vote interstate compact would not take effect until enacted by states possessing a majority of the electoral votes—that is, enough to elect a President (270 of 538). Under the compact, the winner would be the candidate who received the most popular votes from all 50 states (and DC) on Election Day. When the Electoral College meets in mid-December, the national popular vote winner would receive all of the electoral votes of the enacting states.

    Might be easier than a constitutional amendment. A fair amount of progress has already been made. Write your state legislators. It would be especially helpful if your state has lots of electoral votes, but all would be welcome.

  205. voiceoreason says

    Well, I would, but my state is smart and already put their name up there.

    We can do something about this stuff. Support Wolfpac and the like. Get money out of politics. Let’s do this.

  206. jrkrideau says

    What do you think will be the first official act by a man who gets his intelligence and political advice from Russia Today?

    Well, it’s a better source than Fox News.

    Oh, the Canadian immigration site is reportedly back up.

  207. krsone says

    All of that shit needs to change in a serious way, and it has not a fucking thing to do with how untrustworthy or conservative Clinton is (not that you’ve argued this, krsone). Her fucking email server or her conservativeness didn’t do that. Do you plan to do anything to change it? When? After you’re done complaining about her today? So it will be tomorrow? When?

    Clinton is an entitled rich white woman whose husband has piggybacked on black vote but at least she’s not the KKK. Lesser of two evils there, and by far: being exploited is at least better than being killed or starved. Trump is the KKK, no difference whatsoever except he’s not wearing a white hoodie in public (although it wouldn’t surprise me if he dabbled in the Klan in private).

    I really don’t care about Clinton’s email server. It’s peanuts, stuff that all politicians do, probably not even illegal (I admit I haven’t checked). It doesn’t matter. It’s a pretext for distracting gullible white people from the fact that Trump is the KKK personified. Although those who are distracted in such a way aren’t much better than those who vote the KKK candidate with glee.

    I bet that Trump’s private emails are full of far worse stuff than Clinton’s. It wouldn’t surprise me if he downloaded child porn and sent it to his other KKK friends. Many KKK members are rapists and pedophiles. Raping black women was a popular KKK sport back in the day, while black men who even dared to look at white women were lynched on the spot.

  209. grandolddeity says

    From around the water cooler:

    I’ve heard a lot of banter from a lot of white folk (and a few not-white folk) about how bad the Obama Administration has messed up their lives. Funny thing is, these folk have some of the better paying blue collar jobs available in our area. (The area has a mix of poverty, middle class, wealthy and very wealthy). These folk have multiple vehicles including airboats, bass boats, off-road four-wheelers, 4×4 pick-ups, gas guzzling, insurance/registration requiring vehicles, homes, barns full of things they complain about having bought, dozens of guns w/ammo and expensive hobbies. They flaunt their poor financial choices like a badge of honor. But their travails must be someone elses fault, right?

    They have affordable medical plans through their employer. Me, too.

    We have high school students driving vehicles I (as an older adult married male) can’t afford. Many of them.

    These folks are indignant about helping the less fortunate…”the American Way is for everyone to provide for themselves”. “It’s not how The Founding Fathers intended it”.

    The victory yesterday went to ignorance, intolerance and irrationality, IMO. Once Again.

    Trumps recent promise to unite the country “as never before”, has the same hollow ring to it as his entire election campaign did. I won’t be surprised when his emotional electorate deals with him in their own fashion when his administration fails to deliver on the rhetoric he employed to lure their votes.

    What I’ve seen in my area is a fleet of folks who aren’t happy unless they’re PO’d at someone or something. It isn’t real or true for most of them.

  210. wzrd1 says

    I won’t be surprised when his emotional electorate deals with him in their own fashion when his administration fails to deliver on the rhetoric he employed to lure their votes.

    As that group, as you noted, is quite well armed, “their own fashion” could very well involve force of arms within our nation’s capitol. That’s not quite an optimal solution.

  211. John Morales says

    Disappointing.

    —

    Best summary IMO, from Charlie Stross:

    Here’s my short term prediction, followed by my long term prediction. (And if you are American, I’m very, very, sorry.)

    Next couple of months: Obama exits. People will feel a strange sad fondness for the utopian era of good governance. (In time, the past 8 years will seem surrounded by a rosy glow, as of Camelot during the days of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table; they will even come to think kindly of George W. Bush.)

    Here’s the facile, obvious version:

    Trump will have to be painfully educated that the office of POTUS is not a CEO’s desk where he can rule by decree, but the head of a 400-person executive team who interact with other agencies and negotiate to get results. The hairpiece that walks like a man won’t like that. In fact, he’ll sulk, and probably retire to his golf course and leave running the USA to Vice President Pence, a man who seems to think that The Handmaid’s Tale was a road map rather than a dystopia, and the likes of Rudy Giuliani (about whom the less said, the better). It’ll be four years of the ugly old white male phobes running the federal government, and only the huge inertia built into the system of checks and balances will prevent it from being a total fright-fest as opposed to a major throwback fright-fest. In the mid-terms of 2018 the Democrats will pick up votes and hopefully re-take the Senate, which will put a brake on Trump … and in 2020, who knows?

  212. slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) says

    re 211:
    Trump sulking litting Pence run it, sounds reminiscent of Bush/Cheney, where Bush was hiding in undiscolsed locations letting Cheney run the show. That went well, eh?/s

  213. says

    Random thought, as published on facebook and http://antiphilosopher.com/wiki/index.php/Why_of_Trump

    http://www.nytimes.com/…/elec…/stop-shaming-trump-supporters NYT … Stop Shaming Trump Supporters

    This is,. I think, the best picture of what happened. It isn’t a repudiation of Washington … an absurd number of incumbents notably contributing to gridlock were re-elected.

    Just as too many of my fellow atheists, I’ve sadly come to see, are prone to interpret religion as a deficiency of personal mental hygiene rather than a complex mesh of interconnected circumstances, habits of thought and most importantly social connection that many need too much to reject because of otherwise meaningless metaphysical arguments. Likewise Trump won because too many of my fellow liberals likewise throw language of privilege as a tribal totem denoting our “enlightenment” and use language derogatory of those who don’t acknowledge such rather than trying to understand that many who refuse assertions of “privilege” often really are struggling or suffering to an extent such that the notions of “privilege” seems ludicrous.

    We fall too easily into habits of thought that crystallize around words that become defensive bulwarks of our thinking and identity. We then divide in tribes based upon acceptance or rejection of words rather than tryng to understand why the language is inadequate to share our understanding … or let us expand our own understanding to include the experiences of others.
    The NYT article illuminates that Trump won, not because his ideas are good – he really didn’t express any constructively – but because he provided a channel of rejection and expression of hostility towards those and disillusionment of those we have not been inclusive of … not because we don’t care – we do, I do at least as this is where I grew up, and these are my family – but because they rejected the words we use to describe our ideals. Our “inclusiveness” excluded many closest to us because we were blind to the hurt our words caused.

    — TWZ (20161109)

  214. wzrd1 says

    Actually, on 9/11, Bush was on the command post aircraft, Cheney was at Site R. Site R isn’t exactly a place one runs much of anything from.

  215. npsimons says

    @ #198 re: In what sense could a person “not even remotely aware of” unemployment and poverty describe themselves as “on the left”?

    Certainly the left has addressed and is still addressing the institutional racism that leads to the majority of poor, unemployed and jailed people being those of a minority race. And that’s very important, and something that should continue happening. But if we want to understand the point of view of Trump supporters, what I’ve read (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/nov/03/trump-supporters-us-elections, http://www.cracked.com/blog/dont-panic/) leads me to believe that they feel disenfranchised (“That sick feeling some of you have right now? They’ve had that for the last eight years. Call them racists, if you want — some of them definitely are — but mostly they’re regular people who want jobs, security, and safety.”)

    I don’t have easy answers; heck, I don’t have *any* answers, but if we don’t want people like Trump in power, we need to figure out ways to address these peoples’ problems. Bickering over Bernie versus Hillary and throwing epithets of racism and sexism accomplish fuck all. Maybe a more grassroots approach is in order.

    Another quote that struck me: “For many, who had focused on their community over career, it felt like their entire world was collapsing.” I have focused on my community to the detriment of my career. I am doing pretty good, and my career hasn’t suffered too much, but I definitely could be doing *much* better if I had said “fuck my community, career first!” It seems to me that people who make that sort of sacrifice are worth trying to win over.

  216. grandolddeity says

    True story:

    Non-white co-worker mansplains how no one in his family will touch ACA, gotta be repealed. Cut back to me: white relative on ACA, for $32/mo, yo, a month, had a major abdominal/intestinal surgery paid for. STHU.

    My wife and I each (different employers) have employee only medical/dental/vision/life and it costs us about $400/mo. Work it smart folks. Get yourself in someplace that doesn’t suck. Start young.

    But if you’re ignorant of your options and make poor choices…

    On the other hand, vote Republican, and you can ensure yourself limited options. When you need them, they’ll gerrymander your suffering self to the street. We have lots of them where I live. They can’t even afford cardboard to keep their sign “fresh”. We have an energetic guy on a bike who has been working our retail district for nigh onto four years.

  217. tomh says

    @ #204

    The NPVIC is a very clever plan to circumvent the electoral college, and much easier than a Constitutional Amendment. Unfortunately, as Nate Silver explains, it’s going to be tough to actually get there. It’s well worth trying for, though.

  218. Ruby says

    @204 Yeah, but that doesn’t help us now (all 11 of the states that adopted it went Blue this time anyway!) which is the point of my petition. To have the electoral results of THIS election conform to a popular vote.

    There will still need to be a reckoning about how this all happened, but at least the apocalypse will have been forestalled.

  219. What a Maroon, living up to the 'nym says

    npsimons@176,

    #notallwhitepeople, amirite? Never mind that we’ve been running this place for four centuries, and in that time have raped and murdered and driven off their land the locals, enslaved millions of POC, and even after we “freed” them kept them in virtual slavery in the south and shuttled them into ghettos in the north, stolen half the land of Mexico and exploited the land and peoples to our south and then blamed them when they came here to work shit jobs for shit pay because even that was a better option than staying home –need I go on? But hey, your conscience is clear because you voted for a few progressive candidates over the years.

    But here’s something to think about while you’re basking in the glow of your virtue. Giliell brought up the rise of Hitler, but there’s some more context here. The Communists hated the Socialists, in part because they supported the war, the Socialists hated the Communists, and meanwhile the more traditional conservative parties tried to harness Hitler’s movement because they thought they could control him. But Hitler was young and energetic; Trump doesn’t seem to be in the best of help, so maybe we won’t have to deal with him long. And I’m sure President Pence won’t be nearly so bad….

    In the meantime, we’re slouching towards WWIII; hell, we might be there already, and we’re just waiting to figure out if we’re at war with East Asia or Eurasia, or maybe both. Hey, here’s an idea: how about a non-aggression pact between Putin and Trump? They can have Syria; we’ll take Iraq. And if Iran or N Korea objects, well, we’ve still got more nukes than them.

    But there’s a silver lining in all this: nuclear winter will mean the end of global warming.

  220. Pierce R. Butler says

    npsimons @ # 215 – Thanks for the reply.

    … if we don’t want people like Trump in power, we need to figure out ways to address these peoples’ problems.

    One (more) of the policy areas where Bernie Sanders would clearly have made a better candidate than HRC. (Which is not to say I feel confident he’d’ve won either – just that the alt-right’s anti-semitism would have displaced much of the sexism on center stage the last several months.)

  221. John Morales says

    In terms of postmortem: Hillary got slightly more population votes, Trump got vastly more electoral votes.

    (The “Electoral College” idea is patently not democratic in a representative sense; it’s not the majority which speaks)

  222. grandolddeity says

    Hasn’t 9/11 been WWIII? It’s involved almost all the globe. It hasn’t been won by any single group or coalition. Maybe we’re going to have WW3 and WW4 go on at the same time. Maybe we need a bravado with his finger on the trigger to, you know, apocalypse us into…I dunno, the fifth century? That would put Trump in the History of The Universe class.

    Trump: “Ooh. Ooh. Me Like!” “Believe Me when I tell you I have The Best Nuking!”

  223. tomh says

    @ #200

    Seriously? You think you can change the Constitution with a petition? I don’t think it works that way. For what it’s worth, Gore had more of a popular vote margin over Bush than Clinton over Trump.

  224. rorschach says

    The Democrats totally missed the boat, in that this was always going to be an anti-establishment election. And they went ahead and put the most establishment candidate available against Trump.
    That, and the repeat of the Nader stupidity of the 2000 election with Stein and Johnson, plus 50% of eligible voters, in particular Democrats who couldn’t be bothered to vote for candidate Clinton staying home, and there’s your outcome.

    There’s not enough whisky in the world to get me or anyone else through this, and I can’t laugh about the fact that 4.5 million people in Florida, a country that will be partially submerged in 100 years, just voted for a guy who thinks climate change is a Chinese hoax.

    And make no mistake, it has already begun:
    https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trump-picks-top-climate-skeptic-to-lead-epa-transition/

  225. consciousness razor says

    Yeah, but that doesn’t help us now (all 11 of the states that adopted it went Blue this time anyway!) which is the point of my petition. To have the electoral results of THIS election conform to a popular vote.

    Petitioning the White House for a polite answer (which will correctly be “we can’t do anything about it”) certainly isn’t going to do anything about it. If you want Obama’s opinion, I’m sure he would say (if he hasn’t already) that it’s a darn shame how our system works, and we should maybe think about doing something. That would pretty much be the end of the conversation and accomplish nothing, not right now or at any time in the future. The Constitution doesn’t permit the President, or even the whole executive branch working in unison, to do anything about it. Obama knows that, and he would not be willing to do anything unconstitutional to give you the result that you and I and he and most voters wanted.

    Conceivably (totally unlikely, mind you), since the 2016 electors haven’t come together to elect anybody yet, a lot of very swift action from a lot of state legislators could enact the law. I guess that would legally and Constitution be effective immediately, so it would help us now. But some people (many in that quarter of the country who voted for Trump) would start tearing their hair out in dismay, when informed that a bunch of state legislators looked at the potential electoral college votes, didn’t like what that meant, and decided to do something about it now, before the electors (Trump’s in particular) had their chance to fuck us over by pretending they’re the ones who ought to have voting rights instead of us.

    Anyway, we could’ve done something about this a very long time ago. We could do something now or any time in the future that would be convenient for you. I’d like it to be sooner rather than later. Writing a petition to get Obama to publicly state/explain his position on the matter will not do it, because his position doesn’t matter, since he cannot (and the executive should not, as I bet he agrees) legitimately do anything about it.

  226. Mrdead Inmypocket says

    Brexit was the most irresponsible, dumbest thing I have ever witne…

    US elections: “Hold my beer y’all, watch this.”

    I stand corrected.

  227. logicalcat says

    @wsierichs

    Yes, there are many blogs that attract Bernie supporters. I indeed looked into them, and they were bullshit. The emails were bullshit. The Clinton foundation scandal was bullshit. And getting ignored by people who think there is something criminal in there even though there isn’t, just affirms what I said earlier; that progressive/liberals are gullible as fuck. If you have any actual evidence that I somehow missed, please link.

  228. daulnay says

    You really want to know why this happened? In 2012, Pew research did an analysis of the electorate:
    http://www.people-press.org/2014/06/26/typology-comparison/party/.

    Add up the numbers for each group. Then take a look at the Hard-Pressed Skeptics and look at their issues. They went big for Obama in 2008, and moved into the middle in 2012. This year, Trump hit all their hotbutton issues, down the line. They made the difference between Democrats winning and losing in 2008, 2012, and this time, and they’re the group that helped Trump win the nomination. He brought them into the Republican fold because the Dems didn’t deliver for them over 8 years, and instead nominated Hillary Clinton who would deliver more of the same neoliberal stuff.

    Never mind that the Republicans obstructed; for most people, that’s too inside baseball. Especially if you’re living on the edge and you’re desperate. There’s a ton of blame to go around for what happened, all of America on the right and left blew this. So did all the austerity-mongers in Europe that helped keep the world in a near-depression.

  230. John Morales says

    SowNunDeskCar, that would be because Gamergate (and the puppies) were a symptom, not a cause.

  231. wsierichs says

    I wasn’t going to comment any more on this thread, but an article elsewhere dissecting the disaster spurred me to write a comment there. I’ve copied it below. Unless people are willing to honestly look at why she lost, this disaster will happen again. Unless/until the deeply corrupt DNC is cleansed, expect more Trumps:

    A lot of people still don’t seem to grasp the basic reason Trump won. This was the campaign when the Reptilian Party base woke up and realized that it was the Establishment – both parties, the corporate-owned right-wing Mass Media (just about all of it) and other purveyors of the Establishment con (economists, pundits, etc.) – that had been royally screwing them for decades. Trump didn’t say anything really different from what the GOP had been saying for a long time. Nixon brought segregationists into the party and the evil Reagan put them in charge. The other Reptilian candidates lost to Trump because he sold himself as the anti-Establishment candidate (falsely, but that’s another debate) when most GOP candidates were clearly part of the Establishment the base had come to hate. That’s why the Reptilian base ignored all of the negative media reports about him as just being more lies from the Establishment. Yes, sexism, hatred of the Clintons based upon a lot of phony scandals (not all scandals were phony; the email issue is a serious scandal and I think involved serious crimes, but that’s another debate), Islamaphobia, homophobia, the yearning for white privilege, etc. all played a role. But underlying that was the economic tsunami that had been washing over working Americans for a long time. Trump was able to direct the blame at nonwhites and other traditional targets of bigotry.

    The Democrats should still have beaten him, but they missed the message in Trump’s success. The Democratic base has recognized for a long time that it’s been screwed too, but it wasn’t until Sanders came along that the Democratic majority felt they had a real champion with a real chance of winning, not the milquetoast Establishment creatures they’d been given for several decades. Rightly or wrongly (I think very rightly), when Sanders lost the nomination, they blamed the Establishment – and Clinton was the very essence of the Establishment. The perception that she got the nomination through many dirty tricks infuriated many. She turned off enough Democrats that they would not vote for her, or they were Democrats so desperate for a populist leader that they voted for Trump while holding their noses.

    I don’t excuse anyone who voted for Trump, but I don’t blame anyone who could not vote for Clinton either. She and the DNC bear sole guilt for trying to force the most Establishment of figures down our collective throat – one who openly, in some ways insultingly, rejected the change people desperately want.

    For the record, I voted for Jill Stein, but that’s because Louisiana was not a swing state so my vote didn’t count unless I voted for the Orange Goblin.

  232. John Morales says

    wsierichs, your pathetic naivety amuses me.

    That you imagine that Trump is not part of the Establishment (or that his policies don’t support it) is telling.

    (Look at what they do, rather than listen to what they say)

  233. Ichthyic says

    That you imagine that Trump is not part of the Establishment

    I don’t think he does…

    The other Reptilian candidates lost to Trump because he sold himself as the anti-Establishment candidate (falsely, but that’s another debate)

  234. SowNunDeskCar says

    wsierichs: “Trump […] sold himself as the anti-Establishment candidate (falsely, but that’s another debate)”
    John Morales: “That you imagine that Trump is not part of the Establishment (or that his policies don’t support it) is telling.”
    Reading comprehension is difficult.

  235. John Morales says

    wsierichs:

    For the record, I voted for Jill Stein, but that’s because Louisiana was not a swing state so my vote didn’t count unless I voted for the Orange Goblin.

    Heh. Your vote might not have made any proximate difference, but it did count.

    Also, please note you’ve actually asserted that it didn’t count, since you didn’t vote for the “Orange Goblin”, the which was the sole condition you claimed would make it count.

    (sigh)

  236. logicalcat says

    @John Morales,

    I don’t think wsierichs is saying that Trump is anti-establishment, but rather people thought he was. Its how they feel. These people are wrong, but they genuinely believed he was anti-establishment.

    @wsierichs Also while I’m on the subject, no the DNC do not bear the blame. They ran a primary, that’s it. They didn’t rig anything so it was the voters who decided that Clinton was a good decision, even though it never was. Spineless democrats who voted for Hillary because she “is the best candidate for stoping Trump”. Bernie lost because his campaign was shit compared to Hillary’s, its time progressives own up to reality.

  237. Ichthyic says

    one who openly, in some ways insultingly, rejected the change people desperately want.

    but… she didn’t. she constantly repeated that she would in fact carry forward the progressive social initiatives started by Obama.

    but she is a “small steps” kind of politician…. thinks the best way to do things is to take a small step, analyze what the impact of that was, before deciding where to place the next step.

    bottom line is, what really threw this election wasn’t the people voting for Trump. turns out basically it was entirely in line with who voted for Romney in 2012.

    this was entirely a rejection of HIllary Clinton from the left… and in my opinion, mostly based on faulty reasoning and misinformation.

    which means… the 25 year misinformation campaign against the Clintons run by the right finally paid off, but I don’t think either side is entirely happy with the result.

    the problem with this election is EXACTLY, 100%, the same problem that occured in the last midterm elections…. the left did not show up in enough numbers to counter the right’s near constant high voter turnout.

    it’s just that simple.

    but now, all progressives have a common enemy. maybe it won’t be like herding cats this time around?

    do something! run for local office! get some penetration at the state level for progressives, that you can use to build a base to run for federal office.

    it’s exactly what the teabaggers did, and it only took them 12 years to control all 3 branches of the US government.

    you telling me there aren’t enough smart progressives to pull that off even faster, if they wanted to?

  238. John Morales says

    Ichthyic:

    I don’t think he does…

    I was trying to be kind, but fair enough: the claim is that other voters are idiots, because they thought their vote for Trump was an anti-establishment vote.

    —

    SowNunDeskCar:

    Reading comprehension is difficult.

    As is voting so as to make it not count — yet you’ve achieved that goal by your own contention.

    (What did you imagine I meant by watch what they do, rather than go by what they say?)

  239. says

    @#176, npsimons

    @ #98 re: White people suck.
    Fuck you. I voted for Jill Stein, and Cynthia McKinney before her, because I believed both of them to be the best candidates for the job. And you would judge me based purely on the color of my skin?

    Look, at this point? That conclusion is entirely warranted on purely statistical grounds, and I’m visibly white myself before you object. One of the African-American families down the street has a kid, and the kid used to always break into a run when he got near my house until he passed. (He has stopped, although goodness knows whether this election will reverse that again.) At first I found it embarrassing and annoying, but honestly I can’t blame any African-American kid for being nervous around white adults when they’re alone. I would sooner harm myself than harm that kid, but they have no way of knowing that. All white people are Schröedinger’s Racist, and if more people are noticing it and calling us out on it, that may even be a good thing.

    @#180, Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk-

    I’m sorry about your health. The rest remains unchanged. Thanks for the ableism, though.

    Ooh, hey, nice to see your gaffe didn’t stop you from trying to one-up my on personal virtue. On rereading, I’m guessing you object to the use of the word “imbecile” to mean “very stupid person” because decades ago, doctors used to use it. Tell you what: give me a noun that means “very stupid person” and I’ll apologize for calling you an imbecile and call you that instead. You very much deserve it.

    America, seeing your “progressives” you probably really deserve Trump. I’m just wondering what the rest of us did that we have to suffer alongside…

    Tell me which country and I’ll tell you their government’s sins, and if you’re going to claim that American progressives deserve Trump, then all countries deserve their governments.

    @#182, logicalcat

    But to say that any of that baggage cost her the election is simply not true. People did not vote for her because of bullshit.

    So, your explanation of why all these rural whites, who never voted in large numbers before, came out of the woodwork this time is what, precisely? They didn’t vote against Obama 4 or 8 years ago. They were the thing that really cost Clinton the election, when you get right down to it — Trump did worse with whites overall than Romney by around 1%, worse with urban/suburban whites, and worse with college-educated whites. (Here is that citation again in case you missed it the other time.) The “hidden” Trump voters were all rural whites. Why did they suddenly turn out in force? The only explanation which both makes sense and matches up with what people were saying in exit polls is that all the anti-Clinton stuff from the 1990s — which, like the Benghazi scandal, was all nonsense but served to obscure more accurate criticisms that were real. That was her baggage. I already said it was lies, but it was known before the primaries, and saner voters would have rejected her on that basis instead of saying “well, it’s all lies, so we can ignore it”.

    @#193: tomh

    Don’t leave out the Stein voters, in WI and MI they could have swung the vote by themselves.

    Gee, maybe her loss of Wisconsin had something to do with not visiting the state even once after the primaries? Nah, couldn’t be that. A state the Republicans keep winning all the local elections in couldn’t possibly be a battleground, right?

    Oh, I know, maybe appointing a super-pro-Wall-Street-and-Big-Banks, pro-fossil-fuels, personally-anti-abortion DINO like Kaine as VP candidate drove people to the Green Party? Or maybe appointing the pro-fracking, pro-fossil-fuels Ken Salazar as prospective Secretary of the Interior? I can’t imagine why people wouldn’t accept Clinton’s environmentalist credentials when she kept making these fabulous decisions, all of them to woo Republican voters, who apparently did not turn out of her at all, just like Obama kept watering down the ACA to woo Republican support which never materialized. It was a mistake then, it was a mistake now, time to stop doing this stupid shit.

    @#202, feministhomemaker

    Bros did not come out for us, their sisters, their mothers, their daughters, their wives, their fucking girlfriends. Don’t ever talk to me about how Bernie Bros are progressive. Eat Shit!

    Yeah, sure, I bet your anti-abortion family member was a Bernie supporter. Uh huh.

    But hey, I’ll be glad to remember that Clinton supporters were telling me to eat shit when the next politician I’m supposed to support purely on the basis of identity politics because I disagree with most of their history comes along. (Then again, other than Nancy Pelosi, who probably won’t run — she’s apparently just fine with her current setup — and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who even the DNC now realizes is toxic for the next several decades, there are no women I’m familiar with in the Democratic Party who are as terrible a choice as Clinton. I would have been door-to-door canvassing for Barbara Lee, for example, if the Democrats had been willing to run an actual anti-war candidate, which they weren’t.)

    @#203, consciousness razor

    All of that shit needs to change in a serious way, and it has not a fucking thing to do with how untrustworthy or conservative Clinton is (not that you’ve argued this, krsone). Her fucking email server or her conservativeness didn’t do that. Do you plan to do anything to change it? When? After you’re done complaining about her today? So it will be tomorrow? When?

    I presume that was a sideways jab at me? :)

    It’s been months, but a long while ago, someone here gave me a serious challenge to come up with a list of concrete things I thought the Democrats should be doing (or should have done). It’s too late for 2016; it may be too late for good — the Democrats just lost a lot of credibility by first cheating against a populist in the primaries and then not even being able to beat Trump, so who knows whether they’ll ever actually have a chance again — but I could probably give you another list if you’re sincere. The thing is, under my plans the Democrats have to make economic populism the major concern. Even Black Lives Matter, which was formed specifically on a non-economic issue, has come to the conclusion that we need economic leveling. (Which is why I’m hoping some of the braver of them will run candidates next time; they’re a million times better than many of the craven Democrats, and they understand the issues.) Clinton was the very opposite of this, and any plan going forward that I would concoct has to start with the assumption that the DLC, Republican-Lite, Social-Issues-Instead-Of-Economics nonsense has to go.

    @#209, grandolddeity

    Trumps recent promise to unite the country “as never before”, has the same hollow ring to it as his entire election campaign did. I won’t be surprised when his emotional electorate deals with him in their own fashion when his administration fails to deliver on the rhetoric he employed to lure their votes.

    I wish I shared your optimism. Granted, these people have shown themselves willing to shoot themselves in the foot by primarying their own Tea Party candidates from the right when those candidates fail to deliver, but on the other hand they’re always willing to put the blame on Democrats, blacks, Muslims, homosexuals, feminists, academics, etc. etc.

    @#215, npsimons

    I don’t have easy answers; heck, I don’t have *any* answers, but if we don’t want people like Trump in power, we need to figure out ways to address these peoples’ problems. Bickering over Bernie versus Hillary and throwing epithets of racism and sexism accomplish fuck all. Maybe a more grassroots approach is in order.

    Which shows that, like the Clinton Campaign and the DNC, you really don’t get it. These people were hoping for a populist who would fight the big moneyed interests, who they perceive as having “done all this to them”. The Democrats had such a candidate in the primaries, Bernie Sanders. They instead nominated someone who was more or less explicitly the public face of the big moneyed interests. And congratulated themselves for doing it, too. The Democratic Party could have pulled the teeth from this particular threat, and instead they sharpened the teeth. And injected the jaws with steroids.

    @#219, What a Maroon, living up to the ‘nym

    In the meantime, we’re slouching towards WWIII; hell, we might be there already, and we’re just waiting to figure out if we’re at war with East Asia or Eurasia, or maybe both. Hey, here’s an idea: how about a non-aggression pact between Putin and Trump? They can have Syria; we’ll take Iraq. And if Iran or N Korea objects, well, we’ve still got more nukes than them.

    I don’t think we have either improved or degraded our chances of WWIII with Trump. He’s less coherent and more personally bellicose, but Clinton had already outlined and promised to undertake military operations which would have put us in direct hot war military conflict with Russia, and she also, according to leaks, has considered trying to surround China with ABM systems (i.e. dared China to launch their nukes while the option was still valid), and publicly cast shade on Obama’s Iran treaty. Considering her role in starting Libya — which was, as Obama said, pretty much full responsibility — and some of her other less-than-stellar military decisions over time, it’s not entirely implausible that she would do something irretrievably terrible herself.

    Basically, Trump might set off a nuclear war because he meant to use nukes but too stupid to see the consequences, whereas Clinton might set off a nuclear war because she didn’t mean to use nukes but thought she could get away with whatever she wanted without retaliation.

  240. Ichthyic says

    So, your explanation of why all these rural whites, who never voted in large numbers before,

    you obviously have not actually looked at the voter turnout numbers.

    the voter turnout on the right looks very similar to the voter turnout for Romney in 2012.

    the voter turnout on the left looks very similar to the voter turnout for the midterm elections in 2014.

    that, right there, tells the story.

    as is usual, you are wrong.

  241. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Vicar, your hatred and paranoia of the Clintons is showing. Please stop it. It makes YOU look BAD.

  243. John Morales says

    [meta]

    Ichthyic, BTW, a comment from Charlie’s blog (linked above):

    It’s going to be good news economically for NZ, as we pick up a decent number of educated, working-age refugees from the US, just as we did when Bush II got in.

  245. mnb0 says

    @232 John Morales: “That you imagine that Trump is not part of the Establishment (or that his policies don’t support it) is telling.”
    Good job missing the point. It doesn’t matter what wsierichs, you and I imagine. What matters is what the Trump voters imagine. That’s painfully clear: they imagine Trump being anti-establishment. It’s a fake image, but Macchiavelli already understood it doesn’t matter in politics what you are but how you are perceived. And if you think Trump didn’t build an anti-establishment image I can only imagine that you spend the last year on the bottom of a huge ocean.
    As for the Clinton vs. Sanders discussion: the first made a strategical mistake not to offer the second an important role in her campaign (and future government), combined with substantial proposals for enough dissatisfied voters who now preferred Trump or did not vote at all.

  246. John Morales says

    mnb0, perhaps I did miss the point (though I doubt that — my own point was more elliptical), but otherwise I entirely agree with you.

    That’s painfully clear: they imagine Trump being anti-establishment.

    The take-home message. No dispute.

    Brexit, our (recent) very own Oz election, the USA election, the Philippines’ recent election, the prospective French election.

    (There’s a global vibe which can’t be denied)

  247. Ichthyic says

    It’s going to be good news economically for NZ, as we pick up a decent number of educated, working-age refugees from the US, just as we did when Bush II got in.

    heh.

    don’t you believe it. I had to fight very hard to get accepted here by immigration, even with my education and business background!

    with Trump, and an already large influx of immigration to NZ…. people coming here from the US are going to have a tough time getting in, unless they have at least a 6 figure bank account backing them, AND connections already here, either business or family.

    not kidding.

    there is a growing anti-immigration sentiment building here, mostly because the current government is doing nothing to actually help integrate current immigrants into the economic system already in place.

    wait until National are out of power here before you even consider it, would be my advice. That, if it is going to happen, will be next year.

    really, there aren’t a tremendous number of jobs here, unless you like working in agriculture (commercial dairy farming), and housing prices have gone through the roof from rampant speculation over the last 5 years.

    I wish I had better news.

    to be sure though, this place actually can ALWAYS use more brainpower… just not sure it would end up actually being utilized under the current power system. I’d like to see better trained medical personnel come here, better teachers, better managers, even. most of the locals tend to jump ship for Australia, or even America!

    I just want people to be aware that while the place has a lot going for it, getting here and getting established is NOT easy.

  249. says

    Noticed a couple more things to reply to, sorry.

    But first: let it be known that a recurring pattern holds true: any candidate for President who is selected because it is “their turn” loses. This has happened at least five times in my lifetime, and that’s just off the top of my head. The next time a candidate is described that way in advance, as Clinton was, let’s either reject them in advance or save ourselves time and just declare the election lost.

    @#190, tomh

    “Sounds to me very like an admission that I was right.”
    Only in your own head. The #1 reason is work to register. Laziness is another reason, but neither one has anything to do with a “populist,” (whatever you think that is, heck Trump has been described as a populist), running.

    You missed the point. Even with auto-registration, even with mail-in ballots, voting is still an act which requires some level of work. If you want people to do work, there has to be some kind of payoff for it. In theory, the payoff for voting is supposed to be “you got to have a say in the government”, but we have convinced people — for good reason — that this is no longer the case. We need populists, real ones doing actual populist stuff, not conmen and frauds like Trump or the “trust me, this multi-thousand-page bill which was written by industry lobbyists who gave generously to my campaign fund is exactly what you need” school that the Democrats have lately specialized in.

    @#237, Ichthyic

    but now, all progressives have a common enemy. maybe it won’t be like herding cats this time around?
    do something! run for local office! get some penetration at the state level for progressives, that you can use to build a base to run for federal office.

    Tried that, about a decade ago. It was a horrifying experience, and the extremely liberal town I lived in decided it preferred the incumbent candidates who were a hair’s breadth from putting the town into bankruptcy by lack of oversight to my slate, which had actual plans to take care of things. The most powerful factor in an election is incumbency, and if you ever run for public office on the local level you will never want to do it again.

    you telling me there aren’t enough smart progressives to pull that off even faster, if they wanted to?

    We thought we were doing that, 8 years ago. Then we got told that our candidates, once in office, had no interest in pursuing our issues and that we were naive for expecting them to live up to campaign promises, and stop asking about the wars or the banks because we’re busy trying to give you a health insurance law originally written by a right-wing think tank. But of course it’s our own fault for not maintaining enthusiasm in the face of that.

    So we came back this year with another popular candidate, and the party cheated in every way they could think of and get away with (or even not get away with), forced through their own choice, belittle us for even having the temerity to try, and then proceeded to move rightward.

    Frankly, I’m willing to try again only if the party will get out of the fucking way this time, and that includes all you tribal loyalists.

  250. Ichthyic says

    (There’s a global vibe which can’t be denied)

    yup. authoritarians are on the warpath.

    there are a lot of similarities to what the world looked like in the late 1920s/early 30s.

    hopefully without the same end result, but I give it 60/40 there will be another world war within 10 years.

    same odds on the dissolution of the EU within 7 years.

    Hope I’m wrong.

  251. consciousness razor says

    I presume that was a sideways jab at me? :)

    Do you feel jabbed? Tell me when you’re going to do shit about voter suppression and the electoral college being a fucked up mess that has to be taken seriously. Tomorrow?

    It’s too late for 2016; it may be too late for good — the Democrats just lost

    I don’t give a shit about Democrats or what they have lost. The question, addressed to all and sundry, is something along the lines of this: “what the fuck are you going to do about voter suppression and the electoral college being a fucked up mess that has to be taken seriously?”

    This will not be a plan for Democrats or Republicans or any other subgroup, but for US citizens who should all have a right to vote for president, since that is a public office which significantly affects how our state/federal governments work (or fail to work, as the case may be). Why the fuck don’t they have that right, when the fuck will you acknowledge that it is a huge fucking problem instead of changing the subject to stuff that will not even happen since Clinton will not win, and when the fuck are you going to do something about it? After you’re finished telling us how bad Clinton and Democrats are, I suppose? When will that be?

  252. Ichthyic says

    ried that, about a decade ago. It was a horrifying experience

    ditto.

    but I didn’t have “Donald Trump” to act as villain.

    hell, he works as a villain even here in NZ.

  253. EnlightenmentLiberal says

    To The Vicar (via Freethoughtblogs)

    I’m guessing you object to the use of the word “imbecile” to mean “very stupid person” because decades ago, doctors used to use it. Tell you what: give me a noun that means “very stupid person” and I’ll apologize for calling you an imbecile and call you that instead. You very much deserve it.

    This is something that I’ve struggled with. Let me try to explain. One should not insult anyone for being stupid. Being stupid is not something that warrants insults, demeaning, jokes, etc. That’s ableism. One can note that someone might be stupid, but one must be careful to not use it in a pejorative manner.

    Instead, try to use other words, like ignorant, and foolish, and close-minded, and other descriptions of other states that are not innate and inherent, but that are learned and malleable.

    The key is to attack fixable flaws in the person, as opposed to attacking fixed inalienable parts of the person. Attacking inalienable parts of a person is not productive.

    I still struggle with this myself. I find myself still using words like “idiot” or “stupid”. I’m trying to cut back on that usage, and I’m definitely very circumspect that I don’t use the words in a way that would actually disparage people with certain mental illnesses, nor merely stupid people. Stupid people are still people. They don’t deserve that.

    As another analogy, I think that there’s nothing wrong with noting that being wheelchair bound is generally bad, specifically in the sense that it’s undesirable from the perspective of the person themself, and perhaps in terms of their cost to society. There’s nothing wrong with that. However, we shouldn’t stigmatize that group. We shouldn’t use “wheelchair-bound” as an insult, as a pejorative, etc. We shouldn’t complain about the costs that wheelchair-bound people impose on society. It’s not their fault. It’s not fixable. It just is. And we should help them to a reasonable and good extent, such as making ramps for public buildings next to stairs, or in place of stairs, or elevators, etc.

    You would never complain about people saying “fucking wheelchair bound people imposing extra construction costs”. Similarly, you would never say “fucking Downs syndrome people cannot show proper empathy and understanding in conversations”.

    It may be a problem that they’re stupid, just like costs of helping handicapped people are costs too, that we all wish we didn’t need to do. However, no good comes from focusing on them, and it can easily normalize the stigmatization of these people, which is what we need to avoid. Stigmatizing them is really bad. It hurts them, for no gain to anyone else, becuase they cannot fix these conditions. The conditions are not fixable. Whereas, malice, ignorance, foolishness, arrogance, etc., are fixable, and that’s why it’s ok to attack people for those traits.

    So, let me revisit what you wrote originally:

    Let me let you in on a little secret, you monstrous imbecile: I have a preexisting healthcare condition which is only being treated because of the Affordable Care Act.

    Maybe the person actually is stupid. However, calling that out is not productive. It might also stigmatize people. If they are stupid, it’s not something that they can fix, and using that word in that way can have negative repercussions ala stigmatization.

    Further, that’s not really your complaint in this instance. Your complaint is that they’re foolish, or arrogant, or condescending, or rash, or pompous, or uncaring, etc. – many things that are not “stupid”.

    Also, “ignorant” does not seem to apply here, but keep in mind that “ignorant” is most often what someone actually means when they use words like “stupid”.

    I know that many people do use words like “stupid”, “idiot”, etc., when they really mean to use the meaning of other words. I know that many times, the listener understands that the speaker really means “ignorant” or “foolish”, etc. However, sometimes the listener gets a different meaning. However, language is important, and I politely suggest that you also consider changing your vocabulary to be more accurate, and less stigmatizing to the conditions that people have for which they have no control over.

  254. says

    Haven’t read the comments. This might have been mentioned previously.

    I saw a tweet involving a person holding up a sign advocating that they organize tar-and-feathering vigilantes to target professors who advocate diversity because they think Trump and congress will let them get away with it. Naturally, it’s been taken down after people retweeted it and called it for what it is: Terrorism.

    Donald Trump has legitimized domestic terrorism. This sign was photographed in Texas. I am afraid to go outside.

  255. wsierichs says

    I keep trying to get out of this swamp but they keep pulling me back in. Sigh.

    First, The Vicar, thanks for being a voice for realistic appraisal, backed by facts, of factors involved in this disaster. Too many people just want to hurl insults. It’s people like them who will put the next Trump in the White House.

    Second, I see some people do have reading comprehension problems, but it’s not me. I know Trump is part of the Establishment, but the perception that he was anti-Establishment clearly was a major factor in sweeping the Reptilian field and holding GOPbaggers’ support. Also, thanks to the Electoral College, my vote will be stolen from me and given to the Orange Goblin, so, yes, it does count in that sense. But it would only really have counted if we had a national vote, which would have put Gore and, probably, Clinton in the White House.

    Finally, anyone who can’t see how the DNC blatantly rigged the nomination is wearing blinders. And Clinton violated laws concerning public records, freedom of information and handling classified material. Don’t even try to argue that the SoS would never get classified info in her email. Other crimes possibly, even probably, include destroying public records, obstruction of justice, destroying evidence, etc. Comey himself outlined some of the evidence of crimes. That he lied to pretend the law required “intent” – which is clearly false; gross negligence can apply – to exonerate her is irrelevant. He told the truth, then lied. We also now know that the FBI investigation was a farce.

    This will be my last comment because I”m not wasting any more time reading the nonsense on this thread.

  256. says

    @#241, Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls

    Vicar, your hatred and paranoia of the Clintons is showing. Please stop it. It makes YOU look BAD.

    At this point, anyone still defending the Clintons, who ran the whole party off a cliff in exactly the way people like me were publicly suggesting she would, months ago (and which you, personally, you utterly disingenuous lousy bad-faith Democratic tribalist, you, belittled at the time), should be ashamed. Your side lost out of sheer bad planning and hubris. You said, when Sanders came from nowhere with no organization, got cheated against in every way the DNC could think of, and still only lost the primaries by a grand total of 6% of the vote, that we had to suck it up and get over it. Well, physician, heal thyself! Clinton was a lousy choice, just like people like me predicted, and you were wasting your time! We quite possibly lost this election, with all the disaster that’s going to entail, to appease the ego of Hillary Fucking Clinton, who simply could not accept that not even a majority of the party wanted to vote for her in 2008, and had to keep going, the rest of us be damned. Either stop trying to excuse her (and your) mistakes which have put us all in the soup, or at least shut up!

  257. consciousness razor says

    Vicar, just so we’re on the same page, I agree with #256.

    It can be slightly difficult (but not that difficult) to disentangle appeals to her popularity or name-recognition with the idea that she belongs to a noble bloodline of Clintons who should be next to sit on the throne. When people argued that in the primaries to make the case against Sanders, it often seemed like the latter, but occasionally I’m sure it was more like the former. But Nerd’s arguments, such as they were, probably had no actual effect on that.

  258. John Morales says

    The Vicar to Nerd:

    Your side lost out of sheer bad planning and hubris.

    I notice these things.

    (So, Nerd’s side (Democrats) was not your side, right? After all, you did not write “our side”)

  259. John Morales says

    wsierichs:

    This will be my last comment because I”m not wasting any more time reading the nonsense on this thread.

    <snicker>

    (You did not read your own comments, I take it)

  260. says

    @#251, consciousness razor

    I don’t give a shit about Democrats or what they have lost.

    I agree with the first half, up to the word “or”, and am appalled by the second.

    The question, addressed to all and sundry, is something along the lines of this: “what the fuck are you going to do about voter suppression and the electoral college being a fucked up mess that has to be taken seriously?”
    This will not be a plan for Democrats or Republicans or any other subgroup, but for US citizens who should all have a right to vote for president, since that is a public office which significantly affects how our state/federal governments work (or fail to work, as the case may be). Why the fuck don’t they have that right, when the fuck will you acknowledge that it is a huge fucking problem instead of changing the subject to stuff that will not even happen since Clinton will not win, and when the fuck are you going to do something about it? After you’re finished telling us how bad Clinton and Democrats are, I suppose? When will that be?

    Are even a plurality of US citizens willing to fight for the right to vote? The Republicans are actively trying to suppress voters, while the Democrats stood by and did nothing in 2009 despite evidence of voter suppression, as I noted above. They didn’t even investigate the voting machines after the 2012 claims by Anonymous that Anonymous had hacked the machines to fend off other hackers — they had actual admission that there had been hackers, and those hackers said there were other hackers, and… nothing. And the Democratic electorate didn’t “hold their feet to the fire” about it.*

    *What a horrible phrase that is, “hold their feet to the fire”, and I don’t mean that it evokes torture. These days it’s used exclusively to excuse a politician who plans to do nothing once elected. “Oh, Clinton will enact liberal policies if we hold her feet to the fire”. And, just as the chronically ill person is told by their fundamentalist pastor that they must not be praying hard enough or they would no longer be sick, when the politician does nothing no matter what pressure is raised, it’s the voters’ fault, because they didn’t “hold their feet to the fire” enough. Because voters have so much leverage against an incumbent once in office. Sure.

    Furthermore, saying “it’s not a party issue, it’s an issue for everyone” is blatantly false. The Republican Party even brags about suppressing the vote; they do it systematically against groups which are perceived to be Democrats, and I doubt that even any Republican voters who are excluded as a result of this are actually upset by it. This is a Democratic issue, because nobody else has the presence (yet) to do anything about it.

    The obvious first choice is to continue to push that law mentioned above. The difficulty will be finding blue states which haven’t already signed on to it, because red states don’t want it to happen (for the same reason they’re performing voter suppression in the first place). There may actually be some opportunity in the near future to put it on the ballot as a direct voter measure in some of the states which went for Trump this time but Obama last time, which will probably experience a fair share of buyer’s remorse — it will have to be carefully timed, but it could be sold as “if this measure had been in place in 2016, you could have had your protest vote and still not given us Trump”. That is going to have to be the first attempt at the legislative side, I would say, and since there are no statewide elections for a while it’s going to have to wait.

    As for the all-too-easily-forgotten practical side: we have grown uncomfortable on the left with the idea of practical action like protests and things, and we clearly need — not protestors, but we need people who are willing to travel around and make sure people get registered, get to the polls, keep an eye on places where suppression is happening, and not back down. In this, as in so many other areas, we need a new Black Panthers. So many things were better when they were around — even the NRA was willing to consider gun control as long as there were highly visible armed black men walking around conspicuously not breaking the law. But of course without doing something about police violence that’s just asking black men to be murdered, so police violence has to be challenged.

    Which, in turn, means that: the Democrats have to start officially supporting Black Lives Matter. There’s just no other way forward. Clinton used noise machines to drown them out, had them escorted out of her events, and her campaign circulated a memo telling down-ticket candidates how to agree with BLM activists without actually promising them anything. That shit has got to stop; it’s stuff like that which got Trump more of the black vote, by percentage, than Romney.

    Therefore, we return (with a groan on your part, I’m sure) to my original thesis: no more crappy right-of-center candidates like Clinton.

  261. John Morales says

    The Vicar:

    Furthermore, saying “it’s not a party issue, it’s an issue for everyone” is blatantly false. The Republican Party even brags about suppressing the vote; they do it systematically against groups which are perceived to be Democrats, and I doubt that even any Republican voters who are excluded as a result of this are actually upset by it.

    If the Republicans write about it and take a stance, in what sense is it not an issue to them?

    (Is it supposedly a non-opinion on a non-issue? Sheesh!)

  262. says

    @#258, John Morales

    (So, Nerd’s side (Democrats) was not your side, right? After all, you did not write “our side”)

    Nerd’s side was loud, unthinking, unquestioning loyalty to the Party over any practical considerations of electability, combined with accusations of sexism, racism (gaining currency as the latest “why Clinton lost because it couldn’t be her own fault” explanation; apparently Hillary Clinton is black now, who knew?), and paranoia. I’m not sure whether to quote “you’re not paranoid if they’re really out to get you” or “just because you’re paranoid it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you”, but those leaks — which the Clinton campaign tried desperately to obscure by blaming them on Russia and the yelling about Putin, but had to admit were genuine and accurate as far as they could tell — demonstrated that yes, the DNC was cheating, the Clinton Campaign was lying, the people sneered at as “Bernie Bros” were right all along, and we’re supposed to just forget that and let the Clintons and the DNC off the hook.

    Obama let Bush off the hook. It has already come back to bite us in the ass. People who willfully break the laws, in a very public way which damages all of us, need to be punished.

  263. says

    @#261, John Morales

    If the Republicans write about it and take a stance, in what sense is it not an issue to them?
    (Is it supposedly a non-opinion on a non-issue? Sheesh!)

    Syntactic nit-picking to pretend to ignorance is really your shtick, isn’t it?

  264. logicalcat says

    @Vicar

    I am not and never was talking about rural whites. I am talking about progressive leftist who sat out the election. They did so for entirely bullshit reasons. Polls show that Clinton’s points were up before a scandal, then down after a scandal. And one of those bullshit scandals came up a week before the election where Clinton had a sizable lead, and then that lead was no more. This isn’t hard. Misinformation cost the democrats the election, plain and simple. When you get deep into the anti-Hillary hate fest, you repeatedly see the same bullshit. What you don’t see are the valid criticisms of her. There are a lot of reasons why the Democrats lost this race, but Clinton’s actual problems were not one of them, at least not a sizable one. Her imaginary problems however definitely were.

    And here’s another thing that was bullshit that the progressives fell for, the “I’m tired of choosing the lesser of the two evils” bullshit. I’m sorry, Clinton was definitely bad compared to Sanders, but comparing to Trump she is the flu while he is cancer. I would rather not have the flu but given the choice between flu or cancer its really stupid to flounder around and be like “gee i don’t know, they are both diseases. I’m tired of having to choose the lesser of two diseases. I’ll just not vote. Or better yet vote for the measles (Johnson/Stein) and pretend that was a good idea.” In the end we all still got cancer.

    you telling me there aren’t enough smart progressives to pull that off even faster, if they wanted to?

    Nope, not enough smart progressives. Just the ones who think Hillary and the DNC are Spectre from James Bond films.

  265. consciousness razor says

    Vicar:

    I agree with the first half, up to the word “or”, and am appalled by the second.

    Please append the word “For these purposes” at the beginning. That should’ve been totally clear to you in context, so please don’t be appalled.

    Are even a plurality of US citizens willing to fight for the right to vote?

    Maybe not. A plurality, or something very close to it, wasn’t willing to go to the polls yesterday (or of course they weren’t able to cast a vote).

    That’s not particularly relevant, since we only need a few hundred state legislators to fight for it. They’ve already been designated our representatives, precisely for the reason that they can do such fighting on our behalf, even for (or maybe especially for) those who don’t personally want to do any such fighting themselves. Those legislators are the only thing standing in the way of the popular vote law, as well as repealing “voter ID” laws and others aimed at voter suppression in various states.

    If it will get them run out of office, because so many people are so upset about being able to actually vote (while also mostly deciding not to vote, which seems to imply the legislators wouldn’t be run out office), then maybe that is a small sacrifice that those legislators should take for our country. Am I really asking for too much here?

    Furthermore, saying “it’s not a party issue, it’s an issue for everyone” is blatantly false. The Republican Party even brags about suppressing the vote; they do it systematically against groups which are perceived to be Democrats, and I doubt that even any Republican voters who are excluded as a result of this are actually upset by it. This is a Democratic issue, because nobody else has the presence (yet) to do anything about it.

    I don’t hold Democrats more responsible than Republicans for failing to do it, on the basis that suppressing voters is a core part of the Republican strategy. We should all support the right for everyone to vote, regardless of which party you belong to or what looks strategically beneficial for your party in the coming election. It’s about how all genuine, fair, legitimate, democratic elections should proceed, under all circumstances, no matter what comes out of it for your little club in the next election or two or three.

    We’re not facing another election very soon, so perhaps with the horrors of the last one fresh on everyone’s mind, this is the best time to convince state legislators that voters should be able to vote. It’s a novel idea, I know. But they’re smart enough and should catch on fairly quickly.

  266. Vilém Saptar says

    This is sad. From a strictly outsider’s perspective, I would say the responsibility lies with:
    1. everyone who voted Trump,
    2. everyone who abstained because of apathy and
    3. everyone who voted in a way that would not prevent a Trump victory
    in that order.

    People had a good long look at all that he said and did and stood for and did not do everything they could to reject him. As much as it’s tempting to say people were misinformed or misled, it simply doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. All arguments about how Clinton was a bad candidate etc are moot. I could imagine people making that argument up until it became clear that the only choices were between Trump and Clinton. But from that point on there’s no excuse.

  267. logicalcat says

    Ahh, so the “DNC cheated Bernie !!!!1!!!” within you finally came out @Vicar. Pls provide evidence. I’ll tell you the same thing I told another one of you in these comment sections after the primaries. I would be your ally. I don’t like Clinton, but I dislike bullshit even more. I would be just as furious if the DNC did cheat and I already agree with you in that the Democrats stupidly choose the wrong person to run on their ticket. You have an easy conversion here right in front of you. I just need some real evidence to be pushed over that edge. This is still a skeptic blog remember?

    @wsierichs

    I asked for evidence, and you give me nothing. Maybe you should stick the flounce. So you are saying that Comey, a man in charge of a law enforcement agency who backs Trump so strongly to the point where some agents were calling the institution “Trumplandia”, and who a week before the election decided to aid in her defeat by bringing up more bullshit which amounted to nothing. You mean this guy somehow did not indict Clinton for crimes she for sure 1000% pinky swear did, when he had the chance? Lol I dont think so.

    The DNC blatantly rigged it huh? Wearing blinders huh? Well you know what would help take those blinders off? Evidence. You want to help a brother out?

    I wont response next time, but I will read what you say. I’m afraid I might have posted to much. Prefer to be a lurker.

  268. Anri says

    So, I’m confused: the leftists who couldn’t vote for Clinton assuredly didn’t lose her the election by not voting for her, but could have won her the election if she had courted them and they had?

    You can’t be both trivial and decisive in effect – pick one and stick with it.

  269. Drawler says

    @Vilém Saptar

    This is sad. From a strictly outsider’s perspective, I would say the responsibility lies with:

    You forgot one important category: the Democratic party hacks who hoisted a corporate sockpuppet upon us as our nominee instead of the outsider economic populist who could have undercut Trumps ethno-nationalist populist appeal and consistently polled better than against him than Clinton did.

    All arguments about how Clinton was a bad candidate etc are moot.

    Apparently not.

  270. F.O. says

    @#241, Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls

    Vicar, your hatred and paranoia of the Clintons is showing. Please stop it. It makes YOU look BAD.

    No it doesn’t.
    Quite the opposite in fact.
    Just giving you a view from the outside, since you seem to care.

    Ignorance, misogyny and xenophobia certainly played a role, but using that to ignore the hatred towards the establishment is exactly what caused Brexit to win. And now Trump.
    The good thing about this is that it means that not so many Americans are ignorant, misogynists or xenophobes, but it means that many, many people were so fed up with the system that they wanted to see it burned down, no matter the damage, no matter the cost.

  271. Vilém Saptar says

    Drawler@269:

    You forgot one important category: the Democratic party hacks who hoisted a corporate sockpuppet upon us as our nominee instead of the outsider economic populist who could have undercut Trumps ethno-nationalist populist appeal and consistently polled better than against him than Clinton did.

    Well, like I said, from the point it became clear that it was going to be Trump or Clinton, that argument should not have any weight. Even if you grant that the Democratic establishment screwed up and did not offer the best possible candidate, given that those were your choices, the reasonable thing to do would have been to prioritize. Keep Trump out of power first and then work to overhaul the establishment even if it meant letting them get away this time.

    People who make arguments like this was a necessary shock to the system to send a message etc miscalculate grossly the potential consequences of what has just occurred. We can only hope that Trump doesn’t turn out to be a catastrophic mistake. Given how high the stakes were, choosing to shock the system for nominating a less than ideal candidate at the expense of allowing someone like Trump to come to power definitely wasn’t the most moral thing to do. It’s easy to make that sort of argument when you’re relatively insulated from the most harmful effects of this outcome.

  272. Vilém Saptar says

    F.O.@270

    The good thing about this is that it means that not so many Americans are ignorant, misogynists or xenophobes, but it means that many, many people were so fed up with the system that they wanted to see it burned down, no matter the damage, no matter the cost.

    Whatever goodness you find in that is not enough offset the damage done. The cost to the environment alone should be enough to outweigh that not to mention putting a far right demagogue into arguably the most powerful position in the world which will energize far right reactionaries in all of the West.

  273. Dark Jaguar says

    It would appear trying to banish all the hateful attitudes to the wilderness has failed. There’s only one path left to us. We must CHANGE them, every last one of them, and not give up doing so ever again.

  274. John Morales says

    The Vicar @262:

    Nerd’s side was loud, unthinking, unquestioning loyalty to the Party over any practical considerations of electability, combined with accusations of sexism, racism (gaining currency as the latest “why Clinton lost because it couldn’t be her own fault” explanation; apparently Hillary Clinton is black now, who knew?), and paranoia.

    Which boils down to voting “Clinton”, given the facts — no?

    (So: your side, or not your side?)

    —

    @263

    Syntactic nit-picking to pretend to ignorance is really your shtick, isn’t it?

    Wrong; being not wrong is my schtick.

    (Why you conflate “hold their feet to the fire” (aka holding someone to account, in less florid terminology) with vote suppression is beyond me — and that’s not pretend ignorance

  275. slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) says

    [derail alert]
    I want Drumph to build his wall along the Hudson River from NYC all the way North up to Toronto. Let NE NExit Trumpistan to become NuEngland. We got lots of solar panels and wind turbines to substitute for all the NJ oil refineries.
    Plus the Technology Highway (Rt 128) that gave us the tech to build the internet Drumph wants shut down. Would be interesting to keep all the MIT grads from migrating to Silicon Valley (*smirk*).
    We even have our own nuclear plant (in NH) that could be amped up. Most of our electricity is purchased from Canada anyways.
    oops, my house is heated by oil, yet many here find it quite easy to switch over to wood burning substitution for oil, along with being essentially carbon neutral.
    Would be cool to charge exorbitant importation fees on lobsters that many in the continental Trumpistan enjoy. Maybe establish Clam Chowdah as the gold standard chowdah and not that Manhattan Chowdah abomination.
    and we get to keep the iconic ironside, USS Constitution. to make endless jibes at Trumpistan with its name. (eg “Drumph can no longer shit on the Constitution, cuz we’ll keep it sailing clean on our side of the wall”)
    —
    gosh, I’m talking myself into believing in this ridiculous fantasy. Don’t tell me the downsides of this. I know they’re there and deliberately ignoring them to concentrate on the unicorn rainbows instead.

  276. thecalmone says

    As an Australian, I found this thread an interesting and illuminating discussion. Thanks to all.

  277. F.O. says

    @Vilém Saptar #272
    Yeah, it’s a rather thin silver lining.
    While I do not agree with you that a Clinton presidency would have been necessarily more peaceful, she may have needed to at least pay lip service to climate change. Trump will not even do that, and in the long term, the damage will be immense.
    The planet is fucked.
    I don’t think anyone in this thread is actually happy that Trump won.

  278. tomh says

    “I don’t think anyone in this thread is actually happy that Trump won.”

    Some seem happy that Clinton lost.

  279. F.O. says

    @tomh: yes, I am happy that Clinton lost. It’s not enough, by far, to offset the fact that Trump won and me freaking out because we are happily marching towards climate catastrophe.
    I think about the shit that’s happening in Syria right now.
    I think about the mass of desperates used as political weapon, I think about the tensions, the war and the massacres that have started already and will only worsen.
    I think about a lot of stuff that the Americans barely acknowledged in this fucking circus of an election.

    But yes, the important thing for you, the thing that offends you, is that people are trying to to come to a conclusion different than “IT’S EVERYONE’S FAULT BUT CLINTON’S EVERYONE WHO OPPOSED US IS STUPID AND IGNORANT AND EVIL”.
    Dismissing your opponents as deluded and evil (even when they ARE deluded and evil), rather than addressing the underlying causes, worked like a charm in the War on Terror, it worked like a charm in UK and it worked like a charm in the US. Lesson learned?

  280. jack16 says

    My opinion is largely the same as expressed in the Thursday episode of the Kaiser Report (RT.com). Max and Stacy give pretty thorough coverage of most of the points mentioned in this set of comments. Check it out.

  281. lotharloo says

    This is really the worst possible news. Everyone that I know has been depressed for the past days, including work colleagues. Trump will be a terrible and incompetent president and even worse, the Republicans have control of all branches of the government and soon the Supreme Court as well. So you can say goodbye to the few good things that the Obama has done.

    Think about this shit. The only lasting legacies of Obama could be making Bush’s fucking tax cuts permanent and drone strikes. Everything else is going down the drain.

  282. birgerjohansson says

    Swedish commenters have pointed out that Donald Trump was *much more Active* on social media than Hilary Clinton.
    Yes, what he wrote was garbage, but he became even more visible.
    Even unemployed people in the rust belt can afford cellphones and follow twitter.

  284. birgerjohansson says

    And Wolf Blitzer says Hilary Clinton is very emotional.

    Has he ever seen Trump go on a rant?

  285. rorschach says

    @280
    “My opinion is largely the same as expressed in the Thursday episode of the Kaiser Report (RT.com). Max and Stacy give pretty thorough coverage of most of the points mentioned in this set of comments. Check it out.”

    Yeah. Nah.

  286. A. Noyd says

    @birgerjohansson (#284)
    A few days ago, just before the election, I told ~100 Japanese third year jr high students that many people wouldn’t vote for Clinton because they think, being a woman, she’d be too emotional. Many of them, both boys and girls, were like, “But… but… Trump wouldn’t?!?” One boy even face-desked at the sheer absurdity.

    They know. Too bad for all of us Blitzer and his ilk either don’t know or get paid to pretend otherwise.

  287. kimberly1091 says

    @148 admits they’ve been banned more than once before, but the comment is allowed to stand? PZ is far too stretched at the moment to be expected to micro-manage trolling. Is anyone else moderating?

  290. Pierce R. Butler says

    Ichthyic @ # 240: the voter turnout on the right looks very similar to the voter turnout for Romney in 2012.

    the voter turnout on the left looks very similar to the voter turnout for the midterm elections in 2014.

    Could you, or somebody, please post a link or two to worthwhile analyses suitable for the statistically below-average?

    One of the last straws I clung to as the polls went backwards in the last several days was the claim that the Democrats had an extensive get-out-the-vote operation while Trump had none. In hindsight, obviously that was wrong both ways. Again, a request for link(s): what happened?

  292. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    A couple of lists
    Lost
    Hubert Humphrey
    George McGovern
    Walter Mondale
    Michael Dukakis
    Al Gore
    John Kerry

    Won
    Jimmy Carter
    Bill Clinton
    Barak Obama

    The top list has some very liberal politicians. The bottom list has more middle of the road/practical politicians. The average democrat isn’t all that liberal, and the general electorate even less so. Too many theoretical political pundits like the Vicar fall to the same irrational premise the radicals of my college days fell to. What they believe is middle of the road, those who don’t see it their way are unenlightened, and they are very surprised when they loose elections because they refuse to see how out of touch they are with the average voter.
    During the primary, the most left candidates for president, US senator, and US house lost the primary in my districts.
    An interesting analysis article on who supported Trump and why.

    On election night, when Donald Trump claimed victory in her home state of Wisconsin, Shay Chamberlain was so excited she screamed and fell over.
    Chamberlain believes Trump is her savior, sent by God to save America from ruin. She owns a women’s clothing store in this remote town; her husband runs a construction company. They have two children and barely get by on $44,000 a year, living paycheck to paycheck.
    In his victory speech, Trump called people like Chamberlain and her family America’s “forgotten men and women” — the blue-collar workers in the manufacturing towns of the Rust Belt and the coalfields of Appalachia who propelled him to an improbable victory. They felt left behind by progress, laughed at by the elite, and so put their faith in the billionaire businessman with a sharp tongue and short temper who promised to Make America Great Again.
    When Trump first ran, Chamberlain thought to herself: “That’s the man everybody has been praying for.” And she now feels vindicated by his victory.
    “This is a movement,” she said. “This isn’t a candidate anymore. This is a movement.”

  293. wzrd1 says

    “This is a movement,” she said. “This isn’t a candidate anymore. This is a movement.”

    To that, I fully agree. That said, I never thought I’d live to see the sorry day that a bowel movement became the leadership of a nation.

    As for the rest of what Nerd of Redhead said is spot on. Add that to Hillary never addressing Trump’s rumor mills spreading wild conspiracy theories of Hillary the arch fiend, mass murderer, all while being alleged to be seriously ill and still maintaining her criminal empire (and all other manner of bullshit) certainly did not attract anyone away from Trump’s lies and handwaves.
    Indeed, scoffing at his wall insanity, never occurred, where several dozen times the amount of concrete would be needed beyond that of the Hoover dam, with precisely zero infrastructure to produce it, deliver it or hydrate it.

    Worse, we were warned with Romney’s fact free campaign, “We won’t let the fact checkers run this campaign”.
    The Democratic campaign made the same error France did with the Maginot Line, static, non-adaptable and out maneuvered.

    Cue Trump’s victory music, “Springtime for Hitler”.

  294. npsimons says

    maroon @ #219 – I do not feel guilty for things outside of my control, which includes people who voted for Trump and the actions of people long dead who I may or may not be distantly related to.

    I do believe that reparations, EEO, affirmative action and other measures are absolutely necessary until institutional racism and sexism are abolished, and perhaps even longer. I’m also a big fan of empathy (remember that? I’d always heard it was supposed to be one of those big strengths of liberals; can’t tell from this thread . . . ) and Rawls’ theory of justice. I was very happy to see Obama get elected; I was looking forward to seeing HRC in office, but alas it would appear “the greatest country on earth” wasn’t ready for that yet.

    @ vicar #239 – I understand and do not blame any minority for automatically distrusting an older white male; it’s still racism, and someone privileged and educated enough to post here saying that “white people suck” is not even in the same class. For one thing, it makes the assumption that Trump is all white people’s fault, when it’s clearly much more nuanced than that. It is also poisonous, as it castigates the very people who are trying to do their best to bridge the divide.

  295. Drawler says

    @Nerd

    The top list has some very liberal politicians. The bottom list has more middle of the road/practical politicians. The average democrat isn’t all that liberal, and the general electorate even less so. Too many theoretical political pundits like the Vicar fall to the same irrational premise the radicals of my college days fell to. What they believe is middle of the road, those who don’t see it their way are unenlightened, and they are very surprised when they loose elections because they refuse to see how out of touch they are with the average voter.
    During the primary, the most left candidates for president, US senator, and US house lost the primary in my districts.

    First of all, you forgot to add “middle of the road” Hillary Clinton to your lost list.

    Second, your mentality and the way you’re clinging on to antiquated cliques about far-left v responsible centrist demonstrates why the Democrats so utterly failed this election and why they were so tone-deaf with what the electorate wanted

    The middle class has been stagnant for almost 40 years and people are more pessimistic about the future than they have been in a long time. The institutions of American civic and political life are regarded with tremendous disgust and repulsion. Voters didn’t give a flying fuck if Hillary was the more centrist candidate in this election, they wanted someone who was an outsider; who would challenge political orthodoxy and was willing to address their anxiety. Sanders could have been that candidate, but since he wasn’t on the ballot they went for the orange demagogue who thumbed his nose at the establishment every chance he got and won.

    You complain that Vicar is a “theoretical” pundit, whatever that’s supposed to mean, but the election is no longer theoretical. The results are in and people like Vicar were the ones who saw the writing on the wall; those who thought like you didn’t (and apparently still don’t).

  296. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Second, your mentality and the way you’re clinging on to antiquated cliques about far-left v responsible centrist demonstrates why the Democrats so utterly failed this election and why they were so tone-deaf with what the electorate wanted

    You haven’t been listening. What I have been saying is that:
    1) Bernie Sanders had a legitimate chance to make his case to the deomocrats. I even voted for him in the primary. There was nothing to stop him from competing.
    2) Sanders lost the popular vote in the primaries by 3 million. This isn’t my opinion, but a fact. Are you saying that the super-delegates should ignore the popular primary votes and should have nominated Sanders for *reasons*? Then what is the use of the primaries? And how would they have known?
    3) The Vicar has a irrational animus toward anybody who doesn’t agree his his far leftist policies. He gave Sanders and Stein as alternative to HRC. Sanders didn’t pan out, losing the primary votes, and Stein, at 1%, is not electable. The only thing left was to vote for Clinton. We should not be criticized for doing so. We got the alternative anyway.
    The decision was made by the people, both at the primary and general elections. It wasn’t the fault of those at this blog since many of us voted for Sanders in the primaries; we tried.
    It doesn’t do any good to say the DNC should have ignored the primary votes, and decided based on the proverbial smoke-filled-rooms conspiracy.

  297. Drawler says

    @nerd

    For the sake of argument, I’ll put aside for them moment how establishment democrats did everything in their power to tip the scale against Sanders in the primary (utilizing servile media organs to trash him, suggesting him and his supporters are crypto-sexists, utilizing superdelegates to inflate Clinton’s delegate count, ect.)

    Smug liberals for years mocked the wacky Republican nomination process for producing candidates who entered the general election severely compromised by the demands of their primary process. Well, the shoe is now on the other foot. Democrats need to take a good long hard look at themselves and wonder how their primary process produced a candidate so utterly unfit for the general election that she not only lost, but poisoned the entire party down-ticket.

    As for you supporting Bernie, I admittedly popped in here fairly infrequently during the election season, but you stood out in my memory as being one of the more obnoxious Bernie-bashers, constantly flaming anyone who had a positive thing to say about him and slurring his supporters. Even now you repeat the most odious Clintonesque rhetoric about all these wacky, unrealistic leftists….yet you say you supported the left candidate in the primary. Color me skeptical.

  298. consciousness razor says

    Second, your mentality and the way you’re clinging on to antiquated cliques about far-left v responsible centrist demonstrates why the Democrats so utterly failed this election and why they were so tone-deaf with what the electorate wanted

    Well, she got more votes than he did, so getting enough votes from the electorate was not exactly her problem. Against someone like Trump, it’s astonishing and very depressing that the popular vote wasn’t a total landslide her favor. But then again, landslides are apparently hard to come by, when turnout is low (and third party votes are high) because voters are so discouraged/disgusted by what they see in the two major parties. You might try to “go high when they go low,” but I’m sure many people were left with a bad taste in their mouths from the shit Trump was constantly peddling. It’s very hard to wash all of that out, and while you’re trying and failing to do so, you’re not focused on substantive issues. The two major parties get conflated and lumped together as one big clusterfuck, which isn’t really so far from the truth; but the point is that none of their substantive policy proposals make their way onto the table as a means of distinguishing them, because you’re too busy cleaning up the fucking mess (or in Trump’s case, moving on to shit somewhere else).

    It wouldn’t take much at all for Hillary to have won the electoral college by squeezing out a few thousand more votes in a couple of states. Would that change much about our evaluation of it now? It shouldn’t. Old-school “centrist liberals” like Nerd could’ve been every bit as tone-deaf, if that’s the right term; and if she had gotten a few thousand such votes, Hillary would be in this arbitrary and non-informative “winner” column that Nerd claims is mostly due to centrists. (However, the fact is that more liberal/conservative people are the ones who are ceteris paribus more likely to vote, engage in activism, volunteer for a candidate’s campaign, and donate to them.)

    Centrists don’t have a consistent set of liberal ideas or a consistent set of conservative ideas. Also, there is no identifiable, coherent “centrist platform” to speak of, which contains some specific mixture of the two, nor any major political party which would be willing to articulate such a thing. There may still be some strange group of people out there, who love guns and pacifism and gays and churchiness and trickle-down and universal healthcare (as well as another opposing “centrist” group) — those people go wherever the wind takes them at the moment. They may have some set of very specific issues that will get each one of them agitated, but they do not agree on what that is and make no attempt to formulate any kind of systematic platform that will try to make sense of all of the contradictions in their views. They just want what they want, and sometimes they want certain things more than others, so they’re happy to settle for the party which is offering that.

    In that light, the suggestion that we liberals (or conservatives) should try to appeal more to “centrists” of this sort doesn’t even make sense. There is no appealing to them as a group, because as a group they don’t have a specific coherent thing which appeals to them. You could highlight one sort of policy (gun control, let’s say) which will appeal to some of them right now, but they are not stupid and will recognize that many of your policies (reproductive rights, let’s say) are unappealing. If some significant chunk of them do think for example that abortion is immoral, that isn’t an argument in favor of being anti-choice. Saying we should take such a position or move in that direction, because otherwise we are “out of touch with the average [centrist] voter,” is saying we should be ignoring the reasons we liberals had for adopting such positions in the first place.

    If we’re being told we should be willing to budge or compromise on certain things, which sounds perfectly reasonable, then give us a reason. Do not give us a tiny confused set of voters who generally don’t think about political issues deeply or consistently at all, even if they’re a group who will be convenient in a certain swing state where we happen to need the extra votes this time. You can’t run a fucking country on anything like that, and as soon as you drop that bullshit after the election in order to actually do something that makes sense, you have lost their trust (if they’re paying any attention) and you’ve already lost the trust of your liberal base. Then the cycle starts over, so you must somehow regain their trust or the trust of some other muddle-headed centrist who wasn’t being served bullshit by you the last time.

  299. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    As for you supporting Bernie, I admittedly popped in here fairly infrequently during the election season, but you stood out in my memory as being one of the more obnoxious Bernie-bashers, constantly flaming anyone who had a positive thing to say about him and slurring his supporters. Even now you repeat the most odious Clintonesque rhetoric about all these wacky, unrealistic leftists….yet you say you supported the left candidate in the primary. Color me skeptical.

    Wrong. When they were “bashed”, it was when they wouldn’t bring themselves support the properly nominated and confirmed candidate if it happened to be Clinton. What viable alternative was available? It wasn’t Stein. What was a real problem was than many Bernie Backers seemed to wish for a Trump presidency.
    By the way, the hard concrete evidence for a DNC campaign against Sanders is still MIA, despite many folks besides my self asking for the conclusive hard evidence, not imagined or insignificant slights magnified into a laughable conspiracy.

  300. says

    “Remove and Replace” vs “Reform” are really actually different positions. It isn’t “tone trolling” to say that Removing something all the way “to the ground” is currently less reasonable than Reform. Nor is it “tone trolling” to point out unclear communication.

    Those are the actual points I was making. And they were ignored/missed (ironically by someone crying “tone troll”, of all things), and thus remain.

  301. consciousness razor says

    I would say we should be looking at the state of the game well before the primary process. People like Nerd (and Clinton) are concern-trolling us all of the time about how “unrealistic” these “far-left” policies are supposed to be. There’s usually not even a pretense of actually explaining that conclusion or thinking it through. Instead, it is just taken as an article of faith that we won’t win with such a platform, or that it won’t work in practice once the candidate gets the office in question (or once there’s majority control in the legislature, etc.). The Cold War is still very real in their minds, for instance, so anything with a hint of “social-” anywhere in it is just plain obviously problematic, “not realistic,” “not practical,” “unpopular.” They think it’s something that doesn’t need to be explained or supported by reason/evidence, because they have this intuition that some nebulous group of people don’t like it (or they know that they don’t like it), which makes them afraid.

    That kind of stuff was already in the water, before the primaries ever happened. It’s still in the water now, after all. The fact that Sanders got as much support as he did is a little encouraging, but just wait until Nerd cites something like the number of primary voters for him the next time we ask for evidence that policies like his are unrealistic. If none of that changes, we’ll just keeping around in these pathetic circles for as long as Nerd (or Clinton) wants, because it suits them just fine to do so.

  303. Rob Grigjanis says

    Nerd @292:

    The average democrat isn’t all that liberal, and the general electorate even less so.

    Funny. I keep reading how most Americans want gun control, universal health care, and something done about climate change.

  304. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Funny. I keep reading how most Americans want gun control, universal health care, and something done about climate change.

    Then why aren’t they voting for those attitudes by voting for democrats? Their attitudes are liberal/progressive, but their votes are conservative.

  306. consciousness razor says

    Then why aren’t they voting for those attitudes by voting for democrats?

    They did. Clinton won, if what we’re counting is people. We should be counting people, which are the sorts of entities which have attitudes and vote, for which laws and other policies are made. So there’s no “why” which needs to be explained in that case.

    Their attitudes are liberal/progressive, but their votes are conservative.

    You are apparently counting electoral college votes, which don’t mean shit about shit.

    More generally, people vote for candidates who are likable, have the beer-drinking factor, are more relatable, more down-to-Earth, validate their concerns, don’t seem to be condescending or insulting about them, or whatever the personal contrasts between two candidates may be from their perspective. That doesn’t express any issues that could be characterized as conservative or liberal. But conservatives do seem more prone to using these low- or zero-information bullshit tactics with their candidates. Pick somebody who’s smiling a lot, somebody who’s white and looks just like you, somebody who talks like you, somebody who can clean an assault rifle in front of a camera, has the same nightmares as you do, and so on. Who gives a shit about policy or informing voters about it, when pretty much your entire policy consists of dismantling/disabling the government and keeping people ignorant about everything?

    It can become quite a show in case you haven’t noticed, but there’s no substance in any of that. We don’t stand much of a chance, if we come off as boring snobs who actually care about tax policy, science, human rights, or anything which isn’t already familiar to you in your personal life. A lot of people just tune out, and their votes for these bullshitting conservative clowns don’t reflect what they would think, if they ever sat down and actually considered what they think. When you do press the issue in a poll or a conversation or wherever, then you can get a sense of how they actually think (when they think). But they’re not acting on that sort of thinking all of the time, if they ever are, so of course their voting patterns may not reflect it.

  307. slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) says

    our election process is a total clusterfark.
    Can’t we institute a multi-round elimination series?
    Where
    1st round: N candidates, party affiliation identified but superfluous.
    – Eliminate candidate with fewest votes.
    repeat: eliminating candidate with fewest number of votes.
    Final round is for final 2 candidates. Popular vote decides.
    or rather
    present N candidates, allow populous to rank preference for each (1 = most preferred, N= least preferred). Tally results where candidate with the lowest total being the most preferred of general population. voila.
    why the fork not?

  309. jack lecou says

    @Nerd of Redhead #292

    The top list has some very liberal politicians. The bottom list has more middle of the road/practical politicians.

    This seems rather…arguable.

    For one thing, there are a lot of other factors – like Washington outsiderism, or Ross Perot – which are very possibly far more influential than those candidates ostensible position on any simplistic left-right axis.

    Moreover, you might think about whether it’s just possible that the conditions of the country and the attitude of the electorate have changed somewhat since 1968. I would note rather pointedly that the only “winner” on there from this century ran and won on some fairly radical promises of universal health care, ending war, and reigning in banks.

    That was not an especially moderate platform by US standards. To be sure, that candidate’s actual administration was a bit less aggressive and uncompromising in pushing that platform through than some might have liked,. but If anything, there’s a strong case to be made that the various concessions and triangulations of the first term contributed to the less enthusiastic vote for the second, rather than the other way around.

  310. jack lecou says

    Then why aren’t they voting for those attitudes by voting for democrats? Their attitudes are liberal/progressive, but their votes are conservative.

    I don’t know if that many of those sort of people are voting conservative – especially for someone like Trump. Instead, a lot of them probably just don’t vote at all if there isn’t someone at the top of the ticket who is credible or inspiring enough to draw them out.

    That’s unfortunate, but it’s apparently a reality. If Democrats want to win, they need to put up a candidate who at least cultivates an image of being a fighter for progressive ideals, because “lesser of two evils” or even “much, much lesser of two evils” is not inspiring enough people to get out of bed on voting day. Demograaphics alone are not sufficient.

  311. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Jack Lecou, it doesn’t do any good for people to vote for an outspoken progressive, if they saddle them with congress opposed to their agenda, or his supporters won’t vote in the off-year election to make sure that the president has congressional support. That is what happened with Clinton and Obama.
    My US house district elected a democrat in 2012, who lost in 2014 because democrats couldn’t be bothered to vote, and the republican, who had about the same number of votes both years, won the second election. The democrat was returned to congress this election as the democrats voted instead of staying home.

  312. erik333 says

    Is there even a credible way to fix your election system? Neither party will want anything to change, it’s what keeps their salaries and more importantly bribes fundraising money coming, and invariably some people climb over themselves pointing out that third party candidates are not going to win, instead “vote for the lesser evil” – and certainly in the short term they are right – but down the line, there seems to be little hope for any semblance of democracy emerging out of this bullshit. It will only ever supress plurality of opinion and promote corruption.

  313. jack lecou says

    Jack Lecou, it doesn’t do any good for people to vote for an outspoken progressive, if they saddle them with congress opposed to their agenda, or his supporters won’t vote in the off-year election to make sure that the president has congressional support. That is what happened with Clinton and Obama.

    Yes, absolutely. And it’s probably even worse on the state level, where statehouses and governorships have been quietly passing all kinds of conservative ALEC crap and whatnot for years, even in a lot of states that go reliably “blue” in presidential years.

    That’s where federal leg districts get set too, which is one of the reasons Republicans currently have the House locked up so tight.

    Again, it’s not entirely clear what to do about that. More grassroots activism and get out the vote volunteers is probably part of the answer, but it only goes so far. We should definitely be pushing hard for changing voting day, and/or making it a holiday, having more early voting, etc.I think more universal mail-in voting as in Oregon might help too, though I’m not sure where the numbers on that are.

    We probably need to think radically too, at least to move the conversation and position some of the above as a “compromise” – maybe voting should be mandatory, for example. There’s also a case to be made for making the House larger. Historically, each representative had at least an order of magnitude or two few constituents to represent. It’d be a lot harder to gerrymander hundreds of smaller districts, and it would reduce voting power distortions between large and small states in the house and the electoral college as well.

  314. jack lecou says

    Also: while the electorate’s habit of failing to back up Obama or Clinton with a cooperative legislature is frustrating, a divided government with a progressive (or at least not ultra-conservative) executive is still a hell of a lot better than a unified one with the wrong party in charge.

    There’s the Supreme Court, for one thing…

  315. ck, the Irate Lump says

    F.O. wrote:

    @slithey tove #307:
    http://tech.mit.edu/V123/N8/8voting.8n.html

    Utterly irrelevant. The saying, “the perfect is the enemy of the good” applies here. Just because there are currently no perfect solutions doesn’t mean there aren’t any better solutions, or that we should hold off on implementing better solutions because a perfect one might be found someday.

  316. blbt5 says

    Brilliant. That one picture says it all. Also, the end of Terminator 3: Judgement Day. American fascism was bound to rise one day, but inevitably whites will inherit the whirlwind.