US Presidential Candidates

Eyal wrote:

PeterZ wrote:So true. I would add that if there was a theme to this election, it was against corruption as well as the re-assertion of nationalist goals

If Trump stays true to form you're about to find out what real kleptocrat-style corruption is like...

Oh yes, i wonder how far the deficit can be increased before USA goes bankrupt. And whether it will happen during the coming presidency or the following one that will end up having to deal with the mess Trump is going to leave behind.

Well, that is, if he leaves ANYTHING behind.

Tenshinai wrote:

PeterZ wrote:
Its not a plague on both your houses, it is a plague on the One House. The elite/donors jumped into joint opposition of Trump. The Kochs and Soros fought on the same side in this election just as ALL the Bushes supported Hillary. If Trump sends the AG after the pay for play allegation of the Clinton Foundation, it will prune back the Uni-Party. Perhaps we can finally establish access for true alternative parties.

Face the facts, the democrats have been captured more completely by the elites. Destroy the mechanisms they use to control that party and perhaps, you can rely on the party to support the will of its members rather than the whims of the elite donors.

The US democrats are BAD, no doubt there, the problem is, the republicans are WORSE.
MUCH worse even.

That you don´t understand just how bad Trump´s constant litany of lies and hatespeech is, that just makes you one of the real losers in this election.

I believe Einstein held one definition of insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

Republicans are worse than Democrats in many ways. Republican voters have learned to try something different. Since voting for those crappy politicians have gotten us here to this awful situation, voting for someone else....anyone else will get us somewhere else.

Will it be a better place? Don't know. But it will be somewhere else that will likely not resemble Europe. We will take that chance as the vote this past Tuesday suggests we did.

PeterZ wrote:I believe Einstein held one definition of insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

Republicans are worse than Democrats in many ways. Republican voters have learned to try something different.

I am continually amazed at how many times I have seen someone try to airily hand wave away bigotry, racism, xenophobia, sexual predation and abject ignorance and incompetence as "something different" when they refer to voting for Trump as if they were experimenting with a new ice cream flavor they hadn't tried before and just wanted to see how it tasted.... all innocent-like.

All those claims are crap. You will view whatever he says under that prism. Sorry but that claim of yours that he response to those KKK asshats means he MUST be supportive of racism requires interpretation for it to be supportive racism. That said, you will interpret anything he says as supportive of racism with the slightest provocation. Indeed my threshold is higher.

Of course, I believe that mindsets similar to yours displays its own qualities of bigotry. That suggests that we have our prism to be aware of. I don't believe further discussion will get us anywhere, so I bid you adieu.

gcomeau wrote:

PeterZ wrote:I believe Einstein held one definition of insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

Republicans are worse than Democrats in many ways. Republican voters have learned to try something different.

I am continually amazed at how many times I have seen someone try to airily hand wave away bigotry, racism, xenophobia, sexual predation and abject ignorance and incompetence as "something different" when they refer to voting for Trump as if they were experimenting with a new ice cream flavor they hadn't tried before and just wanted to see how it tasted.... all innocent-like.

PeterZ wrote:All those claims are crap. You will view whatever he says under that prism. Sorry but that claim of yours that he response to those KKK asshats means he MUST be supportive of racism requires interpretation for it to be supportive racism.

Re-tweeted. White. Supremacists. SEVENTY. FIVE. TIMES.


There is precious little interpretation required in what that involves.

gcomeau wrote:

PeterZ wrote:All those claims are crap. You will view whatever he says under that prism. Sorry but that claim of yours that he response to those KKK asshats means he MUST be supportive of racism requires interpretation for it to be supportive racism.

Re-tweeted. White. Supremacists. SEVENTY. FIVE. TIMES.


There is precious little interpretation required in what that involves.

If I may suggest an alternative, consider Trump's lack of self-control. He shoots from the lip, and I suspect that he'd retweet almost anything critical of Clinton without thinking first. He is brash and impulsive, which is attractive to those tired of the same old political dance steps.

dscott8 wrote:

gcomeau wrote:
Re-tweeted. White. Supremacists. SEVENTY. FIVE. TIMES.


There is precious little interpretation required in what that involves.

If I may suggest an alternative, consider Trump's lack of self-control. He shoots from the lip, and I suspect that he'd retweet almost anything critical of Clinton without thinking first. He is brash and impulsive, which is attractive to those tired of the same old political dance steps.

I would entertain that as a reasonable explanation for a handful of infractions.

Once you pass the tenth time you have retweeted some guy posting with a #whitegenocide tag or something it becomes a little strained.

Once you pass the 30 or 40th white supremacist retweet you're straining the plausibility of the excuse.

Once you pass 50 or 60 still trying to insist it's all an innocent mistake has long since become absurd.

gcomeau wrote:

dscott8 wrote:If I may suggest an alternative, consider Trump's lack of self-control. He shoots from the lip, and I suspect that he'd retweet almost anything critical of Clinton without thinking first. He is brash and impulsive, which is attractive to those tired of the same old political dance steps.

I would entertain that as a reasonable explanation for a handful of infractions.

Once you pass the tenth time you have retweeted some guy posting with a #whitegenocide tag or something it becomes a little strained.

Once you pass the 30 or 40th white supremacist retweet you're straining the plausibility of the excuse.

Once you pass 50 or 60 still trying to insist it's all an innocent mistake has long since become absurd.

Another less innocent interpretation is that he used this tweet to get press coverage. The press get splody heads and he gets the "unfair" coverage to bolster his outsider/anti-establishment persona. Did he troll the press to call him racist? Yes. Was it racist? No.

I don't know if that was what happened. But it very well could have happened that way.

gcomeau wrote:

dscott8 wrote:
If I may suggest an alternative, consider Trump's lack of self-control. He shoots from the lip, and I suspect that he'd retweet almost anything critical of Clinton without thinking first. He is brash and impulsive, which is attractive to those tired of the same old political dance steps.

I would entertain that as a reasonable explanation for a handful of infractions.

Once you pass the tenth time you have retweeted some guy posting with a #whitegenocide tag or something it becomes a little strained.

Once you pass the 30 or 40th white supremacist retweet you're straining the plausibility of the excuse.

Once you pass 50 or 60 still trying to insist it's all an innocent mistake has long since become absurd.

Please remember that this is a son of privilege, who has never lived among common folk. He may have had no real understanding of the consequences when he retweeted that stuff, and because he didn't know, he didn't care. I'm not excusing him, just trying to explain him.

PeterZ wrote:Eyal,
If the organization the judge belonged to was something more benign than the more renowned La Raza, does that not argue for making assumptions based on affiliation and NOT race? Also, how often do people use sloppy language. Referring to someone of Mexican decent as Mexican is inaccurate, but is it by definition racist?

I maintain that the charge of racism is unproven.

Did Trump ever mention La Raza? AFAIR his argument consisted of "he's Mexican...and I'm building a wall!". To the best of my recollection La Raza was brought up by Trump supporters to try to explai his statements.

Now, I have no idea whether or not Trump is personally racist. But at least as seen in his campaign, he seems to have no problem playing along with racists (for another example see his comment which started the whole Khan storm). Even if , as you suggested, he only did it for the press attention, is that much better? Does it matter whether he's racist if he's willing to cater to racist supporters?

As for your concern with regards to Trump's kleptocratic tendencies, pleas help me be vigilant. I am sure more eyes will follow his every move than would have followed Clinton. The forces of kleptocracy face a more inhospitable environment now than it would have under Clinton.

Why would they? Trumps misdeeds re his foundation and so on are a lot more clear-cut than Clinton's (doesn't he have something like 70 upcoming court cases?), yet the voters chose him anyway. I have little faith his supporters would turn on him for that (if they even believed allegations against him). And I don't hold much faith in the legislature as a check either, since while Trump got less of the vote than Romney did he still has a good chunk of the Republican base; do you think any of them will risk their seat to go against their own party's President? Especially since gerrymandering has given them a lot of secure seats in Congress but conversely makes them more vulnerable to the fanatical portions of the base.

To be honest, What I find most distressing about the current situation is that you have a party and candidate (and yes, I know the Democrats have also engaged in their shenanigans, but over the last decade it's been more on the Republican side and gotten worse) which are quite willing to challange the basic foundations of your political system. While I'm more sympathetic to the Democrat's platform in most ways, I'm not passionate about it. But in this case you have a party which has turned the Supreme Court appointment process blatently partisan (prior to his nominations, there's at least one Republican Senator who gave Garland as an example of a candidate which would be perfectly acceptable but wehich Obama would never nominate), who've openly used the Congressional oversight functions and wasted millions on a political witch hunt (the 9 Benghazi investigations which found nothing except the emails, which are a tangential matter, and which Republican legislators explicitly stated were intended to politically harm Clinton), among other things (e.g. Gingrich suggesting the reformation of HUAC).

And as for Trump, leaving aside his policies (which for the most part were never particularly clear in the first place, and I understand he's already backtracking on a lot of his platform), you have a candidate who's proposed a string of proposals which would violate the first, second, fourth, fifth and several other amendments of the Constitution, who has utterly no experience at government (remember when lack of experience was a major Republican attack against Senator Obama?), who's expressed his intention to jail his opposite number, who comes off as less coherent and consistent than a five-year-old, who accuses his opponent of masive dishonesty and corruption while being massively corrupt himself and lying about pretty much everything, who frankly spits on your military (his comments re POWs and the effectivity of generals in Mosul) and who bluntly appears to be completely ignoratn on much of what he needs to do (Msoul again for just one example)*. Who is vindictive (see for ex the analyst who - correctly, in retrospect - said the Taj Mahal would be unsuccessful, upon which Trump got him fired) and unable to resist being baited and get's into fights he doesn't need to (for example the affairs with the Khan's and Machado, both of which would have been forgotten within 24 hours if Trump had ignored them).

And the American electorate just validated all of this.

Sooner or later, the Democrats will be in power again. It's quite possible that the lesson they take from this election os to forget policy and go as dirst as you can for the heartstrings; forget good governance and go to for the jugular. Do you really want US politics to descend into an orgy of mutual scorched-earth tactics? Because that's where I see this headed if not repudiated.

*This is without mentioning the FBI's conduct which AFAIK Trump didn;t have anything to do with but undermines the credibility - hard-won after Hoover - of one of your major law enforcement agencies. Frankly, depending on what you believe his motives were, Comey's conduct towards the end of the election indicates he was either playing partisan politics or lsot control of his underlings, and either way he should lose his seat, although I imagine he dodged that particular bullet.

EDIT - which is not to say I'm particularly for Clinton. I wouldn't be this irate if, say ROmney or McCain had won in the previous elections. But even taking the worst allegations about Clinton as true well, apart from the outlandish ones like toe Clinton Murder Machine), she'd have done a lot less (or at least more easily repairable) damage to basic American institutions.

dscott8 wrote:Please remember that this is a son of privilege, who has never lived among common folk. He may have had no real understanding of the consequences when he retweeted that stuff, and because he didn't know, he didn't care. I'm not excusing him, just trying to explain him.

Presidential material, there.