I will keep doing, but not worth it! The 2016 Presidential Primary Voting Thread

otm

Tough call, but I'll go with this:

RUBIO: Well, first of all, I don't know how he knows what I said on Univision because he doesn't speak Spanish. And second of all, the other point that I would make...

CRUZ: (SPEAKING SPANISH).

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/02/13/the-cbs-republican-debate-transcript-annotated/

This whole thing of Trump and Bush playing Connery and Trebek has been my favorite part of the GOP season.

oh man, perfect analogy

Republican debate bringing us ever closer to:

http://33hpwq10j9luq8gl43e62q4e.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/images/president-camacho-machine-gun.jpg

and then yeah the stuff about george w. was pretty amazing. like the 9/11 comments are what will grab the headlines but trump went hard after the iraq and afghanistan wars with "we've been in the middle east for fifteen years and we haven't won AN-Y-THING." by all accounts this is not what republicans want to hear since apparently the iraq war is still really popular with 2/3 of them. which makes me wonder if the 1/3 that supports trump is that other 1/3 or if there's some overlap since this hasn't really been the major feature of his campaign (except i guess beyond "winning" being something we need to do more).

― the thirteenth floorior (Doctor Casino), Sunday, February 14, 2016 11:01 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is precisely why there are people who are deciding between voting for sanders and trump!

as for trump's shots at GWB for the failure of our middle east policies, it's easy to applaud those. but although sometimes trump makes isolationist gestures and suggests we should just stay out of the middle east, other times it seems like he's not criticizing the interventionism but just the fact that bush et al are "losers" and haven't "won"--whatever that means. i guess it means dropping a few H bombs.

honestly if trump gets the nom i hope someone shoots him.

I was trying to figure out what kind of cuss an H bomb was for a moment...

srsly, post less, ppl

honestly if trump gets the nom i hope someone shoots him.

Might finally get the ball rolling on gun control ...

i'd say the same about someone else. :o

i didn't quite get the Trump "pussy" controversy. Howard Stern said that 20x a day on broadcast radio in the '90s.

And theres trumps vp

struggling to find a good-size image of the newsweek cover from 2000 positing trump, jesse ventura and warren beatty as presidential possibilities

haha, what was this.

http://i.imgur.com/7JiJW9N.jpg

In December 1998, Trump finally said that he would explore the possibility of running for president, but he didn’t offer any specifics on platform or political party, People reported:

Donald Trump declared Thursday he is moving toward a run for the U.S. presidency. “I will be forming a presidential exploratory committee,” Trump, 53, said on CNN’s “Larry King Live.” The New York real estate developer and New Jersey casino owner said his top choice as a running mate would be Oprah Winfrey. “She is terrific, ” he said. A Winfrey spokesperson said she is not interested. Trump, who claims he’ll pay his own campaign expenses, had dinner with Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura Thursday. Ventura, leader of the Reform Party, has been recruiting Trump for months to seek his party’s nomination — but after the meal the two men joked to reporters that they were throwing their support behind their dinner companion, actor Woody Harrelson.

http://i.imgur.com/WX8JVzU.jpg

that! thank you. veepstakes 2016, ready to roll.

http://i.imgur.com/vKLBAWP.jpg

"And I told those two that I would not seek nor would I accept their party's nomination..."

the thermals - the body, the woody, the trump

i'd say the same about someone else. :o

eh?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YfvBnTe16o

So the Clintons and Kissingers do hang out.

Ugh Clintons are such POS.

The ex-President isn't the only on the trail for Jeb. (sic)

Barbara Bush, the former first lady, hit the trail with Bush in New Hampshire, boasting to voters that her son is an honest and decent man.

Lower-profile Bushes have made cameo appearances as well: Jeb Bush introduced his uncle, John Bush, at a campaign stop in Mount Pleasant on Wednesday, and joked for two minutes about various members of his family, including a granddaughter, Georgia Helena Walker Bush, who has the same initials as Bush 41.

rapidly going from Poppy Bush to Scrappy Bush, Yabba-Bush, Bushy-Dum etc.

Freddie deBoer:

The problem, from my perspective, is that the politics of association — the ways in which politics becomes about establishing a given in-group identity, and more importantly, an out-group identity, threaten to become the only kind of politics, in general and especially among progressives. I’ve written a lot about this and I don’t want to belabor the point. Suffice is to say that the tactic involves spreading a particular political belief through associating it with a social or cultural group people want to be a part of, and that this tactic has become inescapable in the past decade or so. It’s no coincidence that this has occurred along with the rise of social media, as the lines between the social space and the political space have blurred considerably in those forums. Again, I should point out that this isn’t an entirely bad thing. These tactics have proven to be remarkably effective at, for example, spreading a particular vocabulary. Look at the rise of the language of academic feminism. I don’t think people realize how quickly that language has taken over progressive politics and media circles. Go back in time even ten years ago and a lot of the language would be just unrecognizable to the people then. And that’s in a world where the humanities are often treated as a joke. But there are deep problems with this situation, too.

What does this have to do with “bro”? I think “bro” is the purest distillation of this associative function of politics, and that the only meaningful definition of “bro” in this sense is “person from the outgroup,” “person who I can treat as ridiculous or irrelevant without argument.”

I’ve written a lot about this and I don’t want to belabor the point.

He belabors it all the time though.

politics becomes about establishing a given in-group identity, and more importantly, an out-group identity, threaten to become the only kind of politics, in general

seriously nobody even has to pretend to give a shit about history anymore do they? It's the most irrelevant subject possible!

ah yes, for the days when politics had nothing to do with in-groups and out-groups, and obnoxious privileged asshats were not driven from the ranks of movements they didn't belong in anyway with the cruel, career-ending label of "bro." i fear for the direction of our country and our politics.

won't someone think of the bros

I think what distinguishes the historical weird bullshit of purity test obsessions and the in-/out-group tribal gatekeeping thru American presidential primaries is that they're now occurring in a space that hypercharges and overclocks the response/retransmission cycles.

The trad ways we had of these convos and public declarations and such, be they pamphleteering or op-eds or mass media broadcasting or cable news or blogs and YouTube, haven't accelerated to the point where things are now.

And the speed of data blasts at each other are enhanced by other recent sociopolitical developments from GOP fracturing to Citizens United funding the disparate cell leaders of that fracturing.

It's like the worst mechanisms of the human brain sharpened and amplified by social media that damage all other bits of interaction are particularly weird in this already screwy social process.

i definitely agree about amplification, tribalism, bubble effects and stuff.... have ranted about that on ilx before (re: the right-wing info-sphere and dylann roof specifically).

just not sure i buy it as a cudgel against e.g. the proliferation of a certain vocabulary in progressive circles (which i incidentally think is way less widespread and compulsory than the blurb above would imply). it kinda starts to sound like anti-"SJW" stuff: oh, you haven't been sincerely persuaded of the value of thinking this way, you just toe the line to impress some feminazi girls. the ~social space~ has blurred into the political sphere. it's similar to the way i see the people-who-agree-with-you-bubble as a real problem, but not quite the same. not sure i can articulate the points of discontinuity right now though. hrm.

Let Freddie do it. He writes words.

this was megyn kelly, on fox, going to ask some people in a room a question in order to get karl rove to accept the outcome of the election -- just saying it was even more epochal than you remember. this was incredible too of course.

― denies the existence of dark matter (difficult listening hour), Saturday, February 6, 2016 9:14 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

just rewatched this, god is it satisfying. it's a different sort of thing than the failure-to-walk-on-stage debate pileup, where the humor builds with each combination of people back there and how they're acting/responding, all these little character-type moments. like some kind of vaudeville routine or a silent comedy. megyn kelly being sent into purgatory because karl rove can't accept the election results is a different order of satisfaction, this deepening schadenfreude as you feel this giant machine and its avatars unable to face the facts their own system is giving them. rove at the desk sweatily running different numbers, spectacles falling down his nose, scratching his head, there's gotta be a way. the boys in the back room having absolutely nothing for them. off in another monitor, the thing you'd actually think would be filling the news screens: enormous crowds cheering the victories as they pile up. for one second the camera following megyn kelly catches a screen showing the current live broadcast in all its stupidity, would be a mise-en-abyme if only they'd stayed there a second.

also megyn kelly in that outfit/hairstyle is total ws of shame, i was pained to realize ;_;

I watched it live. I watched FOX the last half hour before Ohio was called. I ran out of tonic water.

oh is there a link for that? Would love to watch it

That was really a thing to see. I had just flipped over to Fox to see how they were handling things and got to see the entire chain of events. Amazing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TwuR0jCavk

the walk of glory/shame starts about 5 mins in iirc

love Karl showing his knowledge of Ohio county names nice work Karl

i only ever saw it thanks to ILX - bar i was at was tuned to MSNBC. thanking u all once again. let's trot this out every four years along with the ben carson trainwreck, it'd be a better tradition than most election year cliches.

what's the unskewed polls guy up to this year?

i had completely forgotten about the unskewed polls thing. i can say with 99% confidence that this election will be even zanier than the last, but 2012 was truly bonkers

love Karl showing his knowledge of Ohio county names nice work Karl

Well to be fair, some of those places are namechecked in the Rush Limbaugh theme song.

i have never, ever, forgotten about unskewed polls guy. i have to stop myself from posting "this will surprise many" virtually every other day in response to totally ridiculous optimistic predictions by one camp or another.

i had completely forgotten about the unskewed polls guy. the craziest thing about that election night in 2012, for me, was the way it slowly became clear checking in with rove on fox and conservatives on blogs/twitter - that they *all* actually believed only their own polling, all the way up until the votes started coming in, and they all were expecting romney to win the election. including romney. they didn't think the democrats would turn out like they had the previous cycle. i mean, in 2008, behind the scenes everybody was pretty certain obama was going to win. the mccain people knew it. not this time.

Romney hadn't written a concession speech, recall!

when she says "the doubts that Karl Rove is attempting to place" (5:58) it's simply the best

and his concession was soooooo lousy. no sense of timing or anything. couldn't even wait for the limp applause to clear before going to the next line. robot smile through the whole thing. i mean all of that was basically par for the course with romney and who could expect that anybody would rise above their normal baseline in what must be a really exhausting, bizarre adrenaline moment - but still, it sucked.

kinda wondering what the best concession speeches of all time are

xpost i just love all her patter to cover what would otherwise be blatant dead air + footsteps as she's making her way down the hall. "keeep comin'... here we go... now when we practiced this before, uh, in our rehearsals, we lost all audio in our ears, right about here. it's happening to me again."

i'm thinking it's something like a city council election in a small town, and someone loses but somehow finds out before the speech that they are now in fact the mayor (?!) and ooooh how the tables are turned during that concession speech