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

pragmatists sure have weird dreams

As I remarked on FB last night, I sense an unholy alliance coming between the Clintons and the remains of the GOP establishment.

If "unholy" is your translation of "Everybody win$!"

also really liked Taibbi's comparison of Rubio to Ian Holm's last moments in Alien

i don't think any GOP remnant is linking up w/ hillary.

back in 08 all the "pumas" and hillary die hards screamed and wept and flirted with palinism and then obama got huge turnout on election day and the phenomenon disappeared.

similarly i think the professional GOP will huff and puff and then happily vote for the man who will keep hillary out. none of these people has a problem with bigots or bullies or liars.

god the election is 6mo away.

actually lots of those establishment types did vote for Obama in 2008.

Depended how much money + influence you had.

god the election is 6mo away.

8+

i recommend baseball.

i grew up in cubs territory, i'll never understand the sport tbh

http://thefederalist.com/2016/02/24/ill-take-hillary-clinton-over-donald-trump/

lol don't believe a word

should I give them a click

Yeah, I was just coming here to post that for all the _Alien_ refs that would pop up in campaign writing, one doesn't expect them to namecheck Ian Holm.

Rubio's face-plant brilliantly reprised Sir Ian Holm's performance in Alien, as a malfunctioning, disembodied robot head stammering, "I admire its purity," while covered in milky android goo. It was everything we hate about scripted mannequin candidates captured in a brief crack in the political façade.

ugh @ Rubio's brief crack

Martin Longman compiled Trump's insults (pollable):

asich: “total dud”
Rubio: “a lightweight choker”
Carson: “Pyramids built for grain storage – don’t people get it?”
Cruz: “the worst liar, crazy or very dishonest”
Fiorina: “if you listen to Carly Fiorina for more than ten minutes straight, you develop a massive headache”
Graham: “dumb mouthpiece”
Walker: “not smart”
Pataki: “terrible governor of NY, one of the worst”
Jindal: “such a waste.”
Paul: “reminds me of a spoiled brat without a properly functioning brain”
Perry: “should be forced to take an IQ test”

FOX News flunkies:

Brit Hume: “know nothing”
Megyn Kelly: “I refuse to call Megyn Kelly a bimbo, because that would not be politically correct”
Carl Cameron: “consistently fumbles & misrepresents poll results”
Charles Krauthammer: “should be fired”
Bill Kristol: “a sad case”, “always wrong”
Frank Luntz: “a low-class snob”
George Will: “boring and totally biased”, “should be thrown off Fox News”

Remember December?

http://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2015/12/16/donald-trump-jeb-bush-cnn-gop-debate-sot.cnn

Carson one is an easy winner

Also pleased that Taibbi foregrounded the WWE comparison that others(and me) have been making. Trump has been business associates with WWE and (probably?) buddies with Vince McMahon since the mid-80s. Both dudes are the same age and inherited multi-million dollar empires from their fathers, hitting their stride in 1980s NYC. Art of the Deal got published in November 1987; Wrestlemania III was the biggest thing thing WWE had done to that point and happened 7 months earlier.

Rather than the fact that modern American presidential campaigns(GOP primary ones especially) resembling pro-wrestling so strongly being a horrifyingthing, it's actually reassuring(and/or confirming several biases all at once).

You have so many shared elements:

-storylines, that everybody's got an angle and beef/alliances with everybody else

-character and persona, heel/babyface or not

- communicating all this in a straightforward, direct manner that reaches every audience member even in the cheap seats(Steve Austin chugged those Steveweisers in an exaggerated manner for a reason)

-that despite what everybody on camera is telling you at that moment, all this is a work, and you are watching a constructed theatrical performance

-oh and that only pro-wrestling is real, to borrow a line from standup/podcast host/ex-WWE writer Matt McCarthy.

Trump speeches are so obviously him cutting a promo to the camera, same as Ric Flair or Randy Savage or The Rock, only louder and with less nuance or intelligence. He's getting his character/persona across to the audience in a way that connects on an emotional level, ugly as those emotions are, but that connects deeper than just listing off policy stances. I think that aspect is what's escaping or exasperating to the punditry, who are operating with a far different model of how these things work.

Dude can communicate, like Obama/Reagan/others; it's just that what he does communicate is so horrendously wrong and evil.

I'm just wondering if he'll cause his own downfall before reaching the general. Probably not, at least not in the same way every one else of these joker chucklefucks have so far this time round.

also WWEism makes politics just a little bit gayer

NY Times has one Sanders story on how the old fogey can't stop railing against the "corporate media," WHATEVER THAT IS! (It includes his alleged regular answer to interview-time requests: "If you are a typical media idiot, hmmmm, 12 seconds.")

And another one with the title Sanders Is Jewish, but He Doesn’t Like to Talk About It. (psssst, self-hating...)

the times coverage of the sanders campaign has been ridiculous

omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg omg

https://twitter.com/ppppolls/status/702541126994153472

http://thefederalist.com/2016/02/24/ill-take-hillary-clinton-over-donald-trump/

how many of these "sincere conservatives" are left in america? are they an actual, sizable voting bloc that could stop trump if the field narrowed to two?

they seem so retro

alex p. keaton

i know this thread moves fast but come on

hahaha barely an hour before that link was reposted

wtf @ this, from a time.com post:

If Robby Mook manages Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, former journalist David Brock rules the external Clinton machine. ...

All the pushback on misleading news reports that Bernie Sanders won the Latino vote (he didn’t) in Nevada, trackers following Sanders catching his every gaffe like when he yelled “English, only!” into a mic at a Nevada event or pushing polling showing Clinton winning amongst African Americans in South Carolina—those all come from from Brock.

http://time.com/4214020/david-brock-correct-record-media-matters-hillary-clinton/

the author just tweeted they are working on a correction (how long does it take jeez)

never forget that this was a man who wrote a book called Blinded by the Right.

It's good that our media is relying more and more on the "Telephone Game" model of information dissemination.

jesus christ

the author of that paragraph is jay newton-small but yeah brock is a piece of work.

do you think that was an intentional lie or a mistake

it's hard to imagine that anyone could be following this campaign at all and think that sanders would say something like that. and even if they thought they had heard he did, printing it without checking up on it.

Hitchens on Brock's book: "I wanted to take an extra shower after trudging through this dismally written, pick-nose, spiteful and furtive little book. It glitters with malice and the more cowardly kind of "disclosure"; it’s a dank, filthy tissue turned inside out."

I can't believe how much that guy twisted the story of Sanders beating up a roomful of immigrants while screaming "ENGLISH ONLY!"

the paragraph kind of reads like a list of three "misleading news reports" but it's not clear, probably a mistake (most things are stupidity rather than malice)

A. Certainly going back to 2008 during the primary Secretary Clinton was subjected to various forms of sexism overt, subtle that were detrimental. Fortunately Senator Obama was not subjected to something similar; the culture seemed to tolerate sexism and not racism.

lol

I would probably take the Fiorina insult over the Carson but either way we can agree that this young man shows promise as he ventures into the longer form.

they missed the one where he insulted charles krauthamer for being disabled, that was a sharp one

i'm guessing nobody copy-edited this post since it is full of run-on sentences

yeah, the sentence in question was even sort of hard to follow

I laughed hardest at the Perry insult. And speaking of which, how does "Vote Perry - The Charges Were Dropped!" grab you as a campaign slogan?

Charles Krauthammer: “should be fired”
Bill Kristol: “a sad case”, “always wrong”

stopped clock etc.

@dick_nixon
It was a goal of mine 40 years ago, along with Gov. Connally, to perhaps start a third party. You can now understand why.

erick erickson is mad, sweating and nude

http://theresurgent.com/rick-perry-for-president/

this is a perrin sock Twitter account right xp

xps how did he miss a Jeb! insult? too many to count?

also WWEism makes politics just a little bit gayer

Yeah, much like many other aspects, it would just foreground such previously obscured subtext