Il Douché and His Discontents: The 2016 Primary Voting Thread, Part 4

if any election was made for vine, it's this one.

https://vine.co/v/igH3wW1Khe9

https://vine.co/v/ig6X7WZOnhw

https://twitter.com/feistyfrank/status/704874838230491137

https://vine.co/v/i60YubamjY5

also

https://twitter.com/Reince/status/704864814280151040

HAPPY BIRTHDAY NED RAGGETT

HAPPY BIRTHDAY NED RAGGETT

Why thank you. If elected etc

Found this pretty riveting last night:

http://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2016/03/02/cnn-analysts-heated-exchange-trump-race-divide-sot.cnn

CNN just let them go, too.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY NED RAGGETT

Hold up there, don't you want to wait for all the votes to come in first before you jump to conclusions?

Donald Trump comports himself with the misplaced arrogance of a Waffle House manager whose branch got its seventh 4-star review in a row.

has everyone heard HRC's "America has always been great" act, and if so can she stfu

Yeah, it's bullshit and you can practically hear her triangulating.

And we know we’ve got work to do. But, that work, that work is not to make America great again. America never stopped being great. We need …

We have to make America whole. We have to fill in what’s been hollowed out.

good lord this is stupid.

Next four and a half years are going to be super painful.

The massive support behind her likely opponent in the GE is a pretty decent argument against America's greatness.

The "America sucks" platform did not test well with focus groups though.

Not in America anyway.

Ha

The massive support of war merchants and neocons behind her in the GE is a pretty decent argument against America's greatness.

any rumblings from bloomberg in the last couple of weeks?

yes, he had some bad borscht.

is "America sucks" as the only alternative to that slop she's been spouting a corollary to "Obama's not perfect, but..."?

Is there anybody in the country outside of the tri-state area who would care one way or the other if Bloomberg dropped into the race? He'd go over about as well as Lawrence Lessig did, imo.

Point to Oliver - "Donald Drumpf" currently a more popular search than "Ted Cruz", "Marco Rubio"

the "laugh at the funny foreign name" approach might be the least funny of a generally unfunny line of attack

And we know we’ve got work to do. But, that work, that work is not to make America great again. America never stopped being great. We need …

We have to make America whole. We have to fill in what’s been hollowed out.

good lord this is stupid.

― micro brewbio (crüt), Wednesday, March 2, 2016

Now, now...NPR analysts liked this response to Trump, along with that other corny one where Hillary says, 'I'm sorry, I don't want to build any walls, I want to build ladders of opportunity"

If you build a 10 foot wall, someone will build an 11 foot ladder of opportunity.

i put the Drumpf extension on my work computer and I gotta say it hasn't stopped being entertaining yet, esp. seeing it in like 48 pt font on CNN

Politico published an extensive “insider” look at the Sanders campaign on the morning of Super Tuesday that concludes with this fascinating tidbit:

They’re already prepping the fallback plan: 10 areas, including killing Obama’s trade deals and changing the super-delegate process that they’re going to organize around and try forcing into the Democratic platform.

“Worst case, we’re going to Philadelphia with 1,500 delegates. Best case, we’re going to win,” [Sanders senior advisor Larry] Cohen said. “Either way, we’re going to change things.”

Miles Davis was a famous drumpfet player.

Holy shit, that Trump weasel in that CNN link. It's just .... insane! I wish I could punch him for being a fucking asshole.

does he really believe this nonsense or is he just saying it to deflect attention?

"The KKK were 50 years ago connected to the Democratic party - the current Democratic party talks about race a lot - Check.... mate!"

Like, if you're going to lie and misdirect and go that big, why not just go bigger? "The moon is a racist invention of the democratic party." "Jews have killed more people than the rest of the world combined." "Poor people cause hurricanes." "The KKK was founded to make sure all Americans could safely vote."

The last makes sense, that has been a frequent focus of leftist groups.

Holy shit, that Trump weasel in that CNN link. It's just .... insane! I wish I could punch him for being a fucking asshole.
--Josh in Chicago

No more insane than every NRO article sadly.

Man, why do they make it so hard to punch people on TV or in print?

That's the problem with the media. If someone comes on TV and just spouts bullshit, not only should you not be required to even engage with them, they should be banned from TV entirely. And yet the co-host or counterpuncher or cowpuncher or whomever even bothers to argue? You can't just leave it at "well, we'll just agree to disagree," you have to punch them in the face and tell them to get the fuck out of the studio.

Can you tell I don't have cable?

It's marvelous how we've reached a point at which Rubio's winning one state gives him the motivation to stay in the race.

Oh man I really had a case of the punchies last night. When Tom Delay came on we were talking abt how much you would pay to have a clean shot. For charity, of course.

Wld actually borrow to get one in.

If donations weren't made public I'd seriously consider giving financial shots in the arm to no-hopers just to keep the popcorntastic spectacle going.

i wonder if anyone responded to ben carson's letter requesting a little chat session before the thursday debate?

"Dear Dr. Carson,

lol"

just Bernie, then xp

xpost

i think carson and rubio have plenty of money to keep going. maybe not kasich though

last-ditch strategy seems to be 'keep trump under 50% of the delegates and prepare for a convention fight', so everyone might as well stay in

"Dear Dr. Carson: I understand you're concerned with the lack of civility. I wholeheartedly concur. Accordingly, you are cordially invited to bite me, you loser shitbag."

It is ridiculous, the extent to which cable news will allow anyone to blather on as if everyone has an equally legitimate and reasoned opinion. Except it isn't as if that at all because it's actually as if they need to fill airtime and as if they exist primarily for the sake of sensationalism and are arguably more entertainment consortiums than they are news organizations.

As the Republicans get mired deeper and deeper into this unsolvable mess, I'm going to start checking in on things like The Weekly Standard, where the we-can-still-stop-Trump contortions will be amazing for the next few months.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/five-reasons-trump-is-weaker-than-he-looks/article/2001354

Cynical or not, I like the fact that Clinton is making Flint a big talking point, because used properly it's the perfect symbol of the evils of privatization and "small government" conservatism. But I hope Clinton is actually going to portray it that way and not just co-opt and blunt it as some kind of vague GOP bad guy thing without an ideology behind it.

the more mainstream conservatives also have their head stuck up their ass. here's Douthat, whose voice is barely audible from within the cheeks:

But in the end, Trump’s numbers were impressive but not at all a race ender. The states in play were mostly up and down what you might call the Trump Belt — the swath of America, extending from the Deep South up through Appalachia and into New England, where his unusual coalition is strongest. Yet he won less than half the night’s delegates, with vote totals still in the 35 percent range — peaking in Massachusetts and Alabama (an amazing combination), but falling into the 20s outside the Trump Belt (in Oklahoma, Texas, Minnesota) and holding in the 30s elsewhere.

For a candidate who is not only opposed but feared as a race-baiting demagogue by almost the entire party establishment, who looks less electable than any of his rivals in the fall, who has prominent conservatives (including, this week, a sitting United States senator) lining up to swear they’ll never vote for him, who is basically in undeclared war with the last Republican president and the last two party nominees — for such a candidate, 35 percent of the vote still does not seem like it should be enough to win through to the nomination.

Hillary really needs to hammer home the potential Trump University-zation of America.

tbf, the night wasn't really as impressive for Trump as it was for Clinton. I think there's some validity to Cruz's argument that if the other candidates drop and the party coalesces around him, he may have a slight chance to upset Trump, although it's a long shot. At this point, Rubio, Kasich, and Carson have no real business sticking around.

xpost

A reasonably likely scenario that I have not really seen gamed out is: how well does Trump do as a general-election candidate bearing only the half-hearted endorsement of a fractured party? At best! At worst, his nomination will have been wrung out of a contested convention, with Much Butthurt ensuing. Plus a number of reasonably prominent Republicans have already said they'd take their ball and go home rather than support Generalissimo Looneytunes.

Previous primaries have been bitterly contested. Gore and Kerry were not ideal choices, but Democrats at least pretended to come together to anoint them at convention time, and mostly stuck with them through to November. Obama v. Clinton was not a warm love-fest (as you may recall), but Democrats at least pretended to come together to anoint him at convention time.

Usually the major-party candidates go from convention to election day with support from their respective parties. Is that now irrelevant in the Age of Trump (when Everything is Different(tm))?

I'm trying to imagine a Trump general-election campaign where he obviously has allies, but much of the party apparatus is at best like, "oh yeah, and please also vote for... um... the individual at the top of the ticket. Here's an RNC-branded clothespin for you to hold your nose with, should you need it."

yet it feels like Cruz has significantly less chance of beating Clinton than Drumpf does. there are no quasi-mystical "Reagan Democrats" out there waiting for Ted Cruz.

eh, mythical not mystical, duh.