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

I had a hard time not reading those quotes from Michael McDonald as song lyrics.

Glad to see you have the same reaction as I to Frankenstein-ing, Karl.

harry reid prob not making mordy's point there but mordy otm

also haha

Republicans created him by spending seven years appealing to some of the darkest forces in America.

very diplomatic

If all of this leads to Trump immolating himself on an ice floe in the Arctic, they can call him whatever they want.

I would like to say definitively that people who choose to vote in a Democratic primary over a Republican primary are already repudiating the overtly racist themes that is powering Trump through the Republican primaries but I don't know people's true hearts so it would be speculation. I strongly, strongly suspect that the audience Trump is appealing to with his bluntness has a plurality of support within the Republican party and I don't think he can modulate enough to salve the people within that party who have rejected him outright so far, let alone voters who are actively choosing someone to compete against him.

The wild card in this are spiteful Bernie supporters who are convinced that Hillary Clinton is a mewling she-devil and that voting for her is directly equivalent to voting for Ted Cruz, so they will either not vote if she's the nominee or, in more puzzling logic, vote for Trump because somehow currently being an unrepentant bigot bully is better than having advocated for things that hurt minorities in the past and saying "Based on how all of that turned out, I would not advocate those positions today."

If only Jon Stewart were around to clip together this "dark forces" talking point, with Reid and Rahm so far.

(Just so we are clear, I am emphatically NOT saying no one has anything to worry about; what I am saying is that if people actually do their jobs, Trump will not be President.)

obv the guy who commanded allied forces in europe was better prepared to lead a country than donald fuckin' trump

"(Clemenceau) once said that war is too important to be left to the generals. When he said that, 50 years ago, he may have been right...but now, war is too important to be left to the politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought...And I can no longer, sit around and allow Communist subversion, Communist corruption, and Communist infiltration of our precious bodily fluids."

woah go joe

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/03/joe-biden-donald-trump-racism-220076?cmpid=sf#ixzz41hr6oJuz

The wild card in this are spiteful Bernie supporters who are convinced that Hillary Clinton is a mewling she-devil and that voting for her is directly equivalent to voting for Ted Cruz, so they will either not vote if she's the nominee or, in more puzzling logic, vote for Trump because somehow currently being an unrepentant bigot bully is better than having advocated for things that hurt minorities in the past and saying "Based on how all of that turned out, I would not advocate those positions today."

I do not believe these people actually exist, any more than I believed the "PUMA" people who were supposedly rabidly pro-Hillary and militantly anti-Obama were real, outside the realm of Internet bullshit.

i agree - i think bernie supporters are going to fall in line. he is going to lose by a lot more delegates than hillary did in 2008 so it's not even like they'll have a legitimate narrative of "we were screwed." and i sincerely hope they aren't going to vote for trump, esp after all the strong principled stands they've associated their with their support of bernie.

yeah i think bernie-to-trump crossover (jesus) is just the standard crisis-time wavering of the angry white working class between socialism and fascism. i'm sure these people exist; they always do.

if and i suppose WHEN more likely that Bernie drops out, I suspect there will be a lot of people who will be in touch telling him to give a strong statement in support of Hillary. probably saying to him, look we know she's not ideal but we've got to keep them out of the white house.

there will be a lot of people who will be in touch telling him to give a strong statement in support of Hillary

Is there even the slightest doubt that he would do this anyway?

so what would a Clinton Treasury Department look like? BlackRock.

"Fink has promoted the privatization of Social Security, while mocking the idea of retiring at 65, which is easy for a business executive who sits at a desk all day to say, rather than working on an assembly line or as a waiter."

https://theintercept.com/2016/03/02/larry-fink-and-his-blackrock-team-poised-to-take-over-hillary-clintons-treasury-department/

yeah i think bernie-to-trump crossover (jesus) is just the standard crisis-time wavering of the angry white working class between socialism and fascism. i'm sure these people exist; they always do.

― denies the existence of dark matter (difficult listening hour), Wednesday, March 2, 2016 12:31 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

confusing "yeah" here, don't know who i was agreeing with. i don't think hillary should take these people's support for granted, because the handful of things that bernie and trump have in common are exactly the same handful of things hillary and bernie don't. (cf morbs' blackrock link; cf also of course dicks.) on the other hand i'm not sure she cares about those people's support in an election in which the gop seems poised to write off basically anyone with melanin.

In fact, Fink’s views on Wall Street are so similar to Clinton’s that it’s hard to see that as a coincidence. Most notably, Clinton’s financial reform plan is mute when it comes to regulating asset management firms as SIFIs.

Fink has in recent months stressed an end to “short-termism” in the financial markets. For example, he wants to limit share buybacks that pump up stock prices, and encourage investors to hold stock longer, to focus on long-term corporate performance. Clinton has mirrored this language to such a degree that the New York Times’s Andrew Ross Sorkin suggested that Clinton “could have been channeling Laurence D. Fink.”

While the call to end short-termism is in some ways laudable, in Fink’s case it certainly reflects his self-interest. Clinton’s tax plan, for example, would keep capital gains rates higher for short-term holdings and decrease the rate for investors who hold assets over five years. Because BlackRock buys and holds most of its investments, any policy favoring long-term strategies in the markets would improve the firm’s bottom line.

limiting share buybacks and encouraging investors to hold stock longer to focus on long-term corporate performance??? what a piece of shit.

All I can say is if "BernFeelers who won't vote for Clinton ever" are the new "PUMAs", I hope they prove equally inconsequential, or equally mythical.

just fyi in case you don't read the intercept article, hillary has never said anything about fink or blackrock so this is what we might call "speculative fear-mongering," if you weren't inclined to see it as a public service warning against something that might happen (but there's no reason necessarily to believe it will)

lol i had no idea -- weird twitter fake pundit has called most of the primaries correctly

http://www.ibtimes.com/day-diggler-medias-most-accurate-political-pundit-joke-2329043

“[Silver] just built this computer, but this election doesn’t make any sense,” he said, noting the primal feelings that seem to be fueling the Trump phenomenon. “It’s not like 1992 or 1996 anger, which was nonspecific and vague, it’s actual palpable anger.”

He was quick to burn the other, non-data, gut-based side of the spectrum as well, made up of elite talking heads who cash six-figure checks for bum predictions. “These idiots think deep anger disappears because they’ve never been that angry about anything in their lives,” Biederman said with a laugh.

Cafe.com sent both of them to New Hampshire, but usually they’re just doing the best they can in New York. Aside from one predictive stumble in Nevada, which they called for Sanders, their instincts get results.

Take Rubio’s victory in Minnesota, which Google Trends, Ballotcraft, and Predictwise erroneously called for Trump. “They’re business conservatives but they’re p***ies so they’re not gonna go for Trump. We thought about it for two minutes.”

Biden otm

this why I'm not completely opposed to the anti-political correctness stance that Trump and other republicans are taking. If it means bringing all this ugliness to the surface so that it can be properly denounced and destroyed, then great. If it means legitimizing and institutionalizing even more hatred, then not so good.

hey everybody let's take a break and eat hair with Ted Cruz

https://youtu.be/v75wCTMZoSY

Without caricaturing Clinton as a she-devil, I would think there would be Sanders supporters who would want to sponsor the less corporate/funded, less dynastic candidate. Especially if those voters aren't committed Democrats, but ones who feel alienated by the establishment.

They'll vote for Clinton.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/takingnote/2016/03/02/the-myth-of-trump-hating-republicans/

Thought this was good, although it didn't cover any new territory

the Intercept piece is clearly dealing with a strong possibility, not a certainty. but keep pimping, M.

speaking of pimping maybe instead of copy/pasting every dennis perrin / fake richard nixon / intercept article that crosses yr field of vision you could set up a twitter feed to reblog them all!

wow that intercept piece is garbage, that's like preying on leftist's financial illiteracy. look a Rich Finance Guy likes her policies, they must be bad right?

Re: GOP turnout, I have no idea, but I imagine there are plenty of Republicans who went to vote for anyone but Trump. This is micro-anecdotal, but I have a friend in Arizona (a closed primary) who even changed his affiliation to Republican just to vote for someone not-Trump.

right! xp

I hated this dude's most recent book, but I won't hold it against him as long as he writes stuff like this:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/trump-a-war-criminal-in-the-making-20160229?page=2

Is there even the slightest doubt that he would do this anyway?

dude, Treeship that article is garbage.

It ends with: There is no chasm in the Republican Party, which directly contradicts the division he identifies a couple sentences earlier:
It is a party of white people that protects its richest members and feeds off the anxiety of its poorest members by directing their anger at minorities, immigrants and women.

^^^that's where the division is

Accepting the possibility that someone like Šešelj (or Trump) could advance so rapidly from bombast to mass murder requires questioning the fabric of reality before it unravels and shows itself to be fragile and disastrously dependent on an assumed ethical consensus. What I've learned is that people are addicted to the inertia of their common reality, to the desperate belief that everything shall continue as it is simply because it's been going fine up to this point.

xps morbs- any financial regulation will benefit some members of financial community at the expense of others, so you can apply that form of criticism to literally any reform. the fact that hillary's talking about short-termism is a triumph of left finance writers like mike conczal, josh mason and doug henwood who have brought critifcism of share buybacks into the mainstream

it's not just that it'll happen to benefit this guy by some coincidence. he is in favor of a policy (long term growth) that should be healthier for corporations like his and for the economy as a whole. it's not that he's profiting more off corporations investing long term than other corporations - they'll all benefit from this! he just has the foresight to advocate for it.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/03/donald_trump_s_presidency_would_create_a_deep_recession.html

sanders has said he would renege PNTR too, fwiw

although it seems popular among ilxors

For the record, I put in that comment about spiteful Sanders supporters based entirely on people in my Facebook feed, a couple of which I am on the verge of muting/unfriending. More than one of them has opined that Clinton is a worse choice than Trump, which to my mind tells me that in a competition between the two, they would not have qualms about voting for Trump.

so, totally anecdotal and probably not statistically significant, but not imaginary

xpost That to me is just insane.

ftr I also have at least one friend who seems to fit that description

Like, vote for fucking Clinton and then spend all your time working harder to get people to her left elected to congress! What the fuck ...

I really want to know if all the anti Clinton absolutists really spend a minute more on politics than the presidential election every four years.

these people are not leftists.

i mean i don't know djp's facebook friends. but people willing to defect from bernie to trump are not morbs-style purists. they're angry.

flopson, where does the privatizing Soc Sec fit in with Fink, then?

As a resident of MA this Sanders supporter has the luxury of never having to vote for Hillary Clinton.

dude, Treeship that article is garbage.

It ends with: There is no chasm in the Republican Party, which directly contradicts the division he identifies a couple sentences earlier:
It is a party of white people that protects its richest members and feeds off the anxiety of its poorest members by directing their anger at minorities, immigrants and women.

^^^that's where the division is

― Οὖτις, Wednesday, March 2, 2016 4:07 PM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Also the GOP revolt against Trump is very real, it's just that it's not exactly because the GOP is an anti-racist party, it's more that (1) Trump isn't actually that much of a conservative on a lot of issues, or at least it's not clear where he stands on them, and (2) the overt racism and buffoonery is alienating to a lot of people the GOP needs to win elections in the future. Basically he manages to damage the GOP brand and not actually support the principles its richest members support, all at the same time.