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

Having previously blamed a faulty earpiece for failing to condemn Duke, he this time said he couldn’t just come out and condemn groups generically because — what if they were Jewish?

shit Romney did at Bain Capital was graft on a level that makes the Donald look like a guy working a crooked carnival game at a county fair
― robbie ca$hflo (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Thursday, March 3, 2016 4:05 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, like keeping guitar center afloat another few years

the people need their multi-fx pedals

If we can't buy a Tube Screamer at 9 PM on a Tuesday, then the terrorists have won.

so there is already, somehow, another GOP debate tonight. i'm not sure i can bear even tuning in and out without carson there.

Rubio and Cruz should just knife Trump onstage

they should just dispense with the questions and do an American Gladiators-styled joust

xpost godfuckingdammit

LOL

Rubio and Cruz: bringing piss to a shitfight

"speak up Donald, you're hard to hear under that white sheet"

romney pulling a backstab candidacy around the GOP convention is akin to throwing the presidency, which it sounds like the party would rather do than see trump run and demolish the party for a decade. romney has nothing to lose and plenty of goodwill to gain. republican party is certainly capable of mustering the political will to push trump outta the drivers seat at their own convention, no? That's what I'd expect if he continues to cruise through the primaries.

somebody who understands this horseshit better than me explain how that can't happen

GOP wont sacrifice an energized voter base. Thats why it wont happen.

They're going to resign themselves to being a rump party/try to cut their losses because the alternative is to not be a party at all.

it can if theyre in denial that it's their base

xp

don't they desperately WANT to sacrifice trumps energized voter base? and don't they want a figleaf so all the senate race candidates can "disavow" trump or embrace him depending on their constituency?

Former=no. The latter=yes. Not mutually exclusive.

also if liberals have to triangulate their thoughts around voting for the same November candidate as John McCain, Bill Kristol etc CHRIST i will have an orgasm every three hours.

romney as candidate doesn't make a whiff of sense to me, even if we're entertaining the idea of a counter-trump nominee getting cooked up at the convention. the argument would be: trump only has a plurality of delegates, the majority of the party voted against him. very close to that would be the thought: and they voted for these other people. not for mitt romney. the delegates they'd be trying to horse-trade into some united non-trump candidate would be ted cruz and marco rubio delegates (well maybe kasich i dunno), neither of whom likely would have the slightest interest in handing the nomination to a proven loser who's anointed himself the savior of the party for no really clear reason.

imo the backroom deal would be for a cruz/rubio ticket or cruz/kasich if rubio completes his fizzling and the latter has some late-game surge and has something to actually offer the dealmakers. this is all imagining a world where a) we actually get to the convention and trump only has a plurality and b) there are people who can present themselves as plausible brokers in the first place. i could imagine that romney is kinda putting himself forward for that role. but him slipping into the presidential nom after having done jack shit this whole time would seem weird, underhanded and/or fishy even to swaths of the party not otherwise inclined to see the entire business as a shady steal of trump's rightful crown etc. etc. i still don't think any of this is a likely scenario mind you but i am willing to say, boy does it look less utterly unlikely than it did when the subject first came up.

also if liberals have to triangulate their thoughts around voting for the same November candidate as John McCain, Bill Kristol etc CHRIST i will have an orgasm every three hours.

― we can be heroes just for about 3.6 seconds (Dr Morbius)

Pictures or it's gonna happen.

romney as candidate doesn't make a whiff of sense to me

I'm not seeing this entertained anywhere in a serious fashion. NRO was tepid too.

yeah it's only popped up as being some hazy idea being considered by possibly no more than one anonymous source, as in this AP story:

Romney advisers have recently sought information on a contested convention, though there appeared to be no concrete planning for that possibility and it was unclear whether their efforts signaled Romney's own interest in becoming the GOP nominee through a floor fight, according to a Republican familiar with the efforts. That person was not authorized to discuss the plans publicly and spoke only on condition of anonymity.

Another idea rumbling through power corridors in Washington was the prospect of a late third-party candidate to represent more mainstream conservatives.

Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry has been approached by "a mixture of people" about being part of a third-party bid, said Jeff Miller, who managed Perry's failed GOP presidential campaign. But Miller said Perry found the idea "ludicrous."

i.e. never gonna happen but get ready for a million commentaries and fan-theories as to how it just... might.. happen!

I'm ready for bloggers wanting clicks for a bullshit opinion.

The contested-convention scenario actually worries me a bit because I don't want Trump's supporters even more (justifiably) angry. He gets the nomination and loses, well, they had a legit chance even if a lot of Republicans were against him. Trump gets screwed out of the nomination, and whether he runs third party or not, they'll be fuming for years that their guy could have been in the white house if it wasn't for the establishment's scheming.

well it wouldn't really be justifiable if he got jilted out of a nomination if he walked in with 35% of the votes/delegates. i mean that's not a mandate. but i otherwise basically agree - the prospect of a whole trumpist "stab in the back" narrative fueling and animating his wing (and probably getting him to run again next time) is really unsettling.

er, i mean the anger wouldn't be justifiable

kasich seems to be thinking that he'll win his home state, other candidates will steal other states from trump, and when they get to the convention trump won't have enough delegates and they'll - like dr casino said - mash their delegates together to make a majority and share a ticket (and maybe promise something to the guy who doesn't get to be on the ticket). the ramifications of executing this successfully are that they lose a sizable chuck of their constituency (hard to imagine Trump not running as 3rd party but even if he didn't). but the real issue is that many of the big states are winner-take-all and not proportional delegates. the more ppl who stay in, the easier it is for trump to win all these winner-take-all states and pretty soon he has an easy majority and then it's impossible bc there is no party infrastructure really in charge he will be the nominee.

man i kinda like romney for giving this speech, ulterior motives aside

basically as i see it this new strategy is a lie the candidates are telling themselves so they don't have to make the difficult decision of consolidating the field down to trump and nevertrump and it is going to destroy the last chance they have of stopping him

man i kinda like romney for giving this speech, ulterior motives aside

― carly rae jetson (thomp)

He's a charlatan and a fool and will convince no one except Beltway people on cable talk shows -- saddest thing ever

well, yes, but it's nice to see this sort of thing said so prominently by someone from the GOP:

"Mr. Trump is directing our anger for less than noble purposes. He creates scapegoats of Muslims and Mexican immigrants, he calls for the use of torture and for killing the innocent children and family members of terrorists. He cheers assaults on protesters. He applauds the prospect of twisting the Constitution to limit first amendment freedom of the press. This is the very brand of anger that has led other nations into the abyss."

Williard also took umbrage at Trump calling George W. Bush a liar so fuck that

yeah, the contested thing really only happens if trump is actually losing some of those big states. which is not impossible! he hasn't swept the table so far, he has vulnerabilities, he has states that are slam-dunk trumps and states that aren't. arkansas for example was quite close - might have gone differently if carson had quit a week ago. kasich was three percentage points away from winning vermont. but those other places where has huge, HUGE leads, terrific leads, sure look like he's heading to just win the thing outright. but i haven't actually looked at any kind of big delegate chart or anything.

romney speech is interesting mainly as a halting, in certain ways still very cautious draft version of what all these other clowns should have been saying six to eight months ago. and a possible model for striking back at trump that doesn't go "i've got it --- pants-wetting jokes!" mitt's basic temperament seems unable to go there and so he's revealed another approach that would have seemed obvious to most normal grownups but which may not work coming from anybody, and certainly won't work coming from him.

i am happy whenever a republican disavows explicit bigotry bc even though it demonstrates that they're in total denial about the implications of their preferred policies at least they do have some unactivated sense that hate is wrong and dangerous. i half-expect them to still line up behind trump bc their dedication to the republican brand is more important than any actual principles they hold.

alfred i will happily look over that for his returning to the demonizing-muslims-is-not-acceptable note four times

He said he saw thousands of Muslims in New Jersey celebrating 9/11. Wrong, he saw no such thing. He imagined it.

my mormon friend says its literally the only thing on her news feed this morning ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

xpost yeah i agree and also having more people saying "bigotry is wrong" is just generally good for the national conversation.

Dubya also spoke up vs bigotry against Muslims while his administration was legally socking it to em

Every GOP statement I've heard condemning Trump's KKK demurrals -- Ryan's, the moron governor of New Mexico's a few minutes ago, Rubio's -- has been pathetic! It's always at the level of Beltway civilized discourse. It's "outrageous," "beyond the pale," "unacceptable." Yet it's OK to mention black-on-black crime and decry "race hustlers." Come on.

I'm halfway on Romney's speech--there's good stuff in there, but it's so transparently and desperately calculated that all of that is nullified. And going by the right-wing call-in show out of Buffalo I catch on the way home, it's backfiring spectacularly.

but just point that out and YOU'RE the Real Racist™

#socialmediajustice

xpost

basically as i see it this new strategy is a lie the candidates are telling themselves so they don't have to make the difficult decision of consolidating the field down to trump and nevertrump and it is going to destroy the last chance they have of stopping him

― Mordy, Thursday, March 3, 2016 7:15 PM (38 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this.

fox news debate on now

http://s1.totalprosports.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/displeased-wwe-fan-gifs-of-wrestling-fans-being-wrestling-fans.gif

America, man. Maybe we are this dumb.

has to be the first time in history that a presidential candidate bragged about his penis size in a debate

BRAGGIN2016

America loves when its presidential candidates make dick jokes.

Oh, god...Trump says everything's just fine with the hands and with everything else.

Cruz alternates between looking defeated and totally amazed at Trump

lbj would have whipped it out

this is just unbelievable