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

Wow. Ramos asked lame FOX-type questions.

A friend just explained Trump's enduring popularity as essentially the last candidate that is not Latino, female or Jewish. 2016: The Future!

OT, gratuitous "degrees of separation" comment: my wife is friends with Jorge Ramos's brother!

I have no problem feeling empathy, especially towards white people

ok LOL

i think clinton would know what to expect from the republicans due to having worked with them in the senate plus of course many years of the vast rightwing conspiracy. it seemed that obama & his team really were idealistic enough to think they could negotiate with them and work in a bipartisan way, at the start. one of the flipsides of this is that unfortunately clinton & people seem to always err on the side of being too secretive due to years of the vast rightwing conspiracy

heh.. hillary just went after trump.. i think she's used this construction a lot before - point out a whole lot of negative things about the opponent & wrap it up with "and you can draw your own conclusion"

excellent

should just say "Trump?", then fart into the mic. get on his level.

sorry to re-dredge this when everyone just moved on but i don't really understand what amerika is supposed to glean from frederik's reminders that the democratic party underwent schism in the 60s. we do know about that. this idea -- i may have misinterpreted this? -- that progressive policies themselves have somehow been fundamentally tainted by fdr's racist coalition-building doesn't seem to jive with the (accurate) idea that lbj-era northern democrats attempted to extend these policies to blacks and lost the south for it. do you think that sanders is some pre-lbj throwback, planning to freeze blacks out of jobs in his resurrected wpa? or that great society ambitions are foolish and worthless because racism still exists? what do you think might have happened in america had lbj not been beholden to bullshit about vietnam -- would everything have fallen apart in just the same way? (ironically, probably the best advice lbj ever got on vietnam -- irrelevant to our interests, impossible to win, our enemies are fighting for their country and will never stop, i watched them drop millions and millions and millions of pounds of bombs in korea and it was worthless, get out completely, get out now -- came from richard russell. sigh.)

hillary's larger share of the black vote is totally understandable considering we are talking here about people whose fear under a republican president, let alone a trumpian one, is of a higher probability of being murdered or seeing their children murdered instead of having to "move to canada", white liberals' perennial nightmare/fantasy. for this reason i'm not gonna tell a black person they're making a mistake by electing not to put their chips, their life, on "political revolution". (i am informed people are doing just this, on facebook, and here i have to swallow what i guess is probably somehow or other a privileged scream of GET OFF OF FACEBOOK, but okay, fair enough. condemn that.) but this doesn't mean that the political legacy sanders belongs to is inherently racist, or that it's moribund and should be sneered at and abandoned. it was abandoned, and that's why we're here. we know america is racist. we know its racism crippled the democratic party for decades. we knew it while it was happening. what do you think we should do? deport the racists? kill the racists? give up and resign ourselves to racist policy? give up and resign ourselves to plutocracy because some of the plutocrats don't actively want to destroy black people except in really extenuating circumstances, like if newt gingrich makes them uncomfortable? where is all this caustic knowingness leading?

i see you guys are pretty angry here but frederik spelled out exactly what i was trying to say

that's fair. it's a pretty anti-hillary, or at least pro-bernie crowd here. dude's individual statements may or may not have merit, but setting himself up as 'belligerent guy who lived here for a year and knows far better than everyone else' is gabbnebery off-putting

xp also dlh otm

great post dlh

it's not like there is a definitive subset of the american public that is "the racists" and meanwhile everybody else especially ourselves and our friends are a-ok and never racist

I had similar thoughts a few minutes ago watching the Univision debate. I don't doubt Clinton was sincere in her 2007 support for legalizing some kinds of illegal immigration, so squabbling about who said what a decade ago looks petty. It reminds me of GOP smearing of Hugo Black because he joined the Ku Klux Klan as a young pol on the make yet whose Supreme Court career represents a rebuke to Klannery and prejudice (Robert Byrd can fuck himself though).

All recent posts from daria dlh alfred otm

Earlier today, I posted/wondered how Clinton would react to the Michigan loss--didn't know there was a debate. Watching tonight, she does seem to be getting much better advice than in 2008.

Jorge Ramos disclosed his conflict of interest (his daughter works for Clinton's campaign), then seemed to overcompensate with a question about dropping out if indicted. Unless it was meant to be one she could easily swat aside, which she did. He probably shouldn't be on the panel either way.

this is a pretty good debate

dlh consistently one of the best posters

How many dick jokes have there been

Xp

Jorge Ramos disclosed his conflict of interest (his daughter works for Clinton's campaign), then seemed to overcompensate with a question about dropping out if indicted. Unless it was meant to be one she could easily swat aside, which she did. He probably shouldn't be on the panel either way.

otm

no dick talk yet, just bill talk xp

nah Clinton hasn't come up yet

Glad someone around here knows how comedy routines work lol

Anyone interested in the history of FDR's liberalism should read: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/books/review/fear-itself-by-ira-katznelson.html?_r=0

"the most beautiful tall wall, better than the Great Wall of China"

hehehehe

it's not like there is a definitive subset of the american public that is "the racists" and meanwhile everybody else especially ourselves and our friends are a-ok and never racist

otm, my deport/kill questions were supposed to be absurd for these reasons but this was unclear

if frederik's only point is that a left-wing candidate must be equipped to attack racism explicitly+directly as necessary to the revivification of progressivism and its 60s-style redemption well of course i agree. the sanders campaign has done this, and is doing this, but we probably do await a more fluidly intersectional and confidence-inspiring candidate than ancient vermont senator bernie sanders. but this sneering like he's The White Man's Candidate, some 30s revival, instead of a guy people aren't necessarily comfortable betting everything they have on, is, idk, insulting.

anyway sry moving on! i confess i was filthily relieved this morning to learn hawaii went for trump. ilx reputation maintained.

Confronted with a Guatemalan woman trembling with fear and panic who hasn't seen her family in a decade, Sanders begins by reminding her that the NYT editorial board endorsed his immigration proposals. Bill Clinton is gross and oleaginous but he would've shown so much empathy that you'd think he was being deported.

"but"?

'fuck'

great posts dlh but i just don't know about the claims you're attributing to richard russell here

irrelevant to our interests, impossible to win, our enemies are fighting for their country and will never stop, i watched them drop millions and millions and millions of pounds of bombs in korea and it was worthless, get out completely, get out now

squeamishness about immigration is a big part of the labor issues that have become dominant in this campaign as both candidates try to win working class americans who want protectionism and low immigration (and obv on the republican side too)

hrc seems genuinely moved right now

"I'm not a natural politician in case you haven't noticed, not like my husband and President Obama."

Was going to make the exact same point as Alfred--the reason I like Sanders so much (no theatrics) is the same area where he shows his limitations as a politician, or at least one running for president. I also got a vision of Bill leaving the podium and walking over to hug that woman (who was clearly distraught).

This won't be a very big re-dredging, because I'm off to sleep. But I want to at least say, dlh, that this part is logically wrong:

'this idea -- i may have misinterpreted this? -- that progressive policies themselves have somehow been fundamentally tainted by fdr's racist coalition-building doesn't seem to jive with the (accurate) idea that lbj-era northern democrats attempted to extend these policies to blacks and lost the south for it.'

Uhm, yes it does? It's precisely because the new deal coalition was 'fundamentally tainted' by racism that it collapsed once anti-racism was brought into it. And it's a huge problem, because what then is to be done to rekindle the new deal? It didn't die due to a mistake, it wasn't something wrong that the dems did. Rather, it was lbj trying to do something very very right for once. Which points to, that something was fundamentally wrong with the new deal to begin with. And since it's still absolutely needed to reclaim it, it makes the conundrum that much bigger.

What is to be done? I've said it before, but it has to be an explicit anti-racist new deal. You can't be radical new new deal and shy away from reparations as too divisive. Support #BLM, break the bonds of racist policing. Support Campaign Zero. How much good could those grassroots movements have done with the money that has gone to the Sanders campaign? Look to BLM, the campaign for gay marriage, the fight for a higher minimal wage, etc. Support change on a local level rather than on a national one. Resign yourself to a Clinton presidency, and that the next contested dem primary to come in 2024. And that the primary electorate will look even more diverse then.

Also, I'm actually quite optimistic, and find a lot of American politics extremely inspiring (just not the Sanders campaign). The supreme court is changing, the gop is falling apart, Trump will be defeated, and if Sanders is a last gasp of relevance, then Trump is even more so to an extreme degree. The world is getting shitty, temperatures are rising, economies all over the world are rising up and/or falling apart. But quite honestly I think the US is getting in a better and better position to adapt to it. I think there's an enormous potential in the new democratic coalition, so work with it. It's what I don't see Sanders doing enough.

Oh, and get rid of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.

#mytwocents

maybe I'm a big softie, but I watch this debate and feel like they're both "winning"

great posts dlh but i just don't know about the claims you're attributing to richard russell here

irrelevant to our interests, impossible to win, our enemies are fighting for their country and will never stop, i watched them drop millions and millions and millions of pounds of bombs in korea and it was worthless, get out completely, get out now

― carly rae jetson (thomp), Wednesday, March 9, 2016 6:53 PM (31 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

taylor branch:

Russell made baleful jokes about how bad the situation looked to him. "It's a mess," he said, "and it's going to get worse." His best idea, which he outlined three times, was to engineer a new South Vietnamese government by coup [for the third or forth time--DLH], 'and get some fella in there that said they wished the hell that we would get out'... When Johnson asked about strategic loss of Vietnam, Russell scoffed, "It isn't important a damn bit... I don't know, sir, you'd better get some brains from somewhere" ... [Russell] had found [Henry Cabot] Lodge ineffective since joint service in World War II. "He thinks that he's dealing with barbarian tribes out there ... there's no doubt in my mind that he had old Diem killed out there."

...

Johnson praised McNamara as a "pretty flexible fellow ... But these politicians got to raising hell ... Lodge, Nixon, Rockefeller, Goldwater all say move." They were advocating air campaigns to stop the enemy while minimizing American casualties ... "That's just impossible," [Russell said]. He told war stories of dropping "millions and millions and millions of pounds of bombs day and night ... We never could actually interdict the lines of communication in Korea ... and you ain't gonna stop these people either."

guys, please read Jane Dark's Dark Money, more frightening than the King oeuvre

xpost yes this sounds like the argument ta-nehisi coates makes re: the case for reparations iirc.

i'm reading dark money right now. it is scary. i don't know how citizens united gets overturned

good night, fred

Oh, and get rid of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.

but then what would bring this thread together?

Oh, shit, forgot one thing. Every new new deal policy needs to deal with racial impact. Free college, for example. Research shows that a college degree improves the lifetime wages of a white student much more than a black one. So giving free college education to everyone is giving white people a lot more money than black people. Every new new deal policy needs to figure this shit out, and correct for it.

Off to sleep. Have a good debate, everyone.

but then what would bring this thread together?

Fred, Morbs, and a scorpion.

Uli or Klaus?

xposts I'm a third of the way into Lawrence Lessig's Republic, Lost (v good so far) and have been curious about Dark Money.

please read Jane Dark's Dark Money

Had to check that out--"Jane Dark writes about politics, too?"

there's a long article mayer wrote on the kochs from 2010 after which they started investigating her! so she kept digging

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/08/30/covert-operations

"Jane Dark writes about politics, too?"

in blank verse!

there's a long article mayer wrote on the kochs from 2010 after which they started investigating her! so she kept digging

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/08/30/covert-operations

I didn't know the extent to which they sicced private investigators on her!

What is to be done? I've said it before, but it has to be an explicit anti-racist new deal. You can't be radical new new deal and shy away from reparations as too divisive. Support #BLM, break the bonds of racist policing. Support Campaign Zero. How much good could those grassroots movements have done with the money that has gone to the Sanders campaign? Look to BLM, the campaign for gay marriage, the fight for a higher minimal wage, etc. Support change on a local level rather than on a national one. Resign yourself to a Clinton presidency, and that the next contested dem primary to come in 2024. And that the primary electorate will look even more diverse then.

- Alexis de Socqueville

dlh it's not that i don't believe russell claimed that, it's that i'm not sure he was right

this is an old fashioned, grown up debate

this would be a pretty good opportunity for bernie to point out that undocumented immigrants would benefit proportionately from universal health care, surprised/disappointed he hasn't gone for it