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

This story suggests Rubio's campaign is behind everything:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/03/25/ted-cruz-affair-rumors-peddled-by-marco-rubio-s-allies.html

Trump's "tiny fingerprints" made me laugh. Trump will now set his sights on The Daily Beast: "I assure you there's nothing small about my fingerprints. I have very large fingerprints, terrific fingerprints."

lol yeah the "tiny fingerprints" aside is great

https://twitter.com/politico/status/713474676765417477

trying to figure out what the kid over his right shoulder is doing at the end lol

well that was unpleasant

― Οὖτις, Friday, 25 March 2016 21:34 (14 minutes ago) Permalink

looooooooooool
https://twitter.com/RichardDawklns/status/672302448535564288

I know I'm gay and I think everyone is gay but Cruz has the mien and attitude of a guy whom you'd find fucking your male roommate and afterwards threatening to report you to the RA on a minor infraction as a way of keeping you both quiet.

Well, in the cigar photo, look at the word he's putting a check mark next to.

Clearly he was pro-Bush at the time.

yeah well I don't think he likes bush very much

Sundquist is the one

that's a fake account shakey

my bad

i've seen chatter on twitteronia that there's some big story that might damage cruz and trump that the media is sitting on but it's only chatter, idk
― arts and crafts THIS GUY (daria-g), Tuesday, March 15, 2016 9:45 PM (1 week ago)

i guess this might be it? last week i was going through twitter conversation w/hashtag #thething (ok also because it was full of gifs/references to best horror film of all time) and trying to figure out what exactly they were talking about

what doesn't make sense to me yet is that the *reason* supporters of rubio were talking about it was principally about damaging trump and cruz was more like collateral damage if they were lucky. i take it all with a big grain of salt because most of it was regular people's wishful thinking that a big scandal would destroy the other candidates since their guy was losing. and even the few comments coming from those who were professional operatives were.. they've heard about whatever-it-is but did not personally have evidence. so why did trump hire the spokesperson he did, who used to work for cruz? odd.

greatest horror movie of all time: TS cruz sex-tape vs. the thing

http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lrwp8n8QML1r3awg7o1_500.gif

Talking about today's news on the weekly NPR roundup, David Brooks sounded like he wanted to cry. EJ Dionne called him out as one of many Republicans who didn't loudly decry Trump years ago for being a jackass. Granted, Brooks is a pussy, but why would any person even pretending to be sensible want to identify as Republican? I get it, in theory, in a vacuum, but what does the party offer at this point? Is it just a cynical matter of "and from the right .... " employment? Because all of the principles these so-called principled Republicans stand for have long been flushed.

If david brooks didn't identify as a republican he wouldn't have a job

Josh, did you read Brooks' column today

ime (i live in the area where he went to high school) there are a lot of these coastal [often jewish like brooks] republican types whose families signed onto a kind of entrepreneurial genteel aspirational conservatism that has its entire own world of magazines + journals (commentary and post-buckley NR) and has basically been able to insulate itself from the ongoing disintegration of the GOP into madness. a close friend was one of these types and already in 2008 we were having conversations about what palin meant for his kind of republicanism and he really didn't want to hear or think too much about it and then by 2012 he was independent but i think still voted for romney and now i assume he'll be voting for hillary bc the candidates on offer are really repellant to this type. this election it has really come to a head and i've been hearing a lot of "i don't know what i'm going to do" just sad head shaking and like "i can't vote for clinton can i" from at least a few ppl.

@dick_nixon
Johnny thinks the Yankees will come calling if he can just get the bat off his shoulder.

dick_nixon's first good line itt

last week i was going through twitter conversation w/hashtag #thething (ok also because it was full of gifs/references to best horror film of all time)

lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FV2wCXKgG1E

I read this at the time. It's extraordinary.

n 1976, Stone was named national youth director for Reagan’s first, failed run for the Republican nomination. Four years later, after serving on various young-Republican task forces, Stone asked the leaders of Reagan’s next campaign for the toughest assignment they had. They made Stone, who was in his late twenties, political director of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. The region hardly looked like Reagan country, but Stone found a new mentor to help him. “I was invited to a party by a socialite named Sheila Mosler, and Roy Cohn was there,” Stone said, as the captain delivered an order of “21” ’s steak tartare. “Roy was a Democrat, but he was an anti-Communist and a master of public relations, and he wanted to help me with Reagan. He told me to come see him at his town house.

“When I got there, Roy was in his bathrobe, eating three strips of bacon burned to a crisp and both halves of a devilled egg,” Stone went on. “He started telling me how he was going to help me set up the Reagan campaign—everything from union endorsements to office space. He told me to ride down to the courthouse with him. He had a young lawyer with him, and it was clear that Roy knew nothing about the case he was going to argue. But he knew it didn’t matter. He used to say, ‘Don’t tell me the law. Tell me the judge.’ Roy knew how the world worked.” Following Cohn’s lead, Stone played hardball for Reagan, challenging George H. W. Bush’s New York primary delegates on a variety of technical grounds, getting many of them disqualified. A couple of years later, Cohn threw Stone a thirtieth-birthday party in a private room at “21.”

Like Stone, Cohn combined conservative politics with an outré personal life. “Roy was not gay,” Stone told me. “He was a man who liked having sex with men. Gays were weak, effeminate. He always seemed to have these young blond boys around. It just wasn’t discussed. He was interested in power and access. He told me his absolute goal was to die completely broke and owing millions to the I.R.S. He succeeded in that.”

http://www.resistanceradio.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/stone.reagan.jpg

o man devilled eggs

"He told me his absolute goal was to die completely broke and owing millions to the I.R.S. He succeeded in that."

lmao

i like that cnn is getting around to talking about this story only by talking about the reactions to it

fucking Reagan everywhere

bowl of grapes to his right

When I was in 4th grade we had some assignment to write a letter to the president. I must have been goofing around, because I was sent to the hallway to work on mine, so I figured, whatever, I will write the best letter ever to the president. I think it had to do with trash pickup. Weeks later, I got an envelope from the White House with a letter, some other swag and a picture of Ronnie riding a horse. I figured, cool, wtf. I still have it somewhere in my mom's house. Maybe I sent him jellybeans.

"i can't vote for clinton can i"

do it, genteel Repugs, she promises endless war and absolutely nothing that will impede coastal flood inundation.

ok also because it was full of gifs/references to best horror film of all time

wait, when did Michael Powell's Peeping Tom enter the fray?

http://i.imgur.com/PgZtz0j.gif

the conventions are a week apart in July, what madness

https://twitter.com/PeteBlackburn/status/713546359287230464

:-(

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/20/2016_Republican_National_Convention_Logo.png

A left-handed guitar, just like what Obama would play.

why is the elephant trampling over an electric guitar, symbol of joy and freedom?

that elephant is shredding, b

I believe that is a reference to Cleveland's undisputed status as the birthplace of rock and roll.

birth AND deathplace

I would say that it's strutting rather than trampling. I read 'RNC' as 'PRINCE' for a moment when I opened the thread

DNC playing up castration anxiety by prominently featuring the Liberty Bell.

Will have to read that New Yorker piece on Roger Stone.

"Everybody talks about the Reagan Democrats who helped put the Republican Party over the top, but they were really the Nixon Democrats. The exodus of working-class people from the Democratic Party was started by Nixon. The realignment was delayed by Watergate, but it was really Nixon who figured out how to win," Stone said.

Rather astute, I'd say.

He wrote recently on his Web site, an erratically updated collection of observations called Stonezone.com

I hope they make all the conventioneers sit thru the interminal docu vids at the R&R Hall of Fame

I'm starting to get pulled into the Stone zone...

This is one of the last sites I would think to link to but the guy knows what he's talking about.

Though these “Trump” delegates will be bound by national and state rules to support Trump through the first ballot at the convention, they are free to vote against Trump’s interests on the adoption of Rules and the seating of delegates. It’s entirely plausible that a state could seat delegates pledged to support Donald Trump who have open affiliations with other candidates. In California, Cruz and Paulistas are signing up online via CA’s GOP website as Trump delegates.

Re: that logo - evidently someone at the RNC heard that the heart of rock and roll is still beating... in Cleveland.

Man, that convention is going to be amazeballs.

a state could seat delegates pledged to support Donald Trump who have open affiliations with other candidates. In California, Cruz and Paulistas are signing up online via CA’s GOP website as Trump delegates

Oh, the idea of a bunch of Cruz men elaborately plotting a dramatic second-ballot Trojan horse switcheroo is packed with dramatic potential.

They stay up the night before drinking Jack and Coke in their hotel rooms, pledging their loyalty to the cause, planning to save the Republic in a swift stroke like Brutus and Cassius of yore, congratulating themselves for their courage. They all go in to the convention in matching blazers. They have, like, secret hand signals or something. Then, due to a tragic miscalculation, Trump accidentally wins on the first ballot.

The confetti falls, the place goes insane, and all yr Cruzers are standing there looking like jackasses and wondering what went wrong. Later, five of them are found dead in their hotel rooms, clutching bottles of Jack and souvenir inflatable American-flag Stratocasters.

rolling stone, or at least its editor, endorses hillary: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/hillary-clinton-for-president-20160323

k3vin you are sooo last thursday with that link

meanwhile:

Mr. Kasich’s colleagues in Ohio and Washington do not share that worry. In interviews, they recall a three-decade career in government punctuated by scolding confrontations, intemperate critiques and undiplomatic remarks.

Today, as Mr. Kasich makes comity a centerpiece of his long-shot bid for the Republican nomination, they describe his candidacy as an exercise in remarkable self-restraint that has managed to keep his crankier instincts mostly out of sight.

The John Kasich of 2016 is a much mellower politician than the hard-charging congressman of the 1990s, who could be so difficult that House Speaker Newt Gingrich, never known for his diplomacy, offered Mr. Kasich firm advice about his tendency to bulldoze colleagues.

“I talked to him a lot about unlocking people rather than running them over,” Mr. Gingrich recalled, adding of his counsel, “I think some of that actually stuck.”

But not all of it. In Ohio, Mr. Kasich is known for flashes of impatience, anger and disdain. A police officer who pulled him over? An “idiot,” Mr. Kasich said (though he later apologized). Lobbyists? Farm animals with “their snouts in that trough,” in his words. Out-of-state rivals? “Wackadoodles.”

“We see a completely different side of him,” said Lou Gentile, a Democratic state senator. Mr. Gentile recalled Mr. Kasich pulling him aside after a news conference and unspooling a vigorous grievance about how Democrats had not supported a proposal he had championed.

“I literally said, ‘Governor, governor, can I please get a word in here?’ ” Mr. Gentile said.