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

"Clinton's presidency promises to be low-impact for the average person, and she's the only candidate of whom that's true."

I think there may be are more "average" people who are looking for more significant changes than you think, Phil (congratulations on speaking for all the normals though).

yeah, i mean the whole basis of sanders's campaign, and in a different way trump's, is that lots of 'regular people' feel like the status quo is actively screwing them over and they are seeking restitution. not saying that that by itself is an election-winning coalition but it's an odd year to lean hard on people's fundamental complacency and preference for business-as-usual.

do you Sanders supporters really not see that your belief that he'd do better nationally than Clinton is the exact mirror image of right-wing nutjobs' belief that "if we just nominate a True Conservative, the country will be ours!"

― the top man in the language department (誤訳侮辱), Monday, April 4, 2016 1:46 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

if you say so

xp also an odd century.

Sanders v. Trump
RCP Average 3/16-4/2 53.4 37.4 Sanders +16.0

Clinton v. Trump
RCP Average 3/16-4/2 49.4 38.6 Clinton + 10.8

(it's been holding steady like this for a long time now)

vs. Kasich, currently

Sanders: +1.3
Clinton: -6.3

And vs. Cruz

Sanders +9.8
Clinton +3.1

i think he's vulnerable on the soviet / communism / bread lines stuff

like i've never seen this clip before today and i've been following the election closely. there's likely a lot of usable stuff out there like this that hillary has not made a part of her campaign in any way:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJBjjP8WSbc

A fair point.

Bernie Sanders praising bread lines and food rationing... as preferable to widespread starvation.

and he only went on his honeymoon to the USSR bc they had a sister-city program. if you think americans respond well to context + nuance then you'll disagree that these things could have an effect. i'm not as optimistic about polity.

(it's been holding steady like this for a long time now)

― Hadrian VIII, Monday, April 4, 2016 2:17 PM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

head to head polls are meaningless this far out

on the subject of someone dying before november

One explanation for all this raggedness is that the Trump team is simply burned out. People who know Trump say they’ve never seen him so tired. Several months ago, he began wearing a bulletproof vest, two sources close to the campaign told me, which has added to his discomfort on the stump, leaving him sweaty and spent after events. And given that his unfavorables among women already are at ruinous levels (a CNN poll last month found that 73 percent of registered female voters held a negative view of Trump), his ill-advised comments about punishing abortion-seekers seem like they might have been a function of sheer exhaustion as well.

sweaty and spent

Gah, erotic Trump campaign fic should not be permitted into the national conversation, even under Rule 34.

http://i.imgur.com/cGX1Spn.jpg

it's similar to how carrying a heavy jug of your own excrement and putting it up the lectern next to the microphone as you give a speech is not illegal. "No, Victoria, I will not move this jug of excrement down from the lectern, and I do not care if it is blocking your vision. That is YOUR problem, Victoria, that is YOUR problem, not mine!"

I legit can't tell if this is real Oliver or parody, and I say that as someone who generally likes him (though now I'm starting to reconsider).

Bernie Sanders praising bread lines and food rationing... as preferable to widespread starvation.

― a little too mature to be cute (Aimless), 4. april 2016 20:32 (30 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That's... A pretty bad excuse... I don't think he's talking about Ethiopia or whereever.

uh are you at all familiar with how many people died of famine in the Soviet Union? more than Ethiopia, for sure.

Well, yeah, but that makes his statement worse.

What's the full context though?

i don't really agree w/ any of top man's "you sanders supporters" post. most successful candidates run on a platform of challenging the status quo to at least some degree, and obama won in 2008 by promising the exact opposite of what you're talking about. voter turnout isn't low because ppl don't want stuff from their government -- weed out the tea partiers, and most americans want a lot of stuff from their government! i also think that the majority of ppl who don't vote are probably never going to vote, and the outcome of the election doesn't depend on them.

Well, yeah, but that makes his statement worse.
--Frederik B

Yeah why didn't Bernie save all the people.

Arguably the famine and the bread lines were both symptomatic of the same forced collectivization of agriculture. Breadlines are obviously preferable to starving to death but I wasn't trying to gotcha Bernie. I was more pointing out that most of the material the right wing will use to smear him haven't even shown up in the discourse yet (partially bc I think the right would prefer him to Hillary and are saving their material for later).

I legit can't tell if this is real Oliver or parody, and I say that as someone who generally likes him (though now I'm starting to reconsider).

lol, it's parody. i still tune in occasionally but once you start noticing his metaphor + short conversation with a fake person thing, it's incredibly annoying

The parody could have been more accurate if you had John yelling at Victoria a little longer. It ended too comfortably.

WATCH: John Oliver absolutely destroys Victoria in an epic rant that originally had something to do with the idea of holding leaders to a higher standard

yeah Oliver's one note schtick gets pretty grating

There's a big Bernie Sanders billboard in my neighborhood now. Such a waste of money and resources.

tbf, john oliver doesn't dig it either
http://www.vulture.com/2016/02/john-oliver-last-week-tonight-c-v-r.html

It’s a comedy show. We can’t really control how people receive it. Just like you can’t control the ludicrous packaging placed on the pieces the next day online, when people write things like “John Oliver takes a sword to the very heart of chicken farming.” “He throws a hand grenade at Congress.” That response never ceases to slightly depress me. “He takes a baseball bat and pounds to death the concept of chicken farming.” Wow, you just oversold what that piece was! It’s really annoying.

Trump's campaign surely never recovered from his insightful takedown!

(Though to be honest, I found his breakdown of the costs and logistics of the border wall refreshing... why won't people press Trump further to go into any detail about how his plans will actually work?)

bc the wall is just a metaphor

The wall is you and me, and we're fabulous.

that reminds me that i was having a bad dream last night where sea levels were overtaking miami and other major cities but we had a giant 40 foot wall between the u.s. and mexico

kinda lovin this photo

https://img.washingtonpost.com/rf/image_606w/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2016/04/04/National-Politics/Images/BotsfordTRUMP160403WI43141459736411.jpg

that reminds me that i was having a bad dream last night where sea levels were overtaking miami and other major cities but we had a giant 40 foot wall between the u.s. and mexico

― Karl Malone, Monday, April 4, 2016 3:49 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Sounds like a good dream to me #TRUMP2016

this exists
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bERtaqXtBpI

If Trump is the most fit person ever, says his GI specialist or derm or whomever, imagine how hard police and soldiers have it with their bulletproof vests.

not the most fit person ever, just "the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency."

so, you know, not completely exaggerated or anything

i miss those silly early days of his campaign was the insane aspects of his candidacy were related to things like his personal doctor saying idiotic shit rather than barely veiled threats against adherents of particular religions

i dunno the latter has been the coin of his candidacy from nearly day one. wasn't the "temporary shut down of all muslims enterting the US" pretty early in the campaign?

There's a big Bernie Sanders billboard in my neighborhood now. Such a waste of money and resources.

― Οὖτις, Monday, April 4, 2016 3:42 PM (54 minutes ago)

because your neighborhood is likely to vote for him already?

p much. also he isn't going to win California or the primary so maybe he should spend that money on better shit.

I never saw an Obama billboard in SF in '08 fwiw

xpost
yeah, guess you're right - he did his "They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people." thing during the announcement of his candidacy on June 16

the muslims thing was months later though, after the San Bernardino shooting

ARG poll comes out showing Trump up 10 in Wisconsin. fans go nuts, ignoring how terrible ARG's track record has been

p much. also he isn't going to win California or the primary so maybe he should spend that money on better shit.

― Οὖτις, Monday, April 4, 2016 5:20 PM (11 minutes ago)

oh i forgot you were doing the bernie-should-drop-out thing, carry on

That's... A pretty bad excuse... I don't think he's talking about Ethiopia or whereever.

Well, what "other countries" was he talking about?

The NY Mag article caek quoted above (about Trump's exhaustion) is pretty good, if you need a look under the hood.

It was also thanks to some information he had gathered that Trump was able to do something that no other Republican has done before: take on Fox News. An odd bit of coincidence had given him a card to play against Fox founder Roger Ailes. In 2014, I published a biography of Ailes, which upset the famously paranoid executive. Several months before it landed in stores, Ailes fired his longtime PR adviser Brian Lewis, accusing him of being a source. During Lewis’s severance negotiations, Lewis hired Judd Burstein, a powerhouse litigator, and claimed he had “bombs” that would destroy Ailes and Fox News. That’s when Trump got involved.

“When Roger was having problems, he didn’t call 97 people, he called me,” Trump said. Burstein, it turned out, had worked for Trump briefly in the ’90s, and Ailes asked Trump to mediate. Trump ran the negotiations out of his office at Trump Tower. “Roger had lawyers, very expensive lawyers, and they couldn’t do anything. I solved the problem.” Fox paid Lewis millions to go away quietly, and Trump, I’m told, learned everything Lewis had planned to leak. If Ailes ever truly went to war against Trump, Trump would have the arsenal to launch a retaliatory strike.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/04/inside-the-donald-trump-presidential-campaign.html#

Bernie staying in past this point, I just don't know what to attribute it to. He's already earned himself a seat at the table for the convention, and he's pushed Hillary's rhetoric to the left and (at least on the Dem side) brought his signature issues into the mainstream of the party. But there's no way he's going to get the nomination now, staying in at this point seems like an exercise in willful contrarianism, egomania, etc. And at this point when it looks like Dem congressional chances are better than previously thought possible, it's weird/sad to see all this money and energy from his supporters being channeled into a pointless charade rather than something actually productive.

(just started Barney Frank's "A Life in Politics", maybe some of his cantankerous pragmatism is rubbing off on me today)

xp