Buttload of Faith: the 2016 Presidential Primary Thread (Pt 2)

“He’s not a bought-and-paid for politician. He knows all the ins and outs of negotiating,” said Clearwater resident Bob Priest, standing in line near a live elephant painted with Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan. “He’s got some guts and he tells it like it is.”

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article46970250.html#storylink=cpy

A little disappointed, frankly...

http://i.imgur.com/70Y8DZB.jpg

poor elephant :(

by rights that pic should include the elephant taking a dump

So the media is being p stupid about his chances eh

They're doing all they can to report Trump's bombast and idiocy, which does at least put some sand in the gears and slow down the bandwagon effect.

there was a thing about how his numbers had dipped some after this whole 'mocking a disabled person's disability' thing but it was only to thirtysomething percent among republicans, previously it was in the mid-forties. that's like hillary territory. i think the media is probably swinging too hard the other way after treating him as an consequence free amusement for so long, they've gone from 'this guy isn't actually a candidate' to 'this guy is THE candidate'. plus when he doesn't when it won't be (or at least won't primarily be) for the narrative reasons the media pretends shape the race and instead will be for his inexperience and probably unwilllingness to do the on the ground politicking that wins races. ie how the legend is that the scream sank dean but in reality the dean campaign had already kinda imploded, the scream coming after his finishing crazy low in iowa after looking like he'd sown up the nomination a month or so prior. media hyping up christie getting the union-leader endorsement; who knows if that really means shit but i guess it's indicative that christie is doing the legwork there. if he somehow won new hampshire now i guess i'd know how it happened.

CC is ROLLIN' NOW

“Mr. Christie is right for these dangerous times,” Joseph W. McQuaid, the publisher, wrote in the endorsement editorial. “As a U.S. attorney and then a big-state governor, he is the one candidate who has the range and type of experience the nation desperately needs.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/30/us/politics/chasing-endorsements-christie-showers-new-hampshire-with-calls-and-texts.html

DESPERATELY

@sahilkapur Nov 28
.@UnionLeader endorsements:

2016: Christie
2012: Newt
2008: McCain
2000: Steve Forbes
1996: Buchanan
1992: Buchanan
1988: Pierre du Pont

The flawed premise of the alternate earth suggested by that list is the assumption that humanity would have survived long enough to vote Christie into office.

ted cruz suffered a big loss this morning as the 13-year-old chairman for Teens for Ted who became internet famous for asking why Obama invited the "Muslim kid" to the White House remembered that he is a 13-year-old kid and gave up his position and conservatism

uh

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/cj-pearson-renounces-conservatism

oh man, i haven't seen the name pierre dupont... probably since 1988.

"Quit callin' yourself 'Pete'...."

I hadn't even heard of him until I read Richard Ben Cramer's book.

any of the candidates have anything to say about this PP shooting over the weekend? Carly? Teddy?

Fiorina and Cruz said it was a shame libs still believe in ending the lives of babies when libs already dying for going to Planned Parenthood.

Ted Cruz called the shooter a "transgendered leftist activist" iirc

yeah that was seriously nauseating

haha waht

wait, seriously? Cruz seriously said that?

i guess some form somewhere with the dude's name on it had F instead of M, and about an hour later the r-w echochamber had ginned that up into "omg he was a trans activist!!" then duly repeated by cruz

i guess we know what ted's media diet is

Mine was bullshit.

Chuckles called it terrorism, I guess that's something:

“What he did is domestic terrorism,” Huckabee said in an interview with CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday. “And what he did is absolutely abominable, especially to us in the pro-life movement, because there’s nothing about any of us that would condone or in any way look the other way on something like this.”

I think when you let Huckabee get out ahead of you on the moral high ground, it's time to set your campaign headquarters on fire and retreat to the mountains to live off of the land.

david futrelle had a look at the echo chamber in action:

http://wehuntedthemammoth.com/2015/11/28/right-wingers-claim-colorado-shooter-robert-lewis-dear-is-a-trans-woman/

It's sad how far shit has to go before it crosses the line that makes (some of) these folks react like human beings.

Even so, I'm sure it's as much about distancing their own extremism from a more unpalatable extremism as it is about expressing true sympathy.

Is Huckabee the only republican candidate to condemn the attacks and/or call them terrorism so far?

*attack

Oh Huckabee had that shit on an index card in his back pocket. For him this is absolutely a pre-planned exercise, the calculated response to a scenario he and a few staff "what-if'd" years ago.

gotta give it to him for being the only GOP candidate to have his index card ready to go, though

I think when you let Huckabee get out ahead of you on the moral high ground, it's time to set your campaign headquarters on fire and retreat to the mountains to live off of the land.

― you're breaking the NAP (DJP), Monday, November 30, 2015 12:58 PM (45 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

OTM

UPDATE NOV 30, 2015 8:14 AM
Cruz campaign spokesman Rick Tyler clarified of the candidate's remarks, "He was making the point that there isn’t enough information. You can’t expect a full response to a story that’s developing. The point was there’s a lot of raw information going around that’s not confirmed.

The campaign also explained that Cruz received his information from "The Right Scoop," which similarly used the voter registration form to ask, "WAS THE COLORADO SHOOTER A TRANSGENDER PERSON?!?!"

there's always the risk that if Ted Cruz retreated to the mountains to live off the land he'd end up like Robert Lewis Dear.

"transgendered" is basically a slur right? like a "Democrat party" kind of jab but a billion bajillion times more reprehensible?

While I'm sure the rightwing echo chamber views the transgendered as freaks and monsters, transgendered is an actual term used by transgendered people (as opposed to, say, "tranny" which is def a slur). By contrast, no Democrat says they belong to "the Democrat Party".

my bad. I thought "transgender" was the preferred term.

lmao look at this trash

https://twitter.com/therightscoop

huh sorry crut I stand corrected, I was not aware of this distinction:

The term trans man refers to a man who has transitioned from female-to-male, and trans woman refers to a woman who has transitioned from male-to-female. Health-practitioner manuals, professional journalistic style guides, and LGBT advocacy groups advise the adoption by others of the name and pronouns identified by the person in question, including present references to the transgender person's past; many also note that transgender should be used as an adjective, not a noun (for example, "Max is transgender" or "Max is a transgender man", not "Max is a transgender"), and that transgender should be used, not transgendered.

The point was there’s a lot of raw information going around that’s not confirmed.

most otm Cruz campaign will ever get

u got to admit it is a unique if cynical and exploitative way to dodge the issue of domestic terrorism

TBF, if we can't keep the accepted terminology straight, I'd be hard-pressed to call out a republican for using something that isn't an outright slur when he's throwing transgender people under a bus.

The point was there’s a lot of raw information going around that’s not confirmed. And we're committed to issuing uninformed, wild speculation of that raw information as quickly as possible.

I'll never understand how politicians can get so much support when they're the type of people who, as neighbors or coworkers, others would rightly avoid and wholly mistrust.

Did not expect to open this thread and hear about a candidate for president of the United States - not named Trump - tie the Planned Parenthood shooting into lol trans jokes.

Huck's got that broken clock thing going for him, if you're into small appliances that don't work 99% of the time. He was somewhat in the right when he condemned Rev. Wright's sermons, but not Wright himself, saying to cut him some slack. That might have more to do with (A.) Being a Rev himself and (B.) serving a term as governor while Nolan Richardson was the state's head basketball coach.

Calling criticism of her misrepresentations about Planned Parenthood “typical left-wing tactics,” the Presidential candidate Carly Fiorina said, on Sunday, “I will not be bullied into telling the truth.”

oh curse you Borowitz, I need to read bylines more closely

'I'll never understand how politicians can get so much support when they're the type of people who, as neighbors or coworkers, others would rightly avoid and wholly mistrust.'

Easily, I think, since presidential campaigns are way more about hopes-and-fears/broad narrative stuff rather than the particulars of actual living & breathing people.

C.f. Hunter S Thompson hating everything about "Nixon" but able to talk football with the actual man.

'I'll never understand how politicians can get so much support when they're the type of people who, as neighbors or coworkers, others would rightly avoid and wholly mistrust.'

There's also the line of thinking that goes, "Of course they're all liars and thieves and douchenozzles: they're politicians. If they weren't lying shits, they'd go into a more honest line of work. If we're going to elect a lying shit no matter what, I at least want to vote for one whose rhetoric aligns most closely with my own views."

Put another way: Power should only be entrusted to people who don't want it.

On this view, thinking you deserve to be president is pathological to begin with; it is almost a disqualifying factor on its own. And yet you need to run to be elected, and we're supposed to have a president. So we have to pick from among the people who want the job.

Yeah, but there are a lot of candidates these days that don't even strive to be "likeable" in that vague way that politicians are considered likeable. Some of this gaggle of republican candidates come off as deeply unpleasant people to an extent that I imagine for many isn't even ameliorated by party affiliation.