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

I think we should all remember Jeb! comes with the Florida Voter Seal of Approval, the land of hanging chads, Elian Gonzales and Terry Schiavo. His aura of harmlessness is because he has been out of office long enough that he hasn't done any real damage lately.

yeah, it couldn't happen to a much worse guy

so talk about how much of a piece of shit he is instead of how much of a hapless dork he is

His ex-CIA chief dad was a big wimp, too, lest we forget.

lucky we are that irrelevant he is

Remember that time he barfed in China like a total nerd? What an ineffectual nerd.

I think we should all remember Jeb! comes with the Florida Voter Seal of Approval,

ha -- he does not

Americans enjoy dorkiness more than shittiness

Bush I isn't irrelevant. "wimp" was the Democratic attack line on him. they said it as often as they could. it was the media narrative. he won the election.

http://www.newsweek.com/bush-battles-wimp-factor-207008

idk trumps popularity contrasts pretty powerfully against that

Xp

lol

The Bush children were expected to play to win. When friends were invited for tennis with the Bushes, "you quickly understood you were there to play tennis, not fool around," recalled Mrs. Reginald Coombe, a lifelong friend of Dorothy Bush

STOP FOOLING AROUND AND PLAY TENNIS

I assumed Morbs meant Americans enjoy the spectacle of clowning dorks, which is obv Trump's MO

There's probably an extent to which the Bushes' nebbishdom is akin to Reagan's kindly-old-fartdom in that classic SNL sketch.

xp my bad, this is probably the right interpretation

Bush I isn't irrelevant. "wimp" was the Democratic attack line on him. they said it as often as they could. it was the media narrative. he won the election.

tbf it was kinda a wimp-off

https://campaignrhetoric.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/tank-ride.jpg

Trump's self-presentation as a tough guy is theater, too, though. He's all mouth. I'd love to see how he reacted to someone actually coming at him (bro).

anyone read Meacham's valentine to Poppy? I read a few pages in Target -- I think that's who it's for, the impatient Xmas shopper who remembers he hasn't bought a present for his sister's asshole conservative hubby ("Bush? Fuck it. In the car it goes").

i agree with crut fwiw

but, from a distance, jeb is clearly unfit to lead conservatives in 2015

trump falls apart and turns into a baby on a fairly regularly basis. he doesn't even need someone to 'come at him', he does it every time he sees a poll where he's down 2 points in iowa or whatever. but none of the candidates are gonna out-macho him - he's already some grotesque parody of unbridled machoness - and nobody would look good trying.

i'm sort of enjoying the thought of trump giving a speech in a time of national tragedy or attempting to give a solemn state of the union address

Trump's self-presentation as a tough guy is theater, too, though. He's all mouth. I'd love to see how he reacted to someone actually coming at him (bro).

As I recall, Trump is a major germophobe who won't even shake people's hands. The fact that none of the other candidates have done anything with that is proof of how pathetic they are.

Never mind; Bush brought it up in September, and it went nowhere.

Bush should approach Trump at the podium holding a Purell dispenser.

yeah I am not sure that germ thing would ever have legs. but trump has a lot of skeezy shit in his business career / linked to his name. I think bringing up stuff like trump university would be a better angle, though who knows, maybe his supporters are proud alums.

fascist supporters aren't deterred by charges of corruption, immorality, stupidity, etc. they revere strength above all - it's only when the illusion of strength is punctured that their support wavers.

and then they string up the corpse of their fallen leader and pelt it with shit

so when Cruz wins Iowa it'll be interesting how Trump and his supporters handle the blow - if he doesn't win in New Hampshire after that the taint of "LOSER" may be hard for him to shake

it's funny cause for a normal person getting 2nd in iowa as a not-religious candidate would be fine even good, but - as a human being, but also as a campaign - there's no way he has the ability to leverage 2nd place into 'success'

fascist supporters

not that it matters but: http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2015/12/10/9886152/donald-trump-fascism

avoid being labeled a fascist with this one simple trick

http://orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/efasc

Yet underneath all this mess there does lie a kind of buried meaning. To begin with, it is clear that there are very great differences, some of them easy to point out and not easy to explain away, between the régimes called Fascist and those called democratic. Secondly, if ‘Fascist’ means ‘in sympathy with Hitler’, some of the accusations I have listed above are obviously very much more justified than others. Thirdly, even the people who recklessly fling the word ‘Fascist’ in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.

But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one — not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.

obv not a new problem

he bears enough similarities to classic fascist movements imo, that article is p lazy and draws a number of distinctions without a difference while repeatedly insisting that the characteristics that Trump shares with fascists don't *make* him a fascist. I'm familiar enough with the academic discourse around fascism to know that a) no one agrees on a hard and fast definition (everyone agrees that Mussolini, Hitler, Peron and Franco were fascist but good luck finding characteristics that can be consistently ascribed to all of them) and b) scholars tend to prefer to tie fascism to the specific historical era when it was successful, and bend over backwards to differentiate it from modern movements.

He's a racist, nativist populist demagogue that glorifies strength and power while exploiting the fears and insecurities of a populace that feels it has been wronged and robbed of its country. He is obviously fine with political violence. He has been adopted by neo-fascist organizations. He has not advocated for the overthrow of democracy (yet) but hey he's just getting started, wait til he starts contesting election results.

xp

Fascism is a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism.

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion. (p. 218)

with so few real actual 100% legit fascists running around it's p useful to look at how many of these boxes trump is checking off

i don't think an american fascism of today would look like a european one of 80 years ago either; the whole concept of american individualism probably throws the 'fasce' concept out from the beginning. so what!

yeah I feel like that article and the scholars cited are like "well he meets only 4 out of the 6 criteria, so no fair calling him a fascist!"

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by:

"obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood" yes
"and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity," not really
"in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants," not really
"working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites," definitely not
"abandons democratic liberties" not really
"and pursues with redemptive violence" not yet at least
"and without ethical or legal restraints" maybe partially
"goals of internal cleansing and external expansion." not really

can we agree he's an "asshole"?

yes for sure

he's not "politically correct"

the primary contest is the test of whether he will have collaboration from traditional elites

barring all muslims from entry, even citizens, is abandonment of democratic liberties

removing 11 million people is cleansing

"not really"s doing a lot of work there

tbf shakey calling him "fascist" is doing far more work, no?

barring all muslims from entry, even citizens, if that's indeed what he advocated is an abrogation of liberties for sure but obama has deported nearly 2 million plus people; would we call him a fascist?

we'd call him an asshole

you go to die on the dumbest hills

i don't even know how to respond to that. maybe grow up a little?

barring all muslims from entry, even citizens, if that's indeed what he advocated is an abrogation of liberties for sure but obama has deported nearly 2 million plus people; would we call him a fascist?

wtf @ this

1) that is EXPLICITLY what Trump advocated
2) Barring citizens from their country is completely different from deporting non-citizens who are in the country illegally

mystified at yr cap'n-save-a-trump routine here tbh, bending over backwards to give him the benefit of the doubt about his not being a cult figure or his eagerness to abandon democratic liberties or his support from committed nationalist militants (who are explicitly and publicly thankful for making their not-so-mass movements more appealing to the masses)

shakey for pt 2 i was referring specifically to goole's contention that deporting non-citizens in the country illegally is indicative of fascism. i wasn't sure if it was explicitly what trump advocated and still am not... "After the initial public uproar, Trump quickly clarified that he did not mean to include U.S. citizens in the ban and was referring only to foreigners." so idk maybe he backtracked.