Curb Your Authoritarianism? The 2016 Conventional Wisdom Thread (Elections, Part 6)

cnn has hired corey lewandowski as a political commentator

smdh

This is pretty bonkers:

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/06/2016-donald-trump-paul-manafort-ferinand-marcos-philippines-1980s-213952

A prominent neoconservative intellectual and early promoter of the Iraq War is headlining an official campaign fundraiser for Hillary Clinton next month, Foreign Policy has learned. The move signals a shift in the Clinton campaign's willingness to associate with prominent Republicans and is the latest sign of how far some GOP defectors are willing to go to block a Donald Trump presidency.

Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century, will speak at a Hillary for America fundraiser in Washington's Logan Circle neighborhood on July 21. According to an invite obtained by FP, the "event will include an off-the-record conversation on America's continued investment in NATO, key European allies and partners, and the EU."

robert fucking kagan

ahhh, the consensus

Kagan is one of those classically educated ivy leaguers who has made no better use of his fancy education than to lend a patina of respectability to deeply reactionary policies and positions. I hope Hillary's connection with him serves no purpose other than to suck whatever money and votes she can derive from the association, discarding him afterwards back onto the trash heap of the Brookings Institute, where he shall forevermore be viewed with distaste and distrust.

Or possibly this is an indication of exactly how far beyond the pale the current Republican position is with Trump at its head

natural allies

https://consortiumnews.com/2016/05/14/the-hillary-clintonneocon-merger/

Kagan is one of those classically educated ivy leaguers who has made no better use of his fancy education than to lend a patina of respectability to deeply reactionary policies and positions.

aka the George Will Doctrine

I was waiting for someone to post about the Scowcroft endorsement.

the Scowcroft endorsement

One of Ludlum's worst.

lol

aka the George Will Doctrine

was disappointed in the lack of classical allusions in his latest anti-Trump plea

maybe he's starting to figure it out

the Scowcroft endorsement

One of Ludlum's worst.

― Ned Raggett,

eh still better than The Eagleburger Dictum!

The Sununu Diversion

The Baker Act

The Rumsfeld Conundrum

The Perle Predicament

the berger extraction

The Wolfowitz Salivation

The Bolton Development

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CllgMwyWQAAEzWQ.jpg:large

tbh this is a pretty good rejoinder to hillary's dumb slogan

Choice of pic on the tee is telling.

Changing my prediction. England leaves EU, markets collapse, Cubs beat White Sox in World Series, Trump elected, World War III, world ends.

I still don't think the GOP gives him the nomination. Desperate times, man

There are clearly a lot of people in the world who need to be told that there are quicker and less painful ways of committing suicide than doing so at the ballot box.

feeling a little less positive about how things might turn out in November

http://www.ctvnews.ca/polopoly_fs/1.2200745.1421947005!/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_620/image.jpg

The FT OpEd post making the rounds concludes with:

Thirdly and most significantly, we now live in a post-factual democracy. When the facts met the myths they were as useless as bullets bouncing off the bodies of aliens in an HG Wells novel. When Michael Gove said the British people are "sick of experts" he was right. But can anyone tell me the last time a prevailing culture of anti-intellectualism has lead to anything but bigotry?

Is that ever not true?

http://gawker.com/trump-delivered-his-scotland-press-conference-surrounde-1782552300

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CltzHqGXIAAtCNL.jpg:small

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CltzHqpWQAA8zs0.jpg:small

he just tweeted that people in Scotland are "going crazy" about the vote and how proud he is that they "took their country back", making me wonder if he knows that Scotland was very strongly against it or even what Brexit is in general

he doesn't know shit iirc

OTM. He didn't even know what Brexit was when asked about it, what, two weeks ago? It's gonna be so rad having someone with so much curiosity and such a thirst for knowledge in charge of our nuclear arsenal.

I'm at the point where I'm convinced that we have a subconscious understanding of our impending doom as a species re: cataclysmic climate change and some among us are doing what we can to speed up the process.

old lunch otm

btw this is why you don't vote for Jill Stein and Gary Johnson:

https://twitter.com/EdwardTHardy/status/746260079645720576

Never act as if your vote doesn't count.

indeed, in the interview with Michael Wolff in the I think the holllywood reporter a few weeks ago, DJT was clearly bullshitting when asked about Brexit.

I don't think voting for Stein or Johnson is the problem. I think the problem will be people voting for Trump to "send a message" who don't really think he could win, as you see with some of the Brexit voters. I also have seen unverified accounts that the voter turnout for people 18-24 was abysmal compared to everyone else; I am looking for a demographic breakdown of voter turnout to verify this but am having problems finding any useful information (the breakdown of what percentage of a particular demographic is easy to find but I can't find voter turnout broken down by demographic group).

maybe this is just me desperately trying to connect the dots, but it feels like at the very moment that WWII is passing from living memory (anyone who was an adult at the end of the war would be at least 89 years old now), people are finding their way back around to forms of politics that the nazi defeat had discredited for generations.

for my whole life i felt like the "never again" stuff almost needn’t be said because america—much less europe—wouldn’t slip en masse into the same kind of reactionary, vengeful politics that produced WWII. but i don’t feel confident of this anymore, and i start thinking about futures where my neighbors (or myself) are herded into concentration camps.

vast majority of european political history driven by reactionary vengeful (and xenophobic/intensely tribal) politics

so we're seeing a return to the mean imo

or is it the median? whatever

it is definitely "mean" in more than one sense

maybe this is just me desperately trying to connect the dots, but it feels like at the very moment that WWII is passing from living memory (anyone who was an adult at the end of the war would be at least 89 years old now), people are finding their way back around to forms of politics that the nazi defeat had discredited for generations.

This seems super otm. Add decades of substandard public education to the mix and a resultant de-emphasis on understanding history and critical thinking skills and this is what you get. IMO, people should be constantly asking themselves what 'civilization' even means and why it exists and how it's perpetuated rather than just assuming that shit will be okay no matter what, who cares, vote for Trump and jerk off in the street like a dumb ape while firing an assault rifle into the air.

I don't know a ton about Europe but as best I can tell it was basically defined by tribal warfare on scales from local to continent- and world-spanning for a thousand years

on a related note, I am seriously considering getting a gun

I mean maybe there haven't been civilizations in the last two millennia that haven't spend most of their time and resources on plundering and despoiling abroad and bloody fratricide at home?

I am seriously considering getting a gun

you have children, plz don't do this