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

Columnist at The Observer, owned by Trump's son-in-law, calls him out on the tweet imbroglio: http://observer.com/2016/07/an-open-letter-to-jared-kushner-from-one-of-your-jewish-employees

(Warning: Tons of vile anti-Semitic tweets embedded there.)

Here are some of the excuses I’ve seen, both from Mr. Trump’s camp and Trump supporters:

“It’s available on Microsoft shapes.” There are a lot of symbols you can make on Microsoft Word, and sometimes symbols SYMBOLIZE ideas, concepts, or groups. A cross for instance. I feel silly explaining this to you. This explanation is so inane that I feel so condescending refuting it to you, ostensibly my boss, that it feels insubordinate.

“It’s a sheriff star.” Because users on the white supremacist forums where this image was found were no doubt implying Hillary is in the pocket of the sheriffs. You know, sheriffs. The group stereotypically associated with greed and money.

“He didn’t make it; he’s too busy to pay attention to everything he tweets out.” This is not an excuse for racism. Mr. Trumps twitter account is seen by millions of people, and he is responsible for the message he’s sending to his supporters. Besides, Mr. Trump is running for president. Making mistakes because he wasn’t “paying attention” isn’t an excuse that qualifies him for the highest office in the land in any way.

“It was an accident.” Then where is the apology?

These explanations are so facile, infantile in their blatant disregard for context or logic that I can only imagine them being delivered by someone doing so while grinning and winking.

this star tweet issue has lasted in the news much longer than I'd expected. so close to the convention, holding out hope that this is a nail in his coffin.

it's interesting that he hasn't trotted out the "I can't be anti-semitic, my grandchildren are Jewish" canard - maybe he's just afraid that will alienate his WP supporters

sheldon adelson gives this guy a shit ton of money too. politics makes strange bedfellows.

His only MO is enjoying playing with shit and fascination with seeing which of it sticks. I doubt there's anything in the world he wouldn't retweet and then half back away from when criticized if he thought it would help him.

sheldon hasn't actually signed that check iirc

(he did endorse Trump tho)

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/understanding-the-trump-star-of-david-blow-up has the ring of truth imo

If the question is: is Donald Trump a racist, the answer is straightforward: Yes.

Running a blatantly racist campaign should probably be enough to answer this question. But if it’s not, even a cursory look at Trump’s public career going back decades shows racism (albeit not always this blatant) and racial grievance are strikingly consistent themes. But is he an anti-Semite?

Here the question gets a bit more complicated. And the nature of that complexity is worth exploring a bit to understand Trump and the nature of the campaign he’s running. I don’t see any evidence that Trump is anti-Semitic in the sense of holding a particular animus toward Jews, though he does seem anti-Semitic in a way that sometimes presents itself as philo-semitism: holding stereotypical views that Jews are high achievers, good with money, etc.

So what’s the story?

One of the most telling things Trump has said during this campaign is that he doesn’t go into rallies with any script or even terribly prepared sense of what he’s going to say. He starts talking and then waits to get a feel for what the audience responds to. In other words, he homes in on affirmation.

This is largely because Trump is a narcissist. But it’s also a trait of a salesperson. You intuit and understand what the client wants or needs (not the same thing) and then get about selling it to them. For these reasons and on both these fronts, I doubt Trump believes 3/4 of what he says on the campaign trail in the sense most of us understand the word. That is to say, things we believe in or believe to be true and would largely continue to believe even if it became less helpful to do so.

Racism and authoritarianism are core Trump values that predate and are separate from this campaign. The other thing that’s very apparent about Trump is that he’s shockingly, almost totally ignorant of the details of almost every public policy issue - much, much more than even your typically caricatured politician who knows little about the issues of public life without their advisors feeding them lines. This makes him more porous to the views and desires of his supporters because he has little to no matrix of pre-existing knowledge or core beliefs to reference them against or challenge them with.

yes i agree. he seems really gullible!

da jewz are good at responding to this stuff, this is just catnip for the adl etc. I'm pretty sure he's gonna have to actually apologize to make the subject go away.

he will not apologize

he won't, and that's what's going to sink him. he can shit on mexicans and blacks all he likes but shitting on jews gets harder to weasel out of. you know because they own the media.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu1NDepxkK8

the fact that he tweeted out an anti-semitic image, probably in ignorance, bothers me less than the fact that he has 1,000s of followers who are explicitly anti-semitic and racist and he'll happily re-tweet what they post.

that fool from The Fix wrote a little while ago that Comey's remarks are "very bad" for the Clinton campaign, but maybe I still don't get Beltway jabber. She wasn't recommended for indictment. What difference does it make to the voter what the FBI director say about her furtiveness and lying? Dems are gonna vote for her anyway. No one who cared about the story will or was going to.

for the vast majority of voters, her non-indictment means the email story will make no lasting impression and frankly that is probably how it should be.

What difference does it make to the voter what the FBI director say about her furtiveness and lying? Dems are gonna vote for her anyway.

Unless they don't? It feeds into the idea that "they" are all crooked. The "If it was anyone else then we'd prosecute" line in particular looks bad.

"the fact that he tweeted out an anti-semitic image, probably in ignorance, bothers me less than the fact that he has 1,000s of followers who are explicitly anti-semitic and racist and he'll happily re-tweet what they post."

by which i mean, it's part of a pattern, and that's the point. if joe biden accidentally tweeted out something with a coded anti-semitic jibe, it'd be out of character and i'd assume he or one of his employees made a really dumb mistake. but with trump it's just one in a very long list of coded racist messages; it's just that this one happens to be directed at a new group.

xpost

i thought comey explicitly said no prosecutor would prosecute for such actions!

It feeds into the idea that "they" are all crooked.

but they are!

"To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions. But that is not what we are deciding now."

hah! "security or administrative sanctions" would seem to mean losing some level of security clearance. but since she was a cabinet secretary that would never have flown, and atm she's not even working in the government. if she's elected president it's not as if this puts some red mark on her past employment file that would prevent her from being hired for that job.

If she was still Secretary she would likely be facing some sort of sanctions, yes. I would guess those sanctions would be rather light and may just require her to attend some sort of training to prevent something like this from happening again. But she's not Secretary anymore so idk what they're supposed to do

Yeah, I think Andrew Farrell is mischaracterizing that line. It doesn't quite reduce to "anyone else and we'd prosecute." It's more like "prosecution isn't the right consequence here - but that doesn't mean Anything Goes."

He's indicating that there are consequences other than criminal prosecution. He's saying there may be an appropriate other kind of consequence for this kind of behavior in the future. But that this is not his call in this case.

Like Aimless, I would interpret "security or administrative sanctions" as meaning punishment that is short of criminal charges: being reprimanded, having your clearance yanked, being fired. Those would generally be internal to the department, and follow that department's chain of command.

Because Clinton was the head of that department at the time, and she doesn't work there anymore, there is no real way for her to fire herself or retroactively punish herself. Nor is there a way for Kerry to punish her, outside the framework of law, which we have already found out is a dead end.

tbh I was hoping for a result pretty much along these lines: no one being frogmarched off to the hoosegow, but some statement saying "this isn't the way to do things, and not just because It Looks Bad."

Something like "in future, departments should issue clearer guidance and establish standard operating procedures" would also be apropos.

Generally I agree with Lord Alfred and Aimless: most people will process this as "she was cleared of wrongdoing" and move on. Ditto for Benghazi. People who are already frothing with hate for her will continue to froth, as they would in any case.

I saw somewhere else that Comey's ruling was pretty similar to Roberts's in the matter of Obamacare: "I don't much like it, but I also don't want to be the one person who completely upends the political universe with the stroke of a pen."

I'm not personally characterising it - my reading of it is much the same as yourselves - but I'm pointing out that this line is being read as "anyone else, we'd prosecute" - on Reddit etc to start with, but it'll spread.

In conclusion Bill Clinton is an idiot.

Curious how damaging this report would have been if Bush or Rubio had been the nominee. You may think they were bound to be as hapless in a general as they were during the nomination, or that Clinton's demographics are rock-solid no matter who the opponent. I don't know--I think the report is damning enough that Trump might be the last best thing she's got going for her.

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) admonished Donald Trump on Tuesday for tweeting an anti-Hillary Clinton message with a Star of David over the weekend. An exasperated Ryan called the tweet "anti-Semitic" and "ridiculous."

“Look, anti-Semitic images have no place in a presidential campaign,” Ryan said in a phone-in with conservative radio host Charlie Sykes.

Ryan also said while he doesn’t know which Trump campaign “flunky” was responsible for the message featuring a six-point star, he couldn’t drop everything to denounce the “ridiculous” tweet over the Fourth of July weekend.

“If I had to stop everything to comment on every ridiculous tweet sent out by this campaign, I wouldn’t have time to do anything,” he said. “I really believe he’s gotta clean up the way his new media works.”

lol

it'll spread

sure, it'll spread beyond reddit, but it won't spread to places that will damage hil's campaign. it will just negatively reinforce voters she'd never win anyway. Bill is def more idiotic now than he used to be, back when he needed to be sharp. his feedback loop for punishing stupid remarks is nowhere nearly as effective as it was when he was sitting in the bulls eye.

Andrew, are you really citing Reddit

As goes Reddit..

All I'm saying is, I am speaking to you from a country that just went bust overestimating the average voter, I am perhaps a little twitchy about this at the moment.

Man I hate Paul Ryan, but that interview is hilarious.

Trump's retweeting is really starting to feel like Homer Simpson's webpage, with Dancing Jesus and a bunch of stuff he ripped off other sites.

Scott Walker is such an empty-headed little twerp.

it is so weird this election to see like the formal & rigid apparatus of the nyt, commentariat &c, reduced to like, Commentators note that the Tweet, a primitive representation of a phallus rendered in the visual computer language ASCII, was shared 17,000 times before being deleted on the early hours Sunday mor-, like verbatim quotations of trump's caveman speech & articulate analysis of like lo-culture fascist macro circulation

Rumors bubbling regarding an impending Gingrich VP announcement

fuckin awesome

noooooooooooot

whoever said "Gingrich is a stupid person's idea of a smart person; just as Trump is a poor person's idea of a rich person" is otm

they would be so perfect, I really hope this is true

it really does make sense, you gotta ask yourself, who can look in the mirror and say to himself, 'i have to be honest, this is it, the only chance i have left.'

how much more 90s effluvia are we going to deal with here

fingers crossed for hologram Lee Atwater rockin at the convention

it is a v beautiful ticket in really adhering to a kind of on-paper dream-logic designed around uniting two heavy hitters, an experienced hand & a business insider, simultaneously existing more fleshily as just a horrible nightmare, the pressed-flesh of two repulsive, disgraced men, red-faced & huffing, sweating in private & handshaking to bruise, deaf confidence & blind judgment, committing sacrifices in hunting lodges, presumably a classically uneasy below-surface tension between them, NEWT 2020, covenant seals popping open with a flip-top-cap sound, newt a hillary figure in evoking the comfort of the nineties providing one doesn't read too closely, a place for speaker hastert in a trump administration, a shrieking executive branch reexamination of the scene in the dark knight where somebody neglects to blow up the boatful of prisoners. hearing some beltway buzz abt hillary's veep = ayers ? interesting development either way

Maybe that Mars colony will really come to fruition now

mars, bitches

our moonbase is going to be the most luxurious moonbase, a really terrific moonbase

isn't gingrich even somehow less popular than trump?

yup. Sad!

"A CNN/Opinion Research poll on Monday [2012] showed 63 percent of All Americans viewed Gingrich unfavorably, compared to just 25 percent who saw him in a positive light."

according to this huffpo link trump currently 59.2% unfavorable and 35.6% popular so big lolz good choice, donald.