I DON'T KNOW WHERE THE BOTTOM IS • US presidential elections part VIII

I mean "no it isn't going to sink him " not "no it doesn't look like bribery"

All part of his deal making genius

i'm surprised it's even getting the traction that it is.

if clinton had any notable health issues at all i have to assume that the insane schedule of a presidential candidate would significantly worsen them and make them impossible to not notice, rather than being something that has to be painstakingly revealed by playing debate videos in slow-motion

yeah there's no way she could've done this for nearly two years with parkinson's

Even if the Bondi thing doesn't sink Trump, it would be nice if it sank Bondi.

But...Florida.

Sink Florida imo

Clinton and Trump are answering (or not answering...) questions tonight at one of those one-followed-by-the-other pseudo-town halls--NBC, I think. They may pass each other in the hallway.

hahahaha

http://theslot.jezebel.com/newt-twenty-minute-coughing-fit-1786346425

Fuck Dr drew that exploitative pos

Sink Florida imo

― (•̪●) (carne asada), Wednesday, September 7, 2016 4:45 PM (seventeen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this will happen sooner rather than later without our help.

Send a chopper for me,

you can toss coconuts back and forth w/ peter thiel on his island

j/k

lol

Hillary Will Unsink It

yousendit?

oh man this "commander in chief forum" is nuts. Trump said we should've "taken the oil." "Take the oil," he repeats. Because Matt Lauer is a polite man when not dealing with female co-hosts on "Today," he doesn't ask, "With what -- beach buckets? portable gas tanks?"

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/08/us/politics/jill-stein-green-party-candidate-is-charged-over-role-in-protest.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0

as someone who shares many of her political positions and a future physician i'm often a little embarrassed by stein, but this is punk af

yeah.

i guess she isn't going to win north dakota now.

boy I'm sure glad we finally got this forum on foreign policy so someone could finally spend 15 minutes asking Hillary about her emails

in all seriousness fuck that public forum and fuck Matt Lauer for pretending to be a real journalist. Hillary has to spend over half her time talking about EMAILS and the Iraq vote with Lauer talking over her the entire time, while Trump gets all the softball "Why do you think you should be president?" type questions and isn't called out on some of his downright insane answers. fuck this election.

Yes! Wtf was that?

"Iran is taking over Iraq"
"People don't know this, but Iraq has lots of oil. We should have taken it"
"I was always against Iraq"
"Obama has made every single decision wrong. He's so terrible"
"Our generals are terrible, because Obama appointed them"

seriously what the fuck is this

like did I hear this wrong or did he say he was going to replace all the generals.

She basically did fine. Obama was ambushed at the Philadelphia debate in 2008 like that--there's so much fear sometimes that they're going to be accused of bias, they overdo it in the other direction. Her tensest moment was about the drone e-mail, where there was this interminable pause and I thought she was going to start ill-advisedly splitting hairs. But she conceded the point and went from there. Even more than the oil stuff, Trump's most ridiculous answer was his secret ISIS plan that he's going to compare to the plan he asked the generals to come up with and, well, maybe he'll combine them into one plan, or maybe he'll stick with the secret one.

being in a room full of vets and praising the hell out of Putin while constantly disrespecting the President seems like a curious move

"are you prepared for the Oval Office?" "yeah sure I'm prepared" "okay next question"

I've been on an island for several days, is there still an election on

the good news is I'm now completely confident he's going to get wrecked in a debate

that said I just remembered that the 3rd and most important debate is going to be moderated by FOX News who straight up said they don't really care if the candidates tell the truth or not

If the Fox News one is moderated by Megyn Kelly, Trump might actually call her (Megyn Kelly) a slur on television, triggering a new round of Surely This

like did I hear this wrong or did he say he was going to replace all the generals.

Has he accused them of being Gulenists yet?

Obama, Trump says, has reduced our generals "to rubble."

"What I did learn is that our leadership, Barack Obama, did not follow what our experts and our truly -- when they call it intelligence, it's there for a reason, what our experts said to do," he said during the forum.

worth pointing out that this almost certainly false - intelligence briefings do not contain any such 'recommendations' - Trump quite blatantly made this up

good rundown of the night

https://twitter.com/ddale8/status/773745177781477376

https://j.gifs.com/gJoj0Y.gif

cool gif of woman asking about veteran suicides getting corrected as to the exact number per day - even though she was right

take the oil

as usual Chait exaggerates but he's otm about Laue:

rump went on to make a series of wild and dangerous statements. He praised Russian President Vladimir Putin as a strong, effective, and popular leader. Lauer did press him on this point, and when he did, Trump offered the astonishing rebuttal, saying President Obama had done equivalently brutish things. Lauer did not press Trump on his claim that the president of the United States behaves in a fundamentally similar way to a dictator who imprisons and kills political critics and journalists. Trump likewise reiterated his belief that “to the victor go the spoils” is the proper basis for American foreign policy, specifically with regard to his longstanding lament that the United States failed to steal Iraq’s oil after the 2003 invasion.

Lauer’s attempt to press Trump was the completely ineffectual technique of asking repeatedly if he is ready to serve as commander-in-chief. Lauer probably believes the answer is no, but nothing about this question would drive home Trump’s extraordinary lack of knowledge. Instead it allowed him to performatively demonstrate his confident, alpha-male reality show character as a prospective chief executive.

Both of these beliefs stun and appall foreign policy experts in both parties, as readers of the Washington Post or the New York Times know. But the average undecided voter isn’t reading those newspapers. The average undecided voter is getting snippets of news from television personalities like Lauer, who are failing to convey the fact that the election pits a normal politician with normal political failings against an ignorant, bigoted, pathologically dishonest authoritarian.

"Morning Joe" crew also legit horrified by Trump – at last – but can't avoid the Both Sides Do It equivalence, i.e. Hillary looked defensive answering email questions (surprised they didn't call her "shrill" or "robotic").

idk what else lauer could have done

our idiotic television media is -- somehow -- ill equipped for something this idiotic.

she came off well imo, burying Lauer and audience in data w/out boring anyone.

xxp lauer could have stayed home and thought up more money saving travel tips. fuck nbc for propping him up as if he's some kind of journalist. what the fuck kind of world are we living in when a morning talk show host is tasked with posing questions to a reality TV star about if he's ready to be president. fuck this election

https://twitter.com/Morning_Joe/status/773851435477762048

Aleppo was one of the minor Marx brothers iirc

Meanwhile, there was this fun moment with Gary Johnson, who doesn't know what/where Aleppo is

http://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/watch/gary-johnson-asks-what-is-aleppo-760358979962?cid=sm_fb_msnbc_native

oh, xpost paws

In a way, I almost find the second part more distasteful, where he goes through a wellknown and well rehearsed spiel on how Syria is a mess because we supported regime change. The absolute authority and selfassurance he brings to a subject he's just admitted he knows nothing about. He knows nothing of the specifics, but the outcome was still 'inevitable'.

Goddamn, dude running for president. I'm ignorant as shit and I know what an Aleppo is.

What the fuck is happening in this country?!

Lauer's getting all sorts of hell this morning, just like Stephanopoulos did in 2008, so I wouldn't worry too much about Trump getting a pass. It could even help Clinton in the debates. She can be as aggressive calling him out as she needs to be now--the moment has passed where he was going to go into the debates with an absurdly low bar to clear. The bar should still be absurdly low for him, but because of the polls and because of last night, I don't think it is anymore.

I can't remember which perennial 80s/90s sitcom supporting actor Gary Johnson reminds me of, but it's all I can think about whenever his Droopy Dog ass is being interviewed and it drives me nuts.

In those days there was a fifth Rutle, Leppo, who mainly stood at the back. He couldn't play the guitar, but he knew how to have a good time, and in Hamburg that was more difficult