UPDATE: I was wrong. We’ll see lots of postmortem analyses in the next few weeks (there are some in this thread), but the damage is done. I just went for a walk around central Hong Kong and felt sick to my stomach, unable to even think rationally about what just happened. To those I’ve bet on this site, send me your address and I’ll pay off. But the whole country is going to pay a much larger price than I over the next four years.
________
By the time this post goes up (I’m writing it at 2:30 a.m. Chicago time), enough ballots will have been cast to ensure a Presidential victory for Hillary Clinton. Or such is my prediction, and I stand to win about $600 if she does win. (All those bets were with credulous liberals who thought Trump had a chance, and would gladly pay me $100 out of relief if Clinton won. I love liberal suckers!)
Who knows what the next four years hold? If the Senate goes Democratic, which may well happen, we’ll get a more liberal Supreme Court justice, one who may help overturn some of the horrible decisions of the pre-Scalia-coronary court, including their wonky interpretation of the Second Amendment (the right to keep and bear arms).
I was never a big fan of Hillary, though many of the readers here are, but if she wins I wish her well and will support those of her policies with which I agree (she already has my vote). By the time readers wake up the morning after this post, we’ll have the nation’s first woman President, and a big bunch of angry Republicans. Although I hope the country can come together after the election, that’s very unlikely: the Republicans, whose policy was simply to obstruct anything Obama wanted, will continue to do that with Hillary, whom they hate even more than Obama. And there will be all those disgruntled Trump supporters, many of whom have guns.
In my experience, this is the most tumultuous time in American political life since the Watergate affair. I can’t predict what will happen after Clinton wins, but readers are welcome to weigh in below.
sub
DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN!
There’s something about those people in Chicago and predicting elections.
I wish the USA well, but if it couldn’t come together before the Presidential election it’s unlikely to come together afterwards. Not without major changes.
I agree completely. Trump was a dramatic outpouring of the ever-present xenophobia particularly racism, in America. WE must TRY to lower its temperature by confronting its root causes. Difficult future.
Ditto.
Given the results and what I perceive as a major source for it, namely Fox News style information, I don’t see how we’ll be coming together anytime soon. Perhaps if Trump proves his idiocy through a series of major fuck-ups will people begin to see him for what he truly is? But then that many fuck-ups could leave us in a horrible pickle. It could NOT have been any plainer how much worse Trump is than Hillary in every way. Every accusation they leveled at her was perpetrated on a larger scale by him. But there is more. The final analysis of the man, beyond his misogyny, beyond his crass criminal dealings, beyond his pedophilia, beyond even his rape of teenage girls, is his sheer idiocy. How does that not shine through to people? Add to that the irony of evangelicals voting for this atheist in droves. “Forgive them for they know not what they do.”
“The final analysis of the man, beyond his misogyny, beyond his crass criminal dealings, beyond his pedophilia, beyond even his rape of teenage girls, is his sheer idiocy.”
Yeah, that’s the problem for the rest of the world. I don’t care if he rapes teenagers, I don’t care if he eats babies. They’re your teenagers and your problem, USA. I can sympathise but in a sort of academic way. But if he starts a war somewhere on no more pretext than Dubya had, then it becomes the problem of everybody else who wasn’t consulted and didn’t get a vote.
I just hope his ranting campaign speeches and dumb slogans were aimed at the dumbos who voted for him, and he’s actually smarter than that. I have to hope so, anyway.
cr
Everyone who already blames Obama for everything simply updates their memes to blame Clinton. An ephemeral ocean filled with tears is created. GM continues to countdown to WW3.
No, they are still blaming Bill Clinton for anything and everything that crosses their feeble minds.
They just added Obama to the list.
The peaceful, prosperous 1990s?: Reagan did that!
9/11/2001?: Bill Clinton’s fault.
/sarcasm
The GOP is intellectually bankrupt.
I heard someone call in to my local NPR station yesterday and whine on about how Trump will reduce the deficit, etc. Well, if past history is any guide, you don’t want a GOP president for deficit reduction (pink is GOP presidents, blue is Dem presidents):
http://www.berettaconsulting.com/barbarossa/M/stuff/inc/deficit.jpg
And, if you are not in the top 20% of earners in the US, you sure should not expect the GOP to improve your economic lot:
http://www.berettaconsulting.com/barbarossa/M/stuff/inc/Quintiles.jpg
And you sure should not expect top marginal income tax cuts to bring jobs (no correlation between the two):
http://www.berettaconsulting.com/barbarossa/M/stuff/inc/Unempl-Rates.jpg
(These data all end in 2009, the the trends are unchanged since (I have checked the data through 2014).)
Great data. I think I may have seen these but forgotten. Would love to know the source.
sorry. source is in the url at top when clicked on. Oops.
Publicly available data: Go to US census bureau and bureau if labor statistics.
bureau of labor statistics
thanks for that
“GM continues to countdown to WW3.”
LMAO
CNN is reporting that Turkey and the US have an agreement to conquer Raqqa (Syria) using Turkmen and Arab militias on the ground. Other outlets report that Kurds have joined with Russia and Assad with the same objective. It looks like a move to annex eastern Syria. Mosul is a growing bloody mess. So much so, the media wants us to believe the operation is in Iraqi hands and not ours. No one is calling it a “US-led” operation, although it must be. The fighting there will become increasingly vicious as the Iraqis, mostly Shi’ite, advance on the western Sunni, ISIS dominated, side of the city. I suspect Hillary’s people will be running foreign policy the moment Donald concedes, if they are not already doing so.
Countdown for WW3?
The BBC but also the Guardian, hardly an MSM or right wing site, says the Kurds have joined with the Turks to attack Isis in Mosul on 25 October –
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/23/mosul-offensive-turkish-and-kurdish-forces-launch-attacks-on-isis
Closer to the front of Turkish contention with the Kurds, the US seeks Turkish backing for Kurdish led operation in Raqqa (also Guardian
As late as 7 November Middle East Observer (Cairo paper) says US backed Kurdish Militias start new offensive on ISIS’s Raqqa
https://www.middleeastobserver.org/2016/11/07/us-backed-kurdish-militias-start-new-offensive-on-isis-raqqa/
ONE of the articles in Kurdish News Rojname search engine asks if Assad is a necessary evil. Raqqa, after all is a major centre for ISIS in the north near the border with turkey – a base with ideological significance the West is keen to dint for fear of recruitment power to it via turkey or turkeys kurdish regions.
Admittedly, the kurds have won signficant syrian territory in the north and Hillary would have to play Turkish fears re the Kurds sensitively – but she may have learned something from Libya and advisors will be very wary of this. Looks like Trump will get in and he has promised to bomb Isis into the ground – and Raqqa is a major drawcard for nasty recruits from the west because its more accessible. Given the potentialities better to leave it if the Kurds start getting edgy but trump may not be able to resist. If Trump gets in and the Kurds do ally with the Syrians and Russia on some strategic places and russia (which has left ISIS more or left unscathed) agrees with Trump to ensure Raqqa and some key places for the west are kept out of ISIS hands that would be something. Trump, if he has sense, might impress on Putin that expansionism beyond what he’s already done can only cost him and the russians militarily but also economically in the long term- its just not sustainable. The man is a dictator though. What annoys me about hillary is she keeps pushing an ideological supremacy angle into other countries which is not appreciated, hypocritical and just counter productive. However trump actually likes dictators. And he’s so impulsive who knows what he’ll do having said he’ll beat ISIS by pretty much any means.
Hillary who?
So is it possible for Congress to stall Supreme Court nominees for a full two terms into the post-Clinton era? 😉
I don’t think so, from a practical, political standpoint.
Totally possible on paper, though.
I’m no constitutional law expert (by any means) — but I wonder if there is a court option for redressing this? Send it to the SCOTUS after a certain while.
Right now, the court has been deciding in a much more liberal way since Scalia died. 100% if I remember correctly – on major stuff. This can’t please the GOP.
They are basically trying to deny the results of three elections — there has to be redress somewhere, I hope.
I am certainly the Senate cannot hold up the selection. Not unless we want to throw out the constitution. What they did with this last nomination should not have happened. Go back and look at what FDR tried to do to the court in the 30s. He failed because the court itself said he could not do it. Look at FDR Packing the Court.
Obama should have sent grievance to the court on this issue….I have no idea why he did not. You have to test the system to find out if it is broken or not.
He threatened to pack the Court because they were nullifying New Deal legislation. The difference was that he had the support of Congress, including of course the Senate. When the sitting Justices realized that it was more than an idle threat, they stopped overturning the lagislation and greatly expanded the Commerce Clause.
The situation today is very different. If the Repugs control the Senate, they could conceivably vote down every nominee HC nominates. This could lead to a Constitutional Crisis.
FDR was attempting to pack the court through legislation. However, the thing was stuck in committee and died. So I was wrong, it wasn’t the court that stopped it, it was the legislature. But the Obama appointee was different, the Senate simply ignored their job and did not even consider. They had no vote. The constitution tells them to do their job and vote. Obama should have demanded court review.
As far as rejecting (voting down every nomination) They might try that but it would be very difficult. You have to at least be able to justify voting down and that would as you say, would lead to crisis.
Yeah, Roosevelt’s court-packing plan ran into a political solution. FDR didn’t have the unified support of his own party, including of his (first) vice-president, former Speaker of the House John Nance Garner.
Republican recalcitrance on Supreme Court nominees would likely run into a similar political solution. If the senate gives the nominee a hearing, the GOP will be unable to hold the line and repeatedly defeat ta qualified nominee on an up-or-down vote (which is what Mitch McConnell understood when refusing to proceed with even preliminary hearings on Judge Garland). And I doubt the GOP has the political will to trigger a constitutional crises by refusing to hold any hearings on judicial nominees for years on end.
If Hilary wins, she should put forth the same guy (as favor to Obama) and see what happens.
I predict Garland will be confirmed before Clinton takes office.
Which would expose the abject hypocrisy of the Republicans’ claim that the purpose of their dilatory tactics was to “let the voters have a say” by allowing the new president select the Supreme Court nominee.
Judge Garland will be confirmed by the lame duck senate only if Hillary agrees (which might possibly have been a done deal even before Garland accepted the nomination).
If the senate simply refuses to consider a nominee for any considerable time, simply because they don’t like the president and not because of any legal reason, surely the resolution would be for the President to appoint a SC justice by executive order? People would object, of course — but on what grounds? The senate is simply refusing to do its job, and the country needs a functioning SC, which means an odd number of justices.
No, you cannot appoint justices by executive order. And before thinking that maybe you should be able to consider how close we are or were (polls are still open) to president Trump. Limits on executive power might seem more appealing.
The dems did not make an issue of this, but should have, and still can.
The Constitution’s “appointments” clause gives a president the power to make a “recess appointment” when the U.S. Senate is not in session. That appoint expires at the end of the current Congressional term, if the senate has not by then confirmed the nominee.
Keep in mind that a president’s nominees to his or her cabinet (and hundreds of other federal nominees, executive and judicial) also require confirmation by the senate.
I guess my question is now somewhat irrelevant.
Subscribe
From your fingertips to the big tote board in the sky …
I myself am not so SURE that Hillary will win, but if she does (oh, please no-lord), expect the worse. The Repugs are going to be even more obstructionist than they’ve been with Obama … and that’s saying a LOT. It is all too horrible, and we can blame Repug gerrymandering for why even though millions more people will’ve voted for the Dems down the ticket, the House will REMAIN Repug. ARRGH!
Watergate was a picnic compared to these days.
Making <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK8Iowe83-A"Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, and Dean (and Liddy and Hunt) the ants that broke into and ruined the picnic basket?
🐾
I am chilling a nice dry Riesling so I can go either way when we know for sure. Drink it in celebration or to drown my sorrow.
150 year old Madiera here (Malmsey).
Ha ha. Jack Daniels here, maybe a few tokes of the legal Oregon weed, and then a razor blade if neither of these two ploys work.
Preparation is key.
Johnny Walker Black. But I would have done that otherwise. Thinking of Hitchens.
Cheers! Boy would I love to have had Hitch’s presence and commentary during this election. He is sorely missed.
Hitch is sorely missed. I am starting a bit early with Sapphire martinis, slowly. I trust JC (this one, not the traditional one) and am cautiously celebrating.
Just cider for me, because I’m helping a friend do his garden.
Quilmes and a malbec from Argentina; where we might be moving 🙂
I’ve been steadily sipping Kahlua with cocoa since noonish.
All those bets were with credulous liberals who thought Trump had a chance, and would gladly pay me $100 out of relief if Clinton won. I love liberal suckers!
You were giving better odds than Pascal. Those credulous liberals weren’t risking nearly what he demanded – their integrity.
I am not a credulous liberal. I am a careful judge enthusiasm among the many Trump and Clinton supporters I know. The difference in enthusiasm between Trump and Clinton voters was striking. When the polls are close and one side has all the enthusiasm, that side can win on the basis of turnout.
“judge OF enthusiasm”
Neither am I, and I would as well claim, that I am a careful judge and observer.
I also remember we both noticed and warned about the evidence and the (to my eyes) apparent rampant confirmation bias present in the reasoning and arguments in many quarters, in a thread already back on March 2, “Trump just lost any chance he had to be President”.
As I stated in the July 27 post, I am not a betting man, so I didn’t take up the offer, but I lift my hat for you 😉
The task many individuals have today, I think, is to start to ponder, hard and long, why some people accurately spotted this (from literally 1000s miles away), while so many others, living and breathing in America, failed miserably.
I would be just as happy to take money from the conservatives. It all spends the same.
I think Clinton should start using “reply all” just to fuck with the FBI.
Reply All – LOL
Take-out Szechuan here to nourish us through the next few grueling hours. No gruel jokes, please.
Cultural appropriation!
🐸
It would be in character.
Considering the incredible way the FBI were trying to fuck with the election – shades of that thug Hoover – I would say the FBI was due to be well fucked over themselves. They should be the receipt of the mother and father of all rockets. A small meteorite, launched from the stratosphere, would be appropriate. (Speaking metaphorically, of course).
cr
I have been known to hit ‘Reply All’ ‘by accident’ a couple of times at work when some self-appointed apparatchik issued some trivial and nonsensical diktat. Which, of course, I shot down, giving reasons.
Shortly followed, predictably, by my public apology for my ‘mistake’. I was quite amused, on one occasion, to receive a strongly worded email criticising me for ‘backing down’.
It usually worked, the diktat being ignored by everybody thereafter.
cr
I’m betting Hillary tries to push some social reforms while attending to all her presidential duties. With a hostile Congress and the GoP of the past 20 years demonstrating they’re only interested in their own ideologies and don’t give a damn about the interests of the citizens of the USA, there’s not much chance of actually getting anything done unless she can pull a LBJ. I’m still hoping the GoP split, even if the lunatics get to keep the name “Republican Party”, but as bad as things are I see absolutely no movement to split the party so we can bet on the same Teabagger ideology well into the future.
Teabagging is a homophobic smear word.
Smear? Well, there’s a lot of spit involved, sure. But for a smear job you’re talking more about hard sports, are you not?
Then again, possibly there are trans-national variations.
The recriminations begin on the news shows tomorrow morning.
The Clintons are not committed to social services, but without a Republican mob that assumes only it has governmental legitimacy even when its not elected, and the new trend, of the last 25 yrs to both houses of Congress being controlled by one party (Usually republicans) who see their remit as obstructing the presidency if its democrat, much of her remit will be blocked and she’ll start pandering to the Republicans. Then the cycle continues because Democrats get disillusioned and its a system that effectively only allows 2 parties and a capacity to effectively block the president
Hillary wins Virginia!
I hope you’re right, but:
“You can never underestimate the stupidity of the general public.” Scott Adams
Much of the general public has been appalled at the stupidity of Scott Adams, as well.
+1
Hillary (and Jerry – congrats!) winning doesn’t mean we have survived the election.
I’m typically optimistic and happy…but
even as a Canadian watching this election unfold I have to say it may be the most depressing thing I’ve ever seen.
Mostly it’s the unbelievable rancor and division in the comments anywhere online.
There isn’t the remotest sense of cohesion, just pure blowing up of bridges, white hot spitting of derision from one side at the other. You expect humanity to look awful during wars, but this is just every-day humanity reduced to pure distrust and conflict.
Though, I find I see this much more from Trump supporting comments…though maybe I’m biased. I wonder if the election would have looked anything like this without Trump?
I think it would have looked nothing like this without Trump. I have disagreements with all of the other Repub candidates, especially about religion, but I don’t think any one of them ( except possibly Cruz) would have come close to spewing the kind of vitriol and pure nastiness which emanates from DT’s every pore.
I predict a lot of unrest for the US. ThenTruno supporters will be convinced that the election was rigged and there will be irrational reactions to that.
Trump reported that his campaign, without a presidential victory, will have been a waste of his time, energy, and money. Quite the contrary; Trump has wasted the nation’s time, energy, and money as we regrettably witnessed the world’s most self-centered, self-aggrandizing, solipsistic, sadistic, sexist, divisive, xenophobic, flamboyant, odious sparkleturd run for public office.
Thanks a lot for the memories, sir. Can I haz a refund?
The man is an avatar of selfishness
Think ya used enough adjectives there, Butch?
😉
http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/images/2009/June/us-economy-4_image005.jpg
cr
“sparkleturd” is special
Sparkleturd! Tough not to see that one coming, in all his sparkliness.
And yet we did, because we were too busy holding our noses when voting for HRC. It’s a mad, mad, mad world.
President Dump
President Fart, in British English.
/@
No. I could have easily added thirty more.
Hmmm. So far, it does not look like this is going to be a walk over for Clinton.
Latest results on WaPo look pretty bad for Clinton. Look like a Trump win so far.
Fivethirtyeight.com has Clinton’s chance up to 78% at the moment.
I’ll still take a bet on Clinton!
From 538 “Our model now gives Clinton a 51 percent chance of winning overall; Trump now has a 48 percent chance.”
If I had the money to pay the bet I’d take it. I suspect Trump is going to win, and I think the pundits know it. Most of them just don’t want to admit it. Florida is lost for sure.
Whew. On 538 Nate Silver has been increasing the probability that Clinton wins as the votes come in. Good sign. 71% before polls closed, 78% now.
Still, I can’t shake this feeling of dread.
“Still, I can’t shake this feeling of dread.”
Same, and Trump just moved slightly ahead in Florida.
We are not alone. DJIA futures down over 250 points.
500 points now.
Down 750 now.
Trump has 55% chance to win now on 538. This is Brexit all over again.
Apocalypse now.
The horror…
Trump is quite a bit ahead in Virginia, and it’s too early to call. That’s a state that 538 had Hillary with a 85% chance of winning.
Glad that Jerry is happy. Glad that Hillary has (already) won. I’m still going to wait until the polls close. (Trust but verify. Or at least get a second opinion.)
I hope this post doesn’t become an eternal testament to PCC’s hubris.
Jerry’s optimism about Hillary winning always made me nervous, because every time someone has thought Hillary had something in the bag, Trump proved them wrong.
Election results thus far feeling like deja vu…
“Jerry’s optimism about Hillary winning always made me nervous”
Made me nervous as well, and I think I said so every time he expressed it.
And I was so pleased that you did. I was too craven to do so myself.
… all over again.
8:20 pm CST and I’m not optimistic. Neither is James Carville.
WTF? Why/how is he doing so well? I was expecting a relentless, national, unambiguous repudiation.
By appealing to the dark side of people’s natures.
It’s looking terribly tight in all the swing states.
If the worst happens, I’m afraid the rest of the world is going to have to take action. Radical regime change. To quote Ripley, “I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure”.
Sorry, Hilary voters. Ever heard of collateral damage…
cr
Yes, well, it seems what we’re going to get is relentless refudiation.
Once again, people are not only dumber than we suppose, they’re dumber than we can suppose.
Lol! That’s a good one.
If Trump wins the underlying reason will be resentment at the contempt shown so many voters. Doubling down on contempt seems a poor strategy going forward.
I disagree. That which is contemptible should be held in contempt. Nothing will change if we simply pat those who vote for misogynist, anti-education, bellicose xenophobia on the back and say “no harm, no foul; water under the bridge; it’s all hunky dory”. It’s not all hunky dory, those people are enabling harm. How do you fix something without saying what’s wrong? Maybe if we get the word out about what’s contemptible more people will want to avoid being held in contempt.
Hear, hear!
This. Absolutes this.
/@
+1, obviously
cr
Perhaps people didn’t vote for misogynist, anti-education, bellicose xenophobia. Perhaps they concluded that they were sick and tired of being taken for granted by the corporatist establishment and didn’t cave in to the moral shaming being dished out. Perhaps they had enough of being told the only possible reason for not voting for the woman candidate was misogyny. We’ve seen this kind of bullshit in the atheist/skeptic community, in the computer gaming community, in the science fiction writing community, everywhere on Twitter, in hyped up media stories about university campuses, and lets not even go into the 180 degree distortions propagated about police shootings. It is becoming relentless, to the point where the anti-white rhetoric looks more and more like the kind of othering that usually precedes genocide.
Against this backdrop, we have a Dem party who clearly greased the wheels for Clinton, and a Clinton camp who crowned her months ago and cluelessly ran with every Twitter social justice idiocy like outcry about the Pepe the Frog jokery. It wouldn’t surprise me if the prevailing sentiment was not pro Trump, but more a case of the electorate declaring that the system isn’t working and that they didn’t give a fuck who the opposition was as long as they weren’t the corporatist candidate taking a dump on them and telling them it was ice cream.
The parallels with Brexit are striking. The media and the remain camp ignored the electorate’s concerns and slathered around moral judgements, leading to a great many secretly deciding to deliver a fuck you in response. It remains to be seen whether an appreciable number of Trump voters are now asking themselves what they have wrought. It is conceivable that some believed the polls and just wanted to make it a bit closer as a rebuke.
Is deciding to deliver a “fuck you” not supposed to be contemptible? Seems pretty childish to me. If one didn’t want misogynistic, anti-education, bellicose xenophobia to win, there was only one legitimate course of action to take. That is the bottom line.
PS, what does anti-white rhetoric have to do with misogyny? Calling Trump a misogynist does not mean one also necessarily endorses anti-white rhetoric.
The 5:30 poll has been showing them pretty close for some months
Never until the fat lady sings.
It looks like the unthinkable is actually happening, I’m walking in a half-panicked daze now….😲😲😲
^^Same here.
I literally can not think of how to get through 4 years of Trump at the helm of the USA. The election was bad enough; it would feel like an every-day panic. If he wins, I’m pulling the plug on my TV and Internet for 4 years….
Probably won’t be 4 years, if that is any consolation : after all, he’ll have his finger on the nuclear trigger…
Don’t worry, you won’t have him for 4 years. It’ll be president Pence when he melts down in a year or so. It’ll be a nice change, idiocracy to theocracy.
When America elected Bush a second time, I knew then never to underestimate the American voter.
It’s awful having to learn history over and over. You think “obviously that can’t happen….that many people can’t be THAT irrational and reckless!” But then, recklessness so often wins the day.
This is the nation that elected both “Tricky Dick” Nixon and Ronald “sleepy” Reagan to the presidency as well as not-exactly-electing “Dubya”. Trump seems like the perfect follow-on candidate.
You know where this is going. Cthulhu for President…
cr
…and then no more elections!
I wonder if Jerry is still cocksure.
He is probably asleep, blissfully unaware in China. But he may get a rude awakening.
Michigan, Minnesota, Virginia -supposed to be Clinton leaning- (not to mention North Carolina and Florida) appear to have a Trump lead 😱
I’m afraid the lady is done.rough times ahead for the Republic.
I think we need to start getting used to the sound of it. President Donald Trump.
Should Trump win, I’m not going anywhere. Have too many Black, Hispanic and other women (and girls)who will need everyone’s help more than ever.
President Trump is as likely to be visiting every non-white citizen in Merka to personally persecute them any more than Obama was o take away people’s guns. He’s probably too lazy, for one thing. You really can’t take the man seriously. He’s been on about three sides of every issue. The impact on women is likely to be somewhere near zero.
You mean, like when he adds a justice or two to SCOTUS and abolishes Roe v. Wade?
Do you really think he could abolish Roe v. Wade? I fully realize the disaster the Trump Presidency represents in terms of states continuing their assault on women’s health, at least in the swath of red states between the liberal coasts. However, this assault was likely to continue largely unimpeded even if Hillary won.
The reverse side of the argument here is one I had frequently with one of my relatives who has, in midlife, taken a new found liking to extremely conservative Catholicism. On a daily basis, she would make FB posts and even tell other religious people in my family that they are in danger of hell and voting for a pro-choice candidate is a mortal sin. I had many discussions with her pointing out that this single issue voting mentality is absurd, as it takes someone with standing bringing a case to the Supreme Court to overturn Roe. I have not seen a convincing argument anywhere demonstrating how someone would be able to have standing to bring a case to the Supreme Court to stop someone else from having an abortion.
I by no means am minimizing the potential damage to the SCOTUS as well as the assault (possibly literally) of women under Trump, I just don’t see the path to entirely abolishing Roe v. Wade, nor am I convinced that even the current right leaning SCOTUS would overturn it.
My strategy is to take a vow of no audible news so that I never have to hear the words said out loud. In print I can detect them and skip over it with the same blah blah blah usually reserved for Russian names.
And First Lady Melania!! Sob!
Aww, it ain’t so bad, at least you’ll be able to find nude pix of the First Lady on porn sites.
(You probably can of Michelle Obama, too, but in Melania’s case they won’t be fakes…)
cr
(Was that snarky? I hope so. Did it help? Probably not…)
I knew I could rely on you, ii, to respond in just this way. 🙄
Maybe she can visit France and plagiarize Jackie.
See, I’m reliable.
How about y’all appoint me Prez instead of The Donald?
I promise to try to hide my ego and never to do that weird circle thing with the fingers…
cr
Knowing no more about you that what I read here, I’m positive you’d be a far superior president than the psychopath-elect.
You probably even have normal-sized hands.
So would you. So would most people on this site, come to think of it.
Which raises the question again, just exactly how the heck did the Drumpf get elected? All I can think of is the most monumental manifestation ever of ‘shit happens’.
cr
To infiniteimprobability:
Johnny-Comey-lately certainly dealt a lethal blow. He tipped over the fence-sitters.
I’m pretty sure that Hillary will win this, but not by the landslide that she should, considering who she is running against. Hopefully, this sends a message to the Democrats that people are unhappy with many of their policies. The Left is so cocksure that they’re right (no pun), that they’re unwilling to listen to any dissent, even from people who should be their allies. The blue collar, white male used to be firmly behind the Dems, but now, the union bosses support the party, the workers on the assembly floor support Trump. If the Republican Party can find just one, half way normal human being to run in four years, they will win.
There is none so blind…
Fear is growing, why are you so ‘pretty sure’ Clinton will win? (I’m looking for straws here).
Probably because he’s not following the news closely enough.
I suppose it’s not easy for a woman to defeat the FBI, Russia, KKK, GOP, Fox News, and DJT.
I need to renew my international passport.
Yup, credit where credit is due. Congratulations to Putin, Comey, and Murdoch!
Trump had to defeat his own party as well as most of the US media.
Clinton has only herself to blame. All she had to do was be calm, humble and respectful of opposing opinions. Instead she badly, badly misjudged the prevailing climate and went with the isms and moral superiority.
I don’t think I need list all of Trump’s shortcomings, however there has to be some form of shrewdness there to have pulled off all of the shady business deals he has. He appears to have had the astuteness to tap into the prevailing disgruntlement that Clinton seemed to actively exacerbate. Who’s the stupid one?
At this point, 10:30 Eastern time, it is more than likely that Trump will win. He is taking Ohio, Florida and likely N. Carolina, which will put him over the top. This is a nightmare.
The only hope now is for an unlikely reversal in Florida.
I’m glad I have a healthy supply of scotch in the house.
Clinton can still flip Michigan, with the deep base of votes from Detroit still pending. But options are running out.
They just projected Ohio for Trump 54:42 for a 15% swing. Followed by Jerry Falwell osculating the rump of the Trump.
Virginia for Clinton (projected) 48:47. Knife-edge.
Pride goeth before a fall.
I suggest seeking out Thomas Frank’s thoughts on what went wrong for Democrats.
NYTs meter is now at 93% chance Trump wins.
I hope Jerry is enjoying his last good sleep for quite a while….
There goes the DJIA. Time for a recession.
Ugh. This is terrifying.
If all we get is a recession out of this, we’ll be lucky. I expect much worse.
Oh, everything will recede—including the coastline.
I’m not sure if Trumpettes understand the meaning of suffragette, but I depressingly digress…
Pitchfork populism and its malcontents.
ShitShitShitShit…
“ShitShitShitShit…”
What he said.
💩👺
Crap. 💩
Quoth Rincewind, “Stercus, stercus, stercus, moriturimus sum!”
At least she got Virginia, it appears. Lost Ohio, but that was not really unexpected.
Trump is leading in Wisconsin, Michigan,
North Carolina, New Hampshire, Florida and even Nevada….Oops, Florida is Trump’s. 😱😱😱
Can Hillary still win?
Sure. And I could win the lottery.
Yep, that neatly exxpresses it.
CNN having difficulty admitting the obvious.
ABC as well. Their commentator was saying how close the state-by-state votes were, yet kept claiming that Hillary was winning the popular vote, even while the numbers on the screen contradicted his statement and clearly showed Hillary trailing in the popular vote.
How far is Uzbekistan from Tennessee?
Not far enough.
A pathway to victory for Trump has become a pathway for me to become an expatriate.
I fear we may be screwed. I’m really freaked out. After Kerry lost, I’d given up on optimism, but Obama gave me so much more hope that the US was on the right track. Now, it looks as though we’re speeding towards oblivion with our foot on the gas.
BTW, if Trump wins, the Republicans will control the White House, the Senate and the House. This is like Trumpnado.
An orange-colored EF5.
You’re forgetting the Supreme Court as well
And you guys thought I was being paranoid to post under a pseudonym!
Really, the lunatics have taken over the asylum.
I think I’ll finish my beer, shoot a few more aliens (on the computer – insectoid hive minds with their fear glands surgically removed), and go to get some sleep.
Precisely. It’s much easier to be an un-educated and lazy person who unthinkingly allows base instincts to drive behavior than it is to work hard, learn things, and critically examine your own instincts and biases. As the population grows the majority that populates the former category will get bigger and bigger.
I’m just sick. I have never felt any election was as important as this one.
And I have never been as horrified by and ashamed of the (apparently) majority of my fellow countrymen.
I thought the kind of people who could not understand how clearly unsuitable Trump is as a POTUS were just a vocal minority, like the KKK and white supremacists.
Hopefully????
What I can’t understand is what Trump’s supporters think he’ll do for them. Make them rich? Make them happy? Give them good jobs and financial stability? Hahahaha!
Yes, they do think that. They also have no clues as to how he might actually do that, nor are they interested in thinking or asking about it. As long as the candidate has an “R” by *his* (that’s important) name, they simply assume he knows how to grant all their wishes.
Yes they do think he will make them rich. Half of his gimmick was get rich schemes between scummy real estate classes and even more scummy pyramid schemes. His voters eat this stuff up
Get rich quick schemes are basically little mini-religions, aren’t they? So we should not be surprised that Trump did well with religious voters. Personality type there.
Mini is probably not even strong enough. I worked for a sales company a long time ago that actually sold real products but we went to a convention (if that is the right term) that had a bunch of heavy weight republicans as speakers like cross dressing Rudy and Powell and everything that was not a mainstream name was nothing more than a sales attempt at more expeiensive classes to get more leads.
I’ve been on forums with numerous Trump supporters and they are as bad as one can imagine. The “C” word is used liberally for Clinton, they are full of taunts and gleeful and about watching the sorrow and meltdown of the Democrats and anyone voting for Clinton.
This election has been like watching one half of the country troll the other half.
The far right was vile before, now they will be worse. But now, I don’t have to follow them just to keep track…
Every election I’ve participated in has seemed so important, but in hindsight seem so innocent. Bush’s reelection was a punch in the gut, this is far worse. I really don’t see anything good coming out of this election at all.
“I really don’t see anything good coming out of this election at all.”
With people like Bush, or the previous Bush or Reagan, I at least had the feeling they were smart enough to surround themselves with smart people. Trump isn’t, and he’ll have a cabinet made up of people like Rudy Giuliani.
This. As evil as I think Cheney is he is at least not dumb. Trump takes advice from Alex Jones. His son reads and takes serious neo nazi websites.
exactly
No past election has seemed very urgently important to me. It mattered to me whether this or that won, but I always could see the floor of either candidate. Only so much bad they could accomplish, and I’ve been right, only so much bad.
This whole election I’ve been unable to see the floor on a Trump presidency, and that has filled me for the first time with actual gut fear instead of mere “well, that’s not going to work out very well” detachment.
Doom, doom, doom …
Okay, it was funny to imagine Trump as president, really funny. I laughed a lot. But come on now!
Jerry’s confidence he spread all the time looks grimly comical now — though I admit, I didn’t expect him to win, either.
If the current trend continues, towards Trump, I hope the Democrats and Republicans use the next four years wisely. Reform your political system, away from a billionaire’s club of oligarchs.
Why would they do that? It’s an all GOP club now. God knows what they will do, but it won’t be that.
And, frankly, I’d prefer the usual oligarchs to the slobbering masses of torch and pitchfork wielders.
Jill Stein was saying Trump foreign policy superior to Clinton and basically she preferred him – absolutely bizarre for a Green party that presumably cares about the environment over horseshoe extreme politics. They will be exclusively blaming the right for this
I’ve only heard a few things out of her mouth, and all of them were profoundly stupid.
I need to finish my advanced directives tonight.
Goodbye cruel world. Civilization has failed.
Cheer up! It always takes awhile to wind down: years, decades even. In that time you can drink many cocktails, read many books, enjoy some dark humor with many friends.
Well folks, it looks like we’re seeing the undoing of everything this nation has achieved from Obama to FDR. President, House, Senate, Supreme Court…there is no firewall left. We have fallen.
I blame the 22nd Amendment.
PCC is going to have to get out his check book. And endure a Trump victory. Oh, the humanity!
Jerry, you may want to stay in China. I’ll be there soon.
Trump is winning – check the NYTimes.
Well, eff it!
I really wanted to take the bet, but was dissuaded. Honestly, I’m struggling to understand how the polls could be that wrong.
Although I’ve got to say, I do blame a lot of the tepid support for Hillary from so many otherwise liberal types, and I’ve now got little but contempt for the Bernie-or-bust types. I hope you enjoy your president!
Yeah, the Bernie-bots and the Stein snowflakes.
Oh please.
Vilifying liberals who actually wanted to vote for a liberal candidate instead of a center-rightist as Clinton is is absurd. All you’ve done is manage to piss off a bunch of people who are 90% on your side, then scratch your head and wonder why doing this hasn’t made them into your bestest friends. Then vilifying them further.
You reap what you sow.
Your comment illustrates the point quite well.
You’re trying to shift (a portion of) the blame from people who voted third party, or who didn’t vote for a candidate who was not quite your ideal liberal, to people who just didn’t speak to you nicely enough…
The third party vote did not cost Clinton this election.
But telling people who were supportive of Bernie in the primaries that they were awful misogynistic “Bernie bros” instead of trying to win them over to your side was still a terrible strategy. Bernie supporters were Democrats. They were liberals. Winning them to Clinton’s side SHOULD have been easy, but Clinton supporters demonized them non-stop and are still doing so as the results come in tonight.
Clinton supporters want to blame everyone but their candidate. She was weak. She lost a fight that almost anyone else could have won.
Re-visit that when the EPA, NPR and NSF are history, we have drill rigs in the National Parks, the Supreme Court’s full-tilt rightwing…
Mousing over the NYT map I see a lot of states where Gary Johnson’s getting 3.5 – 4% of the vote; which is very close to the margin by which Trump is winning those states.
Just read elsewhere that the Canadian Immigration website crashed.- LOL
Emigrating will not help much, the whole world is affected. The World’s no 1 superpower ruled by lunatics and deplorables?
That’s the trouble. That’s why POTUS *should not* be voted on by the American population. S/He should be elected by the rest of the world – you know, the people s/he’s allowed to kill without breaking any US laws?
cr
I used to half-seriously wonder about why we couldn’t do that when I was younger. Now it sounds very appealing.
From the opinions I’ve heard over here though, which are generally about how much of a crook ‘that Hillary Clinton is’, I wouldn’t expect the rest of the world to necessarily be that much more sane.
I’ve just woke up. I couldn’t take it, as with Brexit, and it panned out exactly the same. I just tried to sleep, and occasionally dipped in, but seeing big Andrew Neil trying to express the inexpressible at 5/6 in the morning I just curled up into a ball an tried to get back to a nice dream I was having.
I do remember being chided for not trusting the polls when I said I thought…Trump(‘president Trump’ – reality has a black sense of humour)…would win but in Britain we’ve been sat through almost the exact same arc of optimism/hope/desperation/massive overconfidence/misery in the last general election and the referendum and it all felt very familiar. I’d bet British readers were on the whole more pessimistic about it than US ones.
“…but in Britain we’ve been sat through almost the exact same arc of optimism/hope/desperation/massive overconfidence/misery in the last general election and the referendum..”
By “we”, of course, you actually mean “people who agree with me”. The millions of Britons who voted for a Conservative government and for Brexit probably don’t share your pain. In fact, many of us feel relieved, positive, optimistic and are still basking in the warm glow of victory – just as Trump’s supporters are doing right now.
Are you *sure* you want to draw a parallel between Brexit voters and Trump supporters… ?
cr
There are parallels though including an unwarranted belief in the idea that simply saying “we’re gonna make the US/UK great again” will make it so.
Both Trump and the Brexiteers have offered a promised land with no coherent plan for how to reach it.
If the election of the tories and our leaving the EU filled you with a warm glow fine.
I would’ve thought it was fairly implicit that I wasn’t referring to everyone in Britain but if you want to get on your high horse go ahead.
After all, feeling a warm glow about your decision is what’s really important.
At 12:15 am Eastern time, Trump has almost won. I feel sick.
I’ve never felt alarmed by an election before. Angry, disappointed, surprised, but never actually alarmed. This election fills me with a visceral fear.
As a masters student and as a decent human being I am still mostly terrified about the prospect of trump winnig ( which now seems likley) both for the likley science slashing (both in funding and in cultural respect/understanding) and for the message it sends to the world, our children and to ourselves.
I have been searchign the interent for a reason not to buy a ticket to NY and jump of trump tower or self immolate and I have foudn the following:
http://inthesetimes.com/features/zizek_clinton_trump_lesser_evil.html
Hopefully it lends a comforting perspective when all hope seems lost.
Yeah, but … Žižek?
/@
Previously Zizek was actually rooting for Trump. He’s a pomo/crit theory/contrarianist philosopher
https://twitter.com/Channel4News/status/794232437337247744
sorry i didn’t mean to embed
“Flee; we are in the jaws of a wolf.” — Lorenzo di Medici, upon the elevation of Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia to pontiff, as Alexander VI.
I feel pretty safe over here in Scandinavia, but we still have to follow this election since anything the US does affects the rest of the world as well. This insane election is not winning americans any allies among the rest of the world.
During lunch at work a few daya ago everyone was rolling their eyes at how crazy the political system in USA has to be to have such candidates.
One if my colleagues said that there’s no way Trump could win, but the others weren’t so sure and one said: “No one has ever accused americans of being intelligent”.
Everyone I know is becoming more anti-american because of this (which is unfair to all the great americans, some of which are on this site).
when my son got a bit alarmed at my distress (are we going to lose our house? are you going to lose your job?) I had to put some levity on it and I said, “but all the other countries are going to make fun of us now!!
Nice to be able to be so detached. Some of us are going to be out on the street when the Republicans start slashing the programs that keep us alive.
It’s not so bad, Mary. We already did. 😁
/@
Hell, I don’t blame anyone for being anti-american after this. Bush was bad, but this is a nightmare. The world has every right to hate us after this. We’ve earned it.
He appealed, quite nakedly, to white self-interest. Everything he said was tailored to that two thirds of America who are white, and regardless of how intelligent or liberal some people are he was attractive to white people with no principles. And our votes are private. No-one’s going to know if you just choose him instead of the person you really ‘should’ vote for.
It was absolute, naked pandering to the largest section of society that ended up winning him the election, and even the outwardly liberal white voters are vulnerable to the devil on their shoulder.
The consequences of choosing a corrupt politician over an honest guy
Think he’s referring to Bernie, since he’s the only person Clinton has been “chosen over.”
His family are well known for tax avoidance
His grandfather ran brothels
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Trump
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/trump-canada-yukon-1.3235254
(and daily mail and elsewhere)
His father built some good housing butTrump was investigated by a U.S. Senate committee in 1954 for profiteering from public contracts, including overstating his Beach Haven building charges by US$3.7 million (fred trump wikipedia) Donald Trump inherited a fortune from his father, has been accused of quite a few sexual assault offences and paid his 200 undocumented polish workers $5 an hour or nothing to work on the Trump tower. Then there’s Trump University and several other scams he’s accused of. (The Many scandals of Donald Trump: A Cheat Sheet in The Atlantic by David A Graham 13 October 2016
“His grandfather ran brothels”
Probably the most honest enterprise a Drumpf has been involved in. At least one assumes the customers got what they paid for.
cr
He still has pending rape charges, but it looks like he’ll be raping America now.
What a classy, sensitive, ethical, and articulate commander-in-chief.
‘Merca has essentially approved rape. The voters, including women voters, have declared that rape and sexual assault are now qualifications for the presidency. Colorado approved assisted suicide, while the rest of the nation has approved moral suicide.
USA USA USA. Never underestimate the troll hordes. Everyone is tired of all this Leftist PC bullshit.
You raise an interesting point. Should I start practicing my racial and gender slurs now so that I can blend in with this New America?
Who would have thought that we might want to have ‘good old’ George W Bush back ?!
Sadly, I’ve thought it many times long before Trump. There are a lot of vile people out there. W was not vile, he was just feckless. We can always do worse than feckless.
John Kerry just arrived in New Zealand, wonder if he will apply for asylum?
And he is on his way to Antarctica! The only place a democrat would feel colder!
People like me were dismissed as Chicken Littles.
Now the supposedly impossible nightmare seems to becoming true.
If current electoral vote and remaining swing state totals hold:
The sky has fallen.
Which means:
I have lost my country.
I can no longer call myself an American.
Because I cannot make common cause on any level with people who have voted to put the Trump creature into the White House.
This is the worst disaster in US history.
Which means:
In any meaningful way the United States of America no longer exists.
It has committed suicide.
Or has been murdered.
Worst? Well, there was that whole slavery and Civil War thing. This seems slightly less bad than that.
Sorry to say it, but I respectfully disagree (without wanting to get into an Olympic medals type of competition over disasters).
So I repeat: The worst disaster in American history.
The horrors of slavery were finally abolished because, after years of disheartening defeats, the northern side of the Civil War finally did emerge victorious, even though, as everyone knows, this victory fell far short of abolishing white racism.
The current disaster is not only national; it’s also global, in what looks at this moment to be unparalleled.
A majority of American voting citizens appear to have abjectly surrendered to bigotry, misogyny, racism, and no-nothingism.
What’s the quote? “The best lack all conviction, but the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
These results strongly indicate that the US was not a progressive country and never had any real interest in being one, despite the prolonged and often heroic efforts of so many progressive people and organizations.
Those efforts have, nonetheless, definitively and sadly failed. And a US government entirely controlled by Republicans, the most despicable political organization in American history, will ensure that this state of affairs continues.
Writing this fills me with despair, but I can’t help myself. USA Born 1781, died November 8, 2016 — even if some entity still bearing the USA name staggers onward for an unknown length of time.
At least she won Nevada. Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota Michigan, I know, I’m clinging to straws here….
Fear we’ll have to face reality.
She lost Pennsylvania, now the election is basically over.
Our only hope is that Trump’s soup isn’t as hot as served. Not very hopeful though. President Cheeto.
Feels apropos:
http://bit.ly/2eKLMS4
Trump won because of uneducated white males who perceived an establishement that was pandering to blacks with BlackLivesMatter, to Muslims with things like Ahmed the clock boy, to immigrants with fast tracking illegals, or allowing refugees in, and even pandering to women with the reaction to Trumps “locker room talk”. And they said who’s going to pander to me? Trumped stepped up, and said “I will”.
Trump won because Hillary was a weak candidate. Trump was also a fairly weak candidate. Either of them would lose handily to almost any other candidate on the national stage.
Hillary’s ground game has not improved one iota since she first lost to Obama. Her campaign was only slightly better than Trump’s, who had one big advantage from all the free advertising cable news gave him.
Nope, Mike got it right.
At a time of record public support for gay rights and gay marriage, coupled with falling religiosity, could it perhaps be that maybe the entire country didn’t just magically become ultra-conservative overnight?
Maybe the country’s values are largely still liberal, but Dems just had a really, really bad candidate?
That seems to make more sense to me, and it seems to be supported by the record number of polled Undecideds in this election. 4-5x as many as in 2012.
Both candidates were unpopular. Trump didn’t win, Hillary just lost.
But if you want to go full misanthrope, I won’t stop you.
“Maybe the country’s values are largely still liberal, but Dems just had a really, really bad candidate?”
I happen to think she was a good candidate, but still–given the appallingly egregious GOP alternative, how the hell could Hillary be perceived as even the slightest bit worse?
Because there is a limit beyond which people can’t simply hold their nose and vote for the lesser of two evils, and for many liberals Hillary was past that limit.
Imagine an election in which someone like Trump were the Democratic candidate and the Republican choice was somehow far worse. Could YOU still pick the lesser evil in that instance? I don’t think I could.
Then they’re kidding themselves if they think they’re liberals. I’m beginning to hear a lot of what I suspect are third-party voters trying to rationalise their incredible entitlement and adolescent idealism by blaming Hillary for being such an appalling candidate. That is just bullshit. The worst you can say is that she wasn’t a strong candidate and the idea that putting Bernie Sanders up against Trump was somehow clearly the pragmatic choice and it was insanity not to do so is just bollocks.
I don’t really care any more – if you voted for a third party candidate you have pissed your vote up the wall and done absolutely nothing at all for the ‘betterment’ of American democracy. You are no liberal either – a utopian leftist maybe, a crypto-conservative, but not a liberal.
Maybe the Democrats lost because the elite of the party and the media live lives isolated from what is really going on in this country. It’s hard to get the pulse of a nation from your mansion in the Hamptons.
The Left has been using the working class white male (and whites in general) as whipping boys for all the ills of the country, even blaming them for slavery that ended 150 years ago. Well, I guess they got tired of being used in such a manner and they rebelled. Now the country can suffer the consequences, but the Left won’t blame itself, it will blame the white males. They’ve learned nothing, they never will.
It’s okay to pander to minority groups, but if you do so by bashing the majority, you’ll end up regretting it.
“It’s okay to pander to minority groups, but if you do so by bashing the majority, you’ll end up regretting it.”
What would be some concrete examples of this?
Every single article blaming the “Bernie bros”, sexism and racism for why people don’t like HRC.
“[B]laming the “Bernie bros”, sexism and racism” bashes working white men?
because someone is good for the working man who
*is known for being good at using tax loopholes,
* wants wealthy people to pay less tax than Hilary did
* believes in cutting social spending (as opposed to military)
* is not committed to good work conditions or regulation
* plans to impose tariffs that will probably (unless he is careful) provoke major retaliation from China to whom the US owes a lot of money
*is known for having used unauthorised and underpaid/unpaid migrant labour
* has no specifics about his policies including none on bank or financial regulation or the tax havens that are in most states – and has consistently cited his own economic power and wealth as qualification for getting things done rather than indicate how he will tackle elite wealth structures like banks/financial/investment
I think one of the most egregious examples, was President Obama sending the Justice Dept down to Ferguson, MO screaming racism and decrying unjustified police shootings, before an investigation could be performed. Of course, they determined that the shooting was justified. Then they had to mumble something about a decade old joke and too many tickets to black people.
This was a major event to many people who support the police and was perceived by many as race baiting by Democrats. White cops bad, black people victims.
I suppose you also think there’s no such thing as sexual assault, despite the recent thread here in which the vast majority of us women provided testimony to the contrary.
Until we have comparable video footage of white men suffocated for selling loose cigarettes, shot in the back while running away, murdered while trying to explain that they’re exercising their right to concealed carry, shot while holding their hands up and trying to protect a mentally ill man, shot while sitting on their own couch in their own living room, etc., etc., I think we can agree that there is evidence of racial bias in police actions.
By your own account, justice prevailed. WTH was the “decade old joke” you talk about?
Whoa. I didn’t say that abuse by police doesn’t exist (and what has this to do with sexual assault? Deflect much?). It just didn’t exist in this case (and in some of those others you mentioned). As the chief law enforcement officers of the country, Obama and Holder should have said, “We are going to ensure a thorough investigation and if wrong doing was done, then we will prosecute. In the meantime, stay calm and let us do our job”. That’s not what they did and they looked foolish and incompetent. They poured gasoline on a small fire.
One of the wrongdoings of the Ferguson PD that the Justice Department reported on (after a dozen or so agents combed through everything the PD ever did) was that a PD clerk emailed a joke after Obama was elected (8 years ago). The clerk said that Obama would only be a one-term president, because black people can’t hold a job. Eight years ago. That was their major finding. Moronic.
BTW. I’m not a Republican. I’m registered as a Democrat and I voted for Hillary. I even criticized Jerry and others for going after Hillary for things that weren’t based on fact.
That doesn’t mean I can’t see that Obama (who I voted for twice) and Hillary often make things about race when they shouldn’t be. Simple test: Go out and do something that the cops will stop you for (high speed, etc.). When the cop stops you (let’s assume you’re a 6’5 white male), punch him in the face several times and try to take his gun. If he shoots you, then the Ferguson thing wasn’t about race. Report back.
There is evidence of racial bias in police actions. The only research I know of which tested police trigger response times in lethal scenarios showed that white police officers took longer to pull the trigger on a black perp.
The stats also show that if you look at violent confrontations with police, an appreciably higher percentage of white people get shot in such instances.
This being the only concrete evidence available, the hysteria and incitement to cop killing seems rather unwarranted.
Proportionally for their population, more blacks are killed
“The Left has been using the working class white male (and whites in general) as whipping boys for all the ills of the country, even blaming them for slavery that ended 150 years ago.”
Thank you for inadvertently backing me up, that’s exactly the perception ignorant white males have, and that Harrison disagreed was the case, that you’ve now provided evidence of. Hillary being a woman only added to the white working class males victim narrative.
…and you still don’t recognize that the Democratic Party has been using identity politics (Republicans too) to solidify their base. Oh well, maybe the party leaders will figure out that this backfired and will correct it. I doubt it though, they have a habit of doubling down on things like this. And calling them (or me) “ignorant white males” is a big part of the problem. Leaders should try to unite the nation, not create racial divides.
People should recall when Romney dismissed 47% of the nation as government freeloaders who weren’t going to vote for him anyway.
The Dems cannot afford to take a similar tact with working class whites. Traditionally democratic voting blocs like labor CAN be won back. Just stop telling them they’re uneducated rubes who may as well vote for Hitler already and maybe think about how their vanishing job prospects in the age of outsourcing might be mollified by the sort of liberal labor policies that were once the backbone of your party.
Outsourcing? That’s only a tiny part of the problem. Automation is going to do more. Self-driving vehicles can eliminate 2-10 million working class jobs in one fell swoop. No one has any idea what to do about the real and probably permanent decline in the value of labor. How does society organize itself, how does it stay together, if 30-40% of it’s population is economically useless? We’re not there yet, of course, but that’s the long term trend and no one treats it like a serious question.
Do you just put that 30-40% on the dole? The cost can be born, of course, since efficiency from this devaluing will create gains that could be spread around. But would people even want to be on the dole? Isn’t it demeaning? Won’t it contribute to public restlessness and unrest?
Myself, I can see no prospect for the future except for some kind of respectable make-work activities. Think of all the redundant servants in Downton Abbey, drawing a paycheck to straighten the forks and such and stand about all prim.
I don’t know, but I think long term we should expect more and more convulsions as the value of labor plummets.
UBI or GMI?
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FTFY
The obvious solution to the decline in the value of labour is to decrease the supply. It’ll take decades, so it needs real political leadership sustained over long periods. More so than the generational wars which are on-going, for example. But can you find a politician who can dare to broach the subject.
I think Somer showed nicely how voting for Trump is not a good choice for working class males, white or otherwise. I don’t see why anyone in the working class should vote for him, but I guess you think differently?
I also don’t get how white males suddenly have the right to throw a tantrum and elect someone that scapegoats minorities.
It’s like saying that it’s fair to elect a homophobe because some heterosexuals are offended by gay pride, or that it’s fair to take away abortion right because some radical feminists have offended men. And racist and sexist leaders have been elected throughout history, long before any SJWs or radical leftists were involved. Why are the left suddenly to blame? Isn’t it more likely that right wingers will use any excuse they have to elect someone they like?
I don’t really see how white men have been scapegoated at all, but then I don’t live in the USA. What I see is a constant scapegoating of immigrants, attacks on women’s rights and gays. If it’s alright for white males to elect a psychopath because they’re offended, won’t f.ex muslims and immigrants have an even bigger right? Would it be alright for them to elect someone that wants to take away rights for white males?
In my opinion, the only ones to blame for Trump, are the people who voted for him.
The leftist blacks, muslims, gays and women that Trump supporters find so annoying shouldn’t be blamed just because the trumpists can’t stand their presence. Anyone that voted for Trump becauase they feel “bashed” when gays are given marriage rights, immigrants are allowed to work and women are allowed abortions, are pathetic pure and simple.
White males should accept that the world doesn’t revolve around them, just like the rest of us. I’m certainly not willing to give away my rights and the rights of my friends, just because someone in the majority is offended at the presence of minorities.
(I know that there are probably some sensible Trump voters out there. My attacks are directed against the people that voted for him because they felt people were attacking white males. That’s just ridiculous).
Jesus, the straw is strong with you, Linn. That is quite a load of resentment and bigotry you are carrying with you. You don’t see how white men have been scapegoated at all? You aren’t aware that white cishet male is actually an insult now?. As a white male I certainly notice that I am blamed for just about every little discomfort that anyone else in the world suffers and that it is impossible to be racist toward me. But go ahead, call me a liar or paranoid. Obviously I’m just a manbaby.
I do think it’s wrong to vote for someone that wants to take away rights for others because of perceived insults in the media yes.
I don’t live in the US so my posts are probably biased, because I can’t say that I have seen white cis males having their rights taken away. Instead I see people that want the rights of immigrants and women (among others) to be taken away.
I’m not saying that no white cis men are poor or are struggling. I just don’t get how Trump will be helping them, and I think it’s ridiculous to vote for him only because you’re annoyed at leftist media.
I also think it would be foolish to vote for Hillary only because you’re a feminist let’s say (I didn’t mention it because she’s not the subject now).
I’m against the idea that it’s okay to take away the rights of others, because you feel that others are against you. The same goes for radical feminists that are angry with men and wants them to be denied child custody for instance.
Anyway, I thought many on the right wing were so against the offense and victim culture on the regressive left, but all of a sudden they are doing the exact same thing themselves. How are they any different than foolish leftist college students throwing tantrums. Only, the college students at least haven’t done much harm. Voting Trump may cause a lot more harm.
Sorry for all the grammar and spelling mistakes by the way. There were quite a few in the last post. Was writing on the run so to speak.
Agreed. For every whiny entitled student frothing about imagined insults, I could point to a whiny entitled gun-lover frothing about imaginary threats to their liberty.
cr
I think without a doubt, whine parity has been achieved between these two groups.
I could be more conscious of the latter because, amongst all the Russian nymphos in my inbox, I also get survivalist spam. Gods know why.
cr
Whose fault is it that there are so many uneducated white males in the US?
“Whose fault is it that there are so many uneducated white males in the US?”
The very party they’ve just elected which doesn’t value education. The majority of the least educated white males live in the red states.
Dunning-Kruger ?
cr
It’s their own fault, foremost. No one pins you down and prevents you from taking night school, or enrolling in a trade school, or taking out loans, or whatever it is you need to do to better your lot. Many people just find it easier to complain and feel sorry for themselves. This is true of moving too… the vast majority of the Trump voters I know are people from my small TX home town who, unlike me, never left. There is a growing, thriving, metropolis an hours drive away with good jobs to spare, but these losers prefer to sit in their dying town and cry over the fact that someone doesn’t bring a factory to them.
And the premise that everyone can be educated is itself false. Biology ensures that not everyone can be an engineer, lawyer, or nurse. No doubt they can get some kind of education, but the answer is not going to be college degrees for everyone even if it were free.
Trump won because the so called “Left” abandoned the working class and decided to focus on identity politics navel gazing (and not entirely sincerely either) while selling out to corporate interests.
When you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, what happens in the post-industrial wastelands of the Midwest is hidden from you. But it still happens.
A good point, but not the only contributory factor.
You can’t explain a whole election by pointing to some cretinous academics and a lot of spoilt students.
I dislike the illiberal left as much as anyone, or as much as most perhaps, but the idea that they should be the main concern of the genuinely liberal left is ridiculous given the relatively minute impact they have on society.
The far-left are loony academics, useful idiots(thanks Jill Stein!) and unpleasant students. OTOH the far-right, who have already been mobilised to an unprecedented degree by Brexit and populist discontent in Europe, are fascists, neo-Nazis and white supremacists. There’s a big difference.
The illiberal left are pretty low down on my list of political priorities at the moment. They certainly don’t help the liberal cause, but anyone who looks at the state the western world is in and concludes that liberals and centrists should be fighting SJWs and Jeremy Corbyn has his or her priorities out of whack.
I think the overriding reason Trump won is because he appealed directly to pure self-interest upon the part of the biggest demographic in the country: whites. He cut no corners, threw no other groups any sops; he made it absolutely clear to white people that he was their candidate and that the rest of the country was so irrelevant he could make spastic jokes at them, or call them rapists. No-one but whites mattered in his campaign.
Now if you’re white, and even vaguely uneasy about societal change, a part of you is going to be attracted to that. It may be a part of you that you’re ashamed of, but it only takes a nanosecond to vote in private, and you’ve given ‘your own kind’ a helping hand. That’s a very, very primal appeal.
“I think the overriding reason Trump won is because he appealed directly to pure self-interest upon the part of the biggest demographic in the country: whites. He cut no corners, threw no other groups any sops; he made it absolutely clear to white people that he was their candidate and that the rest of the country was so irrelevant he could make spastic jokes at them, or call them rapists. No-one but whites mattered in his campaign.”
Exactly!
I remember in 2008 thinking the racist streak that still exists in many parts of America was enough to prevent Obama from being elected. Apparently, a black man serving as President was enough to mobilize these people. We definitely fooled ourselves thinking that we’ve approached anything like a post-racial era in America.
In fact 4 thumbs up to your entire comment. I repeatedly saw people acting as though the SJW “problem”, was a bigger one than Trump.
I think among many factors in this election, the SJW problem played a somewhat significant role. The regressive left feeds into Trump’s narrative. If you’re a white guy in rural America with no college education and you have to do 2-3 minimum wage jobs to support your family, the fact Trump is paying attention to you at all is a change from the past few decades. Add to that the rhetoric about white privilege and the SJW narrative that everyone should STFU and listen to them, and we’ve created a monster we all now have to live with. This morning on the radio, I heard one DJ saying that his daughter is college is so distraught (as are her fellow students), that her professors cancelled tests for the week. This is absurd. I can’t imagine anyone with job responsibilities calling in and saying they just can’t participate for a week due to their hurt emotions. Sure, they have their safe space in the college classroom, but the reality of Trump awaits as soon as they cross the threshold. Perhaps they should have been more active in mobilizing people against our newly elected proto-fascist and gotten people out to vote, which was the best way to stop his rise.
But you’re right, the SJW problem itself pales in comparison to what’s going on now.
If you think that illiberal left ideology has minimal impact then you are, like most of the West, sleepwalking toward a rude awakening. They have subverted the justice system in the UK, Canada, US and who knows where else.
Google Mark Pearson for an example of the kind of thing that is going on.
How did I miss this post? +1 from me. You wrote what I wanted to state, only much more eloquently than me. 🙂
I suspect the ‘regressive left’ had minimal direct influence but, as with Hitler and the Jews, they made a very convenient bogeyman for Trump supporters to invoke.
“He cut no corners, threw no other groups any sops; he made it absolutely clear to white people that he was their candidate…”
Well, he did make a token appeal to black voters IIRC, though I guess he wasn’t trying all that hard. But it would be interesting to know how many working-class blacks voted for him, given that they suffer from many of the same financial problems as working-class whites.
cr
Your takeaway from this result is MORE vilification and taunting of “white males”? Do you have gun-shot proof feet or what?
“Your takeaway from this result is MORE vilification and taunting of “white males”?”
You do understand that the word vilification implies an unfair characterization don’t you?
Do you realize that white males only make up 31% of the population? Why are they at fault for the Trump victory? A lot of people who aren’t white and who aren’t male had to vote for Trump in order for him to win.
“Do you realize that white males only make up 31% of the population? Why are they at fault for the Trump victory?”
She only got 31% of their vote. If that vote had simply been an even split she would have won by a landslide, and have gotten something like 60% of the popular vote. And that 31% is only as high as it is because of states like New York, and California. It’s probably more like 20-25% in the raci.. I mean red states.
Romney got their vote too. If you remember, he lost.
And I just saw this from the NYT “Trump did best among white voters without a college degree, beating Clinton by the enormous margin of 72 percent to 23 percent.” That means my 20-25% estimate among that demographic in the red states was probably high. If you don’t believe much of that was because of racism, sexism, and xenophobia, I have a bridge to sell you.
+1
” If you don’t believe much of that was because of racism, sexism, and xenophobia, I have a bridge to sell you”.
Some of it was, but if the country is so racist, how did Obama get elected twice? Trump carried the usual racist vote, but that vote won’t get you elected. He had to appeal to other groups. What he did, was talk directly to the blue collar voter in the rust belt. The Left, many of whom live along the coasts on both sides of country and in places like Chicago, don’t understand or care about the plight of workers in the rust belt. Michael Moore warned that Trump was going to take these voters and he did. You swallowed the media’s line that these voters are racist, xenophobes. Most are not. Many voted for Obama. They voted for their economic well-being this time, as oft they do. Maybe Trump promised them things that he can’t carry out, but at least they now have hope, hope they didn’t have with Hillary. That open border trade comment (even if untrue) hurt Hillary more than anything else with this demographic. These people need jobs and they need them now. The Democrats have ignored them and it cost them the presidency. This isn’t about race, it rarely is. And yes, I know you have a bridge to sell, you bought it from the Left and paid dearly.
“You swallowed the media’s line that these voters are racist, xenophobes. Most are not.”
I never said most were, and when I talk about racism, xenophobia, and sexism in this context I’m not, as I’ve said already talking about the “let’s send them all to concentration camps” type bigotry, I’m talking about the “I don’t care about them” type of bigotry. And it would only require 20% of that type of bigotry, though I think it’s considerably higher, to make the difference between a Trump win, and a Clinton “landslide” victory.
Oh and BTW. If you think racism isn’t as bad as I argue. In 2008 Obama got only half the white vote in my state of Alabama, that John Kerry got just 4 years earlier, and Obama actually won. That racism has only gotten worse in the last 8 years here in my opinion.
Yes, yes, yes. Racism in Alabama. They always go Republican. They’re “the usual suspects”. But I’m not talking about the deep South, I’m talking about Wisconsin, the last time Wisconsin went for a Republican was Reagan. Did Wisconsin import a bunch of white racists from Alabama and no one told me? Or did these people vote on other issues like jobs. Michael Moore says it was jobs and the economy. I have no reason to doubt him.
I am presently of the opinion that Trump won not so much because of racism or xenophobia of illegal immigrants (though they also voted R), no, his march thru the whole election process was because of the disaffected working class and their concerns that were ignored until Trump came along. They saw their jobs go overseas because of trade deals, and they want them back. They want an outsider who can clean up Washington with its habit of back room deals and powerful lobbies. They perceive corruption in the whole political process, and they are sick of it.
If anyone finds fault in this argument, then ok, but that is what their argument has been, realistically or otherwise. They projected their wants upon this one person, ignoring the flaws nomatterwhat.
I think your analysis is spot on. Even though Trump is manifestly incapable of giving them what they want and he has promised, and still would be even if he were as smart as Obama.
cr
Trump played on people’s fears but a large part of his fortune was built on the very tactics that has brought them so low. All he really cares about is boosting his ego and keeping in the spotlight. I expect the next two years to be horrid with Republicans controlling the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches of government but retain some dim hope that maybe the process of correcting the wrongs they will commit will begin with the mid-term elections of 2018. OH, and as a mid-level civil service employee in a very red city in NE Florida, I certainly don’t live in any ivory tower.
“I am presently of the opinion that Trump won not so much because of racism or xenophobia of illegal immigrants”
I wish I had some rose colored glasses as well, but they don’t sell them in Alabama.
“I am presently of the opinion that Trump won not so much because of racism or xenophobia of illegal immigrants (though they also voted R), no, his march thru the whole election process was because of the disaffected working class and their concerns that were ignored until Trump came along.”
Sure, but Trump appealed to them by using minorities, foreigners, and immigrants, who they feel no empathy for, as scapegoats. It’s not the “we’re going to send you to concentration camps because we hate you” type racism, and xenophobia, at least for the most part. It’s the “we don’t care about you, and are unwilling to make any sacrifices to help you” type of racism, and xenophobia.
Hang in there, Ruth Bader Ginsberg!
I’m sure someone else has added this already, but “No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”
H.L.Mencken,I think…
Not looking good
They say the wages of sin is death. Tonight we found out the wages of identity politics, methinks.
Agreed.
Sorry but nope. :/
The whole damn gumnt has gone to the repugs. I predict He will name the country Trump Industries and move the administration to the Cayman Islands, which should be eaesy to invade. (Remember Granada?) Then H will pick a Bible-thumping fundamentalist to the Supreme Court. Aside from that, it’s hard to know what might happen.
Oh, yeah. Sorry about your $600, Jerry.
I don’t cae about the money. I’m devastated. I will of course pay off, but bets seem like the last thing to worry about now.
All bets are off anyway. On everything.
oh jerry
Yes Commiserations on a wretched day … but one shared by half of America
America has been through several dark periods in our history. The Civil War, the Great Depression, WWII, the Cuban Missile Crisis, etc. and we survived the experience. I’m not so sanguine about our prospects of survival under a Trump regime. Trump has obvious ties to Putin and the Russians. Trump is highly unstable mentally and plans to surround himself with the worst power players in the GOP who will simply egg him on. The Congress is controlled by the GOP which will not bother with any oversight or containment on Trump’s actions. Trump could realistically lead us into a shooting war with numerous other countries and how quickly would he resort to the use of nuclear weapons? Even if Trump manages to avoid going to war with foreign powers, he will surely declare war on every American who is deemed to be different. The Republican-controlled Congress will appoint far-right extremists to the Supreme Court which will roll back the progress we have made as a nation since the 1960s. Conservative White Christians will demand and receive special treatment and privileges once again at the expense of women, African-Americans, Hispanics, Muslims, the GLBT community, Freethinkers, immigrants, etc. The only good news is that the Democrats should be able to retake Congress in 2018 after two years of their incompetence, mismanagement, greed, avarice, and criminal behavior. Of course, that makes the assumption we will still be here and able to vote as the rest of the VRA will get tossed out. This is going to be one hell of a Culture War as White Christian America tries to hold on to power or burn down America in the attempt to stop the changing demographics of our country. I hope for the best but expect the worst. This will make the Bush years seem like a walk through the garden.
“The only good news is that the Democrats should be able to retake Congress in 2018 after two years of their incompetence, mismanagement, greed, avarice, and criminal behavior.”
You might think this will be the case, but I wouldn’t count on it. In 2018, 25 Democratic seats are for re-election and only 8 Republican. House districts are so gerrymandered that the Republicans will probably retain the House even if the country is a smoldering ruin as the result of a war Trump starts.
Then I fervently hope we survive until 2020!
I am thinking of claiming the domain dumptrump2020 🙂
I guess Hillary and Bill won’t f**king with us any longer. Now is the time to learn our lession and unite against Trump.
Hopefully, they don’t go to someone like Bernie. This country wants a moderate president, a centrist. A far left ideologue will never get elected.
Bernie had double digit leads over Trump in all polls throughout the primaries
And the polls had Hillary winning the election…
I guess we’ll be viewing pictures of humble pie! yuck!!!
In the words of Trump, “Wrong.”
Ugh.
What’s the best that can happen? Hope that Drumpf will remember why many voted for him and be immune to the corporate lobbyists in Washington (he doesn’t need the money). This is probably wishful thinking, like my earlier hope that half the US population would not turn out to have an IQ below that of the average cabbage.
The worst? – that Trump, whose ego is infallible and omniscient and it therefore follows that anything he does must by definition be right and morally irreproachable, will take all the bribes and turn out to be the most corrupt leader since Caligula or possibly President Marcos.
Welcome to the third world, USAnians.
cr
I wrote in a previous post that Trump’s victory felt inevitable, like a bowel movement; and that even if he had lost the populist discontent would have to work its way through the system somehow. Maybe his election will speed up the process.
For what it’s worth I definitely don’t think a majority of the country are evil, racist psychos, and I have a certain childlike belief in America and its political system. I think you guys will come through this. And you’ve got some strong Democrat candidates for next time.
Thanks, Saul, I needed that.
The faction with the cabbage IQ are the idiots who failed to listen to what the voters were actually telling them, preferring to go with their own knee-jerk diagnoses of an assortment of isms and derision.
My cabbage comment was aimed at anyone who believed Trump’s wild election promises – mostly slogans made without any specifics whatever about how he might carry them out.
Insofar as they were specific – like his wall – they were daft.
cr
I am not even American, nor living in America, but I couldn’t be more depressed. I woke up to the news of this nightmare come true and my first thought was “this is the end of civilization”.
Something is very badly broken in your political system when such a creature can have access to the nuclear button. In the present globalized world we are all going to suffer the consequences of this triumph of idiocy and the darkest shadows of the mind.
this is the end of civilization
Well, I just listened to Trump’s speech and he said “I will work for good relations with everybody”.
Meanwhile HRC was super hawkish every time foreign policy came up.
If the candidates’ words are to be believed, civilization is safer as a result of this vote.
What will happen in practice remains to be seen, of course
I always marvel at the way some people hear or read some “words” and that is all they need, irrespective of how the facts turn out to be.
“If the candidates’ words are to be believed”, well “grab them by the pussy…”, etc.
Indeed.
Indeed – Trumps victory speech was nauseating in its hypocrisy.
I’m feeling a bit weird that Trump has won and I worry about how the USA (and the rest of the world) will fare.
However
In the UK Conservatives win the last General Election with an unexpected majority.
In the UK Leave voters win the Referendum with an unexpected majority.
Trump wins the American Presidency with an unexpected majority.
Perhaps the decades-long liberal consensus has stretched itself too far (as exemplified by the growth of the authoritarian left, criticized in this very web site) for the ‘shy voters’ to remain uninvolved? If this is so then other future elections in the Western world might also have a few surprises.
Somehow I am not surprised that so many people lack a level of intellectual competence to vote against Brexit or Trump.
Why doesn’t it surprise me that the majority of voters cannot see through the most obvious untruths and continually mistake demons for heroes?
Reminds me of Peter Medawar:
I believe that it is a mistake to think that intellectual competence has anything but a passing nod to how people vote.
My suspicion is that people vote in accordance with how they feel. In some ways this is sensible(!) because no-one can reliably predict the future intellectually, and can only choose what political attitudes they wish to apply.
This is the underlying dynamic for religious belief too, I think. I’ve come to accept that intellectual argument about facts will rarely trump(!) religious feelings.
Change peoples’ feelings and the ‘facts’ will follow.
And how people feel has nothing to do with their intellectual competence?
If I’m walking alone on the street at night and I feel unsafe because I’m in a Mexican neighbourhood then brief application of logic will make me feel safe immediately.
How so? Because I know that Trump has deported all the Mexicans so I have nothing to be afraid of.
(Don’t be missing the sarcasm please.)
I suspect that people select facts to justify their feelings (plenty of literature about cognitive biases) and cleverer people select cleverer facts.
I suspect you’re right.
😉
cr
Is it really that irrational to conclude that a populist buffoon is less dangerous than an ideologue committed to a path you don’t want to go down?
How long before disrespecting the President becomes a federal crime?
Yep.
You get a sense of the unease just by scanning the liberal press. They’re genuinely worrying about that.
Doesn’t the constitution offer a good deal of protection against that?
Just words on paper.
Only works if people back it up.
There’s a good deal of Constitutional protection against a lot of things Trump proposed as well as other aspects that are infeasible.
His wall idea is absurd and would avoid a complex mess of Federal, State, and local Government red tape, plus a good deal of issues with private property at the border. Plus, no expert in the field thinks this would accomplish much to change what is already a downward trend in border crossings. I think this proposal is probably dead and I doubt he’ll bring it up again.
The deportation squads Trump proposes definitely have Constitutional issues and groups like the American Civil Liberties Union have already sworn to block any such efforts with lawsuits.
Obamacare can’t simply be repealed by Executive Order as Trump claims, but they can defund portions of it. Even conservative analysts concede that would be a huge mess and if they don’t replace it with something and allow the 20 million newly insured to lose it, they’ll likely face swift political backlash even in this environment.
The list of ridiculous ideas goes on and on, but I’m mostly worried about foreign policy. This I fear could be a runaway disaster. Hillary was already too hawkish, but Trump has floated ideas about increasing nuclear arms around the world and openly wondered what’s wrong with using them. I fear he’ll also get us into another full fledged war in the Middle East with his pledge to take out ISIS. He also is likely not bluffing about scrapping the Iran deal in favor of more forceful measures. Combine these ideas with a Republican Congress who just loves delivering “freedom” by force around the world, plus some pretty absurd protectionist economic proposals, and this could end extraordinarily badly. It could end up making us long for the days of George W. Bush by comparison.
for a man like Trump to even stand the chance of getting this far in an election, and then winning it, really shows how America has derailed in a lot of ways. (no offense to anyone) hello?? Trump!! Trump has made a lot of racist remarks, has proved to be clueless on a lot of things that a presidential candidate needs to be knowledgeable about, and has proved that his first way of communication is aggression. Trump marks the beginning of a dark era in the history of US. Very unfortunate that the nation would even vote a man like Trump
But a lot of voters thought, rightly or wrongly, that Trump was more likely to stick up for them than Clinton.
No one can know how good, or bad, Trump will be as President. But everyone has an opinion.
true, everyone has an opinion, but no one knowing how good or bad someone can be is the reason for the presidential debates, and the campaigns and all the drama before the election. If I am right, all those are supposed to give the electorate an insight into the personality and nature of the presidential candidates, and none of that showed good about Trump. What kind of aspiring president talks in the way that stirs up hate in the minds of many. My opinion? If the whole of America chose to be reasonable, unbiased and sensible, if the whole of America chose to look for the right virtues when electing a leader, Trump wouldn’t have stood a chance.
My thoughts too.
Leave the policy issues aside. Leave aside the fact that Trump is probably *less* religious than Hilary, which in any normal circumstance would be a plus for most of us. Just taking it on character – Hilary is unloveable, Trump is flat-out obnoxious, highly unpredictable, and should have been unelectable.
cr
From what I could see that’s exactly what the electorate did. Leave the policy issues aside and vote on a wave of emotion against shadow monsters.
Sending poor PCC[E] virtual hugs 🙁
I was looking forward to installing the “Drumpfinator” extension that I have in Chrome.
Now I guess it’ll have to stick around or another 4 years.
Murca being what it is, probably 8.
“installing” should have read “uninstalling”
Just stumbled on that extension, I was watching an old ep of ‘Last Week Tonight’ with John Oliver where he went after The Drumpf.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnpO_RTSNmQ
In which John Oliver linked to the site http://www.donaldjdrumpf.com (which is still up) where you can download the Drumpfinator.
I’ve just downloaded & installed it in Chrome and – it works! 🙂
(I’ve also downloaded all John Oliver’s pronouncements on The Donald to my hard drive, forestalling the day when President Drumpf gets all adverse mentions removed from Youtube. It would be great to see who was the winner, Drumpf or the Streisand Effect…)
cr
Hyperbole maybe but it is easy to feel echoes of the nineteen thirties with the election of dangerous,authoritarian populists and the trashing of democratic institutions.
Here in Europe we have already seen the pauperisation of Greece, Britain vote to leave the EU, the capture of the British Labour party by a coalition of far leftists, Spain has been without a government for over a year and France looks very vulnerable both to Islamist terror and to a strong far right.
In the thirties the USA held the pass of course with FDR. Now it seems to be leading the way to chaos.
So farewell then, “United” States
Not with a bang
But a fart
You mean a trump?
Down it went with a Trumpety Trump / Trump, Trump, Trump.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh
In Brit. English, a “trump” is an old-fashioned word for a “fart”, as in ..
“the dog’s just done a big, smelly trump”.
Seems entirely apt …
I know, I just couldn’t help hearing Nellie The Elephant playing in my head. A huge orange Nellie, with no respect for personal space
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
T S Eliot, The Hollow Men
Decline and Fall
Any other rural liberals on here who saw this coming? The enthusiasm gap here in the hinterlands was more like a canyon. I saw my first Hillary sign just a week ago but there are hand-made (i.e. shitty) Trump signs everywhere.
It will be interesting to see what part of the 1950s the Republicans try to recreate now that they will control all of the federal government. People who hate government put in charge of government…what a country!
Yep all I ever saw was Trump signs everywhere.
Same here–outstate Michigan.
Yes, it was the enthusiasm gap (coupled with close polls) that led me to take Jerry’s bet.
…first time as tragedy, second time as farce.
Our only hope is that Drumpf was lying to the GOP electorate too.
I remember in the 1980s Neil Postman wrote a book called Entertaining Ourselves to Death, about how TV is making people dangerously stupid and incapable of caring about their own well being let alone anyone else’s. I thought he was exaggerating.
Hello America.
This is Galactic Central.
It has become apparent to us that your systems of government have irretrievably broken down and are no longer capable of designating a competent and rational leader. This is a dangerous situation and an unacceptable condition for the most powerful nation on your planet.
Your government is therefore dissolved herewith. A commissioner will be appointed to manage your country while your governmental processes are reviewed and an effective system of government is re-established. This process will be expedited as swiftly as possible. Your cooperation is requested to facilitate this with a minimum of disturbance. Resistance is futile.
Thank you.
😀 Reminds me of a political bumper sticker I see around: “Asteroid ’16”, with a big, flaming meteor plummeting down.