57Brave
Well-known member
Martin Gelin @M_Gelin 19m19 minutes ago
Bernie Sanders making unexpected visit to Cali breakfast. "It's easy to boo, it's harder to look your kids in the face if Trump is prez"
Democratic National Convention
- Thread starter The Tariff King
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Martin Gelin @M_Gelin 19m19 minutes ago
Bernie Sanders making unexpected visit to Cali breakfast. "It's easy to boo, it's harder to look your kids in the face if Trump is prez"
So basically the lesser of two evils argument? Inspiring stuff.
No, I didn't get it, and your copied tweet from one of the three accounts you share material from didn't help illustrate whatever it is you are trying to convey either.
bravesnumberone
Well-known member
Not a single mention of the problems ISIS is causing. Hopefully that will change over the next three nights.
How do I look my kids in the face if Hillary is president? Benghazi, standing my her husband (for political reasons) as he nuts up on women in the white house, cheating her way to the nomination....the list goes on.
50PoundHead
Hessmania Forever
I think Michelle Malkin is a total whack-job, but this is kind of priceless.
gilesfan (and other younger folks), I'm not defending Hillary and company to the hilt here, but I've lived through the hijinks of the Kennedys, Nixon, and Lyndon Johnson and compared to them, this is all pretty weak soup. The only thing that has changed is the 24/7 news cycle and the over-weening desire for the public to know everything (which they won't ever really know). So you and your children will be fine. It's probably a teachable moment that you can use to the effect that public officials are people like everyone else with warts of all kinds. None of them are perfect.
As someone who has made a career out of politics and government, I'm always surprised how many people put way too much stock in it. I don't want Trump to be President, but I think I will manage if he does.
bravesnumberone
Well-known member
For me, it provides clarity to how expendable voters and people are and have been for a long time. Unless Trump really is Hitler reincarnate, you are right. It won't ultimately be our leaders who doom us.
Runnin
Well-known member
You need to start weaning yourself off right wing radio. The ONLY reason Hillary has been demonized is because she's a smart Democrat. She's the enemy. And ever worse, she isn't an incompetent hack like most of the nutjobs on the right. Have you ever asked yourself why people hate her so. Perhaps it's because they fear everything in general, though mainly just progress and the future. If they were really paying attention, and I'm sure some are, they would realize that Hillary's policies, like her husband's, are at the end of the day, Conservative-light and aren't that far away from where the Republicans were thirty years ago.
Benghazi, meh. Attacks happen and people do make mistakes. I still don't know why people think that was her fault. Educate me, please. Where was this outrage when Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld were committing war crimes?
Standing by her husband? Neither you nor I know the workings of their marriage and it's none of our business. So what if it IS a mutually advantageous arrangement? Good for them.
The list doesn't go on and on, only the imaginations of people out to get her.
Btw, I've never really liked her myself. She comes across fake to me but the difference is that I believe that under that fakeness is a policy wonk who will try her best. If she saves the world from a Trump presidency, she'll start out a hero in my book. And likely win a Nobel Peace Prize. Boy that will make the Ditto Heads' heads explode.
Runnin
Well-known member
It does provide balance.
50PoundHead
Hessmania Forever
Good article from today's The American Prospect by Harold Meyerson: http://prospect.org/article/sighted-and-blinkered
50PoundHead
Hessmania Forever
I saw her testify on behalf of the Children's Defense Fund at a legislative hearing in Minnesota in the late-1980s and she did a bang-up job. Funny thing is that while being professional, she exuded a warmth and concern that is greatly lacking in her presentation now. Maybe that's what two-plus decades of getting beaten-up (some of it self-inflicted) will do to a person's psyche. Underneath everything, I think she is truly a policy wonk and a manager more than a visionary.
Runnin
Well-known member
One of my college profs who later became a good friend went to Miss College for Women, where Hillary gave the commencement address sometime in the early 80's. She told me then how it was the greatest speech she had ever heard. I thought, yeah yeah, blah blah. And quite honestly I've never had much cause to rethink my early impressions. Hopefully I will.
jpx7
Very Flirtatious, but Doubts What Love Is.
What I hate about it isn't that it's fallacious, per se, but that it gives cover for never actually trying to improve much more than in the barest and most incremental ways. Those larger, structural improvements might come through reformulating the party (and I mean either dominant party here), or—for the individual—they might come through rejecting the party, moving on, and devoting one's energies into an organization that better suits one's principles. But if the constituency is always cowering aback from the carefully constructed boogeyman on the other side, there's a lot of carefully constructed disincentive to do anything but maintain.
Meanwhile, accepting the "lesser of two evils argument" also means embracing its correlative narrative: that this cycle's opposition is always history's greatest monster, the worst they've nominated yet, et cetera. Forcing this binary also means ramping up the demonization rhetoric, to sustain the wedge: it incentivizes a focus on all the ways your opponent is scary and bad, as opposed to specifics regarding how you're good and how you're going to take things to a better place.
And I think we've seen this from both dominant parties to a dizzying extent this season, and especially at the conventions: Trump's tagline may be "Make America Great Again", but the RNC spent a lot more time talking about how Clinton is going to make it worse; likewise, the "a vote for anyone but Clinton is a vote for Trump" scare tactics explicitly play up the binary wedge, while the tone-deaf "America Is Already Great" and "greatest country in the world" mantras further imply that we've got something really good going, it's almost perfect already, and we just need to ensure Trump doesn't royally **** it up.
Yeah. I think the far left has taken the Trump thing too far. It's become the opposite force of the far right predicting Obama would confiscate all guns on day 1 of each presidency, send dissenters to concentration camps and what not.
If Trump gets elected it's not the end times.
57Brave
Well-known member
" Underneath everything, I think she is truly a policy wonk and a manager more than a visionary. "
I listened to a 90 minute interview yesterday and heard her with conversational ease analytically jump from subject to subject . Be it domestic or foreign affairs.
Nixon could do that. I can't think of another pol that held as much policy on the tip of their tongue
Depending on the interviewer and how much time she has determines how deep she goes with data point after data point. With 90 minutes and someone interested in discussing her policy goals she goes on and on, toe to toe. This interviewer (I forget the name) frequently and respectfully challenged her and questioned her logic and she in turn respectfully answered and where she felt need be returned fire.
Not sure how many have watched her debate Sanders this time through, but at times it was like listening to someone read an encyclopedia.
Made me think to be sure not to get in a fantasy baseball league with her
I listened to a 90 minute interview yesterday and heard her with conversational ease analytically jump from subject to subject . Be it domestic or foreign affairs.
Nixon could do that. I can't think of another pol that held as much policy on the tip of their tongue
Depending on the interviewer and how much time she has determines how deep she goes with data point after data point. With 90 minutes and someone interested in discussing her policy goals she goes on and on, toe to toe. This interviewer (I forget the name) frequently and respectfully challenged her and questioned her logic and she in turn respectfully answered and where she felt need be returned fire.
Not sure how many have watched her debate Sanders this time through, but at times it was like listening to someone read an encyclopedia.
Made me think to be sure not to get in a fantasy baseball league with her
jpx7
Very Flirtatious, but Doubts What Love Is.
It's not the far left, though; it's the establishment liberals who've invested a lot in Trumpocalypse narrative, because they (wrongly, I think) see it as their path to victory, believing it'll bring establishment Republicans and the leftists around to the Clinton cause.
In fact, a lot of folks in the farther reaches of the left (much farther left than me) actively want a Trump victory—even if they dislike the man and loathe his policies—for the same reason you said you think it'd be beneficial: because it will shake up the nominal party of the left and force either (a) a restructuring of the Democrats or (b) a mass exodus of youth and left to some other partisan organization. Indeed, if the "far left" has taken anything "too far", it's the extent to which they claim a Clinton presidency and a Trump presidency would effectively be the same thing, outside of a few optical differences.
That's what I meant. Thanks for saying what I wanted to say so much more eloquently. I thought we'd seen the last of Blue Dog dems after Obama took over but they're trying to pull it back to Blue Dog Era.
Julio3000
<B>A Chip Off the Old Rock</B>
This is the 2000 narrative all over again, in so many ways. The same rhetoric—there's no difference between Bush and Gore!—and the same superficial merit to the argument: yes, the two major parties have disturbing similarities, and yes, a vote for either major party candidate can be considered a vote for the status quo. In retrospect, though, nobody can quite imagine Al Gore spending his public goodwill and political capital creating a phony narrative for the purpose of prosecuting a war of choice. Something something doomed to repeat it.
I've watched the last couple of months
Bernie looked like he was about to choke up and cry. Almost made me choke up.
Hate him or love him, Bill has such a presence when he speaks.