Friday Open Thread [5.27.2016]
Last night, Mein Fuhrer Donald Trump, was featured with his family in an hour long special called Meet The Trumps on Fox, who are obviously auditioning to be the US version of Russia Today to Donald Trump’s Vladimir Putin. This is what state-run fascist media looks like.
Seriously, what the hell is this? pic.twitter.com/g4ebWr6ZVl
— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) May 26, 2016
The special served as a decent preview of America’s dark totalitarian future. But there is good news! You can stop this. You can vote for Hillary Clinton. Yes you can. Yes we can.
“The Republican National Committee is scrambling to respond to increasingly frantic concerns from state GOP officials that the party has not provided enough field organizers and will be badly outgunned by Democrats in battleground states,” Politico reports.
“It’s a development that could spell trouble for Donald Trump, who trounced his primary competition despite lacking a traditional field organization but is now relying on the national party for its infrastructure. And it has implications for the fragile Republican Senate majority, which is also depending on the RNC’s ground game.”
Bernie Sanders was trying to set up a situation where he could both impress Super Delegates and voters in California, two things he needs to win by historically large margins to have any chance at finishing in a close second to Hillary Clinton (yeah, he can’t win the nomination even with a 66% win in California, but I digress). But it blew up in his face. Which is a good thing. Josh Marshall:
It is truly difficult for me to imagine that a Trump v Sanders debate is really going to happen. [….] It is only a spectacle by which both candidates, Trump and Sanders, can indulge their tacitly-agreed common interest in sidelining and diminishing Hillary Clinton, who of course will be the nominee. I don’t want to speculate about Sanders’ motives, other than that it is probably a good way to elevate himself into the appearance of an ersatz Democratic standard-bearer and to get media attention which has slackened as most of the attention has moved toward the general election. That would be perfectly understandable if we didn’t know for a certainty that he is not going to be the nominee and that this would be bad for the person who is. Remember: President Trump.
I think there’s a very good chance it would descend into a Hillary-bashing fest. Indeed, how could it not? That would obviously be Trump’s overriding interest and aim. And it would be at best awkward for Sanders to be in the position of aggressively defending Clinton. Great theater and spectacle. It would be great fun to watch – if we didn’t have a campaign going on in which the fight to keep Donald Trump out of the White House depends entirely on how much Hillary Clinton can unify Democratic support behind her candidacy.
More Marshall:
The modern vice presidency – as a political device – is seldom about ideological balance or bringing a critical state into play. As it happens, Warren would be a helpful political balancing both in general and coming off the bruising Clinton v Sanders fight. But the most effective modern Veep picks have been ones that helpfully frame and reinforce the message the person at the top of the ticket embodies.
For Bill Clinton in 1992, picking Al Gore for his second was crazy by conventional standards which were generally regional and ideological. Gore was by traditional measures almost a carbon copy of Clinton. But his pick reinforced the image of youth, newness and a different kind of Democratic party. He also added some ballast to offset Clinton’s lack of DC experience and personal impulsiveness. Fundamentally, Gore didn’t balance Clinton; he intensified the positives about him and offset the negatives.
Joe Biden did something similar for Barack Obama. Obama certainly wasn’t angling for Delaware. For all the cultural and generational differences, their politics were indistinguishable.
Warren is off-the-cuff, free-wheeling and direct in all the ways Clinton is cautious and rehearsed. But it is a reinforcing rather than an invidious contrast and likely helps bring to the surface Hillary’s progressive background that has been buried by decades at the pinnacle of Democratic party politics and years as the punching bag of the left of the party which feels excluded by the seemingly endless Clinton ascendency.
It may sound crazy to attach so much to her recent Twitter contretemps with Donald Trump. But the tone, rhythm and style are exactly what the Democrats need to knock Trump down and bring out his toxic mix of personal insecurity and emotional instability. It’s not over-earnest or off-key or droning (traditional Democratic tonalities – let’s be honest). She’s mocking, substantive and constantly on target.
Indeed, Trump’s responses to Warren, his attacks on her, make it clear to me he’ll have a hard time handling her.
Wanna make Sanders voters enthusiastic? Want to upset Donald Trump? Pick Warren.
Sheila Foster Anthony, the sister of the late Vince Foster, has condemned recent speculations by Trump that the Clintons were involved in Foster’s death in a Washington Post op-ed Thursday.
“It is beyond contempt that a politician would use a family tragedy to further his candidacy, but such is the character of Donald Trump displayed in his recent comments to The Washington Post. In this interview, Trump cynically, crassly and recklessly insinuated that my brother, Vincent W. Foster Jr., may have been murdered because ‘he had intimate knowledge of what was going on’ and that Hillary Clinton may have somehow played a role in Vince’s death.”
“How wrong. How irresponsible. How cruel.”
Paul Krugman’s analysis at The New York Times:
Mr. Trump is a clear case of someone born on third base who imagines that he hit a triple: He inherited a fortune, and it’s far from clear that he has expanded that fortune any more than he would have if he had simply parked the money in an index fund. […] Does business success carry with it the knowledge and instincts needed to make good economic policy? No, it doesn’t. […]
I’m not saying that business success is inherently disqualifying when it comes to policy making. A tycoon who has enough humility to realize that he doesn’t already know all the answers, and is willing to listen to other people even when they contradict him, could do fine as an economic manager. But does this describe anyone currently running for president?
The truth is that the idea that Donald Trump, of all people, knows how to run the U.S. economy is ludicrous. But will voters ever recognize that truth?
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) accidentally published an op-ed in the Deseret News claiming that his meeting with Judge Merrick Garland didn’t change his mind about delaying action on the nomination until after the presidential election, the Washington Post reports.
The problem: Hatch hasn’t even met with Garland yet.
Greg Sargent on Trump bringing back the Whitewater non-scandal:
One Republican strategist tells me that he thinks this effort is very likely to backfire — and he is in a good position to make this prediction, because he was actually involved in a previous GOP campaign’s effort to research whether this would work on Hillary Clinton.
GOP strategist Rick Wilson was a senior adviser to former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s campaign for the New York Senate seat in 2000 that Hillary Clinton ended up winning. Before Giuliani dropped out of the race (to be replaced by Rick Lazio), and his fellow strategists extensively tested attacks on the Clintons over Whitewater and Bill’s sexual exploits.
“We tested Whitewater and it was a nothingburger,” the Florida-based Wilson tells me. “We did polling and focus groups, testing the whole pantheon of Clinton scandals.”
Exclusive: Donald Trump signed off on a controversial business deal that was designed to deprive the US Government of tens of millions of dollars in tax, the Telegraph can disclose. The billionaire approved a $50 million investment in a company – only for the deal to be rewritten several weeks later as a ‘loan’.
Experts say that the effect of this move was to skirt vast tax liabilities, and court papers seen by the Telegraph allege that the deal amounted to fraud. Independent tax accountants and lawyers said that the documents Mr Trump signed – copies of which were obtained by this newspaper as part of a three-month investigation – contained “red flags” indicating the deal was irregular. But the Republican presumptive presidential nominee signed nonetheless.
Stuff like this is why Trump is slinging mud and talking about Worker’s Party. Maybe folks won’t notice.
Harry Enten with another myth buster:
Sanders did slightly better with Democratic-leaning independents (71 percent favorable) than he did with plain-old Democrats (68 percent favorable), but that appeal does not seem to extend to true independents — those who are most likely to change party allegiances between elections and whose split between the Republican and Democratic candidates nearly matched the split in the nation overall in the last two elections, according to the ANES. In the Gallup poll, Sanders had a 35 percent favorable rating among independents who don’t lean toward either party. Clinton’s favorable rating with that group was 34 percent. Trump’s was a ridiculously low 16 percent.
One could argue that Sanders has greater potential with these true independents than Clinton: Just 63 percent of them had formed an opinion of him, according to the Gallup poll, while 83 percent had done so for Clinton. But it’s also possible that these true independents will turn against him in greater numbers as they learn more about him.
Jonathan Bernstein lists the three reasons that the Republican Party got the voters it deserves.
Republicans had encouraged, or at least tolerated, schoolyard taunts and far-fetched conspiracy talk long before Trump’s campaign…
Another part is how Republicans lowered the standards for their politicians. Normally voters might oppose Trump as flat-out unqualified for the job, both by lack of relevant experience and lack of knowledge of government and public affairs. But by giving a megaphone to people like Pat Robertson, Herman Cain, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina, Republicans showed their voters what counts as a “normal” Republican presidential candidate — and it isn’t all that different from Donald Trump…
That same observation can be made about how Republicans have tolerated and promoted bigotry, forging a path for Trump to go even further.
DD is playing with me, I know. He knows I don’t like Trump. I admire people who are talented and good at their jobs. Trump’s job right now is tricking a bunch of idiots to vote against their best interests and he is good at it. The idiots are falling like duck pins.
“the fight to keep Donald Trump out of the White House depends entirely on how much Hillary Clinton can unify Democratic support behind her candidacy.”
This is the kind of bullshit you write when you never leave the Beltway. Keeping him out of the White House depends on getting more votes. It doesn’t matter whether they come from Democrats, Republicans or independents.
For every Bernie voter who won’t vote Hillary, there is an anti-Trump Republican who will.
This anti-Trump panic is almost as absurd as the pro-Trump love.
No post on last night’s Wilmington Mayor’s debate/ they finally stopped playing nice and got REAL last night…
The holiday is nigh upon us.
Unlike the vast majority of the public, I refuse to click on any story that highlights yet another bit of evidence of Trump’s lunacy — the only way to frustrate a jester is by ignoring him, and if the clickbait stops working, the media will start ignoring Trump. It’s just me, but whatever — Bleats Against the Empire.
But the Trump-Sanders debate is worth exploring now that it has been revealed as the clickbait generator it always was:
Rachel Maddow (don’t watch her but lots of sites reference her show) and Josh Marshall both crapped themselves when Bernie agreed. “What’s he thinking? This is just his ego. This hands Trump a huge victory.” Etc, etc, etc.
Those who panicked about the proposed debate look foolish now. Turns out that accepting his challenge served as another demonstration of Trump’s cowardice. First he wanted $10 million; when a tech company stepped up with it, he backed out anyway.
Had Sanders declined, Trump would have ridiculed him for cowardice. Instead he has displayed it himself. Sanders called his bluff — basically, he stood up to the bully and allowed the bully to show he was just blowing off more hot air.
Panic almost never leads to good decisions, which is why I am not surprised at how poorly the panic-stricken are reacting to Trump’s nomination. Josh Marshall, for example, gets palpitations almost daily.
Emphasizing how awful a Trump presidency would be is actually counter-productive, because no reality could match the horrors of our imaginations. It’s probably no accident that the imaginations of people who want to vote for Trump are mostly obsessed with dreaming up heroic confrontations with armed intruders. Images of nuclear war don’t seem to hold much terror for them, because it would bring about the post-apocalyptic future of their imaginations, in which they’re never among the billions who die; they’re always among the handful of survivors establishing civilization among the ruins.
It’s similar to the way that you can’t scare evangelistic Christians with images of war in the Middle East, because that’s a key part of their end-times eschatology in the first place.
I realize that the scare stuff is intended for the Bernie supporters, who are expected to react to these emotional pleas with a rational response. That never works. Emotional pleas don’t spur reasoned reactions — they spur emotional ones, which is why, when Hillary backers make these pleas, they are met with emotional reactions along the lines of “fuck you.”
And, despite what some may think, the statement that “if you don’t work hard to elect Hillary you’re helping to elect Trump” is not a reasoned argument, and it’s not close. Most votes in the presidential election are statistically meaningless — they will be cast in states where the outcome is not in doubt.
What those statements are is casting blame for the loss you fear on others, for not liking Hillary — instead of upon those who chose to back her nomination in the first place.
DISCLAIMER: This is not meant to endorse Sanders for President. I don’t think he’s a good candidate, and I think he would perform more poorly in the job than she would. I believe his success is not a reflection on his abilities but, rather, her vulnerabilities.
You know… Politics this year is just so weird, that instead of being drawn in to being more interested, it is all becoming noise… …. It is as if ALL discussion, here and everywhere is nothing but idle chatter, just like one tunes out all the hype over the Super-Bowl during the week before the game.
Some speculation as to why: Citizens United HAS caused tone deafness by its constant noise on our airwaves…
The over-reaching extremism of all press-reporting is so unbelievable, that like that little kid in first grade trying to make up tall stories, you tune them out.
No one gives a shit about policy anymore; just flaws in personalities are all we get fed, and there are over 7 billion personalities on this planet, so really, who cares about the quirks of three of them….
As soon as I hear the word “Trump” or “Hillary”, I flip the station or click out (unless I know the caliber of those talking and respect them from previous associations)… Bernie still gets a listen solely because he is more rooted in reality than anyone else… but that too, will probably fade in time.
Social Media with its ability to bombard you with items to bait you, has dulled any curiosity… After 55 hooks in ones mouth, you learn not to bite anymore…
Which……
Means Donald Trump could actually have a good chance to win….
And that realization comes from one distilation I read about the primary of West Virginia…
One “former Democratic” voter explained it at an exit poll this way:
“You know, I know Trump is nuts!. But the status quo is broken… At least he will make something happen, good or not.. But the same thing we continue to have, year after year, of doing nothing for nobody,… will stop. I just want to make it stop….”
You know, I can almost empathize with that remark… We are tired of everyone trying to control things.. We want randomness and in a big way, we need it….
If the nation were filled with West Virginians, I would worry, and not just about President Trump.