Delaware Liberal

The October 16, 2016 Thread

Delaware Dem

PRESIDENT
PENNSYLVANIA–The Times-Picayune/Lucid–CLINTON 45, Trump 39
IOWA–The Times-Picayune/Lucid–CLINTON 42, Trump 36
OHIO–The Times-Picayune/Lucid–CLINTON 44, Trump 39

Joe Klein: “In the midst of our bountiful October harvest of Trump grotesqueries, the Russians and Julian Assange organized a WikiLeaks dump of private emails from the Clinton campaign. These revealed a shocking and scandalous fact about the former Secretary of State: she is a politician. Indeed, the documents represent one of the most reassuring moments of this calamitous campaign. The overwhelming impression is of the candidate’s and her staff’s competence and sanity–and something more: a refreshing sense of reality about the vagaries of politics.”

Turns out Hillary’s speech to Goldman Sachs contains good stuff.



Elizabeth Drew: “Already, not just the Republican Party but our body politic have sustained a serious blow. Now, there’s a new sense of peril—whether we will get through this election without chaos and violence. Much is in the hands of the outsider who came in, broke all the understood rules, and took over the party he’d chosen for the furtherance of himself. At some moments in our history our democracy can seem fragile. This is one of them.”

Jonathan Chait: “Donald Trump is a vile human being. He also happens to advocate policies — or, in some cases, policy-esque impulses — that I find dangerous and horrifying. And so revelations about his boasting of sexual assault serve to reinforce my repugnance for this grotesque bully. This makes it easy for people who agree with me to judge the Republicans willing to overlook Trump’s obscene and even criminal mistreatment of women.”

“But what if the candidate I supported were the Trump-like character? And, hence, what if the election of a sexual predator was the only alternative to eliminating health insurance for millions, allowing runaway climate change, submitting to right-wing control of the courts, and so on? Well, then, I have to admit that I would probably hold my nose and support him anyway.”

Historian Douglas Brinkley told the New York Times that the country has not had a presidential candidate from one of the two major parties try to cast doubt on the entire democratic process and system of government since the brink of the Civil War.

Said Brinkley: “I haven’t seen it since 1860, this threat of delegitimizing the federal government, and Trump is trying to say our entire government is corrupt and the whole system is rigged. And that’s a secessionist, revolutionary motif. That’s someone trying to topple the apple cart entirely.”

Charles Krauthammer on the “Lock her up” talk: “Such incendiary talk is an affront to elementary democratic decency and a breach of the boundaries of American political discourse. In democracies, the electoral process is a subtle and elaborate substitute for combat, the age-old way of settling struggles for power.”

“Vladimir Putin, Hugo Chávez and a cavalcade of two-bit caudillos lock up their opponents. American leaders don’t. One doesn’t even talk like this. It takes decades, centuries, to develop ingrained norms of political restraint and self-control. But they can be undone in short order by a demagogue feeding a vengeful populism.”

Politico: “Remember when the GOP said it had this great ground game in Florida? Yeah. The Florida Dems are beating the GOP in voter-registration forms submitted by 503,000 to 60,000.”

Meanwhile, “Donald Trump’s Ohio campaign manager on Saturday renounced its relationship with the Ohio Republican Party’s top official, laying bare the long-simmering tensions over Trump’s candidacy within the state GOP,” the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports. “The letter is a remarkable display of disunity between a GOP presidential campaign and the state party in Ohio, a key battleground state for Republicans, just 23 days before the election.”

So now the Trump campaign has no ground game in Ohio and Florida. LOL. Hillary will win both states by 10 points.

Matt Taibbi on how the GOP came to Trump: “The party spent 50 years preaching rich people bromides like ‘trickle-down economics’ and ‘picking yourself up by your bootstraps’ as solutions to the growing alienation and financial privation of the ordinary voter. In place of jobs, exported overseas by the millions by their financial backers, Republicans glibly offered the flag, Jesus and Willie Horton.”

“In recent years it all went stale. They started to run out of lines to sell the public. Things got so desperate that during the Tea Party phase, some GOP candidates began dabbling in the truth. They told voters that all Washington politicians, including their own leaders, had abandoned them and become whores for special interests. It was a slapstick routine: Throw us bums out!”

“Republican voters ate it up and spent the whole of last primary season howling for blood as Trump shredded one party-approved hack after another. By the time the other 16 candidates finished their mass-suicide-squad routine, a tail-chasing, sewer-mouthed septuagenarian New Yorker was accepting the nomination of the Family Values Party.”

“Senate Republicans, whose fragile majority has been threatened by Donald Trump’s tanking presidential bid, are suddenly confronting another problem: a lack of cash,” Politico reports.

“Republicans are set to be massively outspent on TV ads in seven of the eight states that are likely to decide control of the chamber. The spending disadvantage could badly hinder the GOP’s prospects, and it has led to growing frustration among the party’s top strategists — many of whom are convinced it’s long past time to cut Trump loose and focus almost exclusively on preserving the Senate majority.”

The Hill: “That Democratic advantage has some GOP strategists worried.”

The Economist: “The recording of him boasting about grabbing women ‘by the pussy’, long before he was a candidate, was unpleasant enough. More worrying still has been the insistence by many Trump supporters that his behavior was normal. So too his threat, issued in the second presidential debate, to have Hillary Clinton thrown into jail if he wins. In a more fragile democracy that sort of talk would foreshadow post-election violence. Mercifully, America is not about to riot on November 9th. But the reasons have less to do with the state’s power to enforce the letter of the law than with the unwritten rules that American democracy thrives on. It is these that Mr Trump is trampling over—and which Americans need to defend.”

“If this seems exaggerated, consider what Mr Trump has introduced to political discourse this year: the idea that Muslims must be banned from entering the country; that a federal judge born of Mexican parents was unfit to preside over a case involving Mr Trump; that a reporter’s disability is ripe for mockery; that ‘crooked’ Mrs Clinton must be watched lest she steal the election.”

“Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote that when many bad things happen at once, societies define deviancy down, until the list of what is unacceptable is short enough to be manageable. When parents wonder if a presidential debate is suitable for their children to watch, Mr Trump’s promise to build a wall on the Mexican border no longer seems quite so shocking.”

Donald Trump says that both candidates should take a drug test before the third and final presidential debate during a rally in New Hampshire, CNN reports.

Said Trump: “I think we should take a drug test prior to the debate. I think we should. Why don’t we do that? We should take a drug test. Because I don’t know what’s going on with her, but at the beginning of her last debate she was all pumped up at the beginning and at the end it was like, uh, take me down.”

House Speaker Paul Ryan pushed back against Donald Trump’s claims that the election is being rigged through a spokesperson, BuzzFeed reports.

Said press secretary AshLee Strong: “Our democracy relies on confidence in election results, and the speaker is fully confident the states will carry out this election with integrity.”

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