I don’t know about you, but I’m about as terrified of what dizzying incompetence the Democrats will display as I am of the Republican intent.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
I don’t know about you, but I’m about as terrified of what dizzying incompetence the Democrats will display as I am of the Republican intent.
The either/or arguments are so boggling. Like, white Trump supporters were the least impacted by the recession in comparison to minority populations, and we know poverty manifests disproportionately along the same axes as other forms of oppression, so why do people keep advancing the false dichotomy of “improving economic opportunity” and “supporting minority rights”? They’re the same damn struggle!
Because the DNC is run by corporatist stooges who have a vested interesting in dismissing the concerns of the people, so they set up a false conflict in order to dismiss civil rights issues and go to where the money is?
I also found Les Leopold’s The Invention of the White Working Class interesting. We’re a society barking at dog whistles that keep the rich and powerful rich and powerful whether it’s Republicans or Democrats doing the puffing.
I don’t think this election was even remotely about policy.
Entertainment fought politics and entertainment won.
If, for crazy example, we ran John Goodman or Jack Nicholson against Trump he’d be dust overnight.
“If, for crazy example, we ran John Goodman or Jack Nicholson against Trump he’d be dust overnight.”
Lewis Black would have eaten his fucking heart out.
This post is basically a prequel to your “dystopian hell” post, I guess.
Just something for thought. Some leftists/progressives are very much against Wall Street.
Bringing this back to Tip O’Neil’s dictum that “all politics is local”, the question is, where is your IRA monies being held and invested? I’ve been forced to consider this issue since I retired, as a majority of our income comes and will come from my IRA (I’m not collecting my SSA until I am 70, per advice from my financial advisor, and the 70.5 rule will kick in shortly thereafter).
I definitely expect an economic downturn in about two years due to the rethugs unevidenced idiotic policies. Yes, I am worried.
Lewis Black would have eaten his fucking heart out.
Ooooooo…. I would pay for ringside seats to see that.
The most frustrating facet of this comic, to me, is that economic policy is technically civil rights policy. The enrichment or de-enrichment of voting blocks gives or takes away political power. Thats the blunt of it, and the problem with the DNC, though, is that the establishment is a bunch rich near-neoliberal butt monkeys too stupid to remember that truth.
Also the DNC has a perennial problem respecting people’s time, and coming up with an easy to remember and catchy message.
Also, Tim-fucking-Kain… a man so nothing I had to be reassured by Cecil Richards that he wasn’t as much of a monster for women as his voting record suggested. Yeah, I’m still angry about that stupid nothing move to reach out to angry Bernie supporters… to me, sorry.
I’ll probably be sorry for this derail, but is there anything realistic that would have made you less angry?
I’m reminded of a female black Miami activist who claimed that because Clinton didn’t sit down with pen and paper with her group, that she wasn’t taken seriously by the black community in southern Florida. Seemed like someone without a clue as to what might and did happen.
What is her chances of being heard by the Trump administration?
I was reviewing my comments from the months before the election a while back. The one I got wrong was concern that the electoral/popular situation was reversed (if Clinton aced the EC and the popular was close, what would the “alt-right” do?). The two that were dead on were the scary deja vu about the nominee ignoring what was motivating their primary opponent’s supporters (Clinton’s outreach to Sander’s supporters seemed to be “Suck it up and vote for us or else” al la Gore/Nader) and the misguided belief that the fact she was competent and Trump wasn’t was sufficient to win the election.
No one associated with this debacle should be allowed anywhere near national electoral politics again. (“Oh, but how could they have known that…” IT WAS THEIR SINGLE FUCKING JOB TO KNOW, AND THEY FUCKED IT UP).
As for what to do, it’s called The 50 State Strategy, assuming that Obama and the DNC didn’t destroy all the existing copies when they threw it out the window and lost the House in 10. And with all the recent hagiography about Mr. 44, he is far from blameless in this outcome. He never made the Republicans pay anything for a single insult/break with norms. So naturally, they kept going. And here we are.
This isn’t a reply to my question in #9. I voted for Sanders in the IL primary. Sanders was given a large say in the party platform. What more was required for you not to be angry?
@9, apparently the same as being heard by Clinton – zero.
#9
Mmh, anything from the campaign, really, that wasn’t, “Vote for me because Trump is awful.”
I had no reason to vote for Clinton, which I did anyway because I’m an adult. Or, at least, I don’t remember any reason to have voted for her beyond Trump being a terrific jackass. There might have been, but it’s a failure of message that I don’t remember it. I remember there being mentions of student debt reform, but them being watered down and nearly inconsequential in the real world. Mostly, after the convention and Sanders was more or less sidelined and his message went away, I don’t remember finding ANYTHING my monkey meat-brain could latch onto and it all became a blur I started tuning out, punctuated by the presence of Trump. All I was really aware of was Trump, and I was being told to fear him, but I’m not entirely motivated by fear so my meatbrain shut down to shut out the white noise coming from the DNC.
If that experience is at all relatable, then maybe it was indicative of the Clinton campaign’s failure to engage with anyone outside of the organic echo chamber.
Oomf, there was no 2012 moment of Bill Clinton coming on stage and reminding us that Democrats usually make things better, while Republicans are stupid and are only good at messing stuff up. Man, that was such a good moment in political theatre.
The Democrats should leave politics and join you all in your comfortable cynicism. You deserve Trump. The poor and disenfranchised don’t, and that’s who the Democrats are working for. Power looks like competence to weak-minded fools.
Qwints
I don’t live in your version of reality.
Your reflexive assertion has no basis in reality. Clinton was talking to and listening to the black community. Just not the south Florida branch. Which doesn’t mean she wouldn’t be listening after the election, unlike Trump. She didn’t have the time to sit down with every such group. That is my point. You didn’t show otherwise.
Trollofreason
I still don’t detect your real problem, which I seem to see as sour grapes Sanders didn’t win the nomination, despite the fact that that Clinton won 55% of the primary votes. I voted for Sanders in the primary. I didn’t go into a permanent snit when he didn’t win the nomination. I went forward with reality, and without bitterness.
Blbt5
Yet somehow those who truly need government support in unemployment, food stamps, and health care, etc., chose to vote for the con man who would and is taking away all their programs, as was obvious during the campaign.
Yes, they are getting an object lesson in voting against their interests, which requires them to actually look beyond the rhetoric of “change” to the policies. They won’t like the change they will be getting, which won’t help them one iota, and will hurt them in the future.
I’m less and less inclined to believe the democrat establishment is intelligent and poorly focused, and more and more seeing reason to suspect they’re just politically incompetent.
See: North Carolina democrats trusting the republicans to stick to their words and getting rid of anti-discrimination ordinances with the hope of republicans being decent people and following through, only to get stabbed in the back.
Vivec, I stopped trusting the rethugs when Reagan was elected in ’80. The Gingrich House of ’94 cemented that lack of trust. However, if you don’t trust the opposition party to a degree, government can’t operate. I was sure the NC vote to repeal the anti-trans ordinances was bullshit. Not surprised at all by the result.
Gonna be an… interesting decade ahead.
If Nerd of Redhead and Applehead are any sign of what average Democratic tribalists think, it looks like the presidential nomination in 2020 will go to Debbie Wasserman Shultz or someone like her. (Hey, look, she’s held on to her seat in Congress, so she must be electable, right? Besides, who are you gonna vote for, Trump? Don’t you want the first woman president? And stop asking questions about her economics and foreign policy positions!) And then the party will be absolutely flabbergasted when Independents turn out en masse to vote against them and a majority of their own registered voters stay home or write in fictional characters.
The coalition of economic liberals, foreign policy liberals, social liberals, and right-wing hawks with right-wing economic policy who are willing to pretend to be left of center on social issues if it gets them into power (i.e. the “New Democrats”) is falling apart as the former groups realize they’ve been shafted by the latter one, and I suspect that all the queen’s pundits and all the queen’s men won’t be able to patch it up no matter how horrible Trump is. We already had an election where the goal was “keep Trump out of office by installing a right-of-center Democrat”, and that doesn’t work — and those clueless wonders running the party certainly aren’t going to change tactics.
@18
I’m not surprised that the Republicans double-crossed the Democrats, I’m amazed the Democrats were dumb enough to jettison their anti-discrimination ordinances in exchange for the hope that the Republicans would do as they hinted.
There’s “trusting the opposition party” and then there’s “handing the tiger your gun and hoping it doesnt maul you”
Wow.
I’m just floored by how many of the so-called “liberals” here have drunken the right-wing Kool-Aid.
Let me remind you what really happened not two months ago: ELECTION. FRAUD. Catchwords: Voting Rights Act. Voting roll purges. Voter ID. Mass imprisonment. Electronic voting machines. Russia. This election was as fair and open as that of the one or other third-world banana republic. And in spite of everything they couldn’t steal the popular vote.
If this election had been actually democratic, Clinton would’ve won by a two digit million lead.
And you really fellate the fascists by pushing their narrative?!?
@applehead, #21
On the subject of fellating the fascists, let’s take a short and ugly look at what Mr. Wall Strait (that would be “Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer from New York”) has been doing lately:
http://www.salon.com/2016/12/29/chuck-schumer-john-kerry-has-emboldened-extremists-by-speaking-about-israel/
“Incoming Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer had harsh words for Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday evening.
“While he may not have intended it, I fear Secretary Kerry, in his speech and action at the U.N., has emboldened extremists on both sides,” Schumer said, referring to Kerry’s speech earlier in the day criticizing Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem and the Palestinian territories.
The New York Senate minority leader also claimed, “while Secretary Kerry mentioned Gaza in his speech, he seems to have forgotten the history of the settlements in Gaza, where the Israeli government forced settlers to withdraw from all settlements and the Palestinians responded by sending rockets into Israel. This is something that people of all political stripes in Israel vividly remember.”
Kerry criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for expanding settlements despite claiming to support a two-state solution.
“The Israeli prime minister publicly supports a two-state solution, but his current coalition is the most right-wing in Israeli history, with an agenda driven by its most extreme elements,” Kerry said. “The result is that policies of this government — which the prime minister himself just described as ‘more committed to settlements than any in Israel’s history’ — are leading in the opposite direction, toward one state.”
This isn’t the first time that Schumer has had a major break with the Obama administration on foreign policy. In August 2015, Schumer wrote an editorial for Medium explaining why he would be the first high-profile Democrat to openly oppose the administration’s Iran nuclear deal:”
@Vivec, #20
I expect nothing out of the Democrats beyond the same level of incompetency that I saw when they were ‘opposing’ Bush-and in terms of achieving his wildly destructive objectives he was tragically successful.
@22,
In a two-party system, the entirety of the political spectrum is covered by the two parties. The inherent infeasibility of this arrangement is regularly demonstrated when someone too left or too right is a member of the wrong party. (Too left is in relative terms, I freely agree the Dems are at best a center-right party.)
What I’m saying is, this Schumer guy is a right-winger (by US standards) who just happened to find a home in the opposing camp, because there’s only two options.
@23,
My God, the Dems bashing becomes successively unsubstantive. Can’t you remember the immediate post-9/11 world at all? It’d have been political suicide to build a great stonewall against all of Dubya’s policies. And very real suicide too, as outraged proto-Teabagger would’ve shot the particular congressmembers dead for being “traitors.”
If your entire country goes mad, swimming against the tide becomes a luxury few can afford, Mr. Couch Activist.
@applehead, #24
1) “Just happened to find a home” is in no way an accurate description of the problem. The problem isn’t that he’s a minor member of the party who’s that far right; he’s Senate minority leader and he’s that far right: _and most Democrats find this acceptable, just like most Democrats find it acceptable to be rehashing Nancy Pelousy for the fifth time even though she was terrible at resistance against Bush, and much of the justification for her seems to be that she’s good at fundraising_.
If you’re not capable of seeing this as a problem I’ll try and spell it out for you: why are Republicans led by accurate exemplars who are competent at implementing their political philosophy (and I’ll freely admit that yes, it’s obviously horrible) while Democrats are ‘led’ by a pack of mealy-mouthed fossils who agree with half their premises, will “try and work with them”, and all you know how to do is make excuses for this?
“My God, the Dems bashing becomes successively unsubstantive. Can’t you remember the immediate post-9/11 world at all? It’d have been political suicide to build a great stonewall against all of Dubya’s policies. And very real suicide too, as outraged proto-Teabagger would’ve shot the particular congressmembers dead for being “traitors.”
If your entire country goes mad, swimming against the tide becomes a luxury few can afford, Mr. Couch Activist.”
The Vichy Dems back then didn’t build a stonewall against any of them.
This logic is why you would be marginally more honest if you just gave in now and became a Trump supporter: because if all you have to say is that any resistance is futile to begin with, why bother resisting at all?