The General US Politics Thread

@Ambar: Much of this is due to Clinton pretty much being the nominee at this point and most people wanting Sanders out of the race for that the left can be united against Trump who is a much bigger threat. It also doesn't get into the fact that Underdog News Stories do well in the ratings and Sanders was certainly the underdog against Clinton. It's the same with Trump in that anything related to Trump does extremely well in the ratings. It's also why many fear that the news media will treat Clinton and Trump as equals rather than treating Clinton as the obvious choice, since a close race gets better ratings.

edited 28th May '16 10:17:02 PM by GameGuruGG

I think the worst is that Jimmy Dore actually argued that Trump would be better because everyone would end up hating him and by 2020 we could get the progressive hero that we want instead of Clinton.

Like...how can someone so fucking stupid even get up in the morning to dress themselves?!

If he's a Marxist-Leninist then there's at least a ideological basis for that; accelerationism was very much emphasized in that particular ideology.

For anyone who wanted to watch the Libertarian Party debate. Here you go.

They literally asked all the candidates which cabinets they'd eliminate. Both Perry and Mc Afee gleefully said all of them.

edited 28th May '16 10:26:33 PM by Demonic_Braeburn

RE: Trump

The Muslim ban was also staggeringly insane. So was the idea of deporting everyone who is already here. And the idea of punishing women for abortions. He's pulled back from all of those now, but it doesn't make them any less loathsome as a position.

RE: Jimmy Dore

Whenever I hear guys like that advocating for a revolution it makes me laugh. You're a white, upper middle class guy in a job that will only be impacted if Trump decides to sue you. You'll ride out the horror show of a Trump presidency just fine, while the people who will make your revolution—racial minorities, LGBT people, the working class—suffer. It's a stance that displays a real lack of empathy for the people they supposedly support, and a belief that ideological purity counts for more than actual, tangible results, however minor.

This is one of the reasons I don't advocate for revolution anymore, by the way. I'm fully cognizant of the fact that as a white, upper middle class guy whose only claim to minority status is being autistic, that it just makes me look like an insensitive ass.

More to the fact, when has that EVER happened. I sure do remember all those progressives when Bush was elected...and Ronald Reagan....and Richard Nixon....

>.>

The thing about purity over results is already a huge thing; it's just normally a Republican thing.

I wonder if the same atmosphere would have cropped up if Elizabeth Warren ran like some people wanted? Like, is it specifically because of Sanders or if it would have cropped up around any "progressive" candidate?

edited 28th May '16 11:20:01 PM by LSBK

For Dore to get his "revolution" there'd need to be unprecedented levels of suffering caused by a Trump administration. So much suffering that people would abandon old political loyalties and give Dore the kind of candidate he wants within the space of four years.

And that is why guys like Dore are about as progressive as Trump himself. They're at best Well Intentioned Extremists, at worst Smug Snake Knight Templars, willing to inflict suffering on the very people they claim to want to protect, all so that they can get a political candidate who conforms to their view of the world. They're not looking out for the working class, they're looking to exploit the working class.

This isn't me putting words in anybody's mouth. This is what Dore is saying when he says he'd prefer a Trump administration to a Clinton one. This is what he's hoping for. He wants people to get deported. He wants people to lose their social safteynet. He wants people to get hurt. So that in four years he and his leftover Sanders fanatics can swoop in and play saviour, rescuing people from agony that they themselves have not had to endure. For that he's lost any respect I once had for him.

Warren's better about not attacking her own than Sanders is. She's also got positions that I at least would generally consider more progressive and more pragmatic than his, and is less tone deaf on race and gender than he is. So that might have made a difference. How much of one I don't know. What I do know is that Warren's refusal to endorse Sanders led a bunch of his crazier fanboys to start launching sexist attacks on her, because apparently not lining up behind him makes her just like Clinton and being just like Clinton means she can be attacked for everything from her positions (legit) to her looks (not so much).

EDIT: Sidenote, but when I hear people, be they left or right, going after Clinton for her looks, two thoughts enter my mind—1) What are you smoking? I should hope I look as good as she does when I'm her age. 2) It's relevant why? She could weigh four hundred pounds, have no teeth, and an eyepatch, and so long as she wasn't talking about weight loss or oral hygiene it would have no relevance to her political views.

edited 28th May '16 10:53:19 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar

I'm worried about Warren. By not endorsing Clinton or Sanders, I fear she isolated everyone by trying to isolate no one.

She should've just said fuck it and endorsed Clinton.

There was no way she was going to end up not being hated by a certain number of people anyhow, might as well join the winning team.

(Politico) The Federal Judge presiding over Trump University case, who Donald Trump called a Mexican, ordered sealed documents related to the case unsealed to the public.

Backfire if I ever saw one

I'd say Warren carved out a useful enough niche for herself as an anti-Trump attack dog. The Democrats will need that.

@Fox: Just because Nixon, Reagan, Bush, and Bush got elected doesn't mean that progressives didn't exist. After all, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama all got elected between those Presidents. Carter, to his credit, was and still is quite progressive in his views. Bill Clinton did have the highest end-of-office approval rating of any president after WW 2. As for Obama, his approval ratings suggest that people would have rather wanted him to run for a third term than vote for either of the two presumptive nominees. Compare that to Nixon, who resigned office in disgrace; Bush, who left after one-term of office; and Dubya, who... well, we had a Great Recession start at his end-of-office. ...Okay, I can admit that Reagan was well-liked of post-WW 2 presidents.

At the very least, Hillary Clinton won't be bad as President if her husband's legacy is anything to go by, though she will probably have to deal with the obstructionist Republican Party that Obama suffered from.

"I'm worried about Warren. By not endorsing Clinton or Sanders, I fear she isolated everyone by trying to isolate no one."

On the contrary — she's burned no bridges, and will remain incredibly powerful in the years to come.

IIRC, Warren's goal was to position herself so that, regardless of which faction sends their preferred candidate to the general, she could make sure the other was still on board. (I've also heard that the Clinton campaign has her high on their VP shortlist, if she's interested in the position. I'd be down for a Clinton/Warren ticket, actually.)

she's basically made herself the "piggybank" for Senate Democrats or Senate Hopefuls for fundraising.

Since the Hillary Victory Fund, which is supposed to be a State Party/Hillary joint venture, is only giving 1% of the 60 million dollars what they made back to those State Parties. The rest shuttled off to the DNC and general expenditures.

So, yeah, Warren is increasingly a kingmaker. And I doubt she's going to take the VP choice, since if she's smart, she'd know the Vice Presidency would essentially be kicking her upstairs where she can't cause as much influence.

edited 29th May '16 12:16:57 AM by PotatoesRock

Also, Warren comes from a state with a Republican governor (Charlie Baker from Massachusetts) so her becoming VP would give the GOP a free Senate seat. Harry Reid has specifically spoken out against this practice, also in the context of other VP candidates like Sherrod Brown (Ohio, where Kasich is the governor).

@Ambar, you've exp,aimed why you despise the way the media have acted over Sanders, the way that folks online have acted (Sanders supporters won't be the only ones throwing slurs and hatred online but they will be the majority, since he's tapped into the Internet generation more then Clinton has) and even the way that some of Sanders campaign people have acted.

But none of that is Sanders personally. That's what I don't get, you seem to have something against Sanders as an individual person, not as a candidate, not the way he's been treated, but him as a single person beyond his politics. You seem to think that he is personally a bad person, but you've not explained why, you just keep talking about what the press have done, what some of his supporters online have done and what even some of his campaign staff has done, but never what he has done.

Do you belive in guilt by association? Is that it? Because if you belive that Sanders is guilty personally for the actions of others even if he didn't tell them to act that way or iresponsibly encourage them to act that way, then yeah you despising Sanders personally would make sense, but right now I can't wrap my head around it.

@Ambar: My point was that the media was absolutely hysterical about Trump since the very beginning of his campaign, well before he'd said anything more vile than any of the other Republican candidates.

A low bar, yes, but...

edited 29th May '16 6:48:27 AM by CaptainCapsase

Trump has been saying vile things for years, his vileness is not new to anyone who's been paying attention.

Vile relative to the rest of the GOP is what I'm saying, and in that regard, Trump was nothing special until fairly recently; even then, he's just saying what a large number of them are privately thinking.

When did Trump promise to build a wall? That's one of his most outrageous promises, and it's been with him since near the start.

And of course before that, he was a birther.

Do you belive in guilt by association?

It may not be fair to blame Sanders for the actions of his supporters, but it is certainly fair to blame him for not dropping out and for continuing to attack the party for no reason. We wouldn't be in this situation in the first place if Sanders wasn't so stubborn and divisive.

edited 29th May '16 7:26:14 AM by storyyeller

At this point, he's no less stubborn and divisive than Clinton was in 2008. Quite a bit less in my opinion, since Clinton was not ruling out going third party. Now that was obviously a bluff, and it stopped after she and Obama came to an agreement, but still.

@Yeller: The wall came fairly early on, and while it is indeed outrageous, it's nowhere near as crazy as the things Huckabee, for example was saying in prior primaries, and the media basically laughed him off, even in his brief spell as the Republican frontrunner.

edited 29th May '16 7:34:39 AM by CaptainCapsase

Sanders is currently just as stubborn as Clinton was, so the accusation that he's doing something special is absurd.

I get that everyone is getting frustrated that Sanders won't drop out, but we know from history that Clinton would do the same in his position, so the idea that it makes Sanders a bad person who's is personally foul is absurd.