The General US Politics Thread

I don't think it's coincidental that Russia — a country that has had perhaps six months of genuine democratic governance in its centuries of existence and whose political culture is ultra-authoritarian — would be propping up the campaigns and governments of fellow authoritarians. Putin, for all his skill as a chessmaster and a politician, is still a one-dimensionally dictatorial man, and that can be seen in that the people he supports would very much like to transform the rest of the world in his image.

Nah, it's just the easiest way for him to cripple or control other nations. He's not running on some set of weird anti democratic values that he thinks nred to be spread around the world.

Finally someone is giving Trumps tweets the attention they deserve!

London mayor: I have more important things to do than respond to Trump's 'ill-informed tweet'

http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/336274-london-mayor-i-have-more-important-things-to-do-than-respond-to-trumps-ill?amp

So, summation of stuff by Cracked, I guess? Only posting because I'm curious about people's opinions.

Some fair criticism of her there. Haven't heard some of those quotes.

That first one Hillary said was....wow.

Girl I love you to death, but lawd, just no. No.

I don't really have time to go through the video right now. What did she say?

There were a few points, but mainly it relates to her shirking a bit of the responsibility in why her campaign failed. Like apparently ignoring data provided to her that showed that Michigan, Wisconsin, and a third state (Pennsylvania, probably) were much more competitive than she thought.

Guys, have you seen this?

He's indoors, isn't that the old one? He did a new one after Trump withdrew from Paris.

In the video, he refers to an invitation he made "last Saturday", and refers to "your President"'s "decision" while shaking his head in a "He's nuts, this is the hand that we're dealt with..." sort of way. Or, in short, "SAD".

edited 4th Jun '17 12:39:21 PM by TheHandle

What the hell does Trump expect the UK police to say? "PANIC! PANIC!!!"

That's what he'd intend to tell the attackers, only he'd word it so cofveve that people don't realize who it's directed to

edited 4th Jun '17 1:39:53 PM by sgamer82

The Macron video is from February. It's not the most recent speech that offers scientists a place in France.

This is the second time that a Trump has attacked Khan after a terrorist attack on London, and the second time Khan has dismissed the tweet as unimportant given what he's dealing with.

When the March terrorist attack happened, Donald Junior tweeted a news story from September 2016 where, within Khan's speech, he happened to have talked about the pros and cons of the globalised world. Junior took a part of what he said out of context to claim that Khan had said terrorism is part and parcel of living in a global city.

Khan's response was "I’m not going to respond to a tweet from Donald Trump Junior, I’ve been doing far more important things over the last 24 hours".

Meanwhile, Junior got absolutely slammed from people in several different countries.

I guess Daddy didn't learn from baby's experience.

Looks like the Trump family really don't like Khan.

And it looks like Khan really couldn't give a crap. Good for him.

edited 4th Jun '17 1:20:04 PM by Wyldchyld

My bad. Here:

He basically says that France believes in Americans, and renews his invitation to scientists, businessmen, and innovators to come to France. He otherwise makes a very uplifting speech about optimism and hope in the future.

It's a very interesting move: the brain and financial drain due to Trump's policies is nigh-inevitable, it makes sense to attempt to draw it to oneself, even though the gesture itself also comes off as an enormous insult to Trump and his administration. However, I'm told that US businessmen have trouble working in Europe because they have a very different work ethic and struggle with what they perceive to be unnecessary overhead?

edited 4th Jun '17 1:32:06 PM by TheHandle

Yeah those Hillary quotes with the context makes her look like another bullshitter in order to not look bad.

Hillary is a bullshitter constantly trying to not look bad. But she's completely average in that sense.

Because of her hubris, people ended up voting for the kind of bullshitter who would make a typo and then pretend it has a true meaning. [muffled catawumpus]

Because trump make look like the protagonist of is own show: a no-nonsense guy who said the truth when he saw and never fails while other cry....and people belive it.

as venezuelan I can only said that is tragic, consider here a bullshitter manage to get away with everything for 15 years.....yeah.

A rank amateur, compared to Trump. Trump is a bullshitter/con man/snake-oil salesman who's managed to get away with everything for 40 years, give or take.

I've said before in one form or another that Trump is literally everything people accused Clinton of being. He's so open about it too that your can't even use bias/false equivalence to deny it.

and yet the moment he is white house trump is fucking up constantly while chavez manage to get away with that shit and make the oposition here is bitch for years, the fact he manage to make is succesor(maduro) who is even dumber(think trump level of dumber) president can tell you something.

Actually, im going to be blunt here, you damn gringos are lucky your demague is trump since he is incapable of anything else except boast and grand standing, you people have not idea what is to face someone who can undo everything in a country.

edited 4th Jun '17 1:53:55 PM by unknowing

Regarding Hillary: I honestly don't get the mind-set that Hillary should take responsibility for not winning an election in which she actually did get more vote than her rival despite the most dirty campaign in US history (and that is telling something), during which Russia systematically destroyed her reputation, used stolen data to turn specific voters against her and which she only lost because of a questionable election system which gave the win to someone who had more than three million votes less than her. People should be furious with the electoral collage which handed Trump the win even though it was known at this point that the election was manipulated for Trump, and not with her. To expect her to apologize for not winning is like pestering Jamie Salé and David Pelletier for only getting silver in Salt Lake City. It wasn't their fault and it is certainly not her fault. You can always say "she could have campaigned more at this and that place" but hindsight is 20/20 and I actually doubt that it would have changed much. What ended her was Comey saying that he would reopen an investigation into NOTHING!!!! shortly before election day. I think there are people who to this day have still not understood that the whole issue with her e-mails was about the question if she had breached security, not if she had committed a crime - and it turned out that no, there was no security breach in them. Meanwhile the US has a president which blurts out highly classified information to the most dangerous leaders in the world and gives out his private cell-phone number. But I hear nobody chanting "look him up! look him up!" (honestly, if Hillary made a mistake, than not insisting to her marketing team to come up with a three word phrase for her because the attention span of American voter is apparently not able to take in more).

We have retread this several times already-while some people want to pile on, the real sticking point comes from an interview from one of her campaign staffers-that said Hillary ignored many warning signs concerning several Midwest states plus Pennsylvania, and continued to stand pat there while pushing into GOP strongholds. A more reasonable point raised suggests that she ignored many studies and pieces of feedback that turned out to be very accurate, and that her actions during the final weeks of the campaign actively hurt her chances and contributed to her loss.

All of which would have been irrelevant if at least a dozen other major things had not broken a certain way as they did, which you and everyone else have touched upon at one time or another.

Edit: Should have clarified these are arguments floating around again, and not my perceptions.

edited 4th Jun '17 6:33:22 PM by ViperMagnum357

It's not unusual for polling and projections within a campaign to be off, just as it's not unusual for independent polling and projections to be off. Every campaign bases its activities to a greater or lesser degree on that information. It is easy to dissect this after the fact and say, "No, you were wrong, you should have paid more attention to Pennsylvania, et. al.," but that's supremely unhelpful. It's not even useful in guiding future campaigns. All candidates and all campaigns have finite resources and have to make choices about how to allocate them.

To uniquely blame Clinton for this is a gratuitously disgusting bit of intellectual dishonesty.

edited 4th Jun '17 5:41:21 PM by Fighteer

I actually think that blaming Clinton is the excuse of those idiots who decided to not vote or voted for a third party even though they are usually democratic voters, because they should have known better than getting suckered into the Anti-Hillary campaign which somehow convinced the population that she is just as bad as Trump. Deep down they know that they are partly to blame for the current situation because they didn't stand up against Trump when they could. It is also the excuse of the far left wing of the democrats who helped to push the "Sanders was betrayed" narrative instead of setting it aside to focus on the more important battle, to keep an egomaniac out of the White House. They are projecting their own guilt on Hillary, expecting her to take responsibility for something which was at the end of the day their mistake.

Hitting the loser with the hindsight stick is hardly unique to Hilary, but I do think that in this case it's being used fairly often by a lot of people who either didn't vote or voted third party because of their "principles" and don't won't to feel guilty about it because we have to deal with President Trump now.

I've talked a fair bit with someone like that, and it's a bit like talking to a brick wall.

edited 4th Jun '17 6:02:29 PM by LSBK