General politics thread (was: General U.S. politics thread)

Bee · 2016-03-13 18:40:14

I don't think anyone here is advocating violence. Just that of the two of them, I'd be much, much more likely to assume Trump's supporters are the ones that started it.

Seeing how, you know, they've been doing it the entire time. And the final count of the whole incident, on both sides, with four digits of anti-Trump protesters at a rally whose supporters and candidate have a record of inciting violence, was a whopping five arrests.

Fuck, the guy's record is bad enough that Ted Goddamned Cruz was able to legitimately take the moral high ground on the topic.

Stormtroper · 2016-03-13 18:56:55

Two things: I didn't say anybody here is advocating violence (nobody is), I said they're relishing in it, and I wasn't referring to your post, but specifically Trout's, Alex's and Glenn's (although on second thought, I might be misreading that last one).

vandro · 2016-03-13 20:09:51

TRIBALISM HO!

KilgoreTrout · 2016-03-17 02:43:24

I don't think anybody should be getting beaten up, Stormtroper. Matter of fact, I just made a Twitter thread about that earlier:

https://mobile.twitter.com/XSiveVerbosity/status/710274459345752064

I actually think there's some truth to the statement that it plays into Trump's hands by allowing him to claim he and his supporters are being victimized, thus gaining sympathy and possibly additional support.

I'm not in favour of starting fights. I am in favour of fighting back if somebody comes at you, though.

Bee · 2016-03-26 06:15:25

I almost -- almost -- feel sorry for Lindsey Graham. Like, if he were almost anyone else, I would actually feel very, very sorry for him right now.

It's seriously like he accepted the offer to be on this show just to have a very public despair breakdown about being forced to choose between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.

glennmagusharvey · 2016-04-05 11:54:56

How you know you're an elections geek: You know about the Wisconsin Supreme Court election today and then suddenly realize that it's also presidential primary day in Wisconsin, rather than the other way around.

Anyway, there's a very important race today for a seat on Wisconsin's Supreme Court, which currently has a 5-2 conservative majority. Justice Rebecca Bradley, who was appointed by Gov. Scott Walker (R) to replace a more moderate justice, faces re-election to her first full term. Opposing her is Appeals Court Judge Joanne Kloppenberg, who is most famous for narrowly losing a race against Justice David Prosser (another conservative incumbent on the WI SC) in 2011, at the height of the protests against Gov. Walker.

For more information on the race: https://ballotpedia.org/Wisconsin_Supreme_Court_elections,_2016

If you know people from Wisconsin you may want to remind them to vote -- and not just for their presidential candidate of choice.

glennmagusharvey · 2016-04-27 03:21:16

^ Well, that didn't work so well. Bradley won 52-48 on better turnout for the Republican primary.

Sad.

Anyway, earlier today, voters went to the polls in at least five states, Delaware, Maryland, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania, to cast their votes for at least the presidential primaries. And a host of other downballot things.

[23:08:42] Pres: Clinton and Trump had big nights, winning everything except RI-Pres-D which went to Sanders.
[23:09:03] PA-Sen-D: former Bill Clinton env. advisor Katie McGinty beats former rep. Joe Sestak.
[23:09:22] MD-Sen-D: rep. Chris van Hollen beats rep. Donna Edwards
[23:09:46] PA-SD09 special election: Killion (R) beats Molloy (D), I think
[23:10:23] PA-09-R: incumbent Bill Shuster barely beats Art Halvorson for Repub renomination to the house seat (likely safe in the general though)
[23:10:58] PA-08-D: state rep Steve Santarsiero beats businesswoman/chemist and former nominee Shaughnessy Naughton
[23:11:58] MD-08-D: state sen. Jamie Raskin beats rich guy David Trone. Trone is most notable for singlehandedly making this primary race the most expensive race in U.S. House history by dumping $12M of his own money into it.
[23:12:38] PA-02-D: Dwight Evans beats incumbent and scandal-plagued Chaka Fattah. THis is a heavily Dem seat in Philly.
[23:14:23] incidentally, Chris Matthews's wife, Kathleen Matthews, was also running in MD-08-D. she got third place.
[23:14:49] MD-08, in case you're wondering, is mainly the DC suburbs.
[23:15:25] also, my old hometown of South Windsor, Connecticut still hasn't reported their presidential primary results.
[23:16:12] no wait they just did. 50.3% clinton 47.7% sanders. almost exactly follows the statewide margin -- clinton 51.0% sanders 47.2%.

Also, Delaware wins the award for fastest reporting of election results.

glennmagusharvey · 2016-04-29 18:57:24

So Trump accused Clinton of "playing the woman card" to be a successful candidate.

Well, the Clinton campaign is not passing up that opportunity. Now, you, too, can own and play your very own official Woman Card. The campaign's selling them for five bucks each.

They look like New York City Metrocards. The amusing thing is that Clinton once had trouble with her Metrocard when trying to get onto the subway; she had to swipe like five times or something. This moment has been immortalized by her campaign's 404 page: https://www.hillaryclinton.com/404

glennmagusharvey · 2016-04-29 21:11:45

Popcorn, in a horrible way.

For reference:
* NRCC = National Republican Congressional Committee, basically the national-level branch of the Republican Party that helps congressional Republicans with their re-election efforts (and secondarily, plays offense against the Democrats)
* David Jolly = current representative, Republican, for the 13th Congressional District of Florida. Florida recently had court-ordered redistricting, which made his district a lot more Dem-friendly, so he earlier bailed from running for re-election and instead tried to take his chances with a Senate race, for the Florida U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Marco Rubio. He's not looking so hot in that race, and now some people are suggesting that he drop back down and try to run for re-election since he's the only person with a ghost of a chance to hold down his district under the new district lines.

Meanwhile, though, the NRCC kinda hates his guts.

DKE's live digest today wrote:

Friday, Apr 29, 2016 · 3:49:00 PM EST

·
Jeff Singer
FL-13, Sen: The NRCC has never had a great relationship with
GOP Rep. David Jolly, and they probably thought they were finally done
dealing with him after the congressman announced that he’d be leaving
the House behind to run for Florida’s open Senate seat after a
court-ordered redistricting plan made his district much more Democratic.
But Jolly’s camp has refused to close the door on rumors that he’s
interested in dropping his Senate bid and instead defending his St. Petersburg seat,
redistricting be damned. The NRCC, however, isn’t offering any
encouragement to Jolly, even though he’s the only Republican who could
possibly hold this seat.

In fact, the committee just did the exact opposite. On
Friday, the NRCC Executive Director Rob Simms sent an remarkable open
letter to the show 60 Minutes that accused Jolly of lying about the committee during a recent feature—one that Simms compared to a scandal no less than Watergate.

So what’s the story behind 60 Minutesghazi? At the beginning of the year, Jolly announced that would he stop personally fundraising for his Senate campaign,
and further said he’d introduce a bill that would prohibit members of
Congress from personally seeking donations. It didn’t take much cynicism
to believe that this was just a bit of grandstanding designed to
distract from Jolly’s consistently poor fundraising, but this new
crusade earned Jolly a segment on 60 Minutes a week ago.

On the show, Jolly promoted his “Stop Act” (which stands no chance of becoming law anytime soon,
and may not even survive in court if it did), and he delved into the
gory details of candidate fundraising. Jolly began by saying that GOP
leadership demands that its members raise “$18,000 a day,” then
described how he had to cold-call donors to meet his goals. The show’s
producers then went on to show the actual NRCC-approved script for
fundraising calls, complete with a diagram outlining how a member of
Congress should respond depending on what the target says.

The segment was already not exactly the type of thing leaders at the
NRCC (or the DCCC, for that matter) would have liked, but the worst was
yet to come. Reporters are barred from NRCC call centers, but host Norah
O'Donnell explained that with the help of an unidentified GOP staffer, 60 Minutes placed
hidden cameras inside NRCC headquarters, and the show obtained some
pretty interesting footage. There were shots of the
office cubicles where members made their calls and a list identifying
how much money each member had brought in. Jolly summed up the office by
calling it “a cult-like boiler room on Capitol Hill where sitting
members of Congress, frankly, I believe, are compromising the dignity of
the office they hold by sitting in these sweatshop phone booths calling
people asking them for money.”

This stunt very much pissed off NRCC
chair Greg Walden and his staff. Simms’ letter insisted that there
never had been a meeting where Jolly was told to raise $18,000 a day,
calling it “a work of fiction.” He went on: “Had the reporter or
producer of the story bothered to verify this claim, they would have
been told as much.” Simss then said 60 Minutes had "knowingly
trespassed or encouraged another to trespass in our offices to film
footage." He concluded in histrionic terms: "Not since Watergate has the
headquarters of a major political party committee been so violated. CBS
conspired with an anonymous staffer to enter our offices and obtain
unauthorized footage under false pretenses. This is not journalism. This
is trespassing."

Republicans love to hate the media, so it's not too notable that the
NRCC is picking a fight with CBS’s famous news magazine, but it's very
unusual for the committee to charge one of their own with lying and
conspiring against the party. There are plenty of explanations for what
could be going on. As we noted at the outset, the NRCC has never liked
Jolly. In 2014, just days before Jolly's closely-watched special
election in a Florida swing seat, anonymous staffers at the
committee—which was also led by Walden at the time—leaked embarrassing details about Jolly's campaign operation to Politico.
Among other things (including complaints that Jolly paraded around the
district with a girlfriend 14 years younger than him), the NRCC's people
claimed that Jolly ran a weak campaign and had to be bailed out by DC.
Jolly ended up narrowly winning the special, but there's absolutely no
love lost between Walden’s staff and Jolly.

The NRCC may also be annoyed at the idea that Jolly might run for
re-election for more than just personal reasons. Jolly's once-completive
seat was redrawn into a district that Obama won 55-44, and even if
Jolly would still have an outside chance, he'd be the decided underdog.
The NRCC may just prefer to triage the seat altogether rather than waste
millions defending it: Since the NRCC is, first and foremost, an
incumbent protection organization, they'd probably feel obligated to do something to
help Jolly. So to avoid flushing money on a potentially hopeless race,
it’s possible that the committee is trying to signal Jolly that he'd be
better off just taking his chances in the Senate race.

But what may have annoyed the NRCC the most (as well as their
counterparts at the DCCC) is that Jolly gave potential House recruits an
ugly glimpse at their future if they run and win. Any credible
congressional candidate will need to spend a great deal of time and
effort fundraising (aside from wealthy people who can just cut
themselves a check). Still, many of them may hope that, once they
actually get elected, that annoying part of their life will at least die
down. If so, the footage of the NRCC's call center is the last thing
they'll want to see. After all, who wants to run a very tough race and
learn that they're going to spend hours each day essentially acting as
telemarketers in addition to having to do their already-stressful day
job?

None of this was exactly a secret before those hidden cameras rolled,
of course, but those images of dreadful NRCC cubicles make the whole
dark enterprise a lot more vivid than it was before. Jolly's ultimate
sin may have been exposing just how sucky it is to be a congressman—and
forcing potential candidates to ask themselves why they'd want this life
for themselves.

KilgoreTrout · 2016-05-01 13:19:22

Donald Trump would be bad, for the country and the world. I think we're all in agreement on that.

Hillary would also be bad, and I'll cite this as an example. It's worth a read, not just the parts I'm gonna quote after linking:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/magazine/how-hillary-clinton-became-a-hawk.html?_r=0

A few months after my interview in her office, another split emerged when Obama picked up a secure phone for a weekend conference call with Clinton, Gates and a handful of other advisers. It was July 2010, four months after the North Korean military torpedoed a South Korean Navy corvette, sinking it and killing 46 sailors. Now, after weeks of fierce debate between the Pentagon and the State Department, the United States was gearing up to respond to this brazen provocation. The tentative plan — developed by Clinton’s deputy at State, James Steinberg — was to dispatch the aircraft carrier George Washington into coastal waters to the east of North Korea as an unusual show of force.
But Adm. Robert Willard, then the Pacific commander, wanted to send the carrier on a more aggressive course, into the Yellow Sea, between North Korea and China. The Chinese foreign ministry had warned the United States against the move, which for Willard was all the more reason to press forward. He pushed the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen, who in turn pushed his boss, the defense secretary, to reroute the George Washington. Gates agreed, but he needed the commander in chief to sign off on a decision that could have political as well as military repercussions.
Gates laid out the case for diverting the George Washington to the Yellow Sea: that the United States should not look as if it was yielding to China. Clinton strongly seconded it. “We’ve got to run it up the gut!” she had said to her aides a few days earlier. (The Vince Lombardi imitation drew giggles from her staff, who, even 18 months into her tenure, still marveled at her pugnacity.)
Obama, though, was not persuaded. The George Washington was already underway; changing its course was not a decision to make on the fly.
“I don’t call audibles with aircraft carriers,” he said — unwittingly one-upping Clinton on her football metaphor.
It wasn’t the last debate in which she would side with Gates. The two quickly discovered that they shared a Midwestern upbringing, a taste for a stiff drink after a long day of work and a deep-seated skepticism about the intentions of America’s foes. Bruce Riedel, a former intelligence analyst who conducted Obama’s initial review on the Afghanistan war, says: “I think one of the surprises for Gates and the military was, here they come in expecting a very left-of-center administration, and they discover that they have a secretary of state who’s a little bit right of them on these issues — a little more eager than they are, to a certain extent. Particularly on Afghanistan, where I think Gates knew more had to be done, knew more troops needed to be sent in, but had a lot of doubts about whether it would work.”
As Hillary Clinton makes another run for president, it can be tempting to view her hard-edged rhetoric about the world less as deeply felt core principle than as calculated political maneuver. But Clinton’s foreign-policy instincts are bred in the bone — grounded in cold realism about human nature and what one aide calls “a textbook view of American exceptionalism.” It set her apart from her rival-turned-boss, Barack Obama, who avoided military entanglements and tried to reconcile Americans to a world in which the United States was no longer the undisputed hegemon. And it will likely set her apart from the Republican candidate she meets in the general election. For all their bluster about bombing the Islamic State into oblivion, neither Donald J. Trump nor Senator Ted Cruz of Texas has demonstrated anywhere near the appetite for military engagement abroad that Clinton has.

glennmagusharvey · 2016-05-03 20:24:18

Since 2006 I've closely observed (at least "closely" for someone who doesn't get paid to do this) downballot elections in the United States, and I've noticed the phenomenon of parties not running candidates for various seats, leaving them uncontested even if the other party nominates Double Hitler or something. This has, in fact, occasionally led to complete fucknuts in Congress and other legislative bodies.

I had wondered why, for a long time. I mean, it is rather plainly obvious, the one thing worse for one's electoral chances than a warm body is nobody at all.

More recently though, I think an explanation is starting to bubble to the surface gradually: it costs a lot to run a campaign, even a placeholder one.

Now, for a placeholder campaign, it's not that expensive financially. If you're not expecting to win, but just expecting to stick around just in case the other party's nominee self-destructs and gives your team an opening, most of the time they won't and you can get by with maybe a few thousand dollars worth of campaigning just to show your party's supporters in the area that they're not completely forgotten, making a token effort on your part.

But it's not just about the money.

It's a time-consuming -- and sometimes soul-consuming -- process, to campaign for a seat. To be the candidate upon whom all those expectations and demands for attention and desires for scrutiny fall. You have to suddenly take about half a year out of your life, going door to door to event to event asking for people to support you, or at least hoping that people friendly to you show up so you can say hi to them. And worst of all...you have to beg people for money.

And this doesn't just apply to challengers. This applies to incumbents. Incumbents have to raise money just to defend their own seats. Then the party also demands that they help raise money for the party. And meanwhile they still have to look happy, kiss babies, talk to constituents like those constituents they talk to are the only people in their lives so they can give them their full attention, and so on and so forth. Oh, and the money picture just got worse after the infamous Citizens United SCOTUS decision.

This problem is probably doubly compounded these days for members of Congress. Especially ones in the Republican majority who have to deal with the fact that on one hand they have to govern and keep the place running but on the other hand they have to appeal to an increasingly insane supporter base that just wants to break everything that their governing job stands for into millions of little tiny pieces.

TL;DR running a campaign sucks and being an elected official quite possibly sucks more, depending.

glennmagusharvey · 2016-05-05 02:16:26

So, instead of carrying their campaigns to term, Ted Cruz and John Kasich aborted their campaigns for the Republican nomination for president of the United States.

The Republican nominee will be Donald Trump.

It's on now, folks.

fourteenwings · 2016-05-05 12:48:57

It's on

I'm sorry

Seriously though I like how since everyone is mad at big money in elections they just decided to give big money the election without the smokescreens and go-betweens.

lrdgck · 2016-05-05 18:52:29

Since it's an exceptional occasion, posting here:

Stormtroper · 2016-05-08 01:33:25

Whether Trump wins or not, I'd be worried about the fact that his incendiary rhetoric really works out.

glennmagusharvey · 2016-05-10 22:32:09

The problem with U.S. politics is that it looks like a YouTube Poop.

...wait, you mean this video is actually a YouTube Poop?

glennmagusharvey · 2016-05-21 16:43:45

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/5/20/1529031/-House-GOP-forces-four-at-risk-members-to-walk-the-plank-and-flip-from-aye-to-nay-on-LGBT-protections

Thursday offered a potent reminder
that the Republican civil war remains just as intense on Capitol Hill
as it does on the presidential campaign trail—and is offering up new
potential victims for Democrats to eviscerate. Let's set the scene: On
Wednesday, House Republicans passed a defense spending bill that would
have allowed federal contractors to use their claimed religious beliefs
as an excuse to fire LGBT people. Nice guys, huh?

Fighting back, Democratic Rep. Sean Maloney offered an amendment to a different defense appropriations bill the following day that would have overturned this anti-LGBT provision. Amazingly enough, despite the GOP's wide majority in the chamber, it passed.

Or so it appeared. As the clock for the two-minute vote expired, 182
Democrats and 35 Republicans joined together to give Maloney's amendment
217 votes; the rest of the GOP could only muster up 206 votes against
it. That's math simple enough even for the Republican leadership to
understand—and indeed it did. Republicans held the vote open for another six minutes, enough time to coerce seven of their number to switch their votes "quietly from the back benches," as Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer put it.

But few congressional shenanigans get past Hoyer, and soon after, he tweeted out a list of the turncoats.
It's an interesting assemblage, to say the least. Of the seven, fully
four are potentially vulnerable this fall: California Reps. David
Valadao and Jeff Denham; Iowa Rep. David Young; and Maine Rep. Bruce
Poliquin. While all of these men are quite conservative, they all at
least had the brains to oppose this particularly instance of anti-LGBT
bigotry … but not enough fortitude to resist when their party leaders
came demanding obedience.

And that's a real problem, because all four of the districts
represented by this group went for Barack Obama in 2012, and all four
are on Daily Kos Elections' list of races that either will be or could become competitive in November. The coverage of this skullduggery has already been unflattering, and this quartet will not only get painted by their Democratic opponents as bigots but as flip-floppers, too.

Oh, and if you're wondering why the GOP was so insistent on making
sure the Maloney amendment failed, Rep. Charlie Dent, one of the
provision's Republican supporters, explained that the more conservative
members of his party didn't want to get stuck voting for a defense bill
with a pro-LGBT amendment attached to it. So House GOP leaders figured
they'd sacrifice a few congressman in bluer seats to protect the
ultra-wingnuts from possible primary challenges. The Republican war
rages on—and only Democrats stand to benefit.

FYI, the members mentioned are:

David Valadao from CA-21 (a D+3 district, parts of Fresno, Kern, Kings, and Tulare Counties in the San Joaquin Valley)

Jeff Denham from CA-10 (an R+1 district, parts of Stanislaus and San Joaquin Counties, centered on Modesto)

David Young from IA-03 (an even-PVI district, southwest Iowa)
Bruce Poliquin from ME-02 (a D+3 district, basically most of Maine not including the southwestern coast, Portland, or Augusta)

KilgoreTrout · 2016-06-10 17:29:07

Curious what people around here think of Cenk Uygur and The Young Turks.

vandro · 2016-06-10 17:51:29

Genocide Denier, letfy-troll

KilgoreTrout · 2016-06-10 18:03:04

Well, no, and I'm sorry I can't provide you with a link or anything, but a fellow fan told me that as far back as 2011 Cenk has said that denying the Armenian genocide is as wrong as denying the Holocaust. And while I'm not somebody who watches every single video they put out, I have never once heard Cenk or Ana or anybody say that the Armenian genocide didn't happen.

EDIT: As a matter of fact, I just found a video of Ana talking all about how that genocide did happen, and was horrible.

Bee · 2016-06-10 19:38:21

Basically I see him as someone who makes easy points against easy targets, without realizing that being so absurdly smug about it only serves to echo-chamber his own side while making no progress in convincing anyone who didn't already agree with him. Because he basically comes off as the Rush Limbaugh of the left.

RE: the Armenian genocide thing, he seems to have genuinely changed his mind in recent years, so progress (or at least peer pressure) I guess. He's very reticent about actually discussing the subject and why he had a change of heart, which is understandable if irritating. I remember he pointedly ignored every single question about it on his AMA, when that seems like the exact place he needed to just own up and say "I was a douche and grew up to be less of a douche" -- I mean his older hardline conservative views are pretty well known, so this wouldn't be a shocker.

The fact that someone keeps scrubbing all trace of it from his Wikipedia page (despite numerous sources, many of them primary) doesn't help.

BassFishing · 2016-06-10 20:04:53

It's nearly impossible to indulge in punditry in word or vid and not come across as a pedantic twat (unless you waste paragraph upon paragraph self-deprecating, and then the people you do this for will still ignore it).

And while I loathe a "hold onto receipts forever" approach, if the pundit does the same to his targets, it's pretty much fair game.

KilgoreTrout · 2016-06-10 20:14:29

Basically I see him as someone who makes easy points against easy targets, without realizing that being so absurdly smug about it only serves to echo-chamber his own side while making no progress in convincing anyone who didn't already agree with him. Because he basically comes off as the Rush Limbaugh of the left.

I can sort of see that. Before I found the video I actually embedded, I found a video of Cenk responding to someone's statement that "socialism leads to communism, which leads to dictatorship" and he was using a mocking tone in parts of it. So yeah, I doubt that sort of thing would be helpful in convincing people who thought socialism was bad to reconsider their viewpoint.

You actually mentioned exactly what I was thinking of bringing up myself, which is him being a Republican back in the day. One of the things I stumbled on when searching "cenk uygur + armenian genocide" was this article he wrote in 1991 that somebody was using to prove he was a denier. I'm open to the possibility that there's more recent evidence than that, but when I saw that, I thought "Really? 1991? People change a lot in 25 years. Hell, that was probably back when he was a Republican, but he sure isn't a Republican any more!"

I can't read his mind so I don't know for sure about this, but since he makes so many other points I agree with, I would like to believe that he has truly changed his mind about it.

Bee · 2016-06-10 20:23:26

He did recently rescind one of those denial articles a couple months ago. He did it in a really cringeworthy way that just said he doesn't know enough about it to make a decision -- it kind of came off on the same level as "I'm sorry you were offended". I don't think he did retract the other one, which was...1999 I think? It was in Salon.

I guess I understand that changing sides outright on this particular issue can actually present concrete dangers to him and his family given the political climate, but he's certainly pissed off enough wealthy/fanatical sociopaths throughout the show's run that I'm not sure how much of a difference it would make, and I wouldn't put it past him to be a smug asshole trying to dodge the issue without admitting fault either.

Stormtroper · 2016-06-11 01:34:00

"socialism leads to communism, which leads to dictatorship"

That's silly.

If that person is talking about welfare and stuff, these things are necessary to maintain bourgeois democracy by encouraging social mobility of the working class so as to better expropriate their surplus labor value, especially important if there's the threat of socialists seeking to agitate and stir up class struggle so as to bring a revolution and a dictatorship of the proletariat. There are good examples of this kind of wild capitalism in Nordic countries such as Finland or Sweden.

Unless we're talking about real socialism, in which case it's still silly because if you're under socialism you're under a communist dictatorship, since socialism is communism and they both imply a dictatorship, thus you can't say socialism "leads" to it.

KilgoreTrout · 2016-06-11 04:05:23

To be fair, I didn't quote the guy exactly right from memory: he said that socialism leads to communism, which leads to Marxism. Still basically the same argument, however: "socialism is the start of a slippery slope which will lead to bad things."

The video is here, so you can judge for yourself what Bee was referring to about Cenk's commentary style. I'll get one thing out of the way: he talks about socialism and such for the whole thing and doesn't talk about the genocide at all. Which could be either because he didn't want to talk about that or because it was something that the caller tacked on at the end with "Oh, and another thing, you know where the name of your show was originally used?", or both.

Late followup to what I said to vandro: I found what I mentioned before, which is this article Cenk did for HuffPo, in which he writes about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Holocaust denial and says, among other things:

_{There are countless people all across the world that deny many things that are patently true — and we don’t go to war with them over it. Senator Inhofe (R-OK) denies global warming. As far as I know we are not planning on invading Oklahoma over it.}
_{But Ahmadinejad is the leader of an important country in the Middle East. Well, so is Tayyip Erdogan, the Prime Minister of Turkey. He denies the Armenian Genocide. Should we invade Turkey?}
_{I bet I can find you at least half a dozen world leaders who deny one genocide or another. Should we suit up and restart the draft? We’ve got a lot of countries to attack.}

So in that piece he isn't saying in so many words "The Armenian genocide did, in fact, happen", but he definitely doesn't seem to be denying it.

KilgoreTrout · 2016-06-11 04:47:46

^{Anyway, back to the election: I wish people wouldn't act like their candidate is some kind of messiah who's worthy of complete trust. I'm just gonna be looking at the Democratic side here. I doubt I need to convince anybody that Donald Trump has fault and is not worthy of being idolized. I guess I could try to figure out why people do idolize him (I know that the easy answer is "They're bigots", but that begs the question of what made them into such bigots), but that's worthy of a whole other post.}

^{I was hoping with all my being that Sanders would get the nomination, but if somebody came to me and said "Hey, you know how you don't like Hillary because she'll keep on using drones like Obama has? Well, Bernie said that drones were useful," I'd have to concede that point. And that really did make me wonder if he'd do the right thing when he was in office, not just on that issue, but on others.}

^{I don't want to paint everybody with the same brush so I won't say "Hillary supporters" here, I'll say "many Hillary supporters I've either interacted with or whose opinions I've read" in the next paragraph.}

^{Many Hillary supporters I've either interacted with or whose opinions I've read simply do not seem to care about their candidates flaws. If you bring up the drone thing to them, they don't care. Bring up how she voted to invade Iraq, they don't care. They'll tell you that you only hate her because of lies in the media (as some told me very recently), and when I go "Okay, you think the media's twisting her words? Look at this article she wrote herself entitled 'How I Would Reaffirm Unbreakable Bond With Israel — and Benjamin Netanyahu',", they don't care about that either. Even a guy who said that he hated the stuff Israel did to Palestinians and hated Netanyahu still went "Well, you kind of HAVE to support Israel in U.S. politics." And I was like "No, you don't. Bernie harshly criticized Israel while he was still in the race, and his numbers didn't plummet immediately after. And plenty of people have criticized Netanyahu, pro-Israel people, Democrats, if for nothing else than his fearmongering during the last Israeli election."}

^{Point to her recent speech in which she said this about Iran and the nuclear deal...}

“Now we must enforce that deal vigorously. And as I’ve said many times before, our approach must be ‘distrust and verify.’ The world must understand that the United States will act decisively if necessary, including with military action, to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.”

...and they won't care. Man, I remember eight years ago when John McCain made a joke about bombing Iran, and everybody on the left was talking about how inappropriate that was, because we shouldn't be attacking Iran. Now Hillary's threatening the country and half of the left is willing to just let it go.

Most of Bernie's supporters are young. I'm older and, maybe unexpectedly, my being older is what makes me believe there is no good outcome to this election with these two candidates. Only bad and worse. I'll give credit to Hillary where it's due and in those areas I'm aware of that she isn't wrong: she's not gonna try to outlaw same sex marriage. She's not gonna try to outlaw abortion. She's not going to tell everybody that Muslims are dangerous, and has in fact said the opposite in the past.

But I'm old enough that I was an adult during the Bush years, and I remember what Bush did. So when Obama wound up doing a lot of the same things, I noticed that, and this was after I had gone all of 2008 seeing Obama as a heroic, flawless candidate who was worthy of all my trust. So now we've got Hillary promising more of the same. If people trying to convince me that Hillary's pretty good point out that her policies are basically the same as Obama's, I would say that's a negative, not a positive. Moreover, as the New York Times article I posted earlier in this thread makes very clear, she is more willing to use military force than Obama is. "What president in history HASN'T used military force?" somebody recently asked me. I didn't have an answer. I wound up saying that I didn't think Carter did, or that if he had, he didn't use it very much. "But even if I'm incorrect on that, does that make it any less wrong?" I asked.

Man, if somebody is talking to me and they say "You know what, you're right, Hillary's got flaws. But I'd rather it was her in office than that psychopath Trump, and that's why I'm voting for her," then I can handle that. I can, and have, said "Okay, I can understand that." But if somebody's talking to me and they say "All of that stuff you believe about Hillary is lies! You're getting your information from liars! Glenn Greenwald's full of shit, and nobody with any brain will believe a single thing he says or writes!" That's different. That's dumb. I find these people's abundance of faith disturbing. (Also infuriating.)

I think I'm finished now. Thanks for giving me a place to vent about this stuff.

Bee · 2016-06-11 05:26:45

I mean, I'm going to be voting for Hillary because Trump is literally apocalypse-level bad. But I would have been much, much happier voting for Sanders. Hillary is all of Obama's faults minus the subtlety to do those things when he thought nobody was looking.

If the Republicans had picked someone who wasn't completely insane (and most likely surprisingly in line with Hillary's historical voting record), I'd have gone third party. Again.

Mostly I'm just sad Warren didn't run. Sanders got enough momentum to be a genuine threat, despite being a party outsider with the DNC basically warring against him at every step and half his supporters being called sexist for daring not to put the first woman in office. Warren would've had nearly all the advantages and none of the disadvantages Sanders did, and she probably would've stomped Hillary. I'd have been just as happy to give her my vote in the end.

Stormtroper · 2016-06-11 06:12:51

Just wanted to say.

The fact that US foreign policy matters considerably to the world at large is the one aspect I don't envy at all from US politics.

(That, and the electoral college thing.)

Serocco · 2016-06-11 06:23:26

FINALLY got to working my original account.

Anyway, I keep frequenting the US Politics Thread over on TVTropes, and.... I'm honestly shocked at the shit show it's turned into.

It's filled with a ton of Clinton supporters. Fighteer outright said that TYT, as an example, regurgitates Republican talking points to assassinate her character - when TYT defended Bill from Whitewater, Vince Foster, Travelgate, even Benghazi and the email scandal.

That's not what aggravates me, though. What aggravates me is when Clinton supporters outright say Clinton is as progressive or more so than Bernie, that she doesn't even give the appearance of corruption, or that she somehow wants to overturn Citizens United.

I will give direct fucking quotes. "There is not a single vote she made in favor of Corporate America," "She will play the game in order to fix things and make them better," "She has more incentive to get rid of Citizens United than any other politician on Capitol Hill," and "Wall Street keeps trying to influence her, but it's mostly on deaf ears."

This is a personality cult. I dare say the allure of a Madam President blinds people to the reality of just how horrible Clinton will be on, particularly and especially, foreign policy. It's gotten to the point where, if Clinton appoints Goldman Sachs executives to her administration, her supporters will excuse it and say "It's just what she needs to do" or "They will help her be the next FDR!"

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