Bang on.

Refusing to vote for for candidates/policies that you don't like very much can also lead to candidates/policies that are catastrophically terrible.*


* But in this case - mostly for people in other countries and non-whites in the US. Oh yeah - also non-white US territories.

Lol conversation goes on until I start posting, then it gets excised again.

It's like grade school all over again. Suzzer talks to someone, suzzer gets in trouble. Someone talks to suzzer, suzzer gets in trouble.

Indeed, it's a real problem. No-one said democracy has to be easy and there's no risk-free strategy. Nor does anyone have the correct answer. If a major party knows that a lot more of their core support would refuse to support candidate/polices then they would be far more unlikely to be the candidate/policies in the first place*

*or a big mistake would be made followed by real progressive change. If avoiding that big mistake guaranteed avoiding really bad outcomes like trump then it might be worth it but that's a great plan with one small flaw.

Yeah just a few million dead Koreans, war with Iran, open season on US Muslims, race riots, militias battling in the streets, sell out the country to business cronies, rape the environment, pack SCOTUS for 30 years with Gorsuch-s.

But *then* we get UBI or whatever.

Which might have been avoided if the democrats hadn't known that they could take their core support for granted.

Then again maybe not.

That is the theory and why ive voted third party where ever i could in life. But trump made me far more of a pragmatist now and not just for him. I dont want republicans in power anymore and even if that means i get a democrat who i do not fully support its far better then having people in there so willing to attack and abandon some of the core values of America that are important to me. The dems are the best tool to fight republicans and if that somehow means dems are not going to reform. Ok. I mean they didn't do much of that when i tried not to vote for them to get them to change. They went more center if anything.

or if dems were just nicer to each and to their opponents

I draw the line at trump as well, but it's simply not clear that supporting any dem makes trump/etc getting in less likely - it may well make it more likely. We could have the same sort of debate about BS giving in sooner. People have to make judgement calls. There's no good reason for us all to agree on exactly where the lines are.

Most people want short term answers but this is a long term problem for democracy, and for progressive forces in particula.

'Nicer' isn't the right concept and the liberal/left are generally reasonable decent people so it's not much of a problem in practice. It would be much more of an issue if, for example, the widespread 'baby killer' message (from the other thread) was a fact rather than a myth.

I do agree with Clinton that the 'deplorable' thing was a political gift to trump, if that's the sort of thing you mean. I suspect just a small gift in practice.

I watched an interview segment on C-SPAN's "Book TV" last night with Hillary Clinton. It was obvious from listening to her that she is still in deep denial over having lost to Trump. She was candid in admitting that she still finds it hard to accept her defeat - especially to a candidate like Trump. (It was also obvious that she was taking it for granted that she would be our next President - right up until election night. The reports of her being in shock at the outcome - on election night - were obviously true.) She admitted that she's still in shock - to this day - over having lost.

Hillary went through a laundry list of reasons why the American people erred in not electing her. Much of what she said was self serving. (She said she was very "detail oriented" and that she had "studied and prepared" for the job of President while Trump treated the job "... like it was a reality TV show" and [apparently] the American people prefer "a reality TV star" more than they prefer a serious [well qualified] candidate. That really seemed to bug her - that a mental midget like Trump was chosen by the American people instead of her. (She didn't say it out loud, but her body English was screaming: "This is so unfair!")

From watching last night, it was obvious that Hillary is embittered over how the election turned out. She can barely disguise her contempt for Trump. Gerald Ford was said to have reacted in much the same way after he and Bob Dole lost to Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale back in 1976. People close to Ford said that he never got over having lost - especially when he and Dole came so close to winning. (Ford's pardon of Nixon in 1974 for Watergate crimes very likely cost him the Presidency.)

One thing Hillary did not touch on, but I'm convinced is absolutely true, is the attitude some women have about Hillary's husband. There are married (generally conservative leaning) women I know who despise her husband. Bill Clinton's blatant adultery and infidelity strikes fear into their hearts. For these women, the fear that their own husband might do the same thing to them is devastating. So their rejection of Hillary is more a rejection of her husband. There's probably no way to measure this, but I sense that a substantial number of women voted against Hillary because they couldn't stand her husband. The thing with Hillary is that she can't bring herself to admit that - at least not publicly.

More likely is that their husbands are ****ty or various degrees of ****ty (philandering, insensitive, see their wives as subservient, etc). They aren't afraid their husbands might become dicks; they live it. Sure, they despise Bill in a sense, but we contain multitudes and they at least understand him. They can buy into his worldview -- a guy who walks around constantly trying to get his dick wet is a known character and fits their political world view and frame. They don't like it but they abide by it. This is covered well here:

https://www.amazon.com/Wimp-Factor-P...he+wimp+factor

...about why Bill's likability and relatability rated so high while HRC's was so low despite the fact they share identical, indstinguishiable politics.

Conservative-ish women have internalized these sorts of gender differences to whatever degree and they're annoyed Hillary Clinton continues (in their mind) to take such a strong feminist pose (or pretense, from their point of view) rather than embrace her role as a wounded wife. Men probably feel much the same way.

Hence a bunch of the claims she's a phony. They see the humiliation and degradation of Bill's affairs should have taught her a lesson, taught her to be less cold, stop being such an ambitious and frigid bitchy type, to accept it as the way of the world and her role in it. They see that partly as how she got into that mess and why her husband strayed.

That she continues not to take the pose as a more conservative, meek, subservient wife is an affront to them. That's the path many of them chose. To live it out and submit to their husbands as they do the Lord, blah blah moew chow.

So I think it's more political and less personal than you let on. Even conservative women can embrace an authoritarian pose where punishment and pain is the great teacher. They think the affairs and the philandering should have been the life experiences that browbeat her into submission and taught her the perils of being a bitchy feminist. But she didn't. That makes her even more strident in her phoniness, in her ambition, her pretense she sells to people that they really don't like. Look how political she must be! Deep down she must now see the true nature of the world and yet she persists pretending she's above it all, that she's a feminist, etc., shame on her. She should have learned better. It deepened their dislike. If she had come out of the affair(s) and genuflected more as the subservient wife who meekly attended to her husband and tried to be a better women to satisfy him, she'd have won them over more.

tl;dr summary: they're annoyed HRC didn't take her life experiences and use them to become a better conservative Republican

One of the worse takes I've heard. Donald Trump is a serial philanderer who literally confessed on tape to grabbing women by the pussy at a time when his new wife was pregnant with their first child. He was accused by over a dozen women of assaulting them, several during times when he was married. But women voted for Trump because of Bill Clinton's vices. Story checks out. That's like saying they voted for Trump because "super predators" was just too racist.

Anybody in Hillary's position would be broken. A professional politician losing to Trump is like Usain Bolt losing a 100 meter dash to a child with muscular dystrophy.

In her mind, she did everything she could to win. She dunked all over Trump in the debates and was leading in the polls for most of the second half of 2016. Trump continually appeared to shoot himself in the foot, doing things that would destroy any other candidate but still persisted. Yet, he still won.

This is a pretty bad take. I know happily married women, widowed women, and not so happily married women who voted for Trump. I've seen their Facebook pages and they hate the entire Clinton family in general.

My take on right-leaning women is deep down inside they despise most other women. So they seek to make their lives as miserable as possible by voting against their interests. Seeing a woman reach the highest office in America would be the ultimate defeat in their minds. They chose Trump because of how he treats women that aren't like them.

=================

The one thing I think the Dems end up taking away from this election is that they need to get their own fake news machine pumping for the 2020 election. Soon we'll either be sifting through a whole lot of bull**** in order to get to the truth or eating it up and asking for seconds.

I never said we all have to agree. Kind of the opposite. Im fine with people voting third party in non swing states. Im not doing it anymore because republicans are a grave threat.

If little old me doing that somehow means democracy will fail in the long run and put republicans in power. Well bs.

It's a long term problem. it doesn't imply democracy will fail.

I'm not in any way criticising your decision - I'd have made the same one if I had a vote*. I'm also not criticising those who put the line in a slightly different place and voted 3rd party* - we can reasonably disagree on this and anyone who is sure they know what's best is being silly

*I'm also not as negative on Clinton as this conversation can suggest

*assuming it's a reasonable 3rd party

Being negative on Clinton and dems is ok with me. They are not all that great. Rock and a hard place.

I don't blame HC for not going there. It's her family and going down the path of blaming her husband isn't wise.

I'm not sure it's because they can't stand Bill. It's the cheated on partner who is commonly thought less of. That's true for men as well as women (remember where cuckold comes from). The more sexist part in the electoral side of this issue is that men can get away with being a known adulator.

Bump for the donks

OK, this is mildly funny

FFS

You partisan slappies are the reason we can't have nice things.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/u...m-company.html

Maybe no LAWS WERE BROKEN and no one goes to jail for any of this, but the story of Canadian Mining Billionaires, tens of millions of dollars in donations, private jet flight around the world to seduce Stalinist dictators, hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees is hardly not swampy. And with the same people including the mining billionaire there was even worse stuff done in Central America.

When did microbet contract the LirvA virus?

Right, a big ****ing nothing burger, got it.

Really bad takes and false equivalencies.

There is no evidence Hilary attempted or was even interested in acquiring the alleged Trump kompromat that was uncovered. There is lots of evidence that Trump campaign was very interested in obtaining Hilary kompromat which potentially involved a quid pro quo.

The line between Podesta Group lobbying on behalf of an NGO that they should have known was dirty and not fully disclosing and Manafort directly and secretly working as a secret agent of Putin in exchange for millions of dollars under the table is similarly bright.