I will keep doing, but not worth it! The 2016 Presidential Primary Voting Thread

presidential candidates didnt even used campaign or debate

rubio literally said trump wld be a street vendor w/o his inheritance

That kind of slipped by--hilarious. Rubio's now selling joke watches on his site:

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/rubio-campaign-sells-trump-watches-after-debate-crack/article/2584287?custom_click=rss

(I.e., not actual watches.)

he should have planned for this crack, got some watches ready

that crack was really snobby and shitty though. there's nothing wrong with being a street vendor in manhattan.

thank u hurting for alerting me to bernie's pro GMO Labeling stance

lol yeah, that irritated me a little

The thing about Rubio's watch vendor line is it rang true. Also you guys are missing some of the point if you think he was just saying "street vendor."

thank u hurting for alerting me to bernie's pro GMO Labeling stance

― Mordy, Thursday, February 25, 2016 11:38 PM (2 minutes ago)

it's very popular in VT

https://imgflip.com/i/zuose

Is street vendor some kind of code? I thought it just meant huckster.

that crack was really snobby and shitty though. there's nothing wrong with being a street vendor in manhattan.

― Treeship, Thursday, February 25, 2016 11:36 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I was referring to this. "Street vendor" doesn't mean huckster necessarily but "watch salesman" def does.

Worst answer of the night might have been Trump's resurrection of the waste-fraud-and-abuse magic bullet. As the moderator pointed out, that's generally deemed to be about 0.1% of the budget or something.

i'm sure his fans care

I guess that's my point about shutting out Carson. His answers are no more ridiculous than Trump's; if that's the barometer for how many questions you get, they should get the same number. If it's where you stand in the polls that decides that, he and Kasich should get the same. Can't have it both ways.

trump said he is going to eliminate the epa and the department of ed

i am not worried about him as much after watching this debate. he didn't do very well when he was being directly attacked, and rubio's a lightweight. hillary will massacre him

(if she's the nominee)

I honestly think all she has to do in a debate is goad Trump into treating her the way he treats Rubio and Cruz (and Bush before that). Most (but not all) Republicans will love it, everyone else will recoil, regardless of how invested they are in her personally. When Biden debated Palin--a situation where he would have been completely justified in mocking her--he had the good sense to step back. Trump won't. I mean, she could debate circles around him on policy, but I don't think she'd even need to.

maybe. idk. she's pretty tough. i don't think insulting her will seem that much different than insulting cruzbio

goes without saying, but ben carson is such a disaster. calling israel america's child?

who does larison actually support? half his posts are about how much rubio sucks, and i can't imagine he's any more of a trump fan

Thing is, how do you go about debating Trump on the merits of an argument? His explanations are so completely divorced from actual content that, knowing Clinton would want to get in there and more or less do what Rubio did tonight with Trump's health plan, you end up in the same place: "Okay, the lines, I got it--what else?" Maybe by the debates in October they'll have gone to work on him and there'll be the semblance of something you can argue about. But I wouldn't be surprised if he's still on winning-winning-terrific-winning auto-pilot.

i mean this is a candidate who basically told his audience indirectly that Hillary was taking a shit for laffs so

xps I don't think supporting someone is really Larison's thing. I do love how much he hates Rubio!

when Trump said "waste, fraud, and abuse" I thought he meant those were the pillars of his strategy

VP pick for reanimated Eddie Guerrero would be a pretty sharp move, tho.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-72voOYqFo

trying to understand why they would be against it from a policy POV misses the point - they don't care about policy, this is just a game

No, there's a pretty solid policy reason too - once people forget they hate the name, it may become another 'third rail' of politics like Medicare.

"Selling watches" has the specific semantics of "impressive looking cheap shit to dazzle rubes", yeah?

calling israel america's child?

you need to go on, because those two words are literally true.

knew someone was going to say that

Perhaps it's time for it to move out of our basement and get its own apartment.

It's like one of those old K-Tel commercials.

http://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2016/02/26/cnn-debate-insults-origwx-allee.cnn

i love this, all of it, everybody looks terrible

Hillary versus Trump is going to be like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOGWbzUM-y8

I'm not sure which player is which.

only Bernie can save us from Punch-and-Judy

almost everything Trump and Clinton would say about each other would be true, tho.

(it's their best respective hope)

Not exactly an earth-shattering revelation, but it occurred to me this morning that Trump is the psychotic end result of the GOP convincing generations of people to vote against their own interests. They did a great job of training the republican hoi polloi to pay more attention to a candidate's position on god and family and guns and scary people from other countries rather than their actual policies and actions, and they ultimately wound up with a wildly-popular presidential candidate who serves no one's interests but his own and over whom they have no control.

trump's position on god and family is pretty shaky though - he's the least convincing evangelical ever, he's been married three times and accused of rape, too

isn't his appeal that wingnuts finally have a candidate who's saying out loud all the moronic shit that others have had rely on dogwhistling to get across in the past?

the final crack-up of the southern strategy

"He speaks his mind!"

My emphasis was more on training people to ignore anything substantive to the point where they rally around a completely substance-free candidate. Who, yes, also indulges their basest impulses (which is just like a big bonus prize for them).

I like "bigly."

― clemenza, Thursday, February 25, 2016 9:56 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

think it was "big league" tbh

― shandemonium padawan (Doctor Casino), Thursday, February 25, 2016 9:59 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it was definitely "bigly"

― crüt, Thursday, February 25, 2016 10:00 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=24240

That's great. Listening to it again, along with all the other clips, I'd say it's clearly "big league."

Still, watching (some) of these things, I am beginning to believe that Trump could hurt Clinton in a debate more than she can hurt him. He doesn't even really "debate," as such, just immaturely deflect, insult, dismiss, etc.. ("I know you are but what am I?") There are often no logical responses to his outbursts, just retorts, and that would only work to her disadvantage. I'm not even sure what she would attack him on - his lack of political experience? Which opens her up to attacks on her past statements, mis-votes, allegiance to moneyed interests, et al. Don't know if Sanders would win, but I'm starting to think he'd do better, rhetorically, against Trump than Clinton. Who can obviously still win, mathematically, but I have a bad feeling strategically she and her campaign are ill-suited for a non-intellectual street brawl, and it would show.

I'm relatively confident it would look awful for Trump to condescend to a woman; the attacks on Fiorina were the only things that halted his climb last fall.

Yeah Clinton doesn't have to do much except appear to be the adult in the room. I don't think Trump's antics play as well outside the Fox New/Rush set.

My gut says Clinton does better against Trump than Bernie does, because the gender dynamics would be so stark. So easy to cast Trump as everybody's worst blowhard boss/ex/father-in-law/whatever. (I also think any Democrat will walk all over Trump electorally, no matter what the polls say right now, but obviously predictions this year are pretty worthless.)

When they debate, Hillary should hire Rosie O'Donnell to occasionally peek out from behind a curtain and wave at Donald to get him fired up.

Laughter would be a good response to Trump in a one-on-one debate. Hillary should just laugh and laugh every time he opens his mouth, and then begin each of her responses with, "Listen, you stupid fuck..." or "Holy shit, did you really just say that out loud? OK..."

another overlooked moment was when Trump, at the very end of an exchange with Cruz, yelled "he's a zealot!" Cruz just kind of stuck his hands out and opened his mouth as if to respond but couldn't think of anything in time, and then wolf asked another question and it was over. the crowd didn't even respond. it was kind of amazing.

Hard to imagine him arguing...