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

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...

Mr Trump says he will save $300 billion from Medicare (the government health-care scheme for the elderly) by buying drugs more cheaply. Alas, total Medicare spending on drugs is likely to average $111 billion annually over the next decade. Aggregate American spending on drugs (public and private) is around $300 billion a year, says the CRFB. Perhaps Mr Trump thinks he can persuade the pharmaceutical companies to give their product away: the “art of the deal” in action.

it's weird how much more shameless he is than every other shameless politician

I caught a few minutes of the debate last night before my fiancé made me turn it off.

"Mr. Trump, how do you feel about this Telemundo poll saying Hispanics don't like you."

"I don't believe Telemundo." *audience seems to chuckle* "I employ lots of Hispanics."

I don't know what people here don't understand about modern Republicans (not *wingnuts*) that makes that a perfectly good answer to them

Cruz is running an ad in Texas featuring testimonial from Governor Greg "Wheels" Abbott and boasting the tag TrusTED.

of course followed by, "I love Telemundo," or something

x-post

trump only has 6.39 million twitter followers. maybe people are right about his slice of the electorate being smaller than it seems

for a point of comparison, katy perry has 83 million followers on twitter.

xxp Wait, you mean that we think that is, or isn't, a good answer?

i mean a good answer to modern (non *wingnut*) Republicans.

it's a "dogwhistle" type way to say that the opinions of hispanics don't matter

xp

republicans will turn out for trump due to their actual ideology, when all is said and done: the government can and should be run like a business

― rap is dad (it's a boy!)

I hope Katy Perry is our first female president.

trump only has 6.39 million twitter followers. maybe people are right about his slice of the electorate being smaller than it seems

― spirited ai weiwei (Treeship), Friday, February 26, 2016 9:58 AM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

for a point of comparison, katy perry has 83 million followers on twitter.

not sure what this says about anything, but:

trump: 6.39m
clinton: 5.49m
sanders: 1.52m
rubio: 1.23m
carson: 1.15m (!!!)
cruz: 849k (he also has another verified account for his senatorial stuff with 700k or so, probably mostly the same people)
jeb!: 489k (also he needs to update his profile description to let people know he's back to just making money again)
kasich: 191k

Jim Gilmore?

4,480.

in the past few hours, trump has posted two tweets describing marco rubio as a "chocker"

he tried to get his account verified but can't get twitter to respond to his messages

nah, just kidding. he has 4,480 followers

xpost

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=chockers&defid=3880404

he also mentioned that he won the debate according to "every poll" and it's a "great honer"

lol curtis

So what I don't really get is this. Is the National Review crowd so fervently anti-Trump because a) they think he would be a bad President, or b) they think his nomination would mean the Democrats would win up and down the ticket? Or is it both?

Clinton is so (seemingly) phony and (definitely) calculating that I really do think trying to out maneuver Trump on stage would be like trying to fight a rabid dog. He's got nothing to lose and steamrolls right over any facts/arguments. His strategy is to just shut things down, either via insult or by stonewalling. Meanwhile, her amped laugh is, shall we say, not her strongest suit - does Trump ever laugh? just that grimace, right? - and when Clinton gets tough she both ends up over-exaggerating for effect and hurting some of her lefty support. Plus, they've travelled in similar social/economic circles for some time, which makes her look worse than it does Trump. And Trump I don't thing will pull punches because he's debating a woman, especially since it hasn't really hurt him so far.

As has seemed likely from the start but definitely the last few months, Dem turnout will be key to Clinton's victory, not anything she says or doesn't say to counter Trump. They're both known quantities, in a sense, at different ends of the DGAF spectrum. And further to that point, getting back the senate is essential. I wish there was more noise on that front.

(Like, how does she counter Trump and not come off like Gore in that first debate v. Bush?)