Tag Archives: 2016 Election

06.07.16
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It’s Different Now: What Buzzfeed Gets About 2016

Ullrich has strong feelings about the way Hitler came to power in January 1933, enthroned by a ‘sinister plot’ of stupid elite politicians just at the moment when the Nazis were at last losing strength. It didn’t have to happen. He constantly reminds his readers that Hitler didn’t reach the chancellorship by his own efforts, but was put there by supercilious idiots who assumed they could manage this vulgarian. ‘We engaged him for our ends,’ said the despicable Franz von Papen. A year later, in the Night of the Long Knives, von Papen was grovelling to save his own neck.

Neal Ascherson, London Review of Books, June 2nd 2016

“What protects us in this country against big mistakes being made is the structure, the Constitution, the institutions,” McConnell told CBS News last month. “No matter how unusual a personality may be who gets elected to office, there are constraints in this country. You don’t get to do anything you want to.”

via Talking Points Memo

Neal Ascherson, the Scottish travel writer, wrote The Black Sea, which is my favorite kind of history book. It shows the long scope, how areas change slowly (and then very quickly) through migration, demographics, and the slow glacial push of cultural shifts becoming norms, and of violent revolutions mutating slowly into evolutions. It’s the long view of history, the kind that understands there aren’t black lines dividing epochs and periods, much in the same way that Masters of Empire explores how native culture didn’t hit a quick reboot when the Europeans arrived, and that understands (as we’ve argued) that the misery of Syria is part of the long night of Ottoman dissolution.

We tend, in this country at least, to see history as buried, and something that doesn’t impact us. It’s sort of the national myth, and it relies heavily on cognitive dissonance, since it is clear that our major issues still spring from the legacy of slavery and the historical memory and political divide of the Civil War. But we admire amnesia, and always look forward. This was accelerated by the 24-hr news cycle, and made manifest in the 24-second news cycle. When discussing yesterday’s tweets marks bloggers such as this one as hopelessly behind the times, understanding how we got to this point is an exercise in futility.

This isn’t just a little rant either; a lack of historical knowledge of American political trends has helped lead to the rise of the first openly white nationalist campaign we’ve seen in modern times. The elite media, and most of the non-elite, failed to understand how 40 years of Reaganite nonsense, 60 years of conservative takeover, and 150 years of post-Civil War resentment could factor into today’s election, and help facilitate the rise of Donald Trump. We live in the immediate present, which is where a man as completely removed from the truth as Trump thrives, and why he has, until the last week, managed to get away with whatever he wanted. It’s in this eternal present that it was believed that a man like Donald Trump couldn’t win simply because he was a man like Donald Trump. This is an ahistoric tautology, in the literal sense, because it ignores the factors that enabled his victory. It was obvious in August that he was appealing to the most violent lizard part of a broken party, one torn apart by geographic and demographic pressures. But he was still treated like a joke.

Now, as he shatters all norms, threatening to “look into” judges and to jail his likely opponent should he win (a statement that should be breathtaking, but barely makes noise), we wonder how we got here, and how we should react. It’s why it is interesting that Buzzfeed, who has generally symbolized the memory-free nonsense of the internet, has broken ties with the RNC over Trump’s nomination. (It should be noted that over the last 5 years BuzzFeed has created some excellent journalism, but its reputation is still that of the constant present, a man seeing the sunrise every morning and wondering what he could possibly be seeing.)

BuzzFeed, which accepts ads from GOP and Democratic candidates, had a $1.3 million ad deal with the RNC, but cancelled it, because Trump is beyond the pale. In a statement, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti said:

The tone and substance of his campaign are unique in the history of modern US politics. Trump advocates banning Muslims from traveling to the United States, he’s threatened to limit the free press, and made offensive statements toward women, immigrants, descendants of immigrants, and foreign nationals.

(cont)

We don’t need to and do not expect to agree with the positions or values of all our advertisers. And as you know, there is a wall between our business and editorial operations. This decision to cancel this ad buy will have no influence on our continuing coverage of the campaign.

We certainly don’t like to turn away revenue that funds all the important work we do across the company. However, in some cases we must make business exceptions: we don’t run cigarette ads because they are hazardous to our health, and we won’t accept Trump ads for the exact same reason.

This is a big deal. This is exactly how the media should be covering Trump. We’ve never had anything like this in our modern history, and he shouldn’t be treated as just another nominee, albeit a flamboyant one. We’re at a hinge in our country’s history. It could go either way.

I began this piece with a few quotes, one from a book review about how Hitler’s rise to power was facilitated by old-guard politicians who assumed they could let him ride popular anger into office but then control him for their ends, and one by Mitch McConnell, who represents Republicans who think the same thing about Trump. The thrust of the TPM article is that the old guard’s main pledge is that sure, Trump might be an authoritarian monster, but once he’s in office we’ll be able to control him.

This isn’t to say that Trump is Hitler. This isn’t Germany in 1933. It’s the United States in 2016, a country that isn’t sure of itself, feels like its best days are behind, and is sliding along a weird trail of economic dislocation and historical amnesia. That’s bad enough, and it can get much worse. That we have even gotten to this point shows how much worse it can get. Not understanding how we got here, and ignoring everything except tomorrow’s news, creates the possibility to slip past the point of no return.

06.06.16
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Trump’s “My African-American”: The Problem Isn’t The Possessive; It’s The Singular

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Pictured somewhere: Trump’s black support. Can you find him???? Image from whereswaldoemotionally.blogspot.com

So, the weekend was dominated, as it should be, by Donald Trump’s not-bizarre insistence that the judge in his fraud case is biased against him because he’s not just Mexican, but really super Mexican. To say this line of thinking should be disqualifying is self-evident, but the real disqualifications are, once again, just how dumb and ill-informed Trump sounds dumb and ill-informed Trump sounds (and is!) when talking about anything other than his business acumen.

These comments caused some fainting in green rooms across the country, as the media tries to reconcile their belief that any bad thing a politician says is a gaffe with the reality that Trump is running a white nationalist campaign based on ignorance and petty grievances. To their credit, they actually seem to be coming around to it. Perhaps the best line of the weekend was offered up by Newt Gingrich, who has always managed to find the perfect combination of obsequiousness when he wants power with self-serving self-righteousness. He called Trump’s comments inexcusable, which allows him to maintain independence, but then said that Trump’s comments were the “biggest mistake of the campaign” so far, as if this was a stumble, and not the point of the whole project. But Gingrich gets to seem like a wise Washington hand, as he angles for the Vice Presidency.

Still, that wasn’t the only racial flap. Trump began the weekend by pointing out a black person in the crowd and saying “my African-American.” The man, who wasn’t a Trump supporter, also wasn’t offended, which is fine. He shouldn’t have been. The outcry was over the use of the possessive, which strikes me as silly. Every politician refers to their supporters like that. The real problem is that, when trying to say you have a racially-inclusive campaign, you probably shouldn’t be able to highlight the single minority in your audience. Having a diverse following isn’t Where’s Waldo.

To me, though, the real highlight was when Trump retweeted a picture of black supporters, which turned out to be fake, just a photo pulled off the internet somewhere.   That’s normal, except, dig this: the account he retweeted.

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

“@Don_Vito_08: Thank You Mr. Trump for Standing up for Our Country! JOIN ME ON THE 🚂http://twitter.com/Don_Vito_08/status/739075864793653248/photo/1pic.twitter.com/zgopGvSEen “

7:49 AM – 4 Jun 2016
Eagle-eyed readers will remember that “Don Vito 08” was the same account from which Trump retweeted the famous Melania Trump/Heidi Cruz picture. At the time, I described him thusly: “The attack comes in the form of a reweet from someone who has named himself “Don Vito 08”, which is perfect image of a Trump supporter- sad and lost but with delusions of greatness underscored by violence.”
At this point, we can just count Don Vito 08 as a top campaign advisor.
06.03.16
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Trump’s Security Briefings: The First Real Sign Of the Sweaty Terror

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“On my first day in office…” -Donald Trump

Until now, the fears of a hypothetical Trump presidency- and even just typing that makes me a little woozy– were just that: hypothetical. We’ve all been able to imagine just how scary it would be, given his combination of rampant insecurity, raw egotism, paranoia, and general inability to keep two coherent thoughts in his head at any one time. But now, as the possibility becomes decidedly more real (although demographically unlikely), the actual outlines of just how fearful his win would be begin to take shape.

Hillary Clinton’s excellent attack on him  yesterday, in which she mockingly demonstrated his unfitness to serve (and demonstrating that she knows how to needle him), was just the beginning.  He further elaborated upon his attacks on the judge in his civil case, claiming that merely being of Mexican descent was a conflict of interest with Trump, a truly frightening line of thinking. And today, the Times has a piece by legal experts worried about his contempt for the First Amendment, separation of powers, and more.

But again, those are all still in the realm of “wouldn’t it be bad if he became President?” As he gets closer to the nomination, though, various norms start to take hold, and we see just how grotesque his victory really is. Reuters had the far more interesting story, about how security officials are worried about giving Trump the daily briefings that are traditionally accorded a nominee.

Eight senior security officials told Reuters they had concerns over briefing Trump, whose brash, unpredictable campaign style has been a feature of his rise as an insurgent candidate. Despite their worries, the officials said the “Top Secret” briefing to each candidate would not deviate from the usual format to avoid any appearance of bias.

Now, to be fair, one says that the briefings are more of an overview, and won’t tell him much that he won’t get from reading the paper. And it’s not like he has the intellectual wherewithal to actually explain anything. The briefings can be politically advantageous, because they give a patina of respectability to his rantings (“I’m getting security briefings because they know I’m the smartest. And let me tell you, people, ISIS is bad, ok. And the people doing the briefings are saying, ‘Mr. Trump, you have to save us, crooked Hillary can’t do, you’re the only one who can stop this’, ok?”).

However, it isn’t the politics of it. It’s the fact that people are beginning to really realize how different this is from anything we’ve ever seen, how large a mutation. We have someone who is not just intellectually unfit, or even morally, but tempramentally and emotionally. We have someone who is truly dangerous, and the people tasked with keeping this country safe are genuinely terrified. This needs to be made a much bigger deal. We’re seeing what the actual election of Donald Trump as President means- a complete breakdown of every national apparatus. The media needs to hammer this, to make sure he loses in such a way that completely discredits the terrifying politics of personal resentment.

(Of course, in the story, Rueters also quotes a sneering RNC official who makes an flagrantly dishonest snark about the email scandal, I guess for “balance”. This allows places like The Hill to have headlines reading “US Intelligence Officials Concerned About Briefing Trump, Clinton”. Goddammit, Reuters, and The Hill. This isn’t balance. Both sides aren’t doing it. This only normalizes the most abnormal and scary campaign we’ve ever had.)

 

06.01.16
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Trump The Flim-Flam Man and the Judge: The Only Thing Hillary Needs To Talk About

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Pictured: Donald Trump campaigning for the support of the FOP.

There’s a lot of talk that the Hillary Clinton camp hasn’t yet settled on a narrative about how best to handle the unpredictable ravings of the idiot madman against whom she’ll most likely find herself running. If I may be so bold, I think over the last few days he’s provided the clearest opening, and it comes from a combination of his phony real-estate “schools” and the racism that underpins his campaign.

From The Guardian:

A federal judge has given the world an unprecedented glimpse into the ruthless business practices Donald Trump used to build his business empire.

US district court judge Gonzalo Curiel on Tuesday made public more than 400 pages of Trump University “playbooks” describing how Trump staff should target prospective students’ weaknesses to encourage them to sign up for a $34,995 Gold Elite three-day package.

First off, this is an obvious swindle, and there was some evidence in the GOP primary that this was the best hit on Trump, because it got to the heart of his self-image as a great, world-bestriding businessman. It shows him to be a cheap grifter, hitting the flats for their life savings and skipping town. His string of bankruptcies, and the fact that most of his business now is just licensing his name, deflates the basis of his campaign, showing him to be a cheapjack Lyle Lanley, always just one step ahead of the mob.

It’s also when he lashes out the most, and he did so, in a series of tweets and rants against the judge. This is when people say they are “disappointed” with the decision. Not so our Trump.

Donald J. Trump

✔‎@realDonaldTrump

I have a judge in the Trump University civil case, Gonzalo Curiel (San Diego), who is very unfair. An Obama pick. Totally biased-hates Trump

4:45 PM – 30 May 2016

Donald J. Trump

✔‎@realDonaldTrump

I should have easily won the Trump University case on summary judgement but have a judge, Gonzalo Curiel, who is totally biased against me.

4:55 PM – 30 May 2016

You’ll notice of course that these came within 10 minutes of each other. Not really a temperate person. The Times already noted how disturbing it is to see a Presidential candidate attack in such a personal manner the judicial branch, but for the real horrorshow, let’s go to this part of a speech.

Trump hit back calling Curiel a “hater”, a “total disgrace” and “biased”. “I have a judge who is a hater of Donald Trump. A hater. He’s a hater,” Trump said at a rally near the courthouse in San Diego. “His name is Gonzalo Curiel. And he is not doing the right thing … [He] happens to be, we believe, Mexican.”

See, it’s the last part that really sets this on a whole new level. There is no way to interpret that except to say that Mexicans are bad, and are aligned against Trump, and are therefore aligned against America. It is absolute naked racism. This case in no way involves, say, a border wall, in which case maybe you could make a (still racist!) case that a Mexican judge would be biased. But not in this one.

Curiel, by the way, was born in Indiana.

This is all Hillary needs to do. His attacks on judges show his thin-skin nd wild intemperance. His quote on “happens to be, we believe, Mexican” should be run over and over in every Hispanic market to make sure his numbers never climb. And his obvious swindle, the details of which are now perfectly clear, should be hammered every day. This is a man who sees Americans as a way to feed his ego and his wallet, and sees everyone else as an obstacle to be removed. Between his venality, his absurdity, and his racism, there’s really nothing more to say.

06.01.16
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Donald Trump as Tinpot Strongman

Perfection, of a kind, he was after
And the poetry he wrote was easy to understand;

-Auden, “Epitath on a Tyrant”

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The man is gone, but the hat remains. Image from nakedtourguideprague.com

It’s doubtful that Donald Trump would know who Emomali Rahmon was. To be fair, very few Americans do. I was only vaguely aware of him. He’s the President of Tajikistan, a landlocked country in Central Asia that doesn’t come up very much. It’s not considered one of the world’s happiest places. With borders that touch Afghanistan and the rebellious Xinjiang region of China, not to mention its abutting of Jammu and Kashmir, it is in a fairly rough place in the world, and has never enjoyed much stability in the post-Soviet era. That’s about to change, albeit in a way that makes most people uncomfortable.

Rahmon, the President, successfully passed a ballot referendum that scrapped term limits, as well as lowered the age one could stand for President to 30, which by a great coincidence gives his son the ability to run. It’s instituting a President-for-Life plan, and it worked. A low-information campaign (which mostly talked about vague “changes to the constitution”), coupled with a population weary about politics, helped make the referendum a landslide. With 94.4% of the votes, Rustam, the fresh-faced whelping, now has a clear path to 40 years of power. It’s hard to say democracy died in Tajikistan, as it was never fully born. But it’s easy to see that this is how authoritarians act. They tell you not to worry you weary hearts. They tell you it’ll all be better if you just let them take care of it. They tell you that all you have to do is give them power, and things will be fine.

Donald Trump may never have heard of Emomali Rahmon, but both he and his gruesome campaign head, Paul Manafort, know that playbook by heart. They’ve taken the lessons of him and every other tinpot tyrant that has stumpled across history, and brought them to America.

Continue reading →

05.27.16
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Never Forget: Donald Trump Is A Giant Goddamn Dummy About Climate Change

Canada Wildfire

Tar sands extractions are a good idea with no downsides.

This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temps,and our GW scientists are stuck in ice. Jan 1st, 2014

Not a dime’s worth of difference between Hillary and Donald, right?

Never forget that Donald Trump is a man who is stupid enough to believe that if it is cold out, global warming isn’t real.

Never forget that Donald Trump is so galactically goddamn dumb that he thinks extreme and unprecedented weather events, happening with terrifying regularity, are a sign that everything is fine.

Never forget that Donald Trump is such a peabrained dipshit that he literally believes China invented the idea of global warming in order to bankrupt the US.

It’s not that Donald Trump doesn’t believe in anything. It’s that what he believes in is so gigantically moronic that his environmental plans include pulling out of the Paris climate accords, which he wrongly thinks allows foreigners to dictate our climate policy, and to build the Keystone XL pipeline, which he wrongly thinks will have a positive impact on energy independence. He also thinks he can bring back coal, absent market forces. This proves again that he doesn’t understand how things work, whether it is the fungible nature of the energy market, coal, pipelines in general, the Paris accords, or, of course, anything at all.

Kudos, by the way, to the New York Times for not hedging when covering his idiotic “energy speech”, which he used to show his wholly non-existent bonafides. They actually used terms like “repeatedly denied the established science” and “However, the next president will not have the legal authority to unilaterally rescind the climate rules” and “In fact, at the heart of the Paris Agreement are voluntary pledges put forward by the governments of over 190 nations” to contradict him when he said things that were in opposition to reality. This is a good way to cover his truthless campaign.

But really, I don’t think he’s lying, in this case. I think he is genuinely dumb about everything that can’t make him money, and even that prowess is questionable. He’s a rich moron who believes that being born rich means he has everything figured out, as long as he can filter a newspaper through his brain, and doesn’t have anyone around him who says “Donald, you’re a giant goddamn dummy for thinking that snow in New York in January disproves science. The Northwest Passage is now a real thing, you enormous featherweight pinhead.”  He lies about nearly everything, but on other things, he’s just a genuine tiny-brained mouth-breather who couldn’t shoot himself in the ass with a shotgun in a phone booth.

But, you know, not a dime’s worth of difference.

05.24.16
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Trump and Hillary Poll Numbers: The Bernie Argument

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If Bernie won, you’d be seeing this guy on a lot more GOP ads.

One more political quick hit, and that’s it, I promise.

It’s true that, for the moment, Bernie matches up more favorably against Trump, and has a much higher personal approval rating than does Hillary. I don’t think that would ever change. He genuinely seems likable (though that might be changing a bit), and Hillary has always had problems, partly due to her, largely due to other factors (such as lies, innuendo, and an idiot press). I can’t imagine a scenario where Bernie is less liked than Hillary Clinton.

That said, these numbers, which Sanders supporters use to say he should be the nominee (as opposed to millions of actual voters), don’t take one thing into account: namely, the right wing media has, since Clinton became inevitable, praised Bernie at her expense, and stopped criticizing him. If Sanders was actually winning, and had a shot, you’d hear the word “socialism” 400 times a day. They’d be conflating it with Communism, and calling him “comrade”, and talking about how “it isn’t a coincidence that his rise comes on the 50th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution, and is that what we really want?”, and I promise that you wouldn’t be able to drive through three consecutive counties in this great nation of ours without seeing his face and Stalin’s on the same billboard. If you can’t picture Trump going around saying “Listen, ok, no one knows history better than Trump, and communism was really bad, ok?” then you have a tragic lack of political imagination.

Socialism, thankfully, isn’t as much a poison word for people who grew up after the Cold War. But it still has an emotional sway with millions and millions of people, and if Sanders was the nominee, that’s all you’d be hearing. I don’t know if that would sink him, since he’d also get more airtime to explain himself, and why socialism is not un-American, but a genuine part, the best part, of our economic and cultural heritage. But it’s disingenuous to suggest that polling numbers would be the same if he was closer to the nomination, and the target of the same kind of smear campaign Hillary has been under for 30 years.

05.24.16
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The Ken Starr Times Puffery and The Normalization of the Paranoid

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Remember: this guy was super gross. Image from NYMag

“There are certain tragic dimensions which we all lament,” Mr. Starr said in a panel discussion on the presidency at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.

“That having been said, the idea of this redemptive process afterwards, we have certainly seen that powerfully” in Mr. Clinton’s post-presidency, he continued…

If there is a bigger weasel phrase in history than “tragic dimensions which we all lament”, I don’t think I’ve heard it.

The Times this morning ran a piece on Ken Starr, the sex-obsessed maniac whose pursuit of Bill Clinton helped turn the 90s into the sordid and greasy decade that it was, in an attempt to show that age has mellowed him to the point where he can depersonalize the very recent past. It was also a clinic in the way that scandal, especially that regarding the Clintons, becomes normalized, and how nonsense phrases that mean nothing become a sort of shorthand for the initiated, and a vague synecdoche for everyone else. This isn’t history, either. It’s obviously directly relevant to this year’s campaign.

Continue reading →

05.24.16
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Bernie and The California Debate: A Political Quick Quiz

  1. When Fox News wants to help you out, you are doing something
    1. Right?
    2. Wrong?

It’s probably not a stretch to say that the gracious offer of Fox to host a debate before the Democratic primary is not a 100% good-faith gesture.  Turning it down is a very normal part of politics for Hillary Clinton. She has an insurmountable lead, an attempt to flip the superdelgates is antidemocratic. It moves past populism to personality-politics, which is where the facile and ridiculous “Trump and Bernie” comparisons start to make a sliver of sense, very uncomfortably.

What does Bernie expect out of a Fox News debate? A reasoned argument about the policy differences between them? Or an opportunity to savage Hillary Clinton in front of a large audience, and to play into the Fox/GOP narrative of Hillary being untrustworthy and unlikable, dredging up past “scandals”, and thus, doing Trump’s homework for him? If he expects the former, he’s being naive. My fear, and deep regret, is that he isn’t being naive at all.

05.18.16
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Sanders and the Kentucky Recount

(Note: I really wanted to do some kind of “Sanders” and “Kentucky Fried Recount” joke, but it’s one of those things that sounds like a joke, but it really isn’t, under any scrutiny. It’s just a collection of words that trigger the referential part of your brain. Scientifically, it’s the Family Guy Correlation.)

As The Guardian reports this morning, the Sanders campaign is “mulling” over calling for a recount in the Kentucky primary, an extremely close race. This is, simply put, narcissistic madness.

There is really no good outcome from this. Even if Sanders doesn’t demand a recount, even mulling one over makes the whole thing seem suspect, like the Hillary team and the crooked Democratic Party are trying to steal things, trying to put one over on Sanders and his supporters, the only ones who have a true passion. Everyone else is a hunchbacked pack of Ralph Steadman caricatures, lurching grotesquely hand-in-hand with blood-soaked billionaires, trying to erase the specter of real democracy.

In short, it’s getting ugly. The narrative that Sanders is now pushing- we’re the real voice of the people, despite being outvoted by the millions- has some validity, but not much. His wins are narrow, not just in delegates, but in total votes. And that’s fine: he’s doing amazingly well, and shouldn’t even still be here. But he has triggered something real and genuine, and something important. It’s why I voted for him. He’s highlighting the ur-issues of American politics, the role of money in distorting any electoral equity.

But this narrative comes with inherent dangers, mostly that anyone standing in the way is a counter-revolutionary. Anything that is messy about voting (and much of the system is bizarre and counterproductive) isn’t seen as a glitch to be fixed, but an enemy to be overcome. An enemy put in place to stop the Voice of the People, the popular tribune, the one man that can save us all. And the number one enemy is Hillary Clinton.

That’s why calling for a recount is dangerous. It doesn’t make sense electorally, as virtually no delegates will shift. But it highlights the dangerous game Sanders is playing. He’s trying to negate the votes of millions of people (largely older and minority) that genuinely want Hillary Clinton to be the nominee, by claiming that the real voters want him to be President. He wants to demonstrate that something is being stolen from him, and his most eager supporters are all too willing to believe it.

That isn’t right, and for such a populist campaign, it is weirdly tyrannical. The nomination is mine, because more people cry at my rallies. Their voters don’t count. Only mine do. Sanders should by all means continue his campaign, and keep pushing for genuine progressive policies. But it is possible to do so in a twilight, accepting that he isn’t being robbed, but that the voters of the Democratic Party chose Hillary Clinton. That’s what happens in elections.

As ugly as 2008 was, Hillary moved toward unity. I believe that Bernie can do so, and that he has to in the face of Trump. But this coalescing idea that if Hillary wins it is because she is a thieving harpy will make it harder to win. Remember, this isn’t about the lesser of two evils. It’s about the greater evil being a genuinely epochal disaster, a country-defining tragedy. Fighting the good fight doesn’t mean imagining yourself Spartacus, and demanding a revolt.