No. With Trump the problem will be having many expectations realized.
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For me, there are a number of Republican candidates that would have relieved enough pressure for me to vote third party like I ordinarily do. I hate the binary system; I hate not voting my conscience. That’s why this burns so much, and articles like the ones posted above just make it worse.
I live in North Carolina. My vote counts here in a real way. It is possible for this state to turn blue for the right candidate (Obama in 2008, for instance), but if it goes to HRC in 2016 it will be by the skin of our teeth. People ought to have a more conciliatory message to voters like me, instead of gloating about how we have to vote for HRC because Trump, and inventing a false voice for HRC that tells us how much contempt she has for us. I think many of us suspect that contempt is real, even if the article is satire.
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I would expect Trump to be much like GWB in office, except with Tea Party cabinet members instead of “just” GOP cabinet members.
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I nominally agree with this idea, but then I remember thinking Trump wouldn’t get this far-- he keeps surprising me. I don’t imagine the havoc he could wreak is locking up immigrants or waging war, but completely screwing up treaties and botching all diplomatic relations, or at the very least being really ineffectual since he has no experience with governance. Whether you look at his business history for guidance here, or the weird stuff he’s said about pulling out of treaties, it isn’t pretty.
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Have you not read @Modusoperandi continuing sarcast-fest?
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Well, I’ve been trying to lower mine for a while now. Damn that Bernie Sanders for getting them up for a bit!
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I think one of our bigger differences is that while I voted for the guy and really wanted Sanders to win, I had minimal expectations that he’d ever win, esp. when his campaign never gave the impression of a possibility of success. So when he didn’t, it was what I’d assumed would happen and I was more briefly depressed than angry. The US electoral system is so bad is just plain stupid, and the party systems are irreparably broken, and it would take Constitutional amendments to fix them. The only problem is at this point if we tried to fix it we’d get moneyed interests installing fascism as a replacement. So we’re in an ossified not-nearly-as-bad-as-it-could-be-but-really-broken system that rewards rural states, limits progress, and creates lesser-of-two-evil elections as our fate. I sometimes think I might be cynical, but reality keeps telling me I’m really just not cynical enough.
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That’s not what I said at all.
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Oh come on now, can’t you see he has a shibboleth to topple?!
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Not just the right wing.
The left seems to be infected with the idea that Clinton is untrustworthy and will not even try to keep her election promises, despite decades of evidence (including a Senate career) to the contrary. I think a male candidate with her record would not be running into the problems with the left that she is.
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Again, I’m gonna have to disagree. There are plenty of leftist arguments against her that aren’t sexist. I myself would not support a candidate with her record. But I’m sure there are some on the left who dislike her because she’s a woman, even if they won’t admit that to themselves. I just don’t think all attacks from the left, or a majority are, while I do think the majority on the right are more likely to be driven by misogyny.
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One of MANY links from @RandomInternetPerson’s link above: Anne Frank’s step sister says “I think he is acting like another Hitler by inciting racism.”
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Since her current platform is (finally!) essentially Sanders’ platform, we are left with “feelings” by many that she has no intention of trying to implement this platform. In the absence of concrete evidence of this, and positive statements upthread about O’Malley (who is not politically to the left of Clinton), prejudice is not an unnatural conclusion.
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Here is me driving to the polls on Tuesday, November 8, 2016 to vote for Hillary Clinton - I’d better walk…
I am never voting Demo or Repub again. Take off and nuke them from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure.
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I agree that it is probably unlikely that he would be literally as bad as Hitler. (Though that belief is tempered by the strong suspicion that there were Germans in the 1920s and '30s who didn’t believe it could possibly get all that bad with Hitler at the helm.)
But he’s a violent, brutally stupid narcissist who is closer than most rational people would like to being handed the keys to the most powerful military in the world, not to mention the nuclear arsenal. And he’s seeking the job in bad faith.
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I haven’t voted for a major party candidate for president since 1992. Even then I was only voting against Bush. It should surprise no one that when you allow them to take you for granted, they will take you for granted. You will never get better than HRC or Trump if you let them force you to vote for HRC or Trump.
I’m torn between Johnson and writing in my wife, because I am attracted to her pro-rice and beans with pork chops platform.
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Well, “unlikely”. It depends what you mean by that. Trump would consider creating a registry of Muslims. I think a few domestic terror attacks by Muslims could convince him to start camps. This is a guy who speaks wistfully about police brutalizing people who protest government policy. I imagine those camps would be more like WW2 American internment camps and less like WW2 German concentration camps which would be… better? Not Hilter, I guess?
So what are the odds of that? Impossible to say, but given that terrorist groups would also be aware of this possibility and would be specifically trying to plan and fund attacks in order to make it happen, I’d put it way over 1%. Personally, cynical me puts terror attacks designed to try to spur backlash against Muslims by Trump at 50% or more, and Trump reacting by extreme measures at pretty good if there are three attacks inside a few months (if I were a terrorist group, that’s what I’d be trying to do - bomb something big, and then a series of small bombings a week apart).
So yeah, I’d say unlikely (as in, less than 50%) but not unthinkable at all.
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The failure to do this is the clearest evidence that Bin Laden was a strategic idiot, BTW. If he’d known what he was doing, 9/11 would’ve been followed by constant micro-attacks (just big enough to attract major press coverage) for a year or two.
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Yeah, it’s probably harder to do than we think. People always say stuff like, “You can’t stop a lone person bent on destruction” and it’s true that if you imagine this perfectly reasonable person who is careful, doesn’t feel the need for any social contact, and is truly motivated simply by killing or destroying then that person would be able to do some real damage. But that’s a fictional person. Getting real people to really give up their lives for a cause isn’t that easy. And people who are willing to do it are probably mostly not actually very clear-headed.
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