And, horribly, it’d work in his favour.
It doesn’t really matter. The overwhelming majority of voters do not read the record carefully and do not process it through logical analysis. They vote on emotion and image. Clinton’s moment of truth was in 2002,
when she voted for the war (while weaseling about it) thus being either complicit in a war crime and a national disaster, or seriously incompetent. Trump’s moment of truth was going into the lion’s den and slagging the lions to their faces about their war, regardless of his prior position. (Remember, media-sanctified JEB! was still saying it was the Right Thing.) When I saw that I began wondering how the hell we are going to get through a Trump presidency, because that’s what seems to be coming.
It seems to me that trying to criticize Trump on policy is self-defeating because in doing so you must agree that his barely coherent ramblings constitute policy. Which is especially bad when you put said ramblings on equal ground with the voting record of an experienced officeholder.
Actually, do we have any evidence that Trump has ever voted for anything? His name never appeared on a ballot previously, so it would seem to be out of character. Or does he pay people to handle that for him?
I recall that at some point the conventional wisdom was the governors had better presidential odds than those in congress because they didn’t have voting records. Every voting record can be presented as a bad one:
“Didn’t you vote against funding for kids with cancer”
“Well, the bill did create a new program to fund cancer research but it closed down three other programs that were effective…”
“TOO MANY WORDS! YOU VOTED TO GIVE KIDS CANCER”
I think not having a voting record to be criticized on is just an advantage Trump has. Having a predictive text engine where his brain would normally be should be enough of a disadvantage to cancel that out, you would think. I maintain that all Clinton has to do to win is present something worth voting for. But I don’t see the point in trying to say the Trump is bad. We’ve had a year of that and the consequence was he won.
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Yes, you’d think. But the level of discourse surrounding elections tends to assume that candidates are, on a basic level, sensible people. Possibly misguided or dishonest, but sane. It it understood that you’re supposed to look for mistakes or contradictions in their plans or past actions, and that the candidates should be capable of feeling enough shame and empathy to be affected by such revelations in some way. And when this fails, there’s no plan B. There’s no acceptable way of dealing with somebody as outrageous as Trump. I guess in software development terms this would be a failure to sanitize inputs: we’re treating candidates as sensible without making sure that they actually are sensible beforehand.
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By an “ad that stoops this low”, you mean one that literally just shows clips of other people saying things of their own free will?
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They also tend to agree on enabling their corporate cronies to loot the Treasury.
The only places in which they strongly disagree are on the issues that rich people don’t have a united interest in. Strange, that.
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You underestimate people’s ability to gloss over details and just focus on the fact ‘he’s not a politician so politicians hate him.’
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This ad is the ad I’ve been waiting for since the beginning of this debacle that we’re calling a primary. It may not be great for Hillary in the long term but, as comedy, it’s pretty good. I wish the music had been more … subtle.
On the other hand, this is the clown party the GOP has been putting down payments on so I guess it kind of deserved a clowny tune.
In terms of whether or not this wins votes from Trump’s base, I don’t think that’s what Hillary’s campaign is going for with this video. She’s going for the anyone-but-Trump contingent from the Republican voter pool. It may in fact be a really good move. If that pool is big enough and doesn’t have too much overlap with the anyone-but-Hillary contingent.
(Disclaimer: I support Pricklepants 2016.)
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My first skim-read of that was, “Poutine Proceedings”, and I thought, “Well, yeah, if she brought the poutine, I’d hug her, too.”
I hope America can regain its ability to carry on an adult conversation and enact adult policies (and not this most recent spate of openly discriminatory bathroom bills), but I expect that process to be generational if it returns at all.
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And my point was that’s actually false and there’s evidence to that fact.
Hillary didn’t advocate sending troops into Libya or Syria (against ISIS), Trump did. He also advocated stealing their oil and killing the families of terrorists.
I think the only basis for the claim he’s less of a hawk than Hillary is the fact that his policy is vague enough that you can cherry pick from both sides. But with his strong-man routine I find it very unlikely that he’d ever back down if he felt challenged.
That is why his supporters like him. Making stodgy party poopers lose their cool makes him look like one of the Monkees…
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I think we have to leave the measure at which has actually voted in favour of or as Secretary maneuvered interest such that war in support of those interests was had.
Trump’s peeps claim he isn’t serious, and holding people to account for crazy tweets is so 2015.
Whereas Clinton is a guaranteed war-hawk, blood on the talons.
If war is your thing, or rather, if war is your issue and you want less of it, Trump represents low chance, Clinton, no chance.
If war is your thing, if you’re a single-issue voter and you definitely want more of the wars, a vote for Clinton is the only way to go.
Why’s that crazy? When all that occurred the thing that most stuck out about it was the fact Hillary never took a position on any of it. She could have made an announcement declaring that it was a private matter and they were going to deal with it themselves or anything to present her disdain at the situation. (But for all I know maybe their marriage works like that…) Either way my take away was a woman who is willing to place her political career above that of her marriage, and that to me is not someone I want to be president.
So by that measure Bernie Sanders is more of a hawk than Trump.
Not really. Clinton isn’t so much a war-hawk as an interventionist. If there’s something really nasty going on in another country (which there certainly was in Libya and Syria) she’ll try to fix it and the military is one of the tools she’ll use.
But while she voted for the Iraq war I really doubt she would have started it herself.
Trump on the other hand seems to see the military as a tool for bullying and maintaining respect. I could really see him starting a war just to intimidate the rest of the world. And if something like the invasion of Crimea happened on his watch Trump is way more likely to intervene with a bunch of red lines to re-establish American dominance. He very easily could have ended up in semi-open military conflict with Russia.
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Sorry, my use of “crazy” wasn’t referring to my mother-in-law or her political beliefs. I was saying that crazily enough, my elderly mother-in-law had the same feeling about Hillary as lamaranagram’s 97yo grandmother. I just thought it interesting that two elderly ladies said virtually the same thing, verbatim, about Hillary. (And for what it’s worth, she made it pretty clear at the time, outright, that it was a private matter and that impeachment was ridiculous)
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According to CLinton and company there are not going to be any progressive options to vote for, so what was your point again? You prefer a slow death, got it.
LoL, a rose eh? Reminds me of that time I used diplomacy to beat a man to death with a 2x4.
Lots of marriages survive infidelity. Just because Hillary didn’t publicly berate Bill doesn’t mean she was fine with it. According to Bill’s memoirs he actually got booted out of the Lincoln bedroom and had to sleep on the couch while the two worked things out. But honestly it shouldn’t matter whether Hillary was OK with Bill’s cheating or not, because how they conduct their marriage is really no one else’s business.
I still can’t understand why anyone who cares about marital fidelity would even consider voting for Trump considering that he’s been serially unfaithful to a series of spouses. It’s almost like women are held to a completely different standard of behavior…
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Hey hey, that’s an insult to the Monkees!
Back on topic: I still don’t think it will be enough to point out Trump’s shortcomings…as amusing as that is. Hillary is going to have to give Independents and Sanders Democrats more of a reason to vote for her than “I’m not Trump.” Hopefully she will.
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But isn’t picking a fight over tariffs a time-honored way to increase war risk?
