Calling him a Commie was the least of the problems in the GOP’s oppo research, and you’ll note that I didn’t bring that up. It was the rape porn that was the issue I mentioned, and the other issues like collecting unemployment and stealing power from a neighbor for years, cheering along to anti-American propaganda at a Sandinista rally, and a whole lot more that were an issue. Clinton went really, really easy on him in the primary for how hard she could have hit him. Trump and the GOP would have torn him to pieces over a lot of it. Also almost all Americans are economically illiterate and his policies scared the carp out of many voting Dems and independents, even if the tiny number of left-leaning educated voters were informed. You can’t win an election in the US on the educated left wing vote, since that’s like 10% of the voting populace and the stuff we like is anathema to 80% of the voting populace for tribal/emotional/propagandistic misinformation reasons and takes a whole lot of work to win people over to. This election should make it abundantly clear that a huge segment of the voting populace don’t even consider policy when voting.
Beyond that the corporate media treated Clinton fairly gently and Sanders as the unhinged lunatic outsider. That would have only gone to extremes in the general, and the Republicans know how to play the media against left wingers with great skill.
I wouldn’t say Sanders would lose. I voted for him, donated to his campaign, and really wanted him to beat Clinton and run in the general. But there’s no reason to assume he’d have won in the general with the major issues of a hostile media, lukewarm party support, a poorly informed and poorly educated populace propagandized to fear most of what he stood for, the gang rape fic he wrote, his being on unemployment until he was 30 and stealing power from his neighbor, his work to send nuclear waste to hispanic communities in NM (the GOP had a “environmental racist” campaign and rhetoric prepared), and a lot more that hadn’t come up in the primaries but would have in the general. They had a lot more oppo research built up on Sanders than Clinton.
Sanders still lost PA in the primary after winning Michigan. His win would require a huge shift toward him from Trump and given the attitudes of Trump voters I doubt he could overcome people that think the Dow Jones went down while Obama was in office and that millions of illegal immigrants voted in the election.
You can say they are fringe but polls post election show people identifying as having voted for Trump believe these things at around 90% response rate.
I maintain he would do better but I just don’t see overcoming Trump when literally nothing Sanders says would matter aside from the things he agreed with Trump on.
Sanders was a Castro supporter which would have likely nailed him in FL. No saying if there were missing voters in the Rust Belt that would have gone for Sanders. Maybe, but it’s certainly not a known. There were so many factors that never came into play in the general that the outcome’s unknowable, with some reasons Sanders would have done better:
easier job of faking being outsider, more passionate rhetoric, being a male not facing misogyny, etc.
and other negatives:
being a Jew in a US that still has a lot of buried anti-Semitism, being on video a Sandinista supporter at a rally where “death to the Yankees” was being chanted, the Castro support, a generic fear of “socialism” and tax hikes among the populace, and the fact that he wrote some seriously sick rape porn. That rape porn one, you can’t just write that off.
Didn’t seem like people gave a shit about the actual assaults Trymp has carried out and Sanders would probably have been a beneficiary of the double standards that harmed Clinton.
Suffer in FL? Who cares? Clinton lost there anyway. The only place I think he might have lost than Clinton won was VA. Especially since I doubt his VP pick would have been Kaine.
The problem is if your only strategy is beating Obama numbers it’s no even a little close to a sure thing. Clinton got as many votes in PA as Obama in 2012, and his victory in 2008 wasn’t going to be repeated by Sanders.
Trump supporters are right wing authoritarians who really DGAF about their leader’s flaws. If Dear Leader is a pervy, nitwit nutcase or anything else that makes Dear Leader less appealing to libtards, since the Trump supporter’s main goal was to stick it to the minorities and esp. the libtards, they’ll be cool with it. It was a prime motivation, hence the endless cheering of “liberal tears” now.
Sanders needed to draw from a different crowd who are much more sensitive to things like someone writing gang rape fantasies.
But it is a moot point and my only real point is that that alternate history’s got enough variables and unknowns that we can’t take Sanders’ winning outcome for granted as a way to justify not taking Clinton’s email server issues more seriously. If Comey hadn’t ratfucked Clinton or a few other external factors hadn’t come into play like Putin trying to swing the election we’d be talking about Clinton’s strategy working and pointing to the high popular vote and turnout as a mandate.
Apparently Trump has nurtured this nuclear policy, unlike pretty much any other of his opinions, for decades.
And it probably doesn’t mean what you think it means:
… which is worse. The MAD doctrine can still be assumed to work even with someone like Trump holding the launch codes (it might take an aide to explain to him that the attendance of his rallies would really drop following a nuclear exchange with Russia), but if the two countries that can deter each other’s use of nuclear weapons start acting as allies, the rest of the world is fucked. If the use of any nuclear weapon does not automatically mean the end of the world, you can expect many more Hiroshimas and Nagasakis, possibly in the form of quid pro quo deals (Trump likes deals, right?): “you can nuke Iran if we can nuke Poland”. Think Molotov-Ribbentrop on steroids.
Nope. Trump is actually still a moron. It’s just our country is setup in such a way that a minority of even bigger morons can decide the election, and yet even stupider people will confirm it, even though the whole point of the modern electoral college is assumed to be to prevent people like trump from becoming president.
[quote=“bucaneer, post:177, topic:91670”]Think Molotov-Ribbentrop on steroids.
[/quote]
Yup. There’s been a lot of worried rhetoric about how criticisms of Putin’s role in empowering Trump are symptomatic of a New Cold War, but it’s really far worse since we’re seeing the makings of a new Molotov-Ribbentrop. The rest of the world is in a really sketchy situation when the US and Russia are both run by right-wing nationalist autocrat buddies.
I’m just hoping for a self-centered, irresponsible incompetent that will face major challenges and once in a while incompetently stumble completely by accident on actions that aren’t totally the worst.
The key to accepting the ongoing and unprecedented dangers and crises of a Trump presidency is to just keep lowering your standards. Also being a straight white male helps a bunch.
