USA Politics

Mosh said:
Not really. Energy isn't the reason Trump is winning.
Click to expand...

It's a massive reason. He gained a ton of momentum with the GOP butting heads against each other and ignoring him. Momentum doesn't come out of nowhere, Trump campaigns' energy and its ability to hit a cord with people from a sentimental (and not rational) level is the reason he's as strong as he is.

LooseCannon said:
Energy only helps with one of those three things and organization is way more important than energy in getting out the vote. If energy won elections, Bernie would be the nominee. None of the other crap made a difference other than Bernie & bros could not convince more people to vote for him than Hillary..
Click to expand...

You say that like the playing field was fair for Bernie. It wasn't. DNC was conspiring against him. And the media portrayed him as an impossible long shot even when he cut Hillary's lead over himself significantly. In the end he lost, but not by nearly as much as it was projected to be.

Bernie would do a hell of a better job bringing people out to vote than Hillary does, too. That was one of his biggest selling points. And likely the main reason he was doing better against Trump than Hillary in the polls.
 
Last edited:
John Oliver on the RNC (starts at 8:20): click
The end with Newt Gingrich is really horrible (fact vs feeling). So much ignorance out there.
 
Last edited:
The Flash said:
You say that like the playing field was fair for Bernie. It wasn't. DNC was conspiring against him. And the media portrayed him as an impossible long shot even when he cut Hillary's lead over himself significantly. In the end he lost, but not by nearly as much as it was projected to be.
Click to expand...
Bernie was an impossible long shot. And the DNC may have not wanted him to win, but in the end, if enough people had shown up to vote for him, he sure would have. Bernie was primarily competitive in states that did not have primaries, where the winning is done by getting people out to vote. Energy counts more in caucuses, where small numbers of people can dominate as long as they 1. don't have a job/something to occupy their time and 2. are willing to wait a really long time in order to cast their ballot.

3.7 million more Democrats voted for HRC than Bernie. Almost 10% of the total. The same margin by which No won the Scotland referendum. A larger margin of victory than Obama claimed over Mitt Romney and very close to his margin over McCain. In other words, this was a firm drubbing, and Hillary also came very close to winning without the user of superdelegates (she was officially awarded 2205 delegates of the needed 2382).

While the leader of the DNC might have preferred Hillary, if you read the stories about what happened in the DNC, Wasserman-Schultz consistently isolated herself and the DNC kept doing its job. They never miscounted or undercounted Bernie votes. They never issued decisions that would make it so Bernie Bros were turned away at the polling stations. Bernie couldn't hang with Hillary. Period.

If Bernie had won, the independent swing that's currently developing very likely would not have developed. One of the key findings in a series of polls is that Hillary's favourability ratings have improved by about 10% (putting her only a few points under water) compared to Trump, which stayed the same or even dropped a bit. Those favourability ratings are massively important when looking at if swing voters will swing.

And finally, Trump is getting his butt kicked by Khizr Khan in the media.
 
LooseCannon said:
One of the key findings in a series of polls is that Hillary's favourability ratings have improved by about 10% (putting her only a few points under water) compared to Trump, which stayed the same or even dropped a bit. Those favourability ratings are massively important when looking at if swing voters will swing.
Click to expand...
Do people still trust polls? No poll has been anywhere near accurate in the UK for years aside from exit polls at the last two general elections
 
I'm starting to notice more and more that it's not so much that Trump is the problem, it's his ravenous supporters.
 
bearfan said:
Lying sacks of shit .. both of them
Click to expand...
You have to hand it to Trump, though. Hillary lying about her emails is a surefire win for a handful of news cycles if he isn't a gigantic shitbag to the Khans. Fucking up that badly takes effort.
 
The thing that gets under my skin about this is that the left seem to believe that the family cannot be criticised in any manner. Sure, Trump's criticism is basically conspiracy-theory tier shit spewing, but just because you lost a loved one does not mean you cannot be criticised. I lost my granddad 7 or so years ago, does that mean I don't deserve to be criticised? Of course not. Trump never directly attacked the soldier who perished, he simply thought the attack levied towards him by the family was a publicity stunt. It could be, but even if it was, it requires a lot of inductive reasoning for it to be true, which defeats the purpose of the argument.
 
RTC said:
is that the left
Click to expand...
Wasn't aware John McCain, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan were part of the left. Hell, even Chris Christie has said it's wrong to criticize the family. Thanks for that.

RTC said:
I lost my granddad 7 or so years ago, does that mean I don't deserve to be criticised?
Click to expand...
For those who participate in the mythos of American exceptionalism, soldiers who lay down their lives for the cause are essentially sanctified. It's a huge no-no in American politics. Bush never got angry at the mothers who lost their sons and daughters overseas, no matter how furious they are, Hillary has been very respectful of the two Benghazi mothers that have criticised him. It's...it's really big in American politics. I don't have another way to describe it. You just don't do it.

RTC said:
Trump never directly attacked the soldier who perished, he simply thought the attack levied towards him by the family was a publicity stunt.
Click to expand...
Wrong. Trump first attacked their religion, by saying that Mrs. Khan wasn't allowed to speak because she's Muslim. Then he complained that he was attacked rather viciously. And to be sure, the Khans have been firmly anti-Trump in their public speaking, which explains why they were on that stage to begin with. But they have a few pretty good reasons to be against Trump. Mr Khan had a pretty strong question when he asked if Trump has ever read the Constitution - and he has been equally as strong in calling on Republicans to repudiate Trump altogether.
 
As far as I've seen, of all the Trump gaffes this one has upset the right the most.
 
LooseCannon said:
Wasn't aware John McCain, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan were part of the left. Hell, even Chris Christie has said it's wrong to criticize the family. Thanks for that.
Click to expand...

It's MOSTLY the left. Many people on the right just think it's Trump having another one of his moments again. Which it is.

For those who participate in the mythos of American exceptionalism, soldiers who lay down their lives for the cause are essentially sanctified. It's a huge no-no in American politics. Bush never got angry at the mothers who lost their sons and daughters overseas, no matter how furious they are, Hillary has been very respectful of the two Benghazi mothers that have criticised him. It's...it's really big in American politics. I don't have another way to describe it. You just don't do it.
Click to expand...

I understand there's a difference between what those families went through with regards to deaths at a young age on the battlefield, whereas my granddad died at 83 from pneumonia, but people need to understand there's also a difference between people actually disrespecting the soldier (which I have seen some conservatives do, and they're scumbags, especially hearing the story of the man who gave his life for America), and criticising the family for what they did at the DNC. Sure, Trump's criticism is stupid, but there's a difference between bad criticism and criticism being off-limits, no matter how warranted it is. I see many people treating this situation as the latter, when in actuality, you can criticise Trump without having to resort to such aggressive protectionism of the family in question.

Wrong. Trump first attacked their religion, by saying that Mrs. Khan wasn't allowed to speak because she's Muslim. Then he complained that he was attacked rather viciously. And to be sure, the Khans have been firmly anti-Trump in their public speaking, which explains why they were on that stage to begin with. But they have a few pretty good reasons to be against Trump. Mr Khan had a pretty strong question when he asked if Trump has ever read the Constitution - and he has been equally as strong in calling on Republicans to repudiate Trump altogether.
Click to expand...

I don't care who it is, what background he came from, or what ideologies he subscribed to, anyone who sacrificed their life for their friends on the battlefield is a hero. That's Trump's position on Khan also. His problem has not been with Khan, his problem has been with Islam as a collective, which is what caused him to jump to a silly conclusion and get him into this mess.
 
RTC said:
It's MOSTLY the left. Many people on the right just think it's Trump having another one of his moments again. Which it is.
Click to expand...
No, it's pretty much everyone right now. The extreme right is cheering on Trump, especially since some of his surrogates (like Roger Stone) are suggesting the Khans are members of the Muslim Brotherhood. The extreme left, meanwhile, is grumbling about the Iraq War even being a thing, and probably blaming Hillary for it to a certain extent.

It should be noted that a Trump spokesperson went on CNN last night and bizarrely blamed Captain Khan's death on Obama's policies, even though Obama was not even in the US Senate in 2004. The Trump campaign is desperate to spin this away from them - until Trump speaks.[/quote]

RTC said:
pneumonia, but people need to understand there's also a difference between people actually disrespecting the soldier (which I have seen some conservatives do, and they're scumbags, especially hearing the story of the man who gave his life for America), and criticising the family for what they did at the DNC.
Click to expand...
People don't need to understand that, at all, actually. It's not the fact that Trump responded to Khan - it's the tone by which he did it. If he had said something like, "I feel for the Khans, whose son is an American hero. But I have to tell Mr. Khan that I have read the Constitution, and my policies reflect my understanding of both it and our current security situation" then he would have been fine. It's interesting that you suggest that the criticism is the crux of the issue, when it isn't. As I have noted before, other major US political figures have found ways to disagree with people respectfully. Trump did not have any respect for the Khans when he began his onslaught - but when it comes to the families of those who have sacrificed in war, in US politics, respect is damn near required, even if you want to disagree with them.

It reminds me of this: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/welch-mccarthy.html
 
Is this a conspiracy theory, a bit of mud slinging or is Clinton genuinely unfit?
 
More email fun with Hillary and a forthcoming new batch of 57 lies about it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/10/u...n-foundation-and-state-dept-overlap.html?_r=0

WASHINGTON — A new batch of State Department emails released Tuesday showed the close and sometimes overlapping interests between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department when Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state.
The documents raised new questions about whether the charitable foundation worked to reward its donors with access and influence at the State Department, a charge that Mrs. Clinton has faced in the past and has always denied.
In one email exchange, for instance, an executive at the Clinton Foundation in 2009 sought to put a billionaire donor in touch with the United States ambassador to Lebanon because of the donor’s interests there.
In another email, the foundation appeared to push aides to Mrs. Clinton to help find a job for a foundation associate. Her aides indicated that the department was working on the request.
Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign, which has been shadowed for 17 months by the controversy over the private email server she used exclusively while at the State Department, said that the emails released Tuesday had no bearing on the foundation’s work.
The State Department turned the new emails over to a conservative advocacy group, Judicial Watch, as part of a lawsuit that the group brought under the Freedom of Information Act.
The documents included 44 emails that were not among some 55,000 pages of emails that Mrs. Clinton had previously given to the State Department, which she said represented all her “work-related” emails. The document release centers on discussions between Mrs. Clinton’s aides and Clinton Foundation executives about a number of donors and associates with interests before the State Department.
Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch, charged that Mrs. Clinton “hid” the documents from the public because they appeared to contradict her official pledge in 2009 to remove herself from Clinton Foundation business while leading the State Department.
The documents indicate, he said in a telephone interview, that “the State Department and the Clinton Foundation worked hand in hand in terms of policy and donor effort.”
“There was no daylight between the two under Mrs. Clinton, and this was contrary to her promises,” he added.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top