2016 Election Thread (My God Kill Me Now)

[BW23]

I may vote Johnson. I don't see it as throwing my vote away. I know he won't win, and it gives Hillary an advantage, but when this two-party system produces these two [expletive] ups, I'll just vote against that system. That's how I view my vote.

[pioneer98]

Arsewipe's praise of Saddam Hussein's methods of keeping law and order -I realize the pace of his manic commentary is hard to keep up with - but it sort of flew under the radar.

Needless to say, we committed a lot of lives, ours and innocent civilians to opposing Saddam, as well as economically-damaging amounts of resources.

FWIW, I opposed the Iraq war, especially the go-it-alone strategy. And am not alone in thinking it was a disaster with long-term effects. That does not mean I am somehow in agreement with the Arse on Saddam. It's a completely reckless comment about a terrible murderous dictator.

Tie this with his views with Putin, and all the other [expletive] he says... I dunno....my gut says he isn't capable of imposing Strongman rule over the US like his buddies Saddam and Putin.... Hell, I don't think he's capable of strongman rule over a country club or hotel (see bankruptcies, Trump U,). But hard to say what he'll do with that sociopathic ego, and the cohorts he cozies up to.

Anyhows, I don't understand how other people (people that openly or effectively support Trump) can reconcile his statements on Saddam Putin with their views on humanity, as well as national security.

The Trump/Russia ties are absolutely bonkers. We've never had anything remotely like this happen in our politics.

It's not the wacky conspiracy that Russia is pulling puppet strings to install Trump as our president. It's just appears that Trump and Russia could be doing favors for each other. It's a classic conflict of interest. Trump needs to resolve the conflict of interest somehow. I wonder if it would be possible to divest all financial ties he has to them. He needs to do that. And if Trump can't separate himself from his ties to Russia he needs to step down as a candidate and let Ted Cruz or someone run. It should be taken that seriously. It's one thing to take campaign donations over the table from some billionaire. It's another thing to appear to be doing favors for one of our biggest geopolitical foes.

[Tim]

As of last week, when head to head Clinton was up ~7. When Johnson and Stein added she was up ~3. I don't see how GJ is taking away from Trump and giving to Clinton. If anything it's the other way

[pioneer98]

Trump: Tribune of Poor White People

Long, very good read. Explains some of the traction Trump has. This is just the first question and answer.

I wrote last week about the new nonfiction book Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance, the Yale Law School graduate who grew up in the poverty and chaos of an Appalachian clan. The book is an American classic, an extraordinary testimony to the brokenness of the white working class, but also its strengths. It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read. With the possible exception of Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic, for Americans who care about politics and the future of our country, Hillbilly Elegy is the most important book of 2016. You cannot understand what’s happening now without first reading J.D. Vance. His book does for poor white people what Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book did for poor black people: give them voice and presence in the public square.

This interview I just did with Vance in two parts (the final question I asked after Trump’s convention speech) shows why.

RD: A friend who moved to West Virginia a couple of years ago tells me that she’s never seen poverty and hopelessness like what’s common there. And she says you can drive through the poorest parts of the state, and see nothing but TRUMP signs. Reading “Hillbilly Elegy” tells me why. Explain it to people who haven’t yet read your book.

J.D. VANCE: The simple answer is that these people–my people–are really struggling, and there hasn’t been a single political candidate who speaks to those struggles in a long time. Donald Trump at least tries.

What many don’t understand is how truly desperate these places are, and we’re not talking about small enclaves or a few towns–we’re talking about multiple states where a significant chunk of the white working class struggles to get by. Heroin addiction is rampant. In my medium-sized Ohio county last year, deaths from drug addiction outnumbered deaths from natural causes. The average kid will live in multiple homes over the course of her life, experience a constant cycle of growing close to a “stepdad” only to see him walk out on the family, know multiple drug users personally, maybe live in a foster home for a bit (or at least in the home of an unofficial foster like an aunt or grandparent), watch friends and family get arrested, and on and on. And on top of that is the economic struggle, from the factories shuttering their doors to the Main Streets with nothing but cash-for-gold stores and pawn shops.

The two political parties have offered essentially nothing to these people for a few decades. From the Left, they get some smug condescension, an exasperation that the white working class votes against their economic interests because of social issues, a la Thomas Frank (more on that below). Maybe they get a few handouts, but many don’t want handouts to begin with.

From the Right, they’ve gotten the basic Republican policy platform of tax cuts, free trade, deregulation, and paeans to the noble businessman and economic growth. Whatever the merits of better tax policy and growth (and I believe there are many), the simple fact is that these policies have done little to address a very real social crisis. More importantly, these policies are culturally tone deaf: nobody from southern Ohio wants to hear about the nobility of the factory owner who just fired their brother.

Trump’s candidacy is music to their ears. He criticizes the factories shipping jobs overseas. His apocalyptic tone matches their lived experiences on the ground. He seems to love to annoy the elites, which is something a lot of people wish they could do but can’t because they lack a platform.

The last point I’ll make about Trump is this: these people, his voters, are proud. A big chunk of the white working class has deep roots in Appalachia, and the Scots-Irish honor culture is alive and well. We were taught to raise our fists to anyone who insulted our mother. I probably got in a half dozen fights when I was six years old. Unsurprisingly, southern, rural whites enlist in the military at a disproportionate rate. Can you imagine the humiliation these people feel at the successive failures of Bush/Obama foreign policy? My military service is the thing I’m most proud of, but when I think of everything happening in the Middle East, I can’t help but tell myself: I wish we would have achieved some sort of lasting victory. No one touched that subject before Trump, especially not in the Republican Party.

This was really good. This section really bugged me:

[SHOW]

But to speak “culture” and then move on is a total copout, and there are public policy solutions to draw from experiences like this: how could my school have better prepared me for domestic life? how could child welfare services have given me more opportunities to spend time with my Mamaw and my aunt, rather than threatening me–as they did–with the promise of foster care if I kept talking? These are tough, tough problems, but they’re not totally immune to policy interventions. Neither are they entirely addressable by government. It’s just complicated.

That’s just one small example, obviously, and there are many more in the book. But I think this unwillingness to deal with tough issues–or worse, to pretend they’ll all go away if we can hit 4 percent growth targets–is a significant failure of modern conservative politics. And looking at the political landscape, this failure may very well have destroyed the conservative movement as we used to know it.

And what do you have to say to liberals?

Well, it’s almost the flip side: stop pretending that every problem is a structural problem, something imposed on the poor from the outside. I see a significant failure on the Left to understand how these problems develop. They see rising divorce rates as the natural consequence of economic stress. Undoubtedly, that’s partially true. Some of these family problems run far deeper. They see school problems as the consequence of too little money (despite the fact that the per pupil spend in many districts is quite high), and ignore that, as a teacher from my hometown once told me, “They want us to be shepherds to these kids, but they ignore that many of them are raised by wolves.” Again, they’re not all wrong: certainly some schools are unfairly funded. But there’s this weird refusal to deal with the poor as moral agents in their own right. In some cases, the best that public policy can do is help people make better choices, or expose them to better influences through better family policy (like my Mamaw).

There was a huge study that came out a couple of years ago, led by the Harvard economist Raj Chetty. He found that two of the biggest predictors of low upward mobility were 1) living in neighborhoods with concentrated poverty and 2) growing up in a neighborhood with a lot of single mothers. I recall that some of the news articles about the study didn’t even mention the single mother conclusion. That’s a massive oversight! Liberals have to get more comfortable with dealing with the poor as they actually are. I admire their refusal to look down on the least among us, but at some level, that can become an excuse to never really look at the problem at all.

He's saying conservatives blame all the problems on culture and don't want to address anything that could be done policy-wise. Then he's blaming liberals for only looking at policy solutions, and (my words) not acknowledging how disfunctional their culture can be. It seems like if you took a mixture of the liberal and conservative approaches, you might actually end up with something kind of close to a decent policy. We used to have politicians that would work together and compromise. We don't anymore. And it's mainly these rural, poor states that send uncompromising politicians to Washington. Please note: the problem is NOT that they send conservative politicians to Washington. It's that the ones they send are totally uncompromising.

I think my biggest takeaway is just how important it is to them that undeserving people don't get help they don't deserve from the government. He's indirectly saying that they'd rather get no help and stay dirt poor than get some policy that might help someone who is undeserving. When my rich buddy from Naperville rails against undeserving people getting welfare, it comes off as insanely greedy and selfish, and it probably is...when these same words are coming from some of the poorest people in the country it carries a lot more weight.

I have no idea how you thread this needle that he's describing - government has to do something but whatever they do absolutely cannot help anyone who is undeserving. It's pretty much an impossible task, especially with the way technology and automation continue to eliminate jobs. The article left me feeling very hopeless about our political situation.

[pioneer98]

Once in a while something good comes out of Facebook

[planet planet]

Michelle Obama is killing her speech right now.

[ghostrunner]

As of last week, when head to head Clinton was up ~7. When Johnson and Stein added she was up ~3. I don't see how GJ is taking away from Trump and giving to Clinton. If anything it's the other way

It's varying a lot from state to state. Taking more from Clinton some places, more from Trump in others. Mostly seems to be pulling equally.

[IMADreamer]

Michelle Obama is killing her speech right now.

Yeah she was.

[M1IRONMIKE]

What does Trump owe Putin for the DNC email hack? Estonia?

Well, we know who Putin DOESNT want to be President. Who wants to vote for the candidate Vladimir Putin endorses? Not me.

IIRC, Berlusconi and Putin were pals too.

Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s top adviser, and his ties to pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine

It's not just Manafort, it's Trump himself with the frightening ties to the Putin and his Russian underworld supporters. As banks have gradually refused to lend to Trump (probably due to the bankruptcies), he has turned to shadowy pro-Putin Russian sources for his financing. It's unsurprising that Trump is now praising Putin as a great leader, talking about not defending NATO allies that Russia has its eyes on, and benefiting from a Russian hack of the DNC servers. That's just how demagogue dictators do favors for eachother.

No big deal though, this is just our democratic republic going down the tubes here.

Here we go.....the left gets caught conspiring to get Hilary nominated and now they blame trump . Not upset with their corruption but upset they were caught red handed....the demo mantra.....deflect....go for cover....then create another diversion....this week ought to be good

OR IS IT BOTH??

Jim, jump in here. Is mike saying he's good with Trump's Russian connection or just ignoring in favor of going after Hillary?
My bias is I am in favor of a Bernie Sanders revolution.

what I am saying is there is absolutely no evidence "Russia is pulling the strings and Trump is their puppet" . There is however evidence that the DNC conspired to keep Sanders out. If you need something clarified about what I said you can ask me instead of the passive aggressive [expletive] asking jim what i meant 4 minutes after I post something. don't be a [expletive]

[Cheddar Tom]

There is however evidence that the DNC conspired to keep Sanders out.

What is the evidence?