Going As Planned?
Donald Trump has insisted all is well with his campaign even as Republicans grow increasingly worried about a candidate who seems to have gone permanently off-track.
Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus is reportedly among a handful of high-profile Republicans considering whether to confront Trump about his approach to his presidential campaign.
Creating the ultimate centrist " Big Tent"
Trump’s unusual behaviour is also prompting some prominent Republicans to jump ship. While many top GOP figures have insisted that they would not vote for Trump under any circumstances, including Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush, this week marked the first time outside of national security circles that any explicitly said that they would support Hilary Clinton.
He has left reality and leapt into the deep dark waters of the true sociopath.
The best way he had of beating Hillary was to keep his mouth shut. Sadly, for anyone with enough cerebral capacity to keep breathing he insists on treating us to his every moronic and putrid thought, The man born with a gold spoon up is ass is giving us every base and vile thought ever to come out of a Republican mouth all wrapped up under some weird hair crisis.
Now the Republicans can say whatever they like but the truth of the matter is that ever since they refused to condemn the "birther brigade" they have tacitly participated in every vile slander out there, their base swallowed their bullshit and gave them Trump. They have no right to complain, they are in it up to their necks.
I am having some real problems taking Trump's candidacy seriously, it all seems too deliberate.
I'm fed up with the Ex-Republican Party as well.
I've been listening to Jill Stein and she is now the best candidate for me.
I also intend to vote green and contribute to them where I can, hopefully we can build a third Party to represent what we used to believe were Democratic Party Principles.
Comments
I'll say it again.
He's a narcissist. You expected a narcissist to keep his mouth shut? They aren't capable of doing that.
When people say he's throwing the election, it makes it very clear that they never understood him. Nothing about this is surprising is any way. He's acting exactly the same as he always has. He simply moved to a different environment.
He doesn't admit that he is wrong. Ever. Not even to himself. That is the secret to every confidence man. The sort of idiot who invests in people like him doesn't want to think or read. They know that someone failed when they see failure on his face. If a man's confidence never appears to be broken, their conclusion is that he must still be winning.
I am not saying he is throwing it, I think the GOP are
however.
Trump is certifiable as a pure sociopath.
You know, that's
possible.
I would say that some want to win at all costs and have forgotten what integrity would even look like.
Some will say openly they support him, but will provide absolutely no help to his campaign whatsoever.
The rare few will be though who completely refuse even token support while people are watching.
With T Cruz it was just sour grapes
I think there will be plenty of deals in the smoke filled rooms to make sure Trump fails as abjectly as possible.
It could have been that insults to his family ...
... it could have been the longer term political calculus a Senator not running until 2018, after the shambles that Trump makes of the current campaign has had a chance to settle.
It could have been a mix of both.
He remains one of the least popular figures inside the Republican establishment ... the one where they tell the joke that if Hitler, Stalin and Cruz was in the same room and you had a gun with only two bullets, you'd shoot Ted Cruz twice just to be sure. But it's a big gamble whether Trump's brownshirt brigade will ever forgive him to allow him to run as an "insurgent" ("because they all hate my guts") candidate in 2020.
-- Virtually, etc. B)
gun with two bullets
If I was locked in a room with Hitler, Stalin, and Cruz, and I had a gun with only two bullets, I'd shoot myself twice......
...... just to be sure!
"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar
"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides
Yup...
Further, he can leave no insult, perceived or otherwise, unchallenged. Even a terrible politician sporting a healthy 80 IQ points would say to a Gold Star Parent, "Of course I didn't sacrifice as much as them, that doesn't disqualify me from being president." And it would have been done. Instead, the Donald has to throw his dick on the table. He is man-child. He has probably never been told 'no' his entire life. He is used to being surrounded by clingers, yes-men, sycophants and groupies. He has never run for office and has no idea how to self-filter or fake sincerity.
The real vomit-inducing thing is almost half of GOP voters think that his comments were 'in-bounds'. I really don't want to hear how much the GOP supports military families ever again.
Democrats, we tried to warn you. How is that guilt and shame working out?
And yet you will, eternally.....
They support white Christian military families,
the way God intended us to be violent.
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Trump: Narcissist with a Dash of Tourettes
And even here at C99 there are people still saying they will vote Trump to save us from the Evil Hellery. Hahaha. People don't seem to know what a shithead he has been to workers in the business world. So they gobble up to his Spiel about being on the working mans side. What a crock.
To quote Hedges...
Donnie The #ShitHole Douchebag. Fake Friend to the Working Class. Real Asshole.
Who do I dislike more, Trump without any
reservation whatsoever. Hillary is on a different planet entirely when compared to his odious nature.
Trump IS Hillary. Hillary IS Trump.
Hillary likes dressing in white and has better hair and speech control.
The differences end there!
"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar
"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides
I'm surprised that
the Trump campaign is not using the Baltimore Raven's Theme Song, "Who Let the Dogs Out". Seems fitting.
"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones."
John Cage
The Law of Unintended Consequences
Citizen's United was supposed to be a big win for Koch Brothers / US Chamber of Commerce type politics. Instead, it meant that every right wing politician with a couple of billionaires or enough millionaires willing to bankroll his campaign could stay in the race ... the need to get "fresh donors" after existing donors "maxed out" went out the window.
Combine that with the weakness on the stump of the candidates who have been hiding behind big money advantages fueling attack ads against their opponents ...
... and the brown shirt brigade that the Republican party has been cultivating as defense against realty, given the urgent necessity to not recognize the scientific consensus on climate change and the massive loss in wealth that implies for Big Oil ...
... and finally the cable TV decision, led by CNN, to cover Trump like they cover a missing airplane, which meant that Trump was not required to constantly ramp up his rhetoric to keep getting attention ...
... and we have perfect conditions for a self-promoting demagogue winning the Republican nomination.
Now that Trump is up against an uninspiring but reasonably competent opponent, who does not rely on votes from the brownshirt brigade to win the general election, and so is willing to attack him no matter what the reaction among the brownshirts may be, his prospects are not bright.
The important thing is to not get distracted by the shiny object. Having lost the fight on the Democratic side to the Whig wing of the Corporate party, the focus now turns down ballot. No matter how much the mess media says YOU MUST PAY ATTENTION TO THIS FREEWAY PILEUP, the pile up is not occurring on the road that we need to be traveling right now, so paying an excessive amount of attention to it is another mess-media-inspired waste of time.
-- Virtually, etc. B)
Maybe the Kochs will run together in 2020
vote evil.
Koch / Cthulhu 2020 ...
... because the real evil loose in the world is actually worse than we can imagine.
-- Virtually, etc. B)
Before I turn attention downballot, I'm paying attention to
Jill Stein. If Clinton=Trump, then I'm supporting Jill.
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I don't believe Trump wants to be president
This is not his first presidential run. He does it for the attention, for the marketing of his name and brand. Except the GOP is so lost and confused he won their primary. The man is having a nervous breakdown. The poor guy is being abused by the GOP. Things will only get worse for Trump and the GOP until the election lets them both off the hook.
We now see conservatives rallying around Hillary. Well, it is about time - that is what she is.
I agree about getting a party to speak the social democratic line. My wet dream is that after Trump is put to bed where he can sleep off the hangover as a landslide installs Hillary (sorry - I don't see another candidate who is ready. And no - I do NOT like Hillary) along with a Democratic Senate and House a new social democratic party emerges. And the social democrats that are now suffering under Hillarys conservative coup switch allegiance to supply that voice to the people they represent. I live in Oakland CA. with Barbara Lee as my rep. I am pretty happy with her - she works hard, has street cred, listens, and I support her. I would love to see her abandon the Hillary for Republican party to join a Democrat for the People party.
I see Hillary as a genuine politician. She has survived too much heat for too long and she will be effective. But she is corporate friendly and a war hawk. That is who she is. She has as much right to represent the Democrats as Trump does to represent the Republicans. She will save us from Trump and this white ISIS called the GOP. She will represent the conservatives.
It should soon be time for a bunch of sitting Democrats to appreciate what she has done and help her restore balance by leaving her side to face her in opposition as social Democrats. That is my dream at this point. A voice for everybody.
"If we all threw our problems in a pile and saw everyone else's, we'd grab ours back" - Regina Brett
An ego trip that stumbled into victory
I don't think the House and Senate will go Dem. Hillary does not
have the coattails and doesn't want it anyway. A divided Congress will help her accomplish nothing on the platform that she doesn't really like in her heart of hearts.
She will do virtually nothing, install moderate SC judges, watch us slide further down into the corporate hellhole, and say, "I did the best I could given the Republican obstruction in Congress!"
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Yes, I went over this phenomenon in my last diary:
http://caucus99percent.com/content/i-hate-be-contentious
At any rate it's good to know that the "ultra-scary" Donald Trump is going to continue on the course to ruination while the rest of us are still free to campaign for, and vote for, Jill Stein.
'French theory is a product of US cultural imperialism." -- Gabriel Rockhill
The implosion is nasty even if it is spectacular
It's a shithead vs the TPP and endless war
War with Russia and China will kill us off faster than uncontrolled climate change under the rule of the TPP's tribunals. Hillary will give us both. Either will finish us off faster than a shithead who objects to both. It's ugly, but it's ugly or the death of the earth - unless Jill can pull it off.
I've just ordered Jill bumper stickers, but if it comes down to one of those other two, I'll vote for the anti-war shithead, and a chance at human survival.
Trump could cause massive internal civil unrest
and would also go along with the Generals
I don't believe his ant war crap for one second especially when it is explained to him just how profitable it is.
And Hillary doesn't go along with the generals?
Not the argument painting Trump as a peacenik
is just crazy
But less likely to go to war with Russia than Clinton. Maybe.
Maybe. He will cause problems with NATO/EU allies. Set back encirclement of Russia/China, maybe even enough to stave off any belief in the US of a winnable shooting war.
At this point my moral calculus for Clinton/Trump: If Trump causes X harm over seas and 100X harm domestically while Clinton does 2X harm over seas and 2X harm domestically, it's clear that Trump is the moral choice.
The rest of the world should not have to pay for the mistakes of the United States.
But a Stein/Johnson presidency would have a wide latitude of executive power to close over seas bases and reduce spending. Sure we'd get vetoproof shit piles from the Dem/Reps in congress but that just lumps them together into the one party they already are. Ripe to be replaced by other parties.
There's a reason demagogues like to start wars ...
... neither Hillary nor Trump are likely to start a war with Russia, but both are obviously going to continue starting wars in Africa / Latin America / Middle East.
Hillary because it's what she does.
Trump because the "rally around the flag against Terrism" will be too compelling during once of his popularity meltdowns during a petulant fight with someone who criticizes him.
-- Virtually, etc. B)
Well, yes and no.
Been reading around and starting to get the suspicion that the US thinks it has a window to win a shooting war with Russia once it gets it's ABM shields deployed in eastern Europe.
Obama/Clinton doctrine is definitely Cold War II encirclement of Russia/China, which is escalatory and ensures a slide into WW3 with one or both of them.
Trump hasn't got the personality for strategic thinking like that. If he's only GWB bad, we can survive him. If we get Cold War II we may get our answer to Fermi's Paradox.
It could easily evolve into a classic escalation scenario.
If Clinton installs those "shields", Putin will consider them to be a hostile threat, not a defensive move. Whether he's right or not is immaterial. He will likely respond by targeting these sites in Romania and Poland with nuclear missiles, and moving troops and tanks along Russia's western border. He has already all but promised to do this. If/when he does, NATO hawks like the mad General Breedlove will regard this as a hostile threat, and move even more of their forces eastward.... And so it goes.
native
2 recent statements by Putin on youtube
One on July 24th and one the end of June about the post cold war period, GWB/ABM, Obama, the future.
He claims Russia has developed an asymmetric counter measure to the ABM (or at least working towards one).
Instead of trying to stave off the rise of Russia & China, shouldn't the US relinquish it's superpower status for a global military draw down and a combined, concerted effort to address the problems facing us and the planet?
Relinquish? The US? (Hysterical laughter!)
Once the Big Eagle sinks its claws into something, it never lets go. It only knows one position and one strategy: Biggest Bully on the Block.
That this is a frankly suicidal strategy for the long run, doesn't matter to TPTB. They would rather destroy the biosphere than lose face.
I wonder if any so-called "intelligent" species, anywhere or anywhen, can ever escape Fermi's Paradox. I don't think we are going to.
There is no justice. There can be no peace.
If I can veer way over into
If I can veer way over into sci-fi for a minute...
Our problem, and I suspect a problem for most hypothetical intelligent life, is that we are simply not capable of maintaining extremely large and populous civilizations that are also rapidly advancing in technology and resource use. We're not equipped for it.
The best hope for humanity, if it can be called that, is to reach some sort of AI singularity before we kill ourselves off - some kind of revolutionary advance in perception, intelligence, social organization, and self-perpetuation. Of course, "humanity" will be dead (or perhaps pets) in a geologic blink, while the robots go on to rule the galaxy in their own inscrutably alien way without us.
Can we actually do it? Is it possible? Well... put it this way, we haven't been visited by alien robots, either.
If we can manage not to kill ourselves for the next ten million years, there may be hope for us as a species.
As it is, I worry more about wages and election fraud more than climate change and nukes; if we can't fix the former, we surely can't prevent the latter, and we might as well get this over with.
That's the doctrine ...
... strategic "containment" of China is trying to close the barn door after the horse has fled. The Belt and Road initiatives seem likely to ensure that China is uncontainable ...
And China is the senior partner here.
The US can play balance of power politics in ASEAN, but China is playing a patient game, and so long as the actual balance of power seems likely to continue tilting in China's favor, they seem likely to continue playing a patient game.
-- Virtually, etc. B)
And they've had 2500 years of experience at it
Regimes come and go, Emperors come and go, enemies come and go - China remains. Maybe we ought to contemplate that and see what can be learned from it. (Although both contemplation and learning are in extreme disfavor in the US just now....)
There is no justice. There can be no peace.
True, but not without strategic problems of their own.
China is facing the same social, structural problems Britain faced during it's industrial revolution, making the same mistakes of pollution and human rights. Trying the same brutal, essentially fascist, solutions to commoditizing their people and containing their resistance to their degradation and dehumanization.
China does better with their long term planning than the USSR but it seem the system is prone to veniality and corruption. It always seems that the third generation after a revolution try to grab as much money as they can, as fast as they can, consequences be damned.
Though we have to avoid assuming the analogy is too exact ...
... as, of course, the Chinese do not have the entrenched aristocracy of landed wealthy to cope with, and in some respects the Chinese emergence as the largest economy in the world is similar to America's first gilded age,
-- Virtually, etc. B)
Stipulated with all analogies by default :)
A blend of Britain IR & US Gilded Age is a good way of shorthanding a large chunk of China.
The US is being sucked into the South China sea. If I was China, I'd be developing unmanned, non-metallic, submersibles designed to sit on the sea bed and deliver shape charges to capital ships.
I don't believe Trump either,
not about anything. And I don't think anyone can accurately gauge his probable future actions, because he is very likely to change his mind at least once a week. To his credit, he does seem to be in favor of a general rapprochement with Russia -- for which rare bit of sanity on his part, he has been roundly pilloried by the entirety of US media. Hillary, we know what Hillary will probably do, more or less. Nobody really knows what Donald Trump might do, not even Donald Trump himself.
native
Where do you see Trump is anti-war? He says he will hit
ISIS harder than it has ever been hit and kill their families. He says he will not rule out using nuclear weapons. The idiot will commit international war crimes and start WW III.
See the videos at Video News, http://caucus99percent.com/content/video-news-open-thread-jill-hill-trum...
Hillary is not good. She will continue the war BS. But at least she will only target terrorists. Trump is even worse.
The only true anti-war candidate is Jill Stein. Possibly Gary Johnson, since so far he says he is more interested in cutting off funding than continuing the physical fight; but since he says he'll consult with the experts to "tweak" from where we are, I don't trust him. They'll convince him that we must bomb more.
Also, Johnson's domestic economic policies are hideous.
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Don't underestimate the racist right
If we're lucky Tromp's zombie horde will remain large enough; there is no doubt that it is large, and there is no doubt that Republicans - even "moderate" ones - stand in line no matter what - but it has to be large enough. If we're lucky Hillary will have to cheat to wim (we know she will cheat, but she must have to cheat - and the political establishment has to know it) If Trump loses too big then there will be a mass exodus of corporate Republicans and the corruptocrats will consolidate power before we can build our movement.
Trump is not a bad Republican, he is just a too obvious too soon Republican. The plan was for a Hillary presidency in 2016 to generate an enormous backlash, and outright 3rd world kleptocracy and ethnic cleansing in 2020. Trump, however, exposes the Republicans for what they are too soon. We need a "close Hillary victory"; close enough that corporate Republicans don't jump, but a "victoyr" so that the inevitable backlash goes against the Democrats but the Republicans aren't strong enough to capitalize.
On to Biden since 1973
Let Trump take the racists, Hill take the rest of the Repugs,
and Jill Stein take the middle to left for the win.
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Wait a minute. The Republicans are talking together now?
Do they realize how late it is?
Life is strong. I'm weak, but Life is strong.
Hmm...Party base at odds with establishment; establishment
at odds with the party base. IMO, this appears to be happening in both of the major US political parties. It's a time of frustration, but also a time of opportunity...for realignments of old parties and construction of new ones.
"All Life is Problem Solving" - Karl Popper
Nobody
can be as stupid as Trump is portraying himself now. Every headline, every news story, every talking head it all about Trump Trump Trump, 24/7. IMO there is something very extraordinary going on, God only knows what it is.
The American people are being punked
And Hill and Bill are laughing their fucking heads off?
There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier
Watch for the pattern.
When Clinton is accused of not being trustworthy, Trump will be less trustworthy. When Clinton is accused of leaking classified information, Trump will make vaguely treasonous statements about Putin. When Clinton is accused of being a warmonger, Trump will go on about using nuclear weapons. He is the star of his own reality show, in real life. His current gig is to be worse than Clinton, no matter what. The boogeyman.
"I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” —Malcolm X
Trump knows to say something outrageous so he gets on TV
and he keeps doing it so frequently that people forget most of his outrageous crap.
The media loves to put him on and pretend outrage.
The public eats up the spectacle, but meanwhile develop this odd affection for this guy with the silver foot in his mouth. Everybody makes money.
Have you seen TOP lately? All Trump hate all the time, and their views have surged again!!
Yet despite all the outrage, the familiarity with Trump make his numbers go up and up. People will find the one or two comments of Trump's that they liked and remember those. They have nothing to vote for Hillary FOR, they barely know her.
He's stupid like a fox, Trump is.
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