politics Post Election Thread: Democracy Dies In Darkness And You Can Help

[Collimatrix]

On 10/24/2017 at 5:46 PM, Jeeps_Guns_Tanks said:

 

 

Please list them. I don't want to buy or read the damn book. 

 

OK, I guess I'll get to this now, since new information has since come out that fills in some of the blanks.  I think that you can consider this my review/summary of Shattered, which I realize has taken me forever to get done.

Shattered is a lot like a biopic on a rock band as written by a groupie.  You wouldn't expect a groupie to be totally objective about the roadies, managers and musicians who are passing her around (along with chlamydia), I mean, she's so in their thrall that she couldn't possibly have anything bad to say, right?

But if you were looking for prurient details, of course you'd ask a groupie.  Cult mentalities are weird that way.  You see, the groupie is so completely convinced of the greatness of the musicians that they're banging, that the mere fact that they are grungy drug addicts doesn't phase her.  The groupie is so sure of the unassailable stature of the object of their infatuation that they're free to develop a sort of detached objectivity.  So she's free to mention that the drummer always hogs all the heroin to himself and that the bassist has crabs because tee hee, aren't they the greatest?  Everyone has their own little eccentricities!

 

That's basically the vibe I get from Shattered.  It's written by two journalists or correspondents or whatever who have followed the Clintons around for years.  They're both very pro-Clinton, and both fairly familiar with the workings of Clintonworld.  In fact, they refer to the orbit of sycophants, money launderers, and various other operatives as "Clintonworld."  I really get the impression that the authors have drunk so deep of the kool-aid that they've actually come all the way around and become quite equitable in their treatment of the whole affair.

So, if you're interested in a (mostly) fact-based, blow-by-blow of the 2016 Clinton campaign, Shattered is the book for you.  Does that actually sound sort of boring and painful to read?  Well, you're right.  You'll note that the price of the book plummeted only months after release.  It turns out that even salacious details about the Hillary campaign are still fucking boring.  When I tried to read it I got maybe three chapters in, and then skipped to the end which is all about the election night Gotterdamerung.  Pretty much that one is the only chapter worth reading because it's really funny.

So, here's my executive summary of what we know now about the glorious 2016 shitshow:

1)  Hillary Clinton's campaign was a mess because Hillary Clinton is not a good leader.  Shattered actually says in the forward that the authors expect that the book will humanize Hillary Clinton to people who dislike her (presumably they mean Sanders supporters).  It does not.  Shattered actually has very little to say about Hillary Clinton, simply because she didn't do very much.  Right-wing radio talk show host are wrong; Hillary Clinton is not a fire-breathing bulldyke.  She would be a lot more effective if that were the case.  Clinton is consistently portrayed as passive, distant and indecisive.  All of the exciting backstabbing and skulduggery was committed by her underlings.  Clinton lacked the energy and ability to sort her employees out and make them work as a cohesive team.

2)  Most of the energy of the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign was taken up by Hillary Clinton's underlings attempting to sabotage each other.  The authors identified four major factions in the Clinton campaign that were constantly feuding.  One of the largest divisions was between Robbie Mook, the campaign manager, and almost everyone else.  Mook was seen as a young, energetic and savvy rising star in the Democratic Party apparatus, which he was, but he was also pathologically distrustful and obsessed with personal power.  He went so far as to dismember a pro-Hillary grassroots organization called Ready for Hillary, because he would methodically attack and undermine anyone in the Hillary campaign that he did not have direct, personal authority over.  There were a few exceptions; apparently he didn't try to fuck with Huma Abedin because he knew better, but even if Mook grudgingly respected someone, he would still jealously hoard information and see any questions about what he was doing as an attack on his power base.

3)  Robbie Mook was an early champion of computer-driven analytics in place of traditional polling.  He saw it as being much cheaper, and Hillary was very interested in running a more streamlined campaign than she did in 2008.  Nevermind that she outspent Trump something like 7:5, the point was that she intended to run a streamlined campaign, so Mook's ideas about how a campaign ought to be operated were very interesting to her.  The problem was that any time that the analytics conflicted with polling or other data, Mook would double down and insist that his analytics-driven system was the best.  Again, he was a newcomer to Clintonworld, so any questions about the methodology he saw as questions about his competence, and he saw questions about his competence as a prelude to his ouster, since there were plenty of other ambitious people around him who wouldn't mind his job.

4)  On top of Mook enforcing a sort of blind faith in new ways of predicting voter behavior, not a single person in the Clinton campaign wanted to listen to Bill Clinton.  Bill Clinton's story, as related in Shattered, is actually pretty funny.  Every consultant and operator in Clintonworld saw Bill as a potential liability that needed to be contained.  Maybe let him off his leash to do a brief endorsement or interview or something.  Hillary's underlings saw Bill Clinton as a loose cannon who would not think twice before accidentally sabotaging the campaign.  In fairness to them, they weren't wrong about that.  The impromptu meeting between Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch at an airport probably wasn't an attempt at sneaky, underhanded influence of the investigation into Hillary's email server.  The leaked DNC emails all seem to indicated that Clinton insiders were shocked and had not expected the event at all.  Bill Clinton just does whatever the fuck he wants all the time, and Hillary's people spent a lot of time worrying about what idiotic stunt he might perform next.

... Thing of it was though, Bill Clinton in his prime had absolutely unmatched political instincts, and even by 2016 they were still quite sharp.  Mook and other big shots always ignored Bill's advice, but events would prove Bill right again and again.  Bill Clinton apparently found the Brexit decision particularly shocking, and spent a lot of time after that darkly muttering about a worldwide populist backlash.  More specifically, Bill Clinton asked to know why his wife's campaign wasn't spending more time and money on the Midwest, and near the end of the campaign he even went off script and started campaigning to blue-collar union workers on his own initiative.  So Bill Clinton basically got to be part Cassandra, part poorly-trained golden retriever that wants to get into the trash and sniff everyone's crotch.

 

5)  The DNC was seriously fucked up, and all the big players knew it.  Donna Brazile mentions that Obama had left the organization severely in debt.  She did not mention that Obama created a parallel, competing organization.  Obama had very little faith in the effectiveness of the DNC even before then.  It's not clear why the Clinton campaign forcibly took over the DNC, but I suspect that Mook saw it as another potential personal fiefdom.  During the time that Obama was president, he had the personal clout to reorganize things like this, but now it appears that there is a serious vacuum in the Democratic Party's leadership.

 

6)  All of the dysfunctional dynamics listed came to a head on election night.  Mook and Conway had made a deal that their respective candidate would make a statement conceding within fifteen minutes of the Associated Press declaring an overall winner.  Naturally, Hillary's people reneged on this agreement because they were an absolute mess and couldn't do anything right.  A number of her people argued that she should concede, but some others opposed since they believed that the situation was like the 2000 election, and conceding could put them in a bad position if it came down to a legal battle (nevermind that it was obvious that they had lost by a wide margin by that point).  The debate stretched on long after the AP had called the race.  Hillary Clinton didn't say anything because Hillary Clinton is indecisive.  Eventually, Barack Obama had a surrogate call and heavily imply that Hillary needed to concede.  This was enough to get John Podesta to make a statement that wasn't really a concession, and Hillary's people thought that would be enough.  Obama wasn't having any of their shit and personally called Clinton to tell her that she needed to concede.  Then he personally called John Podesta to make sure that he told Hillary that she needed to concede, pronto.  Barack Obama was the only adult in the room, and he wasn't even in the room.

According to Shattered, Bill knew what the fuck was up well before then.  Several hours before the AP called the race, Bill had telephoned a number of his friends and told them not to bother coming to the victory party.  Then he started muttering about Brexit and populist backlash again.

[Donward]

 

Literally the equivalent of Selma and getting attacked by police dogs and hit with firehoses.

 

We salute you, modern day civil rights activists!

 

[Priory_of_Sion]

3 hours ago, LostCosmonaut said:

The shitshow continues; https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/brazile-i-considered-replacing-clinton-with-biden-as-2016-democratic-nominee/2017/11/04/f0b75418-bf4c-11e7-97d9-bdab5a0ab381_story.html?utm_term=.4c1ec7674144

 

Bonus mention of Seth Rich included.

 

[Sturgeon]

1 hour ago, Donward said:

 

Literally the equivalent of Selma and getting attacked by police dogs and hit with firehoses.

 

We salute you, modern day civil rights activists!

 

 

I like how they are doing exactly what the people who put up the signs are talking about.

[Donward]

In further news, a vicious Trump supporter and Alt-Right Nationalist beat Senator Rand Paul at his Kentucky residence. 

 

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/11/04/sen-rand-paul-assaulted-in-kentucky-home.html

 

Kentucky State Police have arrested the senator’s alleged assailant, identified as Rene Boucher, 59, of Bowling Green for intentionally assaulting Paul at his home, causing minor injury, local law-enforcement officials confirmed to Fox News.

 

Voting records from the Kentucky State Board of Election list Boucher as a registered democrat, according to The Daily Caller. A person with his name also works as an anesthesiologist in Bowling Green.

 

Oh...

 

Nevermind.

 

 

 

 

[Donward]

I posted in the wrong thread. So with that in mind, here are some Antifa ramblings.

 

 

 

 

ActionFront‏ @SeattleAntifa  Nov 1

More

1/Nov 4th is coming. The boot-lickers think we want civil war, we do, but we want it through an autonomous working class smashing capitalism

2/a civil war, for us, is global revolt against value and the state, through the abject, the proletariat, etc. This is a continuous process

3/and it won't be "clean" and tidy, there will be revolutions and counter-revolutions. victories and defeats. And no one will perceive....

4/ ...it until it is over because it will be a dialectical and contradictory process: communism as process.

5/ those who try to control it are only standing in the way. Whether they be Trots, Stalinists, Maoists, or even the ultra-left!

6/ no matter what happens on the 4th. Know that we love you and we will smash fascism(and capital) together, in love.

 

[Ramlaen]

Just a coincidence..

[ApplesauceBandit]

Today was indeed very much a "I was just pretending to be retarded!" day for antifa.  At least with the Austin one I was watching a bit of, was just some people going down the street while chant the usual "No Trump, no KKK no fascist USA".  I wanted a happening but only got some minor incidents in Saudi Arabia today.

 

Took a quick visit to our friends at /leftypol/ before I get some sleep.  Half are saying that the Nov4 stuff was a false flag by /pol/ to try to make antifa do something stupid or otherwise defame them, the other half are saying that it was a false flag by antifa all along, meant to troll Trump supporters and /pol/.

 

Edited November 5, 2017 by ApplesauceBandit

[Donward]

1 hour ago, ApplesauceBandit said:

Today was indeed very much a "I was just pretending to be retarded!" day for antifa.  At least with the Austin one I was watching a bit of, was just some people going down the street while chant the usual "No Trump, no KKK no fascist USA".  I wanted a happening but only got some minor incidents in Saudi Arabia today.

 

Took a quick visit to our friends at /leftypol/ before I get some sleep.  Half are saying that the Nov4 stuff was a false flag by /pol/ to try to make antifa do something stupid or otherwise defame them, the other half are saying that it was a false flag by antifa all along, meant to troll Trump supporters and /pol/.

 

#RemoveFurries!!!

 

[Legiondude]

Is that a Nerf battleaxe?

[Belesarius]

I was always pretty sure the November 4 thing was someone trolling the media again. I didn't see anyone who is taken remotely seriously talking about it except for a few pretty hard left people talking about possible peaceful counter protests.  It's one of the things that my friends and I have been talking about, on just how easy it is to get the media to bite on something completely retarded.  And the reason for that is pretty simple at it's  core.  There aren't a lot of real reporters anymore. 90 % of shit is taken off the wire and just repeated ad nauseum.  So all you have to do to get traction is get one wire agency to pick up a tweet or a comment on a board and run with it, and that becomes 'news'.

 

 

[ApplesauceBandit]

I'm sure there was a degree of that as well, but I would have been surprised if they could have pulled those protests off in the first place.  You at least had someone throwing money it at, they had plenty of pre-made signs to march with and had taken a few rather sizable newspaper ads.  Regardless, I figured it'd be more likely for nothing to happen, but that's just a lot less exciting.  I've heard some people say that there was a failure to communicate between the people running it like ResistFascism and the local antifa and commie groups, that'd also help explain the poor turnout.

 

The majority of these people probably just couldn't be bothered to show up since they didn't have any motivation in the first place.  Most of the riots that I'm aware of that these people have pulled in the past were in response to something, be it Trump taking office, scary people talking on campus, or other stuff like that.  With this, I think all they had to motivate themselves was I guess November 4th is a special date for commies?  Historical fun facts don't motivate people like being hysterical about Ronald Gumpf taking office does, there was no "threat" for them to get out and #RESIST.

[Belesarius]

There is no real organize antifa group to any real degree.  It's a fucking twitter hashtag, with no real leaders or actual serious organization. Signs are pitifully easy these days. I can make a slick sign with about 6 hours notice and access to a printer. It's even less organized than BLM.  I say that as someone on the left.  I've looked around for an anti fascist organization to join up with and I can't find anything serious at all.  People take a few black block anarchist groups, and crackpot shitlords who wear a Che t-shirts who could not find their way out of a wet paper bag with a sharp knife in both hands overly seriously, and someone picks up a few tweets and all of a sudden ZOMG COMMIES ARE TAKING OVER.   It's a lack of real reporting and investigation on all sides of the fence.  It's like people on the left taking WBC as a representation of the right. The lack of real reporting gives fringe groups a massive over representation in the media.

 

[Sturgeon]

1 hour ago, Belesarius said:

There is no real organized alt-right group to any real degree.  It's a fucking twitter hashtag, with no real leaders or actual serious organization.

 

1 hour ago, Belesarius said:

There is no real organized gamergate group to any real degree.  It's a fucking twitter hashtag, with no real leaders or actual serious organization.

 

1 hour ago, Belesarius said:

There is no real organized tea party group to any real degree.  It's a fucking twitter hashtag, with no real leaders or actual serious organization.

 

1 hour ago, Belesarius said:

There is no real organized colonial independence group to any real degree.  It's a fucking twitter hashtag, with no real leaders or actual serious organization.

 

[ApplesauceBandit]

I realize antifa isn't very organized, but you can't deny that the black-clad trashcan-kickers and their friends still have some level of organization.  It was actually a reason I listed for stuff not happening in my last post, that the more national sorts of groups trying to start it failed to reach out to the local groups for where they wanted stuff to happen.  I don't know where you live, but I know that plenty of cities do have their own "chapters" of antifa.  

 

The signs and ads and all the stuff wasn't that cheap either.  I know that you can print that stuff out easily enough, but one of the ads alone I'm seeing quoted as $150k.  That's a pretty high price tag for merely trolling, which is why I say that the stuff on the fourth was a result of some of the more powerful people in commieworld trying to cause something, but not being able to actually get anyone to show up.  I don't expect people in the far-left to take it seriously when it's only a few people buying stuff that actually want it to happen.  Them saying it would happen is the only reason it would have happened in the first place, they had nothing to react to.

 

 

Just a joke guys!  We were only pretending!

[Donward]

That's curious. Those stakes for the signs look more like thick, rounded dowels instead of your normal chincy 1X2 pine sign stake.

 

If I were a more suspicious man, I'd suspect that they were meant to double as a club/weapon.

[LostCosmonaut]

Don't quote me on this, but I've heard that a common tactic is to use PVC pipes as flagpoles that just happen to be filled with concrete.

[Belesarius]

1 hour ago, ApplesauceBandit said:

I realize antifa isn't very organized, but you can't deny that the black-clad trashcan-kickers and their friends still have some level of organization.  It was actually a reason I listed for stuff not happening in my last post, that the more national sorts of groups trying to start it failed to reach out to the local groups for where they wanted stuff to happen.  I don't know where you live, but I know that plenty of cities do have their own "chapters" of antifa.  

 

The signs and ads and all the stuff wasn't that cheap either.  I know that you can print that stuff out easily enough, but one of the ads alone I'm seeing quoted as $150k.  That's a pretty high price tag for merely trolling, which is why I say that the stuff on the fourth was a result of some of the more powerful people in commieworld trying to cause something, but not being able to actually get anyone to show up.  I don't expect people in the far-left to take it seriously when it's only a few people buying stuff that actually want it to happen.  Them saying it would happen is the only reason it would have happened in the first place, they had nothing to react to.

 

 

Just a joke guys!  We were only pretending!

It's not that I don't think that they aren't organized, I just think it's the same bunch of shitlords who do this shite for kicks all the time no matter what the cause. They co opt whatever trendy thing is making the news and use it as an excuse to break things and get in fights with cops and 'the man'. And when somebody tried to organize them and get some cash flowing no one shows up because they are doing this shit for kicks and not to make a serious political point beyond lets knocks heads with people and break shit. YMMV, but that's what appears to be happening to me. They don't actually give a flying fuck about actually being anti-fascist. They just want to fuck shit up. And there isn't really all that many of them.

 

[Belesarius]

53 minutes ago, LostCosmonaut said:

Don't quote me on this, but I've heard that a common tactic is to use PVC pipes as flagpoles that just happen to be filled with concrete.

You can quote me on that. I've seen that done here in TO with the black bloc assholes.  Same tactics, same shitlords mostly, IMO.

 

 

[Scolopax]

On the opposite side of things, I definitely know and saw a few people on Facebook like this:

 

 

[Xlucine]

10 hours ago, Donward said:

That's curious. Those stakes for the signs look more like thick, rounded dowels instead of your normal chincy 1X2 pine sign stake.

 

If I were a more suspicious man, I'd suspect that they were meant to double as a club/weapon.

 

Could be cardboard tubes, going by the box in the left of shot that's from a cardboard tube company

[Donward]

Bicyclist fired for flipping off President's motorcade

 

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/woman-flips-off-donald-trump-fired_us_59fe0ab4e4b0c9652fffa484

 

#WINNING

 

[Donward]

In the meanwhile, CNN and other leftist websites lose their shit over Trump feeding koi.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2017/11/06/cnn-others-hyperventilate-over-president-trumps-perfectly-fine-fish-feeding/?utm_term=.37d1582feb9d

 

 

 

[Oedipus Wreckx-n-Effect]

2 hours ago, Donward said:

Bicyclist fired for flipping off President's motorcade

 

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/woman-flips-off-donald-trump-fired_us_59fe0ab4e4b0c9652fffa484

 

#WINNING

 

Can't wait to hear people start complaining about a violation of the first amendment. 

[Belesarius]

12 minutes ago, Oedipus Wreckx-n-Effect said:

Can't wait to hear people start complaining about a violation of the first amendment. 

Price you pay for living in an at-will employment state. Also very fucking dumb to use it as your profile picture on FB. She's also in the fucking marketing department.