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

[Collimatrix]

Clinton aides still in apoplectic fit.

 

I suggest that some enterprising news agency begin a spinoff paper that reports the imaginary news from an alternate timeline where Clinton won the election.  My initial predictions are that this would be a wildly lucrative venture.

 

News agency pundits called this election completely wrong.  They were saying, what, 20% chance of Trump winning?  And that's if they were downright bullish on Trump.  So, having called the election completely wrong, they are now trying to explain what happened and what's going on now and what will happen next.

 

Um, what?  Didn't the events of November 8, 2016 show that their ability to model reality is severely compromised?  Shouldn't there be some serious re-evaluation of their views?

 

No, of course not.  People don't read the news because it makes them better informed.  People read the news because they find it emotionally comforting to read things that re-affirm their worldview (I am guilty of this too).

 

So why not go all the way?  Instead of reporting slanted news about the real world, just start reporting news about a completely made-up fantasy world!  It'll be great!  Clinton can crush ISIS, and then an American-style democracy can be made in Iraq, only this time it will work because it turns out that the problem with the previous government wasn't corruption, sectarian tension, or the fact that all the functioning Iraqi governmental organs were dismantled after the 2003 invasion.  No, no, it turns out that the only problem was a cadre of lingering Bushite wreckers, who were duly rounded up and sent to re-education camps.  Hooray!  Next Clinton can fix the US economy by subsidizing renewable energy research.  How's that for investing in our future!  Next, Clinton will graciously welcome back Eric Holder, after a fact-finding mission discovers that all of the violence on the US/Mexican border is caused by racist minuteman Trump supporters, and Holder's policy of supplying the poor, helpless Mexicans with assault rifles to defend themselves was simply the only expedient way to address the problem.  The most qualified candidate of all time is really showing those boys how it's done!  It'll be a completely positive safe space for everything Clinton supporters yearned for.

 

I'm telling you, there's money to be made.

[Donward]

You guys remember Evan McMuffin?

 

Yeah. Most people don't either.

 

It looks like his failed write-in campaign is causing further blow-back here in Washington state because McMuffin has garnered enough write-in votes to cause the Libertarians and Gary Johnson to fall just under the 5 percent vote total needed to get them recognized as a "Major" party which allows them all sorts of free goodies from the government. Which is completely not hypocritical btw.

 

http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/libertarians-say-theyll-sue-if-theyre-denied-major-party-status/

 

Hehehehehe.

[Sturgeon]

Lololol

[ApplesauceBandit]

Looks like they're trying to sign stuff about the alleged Russian meddling into law.

 

Section 501 of this bill

https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/6393

 

 

 

The bill establishes an executive branch interagency committee to counter active measures by the Russian Federation to exert covert influence over peoples and governments.

 

IMO, if they want to remove covert influence over the American people by foreign countries, keeping China in check would perhaps be a better place to start

[Sturgeon]

Is it just me, or did the whole "Russia is secretly backing Trump" thing come straight from Hillary Clinton's irrational fear and hatred of the Russkies?

[Priory_of_Sion]

Is it just me, or did the whole "Russia is secretly backing Trump" thing come straight from Hillary Clinton's irrational fear and hatred of the Russkies?

Clinton deserves some blame but the Washington groupthink national security apparatus that's been trained to hate Russia is more to blame. 

[T___A]

My body is ready:

[LostCosmonaut]

To be fair, that's a pretty useful alert.

[Walter_Sobchak]

Is it just me, or did the whole "Russia is secretly backing Trump" thing come straight from Hillary Clinton's irrational fear and hatred of the Russkies?

I don't know why you are so skeptical about the notion that Putin tried to influence the US election.  Governments do that sort of thing all the time.  Hell, what do you think the National Endowment for Democracy is for?

[Oedipus Wreckx-n-Effect]

Clinton aides still in apoplectic fit.

I suggest that some enterprising news agency begin a spinoff paper that reports the imaginary news from an alternate timeline where Clinton won the election. My initial predictions are that this would be a wildly lucrative venture.

News agency pundits called this election completely wrong. They were saying, what, 20% chance of Trump winning? And that's if they were downright bullish on Trump. So, having called the election completely wrong, they are now trying to explain what happened and what's going on now and what will happen next.

Um, what? Didn't the events of November 8, 2016 show that their ability to model reality is severely compromised? Shouldn't there be some serious re-evaluation of their views?

No, of course not. People don't read the news because it makes them better informed. People read the news because they find it emotionally comforting to read things that re-affirm their worldview (I am guilty of this too).

So why not go all the way? Instead of reporting slanted news about the real world, just start reporting news about a completely made-up fantasy world! It'll be great! Clinton can crush ISIS, and then an American-style democracy can be made in Iraq, only this time it will work because it turns out that the problem with the previous government wasn't corruption, sectarian tension, or the fact that all the functioning Iraqi governmental organs were dismantled after the 2003 invasion. No, no, it turns out that the only problem was a cadre of lingering Bushite wreckers, who were duly rounded up and sent to re-education camps. Hooray! Next Clinton can fix the US economy by subsidizing renewable energy research. How's that for investing in our future! Next, Clinton will graciously welcome back Eric Holder, after a fact-finding mission discovers that all of the violence on the US/Mexican border is caused by racist minuteman Trump supporters, and Holder's policy of supplying the poor, helpless Mexicans with assault rifles to defend themselves was simply the only expedient way to address the problem. The most qualified candidate of all time is really showing those boys how it's done! It'll be a completely positive safe space for everything Clinton supporters yearned for.

I'm telling you, there's money to be made.

Huffpo beat you to it.

[Priory_of_Sion]

I don't know why you are so skeptical about the notion that Putin tried to influence the US election.  Governments do that sort of thing all the time.  Hell, what do you think the National Endowment for Democracy is for?

There's no real evidence for it (the DNC hacker spoke in bad Romanian is the best evidence they have?) and governments are usually incompetent and leave evidence of their meddling everywhere. 

 

Same reasons also apply to my skepticism about the paid protesters and mass voter fraud. You can't actually believe that the people at the DNC are smart enough to organize that when they can't even organize a lemonade stand to save their own lives. 

[EnsignExpendable]

Is it just me, or did the whole "Russia is secretly backing Trump" thing come straight from Hillary Clinton's irrational fear and hatred of the Russkies?

 

It's a false flag operation by the GRU which is also secretly backing Hillary. We're everywhere >:^D

[Sturgeon]

I don't know why you are so skeptical about the notion that Putin tried to influence the US election. Governments do that sort of thing all the time. Hell, what do you think the National Endowment for Democracy is for?

Maybe because there's exactly diddly squat for evidence, and because Clinton radiates irrational hatred for Russia?

I mean, unless you've got something, Walt.

[Collimatrix]

I don't know why you are so skeptical about the notion that Putin tried to influence the US election.  Governments do that sort of thing all the time.  Hell, what do you think the National Endowment for Democracy is for?

 

Good question.  It's precisely because the US undermines and influences so many foreign governments that I'm skeptical that Putin was doing the same thing to the USA, at least, on a meaningful scale.  Guy probably had his fingers in somewhere, but, I am inclined to think, not in any important way.

 

Because the USA has spent so much time overthrowing governments in the Middle East so they can be replaced with Islamists, we have a pretty good idea of what foreign subversion looks like.  There are suspiciously well-funded Non-Governmental Organizations.  There are protests that always get lots of juicy media coverage, and the members of these protests are always described in terms that young, hip Americans can relate to.

 

During the Arab Spring, Western-educated, young, secular Arabs were portrayed as being frustrated by the lack of opportunity in their native lands, and by endemic corruption and repression.  That part was basically true, and that's part of why I continue to believe that America makes the best propaganda in the world.  By percentage of weight, it has a surprising amount of true facts in it.  The media chose to ignore certain facts, say, that in Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood has been around for about a century and thus knows the smell of opportunity and blood.  The media also chose to ignore the fact that the organization of the protests wasn't being accomplished entirely with smart phones and the righteous indignation of the People.  The CIA was definitely involved too.

 

With the Trump insurgency, I'm just not seeing it.  The Arab Spring demonstrations were ostensibly spontaneous displays of a put-upon youth with no hope for the future, but actually orchestrated by American intelligence agencies and State Department front NGOs.  The Trump insurgency was ostensibly the uprising of put-upon working class Americans as orchestrated by the Trump campaign.  So, unless the Trump campaign itself was thoroughly infiltrated by Russian intelligence, the part of the election that mattered, i.e. Trump appealing to Rust Belt voters and Clinton completely failing to, does not appear that it was substantially influenced by the Russians.  Also, if the Russians did have a hand in that part of the election, then it implies that Russian spooks have a better idea of how to win elections that the Clinton campaign does, which is probably a more disturbing revelation than the one that they were interfering in the first place.

 

I could buy that Russian intelligence agencies were involved in the dissemination of leaked information from the various penetrations of Democratic Party institutions.  US cyberforensics have certainly all pointed fingers in that direction.  However, I'm given to understand that cyberforensics aren't actually that reliable, so who knows.  Some of the specific evidence that Guccifer 2.0 was really Russian intelligence, like document metadata, strikes me as the sort of thing that could plausibly be the result of a careless FSB hacker, but just as equally plausibly the result of someone else trying to throw people off the trail.  Hard to say; I'm not aware of particularly strong evidence either way, but let's say it was the Russians.  They're certainly in the top ten of likely suspects.

 

So the Russians leaked a bunch of information showing endemic corruption in the US Democratic Party.  Does this count as trying to sway the election?  Did this sway the election?

 

As to the first question, call me jaded, but I don't think you're trying to influence a foreign election until you're sending your preferred party ammunition.  And I don't mean "ammunition" metaphorically.  I mean as in cartridges that you fire out of guns ammunition, the sort of stuff the US supplied to a very long list of nasty people in an attempt to ensure favorable political outcomes.  In the majority of cases in Arab Spring, there was a substantial strong-arm component to the attempts to overthrow the sitting government.  These were all shamelessly spun as "peaceful protests," of course.  Was there anything resembling this in the US 2016 election?  Um, I guess some people tried to paint swastikas on some buildings, but fucked up because they were too stupid to know how to paint a swastika.  Ladies and gentlemen, the spooky and malign hand of Russian foreign influence!

 

As to the second question, I don't think the leaks of Democratic Party material had much influence over the election.  I don't recall the exact sequence of events, but I do know from Google Analytics that Trump was calling his opponent "crooked Hillary" substantially before the Guccifer 2.0 leaks.  The leaks certainly did give him something to talk about, but Jesus Angra Mainyu, he's Trump fergwadsake.  If he didn't have the DNC leaks to talk about he'd have just made something up on the spot.  Just making shit up is not beyond the pale of his moral scruples, as Trump has made abundantly clear.  Or he could have spoken about the numerous instances of shady crap that public records showed Clinton was involved in, like the six billion dollars that went missing from the State Department when she was head, or accepting speaking fees from lobbying groups during that same time.  It's not that hard to convince the convinceable that Clinton was corrupt, because she blatantly obviously was.

 

So, no, I don't think the Russians significantly influenced the US 2016 presidential election.

[Donward]

Piling on. So it was the Russians that gave Trump billions of dollars in television coverage, to the point where networks would stop normal programming in order to cover Trump's rallies? 

[Sturgeon]

Exactly how would the Russians influence the election anyway? Guccifer? Sponsoring InfoWars? The only reason tactics like that could conceivably work is because the people they are working against are hopelessly corrupt and disconnected.

As far as rigging elections go, that's fucking cute and cuddly.

[Belesarius]

I think there is a possibility that the FSB was involved with wikileaks/emails etc. The FBI certainly thinks so.  I don't think it had any real effect on the election.  Hillary lost due to arrogance. Pure and simple.  If you want to win, it helps if you show up.  12000 votes in Michigan cost her that state.  2 minor campaign stops there. 60k-ish in WI, IIRC... no campaign stops there.  PA I don't have the #s for stops for either, but that was another vote that was decided by votes in the 10s of thousands. 

 

Arrogance and blind stupidity, especially with the amount of money the Clinton Foundation has to throw around.  Doing something as small as announcing building a couple of librarys or community centers could have turned this around for her.  It boggles the mind. 

[Donward]

And don't forget Divine Intervention by the Almighty himself.

 

 

Just like God has intervened to save America so many times in the past.

 

Washington's escape from Brooklyn. The discovery of Lee's plans to invade Maryland wrapped in cigars. The Miracle at Midway. And a guy named Weiner texting pics of his dick.

 

The Lord works in mysterious ways my fellow comieboos.

[Belesarius]

I dunno if it's true, but I heard Slick Willy is absolutely fucking furious with the campaign team. He apparently advocated pretty strongly for campaigning in MI and WI and PA. 

[Sturgeon]

Yeah, the Dems should have run Jim Webb. Then Webb would have picked Mattis as VP, and the USMC would have collectively volunteered to campaign for their ticket, thus ushering in the glorious Marine Corps Junta era of US politics.

I am serious, though, take a look at the Democratic candidate list and try to find a strategy where they could have won without a major party overhaul. I don't think it existed.

Yes, I suppose Hillary could have done some things differently, but doesn't that require everyone involved - including her - to be prophets? Nobody thought Trump was going to win those states. Nobody in the Democratic Party's sphere, anyway.

[Donward]

I dunno if it's true, but I heard Slick Willy is absolutely fucking furious with the campaign team. He apparently advocated pretty strongly for campaigning in MI and WI and PA. 

That's because Bubba is able to pass himself off as a likable and empathetic human being who actually gives a damn about the dirty fucking plebs who make up most of the country.

 

 

This is from 1992. Gee. Who does Bubba sound like?

[Sturgeon]

I dunno if it's true, but I heard Slick Willy is absolutely fucking furious with the campaign team. He apparently advocated pretty strongly for campaigning in MI and WI and PA.

I'd heard that. This is why Bill is a legendary politician, and Hillary won't be. Bill vs. Donald would have been fun as fuck.

[Donward]

Yeah, the Dems should have run Jim Webb. Then Webb would have picked Mattis as VP, and the USMC would have collectively volunteered to campaign for their ticket, thus ushering in the glorious Marine Corps Junta era of US politics.

I am serious, though, take a look at the Democratic candidate list and try to find a strategy where they could have won without a major party overhaul. I don't think it existed.

Yes, I suppose Hillary could have done some things differently, but doesn't that require everyone involved - including her - to be prophets? Nobody thought Trump was going to win those states. Nobody in the Democratic Party's sphere, anyway.

 

We mentioned it in the other thread, but it was absolutely astounding the level of sneering disdain most Democrats had for the only decorated, combat veteran in the race. 

 

http://www.thestranger.com/blogs/slog/2015/10/14/23010331/here-are-the-fun-parts-of-last-nights-debate

 

http://www.thestranger.com/blogs/slog/2015/04/24/22108721/whos-vying-to-lose-to-hillary-this-primary

 

And here's this cunt who was making fun of Webb's war injury.

 

https://twitter.com/GoldyHA/status/654108671375347712?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

[Priory_of_Sion]

Have you ever laughed and vomited simultaneously? 

[Walter_Sobchak]

We mentioned it in the other thread, but it was absolutely astounding the level of sneering disdain most Democrats had for the only decorated, combat veteran in the race. 

 

http://www.thestranger.com/blogs/slog/2015/10/14/23010331/here-are-the-fun-parts-of-last-nights-debate

 

http://www.thestranger.com/blogs/slog/2015/04/24/22108721/whos-vying-to-lose-to-hillary-this-primary

 

And here's this cunt who was making fun of Webb's war injury.

 

https://twitter.com/GoldyHA/status/654108671375347712?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

Yes, because some random blogger represents everything thought by every Democratic voter everywhere.

 

Meanwhile, the man who was elected president actually said "I like people who weren't captured" in regards to actual veteran and POW John McCain.  Also, when someone offered him a purple heart, he didn't do what any sane rational person would do and refuse it, he said "I always wanted to get the Purple Heart. This was much easier.”   Also, he compared sexually transmitted diseases to the Vietnam war.  “I’ve been so lucky in terms of that whole world (STDs). It is a dangerous world out there — it’s scary, like Vietnam. Sort of like the Vietnam era. It is my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave solider."  Anyone with an ounce of decency should be appalled that such a man is now our president. 

 

 

By the way:

 

Over the past 50 years Democrats have elected more veterans to congress than Republicans.

 

 

 

 

Prominent Republican leaders who served in the Military:

 

Um, let's see....

 

John McCain (mocked by the current president elect)

 

Colin Powell (who referred to neoconservatives within the Bush administration as "fucking crazies.")

 

Chuck Hagel (a veteran and a fellow Republican who became the first nominee for Secretary of Defense to be filibustered, by a Republican congress)

 

Does Allen West count as "prominent?"

 

The list is quickly becoming a bit thin...

 

Darrell Issa?

 

Louie Gohmert!

 

Todd "legitimate Rape" Akins

 

Mitch McConnell