12.10.2016 09:54 PM

I literally feel like we are sleepwalking towards some kind of an apocalypse 


22 Comments

  1. Ronald O'Dowd says:

    Warren,

    Trump won’t change his view of politics and his approach to same. That makes him, at the very least, a walking conflict of interest. And that likely means impeachment by Republicans before his first term is over.

  2. Ron says:

    Trump’s herd doesn’t give a shit. I guess they can’t tell Russian oligarchs from American oligarchs.

  3. Sean McLaughlin says:

    Is Obama’s intelligence review a last ditch attempt to disqualify Trump from becoming president or is he trying to simply undermine him?

    Also, how can Trump work with the intelligence agencies when they out him as illegitimate? He probably wouldn’t have anyway, but open antagonism between Langley and the White House? Cheney and Rumsfeld circumvented the traditional organs to create their own intelligence fiefdoms that fed them what they wanted on Iraq. This is going to be much, much worse.

  4. Kevin T. says:

    This would be a Twilight Zone episode to the teenage me who grew up in the 80s — Russia helping an American cheat to win the PRESIDENCY!?!

  5. PJ says:

    The most troubling thing about these revelations, beyond just the fact that Russia was interfering in the election to help Trump win is the GOP leaderships’ silence on this issue.
    If the Washington Post story is to be believed, we had the Obama administration wanting a bi-partisan rebuke of Russia’s interference in the Presidential election and Mitch McConnell wants to remain silent, states if the White House or Democrats release this unilaterally the GOP will accuse the White House of political interference in the Presidential Election.

    So we have the spectacle of a GOP leadership that from day 1 questioned the legitimacy and citizenship of President Obama acting as the lap dogs of Putin.
    Ronald Reagan would not approve.

  6. armand says:

    After the election there was a brief period where a few pundits, media and politicians had a reflecting moment where they realized why they lost. But now they are all back to the same point that lost them the election in the first place. Doubling down will only guarantee Trump a second term. Is that what they want? When millions who voted for Obama twice voted for Trump there’s got to be a reason far beyond racism or the Russians.

    Instead of “omg, the Russians interfered in the election”, where is the reflection on what was revealed in those emails. If I were a Democrat I would be pissed at the DNC. I’d also point out that Wikileaks still denies getting those emails from the Russians.

    The media have also tried to turn the “fake news” issue away from true fake news to simply slandering their business rivals. I’m pretty sure the more they do that the further away those who have wandered will stray.

    It is time for Democrats to move past the election and get ready for opposition. A weak opposition is ineffective in turning around public opinion. The US has another election in just 2 years. A strong opposition is important to any democracy. Are the Democrats going to be leaders or continue to double down on a losing strategy?

  7. dave constable says:

    Not only did the hack put Trump in the White House, it had Republicans do well in the Senate, House of Representatives, gubernatorial elections, state legislatures…boy oh boy, Nate Silver, adn the White House announcements that the election went okay sure were wrong. Unlike in the past, I am sure we will soon see publicly the evidence of this thorough top to bottom, hack of the USA voting.
    Meanwhile, let’s keep Stein and her ‘ilk’ ( a popular term recently on this message board) from pursuing those irritating recounts, and casting doubt on the integrity of the electronic machine voting.

  8. monkey says:

    Trump will be a disaster, but like all disasters we will survive although it will be tough. In many ways this is not too dissimilar to the fall of any empire be it the Roman Empire, British Empire etc. The days of the US dominance globally are coming to an end, the question is who will replace them. Most likely China, who there are many issues with, so hopefully they do a better job as the next superpower but no doubt the transition will be tough. Generally speaking when a superpower loses its status the decline is quite ugly and messy until someone else takes its place.

  9. Charlie says:

    Or, in other words:

    America has a full-on retard heading into the White House after he conned millions of his voters into thinking he was going to do fuck-all about their problems while also receiving help from a rapist locked up in a closet in London who was receiving stolen information from Russians in order to attack his political opponent and prevent her from winning fair and square.

    Now you have Carl Bernstein calling Trump’s lies “worse than Nixon”.

    But, hey. Its all good. At least Americans can say merry-motherfucking-christmas again.

  10. Ronald O'Dowd says:

    Warren,

    I would argue that three people got it right in the Democratic campaign: Mook, Podesta and the candidate herself. That’s why Clinton got 2.6 million more votes than Trump. However, Clinton’s own instincts and political smarts failed her dramatically. She, along with Mook and Podesta did not even envisage the possibility of a directly targeted Rust Belt strategy and that lost them the election.

    This is by no means an election that Trump won. Rather, it’s an election that was Clinton’s to lose, and her strategic team did just that.

    • Scotian says:

      I would argue that the Russian interference and especially the double appearance of James Comey in the last 11 days of the campaign were what defeated Clinton, she was clearly in the ascendant and Trump was flailing and his supporters dispirited from the three debates and all the ugly material that had come out about Trump right up to the point Comey suddenly intervenes without cause.

      Clinton had a winning strategy and it took a very hostile media, a GOP Congress ginning up years of bogus investigations into first Benghazi and from that into her private email server which they fed to the media and forced the FBI to investigate for criminality (which concluded there was none), the active one-sided hacking and release of emails from the DNC and her campaign manager released by foreign actors and almost certainly at the instigation of Putin’s Russia, and even then she was winning. It was the Comey intervention that changed it all. Much like how the announcement of the Goodale investigation regarding leaked In come Trust info during the 2005-06 election was the moment when the Martin Libs really started sliding in the polls to their defeat.

      There is a reason law enforcement people are supposed to not be seen to be involving themselves in a political context, because any investigation carries with it the stigma of guilty until cleared, and in politics that is clearly a massive problem, especially when you cannot refute what you do not know is actually being examined. What Comey did was worse than anything J Edgar Hoover ever dared pull, which is no low/small bar to be clearing!

      Clinton didn’t lose the election so much as it was ripped from her through extraordinary actions taken by multiple actors, Russia among them, but the FBI Director being the truly decisive actor/incident, as shown by the way late breaking voters lopsidedly sided with Trump. If that narrative had not returned, had it continued to be what we saw by the end of the third debate there is simply no way Trump could have overcome.

      You cannot plan for black swans, and there were two major black swans, one external one internal, Russia/Putin and James Comey/FBI. Her strategy was a good one, her execution was not perfect, but such rarely is, it was NOT however what cost her the win, no that was Putin and Comey, especially Comey, but the Russian interference cannot be diminished either, I just think the evidence shows it was Comey that was the truly decisive event.

      I’m not as sure as you clearly are that the rust belt strategy issue was really at the heart of the failure, but I will agree it was a clear oversight, but as I just noted, all the evidence I’ve seen (both contemporaneously and in the aftermath) puts the true decisive point in James Comey’s actions, and I have yet to see anyone seriously manage to refute that. It wasn’t just the anchor it gave Clinton, it was the refocus and re-energize it gave team Trump, and changed the media narrative to Trump being a failure in all three debates and full of sexual predator scandal to nothing but EMAILZ!!! for the last 11 days of the election, and in a way that the Clinton camp had no way of responding to. Late deciders broke hard for Trump, and it is all but impossible to believe that the coverage thanks to Comey’s actions in those last 11 days was not a major influencer with such voters, since usually such voters tend to decide at the last moment based on what they heard most recently.

      Clinton had extraordinary forces arrayed against her, and even then she was winning. It took the Director of the FBI, a former Starr witch-hunter, to deliver the coup de grace. The fact that the chief law enforcement person and a major rival power clearly intervened on the behalf on one side and one side only (Comey refused to discuss any investigations into Russian links to team Trump with the stated reason being for fear of improperly impacting the election, but he had no such compunction with the Clinton campaign, a clear double standard and arguably proof of a Hatch Act violation) is not sending up the entire American electorate up in flames, well that shows just how sick and unhealthy the American political context has become, especially on the right, which not so long ago was better dead than red, well not so much now.

      Sorry, I’m one of those that feels Clinton did all she could and then some, she was defeated not by her own failures but by such extraordinary and unprecedented events as never to happen to a Presidential nominee before. Sure her team didn’t get everything perfect and made mistakes, and sure you can point them out, but it is clear to me, and many others, that it was the impact of two forces in particular that were the late deciders for this election. These would be the Russian/Assange/Wikileaks element which aided the impact of the Comey/FBI intervention which was clearly decisive. She did as well as could be done, and it took truly extraordinary unprecedented actions by multiple actors to barely beat her in the electoral college, and seeing as she is closer to three million than two in the popular vote at this point, well that says a lot too.

      • monkey says:

        True enough, but in the Rust Belt states even before that Clinton’s margins were quite weak. Obama in states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania made sure he locked them up early in the race so he didn’t have to spend dollars on them in the final weeks. His choice of Biden (blue collar background from Pennsylvania), making a big deal out of Romney’s saying let Detroit 3 go bankrupt allowed him to connect in the rust belt in a way Clinton could not. Trump is a disaster, but if you look at the county map in 2008 and 2012 and then check 2016 you will see a whole swath of blue counties through Minnesota (she won this barely by running up the margins in Minneapolis-St. Paul area whereas Obama was competitive throughout the state), Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Northern Ohio, Pennsylvania, upstate New York (Clinton won this state due to her massive margins in New York City, but if you took NYC out they ran even whereas Obama would have easily carried the state both times even without NYC), and interior of Maine there a whole wack of small town, small cities, and rural largely white counties that Obama had no trouble winning, but Clinton couldn’t. Depressed Democrat turnout was partly to blame but Trump also got more votes in those counties than Romney or McCain. The reason he didn’t get more nationally is in the large metropolitan areas, there was a swing towards Clinton. Otherwise the states the swung towards Clinton were all either solid blue or solid red states where it didn’t matter. She already had California locked up so winning by bigger margins there did not good while in Texas should dramatically cut down on the GOP margin, but it was probably too big a margin to realistically overcome. In past elections usually the Democrat margin in California is cancelled out by the GOP margin in Texas but this was not the case this time around thus why she won by almost 3 million votes yet still lost the electoral vote. She also should have gone after Arizona and Georgia more aggressively as had she put more resources into those maybe she could have flipped one of those to offset losses elsewhere. In 2020 those states as well as Texas are ones the Democrats should target more heavily as well as try and win back all the states Obama won in either of the two elections asides from Indiana (which was a fluke in 2008) and Iowa (which like Missouri is probably lost and its demographics are horrible for the Democrats anyways). Had Obama not been term limited, I believe he would have won as he struck me as much saviour campaigner than Clinton whereas Clinton seemed too risk averse and played defence too much, when to win you need to be on the offence which is what Obama did unlike Clinton.

  11. Liam Young says:

    Couldn’t agree more. The FACT that we’re not marching in the street demanding Trump be shoved off the waiting list, boggles my mind.
    The West’s experiment with democracy has failed. What do we do now?

  12. Bill Templeman says:

    Agree with your sleepwalking idea….that is the sense right now. The lull before the storm. The phoney war of 39-40, before Europe fell.

  13. Eric Weiss says:

    Yep… Dangerous and incompetent. Remember when Republicans and Conservatives were anti-Russia because they were anti-freedom commie dictators? Guess none of that matters as long as they help elect a guy who hates everybody conservatives hate. so much for them claiming to care about democracy.

  14. BooyahBoy says:

    Bill (1983): “It’s the economy, stupid!” – Carville

    Hillary(2016): “It’s the emails, stupid!” – Comey

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