The Next President of the United States: III

Off Topic Politics & World Issues
222

[quote]MaximusB wrote:

[quote]smh_23 wrote:
TB’s point is being expertly demonstrated.

“Stupid” gets obliquely questioned or sarcastically invoked as “common wisdom,” as if this alters its truth value. Notice that nobody has touched the wealth of objective fact showing beyond the hint of a shadow of a doubt that stupid – and much, much more – is apt (and this is to understate the matter). Conspiracy theory (again: fucking conspiracy theory; and again: con-spi-ra-Cy the-o-ry), policy-free extemporaneous horseshit; inability to communicate clearly at even a 3rd-grade level; histrionic midnight Tweeting (like an early-adolescent girl lashing out against some social slight in the lunchroom) – nobody has touched any of it, because it can’t be touched, it can’t be denied. Instead we get vague, utterly futile nonsense designed to make a spade look like maybe it’s something else. It’s fatuous and transparent and it may well come back to bite you (and the country) in the collective dick.

Harsh, yeah, but again, we’re talking about a conspiracy theorist. Running for president. And doing well, at least with one large and dumb set of sad clowns.[/quote]

Hillary’s campaign started the birther bullshit back in 2008, and she is the Democratic front runner, so why aren’t you calling her supporters all the names you are calling Trump supporters ?

[/quote]

No, very wrong. Your source accurately describes what happened: embittered Clinton supporters circulated a chain email during the 2008 primary. Another source:

[quote]
There is no record that Clinton herself or anyone within her campaign ever advanced the charge that Obama was not born in the United States. A review by our fellow fact-checkers at Factcheck.org reported that no journalist who investigated this ever found a connection to anyone in the Clinton organization.[/quote]

So here’s an answer to your question: none of those Clinton-supporter Birthers are running, and no candidate is responsible for the stupid or buffoonish shit some of his or her supporters might say. Donald Trump is running for President, and he himself is a conspiracy theorist, and he is getting support from enormous numbers of people. That’s why I’m calling him and his supporters idiots (which, by the way, is not name-calling; it’s description). Note that it’s the fact that he himself is a conspiracy theorist (though given that polls tell us that, ridiculously, almost half of Republicans believe Obama is a Muslim, it’s not a stretch to imagine that huge numbers of the idiots showing up at Trump events are conspiracy theorists along with their candidate). This makes him unfit for the office in the mind of anyone but a complete cretin. Not on ideological or policy grounds, but on “we shouldn’t give a conspiracy theorist the nuclear football” grounds. Anybody who fails to see this needs to step back and think for a while.

223

[quote]pushharder wrote:

[quote]MaximusB wrote:

[quote]smh_23 wrote:
TB’s point is being expertly demonstrated.

“Stupid” gets obliquely questioned or sarcastically invoked as “common wisdom,” as if this alters its truth value. Notice that nobody has touched the wealth of objective fact showing beyond the hint of a shadow of a doubt that stupid – and much, much more – is apt (and this is to understate the matter). Conspiracy theory (again: fucking conspiracy theory; and again: con-spi-ra-Cy the-o-ry), policy-free extemporaneous horseshit; inability to communicate clearly at even a 3rd-grade level; histrionic midnight Tweeting (like an early-adolescent girl lashing out against some social slight in the lunchroom) – nobody has touched any of it, because it can’t be touched, it can’t be denied. Instead we get vague, utterly futile nonsense designed to make a spade look like maybe it’s something else. It’s fatuous and transparent and it may well come back to bite you (and the country) in the collective dick.

Harsh, yeah, but again, we’re talking about a conspiracy theorist. Running for president. And doing well, at least with one large and dumb set of sad clowns.[/quote]

Hillary’s campaign started the birther bullshit back in 2008, and she is the Democratic front runner, so why aren’t you calling her supporters all the names you are calling Trump supporters ?

[/quote]

Max, that post alone makes you an ENABLER! You just “deflected criticism of Trump!”

I thought of this and other valid criticisms of Shrill (and Bam too) that were going unmentioned by the anti-ENABLERS on this thread and it assured me that the !ENABLING! is a fun thing to do. Highlighting hypocrisy is so pleasurable.[/quote]

Whoops, see above. There isn’t hypocrisy within a million miles of this thread. This is getting far, far too easy. And some or another criticism of Obama has nothing to do with this – it’s just nonsense whataboutism, always the crutch of somebody, like Glenn Greenwald (the godfather of whataboutism), who’s enormously confused about reality.

Again, not a word about the objective, unarguable factual information from which our inescapably correct criticisms of Trump arise (because, of course there can be none). It’s about as mysterious as a bucket full of sand.

224

[quote]pushharder wrote:
Here he comes, Muf:

Thanks, Push.

If Cruz can stay laser focused on the fiscal issues and the downsizing of Government and cutting back of needless regulations…I just see something being done with him and Ryan.

While I haven’t been party to all of his rhetoric…he had me at “…I’ll abolish the IRS…”. Whether he and Ryan can do it or not, is one thing; but it does set a certain tone that resonates with a lot of voters.

Mufasa

225

So, to recap:

– Trump, a leading presidential candidate, is a conspiracy theorist, and therefore a loony idiot, and therefore supported by loony idiots. Not opinion, not arguable.

– Many good posters on PWI would rather not be reminded of this, and would rather plug their ears and shout “lalala” or change things up with “hey, what about this” (nevermind that “this” isn’t true).

In short, my prediction is panning out. This buffoon is hurting the country. Not because he’s going to win the White House – barring some kind of unforeseeable catastrophe, he isn’t – but, rather, because he’s injecting heavy doses of bullshit into the electorate. And he’s making the Republican Party and its sympathizers dumber and dumber. I’ll be back to tell you all I told you so. For now I’m tired of talking about this sad clown and his sad clown fans.

Edited typos.

226

[quote]smh_23 wrote:
So, to recap:

– Trump, a leading presidential candidate, is a conspiracy theorist, and therefore a loony idiot, and therefore supported by loony idiots. Not opinion, not arguable.

– Many good posters on PWI would rather not be reminded of this, and would rather plug their ears and shout “lalala” or change things up with “hey, what about this” (nevermind that “this” isn’t true).

In short, my prediction is panning out. This buffoon is hurting the country. Not because he’s going to win the White House – barring some kind of unforeseeable catastrophe, he isn’t – but, rather, because he’s injecting heavy doses of bullshit into the electorate. And he’s making the Republican Party and its sympathizers dumber and dumber. I’ll be back to tell you all I told you so. For now I’m tired of talking about this sad clown and his sad clown fans.

Edited typos.[/quote]

There are a number of fuck-ups on Hillary’s end that she too would be disqualified from being president, but none as big as the rise of ISIS on her watch.

I can forgive Trump over his birther comments, because to the best of my knowledge, no one has been beheaded, burned, drowned, thrown off a roof, shot, or bombed because of them.

Seriously, you are more concerned with Trump’s words than Hillary’s (in)actions ?

231

[quote]MaximusB wrote:

[quote]smh_23 wrote:
So, to recap:

– Trump, a leading presidential candidate, is a conspiracy theorist, and therefore a loony idiot, and therefore supported by loony idiots. Not opinion, not arguable.

– Many good posters on PWI would rather not be reminded of this, and would rather plug their ears and shout “lalala” or change things up with “hey, what about this” (nevermind that “this” isn’t true).

In short, my prediction is panning out. This buffoon is hurting the country. Not because he’s going to win the White House – barring some kind of unforeseeable catastrophe, he isn’t – but, rather, because he’s injecting heavy doses of bullshit into the electorate. And he’s making the Republican Party and its sympathizers dumber and dumber. I’ll be back to tell you all I told you so. For now I’m tired of talking about this sad clown and his sad clown fans.

Edited typos.[/quote]

There are a number of fuck-ups on Hillary’s end that she too would be disqualified from being president, but none as big as the rise of ISIS on her watch.[/quote]

That would be a good point if it were accurate. ISIS developed over a long period of time and under a variety of names, but its direct antecedent is AQI. As CFR has it:

[quote]
The group that calls itself the Islamic State can trace its lineage to the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, in 2003. The Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi aligned his Jama’at al-Tawhidw’al-Jihad with al-Qaeda, making it al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).

Zarqawi’s organization took aim at U.S. forces (PDF), their international allies, and local collaborators. It sought to draw the United States into a sectarian civil war by attacking Shias and their holy sites, including the Imam al-Askari shrine, in 2006, and provoking them to retaliate against Sunnis.[/quote]

Again: “The group that calls itself the Islamic State can trace its lineage to the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, in 2003.” So, Bush creates a mendacious case for a superfluous and idiotic war (at a time when there were actual wars to fight elsewhere, no less), and in the course of doing this, creates a power vacuum in the heart of the planet’s unarguably worst region. He then brilliantly puts hundreds of thousands of Iraqis with military training out of work; many of these are absorbed into the insurgency, which develops into AQI/ISIS. Then he negotiates a SOFA prescribing the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops, which is executed to the letter under Obama. So, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi dispatches fighters to Syria from Iraq, where he and his band of idiots have been fighting for years. The great, singular American blunder that brought us, more than anything else, down this shithole belongs neither to Clinton nor to her boss.

Furthermore, you don’t appear to understand what a Secretary of State does. A Secretary of State can advise the president and that’s all well and good, but in the end she does not make the major decisions involved with foreign policy. The President does. (And she has much less to do with military matters than you appear to think.) More importantly, nobody ever came up with a good answer, from 2011 until this past year, regarding what was supposed to have been done in Syria. You had lots and lots of people talking about “failure,” but nobody explaining just what was wrong and how it was supposed to have been remedied. Do you remember a big push for an invasion of Syria a couple of years ago – or, for that matter, any concrete counterfactual proposal? I don’t. Because there wasn’t one…

I’m no Clinton fan – one of my concerns about Trump is that he is going to make it too easy for her – but the ISIS thing is largely bullshit. Anyway, this whole thing has been an exercise in fatuous whataboutism. You say you can forgive Trump for having been a conspiracy theorist. I assume you’ll also forgive his stupidity and his histrionic, adolescent-girl personality. OK. I’ll take comfort in the knowledge that most Americans will not.

232

[quote]pushharder wrote:
So, smh, who are you rooting for?[/quote]

I don’t root for anyone. They earn my vote or they don’t. Or a candidate is so crazy and stupid that s/he is actually and literally dangerous, in which case s/he earns my anti-vote. Maybe this election ends up being one of the latter kind.

234

[quote]Bismark wrote:
Trump supporters aren’t low information voters? One would have to be to support such a buffoon. While secondary education isn’t necessarily indicative of intelligence (and vice versa), the two are correlative. Polling indicates that Trump is much more strongly supported by those with no college degree than he is by those with one.

[/quote]
College is tertiary education. High school is secondary education.

235

[quote]pushharder wrote:
I mean let’s face it, you gotta be a low information voter to believe a Chicago Machine produced boy who was bathed daily in the unholy water of Marxism wouldn’t have devastating effects on our republic.
[/quote]
Not really. Plenty of high information people have miserably bad judgment.

236

[quote]pushharder wrote:

[quote]smh_23 wrote:

[quote]pushharder wrote:
So, smh, who are you rooting for?[/quote]

I don’t root for anyone. They earn my vote or they don’t. Or a candidate is so crazy and stupid that s/he is actually and literally dangerous, in which case s/he earns my anti-vote. Maybe this election ends up being one of the latter kind.[/quote]

Just answer the question. We don’t need to play a silly semantics game where I have to rephrase it to get your answer. Sheesh.

I’m rooting for Cruz. There. It wasn’t hard for me.

Your turn.[/quote]

I’m sure it wasn’t hard for you – because it’s true. You were always going to be rooting for the candidate in Cruz’s position on the spectrum, because you’re a partisan. This is why you can’t speak cogently about Trump – your knee-jerk reaction is to oppose anything the other guys say, no matter how right they are (in this case, fully). This is the fatal drawback. And it is fatal.

But no, again, I’m not rooting for anyone because it doesn’t work like that for me. I may vote for or against someone depending upon what the choices are, and what happens between now and November. Or I may not. As of now I can live with Rubio, Clinton, and the increasingly unlikely Bush. I don’t like any of them and I don’t actively want any of them to be president in a specific, sports-fan kind of way.

237

But enough of the whataboutism. I have accomplished my goal of demonstrating the extraordinary stupidity of both Donald Trump, conspiracy theorist / incoherent bumbling clown, and his supporters. Lots of vague deflective equivocation, obfuscation, dancing, casting about, and factually-inaccurate whatabouts ensued, but of course nobody touched the substance, the evidence. In fact, nobody even tried. At all. So the point stands and the matter is resolved.