Yeah Zeb, because Trump hasn’t had quite enough coverage of people in high places calling him a liar and a fake. Romney is a LOSER, and everyone except for him and you seem to know it at this point. I can’t believe you are still carrying his water after all this time.
He’s an opportunist and a hack who needs to go away.
You’re right to a degree however there are more than just the hardcore Trumpets that have voted for Trump in the last couple primaries. Namely low information voters (and I’m not implying that they are stupid with this description). Chiefly these are people that have have traditionally voted Republican although they don’t follow the debates, read through blogs, watch Fox news or have any other regular source of info that say the posters on this forum would have. Sure they have heard one of the other candidates calling out Trump or seen some of the main stream media denouncing his quotes but they most likely attributed this to the typical political discourse. In short they weren’t fully aware of the civil war raging in the GOP. Regardless of whether or not they were a fan of Romney he was the best option as a recognizable face of the GOP to bring this issue to light while still being outside of the 2016 race. While this may or may not sway them it forces them to realize that they are taking sides and not just voting for what seemed like a strong winning frontrunner.
This inability to communicate any complex issue has kind of baffled me with Trump. It’s one thing for him to dumb it down to inspire a populist vote, I would expect that out of a complete demagogue but he has undoubtedly suffered in debates when he has been called out on it. I know that Trump is an excellent salesman above all else, its what he’s built his company on. Working in sales myself I can quote a common phrase that “the longer you sell the dumber you get” nonetheless any experienced salesman can still present his core points and at least dance around uncertain areas. (The dancing is where Trump utterly fails) I can’t buy into some sort of developmental disability, theres no way he could have gotten where he is with anything of the sort.
Question if anyone knows the answer:
At this point (keeping in mind that there is still a ways to go): How are Trump and Cruz polling against Hillary?
[quote=“Chushin, post:1266, topic:212571, full:true”]
Again, I don’t want to make it seem like I totally disagree with your assessment[/quote]
You aren’t coming across that way; I understand your purpose and I certainly don’t resent it. Even if I believe my cruelty to be necessary and justified, which I very much do, I recognize (and in a real way appreciate) the impulse to temper it.
[quote]
I don’t know that it is fair, for example, to call a hardworking, blue-collar, father of 3 who lost his job because of the huge influx of illegals, “stupid.” That man wants something done now about all of the illegal aliens who’ve invaded his country so that he can feed his family, or send his kids to college, or whatever. (Standing by and watching those same illegals benefit from taxes he and / or other citizens have paid from their hard-earned paychecks doesn’t help.)[/quote]
I think it’s eminently fair to call him stupid if he believes that Donald Trump is going to solve not just this but any policy problem in the United States of America. The argument has already been made many times over – in this thread and everywhere else. Take anything about Donald Trump: his inability to understand, and utter disinterest in, the most fundamental questions of American government and politics – questions in answer to which we have literally come to expect from him logically-contradictory gibberish. It takes a plain, simple idiot to bear witness to such bold stupidity, such obvious incompetence, and to then continue in the deluded belief that the stupidity’s human source will find solutions to complex problems in the contemporary world. An idiot: nothing more.
Or, as it might be put, “[Trump’s] advocacy for aggressively waging trade wars is a recipe for economic disaster in a globally connected world.” That’s from – and this is literally unprecedented – a heaping pile of Republican subject-matter experts. And it’s true: not a day goes by during which at some point Donald Trump fails to expose himself as a literal and enormous risk to American prosperity and security. Does “economic disaster” brought on by a single mumbling buffoon sound like something that will lift the boat of our hypothetical jobless American? No, not in the least.
[quote]
In the minds of some people, such immediate, very personal concerns understandably outweigh the rather distant and abstract fear that a candidate might someday start a nuclear war.[/quote]
There is nothing abstract about the fragile military balance under which the world has lived for the last seven decades, but that, as explained, is merely a representative formulation – a way of making the argument concrete and easily grasped. It’s got a thousand cousins, many of them veterans of this very thread (e.g., the conspiracy theories, the lying about immigrants and immigration [for which efforts he was quite naturally and correctly awarded the explicit admiration of the white supremacist community], the internally-contradictory babble about currency and trade, the military strategy lifted out of al-Qaeda’s playbook, the fascist impulses, etc., etc., etc.), all of them pointing us in a direction – Trump is an inexcusably idiotic pick for president regardless of your politics, regardless of your policy aims – that is so clear and well-marked as to allow us to say with certainty that anybody who wanders off the wrong way is, well, an imbecile by definition.
They might indeed, and my withers would remain entirely unwrung, not least because these blue-collar voters would be spectacularly (and objectively) wrong about who it is who offers them “the most direct chance of benefiting their own spouses and children.” The small part of me that is a vindictive nihilist hopes that Trump wins just so that his brand of “benefit” can be felt good and hard by the teeming wave of low ignorance on which he’s ridden this far.
As for our hypothetical interlocutor, I would suggest that he divert his energies to the getting of one of the millions of jobs that are available in the United States in 2016 (surely this is a better use of his time than advocating for a candidate who, if elected, is expected, by everyone who knows anything about the state and operation of the world, to diminish [or destroy] American prosperity and security in every conceivable manner). This advice, once so in favor, seems to have lost its luster among conservatives.
Edited twice.
drpangloss
posted this on stupid thread
“In a country where working class people are being forced to fund research on the postcolonial gender theory of melting ice caps, is it any wonder some of them are rooting for a charismatic demagogue who promises to bully their tormentors?”
http://phg.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/01/08/0309132515623368.abstract3
Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change. However, the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers – particularly related to epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge – remain understudied. This paper thus proposes a feminist glaciology framework with four key components: 1) knowledge producers; (2) gendered science and knowledge; (3) systems of scientific domination; and (4) alternative representations of glaciers. Merging feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions.
And…
Feminist and postcolonial theories enrich and complement each other by showing how gender and colonialism are co-constituted, as well as how both women and indigenous peoples have been marginalized historically (Schnabel, 2014). Feminist glaciology builds from feminist postcolonial science studies, analyzing not only gender dynamics and situated knowledges, but also alternative knowledges and folk glaciologies that are generally marginalized through colonialism, imperialism, inequality, unequal power relations, patriarchy, and the domination of Western science (Harding, 2009).
this is not the only example of where politicians are taken us
there is a crap load more
so you wonder why the PEOPLE are voting for trump who basically is an asshole but he is not a politician
So then you are saying in many cases endorsements have absolutely no effect. Because this was the reverse of an endorsement. Also, I don’t think it matters where you’re from. When you are Joe average and you are driving down the street then suddenly someone (could be anyone not just Mitt whom you obviously don’t like) starts calling a guy you are thinking about voting for a liar and a fake that has an impact. When that guy is the former nominee of one of the two major parties it has an even greater impact.
I want to add that Romney ran a horrible campaign in almost every way and I was not at all happy about that. But, he’s still a well known national figure whom almost 61 million people voted for. Add that to the fact that most people, unlike you and I, don’t follow this stuff very closely. And you have a recipe for him hurting Trump with his remarks.
Okay…maybe this is all wishful thinking. But, I’m certainly hoping that it had a negative impact on Trump and judging by his mediocre performance in the primary last week losing two out of four to Cruz I might be right. Okay…it had to help some…There were other things like Trump’s refusal at first to denounce the KKK. But I will give at least some credit to Romney for sticking his neck out and helping tip the scales in the other direction and help begin Trumps demise. But time will certainly tell how much harm that Romney did…
Real clear politics has Cruz winning on 3 polls and losing on one. Trump loses on all polls.
Of course, in typical Trump fashion, he blatantly lied on Saturday night and claimed he beat Hillary in “a lot” of polls.
I agree with Zeb, like or hate Romney, that speech was an unusual event (most recent nominee excoriating current front runner) and was actual news. Ordinary people don’t parse over every bit of election “news”, but that Romney speech was not just election news, it was generic news.
BTW! Notice Sanders!!! beats all GOP candidates in said polls. Speechless…
Be thankful the Democratic Establishment is in the tank full bore for Hillary. (my favorite was when the “neutral” Harry Reid basically handed Hillary Nevada on a silver platter when it looked like she was in trouble there) And that Obama will not allow Hillary to be indicted IMO.
First of all Bernie beating any of the republicans one on one is a fairy tale. That’s a really good example of why cross party polls this early mean literally nothing. Bernie would lose by monumental proportions to any of the republicans in a real national election. Of course we will never know because as you have inidcated the DNC is in the tank for Hillary.
As for Hillary Clinton getting indicted, I don’t think she has to get indicted. Obama can in fact protect her from that and he may. But, no one can protect her from a recommendation from FBI Director James Comey to indict. And that is all that the public needs to hear. Once the recommendation goes in Hillary’s name will be trashed. Obama can cover for her but he’ll look just as guilty in doing it and even many democrats will think that politics saved her.
Also, as far as I know Director Comey is a very straight shooter and not at all political.
No one knows what will happen but I honestly think there is a better than 50/50 chance that Comey will in fact recommend and indictment. You don’t start handing out immunity to witnesses unless you have a specific target that you are going after and you are getting close.
At first blush, those were my thoughts on Sanders winning as well. But…Hillary’s forte is her rock solid black voting bloc which I 100% believe Bernie gets against any of the GOP candidates. Plus, Bernie will definitely retain all those crazy white liberals who think he’s “their” reincarnation of Obama. So, I am not dismissing those #s.
I used to think Obama’s hubris was unmatched (and I fell for the guy in 2008, so maybe I just feel scorned…lol), but the more Hillary’s story unfolds, the more I think Hillary Trumps Obama!
I felt nautious after reading the last 3 words of your post in succession…
What a sad day in America when the political leaders have been whittled to this
I am admittedly thinking of copyrighting that as a Slogan for…Something!
While I’m on a roll here (in my own mind lol), I’ve been ruminating on how the US has evolved, or devolved take your pick, from “manifest destiny” to “manufactured destiny”.
It’s not necessarily an issue of stupid. People are irrational, emotional creatures first, and intellectual ones second. No matter how much we evolve or how big and complex our brains grow, overall, as a species and as a group, we make our decisions emotionally and instinctually. This is actually how things like shaming and bullying serve a societal purpose, too. Sometimes it is actually in the best interests of society to remove undesirable traits using brutal and perhaps immoral methods. Other times, this method belies those interests, but our angry caveman brains can only see red. The thinking that goes into those methods is not dumb, it’s atavistic, rooted in something far different than a rational analysis of the situation at hand. I have a lot of friends who voted Trump in the Texas primaries. Some of them surprised the hell out of me. They are not dumb people. Trust me, they’re not.
If everyone were rational creatures, acting in their own best interests, we probably wouldn’t need to vote in the first place. We would automatically push our best candidate to the top. If everyone made purely intellectual decisions that were always in their best interests, Ted Cruz would be the only candidate to choose from. 
One thing is evident in this thread, the Presidency has accumulated far too much power. The fact that the stakes are this high prove how far we have let the Executive branch intrude into the power of the others.