Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

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Mongrel
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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Mongrel » Sat Dec 10, 2016 7:00 pm

Tillerson and Bolton to State.

What can I do but laugh.
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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Mongrel » Sun Dec 11, 2016 5:03 am

Speaking of bitter laughter...

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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Büge » Sun Dec 11, 2016 4:40 pm

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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Yoji » Mon Dec 12, 2016 4:45 pm

What a weird world we now live in where Teen Vogue of all fucking places hits The Bastard harder than some established newspapers.

I'm guessing we're going to get sick of hearing the term in the years ahead, but "gaslighting" seems way too appropriate. Not just after this whole development with the Russian hacks and The Bastard completely dismissing it, but Mike Pence trying to paint Clinton's campaign as the "insult-driven" one. And lots more than I could possibly name. I'm not sure about anyone else, but it feels not just insulting, but weirdly abusive to be so consistently and blatantly lied to.

Also:
Teen Fucking Vogue, how did this happen wrote:When defending each of the identities in danger of being further marginalized, we must remember the thing that binds this pig-headed hydra together.
Nice analogy, but I think those conjoined twins in American Horror Story are more apt. They nominally work together, but there's that teeny problem that one of them wants the other one dead.
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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Mongrel » Tue Dec 13, 2016 2:46 pm

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Friday
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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Friday » Tue Dec 13, 2016 3:05 pm

We're gonna build a space wall to keep out the Kryptonians who keep sending their farm boys and woo girls
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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Grath » Tue Dec 13, 2016 4:20 pm

A climate denier for EPA, an oil exec for State, and... what's the third one there? The third one, I can't. Sorry. Oops.

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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Yoji » Wed Dec 14, 2016 12:26 am

I heard someone on the radio talking about how The Bastard is appointing people who oppose the very departments they're being tapped for. "After all, he was elected to tear it all down and start over."

Yeah, start over in the same way people do after a nuclear holocaust or zombie plague.

I really don't know how I'm going to survive the next four years. Between the news and other stuff not relevant to this thread, I want to cry almost every day.
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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Brantly B. » Wed Dec 14, 2016 12:51 am

Someone asked me why Congress - both the current and incumbent ones - aren't getting more incensed about all this, and my somewhat-train-of-thought answer at the time was, "They kind of just want to wait and see... Trump really clearly wants to just burn down the entire executive branch, and you can't really argue at this point that it's not called for."

Upon further reflection the answer may be a bit more passive-aggressive: Regardless if it was called for or not, why wouldn't Congress just hang back and let the Executive branch self-destruct?

That's assuming all these Enemies of Themselves actually take a suicide pill as promised and don't just go, oh yeah, no, I'm in the most important chair in the world now obviously.

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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby pacobird » Thu Dec 15, 2016 10:28 am

Hardly Ideal wrote:I heard someone on the radio talking about how The Bastard is appointing people who oppose the very departments they're being tapped for. "After all, he was elected to tear it all down and start over."


Such horseshit. Appointing a climate denier to the EPA is not "starting over". Betsy Fucking DeVos is not a null state. These people are being brought in to achieve specific things, and the executive branch will remain intact insofar as it assists them in doing so.
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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Mongrel » Thu Dec 15, 2016 3:10 pm

Well! This is bad!

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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Mongrel » Thu Dec 15, 2016 3:11 pm

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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Yoji » Thu Dec 15, 2016 3:21 pm

But remember, kids: it was Obama who was the pinko communist dictator who wants to socialize all your Nazism and make everyone eat Islamic kale. Jesus fucking Christ.
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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Grath » Thu Dec 15, 2016 4:10 pm

The reason Putin helped elect Trump is so he can bribe Trump to drop the sanctions on Russia, then Tillerson and Exxon can start drilling for oil in the arctic circle again so that everyone involved gets richer and fuck the environment.

The important thing is that we finally got a president who isn't owned by special interests.

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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Mongrel » Thu Dec 15, 2016 6:37 pm



I'm stuck watching the stain get bigger as everything I've ever hated about the internet continues to bleed into real life.
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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Mongrel » Fri Dec 16, 2016 2:49 am

North Carolina, man. Jesus Christ.
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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Thad » Fri Dec 16, 2016 12:06 pm

I've got some small amount of hope that the Republicans making noises against Tillerson aren't just doing it for show, to create the illusion of opposition before confirming him.

Trump's majority in the Senate is actually pretty fragile; McCain, Flake, and Graham have all been openly contemptuous of him, and Rubio and Cruz are looking for an opportunity to run against him in four years. (And McCain's said this is probably his last term, so he's all out of fucks to give.)

The Senate's full of craven opportunists, and it's a question of seeing just which opportunity they cravenly go for. I think that to start with they're going to try and grab as many sweetheart Republican deals as they can, but if his approval rating dips there are a hell of a lot of them ready to turn on him at the drop of a hat.

And then there are dilemmas between "talk tough on Russia" and "give the oil companies everything they want". I think most Republicans are going to come down on the latter side, but all it takes is a few of them to defect to scuttle a nomination. (Assuming the Democrats all vote as a bloc, of course, which is also not a guarantee; if I were to bet on which party's likelier to split on any given vote, it wouldn't be the Republicans.)

Meanwhile, while we absolutely should be talking about the Russian interference in the election news, and the electoral college, and Comey, and all the other outside factors that contributed to Trump's victory, I think there's a real danger there of Democrats blaming outside factors entirely and not accepting any responsibility for their loss. I read an interview with Reid the other day where he basically said that Clinton didn't do anything wrong and Democrats don't need to do anything different, it's all Comey's fault, and I thought man, I am sure glad that guy's not going to be one of the leaders of the party anymore. (He was way better than Daschle, at least; I'll give him that.)

Ultimately, 2016's a lot like 2000: no, we should never forget about the dirty tricks the Republicans pulled to get their guy into office after most people voted against him; we should question his legitimacy at every opportunity -- but we also have to keep in mind that he couldn't have won if he hadn't been running against a weak and vulnerable opponent.

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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Joxam » Fri Dec 16, 2016 1:59 pm

I worry that the liberal coalition is irreparably damaged. I follow a lot of liberal minority news and people(This Week in Blackness, Imani Gandy, Roxanne Gay, Talib Kweli, Ta-Nahisi Coates, etc) and I follow a lot of mainstream left media also on twitter and other social media and I have to say it seems to me like there is a stark divided between minorities and whites on where this election failed.

I haven't seen one person on the minority left who hasn't blamed working class white democrats for failing to show up to vote at the expense of people of color and the LGBTQ community and to contrast that mainstream liberal news is talking pretty consistently about how poor white people think the Democrats spent too much time worried about minority and LGBTQ issues and not their issues (money).

And while I guess technically both sides agree what the issue is (poor white democratic turn out) I think they both ascribe to radically different ideas for what to do about it.

Of course its barely been a month. Most minorities I know are still in the 'how could you do this to us' stage of after election woes, hopefully it gets less divided as time goes by.
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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Thad » Fri Dec 16, 2016 3:47 pm

Keep in mind, too, that we've spent the last eight years wondering if the REPUBLICAN coalition was irreparably damaged. These coalitions may be a lot stronger than we think.

The central paradox here is that this election was a massive repudiation of the status quo, but broke down along demographic lines that are VERY status quo. The pollsters were mostly off by about 4 points, which is a sizable error, but Clinton's popular vote victory was ultimately pretty close to Obama's.

Plus, don't underestimate just how much Trump stands to unite disparate factions against him. Remember the disarray in the Republican Party; it looked a lot worse than current Democratic disunity does, but the Republican opposition to Obama and Clinton went a long way toward bridging that gap. That could cut both ways, and Trump is already more unpopular than Obama or Clinton ever were, before he even takes office.

Then again, I haven't forgotten 2004. All it takes is for Trump to start a war and the Democrats to nominate another bland establishment politician, and it's four more years.

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Re: Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

Postby Thad » Sat Dec 17, 2016 4:26 pm

Adding:

Joxam wrote:I haven't seen one person on the minority left who hasn't blamed working class white democrats for failing to show up to vote at the expense of people of color and the LGBTQ community and to contrast that mainstream liberal news is talking pretty consistently about how poor white people think the Democrats spent too much time worried about minority and LGBTQ issues and not their issues (money).

And while I guess technically both sides agree what the issue is (poor white democratic turn out) I think they both ascribe to radically different ideas for what to do about it.


I think the only correct answer is you have to do both.

In the primaries, we had one candidate who appealed to working-class whites but not minorities, and one who appealed to minorities but not working-class whites. I think the Democrats need a candidate who can do both.

The good news is, they're not mutually exclusive; it's not a zero-sum game. You can absolutely be an economic populist and support minority rights.

The question is, who the fuck's it gonna be? There aren't a lot of good names jumping out at me as candidates for '20.

If Michelle Obama ran, I think she'd win in a walk. But she sure doesn't look like she's planning to.

Who else is there? I think Biden*, Sanders, and Warren could all earn some blue-collar cred (and take the next four years to shore up their appeal with minority voters), but they're not exactly fresh faces; Warren's the youngest of the three and she'll be 71 years old in 2020. (Granted, Trump will be 74 -- though we don't even know for sure he'll be the Republican nominee.)

We've talked about Sanders's disconnect from minority voters before; my read is that where he fucked up was his inability to shut up about Wall Street for five minutes. In his early confrontations with BLM protesters, he made some serious misstakes and missteps; when people are worried about being murdered by the police, the appropriate response is not to talk about increasing taxes on the big banks. Yes, racism and classism are inextricably intertwined, but abstract, long-term economic solutions are no comfort to people who have immediate, concrete fear for their personal safety, and their families', and their friends'.

And "Look, I've been on your side for decades; I marched with Dr. King" is privileged white guy defensiveness; while I respect the hell out of Sanders's participation in the protests in the 1960's, it's not relevant to the question of what he's going to do right now to deal with racial injustice.

On the plus side, it looks to me, at least, like he's learned his lesson and started speaking more concretely about racial injustice. I don't know how good a shot he'd have if he ran again in '20 (again, dude is old), but he's got the potential to be a powerful voice in the Senate.

Who am I missing? There've gotta be some rising stars in the Democratic Party who were born after the Truman Administration, right?

And, granted, it's four years out and there's plenty of time for surprises; nobody in '12 was saying Trump would be the nominee. But on the other hand, Bush, Gore, Kerry, McCain, Romney, Clinton, and even Obama were pretty predictable choices four years before their respective contests.

Hm -- what about Gillibrand? I think she'll need to move to the left on economic policy if she's going to appeal to the white working class, but she's already done a pretty credible job of moving to the left on social policy. She might be someone to keep an eye on.



* Biden's actual economic positions are neoliberal as fuck, but politics is about perception, not reality. The image of Trump as a "blue-collar billionaire" is complete horseshit, but a lot of people eat it right up. Biden himself has done a very good job of maintaining a relatable, down-to-earth lifestyle, and I think that's a lot more important to public perception than the details of his policies.

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