Octopus Overlords

Smutly wrote:If Trump supporters are truly deplorable and beyond redemption...

Skinypupy wrote:

Smutly wrote:If Trump supporters are truly deplorable and beyond redemption...

It seemed pretty clear that the "deplorable" label wasn't simply because someone happened to be a Trump supporter. That is immaterial. It was intended to describe that subset of Trump supporters who agree with and actively promote his litany of racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic viewpoints. A fairly significant distinction which I'm sure is entirely lost on most of the people who are now proudly wearing "Deplorable" t-shirts, hats, etc.

Which makes it all the more amusing/horrific (I honestly can't tell which one) how strongly Trump's camp has latched onto it.

Kraken wrote: A wall on the Mason-Dixon line

In last night’s debate, the 2005 candid video of Donald Trump saying what he does with women was still on everyone’s mind. In response, he brought up many topics beloved by Republican rank-and-file voters: Bill Clinton, Benghazi, emails…it was a veritable Greatest Hits of 1996-2016. The likely consequence of this scorched-earth strategy is that Republican leaders are trapped. All their base (R) belong to Trump. This will reverberate downticket.

RunningMn9 wrote:Supporting Trump at this point is borderline treasonous to me considering the damage that this shit heel is capable of doing to this country.

malchior wrote:Ryan's and rnc dilemma in sharp focus as independents flock to Clinton *and* abandon Trump. CBS/WSJ have Clinton/Trump at 52/38. Insanity.

This is why Ryan threw in the towel. At 14 points they are past the point where the House is in jeopardy by some accounts.

Hamlet3145 wrote:Holy crap. They are not going to re-direct funds. The conference call was to state that the RNC is still behind trump.

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/p ... ump-229568

I actually think the Democrats now have a chance to take back the house in addition to the senate.

http://www.vox.com/2016/10/8/13211858/house-math-trump

hepcat wrote:I love extremist analogies.

"I don't like cheese."

"SO YOU WANT THE DAIRY INDUSTRY TO FAIL IN THIS COUNTRY!?"

hepcat wrote:I don't think the GOP will be destroyed over this, but they will have to redefine their values in the coming years. Trump has shit over a lot of them.

gameoverman wrote:I think what has happened is the lunatic fringe of the Republican party had been kept at bay for a long time. The mainstream Republicans certainly used them, for their votes, but they weren't allowed to play in the reindeer games. With the appearance of Sarah Palin, they were brought out to the forefront. Having had a taste of the spotlight, they did not want to go back into the shadows. This is where we are now.

Trump is their icon. He's the ONE for them, the culmination of their advancement on the main stage. Thus, I think to save their party, mainstream Republicans have to gut the lunatic fringe. Somehow, some way, they have to sever themselves from these formerly useful voters. The challenge is that by cutting loose these voters, Republicans also lose a huge chunk of their foundation, making their position unstable. It's like they're caught in a bear trap and have to lop off an arm to get out of it.

tgb wrote:

hepcat wrote:I love extremist analogies.

"I don't like cheese."

"SO YOU WANT THE DAIRY INDUSTRY TO FAIL IN THIS COUNTRY!?"

Why do you hate Wisconsin?

Hamlet3145 wrote:Holy crap. They are not going to re-direct funds. The conference call was to state that the RNC is still behind trump.

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/p ... ump-229568

I actually think the Democrats now have a chance to take back the house in addition to the senate.

http://www.vox.com/2016/10/8/13211858/house-math-trump

tgb wrote:

hepcat wrote:I don't think the GOP will be destroyed over this, but they will have to redefine their values in the coming years. Trump has shit over a lot of them.

They made their bed. Fuck 'em.

malchior wrote:Ryan's and rnc dilemma in sharp focus as independents flock to Clinton *and* abandon Trump. CBS/WSJ have Clinton/Trump at 52/38. Insanity.

This is why Ryan threw in the towel. At 14 points they are past the point where the House is in jeopardy by some accounts.

malchior wrote:The thought is at > 8% some districts may come into play. Gerrymandering isn't 100% reliable. They created as many "safer" districts in other words. Not electoral fortresses. We have not had a potential disparity like this so no one is sure what the down ticket effect will be. Ryan made comments today about protecting the House so they are taking the threat seriously obstensibly.

Max Peck wrote:Is there a word to describe someone who wants to put "Grab a Pussy" on a protest sign, but is too much of a pussy to actually spell it out?

I am Sidney Blumenthal. At least, that is what Vladimir Putin—and, somehow, Donald Trump—seem to believe. And that should raise concerns not only about Moscow’s attempts to manipulate this election, but also how Trump came to push Russian disinformation to American voters.

An email from Blumenthal—a confidant of Hillary Clinton and a man, second only to George Soros at the center of conservative conspiracy theories—turned up in the recent document dump by Wikileaks. At a time when American intelligence believes Russian hackers are trying to interfere with the presidential election, records have been fed recently to Wikileaks out of multiple organizations of the Democratic Party, raising concerns that the self-proclaimed whistleblowers group has become a tool of Putin’s government. But now that I have been brought into the whole mess—and transformed into Blumenthal—there is even more proof that this act of cyberwar is not only being orchestrated by the Russians, but that they are really, really dumb.

The evidence emerged thanks to the incompetence of Sputnik, the Russian online news and radio service established by the government controlled news agency, Rossiya Segodnya.

The documents that Wikileaks unloaded recently have been emails out of the account of John Podesta, the chairman of Clinton’s election campaign. Almost as soon as the pilfered documents emerged, Sputnik was all over them and rapidly found (or probably already knew about before the Wikileaks dump) a purportedly incriminating email from Blumenthal.

The email was amazing—it linked Boogie Man Blumenthal, Podesta and the topic of conservative political fevered dreams, Benghazi. This, it seemed, was the smoking gun finally proving Clinton bore total responsibility for the terrorist attack on the American outpost in Libya in 2012. Sputnik even declared that the email might be the “October surprise” that could undermine Clinton’s campaign.

To understand the full importance of the story—and how much Putin and his Kremlin cronies must have been dancing with delight—I have to quote the top few paragraphs:

In a major revelation from the second batch of WikiLeaks emails from Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta it was learned that Hillary's top confidante Sidney Blumenthal believed that the investigation into Benghazi was legitimate because it was "preventable" and the result of State Department negligence.

In an email titled "The Truth" from Hillary's top confidante Sidney Blumenthal, the adviser writing to undisclosed recipients said that "one important point that has been universally acknowledged by nine previous reports about Benghazi: The attack was almost certainly preventable" in what may turn out to be the big October surprise from the WikiLeaks released of emails hacked from the account of Clinton Campaign Chair John Podesta.

Then came the money quote: "Clinton was in charge of the State Department, and it failed to protect U.S. personnel at an American consulate in Libya. If the GOP wants to raise that as a talking point against her, it is legitimate," said Blumenthal, putting to rest the Democratic Party talking point that the investigation into Clinton's management of the State Department at the time of the attack was nothing more than a partisan witch hunt.

Those words sounded really, really familiar. Really familiar. Like, so familiar they struck me as something I wrote. Because they were something I wrote.

The Russians were quoting two sentences from a 10,000 word piece I wrote for Newsweek, which Blumenthal had emailed to Podesta. There was no mistaking that Blumenthal was citing Newsweek—the magazine’s name and citations for photographs appeared throughout the attached article. The Russians had carefully selected the “of course” paragraph, which mentions there were legitimate points of criticism regarding Clinton and Benghazi, all of which had been acknowledged in nine reports about the terror attack and by the former Secretary of State herself. But that was hardly the point of the story, “Benghazi Biopsy: A Comprehensive Guide to One of America’s Worst Political Outrages.” The piece is about the obscene politicization of the assault that killed four Americans, and the article slammed the Republican Benghazi committee which was engaged in a political show trial disguised as a Congressional investigation—the tenth inquiry into the tragedy.

Here is the real summation of my article, which the Russians failed to quote: “The historical significance of this moment can hardly be overstated, and it seems many Republicans, Democrats and members of the media don’t fully understand the magnitude of what is taking place. The awesome power of government—one that allows officials to pore through almost anything they demand and compel anyone to talk or suffer the shame of taking the Fifth Amendment—has been unleashed for purely political purposes. It is impossible to review what the Benghazi committee has done as anything other than taxpayer-funded political research of the opposing party’s leading candidate for president. Comparisons from America’s past are rare. Richard Nixon’s attempts to use the IRS to investigate his perceived enemies come to mind. So does Senator Joseph McCarthy’s red-baiting during the 1950s, with reckless accusations of treason leveled at members of the State Department, military generals and even the secretary of the Army…The consequences, however, are worse than the manipulation of the electoral process. By using Benghazi for political advantage, the Republicans have communicated to global militants that, through even limited attacks involving relatively few casualties, they can potentially influence the direction of American elections.”

Of course, this might be seen as just an opportunity to laugh at the incompetence of the Russian hackers and government press—once they realized their error, Sputnik took the article down. But then things got even more bizarre.

This false story was only reported by the Russian controlled agency (a reference appeared in a Turkish publication, but it was nothing but a link to the Sputnik article). So how did Donald Trump end up advancing the same falsehood put out by Putin’s mouthpiece?

At a rally in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, Trump spoke while holding a document in his hand. He told the assembled crowd that it was an email from Blumenthal, whom he called “sleazy Sidney.”

“This just came out a little while ago,’’ Trump said. “I have to tell you this.” And then he read the words from my article.

“He’s now admitting they could have done something about Benghazi,’’ Trump said, dropping the document to the floor. “This just came out a little while ago.”

The crowd booed and chanted, “Lock her up!”

This is not funny. It is terrifying. The Russians engage in a sloppy disinformation effort and, before the day is out, the Republican nominee for president is standing on a stage reciting the manufactured story as truth. How did this happen? Who in the Trump campaign was feeding him falsehoods straight from the Kremlin?

The Russians have been obtaining American emails and now are presenting complete misrepresentations of them—falsifying them—in hopes of setting off a cascade of events that might change the outcome of the presidential election. The big question, of course, is why are the Russians working so hard to damage Clinton and, in the process, aid Donald Trump? That is a topic for another time.

For now, though, Americans should be outraged. This totalitarian regime, engaged in what are arguably war crimes in Syria to protect their government puppet, is working to upend a democracy to the benefit of an American candidate who uttered positive comments just Sunday about the Kremlin's campaign on behalf of Bashar al-Assad. Trump’s arguments were an incomprehensible explication of the complex Syrian situation, which put him right on the side of the Iranians and Syrians who are fighting to preserve the government that is the primary conduit of weapons used against Israel.

So no, Mr. Putin, I’m not Sidney Blumenthal. And now that you have been exposed once again, get the hell out of our election. And Mr. Trump—you have some explaining to do.

Smutly wrote:I think the Republican Party is done. They won't be viable after this.

[Max Peck's Newsweek quote.]

tgb wrote:I miss my grandfather.

Back when I was in college and an unabashed Lefty/anti-war activist, Zaide Nathan and I would get into these monumental arguments, usually about the war but mostly about Nixon. For my grandfather, all that mattered was that Nixon was a staunch friend of Israel (the anti-Semitic stuff on the tapes wouldn't come to light until years after Zaide was gone).

At family gatherings it would be myself, my mother, and my uncle Mel taking on my grandfather. (Side note - my uncle may be the only crazy old relative to spend his days sending out anti-Trump conspiracy theories). On days I didn't have class (or just didn't feel like going) I would walk the 3 miles to my grandparents apartment in Brighton Beach and the argument would continue over several hands of Gin Rummy or Pinochle.

Anyway, Zaide Nathan always had to have the last word, and it was always the same - totally unrelated to anything that had come before he would shut the argument down with "If you think Russia's so great, why don't you go live there and see how you like it."

I suspect if he were here today, that's exactly what he'd say to Drumpf.