Trump cheats at golf - the ONE and ONLY politics thread

Pinhead.

 

The party does not stand for what Trump stands for. Not really. The party power stands for all the things you mentioned, which is, to say, they stand for bullshit that doesn't work for most of America, and has been proven not to work, stuff they knew didn't work, since you can never trust flawed human beings to be generous with money they can't write off as charity (if any of that shit worked, Jack Kemp would have been allowed to win a nomination) and then they vaguely stand for "morals." You saw that embrace in the 1970s and 1980s. That's mostly bullshit, too -- wrecking the economy and widening the wage gap only runs familes into the ditch of depression, abuse and violence -- but it's bullshit that a whole swath of Americans who fancy themselves "good people" decided to agree with, especially in the Reagan era and right around the time Gary Hart - a saint compared to Trump - showed his ass.

W. Bush was a death rattle of all that. His presidency was, in many ways, a miserable fulfillment of all that. Poor people owning part of the American dream? Wall Street fucked with that. Working hard at jobs for a good wage? NAFTA started eroding that edge and it just kept on going from there. The housing bubble - that whole disaster in 2008, plus the wars in the Middle East - that broke a lot of Americans. I know families who lost 70 percent of their retirement in that deal. I know one that lost 80-90 percent. Kept the house. Lost a life's work. And then they sit down at watch Fox, which, since Obama took over have said this is shit this is shit this is shit this is shit and...what did people think would happen? Hope is dead. Change - it's all bad. At least for these people.

Trump stands for being the devil you know, the devil who works for you, since the general idea, among Trump supporters, is that all politicians are from "Washington" and are, collectively, devils. I don't think there's a lot of illusions about Trump's character. He doesn't have a good character. His supporters don't care because, well, according to them, none of them do. What's the point of virtue when none of them have any? So, setting virtue aside, who's actually going to Get Things Done? Trump supporters think he will. Not only that - he'll do it for them.

Trump stands for winning, in an era when his supporters hate losing. They're also tired of being talked down to, tired of feeling like, if they don't hand a college $100,000, they can't make decent buck, tired of good-paying jobs going to other countries so rich CEOs (like Trump!) can stay rich. They're tired of feeling screwed - by everyone.

And I think they're tired of being told they're not smart, that they're racists, that they're xenophobic, that they're homophobic, by people who they think have never lived paycheck to paycheck, never owned a house, never had to keep a job they didn't like, never had a margin so thin and scary that it kept them up at night. I'm not saying they're right. I'm saying that how's they feel. It's a postmodern thing - this tyranny of feeling over reason - and I think it's wrong to presume that, with Trump supporters, it's always wrong thinking so much as it is hurt feeling. They are awash in day-to-day rage that is just below the surface. It's a product of a media culture that makes money off of it.

So as long as a devil is going to run America, they think, might as well be a devil working for me, since the last 2 haven't.

And these people will love going into a voting booth and voting for Trump for the sheer pleasure of telling the liberal intellectual class to go fuck itself - just like they loved doing it to Cruz, Rubio and the rest of them.

I don't agree with it, but I get it. The GOP - well, more, the conservative media - has prepared Trump supporters for this moment for decades.

And you notice how impossible it is for the GOP to break free of it. Trump is their nominee, and he's an embarrassment but - better than Clinton! He has to be, right, considering they've villainized her for 25 years. Clinton can't have a lick of virtue, because, since 2008, she's been the most awful person in America not named Obama. So the GOP is faced with, on some level, admitting "look ripping Clinton, yeah, that's just for show and self-interest, she's really not that bad, and she's definitely better than Trump since knowing how to run government is a valuable tool" or, you know, keeping up the facade to save some face and hope Trump isn't a tyrant.

You see what they've chosen. The ones who don't reject both and stand behind Gary Johnson, which is the equivalent of Mercutio, a motormouth who declares a plague on both houses, as he bleeds out.

 

And yet, members of one political party persisted in dragging that rape victim into the lawsuit, secretly tape-recording her, and bringing up the possibility of prosecuting her unless she recanted her refusal to get involved. Refresh my memory again, which political party was that?

 

Yep, and some of his stories have been discredited.

And the only people who cared were the moralists who acted holier than thou until their credibility was shot to hell when it came out they weren't who they pretended to be either.

 

"If only a catcher could have been there, in the rye of Egypt, to catch all those bodies, and tell off all those phonies." -- Ben Rhodes

 

Seriously, that's perhaps the single most baffling lock I've ever seen here. I'd think the mod who did it could at least give a short explanation why.

It's only the biggest news story in the world right now and we're not allowed to discuss it because ...umm, I don't know ...people dared mention the word muslim?

 

Effin hilarious and brilliant

 

One of the biggest disappointments of my youth was finding out in ninth grade English that Salinger's book wasn't about baseball.

 

Well said, Alma. You nailed a lot of it on the head. I've tried to dryly explain why Trump is popular a few times in this thread and echoed some of these points, but most people want to shout it down and lampoon it. Understanding Trump's appeal is often confused with support and shouldn't be. You can logically understand his popularity and even agree with parts of it without fully supporting him.
This part, especially, gets to the heart of it:

People are indeed tired of being told, at every turn, that they're assholes for not wanting their world to crash and burn and change around them. They're told that everything they believe is wrong -- not because it's morally, ethically or factually wrong, but simply because one person or one small group woke up with sand in its shorts and says it's wrong, and they somehow gain traction with the masses.
They've seen and been told all of this by the media, both conservative and liberal, and are waking up to the fact that they have some options. Trump, unfortunately, is that option. He's one giant protest vote. Bernie Sanders is the same for the more liberal-mineded. The Bernie Bros are to Democrats what the Tea Party has been to Republicans.
As you said, the regular cast of characters has been screwing us over for a long time, so why not at least try something different? They feel like even if it doesn't work, what do we have to lose at this point? If nothing else, it'll send a loud message.

 

I hate this logic.

"Well, the Padres can't hit. They should field a lineup of koalas instead of humans."

 

By "in ninth grade English," you mean Wednesday, right?

 

As a Reds fan, I would vote for an all-koala bullpen.