Trump is "a clear and present danger"

So far, the source for the birther rumor closest to HRC was Sidney Blumenthal. Which does not mean either that HRC was a part of the plan, or not party to the plan.
Was the claim by Sid an act of desperation, trying to save a failing HRC candidacy?

 

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So what if it was? It got no traction among Dems, liberals, and lefties, either in the media or on the ground, because it was immediately debunked by physical fact.

And it was picked up (from wherever obscure and currently almost untraceable source) by Trump and Republican media, turned into a cause celebre for going on eight years now, and used to motivate and focus the Republican voting base, because it worked well for that purpose. Historical fact means little or nothing to them. They live in a fantasy world, by and large.

And we see the fact that Trump's core support believes goofball crap they got from him defended on the grounds that he got it from somebody else in the first place - he didn't make any of this bs up himself, so spreading it and running on it and conning people with it is no reflection on him or his victims voters.

And so we see the candidacy of Trump, a type of politician and political movement well known in history and in current examples world wide. So well known and familiar it is, that he has no chance among an electorate with a liberal arts education. Anyone familiar with the political history of the past couple of centuries can see him coming a mile away, and if possessed with a basic moral decency and sense of adult responsibility will refuse to support him or promote his ascension to power.

 

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If half of HRC's voting base were child molesters, your inversion of the argument would be less obviously foul. But it would still be fallacy.

 

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And that's not true either, is it? Blumenthal never suggested or said Obama wasn't born in the US and neither did Clinton or her campaign ever make that assertion.

I suggest you ask yourself why so many of your beliefs are so blatantly false. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-m...y-clinton-and-birther-movement-still-no-ther/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_citizenship_conspiracy_theories

 

Either|Maybe|Or

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Wow, you're really putting some effort into your support for human atrocity, aren't you?

Is Hillary Clinton accused of raping a minor? Donald Trump is.

Did Hillary Clinton ever have to send out her lawyer to give a fake explanation for why rape isn't rape? Donald Trump did.

No, seriously, Sculptor, what's your point?

Convince me this isn't trolling. Convince me there is an educated political thesis about your advocacy. You don't like that HRC qualifies as a warmonger by your definition―nor will I utterly refuse your definition―but your "moral compass"° what, then, surrenders to the man promising to one-up the warmonger you don't like?

You keep posting these weird, nearly paradoxical arguments that only hold stable as long as they are reserved motionless in their own independent sphere of existence devoid of interaction with any other information. I start to wonder if maybe this is why conservatives so ostensibly loathe Hegelian dialectics, because their political theses so frequently require a condition of informational and psychological stasis that just doesn't exist.

You know, it's been over twenty years since I wrote in the name of a friend for a local election. The funny thing is that I'm the only person he specifically knows voted for him; he had no idea who the other six were. And in all that time, the biggest write-in event I've witnessed is an establishment Republican overcoming an insurgency that won the primary. We always say you don't have to like the candidate you vote for, and that's largely true because nobody gets an idyll, much like averages generally represent an impossible condition for any one human being. We're in a year when one of the apparent headlines is the astounding unpopularity of the candidates themselves, which is itself seemingly paradoxical. But part of that sense of impossible contradiction falls away when we stop presupposing them, for the sake of argument, equivalent.

For instance, it's hard to explain the full measure of GOP insanity. Perhaps the historical asterisk will glitter with the implications of a party (i.e., collection of individuals) of Machiavellian individualist capitalists (i.e., in it for themselves) trying to cooperate toward a common goal in which no one person gets everything desired. In the end, though, Donald Trump is who Republican voters want; this is how their process worked out. And Mr. Trump really is appalling. We're not just throwing out electoral and political customs, we're setting aside a large swath of our American psychomoral assertion of decency, in order to accommodate him.

If you could actually explain yourself, Sculptor, perhaps your pathetic maneuvers and excuses↑―e.g., "I borrowed it from the HRC supporters"―might make sense as something other than desperate and pathetic trolling. But it is clear, Sculptor, that you are not arguing in good faith.

Still, though, if your "moral compass" points away from Hillary Clinton, one can reasonably wonder how much of that revulsion is founded in reality. After all, one of the reasons the email scandal is a scandal is that we decided arbitrarily to declare scandal. We don't know about Colin Powell's security situation because he's not Hillary Clinton so nobody cares what he did. We don't care about the evidence of actual pay for play with Powell's foundation because he's not Hillary Clinton so nobody cares what he did. We haven't investigated the foreign service personnel deaths that occurred on his watch because he's not Hillary Clinton so nobody cares what he did. Your "moral compass" trembles and falters at the mere whiff of rumor when it's HRC, but like so many other people you don't give a damn if it's anyone else. The liberal critique against Hillary Clinton is generally far more valid than the conservative, but it, too, falls apart if it skips out on history.

Borrowing a rape metaphor in order to explain why your "moral compass" points toward the guy whose attorney once had to assert, on his behalf, that it's not rape when it's your wife probably wasn't the best of ideas.

And there is something of an I dare you feeling about it; I really want to know, because, seriously, the one thing you can't convince anyone right now is that you're thinking this bullshit through.

Is malice really the best you have to offer?

It's like you're just making up atrocious things to say as if they have some actual meaning. The reason why is probably fascinating, but at this point I doubt you're capable of telling us, because part of it is mere vice.

But here's the other problem: What if it's not vice? What if you really did fall for it? When Jonathan Chait↱ recently wrote―

The critics are suggesting that the fact that Clinton and Trump are both trusted in roughly equal measure is a problem for which the news media bears at least some responsibility. Perhaps they are about equally distrusted because the liberal media has portrayed Clinton as a criminal? No, Spayd replies, the media is doing it right because people dislike Hillary Clinton almost as much as Trump.​

―my memory tumbled back a bit over eight years, to the waning days of the Bush administration, and the Senate Intelligence Committee report that, as Dan Froomkin↱ put it, "further solidifies the argument that the Bush administration's most blatant appeals to fear in its campaign to sell the Iraq war were flatly unsupported":

The White House response? That officials in Congress and elsewhere were saying the same things about Iraq. Or in other words, that other people bought the administration line. It takes a lot of chutzpah to defend yourself against charges that you've engaged in a propaganda campaign by noting that it worked.​

It really is a remarkable occasion. Yes, they really did do that. It's one of the weird things about the way we've treated the "Iraq War Vote". Not that we shouldn't criticize, but Congress saying no to the president right then and there would have been, historically, extraordinary to the point of unspeakable.

But the flip side here is the idea that "it worked", a very important consideration in Chait's context.

Because the problem is that not every complaint about Hillary Clinton is invalid; it's just that the whole discussion takes place amid an insistent dishonest framework. Consider the idea of the squeaky wheel. Conservatives have been about trying to prove, for some years now, that simply repeating oneself enough is sufficient, and whether one is correct or incorrect is irrelevant.

And that's pretty much the standard Spayd appeals to: Whether it's true or not, it's Hillary Clinton's fault that people think it's true because people don't like her after all that other stuff that wasn't true.

Actually, tellyawhat: One of the interesting phrases you'll hear these days is "without context"; it's part of the complaint against the media critique of Hillary Clinton, that too much is presented "without context". It's also about to come to the fore in Charlotte, where the police have gone from very definitive statements to acknowledging ambiguity, and I'll have to find the columnist who phrased it that the department didn't want the footage released without context.

Still, though, how about the time Matt Yglesias↱ felt exasperated enough to tweet:

You'd think hosting the 5th Fleet would be enough to buy Bahrain "access" to the Secretary of State but I guess is took that donation.​

See, by Spayd's argument, it's Hillary Clinton's fault the AP deliberately left the 5th Fleet out of their alleged exposé. And it's Hillary Clinton's fault that the AP's readers might think there was something untoward about the Secretary of State having official business with a host of the 5th Fleet.

At some point, I blame the audience for gullibility.
____________________

Notes:

° (chortle!)​

Chait, Jonathan. "New York Times Public Editor Liz Spayd Writes Disastrous Defense of False Equivalence". New York. 12 September 2016. NYMag.com. 24 September 2016. http://nym.ag/2cxjabr

Froomkin, Dan. "The Propaganda Campaign Dissected". The Washington Post. 6 June 2008. WashingtonPost.com. 24 September 2016. http://wapo.st/2cVkMxE

Yglesias, Matthew. "You'd think hosting the 5th Fleet would be enough to buy Bahrain "access" to the Secretary of State but I guess is took that donation". Twitter. 26 August 2016. Twitter.com. 24 September 2016. http://bit.ly/2d7JKb8

 

Meanwhile, former McClatchy Washington Bureau Chief James Asher tweeted Friday that Blumenthal had “told me in person” that Obama was born in Kenya.

“During the 2008 Democratic primary, Sid Blumenthal visited the Washington Bureau of McClatchy Co.,” Asher said in an email Friday to McClatchy, noting that he was at the time the investigative editor and in charge of Africa coverage.

“During that meeting, Mr. Blumenthal and I met together in my office and he strongly urged me to investigate the exact place of President Obama’s birth, which he suggested was in Kenya. We assigned a reporter to go to Kenya, and that reporter determined that the allegation was false.

“At the time of Mr. Blumenthal’s conversation with me, there had been a few news articles published in various outlets reporting on rumors about Obama’s birthplace. While Mr. Blumenthal offered no concrete proof of Obama’s Kenyan birth, I felt that, as journalists, we had a responsibility to determine whether or not those rumors were true. They were not.”

 

Still irrelevant.

Still an inverted and fallacious logic as well as a delusional motivation.

Still an example of Democratic campaigns and political memes being held to, and based on, reasoned reality, as Republican ones increasingly spin into fantasies and delusions and lies.

What is your problem? Is there something about Trump's many years of marketing Birther bs, running on it, that you honestly don't know ?

 

Every once in awhile guys, it might be a good idea to consider the humorous aspects of this nation's quadrennial seeming mass insanity.

It seems to be a crossover problem between intellect and emotion. Once a side is chosen(intellectually?), it seems that it becomes emotionally painful to actually listen to the other side.

And that pain seems to vent itself through negative displays toward the "other side" the goyim if you will.
........................
on another note, the river is up another 2 ft in last 24 hours
The crest is most likely 4-6 days off, is expected to top at 17ft above normal, and it's supposed to rain again in the wee hours.
Maybe next week we get to kayak through the flooded forest again---------

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It's a rare treat.
So, I dragged the kayaks up to the back yard and filled them with water. Now, I'm off to scrub out the mud...........................

 

Hard to miss dad..........

.................
hey, I didn't let that jinni out of the bottle.

 

Trump loves war. He admitted it. And there is no one bigger or better at the military than he is (per his claim.)

It's funny that the most effective anti-Trump ads all just replay Trump's own words.

 

Oh baloney. We were there, remember?

Whether Clinton, in particular, would have the political integrity (and competence) to vote as it was obvious she should was a major topic of speculation among liberals, with the cynics - those who thought the worst of Clinton - predicting she would get rolled as always before.

A majority of her fellow Democratic Congresscritters, quite ordinary members of the House, of no special reputation for courage or integrity beyond the norm, did buck up and vote well. Her vote was a minority vote in the Democratic Congress as a whole. The rest obviously found nothing "unspeakable" about a sound, well-founded, clearly prudent "No" to an unprecedented, visibly unwarranted, and clearly badly motivated Presidential demand. Even from a cynical but competent realpolitik analyst's point of view, it was a likely disaster in the making - nobody in that administration knew what they were doing, not even Powell in the Middle East, and they were talking like fools.

The Iraq invasion wasn't just hubris and folly, but stereotypical hubris and folly. This was obvious to anyone with a solid evaluation of the capabilities and motivations of W&Cheney's administration - any competent American politician.

Do not spread any more reality denial on Democrats than can possibly be avoided, is the recommendation. Reality recognition is a core advantage of the Democratic Party's political situation these days, and it should not be dissipated. Imho.

 

It's not a "mass" insanity we're dealing with here. It's a factional, limited, defined one. Its symbol, as well as its fundamental threat, is Donald Trump's bid for the Presidency.

We've got a fascist movement, complete with a theatrical media operation and a Mussolini clone making future slapstick comedy out of the fate of what was a great country, and its champion is within four polling points of being elected President and Commander in Chief.

There isn't really another "side" to this, with a choice and a team and all that: it's Trump and his base against the rest of us, in all the variety of the non-crazed and reality based political world.

It wasn't Mussolini who made stage-moustached handwaving mama mia Italians out of what had been the Roman Empire - but it was Mussolini who made the jokes bitter ones. We got a second chance after W&Cheney - we're four points from blowing it.

 

No, you didn't. There are polls that show how deplorable Trump supporters are: a very high percentage of birthers, Obama-is-a-Muslim-ers, racists, homophobes, and so on. You don't like the facts, but you help these people.

 

Indeed, 72% isn't a small number. The fact is 72% of Republicans believe in birtherism or have doubts about Obama's birth.

http://www.salon.com/2016/08/11/tru...ers-still-doubt-president-obamas-citizenship/

 

I don't know, Ice, that's so vague, and you're so unreliable.

I would ask what you're on about, but that would suggest I intend to waste any time on a pro-stalker, ahistorical, unreliable, whiney-whine libertarian Trump supporter such as yourself.

 

But you might want to spend a little time on this:

If you think the only way Clinton can beat Trump is on a sudden wave of collective fantasy and history denial breaking in her favor, then your schtick here makes some minimal sense. But it looks like a risky bet, to me. Are you that desperate, already? She's still holding on, in the polls, with voter suppression the darkest factor looming.

And the downside of that approach is of course the aftermath, in which nothing predicated on getting the reality muddled and wrong will actually work. One of the advantages of the comparative Democratic Party strength in reality recognition is the post-election leverage it brings - in theory - to subsequent efforts. You were hoping for something positively good to come out of Clinton's victory, right? Something more than merely dodging the Trumpcountry's fate?

 

Meanwhile, on the OP, Martin Amis writes for us an essay on Trump (http://harpers.org/archive/2016/08/don-the-realtor/1/ ) , and makes the following observation: On the evidence of his books Trump appears to be aging into serious trouble, mentally.

 

Please do recognize, sir, just how many arguments you have cause to invent in order to be seen responding.

 

Well, until you address one or more of them, looks like I can take a break from invention - here's the last one left hanging:

So what do you think - does the extraordinary level of denial of Clinton's actual political nature and career we find among Clinton supporters reduce the threat of Trump, increase it, or make no difference?

My take is that it increases it, by creating the impression that supporting Clinton involves playing gullible sap and being used by cynical bad guys with ulterior motives.

 

Well, yes, but your take is unreliable.