jamiethekiller wrote:

smitty wrote:After eight years, a LOT of voters vote against the party that holds the White House. Since 1944, only once did either party hold the White House more than eight years. Just once.

Many, many voters are angry and want "change." It happens sometime during the second term of the party in charge.

yet after Clinton left Gore won the popular vote.
yet after Obama left Clinton won the popular vote.

CalvinBall wrote:Cruz for AG maybe.

Frank Gaffney is on the transition team. He didn't want Ellison to be on the House Intelligence Com. because he is Muslim.

Youseff wrote:

Warszawa wrote:

td11 wrote:

Houshphandzadeh wrote:the Democratic party completely failed. while certainly not as culpable as Republicans, we also bought into a cult of personality. we put forth a candidate who was hugely unpopular, like popularity doesn't matter. a candidate who was under investigation by the FBI, like that can just be waved away. we expected charges of sexual misconduct against Trump to stick when Bill Clinton was on stage every night, a guy so mired in scandal his own VP didn't want him campaigning for him in 2000. we aggressively ignored red-handed evidence that the DNC was corrupt and weighted toward Clinton, like that wouldn't bother anyone not inclined toward her. and then she waged a terrible campaign ignoring any kind economic message in favor of identity politics and negative messaging, even entirely ignoring crucial states. everyone crowed for pragmatism throughout the primary and then assumed the whole country would vote the way Dems think they ought to have, like everyone reads the same college-level articles about privilege and sexual politics. I'm embarrassed that I woke up confident last Tuesday

yeah i agree with this post

it's fair, and I think Hillary is filled with hubris and likely scandal, but I think you have to negate this some with how aggressively the GOP slandered her and Obama and how they manipulated their conspiracy theory frothing base. Benghazi, Kenya, Vince Foster, the Clinton aid getting murdered because he leaked to wikileaks. she was a bad candidate largely because she was a bad candidate, but she was also a bad candidate because the GOP fosters and flames lies about her and Obama with no remorse or retrospection.

CalvinBall wrote:Cruz for AG maybe.

Doll Is Mine wrote:

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) -- A local West Virginia official said she has been placed on leave after she made a racist post on Facebook about first lady Michelle Obama.

Clay County Development Corp. director Pamela Ramsey Taylor made the post following Republican Donald Trump's election as president, saying: "It will be refreshing to have a classy, beautiful, dignified First Lady in the White House. I'm tired of seeing a Ape in heels."

Clay Mayor Beverly Whaling responded: "Just made my day Pam."

wwry wrote:i think doll is mine was right this whole time jh secretly loves trump and wants to kiss and hug him

Warszawa wrote:

td11 wrote:

Houshphandzadeh wrote:the Democratic party completely failed. while certainly not as culpable as Republicans, we also bought into a cult of personality. we put forth a candidate who was hugely unpopular, like popularity doesn't matter. a candidate who was under investigation by the FBI, like that can just be waved away. we expected charges of sexual misconduct against Trump to stick when Bill Clinton was on stage every night, a guy so mired in scandal his own VP didn't want him campaigning for him in 2000. we aggressively ignored red-handed evidence that the DNC was corrupt and weighted toward Clinton, like that wouldn't bother anyone not inclined toward her. and then she waged a terrible campaign ignoring any kind economic message in favor of identity politics and negative messaging, even entirely ignoring crucial states. everyone crowed for pragmatism throughout the primary and then assumed the whole country would vote the way Dems think they ought to have, like everyone reads the same college-level articles about privilege and sexual politics. I'm embarrassed that I woke up confident last Tuesday

yeah i agree with this post

drsmooth wrote:

Houshphandzadeh wrote:spend a few more years preaching that it's impossible for Trump to win

You read poorly; I'm quite sure I never said that. And if I said that, I did not insist on it. I have said repeatedly that he's a gob of shit unfit to be President. Maybe that's what you've misunderstood.

drumpf has no mandate. He's the presidential choice of people who make poor choices.

I would not invest in, I would not employ, anyone who voted drumpf sincerely believing "yeah, he's capable of leading a large, complex, productive organization". Because he's not. And it's painfully evident he's not.

He - and so we - may get lucky. It's not probable.

jerseyhoya wrote:Was busy at work yesterday afternoon, but would like to weigh back in on this. I don't think I'm The Real Victim in all of this - though I haven't seen anything in the last week to make me think Trump winning wasn't the the worst outcome for me politically, so I think I'm a very minor victim to his victory.

The reason I've been giving the thread a bit of a wide berth is many people are angry, and it hasn't seemed like a great use of time to try to expound on my takes with the election so far. If pacino or slugsrbad or Richmond or a number of other posters who vehemently disagree with me but don't go out of their way to antagonize had asked what I thought about Bannon or how the transition was going I'd have answered differently.

And given the stakes of what happened I'm not judging people on this. I was pretty hurt by Romney losing in 2012, and by the time election day rolled around I expected it and in no way did Obama's reelection pose a direct threat to anyone I cared about (other than downstream typical political/economic stuff). This was a total shock and could be devastating to various groups. Trump is scary to me as a fat white dude who sort of works for the Republican Party. I lack empathy in some respects, but I'm not blind. This isn't a usual presidential loss.

On the flip side to that friendly stuff, I think any claims about how this thread isn't too out of step from the mainstream should maybe pause for a minute to reflect that there isn't a single regular poster in the political thread who voted for Trump. Like, there are a bunch of people here who talk about politics, and not a single one actually voted for the dude that won. So this is a pretty weird group of people.

I'll write something at work tomorrow about my feelings so far about the transition since the reason I told myself I wasn't posting anything in depth was it was a waste of my time, and I just spent 15 minutes explaining why I thought it was a waste of my time. I have at least 15 more minutes to hash through my hopes/fears/expectations/worries of a Trump administration vs. a Clinton win.

Monkeyboy wrote:
We're going to demote you to Mr Smooth if you keep pretending that you weren't screaming from the rooftops that he had no chance. And no, splitting hairs doesn't count.

Within the past decade, though, he has made headlines mostly for questionable and outrageous comments such as his suggestion about Obama. During the 2008 election, Gaffney wrote about the "jihadist vote" in another Washington Times piece, suggesting that a large number of Muslims were backing Obama's candidacy financially and with votes. Oh, and that Obama wasn't born in America. (He reiterated that argument before the 2012 election.)

Once Obama was in office, Gaffney was one of the main drivers of the idea that there was a deep-rooted Muslim infiltration of the government and that Muslims wanted to create an alternative system of law in the United States. Gaffney opposed the "Ground Zero mosque," a proposed Muslim center that was to be built near Ground Zero in Manhattan. After he opposed a Muslim community center in Tennessee, the largest paper in that state included Gaffney in a report linking anti-Muslim rhetoric to big paychecks.

His insistence that a group called the Muslim Brotherhood had worked its way into the American political sphere (including in the person of top Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin) eventually meant accusing prominent conservative Grover Norquist of ties to Islamic infiltrators. Gaffney wrote an entire book - published by the Center for Security Policy - accusing Norquist of links to that group and others, which in 2011 ended up getting Gaffney banned from the high-profile annual Conservative Political Action Conference.

In another famous incident, Gaffney suggested in 2010 that a logo for a missile defense group incorporated the Obama campaign logo and an Islamic crescent. It didn't.

The Daily Beast credited Gaffney in 2012 with driving the state and federal push for anti-sharia laws. When New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie defended his appointment of a Muslim to the state judiciary against charges that the governor was abetting the implementation of sharia, Gaffney suggested on a radio show that Christie might be turning a blind eye to treason.

The conspiracies aren't all Obama-centric. On MSNBC's "Hardball" in March 2009, Gaffney argued that Saddam Hussein was behind the Oklahoma City bombing. Earlier this year, Gaffney hosted a white supremacist on his radio show to discuss Muslim immigration and later said he didn't know about his guest's full views. (He did, however, welcome Jared Taylor as "the author of six books, including 'White Identity.'") The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate speech, has labeled Gaffney an "extremist."