monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Trump supporters are dead easy to spot, despite the election being over ten months ago and Trump being in office for the past eight months, all they do is bang on and on about Hillary Clinton.

That's you matey boy.

The propaganda campaign preceding the launching of the war against Iraq was a huge, multi-pronged operation run over an extended period of time. This example is not comparable. I think we can safely assume that Fox is playing its standard game of providing support for a GOP president while also presenting its audience (Trump's base) with stories that will frighten or anger or in some other way cause irrational and emotional states of mind.

Of course he did.
TPM

I hope you're right, but it's still early days, little acorns and all that.

TPM has an informative piece up today on Russian propagandists operations on Twitter you ought to take the time to read. Because they are going to keep doing this stuff. Here's one example:
The sharp observer will not miss the similarities between these sorts of stories being pushed by Russian operatives (the likely source) and what Fox or many other right wing media outlets push.

What's so odd to me is seeing people here, such as you, continue to refute facts when they're presented. Post-fact guys like Trump, huh?

Limousine liberal is a useful term, used by anyone who pleases, to describe liberals who are all talk, but don't want to actually get in the mix with the people who are adversely affected. For you and others here to portray Sanders progressives or former Sanders voters as establishment-friendly is ridiculous. Post-fact again.

Did you know that 12% of Sanders primary voters actually voted for Trump to deny Clinton the presidency? I didn't know that little jewel until yesterday. Now, that is some hate. A third of Sanders primary voters stayed home or voted third. I was one of them. That's some pretty potent anger. Think that one of them might be angry enough to call her or her ilk a limousine liberal??? Think about it.

She and her loyal subjects can be easily be described as limousine liberals. It's a concise descriptor of a certain type of person that should be used...liberally....when it's applicable.

And it will be.

Alabama Out-Trumps Trump
NYT header

That is not a bad way to think of this Moore victory.

Trump's rise through the primaries followed by his EC win can be rationally considered as a predictable consequence of the GOP's reliance, over four decades or more, on a narrative that government is inevitably venal and coercive. A key part of that narrative has been the rejection of expertise and intellectualism/education. It is not at all difficult to grasp how this has led many in the GOP base to a delusional faith in "common sense" and "rogue" characters far outside the mainstream (Jesse Ventura, Joe the Plumber, Sarah Palin, Ben Carson, etc). Trump is the epitome of this stuff.

But, once in office where he becomes government itself, then Trump and his administration are immediately set up for challenges from voices who are, or present themselves as, even further rogue.

Data source, please.

It's sort of curious how sensitive so many establishment democrats are to names. The very word liberal was a huge source of contention a few years ago.

All a conservative would have to do was use the word, and A2K liberals would claim it was being used as a perjorative and sulk. It started to be funny to me--thinking that nothing but their own perception was condemning them. All they had to do was be proud of it.

12% of Sanders voters voted for Trump.

I was surprised too.

http://www.npr.org/2017/08/24/545812242/1-in-10-sanders-primary-voters-ended-up-supporting-trump-survey-finds

Fully 12 percent of people who voted for Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries voted for President Trump in the general election. That is according to the data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study — a massive election survey of around 50,000 people. (For perspective, a run-of-the-mill survey measuring Trump's job approval right now has a sample of 800 to 1,500.)

Political science professor Brian Schaffner of University of Massachusetts, Amherst tweeted the data on Wednesday.

Schaffner's numbers show that after a bitter Democratic primary, more than 1 in 10 of those who voted in the primaries for the very progressive Sanders ended up voting for the Republican in the general election, rather than for the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton.

You guys don't seem to absorb how furious Sanders voters were after being cheated. But, I wonder if this 12% didn't meet some other criteria...

As noted in the piece, race and gender look to be key factors.

Hatred prevailed in their heart.

From the article, that 12% were "much less likely to be" Dems. They look to be either attracted in to voting by Sanders' anti-Wall Street, anti-establishment rhetoric, or they may be right-leaning Independents, but most independents lean left.

When this collection of people saw their candidate cheated, they responded rather viscerally in anger, ...or thought (grimace) that Trump was the only other anti-establishment candidate. I think anti-Washington sentiment probably ruled the day with some, anti-Clinton with others.

I do see that negative racial views may be present in anyone willing to vote for Trump, but Sanders' rhetoric could never attract a racist. He loudly lectured against racism and embraced Muslims, repudiating Trump's anti-Muslim rhetoric from the Dias constantly.

Still, an interesting study.

As an aside re "liberal":

since here in Germany, our liberals most certainly will become a coalition partner in the new government - that reminded me about the different meaning of "liberal" in the world and in the USA, and the different positions of the liberal parties elsewhere.

Since 'liberal' is one of the oldest political terms in the Western repertoire, it has a whole variety of meanings, and it also encompasses a lot of different wings - for example, the British and Canadian liberal parties are both moderate leftist parties, the Australian liberal party is staunchly conservative, the German FDP is right of centre, the Austrian liberal parties are right-wing and extreme right.

(When you look at the members of Liberal International (LI) [the political international federation for liberal political parties], you'll notice that many if not most are at least rightish.)

It is actually less than I thought. Personally I don't think those Sander voters were true "progressives" if they could go from Sanders to Trump, knowing a republican president was going to get them a republican choice for the supreme court and a republican domestic agenda. Sure wasn't going to get them anywhere close to a $15 dollar wage or Medicare for all; much less free college. They must have been just all caught up in the hype rather than having any true cause.

Trump Thinks Twice About His Tweets, and Hits Delete (NYT)[url]

Some, surely. The Dem establishment vector was in support of Clinton (read Greg Sargent's essay I linked yesterday. But this does not tell the whole story. GOP operatives (and, as we now know, Russian propagandists) were working to create discord among likely Dem voters by a sustained and covert operation to encourage these voters to think poorly of Clinton.

1) As I've noted earlier, one of the loudest and most disruptive BernieBros voices at the Dem convention (heckled Sarah Silverman at one point) was later revealed to be a conservative operative.

2) All of this has precedents in GOP electoral activities for decades now that fall under the term "rat *******".

3) There is an identical precedent from 2008 where GOP operatives used the emerging social media universe (MySpace at the time) to forward a story that because Hillary had been cheated out of the nomination by Obama, that therefore thousands or millions of women were so angry that they were going to teach the corrupt Dem party a lesson and vote for McCain/Palin. This was the ClintonsForMcCain/Puma etc crowd.

If you don't know this history, for the love of god, get educated on it. Wikipedia has a rather good page on it HERE In 2008, I spent six months digging into this. Three key names that come up in the wikipedia piece - Christi Adkins, Peter Boykin and Will Bower were all GOP operatives. None had any history of supporting Clinton or progressive policies. Each (perhaps not Boykin, whose expertise was in site creation/management) made themselves available to Fox and other media outlets on many occasions. All these sites created at the time were linked to each other (there were dozens of them) and nearly every one of them featured the same or similar content. One of the most commonly repeated bits of content was this:



As I've noted before (and it is also noted in the wikipedia page), ClintonsForMcCain was registered as a domain by the RNC. Within a day or two, that site was up and running with links to these many other groups/pages and Christi Adkins was appearing on Hannity and elsewhere.

This obviously isn't to say that there weren't angry women who believed and hoped a woman they respected would finally achieve the WH. Many sincere women were involved here but the big push that gathered them up and tried to drive them to extremism and anti-Dem feelings was a GOP covert operation.

Likewise, Bernie supporters are not all or even mainly operating under false pretenses, but many extremists were and are.

Good post, Walter. Let me add...
Here in British Columbia, the Liberal Party is a right wing party. Though the Liberal Party in Canada has always been strong, in BC it never was. The two dominating parties were New Democrats (left) and Social Credit (right). The Social Credit party was the dominant party but became so corrupt that it actually disappeared as a provincial party. However, the big money interests that it had supported and forwarded weren't going to just fade into powerlessness. They took over the moribund Liberal Party.

No kidding.