19
   

Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

 
 
izzythepush
 
  1  
Reply Sat 2 Nov, 2024 08:14 am
@hightor,
hightor wrote:

Is there some sort of backroom calculation going on, with the hope of attracting non-white voters, the way the GOP does here?


If James Cleverly had been elected leader you may have had a point.

He is more central than the others, and he was the front runner among mps right up until the last round where he still got about a third of the votes.

It was very close, and shows none of the candidates have the support of a majority of mps.

As it was the right wing membership was given the choice of far right or even further right.

And, as expected, they voted for the most right wing.

Personally I think Cleverly would have lost against either candidate had he gone through.

The Tory membership is not interested in winning elections but in idealism. This is their Jeremy Corbyn moment.
Walter Hinteler
 
  1  
Reply Sat 2 Nov, 2024 08:44 am
@izzythepush,
A poll this summer showed that half of Tory members were opposed to any merger with Reform UK, but also think the party should move more to the right.
0 Replies
 
Lash
 
  -2  
Reply Sat 2 Nov, 2024 08:51 am
@izzythepush,
The demonization of Trump is silly.

Cheney, Harris, Biden, the silly chum squad here, Bush & Trump all have the same core policies.

I dissent.
NSFW (view)
blatham
 
  2  
Reply Sat 2 Nov, 2024 09:06 am
NY Times editorial

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GbYJj1RWIAAs7qm?format=png&name=small
0 Replies
 
izzythepush
 
  3  
Reply Sat 2 Nov, 2024 09:09 am
@Lash,
Don't be ridiculous.

He said he would be a dictator from day 1.

People said the same of Hitler, that he was a 'normal' politician prone to hyperbole.

He wasn't, neither is Trump.
Lash
 
  -1  
Reply Sat 2 Nov, 2024 09:22 am
@izzythepush,
So, it’s cool that the Democrats embrace Cheney and Kamala promises to have a republicans in her administration…?

😏?
izzythepush
 
  2  
Reply Sat 2 Nov, 2024 09:26 am
@Lash,
It's better than the alternative.
0 Replies
 
izzythepush
 
  2  
Reply Sat 2 Nov, 2024 09:31 am
@Lash,
You need to stop using misleading language.

I could just as easily say you're 'cool' about school shootings.

I wan't 'cool' about Jaques Chirac becoming the French president, but he was infinitely preferable to Le Pen.
0 Replies
 
izzythepush
 
  2  
Reply Sat 2 Nov, 2024 09:34 am
I don't live in America, domestic issues such as medicare etc. do not interest me.

Bottom line, I want a president who will honour America's commitment to NATO, and that ain't Trump.
NSFW (view)
hightor
 
  3  
Reply Sat 2 Nov, 2024 09:50 am
@Lash,
Quote:
The demonization of Trump is silly.

Not really. He's patently the biggest oaf who's ever sat in the White House, barring none. He represents the very worst of the USA – violence, greed, ignorance, pseudo-religiosity, narcissism, militarism, nationalism, and racism. It would be stupid to treat him as "any other politician" and not to single him out.

You go on and on about "genocide" in Gaza and, rightly and understandably, inveigh against the death of innocent civilians. But Trump alone, of all those people you identify, is an authoritarian. And if he is elected, we can kiss the livable planet goodbye – he will do nothing about the industrial pollution which threatens the biosphere. The loss of human life in Gaza, Ukraine, and Sudan will pale compared to the death of entire ecosystems which sustain complex webs of interdependent life forms, including Homo sapiens. Have you seen what unrestricted extractive development has done to the Amazon? Do you have any idea what the collapse of Atlantic meridional overturning circulation will mean for agriculture? Do you understand the consequences of the melting tundra? It's likely that these eco-tragedies are now unstoppable. But shouldn't we at least elect leaders who accept our responsibility for our destructive habits instead of a grifting clown who denies that there's even a problem?

And, by the way, the people who disagree with you on this forum are not in any position to enact "policies". We may share core opinions but we don't form determinative guidelines the way governments do. We don't have that power.
hightor
 
  2  
Reply Sat 2 Nov, 2024 09:54 am
Josh Kovensky wrote:
One way of thinking about the time since Donald Trump descended on a golden escalator into American political life is to conceptualize it as a spree. Trump has been gambling since 2015; he entered the GOP primary that year as a demagogic wildcard. People laughed at first, and thought his immediate surge in the polls was a fluke, but they were wrong: his support stayed high, as he both reflected and shaped the party's base by humiliating GOP leaders to establish dominance over them.

Throughout, the draw of the spectacle that Trump created was the dominance that he exerted over his opponents. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) became "little Marco;" Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) had his personal cell phone number read out; Jeb Bush walked away almost completely emasculated. For many on the left, there was a deeply pleasing quality to this: politicians that had long been seen as hypocrites and shills for various nexes of moneyed interests were finally getting their comeuppance, upstaged by an obvious con artist who had no chance of victory.

That feeling obscured the truth. Trump was taking big risks, yes, but his appeal to segments of the American public was real and durable. The first significant instance in which he bullied his way to power was his first GOP primary, where he abused, intimidated, and scapegoated his opponents to beat them.

From there, Trump kept gambling. He took a risk in asking the Russians for help in unlocking Hillary Clinton's emails; he took a risk in paying off Stormy Daniels; he took a risk in refusing to commit to accepting the results. They all mostly paid off: Trump won the 2016 election. Accountability, to the extent it came at all, has appeared in meager and late helpings.

His term was a shambles of day-to-day incompetence and impulsivity. But on longer-term issues that concern himself, Trump has shown a real capacity for learning and focus. As early as 2019, with his attempt to strong-arm the Ukrainian government into smearing Joe Biden to win re-election, Trump began to twist the policies and resources of the federal government towards staying power. Ukraine led to an impeachment, but he pushed through: as COVID swept across the country, he began to implement the blueprint for a potential second term. He chipped away at protections for federal workers that keep them nonpartisan, and stacked top positions at DOJ and defense agencies with political cronies.

After he lost the 2020 election, Trump stayed the same — denying that he lost, he gambled on a series of outlandish plots that came dangerously close to success. He tried to bully state election officials. Courage at the top of the DOJ prevented him from enlisting it in his fight to stay in power; Mike Pence stopped the certification of Trump's defeat from foundering in Congress.

That gamble failed, but only partly. Through a strategy of delay, some fecklessness by those empowered to hold him accountable, and a major assist from the conservative-stacked Supreme Court, Trump has managed to survive the legal peril in which January 6 placed him long enough to election day.

For Trump personally, the stakes in 2024 have never been higher. The risks he's taken to get here have crossed so many legal boundaries (forget about ethical lines, come on) as to make this quite existential for him. One thing that struck me, watching him in the courtroom for his Manhattan hush money trial earlier this year, was how much time he'll have spent in court in the year leading up to a potential victory. The sexual assault defamation cases, his New York Attorney General case, the hush money criminal case — it's a lot of time spent stewing quietly in dingy rooms, as people recount horrible things you've done.

And yet, it's not nearly enough to say that Trump's gambles over the past decade of American life have failed. Next week's election is the big one, where all of it may come due; for him, or for the country.

tpm
0 Replies
 
Walter Hinteler
 
  1  
Reply Sat 2 Nov, 2024 09:58 am
@izzythepush,
izzythepush wrote:
As our leadership elections are chosen by party members it's really dependent on the whims of members.
Quote:
Barely 95,000 people voted in this year’s contest as turnout plunged to its lowest level on record amid declining party membership.

In 2022, when Liz Truss defeated Mr Sunak, 141,725 members out of a total of around 172,000 voted in that leadership contest.

However, by Saturday there were only 131,680 Tory members eligible to vote for their next leader, a drop of 23 per cent, while turnout fell from 82.6 per cent to 72.8 per cent.
The Independent
0 Replies
 
Frank Apisa
 
  3  
Reply Sat 2 Nov, 2024 09:59 am
@hightor,
hightor wrote:

Quote:
The demonization of Trump is silly.

Not really. He's patently the biggest oaf who's ever sat in the White House, barring none. He represents the very worst of the USA – violence, greed, ignorance, pseudo-religiosity, narcissism, militarism, nationalism, and racism. It would be stupid to treat him as "any other politician" and not to single him out.


He is more than that, Hightor.

He is a despicable human being...PERIOD.

I grieve for our nation that so many of our people actually support and praise him.
0 Replies
 
hightor
 
  2  
Reply Sat 2 Nov, 2024 10:03 am
All the Demons Are Here

Maureen Dowd wrote:
In the midst of the furor over Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky and his manipulative attempts to cover it up and figure out if he should lie about it or come clean, liberals began advancing the argument that the private character of a president should be differentiated from his public character.

Look at F.D.R., J.F.K. and L.B.J., they said. Lots of presidents betrayed their wives and deceived the electorate about their personal lives. But that should not distract from their public character, what they achieved and how they helped people while in office.

Donald Trump’s private life is marked by a cascade of sordid episodes. But so is his public life. Trump simply has no character.

When I asked a scholar what Shakespearean figure Trump most resembles, he replied that Trump is not complex enough to be one. You have to have a character to have a tragic flaw that mars your character.

And that raises the question: How did the America of George Washington never telling a lie, the America of Honest Abe, the America of the Greatest Generation, the America of Gary Cooper facing down a murderous gang alone in “High Noon” — how did this America, our America, become a place where a man with no character has an even chance of being re-elected president?

Once, character and reputation were prized in our leaders. “Character is like a tree, and reputation is like a shadow,” Lincoln said. When Claude Rains’s graft is discovered in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” he becomes suicidal out of shame.

Republican politicians bending to Trump’s will don’t know what shame is. And Trump, brazenly projecting every bad thing that he does onto his rivals, and boldly hawking sneakers, Bibles and cologne like a late-night cable huckster, has no shame.

Trump has exploited the widespread disillusionment that has curdled into cynicism about a ruling class rife with hypocrisy, self-aggrandizement and bad judgment.

Americans have felt let down again and again since the ’60s, with wars we shouldn’t have been in, occupations we shouldn’t have had, the bank scandals that were allowed to happen, trade agreements that hollowed out manufacturing hubs. Then there was the devouring pandemic. Many Americans felt left behind, fooled by Republicans and disdained by Democrats.

All the dislocation was exacerbated by social media algorithms igniting anger, outrage, resentment, conspiracies and fake stories.
Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.

Donald Trump is a human algorithm, always ratcheting up antagonism. He’s a personification and exploiter of all the things creating anxiety in people’s lives.

I sat in Madison Square Garden for eight hours last Sunday, working my way through a box of popcorn, a large pretzel and two bags of peanut M&M’s. I was surprised when some commentators reacted with shock at some of the insults slung that day.

For me, it seemed like a pretty typical Trump rally: ugly, dark, crude, denigrating, racist, misogynistic. (Sid Rosenberg, a conservative radio host, helped kick things off by calling Hillary Clinton “a sick son of a bitch.”) Speakers included Elon Musk, R.F.K. Jr. and Tucker Carlson, who thinks a demon clawed him while he was in bed last year. It is frightening to contemplate how much power this gruesome threesome will have if Trump wins a second term. It’s unimaginable that R.F.K. Jr., who doesn’t trust vaccines, could be in charge of health policy.

Bobby Kennedy may not believe in vaccinations, but somehow we’ve been immunized against outrage.

Trump just keeps finding new ways to make America lurch backward; he has cast women back into back alleys on abortion. This past week, it felt as if every day there was some new horror story about a young woman dying or nearly dying because doctors are scared of new legal strictures on reproductive care.

We’ll see if Madison Square Garden was a last hurrah or a harbinger with this crazy movement that cannibalizes institutions and people and souls and spits them out and then replenishes its ranks with new Trump enablers.

The bizarro gathering was seen as a turning point by Harris campaign officials, who told reporters that they thought that the rally’s nasty tone had helped Kamala Harris with voters who decided late, underscoring her emphasis on the positive versus the negative, the light versus the dark.

It’s no surprise that Trump provided last-minute evidence of the character he lacks. As he said about being the Protector of Women, he will do it “whether they like it or not.” That’s the way it is with Trump and women — whether they like it or not.

I would have been more shocked if Trump had used his big moment at the Garden to offer a sunnier vision, to recall growing up in Queens, longing to get to Manhattan, to offer some humorous anecdotes from “The Apprentice,” filmed a mile away at Trump Tower, or some reminiscences about Frank Sinatra, Muhammad Ali or iconic Garden sporting events.

But that would have been the human thing to do. And Trump doesn’t care about human niceties. He just wants to be the biggest beast in the jungle, to take whatever he wants, in any way he can get it. At the Garden, an artist live-painted a picture, then revealed a pentimento of Trump hugging the Empire State Building, King Kong style.

Trump’s premier skill is an ear for the roar of the crowd — in person and in ratings. He will follow that roar anywhere and say anything to hear it.

Con men succeed because they tap into genuine yearnings in society. When Trump was a New York celebrity, he was famous for running his mouth, saying outrageous things and engaging in a mutually beneficial gossipy relationship with the tabloids. Then he learned the really dark arts. He began milking the emotions of Americans who don’t feel that things are working for them, who feel that government is corrupt and incompetent, who feel that it’s them versus Washington.

When Joe Biden jumbled his response to a vile remark about Puerto Rico by a comedian at Trump’s Garden rally — making it seem that Biden was calling Trump’s supporters “garbage” — Trump pounced. He turned the “garbage” comment into a “deplorable”-like slur against his fans, even putting on a neon orange vest and riding in a garbage truck to emphasize it.

There were two things Trump said to me during the 2016 campaign — when he was still speaking to me — that struck me as unusually honest.

I asked about the incidents of violence that were starting to erupt at his rallies. Wasn’t he worried about that?

No, he explained, he liked it rough; it added an air of excitement to the proceedings, he said. (This barbaric side of him came out on Jan. 6, as he watched television, savoring the violent scene he had egged on, saying about the rioters who wanted to hang Mike Pence, “So what?” He recently told Fox News it was “a day of love.”)

I also told him once that his persona was getting more belligerent and divisive. To me, he had seemed like a more benign, if crazily narcissistic, Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloon of a figure in the New York real estate days. Why was the former pro-choice Democrat going down such a dark and authoritarian path as a candidate?

“I guess,” Trump mused, “because of the fact that I immediately went to No. 1, and I said, ‘Why don’t I keep the same thing going?’”

Trump can play it round or square, pro-choice or anti-abortion, pro-TikTok or anti-TikTok, pro-crypto or anti-crypto. He has no philosophy, except: What’s in it for him? The only thread of continuity in his life is self-interest. He supercharged and retrofitted the Republican Party for his own benefit.

Trump told a Friday rally that he’s always “tossing and turning, spinning around like a top” in bed at night, thinking about the problems in the world.

I don’t think he wakes up every day worrying about the country, and how to solve problems that people care about, or how to soothe our raw divisions.

He wakes up obsessing on how to reward himself and his family and friends and how to punish his enemies. He wakes up plotting how to pit people against one another.

Government can produce a positive effect only if it’s run by people who are serious about government.

And, as Kamala Harris said, Donald Trump is an unserious man.

nyt
0 Replies
 
thack45
 
  2  
Reply Sat 2 Nov, 2024 10:10 am
@blatham,
President Doin' Bits's material was always geared toward quantity over quality, and I'm always hesitant to credit him with ability, but it's unquestionably effective in getting him what he wants.

On the plus side, it's good fun when Mike Johnson has to squirm through his kissing of the ring in cable news spots ... Okay, don’t say it again. We don’t have to say it. I get it.
0 Replies
 
Lash
 
  0  
Reply Sat 2 Nov, 2024 10:14 am
@izzythepush,
NATO is your enemy.

Europeans pay the US for ‘security,’ but it has brought you economic destruction & it’s not over yet. NATO’s flailing last-gasp hegemonic wars will lead even more immigrants to your streets, poison in your ground & air—and your former friend who you betrayed at ‘NATO’s’ command may not come when you call.

And you’re going to call.

0 Replies
 
Lash
 
  0  
Reply Sat 2 Nov, 2024 10:16 am
@hightor,
These things you claim Trump will do are already done.
By the Biden Harris administration.
The world is a roiling cauldron.
0 Replies
 
 

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