Symmetry required it: 2012 american general election thread #2

wow the knives really ARE out in the GOP

how delicious

Other than the Akin joke, Nothing too much new here. But grrrr, can't stand Rove.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-08-31/exclusive-inside-karl-roves-billionaire-fundraiser

“We have to keep in mind whose vote we’re trying to get—it ain’t the delegate from Alaska. It’s not the alternate from Alabama. It’s some undecided voter in the battleground state who likes the president.”

Rove spoke almost exclusively about defeating Barack Obama and retaking control of the White House. There was sparse praise for Mitt Romney—either as a candidate or as a future leader and policy maker.

it's some kind of small comfort to know that I'm living through the self-immolation of the Republican party

I hear you, but I hope it's a while before that phoenix comes flying out.

itll be v interesting to watch them attempt to pivot from their standby total racism strategy

I don't think that's going to happen, honestly. racists need a party too!

problem is then do to demographic realties theyre conceding the presidency

yep. tbh I'd be more stoked about it if it didn't mean that the Dem party will continue to drift ever rightward as it tries to absorb more and more of the GOP voting base

I'm honestly disappointed that the far righty party I suspected would emerge post-2010 never did. GOP elite aren't going to put up with this shit much longer though, and those factions may still be unceremoniously ejected yet.

Repeal Obamachair!

(Not mine. Sullivan keeps finding funny stuff.)

haha

can someone explain to me why the conspiracy/ron paul/fake moon landing people believe EVERYTHING that is made up and crazy? like, they don't just believe one or two things that are obviously made up they believe every single crazy theory. there is a hippie-ish guy in his 60's who sells me records and he was telling maria and i all about how obama is a gay muslim who wants to bring back sharia law and i could have made up pretty much any story about obama and bin laden and terror plots and he would have believed whatever i said. and then he would have repeated the stuff i just made up to other people.

sorry, probably the wrong thread. but the convention got me thinking about this and how the repub people just keep repeating things that aren't true over and over and then this guy came in today. with these people everything true is untrue and the other way around. i guess its a form of church. they just take everything crazy on faith. and all these people are racist. every conspiracy person. all of them.

i'm kinda with them with the jfk thing though. something definitely wrong with THAT picture.

ya i have a conspiracy friend and he believes its all, crop circles, the amero, fema prisions, global warming hoax - the only thing he rejects is lizard people which according to him is just another conspiracy to discredit the movement

JFK was a secret gay muslim commie born in Uganda. That's why they killed him.

is it really crazier to believe 20 of these things than it is to believe 1? once you're willing to accept one stupid thing that no one could possibly believe, you might as well believe them all.

i kinda think the problem stems from ppl realizing that most politicians are self-serving hypocrites but lacking the common sense necessary to realize that actual government conspiracies are mucked-up farces like watergate and iran-contra, not supernaturally effective plots like a fake moon landing.

tbh i think JFK assassination ppl are by far the most tiresome and impossible to argue with because they NEVER give up and they've got decades more of 'research' to draw on than the 9/11 truthers.

Yeah i think living through JFK and then 50 years of nuclear war paranoia, capped off by the sheer surrealness of 9/11 probably explains it.

they just want to make sense of chaos, feel like theyre smarter than everyone

it's reasonable to assume that if something as ott and absurd as a moon landing conspiracy occurred, then surely there must be a lot of other conspiracies. And if you believe in something like the illuminati, you're really believing in a conspiracy of conspiracies.

a pyramid of conspiracies

its that whole EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS WRONG thing. nothing can be taken at face value. everything means something else. they really go for it whole hog. there must be a name for that. a psychological term. true believers. it does remind me of fundamentalism.

i think the more curious thing is that nothing can be taken at face value, except this very tenuous theory that's been concocted, which is clearly true.

Also believing in one thing usually = twisting your brain to believe that ten coincidences aren't coincidences and that creating plausible coincidence is a powerful tool for The Powers That Be. After that, nothing is a coincidence and the dominoes .. come tumbling .. down.

pretty sure there's a separate thread for this stuff

or... do THEY want us to THINK there's a separate thread for this stuff

too early in the day for thread police mayn

yeah i'm sure there is a conspiracy thread. really am curious about the thought process. or non-thought process. this is millions of people. not some lunatic fringe. all kinds of people believe this stuff.

like at the convention this idea that obama is literally DESTROYING the country. for real! they believe that. president obama is systematically DESTROYING the united states. i mean....what do you say to that?

i generally explain how obama is really a republican

actually, entire morbzian conceit is a lot of fun to play on lunatic right wingers. "you're right, he's terrible and destroying america. but that's only bc he agrees w/ you."

you'd think the science guy would know a bit more about ass lube physics

science rules

yeah, there's this black guy who hangs out at the same bar as me and we have the usual political discussions. he's a lawyer and a self-described 'Rockefeller republican'. didn't vote for BO the first time but is pretty impressed with his liberal republican policies. he had quite a conversation that i ease dropped on with another republican trying to convince her that Obama isn't a wild eyed socialist. it went nowhere. cutting taxes, bailing out the banks yeah real Lenninist we have as prez.

do people in ireland like this guy? we need more fightin' irish taking on the tea party people:

http://www.upworthy.com/a-tea-partier-decided-to-pick-a-fight-with-a-foreign-president-it-didnt-go-so-we?g=4&c=ufb1

Well we elected him President after that, but I think he had his time on the last thread.

oh okay didn't see it!

I don't think conspiracy nuts are helped by the internet either. First off, you can find so many more conspiracies and fellow nuts. Secondly, there's the know-it-all culture that makes people write things like "The moon landing was faked!" in response to Neil Armstrong obituaries. Not that anyone hasn't heard of the moon landing hoax, but there's a certain one-upsmanship that is probably 90% responsible for those posts. It doesn't quite mean the poster literally thinks the moon landing was faked any more than he thinks he's smarter than all the other posters.

i really want my brother-in-law to run for office. some office. he's so righteous. maria's older brother. not that i usually wish politics on anyone. some people are just obvious leaders. he takes on stupid talk in this speech:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dl6Y3MsxPL0

i mean he's inspiring to me. i don't know what he inspires me to do, but he's just generally inspiring. i could help him with his speeches. maybe he could run for mayor of seattle.

Just saw something on one of the newscasts that I didn't see last night (maybe I'd walked away from the computer to post): reaction shots of Ann Romney and the Ryans as Eastwood rambled. The Ryans shift impatiently in their seats, and PR seemed to do that thing where you puff out your cheeks and exhale slowly when you know things aren't going well.

i generally explain how obama is really a republican

^^79% of my political discussions irl and online are basically a variation of this

i find it pretty useful to point out to ppl that o's basically more like eisenhower than he is any recent democratic pres -- fiscal conservatism, ruthless but low-cost and efficient foreign policy, at war with right-wing lunatics (except that they're in the other party, not his own).

pretty sure there's a separate thread for this stuff

Yeah, I think we go into it in the anti-vaxxer/Jenny McCarthy thread. I've posted about it some, and Plasmon and Grady have too, and I'll happily go into why people desperately want conspiracy theory to be true, but this ain't the thread for that.

Plus my usual style is to lapse into lecture mode and do walls-o-textdumps and heavy linkage because I read so much about this stuff and don't trust my abilities to summarize and present it as well as the authors I've read or certain succinct ex-ilxors who now collect salaries for their online otm-ness.

Will post run-on paragraphs 4 beer

He's a good speaker, scott! Maybe it's good he's not running for office. Leave politics to the politicians. Sounds like he's making a difference in a more real way.

^ this!

and all these people are racist. every conspiracy person. all of them.

well, tbf there are probabably many who are okay with black people and only hate jews

in my experience the JFK conspiracy ppl are just cranky old liberals

sure, that's what they want you to believe