a clown car full of millionaires: the 2016 presidential primary thread

though the first para of that perry story is p funny

Former Texas governor Rick Perry's presidential campaign is no longer paying its staff because fundraising has dried up, while his cash-flush allied super PAC is preparing to expand its political operation to compensate for the campaign's shortcomings, campaign and super PAC officials and other Republicans familiar with the operation said late Monday.

this fuckin country

thank this man:

https://www.natcom.org/uploadedImages/CommunicationCurrents_Articles/Volume_6/Johnson_AnthonyKennedy.jpg

his real/fake campaign is broke but his fake/real campaign is rolling along, thumbs up

Bush Says Clinton ‘Stood By’ as Iraq Fell Into Violence
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and ALAN RAPPEPORT 53 minutes ago

Jeb Bush will deliver a foreign policy speech on Tuesday, when he is expected to criticize Hillary Rodham Clinton’s performance as secretary of state.

bahahahaha

history truly written by the victors

Jeb thinks that Hillary should have re-invaded Iraq and imposed regime change on Al-Maliki when she had her chance as commander in chief secretary of state?

pretty sure the only thing secretary of state would be involved in would be building and staffing that fucking fortress/embassy in the green zone

they announced the lineup for the sept 16 CNN debate, which is also two-tiered: 10 on the mainstage, 6 at the smelly kids table. only one person didn't make the cut - jim gilmore.

State Dept just a great place to harvest future cash for the Clinton Foundation

uh, the secretary of state is pretty involved in foreign policy iirc

But FP is set by the White House and the State Dept carries it, no?

*carries it out

face palms?

jeb is so bad at this whole running for office thing, it is a delight

lol at the idea that americans are going to rewrite their mental and emotional histories of the iraq war such that everything was going great under bush and it was only clinton's tenure as secretary of state that transformed it into a national shame. "mission un-accomplished," she declared. i guess someone in the j.e. bush campaign convinced the boss that he needed to "get out front of this iraq thing." christ.

Wish I could laugh off your post as total bullshit, Doc, but AMERICA never fails...

I'd like to think if Jeb! is the GOP candidate we can have a national reckoning of the stolen 2000 election and iraq but I dont think that will ever happen. American exceptionalism means never having to say sorry.

by the way, for those who were wondering why Clinton's campaign stops weren't being disrupted by BlackLivesMatter: https://twitter.com/tnr/status/631184572928159750

NYMAG: How Roger Ailes Picked Trump, and Fox News’ Audience, Over Megyn Kelly

In the fallout since the first GOP debate, Fox News chairman Roger Ailes has found himself caught between Donald Trump, who has the full backing of Fox’s misogynist audience, and Megyn Kelly, the star anchor whom Ailes has nurtured and sees as the key to reaching younger viewers. For a few days, Ailes didn’t know how to handle Trump’s full-throated attack on Kelly, who accused Trump of sexism during the debate. Eventually, as I reported yesterday, he made the same choice he always does: follow the ratings, and mend fences with Trump. But that process has meant that Fox has had to mute its defense of Kelly, who is now watching uneasily as the Fox audience turns on her: According to one high-level source, Kelly has told Fox producers that she’s been getting death threats from Trump supporters.

it was amazing seeing, in 2009/10, the explosion of the "tea party," meaning we saw a whole bunch of really weird right-wing folk of the AM radio/direct mail/sovereign citizen stripe having their brush with the mainstream and their uneasy relationship with establishment conservatism and the GOP. some kind of return of the repressed where a lot of loopy, old-right elements that were suppressed under bush and neoconservatism got out of the pen to run around for a while.

i think now in 2015 and trump, we're seeing a new micro-generation of wackiness taking their moment: the trolls, the "shitlords," the same grinning shittalkers we've seen in all the internet-based backlashes to liberalism in the past few years, the same flirtation with pure reaction and thuggery.

i keep thinking of max's line that in reading reddit he's seeing the next generation of republican leaders. aside from breitbart (who get closer to WNINO every day) sticking up for trump, the rest of the conservative internet and FOX appear horrified and what's happened -- it's like DO YOU READ YOUR OWN COMMENTERS, this is a "comment box primary" so far.

er i guess that should be WNIABN

Larry Wilmore made a joke on a recent Nightly Show about how what really scared him was that for many of these Trump supporters, "some people just want to see the world burn" (cue graphic of Heath Ledger as the Joker). But there might be a little truth in that! (/reddit)

but i agree with the thread of wisdom from political scientists who say trump is already toast: his negatives are already sky high, national polls six months out from iowa don't mean a thing. when he loses it'll just make them even more mad. (but maybe...)

the mens rights movement is a massive breeding ground for reactionary right wingers and teens on reddit drink that shit up like kool aid

otm. Whatever 'harm' Trump will do to the GOP is massively undercut by him popularizing bigoted behavior. They have media people analyzing every shitty thing he says so that when 2016 comes along they will know just how far to go in scare tactics and populist pandering. It's like dry-running all the worst Tea Party candidates rolled into one.

http://pitchfork.com/news/60764-lil-b-talks-support-for-bernie-sanders-black-lives-matter-with-cnns-brooke-baldwin/

shitlords would be a good name for a third party

Trump running an independent third party campaign would be about as wretched and disheartening a spectacle as Strom Thurmond's Dixiecrat campaign.

@ goole - The Republican primaries are always comment-box primaries to at least some extent though. There's always at least one loon that, in the comment boxes, is celebrated as the ONE guy who SAYS IT LIKE IT IS and everybody else is OUT TO SHUT THEM DOWN. I mean, at most I'd say this is just another chapter in the Tea Party revival of far-right conservatism you outline. Not sure any aspects of it are different enough to say that this is primarily about shitlords and trolls. That long profile of Trump's rally in Depressed Town You've Never Heard Of, Midwest USA makes clear that he definitely has supporters who genuinely think he's speaking for them, just as Pat Buchanan, et al., have had going back. Agreed though about the Frankenstein's monster aspects of this - Fox News spent the 2000s stirring up a hornet's nest to win reelection for George W. and his ilk, not so that the hornets would actually play a major role in the party.

"shitlord" means a specific subculture tho

disagree with frankenstein metaphor & idea that trump represents revival of far-right conservatism (though he certainly serves as vehicle/screen upon which some conservatives, far-right & not so far-right, project their feelings)

trump is an asshole who says many offensive things, but it's real stretch to say that he's 'far right' ideologically, in any coherent sense of the term

what he does have is fuck-you attitude, toward media & other politicians & rules of public political rhetoric, which is appealing to many conservatives angry with gop establishment (& maybe appealing to number of non-republicans as well, sick of 'politicians' in general)
so far he strikes me as very effective kind of troll-candidate

his resentments, impatience with government, reveling in Big Business approach to problems -- they code as far rightist.

That's why his rise doesn't surprise me. He's what the right has stoked since 1980.

Trump is a fascist in the Mussolini style, where political positions are much less relevant than xenophobia and belligerence.

https://twitter.com/JebBush/status/631194547649818624

Here's a no duh point but unless he exhumes Reagan and desecrates his remains, his stans like him only because he irritates their enemies. It's all pent up payback for 8 years of having a black man "shoved down their throats" (single entendre) who everyone they hated worshiped

Just as one of the BLM protestors in Seattle wears a t-shirt that reads "I bathe in white tears"

xp guess i demur on definition of far right
trump is ideologically vague & pretty unsubstantive policy-wise, cf comments on health care
his schtick is not ideological but more reality-tv-character: e.g. i'm a winner, i'm a rich businessman, i can solve problems
nb those qualities were if anything disadvantage for romney precisely among many of the conservatives trump is appealing to
bc romney was establishment gop & deployed measured political rhetoric
the key part of trump's schtick is the fuck-you & the specious impression that he cuts through political bullshit (instead of serving it)

fellow joyful tortoise wtf?

(insert mitch mcconnell joke here)

trump is ideologically vague & pretty unsubstantive policy-wise, cf comments on health care

like every GOP candidate in the last decade. They stoke inchoate rage.

tbh i don't think that was true of romney

or mccain for that matter (though mccain had palin)

certainly not to the angry people which constitute the flotsam and jetsam of the GOP.

I wrote a few days ago. The rise of Trump doesn't surprise me: I heard the same twaddle from my parents in 2008 when Huck won the Iowa caucus. "I can't vote for a religious fundamentalist!" Your choice, assholes. You've spent 30 years stoking these embers. Deal with it.

fellow joyful tortoise wtf?

"Slow and steady wins the race," I guess?

Same chance of being president?

tbh i don't think that was true of romney

― drash, Wednesday, August 12, 2015 12:33 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

or mccain for that matter (though mccain had palin)

― drash, Wednesday, August 12, 2015 12:35 AM (58 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It really is fascinating how the Republican Party nominated those two guys back to back.

I remember thinking that when the ACA finally went through that surely Romney wouldn't be able to get around it.

You'll undoubtedly be able to add Bush to that list. They scream and hiss and put on a show, and then they nominate the guy they think will be most acceptable. (Actually, I think McCain's nomination wasn't nearly as noisy as the last two.)

https://scontent.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xtf1/v/t1.0-9/11062738_1044178932282043_8490996131360563060_n.jpg?oh=5da80ce05806074163d34e230ec835bc&oe=5641DA49

God to son: "Jesus, she called again?"