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

Xp

We 'got over' the Chinese Communists in a big way.

dave weigel has the screenshot of the relevant passage in carson's book

https://twitter.com/daveweigel/status/662678590249545728

but i don't get why weigel is downplaying this

― goole, Friday, November 6, 2015 12:47 PM (1 hour ago)

some welcome restraint and objectivity amid the hysteria, probably

when coach k visits kids houses (ok, maybe 25 years ago before anyone cared about recruiting violations), you think he had them fill out applications before talking to them about scholarships? with carson's grades and ROTC service, it's not out of the realm of possibility that general whatshisname told him that west point would be lucky to have him, he'd be glad to write him a recommendation, yada yada. is it possible carson was excited and flattered and took it to mean something it didn't? sure. idgaf really

on another note judging by that excerpt he hired one of his neurosurgery patients to edit his book, though

Oct 2011:

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/44881446/ns/politics-decision_2012/t/nbcwsj-poll-cain-now-leads-gop-pack/

re carson:
https://twitter.com/harrymccracken/status/662504792627920896

chinese communists kinda got over capitalism more than we got over communism. i'm not like one of these guys who thinks that just bc communist govts killed a hundred million people that means that communism as an ideology is entirely without merit but u kno no one is asking when we're going to get over fascism (except for like these neo-reactionary weirdos)

western societies are far more likely to turn in the direction of fascism atm than to spawn a revolution of the proletariat

this is all just a repeat of 2012 - Trump as Giuliani

but Trump is actually running

That's not really an exclusive choice, West Point vs med school, is it? You sign up and you get paid to get trained, right? My former doctor got trained in the US Navy, for example.

guys I know the analogy isn't 100% but the pattern is p clearly similar - they didn't learn the lessons they were supposed to from the last time around.

what I've been saying:

Despite Cain’s rise and Perry’s fall over the past month and a half, Romney’s standing in the Republican horse race hasn’t changed—it was 23 percent in August, and it’s unchanged at 23 percent now.

But that doesn’t mean that Romney is unappealing to Republican voters. His favorable/unfavorable score is 51 percent to 16 percent, which is in the ballpark of Cain’s.

Among Tea Party supporters, it’s 55 percent to 20 percent, and among “very conservative” Republicans, it’s 60 percent to 19 percent.

I just meant that Giuliani ran in '08 not '12

u kno no one is asking when we're going to get over fascism (except for like these neo-reactionary weirdos)

On the contrary, Mordy, when somebody in the contemporary US starts talking about "the FASCISTS" they are generally seen as a fringy weirdo, and I think it should be the same when someone starts talking about "the COMMUNISTS" -- it is no contradiction to say a) global fascism and global communism were a big part of the history of the 20th century and killed and displaced millions of people, and b) those entities are of minimal importance in understanding the issues at stake in the contemporary US. When somebody says "when are we going to get over the communists" they don't mean "when will we admit than stalin had his good points," they mean "when are we going to stop calling people we don't like, but who are manifestly not communists, like Hilary Clinton, communists, because communist is the only word we know for "person I don't like"

sorry to belabor a point that probably no one here disagrees with

"i'm not like one of these guys who thinks that just bc communist govts killed a hundred million people that means that communism as an ideology is entirely without merit"

The opposition to communism (now and then) has less to do with the slaughter of a hundred million people and more to do with the threat to certain moneyed interests and a desire to scapegoat certain groups of people, but whatever.

spoken like a true Fellow Traveller

Now you've made him angry. You won't like him when he's angry. (You don't like him now though tbf.)

http://www.salon.com/2015/11/06/ben_carson_loses_his_cool_lashes_out_at_cnn_anchor_i_cant_believe_that_you_used_to_work_on_fox_news/

this phase of Ben Carson's campaign is such a beautiful gift

it really is. hoping he tries to stab somebody next.

trump and carson have been popular for months.

Or ... maybe the other candidates are just that unpopular. It's Carson or Trump by attrition.

that carson cnn piece is astonishing in its idiocy

In 2012 Romney went into the race already kind of unpopular, amongst conservatives, journalists and other pols, and yet even though all of the weirdos kept popping to the top of the polls week after week, it was always assumed that he'd be the nominee because he maintained somewhere around 20% popularity and had a ton of money. Still, there were a ton of Republican op-eds and blog posts where the writer begged Chris Christie or Jeb Bush or Bobby Jindal or even Huckabee to jump into the race and save the GOP. It's hilarious to watch all of these "stars" of the party find out their actual level of popularity.

Yes, but imagine how popular they would be if there were no other Republicans in the race.

office conversation:

me walking by A's desk as she's reading the pyramid story

me: uh oh
A: what?
me: he's trouble, Ben Carson
A: why?
me: he made some stuff up
A: *dies laughing* no shit

he's *in

Works either way

"The story is well-documented,” Carson continued. “If you choose not to believe it, if it doesn’t fit the narrative that you want, that’s fine. Let’s let the American people decide."

Do you get the feeling he's occasionally mentioning the phrases he's been coached on in with everything else or is it all somehow pure-Carson?

he needs to find a couple scientists who believe that he knifed somebody

"Fit the narrative" line struck me because Hillary used that exact phrase in the Benghazi hearing.

ben carson is just a hyper-advanced android capable of taking and repurposing the words and phrases he hears

I was listening to the Buffalo right-wing talk-radio station on the way home, and woman said that all the Carson stuff (which I'm still catching up on) was the work of Democrats who were afraid of him.

I know this is obvious--it gets harder to write about that kind of thinking without stating the obvious--but that is just an amazing disconnect. There's a woman out there, and many million more like her, who believes that given the choice of who they run against next year, the Democrats want to sabotage Ben Carson's campaign to make sure it isn't him.

dems have infiltrated carson's campaign to release statements saying they made up a bunch of shit - got it

One of my conservative friends is posting exactly that on Facebook; wow, the Dems must be really scared of Ben's powerful presidential chances. (xp)

The reaction: "Who cares about Dr. Carson's fabrications when we've got a serial LIAR in the White House?"

And another one's going to be the Democratic nominee?

hmm

http://www.dailynewsbin.com/news/exposed-unstable-ben-carson-is-a-mere-puppet-of-his-business-manager-armstrong-williams/22955/

sanders campaign saying the gloves are off, they're gonna go after hillary on e-mails and benghazi

As press conferences go, pretty entertaining. And a little confusing trying to keep the West Point Incident and the Stabbing Incident separate.

i accidentally ended up at a Chris Christie town hall meeting tonight at my local bar

was kind of annoyed about it tbh

While there have certainly been more vile presidential candidates and more cynical candidates and candidates who were more willing to pander to the lowest common denominator, I'm hard-hard-pressed to think of a dumber candidate than Carson. I'll allow for the possibility that he has some sort of degenerative brain disease or that he's mentally ill, but otherwise...my god, is he ever just unfathomably, next-level stupid.

Rick Perry was pretty stupid.

I'm not entirely with all this speculation & armchair diagnoses of Ben Carson's intelligence/psyche, but man, I would love to witness the meeting between him & Armstrong Williams & rapper Aspiring Mogul

it is amazing how terrified of their base the gop is -http://www.politico.com/story/2015/11/ben-carson-2016-campaign-rivals-215615?cmpid=sf#ixzz3qlQURVNf

http://www.vulture.com/2015/11/meet-aspiring-mogul-rapper-behind-ben-carson-ad-freedom.html#

The reason I go by Aspiring Mogul is because it’s not about me. It’s about me inspiring other black men, other African Americans, to say, ‘Hey, you can start a business, you can become anything you want to become in America. You can get on Google and Google anything you want to be or anything you want to do

#GoogleSearchesMatter

Dare to look at a picture of what you want to be.

Ben Carson is... Marine Todd:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CTLM2xyUYAAPR4c.png

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CTLM2xyUYAAPR4c.png

that's an amazing lie

you stick to the truth, dr. carson!