Sell The Whitehouse to Trump

[Diogenes]

“Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.”

-John Quincy Adams

Tell that to President Perot.

[Tom Ligon]

Diogenes, I'm curious.

In 2008, in the race between McCain and Obama, the polls were pretty clear. The economy was in a slide, the country was war-weary, and it was obvious that the country was in the mood for a change. In other words, a vote for McCain was a vote for the losing side. Just making a wild guess here, but did you waste your vote? Or did you make a statement about what you believed was the right choice for the country?

If McCain were running today, I would be supporting him enthusiastically. Instead we've got a draft dodger running for President who thinks getting shot down over enemy territory and being held prisoner in a country that considered him a war criminal makes McCain a loser.

My one vote, out of three hundred million people, hardly counts. But its my voice and it will be heard. And I think it sorely needs to be heard.

[paperburn1]

“Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.”
-John Quincy Adams

We have to get away from this two party dogma if we are ever going to regain control of our country again. So while some think I may be throwing my vote away I consider it just a expression of civil outrage over a corrupt and tainted system.
Revolutions were won this way. And I do not mean just the war kind but economic, cultural, spiritual, and social.

Gary Johnson.

[Tom Ligon]

This could never happen here, right?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wor ... ex-worker/

[Diogenes]

Diogenes, I'm curious.

In 2008, in the race between McCain and Obama, the polls were pretty clear. The economy was in a slide, the country was war-weary, and it was obvious that the country was in the mood for a change. In other words, a vote for McCain was a vote for the losing side. Just making a wild guess here, but did you waste your vote? Or did you make a statement about what you believed was the right choice for the country?

A vote that has no possibility of affecting the outcome of a race, is a wasted vote. If you are going to vote for a candidate that has no possibility of winning, you might as well stay home. In our system, an election always comes down to one of two possibilities. Within that constraint, people need to vote their principles. Voting for a third party candidate is just refusing to make a choice between the two actual alternatives.


If we had run-off elections, you would have a point. As we do not, you do not.

My one vote, out of three hundred million people, hardly counts. But its my voice and it will be heard. And I think it sorely needs to be heard.

It won't count at all if you vote third party. The system is designed to select one of two, and it will only select one of two. It is an inherent defect in our existing selection process. If we instead numbered candidates in order of preference, Voting for a third party might actually result in a win.


In a binary race, it is just a complete waste of everyone's time. It is no different from writing "Mickey Mouse" on the ballot. It will just get tossed out and ignored, having accomplished nothing.


The winner won't care, and the losing party will not learn any lessons.

[Diogenes]

I will further add that I consider Hillary Clinton to be a Nazi. She is a true-believer Socialist authoritarian who will create a national secret police force to impose her will on we untermenschen out here in flyover country. She will not hesitate to use the force of law and "executive orders" to further abuse her political opposition, of which I consider myself most definitely a member.



Donald Trump is an ego-driven wheeler-dealer narcissist who is not above telling "sweet lies" to get people to go along with him, but I have no reason to believe he hates me or people on my side of the political spectrum, or that he will institute a deliberate system of government oppression against us.


I have no doubt whatsoever that Hillary will do so. It has been her normal behavior in every position of power or influence she has ever had in her life; "Travelgate", "Filegate", Law firm records. Cattle Futures. "White Water", "Bimbo Eruptions", Secret email server, "What difference does it make?" and so on.


So to me, the choice is between a dangerous, corrupt, Nazi-Dictator-like Hate-Witch, or a Boorish ego-driven and somewhat unethical attention seeker.


Talk of voting third party simply makes me think of these guys.










In this case, voting third or forth party was never a worse mistake.

[Tom Ligon]

We each get our opinion. Mine is that Trump is the more dangerous of the two main party candidates, tho' Hillary is no bargain either, just a sneaky version of Obama. You think Trump tells "Sweet lies?"!!! Lies, in abundance ... hardly a true word comes out of his mouth. But also nothing sweet.

So I can't bring myself to vote for either. We lose either way. I think we lose bigger with Trump, as I see several outcomes:

1. He manages to start WWIII, and then nothing after that matters. This is not highly probable. Maybe about 30%.

2. He actually does the things he say he will, in which case, you'll find out what a Nazi is, because he sounds so much like Hitler. This is the "Oh, you thought I was telling sweet lies, did you?" scenario.

3. Best case, he can't get Congress to go along with him on a single thing, the courts shoot him down when he tries to do it by executive order, buddies up to Putin, kills trade with our allies, etc., resulting in an administration so bad, he'd be gone in 4 years (if not sooner), and we wouldn't see another Republican for 20 years.

Whereas, Hillary would probably be about as bad as Obama and would be gone in 4 years, IF THE REPUBLICANS GET THEIR HEADS OUT OF THEIR @$$&$ AND PICK A HALFWAY REASONABLE CANDIDATE. And they'd have been a shoo-in this time if they had picked almost anyone but Trump, or maybe Cruz.

Faced with a lose-lose situation in this election, I'm voting the long game, letting them know what I am looking for in a candidate and hoping they value my vote. This is not a wasted vote. A wasted vote is accepting that either horrible choice offered by the major parties is as good as we can get.

[paperburn1]

[Diogenes]

We each get our opinion. Mine is that Trump is the more dangerous of the two main party candidates,

I cannot comprehend this point. I fear you lack the knowledge of Hillary's history that I posses. In what manner is Trump more dangerous?

tho' Hillary is no bargain either, just a sneaky version of Obama. You think Trump tells "Sweet lies?"!!! Lies, in abundance ... hardly a true word comes out of his mouth. But also nothing sweet.

Yes, he lies all the time. He supported Bill and Hillary Clinton when it was beneficial to him to do so. This is his modus operandi. He tells people what he thinks they want to hear. I simply regard this as the usual way of doing business in New York or Los Angeles. Among his social circles, lying to people's faces about what you think of them is simply the norm. Flattery and bluster are the tools of his business.


But I don't consider him ideological. He is not a "true-believe" in any ideology that I can discern. He isn't a political theorist, he is a genuine populist who doesn't bother to work out the theory of why he thinks this or that, he just goes with what seems right to him. One of the biggest criticisms against him that I see in conservative circles is that he does not have a clearly conservative ideology. I point out that he has no clear-cut ideology of any sort.

I pointed out that Hillary, on the other hand, has very clear cut and consistent ideological beliefs, and which happen to be very inimical to theirs.


Trump is more of an Oskar Schindler sort, while Hillary strikes me as more of an Ernst Röhm type.

So I can't bring myself to vote for either. We lose either way. I think we lose bigger with Trump, as I see several outcomes:

1. He manages to start WWIII, and then nothing after that matters. This is not highly probable. Maybe about 30%.

More probable with Hillary. Look at the mess her and Affirmative Action man created in the Middle East. Those Millions of Refugees streaming into Europe? That's Her and Obozo's handywork. ISIS? Yup, they created that too. Nuclear Iran? I can't think of a worse nightmare scenario. Those religious cultists in their leadership *WANT* to start a nuclear war to bring back the Mahdi.

Weakness breeds contempt, and I don't see any Muslim nation regarding her with the slightest speck of respect. (Or any other Nation outside of the Pussified Europeans) They will simply look at her election as further confirmation of their belief that we are decadent and worthy of destruction.

2. He actually does the things he say he will, in which case, you'll find out what a Nazi is, because he sounds so much like Hitler. This is the "Oh, you thought I was telling sweet lies, did you?" scenario.

I think he puts his finger in the air quite a lot before he will do anything. If he gets back positive feedback, he'll probably do it. He will operate kind of like Bill Clinton's Presidency. If you think he will turn the Federal government into an agency of partisan oppression, I am listening, but I don't see it.

3. Best case, he can't get Congress to go along with him on a single thing, the courts shoot him down when he tries to do it by executive order, buddies up to Putin, kills trade with our allies, etc., resulting in an administration so bad, he'd be gone in 4 years (if not sooner), and we wouldn't see another Republican for 20 years.

And from whence do you get these notions that this is a reasonably likely scenario? I see several other potential outcomes.

Whereas, Hillary would probably be about as bad as Obama and would be gone in 4 years,

Obama has widely expanded the range of abuse in which the office of the presidency can successfully engage and with which it can get away. Hillary will simply expand executive abuse even further. She has a large history of abuse of power, and it is a consistent vein that runs through and through her. She is despotic by nature.

IF THE REPUBLICANS GET THEIR HEADS OUT OF THEIR @$$&$ AND PICK A HALFWAY REASONABLE CANDIDATE. And they'd have been a shoo-in this time if they had picked almost anyone but Trump, or maybe Cruz.

Nobody except for Cruz would have attempted to do anything which needed to be done. All other potential candidates would have simply continued the current business as usual in which the "Uni-Party" is engaged. He was the only "HALFWAY REASONABLE CANDIDATE", and Trump's vicious and unethical attacks against him, did him in.

Faced with a lose-lose situation in this election, I'm voting the long game, letting them know what I am looking for in a candidate and hoping they value my vote.

I wish I had your optimism. If Hillary is able to unleash the fury of the Federal government on her political enemies, (do you not grasp the significance of "file gate"? ) then there will be no long game. We will have crossed a Rubicon. She might even trigger national upheaval. I think that is what Trump was suggesting by his "Second Amendment people."

This is not a wasted vote. A wasted vote is accepting that either horrible choice offered by the major parties is as good as we can get.

I wish I lived in your world. From mine, this looks like the height of folly.

Bone up on what is happening in Venezuela. That is what I think your "long game" looks like.

[Tom Ligon]

Actually, Diogenes, you live in a world in which the odds are about 86% that Trump will lose, regardless of what you and I do.

You support Trump because you can fool some of the people all of the time. Your delusional world of conspiracy theories and dark right-wing BBS fact-finding have you so hornswaggled you believe that stuff you just posted. As clear evidence of what I say, you just compared Trump to Oskar Schindler.

Enough of the rest of us are not buying that stuff he's selling. We're not voting for a guy who has obviously not read the Constitution and wouldn't follow it if he had. He attacks his allies and praises our enemies. He has zero regard for the law. He's a swindler and a cheat, willing to prey on little old ladies. I can't tell if he's a xenophobic racist or if he just plays one on TV when catering to his uneducated white male supporters. He believes ratings are what matter. Above all, he's so intolerably fake, only a moron would trust him.

Take that for what you will.

[williatw]

Trump lacks experience but his detractors lack common sense: Spengler

...a letter from fifty former national security officials who served in Republican administrations, declaring that Donald Trump “lacks the character, values and experience” required of a president and, if elected, “would put at risk our country’s national security and well-being.” Trump responded, “The names on this letter are the ones the American people should look to for answers on why the world is a mess, and we thank them for coming forward so everyone in the country knows who deserves the blame for making the world such a dangerous place.” That is exactly correct. He might have added that they are incapable of learning from their mistakes and doomed to repeat them if given the opportunity.

Last year I arrived early for a lunch address by Gen. Michael Hayden, who ran the National Security Agency and later the Central Intelligence Agency in the George W. Bush administration. Hayden was already there, and glad to chat. The conversation turned to Egypt, and I asked Hayden why the Republican mainstream had embraced the Muslim Brotherhood rather than the military government of President al-Sisi, an American-trained soldier who espoused a reformed Islam that would repudiate terrorism. “We were sorry that [Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed] Morsi was overthrown” in July 2013, Hayden explained. “We wanted to see what would happen when the Muslim Brotherhood had to take responsibility for picking up the garbage.”

“General,” I remonstrated, “when Morsi was overthrown, Egypt had three weeks of wheat supplies on hand. The country was on the brink of starvation!”

“I guess that experiment would have been tough on the ordinary Egyptian,” Hayden replied, without a hint of irony. As Tommy Lee Jones said in “Men in Black,” Gen. Hayden has no sense of humor that he’s aware of. He repeated the same point verbatim a few minutes later in his speech: It was a shame that the Muslim Brotherhood government of Egypt was overthrown, by acclaim of the majority of Egypt’s adult population, which had taken to the streets as the country careened towards ruin. Hayden, like Sen. John McCain, the Weekly Standard, and the majority of the Republican foreign policy establishment, believes that America should try to foster a democratic version of political Islam. It lionized Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood in Washington, nurtured Turkey’s dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and armed “moderate Islamists” in Syria as a supposed democratic alternative to the Assad regime. Hayden’s specialty was signal intelligence, and by all accounts he was good at his job. He is clueless about foreign policy.

Gen. Hayden was perhaps the most prominent signator of a letter from fifty former national security officials who served in Republican administrations, declaring that Donald Trump “lacks the character, values and experience” required of a president and, if elected, “would put at risk our country’s national security and well-being.”

Trump responded, “The names on this letter are the ones the American people should look to for answers on why the world is a mess, and we thank them for coming forward so everyone in the country knows who deserves the blame for making the world such a dangerous place.” That is exactly correct. He might have added that they are incapable of learning from their mistakes and doomed to repeat them if given the opportunity.
The Republican Establishment believed with fervor in the Arab Spring. Weekly Standard founder Bill Kristol went as far as to compare the abortive rebellions fo the American founding. It backed the overthrow and assassination of Libya’s dictator Muamar Qaddafi, which turned a nasty but stable country into a Petri dish for terrorism. It believed that majority rule in Iraq would lead to a stable, pro-American government in that Frankenstein monster of a country patched together with body parts taken from the corpse of the Ottoman empire. Instead, it got a sectarian Shi’ite regime aligned to Iran and a Sunni rebellion stretching from Mesopotamia to the Lebanon led by ISIS and al-Qaeda.

Trump is vulgar, ill-informed and poorly spoken. He has no foreign policy credentials and a disturbing inclination to give credit to Russia’s Vladimir Putin where it isn’t due. But he has one thing that the fifty former officials lack, and that is healthy common sense. That is what propelled him to the Republican nomination. The American people took note that the “experiment” of which Gen. Hayden spoke so admiringly was tough not only on the ordinary Egyptian, but on the ordinary American as well. Americans are willing to fight and die for their country, but revolt against sacrifices on behalf of social experiments devised by a self-appointed elite. That is why the only two candidates in the Republican primaries who made it past the starting gate repudiated the Bush administration’s foreign policy.

Common sense, to be sure, isn’t enough. Trump can’t swap spit with Vladimir Putin and let the witches’ kettle of the Middle East boil along by itself without dire consequences. As Bret Stephens complained Aug. 8 in the Wall Street Journal, some of Trump’s loudest supporters make a motley virtue of their ignorance. “There was a time when the conservative movement was led by the likes of Bill Buckley and Irving Kristol and Bob Bartley, men of ideas who invested the Republican Party with intellectual seriousness,” Stephens wrote. I knew the late Irving Kristol, who trained and promoted most of the cadre who ran the first Reagan Administration, and Robert Bartley, the late editor of the Wall Street Journal — brilliant men from whom I learned a great deal, some of which I had to unlearn afterwards.

But the Republican Establishment today is guided not by the likes of Irving Kristol, but by his epigonoi. His son Bill Kristol has never published a single essay of intellectual significance, and the same is true of Commentary Magazine editor John Podhoretz, son of the estimable Norman Podhoretz. To be a “neo-conservative” in the 1970s in the mold of Irving Kristol and former Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz meant to repudiate the leftist views of one’s youth and make the leap to the Reagan camp. The original neo-conservatives knew how wrong they had been in their youth, and re-learned their politics after forty. Unlike their forbears, today’s neo-cons never have had a self-critical moment. Today’s guardians of the sacred flame of the sacred conservative flame are to the manure born.

The choice, sadly, lies between an unlearned interloper with common sense and an Establishment whose policy response is predictable as the emergence of a gumball from a supermarket machine after a quarter is cranked in. They are mediocre ideologues incapable of learning from past failures, clinging to their careers because they are unsuited for honest work. Trump may not know much but he is capable of learning. That can’t be said for his detractors.

“It isn’t just that the emperor has no clothes,” I wrote in a review of Angelo Codevilla’s brilliant 2014 book To Make and Keep Peace. “The empire has no tailors.” Three administrations of Bush father and son have produced a monotone Establishment of functional foreign policy morons. One can’t find many prominent national security officials to oppose the signators of the anti-Trump letter because a whole generation of functionaries has been bred from the same stable. America will have to learn foreign policy from scratch. For my money, I’ll take the rough-edged outsider over the recidivist failures

The choice, sadly, lies between an unlearned interloper with common sense and an Establishment whose policy response is predictable as the emergence of a gumball from a supermarket machine after a quarter is cranked in. They are mediocre ideologues incapable of learning from past failures, clinging to their careers because they are unsuited for honest work. Trump may not know much but he is capable of learning. That can’t be said for his detractors.

http://atimes.com/2016/08/trump-lacks-e ... mon-sense/

[Diogenes]

Actually, Diogenes, you live in a world in which the odds are about 86% that Trump will lose, regardless of what you and I do.

I think that assertion is nonsense. I think there is a very good chance that Trump is going to beat the Witch like a drum. He is making deep inroads into traditionally Democrat constituencies, and I think that if nothing significant occurs to derail him, he is going to be on course for a win, and probably a massive one. If we have another significant terrorist attack, it is going to help him even further. Muslim Jihadists, rocket scientists that they are, are likely to provide him with one. September 11 is just around the corner.

You support Trump because you can fool some of the people all of the time.

I do not support Trump at all. I do not like him, I did not vote for him, and I would rather he had stayed out of the entire process. However, with a choice between Hillary and pretty much anyone else, I'll have to take the "anyone else." "Third Party" is not a rational path to stopping Hitlery.

Your delusional world of conspiracy theories and dark right-wing BBS fact-finding have you so hornswaggled you believe that stuff you just posted. As clear evidence of what I say, you just compared Trump to Oskar Schindler.

High Living businessman that joined a party for business reasons but was never a true ideologue? Realized how horrible was the existing power structure, and decided to do something about it? Seems a pretty apt comparison to me.

Enough of the rest of us are not buying that stuff he's selling.

But your buying the stuff that G*dD@mn witch is selling?

We're not voting for a guy who has obviously not read the Constitution and wouldn't follow it if he had. He attacks his allies and praises our enemies. He has zero regard for the law. He's a swindler and a cheat, willing to prey on little old ladies. I can't tell if he's a xenophobic racist or if he just plays one on TV when catering to his uneducated white male supporters. He believes ratings are what matter. Above all, he's so intolerably fake, only a moron would trust him.

Take that for what you will.

I take it for someone who is worrying about the mote in Trump's eye, while ignoring the Beam in Hillary's. She is all those things as well, but of far worse magnitude.


It seems to me to be a case of incredibly misplaced priorities, and I have become all too familiar with this phenomena during the last couple of decades.

[Diogenes]

The choice, sadly, lies between an unlearned interloper with common sense and an Establishment whose policy response is predictable as the emergence of a gumball from a supermarket machine after a quarter is cranked in. They are mediocre ideologues incapable of learning from past failures, clinging to their careers because they are unsuited for honest work. Trump may not know much but he is capable of learning. That can’t be said for his detractors.

‘What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.’

[choff]

The Clinton body count is starting to read like a Friday the 13th script. Latest was the Bernie supporting lawyer who served papers on the DNC for election fraud. At the current rate, there could be a dozen more corpses before election day, all very PC. After that, with the mindless push to encroach on Russia, who knows?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=753ZegbjHU4

[Diogenes]

The Clinton body count is starting to read like a Friday the 13th script. Latest was the Bernie supporting lawyer who served papers on the DNC for election fraud. At the current rate, there could be a dozen more corpses before election day, all very PC. After that, with the mindless push to encroach on Russia, who knows?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=753ZegbjHU4

There is a lot of speculation that the DNC employee (Seth Rich) who was murdered a short time ago was the Wikileaks source for the DNC E-mail leaks.


Wikileaks is offering a $20,000.00 reward for any information regarding this murder. Do they usually do something like this?


Julian Assange very strongly suggested that this man was the leaker.


Of course, wandering about at 4:00 in the morning in Washington D.C., it would be amazing enough not to get shot.


No robbery though. His money and valuables were left behind after the murder.