Month: May 2016

Campaigning by lizard brain

by digby

Chris Wallace challenged Donald Trump this morning. It didn’t shake his confidence one little bit:

WALLACE: You were the target of sometimes violent protests in California this week, opposing your hard line immigration policy. Are you concerned that if you are the Republican nominee these demonstrations could disrupt your campaign?

TRUMP: No, we were at that particular moment we had 31,000 people in the stands, it was packed, they have never had a crowd like that, it’s the biggest crowd they’ve ever had.

We had 31,000 people. We didn’t have a riot. We didn’t have anybody even raise their hand. It was a love fest for an hour and a half. It was incredible.

I didn’t even see the riot. You know, these are wise guys that stomp on policemen’s cars. And it’s terrible thing that people are allowed to get away with this.

These were professional agitators. They were wearing masks. The cops tell me, anytime you see a guy with a mask, you know he’s a professional. And they were wearing masks.

These people have to be dealt with very strongly, because you can’t allow that to happen to a police car, you know, essentially.

That’s your “dovish” center-left Donald Trump for you. Move over Dennis Kucinich.

Seriously, if you aren’t hearing what Trump is saying about police authority you aren’t listening. We have not heard anything like this since George Wallace. He gets huge cheers from his followers for it.

And, by the way, the Pacific Amphitheater where he allegedly had a 31,000 person crowd holds less than 10,000 people. They only handed out 8,000 wristbands to get in. His lies about the size of his crowds are right up there with his lies about size of his hands.

This was good too:

WALLACE: Let’s talk about your standing with women, too. In that same poll that showed you overwhelmingly negative among all Hispanic voters 24 percent of women have a favorable view of you, 75 percent unfavorable.

And yet in your victory speech on Tuesday night, here is what you had to say about Clinton.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: I think the only card she has is the woman’s card. She’s got nothing else going. And frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don’t think she’d get 5 percent of the vote.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WALLACE: Now, I’ve got to tell you, strategists in both parties say if you consciously went about it, if you specifically planned you couldn’t have said anything that would drive your numbers among women even lower.

TRUMP: Really? OK. Well, I’m my own strategist and I like that — what I said and it’s true. I only tell the truth and that’s why people voted for me.

WALLACE: Well, wait — wait a minute.

TRUMP: And don’t forget, in the Republican primaries which I just beat by Cruz by numbers — like 50 percent, I was up by so much, I had 62 percent in New York and I was 63 percent and 64 percent —

(CROSSTALK)

WALLACE: Mr. Trump, with all due respect, whether or not you like — let me just ask the question.

TRUMP: But, Chris, all of the polls coming out, I won with the women by landslides, I beat Cruz and I beat Kasich —

(CROSSTALK)

WALLACE: I understand, but Hillary Clinton is a different —

TRUMP: I won with the women by landslides, you don’t mention that.

WALLACE: — is a different deal.

And regardless of whether you like her or not, or think that she should be president or not, to say — I mean, she was a senator, she was secretary of state for four years. To say if she were a man, she’d get 5 percent — isn’t that kind of dismissive?

TRUMP: Well, Bernie Sanders said a lot worse than that. He said that she almost shouldn’t be allowed to run, that she’s not qualified to run and she’s not capable.

I mean, Bernie Sanders, what he said was a lot worse than what I said and I’m going to use that. We’ll have that teed up. But Bernie Sanders said she shouldn’t be allowed to run, that she’s not capable.

And, you know, what he said is incredible. It’s a sound bite. It’s an — in fact, as soon as he said it, they broke in and they said, I can just imagine Donald Trump watching these statements Bernie Sanders has made — is making about Clinton.

So, look, she’s a strong person. She’s going to have to be able to take it. The fact is, the only card she has is the woman’s card. She’s done a lousy job in so many ways and even women don’t like her. They don’t like her.

But it is the woman’s card and she plays it, and I’ll let you know in about six months whether or not she plays it well. But I don’t think she’ll play it well. I don’t think she’ll play it well at all. And it’s true, if she were not a woman, she wouldn’t even be in this race.

Wallace let all that go and moved on. I guess you can’t blame him. When someone spews that many lies and nonsensical comments in such a short time it would take the whole show to unravel it especially since Trump continuously interrupts and trainwrecks the conversation.

But out of all that ignorant dreck this does stand out:

Well, I’m my own strategist and I like that — what I said and it’s true. I only tell the truth and that’s why people voted for me.

It’s not true. He lies constantly about everything. But he is his own strategist, which is to say that he has no strategy. His campaign is run by his lizard brain and he’s connected it to millions of other people’s lizard brains. It’s worked well for him in the lizard brain party. It remains to be seen if his lizard brain connection reaches beyond the Republicans.

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Trump’s mentor

by digby

Nixon was a big fan:

I’ve said this before but the madman theory isn’t supposed to be deployed by an actual madman. Unfortunately they seem to be the only ones who think it’s a good idea.

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Swag slag


by digby

This is brutal:

Beltway power brokers leaving a White House Correspondents Dinner party at the St. Regis Hotel on Friday night if they would donate the pricy swag bags doled out at the party as charity to the organization. (The dinner itself is on Saturday evening, but parties and other events associated with it take place all weekend.) 

The nonpartisan group caught many of the interactions on camera. 

The six-and-a-half minutes of footage the foundation released on Saturday don’t flatter the members of the media, entertainment and political elite attending the lavish affair. 

Donations were not exactly forthcoming. Many people can be seen studiously ignoring the Sunlight staffers as if they were panhandlers.

I can’t believe these people actually wanted to keep this shitty swag bag. It’s not like it had expensive watches and wine like the Hollywood swag bags do. But if there’s one thing that’s true whether in LA or DC — celebrities want their free stuff no matter what it is.

On the other hand, there was this:

For an event held at the soaring U.S. Institute of Peace building in Foggy Bottom, the swanky afterparty hosted by MSNBC following the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner sure saw some conflict.

In the early-morning hours of Sunday, a scuffle broke out between Fox News correspondent Jesse Watters and Ryan Grim, the Huffington Post’s Washington bureau chief. The fight — unusual among a tuxedo-clad crowd more used to venting their differences with Twitter snarks — briefly caused ripples in the party, where political staffers and journalists were grooving to tunes spun by DJ Biz Markie and noshing on mini servings of chili cheese fries.

Here’s how it went down, per several witness: Grim and Watters were among a group located in a heated tent just outside the main party area. The two apparently don’t have a personal relationship, but Grim realized who Watters was and recalled a beef he had with the “O’Reilly Factor” correspondent that dated back to 2009, when Watters, known as an “ambush journalist,” had engineered an on-camera confrontation of writer Amanda Terkel, now a HuffPo colleague of Grim. Terkel’s account of the incident was headlined “I Was Followed, Harassed, And Ambushed By Bill O’Reilly’s Producer.”

Grim decided to give Watters a taste of his own medicine, whipping out his camera phone and filming him. Watters didn’t take well to this, eventually snatching the phone away from Grim and putting it in his pocket. Grim set out to retrieve it, and a scuffle ensued. No cinematic sparring or broken beer bottles, witnesses said, but the two flailed around a bit, upending a table and bumping into several people.

“Punches were definitely thrown,” said one witness.

Before any damage was done, several bystanders, including RNC executive director Sean Spicer, separated the two. Spicer said he didn’t see the lead-up to the fight and said he was just attempting to stay true to the party venue. “Just trying to keep the peace,” he said.

Watters couldn’t immediately be reached for comment, but reached for comment, Grim was unrepentant. “Ambush guy can’t take getting ambushed,” he said. “Maybe he should think about his life choices.”

Bravo Ryan Grim. Jesse Watters is a truly malevolent piece of work and it’s good to see someone turn his stalker game back on him. Like most bullies he can dish it out but he can’t take it.

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The GOP’s Solomon’s choice

by digby

It looks like the GOP establishment actually is deciding it will be better to get thumped with Trump than lose with Cruz:

The most dramatic example of anti-Cruz sentiment came from former House Speaker John Boehner, who told an audience at Stanford University that Cruz was “Lucifer in the flesh” and that he would never vote for that “miserable son of a bitch” in a general election. He would, however, support Trump.

Former New Hampshire Sen. Judd Gregg also blasted Cruz as a “demagogue’s demagogue” in an interview with WMUR and said he would vote for Trump in November but write in House Speaker Paul Ryan if Cruz won the nomination.

Nor is this problem limited to party elites — Kasich supporters drawn to his message of steady bipartisanship have stubbornly refused to unite behind Cruz to stop Trump even as their candidate sits fourth in the delegate count in a three person race.

Perhaps even more shocking than Boehner’s brutal dismissal of Cruz was Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker’s warm embrace of Trump the same day.

Corker is the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee and often a key player in brokering bipartisan agreements, including the “Gang of Eight” immigration bill that Trump and Cruz have each vilified on the campaign trail.

“I just hope that we don’t let demagogues prevail and that we finally deal with this issue and put it behind us,” Corker said after the 2014 election, in which a number of Republican candidates won races while railing against “amnesty.”

Not surprisingly, Corker has been a sharp critic of Trump at points in the race, most notably saying his proposed ban on Muslims entering the United States ran “completely counter to the values and principles of our great nation.”

After Trump delivered an often contradictory foreign policy speech that was widely panned by experts, Corker issued a statement gushing over the remarks and told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell he was excited Trump “challenged the foreign policy establishment here in Washington.”

It’s too bad for them. This won’t break the fever. If Cruz loses, it would take the starch out of the conservative movement once and for all.  They’d try to excuse the loss with some cockamamie explanations but they will not be able to say it was because the candidate wasn’t conservative enough. I guess the GOP establishment figures it’s better to keep putting up with the congressional freedom caucus and the Tea Party than it is to take a chance on electing an ignorant madman. Maybe they’re patriots in their own twisted fashion.

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Politics and Reality Radio: What the Economy of Star Trek Says About Our Future; What’s Next for Sanders’ Movement?

by Joshua Holland

This week, Joshua Holland begins with a rant about some ridiculous claims that the Democratic primaries are being rigged. There are lies, damn lies and statistics.

Then we’ll be joined by Manu Saadia, author of Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek. It’s two nerd tastes that taste great together!

Finally, we’ll speak with Stacey Hopkins, a grassroots team leader for Brand New Congress, a new PAC that hopes to move Bernie Sanders’ agenda forward after the 2016 campaign.

Playlist:
Alexander Courage: “Theme from Star Trek”
David Bowie: “Ziggy Stardust”
De La Soul: “Buddy”

As always, you can also subscribe to the show on iTunes or Podbean.

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Suckers and the suckers who sucker themselves
By Tom Sullivan

U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Katerina Slivinske.

What could be simpler and more intuitive than telling people that countries are just like people, that we have to stand up to this bully or we’ll get our lunch money taken again? — Max Fisher at Vox

Remember the “I don’t think anybody could have predicted” defense Condoleeza Rice used to explain why the Bush II administration failed to stop the September 11 attacks? Look again at the quote in italics. Now ask yourself whether it is predictable that we’ll hear the “stand up to this bully” argument deployed to sell America’s next foreign military adventure.

Foreign intervention is another place where facts don’t matter, according to Max Fisher. In a fascinating article at Vox, Fisher argues that American military intervention is often sold on the false belief that American “credibility” will suffer if we fail to intervene in this or that conflict regardless of our objective national interests. Regardless of the fact that this theory of credibility “does not appear to be real. Political scientists have investigated this theory over and over, and have repeatedly disproven it.”

But it sells. Planes, drones, rifles, etc.

Reputation theory is “a compass that only points in one direction.” Invoking credibility is a sucker move foreign leaders use to get the U.S. to intervene for them. Besides being an emotional argument and essentially unfalsifiable, the reason this version of the embolden-our-enemies argument serves foreign policy elites is it is easy to explain:

“The credibility argument is simply an easy (and hard to disprove) way for elites to sell the foreign policy they’re most interested in to the American people, whether that’s domino theory, primacy, or intervention in some conflict,” Emma Ashford of the Cato Institute pointed out.

“Credibility is an intuitive and hard to refute argument, even if larger studies show it to be false,” she added.

Plus, the credibility argument plays to America’s inflated sense of its own importance:

It portrays the world as a place where the world turns on American power, whose assertion is inherently a force for justice and stability.

It’s a world where the United States is the protagonist of every story — because every conflict is a test of our credibility, we are at the center even of events that seem to have nothing to do with us — and where the US is best served by personifying the characteristics of a Hollywood action movie hero.

Remaining 2016 presidential candidates (particularly of the Republican persuasion) are sure to entertain us this election season with how tough they are by repeating some version of the Ledeen Doctrine. Some already have. Fisher explains:

“The toughness fascination emerges from a variety of gender tropes that extend back pretty far that associate toughness with manliness,” he wrote. “This understanding manifests in diplomacy through the obsession with reputation. Combine that with the regular diplomatic over-emphasis on the effect of US action, and you get a compulsion to look at every event in terms of whose dick is longer.”

I can’t imagine who among the presidential candidates might act out militarily just to prove that, can you?