Month: August 2016

Trump & 2nd Amendment People: Stop The Violent Rhetoric

by Spocko

Many many people have said that Donald Trump talks like a right wing talk radio host. His comments appeal to people’s anger and fear. As Janeane Garofalo used to say about the RWNJ radio hosts, “They talk to people’s inner Archie Bunker.” or put less politely, their inner asshole.

These radio hosts can also be funny, they call themselves “entertainers.” This combo gets good ratings for a certain audience.  If they say something that goes too far and get called out on it, they can use the “It’s just a joke!” line.
(My favorite response to this dodge came from Ted Rall at EschaCon 08 in Philadelphia. “If an actual joke had happened, laughter would ensue.”)

But death threats aren’t funny.

As Digby pointed out today,

“we have a Republican presidential nominee whose message encourages paranoia, violence and anger among his followers directed generally at various “others” and specifically toward his opponent who he characterizes as a criminal and an illegitimate tyrant who plans to abolish the Second Amendment.

        What could go wrong?”

Oh, I don’t know, the Rwandan genocide?

Of course what happened in Rwandan could never happen here. People don’t make decisions about an entire group of people from listening to media!

The media regularly allow political figures chances to “walk the statement back” The clever politician will call it “hyperbole, out of context, misunderstood, not intended. misspoke, etc.” They even give themselves the same out when they are busted.

Americans certainly aren’t going to listen to a old white man who goes on radio to identify a specific person, gives them a nickname and just wonders what some people would do. Not that Bill would do anything. He’s just sayin..

“In fact, O’Reilly himself repeatedly referred to Dr. Tiller in his own words as “Tiller the baby killer,” and as “Dr. Killer,” a fact he later denied. In a 2006 anti-Tiller rant on his radio show, O’Reilly said, “And if I could get my hands on Tiller — well, you know. Can’t be vigilantes. Can’t do that. It’s just a figure of speech. But despicable? Oh, my God. Oh, it doesn’t get worse.”

These kind of comments get through to the intended audience. Message received. And, when there are no consequences for the speakers, they keep saying them.  The people who watch the speakers get away with this kind of talk are then “emboldened” (like we used to say about the terrorists) and engage in it themselves.

These people might bring up the 1st Amendment as a shield for the horrible things they say, so I remind them, threatening speech is not protected speech. 
This isn’t Rwanda. Stop the violent rhetoric. 

Even a landslide won’t be enough


by digby

Fergawdsakes:

You can feel the huge regret that he isn’t given the opportunity to “mock” her the way he really wants to. Poor, poor Villager.

And, by the way, the idea that she would have been beaten by the rest of the clown car is dubious to say the least. After all, that deep bench of awesome political talent couldn’t even beat an incoherent orange demagogue.

But gird yourselves. The right is preparing a “rigged” rationale to explain her win. (It’s impossible that the old bag could have won otherwise, amirite?) Certain members of the left will insist that she only won because Republicans saw through her pandering and recognized that she had no intention of even trying to govern with the platform on which she ran. (These fears are not proving to be true, at least not yet.) The Village will run with this unsupported view that anyone but Trump would have beaten her easily.

Anyway, I’ll let Krugman have the last word on this nonsense.

Poor Mikey

by digby

Pence’s friends are scrambling madly to save his career. Good luck with that:

“Mike has done a good job distancing himself from Trump even as his VP choice, and as odd as that is as a campaign dynamic, it’s showing that his principles come first, however much some think he has compromised his principles,” a former Pence adviser wrote in an email, communicating on the condition of anonymity. “When this campaign is all said and done, people on all sides of Trump in the GOP will think [Pence] did the best he could given the circumstances. And I predict most of my anti-Trump friends will at that point at least admit that trying to unite the party against Clinton by joining Trump wasn’t entirely without its merits.”

Nice try. He’s cooked. And because he lined up with Trump it’s even possible that he won’t be able to parlay his political contacts into a lobbying career either.

Poor Mikey.

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This is what it’s come to

by digby

I don’t think we can even imagine the damage this person has already done. What country will ever feel confident again that the USA is not on the verge of going mad?

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Trump’s been building a case for his 2nd Amendment comment for months

by digby

I wrote about the context for Trump’s Second Amendment comments for Salon today

Gun rights advocates showing up armed at political events has been one of the more disturbing images of the past few years. It changes the very nature of political debate to have one side of an argument carrying a lethal weapon, particularly when they are also carrying a sign with the Jefferson quote “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with blood of patriots and tyrants.” You don’t have to be a history professor to understand what that person is saying. Guns and politics are a combustible combination best avoided if at all possible.

But the epidemic of gun violence, particularly mass killings (a number of which have taken place as the campaign unfolded) has put the issue of gun rights front and center in this election. Democrats had been treading lightly on the issue of gun safety for many years but the rise in mass shootings and the recognition that guns are now taking more than 30,000 lives per year, including many children, has changed their view. And the blowback from the gun proliferation activists and the gun lobby has been furious and hysterical. They have greeted every attempt to enact common sense gun regulation with total obstruction, unwilling to give even an inch. Gun owners rush out to buy more weapons, particularly the semi-automatic types, whenever a bloodbath takes place. And throughout the nation, Republican office holders have responded by loosening the gun laws wherever they could, allowing them on campuses, churches, and even bars as an exercise of citizens’ fundamental freedom.

The one notable exception has been the laws against carrying weapons in government buildings where they work, for which they have an interesting rationale. As a Republican legislator and gun rights proponent from South Dakota explained, “we have the most contentious issues being debated in public policy, affecting people in irate, angrily ways and affecting millions and millions of dollars. This is different than when you go work at the bar. This is different than you working at the bank.”

The central gun rights argument is that the Second Amendment is necessary for the citizenry to protect itself from government tyranny which is the reason why people showing up at rallies and political events armed has such a resonance. These people consider themselves to be patriots, fighting for freedom. But they are instead operating as thugs intimidating people who disagree with them, a fundamentally undemocratic act.

This brings us to Donald Trump and his shocking suggestion this week that Hillary Clinton wants to abolish the Second Amendment and if she were to be elected and allowed to appoint judges to the Supreme Court there would be nothing his followers could do about it “although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is.” He was clearly saying that the gun patriots might take things into their own hands if Clinton were to win the election and frankly, he might be right. It has caused a firestorm and for good reason. Reports are that the Secret Service took the comments seriously enough that they had a little chat with the campaign about it.

It’s not the first time a politician has made such a provocative remark. Recall that the late North Carolina Senator  Jesse Helms famously said that President Bill Clinton was so unpopular with the military in his state that he’d better not show up without a bodyguard.  But there is something very different about what Trump is doing.

From the time he announced his candidacy, there has been a violent subtext to Donald Trump’s message. He’s been ginning up fear of immigrants and Muslims, calling for torture, summary execution, extrajudicial killings and fetishizing “law and order.” At his rallies he has commonly called for violence against protesters, lamented that “nobody wants to hurt anyone anymore” and said:

“Protesters, they realize there are no consequences to protesting anymore. There used to be consequences. There are none anymore. Our country has to toughen up folks. We have to toughen up. These people are bringing us down. They are bringing us down. These people are so bad for our country, you have no idea.”

The crowds love it and cheer lustily whenever he makes these “un-PC” comments. But nothing gets his febrile mob excited as much as ad hominem attacks on his rival Hillary Clinton. From the early days of the campaign he has been building a case that Clinton is a criminal who “shouldn’t be allowed to run for president”. He says, “I will say this, Hillary Clinton has got to go to jail. Folks, honestly, she’s guilty as hell.”

These comments have always been met with feral shrieks of delight from his fans but at the GOP convention Trump supporters Alex Jones and Roger Stone introduced a new “Hillary for Prison” meme for mainstream consumption supplying mobile billboards and signs for the convention goers. And many of the headliners, including Rudy Giuliani, Chris Christie and General Michael Flynn stoked the crowd with more accusations of criminality leading to the now ubiquitous chant, “lock her up!” Delegates appeared dressed in orange jumpsuits and Clinton masks (a depressing routine that’s being repeated in small towns in America.) Now Trump is accusing her of rigging the election to steal it from him and many Republicans believe him. These people will not accept that she is a legitimate winner.

This is the context in which Trump’s very unfunny Second Amendment comment was made. In an era of excessive gun violence we have a paranoid gun culture that is (literally) loaded for bear and a political environment where gun rights and regulations are a top level issue  And we have a Republican presidential nominee whose message encourages paranoia, violence and anger among his followers directed generally at various “others” and specifically toward his opponent who he characterizes as a criminal and an illegitimate tyrant who plans to abolish the Second Amendment.

What could go wrong?

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“A bog of testosterone”
by Tom Sullivan

Donald Trump – Caricature by DonkeyHotey via Creative Commons.

Donald Trump has a problem with women. They dislike him. E.J. Dionne caught up with a few in Pennsylvania where polls show Trump 11 points behind Hillary Clinton. Susan Byrnes, a York County commissioner and a moderate Republican, for example:

“The way he interacted with the parents of a Muslim soldier and the way he talked about the Purple Heart — it almost made my heart stop,” she said in a telephone interview from a county commissioners’ gathering in the Poconos. “I can’t vote for someone like that.”

Kristen Fraser is a lawyer and businesswoman who wrote in Paul Ryan’s name in the primary and is exactly the sort of voter the Republican Party needs to cherish. She can’t vote for Clinton, she said, but added: “My social views are very liberal. I can’t bring myself to vote for Trump.”

Dionne concludes that Trump is an offense against the common decency conservative voters expect from their leaders.

The Guardian not long ago described British novelist Martin Amis this way:

Amis occupies a really peculiar position in our national life. He is the object of envy, contempt, anger, disapproval, theatrical expressions of weariness – but also of fascination. Has there in living memory been a writer whom we (by which I mean the papers, mostly) so assiduously seek out for comment – we task him to review tennis, terrorism, pornography, the state of the nation – and whom we are then so keen to denounce as worthless?

But of course Amis would have tasty things to say about Donald Trump. In this month’s Harpers, Amis “reviews” bestselling books by Don the realtor (“by” in quotes, obviously). Amis deploys a retort I have been waiting to trot out for years against such as Trump. The question is not “If you’re so smart, how come you ain’t rich?”; it is “If you’re so rich, how come you ain’t smart?”

Trump has a predator’s instinct for when the object of his desire has grown weak and vulnerable, Amis writes. The GOP, for example. “The question is, Can he do it with American democracy?” After a couple of weeks in the White House, Trump’s brain would reduce to, in Amis’ estimation, “a bog of testosterone.”

Regarding Trump, women, and the election:

Trump’s sexual bashfulness is an interesting surprise. But where, then, does it come from — the rancor, the contempt, the disgust? It is as if he has never been told (a) that women go to the bathroom (“Disgusting,” he said of a Clinton toilet break), and (b) that women lactate (“Disgusting,” he said of a lawyer who had to go and pump milk for her newborn). Has no one told him (c) that women vote? And I hope he finds that disgusting too, in November. This race will be the mother of a battle of the sexes, Donald against Hillary — and against her innumerable sisters at the ballot box.

Visitors to the United States in an election year are touched by how seriously Americans take their national responsibility, how they vacillate and agonize. They very seldom acknowledge that their responsibility is also global. At an early stage in Trump’s rise, his altogether exemplary campaign staff decided that any attempt to “normalize” their candidate would be futile: better, they shruggingly felt (as they deployed the tautologous house style), to “let Trump be Trump.” As a lover of America (and as an admirer of the planet), I offer this advice: Don’t shrug. Don’t stand by and let President Trump be President Trump.

“A bog of testosterone”? He’s already there.

by tristero

J.D. Vance is being touted as an actual fleshnblood version of that heretofore mythical creature, The Thoughtful Conservative. Here is a NY Times review of his new book, Hillbilly Elegy. And he sure sounds promising. He happily beat the odds of his social milieu and not only thrived, but excelled. It’s a wonderful, moving story. However:

Time and again, Mr. Vance preaches a message of tough love and personal responsibility. He has no patience with an old acquaintance who told him he quit his job because he hated waking up early, only to take to Facebook to blame the “Obama economy.” Or with a former co-worker at a tile warehouse who missed work once a week though his girlfriend was pregnant. 

Squint, and you’ll note the incendiary nature of Mr. Vance’s argument. It’s always treacherous business to blame a group for its own misfortunes. Certainly, an outsider cannot say what Mr. Vance is saying to his kin and kind. But he can — just as President Obama can say to fellow African-Americans, “brothers should pull up their pants,” as he did on MTV. 

The difference is that President Obama believes poverty, though it may have a cultural component, is largely a structural problem, one the government can play a large role in fixing. Mr. Vance, a conservative, takes a far dimmer view.

Yeah, I’ve heard this one before. And I’ve seen the exact behavior Vance talks about as well (although I come from a very different background) and it’s galling. But it’s also quite clear to me that the problems created by poverty are extremely complex and that Obama is absolutely right: this isn’t going to solved by essentially telling people to act with more gumption. It’s going to take a larger community effort. A government effort.

And then there’s that famous interview with Vance referred to in the article. And again, he sure sounded Thoughtful. Until I read this:

To me, this condescension is a big part of Trump’s appeal.  He’s the one politician who actively fights elite sensibilities, whether they’re good or bad.  I remember when Hillary Clinton casually talked about putting coal miners out of work…[emphasis added]

This seemed a bit weird for Clinton to say, So I looked it up. In fact, she clearly meant the exact opposite of what Vance suggested (although she should have known that Fox News types would rip it completely out of context):

Look, we have serious economic problems in many parts of our country. And Roland is absolutely right.  Instead of dividing people the way Donald Trump does, let’s reunite around policies that will bring jobs and opportunities to all these underserved poor communities. 

So for example, I’m the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country. Because we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right? 

And we’re going to make it clear that we don’t want to forget those people. Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories.  

Now we’ve got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don’t want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce the energy that we relied on. 

So whether it’s coal country or Indian country or poor urban areas, there is a lot of poverty in America.  We have gone backwards. We were moving in the right direction. In the ’90s,  more people were lifted out of poverty than any time in recent history. 

Because of the terrible economic policies of the Bush administration, President Obama was left with the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and people fell back into poverty because they lost jobs, they lost homes, they lost opportunities, and hope.   

So I am passionate about this, which is why I have put forward specific plans about how we incentivize more jobs, more investment in poor communities, and put people to work.

Now I’ll give the guy the benefit of a doubt and just assume that he heard the remark completely out of context. But I wouldn’t be surprised if, like so many other sightings of The Thoughtful Conservative, Vance and his Thoughtfulness turns out to be just one more hallucination by a media desperate to appear fair and balanced – and who do so by providing terrible rightwing ideas and their spokespeople a status they don’t deserve.

Just one day after Donald Trump tried to incite his supporters to violence against his opponent Hillary Clinton if she defeats him in the election, it turns out this isn’t the first time Trump has done something like this toward a woman who got under his skin. MSNBC reporter Katy Tur, who has spent more than a year traveling with the Trump campaign, revealed today that the Secret Service had to protect her from Trump’s crowd after he attempted to incite them against her. 

While Tur was covering a Trump rally in Mount Pleasant, he took his longtime grudge with her public. He didn’t approve of how she had covered an earlier incident, so he privately demanded that she apologize, which she refused to do. So Trump retaliated by pointing to Tur and saying to the crowd. “What a lie. Katy Tur. What a lie it was. Third. Rate. Reporter. Remember that.” 

The crowd of Trump supporters turned so fiercely against Katy Tur that she says the Secret Service had to protect her while she was walking to her car, simply to keep her safe. She’s referring to it as an “extraordinary step.” The agents are specifically tasked with protecting people such as Presidential nominees, and it is in fact rare that they would feel compelled to protect a reporter due to the unsafe situation she’d been placed in by the candidate they’re protecting. 

He knows very well what he’s doing. He’s intimidating people, especially women, into going easy on him by threatening to sic his violent cretins on  them. There was no other reason to publicly name her.

His “rigged election” talk is very likely to inspire a few of these crazies to try something.

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She’s always made them crazy

by digby

From a 2008 Newsweek story:

In his biography of Hillary Clinton, A Woman in Charge, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Carl Bernstein writes about the 1994 Reform Riders campaign, a nationwide bus tour designed to build support for President Clinton’s health-care reform agenda. The idea was to emulate the famous 1960’s Freedom Rides but the campaign was plagued with protesters. In Portland, Ore., the route was blocked by an “angry anti-Clinton mob” who had their own bus, which was covered in red tape and dragged by a tow truck with a sign reading THIS IS CLINTON CARE. A plane bearing protest signs flew overhead. Hillary Clinton met the Reform Rider activists in Seattle where she delivered a speech on health care. The result was a mob scene. Here’s Bernstein:

“By the time the caravan had reached Seattle the threat of violence was constant. All week, talk radio hosts, both in the Northwest and on national broadcasts, implored their listeners to confront the Reform Riders to “show Hillary” their feelings about her. This “call to arms,” as she described it, attracted menacing hordes, many of whom identified themselves as militia members, tax resisters and anti-abortion militants. She estimated that at least half of the 4,500 people in the audience of her Seattle speech were protesters. She agreed for the first time to wear a bulletproof vest. Rarely had she felt endangered, but this was different. During her speech, the catcalls, screaming, and heckling drowned out much of her remarks. When she left the stage and got into a limousine, hundreds of protesters surrounded the car. They were rabid with hatred. Several arrests were made by the Secret Service, which impounded two guns and a knife.”

She had to wear a bulletproof vest because people were trying to kill her — over her health care plan.

by digby

A delegate at the GOP convention. #Stomachchurning

Rudy Giuliani accidentally told the truth about many of the people who are voting for Trump. They are cretins:

Rudy Giuliani rejects the notion Donald Trump alluded to Hillary Clinton’s possible assassination with his remark about how “2nd Amendment people” could stop her during a rally in Wilmington, North Carolina on Tuesday. Giuliani’s rationale? If Trump had really said that, his supporters would’ve cheered louder.

“What he intended was, that they should vote against her,” Giuliani, who introduced Trump at the rally, said Wednesday on Good Morning America. “With a crowd like that, if that’s what they thought he meant, they would’ve gone wild.”

They knew what he meant. But Giuliani is right that if Trump had just come right out and said that if she is elected Clinton will take away your guns and “there won’t be anything you can do,  although the 2nd Amendment folks could decide to shoot her — I don’t know. But I tell you what, that will be a horrible day, if Hillary gets to put her judges in,” that would definitely have resulted in yuuuuuge cheers to be sure. But there are people like this who have heard Trump’s message loud and clear anyway:

By the way:

A US Secret Service official confirms to CNN that the USSS has spoken to the Trump campaign regarding his Second Amendment comments. 

“There has been more than one conversation” on the topic, the official told CNN. 

One would hope so.

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