Trump Calls US Soldiers "Losers"

[tassojunior]

In fairness, Biden didn't think much of the 5000 American soldiers he sent to their deaths in committing genocide in Iraq to help other countries, not the US. That was too awful for even Big Dummy to support. 

You honor American troops by not sending them to commit genocide, not sending them to die for no reason, and not having a continual war economy. 

Edited September 8, 2020 by tassojunior

[tassojunior]

Trophy' pictures show US soldiers posing with corpses of Afghan civilians they are accused of killing for sport

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/mar/21/afghanistan-trophy-photos-us-soldier

 

Edited September 8, 2020 by tassojunior

[stevenkesslar]

17 hours ago, tassojunior said:

Trump used to be a liberal Democrat and Biden was a main supporter of the Iraq War.

That's a bridge too far.  President Toxic is not, and never was, a liberal Democrat.

I've never read any real comprehensive analysis of his political donations, going back decades.  I know he gave lots of money, and I know a bunch of the names he gave it to.  My guess is he gave to both parties to do what any developer would do:  wield influence.

The easy apples to apples on this is racism.  You can say anything negative you want about Biden and the crime bill.  But you have to add that the majority of the Congressional Black Cacus was for it, crime was at records highs, crime went way down from that point forward, and to this day older Blacks like Rep. Clyburn insist there is no distance between Biden and the Black community on that issue.

Meanwhile, Trump called for the death penalty for the kids involved in the Central Park Five case, and said loudly that Whites should hate "those people".

He's not a liberal.  He's a racist.

I'm going to post this article in a different thread and comment on it more extensively.  It's an honest and sober article from a true principled conservative magazine.  One of the points they make is relevant in this context.

After Trump Loss, ‘Deplorables’ Will Be The Democrats’ First Target

Blame the president for leaving his core supporters at the mercy of the opposition's cultural and economic revolution.

Quote

What went wrong? Trump went wrong. He built his constituency by exposing to America the fundamental political reality of 2016—namely, the widening chasm between Middle America and its bicoastal elites of big media, government officials, think tanks, big tech, burgeoning financial institutions, the federal deep state, and mavens of popular culture. He pulled his voters together into a tight knot of political support born of fear and intimidation and self-interest. But then he couldn’t build on it. He could never take his 43 percent support and find a way to add another 10 percent by devising policies designed to operate on the political margin. 

Bill Clinton had a word for it—“triangulation,” meaning the art of building coalitions of people and institutions that constitute majority sentiment on well-chosen issues.

I'll take issue with some of the points in another thread.  Like whether the "revolution" MAGA conservatives supposedly fear is real.  But I think the overall analysis is correct.  Both that President Toxic is likely going to lose.  And that he only has himself to blame.

In the context of what you said, he may not have been a liberal Democrat.  But he was, sort of, a Democrat.  He's never been wedded to any ideology, other than perhaps the ideology of money and power.    That could have been a plus if he had chosen to do what Clinton did in the 90's.   I will always suspect that one impactful difference between Clinton and Obama was that Obama was just more ideological.  Maybe it's noble that he put liberalism before cutting deals, at least more than Clinton did.  But it ended up being good for the country and the economy that Clinton compromised some of his principles and cut some deals.  Since President Toxic has more or less no principles, he should have been able to easily trump Bill Clinton on triangulating.

Alas, it was not to be.  My one sentence explanation for it is President Toxic just has really shitty political judgment.  He was the right hateful racist in the right place at the right time.  Which is not to say all MAGA types are racists, or haters.  And I will repeat that in 2016 I saw Trump as more hope ("Make America Great Again") than fear ("Jobs Not Mobs").  Maybe he'll surprise me and pull a rabbit out of a hat in November.  But this feels more like very desperate people doing desperate things.

Mostly, I figure President Toxic figured out in his reptilian way that it made sense to play a MAGA President on Reality TV.   He is not wedded to MAGA conservatism, or any type of conservatism.  I think it was all about power, money, and ego.

My reason for bringing it up in this context is that if The American Conservative is right, which I think they are, President Toxic will do the same thing with his base that he has already done to the military.  They'll go right under the bus.  The only difference is that the military is smart enough to figure it out.  And the MAGA base is largely clueless.  Maybe, as you said, it's that the military is full of people with college degrees.  And integrity, too.

The biggest reason I might be wrong about what I said in the last paragraph is that ex-President Toxic may choose to become a cult-like figure among his dying and diminishing base.  He could be facing slammer time.  So that might be one reason for him to hold on to as much political power as he can.  The types that read George Will and The American Conservative will try to reconstitute a more decent Republican Party, I'm sure.  So that will be interesting to watch.

I'll add one other concession to your stream of thought, which I suspect we'll both be happy about.  I'm hardly the military's # 1 fan.  And it's not so much the military, per se, as warmongers like Cheney and Rumsfeld.  So the good news in this is that President Toxic has slowed the military down, in two ways.  First, he's made it clear that the Republican Party isn't the "pro-war" party it seemed to look like, at least to me, when we decided to go bomb the shit out of Iraq.  Second, as AB Stoddard pointed out in a recent anti-Trump rant, it will take a very long time just to undo the damage President Toxic has done to our global position.  So we're hardly in a position to start World Word III.  Which is not to say that's what the military wants.  I don't think they do, of course.

Given all the challenges we have, one thing I hope we won't have to worry about for a while is the Cheneys and Rumsfelds of either party war mongering.

Edited September 9, 2020 by stevenkesslar

[stevenkesslar]

3 hours ago, tassojunior said:

In further reading of the new FL poll, Biden is underperforming Clinton 2016's final across the board except for older voters: 

 

 

That Harry Enten tweet about the Florida poll speaks to my worst fear.  Which is that it's the economy, stupid.  And President Toxic somehow manages to add to his zero sum older base by pulling in younger voters.

There's not a whole lot of evidence in the real world that such a thing is happening.  As Enten said, beware of margins of error on small samples.  But he's also right that this is not the only poll that shows Biden's weaknesses with Hispanics and some younger voters.

My theory, which I have no real data to support, is that a segment of younger voters are just more worried about their jobs and incomes than about COVID-19.  I've seen at least one poll that suggests that may be true in the Hispanic bucket, as well.  If you only look at Hispanics, it was working age Hispanics that were leaning somewhat more to Trump.

There's still a lingering "health v. wealth" debate going back to when the plague started.  It doesn't make much sense to me.  China is growing again.  Other Asian countries and European countries took a bigger hit than China.  But most of them took much less of an economic hit than the US has.  I don't think it will be hard for Biden to connect the dots in debates and commercials that the biggest driver to the economy being so weak is that President Toxic's leadership on COVID-19 was weak and ineffective.

I'm not very worried about race and safety and crime tipping the election to President Toxic.  And I don't think he can just bullshit his way out of his mistakes, and a shitty economy.  But if there is an argument to be made for how he wins, this is the path it would follow.

Even if President Toxic can solve his math problem by replacing older 2016 voters who are no longer with us with some younger 2016 Clinton voters, there's another factor.  Arguably the biggest unknown is what the Millennials and Gen Z will do. 

It's not a good sign if President Toxic is pulling more younger voters in Florida than he did running against Hillary.  But the math remains the same.  If a million new young people vote, it would of course be better for Biden if he gets 60 % of them, as opposed to 55 % of them.  Either way, whether it's 600,000 Biden to 400,000 Trump, or 550,000 to 450,000, it's a hell of a lot more votes for Biden than for President Toxic.  If youth turnout spikes, it's just going to be bad news for Republicans, period.  Even if concerns about reopening the economy more quickly lead a slice of young voters to vote for Trump.

Biden Doesn’t Really Have A Young Voters Problem

 

That 538 article is three months old.  And it's national polling data, not Florida.  At least at that point, Biden was in the same ballpark with Hillary.  Of course, Biden has never been the poster child for young Democrats.  Not was Hillary, for that matter.  But that article cites polls saying Biden led Trump by as much as 20 points with voters under 30, and maybe 6-12 points with voters aged 30-44.  That Florida poll puts the cutoff at 45 years old.  I think the real question is voters under 30.  They have the potential to make this a slam dunk for Biden.  Whether or not they actually do that is a whole different matter.

Edited September 9, 2020 by stevenkesslar