The 2016 Presidential Candidates Thread

[His_Highness]

@cybrguy - I don't take offense. These are your opinions and you are entitled to them. My opinions differ but I am aware they are my opinions and not necessarily fact.

I was and am a Bernie supporter who will vote for HRC assuming she is still the end result candidate. I've said this before though .... I voted for Bernie not because of frustration as you allude to .... but because of his stance on some personal political issues I have. I voted for the candidate who held beliefs closer to my own.

 

[Gunky]

Sanders' campaign says he'll stay a Democrat after election



By Nolan D. McCaskill


04/20/16 06:07 PM EDT

Bernie Sanders to Return to Senate as an Independent
By
Peter Nicholas
Jul 26, 2016 12:21 pm ET

And by the way. The 39 estimated separate occasions Clinton did not remember something in her interview with the FBI ( the events in question took place four to eight years prior to the interview) were not under oath. Also, when you put a quote box around something it's supposed to be a direct quote. Clinton never said the following, it's a bogus quote:

I do not recall. I do not recall. I do not recall. I do not recall. I do not recall. I do not recall. I do not recall. I do not recall. I do not recall. I do not recall. I do not recall. I do not recall. I do not recall. I do not recall. I do not recall. I do not recall. I do not recall. I do not recall. I do not recall. I do not recall. I do not recall. I do not recall. I do not recall. I do not recall. I do not recall. I do not recall. I do not recall. I do not recall. I do not recall. I do not recall. I do not recall. I do not recall. I do not recall. I do not recall. I do not recall. I do not recall. I do not recall. I do not recall. I do not recall.

So that is two lies in one post! Quit makin' stuff up.

 

[Farid]

When did you stop beating your wife?

When you begin with a false premise, anything is possible.

Hillary didn't rig anything. Bernie lost the primary because he wasn't/isn't a Democrat, and there was no way he was going to convince most of us, especially those that have followed politics for decades, that he was a dem or gave a shit about the Democratic party. The fact that he got so far is remarkable, but he couldn't win and thank the stars.

The majority of Bernie supporters were new to politics and didn't have a clue how it was supposed to work. They and people who were so frustrated they were willing to take a chance on someone with relatively little chance of winning the general. Or had Clinton derangement syndrome. There were never going to be enough for him to win.

I think most of those people understand that Trump can not be allowed to destroy America and will vote for Hillary in the end. And Trump continues to help.

Thanks Don.

Ok, ignore the point about the rigged election then. You still have to admit the Democratic establishment picked an unlikable, weak candidate in Clinton. If it were Biden, Warren, or Corey Booker or even somebody not qualified like John Stewart (I mean not qualified in that he has never served in an office) then Trump wouldn't have a chance.

As for false premises, you present one yourself when you say Bernie supporters were new to politics. What a lie. It was my father and some older folks here on FC who had to convince me to support Sanders, somebody who I thought had no chance in Hell.

 

[His_Highness]

I don't blame Bernie for independence....why stay where you're not wanted?

 

[cybrguy]

As for false premises, you present one yourself when you say Bernie supporters were new to politics. What a lie.

You misquote me and then call me a liar? Really? Did you not read my reply to BD9?

Inexperience was only one of the qualities that I stated drove people to vote for Bernie. You really need to read more carefully. Especially when you call someone a liar. I understand that your hate for Hillary blinds you but that is not permission.

And, by the way, Hillary Clinton is the most qualified person to ever run for the office in modern times. She may be unlikable for some, but she is surely NOT weak.

 

[Farid]

How on Earth did I misquote you? You said:

"The majority of Bernie supporters were new to politics and didn't have a clue how it was supposed to work."

It seems to me any criticism of Clinton is baseless in your opinion. I get it. You think she's the perfect candidate. But to others, Clinton has a long list of negatives. Every candidate has negatives. Sanders was too idealistic. Johnson is not a great speaker. I could think of more. But every candidate has flaws, including Clinton.

 

[TeeJay1952]

The backup quarterback is always the greatest player in the world till he plays.

 

[BD9]

I didn't expect to get much love in here for my post, it is pretty clear there were many Bernie fans here. We are unlikely to agree on any of this, but I believe it to be true.

But if you are offended by the post you need to work on your reading comprehension.


Of course, you can choose to be offended anyway, but that's on you not me.

And this is why I stopped posting in this thread.

 

[cybrguy]

How on Earth did I misquote you? You said:

"The majority of Bernie supporters were new to politics and didn't have a clue how it was supposed to work."

By implying that that was the only reason I gave that led people to vote for him. It was not. And many if not most of the people who supported Bernie had never voted before so the statement you called a lie is true. Certainly there were many who had and I never said everyone who voted for him lacked experience.

To be more accurate, you didn't misquote me, you mischaracterized me.

This is all moot. Bernie is no longer running and the choice for President doesn't include him.

 

[grokit]

yeah, cos it couldn't be anything to do with the campaign of lies and hate the republicans have waged against her, could it?

Of course it does, but that doesn't matter any more. The problem is that despite all of her political experience, killary is not a politician; she's a policy wonk. Trump otoh, has no political experience but is the superior politician. Just more examples of what an ass-backwards, downside-up race this has been.

Sanders A Washington Insider, Clinton More Dangerous Than Trump

Sanders and Clinton are ripped by Green Party candidate Jill Stein during an explosive interview.

Stein recognized Donald Trump as a danger but dismissed him as nothing more than a moron who has destroyed the Republican Party. She believes Hillary Clinton is more dangerous than Trump and said, “Donald Trump, I think, will have a lot of trouble moving things through Congress. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, won’t … Hillary has the potential to do a whole lot more damage, get us into more wars, faster to pass her fracking disastrous climate program, much more easily than Donald Trump could do his.”

Stein also lashed out against Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) by referring to him as a Washington insider.

“I’ve tried to talk with Bernie, but, you know, Bernie is — he is a team player,” she said, saying Sanders refuses to speak to her. “I think he’s on the wrong team, perhaps because he’s been in Washington, D.C. too long, because he used to really understand independent politics and why we cannot have a viable political system unless we have independent political parties.” She concludes that it could be “a generational thing.”

Sanders has been campaigning for Hillary Clinton and has cautioned his supporters against a third-party protest vote.

much more:
http://samuel-warde.com/2016/09/sanders-washington-insider-trump-clinton-same-jill-stein/

 

[Gunky]

I don't blame Bernie for independence....why stay where you're not wanted?

You're ok with promising to remain a democrat when you think it will help sweeten the deal and then blowing it off three months later when ya don't get the nomination? What are Bernie's other promises worth? And what does this small-bore opportunism tell you about Bernie as a politician and a leader? Meh.

 

[Silat]

I'm starting to realize the real comedy of this election:

That Clinton supporters are up in arms about how Trump could possibly win, but the only reason he has a chance is because their candidate is so disliked. It's almost like she's paying for rigging the primary by not having enthusiastic support in the general.

Rigging the primary? Any evidence that she did that? I have seen none. More people voted for Hillary that Bernie. That was not rigged.
20+ years of negative press from the reich wing and the failed 4th estate has everything to do with Hillary's negatives. Fact have nothing to do with it.

 

[Farid]

By implying that that was the only reason I gave that led people to vote for him. It was not. And many if not most of the people who supported Bernie had never voted before so the statement you called a lie is true. Certainly there were many who had and I never said everyone who voted for him lacked experience.

This is all moot. Bernie is no longer running and the choice for President doesn't include him.

You made the statement that Bernie supporters were new to politics which is false. What you said following it did not change/invalidate the first statement. I was responding to that statement. Bernie isn't running anymore, but if you look at the chain of comments which led us to discussing him, you will see that you were the one to bring up Bernie (me discussing Clinton rigging the primary doesn't exclude O'Malley and any other candidate who wanted to run against her, but felt they had no chance with the establishment behind Clinton). I was trying to highlight how Clinton has incredibly high unavailability ratings, but die hard Clinton supporters refuse to admit she even has a single flaw.

 

[His_Highness]

@cybrguy - Got any numbers on the "many if not most of the people who supported Bernie had never voted before"? It's the way you can turn this opinion to a fact and shoot a hole in the liar aspect.

You're ok with promising to remain a democrat when you think it will help sweeten the deal and then blowing it off when ya don't get the nomination? What are Bernie's other promises worth?

I wasn't OK with the promise being broken until the emails came out. Then it became apparent he was not wanted .... I don't stay where I'm not wanted either if those not wanting me have enough power and I can do more good by moving on.

 

[grokit]

From:
Carl Bernstein: There Is Growing Recognition That Trump Is A ‘Con Man Presiding Over A Cover-Up’ – Video

“He’s a con man,” Bernstein stated, adding, “It’s been established. And also he has presided over a cover up of his own life. And we have allowed it in cable news and network news particularly.”

 

[Greenfinger53]

This is why America has guns isn't it? To stop the government when things are going up the wall?

What are they all waiting for... how much worse does it need to get?

 

[cybrguy]

How Did the Republican Party Become Xenophobic?
by Nancy LeTourneau
September 20, 2016 9:50 AM

Imagine for a moment that you are a political strategist for the opposition party seeking to challenge a candidate who wants to build on the progress of her predecessor. As you try to come up with a message for why change is necessary, you have to combat the reality of that progress.

* Following the worst recession since the Great Depression, unemployment is at 4.9%.

* In the previous year, real median income for Americans rose by 5.2%.

* The number of Americans living in poverty fell by 3.5 million in the last year.

* The number of people who are uninsured dropped below 10% – the lowest in history.

* Crime rates are dropping and “by virtually any metric, Americans now live in one of the least violent times in the nation’s history.”

* Net migration from Mexico has dropped below zero.

* “The chance of an American being murdered in a terrorist attack caused by a refugee is 1 in 3.64 billion per year.”

Now add the fact that the party you are working for built its modern-day iteration on the Southern Strategy to appeal to racist white people and the guy who presided over that record happens to be the first African American president in the country’s history. Beyond that, your party did everything it could to stop him from making any progress by simply obstructing anything he tried to do. How would you make the case for the need for change?

I thought about that as I re-read something Adam Serwer wrote back in 2011 as he began to envision President Obama’s re-election prospects.

The Republican Party had a choice after 2008. They could continue to rely on a dwindling but still decisive share of the white vote to prevail, or they could try to bring more minorities into the party. While I’m not entirely sure how much of the decision was made by party leaders and how much is merely the unprecedented influence of Fox News, but whether it’s pseudo scandals of the past two years, from birtherism to the NBPP [New Black Panther Party] case, the GOP’s nationwide rush to ban sharia and institute draconian immigration laws, or characterizing nearly every administration policy as reparations, the conservative fixations of Obama’s first term indicate that the GOP will end up relying at least in part on inflaming white racial resentment to close the gap.​

Of course he was right. The GOP did, in fact, rely “on inflaming white racial resentment to close the gap.” And now they’ve nominated the guy who built his political reputation on claiming that the first African American president isn’t a citizen of this country. In order to make his case, he has to blatantly lie about all of the bullet points above and say things like this about refugees who want to come to here due to the violence and destruction in their own country.

They’re here. And I’ve been saying. This is going to be like the Trojan horse. We’re letting tens of thousands of people flow into this country and they are bringing in, in many cases, this is cancer from within. This is something that’s going to be so tough and you know they stay together, so nobody really knows who it is, what’s happening. They are plotting. They keep plotting, and this has been going on for so long and everybody knows it…​

In response to that kind of talk, Josh Marshall asks whether the fascist labels are really too much. I’m not prepared to go there. But the word xenophobic certainly fits.

Fear and hatred of strangers or foreigners or of anything that is strange or foreign.​

Just this past weekend, after Trump supposedly put all that birtherism nonsense to rest, we saw a Republican political consultant say this on CNN:

Sam Stein ✔ @samsteinhp

“There is an otherness to this president” — Alex Castellanos, Trump super PAC strategist, on Meet The Press

10:16 AM - 18 Sep 2016

In many ways the Republican Party took this road back in 2008 when they made the decision Serwer referred to up above. Some of them are beginning to express regret for where that decision has brought them. But I haven’t heard any of them be honest enough to articulate the path they chose to get here. Until they do that, I suspect that the GOP will continue to be the party of xenophobia.

 

[Silat]

This is why America has guns isn't it? To stop the government when things are going up the wall?

What are they all waiting for... how much worse does it need to get?

No that is not why.
That is the distorted view of the ammosexual fake constitutional scholar nation.

 

[ClearBlueLou]

You're ok with promising to remain a democrat when you think it will help sweeten the deal and then blowing it off three months later when ya don't get the nomination? What are Bernie's other promises worth? And what does this small-bore opportunism tell you about Bernie as a politician and a leader? Meh.

He was elected to the Senate as an independent, and what I recall him saying was that he would finish out his term as an independent, to keep faith with the people who elected him (unlike everybody else who has switched parties). If he runs for re-election as an independent, have at it: until then, you're complaining about a movie you might never see.

===

This is why America has guns isn't it? To stop the government when things are going up the wall?

What are they all waiting for... how much worse does it need to get?

I grew up being fed that - believed it, whole-hog, for the longest time, too.

Remedial history time: America has guns because white settlers were waging extermination wars against the inhabitants ('Indians'), and dragging enslaved people with them: guns were required to exterminate and to keep slave populations "under control" (prior to the advent of the KKK, local militias were also fugitive slave patrols, as well as an 'instant-access' army).
After the Rebellion went home, they continued as they had in the past, but now instead of catching runaway slaves, they were terrorizing the recently-freed blacks, burning crosses in their yards, and sometimes burning their homes and businesses down around their ears while shooting all who tried to escape the flames.

Big irony is that the whole 'protecting against government encroachment' never surfaced until after the Rebellion - right at the same time that the Rebellion stopped being about slavery (yeah, right) and started being about "states' rights".

They've been lying ever since. 'Bout pretty much everything.

 

[grokit]

This is why America has guns isn't it? To stop the government when things are going up the wall?

What are they all waiting for... how much worse does it need to get?

Sadly it's more about fending for and protecting yourself when government finally gives up the ghost, and from outside invaders as well at that point. Rising up against our own government is a non-starter, because they have the biggest baddest guns in the world, and more of them than anybody else plus all the ammo.

 

[Gunky]

-snip-


I wasn't OK with the promise being broken until the emails came out. Then it became apparent he was not wanted .... I don't stay where I'm not wanted either if those not wanting me have enough power and I can do more good by moving on.

Very well rationalized. But is this leadership? Or Bernie-style, independent-except-when-it-suits- me-to-be-a-dem crackpotism? Are dems going to follow his lead now? Nope. Bernie does not have a clue how to lead. Snipe from the sidelines, yeah he's great. Those of you still regretting and dreaming of a Bernie presidency ought to think about how fucking ineffective, small-bore, and opportunistic Bernie was and will be in congress and consider how he would be as prez. I am not talking about making inspirational speeches now. Using the levers and mechanisms available to the executive branch to lead the rest of the power structure in the legislature and get them to follow - these are not skills Bernie has ever shown. Everything we have seen during the campaign and since confirms this. Bernie is good at rallying a crowd of leftists and young people. He is shit at getting things done as a politician. Trump is also great at getting a crowd worked up. BFD.

And you keep going on about the emails and it was rigged, we wuz robbed... No it wasn't. All the emails show is some staffers indicating their preference for Hillary and a vague wish to do shit to disadvantage Bernie. Nothing ever was actually done. Saying the DNC rigged the primaries is a lie, period (one that Trump is fond of repeating). Bernie just fucking lost the popular vote, in spite of some undemocratic advantages he got from peculiarities of the caucus system (like winning the WA state caucus but losing the popular vote by a landslide. That's embarassing). Can we get past this? There simply is nothing there: he lost, fair and square. It wasn't close.

 

[grokit]

If drumpf wins the presidency,
it will be because of how the dnc rigged a broken electoral system.

This race wouldn't even be close if bernie was in it.

 

[His_Highness]

Very well rationalized. But is this leadership? Can we get past this?

'Very well rationalized' - Thanks!
'But is this leadership?' - Yes. HRC did move to the left because of his leadership.
'Can we get past this?' - I can. But not if you keep trying to convince me that it didn't happen when it did.

 

[Gunky]

One of these days some of you cats are going to wake up from this Bernie infatuation and notice that when you strip away the faith and admiration and trust and worship of the followers, and the single speech with minor variations that he has repeated for the past year, the guy is completely hollow and shows zero leadership aptitude in government. His record is spotless; he has never done much of anything except individual efforts mainly centered around using legislative choke-points to insert some small-bore pet policy of his, often despite the opposition of party leadership - so convenient being 'independent'. Just what we need for prez, some isolated crackpot, single-issue fool that no other politicians give a damn about, let alone follow.

 

[Joel W.]

One of these days some of you cats are going to wake up

. One can say the same to you when trump wins and we are all fucked.