This video speaks for itself. Even though it was first published November 18, 2016, nothing has changed. If anything, there has been lots of crowing over a misidentified mandate (there is NO mandate), some right wing fear mongers are beginning to ratchet up playing on people’s fears.
Is some of the most recent ratcheting an attempt to scare the left into submission? Control the right and scare the left seems to be the not-so hidden agenda.
Ben Carson to head up HUD? He has never held a government post. Of course, neither has the president. While we are at it, let’s destabilize our relationship with China. I sure hope we don’t need their help with North Korea any time soon.
Throw in Retired US Army Lieutenant-General Mike Flynn as National Security advisor. Has he denounced his radical son yet? What other leaders have surrounded themselves with generals?
What Trump is doing is disgraceful, irresponsible, and unacceptable. His behavior brings a whole new meaning to bully pulpit. I can’t wait for the impeachment hearings to begin.
No one is surprised. Trump is filling our dreaded expectations, even before taking office.
This video is itself propaganda designed to instill fear in progressives. It is also designed to de-legitimize those who supported Trump by making it appear that his voters were uninformed rubes manipulated by a deplorable candidate who is but one step from Mussolini.
Media Matters for America (which produced this video) is a political organization run by David Brock who has close ties with Hillary Clinton and attacks anyone that stands up to the narrative put forth by Obama, Hillary and other progressives.
Elections are a time of hyperbole and exaggeration in American politics. One could easily put together a similar montage using Hillary statements that is just as scary as this one. Those who watch videos like this should not complain about right-wing propoganda.
I hope that D’s running for office will take their cues from videos like this. It essentially calls all those women, minorities, and Reaganite democrats who voted for Trump stupid. Hopefully, D’s will continue their tactic of insulting the electorate, which should lead to further losses in the next election cycle ( i.e. in Virginia).
Many were uninformed rubes. Sorry. I haven’t lived in a vacuum for the past five years. How is saying that any worse than painting the picture of blacks voting for Obama just thinking they were going to get free stuff.
Trump’s behavior during the campaign was exceptionally unacceptable in a civilized world. I can’t get past that.
There is no video in existence where Hillary Clinton has called Mexican rapists or attempted to terrorize Megyn Kelly. She didn’t mimic a handicapped person or suggest that protestors be beaten up. No, there is no similar montage. You might not like her policies but she didn’t behave deplorably.
@MoonHowler
You are going to have to come to terms with the fact that voters were well informed about Trump’s boorishness, but nevertheless rejected the narrative of racism and misogyny pushed by the media. Trump attacked anyone that attacked him, regardless of their race, gender, national origin or handicap status. Americans do want to root out institutional racism, but identity politics has been so over used that it is no longer a winning issue.
Let’s push aside racism, misogyny, and the other things you mentioned. The media doesn’t have to push a narrative. Trump did that on his own, out of his own mouth.
Kelly, you are ignoring the fact that Clinton won by more than 2.5 million votes. That is fairly significant in my world. I know how the electoral college works. Let’s not fool ourselves into thinking he had a mandate.
The fact that so many chose to ignore boorishness and simply unacceptable behavior is not something I will be able to change. I simply don’t know why people find that behavior acceptable in a president. Perhaps the war on facts had something to do with it. The is an entire cottage industry of the spreading of disinformation and lies. Perhaps the first amendment isn’t all its cracked up to be.
@Kelly_3406
“Trump attacked anyone that attacked him, regardless of their race, gender, national origin or handicap status.”
So you define someone “attacked” by another as one who disagrees with the other? Luckily I disagree with that, because I’d have to go on the offensive.
@Joe George
I agree, Joe. He attacked over the mildest criticism.
@MoonHowler
Let’s talk about the term “mandate” for a minute. I do not recall mentioning it before now.
Trump won the popular vote in the 49 states other than California. Substantially. Hillary won the state of California by over 4 million votes. If I were doing a statistical study (which, as you know, I do professionally), I would throw out the results from California because it is an outlier and would skew the results.
And that beautifully demonstrates the reason for the electoral college, which is to prevent a single out-of-step, populous state from imposing its will on the 49 other states.
When you go to California, it is like visiting a foreign country. Few speak English in the cities. The infrastructure is crumbling. The taxes are massive, as are the welfare rolls. Massive numbers of people leave the state every year.
I would say that there is a mandate from the 49 other states to prevent the rest of America from going the way of California.
Trump did not win the popular vote in Virginia. Clinton won by over 200 k votes.
Massive numbers leave and massive numbers go there. California also is home to some of the most brilliant tech thinkers in the world. Is speaking English a requirement for being franchised? Is California worse than Texas? New York? Sounds like there is a little nativism in your comment.
How about Washington State? Clinton won by over 250K votes. Washington doesn’t even have that much diversity if we want to look at “real Americans.” They do have a lot of Native Americans living there, however.
Oregon has similar results. Clinton won by about 210k votes.
I don’t think we can say that every one of our west coast states voting Democratic is an outlier.
You didn’t mention “mandate.” I did. I chose that word to express what we were talking about.
@MoonHowler
Trump won the combined popular vote by 1 1/2 million votes for the 49 states other than the Golden State. California is thus an outlier, not because Hillary won the state, but rather because the vote differential (>4 million votes) was so large.
I travel to CA several times per year on business. I am always glad to get home because CA seems so “foreign” in a way that Texas and Arizona do not. I also enjoy traveling to Europe and Asia, but there is just something odd about California.
Educated professionals are leaving CA in droves.
California has high state taxes. It’s also a huge state with a large population. They shouldn’t be marginalized. I expect I would find most places in Louisiana fairly “foreign,” not to mention Arkansas.
Should we marginalized Alaska because it is huge and has very few people? Is it an outlier?
The concept of the electoral college really has its roots in slavery. It was a compromise. I think we are past that. Each election has its own idiosyncrasies. This one is no different.
Alexander Hamilton proposed the electoral college and explained the motivation/benefits in Federalist Paper No. 18. Slavery was not mentioned.
Whenever Leftists want to get rid of something, they find a reaso to call it racist. There has been a lot of talk about fake news. This is fake history.
The small states that do not want to become irrelevant in the election process are not “past” the electoral college.
Which states had less population? Who would direct election of the president hurt? Yup, the southern states. Slavery doesn’t have to be mentioned for it to have been influential in the formation of our country.
Then there was the worry of riffraff being elected directly.
Sorry but the southern states wanted to have their cake and eat it too. 3/5ths compromise pretty much bears that out. Let’s not let people vote but let’s count them towards our representation in Congress.
Calling me a leftist doesn’t strengthen your argument. (directly or indirectly) I didn’t call anything or any body a racist. I said that the electoral college had its roots in slavery. Why do YOU think that the southern slave holding states didn’t want direct election of a president? Why do YOU think they bought in to the electoral college?
For the record, I consider myself a southerner. I was born and raised in Virginia and have lived in my birth state all but 5 years of my considerably long life. My mother’s family settled in the Charlottesville area in the 1700. They were middle class, not plantation owners. “Tara” was not in my background. However, I cannot deny the fact that some of my ancestors were slaveholders.
I believe I can look at southern issues rationally without trying to sweep the issue of slavery under the rug. I may be old but I wasn’t a slave holder nor have I profited from ancestral slave ownership.
The notion that the slave states had no preference in the matter is fake history. They continually tried to bolster their population numbers to “look large.”
@MoonHowler
I am not calling you a Leftist. This meme has been put forth by Leftist professors since the 2000 election. There is nothing in the electoral college that states how the electors were to be distributed.
The 3/5 compromise was about a lot more than the electoral college. It affected the balance of power in the House of Representatives and the rate of taxation. It was first proposed as an Amendment to the Articles of Confederation, which did not have an electoral college, to define each state’s wealth, and thus tax obligations.
The modern equivalent is the counting of illegal immigrants in the census, which gives states with large populations of illegal immigrants more representation than they would otherwise have.
I am not sure there is a modern equivalent to apportionment based on slavery.
Of course there is more to the 3/5th compromise than the electoral college. However, the two concepts are related as the compromise determines apportionment. I don’t know how to separate the issues.
Would you want census takers to be able to determine who was here legally and who was not?
Please consider this: Trump took a very unconventional approach to conventional politics. I would even go so far as to call it “revolutionary”. He “blew the Chi” of Democrat and Republican strategists, the media, and every other institution that took everything he said or tweeted literally, and totally dismissed him for it. He proved these “experts” wrong.
I say this as someone who fancies himself a bit more than a political neophyte. I’ve helped run campaigns, and have been in the “business” of politics for approaching 20 years.
As Trump began his march through the nomination process, I too said “this is craziness…it’ll never work”. But it did.I began to say to myself; “Take conventional wisdom, ball it up, and chuck it in the trash. Trump does things a different way, and it appears to be working.”
Write him off as a boob supported by rubes….but mark my words, he will be very successful, at least in the near-term. It will take that long for those opposed to him to come up with a counter to his very unorthodox style. This goes for foreign and domestic opponents.
I actually hope you are right. (I just don’t believe you are)
I think you should be able to take candidate’s at their word. His candidacy was built on lies and insults. That isn’t ok and I refuse to be part of normalizing that behavior.
The fact that some deranged fool came to town to free all of Hillary’s little sex slaves should point out why we don’t someone holding the highest office in the land to be a liar. I don’t want to guess what he means.
Finally, how does one separate truth from fiction? You don’t really. We aren’t there.
We’ve had liars from both parties in the White House. I’ve worked in politics for more than half a century and during that time only two or three weren’t.
The danger in this case is the crazies that this president-elect has indulged and excited. He’s a master marketer but we don’t know whether he can deliver the product he sold to voters in the states he carried. Republicans and union leaders are already picking apart the Carrier deal.
What bothers me most is the list of leaders who kept holding rallies after they were elected: Hitler, Peron in Argentina and Chavez in Venezuela all make that list.
I really do blame Hillary Clinton for this. General Petreaus admitted his mistake, took the consequences and now his reputation has rebounded. She hunkered down and ended up losing to an equally dishonest huckster.
@MoonHowler
I hope you see the difference in what happened with Clinton and what happened with Petreaus. What Petraeous did was intentional and deliberate. What Clinton did was imprudent.
Yes, but people respect it when you admit your mistakes.
@MoonHowler
“Sorry but the southern states wanted to have their cake and eat it too. 3/5ths compromise pretty much bears that out. Let’s not let people vote but let’s count them towards our representation in Congress.”
I am disappointed that you have fallen for this historical half-truth. While it is true that the compromise gave slave states a fraction more representation, without the compromise the constitution would have failed ratification in these states legislature, if the Non-slave state proposal (not counting slaves for legislative apportionment) had been accepted.
What you may not know is that in 1789, New York, New Jersey and Delaware were slave states as well, so this wasn’t a North vs. South issue.
And what you may not know as well, is that along with not wanting slaves counted as people for voting, non-slave states wanted slaves to be counted went it came to taxation…so it wasn’t just the non-slave states wanting to “have their cake and eat it too”.
I had forgotten these nuances as well, until I recently read some of the founder’s commentaries on the convention, as well as “Compact of the Republic” by David Benner.
Lastly, I think we mistakenly view the founders harshly through the lens of today’s values. At the time, the colonies were primarily agrarian, as the industrial revolution was in its infancy. Secondly, those northern textile mills had no issue with getting their cotton from slave states.
I am trying to figure out what I have fallen for. Because I didn’t write a treatise doesn’t mean I have fallen for anything. I would say that wanting to count people who don’t have the vote or freedom is rather greedy. But hell, people will do as much as they are allowed to do. 3/5ths of a person is pretty much of a compromise. 0 count vs 1 whole person count.
I thought most of the colonies were slave colonies at one time or another or at least some people owned slaves. The difference is that those states didn’t have industries that depended on the use of slave labor. In other words, there wasn’t much government support for slavery.
Then again, who was the last US president to own slaves? hint: not who you might expect
Getting back to the original topic, I’m becoming convinced that as events happen and behavior patterns emerge we are seeing a role reversal from the way Eisenhower and Nixon led Republicans. Back then, the president acted presidential and the vice president was the attack dog. Bush and Cheney did the same more recently. Now it appears that Trump wants to mix it up with his critics and let Pence project dignity.
Nineteenth century master marketer P. T. Barnum once said “if you want to draw a crowd, start a fight.” He would no doubt be impressed with current events.
@Robin Hood
I like your comment. Look at hockey games;
fighting draws a crowd. It´s sooo true.