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Originally Posted by jlousa
People on SSP fail constantly to realize how many right wing people there are out there. They aren't the enemy...
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What they are are idiots voting for a drooling loose cannon, a gameshow participant born with a silver spoon who has never told the truth or acted in anything other than a dishonourable way in his entire life, but hey, he's an outsider, so he "speaks" for them. Not like that criminal Hillary, who has been getting rich writing emails to her charity in Benghazi.
That's the Benghazi in Kenya, by the way. Where she was born.
How are you supposed to reason with a whole sector of society that voted for Bush (fucking twice!), then Palin, and now Trump? There's nothing subtle about this, and it's not a cry for help. Rather, it's a straight up declaration of mass psychosis, and they're damned well proud of it. The Democrats could have done lots of things better, and the coastal elites could have been a little less arrogant about the cretins in flyover country, because no one likes to be called a "deplorable," but we Canadians who live next door and feel such kinship with our neighbours so easily forget that
Deliverance was as much a documentary as a fictional film.
Pointing out the niceties of the campaign that Clinton could have handled better seems like wanting to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic, as the cliche goes. How do you reason with Sarah Palin? Ann Coulter? Breitbart? Rally attendees chanting "lock her up?" At what point do you just throw up your hands and stand back as the troglodytes rush in to burn everything down?
I hope I'm just letting my disgust get the better of me, and that somehow the course will remain steady. But I fear that Friedman gets it right with the ominous tone in a column today.
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... if we don’t pull back from the madness that has become American politics — if we have another eight years like the last eight — we’re going to break this place.
I lived in the middle of a civil war in Lebanon. I saw what happens when people stop trusting one another. Your country goes backward — fast. And once the bonds of trust are lost, they are so hard to rebuild.
We are becoming like Sunnis and Shiites now — not rival parties anymore but rival tribes. Republican leaders have been speaking like Middle Eastern tribal chiefs: If we’re not in power, we just won’t allow anything to get done. That is exactly the stance the Shiite Hezbollah — “the Party of God” — has used to dominate Lebanon.
What produced all the anger that has propelled the Trump campaign? I believe it has much less to do with trade or income gaps and much more to do with culture and a lost sense of “home.” America’s becoming a minority-majority country has threatened the sense of community of many middle-class whites, and the fact that we’re in the midst of a dizzying whirlwind of technological change has threatened their economic status as well, and left many people feeling unanchored.
Women’s empowerment, which Hillary Clinton embodies, also threatens many less-educated white men. Donald Trump, presenting himself as The Strongman, promised he could build walls to contain all of these changes. A shocking number of Americans fell for it. But Trump had help.
In recent years, making people angry, sowing mistrust among Americans and delegitimizing our national institutions in Washington became good business — and good politics — on the right. Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin and other radio and TV fearmongers have been deliberately making people angry and mistrustful, and gotten rich doing so.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/09/op...pan-abc-region
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