My goodness.  What an election season it is.

By Whskyjack, a Trail Mix Contributor

The Republican coalition is coming apart. The Koch bros and the Chamber of Commerce are battling in Republican congressional primaries, both have refused to support the White ethnocentric nationalist faction and their candidate, Donald Trump. Republican “Conservative” elites are writing sneering condescending articles about working class whites using words they usually reserve for inner-city blacks. Republicans are not only refusing to support Trump but increasingly are moving across the line and supporting HRC, thus cutting themselves off from the Republican Party. College educated whites once a stalwart of the Republican Party are moving toward the Democratic Party in large numbers.

simpsonsFunRun
In years to come will we be talking about Hillary Republicans like we talk about Reagan Democrats?

So is this the end of the Republican Party? For some perspective and if you have the time here is a long read discussing American parties and their longevity. Well worth the time IMO.

You might read the other links too.

We live in interesting times.

More Posts by Whskyjack

Share

51 thoughts on “My goodness.  What an election season it is.”

  1. jack, terrific post. and if all the chaos of the election from hell doesn’t scare one enough, how about, with one hand holding tight your security blankey, contemplate the chaos to come sans internet in this interview with werner Herzog:

    We’re speaking one day after a small electrical glitch grounded Delta’s airplanes. Part of your story in the film is how perilous our dependence on technology is. And I suspect you would guess that these kinds of events are not rare occurrences, but they could continue to happen in greater magnitude?

    Correct. What we overlook quite often is that the internet is very vulnerable. Vulnerable, let’s say, in terms of hacking. Vulnerable in terms of, let’s say, a solar flare which may wipe it out completely for a given amount of time. And then some computer glitches. What we should really reflect upon is disentangling some essential things from the internet. The crazy thing is that, for example, on the International Space Station, when I make a phone call from one end of the modules to the other — only something like 70 feet of distance — they call each other and it goes via internet.

    It’s routed back to the planet.

    Yes. That’s very strange and shouldn’t be like that. And when the internet is down, you cannot even buy a hamburger anymore. You cannot flush your toilet anymore. No water would come from your faucet because the water supply is somehow organized through the internet. No phone calls, no communications, no radio, no government websites. You cannot renew your driver’s license and you can’t call the police. The police even wouldn’t find you because they go on GPS. So it’s a kind of an alarming scenario and we have to try to find ways to disentangle ourselves. 

  2. also from above:

    But we’re in the middle of an incredibly important election right now in the U.S. and people don’t read. What does that do in terms of the quality of debate?

    I do believe that there is an innate intelligence in the electorate. There’s no innate intelligence, for example, in matters of the media. And I’m speaking…about tweets and things like that. I do believe that there’s an intelligence that is beyond a collective intelligence, that is beyond the polls. This is why I believe the American voters will take a good look at the choices. 

  4. The next couple of months should provide an answer for my questions of where will the Republicans regather and what will they call themselves?  Unless the blob packs up and completely leaves, taking the white supremacists, KKK, john birchers and like from the Republican party, there will no longer be a Republican Party.  The takeover of the R Party by the heathens is complete. Will they leave after November?  Or will the former Republicans raise their new party?  Or perhaps more interesting, multiple minor parties?

  5. It may be time to stop glorifying the anti-science, anti-education Goober Nation.

    And they could start just by writing some decent songs for the so-called “Country” music stations.

  7. fires and floods  the worst ever and not one word about climate change during this campaign

    Jack

    I’ve been watching too much for sure but I’ve been stuck at home doing work and I get bored of course then I start ranting

  8. Viva the two party system…and I believe that we are seeing a shift in the poles or polls, if you prefer.  As I have stated, ad naseum, most of America resides in the middle.  This election seems to be about the myth of purity in politics…as if the uber right and left are more pure of thought and deed in their trek about the collective hive we call government.  Sanders tried to claim it and his sullying of honesty within the dem party?  It didn’t stick as most dems are in the middle.   Most Americans lie everyday…just to get by.  It is human nature and do no harm seem to apply.  Same with the tea party and obstructionists of the right.  Hijacking of the middle to the pure standards of either fringe.  Americans want efficiency, quality, quantity and quiet.  This honesty crap is just that, but I hold-out hope.  The cable news networks are vapid agitators, so I watch the 3 network feeds each night…how they cover the election.  CBS hates HRC…but, is softening.   ABC is the most favorable.  NBC?  the ghost of brian williams haunts their honesty feed.  Yet, none of them have the silliness of cable.  Last night, ABC showed the Louisiana flooding with a woman drying flags at the VFW and trump’s motorcade drove-by…she said  “publicity!”  The little people see it…let us see if the propaganda machine can twist and turn us to the rigid right.  BTW, no mention of climate change by the trumpence crew in LA…just using Baton Rouge as a prop.  PS…flooding is climate change, ya stupid morons.

    Nice post, Jack.

  9. “flooding is climate change, ya stupid morons”

    bw, on top of the stupid moronic dredging and river redirecting perpetrated by the army corps of engineers

  10. hope the drumpf didn’t import to Louisiana any zika he might ‘ve picked up at mar-a-lago.

     

    bb, speaking of Louisiana, any more word on when and where you’ll be helping out? mucho kudos to you, trail friend, for your service.

  12. Speaking of silly, you all know I love creative euphemisms.  I’m sure Old Sea Hag won’t want to accept this trio into her inner circle, but this bit of name calling one was a fun discovery:

    “The sisters of the cauldron @AnnCoulter, @KellyannePolls and @MarshaBlackburn would be at top of their screechers!”

    3 retweets0 likes

  14. patd – for right now I am staying home.  The ARC DS needs people who can deploy two weeks or longer to LA and CA.  I am not one of those. If they need someone with my skills, Group Activity/Position, GAP, for a shorter duration they will contact me.  My GAP covers Mass Care, shelter and feeding; Logistics, ERV driver; Staff Support planning.  I have other trainings which covers many other areas too.

    I am available for regional disasters.  Most of the local disasters, in the D.C./Baltimore area the current ones are the Silver Springs apartment building explosion and the Ellicott City flood, are handled by the region where the event is located with occasional help from other regions.  National Capitol Region, which includes Montgomery/Prince George’s Counties is handling the Silver Springs event, and the Baltimore is handling the Ellicott City event.  I am in Southern Maryland Region, south of Baltimore south.  We had people drive up and help at Ellicott City for a few days.  Several people from this region are in LA right now.

    When you are on a disaster event, we call them DRO Disaster Relief Operation, you work twelve plus hour shifts, seven days a week, with a day off after three weeks.  You might live in a tent shelter, you might live in a motel room.  You might eat Heater Meals (lower calorie MREs) or you might get home made meals.  And, you are always going to meet a lot of people who have lost everything in their lives, including loved ones.  You make great friends too.  I am just a few days away from celebrating my eleventh year in Disaster Services.  I call it the most emotionally draining and most emotionally fulfilling experience of my life.

  15. Jack,

    Great post! Interesting times indeed. Can’t help but wonder if this is the best of times or the worst of times. Both seem to apply

  17. raw story: Trumps Latest Insulting Appeal to Black Voters gets Trashed

    Friday night in Michigan, Trump himself attempted to rustle up some black votes — albeit in front of a predominately white audience — only to further inflame black sentiment against him with a cynical and condescending pitch that implied that all African-Americans live in abject poverty and whose lives could not get any worse.

    “Look at how much African-American communities are suffering from Democratic control. To those I say the following: What do you have to lose by trying something new like Trump? What do you have to lose?” Trump shouted at a crowd of his supporters. “You live in your poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58 percent of your youth is unemployed, what the hell do you have to lose?”

    As noted by Philip Bump of the Washington Post, Trump’s appeal insults the millions of black voters who don’t live in poverty and who are well-informed enough to reject a Republican Party that is considered anti-minority — going so far as to attempt to suppress the back vote with onerous voter ID laws such as seen in North Carolina.

  18. Toby patiently waiting for Dad at Lowes. I call this position of her ears Airplane Mode, flaps down. There’s also a flaps-up version and about 4 or 5 other positions, from Full Alert (straight up) to Pitiful Me (pinned back, sorrowful eyes) for maximum begging potential.

  19. Don’t know why the chattering class consensus that Trump was appealing to black voters and failed. He’s playing to white voters who like hearing that stuff, and probably succeeded.

  20. Inquirer Editorial: Trump’s accusation of voter fraud in Pa. is offensive 

    The allegation is not only unfounded; it’s dangerous. Imagine the chaos and disenfranchisement if Trump’s volunteers show up in certain areas of the state to make sure voters feel so intimidated that some may turn around and go home instead of exercising their voting rights.

    The law allows parties to have trained observers at polling places, but Trump’s motives appear nefarious. A trail of Trump’s previous insults and insensitive remarks suggest the certain places he wants watched are in black and Latino neighborhoods where polls show he is losing.

  21. craig, so many dog whistles blowing during this campaign, toby the dog might even take offense.

  22. from latimes oped Maybe Trump’s not trying to win the White House — he’s trying to start Trump-TV

    One possible conclusion is that Trump, who recently acknowledged that he might end up taking a “nice long vacation” after November, has realized he is going to lose. He has therefore recruited Ailes and Bannon to lay the groundwork for his backup plan: a new career as a right-wing media personality. Indeed, Vanity Fair published an article in June suggesting that Trump wanted to “monetize” his success as a candidate by turning his voters into viewers.

    [….]

    Instead of joining Fox, we wouldn’t be surprised to see Trump, an aggrieved Ailes and an acerbic Bannon unite to create an alternative media empire – one focused on the same demographic represented at Trump rallies.  From his televised throne, Trump could savage the conservative media establishment just as he savaged his Republican rivals in the primary.

    And the new empire could well pose a significant threat to Fox. Ailes knows where the bodies are buried at Fox, its personalities and insecurities. Trump could easily win over the demographic that is prone to millenarian fantasies and conspiracy theories – making Fox News look moderate by comparison. Fox News might become the Paul Ryan wing of the Republican media establishment.

    So while Republicans may lose the presidency, Trump may still win the election. We’ve seen Trump steaks, Trump wine. Up next, Trump TV.

  23. http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08/2016-gop-hillary-clinton-delegitimizing-dems-214170

     

    Good read here if you have the time.

     

     

    Republicans insist that Democrats bear at least as much responsibility as they do for the ill will that pervades Washington. And, as David Graham has argued in The Atlantic, Democrats have in the past described mainstream GOP nominees in near-apocalyptic terms too. But at least in the view of two of Washington’s most venerable political scholars, there is no real equivalence. Norm Ornstein of the AEI and Thomas Mann of Brookings authored a 2012 book that said flatly: “The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier in American politics — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

  24. Troll is following the gooper playbook now  – the same insults to minority communities designed to bolster opinion with white suburbanites

    except – these for the most part are college educated white women they aren’t going to fall for Trump even with the condom on.
    how’s it working in the  Philly suburbs Ms. Condom? And all the media drooling over the condom like she doesn’t have the worst client list ever It’s too late for gooper women they are already on record supporting Clinton especially where he is losing by very high double digits. The only people trying to rig the election is the tub of lard and his band of trolls. The last campaign of desperate people. Now that he had a campaign rally with Alt-right people in Louisiana what’s next?

    Bannon is an anti-semite well anti everything but white ‘christian men’ but he feels comfortable being an anti-semite in public and in his writing. That’s who Trump feels comfortable with. I guess Trump’s daughter and her husband are Jews in name only and don’t care that Troll’s campaign is being run by a Jew-hater. ..just ask him I’m sure he would be glad to tell you. And when they start rounding people up – I guess you figure you can save your immediate family but what about the rest??

  28. Trump’s Sickening attacks on Clinton’s health

    By Ruth Marcus

    Donald Trump — he who likes to fly home at night in the comfort of his own plane to sleep in the comfort of his own bed — is at it again on the question of Hillary Clinton’s stamina, or alleged lack thereof.
    “To defeat crime and radical Islamic terrorism in our country, to win trade in our country, you need tremendous physical and mental strength and stamina,” he said in Wisconsin. “Hillary Clinton doesn’t have that strength and stamina.”
    And a day earlier, in case you missed it, “Importantly, she also lacks the mental and physical stamina to take on ISIS, and all the many adversaries we face.”
    It’s obvious what’s going on here. The strength-stamina combo is a gender-age twofer, a double whack at Clinton for the price of one. Strength, what men have and women lack; stamina, with its intimations of go-all-night virility. Clinton, in this depiction, is both a weak girl and a dried-up old crone.
    No matter that Trump is a year and four months older — and, for that matter, endures a far less rigorous schedule. In Trump World, what counts is the attack, not the truth.

    Trump began hitting Clinton on strength and stamina during the primaries, in a fascinating detour from his usual precision-bombing of opponents. Ordinarily, Trump homes in on an opponent’s actual deficit and proceeds to magnify it: low-energy Jeb, Liddle Marco or, more pertinent at present, Crooked Hillary.
    But sometimes, under attack, Trump shifts to that trusty playground tactic — I know you are but what am I? — a move intended to jujitsu the conversation away from his own perceived vulnerabilities. Thus, Trump has trotted out “unstable Hillary Clinton,” “a totally unhinged person” and “like an unbalanced person.” I’m rubber, you’re glue. Whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you.
    Increasingly, though, the rap on Clinton combines gender, age and health in a smarmy package of unsupported insinuation. “She’s a mess, a total mess,” Trump told radio host Hugh Hewitt. “She’ll do an event, she’ll make a short speech off a teleprompter, and then she goes home and goes to sleep.”
    When Trump uses the teleprompter, it is a supposed token of maturity and professionalism; when Clinton does, she is failing — indeed, possibly brain-damaged. “She took a short-circuit in the brain,” Trump said in New Hampshire this month, seizing on Clinton’s explanation of how she flubbed an answer on her emails. “Honestly, I don’t think she’s all there.”
    Trump is subtle only by comparison with his unhinged allies — and employees. Say-anything, know-nothing spokeswoman Katrina Pierson was on the job Thursday on MSNBC.
    “What’s new are the other reports of the observations of Hillary Clinton’s behavior and mannerisms . . . as well as her dysphasia, the fact that she’s fallen, she has had a concussion,” Pierson told Kristen Welker.
    “It is extremely important to note that Hillary Clinton has taken a lot of time off the campaign trail,”Pierson added. “It is something that needs to be addressed.”

    What needs to be addressed, actually, is Pierson’s own “behavior and mannerisms,” including her time-traveling assertions that President Obama and Clinton were responsible for the 2004 death of Army Capt. Humayun Khan (“It was under Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton that changed the rules of engagement that probably cost his life”) and alleging that Obama launched the 2001 war in Afghanistan (“Barack Obama went into Afghanistan, creating another problem”).On the topic of Clinton’s health, Pierson is backstopped by a cabal of conservative websites and commentators who have peddled out-of-context photos and video snippets to paint Clinton as a weakened, stumbling victim of brain damage.

    Fox News’s Sean Hannity has been in the repulsive lead, citing video of Clinton’s shaking her head in pretend surprise at being accosted by reporters to suggest neurological injury. “It almost seems seizure-esque to me . . . violent, out-of-control movements on her part,” Hannity said.

    Presidential candidates’ fitness for office, including their medical fitness, matters enormously, especially when Trump would be the oldest president ever elected, Clinton second only to Ronald Reagan. Both could reasonably be called on to disclose more health information; the Trumpian claim by the candidate’s physician, that he would be the “healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency,” is particularly risible.

    But the Trump & Co. attack on Clinton’s health, with its undertones of ageism and sexism, has no basis in reality, and no place in a presidential campaign. It would be tempting to say this is beneath even Trump, except that it isn’t.

  29. From Jace @ 11:32am : “The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier in American politics — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.” – Norm Ornstein, AEI (and presumably former republican, ‘cuz he was a fellow repub when he lived here) & Thomas Mann (no, not THAT Thomas Mann, this one is non-fiction) of Brookings I.

    Thanks, Jace !

     

  30. And the really bad news is:

    Brother of Omran Daqneesh Dies

    Every time I see Omran’s picture all I can hear is Mark Twain:

    “Help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended in the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst

  34. craig, you and your dad may want to see this… they give out the recipe (or one that sounds just as tasty)  toward the end of the article

    usatoday:

    LOUISVILLE, Ky. — The Chicago Tribune is reporting that it may have uncovered Colonel Harland Sanders’ secret original recipe for his famed fried chicken, the linchpin of KFC’s global franchise of some 18,000 restaurants in 115 countries.

    In a story posted on the Tribune’s website Friday, a freelance reporter for the newspaper said he stumbled upon the recipe at the home of Joe Ledington, a nephew of the colonel by marriage, while paging through a scrapbook once owned by Sanders’ late wife, Claudia Sanders.

  35. more on the recipe

    courier journal: KFC secret recipe clues in Corbin, Ky

    While the Chicago Tribune has published what it claims is the original secret recipe for KFC, you can find clues about why its origins remain elusive with a visit to Corbin, Ky.

    Col. Harland Sanders was a secretive man. When he sold the rights to KFC in the 1960s to former Kentucky Gov. John Y. Brown Jr., he was batching up the recipes in pieces. One spice manufacturer would mix half the recipe. Another manufacturer would batch up the other half, Brown said.

    “The Colonel was pretty crafty. I will give him credit for that,” Brown said Friday. “The recipe was totally segregated.”

  38. The extremes the “media” goes to create an equivalence between HRC and the alien with orange antennae continues to amaze me.  Just now i was watching a on the scene reporter gushing over how many people were lined up for a science fiction monologe by said alien.  And how Hillary was trying to do something similar.  Then he put the mic to the morans.  I did not know the world was going to end and all republicans especially LEOs were going to die when if she was elected.  That these people believe in that alternate universe is astounding to me.

    But, the one thing that is funny (to me at least) is when asked about voting, many are not registered and cannot vote or might be registered (if they can remember) but do not plan on voting.

    The alien congregations are more like a revival for those in space than as actual campaign politics.  There are still a lot of minutes before the first votes are cast in September, much can get more weird.

  39.  

    the average Trump voter (sic) doesn’t believe in the government let alone voting

  40. Flatus, Sturg — I’m 39k feet above Hardeeville heading northeasterly to DC at 438 kts. Waving distance?

  41. I keep trying and failing over being judgmental on the (take your pick) lack of intelligence, prejudice, knowledge of history, ignorance of events, and/or ability to do math of the average Donald Trump supposed voter.

    Placing head in hands and rocking to and fro is the standard “You’ve got to be kidding” position.

  42. politicspa wrote this about Hillary’s new ad:

    The Hillary Clinton campaign is up with a new TV ad meant to appeal to Hispanic and Latino voters.

    The thirty-second spot, though, never explicitly identifies itself as a Latino-specific commercial. In fact if you were to judge it solely on its script, you would conclude the ad was no different than any other one. That’s because rather than mention issues like immigration, it has a general economic security message.

    The only distinction is that all the people in the video and the narrator are Hispanic and/or Latino.

    Titled “For Those Who Depend On Us”, the commercial hits four of Clinton’s bullet points for families, namely: 1. Relief for child care costs 2. Debt-free college 3. Equal pay for women 4. Paid family leave.

    The ad, which hits airwaves today, is an implicit rebuke to Donald Trump’s campaign and may have even been chosen to contrast to his first general election commercial. In his commercial, border security is the primary topic.

    In addition to Pennsylvania, this ad will air in Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada and Ohio.

    “all the people in the video and the narrator are Hispanic and/or Latino”?

    funny, no one in media ever points out all those ads with only white folk nor is anything ever said about the all male gaggles of gopers.

  43. “average Donald Trump supposed voter.” -Jamie

     

    …program on NPR today had someone explaining that it’s default instinctive behavior to believe eveything, because in a primitive existence, that assumption was true more than not and a valid basis for survival decisions.  “Yes, that is a tiger, and it does want to eat you” kind of stuff.

  44. There was no program on conservative radio attempting to provide understanding concerning the perspective of skeptics, that i heard.  Ok, i didn’t listen to any conservative radio, today, but they don’t ever, so let’s assume.

  45. “On today’s program we will attempt to gain a greater understanding of important issues through reasoned analysis and try to employ the resulting conclusions in an effort to make wise, rational decisions”, began no conservative radio program, ever.

  46. I also heard another NPR(PRI?) program, this week, that theorized that humans’ ability to perceive color is based on their ability to produce the corresponding pigment reliably.  Pretty neat!  Good job, Public Radio!

    Yay, internet:
    http://www.radiolab.org/story/211119-colors/

    …worth the time if you enjoy aural entertainment.

  48. “Yes, that is a tiger, and it does want to eat you”

    Bink

    My son and I have a running joke about being descendants from the guy who didn’t look at the tiger and say, “ooh pretty, here kitty kitty”

     

  50. Bink,

    Television was once famously referred to as a “vast wasteland.” Had conservative radio been around at the time it would have earned that moniker, and television would have been considered a treasure trove of factual information and informed opinion.

    Conservative radio; the cess pool that gives cess pools a bad reputation.

Comments are closed.