Kansas Crimson

randylahey wrote: ↑Mon Nov 04, 2024 2:55 pm

twocoach wrote: ↑Mon Nov 04, 2024 2:39 pm

randylahey wrote: ↑Mon Nov 04, 2024 2:35 pm Why is it the portion of what trump said that the media (and a few of you) have used for years was the part about fine people? which he then clarified specifically, he wasn't talking about neo nazis or white nationalists

When they just as easily, and more truthfully, repeated the part where he condemned white nationalism and neo nazis?

One tactic was very divisive. The other would have been unifying, and more honest

Because Trump has zero clue who else was there and neither do you. You're assuming it ONLY because he said so. It was a white nationalist rally with hundreds in attendance, not thousands. I don't assume that a bunch of random suburban moms also chose to attend it. Do you see any "very fine people" standing around the outskirts of the processions of white supremist Nazis marching down the street that look like "I was just here because that statue reminds me of eating lunch in the park with my Grandpa when I was a kid"? Me neither.

But you know? Do you understand how ignorant that is to say? That you know more about every person present in some random location at a certain point in time than the sitting president, who has every surveillance and intel resource imaginable at his finger tips

Were you there or something? Were you one of the white supremacists twocoach

Overlander wrote: ↑Mon Nov 04, 2024 9:35 pm I have been saying for weeks that Trump is going to claim victory around 9pm EST

Four years ago yesterday — the morning after Election Day 2020, when we still did not know who was going to win — I wrote a very grumpy newsletter item about how, even if Biden did pull it out, there was nothing to cheer. My reasoning:

Looking at these results so far, we have to face the fact that, despite everything that has happened these past four years, millions upon millions of Americans eagerly voted for Donald Trump. Again. Many of them, we could rationalize, were merely taking a chance or a gamble in 2016, but now, after seeing him rule for four years, most of them have decided that, yes, they liked it. They really did.

They liked someone who is objectively racist, misogynistic, xenophobic and corrupt. Someone who mocks people with disabilities and embarrasses the country while obsequiously currying favor with dictators . . . Yes, Trump will always have a small core of support, but in light of all of that has gone down, Donald Trump should not, the day after Election Day, still be in anything approaching a close race. He should’ve been soundly trounced. There should have been a complete and total repudiation of this monster who has been our president for the past four years and who has been an abject failure at every aspect of the job, causing active death and destruction while showing a reckless disregard for the lives and well-being of Americans.

But It did not happen. And the fact that it did not happening breaks my heart. It breaks my heart because it’s clear to me now in ways it was not before that what he is and that which he represents is, really, what the country wants. What it’s all about.

I’ve sat with that realization — that this is, really, who we are as a country — for the last four years. I’ve thought a lot about it. I’ve written a lot about it. And to be clear, I’m no more happier about it today, when Donald Trump will once again receive millions upon millions of votes in what will still likely be a pretty close race, than I was in 2020.

But I have come to accept it on some level. Not an emotional level and not on a level that will inspire me to stop wanting better and doing what I can to make things better, but I have come to understand that my surprise in 2016 and 2020 at what this country is all about was painfully naive. That my belief that the very darkest parts of America’s history were, in fact, history were mistaken. That it took so long for me to disabuse myself of the notion that the bad old days of the past were truly in the past in the United States of America was a function of my privilege — and my age, my race, my gender, my sexual orientation, and my mostly good fortune — but that’s where I was. I’m not there any longer.

Thanks to a lot of reading, listening, observing, and thinking, I’ve known for a good while now that Biden beating Trump in a nail-biter was not going to move us past the era in which all of the stuff many of us thought we had settled for good in the second half of the 20th century might come roaring back. The fascism. The racism and bigotry. The nativism and xenophobia. The sexism and misogyny. The homophobia and transphobia. The antisemitism and Islamophobia. The superstition, Luddism, and fascination with conspiracy theories. That stuff has always been here. It will always be here. It is, again, who we are as a nation. There is simply too much blood on our hands for us to ever clean it off and we don’t, as a nation, have the temperament to truly commune with and atone for our collective sins. Which means there will always be an incentive for many — for millions — to deny, to dig in, and to double down. Our country seems wired to self-destruct if it engages in meaningful self-reflection so we . . . don’t. We’d much prefer to err on the side of delusion.

But unlike the way I felt on Election Day 2020, on Election Day 2024 I have at least some amount of hope. It’s hope born of both immediate electoral circumstances and of a better understanding of what America is and what it is and is not capable of.

As far as the electoral circumstances go, I am more confident in Kamala Harris winning today than I was of Biden winning in 2020. The granular details of why that is are not important because I’m just one guy with an opinion, but I’m pretty convinced that a great many of the polls that have driven news coverage for the past year have over-compensated for Trump’s past hidden strength and have underestimated Harris’ current strength. There is copious reporting out there about how Trump’s campaign has been imploding in ways it never did in 2016 or 2020 and that it’ll cause him way more problems with the ground game than anyone is anticipating. I also think that the vibes and the momentum — two things which are unquantifiable but which always feel far more real in politics than they ever do in sports — strongly favor Harris. Above all else I feel like both the polls and the vibes/momentum-based news coverage has vastly underestimated just how righteously angry women are and just how powerful a message women voters are going to send to Donald Trump today. Assuming Harris wins — and as I sit here right now I think she will — that will be, without question, the story of the 2024 election by the time its history is properly written.

More broadly: I think the Donald Trump fever is finally breaking and I think that has consequences beyond this election.

Part of the reason all of the bad stuff I mentioned above was easy for some of us to overlook was that there really hadn’t been anyone of prominence who could leverage and weaponize it at scale the way Trump has done it. But despite constant coverage of every odious thing he says and promises, he’s experiencing vastly diminishing returns on his rhetoric these days than he used to get. His true believers will always believe and, as noted, there are a lot more of them than any of us feel comfortable with, but no one has really figured out how to replicate what he has done over the past nine years. No one in the Republican Party has been successful unless Donald Trump has allowed them to be. He has created no successor to his movement because he’s a narcissist and narcissists don’t think about things like that. Anyone who has even attempted to harness the ugliness which Trump has so effortlessly harnessed has failed pretty spectacularly. As the years have gone on I have come to believe that his rise and his appeal were something of a perfect storm born of his preexisting celebrity and persona as a successful rich man, his humor — and yes, he can be funny, we have to admit that — and his complete lack of conventional political discipline. Our country used produce a lot of unconventional populists like Trump, but it’s been like 90 years since their heyday. No one really saw it coming and no one knew, until relatively recently, how to effectively combat it.

But now I believe that Trump is about to go down, hard I suspect, for a second time in a row. A lot of my more doom-oriented friends have told me they think he’ll be back in 2028 but that’s nonsense. He'll be 82 then and his brains are already tapioca. This was his last rodeo and I strongly suspect he’s about to be bucked off. When he leaves the scene there will be no one to take his particular place. There will, instead, be a half dozen or more charmless political creatures who, like the feckless and almost pitiable J.D. Vance, think they can ride the Trump Tiger but who will be hopelessly out of their depth. And they’ll all be fighting each other to boot while whatever life and energy Trump has left in him in the next few years will be spent alternately blaming them for his defeat or disparaging them as not as good as he is. It’s not the sort of thing that will sustain a movement.

So I sit here this morning, my friends, with hope. It’s guarded hope to be sure — and if I’m wrong and Trump wins, my being wrong in a newsletter will be the least of our problems — but I have hope for the first time since I don’t know when. I think Harris is going to win. And I think that win will close the book on Donald Trump for good. While that will not end the fight against all of the ugliness which he stirred up and which revealed to most of us just how much history we’re still fighting in this godforsaken country, it will make it easier for a while and it will have taught us to be way more vigilant going forward.

And yes, we sure as hell will go forward. Because we are not going back.

RainbowsandUnicorns wrote: ↑Tue Nov 05, 2024 6:46 am Am I the only one who is looking forward to this thread dying? Hopefully more sooner than later.

P.S. I will be voting in about 30 minutes. Still haven't made up my mind if I will fill in a circle for Kamala.