This blog is dedicated to the memory of David Weintraub, who took on insidious astroturfers and won.

Sunday, November 22, 2015

Terrorism, Inc. is very good for the GOP Brand



Circumstantial evidence shows the GOP --- and Donald Trump in particular--- gaining ground in the 2016 presidential campaign by finding an issue that resonates with voters' fears of the "other" since the Paris attacks nine days ago.

Newspapers fill with reports of the ghastly events themselves. Other atrocities occur in farther locales such as the attack on the upscale hotel in Mali. Once an inviting, friendly world, sort of, becomes as ominous and forbidding to Jane and John Whiteysphere as the world circa 9/11/01.

People now wish simply to stay home and perpetuate their fears by spreading paranoia across social media, that garish hell of our own making AKA 'the internets'.

The NSA reclaims the lead in the war to trample our civil rights in the police state which encircles us within techno fascist corporatism.

GOP candidates hit Barack Obama's policy of non-intervention in Syria and hit it hard. They've gained the perfect illustration to bolster their arguments. Hillary Clinton, as ever the calculating reactionary stakes out a position to the right of Obama safely within the confines of the neocon worldview.

Bernie Sanders, lacking a shred of foreign policy experience or any personal interest in same finds himself in a no-win position. The social democrat punted from poor field position, falling in behind Obama's progressive approach of welcoming refugees but allowing NATO, the UN and the Kurds to carry the water on the ground in Syria.

Significantly, the Bern ignored his best public opportunity to begin moulding a foreign policy identity for himself during the opening statements of the last debate. He could've taken with ease the moral high ground since assumed by Obama. Sanders gambles that he will continue to attract the voters he needs, IE those Democrats outside of his immediate white liberal circle who have resisted his message to date, by continuing to hammer on the economic and social policies that drive his campaign to astonishing levels of competitiveness in the early going.

Still, one must issue a caveat: the President of the US is also the commander in chief and the deliverer of diplomacy throughout the putatively free world. This role cannot be ignored or dismissed entirely in the campaign, even when the candidate offers a compelling socioeconomic vision for the country.

A recent spate polls (warning: national and general election polls at this stage are meaningless) offers a glimpse of the difficulty facing the Democratic contenders who will never pretend to match the levels of xenophobia offered up second nature by the GOP clown show. Alarmingly for liberals, the political issue created by ISIS doesn't favour the hawkish Hillary much less peace and love Bernie Sanders.

A significant percentage of independents (a group trending conservative in recent years when otherwise reasonable people can no longer identify as Republicans and retain any sense of dignity and self respect) respond to the so-called threat of ISIS with anger and desire to see this group eradicated (a rather normal human response, I might add). This bloc appears ripe to shift towards the GOP. To the extent terrorism remains atop the headlines this is not a positive development for the left. Yes, maybe these events are transitory and will fade in time, however one can surmise that ISIS timing and consistency of recent attacks owes at least in part to an awareness that they are having an impact on our politics of fear.

Obama created the effect of driving the fearful right to new levels of insanity beyond anything seen since the late Dollar Bill Clinton oral office era to the extent they've now completely abandoned their own party leadership (as well as reality) and are clearly in the market for an out and out fascist leader.

Donald Trump delivers all that and a bag of Mussolini chips. His popularity has only grown since Paris, especially as the other outsider Ben Carson has stumbled. Trump's anti-immigrant nonsense long the centerpiece of his appeal now has found a place in (paranoid) reality to hang its hat. Let's look at the RealClearPolitics trend line from before and after the attack on gay Paree.

On November 9, in a hypothetical match-up with GOP favorites, HRC clocked them all by an average of about 11 points.

By November 19, her lead shrank to 1-2 points, well within the margin of error. She's actually fallen behind Rubio, the so-called GOP foreign policy realist.

Furthermore, the country as a whole does not favour Obama's handling of Syria, whose policies remember are also Sanders' policies.

With terrorism fears near a post-9/11 high in a new ABC News-Washington Post poll, majorities of Americans back increased use of military force, including ground forces, against the Islamic State, and more than half oppose admitting Mideast refugees to the United States.

Seventy-three percent support increased U.S. air strikes against the Islamic State, or ISIS, and 60 percent back more ground forces, double the level of support for ground forces from summer 2014. One reason: Eighty-one percent see a major terrorist attack in the United States in the near future as likely, a level of anxiety that has been higher just once since 9/11.

Recall also the last time an outsider won the White House it was Jimmy Carter, whose re-election chances foundered almost entirely on his inability to look like a commander in chief when Iranians took American hostages and refused to release them until after the 1980 election.

There have been countless stories implicating a conspiracy between the GOP and the Mullahs, "arms for hostages" theory that gained credence after Reagan's administration was caught years later in the middle of the "Iran Contra" affair .

Is there an ISIS/Republican connection this time too?

Now, these and all polls must always be viewed with caution and today's mood may shift quickly in other directions in reaction to other events but terrorism at the forefront of the news cycle clearly  plays into the bellicose hands of the conservatives who cannot win based on their tawdry domestic policies which have finally been rejected by a majority of the American people.

And the prime beneficiary of this turn of events appears to be the erstwhile Amerikkkan il duce, the Berlusconi wanna be, Donald Trump.

Now more than ever, leftier than thous need to put on our rhetorical battle gear and go forth to stop the American slide to fascism as the final nail in the coffin of the free world hammered home since 9/11 by the extreme radical islamist nut fringe who are loosing the battles but still winning the war.


Saturday, November 14, 2015

Fight or Flite

                                     (DFQ2 stock photo. No schtick infringement intended.)

At some point life cannot sustain through rational thought. Our acts are not rational but absurd. Yes, we talk and we write intelligently [Pinocchio alert]. We make studies. We take polls. We conduct endless experiments that prove both the veracity and falsity of the mind.

We are successful beyond the dreams of our grandfathers.

Nihilism cannot obtain. Our duty is to ancestors and children to remain vigilant against our inside out decay.

We see resurrection but we earn no redemption. Eventually, all fall down. Right is wrong is right is right is wrong is right.

History reduces to a stained page written by winners who dissolved.



Wednesday, November 11, 2015

"All we have to go on are the polls"

                                                   Junior Wells - Messin' With The Kid

I wonder what kind of moron would say that. Oopsies, it was me.



I am changing my tune. I am evolving. Polling does not mirror social reality. Polls are extremely unreliable.

What’s the Matter With Polling?


Until the media shares with its audience the methodology behind each poll, they are merely spinning irrelevant "data" which has already been circumscribed into the coronated alternate reality game.

I am evolving as a blogger. I am no longer willing to toil over providing links to prove my points.

If something is true, that's that.

It is what it is?

Does anyone else besides myself and donkeytale wonder why there aren't any polls being produced in states other than the first few?

When the surge first kicked in, I noticed a poll for Portland/Oregon and it looked competitive. Very early in this process I saw another poll for California. Bernie was down something like twelve points. It was close for someone who didn't seem to have a realistic chance. The medium still had a little bit of O'Malley coverage to share. They had a lot on Joe Biden, Trumptard, & those damn emails.

McLuhan said content ends up meaning nothing to nobody.

I am starting to see what he meant.

I am one voter who the pollsters cannot ever reach. It is impossible for myself to be statistically circumscribed into polling results.

[Please pardon this interruption for a DFQ2 public service schtick.

Please go to this website to add your name to the quit stalking me with your rigged polls directory:

https://www.donotcall.gov/

We now resume this mailed in entry which was produced during halftime of the lame Boston/Indiana game.]

It may boil down to how many Bernie voters have made sure that they will be allowed to vote in their state's primary or caucus. We will also need to include in this zeitgeist sniffing analysis those Hillary voters who will end up voting for the saint bernardo.

No one knows. Everything is speculation based on polls no one ever explains.

It is a farce. The coronation is mythology.


Sunday, November 8, 2015

Progressivism is a luxury not a necessity for recent immigrants



In Amerikkka, politics is about winning. Idealists of both the left and right seldom grok this plain fact. You have no shot at implementing progressive policies unless you win. Worse, if you loose the other side has a shot at implementing more of the same Reaganomics that has helped destroy this country (along with Clintonomics) since 1981.

Sometimes the smart thing to do politically is try to relate with the "other" whom you need to attract into your voting bloc, walk a mile in their shoes and empathise with their problems rather than obsess solely on yourslef. I know, I know.

You can always go back to hating on them post-election.

Asians score higher than whites on education levels, SAT scores, hard work, entrepreneurialism and income and are the fastest growing immigrant population. They would seem to be GOP leaning based on these characteristics .

 
These milestones of economic success and social assimilation have come to a group that is still majority immigrant. Nearly three-quarters (74%) of Asian-American adults were born abroad; of these, about half say they speak English very well and half say they don’t.

Asians recently passed Hispanics as the largest group of new immigrants to the United States. The educational credentials of these recent arrivals are striking. More than six-in-ten (61%) adults ages 25 to 64 who have come from Asia in recent years have at least a bachelor’s degree. This is double the share among recent non-Asian arrivals, and almost surely makes the recent Asian arrivals the most highly educated cohort of immigrants in U.S. history.

Compared with the educational attainment of the population in their country of origin, recent Asian immigrants also stand out as a select group. For example, about 27% of adults ages 25 to 64 in South Korea and 25% in Japan have a bachelor’s degree or more.2 In contrast, nearly 70% of comparably aged recent immigrants from these two countries have at least a bachelor’s degree.
 
 
Yet Asians are trending demotardic more and more. They also believe in the efficacy of a strong safety net and are willing to pay higher taxes to pay for more government services. Obviously, they are simply too intelligent to fall in line with the moronic GOP orthodoxy.


White progressives seldom grok that for immigrants elections have practical implications. When Trump goes on and on buffoonically about Mexicans and the border he is indirectly threatening Asians too, many of whom are also here illegally and worse off than Mexicans if deported, because they will be treated as criminals when they return to their home countries under those circumstances.
 
 

Now, Trump is not an idiot (although he plays one on TV). He knows that the US of A-Holes benefits greatly from illegal immigration, on the high end by Asians and on the low end by Hispanics. These people bring youthful vitality, desire and social security/medicare tax dollars to the table.
 
We all know that Asians perform the work that too stupid Amerikkkans cannot do, while Latinos perform the work lazy/decadent Amerikkkans won't do (although we progressives will deny the latter all the time. Here's an experiment to prove my theory correct: next time your lawn needs mowing, ask your kid to do it and see what response you get. After he doesn't bother looking away from his xbox long enough to even answer, go out and mow it yourself. Go on, lard ass, I dare you).

There are ample  reasons minourities will prefer to vote for the candidate they see as the one with the best chance of keeping the GOP out of the white house. regardless of how liberal or cool that person is to white progressives, who face no such daily obstacles in our uber comfortable progressive existences.


Well-educated whites have all the relative advantages and seldom consider that minourities, even better educated and wealthier Asians for instance, have more reason to fear the Amerikkkan electoral outcome and will vote defensively moreso than anything. And this has nothing to do with whether they personally like one candidate over another.


At the end of the day, Bernie must assure minourity voters that he can win the general election.

Progressivism is a luxury for many minourity voters not a necessity.

This seems counter intuitive to most whites. However, most whites spend very little to no time, especially intimate time (full disclosure: donkeytale is married to an Asian immigrant and spends most of his personal and professional time in the minourity community), getting to know and truly understand what motivates minourity voters.

Up there in lily-white, hippiefied Vermont Bernie can certainly be classified as "most whites." He stumbled out of the gate with minourities and has been playing catch up since day one. And even here, one gets the feeling he is doing so against his (extremely Caucasian and erroneous) belief that economic inequality rather than racism is the number one problem affecting minourities in the US.


He is smarter than most whites and has made adjustments but he still needs to gain more ground. It seems he is doing better relatively in attracting latinos rather than Africkkkan Amerikkkans, but the latino demographic is notoriously difficult for pollsters to pin down as "likely voters."


Just win baby.

 

Tuesday, November 3, 2015

No Favores tiene Hee





Girls caress rainbows inside them

We burn them out

Boys is a guitR-one form'la

We burn us down


TIME FUCKS us nowhere

 blight rotten stairs

TIME fucks us nowhere

nowhere's everywhere


Cornfields in fall everlasting

the stalks set on fire


Grievous laughter and resentment

fuel a heart's desire



and time kiss me mija

Much passion has she


Time sucks us forward;;\

and makes a fool of me