Saviolo
Saviolo's JournalSam Bee asks RNC attendees "When Was America Great?"
This is the willful cognitive dissonance we're dealing with, folks.
How did we get here? The monster that the GOP built.
I've seen the question raised a few times, both here on DU and on my twitter feed and various blogs and vlogs. The below are just my opinion based on observation.
There's been a concerted effort by the right to demonize the word "liberal" and "progressive." This is not an accident. The right has been building this for years and years and years. From the advertising of supply-side-economics, to corporate personhood, the right has been designing a bespoke culture war that neatly pits the poor and middle class against their own self-interest in the loudest possible terms, while those same corporations keep cutting the bottom line, cutting jobs, cutting benefits, and moving production to cheap tax havens.
It's a stunningly good example of the "Let's you and him fight" con.
It's so firmly entrenched now, that well before this election cycle we were seeing signs of "Keep the government out of my medicare" with no sense of irony or understanding around it. Incredibly wealthy right wing radio and TV hosts have been training the poor and middle class to be angry at the "liberals" who are taking their money and giving it to "do-nothings" or "slackers" or "welfare queens" or "special interest groups."
Those are, of course, all code for immigrants, the poor, POC, single mothers, etc...
And now the anger they've been injecting slowly and steadily into their followers for decades has reached a critical mass, and they've lost control of their own creation. The monster they've built has no allegiance to them or anyone. It's a headless blunder that wants to break everything down because ANGER!!!!
People are scared of change, by and large. Scared people become angry when they are subject to changes that they don't understand or welcome. They've been trained for years to be angry and scared, and now the GOP seems shocked by all of these angry people supporting Trump. It takes almost no brains to oppose change, but real change takes planning, careful thought, and intelligence; another thing that the right has been training people to fear and mistrust.
So, here you have a soup of racism, anger, fear, mistrust of government, mistrust of liberals and progressives, mistrust of the educated, mistrust of the poor, sexism, and fear of change. When Trump is defeated in November, those voters aren't going to go away. They're going to be angrier and unhappier than you've ever seen them.
And this doesn't even touch on things like austerity, free trade, etc...
Why isn't Trump Tweeting about the Olympics?
From Politico: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08/donald-trump-olympics-twitter-214176
But actually, Trump doesn’t seem to be interested in the Olympics at all: As Team USA shatters world records and scores win after historic win, Trump’s Twitter account, his favored megaphone, has been virtually mum. Since the one awkwardly-worded meme he blasted out to his feed on August 5, with his own photo in front of an American flag, Trump has tweeted about the Olympics exactly zero times. He’s attacked the media, retweeted compliments to Donald Trump, pumped up his rallies. Not a word about the events that people are tuning into every night.
Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, is seizing the opportunity to ride the wave of these feel-good Olympics. Since the start of the Rio Games, the Clinton campaign has unleashed a steady flow of social media messages congratulating the athletes and embracing their stories. And she has deliberately piled on by peppering the Olympics broadcast commercial breaks with the same brutal ad, over and over—the one that shows Trump being ridiculed on Letterman for making his clothing lines overseas.
Why has Trump hit the mute button on the Olympics, while Clinton has pumped up the volume? There’s a good reason for that, and a surprising one. The spectacle of America vanquishing its global rivals is—ironically, amazingly—utterly terrible for the “America First” candidate.
From the start of the opening ceremonies, the Olympics felt almost like a direct rebuke to Trump. As the 555 members of Team USA entered Rio de Janeiro’s Olympic stadium for the opening ceremonies, on an international stage before a television audience of nearly 30 million U.S. households, right up front walked fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad of Maplewood New Jersey—the first Muslim-American Olympian to compete wearing a hijab. As a group, the athletes embodied an America utterly at odds with the one Trump’s campaign portrays on a daily basis: there was 19-year-old Mexican-American boxer Carlos Balderas of Santa Maria, California, the first in his family born in the United States, destined for the quarterfinals; there was U.S. Army Sargent Hillary Bor, a Kenyan-born American who was poised to run the 3,000-meter steeplechase while his brother is serving our country in Afghanistan.
This America also wins, a lot. At press time, the United States sits far atop the Olympic medal leaderboard. We’re beating China. We’re torching the Russians. In the first 10 days of the Olympics, an American has stood on the podium 84 times. Twenty-eight of those times, American Olympians stood at the very top, watching the flag rise, through tears, as the Star Spangled Banner plays on. For a candidate who tells us we “never win anymore,” “we don’t have a country anymore,” these soaring, transcendent images do more than evoke American pride—they also chip away, directly, at his campaign claims.
The USA winning at the Olympics only shows over and over how the environment set up by Obama over the past 8 years has allowed these diverse and talented athletes to flourish and succeed. When his only narrative is that ONLY HE can fix the problems facing the USA, the fact that the USA is at 100 medals (as of this post), and in first place, only puts paid to his bluster and lies.
I suspect you won't hear anything from Trump about the Olympics. Except he might defend Lochte with more "Boys will be boys" and "a foreign country can't judge our people" sort of talk.
Listen, I have the best failures.
Really, believe me, okay? No one has a meltdown spectacular failure like I do. It's going to be a yuuge big beautiful failure, and I think you're going to be, okay - listen, people are telling me, I keep hearing many people - many people around me are saying "Your failures are the best, thank you so much for your failure." That's just - you know, that's just what I'm hearing, what many many people are saying. And the media, well, they're not reporting on that, but people know it, right? Okay? People just know it, they know me, and they know that when they see my failure, it's going to be the biggest, most beautiful failure you've ever seen. And little Lyin' Ted, and Little Marco, listen, their failures were so low-energy and boring. Sad. Just really, it's a tremendous problem, okay? And I'm going to have the biggest most spectacular failure you've ever seen. Believe it.
(after writing that, I feel like I need a shower)
XPost LGBT: Daily Beast "journalist" joins Grindr in Rio and is Shocked! Shocked I tell you! UPDATE
I won't link to the original journalist's article, because it's the worst sort of tripe, but Nico Hines, a straight, married journalist in Rio for the Olympics, joined various gay hook-up apps and had a pearls-clutching moment about how to-the-point these men were about hooking up:
Perhaps the question most people have is: How do the rest of us get an invite? Can an Average Joe join the bacchanalia?
After 60 minutes in the Olympic Village on Tuesday evening, I’m surprised to say that the answer is “yes.”
Armed with a range of dating and hookup apps—Bumble, Grindr, Jack’d, and Tinder—your distinctly non-Olympian correspondent had scored three dates in the first hour.
No prizes for guessing that Grindr proved more of an instant hookup success than Bumble or Tinder, which is owned by IAC, the parent company of The Daily Beast.
For the record, I didn’t lie to anyone or pretend to be someone I wasn’t—unless you count being on Grindr in the first place—since I’m straight, with a wife and child. I used my own picture (just of my face…) and confessed to being a journalist as soon as anyone asked who I was.
And he then proceeded to name sports, finish places, and rough descriptions of the athletes that pinged him back on Grindr, including indicating that some of them are from "a notoriously homophobic country."
They've since scrubbed the article of some of the more damning personal stats, but you know how the internet loves to forget things, right?
So, he may have outed athletes as gay from homophobic countries? Good job Mr. "Journalist." The article is basically content free, but there have been some incredible take-downs from around Twitter and the web. The Guyliner has a great blog about it here:
https://theguyliner.com/2016/08/11/time-to-cage-the-daily-beast-within/
The story – its news angle so toothless it can barely manage soup and liquidised veg as it lies dying on its hospital bed of irrelevance – goes that gay men short on time are usually pretty direct when it comes to asking for sex. They ask for photos, share their stats and locations and cut straight to the chase. Nico claims that he was only ever honest with these guys in his replies – that he was not only a journalist but straight and married – but the act of putting your photo on an app like this is an understanding you are available. It is an invitation to be wooed, propositioned or demanded of; it is an acceptance of an invisible, unspoken code. “I am here for the same reason as you. I understand you. I want this too.”
Among the most malevolent aspects of this noxious, patronising horror show is Nico’s disrespect for these guys’ anonymity. He reels off guys’ stats, their countries of origin and even the sports they compete in, under the guise of showing the variety of guys available and looking for sex. This is not only cruel, it’s irresponsible. As I said, a lot of these sportsmen come from countries where any revelation of their sexuality could result in their lives being made difficult or, in some cases, snuffed altogether. Whether we like it or not, a great number of people – increasing if the current political climate is anything to go by – think homosexuality is wrong, or shameful, or disgusting. These guys aren’t just hiding their sexuality because they’re worried about product endorsements – they’re trying to stay safe. Nico shows no regard for this, however, he’s got 1,500 prurient words to file. And, pardon my hyperbole, but this could get someone killed. Sexuality isn’t a game; it is not content. It is our life.
The sad thing is it’s a missed opportunity for the Daily Beast, if not for Nico. While the author may like to tell himself his was a human interest story and not a patronising smirk, there was a genuine tale to be told here. The story of how the Olympics, and the availability of hookup apps, is allowing gay athletes from homophobic countries to express themselves and have sex could’ve been genuinely informative and enlightening. It could have held these countries to account, asked what “inclusive” events like the Olympics can do to reinforce themes of freedom from oppression, maybe even talked to these athletes about what it was like to hide who they really were – and it could’ve provided work to a gay journalist to tell it.
And Attitude Magazine UK went straight to the danger it placed the potentially closeted athletes in:
http://attitude.co.uk/daily-beast-potentially-outs-lgbt-athletes-in-controversial-olympic-grindr-hook-up-article/
“These hookup apps exist to protect us from YOU,” wrote one user. “We have to hide, in plain sight, because you still don’t get it, or us.”
Another added: “Unless queer outing is now an Olympic sport, can we just all agree that @NicoHines piece is outright homophobia? Needs to be withdrawn.”
And this fellow's Twitter thread pulls no punches, and hits all of its targets:
https://twitter.com/meakoopa/status/763679800603082752
Once again, the LGBT space is being defined by straight people who are looking in from the outside. From the end of the Guyliner article above:
Move over. You’re getting it all wrong. We can drive from here.
*** Update: Daily Beast has taken the whole story down:
https://twitter.com/c_9/status/763909581210869760
Daily Beast "journalist" joins Grindr in Rio and is Shocked! Shocked I tell you! UPDATE
I won't link to the original journalist's article, because it's the worst sort of tripe, but Nico Hines, a straight, married journalist in Rio for the Olympics, joined various gay hook-up apps and had a pearls-clutching moment about how to-the-point these men were about hooking up:
Perhaps the question most people have is: How do the rest of us get an invite? Can an Average Joe join the bacchanalia?
After 60 minutes in the Olympic Village on Tuesday evening, I’m surprised to say that the answer is “yes.”
Armed with a range of dating and hookup apps—Bumble, Grindr, Jack’d, and Tinder—your distinctly non-Olympian correspondent had scored three dates in the first hour.
No prizes for guessing that Grindr proved more of an instant hookup success than Bumble or Tinder, which is owned by IAC, the parent company of The Daily Beast.
For the record, I didn’t lie to anyone or pretend to be someone I wasn’t—unless you count being on Grindr in the first place—since I’m straight, with a wife and child. I used my own picture (just of my face…) and confessed to being a journalist as soon as anyone asked who I was.
And he then proceeded to name sports, finish places, and rough descriptions of the athletes that pinged him back on Grindr, including indicating that some of them are from "a notoriously homophobic country."
They've since scrubbed the article of some of the more damning personal stats, but you know how the internet loves to forget things, right?
So, he may have outed athletes as gay from homophobic countries? Good job Mr. "Journalist." The article is basically content free, but there have been some incredible take-downs from around Twitter and the web. The Guyliner has a great blog about it here:
https://theguyliner.com/2016/08/11/time-to-cage-the-daily-beast-within/
The story – its news angle so toothless it can barely manage soup and liquidised veg as it lies dying on its hospital bed of irrelevance – goes that gay men short on time are usually pretty direct when it comes to asking for sex. They ask for photos, share their stats and locations and cut straight to the chase. Nico claims that he was only ever honest with these guys in his replies – that he was not only a journalist but straight and married – but the act of putting your photo on an app like this is an understanding you are available. It is an invitation to be wooed, propositioned or demanded of; it is an acceptance of an invisible, unspoken code. “I am here for the same reason as you. I understand you. I want this too.”
Among the most malevolent aspects of this noxious, patronising horror show is Nico’s disrespect for these guys’ anonymity. He reels off guys’ stats, their countries of origin and even the sports they compete in, under the guise of showing the variety of guys available and looking for sex. This is not only cruel, it’s irresponsible. As I said, a lot of these sportsmen come from countries where any revelation of their sexuality could result in their lives being made difficult or, in some cases, snuffed altogether. Whether we like it or not, a great number of people – increasing if the current political climate is anything to go by – think homosexuality is wrong, or shameful, or disgusting. These guys aren’t just hiding their sexuality because they’re worried about product endorsements – they’re trying to stay safe. Nico shows no regard for this, however, he’s got 1,500 prurient words to file. And, pardon my hyperbole, but this could get someone killed. Sexuality isn’t a game; it is not content. It is our life.
The sad thing is it’s a missed opportunity for the Daily Beast, if not for Nico. While the author may like to tell himself his was a human interest story and not a patronising smirk, there was a genuine tale to be told here. The story of how the Olympics, and the availability of hookup apps, is allowing gay athletes from homophobic countries to express themselves and have sex could’ve been genuinely informative and enlightening. It could have held these countries to account, asked what “inclusive” events like the Olympics can do to reinforce themes of freedom from oppression, maybe even talked to these athletes about what it was like to hide who they really were – and it could’ve provided work to a gay journalist to tell it.
And Attitude Magazine UK went straight to the danger it placed the potentially closeted athletes in:
http://attitude.co.uk/daily-beast-potentially-outs-lgbt-athletes-in-controversial-olympic-grindr-hook-up-article/
“These hookup apps exist to protect us from YOU,” wrote one user. “We have to hide, in plain sight, because you still don’t get it, or us.”
Another added: “Unless queer outing is now an Olympic sport, can we just all agree that @NicoHines piece is outright homophobia? Needs to be withdrawn.”
And this fellow's Twitter thread pulls no punches, and hits all of its targets:
https://twitter.com/meakoopa/status/763679800603082752
Once again, the LGBT space is being defined by straight people who are looking in from the outside. From the end of the Guyliner article above:
Move over. You’re getting it all wrong. We can drive from here.
*** Update: Daily Beast has taken the whole story down:
https://twitter.com/c_9/status/763909581210869760
Trump is the GOP/Tea Party's "Icarus Factor"
The GOP, the Tea Party, and the "Freedom Caucus" have all be riding high on that rhetoric for years, now. Decades, even. It speaks to a very strong base of people that have been primed through propaganda to fully accept the message that these jokers are peddling. The Tea Party capitalized on a vague uneasiness that middle America felt about change and progressive movements, and managed to turn it into a full-blown movement that had undercurrents of racism, homophobia, and elitism disguised as protection of "traditional values."
But they've flown too high with these messages. They've gotten too close to their bright orange sun, and the wings started by Reagan and completed by Ted Cruz, Paul Ryan, and a host of other right-wing architects are starting to melt. I'd love to see Trump cause a fall so disastrous to the GOP that they aren't even a viable policy party for another 30 years. Let's see what a few actual progressives can do in the top seat for a while!
The Tea Party message has succeeded beyond Sean Hannity's wildest hopes and expectations, and has grown into a monster that no one on that side of the aisle can control. And I don't just mean the walking disaster of Trump, but also the millions of people who voted for him and strongly support him. If the GOP collapses under the weight of Trump's massive ego, those people will still be out there, and will be very angry. They will feel as though something has been stolen from them.
GOP/Trump supporters asking us to "Imagine polls don't exist"
They're worried! Right wing radio host Bill Mitchell tweeted:
Imagine polls don't exist. Show me evidence Hillary is winning?
— Bill Mitchell (@mitchellvii) August 8, 2016
Link here: https://twitter.com/mitchellvii/status/762497721831874561
For which he was roundly mocked by, well... just about everyone.
Pretend words don't exist. Write a novel using only dogs https://t.co/4CaAMCPGcL
— Jon Rosenberg™ (@jonrosenberg) August 8, 2016
@mitchellvii If we imagine polls don’t exist, then DJT only tweeted like six or seven times in the first 6 months of his campaign.
— Matt Shaw (@NotMattShaw) August 8, 2016
Imagine @mitchellvii doesn't exist. Show me how much time I would have saved not reading his inane tweet
— Scott M. Larabee (@ScottLarabee) August 8, 2016
They're looking at the numbers, and even the dumbest GOP operatives can do a LITTLE math and see which way the wind blows. And article in The Hill about the ridiculous tweet: http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/290769-pro-trump-radio-host-imagine-polls-dont-exist
The type of ignorance we're still struggling against
Here's a man, a pastor, preaching to his church, that women must be subservient to men. That men are naturally leaders, and that women are naturally servile and just WANT to be dominated by men.
From Patheos: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2016/08/04/christian-pastor-men-rule-over-women-at-home-and-ill-arm-wrestle-any-woman-here-who-disagrees/
I get an email every day calling me “misogynistic.” What a stupid word. This is, like, a new word. I never heard that when I was a kid. I didn’t hear that. Did you hear that growing up?…
See, I don’t go with all your little trendy words and all your little trendy concepts. You know, people have been doing it my way for the last 6,000 years — in all cultures, pretty much, in all nations of the world, and it’s worked out great for a lot of people.
Anderson doesn’t get the problem with misogyny because things have “worked out great for a lot of people.” Which is true. Men are doing just fine.
And “misogynistic” isn’t a new word. (It’s actually from the mid-17th century.) Saying you never heard it growing up, as if that’s an argument for why this isn’t a big deal, is like saying there’s no sexual harassment taking place at Fox News Channel because Roger Ailes has always been nice to you. Just because you’re not the victim of it, and people don’t always talk about it in public, doesn’t mean it may not be happening.
Anderson continued:
But all of a sudden, we’re supposed to get on this trendy little faggoty type of a relationship where, you know, my wife and I are supposed to dress the same, act the same, look the same, talk the same, live the same lifestyle, have the same authority.
I want to tell Anderson to get a dictionary and look up the word “misogyny” so he doesn’t keep misinterpreting it, but I’m pretty sure he has a rule against opening up a second book.
Here is where the fight is, folks. Hearts and minds. These people are looking up to this man as an authority and he's telling them with holy authority that women are weaker than men, and inherently want to be dominated.
His followers will vote for Trump before they vote for Hillary. They will believe that Hillary is subverting the natural holy order of life by trying to become president. Not all of them, obviously, but I grew up religious and I know lots of religious people and many of them believe everything told to them in a homily or sermon, because "that holy man up there wouldn't lie to us, would they?"
From the article:
Even the feminist women, deep down, they’re like, “Please rule over me! Please be my leader!”
Citation needed.
This is how toxic Christian masculinity works. Might is right, and the Bible must always be interpreted to give men the upper hand. Strong women? Women who want to be in positions of leadership and are fully capable of it? They’re cast aside as heretics. Just ask Hillary Clinton and the pastors who refuse to vote for her because of her gender.
Woohoo!!
Looking forward to another 8 years of the right wing lunatic fringe claiming that the president is illegitimate because (in this case) she stole the election through... voting machines? I guess? Despite the fact that Diebold is in the pocket of the GOP?
Holy shit, I can't even follow any more. They're starting early, priming their rabid followers to go bananas as soon as things look like they might not be going the way they want. Dog whistles are done. Hinting, implying, all that subtle stuff, it's all done now. Now it's just out-in-the-open calls for violence from white nationalist men who feel like their country is being taken over by the blacks, the wimmins, the queers, the mooslems, the Mexicans...
What the hell is going on? Why is the media not talking about any of this? Just now (15:30EST 02Aug16) I went to cnn.com and the top story is "DNC CEO to resign." You have to go to the political cartoons to see depictions of angry white nationalists being absurd (thanks to n2doc for all the comics every day, BTW!).
So, for the past 8 years, the far right has been able to justify their treatment of Obama because his presidency was "illegitimate" because he's Kenyan (also Muslim, shhhhhh!) and they're already setting up the excuse for the next 8 years. But they have no problem with SCOTUS selecting GWB in Florida.
I just don't have anything left to figure this out.
Profile Information
Gender: MaleHometown: Ottawa, Ontario
Home country: Canada
Current location: Toronto, Ontario
Member since: Wed Oct 29, 2008, 04:34 PM
Number of posts: 3,280
