US Election 2016
Users browsing this topic:0 Registered, 0 Hidden and 0 Guests
Registered Users: None |
 |
| View previous topic :: View next topic |
| Author |
Message |
David 
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
|
| Post subject: |  |
|
https://www.crikey.com.au/2016/10/24/what-if-donald-trump-is-right-and-the-polls-are-wrong/
| Quote: | Two weeks out from a massacre ... or is it?
Guy Rundle
With a fortnight to go until US election day, the contest has been all but handed to Hillary Clinton by general acclamation — or has it? The Democrats are now leading by a seven-point average across all polls, and Hillary Clinton has turned her campaign to Republican states and “down-ballot” races, Senate and House races Democrats hope will be tilted in their favour by Clinton’s presence. The Trump campaign has officially adopted the position of being less-favoured, with campaign director Kellyanne Conway telling all meeja “We’re the underdog, and American loves an underdog”.
In response to the continued bad polling, Trump has announced a redoubled commitment to personal appearances, lining up a three, sometimes four rallies and events per day — a strategy designed, in part, to imply that Hillary Clinton lacks the stamina and energy for the job. Usually at this point in a losing campaign, the losing candidate would also redirect to down-ballot races and attempt to shore up Senate candidates in troublesome states, often those the presidential candidate has no chance of winning. But Trump is poison to so many of the congressional candidates that there are few who want to be seen with him.
The new strategies come off the back of the widespread perception that Trump lost the third debate, making the series a 3-0 win for Hillary Clinton. The first debate on September 26 appears to have been the crucial one — Trump lost that by more than 30 points, with an unfocused and low-content performance that spoke to his base, but it appears to have convinced a decisive number of swinging voters that he wasn’t presidential material. That debate appears to have been more decisive than the Access Hollywood tapes, in which Trump boasts of using his power to sexually assault women with impunity.
Trump would have had to pull out something extraordinary in the third debate — some new proposals, or some sort of major repositioning of self, though Reagan Jesus himself most likely couldn’t have turned it round at this stage. But any hope of that was gone when he explicitly noted that he was reserving his right to accept the result of the election, as declared on election night. In the following days, he returned to the theme of the election being “rigged”, with his dutiful surrogates defending the charge on the airwaves. Two narratives developed: at rallies, Trump has been telling faithful crowds that the election might be literally stolen, with dead people on the voting rolls, and “inner-city” political machines — read: black people — actually intimidating Trump voters and stuffing ballots in cities like Philadelphia and Chicago (because he is so going to win Illinois).
On TV however, his surrogates argue a different line, claiming that the media and the “elites” are now so biased against Trump that it amounts to a rigging of the election. Trump’s supporters point to the media’s obsession with the Access Hollywood tape, with the 11 women — at time of writing — who’ve come forward with similar stories about Trump’s insistent kissing and sexual touching, and with the more lurid aspects of the campaign, such as Trump’s demand that the candidates take a drug test before the final debate. The meeja point out that Trump begins his rallies with 20 minutes on these topics, so maybe they’re not the ones to talk to about this.
Does the mainstream media have an inherent bias towards the left-of-centre in the US? Quite possibly it does, instantiated above all in the utter lack of interrogation of Clinton, or her surrogates, as to what President Hillary Clinton’s concrete proposals on budget reform, taxation, spending and foreign policy would actually amount to. Much of Clinton’s program appears cobbled together; much of her trade policy is simply a reaction to the insurgency of Bernie Sanders, and the foreign policy in the Middle East is politics-driven, an anti-Russian line taken to accentuate Trump’s perceived closeness to Vladimir Putin, which Trump has handled with characteristic ineptitude:
TRUMP: I don’t know Pootin, I mean, he’s said some nice things about me, if we got along well, that would be good … It’s pretty clear he has no respect for this person [pointing at Clinton]
CLINTON: That’s because he’d rather have a puppet for a United States president.
TRUMP (interjecting): No puppet … no puppet …. You’re the puppet!
But any complaint the Trump forces may have about the lack of scrutiny of Clinton’s policies is blunted by an equal lack of scrutiny of Trump’s policies, his ludicrous trickle-down economics, his ineffectual protectionist proposals, and his confused mix of isolationism and global dominance as a foreign policy. On the weekend, at a rally in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Trump outlined his “10-point plan to make America great again”, which was mostly a restatement of earlier themes, but also included a new commitment to “push for a constitutional amendment for term limits”, and “a hiring freeze on federal employees”. (Yes, that Gettysburg, leading to innumerable parodies of Lincoln’s address: “Four score and what five? Seven? Nine? I dunno a while back, my dad and some other guys created this nation, this most excellent nation, we have the best nation …” etc)
As with everything about the Trump campaign, that isn’t dirty tricks, it was ineptly handled. At this stage, what they needed was one or two big fat bribes to roll out, akin to the paid childcare proposal they had suggested months earlier, and which has never been heard of again — kyboshed by Republican grandees, presumably. Something, anything, that might pull across 2-3% of voters, mostly women — a larger pool to convert — in Florida, Ohio and elsewhere. The 10 commandments — much of them standard Republican small-government rhetoric — have already been consumed by the news cycle.
The point may be moot. Many are suggesting that Trump has already come to the conclusion that he’s lost the race, and is using the notion that the contest is “rigged” both as face-saving and as a way of creating the maximum chaos so that he’ll emerge from the election as an undiminished figurehead for the “insurgents”, i.e. the core of angry white people who would form the basis for a new media/political outfit. There would certainly be a ready-made audience. Polls suggest about 50% of Republicans — i.e. about 15% of the adult population — believe the election is “rigged”, on a spectrum from “liberal media dominated” to “ballot-stuffing”. The fact that a presidential candidate has named this as a possibility allows such a sentiment to coalesce into a specific political form.
This “insurgent” form takes many such people right past the settings of the Tea Party, which still tried to reconcile notions of being an oppressed minority with a reverence for American institutions. This new line, uninterested in questions of constitutionality or even foreign relations, now has a mob/chaos aspect to it — the overwhelming sentiment is that of doing as much damage as possible to the existing institutions. Some of that sentiment is strategic — wrecking any notion of bipartisanship or consent in order that some new political force may emerge — but now it has another edge, a pure mix of envy and destructiveness. The hardcore Trumpistas, caught at rallies, are champions of cognitive dissonance, simultaneously holding that the polls are disguising a Trump majority that will sweep to power, and that the system — government, elites, media, big corporations — is so tightly interlocked that it would never permit such a victory.
Indeed, they get their biggest thrill from some of Trump’s most punkish antics, such as the speech he gave at last week’s Al Smith charity dinner, a deathful white-tie occasion (in honour of the 1928 Democratic candidate, the first Catholic to run as a major party candidate), in which the honoured guests sit in tiers on the stage, and the two candidates trade self-deprecating jokes about each other. Ha, not this time. Trump spoke first, his only “self-deprecating” joke being to humiliate his wife: “Michelle Obama gives a speech. And everyone loves it, it’s fantastic. They think she’s absolutely great. My wife Melania gives the exact same speech. And people get on her case.” [To Melania] “Stand up up, honey, oh, she didn’t know I was going to make that joke.” Hahaha, wattanarsehole, 2% more Republican women just peeled away. For the rest, it was joke-free anti-Clinton barbs, so much so that he was heavily booed. Booed at a charity dinner. Takes talent.
Most bizarrely, their thought leaders have taken to WikiLeaks with an enthusiasm that borders on devotion. This has been led by Trump from the podium — “WikiLeaks! How much do we love WikiLeaks!” — but also by Fox News, which six years ago was calling for the assassination of Julian Assange. Not much doubt that the vast majority haven’t read a single one of the ‘Podesta’ emails released by WikiLeaks over the past weeks, still less would they be able to focus on a key finding. What many appear to like is the simple exposure of camp Clinton, the very fact of it – a blow against the monolithic closed establishment.
There is no question at all that the Podesta emails, as they accumulate, paint a picture of the Democrats and the Hillary machine that is disturbing, if unsurprising. But it is a picture of a campaign, and the Clinton foundation, that is often operationally cynical, sleazy and wearingly arrogant and duplicitous. But even the starkest individual revelations falls short of what many want — direct proof that the Clintons were trading future favours for present cash from sovereign wealth funds. In one email, the foundation promises to hold a foundation mini-conference in Morocco in exchange for $12 million from the government. But that’s it. Nothing more is offered, though a conference like that is the sort of place where plenty may have been (in fact, Hillary herself never turned up to the meeting in question). The truth of the Clinton machine remains elusive, and the absence of a smoking gun tends to reinforce the polarisation of the worldviews.
So is it over? The Republicans themselves appear to believe it is. The RNC has put zero dollars into Trump’s campaign, and Speaker Paul Ryan is conducting an entirely separate tour to shore up 35 threatened House seats. The party expected to lose about eight of their 59-odd majority in the 435-seat House. They’ve now revised that to 15-18. The Democrats are now working hard to extend that into the 20s. The airwaves are full of ads featuring President Barack Obama directly endorsing local candidates, which can be a shock:
“Hi! I’m the leader of the free world! Please elect Bob Doofus, the placeholding candidate we put into this nine-legged starfish-shaped gerrymandered district we didn’t plan on getting back for a decade. Bob Doofus! He’s the man for your disregarded shithole. I’m Barack Obama and I approve this message.”
The Senate is now leaning towards a regain for the Democrats — the Republicans appear to be finished in Wisconsin, Illinois, New Hampshire and North Carolina (all of them tossups when the campaign began), and in trouble Pennsylvania, Indiana and Missouri — and at a stretch, Marco Rubio’s seat in Florida. The only Democratic hold threatened is Nevada, with the retirement of Harry Reid. White House and Senate gives you the Supreme Court, which is the ballgame.
The only caveat? Trump has not lost this yet. He may still be president. The tales that the Republicans tell themselves of skewed polls, etc, are largely bullshit. But they may be right, given three recent, Trump-favourable, polls — the IBD/TIPP. The LA Times tracker and the Rasmussen — may be more pertinent than others. These polls show Trump either leading by two points or at evens. If they’re picking anything up it’s this: that Trump has rearranged the map as he promised he would, bringing the rust belt and white-dominated northern states into play — Ohio, Maine, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota — even as “new diversity” states — North Carolina, Arizona, and Florida — slip from their grasp. That would still be a difficult path to power for Trump, but not an impossible one. It would simply mean that polling, en masse, has been as unresponsive to the Trump revolution as has the rest of the body politic. Should that happen on election night, that’s how it will have happened.
But once again, only that paradigm-shift level collapse between social being and social knowledge will deliver Trump that victory. As the final fortnight looms, the whole Clinton/Democratic enterprise is simply overwhelming Trump. Hillary has Bill, Barack, Michelle and Bernie out on the stump, all capable of getting a specific sector to the polls. They have double and triple the offices and networks that Trump has, and they’ve run close to 200,000 more TV ads. Should this all bear fruit in the usual manner, it will be a massacre.
The Clinton campaign is now deep into Arizona and North Carolina, is having a more tentative go in Georgia, and is eyeing off Alaska. Due to the third-party candidate of Evan McMullin (of which more, anon) Trump may lose Utah and even Idaho. And this morning, RealClearPolitics quietly transferred a new state to the “tossup” column — Texas. Texas, last Republican bulwark. If that is really in play, the party is in deep trouble. If it falls (unlikely), it’s more or less over in its current form. Or is it? Yes, of course. Ha, typical elitist arrogance. Oh yeah, the polls are skewed, are they … on it goes, on the airwaves, on the street, in your head, for two weeks more … |
_________________
All watched over by machines of loving grace |
|
|
|
 |
David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
|
|
|
|
|
Wokko 
Come and take it.
Joined: 04 Oct 2005
|
| Post subject: | |
|
| Hillary FBI investigation reopened. Hillary for Jail 2016. |
|
|
|
|
Pies4shaw 
pies4shaw
Joined: 08 Oct 2007
|
| Post subject: | |
|
| Wokko wrote: | | Hillary FBI investigation reopened. Hillary for Jail 2016. |
Would it be a good thing if the election for the most important position in one of our most important allies were - one day - to be between a serious criminal and a guy in a clown costume with an emotional age of 13? |
|
|
|
|
stui magpie 
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
|
| Post subject: | |
|
| Quote: | Last month, the man who's tried to turn vote prediction into a science predicted a Donald Trump win.
Allan J. Lichtman, distinguished professor of history at American University, said the Democrats would not be able to hold on to the White House.
In the intervening weeks, the campaign was rocked by a series of events. The release of the Access Hollywood tape was followed by accusations from a growing list of women of various improprieties on Trump's part, ranging from verbal abuse and harassment to outright sexual assault.
At the same time, WikiLeaks released internal Clinton campaign emails, and the US government flatly accused the Kremlin of being involved. And let's not forget those presidential debates.
So plenty has changed. But one thing hasn't: Lichtman, author of Predicting the Next President: The Keys to the White House 2016, is sticking with his prediction of a Trump victory. |
http://www.smh.com.au/world/us-election/trump-will-still-win-says-professor-whos-predicted-30-years-of-us-elections-20161028-gsdjf1.html
And the latest news about her emails won't help. Nor will, since she's been so into Trump for how he treats women, the fact that the trigger for reopening the investigation is a tard named Weiner who's been sexting 15 year old girls and happens to be married to one of Hillary's closer support staff
I saw in the Aged that they reckon the numbers are about 48% to 44% and that several of the polls putting Clinton further ahead are flawed. This may just go down to the wire.
_________________
Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
|
|
|
|
Tannin 
Can't remember
Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Location: Huon Valley Tasmania
|
| Post subject: | |
|
| Pies4shaw wrote: | | Wokko wrote: | | Hillary FBI investigation reopened. Hillary for Jail 2016. |
Would it be a good thing if the election for the most important position in one of our most important allies were - one day - to be between a serious criminal and a guy in a clown costume with an emotional age of 13? |
Are we still talking about 1984? Or did you have 1968 in mind?
_________________
�Let's eat Grandma.� Commas save lives! |
|
|
|
|
Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
|
| Post subject: | |
|
| Wokko wrote: | | Hillary FBI investigation reopened. Hillary for Jail 2016. |
If you can point out what law she has broken, and how, or how she has seriously and wilfully acted against the public interest, then it might be an interesting discussion point. Until then, wanting to put your opponents in jail seems to me vastly more corrupt, corrosive and tyrannous than anything
Hillary seems to have done. It is a very, very odd position for libertarian to take, using the power of the government to jail opponents.
_________________
Two more flags before I die! |
|
|
|
|
Tannin
Can't remember
Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Location: Huon Valley Tasmania
|
| Post subject: | |
|
I disagree, Mugwamp. It is in fact not a position any libertarian could ever take. Claiming to be a libertarian while holding to a view like that is equivalent to claiming to be a vegan over a meal of raw steak.
_________________
�Let's eat Grandma.� Commas save lives! |
|
|
|
|
Wokko
Come and take it.
Joined: 04 Oct 2005
|
| Post subject: | |
|
| Mishandling classified and Top Secret information has put many, many people in jail even those who did it by accident. Clinton did it on purpose so that her emails would remain hidden from any kind of investigation, she also deleted 33,000 of them when the net tightened. I don't see what's so controversial about this. |
|
|
|
|
Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
|
| Post subject: | |
|
| Wokko wrote: | | Mishandling classified and Top Secret information has put many, many people in jail even those who did it by accident. Clinton did it on purpose so that her emails would remain hidden from any kind of investigation, she also deleted 33,000 of them when the net tightened. I don't see what's so controversial about this. |
Petraeus - then CIA Director, no less - actually knowingly passed classified info to a lover, and he was (only) put on probation and fined, presumably because no great harm was done to the national interest, though the behaviour was wilful.
Clinton has not knowingly or intentionally passed classified info to anyone else, as far as I am aware. There was an FBI investigation into the point which concluded that, in the absence of intent to transmit the material wrongfully, or actual harm being done, it was unlikely - on the basis of case law - that a prosecution would succeed. This seems reasonable.
Now, if there is new evidence then it should be investigated. Calling for anyone to go to jail for political reasons before an investigation is of course contrary to the entire spirit of the American constitution and its attempt to secure individual liberty against tyranny, but then, that is what Trumpery is all about - the subversion of American civic ideals through demagogic capture of the US state by a monstrous individual.
None of that makes Clinton a good candidate. I dislike her candidacy and much of what it represents. She deserves censure for bad judgement in violating classified information procedure while SoS. Justice, however, and civility, and decency and constitutional propriety - none of which Trump seems to understand - even extend to Hillary Clinton.
_________________
Two more flags before I die! |
|
|
|
|
3.14159 
Joined: 12 Sep 2009
|
|
|
|
|
stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
|
|
|
|
|
David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
|
| Post subject: | |
|
I'm digging a hole in the backyard for the bomb shelter as we speak. 
(In all seriousness, with all this breathless 24/7 news cycle back and forth about polls – one minute Hillary's going to smash Trump and even take Texas; the next Donald's in with a serious shot of winning – I suspect the results are going to end up the same as they seemed about three months ago: a less-than-convincing Clinton win.)
_________________
All watched over by machines of loving grace |
|
|
|
|
Pies4shaw
pies4shaw
Joined: 08 Oct 2007
|
| Post subject: | |
|
| After stories criticising the governance at Collingwood, US political scandals seem to be the next big seller of newspapers. |
|
|
|
|
David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
|
| Post subject: | |
|
Rundle's been on fire lately.
https://www.crikey.com.au/2016/10/31/rundle-on-weiner-and-possible-president-trump/
| Quote: | Someone should've told Clinton, it's a long way down from the high road
Guy Rundle
Hey remember how a few weeks ago I suggested that people should start mentally preparing themselves for the possibility — just the possibility — of President Trump? Some people didn’t like that, suggesting I was forecasting a Trump win — a measure of their own terror at the prospect, and their own lack of faith in the pretty terrible Clinton campaign.
Days later, Trump was got by one of the few things the Dems have got right: their ability to bait him into angry defence of personal attacks. The Access Hollywood tapes, the angry defence, the attacks on speaker Paul Ryan and the whole Republican party, the desperate flailing in the third debate, threat to sue women accusers, claims the entire election may be rigged against him — by the end of all that, Hillary was up by anything from seven to 12 points, and she was campaigning in Arizona, and advertising in Texas, Georgia and Alaska.
Now? Well, I would mentally prepare yourself for the prospect of President Trump.
In the last week, the Clinton campaign has been hit by fresh revelations from the rolling WikiLeaks releases of the “Podesta emails”, with new releases having real bite about potential Clinton favours and malfeasances. Then on Friday afternoon, a bombshell: FBI director James Comey informed Congress that he was reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server.
There was uproar when the news hit the wires, as everyone realised at the same time what it meant: Hillary Clinton would be officially under investigation by the FBI right up to election day, and beyond. People scrambled for details, but Comey had given nothing away other than that a stash of Clinton emails had been found at “another source”, as part of a separate investigation.
Hours later, the whole thing was thrown into further uproar when the subject of that “other investigation” was revealed: Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of Clinton’s top aide Huma Abedin, currently under investigation for, well … let’s go back a bit.
Weiner is the ex-congressman from New York state, who resigned in 2011 after being caught sending dick pics to several women, an infraction for which Abedin forgave him. So much so that she helped out on his 2013 race to be mayor of New York, all of which was filmed in the fly-on-the-wall doco Weiner — and which included the eruption of a fresh scandal, because Weiner had been sexting another woman (one “Sydney Leathers”, who repeatedly ambushed him at events, all on tape). It was all consensual, but that doesn’t fly in American politics, and Weiner’s campaign was sunk. Abedin stuck by him, even as she became perhaps the most important person, apart from Hillary herself, in winning the Democrats a third term.
And waaddaya know, Weiner was caught sexting again. Except this time, it was to a 15-year-old girl, and suddenly he was very very screwed. Abedin separated from him. The FBI got involved. One of the things they picked up in the investigation was a laptop shared by Weiner and Abedin (I know, ewwwwwww, right?) and therein was a batch of emails between Abedin and Clinton, that Abedin appears to have forwarded to herself for work purposes.
Thus the emails are probably duplicates of those already seen by the FBI. But they may not be, as Hillary destroyed a number of them during the FBI investigation. Since the issue at hand is how Hillary handled emails marked confidential or top secret — that should never have been on a private server, much less a sticky laptop — there is a compelling reason for re-investigation.
Whether FBI director James Comey was required to announce such, as he says he was, is currently being politically litigated hour-by-hour across all media. Comey claims that the fact that he had earlier testified that the investigation was closed, meant that he had no choice but to notify Congress that it was open again.
There then followed a perfect crossover, with Democrats who had previously praised Comey as a stern guardian of the law, etc — after announcing that he wouldn’t be sending the case for prosecution — now piling on. Two weeks ago he was a “fine public servant”, resisting pressure. Now outgoing-Senator Harry Reid says he may have broken the law. Others say that he was responding to “peer pressure” — srsly — from other agents, angry that the original emails inquiry had been truncated.
Republicans, who had piled on Comey — Trump said that there would be an inquiry into his possible prosecution — are now, of course, praising this fine, upstanding champion against the blah blah. The party reversals are utterly shameless. If prior to this, politics made the public feel like they wanted to throw up, we are now at the retching-water-on-the-bathroom-floor stage.
Weinergate 4: A Very Weinereen came at the end of a bad week for team Clinton, as the steady release by Wikileaks of emails from the “Podesta files” began to bite it. It’s either pure coincidence, or the individual emails have become more and more problematic for the Clintons with each fresh release. Early releases gave a picture of the Clinton Foundation and campaign as a small, separate world insouciantly soliciting charity donations from big corps and sovereign wealth funds without much thought to issues of transparency or separation from influence, together with a lot of bitchiness about Bernie Sanders, possible passage of debate questions from media to team Hillary, and clear prejudice against the Sanders campaign by the DNC.
An email a few days ago detailed the promise to the King of Morocco for a Clinton Foundation jamboree in Morocco, in exchange for $12 million dollars, about which much was made. But that was merely a curtain-raiser to a genuine smoking-pistol — a long email by disgruntled Foundation associate Doug Band, claiming that Bill Clinton had gained tens of millions in speaking and consultancy fees from foundation donors, by piggybacking on the donation effort. Any doubt that the releases had a deliberate escalation to them were dispelled when WikiLeaks announced a few hours ago that it would be launching “phase three” of its releases next week. Phase three? Julian, Julian, I thought we agreed: none of this till you get your undersea headquarters.
With the Trump campaign looking ever more each day like Led Zeppelin’s chaotic 1971 tour, an aimless 747-based wandering across the nation without rhyme or reason, the weirdest thing about this election is that Wikileaks has essentially given the Republican presidential campaign the only narrative structure it possesses. Without that, it would be nothing but Trump landing in cities and bitching about Rosie O’Donnell and those “lying”, 12, 13, 14 women, to fans baying for blood in “Jew-S-A”.
Win or lose (and the estimable Mr Bowe has a deep dive into the polling to date), the Podesta releases have had their effect, an expose of the cynical, assured and cosy world of elite power on the “progressive” side, the arrogance displayed towards any and all outside the charmed circle of enthusiastic globalisers. Also, and as a by-product, an expose of the bloated, bitchy and ineffectual world of the Clinton campaign, with its layers of managers and party panjandrums, in contrast to the lean, efficient and effective outfit Obama ran in 2008 and 2012. Team Clinton has decided to go in hard on the FBI, having earlier declared that they were taking the “high road”. It’s an … interesting choice.
Fair to say that the WikiLeaks strategy is dividing the left right down the middle, and with a degree of bitterness of the sort that ends in one side putting the other up against the wall. Mainstream progressives have always been pro-Clinton, but there is now a split between left progressives (liberals in US parlance) and the left. Thus, liberals like Bill Maher and Michael Moore, hitherto supportive of Assange, have gone in hard for Hillary, dismissing any notion that the Podesta emails reveal anything — when of course they reveal the full anatomy of ruling-class power on the progressive side. That there is greater and more pernicious corruption on the Trump side, the gangster ruling-class pretending to be peoples’ tribunes, does not alter that picture.
Should Trump get elected — with at least one more October surprise before we get to the November surprises — the pursuit and prosecution of Clinton will be relentless, to the limit of legality and beyond. But, as millions are realising with a sinking feeling, even if Clinton gets elected, barring miracles, she will face a hostile House, which may convene relentless inquiries against her, and go for impeachment proceedings prior to the 2018 midterms.
How far they go would be a question purely strategic, and factional — no sense of decorum or national greater good would enter into it. It would all be about what they can get away with, with independent voters. Fair to say that Clinton’s behaviour as exposed has driven millions in the country to a pitch of fury, and exasperated many of those inclined to defend her. Should she lose, one useful consequence will be an upheaval in the Democratic party, following the utter discrediting of the Clinton machine.
Most likely, Hillary will win. But the lead has tracked into four points, from five or six. This could be a squeaker. Even better! Not impossible that there’d be a split between the popular vote and the electoral college result, running in either direction.
So as I say, mentally prepare yourself for the prospect of President Trump … and Weiner 5: Where you Putin That? Stay tuned for more from the last, best hope of man … |
_________________
All watched over by machines of loving grace |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum
You cannot attach files in this forum
You cannot download files in this forum
|
|
The Rules
FAQ
Usergroups
Calendar
Search
Log in
Register
