1988

One of the myriad reasons I’m voting against him, I assure you. I mean the fact he is what stands for a moderate Republican these days says all you need to know about Republicans, really. Basically him standing against party leadership more than most of his peers is about the equivalent of saying someone has more backbone than a jellyfish. It ain’t a big compliment.

The problem s there isn’t really a great example of a senate Republican who isn’t prone to crazy, and as such any illustrations will ultimately fall apart when examining the actual person.

1989

Trump’s illegal immigrant deportation plan:

[quote]
During an appearance on Fox News Monday night, Trump said that “the first thing we’re going to do if and when I win is we’re going to get rid of all of the bad ones.”

But Trump then added that “everybody else” will go through an existing process already being used by the Obama administration, although the GOP nominee said he would enforce the law “perhaps with a lot more energy.”

“As far as everybody else, we’re going to go through the process,” Trump said. “What people don’t know is that Obama got tremendous numbers of people out of the country. Bush, the same thing. Lots of people were brought out of the country with the existing laws. Well, I’m going to do the same thing.”[/quote]

Thanks Obama.

1990

I don’t watch much Fox News but they have it at the gym while I am there. It is interesting that while Fox airs Trump’s speeches live and fawns over them, they also take their fair share of shots at him. I don’t remember them doing that to GOP candidates in prior years, at least not after the convention.

1991

Faux even-handedness can only go so far. When you nominate a truly awful person, how can journalists entirely resist calling a spade a spade? And why should they?

1992

I watch Fox every evening at 5PM. Up until recently they were pretty good about calling him out. This week it’s all about how he’s creeping up in the polls and keeping on point. One “politico” was talking about how Hillary was skewing the polls and the “silent Trump voters” would come out in droves and there would be a Trump landslide. They say that the 109 million voters that didn’t vote in any election during both Obama victories are finally going to vote, en mass, for Trump.

1993

Trump supporters are very skeptical of the polls. I remind them that they were likewise so in 2012, but it’s like talking to a brick wall.

Checking 538’s forecast, he’s at 15%, up from 11% last week. . .mainly because AZ and GA are currently slightly red.

1994

All of those terrible things you’ve heard that Trump said and did? None of it true. The media is twisting his words. And they lie! They shouldn’t be allowed to lie and if Trump is elected he will put an end to it. Trump is actually a really good guy. The best. Don’t go by what you are seeing and hearing in the news every day.

1995

Everything becomes plausibly deniable if you say every source is unreliable and biased.

1996

I could imagine John Miller saying that on the phone, definitely.

1997

I watch NBC Nightly News, and I’d say the opposite is true, at least for the last few weeks. Tonight they would not shut up about Trump calling for an independent investigation into the Clinton Foundation (who gives a shit what Trump says?) and spent several minutes talking about Secretary Clinton maybe, possibly, doing favors for Clinton Foundations donors (they did not mention that there’s no evidence of that). Then, later, they spent several minutes talking about how the Clintons have ties to a for-profit College. Just like Trump U, they trotted out half dozen students (PhD students, no less) who felt cheated and wanted their money back. They did briefly mention that Trump U was not a certified school and the Clinton one is.

I think NBC is really going after Clinton because they want to tighten the race.

1998

I think it’s just a continued decline of traditional news reporting. It feels like the “regular” network news (CBS, ABC, NBC) have really fallen off a cliff in terms of news reporting. We tried watching a nightly news show just to get an idea as to what’s going on but after about 5 minutes of semi-real news, the remainder of the show is feel-good stories, facebook posts, youtube videos, crap news and promos of “coming up after the break… a stunning video you won’t want to miss” - repeated 3 times and the video ends up being 15 seconds of I dunno, something pretty trivial (something not newsworthy). With all the stuff going on in the world they still find time to have a story about a fan singing with Britney Spears… crap like that.

Not to mention that 75% of the ads on the show are pushing name brand medicines for erectile disfunction, high blood pressure, diabetes, incontinence, depression…it’s a sad commentary as to who is actually watching these shows!

Really, the only TV related news my wife and I can stand are BBC (which sadly we don’t get!) and Al Jazeera America (which stopped broadcasting). Maybe the PBS news hour. But aside from that, everyone else’s news reporting is turning into a crapfest.

1999

There doesn’t need to be an active/malicious desire to affect the race’s numbers, but the media absolutely wants to keep the ratings/clicks gravy train that comes from a (perceived) tight election going.

The Washington Post had an interesting article yesterday on what the media reports on, specifically which national polls they choose to highlight. Basically, they looked at the 2008 election and which polls got reported on and with what frequency.

The results should not come as a surprise, but the media preferentially reported on (national) polls that showed the race as neck-and-neck, OR they reported on polls that showed a massive gap… very little reporting on a slight or steady lead for one candidate or another. This graphic sums it up nicely:

Essentially, the media over-reported polls where Obama was neck-in-neck or slightly losing to McCain rather than reporting the aggregate conclusion that Obama was ahead.

2000

I guess a 2 point lead isn’t sexy. Does that graph imply that there was a bunch of reporting on non-existent polls where Obama was 4 points ahead?

2001

But you realize that this contributed to what we’ve seen in terms of the party evolution?

If reasonable Republicans cannot, no matter what they do, compete for your vote, then the only votes they can get are from the crazy fringe, which means that the crazy fringe gains increasing influence over the party.

2002

Ridiculous. The party line is toxic anti-democratic bigoted nonsense, and it’s the fault of people like Craig and myself who see it for what it is and refuse to support it?

Causality is a bit backwards there, my friend.

2003

But it’s not, because the only way the party would change would be for moderate refinished to be elected, but if you won’t support them, no matter what their position, then they can only get votes from the crazies.

What’s worse, they need to rile the crazies up, because they need to get them in enough numbers to win with them alone.

2004

This is absurd.

If the GOP wants to court voters like me who find specific planks in their platform abhorrent and deal-breaking, there’s a real easy way to go about doing that.

There is no universe in the infinity of quantum totality in which it is my responsibility to change the GOP platform. I guess maybe if I lived in a shittier state in which the GOP had a stranglehold on government and working from within was the only way to affect anything, but thank goodness my life choices haven’t been that misguided.

2005

The point is that there’s nothing they can say that will change this view, there is plenty that they can do to change this view. If they actually were willing to compromise and force the party to govern and enact legislation and etc either by forcing compromise internally or breaking with the party to vote for what they claim their beliefs are then that could change opinions.

Saying that they condemn various opinions/bills/laws/people etc doesn’t matter if once elected they are going to support those things (or abstain from fighting them). There’s an easy way to actually win back the middle which would be to actually govern in a way that the middle supports instead of talking about centralist ideas in the campaign and then acting more extreme once in office.

For instance, there’s a lot of support in this nation for reduced government spending and deficit reduction. The Republicans have catered to them in speech after speech. But once elected the Republicans have spent at least as much as the Democrats and seem hell bent on increasing the deficit by tax breaks for the very most wealthy. This has driven away a ton of voters. Those voters aren’t coming back because of whatever speech someone gives, those voters would come back if the Republican controlled Congress started doing things like passing or at least proposing some bills that actually did any of that stuff.

2006

See it’s about things like refusing to meet with Garland, going along with the debt ceiling brinksmanship, the obstructionism. Even though Kirk, at times, has bucked party leadership he is still complicit in more than enough of their shenanigans. And there are policy reasons to boot, but I was removing those from consideration.

But the rise in fillibustering, the abandoning of their duty to advise and evaluate appointees of the executive branch, the religious fervor of party purity over actual governance that make the Republican banner persona non gratta.

And the Republican brand really is that toxic. Were he running as a conservative aligned independent, or Libertarian, it would not equate to automatic disqualification. I have voted for such persons in the past, and hold no such negative reaction.

But when the party as a whole embraces conspiracy theories like Obama’s secret Muslim tendencies, birtherism, and wholesale obstructionism, that party is dead to me.

EDIT: also what @Lantz said.

2007

Until and unless the GOP demonstrates interest in responsible governance, it is irresponsible to vote for GOP candidates.

There is hope that this can change. It was not too long ago that the GOP was not exclusively focused on feeding red meat to their gerrymandered, FoxNews-ified, fact-free angry base. The party could return to reality-based pragmatism. I’m not sure how, but I believe that it’s possible.

If they do that, they deserve consideration from independents and centrist democrats. Their current version, though, is simply poison.