WHERE THE DEPLORABLES ARE: Data are hard!

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2017

Part 1—Under every bed:
Should Hillary Clinton have said what she said about our many deplorables?

You may recall the incident! In early September 2016, while running for president, Clinton made an unusual comment about the people supporting her opponent, Donald J. Trump.

She about that half of Trump's supporters belonged in a "basket of deplorables." They deserved that designation because they were "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it," she rather expansively said.

"Some of those folks—they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America," she said as part of this same comment. From Clinton's full remarks, it wasn't clear if all the deplorables were irredeemable, or if only some of them were.

This was a highly unusual statement from someone running for president. Her opponent, Candidate Trump, said that Candidate Clinton's statement showed "her true contempt for everyday Americans." The statement became a rallying-point for Trump's supporters.

(For the record, 63 million people ended up voting for Candidate Trump. [66 million voted for Clinton.] As such, Clinton had placed well over 30 million people in her now-famous basket.)

Clinton has now released a book, What Happened, in which she offers her account of last year'as campaign. In a somewhat surprising passage, she defends the substance of her remarks about the deplorables, if not the political wisdom of making such a remark.

On the substance, Clinton says that her sweeping assessment was right. In this essay, CNN's Dan Merica quotes from Clinton's book:
MERICA (9/12/17): Clinton writes that she handed Trump a "political gift" in September when she told an audience of supporters that "you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables."

Her admission of a mistake isn't without equivocation, though.

Clinton writes that she was "talking about well-documented reality," citing a 2016 study by the General Social Survey that found 55% of white Republicans "believed that blacks are generally poorer than whites 'because most just don't have the motivation or willpower to pull themselves up and out of poverty.'"

"Generalizing about a broad group of people is almost always unwise. And I regret handing Trump a political gift with my deplorables comments," Clinton writes. "I know that a lot of well-intentioned people were insulted because they misunderstood me to be criticizing all Trump voters. I'm sorry about that."
Quite correctly, Clinton says she didn't condemn all of Donald J. Trump supporters to the agonies of Hell. She's sorry that people misread her remarks—remarks whose accuracy she has now reaffirmed.

It's very unusual for a political figure to make such comments about such a wide swath of the public. It's amazing to see Clinton double down on the accuracy of her assessment, in a book for which she presumably conducted full measures of research.

Having said that, let us also say this:

What Clinton says about last year's General Social Survey is basically accurate, perhaps perfectly so—at least as far as she went.

What is the General Social Survey? The GSS is a giant survey of social and political attitudes. According to the leading authority on the project, it's "a sociological survey created and regularly collected since 1972 by the research institute NORC at the University of Chicago. It is funded by the National Science Foundation."

As such, the GSS is conducted by some of the nation's top brainiacs in the general field of social science. Last year, as in prior years, this is one of the questions respondents were asked. We apologize for reprinting the question:
Question from the General Social Survey:
"On the [sic] average (Negroes/Blacks/African-Americans) have worse jobs, income, and housing than white people. Do you think these differences are because most (Negroes/Blacks/African-Americans) just don't have the motivation or will power to pull themselves up out of poverty?"
That's a stereotype-laden question. As best we can tell, the brainiacs at NORC ask this question about no other group. Arguably, its inclusion in the GSS helps draw back the curtain on the hearts and minds of Those Top Researchers Today.

We'll discuss the judgment of those NORC researchers before the week is through. That said, that unfortunate question was indeed asked and answered as part of last year's GSS, and Clinton's statistic is basically accurate, perhaps even perfectly so.

For ourselves, we can't easily find the series of clicks which tells us what "white Republicans" said in response to that question. But according to the somewhat unwieldy GSS site, these were the responses to that question from "non-black Republicans," and from Republicans overall. Once again, we apologize for posting the question:
Responses to particular question, 2016 GSS
"On the average (Negroes/Blacks/African-Americans) have worse jobs, income, and housing than white people. Do you think these differences are because most (Negroes/Blacks/African-Americans) just don't have the motivation or will power to pull themselves up out of poverty?"

Responses by non-black Republicans:
Yes: 53.1 percent
No: 43.1 percent
Don't know: 3.7 percent

Responses by Republicans overall:
Yes: 53.3 percent
No: 42.8 percent
Don't know: 3.9 percent
On the basis of that survey question, Clinton continues to say that half the people who supprted Trump belong in the "basket of deplorables" and may even be irredeemable. She was dumb to say it, but right on the substance, Clinton has said in her book.

Let's ignore the possible lack of political wisdom in Candidate Clinton's original remark. Every candidate says something unwise at some point in a long campaign. There's no reason why Candidate Clinton should have been the exception.

Forget the possible lack of political wisdom in Clinton's extemporaneous comment. Over the next few days, we're going to review her defense of the accuracy of her assessment.

Having said that, we offer this trigger warning:

We've reviewed the full data set from the GSS. We've seen how Democrats responded to that question as well as Republicans.

We've seen how our different "racial" groups responded—whites, Hispanics and blacks.

A full year later, Candidate Clinton is still upset about the way Trump's supporters answered that unfortunate question. Tomorrow, we're going to show you how her own supporters answered that question. We may even try to figure out what the full set of data might mean, perhaps about the usefulness of including such questions in social science research.

This probably isn't the most significant part of Clinton's new book. That said, we think this episode has much to tell us about the way our broken American discourse currently works.

We think the episode tells us some things about Candidate Clinton herself. We think it tells us some things about the American press corps.

We think the episode tells us some things about the nation's liberal social scientists. As a general matter, we think it tells us somethings about the "hive mind" of our own liberal world, which has misfired very badly over the past several decades.

More than anything else, we think this episode helps us ponder our liberal tribe's desire to loathe The Others. To a substantially lesser extent, we'd say the same thing about this recent piece at Slate, in which William Saletan examines five recent surveys in an attempt to examine (we're quoting a headline) "the president’s racist base, by the numbers."

We'll review that piece later on in the week. Tomorrow, we'll look at the wider set of responses to that stereotype-laden question from last year's GSS.

All through the annals of time, tribal groups have looked for ways to loathe, despise and negatively characterize The Others. This deeply entrenched human desire has given rise to the endless succession of wars we've conducted down through the annals of time.

We humans are always able to see how bad The Others are. AS our horror grows, we usually manage to find such demons under every bed.

In the modern context, as we pleasure ourselves with our exquisite loathing, we rarely bother to take the time to review full data sets. We're much more likely to pick and choose our data, selectively feeding the beast of our exquisite loathing.

In the world of us rational animals, loathing The Others has always felt good. Checking the data is hard.

Tomorrow: "White" and "black" responses

71 comments:

  1. Coates in the Atlantic wrote a similar justification for the remarks. Claiming they are really "deplorable" based on a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll where half of Trump supporters said blacks were “criminal,” “unintelligent,” “lazy” and “violent”.

    30 percent of Hillary supporters said the same thing in the poll! 30 percent of Hillary supporters blacks were “criminal,” “unintelligent,” “lazy” and “violent”. (It may have been 25% I can't find it)

    So a third of Hillary supporters were in the basket too according to his logic.

    You hear that fools? A third of you are deplorable! "open and acknowledged racists" according to Coate's logic.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. View blacks as less 'intelligent' than whites:
      Trump supporters: 32%
      Clinton supporters: 22%

      View blacks as more 'lazy' than whites:
      Trump supporters: 40%
      Clinton supporters: 25%

      View blacks as more 'rude' than whites:
      Trump supporters: 44%
      Clinton supporters: 30%

      View blacks as more 'violent' than whites:
      Trump supporters: 49%
      Clinton supporters: 31%

      View blacks as more 'criminal' than whites:
      Trump supporters: 46%
      Clinton supporters: 32%

      Delete
    2. Trump gave his supporters the bigotry they craved. So maybe Clinton's problem was she didn't give the 10's of millions of bigots who supported her (according to Coates's logic) the bigotry they craved. Hence the loss.

      Delete
    3. According to FBI statistics, blacks, although only 13% of the population, commit 51% of homicides. Maybe there's something to that.

      Delete
  2. With some recent exceptions, the media never interrogates where the word "white" itself came from. It isn't a natural law, it's not even an ethnicity. It's just a political designation that separated citizens from slaves. The words White and Black came out of colonialism. Before that you were a citizen of England or Spain or Egypt. So how the heck are Republicans to see that American conservatism is a racist movement if it's just considered natural that the opposite of Black is White? In 2007, Republicans, with a token minority Michelle Malkin at the helm, advocated the removal of white supremacists from the FBI's terror watch list because it included too many conservatives.

    Of course, you fight racism with solidarity. But both Dems and Republicans are parties of exclusion, it's a matter of degree. Republicans have excluded non-racists through coded words like "safe schools" and "borders" that no educated man or woman of color can tolerate. It is a movement with the militancy of Bolshevism that is devout enough to be called "a low-level insurgency."

    Going back at least to the purges of ACLU members during McCarthy era, the Democrats have a strategy of ostracizing socialists while loudly protesting on behalf of the vulnerable and the poor. Hillary Clinton, for example, invited an advocate for single payer healthcare, Vicente Navarro, to the 90's healthcare discussions as an ineffectual token. When the push failed, the insurance industry encouraged the party to blame the voters and they did. They then waged war on national healthcare as a program designed to kill off old people.

    Having no real program for working people since the 1970's, Democrats of course have to get their base riled up with something, and have to emphasize the racism of their opponents. But the factions that were in charge in 2016 were basically Big Law and Security Contractors, Neera Tanden and John Podesta. These jobs have some of the highest rates of psychopathy, and the voters saw it. Republicans then just stand at the podium and wait while voter disillusionment with incumbents swings around, and pretend to be fighting the establishment.

    Clinton is frantically lost in this mess, knowing only the official pieties meant to keep a certain team inside the leadership playing ball. When the women march she doesn't show up, and a good thing too, because those who did were labeled anti-Israel by the NY Times, a neat mechanism that filtered out the grassroots but not bank-bailout drone-strike president Barack Obama.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The words White and Black (light and dark) do not come out of Colonialism. They are the first categories formed in any color categorization system. They are an inherent part of mental representation, which is a cognitive process essential to memory.

      All cultures stratify people as lighter or darker skinned within their own society, regardless of contact with so-called white cultures. Read some anthropology!

      Western culture enslaved all kinds of people, irrespective of race and skin color. They did this all the way up through the American Revolution and people are still doing it. Slavery is not ended -- the UN fights it today all over the world.

      But this comment is a great example of where Somerby's approach leads. Here is where the alt-right and the Bernie bros find common cause. Happy now? I'll bet you are.

      Delete
    2. Everything you just wrote is totally bullcrap.

      Delete
    3. Arguing with racists is like arguing with a 5 year old. Either you are prepared to make a mature and difficult decision about your identity, or not. It appears you'd rather collapse all of colonial history into a simple mistake about gradients. What an amazing lie.

      Delete
    4. I trust my five year old and his judgment of his own sexuality more than I would a soviet funded bigot!

      Delete
    5. What an insane straw man. Go away troll.

      Delete
    6. @10:33 This is Bernie's argument. It is also a version of the marxist argument. Bernie is not a Democrat because he doesn't share party values. This idea that Clinton and Democrats are cynical in their use of race to manipulate supporters is ugly. I do not doubt the sincerity of those who care about civil rights on the left but arguments like this drove a stake between Clinton and younger voters who were taken in by it.

      Delete
    7. 12:40 PM

      I'm not some sinister Stalinist, I'm just a 27 year old Democrat.

      Anyone who reads this blog regularly should know what a huge mistake it was to nominate such a hated person as Hillary. Doing so rallied Republicans to stop one of their main villains, and it worked.

      Vincente Navarro can speak for himself. Read his article here: https://www.counterpunch.org/2007/11/12/why-hillary-s-health-care-plan-really-failed/

      Delete
    8. Trolling from the left is a way of splitting the Democratic vote in order to keep the Dems from sweeping the 2018 elections.

      Bernie needs to go home and shut up. He is talking about passing a Medicare expansion bill while we are once again fighting back Obamacare repeal. Our efforts needs to be directed where they are needed.

      Trump may be an idiot, but the people riding his coattails are not and they are funding Bernie, an army of trolls, and a massive propaganda campaign on social media, to get their economic agenda enacted.

      Democrats believe in social justice. It is definitional to our party. That is why Bernie is not a Democrat. The question is "what else is Bernie?" At best, he is an opportunist. At worst, what are the possibilities?

      Delete
    9. Excuse me but this is a democracy, not a damn country club. A 12 dollar minimum wage isn't social justice. Heck, even a 15 dollar wage isn't, if you look at inflation.

      Maybe Dems should stop excluding "the wrong kind of white" people from the party finally.

      Delete
    10. Anyone who reads this blog regularly should know what a huge mistake it was to nominate such a hated person as Hillary. Doing so rallied Republicans to stop one of their main villains, and it worked.

      Good thinking, junior. From now on I think we should check first with Roger Stone, David Bossie, Sean Hannity, Rudy Giuliani, and the Mercer family billionaires behind Bannon and Breitbart. Just to make sure they are cool with our choice before we commit.

      But just for the record, Secretary Clinton would have won if not for the ignorant alt-left swallowing Russian fake news and Jill Stein, another Putin strange bedfellow.

      Delete
    11. You're assuming Jill Stein voters would vote for Clinton.

      By the way, Obama was running against third parties but somehow he won. Weird huh?

      Delete
    12. Lets inject some facts into this discussion:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_awards_and_honors_received_by_Hillary_Clinton

      And she was Most Admired Woman of the Year a record 20+ times, beating Michelle Obama and Laura Bush when they were first ladies.

      Her ratings fluctuate. They were high at the end of her tenure as a US Senator and as Secretary of State. They went lower when she was attacked during political campaigns.

      http://www.people-press.org/2015/05/19/hillary-clinton-approval-timeline/

      The attacks from the right are part of the political territory for both Clintons. The attacks from the left were deplorable. Pretending that Clinton deserved her favorability rating after such attacks is ridiculous. No one can withstand the kind of malicious, false, coordinated and well-funded propaganda without seeing a drop in their favorability.

      The difference between Trump's low favorability and Clinton's is that Trump earned his through deplorable words and deeds whereas Clinton did not.

      Delete
    13. Obama was running against third parties but somehow he won. Weird huh?

      Did any of the 3rd party candidates running against Obama sit down and have dinner with Putin?

      Maybe Obama had it easier because Hillary did not act like an ass after she lost the nomination. Bernie couldn't even give her the respect and show enough decency to give her convention unmarred by his sour lemon troops. Even interrupting her very acceptance speech like the asses they were.

      As I said previously, there are no lessons to draw from this election. It was played under different rules, Clinton Rules and we will never see another one like it.

      Delete
    14. Hillary supporters are now blaming Jill Stein for her loss?! And if it's not Stein's fault, it's Sanders' fault. To hear them tell it, she shares no responsibility whatsoever. Pitiful. Hopefully now we'll be done with the Clintons.

      Delete
    15. Thats ridiculous.
      No one is stupid enough to vote for jill Stein as President of the United States. I find it hard to believe she could find the United States on a world map.

      Delete
    16. Most of us are blaming Comey, Putin, and Bernie, in about that order.

      Delete
    17. The point of Hitler's war was to enslave his neighbors of inferior races and put them to work producing goods and services to meet the needs of Germans. Inferior races were French, Italian, Greek, all the Eastern Europeans --anyone not pure German (Aryan). Forced labor occurred in all the Nazi occupied countries in WWII. As all the women and children sold into sex slavery can tell you, being white is no advantage.

      Slavery is a human vice only sometimes associated with skin color, but more often not during our long human history. Look up how serfs were treated by their Russian owners, who were of the same color and ethnicity.

      Delete
  3. "That's a stereotype-laden question. As best we can tell, the brainiacs at NORC ask this question about no other group. Arguably, its inclusion in the GSS helps draw back the curtain on the hearts and minds of Those Top Researchers Today."

    Is Somerby seriously going to argue that inclusion of this question implies that the researchers are themselves believers in this stereotype, that they themselves are biased for asking the question?

    You cannot put a question on such a survey that asks "Are you a racial bigot?" Nor can you ask "Do you believe in negative racial stereotypes?" People answer such questions in a socially desirable way, by saying "of course I am not a bigot". They lie, in other words.

    Many people would recognize even the question asked, about why African Americans are more likely to be poor, as one tapping into racial attitudes and would know how to give an answer that conforms to socially desirable racial attitudes. They would know how to appear less bigoted. Republicans appear to be less able to do this than Democrats.

    Somerby takes this question at face value. In doing so, he reveals that he knows nothing whatsoever about how social science research is done. That is unsurprising. No doubt, he is going to argue that the question is invalid because a substantial proportion of Democrats also answer the question in a way that upholds negative racial stereotypes about African Americans. He is going to claim that because some proportion of Democrats show racial bias, the question itself and the bias itself are specious. He is going to claim that Democrats (and by extension Clinton) cannot complain about Republicans unless and until all Democrats have no bias at all.

    He is going to ignore what the Democratic party stands for, he is going to ignore Clinton's own lifelong work and actions and beliefs, and he is going to ignore the dogwhistles and explicit encouragement by Donald Trump of the alt-right's racist agenda, in order to claim that deplorables exist in both parties and thus there is no rightful way to call out deplorable attitudes.

    I believe it was foolish for Clinton to call Trump's supporters deplorable. I also believe many of them ARE deplorable. I saw them beating up the press, reveling in their bias against immigrants and the poor. I didn't see that at the Democratic convention or at Clinton rallies. I saw it at Trump rallies. This was a consequence of the media's broadcast of those events in their entirety, including the prideful crowds and their antics outside the venues. It was deplorable in any sane world.

    Where has Somerby's sanity gone? Why is he now justifying the alt-right by calling social science researchers biased because they include questions measuring racial bigotry on their surveys? Somerby should be ashamed of both his ignorance and his motives.

    Why is Somerby, who is presumably not a bigot because of his biracial relative, engaging in this kind of tactic? If I were being charitable, I would chalk it up to a misguided defense of Bernie's attack on identity politics. He is trying to show that we cannot engage in identity politics (the ugly name for civil rights and social justice these days) without being hypocritical, because the left is not pure, no matter what its values and goals. Yay yay yay yay yay, look at how biased the left is, lets just follow Bernie's economic agenda since we cannot change racial stereotypes and the left is just as bad as the right. Somerby is correct to talk about loathing, but it is him that I feel that loathing towards. I expect this crap from Republicans and don't particular hate them. I am hating Somerby these days. He should know better.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Since you're hating Somerby these days, to the point that you're actually putting ridiculous words in his mouth in anticipation of arguments he has yet to even make, please, please, just read something else!

      Delete
    2. Tomorrow Somerby will post his next installment. He doesn't read the comments, so nothing said here will affect what he posts tomorrow. She if he doesn't follow through as I have predicted. If he doesn't, you will have a complaint.

      Delete
    3. Gee, "Unknown", I'm not one to criticize how anyone gets his jollies,
      so if you get a kick out of being Bob's unpaid bouncer, then who am I to judge? Although your contribution here, consisting of telling other commenters to "get lost", is minimal.

      Delete
  4. Better trolling please

    ReplyDelete
  5. Deducing bigotry based on attitudes is a great way to insure that surveys will always show lots of bigotry. Conduct is more important IMHO. If someone doesn't discriminate in her behavior, that's all you can reasonably ask. And, that's surely all the government can demand.

    Our attitudes and thoughts are our own. Die gedanken sind frei, as the old song says. BTW remember when freedom of thought was a liberal virtue?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It is offensive that you would use this song, emblematic of the anti-Nazi resistance to Hitler in Germany by White Rose, to express support for racial bigotry. What a creep you are!

      Delete
    2. Anon -- That usage was intentional. My point is that some people who claim to oppose bigotry are behaving in ways that were criticized by this anti-Nazi song.

      Delete
    3. That song did not criticize anyone. It was written in the middle ages and appropriated by various groups to express their own political opposition to oppression. YOU are not going to use it to support alt-right bigots in their free expression of hatred for minorities. Doing so makes you scum because it disrespects the prior meanings attached to the song in contexts like opposition to Hitler from within (which led to the deaths of many of the youth involved in White Rose). That your usage was intentional makes it worse, since you casually spit on these courageous martyrs against fascism in the name of protecting bullies emboldened by Trump to attack those they hate. That song has never been about condoning hatred.

      Tolerating hate speech does not require us to tolerate hate. Hate speech that is followed by violence is not protected speech.

      I don't think you belong here any more, David. Please pack up your actuarial tables and leave the premises.

      Delete
    4. lol @ 2:52. more schoolmarmism. you guys are as bad as the prohibitionists

      Delete
    5. In the words of Eric Cartman: "I do what I want."

      Delete
    6. The foundation of pretty much all viable cognitive research operates on the premise that thoughts and behaviors are linked, and that thoughts in fact inform emotions, behaviors, and physical reactions. The belief that people being conquered are unusually tolerant to pain is a standard running right through war doctrine. Thomas Jefferson consoled himself that his slaves could withstand violence because their "griefs are transient." When the US bombed Vietnam, it was argued "The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner." To use another but not unrelated form of violence, acceptance of rape myths is one of the leading causes of rape, and the continued difficulty in prosecuting it. Simply put, in a democratic society, with juries and armies, thoughts are very important.

      Delete
    7. There is no such thing as "viable" cognitive research, although it sounds pretty hefty.

      First you say that thoughts cause actions, then you say that thoughts justify them. That implies a different temporal order (thoughts after actions, not before them).

      People who study cognition don't much like it when amateurs selectively use their research to justify their own preferred beliefs.

      Doctors believed that infants didn't feel pain either. Does that justify infanticide? You are an idiot.

      If you are going to make this argument work, you first have to find one set of thoughts and beliefs that characterize a whole culture. Good luck with that. Unless you do, you are just cherrypicking beliefs and using them as post hoc explanation for actions which probably have a whole set of causes. Historians learn not to do this. You, on the other, find coincidence meaningful. That's going to make you susceptible to all kinds of conspiracy theories and nonsense.

      The foundation of cognitive research is experiment. That means showing cause and effect by manipulating variables and showing their impact on measurements. We don't run around believing our pet theories just because a few examples suggest co-occurrence.

      For example, there is also a belief that people who win in battle are tolerant to pain (e.g., Navy Seals, boxers). If you have both the losers and winners exceptionally tolerant to pain, what is left of your theory?

      Delete
    8. To use your example of Navy seals, they experience very high rates of trauma too. Aggressors and victims both have trauma and experience anxiety and depression, and have to be treated for that. Cognitive therapy is the leading framework for understanding that.

      Delete
    9. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

      Delete
    10. [QUOTE] President Lyndon Johnson chose William Westmoreland, a distinguished veteran of World War II and the Korean War, to command the U.S. Military Assistance Command in Vietnam (MACV) in June 1964. Over the next four years, the general directed much of U.S. military strategy during the Vietnam War, spearheading the buildup of American troops in the region from 16,000 to more than 500,000. His strategy of attrition aimed to inflict heavy losses on North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces using superior U.S. firepower, but resulted in a costly stalemate by late 1967.

      The enemy’s ambitious Tet Offensive in early 1968 cast serious doubt on Westmoreland’s claims of progress in the war effort, even as he called for some 200,000 more troops. Growing antiwar sentiment on the home front led President Johnson to halt bombing attacks on North Vietnam in March 1968, and in June he replaced Westmoreland in command of the MACV. [END QUOTE] LINK

      I had always assumed the context of that quote about "the Oriental" had more to do with why Westmoreland thought his strategy of attrition had proved less effective than he thought it would than as a justification for U.S. bombing in North and South Vietnam.

      That said, a whole lot of sixty and over lefties in the United States owe their familiarity with that precise quote to an astounding one minute thirty-eight seconds of film from the 1974 documentary "Hearts and Minds." LINK

      If you can believe it, these were Westmoreland's revised remarks after, we are left to surmise, his initial statement was uttered with more bluntness than the general had intended. LINK




      Delete
  6. Matt Yglesias shows a chart of the impact of Comey's statement on Clinton's poll numbers and states that there is fairly strong evidence that Comey in fact did affect the outcome of the election.

    https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/9/18/16305486/what-really-happened-in-2016

    See the last of the 7 charts.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Nonsense. Comey saved her ass, by re-opening the case and taking Weiner's laptop from leaky NYPD custody.

      He's always been a faithful minion of the Clinton Crime Family.

      Delete
    2. You didn't look at the chart did you?

      Delete
    3. No, and why would I care? Like I said, Comey saved her ass, by re-opening the case and taking Weiner's laptop from NYPD custody.

      If he didn't re-open the case and get the laptop, in all likelihood she'd be in prison now.

      Delete
    4. Shorter Mao: I don't need any facts and I don't care whether I am saying anything true or not.

      Delete
    5. I sure don't need any irrelevant factoids from Killary's fanclub boys.

      Delete
    6. The source in this case was election.princeton.edu

      Delete
    7. "...in all likelihood she'd be in prison now."

      What's the typical prison sentence for the crime of being sloppy with emails?

      Delete
    8. Hello, dear, anybody there? There was a reason why the Clinton Crime Family used their own mail server, and it's not sloppiness. It's the content of their emails.

      Delete
    9. When someone uses the phrase "Clinton Crime Family" I know I do not have to read a word they say.

      Delete
    10. It's a Dragonspeak flaw in Comrade Boris's translation.

      Delete
  7. "All through the annals of time, tribal groups have looked for ways to loathe, despise and negatively characterize The Others."

    Yeah, sure, however: some despise, while others only negatively characterize. Big difference.

    You see, as someone noted (quite correctly, imo): liberals believe that conservative are evil, while conservatives believe that liberals are mere idiots.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's so true.

      Ben Carson raised some eyebrows Tuesday night, when he veered off his prepared remarks at the Republican National Convention to compare Hillary Clinton to Lucifer, by way of a long tangent about the late community organizer Saul Alinsky. Given the opportunity to explain himself the next day, Carson eagerly defended his thesis about their axis of evil by doubling down on the Satan-Clinton connection.

      Delete
    2. Mao, men are ambitious or power hungry. Women are "pushy broads".

      Delete
    3. "You just sound ridiculous when you type this stuff."

      As long as the rubles keep rolling in...

      Delete
  8. From Political Wire today:

    "Bloomberg: “Last month, just before her book What Happened was published, Barack Obama spoke in New York to clients of Northern Trust Corp. for about $400,000, a person familiar with his appearance said. Last week, he reminisced about the White House for Carlyle Group LP, one of the world’s biggest private equity firms, according to two people who were there. Next week, he’ll give a keynote speech at investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald LP’s health-care conference.”

    “Obama is coming to Wall Street less than a year after leaving the White House, following a path that’s well trod and well paid. While he can’t run for president, he continues to be an influential voice in a party torn between celebrating and vilifying corporate power. His new work with banks might suggest which side of the debate he’ll be on and disappoint anyone expecting him to avoid a trap that snared Clinton. Or, as some of his executive friends see it, he’s just a private citizen giving a few paid speeches to other successful people while writing his next book.”

    --------------

    But, when Clinton does this, she has sold out to Goldman Sachs, or whatever. Obama was always in the pocket of Wall Street and no one cared. When Clinton ran, the Bernie Bros tagged her as crooked because of activities that every out of office politician engages in. These are the Clinton rules.

    I didn't vote for Obama because of his close ties with Wall Street. His ties were gratuitous, since Wall Street was not part of his congressional district, yet he received more campaign funding from Wall Street than Clinton did (in 2008). And then there was Larry Summers. Matt Yglesias points out that educated women supported Clinton disproportionately. No educated woman could be sanguine about Obama's choice of Larry Summers as a financial advisor. We remember what he said and did as head of Harvard.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I suggest that there are also "Obama Rules", the media found it nearly impossible to criticize a black man.

      Delete
    2. No one cared? Obama had and continues to have his non-right wing critics. The "they all do it" argument has got to stop, otherwise we'll never do any better than what we have been getting. None of what Obama did or does absolves Clinton, she remains and always will be a big money tool.

      Delete
    3. She uses big money resources to do good for the little guy. Other tools build Mar a Lagos with gold toilets.

      Delete
    4. Dave the Guitar PlayerSeptember 19, 2017 at 1:09 PM

      Politics is not a "holier than thou" game, where you can decide to withhold your support in the election because the candidate is not "good enough" for you. You have to get involved early and often to make sure you support the best candidate that you can, and when the time comes to vote, you make sure your vote elects the better of the two candidates. Anything else is just letting someone like Trump win just to score points with you friends about how "pure" you are. Elections have consequences and the most vulnerable in our nation are going to suffer because too many people couldn't be bothered to vote for the lesser of two evils. Grow up.

      Delete
  9. Hillary was right. Bob should examine what she says about the media and dicuss an article that appeared on Vox documenting how the media deliberately distorted what she said about coal mining.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Political affiliation doesn't give Bob the answer that he was looking for, so he found one that did. Talk about cherry picking.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Clinton's cowardly Iraq invasion pro-authorization vote cost her the Presidency. No guts, no glory.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. "cowardly"?
      Because she didn't "love Saddam" nor "hate America'?

      Delete
    2. Just as the anti-war folks were begging for a leader who would stand with them and say NO!, she cast her lot with the hawks. Thought she could win the respect and admiration of the 'why do you hate America?" crowd. When it was all said and done all that was left for her was to complain that she had been duped by the neocons. I have no sympathy for her.

      Delete
    3. Spoken like someone who never read the speech she gave about the war at the time.

      Delete
    4. She voted for authorization for the war ... then tried to cover her ass with a speech. Typical Clinton "triangulation". A simple NO! would have been much more useful.

      Delete
    5. That'll teach her for siding with corporate America.

      Delete
  12. Will someone please relieve the "economic anxiety" of Anonymous at 1:26 PM?

    ReplyDelete
  13. Glorious be unto happy love spell the man who make me see reasons that there are still real and genuine spell casters like him. since 3 weeks now i have witness what is called heart broken. my boyfriend that promised me marriage failed me and impregnate me and leave,he dump me,he stop calling" he stop picking my calls,and he no longer respond to me. I have be looking for solution,I fall into the hands of fake spell caster,they rough me off and took my money without help.I have cried,I have weep"and tears runs out of eyes. the silentness in my heart brought me to the deepest path of failure that I lost my job. crying all day,because my life was lonely. so thanks to Dr happy who came into my life and brought me the greatest joy that was lost. i saw his web on http://happylovespell2.webs.com/ while browsing and I contacted him, tell him what am passing through with no doubt because of what i saw about him,was enough to believe. and i was given words of solution on what to do. i can't really help thinking about it i have tried to see what i can do, i manage to provide him half of the money for the spell, and he help me with the rest. after casting the spell, 12hrs later, here comes my boyfriend with a rose flower on his hand and i was even about going out,i saw him in front of my door when he sees me he knee and said he is dying i should forgive him and accept him back he was crying,i can't wait to let him finish I quickly crab him and kiss him, just then" he said he is restless without me, just as the Dr happy said it will be. he brought out a ring and put it on my hand. our wedding day was scheduled,1 week after we got married. today makes it a month and we are living happily I don't know how to praise him enough, he has done me a thing i can never forget in my life. and i can't really share to myself alone, I want you all to help me praise him because if it wasn't for him, i already plan of committing suicide. but right now am now so happy more than i was before. if you fine it difficult to get your ex boyfriend back, contact him via..... email happylovespell2@gmail.com also make a view at his web site: http://happylovespell2.webs.com/ or add him on whats-app +2348133873774

    ReplyDelete
  14. jared spencer's a momma's boySeptember 19, 2017 at 6:59 PM

    There's not a slag heap big enough to contain @ 1:26

    ReplyDelete
  15. Someone who says "standard of deviation" when he means "standard deviation" isn't showing off much of an IQ. Love it when folks misspell their racial taunts.

    ReplyDelete