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http://blog.dilbert.com/post/151504993671/why-does-this-happen-on-my-vacation-the-trump

Why Does This Happen on My Vacation? (The Trump Tapes)
Posted October 8th, 2016 @ 1:58am

By now you know about the Access Hollywood recording in which Donald Trump said bad things eleven years ago. Many of my readers asked me to weigh in. One of the requests came from anti-Trump GOP elite person Erick Erickson. (Middle name Erick, I assume.) This was his polite request and my response. Read it from bottom to top.

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Challenge accepted!

I’ll give you my thoughts, in no particular order.

1. If this were anyone else, the election would be over. But keep in mind that Trump doesn’t need to outrun the bear. He only needs to outrun his camping buddy. There is still plenty of time for him to dismantle Clinton. If you think things are interesting now, just wait. There is lots more entertainment coming.

2. This was not a Trump leak. No one would invite this sort of problem into a marriage.

3. I assume that publication of this recording was okayed by the Clinton campaign. And if not, the public will assume so anyway. That opens the door for Trump to attack in a proportionate way. No more mister-nice-guy. Gloves are off. Nothing is out of bounds. It is fair to assume that Bill and Hillary are about to experience the worst weeks of their lives.

4. If nothing new happens between now and election day, Clinton wins. The odds of nothing new happening in that timeframe is exactly zero.

5. I assume that 75% of male heads of state, including our own past presidents, are total dogs in their private lives. Like it or not, Trump is normal in that world.

6. As fictional mob boss Tony Soprano once said in an argument with his wife, “You knew what you were getting when you married me!” Likewise, Trump’s third wife, Melania, knew what she was getting. It would be naive to assume Trump violated their understanding.

7. Another rich, famous, tall, handsome married guy once told me that he can literally make-out and get handsy with any woman he wants, whether she is married or not, and she will be happy about it. I doubted his ridiculous claims until I witnessed it three separate times. So don’t assume the women were unwilling. (Has anyone come forward to complain about Trump?)

8. If the LGBTQ community wants to be a bit more inclusive, I don’t see why “polyamorous alpha male serial kisser” can’t be on the list. If you want to label Trump’s sexual behavior “abnormal” you’re on shaky ground.

9. Most men don’t talk like Trump. Most women don’t either. But based on my experience, I’m guessing a solid 20% of both genders say and do shockingly offensive things in private. Keep in mind that Billy Bush wasn’t shocked by it.

10. Most male Hollywood actors support Clinton. Those acting skills will come in handy because starting today they have to play the roles of people who do not talk and act exactly like Trump in private.

11. I’m adding context to the discussion, not condoning it. Trump is on his own to explain his behavior.

12. Clinton supporters hated Trump before this latest outrage. Trump supporters already assumed he was like this. Independents probably assumed it too. Before you make assumptions about how this changes the election, see if anyone you know changes their vote because of it. All I have seen so far is people laughing about it.

12. I hereby change my endorsement from Trump to Gary Johnson, just to get out of the blast zone. Others will be “parking” their vote with Johnson the same way. The “shy Trump supporter” demographic just tripled.

13. My prediction of a 98% chance of Trump winning stays the same. Clinton just took the fight to Trump’s home field. None of this was a case of clever strategy or persuasion on Trump’s part. But if the new battleground is spousal fidelity, you have to like Trump’s chances.

14. Trump wasn’t running for Pope. He never claimed moral authority. His proposition has been that he’s an asshole (essentially), but we need an asshole to fight ISIS, ignore lobbyists, and beat up Congress. Does it change anything to have confirmation that he is exactly what you thought he was?

My thoughts above have more to do with reason than persuasion. And that means you can ignore all of it because reason is not part of decision-making when it comes to politics. On the persuasion level, all that matters is whether this new development changes what you already assumed about Trump.

Personally, it didn’t change what I assumed about Trump’s personal life. Your mileage may vary.

I hope this answers all of Erick Erick Erickson’s questions.
 
IMG_8888.webp
  • “I moved on her like a bitch, but I couldn’t get there. And she was married.”
  • “I did try and fuck her. She was married.”
  • “Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”
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People keep going on about how this will affect women's votes, but how many guys would feel comfortable with this creep stalking around the same room as their daughters or wives?

Sanctity of marriage issue would cost him evangelical votes if he wasn't running against a Clinton, too.
 
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The past 24 hours have been the single greatest day of politics ever. I have been non stop giggling to myself since last night.

I can't even list all the hilariousness.
 
doghouse said:
The past 24 hours have been the single greatest day of politics ever. I have been non stop giggling to myself since last night.

I can't even list all the hilariousness.
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Just wait until he's president. You know it's going to happen. The people really are this stupid.
 
Rambo said:
Just wait until he's president. You know it's going to happen. The people really are this stupid.
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No, this is the death rattle. Rats are fleeing the ship, the RNC has halted all his promotional material, the lawyers are looking at ways to get him off, etc... I'm sure he will probably stay in race but he is toast.

One idea floated if he dipped was Pence / Carson which would be maximum lulz.
 
doghouse said:
No, this is the death rattle. Rats are fleeing the ship, the RNC has halted all his promotional material, the lawyers are looking at ways to get him off, etc... I'm sure he will probably stay in race but he is toast.

One idea floated if he dipped was Pence / Carson which would be maximum lulz.
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Just wait until after the debate. Everyone will be back on board. The only thing the repubs hate more than Trump is Clinton.
 
Trump booster William Bennet saying he needs to step down now.

There's hours of stuff way worse than this. It's going to come out day by day. Trump and the RNC have been informed of this too.
 
That is the details. The Democratic oppo shop has unearthed loads of information they've been holding until now to selectively leak at strategic moments. This thing wasn't the bottom of the barrel apparently.

I find it curious you think a debate is going to help this guy given he got torched in the first one and has fallen 5-6 points behind nationally, not even counting this debacle yet, and the next format is way worse for him than the first. Debates are also Clintons wheelhouse.
 
doghouse said:
I find it curious you think a debate is going to help this guy given he got torched in the first one and has fallen 5-6 points behind nationally, not even counting this debacle yet, and the next format is way worse for him than the first. Debates are also Clintons wheelhouse.
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yes, he performed extremely poorly in the first one, but he's got two more to go. all the people that are denouncing him are GOP stooges that no one likes anyway. with the release of the Clinton emails i think Don's going to have some good material, even with the audience questions.
 
My man Ian Welsh is back with a hot take that's right up doghouse doghouse 's alley

Obama’s Department of Justice’s Prime Job Is To Immunize Rich Wrongdoers
2016 OCTOBER 8
tags: EpiPen, Mylan
by Ian Welsh

Nobody went to jail over the financial crisis. Instead their companies paid fines. Those fines were usually less than the company made in the crisis, and they did not include repayment of salary and bonuses, so the executives always won.

Now the DOJ has immunized Mylan over their EpiPen price gouging:

maker of anti-allergy device EpiPen said its subsidiary Mylan Inc. has agreed to a $465 million settlement with the Justice Department and other government agencies stemming from the classification of EpiPen for Medicaid rebates. The terms of the settlement “do not provide for any finding of wrongdoing” by Mylan

This is deliberate government policy and, yes, it comes from the top, from Obama. Obama and his DOJ engage in what should be considered routine criminal behavior as far as I’m concerned: helping criminals get away with their actions is itself criminal and that’s even before we talk about his actions in Libya and so on.

Scum. Absolute scum. People die when lifesaving drugs are raised to high prices. This is is immunizing negligent homicide.

I want to be real clear, corporate criminals generally do more actual harm than the worst serial killer.

Meanwhile “liberals” act like Obama’s the greatest president ever, even though he left the US economy far worse for most Americans, was a warmonger and engaged in the largest immunization of corporate crime in at least 90 years.

He talks pretty but the man is scum. Scum to the bone. He took Bush’s America and regularized most of it and made some parts worse: kicking out more Hispanics, being far worse on whistleblowers, continuing to sign continuations of the AUMF and so on.

That Obama is scum does not mean, for the less bright, or more partisan, that he is not better than certain alternatives. Beelzebub being the lesser evil to Satan doesn’t mean you want to sup with him.

Scum.
 
So tons of scandals in which both Clintons were (and probably still are) involved, lying to all sorts of institutions and federal agencies, doing favours for money to some of the most awful countries/ people on this planet while holding a public office is somehow dwarfed by whatever remarks Trump made about women (and possibly minorities)?

It's kind of funny, because some of the Clinton voters can be considered rather promiscuous and "macho", and I'm not talking about all the Hollywood celebrities. And lets not forget Hillary's beloved husband.

The problem is that Trump started to listen to his GOP advisors, who applied way too many filters. Looks like he is no longer the angry voice of those who feel left behind.
 
Scherensammler said:
So tons of scandals in which both Clintons were (and probably still are) involved, lying to all sorts of institutions and federal agencies, doing favours for money to some of the most awful countries/ people on this planet while holding a public office is somehow dwarfed by whatever remarks Trump made about women (and possibly minorities)?

It's kind of funny, because some of the Clinton voters can be considered rather promiscuous and "macho", and I'm not talking about all the Hollywood celebrities. And lets not forget Hillary's beloved husband.

The problem is that Trump started to listen to his GOP advisors, who applied way too many filters. Looks like he is no longer the angry voice of those who feel left behind.
Click to expand...

The Clintons are a bunch of shit heels, but if you don't understand how awful a human being Donald Trump is I don't know what to tell you.


Meanwhile, this is on tap for this week.



And Pence just canceled all his campaign events.
 
doghouse said:
Meanwhile, this is on tap for this week.
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I've worked strategic-level PSYOP. Never on Americans, of course, but the principles remain. Everything since the moment Hillary walked onto the debate stage has been right out of the Ratfucker's Hymnal. It's obvious that Trump had no clue how wide-open his past is, or more to the point, what he could and couldn't get away with. He didn't even make an attempt to clean up after himself. His campaign appears to still be figuring out how this game works. Hilarity to ensue in 3 . . . 2 . . .

I do have to wonder if he's a plant by the Clintons to completely demolish the Republican party. You couldn't do more damage to the party if you tried.
 
some good thoughts from Corey Robin

Sex, Dice, and the Trump Tapes


Yesterday, the Washington Post revealed that it had obtained a videotape featuring Donald Trump bragging, in the most graphic and ugly terms, about women he’s groped, harassed, demeaned, and more. Within 24 hours, the tape seems to have transformed the political landscape, with legions of Republican leaders now calling on Trump to step down from the ticket.

1.
Across social media, people are wondering why this particular story has proven so explosive for Trump. Given that everyone already knew the vileness of his views on women and the viciousness of his behavior toward them—not to mention Muslims and Mexicans—what’s so different about this story?

I suspect it’s the profanity. People forget this, but one of the things that most hurt Richard Nixon during Watergate was the release of the White House tapes. The transcripts were laced with what was politely called in the media “expletive deleted,” and even though some of the expletives were rather mild, it made Middle America sick to think that their straight-laced president might be slinging “fuck” and “shit” with all the abandon of an unwashed hippie.

But I also think it matters, a lot, that the New York Times, rather than relying on coy evasion, went all in and actually quoted Trump, in its article, using words like “fuck” (“I did try and fuck her. She was married”), “tits” (“She’s now got the big phony tits and everything”) and “pussy” (“grab them by the pussy…You can do anything”).

Thinking back on Watergate, remember when Carl Bernstein woke Attorney General John Mitchell in the middle of the night to tell him that the Washington Post was going to run a story the next morning saying that Mitchell was the head of a secret slush fund to spy on the Democrats? Mitchell warned Bernstein that Post publisher “Katie Graham’s going to get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that’s published.” In the movie version, Ben Bradlee, played by Jason Robards, tells Bernstein not to include that quote. “This is a family paper,” he says.

Not anymore.

2.
In the end, I don’t think the tape is going to be the nail in Trump’s coffin.

I’ve been saying for months that Clinton is going to destroy Trump. Back in March, I wrote, “There is a silent majority in this country. And it hates Trump.” But if this latest revelation has any effect on the election, it won’t be the tape; it’ll be the apology, which Trump issued last night.

Misogyny is not an issue for Trump’s base. And it may be that profanity isn’t either. But weakness is, as Jodi Dean taught us in a memorablepost from August of last year. With this apology, Trump will be thought of as a wimp, a weakling who caved into the forces of feminized political correctness.

Of all the commentators on the RNC Convention this past summer, only Lauren Berlant caught the full tenor of anti-PC ideology among the ranks of Trump’s supporters. This tape was Trump’s moment, to borrow Berlant’s terminology, to demonstrate just how a free man he is. But with that apology, he only shows that he, too, has been captured and tamed by the forces of PC.

3.
That said, it’d be a shame if the tape were used merely to delegitimate Trump. After all, Trump really has nothing to answer for here; we’ve known all along that he speaks and acts like this. The real crew that needs to answer for this tape is the Christian Right.

Throughout the campaign, white evangelicals have overwhelminglysupported Trump—often with higher majorities than Romney got from them. Despite Trump’s obvious flouting of the sexual puritanism they claim as their brand. And as of last night, their leadership was still firmly behind Trump.

Rather than discredit Trump, this tape should destroy that movement, its leaders, and the cottage industry of enabling journalists and academics who’ve told us for decades that we need to take “people of faith”—by which they mean white evangelicals—more seriously.

4.
But tonight the story is whether the tape will force Trump to step down.

I have my doubts. To put it more pointedly: it’ll never happen.

This is a party whose leadership was incapable throughout the primary of keeping Trump off the ticket. Now that he’s demonstrated that he’s the party’s top vote-getter, and has been crowned as its leaders, how will they force him to step down?

And why would Trump, for his part, voluntarily agree to do it? He’s never been accountable to the party leadership. He won, despite their opposition to his candidacy. He doesn’t owe them a damn thing. And in the world he comes from—not real estate, remember, but reality TV—this kind of shit show is just a good night of sky-high ratings.

Even if he did step down, I don’t see how it would change the outcome of the election.

It might actually be a disaster for the GOP if Trump stepped down. It would only confirm that the party is the three-ring circus it has seemed to be, completely incapable of selecting a responsible leader.

Frankly, I think Clinton’s margin of victory would be even higher if Trump did step down. Trump’s voters, his fervent base of support, would be absolutely devastated. And what kind of mass constituency does Pence have? Half the time, I can’t even remember his name and have to look it up.

But if it did happen—and it won’t—it would be an even bigger confirmation of my “Trump is the George McGovern of theRepublican Party” thesis.

After all, the McGovern campaign also saw a head of the ticket forced to step down after a public controversy. Missouri Senator Thomas Eagleton had been McGovern’s VP candidate, until it was exposed in the media that he had been hospitalized for depression, and McGovern removed him from the ticket. The result was the same as what I described above with respect to Trump: it only confirmed people’s sense that this was a campaign, and a party, that was not in control of itself.

5.
The only thing that’s interesting about all this maneuvering to get Trump off the ticket is how legalistic, almost quasi-constitutional, it is.

The presidency, as any high school civics student can tell you, is supposed to be the agent of constitutional efficacy, the one institution in the American firmament, as Hamilton understood (“energy…unity…duration”), that truly could act on behalf of the whole.

Yet here we are, less than 20 years after Bush v. Gore, confronting yet another massive political, quasi-constitutional, crisis, centered around…the presidency.

Presidents may not be Green Lanterns, but, damn, do they generate a considerable amount of constitutional chaos.

6.
I would be remiss if I didn’t note here the panic among Clinton supporters that all this talk of Trump’s possible stepping down has provoked.

On Facebook, quite a few people seem genuinely unnerved by the possibility that Trump would step down, leaving Pence or some other improbable figure (John Kasich?) to rally the Republicans to victory. With just five weeks to go until the election.

Here’s a message for my Clinton-supporting friends: You can’t scream for months that Donald Trump is a unique threat to humanity, different from all other Republican threats we’ve seen, going back Goldwater, and then, when it seems like we might finally and happily be spared this unique fascist threat, panic. Just because you fear that it would mean your candidate won’t win. That kind of response undermines everything you’ve been saying these last few months.

When I pointed this out on Facebook and Twitter, several intrepid souls tried to counter that though Trump was a unique threat, he offered the Democrats the possibility of not merely winning an election but destroying the GOP along with him.

Now I’ve been on the record as saying that if the Democrats had played their cards right, this could have been a realignment election, in which the GOP was thoroughly repudiated.

Even so, wanting Trump to remain on the ticket, just on the off chance that it might destroy the GOP, seems like an awfully big risk, an awfully dangerous rolling of the dice, for Clinton supporters to take. After all that they have said about Trump being a fascist.

It makes them sound like none other than Ernst Thälmann, the German Communist they love to invoke (as a cautionary tale against the left), who famously said, “After Hitler, our turn.”
 
doghouse said:
The Clintons are a bunch of shit heels, but if you don't understand how awful a human being Donald Trump is I don't know what to tell you.
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No doubt Trump is an asshole. That has been established long before this election.
Not to defend him, but he's just abusing his status as a rich guy with a lot of influence to get laid. Just like all the other rich and/ or famous people on this planet. And most of them get away with it.
Like Bill Clinton who cheated on Hillary left, right and centre when the occasion was there. And probably still does.
There are a lot of people out there who are willing to do anything for their 15 minutes of fame and/ or a shot at that sweet extra cash.

However the outcome of this election will be, we are all fucked, but I'm worried it will be worse when the Clintons get back into the White House.
 
Scherensammler said:
No doubt Trump is an asshole.
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No, you don't seem to understand. Donald Trump isn't just "an asshole". He one of the singularly worst people to ever live.

I would, and I'm not exaggerating, probably vote for Hosni Mubarak over Trump.

I've never voted for a Democratic presidential in my life and I don't plan on starting now, but Trump needs to die in a fire.
 
doghouse said:
Berlusconi, in a heartbeat.
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Really? Berlusconi is much closer to Trump than you might think.

Once broke billionaire
womanizer and most likely pimp (bunga-bunga), organizing sex parties for friends and supporters in his villas
media mogul who used his power to influence Italian voters, manipulate laws (especially those that would have gotten him into jail)
tax evasion
just as sexist and racist as they come.

 
Scherensammler said:
Really? Berlusconi is much closer to Trump than you might think.

Once broke billionaire
womanizer and most likely pimp (bunga-bunga), organizing sex parties for friends and supporters in his villas
media mogul who used his power to influence Italian voters, manipulate laws (especially those that would have gotten him into jail)
tax evasion
just as sexist and racist as they come.

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Berlusconi's libertinism is his biggest positive for me. And this just reinforces that i dont think you really understand Trump. He couldn't even conceive of a bunga bunga party.
 
Scherensammler said:
Really? Berlusconi is much closer to Trump than you might think.

Once broke billionaire
womanizer and most likely pimp (bunga-bunga), organizing sex parties for friends and supporters in his villas
media mogul who used his power to influence Italian voters, manipulate laws (especially those that would have gotten him into jail)
tax evasion
just as sexist and racist as they come.
Click to expand...

Hence why I brought him up...

Berlusconi was more discriminate with Ruby and his more 'cultured' with his orgies.
 
Whenever Trump says law and order I think he nicked the phrase from Nixon.
 
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