The Goat Pen

Bklyn wrote:Real question. Do you guys here (which I view as my rest stop for middle America "white standardness"...and I don't mean that as a perjorative) understand why people would suspect (if not outright view) Donald Trump as a racist, sexist, xenophobic strong man? Or do you think it was all an attempt to smear him by the media?

I am lazy so my response is that I agree with what Ecat said.

eCat wrote:

Cletus wrote:

eCat wrote:All they want is someone to acknowledge that they are struggling instead of hearing about how well people who need subsidies or dream about becoming a citizen are doing.

Does a steel worker in Pennsylvania think his factory that once employed 12,000 but now has less than 800 is going to see that factory come back? I doubt even the most optimistic believe that. But they sure as shit don't want a candidate coming up there and telling them "We're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business”

So, they want someone who will lie to them?

we're talking politics. Lying to them is a given. Obama ignored the middle class. Hillary didn't have a message for them. Trump did. Its that simple. Why would they vote for Hillary even if they think Trump can't deliver?

Democrats have created a lower class system for people to NEVER want to get out of and they only care about them during elections. Hillary rode on the wave of neck beard having, white upper class rich kids at colleges to make a difference in her campaign. Be twitter savy and try to be cool. Well it didn't work. Because the true middle class of this country fucking carries this country on its back and a lot of people were tired of carrying the load and getting shit on at the same time.

I've said it a bunch. Trump victory means that BOTH sides have to blow their shit up and start to understand the new age of politics. Smart people look through the bullshit that is not social media and get down to facts.

And I swear to god if I see another college offering grief therapy or group hug sessions that consist of pizza party, play-dough, board games, and singing I am going to lose my shit. You know what people you college age assholes were doing during WW2 and Vietnam??? Getting shot at and trying to make it back home. Not using this fake grief I didn't get my way I never lose where is my participation award OCD ADD medication bullshit. Grow up. Things didn't go you way. Understand why it didn't and then make your choices for your life going forward.

And NO that also means you can't protest and block streets, throw rocks at cops and then expect no consequences.

speaking of that, I watched the American Experience last night on PBS on the Korean War - Battle of Chosin Reservoir

After reading up on Guadal Canal 5 years ago and seeing this last night, much respect for Marines - and I'd never want my son to be one.

The mood in the Washington press corps is bleak, and deservedly so.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that, with a few exceptions, we were all tacitly or explicitly #WithHer, which has led to a certain anguish in the face of Donald Trump’s victory. More than that and more importantly, we also missed the story, after having spent months mocking the people who had a better sense of what was going on.

This is all symptomatic of modern journalism’s great moral and intellectual failing: its unbearable smugness. Had Hillary Clinton won, there’d be a winking “we did it” feeling in the press, a sense that we were brave and called Trump a liar and saved the republic.

So much for that. The audience for our glib analysis and contempt for much of the electorate, it turned out, was rather limited. This was particularly true when it came to voters, the ones who turned out by the millions to deliver not only a rebuke to the political system but also the people who cover it. Trump knew what he was doing when he invited his crowds to jeer and hiss the reporters covering him. They hate us, and have for some time.

And can you blame them? Journalists love mocking Trump supporters. We insult their appearances. We dismiss them as racists and sexists. We emote on Twitter about how this or that comment or policy makes us feel one way or the other, and yet we reject their feelings as invalid.

It’s a profound failure of empathy in the service of endless posturing. There’s been some sympathy from the press, sure: the dispatches from “heroin country” that read like reports from colonial administrators checking in on the natives. But much of that starts from the assumption that Trump voters are backward, and that it’s our duty to catalogue and ultimately reverse that backwardness. What can we do to get these people to stop worshiping their false god and accept our gospel?

We diagnose them as racists in the way Dark Age clerics confused medical problems with demonic possession. Journalists, at our worst, see ourselves as a priestly caste. We believe we not only have access to the indisputable facts, but also a greater truth, a system of beliefs divined from an advanced understanding of justice.

You’d think that Trump’s victory – the one we all discounted too far in advance – would lead to a certain newfound humility in the political press. But of course that’s not how it works. To us, speaking broadly, our diagnosis was still basically correct. The demons were just stronger than we realized.

This is all a “whitelash,” you see. Trump voters are racist and sexist, so there must be more racists and sexists than we realized. Tuesday night’s outcome was not a logic-driven rejection of a deeply flawed candidate named Clinton; no, it was a primal scream against fairness, equality, and progress. Let the new tantrums commence!

That’s the fantasy, the idea that if we mock them enough, call them racist enough, they’ll eventually shut up and get in line. It’s similar to how media Twitter works, a system where people who dissent from the proper framing of a story are attacked by mobs of smugly incredulous pundits. Journalists exist primarily in a world where people can get shouted down and disappear, which informs our attitudes toward all disagreement.

Journalists increasingly don’t even believe in the possibility of reasoned disagreement, and as such ascribe cynical motives to those who think about things a different way. We see this in the ongoing veneration of “facts,” the ones peddled by explainer websites and data journalists who believe themselves to be curiously post-ideological.

That the explainers and data journalists so frequently get things hilariously wrong never invites the soul-searching you’d think it would. Instead, it all just somehow leads us to more smugness, more meanness, more certainty from the reporters and pundits. Faced with defeat, we retreat further into our bubble, assumptions left unchecked. No, it’s the voters who are wrong.

As a direct result, we get it wrong with greater frequency. Out on the road, we forget to ask the right questions. We can’t even imagine the right question. We go into assignments too certain that what we find will serve to justify our biases. The public’s estimation of the press declines even further -- fewer than one-in-three Americans trust the press, per Gallup -- which starts the cycle anew.

There’s a place for opinionated journalism; in fact, it’s vital. But our causal, profession-wide smugness and protestations of superiority are making us unable to do it well.

Our theme now should be humility. We must become more impartial, not less so. We have to abandon our easy culture of tantrums and recrimination. We have to stop writing these know-it-all, 140-character sermons on social media and admit that, as a class, journalists have a shamefully limited understanding of the country we cover.

What’s worse, we don’t make much of an effort to really understand, and with too few exceptions, treat the economic grievances of Middle America like they’re some sort of punchline. Sometimes quite literally so, such as when reporters tweet out a photo of racist-looking Trump supporters and jokingly suggest that they must be upset about free trade or low wages.

We have to fix this, and the broken reasoning behind it. There’s a fleeting fun to gang-ups and groupthink. But it’s not worth what we are losing in the process.

"And I swear to god if I see another college offering grief therapy or group hug sessions that consist of pizza party, play-dough, board games, and singing I am going to lose my shit."

Never thought I'd see the day BRM would be sassing free pizza...

Listening to Morning Joe this morning, it seems Rudy Guliani has made considerable bank giving $100K speeches and took money for consulting from various questionable clients, and now he's up for Secretary of State. Were is the "conflict of interest" and "using his position for personal gain" outcry? I thought Hillary was the only politician in history to ever do this sort of thing?

"Rudy Giuliani's paid consulting for foreign governments would present conflicts of interest as the nation's top diplomat that would make the Clinton Foundation look trifling."

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/g ... cts-231413

I wonder if Newt Gingrich ever got paid to give a speech or "consult" with any questionable clients? No way, it's only Hillary who did that, she's the only "corrupt" person to ever hold high office...

hedge wrote:Listening to Morning Joe this morning, it seems Rudy Guliani has made considerable bank giving $100K speeches and took money for consulting from various questionable clients, and now he's up for Secretary of State. Were is the "conflict of interest" and "using his position for personal gain" outcry? I thought Hillary was the only politician in history to ever do this sort of thing?

"Rudy Giuliani's paid consulting for foreign governments would present conflicts of interest as the nation's top diplomat that would make the Clinton Foundation look trifling."

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/g ... cts-231413

Trump has 500 companies around the world.

Said it before and looks like there will be ample opportunity to say it again: Meet the new boss, same as the old boss...

hedge wrote:I wonder if Newt Gingrich ever got paid to give a speech or "consult" with any questionable clients? No way, it's only Hillary who did that, she's the only "corrupt" person to ever hold high office...

what office does Rudy Guliani and Newt Gringrich hold? As a civilian, its not corrupt to give speeches and make money. It becomes corrupt when you turn that speaking fee into access and influence because you hold a political office.

I'm sure there's no way Trump will use his role as president to benefit any of his companies...

hedge wrote:I'm sure there's no way Trump will use his role as president to benefit any of his companies...

I'm not saying he won't - that's why I know there are 500 companies he owns around the world. It would be very tempting for Trump to shape foreign policy to save a business of his.

But he did say that his life isn't about hotel occupancy, the office he holds is bigger than that. So at least for the moment, he *knows* the difference between right and wrong. He's ahead of Hillary on that count.

If he said it, it's got to be true...

Read that article on Guliani...

hedge wrote:If he said it, it's got to be true...

Read that article on Guliani...

I already saw it.

Does that bother you at all?

I think I've been pretty clear about my expectations from Trump as president.

He's going to do alot of stuff that bothers me.

I just hope he accomplishes the big 3 - secure the border and stop the flow of immigrants, addresses Obamacare to the extent that its no longer the middle class funding the have nots, and does whatever with trade to focus on fair trade versues free trade, then I will consider that a gain for conservatives and America as a whole.

eCat wrote:

hedge wrote:I'm sure there's no way Trump will use his role as president to benefit any of his companies...

But he did say that his life isn't about hotel occupancy, the office he holds is bigger than that. So at least for the moment, he *knows* the difference between right and wrong. He's ahead of Hillary on that count.

You are living in a strange bizzaro world.

we all don't get to hang out Bohemian Grove , Cletus

eCat wrote:we all don't get to hang out Bohemian Grove , Cletus

Why are we still talking about Hillary? She's gone. Forever. You'd think people secretly wanted her to win so their bitchfest could continue unabated for another 4 years. Time to get all up in that Trump shit. Get Tr(i)ump-hant! Get it?