CONSPIRANOIA…

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

from The Times....

Trump's conspiracy theories are incendiary

When so many Americans believe the presidential candidate's
rants, there's a serious danger it will lead to violence.

By DAVID AARONOVITCH | 12:01AM GMT - Thursday, 04 August 2016

HOW we laughed back in 2011. Barack Obama was doing his comic turn at the annual White House correspondents' dinner. The week before the president had published his birth certificate in response to those persisting with the endlessly debunked theory that he hadn't been born in Hawaii but in Kenya or Vanuatu, and was thus ineligible to be US president. One of those most loudly questioning President Obama's origins had been Donald Trump.

Well, quipped Obama; “He can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter. Like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?” He brought the house down.

This week Trump — who is no longer to be dismissed (as Obama did back then) as a reality TV presenter, but is now the presidential candidate of the party of Abraham Lincoln, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan — dived once again, fully clothed, into the roiling waters of conspiranoia.

“I'm telling you, November 8th, we'd better be careful,” he told a rally of supporters in Columbus, Ohio, “because that election is going to be rigged. And I hope the Republicans are watching closely or it's going to be taken away from us.”

Loud cheers from the faithful. And then he said it again on TV. In one sense this is just a continuation of the “insurgent outsider” theme. “They” — the establishment, the elite, the corporate few who run the affairs of state in their own interests — are out to stop me because I am on the side of the little guy. But it is a particular form of continuation; one that alleges that this establishment is prepared to conspire secretly to steal an entire election through invisible fraud. It is a conspiracy theory par excellence.

Trump's campaign team has an affinity for them. His national media spokeswoman is Katrina Pierson. A former Obama voter from an impoverished Texas upbringing, Pierson has been on the airwaves defending Trump's unsupported assertion that “thousands” of New Jersey Muslims celebrated the attacks on the twin towers in 2001. But before that Pierson was herself a 9/11 “truther”. Just after the 11th anniversary of 9/11 she tweeted “9/11 … An inside job?” For the most part this kind of thinking has been a fringe pastime in the modern West.

A bit of Diana here, a smidgen of the Illuminati there. During the presidency of Bill Clinton, it's true, there were lurid stories of political murders and cover-ups spread by people who should have known better, but they were never adopted by mainstream parties. The Obama birther nonsense was accepted by some Tea Party types but indignantly repudiated by people such as John McCain and Mitt Romney — his opponents in 2008 and 2012. But now conspiracism is the choice of millions: 13.5 million Americans voted for Trump in the Republican primaries. Many, many more will vote for him in November, even if he is massively defeated.

A large section of right-of-centre America will give itself over to a man and a movement that runs on the fantasy-infused steam of paranoia.

Of course there are left-wing conspiracists too. Just this week the Green Party candidate for president, Dr Jill Stein, lauded her 2008 predecessor as candidate, Cynthia McKinney. McKinney, a black former Democratic congresswoman from Georgia, had suggested that Bush and the Israelis were behind 9/11. And instead of Trump's dancing Muslims she had invoked dancing Jews. A day before she lost a Democratic primary in 2002 her father, a former civil rights activist, had told an interviewer that “Jews have bought everybody … J-E-W-S”. But McKinney was also fringe; disowned by her party.

There was deep upset among Democrats at the result of the 2000 presidential election in which a few contested votes in Florida decided the result in favour of George W Bush. But again, no mainstream Democrat politician seriously suggested that there was a plot to steal the election.

Now it's out there, it seems, the stuff of mass assertion. If Trump loses, says Trump, then it'll be because the criminals who run everything will have rigged the vote. Any attempt to show how impossible this is, and how Trump has a history of conspiracist thinking, will be met with the counter that this is exactly what the establishment wants you to believe; what their MSM (mainstream media) buddies want you to believe. And the more the “elite” attacks Trump, the more it proves that they are part of the plot. In conspiracist thinking “independent thought” (ie conspiracy fantasy) is always to be counterposed to “the official version” — a version untrustworthy precisely because it is official.

That bicultural leech Piers Morgan inadvertently put his finger on the problem that mainstream commentators now face. “Today's New York Times,” he tweeted, “has 6 negative news stories, 5 negative letters & 2 negative opinion pieces about Donald Trump. Absurdly partisan.”

However, only in recent days Jan Halper-Hayes, the vice-president of Republicans Overseas, told the BBC that Trump “truly is psychologically unbalanced”; a Republican congressman became the first to say that he would vote for Clinton; a senior adviser to Jeb Bush has left the party; and Trump's apparent attack on the parents of a dead American Muslim soldier has appalled many on his own side.

Under these circumstances, normal, straight reporting necessarily consists of a lot of negative stories about Donald Trump. How could it not? Unless you think that running “balancing” features like Ten Great Things about Bashar al-Assad, is somehow more impartial.

This week Trump, speaking in a country where half of Republicans live in a household with at least one gun, described Hillary Clinton as “evil”. What on earth is this an invitation to do? One of Trump's oldest associates, a man called Roger Stone, was interviewed on Monday about the “rigging” question. “If you can't have an honest election,” Stone said, “nothing else counts. I think he [trump] has gotta put them on notice that their inauguration will be rhetorical … I mean civil disobedience, not violence, but it will be a bloodbath … We will not stand for it.”

Today millions of people in America — who already imagine themselves to be righteously “angry” — are capable of believing this kind of thing. And although it rarely happens, modern history suggests that the consequences when conspiracy thinking jumps the barrier between fringe and mainstream politics, can be terrible. I am beginning to wonder: did Weimar feel like this? This is no longer Roswell and alien abductions. And I'm not laughing.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/trumps-paranoia-could-be-incendiary-mfhwx3zgb

[clint eastwood]

Obama has worked to get the TPP, Hillary says she will ditch it, they are from different parties right....
..and does Obama stand by his words that she is the most qualified candidate ever to be running for president .....yeah right

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

from The Washington Post....

• Did Paul Ryan just predict that Clinton will win in a landslide?

• As Trump flails, Clinton broadens effort to recruit wary Republicans

• The Fix: Paul Ryan just summed up Republicans' Donald Trump problem in three lines

• Two new polls put Donald Trump further back than Mitt Romney ever was

• The Daily Trail: Donald Trump's love affair with polls is definitely over

[clint eastwood]

Jeeeez...you really are feeling lucky

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

from The Washington Post....

Why a Trump loss in November could still be destructive

By DANA MILBANK | 11:27AM EDT - Friday, August 05, 2016


Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks on August 4th in Portland, Maine. — Photograph: Sarah Rice/Getty Images.

ALL Americans should be alarmed by Donald Trump confidant Roger Stone's suggestion that Trump claim Hillary Clinton is trying to steal the election.

Asserting that there is already “widespread voter fraud,” Stone said Trump should say that “if there’s voter fraud, this election will be illegitimate … we will have a constitutional crisis, widespread civil disobedience, and the government will no longer be the government.” In an interview with the conservative outlet Breitbart, Stone continued: “I think he's got to put them on notice that their inauguration will be a rhetorical, and when I mean civil disobedience, not violence, but it will be a bloodbath.”

A bloodbath. Rhetorically speaking, of course.

If you have any doubt that Stone has Trump's ear, two days later Trump said, “I'm afraid the election is going to be rigged,” and he went on to warn of voter fraud.

Some are comforted to know this election ends in 95 days. But a Trump loss in November — which seems increasingly likely — could be only slightly less destructive than a Trump victory. At best, his followers would regard the Clinton administration as illegitimate from Day One and use whatever legal means they can to prevent government from functioning. At worst, they will conclude that their white-male dominated America is lost forever — and take extra-legal measures to protect themselves.

Americans take for granted peaceful transfers of power. But if the losing side declares the government illegitimate and talks of bloodbaths, something else could occur.

Sixteen years ago, after the contentious 2000 recount, Al Gore gave a gracious concession speech that invoked Stephen Douglas's words to Abraham Lincoln: “Partisan feeling must yield to patriotism. I'm with you, Mr. President, and God bless you.”

“This is America. Just as we fight hard when the stakes are high, we close ranks and come together when the contest is done,” Gore said. “We will stand together behind our new president.”

Can anybody imagine Trump saying those words after a Hillary Clinton victory?

Trump's supporters are primed to suspect conspiracy — all the more so now that they see Trump sinking in the polls. At a Trump rally in Virginia this week, after Trump told the crowd, “We're running against a rigged system,” the Trump backers I sampled at random all thought the election could be stolen.

Dawn Quires told me that FBI director James Comey didn't recommend charges against Clinton because he “doesn't want to get shot in the back like others.” James Scarborough, in red “Make America Great Again” cap, said court defeats for voter-ID laws were evidence of a rigged election. And Connie Jagger reasoned that a Trump defeat would necessarily mean a stolen election because Trump's crowds are bigger than Clinton's.

This fallacy — that the winner is determined by crowd size rather than the 125 million ballots cast — makes Trump backers think a legitimate Clinton victory is impossible. “Trump in trouble? 10,000 people in Jacksonville!!!!” somebody named Eric Swenson emailed me Thursday. “Pathetic media, corrupt to the core.”

Mix that paranoia with the propensity for violence seen at Trump events, and you can see where this could go after November 8th.

At a Trump rally in Pennsylvania this week, a video posted by PennLive shows Trump supporters shoving, throwing to the ground and bloodying the nose of a demonstrator.

A video montage published this week by The New York Times captures the rage at Trump rallies: Trump supporters proclaiming “F--- those dirty beaners”, “F--- Islam”, “F--- that n------”, “Hang the bitch”; Trump responding to a protest by telling supporters “come on — get him”; and various scenes of pushing and shoving of demonstrators.

Slate's Ben Mathis-Lilley has a tally of 20 violent incidents at Trump events by Trump supporters, and protesters, including protesters hit with pepper spray by Trump backers, and instances of demonstrators being sucker-punched, shoved and choked.

Trump has encouraged such activity by offering to pay the legal fees of the violent, by likening demonstrators to terrorists, by suggesting a demonstrator “should have been roughed up” and saying “knock the crap out of them” and “I'd like to punch him in the face”, among other things.

Trump has identified Clinton as a criminal and the devil. Would his most ardent backers just possibly assume he would favor violence against a government run by such a person?

The rage will only increase if Trump continues to sink in the polls and — as is his pattern when in trouble — he continues to get more and more outrageous. “I worry that all he knows how to do is double down,” Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona, a Republican critic of Trump, told me this week. “They're out of options.”

Not entirely out of options. There's still the rhetorical bloodbath. Or worse.

• Dana Milbank writes about political theater in the nation's capital. He joined The Washington Post as a political reporter in 2000.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related stories:

 • Kathleen Parker: After a brain injury, I suddenly displayed some behavior similar to Donald Trump's

 • Charles Krauthammer: Trump and the fitness threshold

 • Ruth Marcus: Trump makes his most dangerous comments yet

 • Stephen Stromberg: Somebody is trying to rig the election. It's just not who Donald Trump claims.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-a-trump-loss-in-november-could-still-be-destructive/2016/08/05/4ed7fff2-5a86-11e6-831d-0324760ca856_story.html

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

I luuurve the smell of napalm civil war in the morning…

[clint eastwood]

??    You talking about Syria now

[Im2Sexy4MyPants]

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

from the Los Angeles Times....

Republicans wish they could blame Bill Clinton for the Trump debacle

By DAVID HORSEY | 5:00AM PDT - Wednesday, August 17, 2016



AT THE very beginning of the long trek into bombast and absurdity that we call the 2016 presidential campaign, there was an intriguing phone call that set off a flurry of speculation in conservative circles. Reportedly, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump had a chat in May 2015 in which the ex-president may have encouraged the reality TV star in his impending decision to run for the Republican presidential nomination.

What stuck many as odd was that Clinton's wife, Hillary, had just declared her own candidacy for the White House. Why would Bill be giving a pep talk to a competitor?

In an interview with Stephen Colbert in October, Clinton said he had merely been returning a call from Trump — the two were golfing buddies back then. “I had a very pleasant conversation with him, and it wasn't about running for office,” he said.

Conspiracy-minded folk could not accept that simple explanation. Instead, the theory developed that Trump and Clinton were in league together to disrupt the GOP primary process. To those who need coherence in their conception of the world, that preposterous scenario has more appeal than ever today, given the disunity and panic that the triumph of Trump has wrought within the Republican Party.

Consider the state of the GOP. Regular Republicans boycotted their own party's convention even as it became a parade of dark, angry, paranoid talk-radio-style memes that produced a sharp dip in Trump's favorability rating. Post-convention, Trump spent days squabbling with the Muslim parents of a heroic, martyred American soldier, then stirred up further controversy with repeated claims that President Obama was the true founder of Islamic State. Meanwhile, his campaign guru, Paul Manafort, was busy denying reports that he received $12.7 million in secret cash payments from a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine.

The number of GOP elected officials and Republican insiders who are rejecting Trump grows daily. There is serious talk among big contributors and party managers about pulling financial support from their erratic presidential candidate and investing the money in congressional campaigns. They fear that Trump's foundering ship could sink the whole Republican fleet with it. One marker of the GOP’s hopelessness: The New York Times' running forecast now puts Trump's chances of beating Hillary Clinton at 12%.

As much fun as it is to think that Bill Clinton and Trump concocted this chaos over the phone, there is no chance it is true. Trump is not the kind of guy who does someone else's dirty work. Trump, however, is not the sole author of his own disruptive success. He is where he is today because the Republican Party and the conservative media have, for years, fed their constituents a steady diet of angry, “real America” pseudo-patriotism and simplistic anti-government rhetoric that made them ready, eager consumers for Trump's brand of bullying and bravado.

Assuming the experts are right — which they have not been very often in this campaign — Trump will lose badly and fade as a political force. But his constituency will still be with us, more angry than ever for being abandoned by the Republican establishment.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-clinton-trump-call-20160817-snap-story.html