Friday, August 5, 2016

Seth Meyers: Trump's disastrous week



Seth Meyers just gets better and better, doesn't he? Or maybe Donald Trump just gets worse and worse...

5 comments:

Chimeradave said...

I've been addicted to watching this train wreck all week. My only fear is that he crashes and burns so soon that the Republicans have time to regroup and put someone else up.

Bill Garthright said...

That worries me, too, John. Of course, they had a vicious primary the first time. And who would satisfy Trump supporters, given that it would have to be a candidate picked by the GOP establishment?

I don't know, I really don't. And it's not as though we're not seeing crazy behavior on the left, too - promoting third-party candidates who'll do nothing but split the anti-Trump vote.

What has happened to my country?

jeff725 said...

"What has happened to my country?"

Mr. Spock has one possible answer, Bill:

https://youtu.be/vi7QQ5pO7_A?t=3m

Chimeradave said...

It's amazing to me that the election hasnt caused an actual splinter in either party. Trump and his brand of craziness on one side and the DNC rigging the primary on the other.

Bill Garthright said...

Sure, John, except for the lack of evidence that the DNC did 'rig' the primary. I certainly haven't seen any. I don't even know how that would be possible.

In fact, I didn't see anything in those leaked emails - leaked by the Russian government to deliberately cause problems for Hillary Clinton - that was particularly noteworthy.

If you didn't already know that longtime Democratic Party activists favored the longtime, mainstream Democratic Party politician, you should have. What was surprising about that?

That they worried about a Sanders nomination wasn't surprising, either. I did, myself. I would have supported either winning candidate, and so would the DNC, but I can't imagine thinking that partisan activists wouldn't be... partisan.

Bitching about the Sanders campaign in emails wasn't even slightly surprising. But if they did anything that actually made a difference in the outcome of the election, I don't know what it was. I don't know what it could be.

Note that it's the nature of emails that they're dashed off quickly, without worrying about how they'll sound to the general public (because they aren't written for the general public). If you take a mass of stolen emails, you are going to find some that sound bad. That's just inevitable.

Indeed, opponents of climate change did the exact same thing when they stole emails from scientists and then picked out isolated lines to imply a conspiracy. That was complete bullshit. It was just that private conversations aren't written for the general public, so you don't worry about outside perceptions.

These emails were stolen and published in order to make Sanders supporters angry. That was the whole purpose of the theft, and it worked. Of course, Sanders supporters were already unhappy and didn't need much at all to convince them of what they already wanted to believe.

But I remain more worried about caucuses (which helped Bernie Sanders through voter suppression) than about superdelegates or anything the DNC did. I just didn't see anything in those emails that surprised me at all. It was just... standard politics, wasn't it?