No, America, It Wasnt Russia: You Did This to Yourself

[portlander23]

No, America, It Wasn’t Russia: You Did This to Yourself
Juan Cole
Truth Dig

Trump was in plain view. He had all along been in plain view. His hatred for uppity or “nasty” women, his racism, his prickliness, his narcissism, his rich white boy arrogance and entitlement (apparently even to strange women and other men’s wives), his cronyism and his fundamental dishonesty were on display 24/7 during some 18 months of the campaign, and it wasn’t as though he were an unknown quantity before that.

Americans voted for him anyway. Slightly more Americans voted for him than for a respectable person like Mitt Romney. No Russians were holding a gun to their heads. And they knew, or should have known, what they were getting.

Nor did any Russian hacking related to Wikileaks, if that is what happened, prove decisive. Clinton’s own polling people found the big turning point was when she called Trump voters a “basket of deplorables.” Americans don’t like being talked down to, and had already gotten rid of Romney for the same sin. The spectacle of Clinton taking hundreds of thousands of dollars to give a speech to the people who put them out of their homes in 2008-9 also turned many of them off so that they stayed home, while another section of them decided to take a chance on Trump. He will screw them over, but from their point of view, they worried that she might have, as well. Trump was promising to stop the hemorrhaging of jobs via protectionism, whereas everyone understood that Sec. Clinton’s first instinct was to do TPP and send more jobs to Asia.

No, America had its eyes wide open. The Republican Party, the usual 61 million, voted for Trump, despite his vulgar talk and vulgar style of life. Since the GOP is mostly the party of Protestant whites plus about 40 million Catholics who think they are white, nobody over there too much minded the racism against minorities. There were some defections among the white Protestant married women from the GOP (either stay-at-homes or aisle-crossers) and there were some defections among the white working class from the Democratic Party. But those two may well have just cancelled each other out.

[SidDithers]

1. Better believe it!...nt

Sid

[JTFrog]

2. Yep.

Working overtime.

[Turbineguy]

3. This is a sound argument the Russians could make.

After all, they helped, but it was the idiots who made it happen.

[Jean-Jacques Roussea]

4. Sssshhh

Let them think Russia brainwashed them. Nobody will spend more time trying to explain why the racist stuff they do aren't racist than white people. We gotta let them know "It's not your fault", "The big scawry Wussians fworced wyou to"

[oberliner]

5. Juan Cole

Shockingly on the Russia-apologist side of things with the rest of his ilk.

[yallerdawg]

6. I don't agree with most of the content.

"Since the GOP is mostly the party of Protestant whites plus about 40 million Catholics who think they are white..."



But I do agree with the conclusion.

[JCanete]

8. Unless Russia literally hacked our machines, any other manipulation, assuming it was effective,

rests at the hands of our very own corporate owned news media that couldn't be arsed to do reporting, and was happy to report non-stories over policies and issues...the kind of shit that ensured Clinton handly took care of Sanders(or more to the point that there usually are no Sanders at all) but also caused her to be edged out in the GE by a buffoon.

I do not blame the DNC for not being jobs focused enough. Either they go all in against corporate influence or they are just leaving it up to the corporate media to frame our leaders and message however befits it anyway. Whether we were weak on these matters or not is kind of moot in the face of Trump's platform, which promises to do horrible things to the economy, national defense, and equality.

If all the media wants to report on is that Comey hints at maybe finding something out about Clinton for two whole weeks before the election, I submit that therein lies our problem. Unfortunately it doens't let the DNC off the hook, in only makes our party look like suckers for continuing to believe that we can play nice with corporations and the media and that that will translate into a chance to make good policy. It hasnt turned out that way. Over and over, it has not turned out that way.

[uponit7771]

9. BULL FUCKIN SHIT !!! Comey, Voter suppression and Russia all the rest of the postmortems are guessin

... guessing and pulling shit out of ass.

The aforementioned are tangible, documented and even the GOP agree's or has seen them to some extent even if they don't believe they played a major factor that they were a factor at all is actionable enough.

"my bullet didn't kill him" isn't an excuse to keep ones ass out of jail after attempted murder.

Fuck that, address those ... everthing else is peripheral

[etherealtruth]

10. In a sense its true that many U.S. voters sat back and allowed themselves to be manipulated ...

Last edited Sun Dec 11, 2016, 11:31 AM - Edit history (1)

.... however, that does not make it acceptable, nor does it lessen its impact

I always respected and admired Clinton .... My respect and admiration has only grown. She had so many concerted efforts fighting her candidacy ... the FBI ... the Russians and their fully developed propaganda campaign ... an energized white nationalist/ supremacist movement ... the right wing (to be expected) ... yet Clinton won the popular vote by almost 3 Million.

edit: spelling