Biden Will Run on Fear, Trump Will Run on Hope

Your post summarizes what I’ve concluded, Ian.

1) If Biden is the nominee, he’ll essentially run HRC’s playbook of “I’m the real Republican in the race” which drove down Democratic turnout and lose (plus likely also translate to Democratic losses in Congress and the statehouses);

2) If Biden wins nonetheless, he’ll pursue the same neoliberal economic policies and neoimperialist foreign policies (the two are linked) that will lead to a further more right-wing, more fascist-like, Republican winning in 2024 or 2028.

Either way, they’ll be no progress for the critical next 12 years or so on anything that matters.

Of the two, Biden losing in 2020 is marginally preferable, as the Democrats are more effective in combating Trump’s awful proposals than they would be in combating Biden’s. But we’d be screwed either way.

Absolutely extraordinary that you saw Trump’s campaign of fire and blood and saw that as “hope”. His acceptance speech for the nomination was filled with law and order rhetoric, citing crime statistics out of context, and bashing immigrants. That’s not running on fear? The entire conservative movement operates on fear! That’s how he won! Every analysis says your economic anxiety argument is a bunch of bullshit. These are racist voters who were animated by the salience of immigration, and Donald Trump promised to restore whiteness to its proper hierarchy. Everything about his presidency exemplifies what he campaigned on. I said it during the debates when you insisted “oh he said people won’t die in the street” as “health care”. That’s not what voters paid attention to or heard when they voted for him. They heard “boots to immigrants faces”. Maybe you think his presidency offers hope. Certainly many white voters think so.

Nonetheless, since the black president isn’t in office anymore, racial salience among voters is lower than it was in 2016, so many of the same voters might not be activated and animated by his rhetoric as they were in 2016. Or rather, racists are still going to correlate for a vote for Trump, but many past Trump voters won’t have “race, immigration” on their minds when they enter the voting booth.

By the way, voter turnout is going to be through the roof for 2020, and nominating Biden isn’t going to stop that from happening. It will set records. Because many voters want Trump gone. That’s all that matters to 40%+ of the country (55% of voters definitely will not vote for him, according to polling right now). Whether increased turnout is good for the Dems or Reps remains to be seen, but I suspect it’ll benefit D’s for the presidency, hurt D’s in some marginal districts, hurt in D’s in Alabama (sorry, Doug Jones), and help D’s in Texas, Arizona, and Georgia. That’s because R’s are reliant on old voters, and old voters always vote anyway. An increase in millennial participation from 45% to 60% will provide more net votes (especially when its 65-35, D) than olds who were at 65% rate increased to 70%.

There will be paralysis until old people stop voting R, or they die. Too bad for the rest of us that there isn’t much time left. Millennials first started flexing muscles in 2017 elections (VA and NJ elections, see also Corbyn’s showing then, although his Brexit attachment is scaring them away). 2018 built on that. 2020 will continue. Voters don’t become “voters” until they’re ~45. 2028 might be when the bottom falls out for the Reagan Revolution.

Hi, Mallam. I guess you can see why I quit hanging around here very much. You might want to consider moving on as well. Wonkette is a nice place, and the Confluence is thoughtful.

Well, for anyone counting on millennial voting to save us from Fox-watching geezers, don’t forget to factor in our new variable. If we wind up with a cluster of states that effectively make abortion illegal, that might lead to some measure of migration by the young, for those in a position to do so. (Especially in a population that, because they are young, are less likely to have marriages and children yet.) So we could wind up with a skew in the millennial population, with some states full of the young and others relatively empty of them.

Here’s a point from Democratic Strategist: https://thedemocraticstrategist.org/

“Trump was very aware of this phenomenon. During his victory tour after the election, he at one point praised black voters for staying home, a function, he claimed, of the appeal of his pitch.

“’They didn’t come out to vote for Hillary,’ Trump said. ‘They didn’t come out. And that was a big — so thank you to the African-American community.’”

According to reporting from Bloomberg shortly before the 2016 election, the campaign was working hard to ensure that they didn’t. A senior campaign official told reporters Joshua Green and Sasha Issenberg that they had “three major voter-suppression operations underway,” including one aimed at dampening turnout among black voters. In part, the Bloomberg report suggested, that included running under-the-radar ads on Facebook tying Clinton to the 1994 crime bill.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because Trump is already pulling the same stunt with possible 2020 opponent Joe Biden, calling the 1994 crime bill “a dark period in American History” that the former vice president should apologize for, and contrasting that with Trump’s involvement in criminal justice reforms that “helped fix the bad 1994 Bill.”

Full on agreement w/Ian here (and w/Stewart & S Brennan & Nihil above).

The propaganda machine is going full court press for the disaster trio of Killer B’s (Bidet, Beavis & Butthead) w/Kamala waiting in the wings as party savior should they falter to try and make sure the Dems doom the world, with Warren as the emergency backstop if throwing a few extra crumbs of pretense is necessary (despite general servility to the cause of late, Warren has shown signs of independent thinking in the past so is ONLY an emergency backstop and primarily a tool to attack and siphon votes from the Bernie/Tulsi wing).

Biden has two ways to win: (1) The propaganda works, and people are sufficiently easy to manipulate and critical thinking skills have been destroyed to such a degree that a majority of Democratic voters believe Bernie is a doddering old agent of Putin who was a sore loser in 2016 and tried his best to sabotage HRC, whilst Tulsi a war-mongering Assad toady and also a Putin plant and really still believes everything she did as child raised in an ultra-conservative household, whilst Trump is Hitler 2.0 and Biden is the stable hand who will return us to the good old days of everything before 2016, when all was golden and everyone was happy and the world was on the right track to paradise, or at least pretty damn nice.

(2) Cheat cheat cheat cheat. Hey, it worked in the 2016 primaries and in the Cali 2018 elections and most people didn’t even notice, and all the “OMG Russia HACKED OUR ELECTIONS!” folk have yet to back paper ballots (good grief, they aren’t even more than dubiously lukewarm for the much easier to fix “paper trail”; even that seems to bother them); I’m pretty sure they have what they view as very good reasons for opposing truly verifiable ballots, and it’s not just contributions from Diebold. If they’re going to do this, his negatives don’t matter, and I’ve been wondering since they started pushing him about a year ago.

Wait till the first debate.

MojaveWolf on the MSM treatment of the Democratic campaigns…I watch MSNBC, and from what I can see it’s not just that they push for Biden, they also prepare for the possibility of any Biden alternative (Beto, Pete, Kamela, Cory, etc). Meanwhile, Warren gets an occasional interview while Bernie is talked about but never talked to or invited for any interviews.

But the interesting thing is that they interpret Trump’s jabs at Biden thusly: “Ooh! ooh! ooh! Trump and his campaign realizes that Biden is the strongest candidate to defeat Trump, and thus make him enemy #1” and then go on to say that paradoxically, the effect of Trump’s attacks among Democratic voters appears to elevate Biden in the polls and thus is self-defeating.

But maybe, just maybe, Trump’s team knows this? They take jabs at Biden to boost his candidacy and count of the Trump derangement syndrome because they WANT Biden to be the Democratic nominee, knowing full well that he has all of HRC’s baggage plus more (remember, HRC was forced to grudgingly come out against TPP, but *Biden still supports it*–how will that play out in the Rust Belt?).

I think the only way that Biden gets the nomination is if the brokered convention comes into play, but the sad thing is is that that is a probability at this point in time.

The polls are bs, they don’t sample the population by economic class only by the identities that our rulers wish to divide us by. The polls, like damn near everything else in the U.S., serve our rulers. Also, it is difficult to get reliable economic information on voters so that hinders the accuracy of polls. The fact is though is that the hispanic software programmer’s and the hispanic construction laborer’s concerns have a lot less overlap than the hispanic construction laborer and the white cab driver. And the the blue collar working class votes primarily upon their financial security. That’s how Trump won.

If Bernie wins the democratic nomination, it’ll be a cakewalk to the presidency for him. If Biden does, Trump has a good chance for a 2nd term. Biden is tailor made for Trump to beat.

Z

The claim that 55% of the voting public will “never vote for Trump” rests on two very frail legs. One is that all of them are telling the truth, which is unlikely. I don’t know very many people, but I know eight people who say in public that they would never vote for Trump and admit privately that they will actually vote for him. The second is that all of the people who say they won’t vote for Trump will vote at all. Some will not vote for Trump, but they won’t vote for anyone else either.

I’ve never thought Biden would be the Democratic nominee. He’s more of a place holder while the rest of the field sorts itself out and realizes that none of them is really up to a presidency that’s been shredded by the current occupant of the throne. Biden is there to comfort the bewildered and disconsolate — which he seems to be doing very well.

Biden is selling a Restoration, and that’s very appealing to a lot of Americans and people around the world who hope for the kind of stability they think was the rule pre-Trump, but… the presidency has been fundamentally changed under Trump and his cronies, and I don’t think there’s any real going back.

Biden must know this as must the factotums of the Democratic Party who are reveling in his current high poll numbers. They will say he’s what the People want. Some of them, sure.

But it’s wrong to say his pitch is Fear. No, his pitch is “going back” to the way things used to be, the way things are supposed to be, the way things were meant to be. For those who have been hurt by or are discombobulated by the Trump regime, that’s a very powerful pitch. He’s selling something that very many people want to buy — and believe they need.

He’s selling the premise that It Will Be OK. Again.

The other Dem candidates are not really focused on that factor; they are more driven by the Fear Factor, the fear of what could be if Trump and his cronies are not stopped. Dead in their tracks.

Their pitch is for something else again, something better — if we all work for it harder, blah blah. It’s not a Restoration. It’s not comforting or comfortable. It’s dedication and desperately hard (collective) work to stave off the Apocalypse.

Trump sells chaos and confusion with a gold-plated gloss. A Tough Luck, Sucker con game. A lie a minute, who gives a shit load of bunkum, but who cares as long as he can get away with it and his fan base is kept entertained?

It’s not just the pseudo-reality shit show. He’s simultaneously providing a powerful and deep-seated faction of the high and the mighty with some of their most treasured and long-sought after desires: unlimited power to do as they will however they might with the least interference of a pesky government imaginable; the corporate-friendliest courts since the last Gilded Age; and the restoration of patriarchy and Christian domination through the US Imperial Sword as God Himself deemed it must be. Powerful stuff.

Ultimately, I don’t think any of the current candidates will be the Democratic nominee. But who the Dark Horse might be, I haven’t a clue.

If there is a brokered convention, I also think that Harris will be the one that our rulers will ultimately try to push through. She’s neo-liberal certified: essentially stands for nothing other than her self-interests. It will create a nice story line heavy on identity politics: a black woman trying to break the gender barrier to win the presidency, to get for women what Hillary had “stolen” from her from the same disgusting, misogynist opponent. That will be the narrative our rulers will try to sell.

But a brokered convention is also the only way that Biden will get in. I believe that the poll numbers are greatly exaggerated for him in terms of how many people are actually committed to vote for him. Most of his “support” is up for grabs, it’s not a strong following, there’s nothing he offers that anchors it, and his numbers are inflated as is. He’ll never get enough votes from the people to get the nomination. Neither will Harris. Sanders might. Beto is a tool being funded to slice delegates away from Bernie in a big delegate state. That’s part of the value to our rulers for the Harris nomination as well, and of course to rope in the duel identity draws of being a black female. Mayor Pete is being funded to net some identity-based gay voters and the cool, vapid millineal professionals (not that all millineals are vapid or are even particularly vapid compared to other generations and identity groups).

Warren doesn’t have enough charisma and is not cynical enough to play her gender card to the hilt to get the votes to win the nomination outright and there’s no way our rulers will broker her nomination; she’s an enemy of the 1%. She’s a policy person and would be a great running mate with Bernie and I think would make a fine vice-president, probably one of our best ever. Bernie is more of a big picture person and Warren is into the details. They would make a good governing team. It would be great to have her working with him to change things more towards the 99%’s favor. She sincerely cares about people and values justice, as does Bernie obviously.

Harris is similar to Palin personality wise, though much smarter. She’s as tight as a wire. I’m not sure she has the disposition to be successful in a long campaign. She will start to tatter. She also will have to answer for some of her past anti-crime, anti-defendant zeal that particularly hurt people of her own race, whose support is crucial to stand her up as a credible candidate to emerge from a filthy, backroom brokered convention.

Z

There will be paralysis until old people stop voting R, or they die.

There will be paralysis until EVERYONE realizes that voting is not the palliative they believe it to be. It hasn’t worked so far.

What does anyone think Bernie will accomplish with a Republican-controlled Congress or even a Democrat-controlled Congress? Neither party, both of which are owned by the Plutocracy, would cooperate with him even if he miraculously got the nomination and beat Trump which we know will never happen.

D.C. is the safety valve for the status quo hierarchy. Politics is the art of making the possible, impossible.

Andrew Yang has promise, talking about giving every American a Dividend, basically UBI by another name. He justified it on Fox News by stating that since Companies have our personal information and are using it to make profits, every American is thus entitled to a $1,000 a month just so businesses have the privilege of our information.

The only news organization giving him any coverage is Fox and even their hosts couldn’t fault his logic for the Dividend with Gutfield looking convinced.

Congressman Tlaib is unviable in this racist atmosphere which is saddening but it is what it is.

John Bel Edwards is the best out of the group though he isn’t running. He has shown what Democrats can do when they adopt a pro-life, pro-gun platform and then use it to beat the Republicans over the head on healthcare and social programs, making them look like hypocrites and shaming them into voting for those programs.

The Democratic Party has pre-tilt engineered its nomination process to prevent any one of the 4 Decent Democrats ( Sanders, Warren, Gabbard, Gravel) from winning the nomination on the First Ballot. Once no-one-single nomination-seeker wins the First Ballot; the Superdelegates are free to vote in every subsequent round of balloting. The intent is that not a single one of the Superdelegates will vote for one of the 4DDs ( 4 Decent Democrats). The Superdelegates will all divide their votes among the CCCs ( Catfood Cluster Candidates). If enough ballots reveal the Superdelegate preference beginning to coalesce around a certain Catfood Candidate, the Convention Masters will keep the balloting going until a Catfood Candidate can be nominated by ballot. If no Catfood Candidate can win a nominating majority, the the Convention Masters will broker the Convention to the Catfood Candidate of their Insider Choice.

That was the design. That is the plan for how to exploit that design which was engineered to make that plan workable.

The 4DDs have only one single First Ballot chance to get a 4DD nominated. The only way they can do that is if they . . . and all their hundreds of thousands of volunteers and workers in the field . . . AND all their millions of primary/caucus votecasting supporters . . . . all study and understand and generously support the following concept: Whichever 4DD batchload of delegates looks to be coming in second and third and fourth among the 4DD Delegations should all eagerly and enthusiastically and unanimously vote for the leading 4DD on the first ballot. If all those voting numbers add up to the 50 per cent + 1 that a nominee-wannabe must win the First Ballot by, then that 4DD will BE the Nominee. That would require each of the 4DDs and all of their supporters to understand that any one 4DD is to be viewed as a tire iron, a Mighty Tire Iron of Justice to swing into the Grinning Teeth of the Catfood Democrat Establishment. I can see an inducement to sell the concept. Whichever 4DD arrives with the most delegates will automatically commit to making the second-placing 4DD the Vice Presidential Running Mate, and the 3rd DD the next highest Cabinet Officer after that, and the 4th DD the next highest Cabinet Officer after THAT. That might be the mutual 4-way pledge and inducement needed to get the whole 4DD community to attempt this one single Hail Mary Long Shot Pass at conquering and grabbing the Nomination for a 4DD Nominee.

The 4DDs will have only that one chance. After that , the only thing the 4DD delegations can do is to refuse to permit any stop to the balloting ever. EVER. They can make the nomination into an unbearable torture process for the Catfood Democrats until the Catfood Leadership imposes a Catfood Nominee by brute force. The kind of brute force which assured Humphrey’s defeat in 1968. The 4DD community will have to force the Catfood Democrats to set themselves on fire in the streets just like those South Vietnamese Buddhist monks used to do in the 1960s.

If I can’t have a 4DD nominee, then I want to see the Catfood Democrat Party exterminated from existence . . . and I will base my voting on what will get me closest to the goal of Catfood Democrat Extermination.

Yang also backs a national value added tax, so that what the state giveth, the state taketh away as well.

StewartM is arguably right about one thing. The Gun issue alone loses [D]’s about 38-44% swing voters in rural areas. That’s why Republicans have done much better in Senate and Presidential elections, it’s not the bleeping Russians, it’s not bleeping racism and it’s not the bleeping Electoral College, it’s dropping 38-44% of swing voters on every election that contains rural areas.

Rural areas [like the one I live in] don’t see much gun violence.

Rural areas [like the one I live in] don’t have police services like densely populated areas. Call the sheriff in the middle of the night because somebody is breaking in, be prepared to wait over an hour on a good night…2&1/2 hours on a busy night. The sheriff [assuming he’s not answering another call] might be only 15 miles away as the crow flies but, he has to drive down a river valley, then cross over and then drive up “your” river valley. Alternatively, shine your laser sight on the door peep-hole/window and the meth-head will be making tracks. Rural people will not vote for government disarmament that leaves them at the mercy of criminals.

Gun violence, when you stop calling suicides “homicides” is an overwhelmingly urban phenomenon, in fact, it’s really just a few zip codes, disarming law abiding citizens will not stop urban gang violence, indeed, Mexico [which is far more like the US than England] proves just the opposite, take guns away from citizens and gangs will have free reign.

Still the Democrats persist…and why is that? Because our rulers know damn well why the founders put the 2nd amendment in the US Constitution. See my comment above:

“Today’s Democratic party is inclusive of minorities, they want all groups to partake in, or be subject to, modern day debt slavery, modern day colonialism and a kinder-gentler form of corporate fascism enforced through an Orwellian domestic surveillance program.”

Was it just me…or didn’t I hear a Senator[D], who represents New York’s financial interests, publicly threatening a sitting President with the violence CIA is well known for? That was quite a sight. Completely lost to most “Democrats” is that the CIA was most certainly involved with the assassination of a very popular President[D] because…the plutocrats did not like the results of an election. Today’s “Democrats” sleep with vipers.

A great number of American Citizens do not trust the US Government when it says, “after we disarm you, we will start protecting you”…nor did the founding fathers btw. By my count, Democrats have been willing to, repeatedly, lose state & national election for four decades in order to disarm American Citizens in contravention to our constitution…why? Because the plutocrats have a plan that requires a disarmed populace…”austerity” is a very nice euphemism for robbing the nation blind.

Want less gun violence? Stop glamorizing it in films and other media outlets! Oh, but wait, that could hurt the [D] donor base, at least the ones lacking the ability to tell a good story that does not include gratuitous scenes of violence to paper-over a feeble story line.

I agree with other commenters that
Biden = Fear;
Trump = Hope
is not an accurate enough description to capture the dynamics. I do agree that voters-who-will-choose-not-to-vote would be a key to the outcome of a Trump v Biden matchup.

Ché Pasa’s Biden = Restoration where what is being restored is an imaginary status quo ante of stability and decency, a “normal” where the world is basically OK and if it is isn’t, if “normal” is under threat (and it is always only a threat — anything that actually happens goes down the memory hole), it is because the evil Republicans made them do it.

Trump = Hope does not work descriptively, because Trump in fact is in general outlook one of the darkest and most pessimistic Presidents we have ever had. Ostensibly, Trump is offering a different brand of Restoration, reaching back further into foggy and wistful memory toward an imaginary status quo ante of Make America Great Again, but he is doing so from a rusty, corrupted personal worldview in which almost everyone is untrustworthy and lies and cheats and betrays, painted over with an hypomaniac’s compulsion to sell himself with public hyperbole.

It is tempting to venture an analysis founded on my brilliant insight into “what is really going on” behind the smokescreen of slogans and posturing, but I am not sure I have a brilliant insight on which to build; in grave doubt, I will give it what is sure to be an embarrassing shot.

In a politics which is just a front for letting the powerful do what they will — and the powerful are not the people we elect — there is a built-in tension in any candidacy between the shiny illusion being presented and the ugly reality any sentient person must at least suspect will be delivered.

So, Biden is promising an illusion of Restoring Normal and fronting a policy of allowing the System to continue the beatings.

It is tempting to invoke symmetry and assert that Trump is doing the “same” or equivalent thing: promising the illusion of MAGA while fronting an even more naked Kleptocracy than Biden.

In the symmetrical view, both candidacies (I won’t say “candidates” here because the candidacy is a construction of political operatives more multifarious than the individual playing its dramatic central role) are effectively promising beatings, just for different groups of people: Trump for the scary Muslims or Hispanic immigrants, obviously; Biden, more implicitly for the deplorable flyovers.

The other candidate — the greater evil — can serve as a reference point for building a narrative of convenient denial of reality supportive of the illusion being fronted. So, lots of Democratic voters somehow convinced themselves that Hillary Clinton was not a candidate of Goldman Sachs, not a war-monger, et cetera because Trump was worse. And, those same Clinton voters bought a narrative that identified Trump voters as fools, whose views and concerns could be disregarded as tainted by racism.

As the illusions grow more tattered and unbelievable, the number of people who simply drop out of the electoral system become ever more important to the strategic calculus of the people running the campaigns. Those who completely stop believing cannot be allowed to participate.

There is also the problem that simply letting a kleptocracy run wild can become worrisome even to some of the kleptocrats.

Trump fronts a nationalist impulse on the Right that seems genuinely worried about trade and China. The mainstream narrative, driven by a business and financial elite that is quite comfortable with the status quo, is that Trump is a bull in the China shop of free trade and international comity (as if!). Democrats seem remarkably reluctant to admit Trump might have a point.

Sanders, Warren and Gabbard represent elements in the Democratic Party that are worried about a kleptocracy and/or military-industrial complex running wild. Whether a Biden candidacy would incorporate any of those concerns in any form seems unlikely, given the precedent set by the Clintonites of exile and exclusion for Sanders supporters in the Party, plus the insistence on attacking Trump via the Russia,Russia,Russia narrative.

Biden is a far less perfect Anti-Trump than Buttigieg. If the thesis that Biden is a placeholder occupying space to keep Sanders or Warren from becoming inevitable is correct then the early debates are a trial period to test out whether Buttigieg or Harris or Booker or Yang or someone else are marketable. If anyone can be elected on pure hot air filling an Anti-Trump balloon with no other commitment to policy specifics (other than Silicon Valley friendly nostrums), Buttigieg, a favorite of Morning Joe, is it.

Some sort of weird alliance has formed between the Democrats and the Deep State embedded in the so-called Intelligence Community and Military-Industrial Complex. I guess it is really hard for me to see the shades of grey that put Trump at odds with the foreign policy establishment or the Intelligence Agencies. To my simple mind, they should love a belligerent authoritarian like Trump. But, there is something they do not love about him.

I look on the Economy as the joker in the deck. A recession is coming on and seems timed for the election year. A business recession could well reveal some of the deep rot in the American economy. I do not know what people will make of Uber collapsing or an uptick in precarity. I suppose the plan is that those people suffering or those who care about the suffering continue to believe that voting cannot possibly matter. (And, I agree with other commenters that voting for a Bernie isn’t enough in any case, you need a Congress filled with AOC-types on the left and some sort of local booster conservatives on the right.)

Lots of great comments; will just chime in on a couple —

@Stewart — ITA, I think Trump would be doing mental cartwheels if the Dems nominate Biden, that’s his best chance to win again, and probably why he wants to keep the media Biden-centered

@SBrennan — Couple of ver good comments; agreed that Kamala makes the most sense for the corporatists to actually get behind; either they’re keeping her off-center now to swoop in later, or she pissed someone off somehow, or her failure to get immediate top-of-the-polls traction frightened them and they really are as gutless and unimaginative as we sometimes think they are;

also mostly agreed on the guns–absolutely on the rural bit, I’m in the same boat as you are, most people here have guns and we have almost no gun violence and if someone tries to break into your house you want the gun (and people almost never break into houses when someone is home out here, only when they’re gone, probably also gun-related in a good way), and it’s idiotic to count suicides with the homicides.

@DC — yes on the necessity of defending women’s bodily autonomy & reproductive freedom! & on the need to eventually coalesce around a candidate on the left, though we have plenty of time. Especially if other states are like Cali where I think (I read this a while back & can’t remember for sure?) the delegates get split among the people who get over 15% off the vote, with those people getting not only all their own delegates but the remaining ones split proportionately based on their overall vote totals? This seems so stupid it’s hard to believe it’s real, but I could swear I remember reading that is how it is going to be here.

Tulsi is my first choice but if this is how the system is going to work, and the polls stay as they are, I will be voting Bernie when we get to primary day, for that reason as well as the ones you gave.

@BruceWilder — the deep state doesn’t like Trump because despite his frequently bellicose and occasionally frighteningly stupid rhetoric, he has thus far avoided invading anyone, and so far stopped their plans for a middle eastern proxy fight w/Russia that could theoretically last forever or even turn into a shooting war with Russia, which I think the MIC actually want, because they think they can keep it contained and we will always win and control the escalation to whatever we want. He may be loathsome and self-centered, but he has this much sense, at least. The MIC-preferred candidates need someone easier to control or more willing to play ball. See: Biden, Buttigieg, and probably all the media acceptable candidates.

Note on Warren: I’m surprised so many still like her. As with Beto (and I sometimes wonder about Yang and a couple of others), the main point of her campaign seems to be to siphon off support from and weaken Bernie. I was once a fan, but not for a long while.

Note on Buttigieg — don’t underestimate this guy. I dislike him intensely but he’s very bright and quick on his feet and speaks really well and the corporate media loves him. We saw what that combo of attributes did for Obama. “1st white gay male President” doesn’t equate to “1st black president” as a narrative, plus people wanting hope and change are a little more skeptical now, otherwise we’d be in trouble.

Sad true story: The first time my naive idiot self saw Obama speak, at the DNC convention in 2004 I think, I ran to get my wife, saying “you have to see this guy! he’s the future of the democratic party!” She watched, said, “I don’t get it; he’s just another politician speaking in meaningless platitudes, maybe a little phonier than most.” Alas, we were both right.

Again, lots of great comments from lots of people.

SBrennan and Mojave Wolf (plus others)

Saying that an individual right to own firearms is one invented by Heller need not imply that any restriction is good or bad policy. It just says that governments *can* impose restrictions, it is within their power. Personally, I am not against the private ownership of any non-nuclear weapon, as long as I’m satisfied that the weapon is in good hands, which I think would be the focus of most regulations.

(Heck, I was told that a WWII Eastern Front re-enactor group not too far away (8th Guards Mechanized Corps, such groups exist now!) who found some old Yugoslav T-34/85 tanks for their group to use in their costly hobby, but the State Department nixed the deal, for gawd knows why. Someone buying and owning such old hardware would not be a problem, as it would be horribly expensive to maintain, you have to make the spare parts oneself, etc, which is why they are own by organizations such as these (the Confederate Air Force comes to mind). Still, you can find them on sale:

http://www.russianmilitary.co.uk/details.php?headers=land&sub_headers=TRACKED&id=248

So yeah, own your own tank, if you want. Just fill out the paperwork and meet the requirements).

Also, just based on the gun owners I know, many of them would agree with my sentiment, so I don’t agree with SBrennan’s electoral consequences argument. The position that you have any personal *right* to own a firearm was never supported by any judicial interpretation of the Second Amendment until it was invented out of thin air in 2008 to make the NRA (the gun manufacturing lobby) happy.

Rural areas [like the one I live in] don’t see much gun violence.

Hmm, not true. Rural areas have fewer gun homicides in absolute terms, but in terms of rate they can be as violent or more violent than many urban areas. To whit:

Map of US gun homicides by county:

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/a0/34/9d/a0349d09525c059fe29f3df82940dc87.png

Map of US gun ownership rates by state:

https://i0.wp.com/media.boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/559451a2ecad0464750b3d6c-1136-918.png?resize=970%2C784&ssl=1

Now the correlation isn’t clear either way, I’d rate it ~ 0.5. You have states like Montana that have high rates of gun ownership and low rates of gun violence, and also rural sections of SC, Mississippi, Alabama, and Arkansas that have high rates of gun ownership and high rates of gun violence. You have urban areas like Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York City with a very high homicide rates but also major cities like Minneapolis, Boston, Seattle, Portland (Oregon) and Austin that have low rates. You also have some low gun ownership states that include some high gun homicide rates.

But overall, there is also a lot of overlap with gun ownership and gun violence and the lack thereof. Mind you, this includes just gun homicides (not suicides) and probably furthermore excludes attempted homicides using a firewarm. But rural doesn’t = ‘safer’ and urban doesn’t = “more violent”. This should be clear once you go outside the US, as cities like Taipei, one of the most densely packed places on the planet, have a crime rate so low it would be the envy of any US city, town, or county.

SM says people may own guns “as long as I’m satisfied that the weapon is in good hands”.

He, like many other megalomaniacs, is under the impression that others must behave in accordance with his wishes. This imperial sense of entitlement is exactly what makes friends of mine buy more guns/ammo than they honestly need, this is what drives many to machine their own untraceable receivers, they know that the final goal of all gun control advocates is gun confiscation.

Although they love war, few [D]’s serve in the Army/Marines nowadays, consequently, few own the civilian version of weapons they were trained on. So rather than disarming violent urban gangs, which would might upset neighborhoods that reliably vote [D], today’s “Democrats” seek to solve the urban homicide problem by going after those who live peacefully in rural areas.

I own an AR in a larger caliber, I do not think it is the “best” carbine I could own but, unlike SM, I served and I was trained by the US Army to use a carbine that was similar to what I now own. The US Army’s M-16 A1 that I trained on and used was an automatic weapon, my weapon is NOT. However, the US Army trained me, they paid to have me fire my weapon just south of 10,000 times, that’s a lot of practice, a lot of muscle memory, that is why I like the AR, it’s familiar. There is nothing magical about the AR, any pistol has the same fire rate, often with powerful rounds and is much more easily concealed. Indeed, pistols are involved in north 85% of all gun homicides nationally, semi-automatic rifles on the other hand, average around 2%, AR are lower than 1%. Every year, knives kill more people than AR’s, let that sink in. Gun confiscation laws like WA & CA’s hope to solve gun homicides by concentrating on only 1 % of the problem. They, in all honesty, would get better results confiscating knives.

So why the public fear? The media, which encourages violence through it graphic & gratuitous depiction, likes to use military style weapons. The media knows the vast majority of young men “have better things to do” than serve in the military. To the well born urban elite, military weapons are unfamiliar and can be given magical qualities that a naive mind will accept. That is why we see the mentally ill chose these rifles, these sick minds see villains do magical things with AR’s. Most times the media’s depictions are laughable and contrary to media depictions, reality has shown, that those individuals who immediately fight back, instead of cowering in fear, are successful in ending the attack. Still, the media insists that we cower in fear while awaiting the gunman’s execution. Why…why are we taught by corporate media to offer no resistance? Ask yourself that.

For Joan. First, the generations ahead of you are using the political and economic system to screw you and your generation over, and make your lives worse so the remains of theirs can be better. Voting for President does not offer the possibility of making a large impact on this problem. Not voting offers even less. It differentiates your point of view from the non-voting masses in no way.

Second, I would encourage you to take a closer look at Elizabeth Warren. When our country suffers under a President whose corruption is exposed, as with Nixon, we tend to elect the most morally courageous candidate in response, as with Jimmy Carter. Warren has supported impeachment on ethical grounds, and fought against many of the ways in which her generation is screwing ours. Examples include the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau she first proposed and later got passed into law, and her vehement public opposition to the Biden-backed bankruptcy bill that exempted student loans from being discharged with bankruptcy. I would love it if she were 25 years younger, with a more fully modern perspective, and I say the exact same thing about Bernie Sanders. That person doesn’t seem, so far, to exist in this race. Maybe Jay Inslee?

More generally, for the Kamala Harris supporters, do you understand what prosecutors do? Do you understand the utter corruption and depravity of the criminal justice system in America? Ask Michelle Alexander. Being not only involved in that system, but so deeply embedded that you are the chief executive of the very worst part of it for a population of 50m? Disqualifying, in my mind. It’s a horror show, and being on the “we advance by achieving a 99% conviction rate” side of it is really awful.

As to Carter, you’re not wrong about his time in office being a mixed bag, though I’d argue that invading Vietnam was surely a largely Democratic neocolonialist action, S. Brennan.

He was also the most ethical candidate in the race, which was the point of my analogy.

“Also it can’t be all video games and media because countries that play the very same games and watch the very same movies have far lower rates of gun violence”

Ignorance or casual lie, dunno but, regardless, it discredits you.

Mexico has some of, if not the toughest gun laws in the world and it’s firearm homicides rate exceeds the USA by a factor of 3-5…and that’s not even taking into account that the USA cynically intermingles suicides with murders to more than double our gun homicide rate.

There is no correlation between gun laws and homicides*. However, homicides and culture have extremely strong links, which is why 80% of all gun homicides occur in about 30 of 42,000 US zip codes.

Those seeking to confiscate the weapons of law abiding citizens have a childlike belief in their infallibility, impervious to real world data and SM stridency makes that point clearly.

Those seeking to confiscate the weapons of law abiding citizens have a childlike belief that violence has no cultural root. That repetitive exposure to violence by media outlets has no effect even though, study after study has shown that vulnerable youth [see above 30 zip codes] are profoundly effected by repeated exposure to violence.

And yet, today’s “liberal” goes into apoplectic fits should anyone suggest we revive media standards to discourage the transmission of violent media material across state lines. Nope, the only answer to gun violence is to repeat Mexico’s failed experiment while ignoring the roots of violence.

And Mexicans are not a violent people but, it’s criminals sure the hell are. And those narcos know, anytime Mexicans get fed up with how they are being treated and start arming themselves, the drug lords can call in the Mexican Army to disarm any resisters. This happened just a few months ago just outside Acapulco, the only people who can carry weapons in Mexico are criminals.

Those seeking to confiscate the weapons of law abiding citizens want to bring Mexico’s tragic situation to the US, unlike SM, I think when a policy is shown to be a complete and utter failure it should not be repeated in the hopes that repeated often enough it will work.

* https://crimeresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Homicide-rates-across-all-countries.jpg