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Title: Hillary Clinton is unraveling quickly
Source:
NY Post
URL Source: http://nypost.com/2016/05/10/hillary-clinton-is-unraveling-quickly/
Published: May 11, 2016
Author: Michael Goodwin
Post Date: 2016-05-11 08:25:37 by cranky
Keywords: None
Views: 4582
Comments: 37
A liberal friend is very concerned about the Republican Party. He tells me that Donald Trump will make it impossible for anybody anywhere running under the “R” column to win election. Even a dogcatcher in Podunk is doomed! The New York Times shows a similar concern. Surely written with furrowed brow, its front page worries because “Sparring in GOP Rises” and because “Rift Grows Wide as Republicans Abandon Trump.” It joins two other concerned lefties, the Huffington Post and CNBC, in declaring that the GOP is “unraveling.” All stand ready to help sponsor a dignified funeral, but that won’t be necessary. Their reports of the Republican Party’s death are premature. Very premature. A new Quinnipiac poll tells the inconvenient truth. Trump and Hillary Clinton are tied in each of the three key swing states of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. The breakdown in Florida reveals how truly close the race is. As Politico puts it, Clinton has a 13-point advantage among women, 48 percent to 35 percent, while Trump’s lead among men is also 13 points, 49 percent to 36 percent. Each gets 39 percent of independent voters, while Trump wins big among whites, and Clinton wins big among nonwhites. The candidates have identical net negative approvals of minus 20 points, 37 percent to 57 percent. With the poll showing Bernie Sanders doing better against Trump than Clinton (and Sanders winning the West Virginia primary on Tuesday), I myself am growing concerned about the “unraveling” of the Democratic Party! Big Media’s fixation on the defections of Big-Name Republicans is the latest proof that both groups remain stubbornly disconnected from real Americans. If Trump had been dependent on the support of Mitt Romney or Sen. Lindsey Graham or assorted pundits and donors, he never would have gotten 10 million primary votes. He launched a rocket-fueled revolution, defeated 16 rivals and became the presumptive nominee by running against the entire national establishment, not to mention conventional wisdom and both political parties. Now he’s doomed if Romney doesn’t back him? Nonsense. Yet each day, the drum beats louder about a new and greater threat to GOP harmony. The current one is the insistence from everybody on the left, and a few on the right, that Trump is toast if he can’t get House Speaker Paul Ryan to endorse him. By all means, endorsements are generally a good thing for candidates, and party unity is usually regarded as an essential starting point. But the claim that Trump must finally conform to all the traditional norms repeats the false assumptions that led the media and most Republicans to miss Trump’s astonishing appeal in the first place. He is a phenomenon, much as Barack Obama was in 2008, and he could do to Clinton what Obama did to her then. Obama was fresh, and she was tired. Now Trump is fresh, and Clinton is even more tired. One result is that the campaign will be fought on his turf. The issues most associated with him — immigration, terrorism, trade, jobs — dominated the GOP primaries. Indeed, try to imagine the last year without Trump. Who would have set the GOP agenda, what issues would have led the way, and how would voters have responded? Would turnout have hit record levels when so many Republican voters feel betrayed by their own party leaders? Trump stirred the drink from day one and the ability to set the terms of the contest is usually the hallmark of a winning campaign. That’s what he’s done so far, and that’s what he’ll try to do in the fall. Clinton can’t let him succeed, and instead must put him on defense with nonstop attacks on his character and lack of government experience. She’s already doing that, but is paying a price with his fierce counter-punching. Her big advantage is the Electoral College, and she will try to shut him down by relentlessly playing the women’s and racial cards. And it’s certain Trump will hand her gaffe gifts and display an embarrassing lack of detailed knowledge. We know all that already, yet still they are tied in the states that matter most. She may win and he may lose, but neither The New York Times nor Mitt Romney will make a whit of difference. Blas, Cuo in summer slimeshare The continuing blizzard of subpoenas demonstrates that New York’s twin corruption scandals are no mere spring fling. Investigations are expanding in the offices of both Mayor de Blasio and Gov. Cuomo and could make for a very hot summer. Coming after numerous lawmakers were convicted in separate cases, the probes paint the era as one of the most corrupt in history. How’s this for a slogan: More crooked than Tammany! Things are so bad that Mayor de Blasio is using Al Sharpton as a character witness. The mayor made a visit to Sharpton’s headquarters and again painted himself a do-gooder caught up in a witch hunt. “The voices of the status quo find many, many ways to undermine progress,” he claimed. Sharpton echoed the “woe is us” tone, calling de Blasio a man of “integrity.” He should have found a word with less baggage. Recall that the mayor had called Sheldon Silver a “man of integrity” when Silver was charged in the federal case that saw the former Assembly speaker sentenced to 12 years in prison and hit with nearly $7 million in fines and restitution. And this Thursday, another alleged man of integrity, former GOP state senate leader Dean Skelos, gets sentenced for his thievery. Silver and Skelos are Cuomo’s former amigos from three-men-in-a-room infamy, and now the governor himself could be under the feds’ microscope again. Prosecutors want records showing whether six current and former members of his inner circle did anything to “benefit” 20 different companies that got state business. Cuomo and de Blasio are sworn enemies, and each is no doubt happy to see the other in a jam. For now, both would be wise to hold the laughter. a Khan-do mayor Sadiq Khan, London’s first Muslim mayor, wrote an op-ed promising that: “As mayor, I will be the British Muslim who finally roots out extremism and radicalisation from British society. I will support mainstream Muslims to challenge extremists and work with the internet providers to ban extremist websites.” Wait, if he’s saying there is an actual link between Islam and Islamic terrorists, he must be wrong. President Obama says there is no connection, and He always knows best. Trans-fer fight to lockers A reader offers a suggestion on the transgender tempest in a piss pot. “Bathrooms are very private places,” he writes. “Locker rooms and shower rooms are not. How many women would be happy to share a locker room or shower with a transgender woman who has male sexual organs? “My guess is that the polling numbers would be dramatically different if pollsters asked about locker rooms instead of bathrooms.” 
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Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 35.
#1. To: cranky (#0)
I missed the "unraveling" in the text of the article. Yes, and much as Barack Obama was in 2008, Trump is a fraud.
Obama has not been a fraud. He campaigned on a set of principles, and by and large he did what he was expected to do.
Unbelievable!! The guy is more despicable liar than the Clintons and a bigger crook than Nixon. For God's sake, man, get a sense of reality. Just look at all the outright lying, records burying, cover-up actions, and total lack of transparency from him and his minions. No person in their right mind would believe anything this asshole says.
You have to realize that Vicomte13 is a Dim and a Papist. Once you understand that,it all makes sense.
I am not a Democrat. Never have been. I'm a Registered Republican.
LOL You must one majorly conflicted puppy as you have said many, many times that you hate the Republicans. This explains a lot about your posts.
I do hate the Republicans. I hate what they have become. I grew up in Detroit, saw first hand what racism, and sloth AND "free" trade AND executive overreach will do. Went into the Navy at 18. I did not agree at all with Reagan's economics, and still don't, but Reagan WAS standing tall and facing down the Soviet Union and the Communists everywhere, while the Democrats were caving and capitulating. National Security was my Alpha. And has remained so. I didn't agree with Reagan's economics, but I gave him a chance. I did well under him until 1987, then got hit in the crash. I was somewhat, not wholly, persuaded that perhaps Reagan had been right about tax cuts after all, even if it meant a growing debt. So I voted for Bush 41, believing him when I read his lips and he promised me no new taxes. He lied. And I trusted him as commander-in-chief when he sent us into Kuwait. But then he stopped us even as we were closing the trap on Saddam's Army. We were halted and we let them get away. We let them get away and soon they were back shooting at our planes. Then he sent us into Somalia. I flew the Marines into Mogadishu airport to effect the takeover. So I went in harms way again, to serve the vanity of a defeated President, in an operation that had no particular plan for victory. A fiasco. So, Bush lied to me, and I went to nasty places all over that side of the world pursuing vague, vain, unspecified goals. I was not impressed and so I voted for Perot. Then came Clinton. I found Clinton to be quite corrupt, and was a more enthusiastic supporter of Bob Dole's candidacy than the candidate himself. But of course Dole lost. I wanted John McCain in 2000, but W was the candidate, so I voted for him, without enthusiasm. Of course he was better than Gore. Then came 9/11. I worked at Ground Zero and was there that day. I thought Bush's initial response was really great. But then he lost his way like his father did before him. He listened to poor advice and did not ask for a declaration of war. He did not commit the country to a full-on war to wipe out the enemy. I was hopeful that a police action could somehow work this time, but I had a sickening dread from the week after the attack onward that we were in the process of blowing it. America was primed for war. 9/11 was Pearl Harbor. FDR took us to war, and we won and changed the world. But W told us to go shopping and settled on sending inadequate forces without a game plan. So we defeated a third rate army, and then were caught up in a much more dangerous regional civil war, which our leaders did not anticipate (but which many of us did). The Republicans simply could not pull their minds out of their economic and social theories sufficiently to actually fight and win a war. At a time when the budget deficit was exploding from war costs, the Republicans were holding the line on estate taxes and other tax loopholes for the very wealthy. So once again a Republican Administration ended with the economy in shambles, and with an unneccessary military mess brought on by a "strategy" - if it can be called that - that was less brain than ear wax. There the economy is in meltdown, and W's would-be Republican successor, McCain, "suspends his campaign" to go out and tell the nation that "the economy is sound" even as it was tanking and going to pieces to a degree rivaling 1929. AND singing "Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" for good measure (the existing quagmire having taught the GOP leader nothing). McCain lost to Obama. I was not thrilled with getting a left wing Democrat. But then I watched the right wing chat boards, the grass roots Republicans, go non-linear over the man's race. Really, Republicans? THAT's what you're going to key on? I saw no reflection, no self-examination, no sense at all that the mess we were in had been made over the long haul. Nope, it was all because Obama was some sort of black radical weatherman. I could not tell if Republicans were patently dishonest or bone stupid. And on it went. Then we had Romney. The same tired economic ideas that had blown up at the end of THREE Republican Presidencies, all on offer again. Nothing learned. Romney's contempt for half the population was openly expressed. I detested him. But I gritted my teeth and voted for him and said "Never again!" And that was that. I didn't go to the trouble of DE-registering as a Republican. I simply identified as an independent. But my party registration remained Republican. When they called for money, I told them to go to Hell and meant it. Then along came Trump. Now, Trump GETS the very things that the Republicans have gotten wrong all along. He's a nationalist, his economics skew to the middle not the rich, and he understands the need for national security. Therefore, OF COURSE the Republicans all came out of their chairs to attack him. But this time, it turns out that there are a lot of Republican rank-and-file who have common sense. Trump condemns the military incompetence and lack of strategy of the Bush administration and its wars of folly. And he is absolutely right. The Establishment howls - because they ARE the idiots who foisted that policy. Etc. Right down the line. Trump is my kind of Republican. I'm pleased I kept the registration alive, so that I could vote for him in the Connecticut primary. Conflicted? No. I hate the Republican Party that was, and as it is. I like what it is becoming under Trump (although I think the racism needs to have a stock stuffed in it). Democrats are babykillers. I don't vote for them. But had the GOP Establishment stolen the election from Trump, all of the experience of my life is that Republicans (Reagan and two Bushes) leave the economy in a mess, while Democrats (Clinton and Obama) leave it better than they found it. So a vote for Hillary and the Democrats would not, for me, be a vote for economic disaster. I think the Democrats have a proven track record of being superior on economic matters than Republicans. But that will change with Trump. Trump is a smart businessman. He'll get it done right.
There are more rich DRats in the halls of power in DC than REPS. None of these, D or R, will ever vote in anything that will change the rules that would negatively affect them or their rich crony donors. No POTUS ever did that, especially Obama because he wanted to be rich when he left the WH and stay that way afterward (and he did achieve that goal even though he didn't tell you about it). "But that will change with Trump. Trump is a smart businessman. He'll get it done right." You are delusional. Trump is a major player in the crony capitalism club. He will not change a damn thing in that regard. He is already back peddling on taxes, the wall, immigration, etc., by the time November comes around you won't recognize him as the guy that campaigned in April. You just don't get the fact that he is a con man, a hustler whose word means nothing, not even when it is in writing, unless he continues to profit from it.
I do not believe that he is. I am going to give him a chance to prove to me that he is what he says he is. I believe he will. I also believe that even if he does do what he says, you will never accept that he has. I think you have Trump Derangement Syndrome and will be unappeasable no matter what the man does.
There is no reason not to accept and acknowledge clear results. It is you that never will admit that he didn't deliver on what you believe he promised you. For example, there will be no wall that Mexico won't pay for, there will be no temporary or otherwise halt on Muslim entries into the U.S., there will be no renegotiation of trade deals (especially with China), there will be no decisive destruction of ISIS anytime some, there will be no repatriation of American jobs that where moved overseas, etc., etc., etc. There only be more "suggestions" from Trump as his promised positions "evolve" or be negotiated to something totally unrecognizable from what he promised just a few weeks ago, much let what you believed he promised you last October. Believe him at your own risk. Benchmark today and the promises that you believe that Trump made to you as of just a couple of weeks ago (he already set the basis for letting himself off the hook on the Muslim restriction, tax cuts, immigration promises of his campaign just a week or so ago when there were still others in the race since then). The above are my benchmarks that gives you plenty of ammunition to come back at me a 18 months or so and tell me "I told you so" as I clearly laid out my position on the promises Trump will not fulfill and which demonstrated performance could clearly prove me wrong. I am not worried about that day. If you have the courage post your benchmark of promises that Trump will keep. Remember trying is not what he promise, he promised definitive results.
I only really care about one single plank of Trump's platform, and I'm only going to judge him on this one, because it's the Alpha issue, affecting everything else: a rework and dramatic improvement of our relationship with Russia. Trump will be able to negotiate a real settlement between the two nations, and Trump will be able to hold the US side to keep the deal. If we keep the deal with Russia, Russia will keep the deal with us. I'm holding Trump to the same standard I held Reagan. I thought that Reagan's economic and trade policies were wrongheaded, but I supported Reagan anyway because he handled the USSR properly, and that made the world a safer place. Those are the definitive results I am looking for, and the yardstick by which I mill judge Trump. All of the bluster of the campaign and the ancillaries are just so much noise to me. You may care about them. I really don't.
I guess all the things Trump promised re: the economy, getting jobs back into the U.S., improved trade deals, etc., etc., etc. mean nothing to you. It's Russia, stupid? Wow, you are all over the place. No wonder you connect with Dollar Donald.
I'm really not over the place. I've been largely in the same place since 1981. I live in a world full of people who are flighty, and people who focus on other things. The flighty ones pay attention to everything. To then everything is important. The people who are focused on other things think those things are the most important. Unlike the flighty, I focus on core issues that drive everything. And unlike the fixed, my eyes are fixed on different things. You want to judge? Judge away. I don't care.
#36. To: Vicomte13 (#35)
Most people CAN intellectually walk and chew gum at the same time.
Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest He [Trump] is a phenomenon, much as Barack Obama was in 2008
#2. To: ConservingFreedom (#1)
Barack Obama was in 2008, Trump is a fraud.
#3. To: Vicomte13, ConservingFreedom (#2)
Obama has not been a fraud. He campaigned on a set of principles, and by and large he did what he was expected to do.
#14. To: SOSO (#3)
Unbelievable!! The guy is more despicable liar than the Clintons and a bigger crook than Nixon. For God's sake, man, get a sense of reality. Just look at all the outright lying, records burying, cover-up actions, and total lack of transparency from him and his minions. No person in their right mind would believe anything this asshole says.
#18. To: sneakypete (#14)
You have to realize that Vicomte13 is a Dim and a Papist.
#26. To: Vicomte13, sneakypete, Roscoe (#18)
I am not a Democrat. Never have been. I'm a Registered Republican.
#27. To: SOSO (#26)
LOL You must one majorly conflicted puppy as you have said many, many times that you hate the Republicans. This explains a lot about your posts.
#29. To: Vicomte13 (#27)
The Republicans simply could not pull their minds out of their economic and social theories sufficiently to actually fight and win a war. At a time when the budget deficit was exploding from war costs, the Republicans were holding the line on estate taxes and other tax loopholes for the very wealthy.
#31. To: SOSO (#29)
You just don't get the fact that he is a con man, a hustler whose word means nothing, not even when it is in writing, unless he continues to profit from it.
#32. To: Vicomte13 (#31)
I believe he will. I also believe that even if he does do what he says, you will never accept that he has.
#33. To: SOSO (#32)
#34. To: Vicomte13 (#33)
All of the bluster of the campaign and the ancillaries are just so much noise to me. You may care about them. I really don't.
#35. To: SOSO (#34)
It's Russia, stupid? Wow, you are all over the place.
Replies to Comment # 35. Unlike the flighty, I focus on core issues that drive everything.
End Trace Mode for Comment # 35.
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