Quote:

---

Originally posted by 1kiki:

Like a lot of things posted by 'g', thugger and second, absolutely fictitious.

I thought this was supposed to be REAL. WORLD. EVENTS.

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by 1kiki:
So, second. hitlery lost.

Shake out your shoulders. Take a deep breath.

Bernie is trying to create a coalition of progressives to counter Trump. Are you going to still obsess over Trump even though it did absolutely NO GOOD the last time around? Are you still going to write Bernie off because he's stooped? Or are you going to join up with Bernie as the most logical place at the moment to DO SOMETHING about what Trump represents?

Your choice. Fruitless obsession? Or active participation?

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by G:
Thanksgiving is shaping up to be a real swell time. "So, Trump.... so far so good?" Where are my manners?!

---

Quote:

---

Misattributed quote again. Second said that not G. Conclusion: proof that meaningful discussion not possible. Ideas, thoughts, facts do not connect.= GSTRING

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by SIGNYM:

I guess that's what happens when {I} post at 4 AM, dopey on Benadryl!

You have to admit, GSTRING, that post of SECOND'S was very GSTRING-like.

Who knew that SECOND could be as big as asshole as you? She usually hides her nastiness behind other people's opinions!

Well, just change the attribution from you to SECOND, but everything I posted applies to you, too. Especially the part where you follow me from thread to thread just to attack. You're a troll, GSTRING.

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by G:

Lots of blame to go around. I will not give the American public any excuses or passes. We got what we deserved (they did, they will).

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by 1kiki:

Yes, if only we could go back in time and undo the Electoral College - or HEY! I KNOW! IGNORE THE CONSTITUTION! Then we could have a REAL democratic election!

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by 1kiki:

What IS it with you SECOND?. Mere reality too complicated for you? Honesty too difficult?

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by G:

Funny thing - with a Republican president I suddenly feel the need to go buy a boat load of guns . . .

---

Quote:

---

"I'm not a white nationalist, I'm a nationalist. I'm an economic nationalist," Bannon tells THR media columnist Michael Wolff as the controversial Breitbart News chief turned White House advisor unleashes on Hillary Clinton, Fox News and his critics.

---

Quote:

---

In late summer when I went up to see Steve Bannon, then recently named CEO of the Donald Trump presidential campaign, in his office at Trump Tower in New York, he outlined a preposterous-sounding scenario. Trump, he said, would do surprisingly well among women, Hispanics and African-Americans, in addition to working men, and hence take Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan — and therefore the election.

---

Quote:

---

On Nov. 15, when I went back to Trump Tower, Bannon, promoted by the president-elect to chief strategist for the incoming administration, and by the media as the official symbol of all things hateful and virulent about the coming Trump presidency, said, as matter-of-factly as when he first sketched it out for me, "I told you so."

The liberal firewall against Trump was, most of all, the belief that the Republican contender was too disorganized, outlandish, outré and lacking in nuance to run a proper political campaign. That view was only confirmed when Bannon, editor of the outlandish and outré Breitbart News Network, took over the campaign in August. Now Bannon is arguably the most powerful person on the new White House team, embodying more than anyone the liberals' awful existential pain and fury: How did someone so wrong — not just wrong, but inappropriate, unfit and "loathsome," according to The New York Times — get it so spot-on right?

---

Quote:

---

In these dark days for Democrats, Bannon has become the blackest hole.

"Darkness is good," says Bannon, who amid the suits surrounding him at Trump Tower, looks like a graduate student in his T-shirt, open button-down and tatty blue blazer — albeit a 62-year-old graduate student. "Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That's power. It only helps us when they" — I believe by "they" he means liberals and the media, already promoting calls for his ouster — "get it wrong. When they're blind to who we are and what we're doing."

On that precise point, The New York Times, in a widely circulated article, will describe this day at Trump Tower as a scene of "disarray" for the transition team. In fact, it's all hands on:

---

Quote:

---

Mike Pence, the vice president-elect and transition chief, and Reince Priebus, the new chief of staff, shuttling between full conference rooms; Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and by many accounts his closest advisor, conferring in the halls; Sen. Jeff Sessions in and out of meetings on the transition team floor; Rudy Giuliani upstairs with Trump (overheard: "Is the boss meeting-meeting with Rudy or just shooting the shit?"), and Bannon with a long line of men and women outside his corner office. If this is disarray, it's a peculiarly focused and organized kind.

It's the Bannon theme, the myopia of the media — that it tells only the story that confirms its own view, that in the end it was incapable of seeing an alternative outcome and of making a true risk assessment of the political variables — reaffirming the Hillary Clinton camp's own political myopia. This defines the parallel realities in which liberals, in their view of themselves, represent a morally superior character and Bannon — immortalized on Twitter as a white nationalist, racist, anti-Semite thug — the ultimate depravity of Trumpism.

The focus on Bannon, if not necessarily the description, is right. He's the man with the idea. If Trumpism is to represent something intellectually and historically coherent, it's Bannon's job to make it so. In this, he could not be a less reassuring or more confusing figure for liberals — fiercely intelligent and yet reflexively drawn to the inverse of every liberal assumption and shibboleth.

A working class kid, he enlists in the navy after high school, gets a degree from Virginia Tech, then Georgetown, then Harvard Business School. Then it's Goldman Sachs, then he's a dealmaker and entrepreneur in Hollywood — where, in an unlikely and very lucky deal match-up, he gets a lucrative piece of Seinfeld royalties, ensuring his own small fortune — then into the otherworld of the vast right-wing conspiracy and conservative media.

---

Quote:

---

(He partners with David Bossie, a congressional investigator of President Clinton, who later spearheaded the Citizens United lawsuit that effectively removed the cap on campaign spending, and who now, as the deputy campaign manager, is in the office next to Bannon's.) And then to the Breitbart News Network, which with digital acumen and a mind-meld with the anger and the passion of the new alt-right (a liberal designation Bannon derides) he pushes to the inner circle of conservative media from Breitbart's base on the Westside of liberal Los Angeles.

What he seems to have carried from a boyhood in a blue-collar, union and Democratic family in Norfolk, Va., and through his tour of the American establishment, is an unreconstructed sense of class awareness, or bitterness — or betrayal. The Democratic Party betrayed its working-man roots, just as Hillary Clinton betrayed the longtime Clinton connection — Bill Clinton's connection — to the working man. "The Clinton strength," he says, "was to play to people without a college education. High school people. That's how you win elections." And, likewise, the Republican party would come to betray its working-man constituency forged under Reagan. In sum, the working man was betrayed by the establishment, or what he dismisses as the "donor class."

To say that he sees this donor class — which in his telling is also "ascendant America," e.g. the elites, as well as "the metrosexual bubble" that encompasses cosmopolitan sensibilities to be found as far and wide as Shanghai, London's Chelsea, Hollywood and the Upper West Side — as a world apart, is an understatement.

In his view, there's hardly a connection between this world and its opposite — fly-over America, left-behind America, downwardly mobile America — hardly a common language. This is partly why he regards the liberal characterization of himself as socially vile, as the politically incorrect devil incarnate, as laughable — and why he is stoutly unapologetic. They — liberals and media — don't understand what he is saying, or why, or to whom. Breitbart, with its casual provocations — lists of its varied incitements (among them: the conservative writer David Horowitz referred to conservative pundit Brill Kristol as a "renegade Jew," and the site delighting in headlines the likes of "Trannies 49Xs Higher HIV Rate" and "Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy") were in hot exchange after the election among appalled Democrats — is as opaque to the liberal-donor-globalist class as Lena Dunham might be to the out-of-work workingman class. And this, in the Bannon view, is all part of the profound misunderstanding that led liberals to believe that Donald Trump's mouth would doom him, instead of elect him.

Bannon, arguably, is one of the people most at the battle line of the great American divide — and one of the people to have most clearly seen it.

He absolutely — mockingly — rejects the idea that this is a racial line. "I'm not a white nationalist, I'm a nationalist. I'm an economic nationalist," he tells me. "The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia. The issue now is about Americans looking to not get f—ed over. If we deliver" — by "we" he means the Trump White House — "we'll get 60 percent of the white vote, and 40 percent of the black and Hispanic vote and we'll govern for 50 years. That's what the Democrats missed. They were talking to these people with companies with a $9 billion market cap employing nine people. It's not reality....

---

Quote:

---

... They lost sight of what the world is about."

In a nascent administration that seems, at best, random in its beliefs, Bannon can seem to be not just a focused voice, but almost a messianic one:

"Like [Andrew] Jackson's populism, we're going to build an entirely new political movement," he says. "It's everything related to jobs. The conservatives are going to go crazy. I'm the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. With negative interest rates throughout the world, it's the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything. Ship yards, iron works, get them all jacked up. We're just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution — conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement."

Bannon represents, he not unreasonably believes, the fall of the establishment. The self-satisfied, in-bred and homogenous views of the establishment are both what he is against and what has provided the opening for the Trump revolution.

"The media bubble is the ultimate symbol of what's wrong with this country," he continues. "It's just a circle of people talking to themselves who have no f—ing idea what's going on. If The New York Times didn't exist, CNN and MSNBC would be a test pattern. The Huffington Post and everything else is predicated on The New York Times. It's a closed circle of information from which Hillary Clinton got all her information — and her confidence. That was our opening."

At that moment, as we talk, there's a knock on the door of Bannon's office, a temporary, impersonal, middle-level executive space with a hodgepodge of chairs for constant impromptu meetings. Sen. Ted Cruz, once the Republican firebrand, now quite a small and unassuming figure, has been waiting patiently for a chat and Bannon excuses himself for a short while. It is clear when we return to our conversation that it is not just the liberal establishment that Bannon feels he has triumphed over, but the conservative one too

---

Quote:

---

- not least of all Fox News and its owners, the Murdochs. "They got it more wrong than anybody," he says. "Rupert is a globalist and never understood Trump. To him, Trump is a radical. Now they'll go centrist and build the network around Megyn Kelly." Bannon recounts, with no small irony, that when Breitbart attacked Kelly after her challenges to Trump in the initial Republican debate, Fox News chief Roger Ailes — whom Bannon describes as an important mentor, and who Kelly's accusations of sexual harassment would help topple in July — called to defend her. Bannon says he warned Ailes that Kelly would be out to get him too.

It is less than obvious how Bannon, now the official strategic brains of the Trump operation, syncs with his boss, famously not too strategic. When Bannon took over the campaign from Paul Manafort, there were many in the Trump circle who had resigned themselves to the inevitability of the candidate listening to no one. But here too was a Bannon insight: When the campaign seemed most in free fall or disarray, it was perhaps most on target. While Clinton was largely absent from the campaign trail and concentrating on courting her donors, Trump — even after the leak of the grab-them-by-the-pussy audio — was speaking to ever-growing crowds of 35,000 or 40,000. "He gets it; he gets it intuitively," says Bannon, perhaps still surprised he has found such an ideal vessel. "You have probably the greatest orator since William Jennings Bryan, coupled with an economic populist message and two political parties that are so owned by the donors that they don't speak to their audience. But he speaks in a non-political vernacular, he communicates with these people in a very visceral way. Nobody in the Democratic party listened to his speeches, so they had no idea he was delivering such a compelling and powerful economic message. He shows up 3.5 hours late in Michigan at 1 in the morning and has 35,000 people waiting in the cold. When they got [Clinton] off the donor circuit she went to Temple University and they drew 300 or 400 kids."

Indeed, during the worst days of the campaign, even down to the last day when most in Trumpland thought only a miracle would save them, "I knew that she couldn't close. They out-spent us 10 to one, had 10 times more people and had all the media with them, but I kept saying it doesn't matter, they got it all wrong, we've got this locked."

Bannon now becomes part of a two-headed White House political structure, with Reince Priebus — in and out of Bannon's office as we talk — as chief of staff, in charge of making the trains run on time, reporting to the president, and Bannon as chief strategist, in charge of vision, goals, narrative and plan of attack, reporting to the president too. Add to this the ambitions and whims of the president himself, and the novel circumstance of one who has never held elective office, the agenda of his highly influential family and the end-runs of a party significant parts of which were opposed to him, and you have quite a complex court that Bannon will have to finesse to realize his reign of the working man and a trillion dollars in new spending.

"I am," he says, with relish, "Thomas Cromwell in the court of the Tudors."

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Well, there is SECOND, cherry-picking again.

SECOND, instead of picking out one sentence in an entire interview, why not post the whole thing? (Well, I know why- it has to do with your predilection to ... ahem ... lie).

The entire interview, which I saw elsewhere, is quite interesting and even positive.

Quote:

---

"I'm not a white nationalist, I'm a nationalist. I'm an economic nationalist," Bannon tells THR media columnist Michael Wolff as the controversial Breitbart News chief turned White House advisor unleashes on Hillary Clinton, Fox News and his critics.

---

So Steve Bannon doesn't see this as a "white" issue, and neither do I.

---

Quote:

---

So mainstream media - which couldn't find the Trump electorate with two hands and a flashlight - had this available to them. Instead of looking into this unwelcome news objectively, they were busy pumping out FAKE NEWS, thumping Hillary, and you were busy sucking it up. As a consequence of continuing to live in your bubble, YOU WERE ALL WRONG.

---

Quote:

---

So mainstream media - which couldn't find the Trump electorate with two hands and a flashlight - had this available to them. Instead of looking into this unwelcome news objectively, they were busy pumping out FAKE NEWS, thumping Hillary, and you were busy sucking it up. As a consequence of continuing to live in your bubble, YOU WERE ALL WRONG. - SIGNY

---

Quote:

---

Then Signym goes off on an argument that anybody in Texas knows is a load of crap.... I heard continuously what an awful man Obama is for NINE long years.

---

Quote:

---

"He will destroy the nation. He is from Kenya and can't be President. He is working with the terrorists." When Hillary came along, they just added her to the list of people that would destroy the nation. It wasn't true about Obama, but that didn't stop them saying it anyway. Obama has two more months to destroy America according to these people. They will be so thankful when someone they trust, Trump, finally takes the country back. ... I remember Signym predicting the end is here if Hillary is President. Same old deranged storytelling about Hillary as about Obama.

---

Quote:

---

It is of zero surprise that these deranged citizens vote for the white guy. It is also unsurprising that they say they are not racists. I live with them. They are racists. They are liars. They are just like Bannon, but they can't talk as fast

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by 1kiki:
don't want this information to get lost in the mindless obsession:


http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/11/16/not-game-sanders-inspired-
movement-mobilizes-against-trump

Long a fierce critic of Trump, Sanders is giving a speech at 7pm EST Wednesday in which he will discuss the path forward for progressives.

---

Quote:

---

a lot of millennials abandoned Clinton for third-party candidates. All told, I'd say this cost Clinton about 5 percent of the millennial vote ... Bernie Sanders ... turned harshly negative. Over and over, his audience of passionate millennials heard him trash Clinton as a corrupt, warmongering, corporate shill.

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by 1kiki:

Quote:

---

a lot of millennials abandoned Clinton for third-party candidates. All told, I'd say this cost Clinton about 5 percent of the millennial vote ... Bernie Sanders ... turned harshly negative. Over and over, his audience of passionate millennials heard him trash Clinton as a corrupt, warmongering, corporate shill.

---

Was he wrong? The answer is no.
The problem was Hillary's. She was on the wrong side of history. And the problem was the DNC's and even yours, for thinking that the same-old-same-old was going to work in a popular sentiment that demanded different.

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by second:
[This is another piece of your thinking that Hillary is a completely incorrigible criminal, that there was no way Bernie could turn her even a little away from being totally evil, while Trump, on the other hand, could be guided by the beauty and awesome majesty of Bernie and Bernie's philosophy of governing. You, 1kiki, will say I overstated what you believe about Bernie's powers over Trump and (... so on).

---

Quote:

---

... that there was no way Bernie could turn her even a little away from being totally evil.

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by 1kiki:
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=60840&p=3

And btw, how DID your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?

During the primaries I said Bernie was the stronger candidate. For the whole campaign, I was telling people that Hillary was a weak candidate, that she had many faults - which I enumerated often - that people 'out there' weren't going to forgive her for, come election time. I said that Donald was succeeding for a reason that had nothing to do with racism and everything to do with people feeling abused and unheard. I said that Hillary needed to enthusiastically and vocally adopt Bernie's strong 'pro-worker' stance - or Donald's - in order to compete. I urged people to forget about Donald and try to figure out ways to make Hillary stronger. For all the good it did. People were stuck in their mindless, uncritical support for Hillary; and obsessed with flinging poo at Donald. And how did THAT turn out?

Unless you come to grips with the notion that Hillary lost due to her own mistakes, you won't understand what to do to better next time.

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by 1kiki:

You keep assuming that 1) my concerns are identical to most voters (they are not) and 2) you keep THINKING you know what I'm thinking despite being wrong at every turn.

1) So, despite the fact that I tried to CLEARLY distinguish between the concerns of others, and my own - since you seem perpetually confused and frankly lost - I'll try to be even more exact, and even redundant.

My PERSONAL SPECIFIC concerns were about Hillary escalating US antagonism of Russia. I could find no good way it could end. The only possible end - if continued to its logical conclusion - was global thermonuclear war. My problem with her was that she was a completely incorrigible ... warmonger.

2) So instead of you pretending to read my mind (which you are VERY bad at) let me continue with a summary of my actual posts.

-MY- concerns about Hillary didn't keep me from talking about Hillary's other problems as perceived by other voters.

Quote:

---

... that there was no way Bernie could turn her even a little away from being totally evil.

---

I said more than once that Hillary wasn't going to change her position unless and until she lost support - from people like YOU. I REPEATEDLY tried to get you to understand that the problem wasn't Donald (and that you needed to get over your stupid obsession with him). The problem was that Hillary wasn't going to change direction unless she lost support and got a different mandate from people like YOU

And was I right?

Of course I was. The polls told her comforting (though wrong) statistics about her support, and as a result of the idiotic blind loyalty of people like YOU, SHE DIDN'T CHANGE. Well, that was her mistake, and yours.

Leave me and Bernie out of your delusions.

---

Quote:

---

You are deluded if you think voters make a candidate "stronger". There is no way to lend our strength to somebody. They either have it or don't.

---