Why Trump Might Still Win – If the Vote is not Rigged
by Peter Kellow, Leader Democratic Republican Party
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The big story concerning the last presidential debate is, according to the mainstream media, the fact that Trump said that he might not accept the results of the presidential election on 9th November. This was supposed to be an unprecedented scandal.
But Trump would have to be a fool to vow to accept the reported results unconditionally. That would open the floodgates all manner of rigging that Hillary and her allies are capable of – with Trump pledged to ignore them. As Trump said in the debate there are millions registered to vote illegally and these are certainly going to be new entrants to the US who will fear a Trump immigration policy.
Earlier Hillary said all residents in the US, illegal or not, should be able to vote. This has not happened but it speaks to her methods
It is a matter of record that Al Gore was cheated out of the presidency by George W. Bush in 2000 by irregular manoeuvring of the count. (And how different the world would be if Bush had not been elected.)
The indignant posture of the pundits shows how little the real world impacts on the media bubble they inhabit.
That “big story” is not a story at all but just another ploy designed to discredit Trump. But the American people are not fools. They understand exactly why Trump made that statement.
So why do I say Trump might still win?
To understand this fully you have to stand back and compare the two candidates as personalities with their own record and histories. If, as I have, you have watched the presidential debates they emerge as complete opposites personalities. I will discuss policies just briefly at the end of this piece.
But let’s start with the polls which are showing Hillary a long way ahead and apparently pulling away. I predicted that the Conservatives would win the 2015 UK elections, five weeks before the event, when according to Nick Robinson, BBC, the day after the election,
No pollsters, no pundits, no political leaders saw it coming. Even David Cameron, himself did not see it coming. This was a day no one expected. No one could take it in.”
One of the reasons for all the commentators getting it wrong is that, despite a long history of polls being wrong, commentators still believe them. They ignore one simple fact. People don’t tell the truth when they respond to pollsters’ questions. They reserve their true opinion for the ballot box.
This is very much the case when one of the contestants presents what is in many ways an unacceptable profile. In 2015 people did not like to say they would vote for the Conservatives because of poor image of being on the side of the rich and the cabinet being made up of Old Etonians as well a few other PR problems.
It was the same with the Brexit vote, where Brexiteers had been presented as “fascists”, “racists”, “xenophobes”, “ignorant”, and so on by the mainstream media. These slurs prevent people answering honestly outside the ballot box.
So it is with Trump. He has been so vilified by the media that people cannot face justifying their true opinion to a pollster and so take the easy way out – as is their right.
A week or so ago the headlines in the US and UK were filled with unproven claims that he had insulted women and put his hand up their skirts on planes. This nonsense offends people and degrades American democracy and American media reporting – and it makes people retreat into their own opinion, until voting day
All this has to be put in the general context of disillusion with the political establishment that extends right across Europe and America.
People, given the chance, will vote anti-politics. This was definitely an important factor behind the Brexit vote. It is what is behind the anti-politics movements in Spain, Italy, Germany, Netherlands, and elsewhere.
America is probably even more anti-politics and political establishment than most countries for this is an ancient tradition going back to the early days of the republic.
Now it is in full flight, as Americans see the devastation wrought on American industry and its humiliation in costly foreign wars, carried on in the name of an endless “war on terror” – a war that has done nothing to benefit ordinary Americans. The deaths and maiming wrought on the people by this war without end are a visible and constant tragedy that Americans are forced to witness.
Trump will be the beneficiary of anti-politics sentiment. He comes from a business background and is decidedly a political outsider.
His claim to able to run the American economy, because of his business success, rings true. To run a business you have to have an eye for detail and to be able to judge character however big the business is. Yes, he will bring a fresh attitude to delivering jobs and prosperity. He will not kowtow to Wall Street and the Fed. Those are not his natural constituencies as they are of Hillary.
All this feeds to his image of being anti-politics, and in our day this advantage cannot be overstated.
The anti-politics feeling works doubly against Hillary because of her dynastic position. Having been already in the White House with husband Bill and having been long associated with him as ex-President does not help her
Americans have had enough of dynasties. The Bush dynasty which continued alongside the Clinton dynasty adds fuel to the fire that people would like to see consume the very idea of dynasty. Dynasty is anti-American and anti-Democratic.
Hillary’s position as Secretary of State under Obama suggests that Obama did not make any break in the dynastic succession. All this damages Hillary’s prospect. Americans are sick of politics and sick of dynasties. They will defy the political establishment as a matter of principle. They may even make a decisive break.
In spite of what the mainstream commentators may say, for me, Trump won the debate hands down. In also most every subject Hillary lapsed into what one of her sympathisers termed, “clichéd and stereotyped thoughts”.
Every time she opened her mouth she was clearly repeating a well-rehearsed, well picked over, line. She displayed no nimbleness of thinking or spontaneity. She was boring to watch. She repeated generalities that had no purchase on the subject matter and vague undertakings to address problems
Against that Trump homed in on detail – all of it relevant and used the detail to construct an argument. He never used politician-speak.
I am not going to discuss here in detail all the policy matters for these are secondary to the personality/history differences I have referred to.
In this sense they are less fundamental. Policies on the national debt, immigration, economics, war/foreign policy and the US Supreme Court, as discussed in the debates all fed into the construction of character.
Of course, I share doubts about Trump’s judgment, his tact and his predictability but what I am discussing here why he will appeal to Americans in a way Hillary does not.
An election is never about choosing your ideal candidate but about making a choice – even though you make not particularly like either candidate
And lying behind all this is the record of Hillary’s misdemeanours which may well be criminal.
This means that if she is elected the Republican Party will immediately implement impeachment procedures. As they did against her husband – although his letting his student aid, Monica Lewinsky, crawl under the Oval Office desk while he was dealing with state business is nothing as compared to what will drive the impeachment of Hillary.
Do Americans have the appetite for this? I think not much
Hillary comes with a lot of baggage and a lot of history and a lot of scandal. Many Americans will want to draw a line and relegate Hillary’s wrongdoings to the normal civic and criminal courts, where they belong – and not have their consequences enacted on the national political stage and broadcast to the rest of the world
Her bid for the presidency is as much as anything an attempt on her part to escape justice
And potential future First Gentlemen’s record of rape and abuse will be brought into play. The unproven accusations of sexual harassment by Trump pale in comparison with substantiated accusations against Bill.
Again, do Americans have the appetite for this? Whether they do or not will affect how they vote?
The last thing to say, even if we do not like to admit it, is that Trump is a man, Hillary a woman. Just because Americans have shown themselves to be capable of electing a black president does not mean they are prepared to follow that up with a woman president.
And the experiment of turning away for the standard white male model can hardly be counted a success. This is not because Obama is black but because he proved himself to be in the pocket of Wall Street, the military security complex and the political classes as much as any white male president before him.
In terms of bringing something new to the office, his colour was symbolic – nothing more. As everything that Hillary has said and done in her long political career confirms, she too is firmly in those self-same pockets. Indeed, she is financed by them.
Trump’s last words in the last presidential debate were “Vote for Clinton and you vote for four more years of Obama”.
This is true – except to say that the warmongering policies of the Nobel Peace Prize president will be continued at greater dymanic and viciousness by Hillary.
Hillary’s womanhood is a big disadvantage – and particularly as a female type she is hardly appealing. She evokes more than anything the Shakespearean characters of Lady Macbeth or the Shrew rather than more appealing examples of femininity.
Whatever you might want to believe, her being a woman will work against her.
In addition, she is up against an alpha-male and one that corresponds very much to certain, admired American mythological types. That does not mean he is always the nice guy, but it means he is the strong guy with resolution and an independence of mind.
He is fearless as he takes on the most dangerous and treacherous forces in the US – the CIA, Wall Street and the military industrial complex.
If he shoots from the hip, without self-censorship, that will not work against him. Americans are electing a future leader, not making a judgment of every past detail of character.
Sit him down in a negotiation with foreign leaders and you know he will be present as a personality not as a product of the Washington machine as Hillary would be. She has no opinions of her own, only those manufactured in the closed world she inhabits. She would be completely unable to think on her feet.
Hillary cannot negotiate because she is not her own person. Putin would laugh her out of court.
And she has form with regard to foreign policy. As Secretary of State 2009 – 2013 (ie Foreign Minister) she presided over one of the most disastrous and humiliating periods in recent US foreign policy. The US actions in Libya and Iraq speak for themselves and, even more important, the US role in the creation and sustaining ISIS is becoming more and more apparent to the American people. They have been betrayed by Hillary and her cabal
Americans do not trust their government and they do not trust the candidate that is so thoroughly implicated with it. Americans will not want to send Hillary aboard to sit at negotiating tables in other countries on their behalf. They will not want to trust her to be president.
Lastly, just a few words on policy:
- Trump vows to repeal the NAFTA agreement whereby US companies can shift production to Mexico and benefit from cheap labour and relaxed environmental regulation there. He is right.
When he brought this up in the first debate, Hillary revealed how, in common with most politicians and economists, she does not understand the difference between free trade and free movement of capital. It is the latter that is so damaging to individual economies not free trade. It is this that is worse of the evils of globalisation. Trump showed he understood the difference and says he will force US companies to repatriate their manufacturing. This is the only way to return jobs to the USA.
He never stopped reiterating that NAFTA is the worst foreign agreement that America has ever entered into. Enacted by President Bill Clinton it was clearly designed to benefit multinationals and the US financial elite against the interests of ordinary Americans. Hillary has no answer to this and attempted none in any of the debates. - Trump will seek rapprochement with Russia and stop the vilification of Putin. Russia is not a real threat. But that is not the point for Washington. The anti-Russian warmongering, just like the War on Terror, is driven by the 1.3$ trillion American arms industry who prosper from war or the threat of war. Trump says he will reverse this policy. This is a very brave position for he is coming up against some of the most powerful and ruthless people in the world. Whatever you make think of his policy, he deserves credit for courage. The mainstream media never allows him this.
- I cannot hold with his anti-abortion policies, but on the other hand Hillary’s abortion policy is far too liberal. We need a sensible balance (such as we have in the UK).
- I cannot hold with his pro-gun opinions. But honestly to reverse the second amendment that confers the right to bear arms is a virtual impossibility. Due to Article 5, changing the US Constitution is all but impossible. Whoever is elected, it will make little difference to the outcome. (Incidentally, Hillary’s claim that 33,000 deaths in America caused by firearms ignores the fact that 66% of these were suicides not homicides. It is still as massive figure, of course, but she distorts the reality.)
- On immigration, the political classes of America are about to learn the same lesson as those in the Britain and the EU. This is a central issue for voters. This will shift votes from Hillary massively.
- On tax, Trump’s low tax policy in itself will not solve any economic problems but combined with his policy of repatriation of American industry and a halt to further export of jobs we will certainly see an improvement on America’s disastrous growth and employment figures.
- On the environment, Trump says he does not believe in manmade global warming. Well neither do many Americans (and neither do I, as it happens). Hillary has a cart load of policies that will address climate change alarmists concerns in which she is a strong believer. All these will be a burden on most Americans. She wants to shut down the coal mines. Trump will keep them open. The figure trotted out that 98% of the world’s climate change scientists believe in manmade global warming is a lie – as a quick internet search will reveal. I won’t go into the rest of the bogus science and the real driver behind climate change millenarianism here. That Trump rejects it, whatever your own beliefs, is a plus to the majority of voters.
I write this primarily as a correction to the prevailing view of the election outcome, but I favour Trump for the break he will make with the existing politics and for his sympathy with Russia and for, what I believe is, a genuine desire for peace. In power he may change and be better or worse than hoped. Everything will depend on the quality of the people he surrounds himself with.
I am sure he is a listener. His choice of aids to date give grounds for optimism. Hillary on the other hand is entirely predictable for she rides on the back of existing the vested interests of Wall Street, CIA and warmongering agendas. Trump is of independent mind. And he is a man (in the other important sense of that word).
Lastly, never forget the time-honoured American criterion for deciding who you will vote for when you an in the voting booth
Which candidate would you rather get stuck in a lift with?
Your call.
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Scam in Mass pre-vote ballot, Trump was on point, slightly rigged.
Hillary first listed on ballot, two green party then Repubilcan candidate Trump, How?
Alphabetical sequencing on the ballot paper?
C (linton) comes before T (rump).
Do the other two candidates surnames begin with letters between C and T?
Interesting idea, but I have a large number of reservations. While I agree with the point about media vilification and poll results, the article nevertheless contains a large number assertions of fact, without any supporting evidence, which seriously undermines the credibility of the writer. On the whole it read like a series of allegations, on a variety of topics, without actually building an evidence-based case to support any of them, to any convincing degree.
A few specific examples:
” But Trump would have to be a fool to vow to accept the reported results unconditionally. ”
This is a very strongly worded statement, supporting Trump’s accusations that US democracy is fundamentally ‘rigged’. Personally I’m not sure how much I buy into that theory. It’s possible that there is a wider conversation to be had about the integrity of US elections – but the article contains no discussion/evidence.
“Earlier Hillary said all residents in the US, illegal or not, should be able to vote. This has not happened but it speaks to her methods”
What does that mean? Whether democracy should be extended to illegal residents is an interesting question (there is a potential argument that if you believe in democracy everyone should be involved in shaping it) – but the pros and cons are not discussed here. Just the statement that ‘it speaks to her methods’ which a) doesn’t make sense (what methods? how does this illustrate them?), and b) is unsupported by any evidence.
” It is a matter of record that Al Gore was cheated out of the presidency by George W. Bush in 2000 by irregular manoeuvring of the count. ”
Is it? I know there was a lot of speculation but I can’t imagine it was ever proven? Surely if so there would have been repercussions? It might be accepted among conspiracy theorists, but has there ever been any legal judgement?
” A week or so ago the headlines in the US and UK were filled with unproven claims that he had insulted women and put his hand up their skirts on planes. This nonsense offends people and degrades American democracy and American media reporting – and it makes people retreat into their own opinion, until voting day”
I’m not saying I believe all the allegations about sexual harassment unequivocally, but there are enough supporting statements/behaviours by Trump on record to strongly indicate that they are well within the bounds of plausibility. It’s one thing to remind readers that they are as yet unproven, but to dismiss them as ‘nonsense’ is both naive, and denies justice the chance to take its course. Compare this attitude with later statements confirming the criminality of both Clintons – equally unproven assertions – yet these allegations are reported as if hard fact, rather than ‘nonsense’. Blatant hypocrisy and bias.
” Trump will be the beneficiary of anti-politics sentiment. He comes from a business background and is decidedly a political outsider. His claim to able to run the American economy, because of his business success, rings true. ”
Personally, I think that coming from a position of extreme inherited wealth puts Trump in exactly the same ‘establishment’ category as other corporate/political insiders. I don’t consider him anti-establishment in any way at all. I’m also sceptical about his supposed ‘business success’. Although I don’t for a minute profess to be an expert I’ve heard sufficient rumours about bankcruptcy, bailouts and fraud to need to be convinced – rather than just taking an un-evidenced statement on face value. Even if I were to be convinced of his business success, it’s a huge leap of faith to think that it automatically qualifies him as President (Phillip Green anyone?).
“Hillary’s womanhood is a big disadvantage – and particularly as a female type she is hardly appealing. She evokes more than anything the Shakespearean characters of Lady Macbeth or the Shrew rather than more appealing examples of femininity.”
I notice another comment’s post already calling the author out for explicit misogyny. The words above are indefensible, and clear evidence of gender bias. If the author is genuinely unaware that these comments, (made by him – he is not quoting anyone here), are sexist then please treat this as a wake up call.
Regarding the climate scepticism/ denial of Trump (as supported by Peter Kellow in this article), I recommend the site ‘skeptical science’ that purports to address the numerous arguments put forward by those on his side of the debate:
https://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php
Peter writes : ‘The fundamental reason why anthropogenic warming is bogus is that we know the planet undergoes huge changes over millennia whereas current alarmists only take measurements of the atmosphere over 100 years or so and these they project as grand changes.’
This happens to be top of the list in the replies section of the above mentioned site:
‘So yes, the climate has changed before humans, and in most cases scientists know why. In all cases we see the same association between CO2 levels and global temperatures. And past examples of rapid carbon emissions (just like today) were generally highly destructive to life on Earth.’
We have just burned about half a billion years of stored sunlight in the form of fossil fuels in the past 200 or so years.
I think that I can relate to a degree to those who are suspicious of grand statements of authorities that promise threats- as so many of these have been shown by history to be exaggerated or false. However, the truth is that the corporate governance that rules this world has tried to bury and diminish the science of climatologists for thirty years, and the very same propagandists who were exposed for seeding false ‘doubt’ about the connections between smoking and cancer have repeated the tactic with regard to climate change. If it were a conspiracy to tax the population and burden the poor, it is either ineffective or unnecessary. The media coverage of climate issues is all but disappearing from view as the weather becomes more obviously extreme. The environment ministers are climate sceptics/ deniers, not scare mongers. The doctrines of Neoliberal economics (that oppose action on climate emissions) does a thorough job of keeping the poor poor and the rich rich.
Climate change is a threat to the world order, not a scheme to bolster its objectives.
I really believe that if one took the time to study the scientists’ responses to the claims of sceptics/deniers then one is persuaded that climate science is solid, and that Republicans, and especially those like Trump are anti-science, basically bullshitters or fanatics who believe in religions of biblical literalism or ‘free markets’ to their dying days. It is THEY who are all to often the ‘milleniarists’ .
You wrote “The figure trotted out that 98% of the world’s climate change scientists believe in manmade global warming is a lie – as a quick internet search will reveal. I won’t go into the rest of the bogus science and the real driver behind climate change millenarianism here.” As an environmental scientist I have to take issue with this spurious dismissal of a phenomenon that does indeed have dire consequences, is caused by human activity, and is widely held by 97% of scientists who study this kind of thing … rather than those who may be scientists but do not actually study climatology, atmospherics, or the environment.
I am unable to comment on the rest of the piece because I don’t claim to know that much about US politics or presidential campaigns, but also found myself troubled by your suggestion that Clinton does not express “more appealing examples of femininity.” Appealing? From whose perspective? You as a man? And if so, isn’t that the point about feminism – to be relieved of the burden of male judgement and the male gaze that objectifies a woman and defines her in relation to a man?
These are the two weakest aspects of this piece. The rest was actually okay and as an op-ed piece I couldn’t find much to disagree with really. Personally, I would prefer Sanders to win, but as evidence emerging courtesy of Wikileaks suggests, that option was deep-sixed by HRC.
This is from forbes.com
“So where did that famous “consensus” claim that “98% of all scientists believe in global warming” come from? It originated from an endlessly reported 2009 American Geophysical Union (AGU) survey consisting of an intentionally brief two-minute, two question online survey sent to 10,257 earth scientists by two researchers at the University of Illinois. Of the about 3.000 who responded, 82% answered “yes” to the second question, which like the first, most people I know would also have agreed with.Then of those, only a small subset, just 77 who had been successful in getting more than half of their papers recently accepted by peer-reviewed climate science journals, were considered in their survey statistic. That “98% all scientists” referred to a laughably puny number of 75 of those 77 who answered “yes”.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2012/07/17/that-scientific-global-warming-consensus-not/#411852071690
As regards Clinton’s being a woman, I was simply trying to be ruthlessly objective – as in this whole article. I think being a woman works against her. I am not saying that is good, but simply that it is the case.
Actually, to be honest, drawing upon Forbes for scientific information is not going to yield robust results. It is wrong in at least two ways. First, the consensus is 97% – this is the widely cited and confirmed census. Second it came from a meta-review of published and peer reviewed papers that took a position on climate change. This was in 2013 and can be accessed at http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/024024. This analysis has been confirmed, again at 97%, and published in Environmental Research Letters in 2016 and is also available on-line at http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/4/048002 The Michigan Tech website gives a brief summary of the findings, available at: http://tinyurl.com/zg4szqd
Older research suggests the same trend of 97% consensus: e.g. from 2011 doi: 10.1093/ijpor/edr033 (not publicly accessible) and in 2010 (open access) at: http://www.pnas.org/content/107/27/12107.full
These are more reputable sources for scientific information than Forbes magazine which has been shown to have a distinct tendency to favour the politics of groups like the Hartland Institute and other deniers/ sceptics.
As for your comment about HRC and her womanhood – still think you could do with shucking off that phrase “appealing examples of femininity” and the question remains – appealing according to who? The simple test is to reverse the statement – ask for an appealing version of masculinity – to whom? Other men, women? According to what standard?
Climate change- or more accurately- global warming is very real. The statistics keep coming in- and the temps keep rising- even more than most scientists believed they would.
Global warming may be occurring at present, but climate change happens to the earth all the time ever since it was born. The last ice age is almost within historical time. The issue is whether it is manmade or not. There is no proof that it is. That does not mean we should not converse the world’s resources. We certainly should. But Trump’s policy is sound.
I had left a much longer reply but it had several links so is stuck in the modding process. Basically, I cited a small handful of links regarding the 97% consensus and how that was arrived at (two of the journals are open access if you care to read them) and suggested that Forbes is not a reliable source for scientific data.
As for your claim that global warming is not due to human activity … the body of evidence that suggests it is, is really quite staggering in how meticulously it has been collected, verified, confirmed, and the absence of any other viable hypothesis that does not get rejected due to it not fitting the data patterns.
Peter, you really do need to stay away from the denial/ sceptic sites and blog pieces that are feeding you misinformation. Do some proper research and you will find that AGW is happening, is picking up speed (recently having past the 400 ppm threshold), we’re on track to cross the 2 deg marker, and yes – like it or not – it all ties in with human activity.
I am afraid that phrases like “the body of evidence … really quite staggering” are all too common from the climate change millenniarist camp are all too common. We are patronisingly expected to accept “expert” judgments with no explanation.
Well I’m sure you do with the “body of evidence” that is “really quite staggering” when it comes to the linkages between, say, PCBs or smoking and cancer, or sugar and diabetes, or even increased car accident fatalities when seat belts are not used. Do you disregard these even though they are generated by experts – even though I’d rather trust an expert on a topic they have researched rather than some quack who feels pretty rebellious to dismiss expertise. Next time you need an operation just select some random person off the street for the procedure. After all – why trust experts? Please don’t be disingenuous Peter.
In any event, you are not being asked to ‘accept’ anything. The data is all there if you care to look. Moreover, the claims that global warming is anthropogenic is also the least complicated of the claims when the others promoted by the (typically) right wing denialist/ sceptic groups involve the greatest suspension of critical faculties. As you presumably know, this is Occam’s razor, and the AGW data sets coupled with the explanations given do satisfy this test. These aren’t truth claims. But there are no rival arguments/ explanations that come even close to satisfying the available data.
Seriously, if you even just read New Scientist or the Science Daily website, which popularise science news, you’d be far more informed, and have more accurate info to consider than the junk that you are going to get from Forbes magazine and sceptic blog-sites.
The big factor you ignore is that the millenniarist orthodoxy is so powerful that no scientist that challenged it could get a job or get research financed. This is why you see a mountain of evidence all saying the same thing. Alternative voices are suppressed. Millenniarism serves the agenda of those who want of prevent the third world from developing, who want to justify more [climate] taxes on the economy, who want to deprive nations like the UK from using their natural resources and who want to distract attention from the really big problems that face the world. The climate [sic] of fear and dread of imminent eschatological outcome has been used down the centuries to control people. As now myths are constructed to serve this purpose. Meanwhile the real cause of depreciation of the environment and waste of resources, namely globalisation, is ignored.
This is a reply to Peter’s last reply to me. For some reason, the reply option following his post was disabled. Anyway, here’s his reply to me, and mine follows that:
“The big factor you ignore is that the millenniarist orthodoxy is so powerful that no scientist that challenged it could get a job or get research financed. This is why you see a mountain of evidence all saying the same thing. Alternative voices are suppressed. Millenniarism serves the agenda of those who want of prevent the third world from developing, who want to justify more [climate] taxes on the economy, who want to deprive nations like the UK from using their natural resources and who want to distract attention from the really big problems that face the world. The climate [sic] of fear and dread of imminent eschatological outcome has been used down the centuries to control people. As now myths are constructed to serve this purpose. Meanwhile the real cause of depreciation of the environment and waste of resources, namely globalisation, is ignored.”
I’ve heard those claims before about people not gaining access to research grants/ jobs if they were to dispute the claims of AGW (why do you refer to these as a “millenniarist” orthodoxy?). This claim glibly overlooks how science and scientific progress actually works outside of conspiracy novels and films. If a scientist could legitimately come up with an account for the data pattern that does not put humanity squarely in the driver’s seat, that scientist would become a legend. To achieve that kind of breakthrough would be bigger than discovering the Higgs Boson, or the work by Einstein, or Copernicus, et al. It would be massive. So actually, scientists are not beholden to maintaining a point of view or subscribing to an orthodoxy: if you want a big name for yourself in science – dispute AGW. Seriously: you then have a ticket to ride! PhD students would be lining up around the block to get a piece of that action.
Furthermore, at no point are there any paragraphs, T&Cs, or hidden questions that ask grant or job applicants if they ‘believe’ in AGW. Alternative voice aren’t suppressed. There is no conspiracy. You don’t hear many people arguing against gravity, but that doesn’t mean it’s a conspiracy to silence dissenters. Simply that there is no evidence to support such claims.
Science is not a democracy in the sense that everyone gets to vote on their favourite theory, but it is democratic in the sense that if you can come up with a rival hypothesis that accounts for the available data sets and that cannot be falsified and thereby rejected, well, you’ve got a winner! It’s just quite simply that denialists/ sceptics have not been able to mount a half-decent case no matter how much money the vested interests throw at the task. That’s why they have had to resort to FUD, muddying the waters, slowing down meaningful steps to mitigate and now adapt to climate change, and trying to propose that the science is in doubt, even though it isn’t. It’s because they (the denialists/ sceptics don’t have a case that is able to pass muster.
Every rival hypothesis has so far been shot down because it cannot account for the data sets, and the denialist/ sceptics keep changing their arguments – solar radiation, it’s not happening, followed up when the evidence of warming became incontrovertible by claims that it’s always been happening it’s just not human driven. The argumentation style from the denialists/ sceptics is akin to whack-a-mole, and it keeps changing, while old arguments are rehashed, and then the last resort is to claim that because their claims aren’t given credibility, then it must be due to a conspiracy.
The test with conspiracies is about who benefits. Scientists are not rich. But people like the Koch brothers who are known to fund, inter alia, the Hartland Institute, and who – among many others, including business leaders – with deep vested interests in both the fossil fuel industry as well as the global infrastructure that is predicated on steady supplies of cheap gas and oil, are very rich, and do stand to gain from slowing down meaningful change away from a carbon-based economy. There is the origin of who benefits from a conspiracy, and because they do not have science in their corner, they resort to FUD and obfuscation to confuse the public and policy makers, many of whom also have vested interests in maintaining the status quo.
Finally, globalisation is a cause of the environmental catastrophe, and climate change is one of the symptoms of that, along with the rapid increase in carbon-based fuel that powers the motors of globalisation. This increases the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gases) which trap heat in, which leads to other effects – so-called positive or amplifying feedback loops – such as the melting of permafrost and the release of methane. The basic physics for all of this has been known since 1890-something, and confirmed again in the 1920s and evidence began to be found in the 1950s of increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide.
The fundamental reason why anthropogenic warming is bogus is that we know the planet undergoes huge changes over millennia whereas current alarmists only take measurements of the atmosphere over 100 years or so and these they project as grand changes. Deep ice core drilling give data going back millennia and these show massive changes long before industry got going. Because they show the bigger perspective they are accurate where measurements over a few decades cannot give anything useful. I have a good article on this somewhere. I will try to find so that I can give you the facts. Unfortunately many alarmists are little interested in facts and there are many proven cases where they have played fast and lose with the data.
For someone who talks so much about science it is surprising that in everything you have written there is not a single scientific, empirical statistic to demonstrate your case. This patronising way of telling people that we cannot understand the mysteries of this “science” is a big reason why people do not believe you.
Peter, when you write: “For someone who talks so much about science it is surprising that in everything you have written there is not a single scientific, empirical statistic to demonstrate your case. This patronising way of telling people that we cannot understand the mysteries of this “science” is a big reason why people do not believe you.” then you demonstrate many of the points I raised previously about whack-a-mole argumentation, obfuscation, and shifting the terms of the debate. Let’s consider just two of these.
1) What scientific data set would you like me to cite, and how would doing so demonstrate my case? What case are you thinking I should be demonstrating? That Big Oil engages in dirty tactics of FUD? That anyone with a viable alternative hypothesis to AGW would be a big star? That the science for greenhouse effects has a long and untarnished history?
In any event Peter, if you are so certain that the established and well articulated claims that suggest GW is anthropogenic are a hoax, a conspiracy, a confabulation, then please, by all means, propose your evidence for this claim. You are the one mounting the challenge; it behoves you to put or, to be blunt, shut up about matters that are evidently outside of your domain of expertise … not that you give much credence to experts, apparently.
2) At no point in my replies to you have I been patronising, nor have I claimed that no-one can understand the science. It’s all there – the science is actually pretty basic. Where it gets complex is when you start factoring in the feedback loops and the emergence of interactions, which is what makes things difficult to model. The science is not mysterious, unless one doesn’t understand basic physics and chemistry, but if that’s the case, blame one’s education, or failure to read introductory texts, not the science that is built on those basic fundamentals.
I have been mindful not to be patronising, but if I failed to guard against that effectively, my apologies. I am also not interested in whether people ‘believe [me]’. It’s not a matter of faith, nor even of public consensus. It just is, what it is, and I, along with many millions of ordinary people, let alone those directly engaged in climate research wait with bated breath for evidence that can be substantiated, using the same rigour with which the AGW theories have been tested repeatedly, that can offer humanity a way to get let off the hook of bringing about the trajectory we are on with the scale and mind-numbing consequences of runaway climate change, and that is just with the volumes of carbon already in train, let alone what we continue to add to the system in real time.
Hi Peter
Re: ice cores – some info for you to beef up on: https://www.bas.ac.uk/data/our-data/publication/ice-cores-and-climate-change/ and http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v429/n6992/full/429611a.html
Ice cores are used to complement other sources of data – they are not the sole sources of data. Again, your approach is to obfuscate not enlighten. I will give you the benefit of the doubt that this is not due to malice or deliberate efforts to engage in disinformation, but please do make the effort to familiarise yourself with the basics.
Please keep the discussion from wandering too far OT. AGW is far too complex and far too controversial to be usefully discussed here.
Actually it is you who are putting forward arguments without explanation. I believe you have been fooled by the misinformation campaigns of the Koch Brothers and Co. You suggest there is a vast conspiracy to falsify the results of climate science- involving scientists from every developed country on earth- all being coordinated- by whom exactly you cannot say… The Illuminati?
I think- you should have a read of David Ray Griffin’s recent book about the so called climate change conspiracy. If you can’t be bothered to read his counter arguments to your claims- then maybe just watch this short interview instead:
Ok children,if AGW is real,as you claim,wtf are you going to do about it?How about all your respective leaders?Moving fast,huh?The only thing that’s going to happen is the people will pay taxes to cover the big business polluters ass.
Now for reality;Vote Trump and avoid ww3,a much more pressing and real threat.
Stay on topic please
A pro-Trump article?
This can’t be the guardian website….!
The guardian is so desperate for HC to win they’re moderating any comments detailing the latest scandals
They’ve become a disgrace for a news disseminator
I’m convinced they’re so hard up, they’ve taken some clinton cash on the sly and are just another wing of ‘correct the record’ now
“Just because Americans have shown themselves to be capable of electing a black president does not mean they are prepared to follow that up with a woman president.”
Non-sense. I was actually surprised that we elected a black president before we ever elected a female president. The problem in this case is not that Hillary’s a woman; it’s that she’s Hillary. She represents all the negatives of the Clinton brand (corruption, dishonesty, etc.) without the charisma. That’s why she’s going to lose–not because of her sex.
This article is so bad that I have to quote a piece from The Guardian in response:
“…, he is a shallow, mendacious, boorish and extremely dangerous man. But those traits ensure that he is not an outsider but the perfect representation of his caste, the caste that runs the global economy and governs our politics. He is our system, stripped of its pretences.”
The fact that the Establishment candidate is so terrible does not make the ‘alternative’ – Trump, something he is not.
And the fact that Trump is not perfect does not make George Monbiot a perceptive writer.
No perhaps not, but he did some it up pretty succinctly.
‘Trump is not perfect’ is a misleading understatement in my opinion.
Sum
Trump is the best breath of fresh American air in decades,and all zionists hate him.
WTF does anyone need?If one can’t figure out by now they are our mortal enemy, one is that enemy,from Abramson to Viner to Cohen to the feminazi retards to Monbiot all scum.The day after Fukushima that crud touted nuclear energy.Drown him. Why do think the Graun and print media died?Zionism and its inherent lie factory of monster war enablers.
Ideologues back in your squirrel cage hamster wheels.
I have no love whatsoever for Donald Trump but preferable he is to a sociopath who is capable of leading us all into WW3.
actually that’s just a theory- until he is president there is no way to know if he would be more or less dangerous than Hillary. His rhetoric about ‘bombing the crap’ out of terrorists, of ‘loving waterboarding’ of ‘taking out’ the families of ‘terrorists’ all tend to indicate that he is just as much of a war pig as Clinton. Beyond that he also seems to be unstable, unpredictable, vindictive and moronic. He is in the category of leaders like Nero, Caligula, Mussolini and Hitler. He is complete and utter scum, a tax avoiding liar, a rank hypocrite, a racist bigot and a molester of women.
hillaryous.
I guess if you are a one world disorder type of person,the Hell Bitch appeals to you.
To American patriots she is the worst example of womanhood and political and human corruption in our history.
You are going to love Trump,believe me.:)
My money is on Hillary.
The way she and her crew stole the election from Sanders provides a perfect model for November 8th.
The truth is that she is more hungry and more ruthless for power than Trump.
There is – literally – nothing she will not do and no depths to which she will not stoop to win.
Trump – by contrast – is just a “softie” pushover.
Anyway, the eventual winner will be Netanyahu – he has backed both horses-arses!
I read somewhere George Soros has control over one of the companies providing voting machines in the US.
This is the same guy who made US $ 1 billion betting against Britain staying in the ERM.
My guess is that the result is already known to him and that he has all his bets placed.
A similar thing happened here in the UK over the Brexit referendum.
One of the main backers of the Leave campaign (Crispin Odey) made £220 million overnight when Leave won.
Politics is turning into just another game for powerful people to play in and make money out of.
I think Trump is too slow on the uptake to be considered seriously as POTUS.
In any one of the debates, all he had to say to the American public was that Hillary was part of the Washington DC power establishment for over 30 years and then ask the American public “Do you feel better off today than you did 20 or 30 years ago?” And “Do you want another 30 years of Clinton failure for America?”. “Do you?”
But he didn’t. Why?
Maybe – like Soros and Odey – Trump too has all his bets placed at great odds – on Hillary!
‘People don’t tell the truth when they respond to pollsters’ questions. They reserve their true opinion for the ballot box.’ And the betting shop. One of the clues ahead of the 2015 election was that far more people were betting on Cameron being the next PM than on Miliband. Obviously, betting odds can be skewed by large bets. However, it remains an indicator worth watching.
I think it right that Off Guardian gives space to at least the idea of addressing the yearnings of half the American people for a voice however hollow , but which has some modicum of resonance for them- amorphous, instinctive and caked in prejudice and ignorance though many of these yearnings may be. What is going on in America can be written about by sociologists, but that is often dry as dust. Trump is the visible point of in the hitherto ignored Polis of 50 per cent of the American people and it serves nobody to ignore that. Examining the man and the phenomenon on this site is crucial. But this is a poor piece of writing, lacks insight and is dense with cliché. I agree with others. Trump is a con artist. But in her own way, so is Hillary. Politicians largely are in the age of mass media. So was Bill. Unless they are the inventors of the products they sell, all CEO’s in business are con men . Most of them can’t do the front line creative work that keeps the business really ticking over. They are simply risk takers with attitude. This one is a throwback to pre political correctness days – a ‘showman’ with appallingly bad taste, a celebrity politician with prejudice and ignorance flowing through his veins who has been looked down on by the Washington hegemony, kept out of the country club (metaphorically speaking as he probably owns a few), and he wants to claim his place. How he managed to surround himself with PR/strategic advisors who are far cleverer than he is God only knows. It is they who have propelled him so far and kept the ship pretty steady.. I presume they get off on the money, the second hand power vibe and the sheer cheek of the man. But the mass of supporters have a stubborn mentality and are used to being looked down upon, and this side of Trump being outed as a Paedophile cross dresser, they won’t change their minds. Rosie Brocklehurst.
This article was an attempt at an objective assessment of why Trump could win not a defense of his personality or morals. At the end I separately commented on his policies and how these feed into his electability.
If you want to access him as a candidate then you should watch his Gettysburg speech. This is what he actually says himself not what the lying mainstream media says. His attacks on the banks, on Nato, on the clique that runs America, on the betrayal of working people with the export of jobs and the hollowing out of the US economy, and other things, I wholeheartedly support and these would come as a breath of fresh air and source of hope for world peace and prosperity. People who focus on a few illadvised comments on women (all of which focus around the fact that a woman’s looks help her get on in society) are subject to the mainstream media indoctrination which is allied with the very things Trump attacks. Don’t you get it? Don’t you understand why his policies are ignored in favour of his vilification. To know what Trump is about and why he has appeal you need to watch this speech.
https://www.rt.com/usa/363814-trump-gettysburg-media-criticism/#.WA24ZK_WtIE.facebook
You build all this around a foundation of supposed business acumen.
His businesses have filed for bankruptcy 4 times, Not only did his start come from money from his father, he also bailed him out at least 6 times after that.
It is also worth noting that comparing trumps inheritance to claimed net worth today (which is likely inflated), Paris Hilton has grown her inheritance 32 times more than Trump has. I see no one running to call her a business genius.
Indeed, had trump simply stuck his inheritance in an investment fund, he would be significantly better of now.
He is no businessman, he has no skills at all. Had he been born to parents who were not multimillionaires, he would be selling dodgy watches in New York today. because all he is really is a con man.
well said- if people cannot see Trump for the absolute bottom feeding low life douchebag that he is: God help us all. I liked the points made by Robert De Niro about Trump:
His claim to able to run the American economy, because of his business success, rings true.
Nonsense. Trump’s business ‘success’ has consisted of the brand-franchising of his name, insider scams, dodgy deals and dodgy accounts books (which remain hidden). He’s a con-artist.
To run a business you have to have an eye for detail and to be able to judge character however big the business is.
Very little has been said about Trump’s Mafia connections. In his 1992 unauthorized biography “Trump: The Deals and the Downfall,” New York investigative journalist Wayne Barrett wrote that Trump’s life “intertwines with the underworld.” Trump bought the property that his Atlantic City casino Trump Plaza would one day occupy — for twice market price — from Salvatore Testa, a Philadelphia mobster and the son of one-time Mafia boss Philip “Chicken Man” Testa.
…and look up the Russian mafia links via Frank Sater, Gennady Klotsman and others.
Yes, he will bring a fresh attitude to delivering jobs and prosperity.
You mean like the success he had when he built the Trump Tower? He had no labor troubles there since only 15 unionists worked at the site alongside 150 Polish men, most of whom entered the country illegally, lacked hard hats, and slept on the site. A federal judge later found that Trump had conspired to cheat the Polish workers who were paid less than $5 an hour and also rip off the union health and welfare fund. Trump claimed that he didn’t notice that the $5/hr workers on his building site didn’t have any hard hats. And somehow he made the Atlantic City Casino regulators go easy on his license application and the background checks. Some jobs. Some prosperity.
The guy’s a dodgy con artist who’s been mixing with criminal elements all his life.
Not unlike Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, sounds like.
Branson’s success is pretty much down to brand franchising his name.
Much as I want to like this article, I can’t, simply because It is mainly based on opinion and hope rather than facts and evidence. The bit that gives it away is this: “I predicted that the Conservatives would win the 2015 UK elections, five weeks before the event, when according to Nick Robinson, BBC, the day after the election …” Based on what exactly? A crystal ball?
My detailed explanation of how I was able to make this prediction is here
http://www.democraticrepublicanparty.co.uk/DRP%20NEWSLETTER/NEWSLETTER%20No%20152%20website.html
Yes, I’ve read your summation of why you think your prediction was so accurate, published on December 21st 2015 more than six months after the election, but I wanted to know what you based your prediction on before the election, and I couldn’t find that anywhere.
There is a good possibility that most of the voters that voted Tory thought their party would win too. And they will have their own reasons why. But it doesn’t make them special. If you add that to all the number of Labour and LibDem voters, who thought their parties would lose, you might find a very large percentage of the electorate thought the Tories would win. So you were not quite so alone as seem to think. Just my opinion, of course. I don’t have any facts or evidence to back it up.
“There is a good possibility that most of the voters that voted Tory thought their party would win too. ” Yeah, anything is possible. What we know for sure is that Cameron thought the Conservatives would not win. If you watched the election coverage on the night, everyone was denying that the Conservatives would win well past midnight.
“Just my opinion, of course. I don’t have any facts or evidence to back it up.” Unfortunately we now live in a world were people think their uninformed opinion has a value. You are part of this general dumbing down of society. But you don’t care. That is where we are heading
Perhaps you might care to read my own articles on this very site before resorting to gratuitous insults. At least I did gave you the courtesy of reading your article and your site before commenting on it.
In the link you posted you don’t offer any proof to show that your original ‘prediction’ on the result of the 2015 election was any more than an opinion, at the time it was made. Your reasoning was given afterwards in a piece you published over six months later.
By quoting it in the context you have you seem to be claiming it was something rather more significant, solely to give weight to your article. That is misleading. I was genuinely interested to reading the link but founf it to be just a piece of propaganda for your political party. If that makes me dumb and uncaring in your eyes, then it is just another of your unproven opinions.
You are as entilted to your opinions as I am to mine. In the end they are both opinions however wrong or right they might turn out to be. Let’s see whether you include how wrong you were in another article should Hillary Clinton win this presidential race.
Are you all forgetting the fact that a number of police forces are currently investigating at least 30 Tory MPs for having over-spent illegally during the 2015 General Election campaign?
How could that be factored into opinion polls?
Bizarrely, I see the Electoral Commission has fined the Labour Party £20,000 for under-declaring election expenses, relating to – among other things – the ‘Ed Stone’! [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-37760562].
The Electoral Commission also concluded that Labour’s treasurer Iain McNicol, who is also its general secretary, had committed two offences under the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act in relation to the missing payments and the missing invoices.
Should not McNicol resign from the Labour Party for bringing it into disrepute?
Also, when will the legal prosecutions of over-spending Tory MPs start to get under way?
Any subsequent by-election defeats for them could see Mrs May’s majority evaporate!
No, I haven’t forgotten, I just didn’t know where to put it as it seems to bear no relevance to the discussion going on in this exchange. Or in this article for that matter.
It is connected with electoral fraud – which applies both here in the UK and in the US, especially with regard to Clinton’s theft of the Democratic Party presidential nomination.
“Just my opinion, of course. I don’t have any facts or evidence to back it up.” That is what I mean by “uniformed opinion” boldly stated. Everything we say practically is opinion in some way. My Trump article of course contains a lot of opinion but it is informed opinion and I have explained how it is informed. Ultimately I have to make a judgment on the facts I have – this is informed opinion. You claimed no “facts or evidence”. Your opinion can exist in a void. My prediction of the Conservative win was an informed opinion. I explained exactly the nature of the information later. That is not really a very grave criticism. I write lots of articles on different subjects and at that time had not explicitly covered this although it ran through other articles I had published. Please if we are going to have a proper debate can we base our opinions on evidence in some way. Otherwise we have infantile anarchy – and I am afraid that is where we are heading
When you try to engage in spophistry, you should learn the basic rules first. In your last reply to me – to which I am unable to reply directly – you quoted me saying: “Just my opinion, of course. I don’t have any facts or evidence to back it up.” Then you added: “That is what I mean by “uniformed opinion” boldly stated.” My statement was supposed to be irony, as I cannot possibly provide evidence for my claim, which ought have been obvious. Nevertheless, to think other than “…you might find a very large percentage of the electorate thought the Tories would win” would clearly be preposterous, as built into the operative word ‘might’ is the suggestion you ‘might not’, which means it isn’t really a claim as such.
But when you use: “I predicted that the Conservatives would win the 2015 UK elections, five weeks before the event, when according to Nick Robinson, BBC, the day after the election …” to give weight the views you express in an entire article, you are suggesting it is more than an opinion. When I asked what that opinion was based on you gave me a link to an article, which actually showed that you had no evidence to base that opinion on – and what is most important – at the time of writing it. In other words you used your opinion on one election to make it appear that your opinions on another election were more important than everybody else’s.
Thanks for the apology for saying: “You are part of this general dumbing down of society. But you don’t care. That is where we are heading.” Oh, you didn’t offer one. Just another opinion ‘bodly stated’ that you can show no evidence for whatsoever.
One of the reasons for all the commentators getting it wrong is that, despite a long history of polls being wrong, commentators still believe them. They ignore one simple fact. People don’t tell the truth when they respond to pollsters’ questions.
True, but the polls are never that wrong. That was the false reasoning carried by the US media in 2004 to ‘explain’ polling discrepancies in Ohio that favored Bush.
The theft of the 2000 US presidential elections is well documented, However, the 2004 election against John Kerry was also stolen, this time largely by electronic vote rigging, and the fraud was swept under the carpet by the US media. Although the rigging took place across all states, Ohio was the key. Kerry was leading in the polls in the late stages of voting (properly constructed polls have been shown to be statistically accurate). After the voting closed the electronic counting showed a wild swing to Bush. Similar polling discrepancies occurred in key states Florida and Pennsylvania with statisticians putting the odds of these swings by chance alone down to 250 million to one.
Now for the kicker. The server controlling the electronic voting machines in Ohio was run by SmarTech, a company in Chattanooga, Tennessee, with strong ties to the Republican Party. The same server was the national web hub for the US Republican Party. Computer records show that the vote tallying machines in Ohio were accessed from Chattanooga after the voting was closed and the electronic counting had still to be completed.
Both the pre-polling and exit polls from the Ohio election ran in favor of Kerry while the electronic counting went to Bush. Discrepancies between the two were so severe that pollsters could find no reasonable statistical explanation for it. A sycophantic Bush-supporting media declared that previously reliable polling methods should henceforth be viewed as untrustworthy.
In 2004 Edison Media and Mitofsky International had been hired to conduct exit polls for the nation’s major broadcasters and the Associated Press (the US National Election Pool (NEP)). They released the results of their extensive, nation-wide exit polls to their clients at 4 pm on election day. Their data indicated that Kerry would win by 3%.
Exit polls are so accurate that the discrepancy between the final vote count and the exit polling is almost always within 0.1%. In Ohio it was over 2% points. Such findings in a third world country would be seen as proof of vote-rigging.
Edison/Mitofsky refused to release their raw data for investigation, citing commercial confidentiality. They claimed that exit polling overstated Kerry’s share of the vote in 26 states by more than one standard error and to Bush in 4 states. But these numbers were simply not credible to other professionals and Edison/Mitofsky stand condemned as being politically compromised.
Statistical reports from experts Dr. Steven F. Freeman (University of Pennsylvania, 2004) and Professor Ron Baiman and eleven colleagues (University of Illinois at Chicago’s Institute of Government and Public Affairs, 2005) were damning: on the best interpretations the chance of the exit polls/ voting pattern discrepancies ranged from 1 in 1240 to 1 in 16.5 million.
The major US broadcasters (which were politically sympathetic to Bush and the Republicans) were unsettled by public criticisms of the polling discrepancies and had Edison/Mitofsky (their paid pollsters conduct) a private review which — surprise! surprise! — found their own polls to be accurate.
Kerry was robbed.
Electronic Voting Machine rigging is real. It was already proven to have happened, by the GOP for the GOP – but, now that the powers-that-should-not-be are with Hillary, its been switched to her. This is not conjecture. Of course you don’t see it on the MSM – they are 100% OWNED.
Want proof? – The Corbett Report: How they rig the vote count starts at 22:53 https://youtu.be/tBpSejHAI5U
Michael Connell was the computer guy who ran the voting machine company (‘SMARTech’) – who was a Bush-insider with the dangerous knowledge, who was then assassinated in another ‘crash of convenience’.
and now the evidence for HRC + DNC rigging results in four more mysterious murders. Curiouser and curiouser – http://www.snopes.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/fourdeaths.jpg
v helpful indeed esp Corbett Report explanation s of MIM and KINGPIN/thx
“As Trump said in the debate there are millions registered to vote illegally and these are certainly going to be new entrants to the US who will fear a Trump immigration policy.”
Nonsense. Not going to happen. Voter fraud occurs where people who are not entitled to vote roll up and provide fake ID or vote in the name of someone legally entitled to do so. Voter fraud is exceedingly rare, generally hard to pull off and effectively non-existent. There is no reason to believe it will suddenly occur here.
Electronic vote-rigging has been almost exclusively a Republican exercise since almost all of the voting machine companies have been owned by Republican Party backers.
In my opinion, it comes down to trust. Could you trust either of them? Probably not, but if you look at it from the distrust angle, who do you distrust the most?…..I’m betting that Hillary’s DISTRUST score would be much higher than Trumps. How could you trust anything she says, given her record so far, and that ‘Billyboy’ will be lurking in the background, pulling her strings(and acting as her ‘bagman’ collecting the money.
By the way, is their any INDEPENDENT monitoring of the vote count?
As Joe Stalin once said, “Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything”
Interesting but not to worry …….. Hillary has already won. That deal went down months ago. “THEY “are not going to rig a rigged election, that would be uncouth!
Great, OffGuardian means a Trump puff piece?
Seriously, wtf? I thought this was a serious site, my bad.
“… man (in the other important sense of that word).” To spell it, out the other sense of the expression “he is a man” refers to a person who it independent and unafraid
The whole woeful article is shot through with veiled misogyny and lacks any evidence that voting will be rigged. Such sour grapes over Obama a decent proud American and dismissing Trumps inappropriate sexual behaviour as of no importance is yet another example of the writers male political bias. Demonising Hillary on the basis of her being born a woman is so 18th as to be laughable and disingenuous in the extreme. The bit about impeachment is again another GOP Birther red herring. Who ever is the next POTUS other parties need to work together for USA not like the racist anti Obama stand of the past 8 yrs from the resentful GOP failures.
Like. (since the like button won’t work for me)
I agree — and this kind of analysis, on both the right and the left, is part of why HRC actually is winning. I don’t want her to be winning, I think she is a nightmare, but she has used very legitimate grievances about sexism effectively. Analyses that essentially say “pfft misogyny whatever who cares” or, as often as not “well just look at her what a bitch” (ha ha ha ha ha the line about what sort of unappealing “female type” she is THANKS FASCINATING) are part of the problem, not part of the solution. If your critical analysis of Obama is falling all over itself to proclaim how it doesn’t matter that he’s black, or he’s not really black, before moving on to anything substantive: you have really really really missed the point. If your critical analysis of HRC feels incomplete to you without the word “shrew” appearing in it somewhere: you have really really really missed the point.
It has been very disappointing, this election, to see feminists I respect and admire supporting Clinton. It has also been disappointing, this election, to see leftists (it’s not as surprising on the right) be unable to resist trotting out hoary misogyny as a mode of attack as if it were clever or insightful. If I were to be very conspiracy minded about it I would suppose that They saw this coming: that they could rely upon the services of the sexist brigade of useful idiots poisoning their own critiques with revolting displays of misogyny and thus serving the establishment cause.
Stop.All this misogyny crap is HRC divide and conquer nonsense,as many many women are voting Trump,and the fact that women will vote for the worst candidate in American history because she is a woman reveals maybe misogynists are onto something.
And Trump is winning,was winning and will win,as all the MSM are serial lying scum,whose polls are only effective on the weak minded.
Trump 2016.
The option to go for then is ‘adult’. Or even better, ‘he is independent and unafraid’. Why specify that it’s important he’s a ‘man’ when he’s running against the first female presidential Democratic or Republican candidate ever?
If you can’t accept that Trump is a serial misogynist, I think you’re a lost cause really. The evidence is out there. But even then, how can you possibly justify his comments to ban all Muslims from entering the country? To engage in mass deportation? His constant offences to Latino and black communities? Media-spun? Not likely when he has virtually zero support from those communities, they feel it. Not relevant in your opinion?
The article is bizarre justification for a demagogic candidate who epitomizes the values of self-interested capitalist accumulation with no qualms about destroying other people or the environment in the process. Admit all that and then argue that he’d still be better than Clinton, okay, I can listen. I’d still disagree, because you basically know what you’re getting with Clinton, the Podesta emails are out there, and the Democratic left isn’t going to forget or let it lie. They will be a Sanders 2. On one condition: Clinton doesn’t wipe us all out with her determination to confront Russia. I find that an unlikely end scenario, but admit it’s not impossible. But backing Trump is backing a route that’s been mapped out ideologically by the alt right and a reckless tycoon with no apparent human sympathy. That’s a huge gamble, the kind that usually ends up in populist dictatorships.