Jan Brewer wants to defend the indefensible without being called out for it. She will not get her wish.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
Heh. Did she jab her finger in O’Malley’s face?
Jan Brewer’s face says it all. I couldn’t help noticing the expression on her face every time she said anything abut the President – she looked like she had just stepped in shit barefoot.
I wonder how much of her rage is alcohol fueled. After all, not only is her married name Brewer, her maiden name was Drinkwine. I think both are apt, especially given the Phoenix New Times report of her involvement in an alcohol-related accident in 1988.
She knows how to play to the all-anger-all-the-time rubes in Arizona. I lived there for more than 20 years (18 in Tucson plus a few in Phoenix in the 80s). Politicians there learn to play their constituents like a fiddle.
necessarily a sincere bigoted nutjob, she “just plays one on teevee” for the rubes?
Unfortunately, not clear which of those is worse.
Martin O’Malley was fabulous job in that clip. I was really impressed.
I know O’Malley didn’t have a good showing as a presidential candidate, but why is he not being discussed as a possible VP candidate?
The Pinatas–they just present themselves.
he was referring to you?
Fit of that shoe feel a bit too comfortable ‘r sumthin’?
We’ve seen a lot of this, and we’re going to see a lot more of this:
“I don’t believe Donald Trump meant it in the manner that he said it,” Brewer remarked. “I believe that he felt that he was being treated unfairly.”
I’m with Martin:
“I can’t believe you’re supporting him,” O’Malley laughed, throwing up his hands.
This hasn’t been really taken in deeply here. Everyone supporting Trump’s candidacy in any way is tying themselves to a famously unrepentant bigot.
I don’t care if, say, Speaker Ryan rejects Trump’s bigoted statements. Speaker Ryan is supporting a bigot.
The voters in the Republican Party primary, and now the GOP Party infrastructure itself, are supporting a famously unrepentant bigot.
This is meaningful. It’s not something that gets put away in an election cycle.
In 2018, and 2020, and beyond, the question that will be able to be asked of GOP leaders and GOP voters lending any support to Trump or opposition to Clinton will be:
“Yes, but you wanted a racist to become President in 2016. Shouldn’t we partly judge your position on this issue today on what you did then?”
In a way, Trump’s ability to take three positions on every subject, depending on the media reaction yesterday, is one of the strongest points to his campaign. Supporters have a smorgasbord of possible answers to any question from which to choose.
You want Trump the racist? We got it.
You want Trump as a non-racist? We got that too.
Warmonger? Right over there.
Peacenik? In that stack there.
You may be right but I hold out hope that people will come to see his duplicity and how unfit he is.
No, we have not been shown Trump the non-racist. We have been shown Trump the extremely racist, Trump the very slightly defensive and retreating racist, Trump the aggrieved “I AM NOT A RACIST” racist, Trump “The Hispanics and The Blacks LOVE me” racist…
And it’s easy to drive a campaign which will put a wreck to the “peacenik” claim. He’s on the record supporting the Iraq war before and as it started, for example. Just because the GOP candidates were not interested in exposing his fraudulent position here does not mean it’s not there to be exposed.
Also, too, Trump explicitly proposes to jack up military spending. For what?
No, we’ve seen the “he didn’t mean it that way” non-racist.
I more see Trump as what s Salman Rushdie described him last fall, being paid to be the big, scary monster that Hilz slays and not a legitimate threat. After all, all the Big Money is bet on Hillary.
For the neoliberal agenda to really flourish, though, we can’t have too many progressive Dems elected to Congress.
Then why is Hillary fundraising aggressively for progressive Dems? Why is she campaigning on the most comprehensively leftist agenda of any major Party POTUS nominee in our lifetimes? If she wanted to pivot right and feels that she can take the vote of the left for granted, why has she continued to campaign to the left in the last month?
I’m wary of some of Hillary’s instincts and relationships as well, but I’m willing to give credit where credit’s due and reward good behavior.
The Machiavellian theorizing keeps on jamming up against reality.
You’re really drinking the Kool-Aid.
One reason why he can get away with this is that he has no record of having actually done anything that is consistent with any of the positions he takes. So, he can be the etch-a-sketch candidate.
But he can’t get away with this in the general election, and he isn’t getting away with it. The press is eliciting and reporting on Trump’s outrageous statements, his clownish campaign infrastructure, and his significant deficit in the polls.
The press is inclined to want to report a horse race and will continue to use sentinel events to emphasize the possibility of a tight outcome, but reality is overwhelming those themes most days.
Yep, I’m getting a little tired of the excuses offered by people who should (and actually do) know better.
If you have to say “my candidate didn’t mean it in the way he said it,” then your candidate either did so mean it, in which case he’s an asshole, or your candidate has minimal command of basic English, and is therefore unfit.
If your candidate gets in trouble for continuously saying racist, sexist, and insane things, his problem is not that “he’s not a politician, that’s why people love him, he’s so refreshingly honest,” it’s that he’s a racist, sexist lunatic whom you should be ashamed of even considering fit for office.
I agree. He cannot escape his bigotry. And, guess what, this has gone on for so long and he has indulged his hatred so much I will never be able to look past it. Nor can I get past much of the republican party for allowing this to go on.
Brewer’s real problem is every time she looks in the mirror she sees what she really is. A racist, bigot that hates all others. She has lost the ability to try and justify her believes as other then what they really are.
Who knows how much of this garbage Brewer really believes. Perhaps all of it, but there’s a huge segment of the population in Arizona that’s really into Trump. Having lived there, I know it’s prime Trump territory. Lots of uneducated angry men. Used to have to deal with them all the time. My mechanic, my plumber, my barber. Basically good-hearted people, not even lacking in native intelligence — just incredibly deluded and ignorant.
As the counting continues: CD 34 just flipped to Sanders.
Bernie 42,275
HRC 42,075.
Xavier Becerra is a good guy, but unfortunately he too jumped on the HRC train.
Several counties have flipped since the original tallies were reported and the race called. Not that Democrats seem to be all that into counting all the votes in this election cycle.
http://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/Sanders-edging-closer-to-Clinton-in-slow-8322387.php
Clinton is currently leading by 430K votes and there are, as of the last unprocessed ballots report, only 600K votes left to count.
Oh, please. If, as seems likely, she will win by only a “mere” nine percentage points, instead of thirteen, I’m sure the delegates will all revolt and install Bernie the Gadfly, who really would ensure a Trump victory.
Oh wait. They won’t.
Move on, already.
Afraid the left will find out the real strength of their position if all the votes are counted and any reports of fraud fully investigated?
For folks so confident of the popularity of their candidate, her record and positions, and that war and Wall St rocks, y’all sure act insecure.
This is California. Republicans have no say. Investigate away, there’s no vote fraud here.
Let’s review the bidding, shall we?
Booman posts about Jan Brewer and her flailing, failing attempts to dodge being tarred with Trump’s racism.
Marie posts a totally off-topic response about the vote recount in California designed to make Clinton and her supporters look bad.
Several other posters point out this information is irrelevant, with no real-world consequences.
Marie responds with snide ad hominems based on nothing more than her conviction that anyone who disagrees with her obsessive hatred of Clinton is a neoliberal fascist enabler.
No doubt her response to this observation will be a furious denial that she’s a Hillary hater, combined with further insults directed at the perfidy of Hillbots.
You win the comment thread for using
“neoliberal fascist enabler”
Wait, you are missing something. Yes, Bernie’s going to lose California, but keeping it close there is so important. Right now, he’s busy sacrificing himself for us all by getting into a word smithing contest over a document nobody reads. He’s also been engaged in various process oriented pissing contests with the DNC. These things are just like the state that matters most, California. A closer election there retroactively justifies his unusual but righteous behavior that mimics, but is not, the actions of someone who has trouble losing.
True, he could endorse the nominee and work for a Democratic Congress, one that could help move some of the issues he cares deeply about. He would likely gain mad respect and get credit if he helps put the House in play. But, he knows what matters most: the platform and pissing on the Democratic Party.
The Dem Platform Committee did not endorse a $15 minimum wage but did back TPP. Thank you, Hilz.
I hear it Bro, we’ve been sold out. Only got verbiage in it that comports with most of what we want, not all. Time for a revolution, right?
So you support the TPP and fracking? You oppose single payer and a carbon tax? Well isn’t that special.
http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/284930-sanders-we-won-some-very-important-vic
tories-in
The Party platform committee does not support the TPP and fracking. It also does not oppose single payer and a carbon tax.
Of these, the one I’d fight for hardest to add as an explicit part of the platform is a carbon tax; I’m most disappointed in that outcome so far. However, not explicitly including it is not at all equivalent to opposition to it. I’d like to see the full proposed campaign plank on environmental policy.
OTOH, the upcoming GOP platform is certain to include opposition to the carbon tax and support for fracking.
The party platform committee does not support the TPP? Honestly, I’m confused. Are we just playing with semantics here? How do you know they don’t support it when they just rejected Keith Ellison’s amendment to oppose it?
As for the carbon tax, shouldn’t they take a stand?
The point about Pres. Obama is important, I admit, but I can’t help wondering, who’s kidding who? In the wake of Brexit, this kind of thing becomes more important than ever.
https:/shadowproof.com/2016/06/25/democrats-prioritize-party-unity-including-stand-tpp-platform
It’s not semantical, at all.
The Party platform could say “Oppose TPP,” “Support TPP,” “something else”, or fail to speak to the issue at all. The position the Committee moved is “something else”.
The President and many Congressional Democratic caucus members support TPP. The two POTUS candidates and many other Congressional Democratic caucus members oppose TPP. A number of Congressional Democratic caucus members have not made up their minds.
The President and the Party’s POTUS nominees are in opposition to each other on the issue. The platform committee is acknowledging that opposition with a proposed campaign plank which is easy to see as a thinly veiled critique of the TPP, saying any trade deal “must protect workers and the environment.”
Here’s a summary of the Committee’s discussions on the TPP which is very sympathetic to the positions proposed by the members placed by Sanders:
https:/shadowproof.com/2016/06/25/democrats-prioritize-party-unity-including-stand-tpp-platform
None of the Committee members placed by Clinton spoke out in support of the TPP. Only one committee member supported the President’s position, a DNC appointee. The other DNC appointees did not speak in support of the TPP.
The President, his Administration and his spokespeople have not made a statement on this Party platform issue at all. They’re fine so far with the President’s position not being supported in the platform. The President has also stopped making the case for the TPP in public. He’s not preparing the public to support its passage any more.
It’s not tenable for the Party to entirely oppose all international trade deals. What we need to do is support and pass good trade deals. That is the essential position held by the Committee. We’ll see what the Delegates do with this plank on the Convention floor.
Those inclined to be suspicious of Clinton on the issue will likely remain suspicious. Me, I want to hold Hillary hard to the fact that she is in public opposition to the current TPP language. That will help us prevent a vote on TPP in the lame duck session, if we use it. Screaming “she’s lying!” will let her off the hook and reduce our leverage with Congress.
But screaming “She’s lying!” takes no careful consideration and is ever so much more satisfying.
I’m not screaming, but I see no reason for confidence that she doesn’t really support TPP, just because, in a heavily contested election, she says she doesn’t. It’s very much the kind of thing she does support and that her friends support. President Obama, to whom she owes so much, explicitly supports it.
The only thing I can say with confidence is, she knows perfectly well that agreements like TPP are extremely unpopular these days with the unwashed masses.
What do you make of the fact that Hillary has continued in recent campaign speeches in the wake of essentially securing the Party nomination to reiterate her opposition to the current TPP terms?
What I make of that is that it helps us mobilize Congressional Democratic Caucus opposition to the current language of the Partnership. I value that, and want to make use of it.
Well, that ain’t exactly how I hoid it.
According to Moveon.org, “We know the administration is pulling strings to get the TPP passed in the Lame Duck session when outgoing members are wholly unaccountable to their constituents, and more susceptible to graft and promises of plum corporate positions and backroom favors, once they leave office.”
Citizens Trade Campaign is organizing opposition to TPP — as is America’s Future:
https://ourfuture.org/20160627/burning-issues-explaining-the-revolt-against-the-tpp
But Clinton’s public opposition helps us lobby the lame duck Congress to prevent them from passing the Partnership. “The next President is opposed to the TPP, and so is much of the public; you shouldn’t pass it.”
If we are cynical about Clinton’s views re. TPP, that weakens our ability to use her opposition to organize Congress against the current language.
I would like progressives to figure out a way to construct trade negotiations which would better defend workers, consumers, and our governments. Just saying No forever is not a position which we can hold.
OK, I see what you’re saying about taking Clinton at her word.
But the Committee didn’t back the TPP, and they did support moving to $15 minimum wages, just not at the Federal level immediately. Here’s a summary with video; it doesn’t support your claims:
http://www.salon.com/2016/06/25/clinton_appointees_oppose_15_minimum_wage_amendment_in_democratic_pl
atform_sanders_surrogates_back_it/
I wish we didn’t have these overstated claims.
Meanwhile, Trump has stated that the current Federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour is too high.
Yes, and in very large measure thanks to Bernie and his 1,900 delegates (45% of pledged delegates). So I’m sure you support his efforts to press on, as I do.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/democrats-approved-platform-draft-sanders-imprint-40123759
Absolutely I do.
Good, he needs that support — especially since, as it turns out, Bob was more right than wrong about the initial draft results for the Sanders platform. For example, the PPP was NOT rejected. So the fight must continue.
http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/284930-sanders-we-won-some-very-important-vic
tories-in
It’s important and unusual that the platform of the current President’s Party will not support the TPP. A significant acknowledgement of opposition to TPP within his own Party is included when the platform takes a different position from the President.
She’s looking to be Trump’s VP pick.
I agree.
Think about that, her dream job is to be the VP candidate with Trump.
Yikes.
.
Worthwhile things for us to discuss from this week’s Politics and Reality Radio broadcast:
https://soundcloud.com/alternet-radio/june-25-2016-alan-grayson-from-the-house-sit-in-dean-baker-on-
brexit-on-identity-politics
At about 8:00 in the broadcast, Joshua speaks with Rep. Alan Grayson about the House sit-in to fight for gun rights. He takes on the discussion about due process protections in gun control legislation.
Before Grayson comes on, Josh also talks about the Brexit vote. A good question he arrives at after going through a bunch of crosstabs from the British electorate:
“If it’s all about the economy, tell me why two-thirds of asian voters wanted to stay, and tell me why three-quarters of black voters wanted to stay. Why was it just a majority of whites who wanted to leave? Does anybody believe that austerity or free trade or European elites hurt white people more than asians and blacks? I find that very unlikely.”
You can name the reasons for Brexit but per someone on TV this morning, both the Conservative and Labour parties and the millennials supported remain. So apparently some folks out in the shire gave them all a giant middle finger and FU.
The young people like having all of Europe at their fingertips. Rather than being forever stuck in soggy England, they can take jobs in Spain and Italy or wherever. The older folks who have no interest in leaving home want England the way it was before the population exploded. Some of them prefer to keep in English too. Simple as that.
The louder she ranted the more I thought she had no where else to go to defend or even promote Trump, much less herself. And she’s probably one of the better Trump surrogates.
Yes, that’s a very low bar. And even a few of his earlier surrogates are heading for the exits now.
Jake Tapper is worthless as a moderator.
Coulda stopped after “worthless”.
The scented hankies are coming out, no?
That went over my head.
Here can expect that this will be ignored or attacked as “purity trolling” or some other similar meme that the HillFans trot out to denigrate those that speak truths that they can’t handle.
Right, because all the problems of the world stem from the Democratic party having lost its soul. Has nothing to do with Reagan having convinced a bunch of folks that government was too big and Democrats having had to find a way to remain in office through the years when about 25% of the population supported a liberal agenda. If Clinton had just governed like a liberal and been smacked down in “96, President Dole would have been so much better. Has nothing to do with what people were willing to support in the 80s and 90s or the idiots who voted for Nader in 2000, handing the presidency to the boy moron and his evil sidekick.
It’s simple, actually.
Stay home in November.
Then…
Something something mass social uprising…something something Social Democratic utopia.
Voting for politicians is gross.
“…this will be ignored or attacked…”? Hell, I upgraded your comment.
Can’t be bothered to mess up HIS future…right?
Former Indiana University student, charged in two rape cases, sentenced to probation
Jesse Williams gave me live at the BET Awards last night.
An excerpt of this speech:
which is why she should stay IN THE SENATE:
If You Fail to Plan, Then You Plan to Fail
by D.R. Tucker June 25, 2016 3:30 PM
Like my colleague David Atkins, I think a Hillary Clinton-Elizabeth Warren ticket would be a strong one for the national Democratic Party; on MSNBC this morning, Joy Reid also noted Warren’s merits as a running mate for Clinton. However, as a Massachusetts native, I cannot dismiss concerns that Warren’s departure from the Senate upon becoming Vice President would quickly become a disaster for the state Democratic Party.
Under current Massachusetts law, a special election to fill a vacant US House or Senate seat must be held at least 145 days (but not more than 160 days) after the seat becomes vacant. Between the time the vacancy commences and the day of the special election, the governor-in this case, Republican Charlie Baker-must appoint an interim US Senator.
In the two most recent Bay State US Senate vacancies (the passing of Ted Kennedy in 2009 and the resignation of John Kerry to become Secretary of State in 2013), the appointed interim Senators-former Democratic National Committee head Paul Kirk and prominent attorney Mo Cowan, respectively-agreed not to run for the office while serving as interim Senator. It is quite likely that Baker will also have his interim appointment agree not to run for the office-because Baker, highly popular in Massachusetts, will not be able to resist the urge to run for the seat himself.
This should scare progressives in Massachusetts; as I have previously noted, the state Democratic Party seems uninterested in confronting Baker on the more offensive aspects of his record, presumably due to his tremendous popularity. It is difficult to imagine the state party suddenly moving from legarthic to lithe when it comes to making the case against a Senate candidate Baker-and it is also difficult to imagine the national Democratic Party and/or progressive Super PACs doing enough damage to Baker to substantially diminish his popularity going into a special election.
Burying the Beast: Why the 2016 Election Needs to be a Democratic Landslide
Trevor LaFauci June 26, 2016
There are two sides to every coin.
Over the past two weeks, I’ve been traversing Palm Beach County, Florida for a crash course in political organizing 101. I’ve been to multiple call banks, house parties, and voter registration events. I’ve met local officials and precinct leaders. I’ve sat in on a conference call led by Robby Mook. I’ve seen and heard strategy sessions regarding messaging, talking points, goals, and strategies for the general election campaign. I’ve made hundreds of phone calls in an effort to recruit both new and seasoned volunteers. I’ve seen staunch Democratic supporters open their homes to complete strangers to offer supporter housing. I’ve spoken with new organizers who quit their cushy jobs to join the campaign. I’ve seen veteran organizers who have been consistently working 70-hour weeks since last summer. I’ve seen a network of driven and dedicated Democrats who will do whatever it takes to elect Hillary Clinton as our 45th president.
But I’ve also seen the other side.