Conservative Misogyny and MCPsThis is not just WHO TRUMP IS, this is WHO HIS SUPPORTERS ARE: MCPs, Male Conservative Pigs, Male Chauvinist Pigs

There was a phrase which entered a broader national awareness back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Male Chauvinist Pig. It was a slang term for misogynists, men who - Sincerely! - viewed women as inferior and inherently unequal to men.  While it has never completely disappeared from use, it is time to revive it again more broadly to apply to the 2016 election cycle. (The right insists sincere beliefs have a priority over everything else, because they are "sincere", and therefore somehow special.)

It is a fair accusation that in the 2nd Presidential Debate, Donald Trump hoped to distract those who were fleeing his sinking rat-infested ship of a campaign with his claim that he would appoint a special prosecutor to go after Hillary Clinton for her emails.  I suggest the 'special prosecutor' be issued the badge pictured here, since he or she would not be operating on behalf of all Americans, but only on behalf of the MCPs.

This relies on the classic civics and other ignorance of his generally poorly educated base of support. The President CANNOT appoint a special prosecutor; that is the purview of the Attorney General and the Congress. While Trump may assume he will get whatever AG he wants, no matter how incompetent, AGs, like Supreme Court picks, are only in office by confirmation of the Senate. If Obama's SCOTUS pick isn't going through, you can bet that such an AG pick won't be confirmed either.

But HEY! It makes a great DISTRACTION for toddlers and ignorant adults from that embarrassing scandal.  And there is much more scandal to come, beginning with Trump discussing his daughter's breasts with Howard Stern, and then proceeding to give his blessing to Stern calling Ivanka Trump a "piece of ass".  Because apparently women, even one's own daughters, are just pieces of meat for male gratification, not real and equal human beings.

From CNN via Mediaite:



When you read the selected collection of Rush Limbaugh quotes below, it won't come as a surprise that Trump and so many of his surrogates are many-times married - Trump, Guiliani, Gingrich, etc. They believe women exist apparently for their sexual gratification and have little additional value other than as baby incubators.

These Pro-Trump conservatives are a slightly sanitized version of a segment of misogynists on the right known as MRA, Men's Rights Advocates or the MRM, Men's Rights Movement, opposed to feminism and female equality, and dedicated to maintaining male privilege. To grasp how vile the MRAs can be, I would direct you to a site listed on our blog roll, We Hunted the Mammoth.  Here "Mammoth" quotes a prominent writer in MRA circles, condemning Paul Ryan for dis-inviting Trump and Pence to campaign with him.  (By way of terminology explanation, they use the term 'alpha' a lot for a fantasy assumption about natural male superiority, and they use the word 'cuck' a lot as a short form of cuckold, part of their belief that women are all sluts who sleep with multiple men - just never them):

If you ever wanted to know why I’m not a conservative or a Republican, this craven pandering to women pretty much sums it up. I’m not sickened by Trump’s locker room talk. I’m sickened by the fact that weak little gamma males like Ryan … have any influence in Western society at all. The only correct response to this “scandal” should have been a single question: “so the f*ck what?”
Never trust a moderate, a Churchian, or a cuckservative. Never. They will stab you in the back in order to virtue-signal every single time.

I agree with the above author on only one point; it is true that the right has accepted and embraced the extremist alt right, including the MRA's, in their big tent that only excludes moderates. But when  as they inevitably do, these MRAs and other misogynists like Trump embarrass people like Ryan who need votes to get elected, then those pols feign surprise and distaste.  They know perfectly well that these are donors and voters for themselves and their party causes.  They know who they are; we ALL should know them for who they are. It's not a secret, it is not a surprise.

The VeeP debate was a yawn, Kaine won. But only because liars are losers.

One set of pundits described it as more of a bickerfest than a debate.

I was disappointed that after the cool, calm and collected way that Hillary handled the first presidential debate, to the detriment of Trump, Tim Kaine was unable or unwilling to follow her example.  I found that to be a huge disappointment, to the point where I wanted to turn off the television and find a good book rather than lose those minutes to irritation.

In contrast to Kaine's interruptions, Pence exceeded the performance of the top half of his ticket, in style, but not in substance - or integrity.

When did right wing evangelicals stop believing that lying was a bad thing?  This is selective Bible reading at the very least, both old and new testament, and a complete omission of the 9th commandment.

“the word of the LORD is right; and all his works are done in truth.”  Psalms 33:4

"Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other." Psalms 85:10“Lying lips are abomination to the LORD: but they that deal truly are his delight.” Proverbs 12:22

But neither had anything new or worthwhile to add, either about themselves or their fellow candidates, and Pence is emphatically the loser in the fact checking department.  Pence's sole value in the debate was to deny the crazy on the right, of which he is himself a blind adherent, and to deny both his own voting record and the accumulated gaffes and follies of his presidential candidate.

The fact checking was summed up by the Nation:

He [Pence] also showed that he can lie as well as Trump. Time and time again Kaine or Quijano presented Pence with stands that Trump had taken, only to see the loyal VP nominee deny Trump had ever said any such thing. Pence also lied about his own record, insisting the only reason he tried to zero-out Planned Parenthood’s federal funding was because that was a “fiscally responsible” way to address the deficit. No one believes Pence on that, including his own far-right supporters.
The anodyne, white-haired Pence, who looks like he’d been sent by central casting to play the disarming, grandfatherly right-wing zealot that he is, did his best to make Trump seem like a reasonable presidential candidate Tuesday night. Meanwhile Kaine, “America’s nice dad” (in the words of comedian/author Sara Benincasa), was strangely judged the rude guy by cable pundits. Yes, he did interrupt some, partly when the placid Quijano failed to challenge Pence on any of his dissembling. “Six times tonight I have said to Governor Pence I can’t imagine how you can defend your running mate’s position. And he has not,” Kaine said toward the end of the debate. But Quijano almost never followed up.

I was particularly disappointed that in the discussion of faith in politics, there was no mention of Pence being a creationist who has repeatedly expressed his desire to suppress the study and teaching of evolution, replacing it with faith based baloney not broadly shared by less-extremist Christianity.

What I did not see was any follow through on the Trump threat to attack Bill Clinton for infidelity, which I had expected from Pence has NOT conspicuously been involved in serial adultery, unlike other surrogates, notably Rudely Giuliani or the Nut Gingrich,.

It is never a winning position to simply lie and attempt to deceive.  Only the true cult-ish believers will be persuaded to find merit, and there will be little if any aggregate gain in the long run.

Whatever damage control was accomplished by Pence will be undone in any case when Trump next opens his mouth, or grabs his phone in the wee hours of the morning to begin yet another tweet storm, showing himself to have the obsessive character of a creepy, old, degenerate stalker.

Donald Trump did NOT fare well in the debate, not in self control, but especially not the fact checks

There were a number of fact check failures for Trump, most notably that he was wrong on ISIS controlling oil in Libya, he was wrong on blaming Obama for the way we left Iraq, and he was especially wrong about Clinton and her campaign starting birtherism.

From CBS.com fact checking:

TRUMP STATEMENT:  ISIS has “oil all over the place, including the oil, a lot of the oil, in Libya.”
FACT CHECK: According to a Bloomberg analysis, Libyan oil fields and pipelines are controlled by a combination of the Government of National Accord, allies of the Tripoli Petroleum Facilities Guard, and the Libyan National Army (and groups aligned with them).
Claudia Gazzini, a Tripoli-based senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, told the Washington Post that it was simply not true that the Islamic State has control of any Libyan oil.
“While it is true that ISIS has attacked oil fields in the Sirte basin area and destroyed key equipment there, they have not sought to keep control of the oil fields,” Gazzini said.

and

Patti Solis Doyle, Clinton’s 2008 campaign manager, told Wolf Blitzer a volunteer forwarded an email promoting “birtherism” and that that person was fired. “The campaign nor Hillary did not start the ‘birther’ movement, period, end of story,” Solis Doyle told CNN, saying the volunteer’s actions were “beyond the pale” and that Clinton called Obama campaign manager David Plouffe to apologize.

Blumenthal, a longtime Clinton confidante but not a current campaign staffer, denies ever contacting McClatchy; the former McClatchy bureau chief, James Asher, recently said he clearly recalled the conversation with Blumenthal.

What CBS either omitted or did not know is that James Asher no longer is making the claim of recalling the Blumenthal conversation, and that the investigatory mission to Kenya by McClatchy news was the result of multiple stories being published at the time.

Trump fat out LIED when he claimed he only filed for bankruptcy four times -- which is a LOT of bankruptcies.  Four bankruptcies argues being very bad at business. It was not four it was six bankruptcies. 

Again per CBS and politifact (because it is important to multisource):

FACT CHECK: Clinton is correct. When Politifact looked into this issue, they found six times that Trump has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection: The Trump Taj Mahal in 1991; Trump Castle in 1992; Trump Plaza and Casino in 1992; the Plaza Hotel in 1992; Trump Hotels and Casinos Resorts in 2004; and Trump Entertainment Resorts in 2009.

I think my greatest outrage is that Trump believes he is in some way more presidential APPEARING than Clinton. Ms. Clinton was elegantly groomed and very presentable. Trump in contrast, has demanded that his appearance NOT be an issue, while he has repeatedly demeaned his women opponents from Carly Fiorina to Clinton, and has demeaned women more broadly, including those in his employ. Women are not qualified or unqualified from office on the basis of appearance. But if we were going to assess ability on the basis of appearance, Trump is a fat, jowly, puffy-eyed, badly spray-tanned smirking swine with an unattractive piece of roadkill on his head, like a tacky version of a Daniel Boone hat. He is in no position to criticize anyone's appearance, other than he clearly believes this view of women as sexual objects and male accessories, sometimes called the demeaning term eye candy, is the exclusive prerogative of men.

The hypocrisy in this, the obscene double standard, is that Trump behaved badly, interrupting Clinton repeatedly - in the first 26 minutes of the debate, Trump interrupted Hillary 25 times, per Vox.

Huff Po referred to this an manterupting:

Manterrupting, defined by journalist and author Feminist Fight Club Jessica Bennett as “unnecessary interruption of a woman by a man,” is a phenomenon that many professional women are (unfortunately) familiar with.
A 2014 study found that women are significantly more likely to be interrupted than men are, and research has shown that when women do speak up, their words are given less weight and treated as less valid than men’s. This phenomenon is especially problematic in fields ― like politics ― which are dominated by men’s voices just by virtue of the numbers.
Women who want to circumvent these professional obstacles have to learn to play the game, and part of that game means dealing with the frustrating habits of one’s male colleagues ― or in the case of a presidential race, one’s political opponents. As Clinton well knows, in order to avoid having her words dismissed, she has to modulate the way she presents her ideas in a way that male candidates simply don’t.
To Clinton’s credit, she appeared unperturbed by Trump’s attempts to verbally bulldoze over her. Each and every time, she kept speaking, often with a sly smile. Because as any professional woman knows, the best way to shut down a manterrupter is to simply refuse to acknowledge him.

Although to be fair, Trump also talked over the moderator, and Hillary Clinton in the second half of the debate did interrupt Trump a few times as well, 17 total to Trump interrupting her 51 times.

I hope this was not a drinking game exercise for the good folks over at Vox.

Counting the interruptions of both candidates by moderator Lester Holt, Clinton was interrupted a total of 70 times, and Trump was interrupted 47 times.

Some of Trump’s interruptions of Clinton featured outright lies, like insisting that he never said climate change was a Chinese conspiracy, or denying that he ever said some of the offensive things about women that Clinton called him out on saying.

Some of his interruptions were petulant asides; at one point he even threw in a one-word, schoolboy-like “Not.”

Other interruptions turned into loud, insistent filibusters, with Trump barreling over Clinton until she finally smiled and relented to let him keep talking — or until Holt interjected to insist that Trump give Clinton her allotted two minutes to talk.

If anything renders someone "unpresidential" it would be this Trump failure to control his mouth and his toxic attitudes of special entitlement towards others.

Birtherism, the Track Back of Fact

Much ado about nothing has been made of the Clinton staffer who was fired for circulating an email questioning Obama's birthplace.

No one however has ever claimed that the staffer WROTE that email.  Here is a copy of that email, via Snopes, and their observations about the email origins and circulation.

“Barack Obama’s mother was living in Kenya with his Arab-African father late in her pregnancy. She was not allowed to travel by plane then, so Barack Obama was born there and his mother then took him to Hawaii to register his birth,” asserted one chain email that surfaced on the urban legend site Snopes.com in April 2008.

That Hillary Clinton supporters circulated such an e-mail isn't in question, but the claim that that's the moment the birther theory "first emerged" simply isn't true. The likeliest point of origin we've been able to find was a post on conservative message board FreeRepublic.com dated 1 March 2008 (which, according to a report in The Telegraph, was at least a month before Clinton supporters got on the e-mail bandwagon):

I was told today that Obama swore in on a Koran for his Senate seat. I do not believe he did. Can someone clarify this for me? I am under the impression only a Congressman has so far sworn in on a Koran.
Also that Obama’s mother gave birth to him overseas and then immediately flew into Hawaii and registered his birth as having taken place in Hawaii.
Again, any clarifications on this? Defintely disqualifies him for Prez. There must be some trace of an airticket. While small babies are not charged air fare they do have a ticket issued for them.
Long time ago but there may be some residual information somewhere. Good ammo (if available and true) BEST USED AFTER he becomes PREZ (if that occurs) and it’s too late for Dems - except accept the VP.

Only the right persisted in perpetuating the theory beyond 2008, notably Trump, well after the totally unnecessary release of the president's birth certificate - something done, imho, to humiliate the president as different (and therefore inferior in the minds of conservatives) to prior presidents, (like Chester Arthur rumored to have been born in Canada, with a foreign father). Not only is there some question as to the location of Chester Arthur's birth, but also a question of what year he was born. 
As with President Obama, the issue of school records were involved as well in the conspiracy theory. Chester Arthur's birther, by the way, really WAS a Democrat, a lawyer by the name of A. P. Hinman.

Politico did a great job tracking down who really DID originate birtherism in a recent article in 2008:

“As we reported, some of her supporters flirted with the idea in 2008 — but it has its origins in the fever swamps beginning in Illinois in 2004,” he said.
In fact, birtherism, as it’s been called, reportedly began with innuendo by serial Illinois political candidate Andy Martin, who painted Obama as a closet Muslim in 2004. That spiraled into a concerted effort by conspiracy theorists to raise doubts about Obama’s birthplace and religion — and essentially paint him as un-American.
Martin, who briefly launched a little-noticed presidential campaign last year, has disavowed the movement he’s often credited with starting, though he still foments similarly discredited doubts about Obama’s religion.
...On Friday, Clinton’s former senior aide Patti Solis Doyle acknowledged that a volunteer coordinator in Iowa forwarded a birther-related email. “Hillary made the decision immediately let that person go,” she said. “We let that person go. It was so beyond the pale of the campaign Hillary wanted to run and that we as a staff wanted to run that I called David Plouffe who was managing Barack Obama to apologize to say this is not coming from us, that this was rogue volunteer.”

And here is Mr. Martin, courtesy of internet video from 2008 -- see how easy it is for Trump and the GOP to fact check? That they don't is a choice for willful ignorance:





The New York Times, back in 2008, did a great job digging into this, elaborating on those in the right, from the 'Freeepers" aka the Free Republic crackpots and extremist conspiracy theorists, and via Fox Not-News, to rabidly Anti-Semite Andy Martin, to equally radical righties who are pro-Israel Jews.  Politics truly makes strange bedfellows.

But an appearance in a documentary-style program on the Fox News Channel watched by three million people last week thrust the man, Andy Martin, and his past into the foreground. The program allowed Mr. Martin to assert falsely and without challenge that Mr. Obama had once trained to overthrow the government.

An examination of legal documents and election filings, along with interviews with his acquaintances, revealed Mr. Martin, 62, to be a man with a history of scintillating if not always factual claims. He has left a trail of animosity — some of it provoked by anti-Jewish comments — among political leaders, lawyers and judges in three states over more than 30 years.

He is a law school graduate, but his admission to the Illinois bar was blocked in the 1970s after a psychiatric finding of “moderately severe character defect manifested by well-documented ideation with a paranoid flavor and a grandiose character.”

Though he is not a lawyer, Mr. Martin went on to become a prodigious filer of lawsuits, and he made unsuccessful attempts to win public office for both parties in three states, as well as for president at least twice, in 1988 and 2000. Based in Chicago, he now identifies himself as a writer who focuses on his anti-Obama Web site and press releases.

Mr. Martin, in a series of interviews, did not dispute his influence in Obama rumors.

“Everybody uses my research as a takeoff point,” Mr. Martin said, adding, however, that some take his writings “and exaggerate them to suit their own fantasies.”

As for his background, he said: “I’m a colorful person. There’s always somebody who has a legitimate cause in their mind to be angry with me.”

When questions were raised last week about Mr. Martin’s appearance and claims on “Hannity’s America” on Fox News, the program’s producer said Mr. Martin was clearly expressing his opinion and not necessarily fact.

It was not Mr. Martin's first turn on national television. The CBS News program "48 Hours" in 1993 devoted an hourlong program, "See You in Court; Civil War, Anthony Martin Clogs Legal System with Frivolous Lawsuits," to what it called his prolific filings. (Mr. Martin has also been known as Anthony Martin-Trigona.) He has filed so many lawsuits that a judge barred him from doing so in any federal court without preliminary approval.

He prepared to run as a Democrat for Congress in Connecticut, where paperwork for one of his campaign committees listed as one purpose “to exterminate Jew power.” He ran as a Republican for the Florida State Senate and the United States Senate in Illinois. When running for president in 1999, he aired a television advertisement in New Hampshire that accused George W. Bush of using cocaine.

It is worth noting that Andy Martin is running again for President, per Ballotpedia, as a Republican. Again.  Also according to Ballotpedia, Andy Martin a week ago lost a run for Congress as a Republican in New Hampshire.for the 2nd Congressional District.
 
So far as I can determine, while Martin attempted to run as a Dem, he got further and more often running as a Republican and he has always been a bigot and a conservative.

Also from the 2008 NYT article, some of the other players in the birtherism conspiracy theory are identified.   They are pertinent to include here, because so many tin-foil hat wearing right wing bigots are still repeating them:

Theories about Mr. Obama’s background have taken on a life of their own. But independent analysts seeking the origins of the cyberspace attacks wind up at Mr. Martin’s first press release, posted on the Free Republic Web site in August 2004.

Its general outlines have turned up in a host of works that have expounded falsely on Mr. Obama’s heritage or supposed attempts to conceal it, including “Obama Nation,” the widely discredited best seller about Mr. Obama by Jerome R. Corsi. Mr. Corsi opens the book with a quote from Mr. Martin.

“What he’s generating gets picked up in other places,” said Danielle Allen, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., who has investigated the e-mail campaign’s circulation and origins, “and it’s an example of how the Internet has given power to sources we would have never taken seriously at another point in time.”

Ms. Allen said Mr. Martin’s original work found amplification in 2006, when a man named Ted Sampley wrote an article painting Mr. Obama as a secret practitioner of Islam. Quoting liberally from Mr. Martin, the article circulated on the Internet, and its contents eventually found their way into various e-mail messages, particularly an added claim that Mr. Obama had attended “Jakarta’s Muslim Wahhabi schools. Wahhabism is the radical teaching that created the Muslim terrorists who are now waging jihad on the rest of the world.”

Mr. Obama for two years attended a Catholic school in Indonesia, where he was taught about the Bible, he wrote in “Dreams From My Father,” and for two years went to an Indonesian public school open to all religions, where he was taught about the Koran.

The Delusions of the MN GOP

gold-plated clown car

This morning I heard an interview on MPR with MN GOP chair Keith Downey waxing rhapsodic over the glorious candidates available to conservative voters, including Donald Trump.  Downey was enthused with the diverse attention that candidates like Trump have brought to the 2016 race, viewing it as favorable to his party.

I think Mr. Downey needs to have his head examined for his apparently deliberate confusing of the gawker attention given to train wrecks as distinct from genuine admiration and support.  While it is the lunatic fringe most frequently turning out for caucuses and primaries, it is NOT the lunatic fringe on the right who most often turns out for the general election - as demonstrated in this Pew analysis of the 2012 election voters.

This analysis is based on 1,575 Republican and Republican-leaning registered voters who are part of Pew Research Center’s nationally-representative American Trends Panel, and who could be matched to the national voter file. ¹
The GOP primary electorate represented a relatively small share of those who went on to vote in the general election. Of Republicans who were verified to have voted in the general election, only 25% are verified as having voted in Republican primaries or caucuses in 2012; while 75% do not have a record of having voted in the primaries or caucuses that year. ²

No one in their right mind would find anything wonderful in the 2016 cast of characters on the right, stuffed into what is now, at best, a gold-plated clown car (classy!)  I'm sure Mr. Downey is well aware, for example, of the recent Pew Poll from a week ago which examined how the candidates are regarded.

Hillary Clinton had the best result among those polled to be a great president, followed by Donald Trump; however Turmp far and away had the highest percentage of poll respondents who thought he would be a TERRIBLE president.

Fellow extremist Ted Cruz got far fewer views as a great president, but also fewer negatives, while Bernie Sanders came in ahead of Cruz (barely) as a great president.  Cruz, Sanders and Ben Carson all faced problems with respondents even knowing who they were, compared to either Trump or Clinton. 

Looking at the same time frame,  Pew Polling indicates Democrats hate Trump more than Republicans hate Clinton.

So while Clinton approval ratings may be declining, it is arguable that opposition to Trump is increasing far faster.  And even among Republicans, the opposition to the extremist crazies, like Trump, Cruz, and/or Carson is high.  Additionally, it's a pretty safe bet that Jeb hasn't a prayer of being the presidential candidate (now or ever, I would hazard).

From a Pew Poll the first week of January 2016:




While I expect Keith Downey to try to spin how crazy bad the candidates are on the right, the numbers are pretty clear.  Donald Trump is not electable, and I would argue neither is Ted Cruz, or Ben Carson who has largely disappeared from popular radar; while the enthusiasm is far lower for any of the other more sane establishment candidates, it is also less likely that any of them would bring out the voters either -- perhaps even less so than with the lack of enthusiasm for Mitt Romney last time around.

Perhaps it is unkind of me to be so skeptical of Downey and the conservative candidates - never more so than when the straw poll this time around will be for real.  Let me point out that the winner of the last presidential election straw poll was Santorum (who also won in the Iowa primary....eventually), while the convention winner for candidate later in the summer was Ron Paul.  Somehow all of that irrelevance escaped comment from Mr. Downey, at least in what I heard of his interview.

Given their past track record, I would NOT expect much of what passes for the MN GOP caucus to have any relationship to the actual election in November.

gold plated clown charm

Trump