285 points

But he… wasn’t. He lost the presidency in 1932 to Paul Von Hindenburg (53% to 37%. not even particularly close) who later appointed Hitler under pressure to the channclorship (which was an appointed role) in 1933. Hindenburg died in January of 1934 and Hitler de facto merged the presidency and chancelorship into one office (Fuhrer). The story isn’t “regular people put Hitler in power”, it’s “broken legislative systems are vulnerable to facists”.

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174 points

broken legislative systems are vulnerable to fascists

Lucky America doesn’t have a broken legislative sys… Oh no

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82 points

At least we have a good judici…

Fuck.

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55 points

We can rest easy knowing that the judiciary is subject to checks and b…

God damn it.

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25 points

We’re toast

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6 points

No we aren’t. Antifascism was effective at stopping fascism in the US and UK.

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29 points

it’s “broken legislative systems are vulnerable to facists”.

She would know all about that. Bernie was killing Trump in the polls. Hilary was neck and neck with Trump.

The DNC cast their votes for who was going to General. A winner was announced. Everyone started to go to the announcement and for the only time in DNC history, the announcement was rescinded and everyone was broken up into different groups. Hilary staffers were observed scurrying around between groups. Then everyone was forced to vote again. THEN Hilary was declared the candidate going to General.

It was all live tweeted. It was all loudly publicized, but noone seemed to notice. Noone seemed to care.

Of course she is now going to make a historically inaccurate statement that casts actual democracy in a bad light.

That hag needs to stay under her rock.

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22 points

I mean, there was a court case…

DNC’s lawyers used the legal defense that they’re a private party and can run anyone they want in the general, and because of that, it doesn’t matter if they influence a primary election.

They flat out said primary elections are just a performative act, and the judge agreed with them.

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20 points

It’s their party, their candidate, and they only let the people vote as a courtesy.

Our “free” country has been run by two private institutions interested only in their own popularity for over 150 years.

We lose. Everything.

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1 point

Which is correct if you look at the history of how primaries came to be. Parties simply nominating someone is exactly what used to happen. The first Presidential primaries started in 1901, and they still don’t even happen in every state. Plenty still use the caucus system, where a bunch of insiders (usually local people who have volunteered for the party in some capacity) take off a day from work to decide on a candidate. The caucus system has historically been far more susceptible tampering by powerful interests. It literally was a smoke filled room, and is where that metaphor started.

Primaries aren’t some system enshrined in the Constitution or anything. It’s just how both parties have evolved over time. The general population gets its say in the election later on. The system now is far more democratic than the one that existed 200 years ago (with the caveat that we don’t have to stop with progress here).

Obama would never have gotten the nomination in 2008 if the caucus system was still the norm. The leaders of the party wanted Hillary.

That said, I think this approach would work better if there were more than two viable parties. If you don’t like who the Democrats nominated, look the Green Party or Progressives Party or Send Billionaires to Guillotines Party. If they all put a candidate out there selected by party insiders, that’s fine, just vote in the general for whomever you think is the best out of a wide range of options. It’s far harder for corrupt party insiders to game the system in this scenario–for example, it’d be harder to have a place in all parties and setup the candidates you want so you win no matter what. It’s only a problem because we have exactly two parties that matter. Treating multiple parties as private organizations who can nominate whomever they want under any system they want would be fine.

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-3 points

I actually think I vaguely remember this.

Thanks for reminding me.

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13 points

Don’t forget that there are many, many appointed superdelegates who each have around 8,000 voting power each.

There were 618 pledges from DNC superdelegates in the 2016 nomination, equaling 4,944,000 voting power (meaning votes equivalent to ~5 million regular voters in the DNC). These are not delegates assigned to states but to specific groups and people in positions in the DNC itself.

For reference, 16,917,853 of the popular vote itself went to Hilary Clinton and 13,210,550 went to Bernie Sanders according to this eye cancer of a website. If all of the DNC superdelegates voted for Bernie Sanders, he would have won the 2016 DNC primaries, even though the DNC voters regardless that the actual regular DNC voters voted for Hilary.

Anyway, I’m only making a point that system was broken.

The DNC did reform this afterwards, in that, if the first ballot doesn’t have an absolute majority then superdelegates will cast votes but otherwise, cannot (as a superdelegate).

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2 points

Nice rundown.

At the end of the day, I think the United States is just too damn big to run this type of system.

Red states are so entrenched in their beliefs and blue states are so entrenched in theirs, there is no way to cap them off with one cohesive federal government.

By design, every advancement is a crucial blow to the other side.

And then the real rub.

We have been at it long enough that there are not 2 parties. There is one mob of selfish egotistical asshats who struggle and toil keep federal office the best place to get richer and more powerful.

We keep calling it a government divided. IT ISNT. They are of one mind, taking a foot but making sure not to take a yard. Giving up a foot but making sure not to lose a yard. And every time the ball moves one half of The mindless masses feel validated, one half of The mindless masses feel violated, and the whole effort had an earmark on page 1672 of 3000 that assraped EVERYONE except the rich and the politician.

My betting money is on the fact that we will crumble like the USSR before I die. No grand civil war two electric Boogaloo. Just a pathetic crumbling.

The difference between US and the USSR is that we don’t have a pre USA history/culture to fall back on.

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24 points
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Not sure entirely about that. Nazis were still a party that held up to 44% of seats in the reichstag (before they were all nazi) with like 6 different parties. Hitler wasn’t isolated. The population voted for him and his party. Hindenburg didn’t like Hitler but essentially passed away at a terrible time and Hitler outplayed Papen who was meant to keep him in check. Hindenburg felt he had to since they had the closest to a majority in the reichstag.

"In the end, the president, who had previously vowed never to let Hitler become chancellor, appointed Hitler to the post at 11:30 am on 30 January 1933, with Papen as vice-chancellor.[91] While Papen’s intrigues appeared to have brought Hitler into power, the crucial dynamic was in fact provided by the Nazi Party’s electoral support, which made military dictatorship the only alternative to Nazi rule for Hindenburg and his circle. [Sauce]

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6 points
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Yes, there was support in the population, but there was also a lot of violence to suppress dissent. The historical consensus, as I learned it, is to call it the “seizure of power” (“Machtergreifung” in German), because Hitler wasn’t simply voted into power by a majority.

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5 points
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This somewhat misleading, Hitler and the NSDAP were indeed voted into the position to seize power by democratic means which they then abused, the voter supression mainly happened in later elections when the undermining of institutions and the consitution was already well underway. “Machtergreifung” is the propaganda term the Nazis used themselves to describe the process of what happened after the fact, which in reality was much more cloak and dagger-y than the term suggests.

P.S.: Germany didn’t have a two-party system, so having a majority wasn’t that important. You would form coalitions of parties after an election which then had a majority, or even form a minority government that then has to actively hunt for their missing votes from other parties to get any legislation passed.

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19 points
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You really expect a politician to tell the truth, especially when it comes to history? She and the rest of the US political elite for decades now are just mouthpieces for interest groups, mostly military groups who make money with wars abroad. Together with the media, they sell you wars abroad, while waving any currently popular flag at home for votes. The US elections are so loud, you don’t hear the sounds of pain and misery those events create abroad, especially in Middle East.

After the reports of Israeli invasion in Gaza, the first smile I saw in media was that of Hillary. When the wars and killings across northern Africa and Middle East started during the Arab Spring, her smile was the most prominent one for months.

Every time this slime of a human being crawls out of a crack in the wall in Washington somewhere, a war is either being prepared or needs justifying for the american voters. All that with a smile, while the cameras are rolling.

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5 points

Manufactured concent is a bitch.

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14 points

That’s super interesting. I did not know that

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1 point
Deleted by creator
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112 points
*

I get it, but this take fucking worries me, dawg. The last time the Democrats played the “I don’t have to try and appeal to you because the other guy is Hitler, lol” card, ‘Hitler’ won. It’s even a little on the nose that this is coming from Hillary. I’m worried that they’re falling into the same intellectually and politically bankrupt trap as in 2016, that they’re aware that they don’t have a meaningful platform besides “we’re not republicans”, and that they’ve somehow convinced themselves that this is enough. The republicans of 2020 and 22 also had that same absence of platform, absence of appeal, and just trying to coast on party brand, and look where that got them. Shit is on fire, we don’t have time for these dumb fuck games, let alone for Trump to win again. C’mon guys, don’t fuck this up.

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55 points

They’re always going to fuck up. That’s what they do. Most of them belong in retirement communities yet for whatever reason think they have what it takes to run a government. They’re disconnected from reality yet expect to appeal to regular people, who have to suffer in the reality they’ve created?

Expect more shitshows.

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21 points

The grassroots efforts are the only reason Dems enjoying their recent victories. Hard-working people who want to see progress. We’d be looking at a red Congress if not for them, and I look forward to when the DNC is irrelevant, too.

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2 points

Grassroots movements have been getting shit on since at least the 70’s trying to get people to vote for the lesser of two evil parties. Look where we ended up.

It’s crazy to me people keep trying to fix the Democratic party instead of just letting that corrupt tower of shit collapse. You got people like Hillary Clinton at the top. Nothing will ever change there but a little bread and circus here and there.

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30 points

When she called them deplorables they ate it up. She just needs to not stick her nose in.

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18 points
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yeah, i came here to post that she is not the person to voice this. anyone currently supporting trump isn’t going to suddenly switch sides to his opponent in the original race, it actually just weakens the argument.

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2 points

If she’s not going to suck republican voter dick, anything she says, no matter how true right now is only going to do damage. She needs to shut her trap, go back to being irrelevant, and continue to consider herself lucky that she and Bill still never went to jail over Whitewater…

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-14 points

People don’t like smart women. Especially when they are right. It’s something culturally strange about the US.

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19 points

It’s even a little on the nose that this is coming from Hillary. I’m worried that they’re falling into the same intellectually and politically bankrupt trap as in 2016, that they’re aware that they don’t have a meaningful platform besides “we’re not republicans”, and that they’ve somehow convinced themselves that this is enough.

The irony is that… progressives absolutely do have a solid platform that people generally support. by people, I’m excluding Hilary’s and Biden’s Corporate Donors. Sorry, I don’t have to respect Citizens United.

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-2 points

Biden’s Corporate Donors.

These people must have hated it when Biden created a 15% minimum corporate tax rate.

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9 points

These people must have hated it when Biden created a 15% minimum corporate tax rate.

If the status quo is any indication, corporate tax rules are largely performative. I would be happy to be wrong about that and see actual enforcement happen as a result of the Inflation Reduction Act, but I’m not gonna hold my breath.

https://itep.org/55-profitable-corporations-zero-corporate-tax/

There is some detailed guidance about the CAMT I found here, but someone with more specific knowledge will have to parse through it to determine how easily they are gonna be able to dodge this, too.

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/n-23-20.pdf

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6 points

These people must have hated it when Biden created a 15% minimum corporate tax rate. There’s enough loopholes that they didn’t care all that much. It only affects companies that net over a billion dollars in profit to start with, and then there’s the question of… do they actually pay the taxes they currently owe? (answer: they do not.)

It’s not like they were paying the ostensible 12% taxes they owed before.

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5 points
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Deleted by creator
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15 points

It’s not an accident. The country is moving left, and the right-wing Democrats are afraid of losing control of the party. They almost did, twice. They don’t take the “the other guy is Hitler” rhetoric seriously, themselves. They aren’t worried about losing their power if the Republicans win the Whitehouse, or even both branches of Congress, because it’s all one big club, and they won’t be kicked out, as long as they go along to get along, but they are terrified that a leftist rise will take the reigns of the Democratic party from them, and then they really will be out of power.

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11 points

The thing those people don’t understand is that they think democracy is a goal onto itself, instead of a means to an end. A good chunk of the population would happily get rid of democracy in order to have someone in power ‘who can just get stuff done’. Especially since said democracy is ridiculously unresponsive to the will of the people.

Compare the polling on the Gaza conflict compared to what members in the house are saying, for example. Or any other super popular thing (legalising weed, taxing the wealthy, not running a global empire that constantly gets involved in wars,…)

And, for the record, Hillary, Hitler never got over 50% of the vote, it was other, so-called democratic parties that gave him the Chancellor job. They could’ve created a different governing coalition, but they thought they could control him.

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2 points
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Deleted by creator
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4 points

Well, the issue with electing one of those people is that you usually can’t vote them out again. It’s definitely not a good move, but when people are desperate enough and they feel ignored by their representatives, they’ll roll that dice.

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5 points
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Dems lose because dems gamble. They always pick some rando as VP instead of the person who got the second most votes in the primary. They should’ve gotten rid of the electoral college when Gore lost. They keep running and electing excruciatingly old people who might die or go senile in the middle of everything (Biden, Feinstein, Pelosi, etc.).

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4 points

They’re gonna fuck it up.

Honestly, I truly believe that both Democratic and Republican politicians benefit from all the bullshittery going on - so of course they’ll actually do nothing to improve the situation for America’s citizens. As long as they get money and they get paid, they’ll say and do whatever the fuck they can, including fucking things up for us.

Probably not much better across the pond, but I am finding myself more and more looking up how to become a UK citizen because at least they have less zany shit going on from what I can tell.

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6 points

both Democratic and Republican politicians benefit from all the bullshittery going on

They absolutely don’t. They just have a very short term view because of reelection cycles and fundraising needs. You’d think their capitalist masters would also realize this increasing polarization and dissatisfaction with the status quo is going to make the line go down, but nobody ever accused economic liberals of actually being aware when the noose was tightening on their necks.

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4 points

You had me in the first half until you brought up the UK. The UK? Seriously?!

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1 point
Deleted by creator
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1 point

I get this, but at the same time, we are also seeing a ton of fallout from those 4 years that’s all currently in the spotlight, which is something we didn’t have in 2016. So despite what she is saying, I think a lot of people are actually seeing the mess, and at least some people are switching sides due to it all. Hoping that the mix of everything really does help next year, last night’s elections were a good sign of it if you ask me but we know they now have a year to pivot and try to change. Thankfully, most of the people in their own party can’t even agree on much either.

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102 points

Hillary is toxic to the brand. The Democrats would be wise to keep her at arms distance.

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54 points

It’s a little sad because decades of right-wing anti-Hillary propaganda not only proved effective, but it noticeably altered Hillary into this jaded cynic completely lacking in vision or idealism. I’m not a huge Hillary fan, but the vast majority of the hate is completely manufactured outrage. That being said it doesn’t change what you said being valid.

You can see them trying with AOC, but I suspect it won’t yield the same results.

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45 points

Dude she was a McGovern girl. She has always been an empty husk seeking power and validation

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41 points

She was a Goldwater Girl, which is orders of magnitude worse. McGovern would have been a massive improvement from Nixon.

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39 points
*

There’s always been this weird push from her supporters that’s anyone who doesn’t like her is either a misogynist or fell for propaganda.

They just refuse to admit she has any faults.

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40 points

She did a good enough job maligning herself, she didn’t need the Republicans to do it for her. The entire DNC primary was a shitshow of Clinton debasing the primaries and showing what she would do for power.

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27 points

but it noticeably altered Hillary into this jaded cynic completely lacking in vision or idealism

it noticeably altered hillary clinton into hillary clinton

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6 points

There’s a bunch of stances she’s taken I view negatively but admit there’s nuance.

Then there’s DOMA. Anyone on that let it be known their principles for marginalized groups is only “as convenient”, which means support of them should also only be as is convenient or useful. She is no longer convenient or useful.

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-1 points

It’s weird because I can distinctly remember after 2008 that she was looked on favorably, as secretary of state. People made fun memes about her and found her likeable. Fox News really did a number on her.

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5 points

She was always the slimiest neoliberal around, and she walked up on stage and said shit like “women supporting women means you have to vote for me”

Hilary was respected because she got stuff done and mostly only spoke to the ownership class. She was never liked, and the more people saw her speak the less people liked her

Let’s not forget, she made deals to get the presidency. She burned the trust and local campaign funds of the Democratic party just to lose.

Fox wasn’t charitable to her, but chanting “lock her up” didn’t ruin her image, she did a great job of that herself who looked deeper than sound bites

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3 points
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Deleted by creator
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-20 points

Clinton is infinitely more intelligent and effective than aoc has proven to be though. Clinton gets hated on because she was good at her job, aoc gets hated on for being a brown chick.

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5 points

Good at her job as long as her job was to be a centrist hack that allowed the political spectrum to shift farther to the right. What a joke.

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78 points

Someone couldn’t find a photo of her looking less…Palpatine-y?

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39 points

You’re welcome to try, but it might take awhile…

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7 points

I could try wrestling a grizzly bear too but I find it’s better to criticize from a distance.

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6 points

Give in to your hate. Feel the powah!

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76 points
*
54 points

An email recently released by the whistleblowing organization WikiLeaks shows how the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party bear direct responsibility for propelling the bigoted billionaire to the White House.

In its self-described “pied piper” strategy, the Clinton campaign proposed intentionally cultivating extreme right-wing presidential candidates, hoping to turn them into the new “mainstream of the Republican Party” in order to try to increase Clinton’s chances of winning.

Ah, the real reason people hate WikiLeaks. It exposed the truth, but rather than focus on the truth people focused on the messenger.

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28 points

My brother in OSRS, they had emails from the Republican Party as well, but didn’t release them because they said there was nothing interesting in them. I don’t disagree at all that Clinton’s strategy was inappropriate, but there’s plenty of legitimate reasons to dislike WikiLeaks. Ironically, there’s a lack of transparency on them. They should’ve released the GOP emails.

WikiLeaks has a problem when we need a WikiLeaks for WikiLeaks.

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17 points
*

My brother in Middle Earth, the hate started long before WikiLeaks allegedly had any Republican emails, and even searching for the subject now I can’t find anything that says WikiLeaks had them.

Edit: I found a source, reading it again pretty much tells the whole story (it wasn’t emails but “information on the Trump campaign”): https://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/293453-assange-wikileaks-trump-info-no-worse-than-him/

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22 points

Sadly the republicans had zero say in their slide to right wing extremism and could do nothing about it. It’s not like their flirtation with the Tea Party movement meant anything.

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8 points

Yup, poor poor Republicans… They don’t actually agree with all the things they say on Facebook or memes they share, or political violence they wish for or enact. Poor Republicans, it was all the evil Democrats that made Republicans be who they are. It’s really a shame that they have absolutely no brain of their own that they just go with whatever the Democrats make them do. We should be lead by that party though, because they’re “free thinkers”

…wait

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11 points

It’s not just Trump either they’ve used the strategy for many insane Republican primary candidates.

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7 points

Repiblicans are maniacs and Democrats are retarded. Story as old as time.

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10 points

Republicans are retarded maniacs and Democrats are gaslighting hypocrites who play dumb when called out on their bullshit.

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3 points

It exposed the truth, but rather than focus on the truth people focused on the messenger.

In this case, the media also focused on the messenger and gave Hillary a pass on the actual contents of those e-mails.

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23 points

Hilarious mistake.

I suppose this would have been effective if even a fraction of the Republican voterbase was reasonable.

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16 points
*

Hilarious mistake.

The mistake wasn’t elevating Trump, but running in the first place.

There’s a very real chance she’d have lost to Ted Cruz or Jeb Bush in a non-Trump national campaign, simply because she was a weak candidate with an awful reputation in the Midwest. There’s a reason she struggled in the primary, both in 2008 and 2016, against a couple of political outsiders despite having an enormous financial and name-recognition advantage.

You can’t win the Presidency without Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin. And Hillary was never going to win those states, under any alternative opponent. She lost Pennsylvannia, ffs. No viable Democrat loses Pennsylvania.

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