2016 elections - because it's never too early

[garbon]

I love that Hillary's "foreign policy speech" was mainly about Donald Trump.

The speech was billed as an attack on him (the pivot!) and she spent it underling her credentials and his many weaknesses.

[Valmy]

I love that Hillary's "foreign policy speech" was mainly about Donald Trump.

Do politicians in elections in Poland never discuss their opponents? Weird.

[Legbiter]

I love that Hillary's "foreign policy speech" was mainly about Donald Trump.

Do politicians in elections in Poland never discuss their opponents? Weird.

Well as you can see from my posted example the Clintons' twitter feed is mostly Hillary asking visitors to vividly imagine her losing. From a persuasion point of view that is...less than ideal. 

[garbon]

I love that Hillary's "foreign policy speech" was mainly about Donald Trump.

Do politicians in elections in Poland never discuss their opponents? Weird.

Well as you can see from my posted example the Clintons' twitter feed is mostly Hillary asking visitors to vividly imagine her losing. From a persuasion point of view that is...less than ideal. 

Or you could read it in the spirit planned that said tweet is about getting people afraid about what a Trump presidency will look like if they choose to support him.

[derspiess]

I love that Hillary's "foreign policy speech" was mainly about Donald Trump.

He's living in her head, rent-free

[Berkut]

I love that Hillary's "foreign policy speech" was mainly about Donald Trump.

He's living in her head, rent-free

I disagree. I think she is taking exactly the right approach.

Go right at him. He is going to respond emotionally and like a child, as he has done already.

Everyone has been trying to treat Trump carefully - fuck that. Go after him, provoke him, poke him, but do it all coldly, analytically, and dispassionately, and let him respond the way we all know he will respond.

Does anyone think his tweets are being vetted? Of course not. Nobody vets the Donald!

She doesn't need to make him do something that isn't himself, she needs to encourage him to continue being himself. Because that person is a fucking nightmare of a human being.

[derspiess]

I'd probably rationalize it that way as well if I were a Hillary supporter.

[Berkut]

I'd probably rationalize it that way as well if I were a Hillary supporter.

Fair enough, and I am not surprised you rationalize it differently as a Trump cheerleader.

[derspiess]

I plan on voting for Gary Johnson, ||Berkut||

[Valmy]

I'd probably rationalize it that way as well if I were a Hillary supporter.

As one of the local trolls I can see why you want it to be all about the LOLZ and want us all to stand around thinking about idiocy like internet shit flinging competitions.  I just want a sane president.

Now you can go all 'LOLZ I LOLZED VALMY' or whatever tickles your fancy.

[derspiess]

Also here's your sane president: https://youtu.be/YtlXkJGKwao?t=63

[Barrister]

On Foreign Policy, Hillary Exploits the GOP Identity Crisis Clinton delivers her foreign policy address in San Diego. (Mike Blake/Reuters)
by NOAH ROTHMAN   June 3, 2016 4:00 AM

A hawkish Mrs. Clinton blasts Trump. Hillary Clinton may seem an odd figure to serve as a defender of the legacy of Ronald Reagan, a champion of the honor of John McCain, and a critic of the economic prescriptions of Depression-era Democrats, but 2016 has been nothing if not surprising.

What the former secretary of state's presidential campaign had billed as a foreign-policy address, in San Diego on Thursday, was, in fact, an attack on her presumptive Republican rival, Donald Trump. And in pivoting toward the general election, Clinton also pivoted toward the center.

"He had the gall to say prisoners of war, like John McCain, aren't heroes," Clinton averred, drawing boos from the animated crowd of partisan Democrats.

She attacked Donald Trump's assessment of the weakness of American leadership. To illustrate her case, she chose a 1987 full-page newspaper advertisement authored by Trump, in which he attacked Ronald Reagan's supposedly wilting spine. "There's nothing wrong with America's Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can't cure," the advertisement read. Two years later, the Berlin Wall came down. Two years after that, Communism in Europe perished.

Clinton even had harsh words for the kind of trade protectionism that Trump champions and that appeals to the progressive voters rallying around Bernie Sanders. Though she chided China for its protectionism and dumping, she also offered a note of caution about escalating reciprocal tariffs and the "trade war" Trump has promised will follow. "We went down that road in the 1930s," said Clinton. "It made the Great Depression longer and more painful."

For Democrats who have spent the past seven years defending Barack Obama's Keynesian economic interventionism and the efficacy of tariffs on Chinese tires, this attack on the Obama-style Democratic-party policies of the 1930s must have felt like a knife in the gut.

Or, at least, it would have — had Clinton's speech not struck such a deft contrast with her Republican opponent. Conservatives should take heart in the fact that Clinton's advisers determined that the most effective way to present herself as the antidote to Trump was to sound like a Republican — at least, the kind of Republican that has been nominated to the presidency for the last 40 years. Gone was the hand-wringing about American post–Cold War supremacy. Her speech was bereft of self-indulgent pretentiousness about the sacred sovereignty of Iran or Guatemala, which were cruelly violated by Dwight Eisenhower's CIA. Clinton's speech was, by and large, a defense of America's current role in the world and a pledge to maintain it through robust and preemptive action.

The biggest problem with Hillary Clinton's message is that Hillary Clinton was its messenger. "I'll leave it to the psychiatrists to explain his affection for tyrants," Clinton quipped. "I just wonder how anyone could be so wrong about who America's real friends are. But it matters. Because if you don't know exactly who you're dealing with, men like Putin will eat you for lunch." As the architect of the failed "Russian reset," though, Clinton knows what it's like when Moscow's apparatchiks steal your milk money. In a staggering display of arrogance, the Obama administration presumed in 2009 that Russian antagonism was a product of George W. Bush's hapless foreign policy, and not more simply the result of the Kremlin's geopolitical objectives' conflicting with those of the United States. In the time that has passed since Clinton and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov shared a chuckle over a repurposed Staples-brand "Easy Button," Russia violated the terms of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, invaded and annexed sovereign territory in Europe (the first event of its kind since 1945), undermined America's alliances in the Middle East, and orchestrated military intervention beyond the former Soviet Union's borders for the first time since Brezhnev invaded Afghanistan.

While paying lip service to the value of America's network of allies abroad, she defended the Iran nuclear deal that is reshuffling a longstanding power balance in the Middle East and turning Washington away from Cairo and Riyadh and toward Iran. Clinton's warnings of Iran's expanded influence in the region and her promises to contain the crisis in Syria sound discordant, from a former secretary of state who watched helplessly as Tehran sent its soldiers to fight in the Levant on behalf of Bashar al-Assad.

For Republicans, their bind is that Clinton's hypocrisy matters little when weighed against Trump's contention that the Islamic State should have a "free zone" in Syria, that America's multilateral alliances should be dissolved, that individual allies should provide Washington recompense for the privilege of a mutual-defense treaty, or that nuclear proliferation is not only unpreventable but desirable. His brand of retrenchment is and has been a traditionally Democratic value since at least the Vietnam War. Republicans who came of age voting for the kind of robust defense of American interests abroad championed by conventional Republican presidential candidates should not be surprised to see some resistance among conservatives to abandoning all that.

Republicans should have no illusions about how Hillary Clinton would govern as president. Nor should they be shocked by how she will conduct America's foreign affairs. If the last quarter century is any guide, conservatives will probably find her tenure suboptimal. They will see America's influence on the world stage shrink, as it has under Barack Obama's leadership. But they can be forgiven for being surprised by how Clinton seems prepared to campaign for the White House. The chords she struck in this speech were not unfamiliar to Republican ears; they have been sounded by countless Republicans in the past and only weeks ago by such candidates as Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, and Carly Fiorina. If Hillary Clinton plans on running an optimistic campaign in defense of a bright future in which American hegemony is unapologetically preserved, the Republican party's identity crisis is far from over.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/436172/hillary-clinton-foreign-policy-anti-trump-speech

Well that's the damnedest thing I ever read in National Review - an article that can help but be complimentary of Hillary Clinton (although it tries not to).

[garbon]

Well that's the damnedest thing I ever read in National Review - an article that can help but be complimentary of Hillary Clinton (although it tries not to).

Yeah I guess it is like they wrote - 2016 has been nothing if not surprising.

My mother*'s reply to me about the speech:

I just read the article from CNN and then the excerpts of her best comments. She totally rocked. I hope she keeps it up.

She is annoying but now I have to love her. She is the only one who can save us.

*a previously die hard anti-Clinton voter and for a long time the only member in my family who was out of the closet about being a Republican.

[derspiess]

I'll dig up some of my brother's Trump emails

[garbon]

I'll dig up some of my brother's Trump emails

My mother went after my uncle who keeps posting about his support for Trump on FB where he also promotes his auto shop which is struggling. She pointed out that beyond how hurtful she thought it was given the people in our family (and how he married into a Mexican family) that spreading his political beliefs was unlikely to grow his customer base.