TRUMP is seriously dangerous

[seemslikeadream]

Donald J. Drumpf
‏@RealDonalDrumpf
Melania tells @Greta I believe strongly marriage should be between one man & a series of progressively younger women

[American Dream]

http://www.leninology.co.uk/2016/10/a-r ... ffice.html

A rapist in the Oval Office posted by Richard Seymour

Say what you like about the second presidential debate, it seems to have struck an extraordinarily delicate nerve with some of the hacks. I say this because, reviewing the gluttonous expanse of instapunditry in respected outlets, there is something that no one appears to want to talk about.

This is the feminist writer Jessica Valenti, in The Guardian:

"That’s why [Trump] trotted out a pre-debate panel of women who have accused Bill Clinton of various offenses".

What offences, feminist Jessica Valenti? To what could you be referring, so obliquely? And why do none of the other reviewers talk about this?

On CNN, former Bill Clinton advisor David Gergen is similarly coy:

"The first was [Trump's] surprise pre-debate appearance with four female accusers of Bill Clinton. While a case can be made for re-hearing their claims of long ago...".

What are those "claims of long ago," former Clinton adviser, David Gergen? What could you be treading so lightly around? Why, again, do other pundits seem to consider it unworthy of comment?

The BBC finally clears things up for us:

"He essentially accused former President Bill Clinton of rape."

WHAT? Rape? Why is everyone so... mealy-mouthed and sleekit about this? What is with the euphemisms and the attempt to relativise them as claims of "long ago"? Is the former president a rapist, or is he not? What are these allegations? The BBC doesn't say, but only goes on to add a solemn, head-shaking Aunty Beeb note of disapprobation:

"It was easily the most tawdry exchange in 56 years of televised presidential debates - one that will likely cast a shadow over US politics for years to come. Mrs Clinton may have emerged the beneficiary, but the nation was the worse for it."

That word 'tawdry' comes up, quite a bit in the reporting. It is a peculiar word to use in a way, since the airily dismissed "panel of women" includes one woman who alleged sexual harassment, and two who allege sexual assault. The implication seems to be that it is tawdry even to discuss such allegations against a former President - a claim that was not made about the discussion of Trump's bragging about sexual assault. Much of the reporting even seems to regard it as a bit silly - a "bizarre last minute ploy," as The Mirror put it.

Certainly, Trump has been plausibly accused of sexual assault, including the rape of a child. Certainly, his behaviour is that of a sociopath. Certainly, he is raising all this in a manipulative way. But doesn't the leaking of the Trump tapes have a clear instrumental logic? And yet it is something we should discuss. Likewise, the allegations of rape against Clinton, are something we should discuss.

Put it like this. Juanita Broaddrick plausibly alleges that she was raped by Bill Clinton. The White House - highly active in smearing or paying off everyone else in the period that these allegations came out - was remarkably reticent about Broaddrick. Clinton himself refused to say anything beyond referring to a lawyer's carefully worded statement. Do we believe survivors? Hillary Clinton, an active participant in her husband's administration, says that we should. But she also says that she doesn't, in this case. Broaddrick, for what it's worth, has also consistently alleged that Hillary Clinton threatened her in the weeks following the rape. Now, is that worth discussing?

If you take liberal principles seriously, if you consider yourself a feminist, the answer has to be 'yes'. Otherwise, how can you expect anyone to take your fully justified attacks on Trump seriously? If you have no respect for the principles underpinning your attack, why should anyone else? And if your loyalty to Clinton undermines your principled opposition to Trump, what comes first: your principles, or your loyalty?

[Searcher08]

^^^ This ^^^

[seemslikeadream]

Trump's History Of Misogyny Is Worse Than You Thought

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/don ... 407cdd1ca6

PatsyLong
‏@SweetPeaPatsy
Trump stalked a woman around a stage and then dry humped a chair ... it was creepy!

yep blame the woman

keep it up shows me who you are

where's the court docs?

i want to read the court papers

[Luther Blissett]

He's really letting his fascism show this weekend. It's really not just locker room talk, he's describing in detail assaults that he's committed. To be lie-bragging about rape would be just as psychopathic. Someone here once said that rape is the prime expression of fascism.

But the whole "jailing his opponent" thing was pure Idiocracy / Liberia / Elysium / Joker / Narcoterrorist proto-fascism.

[seemslikeadream]

and yet people here would love to see him president and are working ever so hard to that end

[Luther Blissett]

Barely anyone with any institutional power. Citizens United and McCutcheon are law.

[seemslikeadream]

Barely anyone with any institutional power. Citizens United and McCutcheon are law.

and with Trump as president .....4 Supremes will make sure that stays that way and get worse

[seemslikeadream]

Trump wants to have a special prosector to investigate Clinton when he is elected....that Trump would do that is an impeachable offense

[Luther Blissett]

Not to mention fascist!

I just don't think he can be installed without that institutional power. He's up in Trump Tower like Howard Hughes in the third act of the Aviator, wearing skivvies and crouched alone in darkened rooms watching projections of primary debate performances.

I took the day off from work and started a patrol looking for trumpist election monitor gangs on election day since Philadelphia is such a hotly contested ("New Black Panthers!") electoral population, because even though our votes aren't counted, his supporters have been hinting for a long time that they want to intimidate black voters.

About 4% of the U.S. population selected him as the GOP nominee, compared to about 5% of the U.S. population who selected Clinton.

[82_28]

I don't think so SLAD. Personally I can identify no members here who endorse trump. At least I haven't yet.

I super do not disagree with you, but it seems this whole thing is a false choice. I personally feel that trump makes me want to viscerally vomit and Clinton someone who I view as at the very least an enabler of war crimes. Don't fall into the trap of this being a male, a hideous male, vs a simple and practical woman. No, no Banghazi outta me. But she has overseen untold deaths of innocents.

We really have no choice. The only choice I have is Stein.

I really resent how much this shit has divided just about everyone in very multitudinous ways. There is a disturbance in the force and it literally is affecting everyone who cares about shit. I am detecting it in small and even non-related ways. Not like before, where you knew what you were dealing with so to speak. This is different. This is existential. It permeates everything, at least here in the US or North America -- indeed the world at large. I for one, did not choose to be born in a nation where there is no choice. But it definitely sucks and there is no saviour.

THE USA HAS GONE PLAID! Sorry. I did all my liberal and very rational, yet fortean "duties" all my life, to no avail.

[seemslikeadream]

this whole thing has just shown who people really are


there are only two choices if a person is going to engage in this election Clinton or Trump one of them is going to be president ...period

if the men here are going to hold a woman responsible for a mans deeds then I know who they really are and who they are cheering for to be president

[FourthBase]

If the Republican nominee were Laura Bush I'm sure SLAD would be using the exact same logic.

[seemslikeadream]

yes I would ...no woman should be held accountable for a mans deeds...period

but thanks for joining the club

color me not surprised

[seemslikeadream]

Donald Trump’s ‘P—y’ Comment Is the Root of Sexual Violence

"American women should be very afraid—and very angry"

http://time.com/4523972/donald-trumps-c ... -violence/

Outrage Over The Trump Tape Is More Dangerous And Repugnant To Me Than His Galling Misogyny
10/09/2016 06:21 pm ET | Updated 46 minutes ago

Soraya Chemaly
Writer

MIKE SEGAR / REUTERS
Apparently, Donald Trump finally went too far for his own party’s leadership. The release of a 2005 tape in which he describes his casual sexual assault of women in graphically dehumanizing language appears to have been a tipping point. So much outrage and spectacle on the part of powerful men who overcame so many other reasons to reject Trump and, in this video, have found the straw they were waiting for.

Let’s be clear about this. This weekend’s outrage was almost all men’s and almost all, in terms of what might happen, conservative men’s. This tape revealed nothing new about Donald Trump’s misogyny and certainly didn’t teach women anything we don’t already know. All women know men like Trump. We have to smile, be nice and politely fold humiliation and fear into our lives at school, home and work.

So, this weekend’s outrage isn’t about women. It’s happening now because it is putting the notion that the leaders of the GOP, almost entirely white and male, cannot be trusted. These are men who are now worried, embarrassed, ashamed or exploiting this situation for personal and political gain. Trump will go away, but their governance, and attempts to make it seem moderate, woman-friendly and tolerable, will not. This outrage, mainly about making sure that important edifices stay in place and that now at-risk Senate and House seats don’t disappear, is deeply hypocritical and self-serving.

The tape revealed that Trump is, in private, knowingly acknowledging how his misogyny and status work to hurt women. The same men who are claiming that Trump is finally indefensible because of his attitude towards women routinely engage in behavior that equally denigrates us, denies us dignity and respect, and violates our human rights.

The most basic way they do this is by making sure women cannot decide if, when and how to reproduce and by devising radical strategies for ensuring that women are compelled to live lives they have little or no control over. Their cynical attempts to mask this oppression of women by defending personhood-for-zygotes has already resulted in bills and laws that criminalize pregnancy and abortion and penalize women for being women, with female human bodies. They approach the law with the fundamental belief that because women can get pregnant, we cannot think clearly, ethically, morally and rationally about our own lives, families and bodies or the consequences of our actions. They insist that women should be personally responsible, but do everything to make sure women stay personally and institutionally powerless.

Second, Trump’s expression of male sexual entitlement wasn’t new, but it was undeniable, and targeted white women easily identified in relation to men like those in charge of the GOP. He had a smug assurance usually hidden in back rooms, lockers, golf courses and boys clubs and routinely excused on playgrounds and Sunday morning talk shows as “boys being boys.” Trump’s most sexist and egregious behavior has almost always been defended by his and others’ rote repeating the standard conservative tropes about how men should feel about women: that they adore, love, defend and protect them. Like a cherished possession. In return for this protection, men are granted greater power and authority. Trump and Bush showed that the “protection” that is provided in return for power is inextricably linked to predation and exploitation. This puts all of these men’s legitimacy at personal risk.

Third, Trump’s reduction of women to pussies is more vulgar than good Christian men can abide, but when he calls them pigs or dogs, he isn’t breaking any Republican molds. Conservative legislators have a long history, often in debates about reproductive rights or immigration, of making comparisons between women and animals. If they use references to domesticated animals - pigs, cows and livestock, the women are more likely to be white. When the animals and women are not domesticated ― i.e. operating beyond the direct control of men ― they’re more likely to be depicted as sexualized and base, making them dogs or wild animals. Two weeks ago, for example, in a congressional hearing to discuss the Hyde Amendment, as a roomful of almost all white, all male politicians deliberated on how to regulate women’s reproduction, two GOP representatives used dog metaphors to describe the plight of low-income women of color. Women immigrants are referred to in legislative debates as “dropping anchor babies,” the way mules do.

Fourth, Trump and Bush jokingly described making women with less power and status do what they wanted, with no regard for their will or consent. Coercing women with less power and making them do what men want is the leitmotif of the GOP’s economic and social policies, many of which can easily be distilled into some version of “you can’t trust women.” This justifies their belief in male governance and intervention and shapes everything from their approach to immigration, domestic violence, wage gaps, reproductive rights, food assistance, health and child care. This isn’t speculation, but fact: this party’s leadership is on the verge of being all male and all white and the people whose lives they are most negatively affecting are primarily women of color.

The indisputable proof of Trump’s misogyny and its connection to his status and power makes for very uncomfortable domestic lives.

Trump is a Trainwreck Patriarch whose narcissism and insecurities makes a mockery of all of it ― the words, the promises, the bargains and the power. That’s not just political, but personal. It’s why so many of the responses to the video have cast Trump’s behavior as a threat to “wives, mothers and daughters,” a typical, transparent and unconscious hat tip to protectiveness and male centrality. This still is not about women’s dignity or humanity, but about women’s relationships to men.

When you put women on pedestals they are unable to do much without falling. And a fallen woman isn’t one you protect.

In the traditional formulation, protecting women, particularly white women, has been the go-to device for justifying racial and ethnic violence. Consider what this means, for example, in terms of race and immigration. Trump is a loud, exaggerated example of the toxic masculinity; some might say toxic border patrol masculinity, demonstrated by a GOP whose paternalistic treatment of women shares a lot with their defense of the nation as an ethnic stronghold. These ideas come together, frequently, in the notion that white women’s bodies require protecting from brown and black men. That’s why when Trump wants to other men of different ethnicities, he uses rape to do it. Yesterday, before the tape was released, Trump doubled down on his belief, despite DNA evidence that has cleared the men accused, that the Central Park Five were guilty. He is on the record saying that Mexicans are all rapists. When conservatives want to silence American women talking about sexual assault, their most common knee-jerk response includes descriptions of Moslem men as all being sexual predators.

We live in a world in which men, not women, decide when something like what Trump did is “really” outrageous. This latest fiasco has less to do with women’s rights or equality than many people would prefer to pretend it does. Trump has given these leaders infinite opportunities – his endless sexism, racism, xenophobia and ignorance - to stop supporting him. His trading in the full spectrum of available hate didn’t do what this one tape did. Trump has a well-documented public history of sexist and racist abuse of women that includes allegations of harassment, rape and workplace discrimination. He’s built an entire media career on exploiting, objectifying and shaming women and regularly boasts about it. He has surrounded himself with a fraternity of men who are abusers of women and responsible for cultivating the ugliest forms of civic expressions and racialized division.

No, this is dangerous and deeply personal to these men. A particular irony considering their visceral dislike of anything smacking of “identity politics.” Rejecting Trump for these reasons is a defense of the worse sort for American women. It pays to remember that we live in a world in which, structurally, systemically, men are the people who continue to decide how much is “too much” and what is worthy of “outrage”.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/out ... 86aa52b6b7