Wow. Eleven dimensional chess for real.
The satisfaction of quoting Sun Tzu was ruined once and for all for me when a Chinese colleague told me that Chinese parents quote The A of W to distracted, eye-rolling kids all the time, much as American parents say things like "Winners never quit."
On the other hand, "If your enemy is truculent, anger him" is good advice for somebody running for president in 2016.
I've heard of trolling your own blog, but never trolling your own state.
I couldn't find the actual commercial online, unfortunately.
Pretty sure this was it.
Heh, it's the NickS women-in-politics day at unfogged.
Pretty sure this was it.
Nice find. That does look like it's very close to being a pro-Akin ad (not even considering it as a dog-whistle; just that most of the text on screen is about things Akin supports or is fighting for).
David Cameron did this just a month ago. Obviously he loves having Corbyn as leader of the opposition, so he made an impassioned speech in Parliament about how Corbyn needed to resign for the good of the nation. We'll show you, Cameron! He's staying!
I feel like this kind of maneuver should be how Hitler came to power, but I looked it up and it isn't.
Unless you count how the Communists preferred the Nazis to the Social Democrats. On the one hand, that's mostly because the Social Democrats shot up a bunch of Communists. On the other hand, I'd bet that by that point, the Nazi's had shot up more Communists than the Social Democrats.
I'm mostly unplugged for vacation, but am checking the front page as a barometer of whether wifi is actually working.
I just finished Before the Storm and it's an eye-opener. Everything new is old again.
That costs just as much in Kindle as in paper back. I guess many not having to have a picture of an armed Barry Goldwater on your shelf is worth something.
Before the Storm is the one I haven't read. I quite liked Nixonland and the Reagan one. I guess I'll be waiting for a Kindle sale, though.
Oh god if Ted Cruz had gotten his start this way would we even know?
To answer that we need to define our epistimological standards.
But basically, no. Nobody would admit that.
That's pretty much why even though I do think this is pretty funny I'm a little queasy thinking about it.
I liked Nixonland and Before the Storm when I read them. As time passes, though, I realize just how much work his combination of document-dump and writing style was doing in the books. You can come up with pretty much any thesis you'd like about 20th century US political history using this method and write a pretty persuasive book illustrating it. That doesn't mean that Perlstein is wrong in general or about anything in particular, necessarily, or that they're not good books (or even that he tries to put a particularly heavy analytical framework onto either of them) but I now think of them in the category overpraised/under-useful. In part, they're designed to produce exactly the "hey, everything old is new again!" response, and while that's interesting and compelling it's not necessarily that illuminating. tl;dr it's soundly popular, journalistic history with all the deep flaws and advantages thereof.
I guess that should be "research dump." Document dump is more my profession's thing.
We use a paper shredder because the plumber had a fit.
I haven't read any of Perlstein's books, but he was apparently didn't see the Trump phenomenon coming, which makes me skeptical about his interpretations of the history of conservatism.
And while I'm linking to Slate, this headline is just perfect.
19: More research is surely better than less, right? I take your point that a lot of people have said a lot of things that a diligent and nefarious researcher could use, but I've never read any accusations of bad faith on Perlstein's part.
Also, I think the principal aim of at least Before the Storm is establishing the conservative movement of the time as something worth taking seriously, contra Hofstadter in particular.
More research is surely better than less, right?
Depends on the how the funding was setup.
Speaking of primaries, we had ours last week and this challenger won. And the Republicans are indeed not running a candidate for that district, so that really was the whole election. A similar candidate in another district is currently leading by 3 votes with a couple dozen more absentee and questioned ballots to be counted tomorrow. Suspense!
I only read the first chapter or so of Before the Storm, because I have no attention span, but when it came out, a lot of history of the 1960s was dominated by the liberal and left stories, with little acknowledgement that there was a lot going on with conservatism. Around the time I was dropping out of history grad school, 2005 or so, conservatism was becoming a hot topic in mid-to-late 20th century US history and it wouldn't surprise me if that research has gone beyond and/or challenged Perlstein's books.
Holding not seeing something coming against a historian's history seems kind of unfair though.
Holding not seeing something coming against a historian's history seems kind of unfair though.
Yeah, fair enough. But being surprised by the rise of Trump seems really surprising for someone as steeped in the history of American conservatism as Perlstein.
I used to think Ann Coulter was just an evil person that figured out an easy way to make a lot money. But this is just so insane.
My worship for him is like the people of North Korea worship their Dear Leader -- blind loyalty," she told Green. "Once he gave that Mexican rapist speech, I'll walk across glass for him. That's basically it."
She doesn't specify that the glass is broken.
30: Maybe even more significantly she doesn't say she would do it barefoot. Wearing the right kind of boots it probably wouldn't be that big of a deal.
But the North Korea comparison?
It turns out that the cheat code to Coulter's affection is being really really openly racist. Who knew?
I'm not saying she's a gold digger, but the world is full of poor racists.
I have to admit that until this week I had no idea that woman was still around. Has somebody sprinkled fresh blood on her skeleton or something?
I think I remember reading an article a few years ago that she had a new book out, but it wasn't selling like it used to, because the latest crop of right wing books had outcrazied her.
30: I just read this, and now I'm more confused.
But unlike many Trump defenders, Coulter makes clear that her primary allegiance is not to Trump the man. It's to the nostalgic "Make America White Again" brand of conservatism that she began peddling even before he did. In In Trump We Trust, Coulter calls Trump a "tasteless, publicity-seeking, coarse billionaire" and argues that, "the one thing voters weren't wild about was his personality."
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/how-trump-betrayed-ann-coulter-on-immigration/497618/
39 was me, and I think I'm just going to have to accept that I'm never going to understand Ann Coulter.
The key thing was earlier. She likes Trump because she likes talking about immigrants and rape.
Doesn't seem that hard. She's a white supremacist who likes nothing better than when white-supremacisty things get said in public. That's pretty much her whole career.