Up all night. Too tired to scan the manosphere for weird reactions to Obama’s victory.
But here are some scenes from last night as a couple of backwards white dudes attempted to come to terms with the new demographic realities that enabled Obama to win the election despite getting a smaller percentage of the white vote than Michael Dukakis did in 1988.
Karl Rove, on Fox News, responded to the new realities with good old-fashioned denial, arguing with the number-crunchers for Fox after they called Ohio as a win for Obama. Rove must have thought he’d bought the election good and square!
Bill O’Reilly, meanwhile, responded with, well, there’s really no other word for it than racism:
Also, while we’re talking demographics, here’s a nice pithy breakdown of the gender gap, from ABC news:
Women favored Obama by 11 points while men backed Romney by 7; the gender gap has been bigger just once, in 2000 (when men were +11 Bush and women were +11 Gore). Add in marital status and the gaps become garish: Married men for Romney by 60-38 percent; unmarried women (younger, more Democratic, more aligned with Obama on social and role-of-government issues) backed the incumbent by 67-31 percent.
Grouchy entitled white dudes, get used to it.
Dammit, mess up the first comment.
Problem?
So I’m not a real American? Funny, seeing how I was born here*, have lived my entire life here (30 years), and have voted in every election since I turned 18, but I guess not voting his way means I forfeit my citizenship. Who cares about that whole democracy thing.
*not implying that naturalized citizens aren’t real Americans, just making point about how long I’ve been a citizen
I seriously cannot wait to see the manosphere flip out about all this.
He’s projecting. Who “gets stuff” from the government other than the super rich? The STUFF that people get otherwise is infrastructure. The very very poor by state get some laughable welfare benefits (in California only if you have kids and there are massive hoops and a time limit.) So is the healthcare “stuff”? Because if healthcare is “stuff” then I need to pull out my go to F word. Yeah, fuck you, Bill.
He he he.
I was honestly very stressed when I first started watching the returns last night after the east coast polls closed. If the Republican party hadn’t been so openly, horribly against women’s bodily autonomy, I think the election might have gone the other way, and that just terrified me. (One of the TV people said that conservative women are economically libertarian, but also reproductively libertarian, which trumped their economic feelings this time around).
The US is so influential on the world’s economy, and all the western countries (well, maybe just Canada, the UK and Australia) have veered rightward. A Romney presidency would have been a disaster, and I just don’t understand how it got to be such a close election.
I’ve even watched those YouTube videos with interviews with Romney supporters, and they just made no sense. I don’t understand why anyone would align themselves with today’s Republican party.
Wow… that’s just… wow. He said that out loud. This man is a well-respected news commentator who millions of people listen to religiously. And he said that out loud.
I’ve heard that the super duper racism didn’t really help them much either, especially when it came to Hispanic voters.
I’ll tell you who wants their precious “things.” It’s the holders of U.S. treasury bonds. They want their interest dividends from all the money that they’ve loaned the U.S. government. $16 trillion and counting, and come hell or high water, they’ll get their interest payments. The borrowers in elected office — whether Democrat or Republican — are the true friends to those bond holders. We enable the borrowers — and we empower and enrich the lenders — with our decisions in the voting booth. Yea for democracy.
This statistic here really shows me how much work there is to do to remind married women how they also need social services. For the middle class women, they don’t realize how conservative policies will make them poor, and when they’re poor, they’ll have no safety net to fall back on. If they have kids, they might not realize how many benefits their kids get, and how quickly they can be taken away by conservatives. Yet another thing they’re not getting is that unless they want a dozen kids, reproductive freedom is just as important for them as it is for single women. Let’s not forget how scary their futures will be if Republicans gut and privatize Medicare and Social Security. Hey, married ladies, wake up. We need to start voting our own interests.
Fox is full of racism.
Apparently, wanting my insurance to cover birth control when it is part of my pay for my job is just wanting things?
And what is a traditional america?
The white establishment is now in the minority??? WTF.
Yeah, ‘non-traditional (apparently women aren’t included in this either)’ Americans want stuff. Like equality and social justice. It remains to be seen whether obama will give it to them, but he certainly doesn’t threaten to take what people have already fought for.
All right, Roscoe, let’s talk about economics. I know how conservatives love to bash “tax and spend liberals” and all, but it’s a lot better than the “don’t tax and then use borrowed money to spend” Republicans. Liberals know that if you want to spend money for social programs, it requires higher taxes, no way around it. Conservatives want to have their cake and eat it, too, promising lower taxes to billionaires and then shrugging about the debt it causes.
Another thing to look at is that trickle down economics is a failure. Give more money to the super rich, and they’ll just hide it away in numbered bank accounts, taking money out of the economy. Give more money and benefits to the poor, and then watch that money circulate over and over again in the economy, helping everyone. It’s cliche but a rising tide lifts all boats.
If we “give” money to this group or that group, what happens when our credit rating is tanked and we can no longer finance our generous and benevolent acts of generosity?
How dare people want ‘stuff’? It’s their fault they weren’t born into wealth like True Americans.
The only time the US credit rating went down was when the “fiscally conservative” republicans started fucking around with their extreme-austerity budget in aid of billionaires.
Roscoe, we can afford social programs if we raise taxes on the rich and spend less on the military, the war on drugs, and the prison industrial complex. Spend money on programs that help people improve their lives rather than on ineffective punishments. Programs like Head Start, after school programs, food pantries, adult literacy classes, and so on are relatively cheap and prevent more expensive problems in the future.
The US is rich enough to take care of people if we’d force our politicians to act rational and get our priorities straight.
We still are able to borrow at very low levels so even if we were giving bags of cash directly to the poor we would still be improving the economy and eventually pay all that money back easily.
See here is the problem you have Roscoe, you really want to have a smug sense of superiority of how much “better” you are than those unwashed masses of the poor. So no matter what reality says, you will say the exact opposite because otherwise you do not get to be smugly superior. And then you will have to confront being a small minded man in the midst of giants.
PZ Myers must have heard David was tired, because he decided to run his own mockery of JtO’s latest screed.
A rising debt raises all prices.
And wealthy conservatives hate that, because for them the pleasure of being rich lies in looking down on those who are less rich than you.
And Roscoe fails to engage with anything people are actually saying here. Time for cat videos!
We won’t default on our debt; we’ll keep paying interest on those bonds even if it takes printing more money. Of course, all prices will increase as a result, hitting the poor the hardest but by no means limiting the damage to the poor. Next stop: $17 trillion.
If smug superiority is a defect, then I point you to the last sentence of the OP.