Agreed; if this were the main type of opposition the Democratic party were facing, the whole country would be better off.

He’s absolutely an amazing character. Conservative but knowledgeable enough as a conservative that he knew the kind of backroom fuckery that was going on they was destroying the Goldwater Conservatives.

Yes. Today he would be seen as a communist: he opposed NAFTA, wanted to cut defense, raise taxes, pay for schools. Crazy.

So we suffer too much from sound bite campaigns, but when a candidate pays for 30 or 60 minutes to explain his platform in detail, it's a silly infomercial. He also is disqualified because he has a funny accent, unlike Uncle Bernie.

Literally knew nothing about politics at that time (I was 3), but I goddamned loved it when All That would do their Ross Perot spoof a few years later. He really did speak to the children.

I think the more apt comparison is Bloomberg, another rich asshole who also doesn’t feel the need to win any primaries to purchase a viable spot in the general.

This is exactly why I voted for him in my kindergarten election. I loved his charts!

I do remember that.

I feel for that schmuck, having once dated a woman with Borderline Personality (which means she either had a serious mental disorder, or she thought it sounded better than “lying, manipulative asshole,” depending). Either way, despite the huge, brightly lit warning signs at every step of the way, I, like the letter…

He’s a victim of emotional abuse, with physical threats to himself and his things to boot. Abuse really twists the mind into thinking there is hope, that the highs are worth the lows, that if he just does the right thing, she will love him and everything will be okay again.

Hey Kirk, remember when I was laying odds on how quick we were gonna get this comment?

For the same reason why people go back to abusive parters. It can take a while to recognize how bad a situation is, and even then, you’ve got the emotional equivalent of the sunk-cost fallacy, feelings of self-worth and the hope that if you do the exact right things, everything will be better and this will be an…

Part of how emotional (and physical) abusers get away with what they do is mind-fucking their victims and their emotions so hard they start to wonder if maybe they’re crazy for thinking there’s a problem.

what if...I was realized that and I was talking to other commenters to facilitate discussion in what is always an echo chamber anyway? And what if I said outright I wasn’t referring to Stassa or criticizing her at all?

what if... that were the obvious point of this essay

Answer to the question: however the fuck she wants. The question is insulting (not that I’m pointing fingers at Stassa, just, you know, at the entire culture of this debate).

To be fair, under any presidency a white chick like Ryn being killed by police because of mental illness is about as likely as getting hit with a chunk of blue ice.

citation? not trying to be snide, just genuinely curious. important issue for me.

Under a Clinton Presidency we’d have no additional mental health funding

Under a Clinton Presidency we’d have no additional mental health funding and someone who you seem to show so much feigned concern for would be at great risk for being killed by police for the crime of having mental illness.