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Cruz vs Beto


Washpark

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Great job by Beto in that interview.

I couldn't believe the amount of negative comments on Willie's FB page about the free concert for Beto. Like 98% negative. Comments like "I'm done with Willie! I won't support that socialist commie Beto !@#$!!".....WTF. I know Willie's fans come in all ages and stripes, but that is disappointing.

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2 minutes ago, Art Vandelay said:

Great job by Beto in that interview.

I couldn't believe the amount of negative comments on Willie's FB page about the free concert for Beto. Like 98% negative. Comments like "I'm done with Willie! I won't support that socialist commie Beto !@#$!!".....WTF. I know Willie's fans come in all ages and stripes, but that is disappointing.

How can you claim to be a Willie Nelson fan and also be surprised that he's supporting a Democrat?  

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6 minutes ago, Art Vandelay said:

Great job by Beto in that interview.

I couldn't believe the amount of negative comments on Willie's FB page about the free concert for Beto. Like 98% negative. Comments like "I'm done with Willie! I won't support that socialist commie Beto !@#$!!".....WTF. I know Russian Bots come in all ages and stripes, but that is disappointing.

FIFY

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8 minutes ago, Art Vandelay said:

Great job by Beto in that interview.

I couldn't believe the amount of negative comments on Willie's FB page about the free concert for Beto. Like 98% negative. Comments like "I'm done with Willie! I won't support that socialist commie Beto !@#$!!".....WTF. I know Willie's fans come in all ages and stripes, but that is disappointing.

Those are Russian paid trolls. 

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How can you claim to be a Willie Nelson fan and also be surprised that he's supporting a Democrat?  


Ryan Bingham had a post on Facebook a few months back where he had a Beto T-shirt or sticker and was showing support for him. Tons of negative comments/never listening to you shit/etc.

It was like his “fans” had never actually listened to his lyrics before.
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What I love is that all the Cruz patriots bitch about their opponents “dividing America,” when there is literally a foreign power with an actual strategy of fomenting division here....and its message sounds exactly like theirs.

 

When your positions are identical to those actively pursued by an enemy power, you might oughta reconsider your life. But they won’t.

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Interesting little anecdote from my Facebook feed this morning. Every couple of days I'll post something about Beto, positive supportive stuff. An old Air Force friend of mine who is a big time gun nut conservative type from out of state will always use my post as a reason to launch into a bunch of standard right wing butt hurt attacks against Beto, libruls, etc. Of course I engage because I just can't help myself. Yesterday we had a long conversation that got rather heated when I invoked Trump, lying, etc.

This morning, a number of friends chimed in to defend me which is always nice, but I was shocked when a very VERY conservative buddy chimed in to say that he agreed with me about Cruz's negative politics. Said that despite agreeing pretty much 100% on Cruz's policy points, he is very disappointed in how he is running his campaign. Shocked this shit out of me. He'll never vote for Beto, but it was interesting to see that Cruz isn't necessarily winning any friends amongst the more thoughtful conservatives out there.

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20 minutes ago, MidTexHorn said:

Interesting little anecdote from my Facebook feed this morning. Every couple of days I'll post something about Beto, positive supportive stuff. An old Air Force friend of mine who is a big time gun nut conservative type from out of state will always use my post as a reason to launch into a bunch of standard right wing butt hurt attacks against Beto, libruls, etc. Of course I engage because I just can't help myself. Yesterday we had a long conversation that got rather heated when I invoked Trump, lying, etc.

This morning, a number of friends chimed in to defend me which is always nice, but I was shocked when a very VERY conservative buddy chimed in to say that he agreed with me about Cruz's negative politics. Said that despite agreeing pretty much 100% on Cruz's policy points, he is very disappointed in how he is running his campaign. Shocked this shit out of me. He'll never vote for Beto, but it was interesting to see that Cruz isn't necessarily winning any friends amongst the more thoughtful conservatives out there.

Good.

What Beto needs is these voters who hate Cruz to either: cross over and split their tickets for Beto/Abbott; abstain from the Senate race; or not show up.

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34 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

What I love is that all the Cruz patriots bitch about their opponents “dividing America,” when there is literally a foreign power with an actual strategy of fomenting division here....and its message sounds exactly like theirs.

 

When your positions are identical to those actively pursued by an enemy power, you might oughta reconsider your life. But they won’t.

that's fucking rich, Cruz' opponents dividing America.  his campaign literally only runs on dividing Texans.  He categorizes any Texan that is less conservative than his ideological ass as "far left" and an enemy to freedom.

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1 hour ago, Celery Man said:

that's fucking rich, Cruz' opponents dividing America.  his campaign literally only runs on dividing Texans.  He categorizes any Texan that is less conservative than his ideological ass as "far left" and an enemy to freedom.

He ran an ad during the Fox (local) news this morning.  Pure and unadulterated fear mongering.  I just had to laugh.

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4 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

He ran an ad during the Fox (local) news this morning.  Pure and unadulterated fear mongering.  I just had to laugh.

That's his entire message.  Oh, and it's not him.  It's his PAC, "Texans Are."  Which makes for a perfectly Trumpish announcement at the end of the ad:

"Texans are is responsible for this message."

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Good read written back in April on what the Russians and Republicans did with Roy Moore in Alabama.

Also, the author of this piece did a lot of work to try and counter it.

https://medium.com/@joohnchoe/the-resistance-information-warfare-handbook-part-iv-a375993f3dc0

The article concludes with this:

(IO = Information Operations)

 

From the experiences of the Alabama special election, I believe a few strategic lessons can be discerned:

Russian disinformation and Republican campaigns will act in concert — massive commitments of the Russian IO infrastructure to support time-sensitive Republican political problems should be expected and planned against. We had the good fortune to observe Roy Moore’s comparatively inept campaign attempt to acquire and deploy IO infrastructure; following repeated “purges” and “ban waves” on Facebook and Twitter as well as continued proliferation of IO on social media, it is a reasonable expectation that November 2018’s bots will be more subtle and more international than previous elections

Combined themes usable for multiple campaigns — Alabama represented a fulcrum point for the application of finite Russian IO assets. By focusing on a single specific term (e.g. #iStandWithHannity) it was possible to provoke a response with potentially national political ramifications — that is, with only one campaign to affect, messaging could be simple. In a situation like November 2018 with multiple races at play, narratives on Russian IO must either become more diverse — a poor choice that dilutes the aggregate impact of “bots” and IO-contractor confederates on social media — or focus on specific themes usable for multiple races.

It is difficult to predict the most resonant theme for November 2018 given the pace of current events with Trump as president. However, based on the immigration-focused State of the Union address in February 2018, the Trump administration’s early emphasis on immigration bans as a “shock and awe” move, and continued propagation of fake news narratives around immigrants, I expect that immigration will be a significant theme for fake news distortion and exploitation. This is a theme that Russian IO is expert at amplifying; Russian strategic fake news narratives around Brexit and NATO expansion often focus on local immigrant communities as a source of tension.

Republicans will do anything to win — Outside of a few notable exceptions, Republicans have staked their careers and continued election on Trumpist policies for a variety of reasons: significant portions of their constituencies with hard-right Trumpist tendencies, an erroneously-perceived favorable strategic position, or RICO exposure in the cases of the extremely-compromised Republicans like Rohrabacher and the Republican power structure like Ryan and McConnell; all are persuasive strategic reasons to continue to hew to the Trumpist camp and support the President against impeachment.

Both sides of the Republican civil war between Bannonite “insurgents” and McConnell/Ryan “establishment” have this strategic position in common: they are screwed for life if the President goes down. Much of the disagreement between the two camps is inconsequential for this reason. Effectively, Republicans have two choices: either go down in history as the party of treason (essentially the death of the Republican Party as an effective political force for at least one, perhaps two generations), or rebut, distract away from, or somehow neutralize the Russian collusion narrative.

With their backs to the wall, Republicans will pull out all the stops, and all the parties at play in the Breitbart bribery case are not exceptional of the Republican dirty-tricks playbook; they are typical. Davi and Lantrip, the retired-operator henchmen, as well as, Boyle and Klein, the willing and disposable bagmen for Breitbart, are the tip of a very large iceberg of gray-market deniable political operatives at work for Republicans. Expect more Davi and Lantrip operators pulling dirty tricks in the shadows; expect that the Boyles and the Kleins of the world will commit crimes on a Friday and return to writing articles the next Monday on Breitbart. November 2018 is not just any election for Republicans; it is an existential issue. At stake is the potential long-term downfall of the Republican party.

Political culture is a militarized space opposing citizens against other countries — An entire nation-state is consciously funding a concerted psychological-warfare effort aimed at distorting American political culture, acting to assist the party of its highest-placed compromised agent in history. This is a highly counter-intuitive situation that bears repeating: we must assume that to at least some degree and more likely entirely, the American presidency is compromised.

In this context, we have a single vehicle by which peaceful removal of the threat to the country can be achieved within a reasonable timeframe; and it is not a 3rd party. It is entirely without fault to state that the Democrat party in America is hypocritical, plagued by in-fighting, corrupt in some places, incredibly bad with fundraising and operations money almost all the time (the DNC since 2016 has been bankrupt almost as often as it has been solvent), racist in some places, stupid in some places, and even openly friendly with Russia in rare exceptions (Tulsi Gabbard in Hawaii, for instance).

None of these factors outweigh being the party of treason; none of them outweigh an appreciably higher risk of global thermonuclear war that increases unpredictably by the day. And absolutely none of these outweigh the obligations that we have as citizens, in particular those of us sworn to “defend the laws and constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic”. If doing so means we must ally ourselves with progressives and centrists then that is what we will do, because that is what is required.

The front lines of the war between the Russian effort to degrade and disrupt our political discourse are ideological. As long as a traitor President with support of the Republican party inhabits the White House, the fastest way to peaceful transition of power away from the danger — impeachment — depends upon a black swan political event and an unprecedented form of mass cultural change; it depends, in other words, on a blue wave in the November 2018 midterm elections, and an American culture of cognitive resilience popularly termed “the resistance”.

Edited by Hugo Stiglitz
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My wife Annie and I have met and spoken with Beto and we share his concern for the direction things are headed,” Nelson said in a statement. “Beto embodies what is special about Texas, an energy and an integrity that is completely genuine.


-Willie
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/willie-nelson-beto-orourke-723418/
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6 minutes ago, chainsaw said:

Beto should just debate the Libertarian.  The centrist conservatives who would never vote O'Rourke but also never sit out an election could be swung away from Cruz.

He needs a web developer who's seen an icon designed in the last decade, but otherwise he seems like he would appeal to some of those folks: https://www.nealdikeman.com/issues

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