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Donald Trump 2018

TheFlyingBoat

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JimmyJames

JimmyJames 12271

Posted
Posted
14 hours ago, Paul Wesley said:

That inauguration article is unbelievable.   

The first family of crime  was diverting millions to themselves before the Criminal in Chief even took a fucking oath.  

I mean, they committed more felonies during the fucking transition period than all admins in the past 50 fucking years.  Almost every damn one of them was lying to the FBI while Trump AND Pence were willfully ignoring Michael Flynn’s fucking treason.  

“Deplorable” doesn’t even begin to describe it.  

“Yeah but nobody got killed did they? So who cares.”  - Republicans 

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SInce y'all seem to be my clearinghouse for all things political, let me tell a story.  A couple of them, actually.  Three, if you want to be specific. When I was 14 I went with a family frien

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JimmyJames

JimmyJames 12271

Posted
Posted (edited)
33 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

This phenomenon is actually fucking crazy.  In the past 10 years or so, Rs have completely and totally gone fucking insane.  It's like the Fox News/Limbaugh potion they were ingesting for 30 years all of a sudden took hold.  The only thing it was lacking was a trigger and, ho boy, get a black man into office and BAM!

I think this really needs to be recognized.  This isn't a difference in political ideologies.  It is a radical shift in objective reality.  You cannot have a functioning society where 1/3 of the populace have their brains addled to the point where they quite literally think that facts and truth are not real.  As has been said, Trump is not the biggest problem, he is merely a projection of a serious break from reality.

Fox News, Limbaugh, Drudge, Facebook, Alex Jones, the NRA, plain Jane looking Russian honeypots and the Russians themselves have completely brainwashed the majority of what is left of the Republican Party, which now mainly consists of a bunch of angry old white men and a collection of dumbasses. Its seriously beyond repair at this point and needs to be completely eliminated and replaced with something else. 

Edited by JimmyJames
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HornOnTheBayou

HornOnTheBayou 9062

Posted
Posted (edited)
54 minutes ago, Grandioso said:

He presents it like he's doing magic.

It's an illusion, OK. It's not a trick. And it's the best illusion. My friend, David Copperfield, said so. Lots of people are saying it was better than making the Statue of Liberty disappear. Of course, he wanted to make Trump Tower disappear, but I said no. Why would I want my building to disappear? It's the tallest one in New York.

Edited by HornOnTheBayou
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WhatTheBuck

WhatTheBuck 28928

Posted
Posted
1 hour ago, Biff Tannen said:

 get a black man into office and BAM!

That was the most amazing thing to see. I wasn't expecting that. It really pulled back the curtain on the racism that still exists in this country and how deeply it goes, how widespread it is. People freaked the fuck out. 

Everything else being equal, if Joe Biden had been president for the past two terms instead of Barack Obama, I'm not sure Trump would've won the Republican nomination, let alone the presidency. 

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retread

retread 2951

Posted
Posted
2 hours ago, Biff Tannen said:

This phenomenon is actually fucking crazy.  In the past 10 years or so, Rs have completely and totally gone fucking insane.  It's like the Fox News/Limbaugh potion they were ingesting for 30 years all of a sudden took hold.  The only thing it was lacking was a trigger and, ho boy, get a black man into office and BAM!

I think this really needs to be recognized.  This isn't a difference in political ideologies.  It is a radical shift in objective reality.  

Quote

A friend who has advised Flynn for years said Flynn felt compelled to abandon the tradition of cautious neutrality to save his country. The friend, who like many interviewed for this article agreed to speak only without being named to protect their relationships with Flynn, said the general came to view Obama as head of a worldwide crime cartel supporting jihadist ideas.

After the 2016 election, in the only meeting between Obama and then-President-elect Trump, the outgoing leader warned against the hiring of just one person: Flynn. Obama believed Flynn was dangerous — because of his performance as head of DIA, because of his incendiary statements about Islam, and because Flynn had appeared at the Moscow event staged in 2015 by RT.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/politics/michael-flynn-partisan-warrior/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.9e6b800c4bc4

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bolverk

bolverk 30313

Posted
Posted
2 hours ago, Post Oak said:

Today in no shit Sherlock

 

 

 

2 hours ago, Biff Tannen said:

This phenomenon is actually fucking crazy.  In the past 10 years or so, Rs have completely and totally gone fucking insane.  It's like the Fox News/Limbaugh potion they were ingesting for 30 years all of a sudden took hold.  The only thing it was lacking was a trigger and, ho boy, get a black man into office and BAM!

I think this really needs to be recognized.  This isn't a difference in political ideologies.  It is a radical shift in objective reality.  You cannot have a functioning society where 1/3 of the populace have their brains addled to the point where they quite literally think that facts and truth are not real.  As has been said, Trump is not the biggest problem, he is merely a projection of a serious break from reality.

 

1 hour ago, JimmyJames said:

Fox News, Limbaugh, Drudge, Facebook, Alex Jones, the NRA, plain Jane looking Russian honeypots and the Russians themselves have completely brainwashed the majority of what is left of the Republican Party, which now mainly consists of a bunch of angry old white men and a collection of dumbasses. Its seriously beyond repair at this point and needs to be completely eliminated and replaced with something else. 

1

So far as I know, the French are the only ones to have taken any sort of tangible action to combat misinformation and propaganda by the likes of Trump on the internet. I made this post last night with an article discussing their introduction of internet literacy courses within their education system. It may well be too late for the olds and boomers, but at least they're attempting to educate the young ones.

 

 

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bolverk

bolverk 30313

Posted
Posted
4 minutes ago, Chooky said:

Was the Tea Party the transition to many conservatives adopting a paranoid sense of victimization?  Did that transition into Trump's constant whining and victim-hood being perceived as position of strength?

It was maybe the tipping point for some, but their obsession with feminazis and PC culture was started by Rush's spittling diatribes on the radio.

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Ted Lange

Ted Lange 16406

Posted
Posted
33 minutes ago, Chooky said:

Was the Tea Party the transition to many conservatives adopting a paranoid sense of victimization?  Did that transition into Trump's constant whining and victim-hood being perceived as position of strength?

Progression 

 

Tea Party...Freedom Caucus....QAnon....

how much lower/stupid can they sink.  Alex Jones for President?

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atomheartbevo

atomheartbevo 90634

Posted
Posted (edited)
42 minutes ago, Chooky said:

Was the Tea Party the transition to many conservatives adopting a paranoid sense of victimization?  Did that transition into Trump's constant whining and victim-hood being perceived as position of strength?

I think that sense of victimization, putting aside the reinforcement from Russian bots, grew out of these people finding one another online through social media and the like and spending a lot more time in an echo chamber.

In some ways, it’s a lot harder to play the victim card around people who know what kind of house you live in, how much you make, what kind of car you drive, etc.  But online or at a politician rally that’s half-an-hour or more away from your home?  That Atheist Muslim Communist Marxist Socialist from Chicago that was born in Kenya is trying to take your guns, healthcare, car, House, etc.  

If you go back and look at when and where the Tea Party groups began to formally organize and hit the scene in a big way, it happened after GOP money, and outside money (Koch Brothers) came in and backed these groups and installed “leaders” who began guiding the groups.  Sure, at the beginning there were lots of little groups and spontaneity, but ultimately a couple of large groups backed by Big Money took control of the movement, built out websites, online media appearances, organized the rallies like the ones in Washington, etc.  And it was telling that while Fox News paid them lip service, and let Glenn Beck cover them (while some channels like MSNBC devoted a lot of coverage), most of their bigger rallies were ignored by FNC, almost as if somebody named Roger Ailes was deliberately downplaying them at times.

For such a large movement, the GOP managed to quietly fold it back into the GOP by 2016 (remnants in the Freedom Caucus).  Seven years.  That’s all it took.  

And arguably, if they had somebody else instead of Romney in 2012, they might have folded it back into the GOP within three years.  

So i don’t consider it as much a transition, as just a group of Republicsnd pissed about Obama and the GOP (some were pissed at W over Iraq, many were pissed at McCain being the nominee).  The fact that they truly didn’t break away and were completely a part  of the GOP by 2015-2016 reinforces that. 

Edit: there was a book covering this all somewhere.  Very interesting how the GOP worked to keep them from growing. 

Edited by atomheartbevo
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Mo Horn

Mo Horn 8937

Posted
Posted
2 hours ago, Chooky said:

Was the Tea Party the transition to many conservatives adopting a paranoid sense of victimization?  Did that transition into Trump's constant whining and victim-hood being perceived as position of strength?

Nah, he's just a weeping pussy. 

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Jack Straw

Jack Straw 2955

Posted
Posted
14 minutes ago, Ted Lange said:

Remember the people aka fake Gary Johnson voters who justified their vote because of Clinton corruption and the Clinton Foundation and PAY FOR PAY?  Those fucking frauds are sure fucking quiet now. Sad!

 

Or disappeared completely.  I’m sure FCHack is posting Hillary memes 20 plus hours a day on some other random school’s site that he has no connection to these days. 

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Ted Lange

Ted Lange 16406

Posted
Posted
8 minutes ago, Jack Straw said:

Or disappeared completely.  I’m sure FCHack is posting Hillary memes 20 plus hours a day on some other random school’s site that he has no connection to these days. 

Speaking of. Where is that huge pussy ClearLakeHorn?  All those idiots just disappeared out of embarrassment.  

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Degenerate Gardner

Degenerate Gardner 4157

Posted
Posted
On 12/13/2018 at 8:14 PM, DixonHur said:

I'm probably a little late to the game on this conclusion, but I just put two and two together regarding the deal Justice cut with The National Enquirer.  Didn't we hear back in July or August that an entire safe filled with things damaging to Trump was missing from David Pecker's office?  I would venture to say that it's in the hands of Mueller by now.

Wonder what other secrets we'll be learning about in the coming weeks.

Publicly, endless angry rhetoric about dishonest media.

Privately, close friend with Fake News OG David Pecker at the National Enquirer, quashing and planting stories to Trump's advantage.

Every accusation a confession. It's such a reliable tell with Trump.

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Bozo_Casanova

Bozo_Casanova 26840

Posted
Posted
Speaking of. Where is that huge pussy ClearLakeHorn?  All those idiots just disappeared out of embarrassment.  

It wasn’t embarrassment. That would require self-awareness.

 

Remember - Clear Lake and others once defended armed men in ski masks terrorizing families entering their church in Irving. Fear does terrible things to people.

 

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bolverk

bolverk 30313

Posted
Posted
29 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

It wasn’t embarrassment. That would require self-awareness.

 

Remember - Clear Lake and others once defended armed men in ski masks terrorizing families entering their church in Irving. Fear does terrible things to people.

 

What I would give to have a Ron Burgundy trident moment with those fucks...

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hobbes2702

hobbes2702 13435

Posted
Posted
35 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

It wasn’t embarrassment. That would require self-awareness.

 

Remember - Clear Lake and others once defended armed men in ski masks terrorizing families entering their church in Irving. Fear does terrible things to people.

 

They are aware. They just know they are pieces of shit

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Biff Tannen

Biff Tannen 46150

Posted
Posted
2 hours ago, Ted Lange said:

Most corrupt administration in US history when all is said and done 

What's worse is that is has been since minute one.  This wasn't someone who got elected and let the power get to their head 3-4 years in or in their second term.  The entire plan from the fucking beginning was to scam the American people.  Period.

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horn4life

horn4life 3838

Posted
Posted

The problem is that Trump has a band of folks that simply refuse to believe factual information.  The GOP gave up on truth and science a while back, and now they have fully embraced outright lies at "truth" because it fits with their own personal politics.  Rule of law?  Well.. for Dems yes, for our guys... not so much. It was a gradual erosion and lowering of overall standards while at the same time pretending to be the standard bearers of morality.

The bottom line is that now there is no shame in the GOP, because there is no sense of morality in the party at all, beyond endless lip service.  I take that back, there are a few moral persons currently elected nationally with an (R) beside their names but you can't fill up your fingers and toes listing the names.  I think that Paul "the coward" Ryan's protecting of a Saudi Prince Murdered within the farm bill is a perfect example of men who PRETEND they are moral, doing immoral things time and again for political gain.

I guess the one positive for the President this week is that his immigration policy of deterrence is working at peak effectiveness.  I mean how much more of a deterrent can you get beyond, we will take your children away, and if you are really unlucky we return them to you dead! 

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Celery Man

Celery Man 21093

Posted
Posted
4 hours ago, Chooky said:

Was the Tea Party the transition to many conservatives adopting a paranoid sense of victimization?  Did that transition into Trump's constant whining and victim-hood being perceived as position of strength?

As others have pointed out, there were a number of factors.  The Tea Party as a movement I think was largely responsible for pushing out serious/reasonable people and handing the reigns to the idiots lacking in enough perspective to recognize where they are going and now have gone.

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retread

retread 2951

Posted
Posted (edited)
40 minutes ago, horn4life said:

I guess the one positive for the President this week is that his immigration policy of deterrence is working at peak effectiveness.  I mean how much more of a deterrent can you get beyond, we will take your children away, and if you are really unlucky we return them to you dead! 

Family Case Management Program had a very good success record, except for the one that counts for the WH -- getting rid of people.

Quote

August 23 - One year after scrapping a program that had a near-perfect record of ensuring that asylum seekers would show up for mandatory check-ins with immigration officials and attend their court hearings, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is standing by its decision to shut it down.

The Family Case Management Program (FCMP), as it was known, was not “removing” enough people, the agency said.

“The rates of compliance for FCMP were consistent with other monitoring options ICE exercises under Alternatives to Detention (ATD), which proved to be a much better use of limited resources,” ICE spokeswoman Sarah Rodriguez told The Daily Beast. “Additionally, removals of individuals on ATD occur at a much higher rate than the FCMP. Over the lifespan of FCMP, there were only 15 removals from this program, as opposed to more than 2,200 from ATD in the same period. There are no plans to reinstate the FCMP at this time.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/ice-scrapped-effective-immigration-program-because-it-didnt-remove-enough-people

Edited by retread
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WhatTheBuck

WhatTheBuck 28928

Posted
Posted
30 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

What's worse is that is has been since minute one.  This wasn't someone who got elected and let the power get to their head 3-4 years in or in their second term.  The entire plan from the fucking beginning was to scam the American people.  Period.

And, given Trump's history, it was totally to be expected. 

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Tuco

Tuco 5093

Posted
Posted
And, given Trump's history, it was totally to be expected. 


Here is the thing about Trump: he half-believes the nutty conspiracy theories he talks about. He really does believe that the Clintons and Obamas got away with obvious wide scale corruption. Why shouldn’t he? He may he honestly confused why citing Uranium One is not a get out of trouble card. He doesn’t get that not everyone is as bad as he is. He thinks his normal corruption is normal for everyone. Why should he be the one to get in trouble?
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Nice Guy Eddie

Nice Guy Eddie 13725

Posted
Posted
2 hours ago, burntorangebongos said:

WTF? Is that why they are calling him "acting"? How can he do both roles...unless he is just pretending to be "acting CoS"? It is just in name only to stop how embarrassing it is that no one wants the job? I'm so confused...

I assume he required the Acting title because he didn’t want to commit for long term.   They also need to quickly get someone in place before Kelly departs.

speaking of titles, has anyone ever figured out Matthew Whitaker’s title over at the DOJ?  

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Hornius Emeritus

Hornius Emeritus 12796

Posted
Posted (edited)
1 hour ago, Tuco said:

 


 He doesn’t get that not everyone is as bad as he is. He thinks his normal corruption is normal for everyone. Why should he be the one to get in trouble?

 



It's so unfair, isn't it, that HE be the one who gets indicted/impeached?

Edited by Hornius Emeritus
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happyfunball

happyfunball 481

Posted
Posted

What Happens When a Bad-Tempered, Distractible Doofus Runs an Empire? 

Quote

One of the few things that Kaiser Wilhelm II, who ruled Germany from 1888 to 1918, had a talent for was causing outrage. A particular specialty was insulting other monarchs. He called the diminutive King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy “the dwarf” in front of the king’s own entourage. He called Prince (later Tsar) Ferdinand, of Bulgaria, “Fernando naso,” on account of his beaky nose, and spread rumors that he was a hermaphrodite. Since Wilhelm was notably indiscreet, people always knew what he was saying behind their backs. Ferdinand had his revenge. After a visit to Germany, in 1909, during which the Kaiser slapped him on the bottom in public and then refused to apologize, Ferdinand awarded a valuable arms contract that had been promised to the Germans to a French company instead.

Not that this deterred the Kaiser. One of the many things that Wilhelm was convinced he was brilliant at, despite all evidence to the contrary, was “personal diplomacy,” fixing foreign policy through one-on-one meetings with other European monarchs and statesmen. In fact, Wilhelm could do neither the personal nor the diplomacy, and these meetings rarely went well. The Kaiser viewed other people in instrumental terms, was a compulsive liar, and seemed to have a limited understanding of cause and effect. In 1890, he let lapse a long-standing defensive agreement with Russia—the German Empire’s vast and sometimes threatening eastern neighbor. He judged, wrongly, that Russia was so desperate for German good will that he could keep it dangling. Instead, Russia immediately made an alliance with Germany’s western neighbor and enemy, France. Wilhelm decided he would charm and manipulate Tsar Nicholas II (a “ninny” and a “whimperer,” according to Wilhelm, fit only “to grow turnips”) into abandoning the alliance. In 1897, Nicholas told Wilhelm to get lost; the German-Russian alliance withered.

About a decade ago, I published “George, Nicholas and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I,” a book that was, in part, about Kaiser Wilhelm, who is probably best known for being Queen Victoria’s first grandchild and for leading Germany into the First World War. Ever since Donald Trumpstarted campaigning for President, the Kaiser has once again been on my mind—his personal failings, and the global fallout they led to.

Trump’s tweets were what first reminded me of the Kaiser. Wilhelm was a compulsive speechmaker who constantly strayed off script. Even his staff couldn’t stop him, though it tried, distributing copies of speeches to the German press before he’d actually given them. Unfortunately, the Austrian press printed the speeches as they were delivered, and the gaffes and insults soon circulated around Europe. “There is only one person who is master in this empire and I am not going to tolerate any other,” Wilhelm liked to say, even though Germany had a democratic assembly and political parties. (“I’m the only one that matters,” Trump has said.) The Kaiser reserved particular abuse for political parties that voted against his policies. “I regard every Social Democrat as an enemy of the Fatherland,” he said, and he denounced the German Socialist party as a “gang of traitors.” August Bebel, the Socialist party leader, said that every time the Kaiser opened his mouth, the party gained another hundred thousand votes.

When Wilhelm became emperor, in 1888, at twenty-nine years old, he was determined to be seen as tough and powerful. He fetishized the Army, surrounded himself with generals (though, like Trump, he didn’t like listening to them), owned a hundred and twenty military uniforms, and wore little else. He cultivated a special severe facial expression for public occasions and photographs—there are many, as Wilhelm would send out signed photos and portrait busts to anyone who’d have one—and also a heavily waxed, upward-turned moustache that was so famous it had its own name, “Er ist Erreicht!” (It is accomplished!)

In fact, Wilhelm didn’t accomplish very much. The general staff of the German Army agreed that the Kaiser couldn’t “lead three soldiers over a gutter.” He had neither the attention span nor the ability. “Distractions, whether they are little games with his army or navy, travelling or hunting—are everything to him,” a disillusioned former mentor wrote. “He reads very little apart from newspaper cuttings, hardly writes anything himself apart from marginalia on reports and considers those talks best which are quickly over and done with.” The Kaiser’s entourage compiled press cuttings for him, mostly about himself, which he read as obsessively as Trump watches television. A critical story would send him into paroxysms of fury.

During Wilhelm’s reign, the upper echelons of the German government began to unravel into a free-for-all, with officials wrangling against one another. “The most contradictory opinions are now urged at high and all-highest level,” a German diplomat lamented. To add to the confusion, Wilhelm changed his position every five minutes. He was deeply suggestible and would defer to the last person he’d spoken to or cutting he’d read—at least until he’d spoken to the next person. “It is unendurable,” a foreign minister wrote, in 1894. “Today one thing and tomorrow the next and after a few days something completely different.” Wilhelm’s staff and ministers resorted to manipulation, distraction, and flattery to manage him. “In order to get him to accept an idea you must act as if the idea were his,” the Kaiser’s closest friend, Philipp zu Eulenburg, advised his colleagues, adding, “Don’t forget the sugar.” (In “Fire and Fury,” Michael Wolff writes that to get Trump to take an action his White House staff has to persuade him that “he had thought of it himself.”)

More sinisterly, Wilhelm’s patronage of the aggressive, nationalistic right left him surrounded by ministers who held a collective conviction that a European war was inevitable and even desirable. Alfred von Tirpitz, Germany’s Naval chief—who realized at his first meeting with the Kaiser that he did “not live in the real world”—consciously exploited Wilhelm’s envy and rage in order to extract the astronomical sums required to build a German Navy to rival Britain’s, a project that created an arms race and became an intractable block to peace negotiations.

The Kaiser was susceptible but never truly controllable. He asserted his authority unpredictably, as if to prove he was still in charge, staging rogue interventions into his own advisers’ policies and sacking ministers without warning. “You cannot have the faintest idea what I have prevented,” his most obsequious aide, Bernhard von Bülow, complained to a friend, “and how much of my time I must devote to restoring order where our All Highest Master has created chaos.”

The Kaiser’s darkest secret was that every few years—after his meddling and blunders had exposed his incompetence or resulted in a crisis—he would suffer a full-blown collapse. His entourage would scrape him off the floor, and he would retire to one of his palaces, where, prostrate, he would weep and complain that he’d been victimized. After the moaning came the pacing, in uncharacteristic silence. Occasionally he would give way to tears. Gradually he would recalibrate his sense of reality—or unreality—and after a few weeks would bounce up again, as boisterous and obstreperous as ever.

I spent six years writing my book about Wilhelm and his cousins, King George V, of England, and Tsar Nicholas II, and the Kaiser’s egotism and eccentricity made him by far the most entertaining of the three to write about. After a while, though, living with Wilhelm—as you do when you write about another person over a long period—became onerous. It was dispiriting, even oppressive, to spend so much time around someone who never learned, and never changed.

 

Quote

The real lesson of Kaiser Wilhelm II, however, may be that Trump’s leaving office might not be the end of the problems he may bring on or exacerbate—it may be only the beginning.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/what-happens-when-a-bad-tempered-distractible-doofus-runs-an-empire

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