monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

@Walter Hinteler,

Try harder the next time. : Wink

@revelette1,

Perhaps, McCabe voted for the wrong person in the 2016 US presidential election, or gave the wrong response when asked about that by the president.

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@georgeob1,

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@revelette1,

revelette1 wrote:

Well, I hope he has a tell all book coming out.

If he "tells all," which the sorry bastard is gunna do, even if it takes water-boarding to get it out of him, the only "book" he'll have is the one thrown at him by the Justice Dept.

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@Walter Hinteler,

Quote:

Under Donald Trump, socialism seeps into US mainstream

Even before Trump, we saw the Occupy Movement in the US (and elsewhere). Whatever else stimulated those passions and ideas, the growing disparity of wealth and power was surely one factor. Both socialists (of whatever degree) and many Trump voters are understandably unhappy with their lot in modern America, in their apparently dwindling opportunities and their negligible voice in decision-making. A slogan like "drain the swamp" can and does appeal to both. There's no small irony in the fact that Trump voters and the women's movement are driven by the same innate demands for fairness. See the brilliant work being done by anthropologist Frans de Waal

But populist fervor like this can be suppressed or it can be manipulated for quite evil purposes. That Americans are becoming increasingly despairing with or angry at government works to the benefit of those who wish government disempowered because that situation allows their dominance over others and their profit-taking is facilitated. There are a lot of people who do NOT sign on to a social contract which holds equality as a desirable community goal because they define themselves in terms of hierarchy - I've got more money therefore I'm better and deserve unique levels of power.

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@ehBeth,

I don't think it matters. Clearly Jan 31 marks the end of everything.

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@georgeob1,

Quote:

So far no real evidence of the existence of an" expansive Russian campaign to choose America's next President" has emerged. We certainly saw some Russian hacking and efforts to disrupt and possibly discredit the process, but there is nothing new in that. Perhaps you have some specific information or citations to back up your assertion.

Jesus christ you are lazy. And you've managed magnificently in keeping yourself insulated from uncongenial ideas and facts.

Quote:

The United States Intelligence Community concluded with high confidence that the Russian government engaged in electoral interference during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.[1][2] A January 2017 assessment by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) stated that Russian leadership favored presidential candidate Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton, and that Russian president Vladimir Putin personally ordered an "influence campaign" to harm Clinton's electoral chances and "undermine public faith in the US democratic process."[2]:7

That's wikipedia but just type a relevant heading into google and get yourself educated.

1 Reply

@Finn dAbuzz,

Quote:

The only problem with this is he's giving the Republican establishment a free pass.

There might be others as well. I think this speech is not much more than a clever piece of propaganda where the speaker relies on the shared values of the audience to preclude any need for backing up his claims and assumptions with proof. There's a lot of shorthand, for instance, mentioning Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, contrasting them with Charleston and Myrtle Beach and then delivering the punchline:

Quote:

It’s just what happens when Democrats run a city into the ground.

I think it's a bit more complex than that. As economies mature the industries that sustained big urban centers may fade or relocate, states may be reluctant to cooperate with the cities because of the power of resentful non-urban voters, Congress may or may not decide to address the issue, etc.

Quote:

Trump didn’t really win the election. Bush didn’t really win the election. Every time a Republican president won an election this century, the Democrats insist he didn’t really win.

This is so misleading. The '00 contest actually was really close and the Florida recount was a mess. We don't know who actually received the most votes and the court had to step in. It's not as if the Democrats just came up with the idea, "Hey, let's make the race so close that the whole thing boils down to a few thousand votes in one state!" And no one is saying that Trump "didn’t really win", no one that I've heard, anyway. It wouldn't matter how much Russian meddling occurred; as long as the vote tally was not purposely altered there is no reason to doubt the legitimacy of the result, and no proof of actual vote tampering has been produced. One of the weak aspects of "democracy" is that voters can be misled. But their votes still count.

You know, with better management Team Trump could have avoided this whole sorry spectacle. Whose great idea was it to open up the whole Russia connection? Whose idea was it to meet with Russian operatives in the hope of getting dirt on the opposition? Who tried to cover it up and told people to lie? If all the Democrats had on Trump was that he behaved like an asshole with women and paid hush money to hookers before being elected there wouldn't even be talk of impeachment.

This is a good little presentation — coherent, touching all the right buttons, and I'm sure it was well-received. But I don't find it very convincing and I certainly don't see the speaker offering much of a solution. He sounds as if he wants to stir up more partisan rancor and increase the level of animosity.

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@revelette1,

Quote:

“Give them the old Trump bullshit,” he told the architect Der Scutt before a presentation of the Trump Tower design at a press conference in 1980. “Tell them it is going to be a million square feet, sixty-eight stories.”

VF

Imagining that Trump's words/claims have any remote relationship to the truth is a fool's move.

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@BillW,

A purple moon. Surely there's a country song with that phrase.

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@blatham,

As far as I know there is blue moon and purple rain in songs, never heard of purple moon.

1 Reply

@revelette1,

Wow. Then there's a fortune to be made by some country balladeer. I can't convincingly pull off the country role as I'm under court order to remain 100 yards from farm animals.

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@blatham,

I'm not lazy at all. And I'm not ill-informed as you blithely suggest. Russian interference in our public information flows and elections is not at all new: it has been going on, at a steady & consistent rate, for a very long time, focused on undermining our political institutions and discourse. . However, if one were to believe the nonsense the Democrat election deniers are putting out, it all started this past year with a campaign to get Trump elected. That's nonsense.

The fact is the long-term pattern Russian ( and Soviet) interference has consistently had the goals of discrediting our internal political processes generally and sowing discord wherever they felt able to do so. As I suggested, the weight of the evidence is that Putin and the Russian FSA expected a Clinton victory in the election (just as did most Liberals - and others - here). Indeed there are powerful arguments suggesting they had good reason to prefer a Clinton win ( vacuous reset buttons; obvious accommodations to them and their ally Iran during the Obama regime; and successful payoffs to Hillary).. Trump, on the other hand was an unknown and unpredictable.

Certainly events subsequent to the election have established the now obvious fact that the Trump Administration is far more effective in thwarting Russian aims in Eastern Europe and the Mid East than was the Obama Administration.

I note that you have provided neither concrete evidence nor plausible arguments in support of the alternative view, which, it appears you consider so obvious that it is a certainty. Unfortunately the historical facts and common sense suggest quite the opposite.

1 Reply

@blatham,

Quote:

Purple moon. Surely there must be a a country song with that phrase.

There is. From the duo what brought us She Put A Louisiana Liplock On My Alabama Pork Chop here's Rusty and Mike with Purple Moon

(Rusty McHugh and Mike Fincher)
- after a bunch of chatter, the song starts at about 1:25 -

1 Reply

Quote:

...The Post sheds new light on Trump’s thinking about the memo by Rep. Devin Nunes, which will bolster the alt-narrative in which the investigation is really a Deep-State Coup to remove the president: Trump has privately told advisers it could give him grounds for getting Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein out. This sets up a possible scenario in which a Trump loyalist is installed to oversee the probe instead of Rosenstein, and more generally, it shows Trump is still actively looking for ways to constrain the investigation.

This gets at an important way that the current moment is different from Watergate — a difference that may point to the possibility of a more alarming endgame. The Nunes memo shows there is a massive propaganda apparatus out there — one that reaches deep into the right-wing media and into the Congress that has been pushing the alt-narrative and would back up Trump if he does take drastic steps — that didn’t really exist in Nixon’s time.

“You certainly had very influential columnists who were diehard Nixon men,” Weiner told me. “But you did not have a Devin Nunes. You did not have a Sean Hannity. And you did not have an alternate universe of conspiracy theories, in which the FBI was painted as the equivalent of the Weather Underground.” Weiner added that we are seeing an “extraordinary echo chamber of dark matter that has gripped part of Washington and part of America.”

WP

Full disclosure: Greg is a friend and we correspond, if infrequently. Several weeks ago I wrote him and laid out my argument that the present situation of Trump/Mueller can't be compared to the Saturday Night Massacre of the Nixon era because the right then had nothing even remotely comparable to its modern media universe which is, and will continue to, act as a propaganda operation to backstop anything Trump does. Several days later, Greg wrote a post on this and the above post is a continuation.

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@georgeob1,

Quote:

I'm not lazy at all. And I'm not ill-informed as you blithely suggest. Russian interference in our public information flows and elections is not at all new: it has been going on, at a steady & consistent rate, for a very long time, focused on undermining our political institutions and discourse. . However, if one were to believe the nonsense the Democrat election deniers are putting out, it all started this past year with a campaign to get Trump elected. That's nonsense.

Actually you are. And careless in thought. That it is not new is irrelevant. Anti-semitism was not new in Europe prior to the 30s. So, therefore Hitler is unremarkable and unimportant?

Your use of "Democrat election deniers" tells us the kind of crap you read or listen to when Hannity is on. And your statement that Dems or anyone believes that Russian influence only began with Trump is either grossly ignorant or grossly careless.

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@blatham,

I read your friend's WP article. Apart from describing the, as yet unreleased, memo summary of supposed irregularities and wrongdoing attendant to the Russia investigation as the result of a massive deception operation, I see nothing new in it, and no facts, citations or data to support the rather broad allegations he made in the article.

Perhaps he hasn't been sufficiently attentive to your lectures on appropriate scholarship. I'm also surprised that you didn't note that deficiency.

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@blatham,

The men allegedly leading the ‘deep state’ conspiracy against Trump are surprisingly Republican

Quote:

Almost every person who has stood atop the supposed “deep state” law-enforcement-led conspiracy against Trump just so happens to be either a Republican or tied to the same party Trump belongs to.

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@Sturgis,

I knew it! But I could only manage to get through about 16 bars. It would be a handy recording to have around for those instances when you are hosting a party and people keep hanging around even though you want them gone. Put this recording on and the house will be empty in minutes.

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@Walter Hinteler,

Yes. That's entirely accurate. And to right wing media and its followers, that is either not addressed at all (if there are instances, I've missed every one of them) or buried beneath a incoherent blizzard of bullshit re "the deep state".

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