Current Affairs Donald Trump POS: Judgement cometh and that right soon

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"What I have determined is that based upon the unique circumstances, the public interest requires me to place this investigation under the authority of a person who exercises a degree of independence from the normal chain of command"

Nice
 
riddick said:
This is insane. This is NOT normal ffs..

I don't get howanyone can stand behind him at this point.
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I think this is one of the more thoughtful answers so far:

The Long, Lucrative Right-wing Grift Is Blowing Up in the World's Face
http://fusion.kinja.com/the-long-lucrative-right-wing-grift-is-blowing-up-in-t-1793944216

Forgive me for indulging. This is just an excerpt:

For years, the conservative movement peddled one set of talking points to the rabble, while its elites consumed a more grounded and reality-based media. The rubes listened to talk radio, read right-wing blogs, watched Fox News. They were fed apocalyptic paranoia about threats to their liberty, racial hysteria about the generalized menace posed by various groups of brown people, and hysterical lies about the criminal misdeeds of various Democratic politicians. The people in charge, meanwhile, read The Wall Street Journal and The Weekly Standard, and they tended to have a better grasp of political reality, as when those sources deceived their readers, it was mostly unintentionally, with comforting fantasies about the efficacy of conservative policies. From the Reagan era through the Bush administration, the system seemed to be performing as designed.

But if this was a reasonably useful arrangement for Republicans, who won a couple close elections with the help of their army of riled-up kooks, it was a fantastic deal for the real engine of the right-wing propaganda machine: companies selling newly patented drugs designed to treat the various conditions of old age, authors of dubious investing newsletters, sellers of survival seeds, hawkers of poorly written conservative books, and a whole array of similar con artists and ethically compromised corporations and financial institutions. The original strategy behind demonizing the “mainstream media” may have purely political, to steer voters away from outlets that tended to present information damaging to the conservative cause, but the creation of the conservative media was also a revenue opportunity for shameless grifters from the very start, as Rick Perlstein showed in his classic Baffler piece on the snake oil-salesmen of the right.

The bottom-feeding amorality of the sorts of people who sponsored the right-wing press, and the crummy nature of the products and services sold, shows exactly who was supposed to be consuming it: suckers. Or, more specifically, trusting retirees, with a bit of disposable income, and a natural inclination to hate modernity and change—an inclination that could be heightened, radicalized, and exploited.

The grown-up Republicans in Washington, meanwhile, still existed in their own genteel bubble of misinformation—they convinced themselves that the occupation of Iraq would be over and done with in a few easy months—but the major figures in the Bush administration, and its allies in Congress, were not men who got the majority of their news from “Free Republic” and Alex Jones. They put their faith in a fairly traditional conservative orthodoxy: That you can use the levers of power to quietly enrich your friends and their firms, while pleasing the masses with some combination of tax cuts, loud proclamations of religiosity, and a modest, popular war or two.

But the complete and inarguable disaster of the Bush administration—a failure of the conservative movement itself, one undeniable even to many consumers of the parallel conservative media—and his abrupt replacement by a black man, caused a national nervous breakdown among the people who’d been told, for many years, that conservatism could not fail, and that all Real Americans agreed with them.

Rather rapidly, two things happened: First, Republicans realized they’d radicalized their base to a point where nothing they did in power could satisfy their most fervent constituents. Then—in a much more consequential development—a large portion of the Republican Congressional caucus became people who themselves consume garbage conservative media, and nothing else.

That, broadly, explains the dysfunction of the Obama era, post-Tea Party freakout. Congressional Republicans went from people who were able to turn their bullshit-hose on their constituents, in order to rile them up, to people who pointed it directly at themselves, mouths open.

Now, we have a president whose media diet defines his worldview, interests, and priorities. He is not one of the men, like most of those Tea Party members of Congress, whose existing worldview determined his media diet—who sealed himself off from disagreeable media sources. He is, in fact, something far more dangerous: a confused old man who believes what the TV tells him.
 
abelard said:
I think this is one of the more thoughtful answers so far:

The Long, Lucrative Right-wing Grift Is Blowing Up in the World's Face
http://fusion.kinja.com/the-long-lucrative-right-wing-grift-is-blowing-up-in-t-1793944216

Forgive me for indulging. This is just an excerpt:

For years, the conservative movement peddled one set of talking points to the rabble, while its elites consumed a more grounded and reality-based media. The rubes listened to talk radio, read right-wing blogs, watched Fox News. They were fed apocalyptic paranoia about threats to their liberty, racial hysteria about the generalized menace posed by various groups of brown people, and hysterical lies about the criminal misdeeds of various Democratic politicians. The people in charge, meanwhile, read The Wall Street Journal and The Weekly Standard, and they tended to have a better grasp of political reality, as when those sources deceived their readers, it was mostly unintentionally, with comforting fantasies about the efficacy of conservative policies. From the Reagan era through the Bush administration, the system seemed to be performing as designed.

But if this was a reasonably useful arrangement for Republicans, who won a couple close elections with the help of their army of riled-up kooks, it was a fantastic deal for the real engine of the right-wing propaganda machine: companies selling newly patented drugs designed to treat the various conditions of old age, authors of dubious investing newsletters, sellers of survival seeds, hawkers of poorly written conservative books, and a whole array of similar con artists and ethically compromised corporations and financial institutions. The original strategy behind demonizing the “mainstream media” may have purely political, to steer voters away from outlets that tended to present information damaging to the conservative cause, but the creation of the conservative media was also a revenue opportunity for shameless grifters from the very start, as Rick Perlstein showed in his classic Baffler piece on the snake oil-salesmen of the right.

The bottom-feeding amorality of the sorts of people who sponsored the right-wing press, and the crummy nature of the products and services sold, shows exactly who was supposed to be consuming it: suckers. Or, more specifically, trusting retirees, with a bit of disposable income, and a natural inclination to hate modernity and change—an inclination that could be heightened, radicalized, and exploited.

The grown-up Republicans in Washington, meanwhile, still existed in their own genteel bubble of misinformation—they convinced themselves that the occupation of Iraq would be over and done with in a few easy months—but the major figures in the Bush administration, and its allies in Congress, were not men who got the majority of their news from “Free Republic” and Alex Jones. They put their faith in a fairly traditional conservative orthodoxy: That you can use the levers of power to quietly enrich your friends and their firms, while pleasing the masses with some combination of tax cuts, loud proclamations of religiosity, and a modest, popular war or two.

But the complete and inarguable disaster of the Bush administration—a failure of the conservative movement itself, one undeniable even to many consumers of the parallel conservative media—and his abrupt replacement by a black man, caused a national nervous breakdown among the people who’d been told, for many years, that conservatism could not fail, and that all Real Americans agreed with them.

Rather rapidly, two things happened: First, Republicans realized they’d radicalized their base to a point where nothing they did in power could satisfy their most fervent constituents. Then—in a much more consequential development—a large portion of the Republican Congressional caucus became people who themselves consume garbage conservative media, and nothing else.

That, broadly, explains the dysfunction of the Obama era, post-Tea Party freakout. Congressional Republicans went from people who were able to turn their bullshit-hose on their constituents, in order to rile them up, to people who pointed it directly at themselves, mouths open.

Now, we have a president whose media diet defines his worldview, interests, and priorities. He is not one of the men, like most of those Tea Party members of Congress, whose existing worldview determined his media diet—who sealed himself off from disagreeable media sources. He is, in fact, something far more dangerous: a confused old man who believes what the TV tells him.
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I can't argue with much of this. Now conduct a similar examination of the left and its present appeal. There aren't many heroes here on either team.

That cold Civil War is heating up. DC is no longer the self-licking ice cream cone it was constructed to be, and it doesn't like it a bit. Many are confused, more are gobsmacked, and most are beginning to realize that the last twenty years has seen the worst political class in the USA since the 1850's. If your house was in order, we wouldn't have gotten Trump. Wouldn't you, like me, rather have had Scott Walker? Trump was pushed down our throats by CNN because they knew Hillary would beat him. Remember that? I thought they were right. Didn't you?

Don't discount the fact that outside the political bubble, the perception is that the economy and "things in general" are improving for the Trump voters. It'll never be printed in Post or the Times, but that perception is real.
 
mezzrow said:
Wouldn't you, like me, rather have had Scott Walker?
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I really wouldn't have, because he would have been much more likely to actually carry out the things that Trump's many personal failings have thus far mostly precluded.

Ironically, Trump's ineptitude is critical to the sense among Trump supporters that things are improving (though obviously, the illiberal bubble won't admit that at least in terms of the economic statistics we use to measure these things, this was apparent long before he arrived in the White House).

Had he actually managed to pass the health care bill, as Scott Walker might well have, this would decidedly not be the perception. People like Scott Walker and Paul Ryan have made it their life's mission to command the full power of the state to not just transfer wealth from rich to poor, but to take special care to humiliate the latter in the process. A uniquely American tradition of "libertarianism."

Between evil and stupid, I'll take my chances with stupid. At least that way you can get lucky some times.

Did you read the entire article? You should.

No doubt even more TL;DR, but if anyone wants to know more about Scott Walker, this is one place to start:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news...scott-walker-corporate-cash-american-politics
 
mezzrow said:
I can't argue with much of this. Now conduct a similar examination of the left and its present appeal. There aren't many heroes here on either team.
Click to expand...

There's an obvious, overwhelming qualitative difference.

Who among these:
gop17.png


had even a fraction of his integrity:
Screen-Shot-2015-10-19-at-9.23.01-AM-620x355.png
 
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