The Trump Presidency

[Oystein]

 

[Oystein]

 

[joepistole]

Suddenly, a lot of Russian officials and Trump associates are dying of sudden heart attacks. That's rather strange since some of them are suspected of being involved in Russia's hacking and other efforts to subvert the US elections. It is also known Putin has arrested some of his IT folks for conspiring with the US. They may be dead now too. Is Putin doing a bit of house cleaning...trying to clear his tracks?

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...ael-flynn-donald-trump-vladimir-a7612866.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/20/world/europe/churkin-russia-ambassador-un-death.html?_r=0

http://www.gq.com/story/russia-diplomat-deaths

 

[spidergoat]

I'm sure it's just a coincidence.

 

[joepistole]

As if it wasn't obvious before, now it's official. Trump's national security adviser was and remains a foreign agent. Trump the Savvy wasn't so savvy. Trump claims to have had no knowledge Flynn was and remains a foreign agent.

http://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/10/white-house-trump-unaware-of-flynns-foreign-agent-work.html

 

[Oystein]

A look back at the 16 clowns that were running for the GOP nomination, it's no wonder we end up with this craphead.

 

[arfa brane]

On Wall Street my friend said "I'll have to see yo' later,
Right now I gotta go and step on the accel-e-rator".

If you read the news today, oh boy, I bet you're thinkin',
Where did he get that hair, and what's he been drinkin?

Heard he had a story 'bout how someone tapped his phones,
Pass me a bottle, Mr Jones.

 

[Michael]

This sums up the type of person Trump is:

 

[Michael]

This sums up your typical Republican (minus Ben Carson of course):

 

[Michael]

This sums up your typical Democrat:

 

[Michael]

With that, you can figure out the type of POTUS Trump is.

 

[iceaura]

This sums up your typical Democrat:

Are you sure Colbert is a Democrat?

 

[Tiassa]

#antiAmerican | #WhatTheyVotedFor​

​

This sums up your typical Democrat:

I disagree; not all Democrats are good at satire.

Still, though, your typical Republican?

"I heard 'Lock her up, lock her up,' and we still need to pursue that," announced Arizona Rep. Anthony Kern; a nod to a prominent Trump campaign promise to imprison then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

"If you don't like it here, go to Syria, go to someplace else," one attendee shouted.

"I don't want 'em, as a veteran I don't want 'em, let 'em go back home," another seconded. "If they've got a problem, let Saudi Arabia take care of 'em."

Some even dared to tell Dan Cohen of the Real News Network how they'd make America great again now that Trump is in office. And Muslims weren't the only religious minority unwelcomed.

"If she's Jewish, she should go back to her country," a 13-year-old Trump supporter said of a protester.

"This is America, we don't want Sharia law," one attendee explained. "Christian country," he added.

One man insisted that Senator John McCain was a "secret communist."

"I think there's a lot there," another said of Pizzagate, a deranged right-wing conspiracy theory claiming that Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta ran a child prostitution ring out of a Washington, D.C. pizzeria. "Definitely enough to warrant an investigation."

The day's proceedings would grow uglier still.

"I just want to let them know that I can't wait for the liberal genocide to begin," an Oath Keeper shouted at a small group of protesters.

"That's the way to make America great again," he later told Cohen. "Liberals are destroying the country."

(Rosenmann↱)​

Yeah, they're pretty sick.
____________________

Notes:

Rosenmann, Alexandra. "Trump Supporters Call For 'Liberal Genocide' and Deportation of Jews at Arizona Rally". AlterNet. 9 March 2017. AlterNet.org. 11 March 2017. http://bit.ly/2mud5Th

 

[Oystein]

I never thought I would say this but "yes, yes I do."

 

[Tiassa]

I never thought I would say this but "yes, yes I do."

This is one of those occasions when I wonder about the standard. To the one, yeah, it makes a cutesy, predictable joke. To the other, the idea of looking fondly back at prior conservative malfeasance against the nation would seem to suggest tumbling standards when the question pertains to Republicans.

My Republican neighbors need to answer for why they keep doing this stuff to society. These are not accidents; they commit willful malice against the nation and its people.

 

[Oystein]

These are not accidents; they commit willful malice against the nation and its people.

Generally speaking, I think Repubs are more heartless than Dems.

 

[Schmelzer]

I would say Trump is an ideal president of the US. He discredits his supporters by his own behavior, his enemies discredit themselves by the methods they use to fight Trump, and as long as they fight each other they have no time to start wars elsewhere. Which is all what the world wants from America.

After Trump, there is no longer such an animal as moral leadership of America. It has always been only pretense. But after Trump it makes no longer sense to pretend, because nobody will believe, neither inside the US, nor outside.

 

[Tiassa]

Generally speaking, I think Repubs are more heartless than Dems.

I wouldn't disagree; historically the difference 'twixt conservatism and liberalism in the human politic has to do with the range of people entitled to the benefits of civilized society. Republicans being our society's "conservative" voice, as such, argue as conservatives always have, in such a manner as to encourage consolidation of benefit to privileged class. They will, in any basic consideration, appear more cruel and heartless than a similarly distilled assessment of Democrats and liberalism. However, nothing is ever so pure; market dynamics make a mess, and at the end of the day it starts to seem enough if the Democrats, in doing their job, simply don't make things worse. We would all like things to get better, but what happens to the mean when we constrict one contributor to the average but not the other?

Take health care: In a pure consideration of liberal and conservative, the dispute would see universal single-payer from the liberal and whatever market-driven moneygoround and upward transfers of wealth conservatives might devise. In our American marketplace of ideas, however, the dispute is presently between a conservative idea that was supposed to be the compromise point, to the one, and American forfeiture of civilized society, to the other.

And, sure, there is a lot of corruption and stupidity going on, but we Americans did this to ourselves by continually compromising civilized society in order to celebrate our incivility. It's been there since the beginning, and maybe that was the problem with having a bunch of Congressional elitists establish our independence. Maybe the people only rallied for the lulz, y'know? Like, to give England the finger and all. Because, honestly, we've spent the next two hundred forty years trying to back out of the deal we made with ourselves.

So there must be a compromise point. After all, we can't be so absolutist, right? Thus, between fulfilling our guarantees and not, the compromise point automatically becomes failing to fulfill our promises; the guarantee becomes, in that moment, that we will not uphold the deal we made with ourselves.

Which, of course, invokes the question of why we've bothered trying to inflict it on the world, but, you know, maybe that was all for the lulz, too.

I also happen to attend a thesis having to do with the relationship 'twixt individual and collective. The liberal expression is considerably more complicated, but the popular conservative criticism about state subjugation of individuals akin to Camazotz is the one thing it isn't. The conservative expression is pretty simplistic, in general, that acknowledgment of civilized society is a matter of individual benefit, which in turn creates an impossible demand of American society, for instance, existing explicitly for the sake of a given individual, and then repeat three hundred some million times; we should also note that it is the conservative agenda verging toward Camazotz, pushing toward uniformity.°

It is interesting, as the conservative agenda starts pushing toward its American Nihil, watching Republican elected officials hesitate. They even tried the whole Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy thing, hiding their plans in a secret basement room. They're caught between generations worth of promises and what they know will happen if they fulfill those terms.

I remember my youth, and disputes with my father, who was a Reagan Republican. The idea that things could come to this? Absurd. And saying Republican and conservative policies could what? Oh, God, how insulting! That's why nobody listens to liberals, you know, because we're always so insulting ans unrealistic. Except thirty years later, here we are.

And it's been pretty blatant the last ten years or so. I mean, you know, if it wasn't flaming letters on the mountainside blatant already.

I don't know how comfortable Democrats would be apologizing for the inconvenience. Republicans, to the other, would spend weeks publicly calling for the flaming leaders to read, "Fuck you!" instead, finally back down after spending weeks running from their own constituents while trying to deliberately misrepresent those constituents, eventually settling on apologizing for the inconvenience but never actually starting the work of building the sign because there's no way they're apologizing for anything and how dare you even imply that they ever thought about saying, "Fuck you!" because everybody knows that's just a dirty feminist-liberal-nazi conspiracy theory.

And American voters? For the longest time they've been alright with this; we keep doing stupid shit to ourselves, over and over and over again.

And we really do need to think some in terms of the unthinkable°°. We have already recited too many ridiculous notions, not even six weeks into the Trump presidency.
____________________

Notes:

° What is supremacism, if not a demand for homogeneity? To the other, we might note that such supremacism need not be part of the individualist agenda; it exists and expresses as it does because this is what is important to the conservative advocates. Liberals continue to hope, often abstractly and even abjectly, that the presence of supremacism in the American conservative experience is in fact temporal and symptomatic, and therefore not intrinsic or essential. And that part seems fair; many conservatives resent being identified by others as being supremacist, but that's the thing, it's hard to believe people who turn around and vote for it, anyway, while giving the excuse that it's an unfortunate price of an otherwise essential platform that, well, doesn't work. Like trickle-down, for instance. Or, as we saw in Kentucky, in two statewide election results in a row, they voted for the candidate who was openly opposed to the "conservative idea that was supposed to be the compromise point" in health care policy, and then freaked out about what might happen to their health insurance. Well, okay, why vote against their own interest that way? Why did Kentucky Republicans vote against what was once upon a time the Republican plan? Because in both elections they were voting for supremacism.


°° cf., #3455374/63↗:

It's a difficult juxtaposition, but when all is said and done, people will tell of a dear friend of mine how it was inevitable. Before she was ever an addict, or a derelict parent, or even just the wrong partner in the wrong relationship with the wrong other person―which she would probably say is the story of her life, even including her parents―there seems to have been a simple question not so much of entitlement, but trust: If you love me, the proposition goes, how will you prove it to me?

This is, of course, hardly a unique phenomenon. And that's actually my point in raising the consideration.

There are myriad forms, but we all know the phenomenon; we all probably have our own versions buried somewhere in our consciences. It's a constant demand, as if you cannot avoid conflicts with certain people in which your role is not to fight back against their abuse, but reassure them and lovingly prove to them why they are wrong by accommodating impossible needs. If they ask you to die for them, and you do, tomorrow they will denounce you for abandoning them.

In our society we set lofty ideals, and then spend the rest of our lives making excuses for why fulfilling those aspirations is the last thing in the world we should be trying to do because, damn it, there are just so many more things that are just that much more important going on. It seems almost inevitable that we would experience existential doubt. Having gone three generations without resolving the problem―furthermore, not only refusing to address it but actively disdaining and assailing efforts to seek solutions―it seems almost inevitable that the fundamental tension between our own idea of virtue and the fact of our wallowing in sin would demonstrate some observable effect.

And this is what has come of our determination to torture ourselves and each other. Americans have long believed ourselves so fucking virtuous, yet our heritage is filthy with violence and exploitation and hatred. Over time we have learned we can't lower our standards enough to alleviate the neurotic tension because we all know we're lowering our damn standards.

And now approximately half the country―not just some few bad seeds―appear to be at the very least nigh on full neurotic rupture. As much as a third, it seems, are already tumbling battered about in the chaotic winds of the breach; and, yes, that is a shocking possibility, but we just got another one-third result exhibiting identity supremacism, and it would seem the real clash of cultures with absurd mortal potential is verging inside these United States of America.

It is entirely possible that we are in the process of identifying and recognizing an American bloc that would see the Republic collapse in order to accommodate them. I mean, I'm sorry, but we just cannot give them certain policies, and that's the way it goes, and if everything comes apart because they won't let things keep going unless they get every last thing they want, the rest is entirely up to them.​

 

[iceaura]

I would say Trump is an ideal president of the US. He discredits his supporters by his own behavior, his enemies discredit themselves by the methods they use to fight Trump, and as long as they fight each other they have no time to start wars elsewhere.

Living and learning about fascism.

Fascists make time to start wars - it's not a leisure time pursuit, for them. Look at Putin and Ukraine.

 

[Schmelzer]

The national mass media was the only source of political support Donald Trump had, prior to his gaining the Republican nomination and some grudging support from some - not all - of the Republican Party "establishment". It was by far his major source of support afterwards, as well.

The problem is not that some media supported Trump, but which type of media. His power base were not the classical mass media, but, instead, the internet, around Breitbart.

See https://www.washingtonpost.com/life...-0449pm:homepage/story&utm_term=.949c105c30a0

A major new study, published in Columbia Journalism Review, detailed just how influential the new media ecosystem has become, calling it a determining factor in Trump’s election.

“A right-wing media network anchored around Breitbart developed as a distinct and insulated media system, using social media as a backbone to transmit a hyperpartisan perspective to the world,”

At the same time, the classical mass media are mainly controlled by the Democrats.

Mainstream newsrooms were once much more ideologically diverse, said Tom Rosenstiel, executive director of the American Press Institute.

“The best data out there shows that there are fewer Republicans working in traditional newsrooms and news generally than there used to be,” he told me.

As right-wing media sprang up over the past few decades, reporters and editors with more conservative beliefs migrated there. That left mainstream newsrooms with a high percentage of people identifying themselves as independent, a fair number of Democrats — and relatively few Republicans.