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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Fri Feb 23, 2018 5:42 am 
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Or his staff thought he did.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Sat Feb 24, 2018 9:07 pm 
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It's not like it would have occurred to him he needed to.

Meanwhile Mueller moves ever closer to Trump, the Democrats edge closer to closing the GOP out of real power in the upcoming decade by getting rid of their ability to gerrymander swing states, and mass murder is fairly openly greeted by the White House as a useful distraction from self inflicted bad press. Just another day in America.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Sun Feb 25, 2018 9:02 pm 
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Well, it does rather tell you what his staff thinks of him, doesn't it?

What a band of incompetent crooks Trump surrounded himself with. Manafort's undoing was his inability to figure out how to convert a PDF to a Word document and back again. He got Gates to do it for him, leaving an email trail of his forgery. I wonder what Gates has to say to Mueller?

Meanwhile, judging by their conference, the GOP has nearly finished jettisoning the less obnoxious members of its tent and is well on its way to being the American version of UKIP. One hopes this will make them broadly unelectable for a decade, but the Dems do have a way of screwing up.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Mon Feb 26, 2018 2:08 pm 
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Kea wrote:
Meanwhile, judging by their conference, the GOP has nearly finished jettisoning the less obnoxious members of its tent and is well on its way to being the American version of UKIP. One hopes this will make them broadly unelectable for a decade, but the Dems do have a way of screwing up.


If you take Italy as example, that likely does not work. In the early 90s (or probably the late 80s) Berlusconi rose as dubious star of the right. At the same time they also tinkered with their election system, to reduce the number of parties, which lead to a 2 big blocks scenario)

Over time all sorts of rightwingers, sane and otherwise, broke with Berlusconi and then joined the left block. The main effect was that the left block became a wider tent on an ideological level, but it did not seem to make much difference in elections.

What did make a difference though was the apearence of the M5S (or Grillini), that do anti establishment populism, but without a clear left or right orientation.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Mon Feb 26, 2018 10:42 pm 
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Yeah, that's what I'm worried about. Most people have opinions that are more fluid than their identity concept. It's less important to have consistent views than to be part of the conservative team, and so as the right wing echo chamber becomes more unhinged, many of them will follow along. Just gotta hope that it's not enough of them to win a lot of elections. But even if they lose, they'll likely hang onto enough seats to make themselves an enormous pain in the rear and continue the degradation of political institutions.

Imagine the future Republican opposition being five times as crazy as the Tea Party. The religious right seems to be fading in influence as they've finally lost the gay marriage debate, but have been replaced by a contingent of people whose animating principle is to be as obnoxiously bigoted as possible for the sake of being edgy, without the patina of religious sanctimony, but with a huge heaping of conspiracy theories. These folks have no interest in economic policy or health care or even facts, they just think that feminists and political correctness are the death of western civilization. That's going to be the Republicans for years to come.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Tue Feb 27, 2018 9:27 am 
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Someone found the other side of Trumps notes:

http://www.der-postillon.com/2018/02/spickzettel-trump.html

And at work we developed the ultimate solutions against school shooters.

Under each school there is a nuclear bomb and all teachers have a button to detonate it at their desks. If there is a school shooting they press the button. This will certainly take out the school shooter.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Wed Feb 28, 2018 5:29 am 
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Brilliant, Trump will love it.

So, this happened.

Apparently there's a Belarussian hooker in a Thai jail trying to trade dirt on Donald Trump's ties to Russian oligarchs in order to get out of jail and avoid being deported back to Russia...

This is also the second time the words "sex yacht" feature in a Donald Trump related scandal.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Wed Mar 07, 2018 10:21 am 
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Kea wrote:
One hopes this will make them broadly unelectable for a decade, but the Dems do have a way of screwing up.

You should spend some time on conservative sites, or read some of the conspiracy posts.The thing is, no matter how bad it gets for trump and the GOP, there are a number of spin machines and lie factories at work putting together a narrative that is largely impossible to counter. Any news or revelations of wrong doing by Tump can be written off as actions of the deep state, lies by the fake media with a liberal agenda or "not that big of a deal." School shootings are called hoaxes, protests are funded by Soros - and people buy this narrative.
It doesn't just taint politics - this goes as far as anti-vaccination movements, environmental efforts, and even trying to curb police violence.
I'm not saying all republicans believe in all of this - but they do believe in parts of it, and just enough to question if things are "really all that bad" and hold off on casting judgement.

So, in a world where facts are a thing up for debate - how do you have a conversation and bridge the gap between two worlds?

And to acknowledge one thing: There are equally populist liberals who are also ignoring facts, and railing against "compromise" or even having conversations on key issues. I'm not super popular in liberal groups because I tend to call Sanders a populist who knowingly spun lies and sowed division to build up a base.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Mon Mar 12, 2018 11:47 pm 
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Yeah, that's pretty much what conspiracy theories do. You can never reason your way out of one because any argument or fact against it just means you're part of the cover up. I think the only way is to deflate the emotional appeal of the conspiracy, but I have no idea how the Democrats could do that.

I mean, if you look at the UK, Tony Blair and Labour came to power in the late 1990s by moving to the center and taking up the middle ground. The UK Conservative Party moved right in response, and became the party of grumpy old xenophobic men. This made them rather unpopular for a decade. David Cameron pulled the Conservatives back to the middle and won the election in 2010 mostly because everyone was sick of Labour by then. But the xenophobic fringe didn't fade away, they kept moving right and voted for the UKIP, which got strong enough to jiu-jitsu Cameron into holding the Brexit vote. Which leaves us where we are today.

Even if Donald Trump loses in 2020, the paranoid right wing isn't going to disappear. I don't know how to get them to stop being so afraid when there's an entire industry that sells fear, and when what they're afraid of is being made irrelevant by demographic change.

I am sceptical that the Democrats could win by spinning left wing conspiracy theories; it seems unlikely for a group of people who take pride in empiricism. The group of left-wingers who'd buy into it seems too small.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Mon Mar 19, 2018 7:32 pm 
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Who knew getting fired by Trump two days before you're eligible for your pension was such a fantastic way to get a job on Capitol Hill?

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Tue Mar 20, 2018 2:19 am 
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I heard that a small gaggle of Dem congresscritters offered McCabe a job (or five), but has he accepted any of them?

Trump seems well on his way to firing everybody who would say "Actually let's not fire Mueller or bomb North Korea" to him.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Wed Mar 21, 2018 7:17 pm 
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Bomb Korea, maybe. Fire Mueller? It seems like he sorta-kinda knows doing that would make it all but impossible for the Republicans to hold the House unless they turn on him, and if they lose the House then he's screwed. Especially if they they then appoint Mueller an independent prosecutor; or just bring him, his staff, and probably the grand juries directly under House control. Since getting rid of Mueller would take much longer than a tweet, he'd have to stay in deepest denial for quite some time.

Besides, the grand juries would not go away; and furthermore it sounds like he can't conveniently replace Sessions without the Senate agreeing. The law regarding Presidents replacing cabinet secretaries with one of their peers specifically does not include replacing one who was fired. Odds are Justice Kennedy would regard that as good enough to say no, so the Supremes would shoot it down (any Senator would be entitled to request an emergency stay; he'd be directly usurping their Constitutional power).

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Thu Mar 22, 2018 12:25 am 
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All of that assumes Trump's capable of acting rationally, understanding consequences or absorbing any information besides "bla bla bla bla some stuffed suit says you can't bla bla bla". I have my doubts. Didn't he just hire a new lawyer whose chief qualification is that he's a deep state conspiracy theorist?

And what's to say that he won't fire Mueller after the midterms in the event that the Republicans hang onto a narrow House majority?


Last edited by Passiflora on Thu Mar 22, 2018 3:23 am, edited 1 time in total.
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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Thu Mar 22, 2018 2:27 am 
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Absolutely nothing.

The catch is that by that point the damage would be done. Mueller is moving too quickly and would certainly drop the boom by next November (one way or the other). And that assumes the bimbo eruptions haven't already done him in, the Feds/spooks don't destroy him, and that New York doesn't just seize the lion's share of his and his family's assets on the basis they're 'proceeds of a crime'. He's made an awful lot of powerful enemies that just aren't worried about his connections in the Russian mob, and six months is a long time for them to all be sitting on their hands.

edit: it seems Mueller has already pretty much finished his report on obstruction of justice (all that's supposed to be needed now is the interview with the suspect). Since getting rid of him would take rather longer than a tweet, if Trump comes for him he can simply release it before he's sacked. At that point the Republicans in Congress pretty much have to turn on Trump and his base or they'll get their collective butts handed to them by the large majority who aren't that come November.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Thu Mar 22, 2018 8:57 pm 
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I don't think we can really know what Mueller's schedule will be. He may hold off on the obstruction of justice report if he thinks he can also find enough evidence of actual Russian collusion - the crime as well as the coverup.

We also don't know if the Congressional Republicans would really ditch Trump. The base shrieking "witch hunt!" might cow the so-called moderates into doing nothing except making vague concerned noises. Nixon didn't lose his base until they found the actual tapes.

John effing Bolton is now National Security Adviser, so by November Trump will probably have started two more wars to distract from the Mueller probe.

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