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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Thu Jul 26, 2018 11:55 pm 
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That's quite clever then - the EU has promised the US things that it was going to do anyway, to make Trump think he's won something. His negotiators can't be stupid enough to be fooled by that, but I suppose they don't really want a trade war and are looking for some kind of victory they can report to the boss.

Now let's just see if Trump can shut down Rosenstein and the Mueller investigation before Cohen manages to blab everything.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Fri Jul 27, 2018 3:22 pm 
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Apparently Cohen is ready to flip, and testify that Trump was in personally on the planning for the Russia meeting: https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/26/politics ... index.html

Dominoes...

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Sat Jul 28, 2018 8:31 pm 
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Apparently Trump has rediscovered how to lose a civil war; he wants the American backed Afghans to pull back from everywhere but the population centers, ceding it all to the Taliban. How creative.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Mon Jul 30, 2018 1:31 am 
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kitoba wrote:
Apparently Cohen is ready to flip, and testify that Trump was in personally on the planning for the Russia meeting: https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/26/politics ... index.html

Dominoes...


Unfortunately, that was not on one of the tapes Cohen has, so Mueller's going to need a corroborating witness. Let's see who the hammer falls on next.

Giulani's spinning like a top and the Republicans have already got their fingers in their ears going "Nahnahnah I can't hear you, anyway Hillary was worse!" Because purchasing opposition research from a British security consultant is exactly as bad as soliciting help from an adversarial foreign government to hack your election opponent's servers. Yep, nothing to see here, Hillary did it first. Just like they did with Nixon right up until he resigned.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Fri Aug 24, 2018 3:22 pm 
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TrumpCo's CFO is apparently cooperating with team Mueller. There are probably literally hundreds of felonies under New York, New Jersey, Florida, and US law that he could establish Trump committed, every single one of which happened before he became president (so executive privilege doesn't even come up). This might be fun.

And let's take the inevitable Pecker puns as read, shall we?

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Mon Aug 27, 2018 9:44 am 
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So, dominoes are falling.

It's a unique political situation right now. The Dems (probably) want to impeach, but they don't want to breathe a word about it until after the elections, because they feel, probably rightly, that the current situation gives them the most juice going into November.

The Republicans (officially) don't want to impeach, but are talking it up, because they think the threat of it might inspire Trump's minions to rise up and vote defensively.

Of course, there are probably Dems --Pelosi, maybe --who are secretly content having a monster in office to run against. And probably plenty of GOP who secretly are rooting for impeachment, but can't admit to it.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Mon Aug 27, 2018 2:14 pm 
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There is a small but non-zero possibility that the dominoes may fall in the opposite direction. They will confirm Brett "Presidents are Unindictable" Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Red States are working overtime to close polling stations in black neighborhoods and purge people with ethnic sounding names from voter rolls. And if by some chance the Republicans hang on to the House by a hair in November, they will probably find a reason to stare quietly at their shoes when Trump fires Sessions and/or Rosenstein. Technically he won't have fired Mueller, so *shrug*.

These guys, they're all Dr. Schlock. Bunch of backstabbing cowards. We just have to hope they their drive for self-preservation motivates them to stab in the right direction.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Mon Aug 27, 2018 10:00 pm 
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Kea wrote:
There is a small but non-zero possibility that the dominoes may fall in the opposite direction.


Yes, we could definitely be looking at the end of the American democracy. We'll know one way or another after the November elections. If the Dems don't take the House AND then go on to successfully impeach AND remove, it's game over.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Mon Aug 27, 2018 10:58 pm 
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Game over how? Do you think Trump is worse than everything else in American history so far? Somehow democracy has survived a civil war, two world wars, blatant suppression of minorities' rights, actual killings of protesters, and obvious corruption. What makes it even more dire now?

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Tue Aug 28, 2018 12:23 pm 
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If the GOP maintains or gains in its numbers in November, it means the effective majority of the country, one of the two major parties, its legislative branch and a key segment of the national media are all endorsing authoritarianism, open corruption, blatant racism, effective infiltration by a hostile nation (Russia) and the ongoing dismantling of democratic institutions, in the full knowledge of what is going on. It also means Trumpism is "working" for its constituency, at least in their views.

Therefore, in that eventuality, there is nothing, post-election, to stop the move towards an racist, nativist, corrupt, compromised authoritarian government (and those are anything but rare in the world, and in history). It doesn't matter at that point what comes out in the Mueller investigation, or so forth. Because we already know everything crucial now. If we don't stop this in November, we will never stop it. The situation is about as stark as it could possibly be. The only thing that can change, outside of the election, is in the direction of Trump consolidating his power. And then, after a certain point, Trump becomes irrelevant. He'll have proven the concept, someone else --someone more competent --will take advantage of it.

Keep in mind, post-slavery America is only 150 years old, and post-civil-rights-movement America is only 50 years old. The "America" whose survival we're hoping for is very young and deceptively fragile.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Wed Aug 29, 2018 1:51 pm 
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I am not really sure in how much danger US democracy is.

With the exception of the civil war, have there been episodes, where there was so much polarisation? As bad as the marginalisation of minorities is, trying to silence a 40 to 60% block is a lot more dangerous to democracy.

Have there been episodes where there was no real real room for growth, but effectivly you had to manage a cake that stays the same or grows smaller? (The latter would be my analysis of the western world nowerdays)

I agree that a republican victory this year would set a very bad precedent. I am not sure if an impeachment or an electoral defeat 2020, would be better in the long run.

On the one hand i like to see Trump style characters to hit institutional brick walls, on the other hand an electoral defeat would require more cognitive dissonance for backstab legends.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Thu Aug 30, 2018 1:46 am 
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I'll defer to others with a more thorough knowledge of American history, but the US has seen periods of extreme income inequality in the early 1900s. It's seen serious political divisions over the Vietnam War. It's seen straight up electoral fraud - at least a couple of presidents won by cheating. I'm just not sure that all of those things have ever happened at the same time.

The thing that really scares me about Trump is that he's given around 40% of the country the permission to live in an alternate reality. One in which education is worthless, science is fraudulent, any unfavourable news is fake, the greatest threat is the liberal deep state, the Clintons are the worst criminals who ever lived, immigrant crime is simultaneously rampant and being covered up, Barack Obama is a secret Muslim terrorist, Christians are oppressed by politically correct university students and transgender boogeypersons lurk in every public toilet.

Like they say in Assassin's Creed, nothing is true, everything is permitted. You can't believe anything so you might as well believe whatever makes you feel better. It feels like we're going back to the Middle Ages, only with Twitter, so that the stupidity can spread faster. The GOP started going in this direction long before Trump (remember the Bush staffer complaining about "the reality-based community" refusing to get on board with the Iraq war?) Trump has taken it to a whole new level. That's what I'm not sure that democracy can survive.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Thu Aug 30, 2018 9:39 am 
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What makes this situation dangerous is that nearly all the protections set up to protect the American democracy against the advent of a tyrant have failed. This coming election is effectively the last one. You might look to 2020, but if people don't effectively vote against Trump this year, they won't in that year either.

Kea wrote:
The thing that really scares me about Trump is that he's given around 40% of the country the permission to live in an alternate reality. One in which education is worthless, science is fraudulent, any unfavourable news is fake, the greatest threat is the liberal deep state, the Clintons are the worst criminals who ever lived, immigrant crime is simultaneously rampant and being covered up, Barack Obama is a secret Muslim terrorist, Christians are oppressed by politically correct university students and transgender boogeypersons lurk in every public toilet.


That alternate reality has existed for quite a while, Trump has merely exploited it. In a way, you could say it gave birth to him --it's his home dimension.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Thu Aug 30, 2018 12:05 pm 
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I'm just not convinced that it's that apocalyptic, now or never. I think America could still climb out of the hole, slowly and with difficulty. It has to be a long slog regardless of how things go this November.

Things feel really dramatic now because Trump is such an obvious trash panda in personality, but he's just the pimple on the grease bag. Remember Bush started an actual war under false pretences and the intelligence agencies and Congress rolled over and let him do it. It's already been really bad.

We are dealing with the fallout of that war today. The Middle East might not have imploded without it. We wouldn't have the Syrian refugee crisis. And without the refugee crisis, we wouldn't have Europe and the US simultaneously having a xenophobic fit.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Thu Sep 27, 2018 11:36 am 
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Trump nominated someone who's a violent drunk with a penchant for attacking women to the Supreme Court because he hates laws regulating businesses and presidents. Actually, both of them do. Unfortunately, his little hobby comes out before his confirmation can be rammed through. For way too many Republicans it's a feature rather than a bug; but they're nothing like an electing majority of the likely voting public.

So, a damage control dog-and-pony show is staged today. On the one hand, the GOP continues to do its best to push white suburban women into holding their nose and voting for someone else if they don't repudiate this clown (which may well cost them both houses of Congress). On the other hand, if they don't double down on the obvious misogyny and corruption, the donor class has let it be known they'll stop writing checks.

Of course, even Supreme Court judges can be arrested, tried, and if convicted then imprisoned for felonies committed on their own time; which will effectively (if not de jure) remove them from the Court again. And now that there's been an accusation of rape taking place in Maryland, the state authorities pretty much have to investigate because there's no statute of limitations on rape in (largely Democratic) Maryland. So they could pay the political price for seating him, and still not get the corruption on the bench they were bargaining for.

What to do, what to do...

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