President Trump makes himself an even BIGGER asshole

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Re: President Trump makes himself an even BIGGER asshole

Postby Absentia » Tue Aug 28, 2018 9:59 pm

Oh, well then. I'm sure it takes a heavy hand for Google to suppress the public's insatiable hunger for news about non-binding preliminary trade agreements.

His argument appears to come from a recent article published by some conservative "media watchdog" and promoted on Fox News. On the basis that all major outlets that aren't Fox News are liberal, they concluded (shockingly) that the overwhelming majority of search results about Trump come from liberals. Apparently the fact that Fox doesn't get equal time with the combined output of every other major news organization can only be because Google has their finger on the scale.
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Re: President Trump makes himself an even BIGGER asshole

Postby Crimson847 » Tue Aug 28, 2018 11:39 pm

Absentia wrote:Oh, well then. I'm sure it takes a heavy hand for Google to suppress the public's insatiable hunger for news about non-binding preliminary trade agreements.


Sure, when you call it what it actually is. But if you call it a replacement for NAFTA, you'd certainly get some people's attention in a positive way, and most of them aren't going to read further to find out they're being sold this. Which I'm guessing was what Trump was hoping for.

His argument appears to come from a recent article published by some conservative "media watchdog" and promoted on Fox News. On the basis that all major outlets that aren't Fox News are liberal, they concluded (shockingly) that the overwhelming majority of search results about Trump come from liberals. Apparently the fact that Fox doesn't get equal time with the combined output of every other major news organization can only be because Google has their finger on the scale.


Trump's Base, Election Day 2016: "It doesn't matter that most Americans voted against us; we won! Suck it losers! Real Americans won, NeverTrump pussies and Democrat thugs lost! USA! USA! USA!"

Today: "We can't think of any reasonable explanation why most Americans don't like us very much."
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"If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them; but the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Re: President Trump makes himself an even BIGGER asshole

Postby Crimson847 » Fri Aug 31, 2018 12:21 am

Trump just froze the pay of civilian federal employees (including law enforcement agencies like ICE and the Border Patrol), preventing them from getting a scheduled raise next year to accommodate inflation and cost of living. He says it's because of the government's "dire fiscal situation".

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/08/ ... ers-804574

I'm reminded of certain family members of mine, who spend thousands of dollars on fancy trips, furniture, or electronics, then force their kids to spend the next 3 months showering at friend's houses or the public pool to save a couple bucks on their water bill.
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"If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them; but the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Re: President Trump makes himself an even BIGGER asshole

Postby iMURDAu » Fri Aug 31, 2018 1:12 am

Just remember kids:

Chelsea Manning = "Traitor"

Reality Winner = Prison sentence is "so unfair" over leaking some "classified" information.

What did I miss? Didn't they both illegally leak government documents? Hasn't Trump gone on multiple rants about leaks and leakers?

Couldn't be political, nope, couldn't be.
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Re: President Trump makes himself an even BIGGER asshole

Postby Absentia » Tue Sep 04, 2018 6:11 pm

On the latest episode of Statements That Would Get Any Other Politician Removed From Office:



Yes, that is a sitting president openly suggesting that his political allies should not be prosecuted because it might cost his party seats in Congress.
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Re: President Trump makes himself an even BIGGER asshole

Postby Deathclaw_Puncher » Tue Sep 04, 2018 7:24 pm

What does Trump consider the biggest mistake of his presidency? Condemning the White Supremacists at Charlottesville.
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Re: President Trump makes himself an even BIGGER asshole

Postby Aquila89 » Tue Sep 04, 2018 9:02 pm

Absentia wrote:
Yes, that is a sitting president openly suggesting that his political allies should not be prosecuted because it might cost his party seats in Congress.


He doesn't even claim that the charges against Collins and Hunter are false. Or "Obama-era" already contains that in his vocabulary? Anyway, the investigation of Collins isn't "Obama-era" - the charge is that he took part in insider trading in 2017.
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Re: President Trump makes himself an even BIGGER asshole

Postby iMURDAu » Tue Sep 04, 2018 9:31 pm

Absentia wrote:Yes, that is a sitting president openly suggesting that his political allies should not be prosecuted because it might cost his party seats in Congress.


Only if you take it as sarcasm. He could have meant it seriously and been congratulating Mr. Sessions on a job well done. I mean, hey he's not a politician. He doesn't know what he's doing so all is forgiven, right?
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Re: President Trump makes himself an even BIGGER asshole

Postby Deathclaw_Puncher » Wed Sep 05, 2018 7:25 pm

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Re: President Trump makes himself an even BIGGER asshole

Postby iMURDAu » Wed Sep 05, 2018 9:19 pm

Dear Bob Woodward,

Learn how to say "It's me, Sean Hannity, put me through" when you call the White House. He's slick in avoiding talking to you but he'll fall for that every time.

Sincerely,

Me
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Re: President Trump makes himself an even BIGGER asshole

Postby Crimson847 » Thu Sep 06, 2018 4:10 am

Woodward is...going to be hard to discredit. This isn't like with Michael Wolff or Omarosa; Woodward is well known as a careful, by-the-book reporter. And he reportedly has hundreds of hours of tapes documenting everything in the book.



That doesn't mean anonymous sources couldn't have lied to him, as Fleischer notes, and some of the things in the book are supported by anonymous sources, like Mattis saying Trump is on the mental level of a fifth grader in a private meeting (which seems prima facie implausible from what I know about Mattis). Claims made on the record however, like staff stealing papers off Trump's desk to keep him from making fantastically dumb decisions, are going to be harder to just flat-out deny. Spin will have to be doctored, points will have to be made to talk, red herrings will need to be hatched, etc. Not a positive development for the Trump administration, especially now, as polling data is starting to indicate that Manafort's conviction and/or Cohen's testimony about Trump has put a genuine dent in his approval rating for the first time since February.
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"If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them; but the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Re: President Trump makes himself an even BIGGER asshole

Postby IamNotCreepy » Thu Sep 06, 2018 1:52 pm

The "failing" New York Times published a damning Op-Ed from an anonymous, high-level member of the Trump administration.

The Times has purportedly vetted the identity of writer, who is staying anonymous to protect their job. And for good reason, because the Op-Ed basically confirms the worst parts of the Woodward book.
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Re: President Trump makes himself an even BIGGER asshole

Postby iMURDAu » Thu Sep 06, 2018 9:46 pm

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Re: President Trump makes himself an even BIGGER asshole

Postby blehblah » Fri Sep 07, 2018 1:11 am

On that editorial:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/new-york- ... -1.4812706

Trump Tweet wrote:Does the so-called “Senior Administration Official” really exist, or is it just the Failing New York Times with another phony source? If the GUTLESS anonymous person does indeed exist, the Times must, for National Security purposes, turn him/her over to government at once!


Donald, it's someone you hired... you know, like Omarosa, Flynn, Manafort, Sessions, or your daughter and her husband - 'the best' people, as I've heard. As for national security purposes, are those the same purposes for which you are imposing tariffs on stuff from Canada?

Image
While I'm not national, I am a secured porpoise.


CBC wrote:The mystery writer has sparked wild speculation, similar to the frenzy to learn the identity of Woodward and Carl Bernstein's mysterious Watergate source, Deep Throat, who was later to be revealed to be FBI associate director Mark Felt.

Trump himself, according the Post, thinks the anonymous official works on national security issues or in the Justice Department.

Social media has been flooded with theories and counter-theories as to the author's identity, with speculation ranging from Vice-President Mike Pence, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and White House counsellor Kellyanne Conway, to Trump's own daughter, Ivanka, or his wife, Melania.

Political observers have become amateur forensic linguists, as they pore over any possible stylistic clues in the piece that might give away the author's identity.


And from Sanders,

CBC wrote:White House press secretary Sarah Sanders had her own advice "for those of you asking for the identity of the anonymous coward." Sanders tweeted that the media's "wild obsession" with the identity is "recklessly tarnishing" the reputation of thousands of "great Americans."

"If you want to know who this gutless loser is, call the opinion desk of the failing NYT."


I'm not a PR expert, but I can't help but to think that having the White House press secretary respond to reports about an op-ed is kind-of the opposite of failing.

Whatever - I just hope they catch that gutless John Barron loser before he goes and spouts-off about Trump again.

I've said too much...
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Re: President Trump makes himself an even BIGGER asshole

Postby Crimson847 » Fri Sep 07, 2018 6:03 am

The commentariat largely seems to agree with David Frum that publishing that op-ed will mainly serve to confirm Trump's fears of a "deep state" conspiracy against him and compromise efforts to rein him in. If your strategy for preventing him from signing bad orders is to engage in distraction tactics like stealing them off his desk until he forgets about the issue and moves on, telling him about that strategy seems like an astoundingly bad idea.

[W]hat the author has just done is throw the government of the United States into even more dangerous turmoil. He or she has enflamed the paranoia of the president and empowered the president’s willfulness.

What happens the next time a staffer seeks to dissuade the president from, say, purging the Justice Department to shut down Robert Mueller’s investigation? The author of the Times op-ed has explicitly told the president that those who offer such advice do not have the president’s best interests at heart and are, in fact, actively subverting his best interests as he understands them on behalf of ideas of their own.

He’ll grow more defiant, more reckless, more anti-constitutional, and more dangerous.

And those who do not quit or are not fired in the next few days will have to work even more assiduously to prove themselves loyal, obedient, and on the team. Things will be worse after this article. They will be worse because of this article.


However, there's some debate over the ethics of the internal "resistance" itself. Frum argues that it's not the role of unelected officials to engage in a "soft coup" by intentionally defying the president's policy agenda. In his view, if administration officials believe the president is unfit then it's their responsibility to use constitutional measures (e.g. invoking the 25th Amendment or resigning and testifying to Congress) to try to remove him, not to use extraconstitutional measures to prevent him from exercising the legitimate powers of the office in the service of unwanted policy goals.

That seems to be the popular position, but some dissenters like Rich Lowry note that Trump himself obviously reconsidered the wisdom of these actions at some point given that he didn't persist for long in attempting them, so they contend that what these officials are really doing is not so much active defiance as waiting out his bad moods in order to better pursue his "true" goals, like a friend hiding your phone when you try to drunk-dial your ex so you won't make a mistake you'll regret in the morning.

Obviously, this isn’t now how our system is supposed to work, and I think the op-ed is dishonorable, as I noted below. But is shambolic government really a threat to the constitutional order? None of the members of the so-called internal resistance are, as far as we know, actively defying presidential orders or actively attempting to depose the president (trying to invoke the 25th Amendment would be such an attempt, but it is a conditional mechanism). What the resisters are doing is operating within the seams of the president’s inattention, changing moods, bar-stool musing, and shaky grasp of policy to keep him from making what they consider mistakes.

But if, to take an example we already knew about months ago, if Trump really wanted Don McGahn to fire Robert Mueller, he could have fired him for not doing it and then found someone to do the deed. McGahn probably thought Trump wasn’t very serious about it, or not serious enough to go through the exertions of making it happen, and he was right. Or, to take an example from Woodward’s book, if Trump really wanted to kill Assad, he could have directly ordered his military to do it and, if Mattis refused, fired him and readily found someone to carry out the order. Trump apparently wasn’t serious enough about this to make it happen, either. Did McGahn or Mattis subvert the president by not acting on what they surely believed to be ill-considered whims, or serve him faithfully by waiting him out and not taking a fraught course with potentially disastrous downsides?
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"If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them; but the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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