Everything Is Great and Amazing

Mister Tee
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Re: Everything Is Great Again

Post by Mister Tee »

Sonic Youth wrote:
Mister Tee wrote: I can't imagine this administration lasting a full term.
2018 is now more important than ever.
I'm not sure things can come close to waiting that long (though obviously it would be better for our hopes, since it would possibly create President Pelosi). But things seem in major motion right now: there's a search warrant being executed, as I type this, at a GOP consulting firm. All the murmurs are that Trump firing Comey was like kicking a hornet's nest -- one that was ready to explode to begin with, but event have accelerated the timtable to a huge degree. The Twitter folk are WAY ahead of the TV crew (though even they are pretty much all-Comey-all-the-time right now). It may turn out they're too far ahead, but I can't help feeling the mainstream bunch is just relocating people from the third to the second floor at a time when the whole building is on fire.

Though even in basic cable-land, the emphasis is squarely on how obviously the "we had to do it because Rosenstein" story was a lie, one that now has Pence and everyone else looking like stooges. On another day, cable'd probably be covering Trump's interview with The Economist, where he claims to have come up with the phrase "prime the pump" just a few days ago, but that's tertiary news at best just now.

Magilla, again I'm not saying I know this is the case, but the Twitter brigade say Russian money was provided to/laundered through Republican campaign committees last summer, and that there are conversations caught on tape of Ryan acknowledging he knew about this. That's the rationale for President Hatch, third in the line of succession as President Pro Tem of the Senate. (Reince Preibus ad Mitch McConnell are also said to be implicated, but that's not germane to succession.)

By most accounts, multiple foreign monitoring services have picked up these conversations -- it apparently didn't occur to Republicans that contacts with foreign countries are routinely monitored worldwide. So, should Trump try something truly radical, like shutting down the investigation en masse, there would be multiple groups prepared to leak so much to the media that it would be impossible for the administration to continue, no matter how deeply Congressional Pubs tried to hide their heads in the sand.

Again, I don't know if/how much of this is true. But at the moment it's far more credible than the "nothing to see here" that's dominated coverage since Trump's inaugural.
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Sonic Youth
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Re: Everything Is Great Again

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Mister Tee wrote: I can't imagine this administration lasting a full term.
2018 is now more important than ever.
"What the hell?"
Win Butler
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Re: Everything Is Great Again

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Obviously firing Comey had nothing to do with his being mean to Hillary. The best moments of the last few days have been those where reporters lose their decorum and burst out laughing when the few remaining Trump apologists try to say otherwise.

They were reporting last night that Trump was so enraged at Comey during last week's testimony when he failed to support Trump's nonsense about Obama spying on him in Trump Tower. I think that's the genesis of his turning on Comey who until that point he didn't see as an enemy. Whether he's personally guilty of collaborating with the Russians I don't know, but how Flynn, Manafort and the others could conspire under his nose without his knowledge defies credulity.

I hadn't seen the Twitter predictions for a President Hatch, but I do hope that a Trump fall will take Pence with him and we'll at least get to a President Ryan, who like Gerald Ford, won't be elected in his own right, but how Ryan gets out of the equation and it falls to Hatch just seems like wishful thinking. In any case, I think we're stuck with most of Trump's horrible cabinet and his list of conservative judges ready for appointment to federal courts for the duration. More damage has already been done than be undone.
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Re: Everything Is Great Again

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I've been too glued to TV/web sites to react. I doubt I have much to say that we all aren't seeing/thinking, but a few observations:

If the Trumpenvolk truly didn't expect this to evoke a wildly negative reaction, they must be even dumber than I imagined. Had any of them even read about the Saturday Night Massacre, which this so obviously and immediately evoked? Even the farcically transparent "we're firing him because he was mean to Hillary" had its echo in Nixon's proposal that night to have Senator Eastland, a die-hard segregationist fascist, be the one to authenticate the tapes -- something so patently unacceptable that you wondered if the insult to intelligence was on purpose.

The '73 event was the galvanic moment of Watergate -- we'd already had John Dean and the revelation of the taping system, but, till that moment, many (including liberals) thought Nixon would never personally pay a price. The fact that he took such a drastic, unthinkable step was what pushed the majority over into believing he must be guilty. A similar thing here: I know some are thinking Trump did this just because he's arrogant or entitled...but I'd suspect this was his least-horrible move: that an investigation going further can only make him look way worse. (One way this is different from Watergate is that, back then, the widespread belief was "it's not the crime; it's the cover-up". Here, I'm pretty sure it's the crime, or more likely crimes.)

We still don't know if this thing will stretch as far as the Louise Mensch/Claude Taylor Twitter rebels think (they're saying "President Hatch"...just think how deep the rot has to go for that to come about). But the panic implied by this move suggests that's at least a possibility. (And, to be fair, Mensch and Taylor have had several stories they broke -- that were initially greeted with skepticism -- proven true, including the existence of grand juries that CNN reported on last night, weeks after initial reports.) The big thing is, this action won't halt the investigation; if anything, it's pushing it into overdrive -- getting it more support in Congress (even from a few sobered Republicans) and heavily motivating those agents still on the case. I said back in the winter that I thought Trump was deeply in trouble for having the CIA on his case. You add the FBI to that, and he's out-armed to a staggering degree.

I can't imagine this administration lasting a full term. The major question is how many people go down with them.
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Re: Everything Is Great Again

Post by Big Magilla »

It's too bad the Congress can't fire Trump with a letter.

This tomfoolery isn't fooling anybody. Trump loved what Comey did to Clinton. If he were upset over that, he would've fired him on day one. The real reason he fired him now was to throw a wedge into the investigation into the Russian connection, which should backfire, but will only if there are enough Republicans to support a special prosecutor. Otherwise it will be delay, delay, delay.
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Sonic Youth
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Re: Everything Is Great Again

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Sonic Youth wrote:
My frustration has nothing to do with the slowness of it all. (Actually, I think things are developing pretty swiftly, as these things go.) It's that for months every time there's a minor development, everyone's flipping out like Rachel Maddow with the tax returns.
Flipping out highly encouraged tonight.
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Re: Everything Is Great Again

Post by Greg »

In addition to everything else, Trump shows he also has a complete lack of gratitude.
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Re: Everything Is Great Again

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"Ooh, I don't know about that move," ~ Ghost of Nixon.

Then Ghost of Nixon realizes that he had to worry about a Democratic-controlled House and Senate and President Trump doesn't, says "Lucky bastard."

EDITED NOW THAT IMMEDIATE HYSTERIA HAS WORE OFF
Last edited by Sabin on Tue May 09, 2017 7:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Everything Is Great Again

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Breaking news! Trump has just fired FBI Director Comey! Stay tuned...
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Sonic Youth
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Re: Everything Is Great Again

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The Original BJ wrote:I think the most terrifying thing I read yesterday was a Tweet suggesting that the GOP is currently acting like a party that does not anticipate having free and fair elections ever again.
They're acting like they have no brains. This is backfiring spectacularly. There will be free and fair elections in 2018, and they will be beautiful. You see how the senate's in no hurry to do what the house just did?
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Re: Everything Is Great Again

Post by The Original BJ »

I think the most terrifying thing I read yesterday was a Tweet suggesting that the GOP is currently acting like a party that does not anticipate having free and fair elections ever again.
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Re: Everything Is Great Again

Post by Sabin »

I'm reading a lot of articles titled "Democrats confident about their ability to block Trump's legislation" and "Democrats confident about their chances in 2018."

In the past year, I've developed a fear of sentences that begin with the words "Democrats confident about..."
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Re: Everything Is Great Again

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I could have done without the singing. Still, better that than the fiddling all the Neros in the Republican party are doing.
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Re: Everything Is Great Again

Post by Sabin »

House Democrats started chanting "Na, na, na, na/Hey hey/Goodbye" as Republicans passed Repeal & Replacement.

Hope they're right.
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Re: Everything Is Great Again

Post by Big Magilla »

This one is right in Trump's backyard, the state where he's spent all his down time since becoming president.

It's in the same vein as ICE deporting mothers of young children including special needs kids, and now registered dreamers.

The ten-year-old autistic kid is obviously a handful, but the incident in which he kicked the teacher's aid because he or she frightened him occurred last November. He was suspended for six months. His mother was asked to bring him to his special needs school for testing so they would know where to place him when his suspension ends next month. The cops were waiting to arrest him on a felony warrant on a complaint filed by the school unbeknownst to the mother in November. He was hauled off in handcuffs, thinking his mother was part of the conspiracy.

First they came for the fathers, then the mothers, then the kids of the "illegals", now they're going for the less-than-perfect kids. It reeks of Nazi Germany.
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