US Politics November 2017

Thank her, corrupt ass.

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/11/23/us/politics/flynn-mueller-russia-trump.amp.html

flynn’s legal team has notified trump’s that they can no longer share information, likely indicating they’re at least now discussing cooperation with mueller

Conspicuously timed thanksgiving announcement

Seth Abrams has thoughts:

(THREAD) Here's a brief itemization of the factual errors in the New York Times' breaking news story, below, about Michael Flynn possibly having signed a cooperation deal with Bob Mueller. The errors are inexplicable, and it's important they be called out. https://t.co/KYQvl4gFpP

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) November 24, 2017

Bah, sorry for autocorrect.

Useful thread, crank or not. Especially the implication that if Flynn takes a deal then clearly he is not the primary target, which means Trump and high level associates likely formally in the cross hairs.

I am not sure you can assume that when he is alleged to have been bribed by a key strategic ally, tbh. There might be plenty of people worried about the implications for Turkey / US relations, which are already strained, if this went to a full trial. Will be interesting to see either way.

New Yorker fact checker chimes in

no buddy i just think you're a hack https://t.co/MqbKLEz0ui

— Talia Lavin (@chick_in_kiev) November 24, 2017

i don't know much about abramson, but why does he keep calling her a "fact-checker" and implying that she actually isn't one? granted, i'm not an "investigator" like he is but she has the little blue checkmark by her name and says she's a fact checker for the new yorker and so i guess i just blindly believe that it's true. sometimes i'm sheeple, i guess

his responses sound similar to the guy who was selling bootleg Miami Dolphins jerseys insisting his jerseys were real and that anybody who knew jerseys would never call them fake

circular reasoning, unimpressive appeals to authority, etc

he doubled down and then tripled and quadrupled down on his idea that she's not a fact-checker, and then started a countdown clock to blocking her. what a complete dipshit. occasionally his name pops up here and elsewhere as some sort of authority on trump and russia but based off of this single thread i wouldn't trust him with my laundry

he also had the one kneejerk cult follower who then joined the fray to attack the NYT factchecker.

BINGO!

it's such a silly micro-scandal, but just for closure on this, know that seth abramson just blocked the fact checker and then deleted all of his tweets in the exchange

he's a nut, right? like mensch?

yes, please stop posting him here.

My apologies - posts to ILX don’t constitute approval etc.

he's a nut, right? like mensch?

tbf this is a tough bar to clear

Leandra English

A statement by the President: pic.twitter.com/kv001qqPcT

— Real Press Sec. (@RealPressSecBot) November 24, 2017

uh, go ahead and name him man of the year and then use the article to take a shit all over him imo.

Colin Kaepernick, then?

(as POTY - that was not in any way a response to KM's post above)

Meanwhile, the crisis at State Department worsens.

I didn't know this!

Mrs. Clinton and John Kerry, her successor, were both seen as focused on their own priorities and were not particularly popular within the department. The model secretaries in recent history have been Colin Powell, James A. Baker III and George P. Shultz, Republicans who cared about management.

One interesting detail in our look at Sessions tenure so far pic.twitter.com/64Wol3AGCq

— Matt Zapotosky (@mattzap) November 24, 2017

I guess it wouldn't help to point out that the area from which Sessions's family traces its lineage is pretty fucking famous for taking up arms against the United States of America. It's pretty much their jam.

Where’s that piece of shit Tillerson from? Oh right, fucking Texas.

Whether they thought Hillary was a careerist schmuck or not, they still lined the hallways and cheered when she took the job in 2009. Because it meant being allowed to do their job again. Ref: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/01/22/hillary.clinton.labott/index.html

I, uh, strongly doubt that Colin Powell is remembered that fondly.

from which country does their family trace its lineage?”

the woke racist, by j sessions

I mean that line Alfred quoted is such a piece of tossed-off typical NYT bothsides daddy-knows-best bullshit - yeah, guys who lie at the UN and abet torture are really popular for their management style. Fuck you.

NYT:

Something deeper has been consuming Mr. Trump. He sees the calls for Mr. Moore to step aside as a version of the response to the now-famous “Access Hollywood” tape, in which he boasted about grabbing women’s genitalia, and the flood of groping accusations against him that followed soon after. He suggested to a senator earlier this year that it was not authentic, and repeated that claim to an adviser more recently. (In the hours after it was revealed in October 2016, Mr. Trump acknowledged that the voice was his, and he apologized.)

So Mr. Trump has been particularly open to the idea, pushed by Mr. Moore’s defenders, that the candidate is being wrongly accused, even as Mr. McConnell and a parade of other Republicans have said they believe the accusers. When a group of senators gathered with the president in the White House last week to discuss the tax overhaul, it took little to get Mr. Trump onto the topic of Mr. Moore — and he immediately offered up the same it-was-40-years-ago defense, according to officials at the meeting.

trump just tweeted about how bad cnn (international) is, again. in the midst of the time-warner / at&t controversy. he just can't help it, he truly can't

Someone should murder him take away his phone

I'm rooting for the cerebral aneurysm. It would spare our country so much.

No, it wouldn't.

Pence would pack the courts, but at least 30% of the country doesn't have messianic beliefs about him.

I'm still rooting for dying on the shitter while tweeting - not because it would do anything good but just out of some small hope for the existence of cosmic justice.

There is no substantive difference between Pence and Trump, other than Pence has devised a so-stupid-it’s-clever means of avoiding being accused of sexual harassment and assault, and the same clenched-anus attitude is what keeps him out of the Russia shit. Pence seems to be just as likely to trade all our grandmothers and children away for a new war machine, get baited into a crusade against North Korea, and more likely to let Mitch & Paul pass decimating legislation without meddling and tweeting everything to death. So I’d keep Trump, actually.

lmao I've been making that argument for months and almost always get pilloried for it

(not On Here just in general)

Honestly I don’t think I’d given it much thought until just now, because fuck spending time thinking about mike pence.

Pence is a garden variety Republican, albeit of the evangelical fringe of American life. I despise him too, but Pence is certainly not in the Bannon camp that wants a race war now rather than later.

What some of you aren't getting is that there are some well armed people who will respond to impeachment/conviction of Trump with violence against government and minorities. Faith in Trump has a religious nature. Better that Trump die of natural causes, to eliminate the messianism going forward.

Best case scenario is Dems take at least one chamber in 2018, and then Trump dies of natural causes shortly thereafter.

Trump dying/getting removed/whatever gives Repubs a tidy "back to business as usual" narrative a lot of people outside of the Trumpdead-enders would find comforting, I think.

What some of you aren't getting is that there are some well armed people who will respond to impeachment/conviction of Trump with violence against government and minorities.

yeah, i agree. it's possible that it's going to get really ugly (much worse than today) after trump goes, no matter how he goes - by impeachment, resigning, managing to finish out a shitty term with very few accomplishments. there was a decent frank rich piece that talked about that a couple weeks ago:

What we should be worrying about instead is the remarkable staying power of the American voters who put these guys in office. They’re in for the long game no matter the fate of the current administration. Trumpism predates Trump and Pence by decades and is a more powerful, enduring, and scary force than either of them. Trump learned this himself the hard way when Alabama Republicans voting in the Senate primary this fall chose the more Trumpist candidate, the gun-totin’ crackpot bigot and alleged sexual predator Roy Moore, over Mitch McConnell’s candidate, the garden-variety right-winger Trump had impulsively and mistakenly endorsed. The toxic anger that defines Trumpism — a rage at America’s cultural and economic elites in both political parties as well as at minorities and immigrants — will only grow darker and fiercer once its namesake leaves office, no matter how he does so. If Trump departs involuntarily, his followers will elevate him to martyrdom as the victim of a coup perpetrated by the scoundrels of “fake news” and “the swamp.” If Trump serves one or two full terms, his base will still be livid because he will not have bestowed the lavish gifts he promised, from a Rust Belt manufacturing comeback to a border wall. His voters won’t pin these failures on Trump but on the same swamp creatures they’ll hold responsible if he’s run out of office. They’re already blaming the cratering of “repeal and replace” and other broken Trump promises on what Bannon and his allies call “the McConnell-industrial complex.”

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/11/frank-rich-trumpism-after-trump.html

xpost - Uh, OK dude. IMO Trump dying in office could give the GOP a pass for nominating him. Not in favor.

Trump also seems to depress Republican turnout and has helped build the DSA and local Democratic organizations into forces to be reckoned with - I wouldn’t give that up. Running against him in 2018 and 2020 is going to be too much fun.

Pence taking over in the last two years would still be, in effect and in nature, a Trump admin - he wouldnt really be able to run away from his complicity. Also he wouldnt have a solid base of support in 2020, and GOP infighting and jockeying (and ineffectiveness) would increase heading into the next election.

Xp

I'm not saying there isn't a strong white nationalist militia movement in this country. There is. But I'd point out that they haven't been visibly present, except at feeble gatherings, since the election.

Look, I didn't think Obama would make it one term. I thought for sure some white nationalist creep was surely going to put a bullet in him.

But now I think this Trump's Army thing is certainly overstated.

dunno if this toobin article was posted here but it's in much the same vein as that frank rich's post trump trumpism new york mag piece

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/13/is-tom-cotton-the-future-of-trumpism

Roby Brock, who hosts the leading public-affairs television program in Arkansas, told me, “From the beginning, Tom could play to both the establishment and the Tea Party. Everyone recognizes he’s got a firm set of conservative principles, but that makes him a polarizing figure. There are a lot of people here, too, who hate him and think he’s the Antichrist. The only thing everyone agrees on is that he wants to be President someday.” To make that next leap, Cotton expresses the militarism, bellicosity, intolerance, and xenophobia of Donald Trump, but without the childish tweets. For those who see Trump’s Presidency as an aberration, or as a singular phenomenon, Cotton offers a useful corrective. He and his supporters see Trump and Trumpism as the future of the Republican Party.
---
Recently, at his Little Rock office, Cotton presented several medals to the family of George Anderson, a Second World War veteran who had died in 2006. Cotton began with a solemn introduction, but then, unexpectedly, Anderson’s family members, most of whom were elderly, took over the proceedings and began telling stories about George, who had made his living running car washes and coin-operated laundries. Cotton’s staff members and the assembled local reporters began chuckling at the rambling accounts of how George stacked his coins. A more deft politician might have joined in the fun, but Cotton just stood there, seemingly paralyzed by the deviations from good order. The ceremony came to a close when George Anderson’s surviving sister turned to Cotton and said, “As for you—you keep standing up for our President.”

I’m totally OK with the future of the GOP belonging to WW2 veterans and their siblings

Recently, at his Little Rock office, Cotton presented several medals to the family of George Anderson, a Second World War veteran who had died in 2006. Cotton began with a solemn introduction, but then, unexpectedly, Anderson’s family members, most of whom were elderly, took over the proceedings and began telling stories about George, who had made his living running car washes and coin-operated laundries. Cotton’s staff members and the assembled local reporters began chuckling at the rambling accounts of how George stacked his coins. A more deft politician might have joined in the fun, but Cotton just stood there, seemingly paralyzed by the deviations from good order. The ceremony came to a close when George Anderson’s surviving sister turned to Cotton and said, “As for you—you keep standing up for our President.”

it's arrested development