US Politics, December 2017: I guess there’s always 2018

oh it's a wrong-thread fiasco!

I definitely remember a time where he was at least good with zingers and one-liners

been sort of in a holiday bubble the paste week or so but just reading some of the NYT quotes is scary as fuck! this dude has for reals lost his mind , fuck pretending otherwise .

If anyone can endure it, watch the following clip. He's still a buffoon but he can speak in complete sentences.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMlz4J4tYbM

1984, Ronald Reagan debated Walter Mondale in Louisville and plainly had no idea where he was.

And for the next four years Reagan was assiduously protected from the consequences of his Alzheimer's by those around him, in order to preserve him as the keystone their political power. Reagan could still play to a camera, smile affably, and read his lines. That was enough to get him through 1988.

No doubt if Trump slips into dementia, he would be carefully protected, too, but Trump is less tractable and more volatile than Reagan was, and he'd insist on making decisions even if he could not make sense of what he's deciding about. This would make his incapacity more difficult to conceal.

See also: congressional hearings on the president's sole control of nuclear missile launches. This is a hint that the game may be afoot already.

he should always speak w/ a garbage truck beeping

xp

Reagan also didn't have Twitter.

Twitter is still mediated. They can already simulate his tweets. They could hand him a phone with a dummy app that looked like Twitter and let him post his babble into it.

more or less agree with yglesias

"let the subject talk" is not the same as "prompt the subject to repeat things he tweets and says all the time already, and affirm him when he lies repeatedly"

didn't know Roger Stone went back that far with Trump

sic otm

if he's still in office in 2020, his mental deterioration could be even more apparent and be the thing that spoils his re-election. Fingers crossed!

I found pierce’s amateur attempts at medical diagnosis to be as silly as his asterisks

as long as he keeps shouting at the right people I think his base will stay with him no matter what

as long as he keeps shouting at the right people I think his base will stay with him no matter what

― frogbs,

well, Pierce is often a good writer, so why not?

yah what was the asterisk thing?

i really don't know how to feel about the dementia stuff, instinctively feels like there might be something to it, but at the same time it feels really bullshitty as a topic for writers esp non medical ppl

trick ending:

djt: "no dementia, no dementia, YOU have dementia!"

*pierce reveals his own dementia, common to his family*

the asterisk is his oh-so-clever Not Really the President denialism

the dementia stuff is tricky because when it's brought up it doesn't feel like "concern" or serious analysis as much as it feels like needling or wishful thinking or trolling his followers. to me trump seems like a lot of older asshole dad types with zero intellectual curiosity whose brains have calcified into a fox news-fueled paranoia and bigotry.

dementia symptoms : brains have calcified into a fox news-fueled paranoia and bigotry

I think it's just in comparison to virtually every other current and past major office holder in every developed country that Trump appears to have dementia. But yeah if you just compare him to your average American male Fox News viewer in his 70s, the clinical dx fades away.

saying prominent women look like "cows" is absolutely shitty and beneath ilx, imo

My dad eventually died of Alzheimer related issues, but before the dementia the first things to go were his senses, starting with his vision and subtle spacial perception, which first manifested itself ... by a weird resistance to books and reading. "Oh, the cat is on my lap, I can't reach my book," that sort of thing. Trump proudly does not read, and clearly has trouble with stairs, like my dad did. With my dad, the vision stuff went on for a couple of years before other things kicked in, like decreased hearing and then eventually a more familiar paranoid dementia. He eventually died of more or less dehydration, when his brain stopped telling him he was thirsty. I can only wish a similar end on this asshole.

I have no clue what the symptoms of dementia are but I will say that the way Trump frequently repeats himself, blows past the interviewer's questions, and speaks in malformed sentences that make no sense out of context does remind me a lot of myself when I'm really drunk

they bothered

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/weather-channel-schools-trump-climate-change

I believe "cow-with-an-aneurysm" it was confined to describing the look in her eyes, not other aspects of her person.

the thing about "cow" as a sexist slur is that it's about denying personhood/consciousness/brain activity

I'm not gonna say trump definitely *doesn't* have dementia, my wife for one is convinced he does. I'm just not sure about a diagnosis based on his behavior.

i now realize that my real trick ending should have been that after fake-trump launches his "you have dementia" attack, 35% of americans incorrectly believe pierce has dementia, and fox demands and obtains his "retirement" for medical reasons from any employment, and gop wants investigations on any in press promoting the idea trump has dementia.

saying prominent women look like "cows" is absolutely shitty and beneath ilx, imo

I actually intended to specify that I wasn't making a fat joke, I was talking about the fact that she has abnormally large, bovine-looking eyes. This would be an example of the "cow-having-an-aneurysm" eyes I was talking about.

https://www.rawstory.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/sarah-huckabee-sanders-800x430.jpg

please stop

i now realize that my real trick ending should have been that after fake-trump launches his "you have dementia" attack, 35% of americans incorrectly believe pierce has dementia, and fox demands and obtains his "retirement" for medical reasons from any employment, and gop wants investigations on any in press promoting the idea trump has dementia.

― y'know, LIBS! libertarians, libertines, even liberians and librarians (Hunt3r),

cool movie bro

please stay OT

please stop

sanctimonious bullshit

ffs it's now off limits to liken someone's features to animals that in another context might be body shaming?

Is doe-eyed allowed?

huckabeesanders is a horrible horrible horrible person
i think i'm doing this right

making fun of her for being boss-eyed *is* body shaming though, whether you make the cow comparison or not xp

ugh

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/sen-gillibrand-urges-germany-back-nazi-jakiw-palij-article-1.3724744
^unsurprising that the feds aren't too engaged with extraditing this guy, gillibrand continuing to apple polish

i also explicitly stated that my issue with "cow" was about denying women subjecthood, not with body-shaming. it's that too in many many cases obv. but nice of hadrian viii to make clear my actual statements are not important compared to a chance to defend shitty sexist discourse against the threat of becoming "off limits"

U all

Search warrant reportedly executed for Sheriff Clarke of Milwaukee e-mails, regarding a pretty audacious civil rights violation. I guess he got into an argument with someone on a plane, and when the plane landed Clark vindictively foisted his people on him?

NEW: According to federal court filing made public today, the FBI has executed a search warrant on an e-mail address associated with Trump surrogate and former sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. pic.twitter.com/Q0AdDqyAaP

— NBC News (@NBCNews) December 29, 2017

MSNBC says its related to:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adJxwWt4ij0

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Clarke_(sheriff)#Airport_harassment_and_abuse-of-power_investigation_and_lawsuit

In 1984, Ronald Reagan debated Walter Mondale in Louisville and plainly had no idea where he was

I just watched the first 10 minutes of that debate on youtube, and the disturbing thing is Reagan seems far more cognitively together, far better at putting a complicated sentence together than Trump has been in the past I don't know how many interviews. Although in the case of Trump, I'm still wondering whether it's dementia or just a case of being a complete moron

why not both

First debates are never good for the incumbent; they look distracted, respond defensively, and act irritably (think Obama, Bush II, Poppy too). Reagan only looks unusually ruffled in the second half.

Schmidt responds:

During our conversation in July, I learned the challenges this president poses in interviews. He can jump from an issue like the Russia investigation to a policy matter before going off on a tangent about something like his golf game. If you try to interrupt him, he often continues talking. Given this, I employed a strategy in which I asked questions about the most pressing issues of his presidency and then allowed him to talk.

Some readers criticized my approach, saying I should have asked more follow-up questions. I believed it was more important to continue to allow the president to speak and let people make their own judgments about his statements. It was the best way to learn as much as possible about the president’s mind-set and his views on issues like North Korea.

times now has a separate "fact check" piece on their own interview pointing out a number of the totally false statements made by the president. i guess putting this information in the publication of the interview itself is just too complicated.