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Amazing we both read the same news and you guys think it’s the dawn of greatness.
It may be apocryphal, but I’m reminded that Mussolini got the trains running on time. Xi built an amazing high speed rail system, among many things.
I’m astonished intelligent people can look at what Trump is doing and celebrate.
i wish I had time to write more. Suffice to say, I think you guys have lost your minds. I always wondered how a well educated country like Germany could fall into madness in the 1930s. I never thought it would happen here. I’m not saying we are turning into a Nazi country, but it’s hard to find the right analogy. Maybe Spain in the 1930s? They suffered repression and stagnation until reforming 70 years later. Maybe a bit of Chinese Cultural Revolution with massive disinformation on social media, lobotomizing the country. A bit of Venezuela over the last 25 years, implementing insane economic policies.
We are our own unique case. There’s no perfect analogy. I’m sure some of it will look ok on the surface, at the expense of our civil society, democracy, rule of law, etc.
We have entered a dark chapter in American history. I am astonished you guys don’t see it. But it was obvious to most people who before the election who weren’t balls deep into Twitter and right wing propaganda. And it seems obvious now as it’s happening.
Maybe I’m the one who is too deep in my own news echo chambers. But I don’t think so. I hope one or two of you who consider yourselves informed and intelligent will have an epiphany one of these days and see the dismantling of our great country. We weren’t perfect. But you don’t throw away the whole system. It’s apparently easier than I thought, though , to break the whole thing. It’s not so easy to rebuild it.
NO MALARKEY
It has nothing to do with not “getting my way for a week”. I could have written all of that (and had been thinking about it) long before the inauguration.
The crap you suggest ‘my side’ has been doing is pure BS or had very reasonable justification. I do not consider myself progressive per se. I consider myself to on the side of pro-democracy and pro rule of law. I know you think I’m some kind of libtard, but most of the talking heads I listen to are former Republicans and people who think of themselves as conservatives.
By the way, I made some predictions. But not everything I said was conjecture. Trump is grifting on a massive scale. The oligarchs are afraid of him (Bezos intervened to halt the newspaper’s planned endorsement of Harris , Zuck has done a 180 and started spouting nonsense to please Trump, etc.). The media is falling in line. The courts have betrayed obvious corruption in favor of Trump. Red and purple states are enacting endless laws targeting liberals to make it harder for them to vote.
These aren’t hypotheticals. It’s bad already and will get far worse soon.
Yes, I made some predictions, as well. I hope I’m wrong about them, but there is enough evidence to expect most of them will come true. Or, if they don’t, it won’t be for a lack of trying on the MAGA side.
NO MALARKEY
“YOU MEAN LIKE THE COUP HE STAGED AFTER BIDEN WON?”
Yess. I do mean that. It was an attempted coup. It failed because there were enough people with integrity to keep it from succeeding (judges, Pence, Secretaries of States, etc.). The fact that it didn’t succeed does not mean it was any less of a coup attempt. If I try to rob a bank but don’t succeed, you still prosecute.
I’m happy to review some of the major themes for you:
You do realize Trump asked Pence not to count the legally certified ballots from each state, and instead count the fraudulent electors they cooked up. His lawyer, John Eastman, is on record saying this was the plan — on the ‘theory’ that Pence had the authority to reject certain states’ electoral votes. Eastman admitted privately that it was completely unconstitutional and wouldn’t work, but it was a major theme in Trump’s efforts to argue that overturning the results had a “legal” basis. To his credit, Mike Pence did not go along with this. I don’t agree with Pence’s view of the world, but I respect him for his pro-democracy stance.
And of course we know now that Trump sat in his room, watching the mob of Trumpers attack the Capitol for 3+ hours before lifting a finger to do anything about it — until it was clear that it wouldn’t succeed in delaying the vote beyond Jan 6th. By some accounts he was pretty thrilled to see what was going on while the mob was smearing shit on the walls, breaking into the buildings, trying to hunt down Pelosi and “hang Mike Pence”.
He was asked about the “hang Mike Pence” chants, by the way, and he reportedly reacted with indifference, if not approval. Testimony during the House January 6 Committee hearings, from former White House aides, indicated that he responded with something along the lines of, “Maybe our supporters have the right idea,” or “Mike deserves it.”
Trump’s team also tried the “Green Bay Sweep” strategy, where (according to his advisor, Peter Navarro) the was a plan to delay certification by having Congressional allies object to the electoral votes from swing states. The goal was to trigger hours of debate for each objection, delaying certification long enough to send the contested states’ results back to their legislatures for review, where Trump hoped Republican-led legislatures would change or reject their state’s election outcome.
He tried to pressure the DOJ to legitimize claims of election fraud. He tried to get then-acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen to announce investigations into baseless allegations of widespread election fraud — hoping it would give states grounds to decertify results.
He spread endless lies (to this day) that the 2020 election was stolen, fueling anger and skepticism among large swaths of the country (some of you still buy that bullshit despite no shred of evidence to this day. These statements were obviously aimed at undermining the legitimacy of the election and setting the stage for rejecting its outcome by any means.
He and his team promoted widespread disinformation about the election, including unfounded claims of voting machine tampering, ballot “dumps,” and illegal votes. Ruby Freeman and Shay Moss (spelling?) successfully sued Rudy Giuliani since he had obviously edited the video in a misleading way. Fox News also settled for nearly a billion dollars because of all the lies they spread to further Trump’s bullshit.
In a Banana Republic move, he called multiple state officials in swing states, including Secretaries of States like Brad Raffensperger, urging them to reject their results and “find” more votes for himself. Having the most powerful man in the country call you up and pressure you to do that is completely anti-democratic, as you all well know, if you’re honest with yourselves. You would have an aneurism if Biden or Obama had done anything like that.
The through-line to all of this, of course, is that Trump tried to throw out all the votes of 158 million Americans based on bullshit. Call it whatever you want, but it was an attempted coup using multiple strategies. Thank god none of them worked.
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NO MALARKEY
He’s already laying the groundwork for contesting. More projection from Trump:
Then again, this is nothing new for him.
NO MALARKEY
I’m not talking about just the insurrectionists on January 6 that Trump sent to the Capitol. I’m talking about his fake elector scheme. I’m talking about the scheme to install cronies across the country who will refuse to certify their precincts, counties, and states in attempt to require a Contingent election. I’m talking about Trump knowingly and intentionally driving out regular Republicans from the Republican Party through violent threats against their families.
Do you understand why so many normy Republican Congressmen and Senators have retired in the last 8 years? It’s not simply because they were worried about being primaried. Trump has systematically sicced his millions of followers on them. When you see him Tweet things like, “I hate so and so”, he is signaling his base to go apeshit on them. He knows they will get endless death threats. He knows their families and kids will get threats. He knows most of them can’t afford security and don’t want to deal with the harassment and threats.
ill give you an anecdote from 2016 from a conservative commentator Megyn Kelly:
From her book about the 2016 campaign (https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/dec/06/megyn-kelly-donald-trump-social-media-online-abuse):
She recalled that she had been “friendly” with the New York property tycoon until August last year when she aired allegations about his divorce from Ivana Trump. She said Trump raged at her over the phone, quoting him as saying: “You’re a disgrace! You ought to be ashamed of yourself! You’re a disgrace! I almost unleashed my beautiful Twitter account against you and I still may.”
A few days later, as a moderator at the first Republican primary debate, Kelly asked Trump about past comments he had made disparaging women. He subsequently launched a social media blitz against her, branding her “overrated”, “angry”, “crazy” and “a bimbo”. In an interview, he later implied that she had been hostile to him because she was menstruating, saying she “had blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever”.
She received death threats and obscene phone calls, she continued. “When Donald Trump comes after you, it isn’t just a tweet – ‘oh wow, he’s tweeting about her’, and I understand he’s a fighter, he’s a counter-puncher, I get all that – but even then he has such power that a single tweet can unleash hell in somebody’s life. “I’ve been under armed guard for 16 months and my children have been under armed guard and it’s not an appropriate price to pay for hard-hitting journalism.”
He threatens business people, as well. Why do you think USA Today and Bezos wouldn’t endorse Harris. Did you see how quickly Zuckerberg got religion after Trump threatened him? It was embarrassing and frankly I don’t blame Zuckerberg. Businesses know he will fuck them over if they don’t play ball.
Blue states, like California, will be part of his retribution. And I don’t mean that he will simply enact policies they don’t like, I’m talking about withholding funding for emergencies, and that sort of thing. But I wouldn’t be surprised if he targeted some policies against New York and California as well.
I don’t post much on here anymore because I realized a while ago that I wasted decades believing that you guys actually believed most of what you wrote. It turned out to be all bullshit. Remember all the discussions on the CEB about how character mattered? Lex’s beer test. All bullshit. Trump, the most unethical public person in America, comes along and you fall in line.
I remember asking two years ago if you guys would vote for Herschel Walker if you lived in Georgia, despite the fact that his son, a conservative, said not to vote for him because he would abuse him and his mother. The response: yes, because even though he was obviously a certified moron, an abuser, and clearly had paid for abortions, it would mean the Democrats might control the Senate. Shocker! character does not matter after all.
I remember all the threads and comments about activist judges. But then the Supreme Court rewrote the constitution for Donald Trump and made up shit out of whole cloth. Not a peep out of anyone here about it.
i could go on about the hypocrisy, but I suspect none of you care. So I’ll just finish by wishing everyone good luck. Let’s hope our country does not commit national suicide on Tuesday and elect this narcissistic unethical, fascistic piece of shit who doesn’t understand Jack about American history, our civil institutions, and the rule of law. But if that’s what you guys want and if there’s enough of you, or if Trump’s next coup attempt works, I guess we can look forward to Trump 2.0, where he is unconstrained by those pesky things like the rule of law. Where he’s not gonna have normal Republicans, like Kelly and Mattis , constraining him from turning the military against our fellow citizens, whom he calls “the enemy within”.
I still can’t believe you guys really buy into all of his bullshit. I know some of you want to have it both ways and make a point of explaining that you’re not a big fan of Trump or his character. But if you vote for him you are enablers of his psychosis and fascism just the same. But I guess it’s a bit late for all of that.
NO MALARKEY
You’re kind of right. The fix is in: Trump will declare victory on election night, before many states have finished counting. Like he did in 2020. And then, if the actual vote doesn’t go his way, Republicans will find some “irregularities” and many Republicans at precincts, state, and local levels will refuse to certify. The strategy is to cook up enough crap to force a “contingent” election by Congress, where each state gets a vote and Trump ‘wins’. It may work.
Its quite sad what has happened to our democracy. I never expected half the country to lose its mind and enable a fascist prick — much less well educated folks with a Stanford education.
i know you don’t see it that way. Or you do, but you don’t care because you’re convinced the Democrats are even worse.
I genuinely didn’t understand how well informed, well educated, intelligent people could be enablers of Trump. It admittedly took me longer than it should have to finally understand: Some of you may not like Trump (some do), but you truly despise Democrats.
God help us. Even if Harris somehow wins, this country has gone mad. That includes the pro Palestine assholes on college campus and some of the stupid pronouns crap, but especially the fascistic MAGA insanity that has taken over Congress and the Republican Party. I don’t understand how you guys don’t see it. You certainly see it clearly on the left, but you have a blind spot on the right.
NO MALARKEY
Legend: Obviously neither of these guys are Trump supporters. That doesn’t mean they are liberals — which was clearly my point, since Mick said “Dems” are shooting at Trump. I don’t know how you missed my main point, which I made multiple times, that “the Dems” are not shooting at Trump.
Apparently the guy from yesterday recently registered as a Democrat somewhere, but was Nikki Haley supporter and voted for Trump previously. Whatever his beliefs — he is not some kind of life long woke liberal. And he does not represent “the Dems”. And the guy from a couple months ago was, by almost every measure, a conservative guy. As you may recall, his school-mates said he would take a conservative position every time political issues came up. He was a big 2nd amendment guy. And there was other evidence that I don’t recall pointing to his conservative bona fides (if I recall correctly, he was a registered Republican).
Again, my point is, both of these guys have a history of being relatively conservative and “the Dems” are not shooting at Trump.
NO MALARKEY
Biden has been even more hawkish on China than Trump, by far. That includes some targeted tariffs on certain things like EVs. Trump, on the other hand, is proposing an extremely inflationary agenda:
He wants to raise tariffs on all manner of goods, including items not produced here. That means consumers will be paying a heavy price if they want something from China.
He also wants to deport tens of millions of immigrants. Whatever you think about the border, deporting millions of low wage workers is going to put huge inflationary pressure on many industries and business throughout the country.
Like he did in his first term, he also will pressure the fed to lower rates significantly. That’s nice for some people, but if not done at the right time, it can promote inflation.
During his first term he also increased the money supply substantially, resulting in inflation that kicked in just as Biden was taking over. Biden didn’t do himself any favors and spent too much, as well. But if Trump acts like he did in his first term, and implements the policies he’s proposing in his second term, we will be in for another round of major inflation.
NO MALARKEY
Ah yes, “the Dems” are shooting at Trump. I guess “The Republicans” are responsible for every crime and idiotic thing a single one of them does?
And apparently you missed the fact that the guy who actually shot at Trump a couple months ago was not a Democrat. By all indications, except on tiny donation he made during high school, he was a conservative. But that doesn’t fit the narrative, so…
And the second guy from yesterday voted for Trump in 2016. He recently switched parties, apparently, so I guess all Democrats are now responsible for his behavior? By the way, he didn’t actually shoot at Trump. He was five football fields away. Maybe he wanted to. We’ll see. But “the Dems” are not shooting at Trump. “The Dems” did not shoot at Trump.
But it makes for good propaganda and changes the narrative after Trump made a fool of himself in the debate (shocker; who would have ever expected /s).
NO MALARKEY
Almost forgot his latest bleat: “I hate Taylor Swift.”
Are you guys seriously going to vote for a guy with the maturity of a 12 year old?
It’s been a while since I posted here, but I recall shortly after my last comment a few weeks ago, Trump was regaling some audience about a conversation he supposedly had with Putin about Ukraine. It was completely made up, of course, so you’d think it was at least an interesting and intelligent fiction. Nope. The exact quote was straight out of Wayne’s World:
“I said: ‘Don’t do it. [Don’t invade Ukraine] You can’t do it, Vladimir. You do it, it’s going to be a bad day. You cannot do it,’” Trump recalled during his chat with Musk on X. “I told him things that, what I’d do, and he said, ‘No way,’ and I said, ‘Way!’”
That is some big brain diplomacy. His supporters must be hanging on every word.
NO MALARKEY
Based on the subject line (imaginary people), I assumed this post was going to be about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs.
NO MALARKEY
It appears Senator Ron Johnson has the smoking gun: it turns out Walz got married on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
I may have to reconsider my vote for Harris/Walz.
NO MALARKEY
Trump A.I.’d it.
I agree rogpodge. Even I don’t think Trump is dumb enough (though, just barely) to believe he was endorsed by Swift. But some of his cult members do believe it.
Funny that he keeps retweeting A.I. images, though, after claiming the use of A.I. images is disqualifying and a form of “cheating”:
“Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport? There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d it,‘” the former president wrote in a furious Truth Social post. “She should be disqualified because the creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE. Anyone who does that will cheat at ANYTHING!”
Projection, as usual. I should have known he would be posting A.I. images as soon as he wrote that. My bad.
NO MALARKEY
You’re seriously reaching Mick. Nobody took that Dowd commentary seriously.
The Democratic Party is a private organization that can determine who they want to run for President. They (along with the Republican Party) spent decades choosing candidates in smoke filled rooms. They can award delegates however they see fit. In any case, to reiterate, the did not force Biden to step down. He did it voluntarily. If he felt it was a coup he can surely speak up and say so. But instead he has offered his support for Harris and is going to be speaking at the convention.
Have some intellectual honesty and consistency. You all keep clamoring how Biden is unfit. So he finally steps aside and now you’re claiming it’s a coup. Which is it? If he’s unfit, then he shouldn’t be running. And as I said in another comment, I am not going to argue with you guys if you want to claim he’s unfit. Fine. Maybe he should step down as President too. WTF do I care. Either way it’s not a coup. Biden stepped away from the campaign voluntarily; the other potential candidates endorsed Harris; nobody else decided to run against her; the delegates decided to support Harris; Biden supported Harris.
The only reason to pretend it’s a coup is to take away from the actual coup from 2020 committed by Trump. It’s projection as usual. Trump literally tried to fraudulently subvert the will of the entire American voting public — 160M people or something like that — and not a peep out of any of you about it in four years (did I miss it?). The fake outrage over Biden is unbelievable. You want me to believe you’re so concerned about how Democrats treated Biden because it was unfair to the voters or some horse-sh!t, but Trump sending fake electors from seven states — pretending they were the lawful representatives of their states — doesn’t even elicit a comment, when in fact it is disqualifying. Some of you are still going to vote for that traitor (maybe not you Mick; I assume you have more sense than that).
NO MALARKEY
[apparently my comment was too long to post the entire thing, so here’s part 2]
Do you remember some of the odd stories in the 2016 campaign? Some of them were ridiculous and obviously bullsh!t. But many gullible people gave credence to them. Some of them were even posted on the old CEB. I remember one of you started a thread about the stories questioning Hillary Clinton’s health — suggesting that she was seriously ill, near death, and unfit to serve as president.
Surprise: it turns out that these stories were made up out of whole cloth and published by Trump’s friend, David Pecker, with input and full knowledge of Trump. Some of the others you may recall included “Ben Carson’s violent past”; or the story about Ted Cruz’s father, who was supposedly linked to the JFK assassination — a story Trump repeated during the campaign, despite knowing it was total bullsh!t; or the fake rumors about Marco Rubio’s extra-marital affairs; etc., etc.
Lets not forget Trump’s “catch and kill” scheme, where he worked with his media buddy David Pecker to help him avoid scrutiny over damaging stories. Pecker testified about this in exchange for immunity in Trump’s New York fraud case, for which he was convicted earlier this year.
Then there are those odd times recently where Trump has been repeatedly caught waving to nobody: https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-waving-video-nobody-1914619 He’s been doing this at least half a dozen time recently. The only explanation is that it’s performative behavior meant to suggest he’s got some big crowd of fans fawning over him. It’s probably not an accident that it has coincided with his obsession with Kamala’s crowd sizes. In any case, it’s another attempt to use fakery to manipulate the election narrative.
But of course Trump gets graded on a curve by conservatives and the msm. If the Harris campaign j-walks, it’s a scandal; if Trump commits fraud it’s just Trump being Trump. No big deal. Where was the outrage about this — or at least an acknowledgement that Trump’s entire persona is a carefully fabricated sales pitch that depends on manipulating the media and making up bullsh!t stories? Instead, let’s pretend to be outraged by some staffer on Kamala’s campaign who j-walked on the Google platform.
For those of you who ignore the constant lies and manipulation by Trump and his campaign, please spare me the pearl clutching.
NO MALARKEY
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