Trump tweets again
I don’t watch TV news or opinion shows these days, and haven’t for well over a year. And I’ve never watched Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzenzski on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
But if you read the news it’s virtually impossible to ignore the enormous brouhaha about Trump’s nasty tweets about Mrzenzski “bleeding from a facelift.” Trump seems to have a special interest in newswomen’s facial bleeding, if you recall his remarks early in the 2016 campaign about Megyn Kelly having “blood coming out of her eyes.”
I said I don’t watch Joe and Mika’s show and never have, but it’s covered regularly on Legal Insurrection and so I am aware that they are heavy and pretty vicious Trump criticizers. That’s their prerogative. But anyone who knows anything about Trump knows he’s going to fight back in just this way. His tweets are personal, often about appearance, often (although most definitely not always) directed at women, and in my opinion extremely offensive. It’s one of many things about Trump that I dislike and of which I disapprove. And yes, I know that sometimes he does it strategically, either to deflect attention from something else or with the general aim of defending himself. But there are other ways to defend yourself, and I very much wish he’d eliminate this one.
But you know what? If you elect Donald Trump president, you’re going to get this sort of thing. Over and over and over. It’s his nature and his modus operandi. And at this point it’s a big yawn to me, although it’s red meat (blood-red meat?) to the MSM:
Collectively, the Big Three Networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) dedicated a total of 12 minutes and 14 seconds to Trump’s attack against the MSNBC personality. ABC’s World News Tonight gave the tweet three minutes 45 seconds, CBS Evening News a whopping five minutes 29 seconds over two different segments, and NBC Nightly News set aside three minutes. All of them led their evening news program with Trump’s tweets.
The more important development of the day was a pair of laws passed by Congress that were designed to protect American citizens. Anchor Lester Holt was the only one to mention the passage of the laws, but only in this mere 26-second news brief…
That’s the way it is, folks.
Then there was this more serious accusation towards Trump from Scarborough:
According to Scarborough, White House staff called him and said the National Enquirer had a story about Joe and Mika they were going to run and that President Trump would have them spike it if Joe called the President and apologized for their coverage of the president.
There’s more at the link, but I find the accusation suspicious. First of all, the calls were supposedly made in April and May, so they would appear to have nothing to do with the current Trump tweet story. Secondly, was the Enquirer story ever published, and what was it about (it’s not clear, according to this article)? No Trump apology was ever issued, so if the threat had occurred you would think the story would have been published by now. Thirdly, is it blackmail to refuse to honor a request that a story already in the works be spiked? Fourthly, why is this only coming out now? The charges are explosive, and why would Joe and Mika have sat on this since April and May?
For what it’s worth, here is a statement on the subject from the Enquirer:
At the beginning of June we accurately reported a story that recounted the relationship between Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, the truth of which is not in dispute. At no time did we threaten either Joe or Mika or their children in connection with our reporting on the story. We have no knowledge of any discussions between the White House and Joe and Mika about our story, and absolutely no involvement in those discussions,” Dylan Howard, chief content officer and vice president for American Media, said in a statement Friday morning.
the National Enquirer is a tabloid. But news in general has become tabloid-like. And President Trump’s tweets fit right into the general atmosphere.
My central objection to Trump is that he is essentially Paris Hilton: a socialite, heiress, and reality-tv star known for a tawdry sex life.
So I agree with Neo here: “you elect Donald Trump president, you’re going to get this sort of thing. Over and over and over. It’s his nature and his modus operandi.”
I mean, If you elect Kim Kardashian President, don’t be surprised if she tweets out pics of her ass. But if Kim tweet pics of her ass, wouldn’t one doubt her fitness for office?
So I’m puzzled by this: “And at this point it’s a big yawn to me”.
I remember the days when all the “reluctant” Trump supporters said he would pivot to Presidential any day now. Good times.
His behavior would be beyond the pale for my kids, let alone the President of the United States.
And – for the millionth time – this isn’t helping pass his agenda. It’s hindering it. I know his supporters LOVE this behavior and think of it as Churchillian “fighting”. I think it’s sad and embarrassing and – most importantly – counter productive.
This article gives more background and claims to pinpoint the story that was published when Joe refused to apologize.
Your mileage may vary
Article: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/06/what-happened-between-trump-morning-joe-and-the-enquirer.html
Story that was published: http://www.nationalenquirer.com/photos/joe-scarborough-mika-brzezinski-affair/
Finally – can you believe we’re having to have these conversations?
Imagine a parallel universe where days go by without major salacious stories about Trump’s latest twitter shenanigans, with him heads-down working on legislative strategy, economics and foreign policy and using his bully pulpit in a focused, disciplined manner to advance his agenda. When fighting back is needed, he fights back skillfully and with aplomb, and with the proper targets in place. He is well-versed on his legislative priorities with the appropriate level of detail regarding the legislation, he is leading a unified Republican party and doing proper member care, member discipline, etc, and he even has worked the proper deals to get across-the-aisle support for his agenda.
Imagine that. We don’t live in that universe, unfortunately.
Manju:
I’ve always questioned Trump’s fitness for office. But “fitness” is a funny word. It encompasses many things, including demeanor—and I don’t like Trump’s demeanor in terms of his tweets and insults. But they are a very very VERY small part of my process of evaluation about someone’s fitness for office. Far more important, to my way of thinking, is the way that person performs the tasks involved in that office. I mean the state tasks, not the PR tasks.
That’s why it’s a big yawn to me. Been there, done that, in terms of my opinion of Trump the man. If I’m evaluating his fitness for office at this point—as long as he has not done anything criminal, I am only interested in his behavior while performing the duties of that office.
By the way, I felt that way about Bill Clinton, too. That’s why I never got all that concerned about the Lewinsky affair. I didn’t like it, but it’s what Bill does, and everyone knew that was his history. More important would have been perjury, but (and I’ve written about this many times before, and don’t have time to find the links now) I do not think that he was guilty of perjury in the legal sense (see this for a fuller explanation of the reasons what he said was not perjury).
So I am quite consistent.
And to answer your question: if he showed a photo of his ass a la Kardashian I would certainly consider his fitness (in terms of personality) suspect, as well as question his “fitness” in the physical sense (I doubt any of us would like to see a photo of Trump’s most-likely-flabby ass). But even if Kim Kardashian herself had somehow already become president, I would judge her fitness for office almost entirely on how she performed the tasks of that office.
Speaking of Kim Kardashian and public office, I don’t know if you ever saw this post of mine, but I suggest you take a look.
“Blood coming out of eyes” is what Texas horned toads (a lizard) do when clutched by a predator, even an innocent non-predator like me.
David Warren is a sane man: “Twitter is anyway full of foul; and I first observed that Trump is exceptionally crass, long before he ran for public office. I have never expected better of him, and as we say, pessimists are never disappointed. Rather I’ve noticed that he uses his indecencies to clever effect. For he is intentionally driving his opponents crazy; counting on them always to take the bait. This works better for him than any other tactic. Take his Twitter account away, and the Democrats would soon have him cornered. Instead they stay too angry to land a telling punch.”
http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/2017/06/30/on-political-pugilism/
Remember that Bush didn’t fight back against the press attacking him and the lack of response just emboldened the press. When Trump fights back the press plays the victim card and claims that Trump is a bully and is picking on them. I believe it was Lenin that said to accuse your enemies of what you do.
I can’t speak for all liberals, but I’ll say this just for myself:
Donald Trump is almost certainly a psychopath, or at least somewhere on the psychopath-narcisist spectrum. The biggest problem with responses to tweets like this along the lines of “yawn” or “he should act presidential” is that they elide his biggest flaw: he is constitutionally (no pun intended!) incapable of acting “presidential.” Six months into being president, and the most powerful man in the world (who is, independently, a billionaire many times over) cannot help but respond to the smallest slight from pundits who should, by all rights, be inconsequential to him. It’s not going to happen because it simply can’t happen. He’s not going to change because he can’t.
I wish this had never become a left/right thing, both because Trump represents a genuine and immediate danger to all of us, but also because Trump very obviously attached himself to Republican coattails to ride his way to the presidency, with no devotion to conservative ideology and no interest in advancing a conservative agenda beyond its immediate usefulness to his personal interests.
Everything from his shallow affect, to his sexual promiscuity, to his (self-avowed) lack of self-reflection, to his treatment of all relationships as transactional, to his lack of any real bonds of human affection strongly suggest a psychopath incapable of experiencing normal human emotions like affection or shame, enabling him to say virtually anything to advance his self interest (“I will solve every problem”) but also trapping him in petty disputes like this.
“Donald Trump is almost certainly a psychopath, or at least somewhere on the psychopath-narcisist spectrum.”
After 8 years of the last White House occupant…this is what you fling at the wall to see if it sticks?
“Trump represents a genuine and immediate danger to all of us…”
You’ll always have Canada. Pretty-boy Trudeau will welcome you with open arms…no…really.
I wish Trump was more Presidential. But then I wished Harry Truman was more Presidential. Yeah, old Harry was a bit crude at times. He threatened to black the eye of a music critic that panned his daughter’s performance. A lot of people thought he was a vulgar hick from Missouri. I sure did.
Then I worked with a man who was Truman’s Naval Attache’. We spent many hours discussing Truman. While he was not a polished politician who weighed his words carefully, he was a decent man with a good reservoir of common sense. So many of the decisions Truman made were really BIG decisions and he was mostly right. (Dropping the A-bomb on Japan, the United Nations in 1945, the Truman Doctrine in 1947 to contain Communism, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift of 1948. the creation of NATO in 1949, and the defense of South Korea in 1950 – to mention a few.) People sighed a sigh of relief (I was one of them) when Truman lost to Eisenhower, because they now had a man who was Presidential. What many failed to see (and I was one) was that Truman, in spite of being a blunt spoken, crude man; was a good President.
I felt the same way about LBJ. He was as unpresidential a President as we have had. Yet the press loved his “folksy” ways. It turned out he was wrong on just about all his decisions. H.R. McMaster savaged Kennedy, McNamara, and Johnson on Vietnam. His War On Poverty has demonstrably been lost, but is still being fought by social justice warriors. He was a crude man but also a poor President.
I’m willing to overlook Trump’s crudeness and look at what is being accomplished. It’s true, major legislation has not been passed – yet. A lot of that can be laid at the feet of the GOP Congress.
Trump’s speech on energy policy yesterday was well delivered and set the tone for the U.S. to become energy independent – a goal that will help us mightily in an energy dependent world. Very little of the policy to accomplish that goal is dependent on legislation. It is going to happen.
This is not something to “yawn” at.
Why?
Precisely because it is, yet again, arming his opponents with exactly what they want.
Precisely because it brings attention and elevates crap like this rather than focusing on getting the job done.
Precisely because it sends the wrong kind of message about what this presidency is all about, and sets / reinforces a cultural tone that is destructive.
Don’t disagree that folks knew that going in, many having selected trump. But, that is no excuse to let him off the hook, or to refrain from holding him accountable for his actions.
There is MUCH more to say, but a good amount is covered well by David French, so will leave it at that…
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/449111/donald-trump-mika-brzezinski-vengeful-tweets-degrade-american-political-culture
One last thing… imagine obama had been this way, would we all have been all right with that, and the automatic excusing and cheering from team left?
Yea, thought not.
When will Trump ever realize he is not the underdog anymore. He is a historical figure already and arguably the greatest man on earth now, his place in history has been cemented, good or bad, why does he continue to pick fights with people below him? or perhaps he knows that he is the greatest man on earth that prompt these bewildering tweets from him, his pride can’t allow him to let those who are below him insult him.
My theory is Trump was doing that to help his friends Mika and Joe. Being insulted by Trump is now the ultimate honor to the left. Morning Joe’s ratings were poor so Trump colluded with the couple to stage a WWE style feud to boost their rantings like how rants against Trump boosted Colbert’s ratings.
John,
I’ve actually wondered if Obama wasn’t also a psychopath; psychopaths (because of their laser-focus on self-advancement and ability to say anything without shame) are generally over-represented among business and political leadership. Obama’s famed unflappability suggests the possibility that he’s unflappable simply because he’s not really capable of caring what other people think. But he was sufficiently reserved that I don’t know if I have enough information to make as solid a judgement, whereas Trump has provided decades of evidence that he is, almost certainly, a psychopath.
I tend to group psychopaths into high-performing and low-performing categories; high performing are the psychopaths who manage to wear the “mask of sanity” (great book!) better, able to play greater lip service to the normal rules of society. Low-performing psychopaths are the ones who make it blatantly obvious, especially when the people they abuse are able to communicate and compare lies told.
I wondered about Clinton, too, but her need for validation from her hangers-on suggested a more banal, every day vanity than Trump’s psychopathy.
If the question is, “why would a man who clearly has no interest in being president or performing the normal duties of a president seek the presidency?” And the easiest answer is: because their is a gaping, empty void inside of him, the part of a person we normally fill with things like family and friends and love, which are alien concepts for him, so he fills it with money and power and infidelity, and when he looked at that void and realized it’s still empty, he tried stuffing the presidency in there too, to no effect.
Somebody Says:
June 30th, 2017 at 3:44 pm
This whole post makes you worthy of being ignored.
You didn’t “wonder” about 0…you got man-tingles (or xhe-tingles if that be the case) just like the TV talking head. You don’t “wonder” about HRC…you cried when she got her corrupt head handed to her by someone you despise.
But all you #nevertrump folks keep on clutching your pearls & crying in my coffee…best sweetener ever.
I’m firmly alongside our dear host “we’ll see.” Trump could well be ruinous…God knows 0 was…But for right now, I’ll take the wins we have & I’ll yawn at the “resistance” media & their fake firestorm over a few rough-edged tweets.
Rocks are hard, water’s wet and Trump’s Trump.
I don’t think much about his tweets anymore. Yes, I often find them distasteful. However, I don’t buy Trump is playing 12-dimensional chess anymore than Obama was.
Trump is following his instincts honed in the odd jungle of celebrity and big business deals. I suspect his tweets do work to unbalance his opponents to Trump’s advantage.
He has no reputation to lose among the elites and those similarly inclined and his base will just throw a fist-pump and cry, “You go, girl.” So there is always the possibility his opponents will respond with even crazier stuff and find themselves on leave at their jobs.
However, in the long run I do think with Trump we slip-sliding-away further into idiocracy, which I don’t think is a good thing. On the other hand, Trump has arrested our slide into what Jonah Goldberg called “liberal fascism” in his book of that title.
Liberal do you know why these misogynist accusations can’t never hurt Trump? even after the leak of the distasteful NBC tape? Bill Clinton. seriously how dare the democrats criticize Trump for his treatments of women when they still have Bill “the biggest white pervert on earth” Clinton on the pedestal. You want to hurt Trump with all these misogynist charges, denounce Bill Clinton first.
“I suspect his tweets do work to unbalance his opponents to Trump’s advantage.”
This is the hope and constant refrain of Trump supporters (and Huxley, I realize you are not a supporter or at least not a strong one).
There is evidence that Trump’s behavior does p*ss people off.
The evidence that’s not yet in is how this helps Trump. The argument goes that it keeps his opponents so “unbalanced” and “unhinged” or “pearl clutching” or whatever other word you want to use and somehow that’s an advantage.
I’d argue that it makes his base happy but reduces his chances of growing his base. I know polls mean nothing to Trump supporters, but if they mean anything at all (again, I realize this argument does not work with Trump supporters) he’s in trouble. His agenda is in trouble.
His behavior has also garnered him a special prosecutor.
So I’m not saying there isn’t some hidden advantage to “making heads explode” or “causing the snowflakes to faint” or whatever other kind of pseudo alpha-dog macho nonsense you want to assign to this man who is bravely and powerfully pounding out vindictive 140 character messages during his morning bowel movement.
I’m just saying that evidence of how this is helping him would be good. The only thing I can think of is that he uses it as a distraction at times from more serious issues. But it’s not helping him pass Trumpcare or build the wall or etc.
I watched the ABC coverage and it had not one word of criticism for the bile that Mika and Scarborough vomit.
Many here emulate that focus upon the reprehensibility of Trump’s response while giving a pass to the original offense. So much so that they express agreement with their charge of Trump being a psychopath.
Funny, I seem to have somehow misinterpreted Ivanka’s affection for her Father, obviously misplaced since psychopaths are incapable of expressing genuine affection to even those closest to them. So she’s imagining that he actually loves her, right? Melania too… not to mention Barron. But he’s just a kid and what do kids know, right?
And Trump’s loyalty to those close to him must be an act as well… whew, he sure has a lot of people fooled.
Yes, Trump is a bore with manifest flaws. Obviously that’s much more important than his efforts to roll back the Left’s advances. So I’m glad to see that many here have their priorities straight.
Can any here argue that Bush jr. taking the high road and not demeaning the Presidency was successful? Civility before all is a guaranteed formula for failure when fighting evil. And while they aren’t consciously evil, what they support is evil personified.
Hyperbole? Read this and then get back to me: “Baby Charlie Denied Life by British Health System, EU Courts”
“The real motives of liberals have nothing to do with the welfare of other people.
Instead, they have two related goals — to establish themselves as morally and intellectually superior to the rather distasteful population of common people and, to gather as much power as possible to tell those distasteful common people how they must live their lives.” Thomas Sowell
doesn’t have lower tax help the poor more? instead having more tax to go into corrupted politicians’ pockets, virtuous billionaires like warren buffet and Bill Gates can have more money left in their pocket to give to charity.
GB,
They are journalists. He’s the President of the United States who has better and more urgent things to do than cover his office in disgrace.
I’m sick of this “he’s a fighter” and “civility is for losers” talk. Yeah, he’s fighting. Against who?
Are Mika and Joe really the enemy here? All he’s doing is guaranteeing them higher ratings.
If Eisenhower or Grant or Washington had “fought” this way, we’d have lost those respective wars. Unless there’s some genius hidden here I’m not seeing, he’s wasting all his energy (and the dignity of his office and our country) fighting stupid, petty battles that hurt, rather than help, OUR cause.
All that being said, he loves his family and I’m sure they love him back. That’s beside the point.
If 99% of wall street millionaires are virtuous democrats who voted for Hillary, lower their tax means they have more spare money to give to charity, how is that not a great thing?
Trump has plenty of time to manage his fight with the media while attending the serious matters since Trump doesn’t sleep and unlike Obama he doesn’t golf and vacation all the time. Which activity takes away more time golf and vacationing around the world with celebrities or typing out a silly tweet in the middle of the night?
For those of you who are concerned about late-night tweets from powerful people, consider this. I find it ominous that a former Attorney General would be dog-whistling to people still in the DOJ & FBI.
@huxley – some good points, but…
“Trump has arrested our slide into what Jonah Goldberg called “liberal fascism” in his book of that title.”
… remains to be seen
IOW, we’ll see.
i came across a katy perry ad on TV with the slogan “Wouldn’t it be great if everyone said what they meant? ” People have been complaining for ages that we need more transparency in government but when we finally has a President who is completely transparent and tweets everything that’s on his mind they hate it.
“I watched the ABC coverage and it had not one word of criticism for the bile that Mika and Scarborough vomit.” – GB
You are right in the lack of criticism where it is worthy, except, that were it not for trump’s tweets, the audience for that would be limited.
But, as Bill says, trump is POTUS. If a POTUS responds to every personal criticism, then when will he have time to do much else?
When it comes to using the bully pulpit, the choice is very much between “getting even” / “hitting back” vs advancing one’s agenda, as it is a limited resource.
Instead of lowering himself to that of those journaltainers, maybe he’d find it more productive to study the issues and help shepherd his proposals through Congress and build public support for them?
For a man who bragged for the better part of a year at how competent he was, and how only he could get things done, he’s been rather lousy at demonstrating it.
Blaming it on the left and the msm fighting him every step of the way, or the weak kneed GOP in Congress, is to admit he had no idea what it takes to be POTUS.
Bill,
NO they are NOT journalists. They are propagandists for a movement that supports a tyranny of the mind that Jefferson swore eternal hostility against. They are the enemy and a more dangerous one than our external enemies.
“”A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within.
An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.
For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist.
A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.” Marcus Tullius Cicero
That you assert them to be merely ‘journalists’ speaks volumes about your mind-set.
Washington and Grant did not have to deal with a treasonous Left. Even Eisenhower didn’t have to deal with a Marxist/progressive Left so close to victory. Hillary got MORE votes than Trump and demographic trends point to an ever greater cultural imbalance. Your complacency is unwarranted.
I agree with huxley’s take on Trump’s tweets. Offensive? Sure, so what? This country is currently incapable of electing a Washington or Lincoln and even were one elected, they’d be crucified by the Left.
We’re in a knife fight and you keep insisting on the “rules”. But come on Bill, you know there are no rules in a knife fight.
I don’t know, for a president who has been portrayed as a Russian spy in the media 24/7 and having his cabinet selection filibustered and all those phony obstructions I think the president has accomplished a lot. We tried the high road stuff with George W and Romney, it didn’t work, it will never work. the free choice ideology the republicans keep pushing has no market, people worries about security, not free choice. When an average joe goes to the voting booth what he has in mind is how the government would take care of him when he is in trouble, not how much tax he is going to save when he becomes a millionaire. Trump saved the republican party, free choice has no market among average americans, pragmatism with light populism does.
Somebody— Here I thought you were an expert on the Middle East, only to find you’re a remote-viewing psychiatrist.
So tell me, Doctor, since when has, “You hit me, I hit you back twice as hard,” been classified as a symptom of psychopathy? Did I miss the latest DSM?
I don’t know the bottom line on Trump’s tweets. Sure, I’d rather he didn’t tweet like he does, but it may not make much difference.
I suspect his tweets are already baked-in to people’s estimate of Trump. As long as he doesn’t start a war with tweets, which I haven’t ruled out, I don’t care. Maybe most people don’t either.
Maybe tweeting nets to a wash between upsetting his opponents into injudicious behavior and distracting from his agenda.
I doubt Trump wastes much energy on tweets. They may even be therapeutic — a way to let off steam without much downside.
Everyone involved in this latest presidential tweet controversy makes me ill. Trump continues to embarrass himself and give his enemies rope to hang him with. I think he’s forgetting that the majority of people who voted for him did so very reluctantly. But Joe and Mika (it’s a real stretch to call them “journalists,” Bill) are loving every minute of this. They couldn’t be happier, all the while protesting how offended they are. Just when I thought this couple, and their guests, couldn’t possibly become more snarky, snide and superior, Trump hands them this Valentine of a tweet. And the wall-to-wall coverage the whole incident has received is completely ridiculous. It would be great if everyone involved would just shut up already.
Trump are friends with Mika and Joe, he was helping them out, only stupid liberals fall for that.
This is a recent Tweet by Jason Alexander:
The truth inherent in this Tweet is that Alexander freely admits that “[Trump] makes fools of us all.”
That’s it. It’s not that Trump looks (or sounds) boorish, what they are saying is that he embarrasses them! Anytime someone references Trump or his Tweets as embarrassing, anytime someone attempts to eviscerate him as vulgar or boorish, what they are actually revealing is a comment about their own investment in their own ego;
As much as I disagree with Alexander, at least he’s honest.
Trump is always like that, he is focused only when his back is against the wall. Whenever he is relief or things are going well he will do some stupid s**t to surrender all the previous gains, every single time. Things were going well earlier this week, and i knew he was about to do some stupid s**t to let CNN off the rope, stupid of Trump. Seriously if Putin was truly colluding with Trump can he hack into twitter and delete his account so he can’t post those stupid tweets anymore.
“As long as he doesn’t start a war with tweets, which I haven’t ruled out, I don’t care.”
So you think it’s possible he could tweet us into a war, but you won’t start caring about that until that happens?
“Washington and Grant did not have to deal with a treasonous Left.”
Grant had an entire half of the country trying to kill him and destroy the union. Washington and Grant were both fighting for our nation’s life against real enemies.
Trump is upset at people who make fun of his hand size and have leapt to the bait that he himself foolishly left out on all sorts of issues, including Russia.
I’ve researched both the Presidents you mentioned in decent depth. Trump doesn’t deserve to be in the same conversation with them. They were both greater men, by far, than this five year old moral midget of a president could ever hope to be.
GB, I’m sick of the eliminationist rhetoric, xenophobia, tribalism and hatred coming from my former party. I know a lot of Hispanics and African Americans and if the future alternative is between them and Trump supporters/Trumpism, I choose the former. Enthusiastically.
Trump didn’t save the Republican party. He killed it.
I was willing to give him a chance, but at this point I can’t wait for him to be gone. Four years or sooner. Best case is he gets impeached or resigns and we get President Pence.
“. . . he will do some stupid s**t to surrender all the previous gains, every single time.” [Dave @ 7:10]
So exactly what gains has Trump’s Tweet surrendered? I see a whole buncha positive things going on underneath the surface, while the MSM, the bolgiverse and the political parties are obsessed with the superficial.
The Tweets are a distraction which draw the attention of those who have little substance to begin with. That, IMO, has been the singular wonder of Trumps short administration; he has caused the Dems, the media, the progressive left, even the Deep State to reveal themselves for the power driven louts that they have always been. The masks are gone!
I just jumped over to Legal Insurrection and this is the post I found:
“While you were watching Trump tweet, Claire McCaskill was caught in another Russia lie”
T
In what universe is distracting people with ludicrous tweets from paying attention to news that would help your case a smart strategy?
Democrats will always win because they have given up the middle class while catering to the super rich and the poor. The west prospered because of a class of people that had never existed in the world before, the middle class. Compare the west to the rest of the world with oppressive regimes, what is the difference, the existence of a strong middle class. Once the middle class is eradicated in America only the super rich elites and the poor remain, that is when the elite turns against the useful idiots who put them into power and make them their slaves, the script is so predictable why can’t people see that. Trump is the last saviour of the middle class if he loses the west is finished.
“the script is so predictable why can’t people see that. Trump is the last saviour of the middle class if he loses the west is finished.”
Nothing is predictable. Everyone thinks they know what’s going to happen.
Who predicted 8 years ago that Democrats would be in
elector retreat everywhere? They are so bad that Donald Trump beat them (and who would have predicted that?)
Deciding you know what’s inevitable leads to bad choices. If Trump is our last hope than anything he does is permissible. Right?
Lots are already basically arguing this, with their flight 93 all is lost rhetoric. It’s comforting for many to think this way but I’m hopeful cooler heads will prevail.
If Trump is impeached, resigns, or – more likely – just continues to exhaust the country with his ineffective presidential reality show over the next four years, the Republic will survive. It has survived much worse. Perhaps we’ll be more the wiser.
In the meantime, hopefully we can remember why we were conservatives in the first place. It wasn’t for guys like Trump to publicly defecate daily from a duly won but undeserved presidential perch.
Every policy the democrats have made since Obama had won was a step to destroy the middle class, obamacare, quantitative easing, climate change, open border all had the same effect of making the rich richer, destroying the self relying working middle class while creating more government depending lower class who has to continue to vote for the big government party to survive. The ingredients for an oppressive society is always the same, a small elite circle, no middle class with a huge lower class. The socialistic ideology is always sugar coated poison, the only reason why democratic socialism kind of worked because the democratic part of the system allows the existence of conservatives to counter the damage pure socialism can do to society.
It is funny how one little tweet has changed the whole momentum. trump definitely picked the wrong fight, he got away from fighting with Megan Kelly bc she was working at Fox News, she didn’t have the backing of the msm and liberals like mika has. You know that the democrats has finished up drawing up the next game plan when Nate silver start tweeting politics again. After the Russia colluding story died you can tell the game play would attacking his temperament
So you think it’s possible he could tweet us into a war, but you won’t start caring about that until that happens?
Bill: Pretty much. I have no ideas what the odds are or how to calculate them or what I might do to prevent such a war or how likely my actions could help.
Which is basically where I stand with climate change too.
But so far Trump’s tweets and their repercussions seem to boil down to so much sound and fury told by idiots signifying nothing.
The next gameplay should be called the bill oreilly play, the left are definitely unleashing the sexual harassment attack that got oreilly fired on trump
Another perspective on the Mika-Joe-Trump triangle.
I came upon this while following another blog comment thread; it speaks to several points made by the group here.
Now, is Rush a truth-teller or making up fake news?
You decide.
https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2017/06/29/what-i-know-about-trump-joe-and-mika/?platform=hootsuite
RUSH: Just a couple of stories here. And folks, I’m just trying to add spice, information to this. ..>
So I don’t know when this was. Yes, I do. It was 2012. So five years ago, and I believe it was a Friday afternoon. I’m sitting here minding my own business, and I get a note that Mika Brzezinski and Scarborough are in town. There’s something going on in town that they’re here, they’re here making an appearance. It might have been Horowitz’s Restoration Weekend or some such thing as that. I think it was at The Breakers. And they asked to come by.
I met Scarborough a long, long time ago. He was a member of the freshman class in 1994. I had never met Mika Brzezinski. They came by here and they were here for about an hour. Could not have been nicer. And I asked Mika, you know, her dad was Zbig, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and I asked her what it was like growing up with her dad national security adviser to Jimmy Carter. She said, “Oh, we went everywhere. Every foreign trip he packed everybody up, we went as a family.”
I heard some fascinating stories. Scarborough was talking about his rock band and playing the guitar. And I ended up giving each of them an engraved EIB iPad. Do you remember? And they were thrilled, they were happy, and they walked out of here with them after about an hour. And Mika even used her EIB iPad on MSNBC. I have a picture of her using it, showing, flashing it. It was about three weeks later that they started trashing me like I have never been trashed. I don’t even remember what about. And I didn’t hear it ’cause I don’t watch MSNBC. I was told about it.
I had no clue. “What did you do to them?” I didn’t do anything. I gave them an iPad. They came down here unannounced. I brought ’em in here for an hour, and they sat here and talked. And then this I haven’t told you. Kathryn and I had dinner at the White House on March 23rd. It was a Thursday night. It was the night before what was going to be the first vote in the House on repealing Obamacare. It did not happen.
We got there right at five o’clock, right as Trump was meeting with the Tuesday group, a group of Republican House members. There were 17 “no” votes. We watched the whole thing, right off Oval Office. He converted 16 of those votes to “yes” votes. At dinner – I’m down to 30 seconds here. I have to go through this faster than I want to. At dinner, I don’t know how it came up, he asked me if I knew Scarborough and I said, “Yeah, I’ve met him.”
He said, “Those two are weird.” And I just sat there. He said, “Yeah, New Year’s Eve, they call, they begged to come to Mar-a-Lago. They want to be around me. They come to Mar-a-Lago. I said, ‘I gotta let ’em in, I’m president-elect, they want to come.’ I didn’t want them there, but they wanted to come. And they hang out for all three days, and I kind of felt obligated to have ’em.” I read this tweet today, and apparently he’s been bugged by that ever since it happened. I mean, just told me, told us out of the blue about it.…
I struggled with how to deal with this kind of criticism all the time, and nobody gave me any advice. Nobody had any. Everybody had theories, but there’s not a tried-and-true way to deal with this. What I found was that the more you react to it, the more it’s gonna happen. And now it’s to the point, like Snerdley walked in, I apparently got ripped in the Washington Post. I didn’t even know until he comes in here fuming. “You ought to see, you ought to see —” Stop. I don’t care. I really don’t care.
Now, Trump is not that way. Trump obviously cares. And Trump, when you hit Trump he is gonna come back at you times five harder. That’s just the way he does it.
We are up in Northern Minnesota, not paying much attention to the world at large. At a restaurant with wifi so took a look. Tweets leading to WW3? Gimme a break. Tomorrow fishing with the grandkids, enjoying the lake, and perhaps a bit of squirrel hunting. Ease off Ripley, you’re just grinding metal.
Dave Says:
June 30th, 2017 at 5:20 pm
i came across a katy perry ad on TV with the slogan “Wouldn’t it be great if everyone said what they meant? ” People have been complaining for ages that we need more transparency in government but when we finally has a President who is completely transparent and tweets everything that’s on his mind they hate it.
* * *
Mark Twain investigated the question of what happens when everyone tells the truth, by way of putting two dear old ladies in the position of having to lie to a dying woman to save causing her more pain. (IIRC, of course)
http://www.twainquotes.com/Truth.html
If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember anything.
– Notebook, 1894
Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.
– Following the Equator, Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar
Familiarity breeds contempt. How accurate that is. The reason we hold truth in such respect is because we have so little opportunity to get familiar with it.
– Notebook, 1898
Truth postcard
Postcard from the Dave Thomson collection
We are always hearing of people who are around seeking after the Truth. I have never seen a (permanent) specimen. I think he has never lived. But I have seen several entirely sincere people who thought they were (permanent) Seekers after the Truth. They sought diligently, persistently, carefully, cautiously, profoundly, with perfect honesty and nicely adjusted judgment- until they believed that without doubt or question they had found the Truth. That was the end of the search. The man spent the rest of his hunting up shingles wherewith to protect his Truth from the weather.
– “What is Man?”
…all through my life my facts have had a substratum of truth, and therefore they were not without value. Any person who is familiar with me knows how to strike my average, and therfore knows how to get at the jewel of any fact of mine and dig it out of its blue-clay matrix. My mother knew that art. When I was seven or eight …a neighbor said to her, “Do you ever believe anything that that boy says?” My mother said, “He is a well spring of truth, but you can’t bring up the whole well with one bucket. I know his average, therefore he never deceives me. I discount him thirty per cent for embroidery, and what is left is perfect and priceless truth, without a flaw in it anywhere.”
– Mark Twain’s Autobiography
Truth is stranger than fiction–to some people, but I am measurably familiar with it.
– Following the Equator, Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.
– Following the Equator, Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar
Truth is more of a stranger than fiction.
– Notebook, 1898
My own luck has been curious all my literary life; I never could tell a lie that anyone would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.
– Following the Equator
Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.
– Notebook, 1902
It is not worth while to strain one’s self to tell the truth to people who habitually discount everything you tell them, whether it is true or isn’t.
– Autobiography of Mark Twain; also in Mark Twain in Eruption
Tell the truth or trump–but get the trick.
– Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar
But it was ever thus, all through my life: whenever I have diverged from custom and principle and uttered a truth, the rule has been that the hearer hadn’t strength of mind enough to believe it.
– Autobiography of Mark Twain
An injurious truth has no merit over an injurious lie. Neither should ever be uttered. The man who speaks an injurious truth, lest his soul be not saved if he do otherwise, should reflect that that sort of a soul is not strictly worth saving.
– “On the Decay of the Art of Lying”
Often the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict truth.
– Following the Equator
I like the truth sometimes, but I don’t care enough for it to hanker after it.
– Ashcroft-Lyon manuscript (related resource: Dangerous Intimacy, Karen Lystra, University of California Press, 2004)
“In what universe is distracting people with ludicrous tweets from paying attention to news that would help your case a smart strategy?” [Bill @ 8:25]
Bill, you completely miss my point. I posted the Legal Insurrection post as evidence of the distractive nature of the Trump Tweets; it is a case in point. I never said or implied that I thought Trump was “surgical” in his Tweets. He fires them like a shotgun. When one does that, occasionally there is sure to be some collateral damage. But the question remains— does it work and is it showing results? Judge for yourself:
I have changed my position on this subject after viewing joe’s previous attacks on the president. Joe’s insults on the president were brutal, he was calling the president all kinds of nasty names, thug, idiot and what not. Why it is okay for high level celebrities to insult the president on a daily basis, calling him orange pig putin’s penis holster and all sorts of other nasty names without any consequences? so why exactly can’t the president fight back a little? Does being the president mean you have to accept every nasty name calling your way and you can’t respond? Does being the president mean you have forfeited your first amendment right? Being the president doesn’t mean the media can unfairly twist his every figuratively speech and misinterpret everything he said while attacking him and his family? Calling Barron autistic with no proof. yes he should have taken the high road, but can you fault him for venting a bit after taken all these hits. No president had ever acted like that, but no president had ever been called a penis holster of someone by a comedian either. If they don’t to want respect the president the people have chosen, they don’t want to respect our constitution, they don’t want to respect our law, they don’t want to respect our country, and they don’t respect the suffering people who had no other choice but choosing this president as their last resort, then I applaud the president for disrespecting these tantrum throwing loser liberals back. Thank you mr president.
We should back the president because how these liberals are insulting the president is exactly how the liberals have been treating non liberal Americans. Calling us names because we worry about the safety of our family; Calling us names because we worry about our future; Calling us names because we support the police who risk their lives to protect us; calling us names because some of us believe all children deserve a chance to experience this wonderful world like all children meant to be; calling us names because some of us believe the union between a father and mother deserves a special recognition; calling us names because some of us believe we should teach the unfortunates how to fish, not just feeding them; calling us names because we question a prediction of an incoming doomsday that scientists with a conflict of interest are pushing our government to spend trillions of dollars on without any substantial proof but some models; calling us names because we believe that there are ways we can held the unfortunates with preexisting conditions get coverage without sacrificing other healthy struggling people by doubling their premiums. But what do I know, I am just an uneducated bigot deplorable who is on the wrong side of history. Mr president, I don’t represent everyone but you have my full support, I wish I had the gut to speak up like you do when my mentor was fired for bogus discrimination complaint.
May I ask one question that may be offensive, as a Chinese living in the west, why is it considered to be an ultimate sin if you are a holocaust denier, but it’s perfectly fine for westerners to deny any wrongdoings of socialism? I find it very offensive that horrible history of socialism is not being taught in American schools since my grandfather was persecuted during anti-right movement and have relatives suffered during the cultural revolution. It is an injustice to be inconsistent. if you want to teach the children the history of nazi to prevent things like that from happening again, then what about the horrible bloodier history of socialism? don’t you afraid what happened in the Eastern Europe and China/indochina will repeat again in the west? if not then why not?
Dave: A fair question and I take your point.
Speaking as an American leftist from 1970 to 2001, I would say that academia and the media have had a strong leftist contingent since the late 1800s which believed that socialism, in some configuration, must be the future. I sure bought into it.
To that end it has been important not to dwell on socialist failures and even to cover them up, while hoping the next great socialist hope (Venezuela! Obama!) will be the one that does socialism right and creates the new heaven on earth.
Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism” provides an excellent, readable survey of this material.
When I was kid in Florida, high school students had to take a six-week course called “Americanism vs Communism.” I was in Catholic school so I didn’t have the pleasure, but there was a Florida law which said:
The course shall lay particular emphasis upon the dangers of communism, the ways to fight communism, the evils of communism, the fallacies of communism, and the false doctrines of communism.
Also:
The course … shall emphasize the free enterprise — competitive economy of the United States of America as the one which produces higher wages, higher standards of living, greater personal freedom and liberty than any other system of the economies on earth.
Well, they repealed that law in 1983. Sounds pretty refreshing by today’s crazy standards.
Apparently, Scarborough is lying about the “extortion” story, which isn’t surprising since the story as it was told Scarborough and Brzezinski defies common sense. It makes far more sense that Scarborough and/or Brzezinski called someone to ask if something could be done about the story, and were told to stuff it. As it turns out, it appears that Scarborough called Jared Kushner, and Kushner told him that he should be asking Trump, not Kushner, as it is Trump who has the close relationship to David Pecker. Scarborough didn’t want to do that because Trump was angry with him, which is unsurprising, right? In any case, Kushner brushed him off with the suggestion that he apologize, and that was the end of the matter.
What I would like to know is this- when were the various stories about this so-called extortion in the planning stage? It appears to me that they predate the Trump tweet about the face-lift, and I suspect that Trump knew this extortion story was about to be published. I think the face lift tweet was the reply not vice versa.
Is it because that there is a bulky in flaw in the conservative ideology that makes it very difficult to defeat the left? Conservatism is a very principled ideology, therefore constituents conservatives choose to fight for are determined by the guidance of the principles, not a pragmatic calculation trying to maximize supporting base. However, the left has no principles, its primary goal is to expand its base of support, once they recognise a group of unclaimed category of people in society that they can utilise by assimilating them into their base, they would change their principles to allow the targeted group to join in. since they prioritize the expansion of support instead of defending principles liberals will almost be guaranteed to always be larger than conservatives.
Take the issue of abortion as an example, the constituents conservatives choose to fight for based on their principles are the unborn babies. Since unborn babies can’t vote, fighting for their rights give conservatives no benefits in expanding their supporting base. Looking Through the pragmatic lens the fight is futile and non beneficial at all.
However, the left has successfully framed the abortion issue as an issue of a right to choose for women. Since women can vote, by incorporating a group of women who want to keep their options open in the case of an unexpected pregnancy, left had successfully expand their support. It was accompanied by abandoning on of their long holding their principles of fighting for those who don’t have a voice (in this case the babies). You can see the same strategy in play in both the issues of immigration and Islam. To incorporate the latinos into their base, they have abandoned their principles of fighting for the benefits of American blue collar workers; To incorporate muslims into their base, they turned a blind eye to their treatments of women and LGBT.
To win the war not only we have to realise we are in a disadvantage, we have to understand too the reasonings behind the disadvantage. Perhaps I am being captain obvious, but typing it out at least help me understand the why
Trump’s latest tweet, today
Crazy Joe Scarborough and dumb as a rock Mika are not bad people, but their low rated show is dominated by their NBC bosses. Too bad!
Trump is a strategic genius. Repeal and Replace will fly through the congress now. /sarc
He’s also a liar, although he’s wiggly enough that his followers can claim he’s truthful, because “low rated” is a relative term. But an honest person wouldn’t use that to describe Morning Joe, which seems to be in a growth period (I wonder why?). Plus, they were part of normalizing Trump in the primaries so he ought to be thanking them.
(side note: unlike Trump, I never have (and am not currently) watched the show).
http://www.nbcuniversal.com/press-release/msnbc-weekday-prime-ties-1-a18-49-2q17-1st-time-msnbc-tops-quarter-demo
He’s also a disgrace, and engages in the kind of name calling most of us quit in the sixth grade. This isn’t normal.
Here’s Jonah Goldberg:
http://www.nationalreview.com/g-file/449152/donald-trump-tweets-agenda-damaged-character-revealed
“Conservatism is a very principled ideology, therefore constituents conservatives choose to fight for are determined by the guidance of the principles, not a pragmatic calculation trying to maximize supporting base.” – Dave
IOW, fighting for principles by being unprincipled in behavior.
Besides the illogic of it, that is a crap argument.
If trump’s tweets were actually achieving much, you might get some kind of concession on that, but the fact is they are distracting and taking focus away from getting the things we want done (among several other things).
What is the objective here, getting “even” for the perceived unfair coverage by journotainers, or is it to get our agenda implemented?
Appealing to one’s own Id and that of his base, is not building support for our agenda one iota. Yet, in a democracy, one needs broad support to get what one wants done.
The best “revenge” is success, but folks who excuse trump with that backwards fitting argument are only encouraging more of the same, and will see the agenda go up in flames along with it.
Credibility and Trust.
Awk, posted this comment and see Bill added a quote that makes a similar argument.
Thanks for the link Bill.
A succinct quote from that same article:
“‘1. Trump tweets idiocy.
2. People pile on.
3. People pile on the pilers.
4. “Why are we ignoring what Trump is actually doing?”
See point 1′”
One more quote from same:
“The point here is that Reagan was a brilliant politician with some core convictions about all of these schools of thought. (Reagan’s) genius lay in being able to make everyone feel as if they had ownership in his presidency and his cause.
…
(Reagan’s success) also had to do with his character. He made people proud to fight in his ranks and eager to defend him on the merits.”
@Dave and other tweet defenders – do you see the difference?
The problem with emphasizing that trump is a liar is that it implies that trump is the only liar in Washington and everyone else is as honest as the Washington in the cherry tree fairy tale.
Who’s more naive? believing trump is doing only what all politicians and media people do, spinning an event, and in some way misinterpret it in one’s favor, or someone who believes Obama and Hillary are CNN and ted Cruz never lie? how about colluding with his cnn insider to lie about Ben Carson dropping out of the race? Why when trump does it he is exceptionally evil but when everyone do it it’s just business as usual?
When CNN said only part of trump’s travel ban was reimplemented by the court, it is clear as day that they were trying to mislead the public to believe that only small part of the ban of the travel ban was lifted but in reality the big chunk of the travel ban was reinstated. technically they weren’t lying but the misleading is no more innocent than lying out right. When the attorney general told the head of FBI to mislead the public by calling an investigation an incident Why are you ok with that you ultimate truth seekers? How about all these liberal legal pundits who were lying on TV about how trump’ travel ban was unconstitutional? why don’t they got called out for lying? why they can get away with lying by calling their lies opinions instead?
You are just as bad as the trump supporters, just like how you accuse them of doing you believe everything that favors your side and tune out everything that contradict your side, you are no better than anyone so get off your high horse. No trump supporter believes trump never lies, but when everyone in the game use steroids, do you really mind the athlete you support juice up a bit too to have a fighting chance in the game?
Trump may or may not be a liar, but so is everyone else in Washington. Politics is nothing more than a game of seeing who gets more people to believe your lies. if he succeeded by being a better liar than all these professional liars who lied for a living, isn’t that an accomplishment in itself.
You are misunderstanding the difference between condoning lying and accepting the fact that spinning is part of the game
“The problem with emphasizing that trump is a liar is that it implies that trump is the only liar in Washington and everyone else is as honest as the Washington in the cherry tree fairy tale.”
No it doesn’t.
“Who’s more naive? believing trump is doing only what all politicians and media people do, spinning an event, and in some way misinterpret it in one’s favor, or someone who believes Obama and Hillary are CNN and ted Cruz never lie?”
I don’t know anyone who believes that.
Two things can be bad at the same time.
It’s also sobering to consider what Trump lies about. He lies when the truth is easy to get to and can thus disprove the lie. “My inauguration crowd was the biggest ever”, “Morning Joe is low rated”, “I’ve done more (with some exceptions) in my time as President than any other President” to name just a very few. This is Bagdad Bob level lying. It’s cheap propaganda. Somehow it works with his supporters.
I have little to quarrel with the reluctant Trump voter who didn’t want Hillary to be President. I didn’t want her to be President either (I voted third party). But I don’t understand people who somehow think Trump’s dishonesty, vindictiveness, cruelty, and pettiness is “winning”.
How do you distinguish “trump is lying” from “CNN is lying about trump’s lying?” remember the women Gloria allred bought on CNN to accuse Trump of sexually assaulting them, including one porn actress or something like that? Remember Michelle fields who accused trump’s the then campaign manager Corey something of pulling her to the ground? Remember CNN lying about trump hiring two Russian prostitutes to pee on a bed which Obama had previously slept on? How about lying about reading wiki leaks is illegal or millions of other things. The matter is who watch the watchmen? How can you believe them when they say trump is lying on subjects that ain’t your speciality when they had been caught lying or manipulating facts themselves so many times?
People accuse trump of lying about taping the comedy conversation. When the president of the United States had to lie to get the former FDI director to speak the truth, trump’s lying was the least part of our country’s problem. When he was surrounded by vicious enemies like that, can you fault him to lie as a device to get the truth out?
Welcome to your American life, Trum’s new reality tv show, in partnership with CNN and CBS. If you see bs, you are entered free into a lottery drawing.
People accuse trump of lying about taping the comedy conversation. When the president of the United States had to lie to get the former FDI director to speak the truth, trump’s lying was the least part of our country’s problem. When he was surrounded by vicious enemies like that, can you fault him to lie as a device to get the truth out?
Americans didn’t have that opinion about Nixon. Why do they expect that having done that to Nixon, they can get out of jail free for their new President.
” . . . anytime someone attempts to eviscerate him as vulgar or boorish, what they are actually revealing is a comment about their own investment in their own ego;” [T @ 6:58]
QED.
Furthermore, if you think this isn’t “normal” or commonplace, 1) you spend too much time in gastropubs and not enough time in local bars and 2) you are completely ignoring the visceral, sixth-grade media name calling that prompts Trump’s Tweets. Again, a “we’re better than that approach.” (and again, QED)
“How can you believe them when they say trump is lying on subjects that ain’t your speciality when they had been caught lying or manipulating facts themselves so many times?” [Dave @ 11:44]
Dave,
FYI, you are (rightfully) referencing the Gell-Mann effect as explained by Michael Crichton:
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gell-mann-amnesia-effect-is-as-follows-you
Dave,
I’m not here to defend CNN.
T
“anytime someone attempts to eviscerate him as vulgar or boorish, what they are actually revealing is a comment about their own investment in their own ego”
He’s disgracing his office. That’s the argument. That’s what you should be debating, rather than psychoanalyzing me.
When you have hussein Obama came out telling the world that there was absolutely no hacking in the election and only a month later after they had lost the election the democrats came out contradicting everything Obama had said earlier claiming that the Russian had hacked the election, who was lying, Obama or the democrats?
Everyone knows America election’s decentralisation actually makes it easier to hack since anyone with meticulous intents can manipulate whole electoral college count by hacking a few counties in battle states, was Obama not lying about the decentralisation making our election nearly impossible to hack?
It is like having a corrupted referee on the field who disallow your every legitimately scored goal. was trump lying whenever he cited some scientific proof you have the author of the cited research presumably liberal came out to accuse of the president lying by contradicting everything he wrote earlier in his research? When you have democrats who were informed by comey long ago that trump was not under investigation still lying about trump is under investigation, and you still support that party, please do not pretend you care about truth.
Negative times negative is positive, is it logical or not to presume a serial proven liar lying about someone lying does not imply that the accused was truly lying?
Manju Says:
June 30th, 2017 at 1:42 pm
A solid point.
Again, a “we’re better than that approach.” (and again, QED)
The reason why you and the Alt Right aren’t better than the Leftist alliance nor are you going to win the war against evil is because:
1. Copying Lucifer’s tactics doesn’t work against Lucifer, only humans like Alinsky.
2. You haven’t started killing them, so you are not “winning” but “losing”. Still doesn’t make you better than them.
When you have hussein Obama came out telling the world that there was absolutely no hacking in the election and only a month later after they had lost the election the democrats came out contradicting everything Obama had said earlier claiming that the Russian had hacked the election, who was lying, Obama or the democrats?
When white boy Hussein voters broke the country and changed/jumped ship to Trum, were they lying about Trum, the Russians, Obama, or the Demoncrats.
How can you believe them when they say trump is lying on subjects that ain’t your speciality when they had been caught lying or manipulating facts themselves so many times?
The answer so so simplistic it might as well be stupid. Unplug yourself from the news and never watch it nor talk about it.
But that’s too high level for American voters. If the media says the sun rises in the east, the earth is a sphere, and 2+2=4, I don’t need to pay attention to them to believe in similar conclusions.
But all you #nevertrump folks keep on clutching your pearls & crying in my coffee…best sweetener ever.
Want to know where that meme and propaganda control comes from… probably not but I’ll free output it.
Eve Online propaganda poster since 2003, where new pilots kept dying to vets, and vets responded that the tears of the weak were joy and entertainment to them, so more salty tears please. *lick*
That crossed over to the Alt Right from Gamergate, reddit, etc. Best sweetner ever, for salt is the joy of the predator.
Obama’s famed unflappability suggests the possibility that he’s unflappable simply because he’s not really capable of caring what other people think.
Demoncrats like Some Boy are closer to their leaders then they want to think about.
“He’s disgracing his office. . . . That’s what you should be debating, rather than psychoanalyzing me.” [Bill @12:14]
Again the sanctimonius ego-based argument of “We’re better than that.”
And again, QED.
Touched a nerve, did I?
Your concern about the office of POTUS is touching but absolutely unnecessary. The office of the president is doing just fine. It outlasted Andrew Johnsons’s impeachment, Grant’s drinking Wilson, Kennedy’s affairs, LBJ’s coarseness Nixon, Clinton’s oval office trysts and impeachment and all other presidents one might wish to denigrate at terrible. Likewise, it will persevere beyond any “damage” you see Trump doing as well.
The town drunk staggering down the street, even if he is your uncle, is not your embarrassment unless your own ego is invested in that town drunk.
I’m having a Hell of a time laughing at angst-filled arguments such as yours because, whether they emanate from Never-Trumpers, establishment Republicans or progressives, they are all of a piece of the complaints coming from the common Kool-Aid of the MSM.
One final point. We once had a serious, polite, constitutionally intentioned popular uprising to address precisely the problems of over-regulation and gargantuan government that Trump is addressing. It was called the Tea Party; remember that? And how was that sober, dignified movement received? It was eviscerated not only by the media, the left, and the Democrats, but it was also reviled by establishment Republicans, the same people who now have their panties in a twist about Trump.
Well, when polite and sober doesn’t work—-you get Trump. If I were you and your ilk, I would be less worried about “damage to the office” and more worried about what comes after Trump if Trump is hounded to be as unsuccessful as the Tea Party was.
LOL
Well, you might ask yourself where principles come from, how and by what, for example, they are generated … i.e., by what underlying predicates.
Traditional classical liberal, and (believing) Christian principles were generated out of a “one humanity” assumption, which was presumed to be more than a categorizing convenience or polemical device.
The one humanity assumption therefore extended to all human-seeming creatures those same attributes which were deemed by those believers to be intrinsically possessed by themselves who were made(so they believed) in the image and likeness of their Creator.
The humanity of the other was assumed to be morally like your own humanity, and a soul with an everlasting fate like yours was imputed to them as well.
Thus, when acting toward a “them”, the rule was that one should act toward them as one would toward a creature like one’s self: a being with a soul, having intrinsic value, made in the image and likeness of his Creator, and destined for an everlasting fate for his good or ill. Which makes of course, one’s treatment of them supremely important, as it was assumed to have infinite consequences.
Liberals and their authorities of Freud, and Marx, and Rorty, of course deny all of these propositions, and mock the ideas upon which the old operating assumptions and rules [principles] were based.
Therefore: We are all free to look at the myth of intrinsic and inherent fellowship in the same way we are instructed by liberals to consider the “god myth”.
So, you don’t have to place “the other” in scare quotes anymore champ.
The leftist other, is, and proclaims himself to be, morally other. Radically finite. Ultimately meaningless. A mere collocation of matter swirling around for a time before it dissipates as meaninglessly as it arose. Treat it as it admits it deserves to be treated.
Thus: Unless you share Bill’s masochistic temperament, it would behoove you to take a closer look at the anthropological/moral assumptions you have been working off of.
In pretending modern liberals respect life, or recognize boundaries and principles based on human value rather than nihilistic appetite, you are trying in effect, to teach dogs to walk on their hind legs: and they don’t appreciate it much.
But you know, if it makes you feel good, go right ahead.
DNW,
If I may be so bold as to succinctly re-interpret your 12:48 post:
You’ll never get the bully to sit at the table for peace talks until you first punch him in the nose to let him know you’re serious.
Thus, Trump.
ALso, sorry, but a few commas missing from this paragraph (12:46 above). For the sake of clarity:
Say,
Is Sergey still around and visiting?
If so I have a question for him, and its no easy challenge, since I have already asked another knowledgeable Russian whose background might have led him to know, and he had to admit coming up with nothing.
Sergey:
The question: Do you know of any good English works on the legal theories of N.V. Krylenko, and Pashukanis?
Specifically of any developed arguments of theirs relating to the liberation of Soviet law from what we would see as the rule of law; regarding the presumed social locus of the power to make law; regarding consistency of application to cases; and regarding their stance on the nature of law itself.
Now, I have noticed a few articles which have appeared on the Internet since I last asked this question, but have not seen any readily available or comprehensive treatments of it.
The fellow I asked a couple years ago was a Russian [in Russia] law student, so I’m merely asking on the off chance, and not assuming that you should know.
Regards …
By turning a blind eye on Obama’s incompetence and sociopathic lying and Bill Clinton’s horrific mistreatments of women because they are their own, the left has unintentionally mentally prepared the public to accept someone as inexperienced and vulgar as Trump.
You have do some soul searching on why such a person who was viewed as unelectable as Ron Jeremy and Dennis rodman merely ten years goo can win a historic election through beating the bush and Clinton family.
Eight year ago when my friend who was and still is a devoted christian mentioned to me that he hoped Trump can run in 2012 to beat Obama I remember I couldn’t stop laughing while saying to his face “Donald Trump, that conman? are you joking?” Eight years later I voted for this conman.
C.S Lewis, I think it was, made some remarks on the futility, or stupidity, of playing cards with an known and unapologetic cheat.
Trump may have found a way. Or, some of us may think they have found a way, through Trump. You are handed the deck to deal and then you either throw the cards in their faces or deal them to them, face up, with insults.
How many years, decades, has it been that modern liberals have operated off of principles which are antithetical to the principles of the polity’s founding, and to the basis of our continuing social contract with them?
How many years, decades, have these malicious, sly-eyed, glabrous cheeked self-dealing sons-of-bitches, gotten away with holding the people they are clearly and proudly intending to economically and politically dispossess, to rules which they, the modern liberals scoff at?
I didn’t want Trump. I voted for him only on the coldest of assessments as to what would be left of free enterprise and personal freedom in this country should the Dems prevail.
The alternatives were not an exaggeration. The left has been hollowing out, subverting, and making war by hook or crook on the middle states’ middle class for two generations now.
The stored capital, and the resilience of that class to suffer further attacks without destruction – which was the left’s aim anyway – was gone.
Unless you are a government employee conservative, or firmly ensconced in the structure of a crony capitalist mega-corporation, the situation looks pretty serious. Government employees now outnumber producers of material wealth. The entitlement budget is so large as to leave nothing to be cut.
What’s to preserve? What does the sensitive pension dwelling conservative have to offer other than stinking self-serving don’t rock the boat platitudes, to the 30 something guy who sees that the state is turned against his freedom, his prosperity, and his future?
Trump burns it down?
Shrug. You may have to let the house burn and build a new one if you cannot get the monkey off your back any other way.
Huh,
Ask and you shall receive … in part at least.
Could be any number of modern leftist American intellectuals talking. Your “fellows”, so-called.
http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1924-2/socialist-legality/socialist-legality-texts/krylenko-on-law-and-state/
The office of the president is doing just fine. It outlasted Andrew Johnsons’s impeachment, Grant’s drinking Wilson, Kennedy’s affairs, LBJ’s coarseness Nixon, Clinton’s oval office trysts and impeachment and all other presidents one might wish to denigrate at terrible. Likewise, it will persevere beyond any “damage” you see Trump doing as well.
It ain’t going to be able to out tank the damage done to Soddom and Gomorrah. So yeah, the President seat is the most powerful seat on this Earth and basically zero humans can kill it. Humans, that is.
Try out tanking an angel, see where that gets you.
The world ends in fire, check your scriptures. A single man isn’t going to save the US, just like a single man (Washington) did create the US.
DNW Says:
July 1st, 2017 at 12:48 pm
I would summarize that as:
Lucifer says to use what he taught Alinsky and obey the world.
Jesus of Nazareth said to fight the world, be hated by the world, and achieve immortality and godhood, perfection like him.
So people think they can defeat Lucifer, or the Leftist alliance, by beating the Left and Lucifer at his own game…
What a bunch of sheepish mortal fools. You really think Lucifer and the Leftist alliance was ordered to give you all this knowledge and technology, for your own benefit… they gave you the 401cs so the Tea Party could replace them, is that it. No they did not.
Talking about a 6000+ year war between light and darkness, as if it is some 5 minute blitz chess you played in your head against the AI, isn’t going to amount to much, just Christian shadow theology and world academic bs as usual.
https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organizations/exemption-requirements-section-501-c-3-organizations
501 c correction. Half the Left’s wet work is done via those orgs, yet the moment conservatives try to play the same game, they got shut down. And everyone trying to talk about it was labeled a conspiracy theorist, since the evidence was under court ban until later.
DNW very well said.
If the left agrees to adhere to the gentlemen agreement by playing fairly with conservatives and do not violently trying to abolish the current system of two parties checking and balancing each other the other side wouldn’t have become so desperate to support someone as radical as djt.
The fact is the left had made the first move with an intent to eradicate the conservatives completely once and for all to try to stay in power forever. To do so they have done everything they can secretly to try destroy all the fail-safe system the founding fathers deliberately put in place to prevent a one party system from happening. The electoral college was designed specifically to prevent Someone like Hillary from getting elected, preventing the event in that two most populated cities deciding how the whole country live our lives. Of course like every mechanism the ingenious founding fathers had designed to prevent tyranny the left viewed it as their biggest hurdle from total domination thus making it something that needs to be taken out.
I don’t support most of what the conservatives stand for, but I support their rights to believe in those things without being harnessed. It is very clear there is one side who has initiated an attack with an clear intent to abolish the other side. To me anyone who try to destroy all political enemies to enjoy an monopoly of idea needs to be stopped to preserve this once great country and the principles it was found on.
Like how King Solomon ruled between the two women both claimed to be the mother of the baby in an era before DNA, you can easily determine which side loves the country more by how each side behave upon a defeat. The right loves the country too much to hurt it with riots and arson even after each devastating loss. however, riot and arson are the first things they do whenever the left suffer a defeat.
I’m talking about cutting them out of the reciprocity arrangement, not about trying to use their rules in order to manipulate and keep them in.
They want to put on the wolf’s head? Fine. I am merely recognizing that they have done so. There is Bill Ayers; he wears the wolfs head.
They have a God given choice apparently, and so do I. Theirs is to devour; and mine is to not be devoured by them under some spurious fellowship pretext.
Are they less liable to cosmic rules, than I am?
When did the criminal class become morally privileged?
When did the notion of secular self-government fall to a replacement in the form of a Christian-tinged masochism drama?
Well you can throw yourself on the rails if you want.
But the issue here is the predicate of our continuing political affiliation and the presumption of moral fellowship with people who are clearly out to use the system to destroy and take over.
If you want to see the fact that Bill Ayers inhabits your political sphere, and is able to manipulate the rules for his own benefit as some sacrifice imposed upon you from on high to bear, then feel free.
But then maybe you should never move house, chose your own career, or put hammer to nail without asking your enemies for permission first.
“Hello, can I please defend my mother and father against your verminous attacks on them … please?”
Remember, they are the ones who mandated orgies and homosexual relations in order to break down bourgeois moral sentiments. Give into them, and your own ass isn’t even safe. Not to mention your child’s as the German radicals proved. If that matters to you. If you feel you have permission to resist that evil.
And then there is this,
and
You don’t have to become a cheat yourself, to throw the cards back in their faces.
Yes, but in this case some parts of the baby can probably survive the suicide of others.
Being regularly held hostage by inhibition-free lunatic assailants who use your own reluctance against you, has finally revealed to conservatives that there was something lacking, something rather shallow, in their grasp of their own principles.
Noticed that for the first time during a trump fight with the media no one called Trump a liar this time, I wonder why.
No more vulgar than getting a b***j** from an young enough to be his daughter intern in the Oval Office and having his semen dripping all over her blue dress. sorry I am a very vulgar man myself as well. I wonder when did trump learn to be so vulgar, must be during his days as a democrat.
@DNW – LOL.
Noticed in your dissertations that you didn’t actually address what the problems were, as stated, with trump’s tweets.
You may think this all is fun, or effective, or ????
You, evidently, also assume that somehow this is all an argument for being a door mat.
Hardly so.
There is a HUGE difference between being assertive, focused, tough vs being petty, unfocused, creating and/or perpetuating a distraction(s), etc.
If you think that what trump is doing is somehow some long term strategy to “Winning!!”, I don’t see that.
Perhaps if you stay focused on arguing THAT case, rather than strawmanning, you might have something convincing.
The tweet was about Trump questioning why Mika & Joe are attacking Trump so fiercely on their show despite the fact that the two parties were in mostly friendly term in the past.
Trump suggested that perhaps the unexpected attacks from the former friends are the result of Trump shrugging off them around the new year time when they were trying to kiss up to Trump, showing up in Mar-a-Lago three nights in a row asking to join Trump for dinner.
Trump offered his reason for shrugging them off, perhaps Mika had patches and bandages on her face after her alleged facelift operation with hint of blood showing through the bandages (Trump knows all the plastic surgeons in town as he probably had tons of facelift himself so i assume he got wind of that).
Ask yourself would you like to have dinner with someone all wrapped up like a mummy or leper patient?
Trump is the sympathetic character in this whole incident.
1. Trump was offered to have dinner with from two old friends, but he didn’t want to do so because of Mika’s condition after the surgery. he didn’t want to state his reason for the rejection blatantly as that would hurt her feelings, so he took the high road, simply rejected their offer without giving them a clear reason.
2. Mika and Joe interpreted the rejection differently. They presumed that Trump shrugging them off because of his arrogance after his then recent victory. They were probably thinking to themselves the following: “That cocky Orange Jerk thinks we don’t deserve to have dinner with him because he is now the president, he thinks he’s above us, f**k him, we are going to screw him in our show”
3. Trump didn’t take the attacks from two former friends lightly because he felt betrayed, he started recalling their recent encounters to try to find the answer to this betrayal. He recalled that little encounter at Mar-a-Lago around new year time, then took to the twitters to fight back.
4. the whole incident happened because Mika and Joe was thinking like a liberal, liberals explain every human action and decision based on their hatred toward minorities. Mike and Joe believed they were the disadvantaged victims in this case because Trump is the president, he is above them. Mike and Joe thought that the President shrugged off their friendly gestures because he was looking down to them, without pondering any other possible reasons.
5. victimhood mentality causes all conflicts and wars in the world, even Trump was thinking like a liberal this time, he fought back because he thought he was a victim of a betrayal. Moral of the story, don’t think like a liberal, liberal’s victimhood mentality is poisonous, it corrupts souls.
I recall one encounter with a young woman who was in her late teen or early twenties. I have seasonal allergy, I was rubbing my nose trying to clear my mucus around my nose because i didn’t want to let this pretty girl see the mucus around my nose, she took that differently, that is what she said to me: “am i stink, why are you rubbing your nose around me?” That is the perfect example of liberal thinking, they assume the worst from people without pondering any other more innocuous reasons for their actions, low self-esteem people usually think like that.
“That is the perfect example of liberal thinking, they assume the worst from people without pondering any other more innocuous reasons for their actions, low self-esteem people usually think like that.” [Dave @ 1:47]
That would be they typical leftist, low self-esteem but high self-regard.
T:
Funny how the part of Trump that the leftists hated the most is in fact his most liberal qualities and behaviours. Throwing tantrums when he gets disrespected, making distrustful jokes and jabs against those he doesn’t like, sleeping around with different women, those are all typical liberal behaviours carried over from his days as a registered democrats hanging out with liberal big shots.
“Sleeping around with different women…”
Wait, this is something I was supposed to be doing as a Liberal? Why didn’t let me know? It must have been in the part of the Liberal handbook I skipped over.
Bill Clinton, Russell brand, john meyers, Anthony wiener, john Edwards, the whole Hollywood, rock stars, porn stars, Bronson, jack Nicholson, flower power, Woodstock, want me to go on?
Make love not war, yep you have skipped a page of the liberal playbook
Almost forgot, JFK, RFK, and Teddy, Hefner, johnny depp, Jeffrey Epstein, Jared of subway… I only started following American politics a few years ago, even just off the top of head I can name that many liberal womanisers, other more knowledgeable people on this blog can probably name many more than I do. the Democratic Party is a party of perverts.
“Funny how the part of Trump that the leftists hated the most is in fact his most liberal qualities and behaviours.” [Dave@6:54]
Absolutely , , , and I’m lovin’ every minute of it. Unlike many of his critics, especially those on the right, my ego is not tied to Trump’s “dignified” performance as POTUS. It solved nothing for G.W. Bush except creating a dignified ignominy (oxymoron, much).
Trump fights. He out Alinskys the Alinskites and either they can’t seem to understand it or, like a moth to a flame, they are simply unable to ignore it. The left is finding out that the shoe which they cobbled for their enemies pinches when it’s on their foot and they don’t like it one bit.
Good. It couldn’t happen to any more deserving group of people.
You know why josh duggar was such a big scandal? it was because conservative perverts are rarities compared to liberal perverts. You know what Josh’s father did, unlike liberals who would defend their own no matter how wrong they were like Hillary going after bill’s victims, he actually called the cops to have his son arrested hopefully he can receive some help. I don’t necessarily agree with many of the things conservatives believe in, but they very often walk the walk and truly make sacrifices to maintain their principles. Sarah palin is against abortion, when her child was diagnosed of Down syndrome she did the unthinkable and kept her baby.
Dave, setting aside the silly nonsense that sexual promiscuity or perversion belong exclusively to the left or right–how many boys did Dennis Hastert rape?–is the obnoxious but pervasive sense that the behavior of the rich and powerful represents the sum total of a person’s political identity.
Just as I would never attribute promiscuity to you because David Vitter loves him some whores, or sexual perversion to you because Donald Trump’s ex-wife once accused him of violent rape after he received some bad plastic surgery, it’s a little silly to attribute “the behavior of a rich and powerful elite” to everyone who ascribes to the political ideology they’re associated with.
I talked a bit in another thread about the senate health care bill’s tax cuts, and a bunch of people defended the cuts as a necessary part of repealing the ACA. But then senate republicans started discussing keeping the taxes to pay for more generous state handouts. A flip flop! And I made a petty, gotcha comment, but the reality is: no conservative should have felt obligated to defend the cuts, and then flip flop and defend keeping the taxes, because partisan politics aren’t the sum total of an ideology, and the behavior of partisan politicians don’t need to reflect on us. The two aren’t the same thing. You don’t own Dennis Hastert raping vulnerable boys he was supposed to be coaching; you didn’t do it and just because someone at the center of the republican party’s leadership was an unspeakable monster doesn’t mean that I can yell “gotcha” and stain you with his behavior.
Oh, and the lady who asked you if she smelled? I wasn’t there, obviously, so i can’t say with certainty, but it sounds like she was flirting with you, or at least cracking a harmless joke. I suspect your struggle to engage in or understand simple, every day human interactions is a key driver of the anger I see in your posts.
But like, seriously, I’m a liberal and I’m happily and faithfully married. If promiscuity is a liberal thing, then I missed the party. You’d be surprised at how boringly, banally normal my life is. Kids, mortgage, PTA meetings, retirement planning, blah blah blah. Knowing a person’s ideological leaning tells you surprisingly little about that person as a person.
But man, Woodstock? Really? Woodstock and porn stars? I mean. What? Really? Woodstock and porn stars? That’s how you build a case?
You may not be a womaniser yourself, but supporting these hypocritical pervert politicians who Continue to preach women rights while treating women like sex objects 24/7 and Hillary f**king Clinton who preaches all victims deserve to be heard while defending rapists as lawyer for political favours and conducting campaign to smear and attack her husband’s accusers make you an useful idiot and accomplice of their crimes. Of course you are responsible for their crimes, you voted them into position to give them power to do those terrible things to women and get away with it. What policy of democrats had successfully decreased poverty, give me one, give one one statistic that shows black student math aptitude had improved because of one democrat policy. Do you have any idea how many government subsidied green energy companies Obama supported filed for bankruptcy and lost the tax payers billions? The compassionate bullsh*t democrats spouts everyday are no more truthful than false ads on tv, they are like shady used car salesmen saying sweet things to try to sell you lemons, their policies don’t match the goals they stated, policies to help the poor ended up creating more poor, don’t get suckered by some bad policies with some virtuous name attached to it.
So like, does that mean you’re complicit in Dennis Hastert raping kids? Because I don’t think it does! But I’m trying to follow your logic here.
Here is some logic for you.
If they are complicit, then they politically supported Hastert’s retaining his privileges after the facts were known.
They did not politically support Hastert after the facts were known.
Therefore they are not complicit. Modus Tollens
But if they generally did that, it would be like the Democrats’ support of Bill Clinton, or Bwany Fwank, or Gerry Studds, who infamously turned his ass to Congress [Wiki has now rewritten the description in an attempt to ameliorate the gesture] as he received a reprimand. And then they would be complicit.
As an instance of how the actual pattern goes however,
Wiki
If conservatives or Republicans or even libertarians did that, they would be as morally liable to judgement as the Democrats demonstrably are. In the cases of Hinson and Bauman, they were both dumped, Hinson resigning after getting one election pass by pleading alcoholism.
Sure it does. It tells you almost everything. It tells you what moral limits the other recognizes as to the placing of interpersonal claims through the agency of government.
When a modern liberal, in effect an organism of the left once it abandons natural law, puts its face in [for example] my face through politics and says that I owe it the diminution of my heritage of liberty merely because it was whelped in the same polity; when it speaks of fundamentally transforming the nature of the polity and the predicate of the law; when it promotes the fascist conception of “positive liberty” as a means of chaining the albatross of its [or its pets’] dysfunction around my neck through political means … it tells me all I need to know about it as a “person”, no matter how conventional its home life may otherwise appear.
This is, you see, because modern liberalism is in essence just a name we apply to a doctrine embraced by a certain kind people. A doctrine that says there are in principle no absolute moral limits to what a liberal may claim that [for example] I owe it, just because … it is.
When CNN calls out President Trump for instigating violence against journalists (funny how CNN employees still believe they are journalists) after he retweeted a parody of him taking down a CNN mascot in a wrestling ring, only merely weeks after CNN promoted and sponsored a play depicting an assassination of the President, you have to ask yourself how can you take the news they reported serious with this type of double standards and hypocrisy in full display. an insult is a joke because CNN says so, and a joke and an insult because CNN says so, is CNN God’s messenger or something that they get to decide what is true what is fake or what is virtuous and what is not?
“A doctrine that says there are in principle no absolute moral limits to what a liberal may claim that [for example] I owe it, just because … it is.”
I realize this is a pretty widely accepted position among, well, at least commenters on this site and I presume many conservatives. But I struggle with this:
– There is some level of taxation X that you consider morally acceptable and compatible with liberty.
– There is some level of taxation > X that you consider morally unacceptable and incompatible with liberty.
It’s not a position that NO level of taxation is acceptable. (I’m using taxes as a handy stand-in for an array of phenomena that you’d probably roll into the rubric of liberal fascism, so bear with me). That would be an extreme position, but it would at least be rhetorically and logically honest: you could say “I believe absolutely in freedom and reject your taxes as armed theft by the state.” Extreme and wrong but consistent.
Instead, the position is: MY rate of taxation is ok, but YOUR marginally higher rate of taxation is not just not ok, but represents tyranny or fascism or something.
So ok, for you and guys like Brian who made the same argument: where is the dividing line and how do you discern it? If X% is ok but X+Y% is not, how do you calculate Y? Is it just “whatever liberals say they want, that’s tyranny”? Or is there some more complex calculation that let’s you discern a tax rate that’s conducive to liberty and a tax rate that is fascist?
Does this rate change over time? Because our top marginal tax rate is significantly lower than it has been under previous Republican presidents; were those Republican presidents tyrants, or has the fascist tax rate diminished over time, reducing the marginal space between a liberty tax rate and a fascist tax rate?
And Dave, I don’t know how we pivoted to CNN, but, as I’ve said before, no one should be watching CNN if they’re looking for news rather than entertainment.
Who’s credibility is more important, a politician’s or a news agency’s? We expect all politicians to lie, it is almost a consensus that all politicians to use euphemistic language to win support for their policies, that is why we need honorable news agencies to tell us when politicians are lying. how the he** can you trust them when they are serial liars themselves with clear bias toward a certain party while favoring anyone to the point of colluding with them and hiding their crimes from the public?
It is like asking which automobile component’s safety rating is more important, the engine or the airbag/seat belt? we all expect the engine to fail eventually, but if your car has a faulty seat belt or airbag you are dead meat if an accident happens. free press is like our seat belt, we need them to keep us safe by exposing an evil government, but when it a seat belt is faulty, it choke you back even when the car is running smoothly and loosen up when there is impact, you need to have it replaced. fighting with the MSM is not the same as getting rid of News altogether, we need to replace them with trustworthy ones. of course not the ones bias toward trump and GOP either.
“fighting with the MSM is not the same as getting rid of News altogether, we need to replace them with trustworthy ones. of course not the ones bias toward trump and GOP either.”
I’m not really sure where this is going, but ok. Do you have any recommendations for replacing the current news media with a new news media and then ensuring their ideological even-handedness?
You say you are using taxation as a handy stand in for what you call an array of phenomena. But even on your own terms – taxes – your aim misses the mark.
Taxes are not all of one kind insofar as goes either the laying, or the purpose.
Some use taxes are laid to grade the surface of the roads. Some income taxes are laid in order to curtail the behavior of the citizenry.
My comment addressed the notion of predicate justifications, legitimacy, and kinds, not levels.
The ‘in principle no-limits” doctrine which has been admitted to by liberal authors such as the author of “The Frozen Republic”
and to me by personally by some number of self-professed liberals, has as much to to with the species and kinds of allowable claims as it does their intensity.
As the man said to the socialite when she admitted she would in fact sleep with him if the reward were great enough, “We have already defined what you are; now we are just negotiating price”.
The income tax itself is an example of the kind of contortions which our legislators had to go through in order to make it seem constitutional. It is justified as a kind of excise on excess income, not as an in-effect capitation tax, which it is.
Under a no-limits positive liberty scenario as advocated by liberal fascists, there is nothing in principle in the nature of legitimate social relationships to prevent laws instituting corvee, or making it illegal to educate your children, or stating that in the interests of social progress you shall be positively commanded to mate with this person or that, or “donate” blood, or sit at a bicycle 4 hours a day to generate electricity for fans to cool the bureaucracy.
That is to say once again, modern liberals having abandoned any notion of natural rights as derived from teleological considerations, find that there are no social management moves which in principle automatically morally delegitimize the sociopolitical arrangement through the intrusion of overweening claims.
This intellectual stance of course dis-inhibits the progressive, and makes not only the intensity of the “authorized” claims a matter virtually pure fiat based on “taste”, but also the species, kinds, and domains into which they intrude.
“Society” is of course and for strategic reasons rhetorically spoken of as some kind of reified entity, with an existence and a sovereignty of its own.
That is pure nonsense. But peddling the notion serves to disguise the real nature of the interpersonal clams made by liberals against others inhabiting the same polity; as it re-frames the transfers in vague terms of some “common” if demonstrably non-distributive, “good”.
And of course, you can never do too much good or go too far in bringing it about.
“Under a no-limits positive liberty scenario as advocated by liberal fascists, there is nothing in principle in the nature of legitimate social relationships to prevent laws instituting corvee, or making it illegal to educate your children, or stating that in the interests of social progress you shall be positively commanded to mate with this person or that, or “donate” blood, or sit at a bicycle 4 hours a day to generate electricity for fans to cool the bureaucracy.”
Ok. Let me know when they set up the bikes. I’ve put on some pounds around the middle that I need to deal with.
I kid! Because what you’re describing would sound scary if it practically existed in any way in the world, but it doesn’t. It’s a fantasy that you’re busy concocting that doesn’t bear out in any way in reality.
And you’re still not addressing my fundamental question, which is: how do you determine a) the acceptable non-zero level of government intrusion that is compatible with liberty, and b) how do you draw the line between that acceptable level of government intrusion and an unacceptable level of government intrusion?
For example: you posit that taxes used for grading roads are compatible with liberty. I want to know: roads but not, say, railroads? Maybe roads and railroads but not ports? Roads and railroads and ports but not immunizations? It seems like wherever you draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable is arbitrary. It’s an arbitrary distinction between levels of taxation, it’s an arbitrary distinction between which purposes are acceptable and which aren’t, etc.
(As an aside, Obama’s proposed top marginal tax rate was a third lower than it was under Reagan; it would seem that under the two Democratic and now three Republican presidencies since then, things have been getting consistently less tyrannical.)
And to look at it from the other side, both Democratic and Republican presidents and Congresses have kept this system in place. If you want to take the principled stance that the income tax is illegitimate and anyone who supports it is a tyrant or a fascist or whatever, that’s legit. But if you want to argue that only one side is responsible for a system that both have sustained, that also seems…pretty arbitrary.
Nightmare, not fantasy. That would be the nightmarish logical implications of a progressive view of law and its limits.
But while you scoff at the amusing reductio which implies that you might in-principle be set to peddling power to the powerful, you cannot very well scoff at the example of schooling laws, or corvee, which have been seen on this continent, and even in this nation. Nor for that matter, can you shrug off the notion of government directed mating policies which have definitely appeared in various polities, and which has been discussed and mooted as an in-principle potential progressive social engineering tool in American law journals. This, in terms of: “If progressive X premise is accepted, then why not Y implication?”
I answered your question. Under a progressive anthropology one cannot. As has been freely admitted by numerous modern liberals … or should I say, “social elements”?
There remains only the juggling or jostling of supposed “interests” … i.e., in modern progressive talk, of competing so-called rights.
Thus: A scenario under which positive liberties which logically entail the sociopolitical “right” to be provided for, or given X by others, are ostensibly weighed against what is clearly a more primordial negative liberty, which logically implies the right to be unmolested by the self-interested demands of another.
The justification of an imposition or cost upon any given member of the political class, which was formerly based on an indifferent and distributive possession of a government good or benefit, is by sleight of hand now politically redefined by progressives in utilitarian terms, and the possession of the good is held to be vicarious.
Why that absurd system is one that should be assumed as tolerable much less as optimum, is never made clear.
I did not posit that. I described how a user tax (for example a gasoline tax) for the maintenance of the surface of a road, or you could throw in municipal water bills in many cases, differed in principle from taxation as a social management tool in the kit of a bureaucratic social engineering class.
The difference between your body and my body, between your bearing the costs of your own body and me bearing the costs of mine are hardly arbitrary.
Either of us can walk along any public highway at will, dock in any public port, in principle.
Railroads were given public lands as incentives, and a century of muddled and bad law ensued.
What you mean to demonstrate with the free floating term “immunizations” I can’t imagine, unless you are talking about the herd effect of government funded immunizations against say, air born contagions, which might well be seen as a legitimate public health issue which in principle affects everyone indifferently. As opposed say to free Gardasil, or HIV vaccines.
The constitutional distinction was always clear until the term “the general welfare” was re-interpreted from bearing a logically distributive sense, to a utilitarian sense.
Didn’t you get that?
In progressive land, everything is arbitrary because there are no rules for interpretation. The taking of private land for private interests is defined in terms of a supposed over all social utility calculus which is understood as the projected flow of taxes into state coffers. The prohibition on a congressional infringement on the right to keep and bear arms, is reinterpreted as the right of state arsenals to store arms for use by national guard, and the (fictional) possession of the right by the individual is then imputed to him as a citizen of the republic. He is then declared as having what he does not have.
You do understand the concept of logical distribution, do you not?
Signing off for the Holiday …
It’s illegal to homeschool? Forced labor is the product of liberalism? You lost me there. I guess if you want to define “all bad things” as “liberalism,” then sure. That’s convenient and self-serving and not at all reflective of reality, but ok!
Happy 4th of July, everyone!
TO DNW,
They have a God given choice apparently, and so do I. Theirs is to devour; and mine is to not be devoured by them under some spurious fellowship pretext.
Are they less liable to cosmic rules, than I am?
Free will is assumed as part of personal responsibility from my pov. Although from atheists like Sam Harris, free will is an illusion. Apparently that also makes his copyright claims to his novels, an illusion, but nobody acts like that is true.
So if the context is DNW’s choice, that is DNW’s business and sanction or loss. But the context is not individual choice, but the choice of the nation, of the Alt Right vs the Ctrl Left, and we are all going to be punished, the innocent along with the guilty. That, I find objectionable, especially when the Alt Right and the Ctrl Left are a bunch of festering ebola carriers calling each other cucks and traitors. If their little lover’s spat only affected them, that would be fine. But when they start drawing me and others like me into their little gig, and pretending I’m on the Ctrl Left or the Alt Right, then I’ll tell them what is really going on in this NASA “sphere” of a planet. Their delusions aren’t going to stop me. The worst they can do is kill the body, as others here have referenced. And I doubt even that is true unless they get more than 100 of their soros funded computer troll rats against me, plus the State SWAT teams. (the city SWAT teams are kind of incompetent, except for those trained before 2001, probably more dangerous as a result)
Are they less liable to cosmic rules, than I am?
That depends on what the lawsuit rules are in the divine courts. Divine laws are not human laws. When Lucifer tells them to do things in a way that has the evidence on their side, and trapping you with loopholes, he can win a case against you that otherwise he wouldn’t have. Because he let you, via your own free will, perjure yourself or contradict yourself, and then the divine counsel has to judge you for it. Or else be broken of their own laws and contracts.
Lucifer’s Own is using the rules and Word of Jehovah, against the allies of Jehovah. Alinsky, a reminder. It was not the human that created the loopholes, and gave it to a entity called Lucifer. Vice a versa.
When did the notion of secular self-government fall to a replacement in the form of a Christian-tinged masochism drama?
Christianity has always been the underdog, before it became State Christianity. “Muscular Christianity” is what people like to hear, but that is a corrupted form of 1st century discipleship under the Messiah. The Jewish messiah, not the Kenyan Hussein American boy.
Well you can throw yourself on the rails if you want.
Westerners like you profess the surface of Christianity, but you don’t actually believe in it as originally written in the Gospels of Mark, Luke, etc: a shell of its former self. Same cyclical historical problem that lead to the death of Jesus of Nazareth. Pharisees vs Sadducees, Jews vs Romans, Gentiles vs Elect, Rome vs barbarians.
But the issue here is the predicate of our continuing political affiliation and the presumption of moral fellowship with people who are clearly out to use the system to destroy and take over.
Remember Exodus? The enemies are to be killed, including the giant tribes of men, women, and children. It was not written in the scriptures “adopt the Egyptian gods, ways, and culture to beat them at their own game”. It was to kill them and separate yourself from them. Preferably the latter first, but the former will do too. That’s it. Maybe this got more complicated later on, but the original solution is still original.
You don’t have to become a cheat yourself, to throw the cards back in their faces.
As if you can quit the game now that you joined Lucifer’s table. You’d have to draw and shoot the dealer first, Then you can throw the cards in their face and leave. Have people forgotten which angels are ruling this earth now… it isn’t the Divine Counsel.
has finally revealed to conservatives that there was something lacking, something rather shallow, in their grasp of their own principles.
It’s natural that Christianity being a shell of its former self, would be revealed for the white washed tomb hypocrisy that it has become. If the Left didn’t do it, somebody would have by now.
Trump fights. He out Alinskys the Alinskites and either they can’t seem to understand it or, like a moth to a flame, they are simply unable to ignore it.– T
Gonna need more than tweet words and punching back 100x as hard, to defeat Lucifer. You’ll love it up until the time Jeremiah’s prophecies come true.
If you still haven’t figured out yet there are two trump, two personas. when he is on twitter he is buddy Donald to his supporters, Twitter is just the secret line for him to communicate with his fans and supporters, we all act juvenile when you are among friends right? they weren’t meant to be read by anyone else especially his detractors and opponents. He is president only when he is off twitter.
If you hate trump then unfriend him and don’t read his tweets that were specifically addressed to his fans and supporters. When you eavesdropping his messages to his fans, and go ahead and read the tweets that weren’t addressed to you or meant for you to read and get upset, it’s More your problems not his. At least when trump hates you he only makes mean tweet about you, unlike obama who would simlie at you while stabbing you in the back when you look away.
Of course billionaires’ best buddy Obama could stay classy when he had His liberal comedian minions like Seth meyers, jon Stewart, Comedy Central and snl to do the low road cheap shot attacks against his opponents on his behalf
Very pert and perky.
But it has unfortunately become obvious that either you are not a serious man, or you cannot read. Always assuming of course, that there is no deliberate attempt on your part to simply introduce chaos and distraction.
Recall, if you are able, that this exchange began when you stated that:
and I responded that to the contrary.
Instead of answering directly on the substance, you attempted to shift footing from what an in-principle no-limits attitude tells about the person having it, to using “taxes” as a paradigm for assessing the concept of limits legitimacy. In other words you wanted to use “taxes” as a general term to counter with a limits concept problem.
I replied that your new framework for analysis was defective on its own terms
since
and further, employing a reductio …
You then retort,
And then in requesting further qualifications, you inadvertently reveal why you have the limits problem you do.
Because,
In other words, like the run of the mill nominalist, every distinction looks arbitrary to you: i.e., “how do you determine … how do you draw the line?”
I reply,
Well, it is apparent that you do not.
For if you did, and if you were sincerely asking questions rather than subverting the text, so to speak, the discussion of principles of lawfulness, what they say about about the person holding them, and why “policy” and “Law” [as decree] are not all of one species assessed only by degree rather than by kind and legitimacy, then you would not keep giddily pursuing the same bobble-head doll line of “objections” over and over again.
Now, please say something chirpy again.