Paul Ryan on Trump tweeting lies: "Who cares?" https://t.co/vgpFedgvto pic.twitter.com/jGKJM4vCTT
— HuffPost Politics (@HuffPostPol) December 5, 2016
One of the meager joys of the PEOTUS-Asterisk’s upcoming term will be watching the establishment GOP’s gentleman-amateur liars get steamrolled by an experienced professional. Because once the troglodyte Trump voters realize that their White Man’s America is not actually being Made Great Again, it’s gonna be the “nice” Midwestern Ryan/Pence/Preibus fellas who look out their windows at the pitchfork-and-torch protesters — not the professional conman on the 24th floor of Trump Tower NYC…
***********
Apart from devoutly hoping the GOP comeupance arrives ASAP, what’s on the agenda for the day?
Reince Preibus on whether Trump's getting daily intel briefings: "It feels like every day. I’m not sure if it is every day, but it’s a lot." pic.twitter.com/74zKJCqqbz
— CBS News (@CBSNews) December 4, 2016
It FEELS like Trump is an idiot. I'm NOT SURE if he's an idiot. But it certainly FEELS that way. https://t.co/woytmSJnh7
— Matt Novak (@paleofuture) December 4, 2016
Pence says lying is just a form of self-expression https://t.co/GY7pl4QTmC pic.twitter.com/udvpOcetWP
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) December 4, 2016
Half the country is about to discover that they've always thought 2+2=5 https://t.co/BI6s8E02yq pic.twitter.com/TiO31X37Fj
— Matt O'Brien (@ObsoleteDogma) December 4, 2016
All's well that Orwells. https://t.co/CrtXhDlRUN
— Schooley (@Rschooley) December 4, 2016
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone???
rikyrah
False statements?
Muthaphucka, It’s LIES.
Plain and simple??
OzarkHillbilly
@rikyrah: Lies, damn lies, and everything Trump says.
satby
They have an entire media world which has supported and propagated their lies for over 20 years and they have never paid a price for it because their supporters really don’t know the reality anyway.
OzarkHillbilly
@satby:
FTFY.
Schlemazel
I was going to link to a giid political cartoon but then there were a couple others worth seeing so I will just give you the site. It will be worth it despite a couple of nutjob cartoons. The American Association of Editorial Cartoonists
http://editorialcartoonists.com/
Today there are 17 cartoons & most are worth seeing
Kay
The country isn’t familiar with Betsy DeVos yet, so you have to read people from Michigan:
Disaster. The one and only reason she got the job is she’s a billionaire donor to Right wing causes. She’s opposed to public education.
Shalimar
Ryan/Pence/Preibus get paid for lying, which makes them pros. Not stars like Trump, but solid utility infielders.
Mustang Bobby
Well, if you want to see something where people actually pay to see made-up stuff, why not join me on Sunday in Orlando at Magic Curtain Productions Still Got It Players presentation of the Short Attention Span Play Festival? They’re doing one of my ten-minute plays and I’m driving up from Miami to see the matinee at 2.
https://www.facebook.com/events/571392789718996/
satby
@OzarkHillbilly: yeah, a lot of them don’t. But not all of them. Almost half the eligible voters didn’t bother to vote, presumably turned off by the whole ugly mess. A mess brought to us by a media that helped make it so. And I believe that has happened by design: if they can suppress votes by disengaging wide swaths of voters from even feeling connected to the process, that’s more effective than voter ID laws.
Botsplainer
This firehose of lies from conservatives(spit) makes me feel like Picard shouting “there are four lights!!”
Mai.naem.mobile
Well if this is how feelings work then I feel Donald Trump is a child molester and committed incest with his kids. Also I feel Mike Pence is an in the closet gay trans man.
Schlemazel
@Mustang Bobby:
Sounds like a good time. I bit of a drive from here on the frozen tundra though, too bad for me.
Some day soon maybe you can boat up to the Orlando shore from water world
Kay
If the voter fraud lies hadn’t have been endorsed by “elites” early on, it would have been easier to tamp them down.
Media only really admitted these were lies beginning about 2012. That was 12 years after GOP operatives had pushed them into the mainstream. The US Supreme Court actually endorsed the lie- they allowed Indiana’s law to stand which led to a flood of laws in other states.
On the voter fraud lie, “elites” bear way more responsibility than rank and file GOP voters.
It was always ridiculous. You just had to know a couple of things about how voting works and think it thru, but none of them did, including the US Supreme Court. The Supreme Court opinion in the Indiana case is riddled with FACTUAL errors and/or assumptions they made. It’s lousy, sloppy, lazy work.
They still mix up registration and voting. 16 years after this started and we still get stories on “dead people voting” when they mean “dead people on voter registration rolls”.
OzarkHillbilly
@Kay:
That’s by design.
Baud
There’s historical evidence for sex slaves. I guess Trump has sex slaves.
Kay
@OzarkHillbilly:
People forget, but “voter fraud” was widely endorsed. We didn’t get here solely thru the efforts of Trump voters. Indiana’s voter ID law as the turning point and the US Supreme Court let that stand, based on the same conspiracy theory Trump relies on.
They minimized what was going on for years– a decade. It was only when it became blatantly obvious that they shifted gears. They gave these guys the benefit of the doubt way too long and that has to be because on some level they bought it themselves- they found it easy to believe that millions of black and brown people were committing felony voter fraud. There was even a polite phrase- “ballot security”.
Talking about the failure of the unwashed masses is fun, but our ‘elites’ sort of suck. They’re lazy and sloppy. Maybe the massive fail that is Donald Trump is a shared failure and “elites” should also do some soul-searching.
BillinGlendaleCA
Palace of Westminster, London, 1979.
debbie
The MSM has always been the GOP’s Good German.
Kay
@OzarkHillbilly:
“Voter impersonation fraud” means millions of people are impersonating other people and walking in and voting. Signing in as another person entirely. The Best and the Brightest in media and the court system swallowed that whole.
A normally functioning person would say “what an extraordinary theory! I’ll need to see some proof before I swallow something THAT outlandish!”
Nope. They all took GOP operative’s word for it. 16 years later here we are. NOW they figure it out.
Baud
Man, the manager of the Oakland building is all over the news. Messed up situation.
Seems more honest than Trump.
Brachiator
@satby:
Sorry. We don’t know why voter turnout was low and it is just lazy to blame the media or to simply assume that otherwise engaged voters were turned off. You also downplay the group of prior non voters who were energized by the Trump circus.
OzarkHillbilly
@Kay:
Ya think?
Baud
@Mai.naem.mobile: I just saw your comment. Beat me to the punch.
BillinGlendaleCA
@OzarkHillbilly:
Why would I want to do that?
Baud
@BillinGlendaleCA: I can’t think of any reason.
OzarkHillbilly
@BillinGlendaleCA: Good point. It works for Trump.
Patricia Kayden
@satby: Or Republican supporters simply do not value truth. Weird because loads of them claim to be hardcore Christians and Jesus said, “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” Funny that.
WereBear
These assholes want a virtual reality where the world is whatever they say it is.
Like those studies that showed people who watched a lot of local news (if it bleeds it leads) were convinced the crime rate was much higher than it actually was. It wasn’t even lying: those crimes were committed. But they never showed the proportion, the deeper truth.
Even though anyone can look up their local crime rate.
Some people are so authoritarian-follower they won’t do it. They have to get their information from some authority. But we are shrinking that pool and we have to keep on shrinking it. It’s the only way out.
WereBear
I spent the week after the election asking them why they didn’t vote. Satby has a good point.
Baud
@Patricia Kayden:
“Don’t bear false witness against thy neighbor… unless she’s that bitch Hillary.”
Conservative Exodus
WereBear
@Patricia Kayden: I used to know a lot of Southern Baptists. Truth is what they beat into different shapes.
They create this ideal from the bible that is contrary to human nature; can never happen. But then they all pretend it does.
Baud
@WereBear: There’s a disjunction between our base, which is strong, and our fringe voters, who are easily discouraged.
MomSense
@Mustang Bobby:
Have fun! Wish I could be there.
Patricia Kayden
@Kay: It’s fascinating that one political party’s entire goal is to minimize the number of people who vote. Anti-democratic and fascist as hell. And they gleefully perpetuate lies such as illegals voting to forward their agenda. Democrats need to go hard in calling Republicans out on their voter suppression tactics and stop allowing them to spread these lies about who votes.
By the way, during this election, it was Trump supporters who engaged in fraud.
Betty
The segment I saw yesterday on BBC showing interviews with Trump voters was beyond depressing. They are so full of false information, they will never be brought back to reality. It’s scary, really.
WereBear
@Baud: Absolutely right. I see it as the gulf between the politically sophisticated, and the ones who basically don’t understand how the process works. They get all upset about the incremental aspect, when that is how it works; and how it should work.
Sudden disruptions lead to mayhem.
p.a.
Post-Competence.
Betty Cracker
@Betty: During the run-up to the election and after it, WaPo interviewed a University of Wisconsin political science professor, Kathy Cramer, who has been studying the attitudes of white rural voters in her state for nearly a decade. Cramer has developed a great deal of sympathy for her subjects over the time she spent interacting with them, and it clearly rankles her when people dismiss them as ignorant yahoos.
But what she found was that facts didn’t really enter into it for Trump supporters. It was all about feelings and identities. In interviews at WaPo, she expressed hope that folks wouldn’t write these people off as stupid or racists. But her own reports from the field make it hard to reach any other conclusion, at least for me. Here’s an excerpt describing one Trump supporter’s thoughts on Obamacare, which he relies on for his own access to care:
Sorry, but that’s just fucking stupid. And these folks aren’t even the ones that have bought into the craziest conspiracy theories.
It would be idiotic from a strategic viewpoint and immoral from a values perspective, IMO, for Democrats to make a big effort to appeal specifically to these folks. We ought to study what sets them off (uppity women is one big trigger, as it turns out) and factor that into our electoral strategies. But only in the sense that we understand that Candidate A has barriers with this group (such as femaleness and uppityness) and therefore we need to expand efforts to make up those votes elsewhere. We should never cater to their prejudices.
sherparick
Something that should be sent to every Senator and Representative is a reminder that there is “no mandate” to repeal anything from the Obama administration, little lone the entirety of the progressive-liberal project created since Teddy Roosevelt. Clinton got 48.2% of the vote, and Mr. Orange Hair got 46.2% of the vote, so almost 54% of the vote thinks he is a crook and a clown. So really just over 2/5ths of the voters have gone full alternative theory of the universe.
Obama and his policies have left them with the best economic situation since at least G. H. W. Bush followed Reagan. Even Dubya was taking over just as shallow recession, but a deep manufacturing recession was starting to hit following the popping of the internet bubble and Clinton letting China into the WTO in 1999 and Summers-Rubin’s “Strong Dollar Policy.” Yet, the 1% is gleeful because they are going to get a big tax cut, the elimination of the estate tax, and the freedom to pollute and cheat to their avaricious hearts’ content and promising magic 4% growth (while reducing the workforce with extreme immigration enforcement). Because of the tax cut and boost in defense spending in 2017 there will be higher growth next year, and higher inflation. I also expect Trump induced a crisis in the Middle East of some sort that might send the price of oil skyrocketing, which in a sense will be Trump’s biggest payoff to Putin since Russia’s fortunes depend so much on a high price for oil and natural gas. The Federal Reserve under Yellin will be raising rates all year to offset the procyclical Fiscal stimulus of Orange Hair’s administration and he will replace Yellin in early 2018 with a Hard Money Gold Bug (I would not bet against Stephen Moore or someone of that ilk) who will hike interest rates even more. At some point in late 2017 or 2018 that tightening will have the intended effect of causing a credit crunch and putting the housing market and auto industry into recession. Further, even sooner, the high U.S. interest rates will recreate the dollar shock conditions of 1981-83 where a super-strong U.S. dollar. The last time something similar happen the U.S. went into deep, sharp recession in 1982-83, but with a rapid rebound because there was 1) a generally buoyant world economy with fairly strong inflationary trend that cut real interest rates and 2) and someone very competent was running the FED (Paul Volker). It will be an interesting experiment to see what this gang of incompetent ideologues will do. I fear the people of the Midwest, those that flipped to Trump or who stayed home because they did not like or trust Clinton or about to find out what Mencken said about democracy and the common people getting what they want, good and hard.
(As much as we want excoriate all Trump voters, there really is a reason Hillary was less than popular in blue collar neighborhoods, whether white, Black, and Hispanic, across Midwest. NAFTA and WTO were celebrated as achievements of her husband’s administration, but they became the twin drums that Mr. Orange Hair used to breakdown the “Blue Wall” and flip five states (Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa from Obama to Mr. Orange Hair).
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
That’s silly. White people don’t practice identity politics.
.
I wonder how much damage to the country they have to do before we can write them off, in her opinion.
It’s not that we don’t want them. But we now know we can’t compete with what the GOP is offering them.
Baud
@sherparick:
That to me just says they are sexist.
D58826
This is not going to end well
And speaking of St Ronulus the Unready, his tough talk almost started WWII in 1983 when the USSR mistook a routine NATO ecercise for the opening stages of war. Words/acts have consequences.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/stephen-moore-trump-taiwan_us_58460deee4b055b31399064a
Betty Cracker
@Baud: I don’t know if Cramer is saying Democrats shouldn’t write them off, but rather she’s trying to get across to people who are appalled by her study group’s political choices that these folks are more than bundles of prejudices and stupid/appalling opinions — I think she wants us to see their humanity.
I get that on a personal level, since half my relatives are wingnuts. They are nurses, airplane mechanics, fishermen, successful small business owners. They can be extraordinarily generous, loving, supportive and kind. They can be insightful, funny and adventurous.
But they can also be racists, sexists and xenophobes who are completely impervious to political messaging that doesn’t cater to their prejudices. They voted for someone they know to be a terrible person, primarily out of spite. They are never going to be our political allies, even if they do cast the odd vote for a Democratic presidential candidate because it’ll “shake things up.”
Baud
@D58826: Remember, Hillary is hawkish.
@Betty Cracker: I wish someone would for once preach to them not to write us off.
I mean, it’s not like this hasn’t been building up for a long time. How many cheeks do we have to turn?
satby
@Brachiator: actually, there’s been a lot of study on this subject, though not this specific election (yet). Link goes to the first page of a multipage report.
OzarkHillbilly
@Betty Cracker:
This. Every single one of the Trump voters I have spoken with have this as their primary motivation, and they are each and every one of them convinced that they are somehow or other magically protected from the pile of shit that is about to hit the fan just by virtue of their vote..
MomSense
@Baud:
I think his models business turned out to be pretty damned close to sex slaves. Can you imagine if the Clintons had a real underage, undocumented models business where the models just overstayed their visas and happened to be associated with parties for wealthy business associates? It’s so awful the right wingers had to make one up about a pizza parlor to cover for der trump.
satby
@OzarkHillbilly: meh, I only know 2 Drumpf voters casually at work, and in both cases they bought the incredibly stupid idea that he was a successful businessman and would be good for jobs. I don’t doubt that many of his voters were racist spite voters, but there’s also the whole “rabid fan” team mentality of voters who identify as Republicans, are super low info voters, and are reinforced in their misconceptions by a misleading mainstream media. Would it help if the MSM was less douchebaggy? I’d sure like to see the results after a few years of reporting on policies and how they affect people vs. horserace-emails-benghazi-unlikable.
schrodinger's cat
@Betty Cracker: We have to understand them when they want to slit our throats? Sorry, I am not feeling much empathy towards your examples of kindly wingnuts who vote out of spite.
satby
And as far as the truthiness in the post up top? Most of the disengaged voters I have talked to think that all politicians lie all the time. To the point that they don’t believe anything and aren’t affected by reports like this. It’s how they can hear about the Ryan plan and not believe that it would ever be passed, or even attempted.
schrodinger's cat
@OzarkHillbilly: I am not surrounded by these spite voters but clueless toteabaggers who think NYT and NPR are their friends.
schrodinger's cat
@satby: When stupid is a matter of pride, you can’t change that but hey my independent friend who didn’t vote for President, said I was smug.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Betty Cracker: More to the point they are basically treating life like a live action role playing game. No one can base policy on a group who demand their collective fantasy trump reality.
What that professors in study you linked to didn’t get is those people were sounding stupid because they were trying to justify their belief in some fantasy to an outsider. They know they object to Obamacare for an absurd reason, like say they were told space lizards from Acturus invented health insurance because space lizards like eating healthy people, so these believers don’t want to admit to believing something so silly with an outsider and be subjected to mockery. That’s why I think we need to start talking about things like Pizzagate because when our relatives and friends start with the wingnut apologetic we can call them on the underlining absurd premise.
Betty Cracker
@schrodinger’s cat: If you think I’m asking you to feel empathy for them, I communicated my thoughts poorly.
WereBear
I understand this is what sets them off. Because they are ignorant yahoos.
What the heck are we supposed to do with that?
schrodinger's cat
I for one do not want to read yet another article of the poor misunderstood sainted WWC.. Where are the articles of DACA kids whose entire life now hangs in balance subjected to the tender mercies of the demolition crew come January.
Jeffro
@D58826: Hmm…I wonder what will happen if the Chinese decide to quit buying quite so much of our debt, or begin to cut off supplies of rare metals, or do a little hacking of their own? Not to worry, I’m sure Team Trump has thought that far ahead…NOT.
satby
@schrodinger’s cat: yep. Those MSM outlets do as much damage as Faux and Infowars, but on a slower, longer term scale, because they normalize the aberrant behavior of the Republicans.
NotMax
@satby
Recommended your wares to Davebo, who was seeking suggestions for multiple gifts, on a thread last night with the addendum of waiting to see if you would be offering a BJ-specific discount again this year.
If not, certainly no dealbreaker but was unsure if it had been mentioned or not.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
Exactly. That’s why the whole “educated elite” thing doesn’t matter to me. It was obvious he’s a bad person. They admire that about him. Their definition of “straight talking” means someone who lies all the time and is an asshole.
We’re not talking about “generic populist politician” here. They were presented with a specific lying asshole and they said “sign me up!” This whole economic anxiety argument ignores that.
You DO know something about people when you see what they admire and do. That’s really the ONLY way you know. Trump reflects poorly ON THEM. That’s just a fact. The rest is political science theory.
WereBear
@Betty Cracker: They can be wonderful: if you are exactly like them.
That milk of human kindness curdles quickly if not.
schrodinger's cat
@Betty Cracker: No you didn’t actually. I am irate. Not particularly at you but at these endless butthurt articles from prestige MSM outlets about understanding WWC.
gvg
@Baud:
Yes that’s what they have been doing that angers me for so long. Palin crystallized that for me. How dare she or they say I am not real America? or Obama or any on my friends who are for some reason not seen as like them? for that matter many people I don’t like are still Americans, including most of our convicted criminals. You don’t get to say an American isn’t American. born here=American. naturalized by our law=American.
Rural isn’t special. Neither is Urban however there are more of us and all evidence is that is getting more so because frankly that’s the way capitalism trends. you may or may not like it, but that is reality. We are a big enough country that you may be able to find a way to be rural if you want and good for you but putting down someone else because they like different things than you or just had to make different choices than you is wrong.
I’d like to see some pushback on this habit of bad manners and selfishness. It’s hard to do because people are flattered and like people who flatter them so politicians have a tendency to flatter voters in their area. I am so tired of it though.
satby
@WereBear: they are ignorant yahoos, and I don’t really have any sympathy for them. My point is that there’s been a campaign to make them that way over the last 30+ years and our side has never effectively addressed how to undo that or re-engage the ones that have unplugged from the whole process because they don’t see how their vote matters at all. This isn’t new, Molly Ivins wrote teams about this issues.
schrodinger's cat
@satby: They are far worse because you don’t see that they are mainstreaming Republican POV unlike Rush and the like. You let your guard down and expect more from them. You give them the benefit of doubt when they deserve none.
OzarkHillbilly
@satby: 6 Trump voters do not add up to hard data, but I was only relating my own personal experience in a very racist part of a very racist state and stating that Betty’s point had a lot of truth to it. As for the ‘“rabid fan” team mentality of voters who identify as Republicans’ one needs to ask what it is that makes them identify as Republicans.
The answer in my experience is nearly always ‘somebody has it easier than I do because of gubmint handouts’ or ‘I work hard for my money and I don’t want the gubmint taking it and giving it to somebody else.’ both of which are dog whistle for affirmative action. The GOP is very good at relentlessly playing this chord.
satby
@NotMax: Thank you! Well this sounds like a good time for me to make a coupon code for BALLOONJUICE and have it be 20% off.
Give me 5minutes to get it activated ?
MomSense
@Betty Cracker:
So the person on Medicare doesn’t know how many services were added to the covered part of Medicare? Physicals, bone density, mammography, prostate screenings, etc. were all added to the basic Medicare coverage. People on Medicare got massive benefit from the ACA.
And one of my great frustrations when trying to discuss health care policy is that the Republican plan when Dole and Gingrich presented Heritage’s dream was the mandate plus exchanges WITHOUT any cost controls like the Medical Loss Ratio which forces insurance companies to spend 85% of the money on actual health services, without any of the tax subsidies to make it AFFORDABLE, without ANY of the patient protections and certainly it didn’t include contraception, wellness visits, or any other improved benefit.
If the Republicans had their way back in ’93 we would only have had the mandate that forces us to buy insurance.
I hate Republicans and the low info voters who enable these death eaters.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@gvg:
Yes this. The idea that if one is not the right skin color, religion, live in a city or has education means you aren’t American is utter BS
schrodinger's cat
@WereBear: To paraphrase Arundhati Roy*, they are kind to their kind.
* She said of Syrian Christians in Kerala in her God of Small Things
Betty Cracker
@WereBear: That’s the million-dollar question. My preference is to learn from what happened and use that information strategically in the future but without catering to prejudices and stupidity.
To use a really simplified and obvious example, Cramer found that her very existence as a female university professor aroused this group’s ire and suspicion at first. That’s a helpful data point that could be applied to a future candidate who might offend such voters by being female and educated.
In my perfect world, we would still put forth educated women for office, but we’d do so with the knowledge that we’ll have to overcome hurdles that the candidate’s gender and education level raise through other strategies, such as finding votes elsewhere and putting a lot of resources into getting out the vote or choosing an educated woman candidate who has the “common touch,” etc.
Eural Joiner
@OzarkHillbilly:
Absolutely on target. I’m in the same spot geographically speaking and family wise and every single damn political discussion starts out with all these crazy fig leafs (economic anxiety, religious freedom, etc. etc.) and every single damn one eventually boils down to race, race, race and the lazy/violent thuggish blacks destroying Good America. The “nice” R’s just take longer to boil it down and do it with a calmer tone and a smile.
Botsplainer
@Betty Cracker:
They’ve been propagandized, and it is VERY pervasive and hard to dislodge. Nothing I say breaks through – I’m done trying with those of my acquaintance.
Right now, I’m genuinely curious as to how a division G2 in 2001 with the strategic and philosophical imbecility of Mike Flynn gets promoted so far above his competency level that he has all the “right” qualifications and credentials for executive level decisionmaking by 2009 forward.
Botsplainer
An additional thought if Adam is lurking – if he’s comfortable talking about Flynn, I’m curious as to any extraneous observations on the man’s strengths, if there are any.
And what the fucking fuck is up with that mental midget Flynn Jr?
schrodinger's cat
@Betty Cracker: We need to break the Republican stranglehold on the media, especially the MSM outlets. The people who buy into the both sides do it BS are people we can peel off more easily than the ones who bathe themselves in GOP blather and take it for gospel truth.
bemused
@Betty Cracker:
I agree. These “you’re not the boss of me” people are permanently set in spite cement. They will never budge. It’s like coddling a 4 year old having a meltdown tantrum, “there, there, dear, I know you’re angry you can’t have, do this or that” without pointing out consequences. At least a 5 year old can learn to reason things out. So what if we know what they are all about. They will never get enough of people paying attention to how they “feel”, being prominently in the limelight just reinforces, encourages them. Time to ignore them and write them off.
schrodinger's cat
@WereBear: Their ignorance is not a substitute for my knowledge.
OzarkHillbilly
@Botsplainer: Back in the 70s and 80s there was a saying in the Air Force: “Screw up and move up.” Because of the perceived difficulties of ridding oneself of the utterly incompetent, the easiest way was to promote them. We’ve been told that those days are long since in the rearview mirror but maybe not.
Betty Cracker
@Botsplainer: Regarding Flynn, one thing that’s pissing me off about the media discussion of his appointment is that the articles often make reference to Junior’s active participation in disseminating outrageous and dangerous lies but seldom note that the father did it too! That seems kind of important.
Adria McDowell (formerly LurkerExtraordinaire)
Paul Ryan is the epitome of “Fuck You I Got Mine” ism and I think I hate him more than I hate Trump. And I hate Trump. A lot.
ETA: Oh, and Ryan is the World’s Worst Catholic. What I wouldn’t pay to see Papa Frankie slap him upside the head. Liberation theology or GTFO.
schrodinger's cat
@Botsplainer: Good to see you in fighting form!
Botsplainer
@OzarkHillbilly:
@Betty Cracker:
The danger I’m perceiving (particularly with Pence’s “it is refreshing that he speaks his mind, however wrong, ludicrous, or he knew it was manifestly untrue when he uttered it, even if it violates one of my fictional deity’s precious and unyielding and sacred commandments that we insist that you see in schools and government buildings” bullshit) is that what is really being normalized is stupidity, which we are apparently mandated to coddle and nod approvingly about when emanating from the WWC.
Flynn et fils are perfect examples of that. So are the Trumps.
Kay
Here’s another lying, bullying asshole people (including all “elites”) admired:
This is about being poor judges of character. It’s about admiring bad things and bad people.
Christie was no “populist” yet he’s Trump’s twin. It has nothing to do with policy.
It isn’t just WWC either. Elites fucking adored Christie. The more of an asshole he was the more they promoted him.
Adria McDowell (formerly LurkerExtraordinaire)
@OzarkHillbilly: The Army is like that, too! Funny world, heh?
Lizzy L
@Botsplainer: Disagree. Trump isn’t stupid; rather, the truth or falsity of any given statement he makes is irrelevant to him. What counts is will people believe it, and what kind of ego-food and/or negotiating advantage can he get from asserting it. Will it bring him praise? Will it make him rich and/or powerful? Then it’s a good thing to say. Is it true? Who cares?
He is, however, ignorant.
Kay
The “straight shooting tough guy’ Chris Christie trapped school kids on a bus on a bridge for hours and then lied to their faces about it for a year and they STILL admired the next swaggering asshole who came down the pike.
They’re poor judges of character. It’s no more complicated than that.
Botsplainer
@Lizzy L:
Nope – dude is stupid, but white American society is very forgiving of the stupidity of people born to great riches who also happen to be stupid.
Listen to his speech patterns and focii over the course of his life, being sure to look at his business failures. He doesn’t think strategically, and gains credit for tactical thinking due to wanting what he wants and refusing to take no for an answer.
With that sort of personality, he’ll get what he wants a high percentage of the time because people tend to cave as opposed to fight, when there is an imbalance of resources going in.
I see this all the time, particularly with real estate developers. Sociopathy and narcissism can work for even middling developers, up to a point. With one born to great riches? It escalates off the charts.
schrodinger's cat
@Kay: Preach it sister.
schrodinger's cat
@Kay: Also too, the faux representatives of WWC in the MSM are arguably worse than the real working class folk. I am looking at you, Chris Matthews and the late Russert.
Betty Cracker
@Botsplainer: You are correct, sir — it is stupidity and willful ignorance we’re being asked to admire and accommodate, and fuck that. Even though weighing in on Democratic politics can seem like gilding the mooring lines on the Hindenburg these days, that’s a steaming pile of horseshit I am prepared to oppose to the bitter end.
I’m only surprised none of its adherents have showed up in this thread to scold us for elitism and brag about their foresight yet. Thus far, I’ve not heard anyone who actually is of the WWC themselves pushing that line of twaddle.
My guess is that 99% of the big mouths in comments here and in the media who are urging us to bow down to the WWC are like their hero Sanders — from big cities or enclaves that are havens for former big city dwellers. To actually know the WWC is to lose your illusions about it.
Botsplainer
@schrodinger’s cat:
You’ll never see a talking head like Chuck Todd, Chris Matthews, the lesser Russert, Anderson Cooper, Joe Scarborough, Mika or the rest ever hold a surrogate’s feet to the fire on a comment about “we have to make a tough choice” and say:
You follow up with a critique on trickle down, which a number of white people born to resources still seem to believe works.
Botsplainer
One other thing – Our Elite Political Media (the institution focused on daily cycles of “polling as sports scores, measuring the effectiveness of messaging” before doing false balance “both sides” panel arguments) never cued into the prediction aspects of the scaling and investment in outcomes aspect of the ACA. They went with the false meme of “everything has to be cheaper now”, and it all deteriorated from there.
schrodinger's cat
@Botsplainer: It has worked for them, they have low taxes and access to cheap goods, the MSM bots, I mean.
bemused
@Betty Cracker:
I’ve lived all my life in the opposite north of the country from you in rural MN and WWC are pretty much the same everywhere. You really do have to have lived among these folks for at least several years to know who they are. It’s fine to know what they are all about. Sympathizing? Just no.
D58826
WTF – Dr. Fuhrer is tweeting that the gov’t will cancel the new version of AF-1. too expensive. Is he planning on flying his own plane on official business (with a suitable markup of course)?.
By the time I finish skimming the morning news about his kids, his business connections, all of the special events at the hotel in Washington, chest pounding at China, all I want to do is get blind drunk and go back to bed.
MomSense
@Botsplainer:
You know I think we should start posting the actual 10 commandments that are in effect. Christians like the ones Moses smashed to dust when he came down from his mountain encounter with god and found his loyal subjects worshipping a golden calf (hmmm almost like there is a modern example of just such a sin). So once he punished his stupid followers he went back up on the mountain and came down with a new set of commandments and those are the ones they covenanted and promised god they would follow.
Here they are.
1. Do not worship any other god, for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God.
2. Do not make any idols.
3. Celebrate the Festival of Unleavened Bread. For seven days eat bread made without yeast, as I commanded you. Do this at the appointed time in the month of Aviv, for in that month you came out of Egypt.
4. The first offspring of every womb belongs to me, including all the firstborn males of your livestock, whether from herd or flock.
5. Redeem the firstborn donkey with a lamb, but if you do not redeem it, break its neck. Redeem all your firstborn sons. No one is to appear before me empty-handed.
6. Six days you shall labor, but on the seventh day you shall rest; even during the plowing season and harvest, you must rest.
7. Celebrate the Festival of Weeks with the firstfruits of the wheat harvest, and the Festival of Ingathering at the turn of the year.
8. Three times a year all your men are to appear before the Sovereign LORD, the God of Israel.
9. Do not offer the blood of a sacrifice to me along with anything containing yeast and do not let any of the sacrifices from the Passover Festival remain until morning.
10. Bring the best of the firstfruits of your soil to the house of the LORD your God. “Do not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk.”
Yeah god gave up expecting idiots not to lie, steal, cheat, covet, worship false gods a long time ago.
ruemara
@Betty Cracker: fuck her empathy for these brain dead fuckfaces. They oppose something good for themselves because they’re still spoiled children in their 40’s. Why am i supposed to not condemn them as stupid racists when they act like stupid racists? They’re not going to warm up to facts or reality, professor. We have no need to like them and frankly, she’s romanticizing her subjects. They wouldn’t hesitate to put her in her place, too.
gene108
@D58826:
For Republicans, it is always about keeping their base frothing mad and engaged.
They will love Trump for this.
And any blowback can be blamed on Obama, as Bush, Jr showed in regards to responsibility for the security failures lesding to 9/11, for a minimum of about nine months.
Botsplainer
@MomSense:
Whenever I read those, I find myself asking this question:
Corner Stone
@D58826: I read where Boeing stock price fell over a dollar (almost 1%) right after the tweet. Not a lot of movement and a stock could move like that for a number of reasons. But think about if a more thinly traded stock came under tweet fire and lost 10% or 20%, and a certain family and/or acquaintances not in formal govt roles were ready for it?
Botsplainer
@Corner Stone:
Kushner et Pere.
Betty Cracker
@bemused: Yep. The only time I’ve lived outside of FL was a few years I spent in Boston right after college. Prejudice and ignorance were as widely distributed among the WWC there as it was among my own relatives back home, and the folks I met in rural areas in NH, Western Mass, etc., were just likely to be contemptuous of city folk and book larnin’ as my cousins in Sisterfuck, Alabama.
Corner Stone
And if I’m Al Gore and my substantive discussion on the target issue of climate change is with Ivanka, isn’t that a little insulting? I know that’s what Trump does to everyone around him, but why would Al Gore agree to a meeting? Trump wants a climate change denier for EPA. What kind of influence does he think Ivanka will have over that?
schrodinger's cat
@Betty Cracker: Be that as it may Western Mass went solidly for HRC, so they at least know which side their bread is buttered and know enough not to commit economic suicide, unlike their kin in Alabama.
schrodinger's cat
@Corner Stone: I have no idea what AG is thinking. Just say no.
dww44
@Kay I honestly think the GOP elites knew better all along that there was no real voter fraud. They did know that this was a surefire method to insure that their party is able to stay in power. The power of suppression versus the power of ideas, of which they have none except for government is bad .
Botsplainer
@Corner Stone:
Lucretia Spice Barbie is ahead of RNC BS in the family chain of command.
SenyorDave
@Corner Stone: Trump wants a climate change denier for EPA. What kind of influence does he think Ivanka will have over that?
I wondered that myself. If you are on the opposite side of Trump politically on almost everything, what is the point of meeting with him other than a photo op for Trump? I’m sure all of Trump’s inner circle has total contempt for Al Gore, so its not like Trump didn’t go into the meeting with an open mind. Just about all of his appointees are climate change deniers.
Botsplainer
@dww44:
Recall which book was on Trump’s nightstand. Recall how junkers and bankers and industrialists thought they had their pawn.
Twitler is not controllable.
germy
@OzarkHillbilly:
I saw that in the ’90s up to present day in the private sector. The employee who fucked up the most, the boss would say “put him in the corner and give him some paperwork to do” and then one morning I’d walk in and find out he’d been promoted to middle manager, and I was now reporting to him.
Betty Cracker
@Corner Stone: Yeah, I wish Gore had turned down the meeting — even if it were with the shitgibbon himself — and used the occasion of doing so to make a statement about how he refuses to provide a fig leaf for their fraudulent activities. These people aren’t serious about addressing climate change. Gore must know that. But we know Gore isn’t always the best judge of character (Lieberman).
schrodinger's cat
@Botsplainer: Twitler! I am stealing that.
Corner Stone
@dww44:
Of course they know that. Anyone who has ever spent 30 seconds in the voting process itself knows it is a wildly ludicrous idea. Maybe in the not too distant past they pulled a few. But over the last 20+ years the idea that you’re going to get a selected group of people to spend multiple hours pretending to be someone else in very specific locales, in numbers large enough to make a difference. And then have them all keep their mouths shut indefinitely. It’s too stupid for words.
And yet I spent many a blog post walking my RWNJ neighbors through the sheer insanity of this idea and they firmly believed it to be true. Because they wanted it to be true and they knew it to be true.
Lizzy L
@Corner Stone:
…and that this deception is never discovered by the people who run the elections, despite their many years of experience and the various safeguards in place to prevent such a thing…
Jeffro
@SenyorDave:
It is a bit of a tough call. On the one hand, you’re exactly right – it’s a photo op for Trump, who will simply go with the meanest, dumbest policy possible (meaning whatever Steve Bannon has whispered into his ear most recently). On the other hand, I’m sure some folks such as Gore recognize that the Man-Baby is the most ignorant person ever put into the White House* and that any advice they can give him at all gives us a shot at surviving the next four years.
*or not…COME ON ELECTORS!! Follow Christopher Suprun’s lead here – make history while saving the Republic!
Corner Stone
Free Markets! Free Markets! Invisible Hand! Invisible Hand! We don’t want to be in the business of picking winners and losers!
Repeat daily for 8 years.
Fast forward to today: “We have a mafia boss extorting specific companies and putting people in place for a national bust out.”
GOP:…
…
GOP: Genius! He’s a businessman! He’s a dealmaker!
bemused
@Betty Cracker:
Oh yeah, those smug book larnin’ college elitists. A guy said those people look down at people like him. This from a guy with a niece whose husband is of Indian descent with an “odd” name, both with multiple degrees and he doesn’t seem to resent them.
I maintain that they suffer from very low self-esteem because they rarely get out of Dodge. They are very uncomfortable out of their element. The only times they get on a plane is to Vegas, Disney World or a state they can elk hunt or drive to big city Mpls is to attend sports games or visit family.
JPL
@schrodinger’s cat: The twitler in chief!
gene108
@Corner Stone:
One thing that became abundantly clear, during the Florida recount in 2000, is right-wingers do not give a damn about “process”, “rule of law” or any other crap we liberals consider important in a civil society.
If they can skirt the law and have their guy win, they are all for the shenanigans.
I think a lot of them, deep down, know that voter ID laws help their side, so they are O.K. with it. The alternative would be a hellscape because then Democrats would be in charge and we’d have give aways to “those people”, at their expense.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
I think that basic, essential decency, fairness, honesty, and knowledge of facts–what I’ve foolishly believed to be bedrock principles–don’t matter anymore to those who vote Republican.
They just want to win.
To offer an imperfect sports analogy, they root for a team that stars Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, Terrell Owens, Bill Romanowski, Ty Cobb, Draymond Greene, and such, coached by Joe Paterno.
Who cares about rightness? Just win (and lie, cheat, beat, abuse, steal) baby!
GregB
We know that a large percentage of Americans don’t give a shit about people being targeted and discriminated against. Perhaps it is time to rewrite Pastor Niemoller’s poem.
First they came for Boeing.
Aleta
@Kay: yes
HRA
There was a time when voter fraud was out in the open and it was expected to happen. Some voters coming out the door of the voting place, going up to a person with a clipboard, having their name checked off and receiving a 20 dollar bill. That was in the late 50s. It was known and more or less accepted as being how politics worked. Today it is hidden although there are some instances that make you wonder.
The reason for the NAFTA vote is very personal. It is losing your paycheck, your benefits and your security. Its not being able to give your children the option of a higher education. Its not being able to fulfill your plans of retirement like so many family members before you were able to do. Those are the reasons I heard when I interviewed thousands of those workers for UI and TRA. There are no other reasons.
Aleta
yes, and thank you.
Shalimar
Bob Dole set up the Taiwan call. Why do I have the sudden feeling that the goal of Trump foreign policy won’t be a hot war with ISIS, or Iran, or North Korea that could potentially be very messy? It seems like they are trying to turn China into a 2nd Cold War adversary for the next few decades and keep America scared that way. What this does to all the goods we get from China, I have no idea, but I suspect with all the tariff talk that his advisors already have plans they want to implement and alternative countries they plan on encouraging multinationals to turn to.
schrodinger's cat
@HRA: Voting for a party that is against labor unions and has anti-labor stances, including gutting regulation that makes workplaces safer is the logical option, then? Sorry, I am not buying it.
hovercraft
@Betty Cracker:
For once POLITICO is actually being useful by pointing this out.
Flynn under fire for fake news
A shooting at a D.C. pizza restaurant is stoking criticism of the conspiracy theories being spread by Donald Trump’s pick for national security adviser.
Chicken or egg, does the fact that he’s become a loon account for the fact that he is with the Shitgibbon, or did being around the Shitgibbon cause him to lose his mind?
Either way this is the person who will be guiding it’s foreign policy when Jared and Lucretia are out of the room. Scary.
schrodinger's cat
@Shalimar: I wonder what the MSM bipartisanship fetishists have to say now.
Iowa Old Lady
@GregB: I just saw that Trump says to cancel the Boeing contract for the new Air Force One. What’s that about?
Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class
@Iowa Old Lady:
I’m guessing that Kushner and his shitbag daddy have short positions on Boeing, is what it is about.
O. Felix Culpa
@Kay:
My take is that they are actually accurate judges of character in that they admire vicious and mean-spirited people and therefore vote for them. They aren’t making a mistake in their assessment of character, they’re accurately identifying and choosing bad character because they like it.
Larkspur
I just watched last night’s Daily Show and Trevor had Van Jones on. It’s worth watching. Van Jones is going to do a show tonight on CNN about talking to Trump voters. He pointed out that there’s the hard core Trumpists, but he believes there’s also people who held their noses and voted for him anyway, and Van Jones says he’s unwilling to just hand them over to Trump without a fight. I know we’re all sick of hearing about reaching out, but Van Jones feels that there are adversaries who don’t hate our elitist guts, and he wants to engage with them. At the end he said “I’m a ninth generation American – ninth generation!” which said to me that he’s well aware of what’s at stake – he and his ancestors built this place, and he’s going to keep working. Did anyone else see that segment?
MomSense
@Iowa Old Lady: @Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class:
He’s going to charge for the use of his jet.
Major Major Major Major
@Shalimar: ohhhh that’s bad news.
hovercraft
@Kay:
Hey I voted against him both times. He won the first time because he was running against John Corzine of Goldman Sachs and it was right after Wall Street had crashed the economy, and Corzine had a bunch of other problems, especially the collapse of MF Global, and his car crash was seen as symbolic of his recklessness. Christie was the “tell it like it is”, take no prisoners guy who was going to come in and clean up Jersey, the media bought it hook line and sinker, and sold him that way. Barbara Bouno was a sacrificial lamb put up by the democrats because they saw Christie as unbeatable, many of them crossed party lines to endorse him, which was what led to the hubris of a republican governor punishing democrats who refused to endorse him over their own parties nominee. He was never as good as the media made him out to be, he just was fortunate in his two opponents.
O. Felix Culpa
@O. Felix Culpa: To expand on my comment a little, the deliberate bad-character choosers are one segment. Another are the single-issue voters like my fundamentalist in-laws, for whom ABORTION is the one and only deciding factor. They are aware of the orange-elect’s bad character, but unborn babies override all other moral considerations.
Major Major Major Major
@O. Felix Culpa:
Including recently-born babies!
gogol's wife
@Larkspur:
Sounds as if it’s worth watching. I find myself most cheered by straight talk, like that of McMullin and Blow in the NYT yesterday (main reason I’m not giving up on the Times).
O. Felix Culpa
@Major Major Major Major:
Indeed. Which is both ironic and deeply painful. Somehow they are unable to see the contradictions.
ETA: Or perhaps unwilling to see them. I do not understand this mindset at all, especially since it’s profoundly unscriptural with respect to the mandate to care for the weak and vulnerable, including those already borned.
gogol's wife
The Western Mass. PBS station showed the “Hamilton’s America” documentary Saturday night as a fund-raiser. I watched it three times when it first appeared (before the election). Watching it after the election was a different experience. Mainly, I could not allow Paul Ryan’s face on my TV without screaming obscenities at it. And when Dubya appeared, I thought, “Yeah, finally I miss you” (h/t Bill Maher).
Major Major Major Major
@O. Felix Culpa: makes sense if you’re catholic I guess.
Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class
@hovercraft:
Why worry? It isn’t as if Flynn Jr, Uday/Cesare, Qusay/Rodrigo, Lucretia Spice, Angsty Spice, or Gioffre will have to serve in any cpacity that will put them in physical danger.
Twitler has seen all the great movies – Patton, A Bridge Too Far, ToraToraTora, The Longest Day, The Green Berets. He knows military things. and John Wayne swagger always solves the problem, like magic.
Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class
@MomSense:
With a full commo/countermeasure suite installed courtesy of the taxpayers.
O. Felix Culpa
@Major Major Major Major: They’re bible church fundamentalists. Catholics are held in deep suspicion, except as allies in the fetus wars.
Kathleen
@schrodinger’s cat: They are the worst.
Major Major Major Major
@O. Felix Culpa: yeah, I know. Just saying.
Betty Cracker
@Larkspur:
Good luck to him. In all seriousness, though, I think it’s an exercise in futility. There are undoubtedly some miserable bastards out there who voted for Trump primarily in hopes that the asshole explosion his election would cause would reconfigure the rubble of their lives. They saw what a sexist, racist, xenophobic prick he was and thought, “That’s not as important as expressing my anger at the system.”
I’ve got two related thoughts about those people. 1) Fuck them, because 2) it is pointless to try to reach someone who is that irrational.
Lizzy L
@Major Major Major Major: Nope. There are many, many different flavors of Catholic. O. Felix Culpa’s in-laws are only one flavor.
Major Major Major Major
@Lizzy L: I was just saying that it’s logically coherent given catholic doctrine on original sin.
Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class
@O. Felix Culpa:
Y’know, the interesting part is that Catholics will, for all their faults, do some social services.
You’ll never see the American flavors of evangelicalism/fundamentalism do diddly shit that isn’t pharisaically and cheaply run and/or proselytizing in nature.
And for those who say “these things are best done by charity and church” my answer is that we had that, and it was an abject failure. That’s what got undone during the Depression.
O. Felix Culpa
@Betty Cracker:
My stance too. Poor Ms. O struggles with that, because these people are her parents, siblings, and extended family and she wants to believe there is some hope at least of co-existence. She’s incredibly thoughtful and gracious when she talks with them. But, when I ask her if they have ever moved their position even slightly on any topic in her forty-plus years of engaging them, the answer is a sad and wistful ‘No.” I’ve reached my conclusions about their reachability. The evidence is compelling.
Lizzy L
@Lizzy L: And it appears they are not, in fact, Catholic.
O. Felix Culpa
@Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class: Agreed.
HRA
@schrodinger’s cat: They also blamed the union. I know the union rep who was blamed for asking a hike in the pay and benefits right before the layoffs began. It is true they were lashing out at the wrong man. I have known Art for a long time. I could not believe what was happening to him.
On the other had, I have belonged to 2 unions in my work history. The first one (CWA) was fine. The second one was not at all fine. For years I was harassed by my manager for reasons I was unable to understand. There came the time when she accused me of something absolutely ludicrous and I called the head of the union in my workplace. She asked me to send her a letter containing my grievance. A few days later, my supervisor told me my letter was given to another manager and read at their monthly meeting. So there is that as well.
Larkspur
@gogol’s wife: Thanks – just went to catch up on the latest Blow columns and I agree with you.
Shalimar
@Iowa Old Lady: Trump already has a private plane. I would bet he wants the government to retrofit it with all the equipment a president needs so he can rent it to the U.S. as his Air Force One.
After all, Obama made them give him a special blackberry even though he was supposed to use the already existing government secure cell phone technology, so this is almost the same thing if you add a few hundred million dollars worth of personal profit.
Keith G
@sherparick:
Be careful with that statement lest you accidentally rewrite history. Most labor unions were bitterly opposed to a NAFTA. The celebrating was done by the management class, owners, and financers who all knew they had stolen a march against labor. This might be a good time to remember that in in the House of Representatives when it came time to pass a bill implementing the treaty, Republican yes votes outnumbered Democratic yes votes. When the Senate voted to ratify the treaty, again Republican yes votes of numbered Democratic votes. Folks plainly knew that the effects on labor were going to be pernicious. Nonetheless, many Democrats led by Bill Clinton played the tune that a rising tide wood lift all, or at least enough, ships.
schrodinger's cat
@HRA: What does HRA stand for?
schrodinger's cat
@Kathleen: I almost had a shouting match with a little old lady who approvingly quoted NYT to me, yesterday. I told her that they could DIAF for all I care.
Gretchen
Too bad the folks whose only issue is abortion don’t realize that Obamacare has helped push the abortion rate to below what is was before Roe v Wade passed:
https://thinkprogress.org/abortion-rates-dropped-sharply-what-caused-it-c522e2e8c4f2#.omm1pso24
O. Felix Culpa
@Gretchen: Believe me, Ms. O has pointed out the reduction in abortion rates due to Obamacare to her fundamentalist family. But the facts don’t matter. My assessment is that their thought-world is hermetically sealed. Nothing that could cause a shift in outlook ever penetrates. That’s why I believe that engaging in “dialogue” with the right-wing heartland is an exercise in futility.
Mnemosyne
@O. Felix Culpa:
This is probably a dead thread, but I’m kicking around the notion that fundies looked at Matthew 25:40 (“Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me”) and decided that they only had to find the very least (most powerless) people and champion them, and then they could treat everyone else like shit because they were secure in the knowledge that they were helping the “least” and therefore were guaranteed a spot in heaven.
Of course, this means they missed the entire fucking point of the parable, but that’s pretty common with fundies.
philadelphialawyer
@HRA:
“They also blamed the union. I know the union rep who was blamed for asking a hike in the pay and benefits right before the layoffs began. It is true they were lashing out at the wrong man. I have known Art for a long time. I could not believe what was happening to him.”
So, they are morons who blame their union and the Democratic party which (at least comparatively) supports it rather than the corporations and the Republicans who (quite explicitly and extremely) support them? What are we to make of that? Even if the issue is really economics (a dubious proposition, but let it go), we can’t do much with at least this branch of the WWC if they can’t get those basic facts straight.
“On the other had, I have belonged to 2 unions in my work history. The first one (CWA) was fine. The second one was not at all fine. For years I was harassed by my manager for reasons I was unable to understand. There came the time when she accused me of something absolutely ludicrous and I called the head of the union in my workplace. She asked me to send her a letter containing my grievance. A few days later, my supervisor told me my letter was given to another manager and read at their monthly meeting. So there is that as well.”
So “there is” what, exactly? Your unverifiable, obviously self interested and biased, alleged, account of your own, individual, personal tribulations? Really, that’s your counterargument? You can’t be serious!
father pussbucket
Asserting something easily known to be false is not an “opinion”.