I’m guilty of my daily schradenfreude as I fire up Twitter every morning before my coffee for tweets like this:
Last 72 hrs:
1 Russian hacker arrested in Spain.
2 Page had FISA warrant on him.
3 Manafort received $1.2M payment from pro-Putin stooge. https://t.co/FlPPhXkr6R— Michael Ian Black (@michaelianblack) April 12, 2017
Michael Reynolds, in comments at Outside the Beltway, has an interesting take on this:
Drip. . . drip. . . drip. . .
As a story guy this feels on an intuitive level like there’s a story-teller here. The narrative has a rhythm. This source waited until the fauxtaliation news was done and then dropped the next piece of the puzzle on the table. There’s at least one Deep Throat at work, is there an uber-Throat pacing this whole thing, parceling out the minimum necessary to keep the story alive?
It’s hard to war-game this since the Trump administration is hopelessly incompetent. Have they decided on their ‘John Dean’ yet? Do they have a designated patsy? Manafort is probably going down, Mike Flynn as well. They have Carter Page by the balls, but does he know anything or is he, as the FSB evidently decided, just ‘an idiot?’ Who’s going to roll over for the FBI?…
So what’s next?
And is schradenfreude a treatable condition?
Open thread
Baud
Technically, losing elections would cure it. Eyes on the prize.
Major Major Major Major
It’s certainly a preëxisting one.
At any rate, everybody knows that this Russia nonsense is just another way the liberals in the media keep deflecting blame for their real problem, letting the factory jobs in Scranton get outsourced–jobs that by divine right belong to American workers.
Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]
At this point I no longer see this as schradenfreude, there is a growing horror of “why isn’t this enough? Why isn’t THIS enough!!!!!” The last scrap in my belief in the honesty of my fellow man has been completely shattered by the past year. I remember thinking that after the elections of 2006 that the Republican party leaders would come to their senses and work with their democratic peers and bring forth the best, and over-ride the worst of the Bush (jr) administration….. Then the “10 years ago” republican party voted down (against the administration) some moderate immigration reforms. After that it has NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, EVER gotten ONE BIT BETTER.
A decade (or two, for Regan, or 3 for Nixon) is more and More and MORE than enough to say that the republicans have to be cast from the temple. I’m laid back, but 3/5 cases of treason with past republican presidents (Nixon with Vietnam, Reagan/Bush with Iran, and Trump with Russia) should be some sort of limit for anyone with functional brain cells.
Vilago D. E. and driftglass are right. There might be honest Republicans, but they are a rounding error in the current party.
Baud
@Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]:
Republicans have cornered the market on protecting privilege.
Major Major Major Major
@Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]:
You know why “none dare call it treason”, right?
Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]
@Baud: Terry Pratchett taught me (maybe not really, but it makes sense) that what privilege means is “private law”…..
Privilege means that the law is whatever you think it is at that moment. One without privilege is ALWAYS losing at calvinball. it’s practically a definition.
Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]
@Major Major Major Major: Well that is the (Bad and bloody) punchline to the joke, isn’t it.
Major Major Major Major
@Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]: one of my favorite Pratchettisms is “Build a man a fire, and he’ll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life.” I think of it every time somebody tries the “give a man a fish” thing.
Baud
Speaking of schradenfreude
Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]
@Major Major Major Major: We are all diminished from DEATH calling him up.
Major Major Major Major
@Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]: it was his time. And I’m not even the type who says stuff like that, that’s how much it was his time to go.
Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]
@Major Major Major Major: I agree, I imagine that people has a similar mono no aware feeling when George Orwell passed.
Major Major Major Major
@Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]: I felt the same way about Vonnegut. So it goes.
Not Leonard Cohen though, still mad at him for falling over.
Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]
@Major Major Major Major: Lul
Major Major Major Major
@Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]: after the election I thought, okay, at least Leonard Cohen will have something sagacious to say, NOPE!
ThresherK
@Major Major Major Major:
I don’t know much about Outside the Beltway; are they good? Im starved for a self-named news source that acknowledges there’s a political existence between the company town hacks (Politico) and RealMerka (plus its imaginary wannabes, like Bobo’s Bucks County PA).
Major Major Major Major
@ThresherK: Teach the wrong man to fish and he’ll start a wildly successful fishery, forget how he learned to fish, and lead a crusade to blame all society’s issues on fishing teachers…
MattF
@Major Major Major Major: Just reread ‘Feet of Clay’. In which Angua describes her regrettable instincts as ‘humanitarian’ (as opposed to ‘vegetarian’).
OzarkHillbilly
@ThresherK:
Yes.
rikyrah
@Baud:
They are too funny
NotMax
Wimps.
Jon Marcus
I’ll bet you quite a bit of money that the Russian hacker had nothing to do with the election hacking. Two reasons:
1. A guy who knows a lot about him and his crimes says he was a spammer, nothing more.
2. The (AFAIK only) source for reports that he was involved with election hacking is the Kremlin-controlled RT.
kindness
Those that control (yes those that fund Republican’s elections control them) haven’t gotten their fat tax cuts yet. Donald should realize once they have that he’s dispensable. But the narcissist that Donald is won’t allow himself to see he’s being used too.
schrodingers_cat
@ThresherK: Both sides do it but Democrats are worse. They are polite and well spoken Republicans. At least they used to be, its been a while since I have read that blog. They are the David Brooks of blogging.
J R in WV
@Jon Marcus:
But spam consisting of fake news coming from a Russian controlled computer network is interference with a free and fair election. That’s all it takes to be an attack on our system of government, a flood of false information making it difficult or impossible to know what to believe.
Not that this hasn’t happened before in the past, it has, but not by a foreign enemy like Putin. I have to give him credit, he watched how the home-grown xtianist fascists did it, daid I can do that, and then followed through, and here we are.
JGabriel
David Anderson @ Top:
Schadenfreude is best treated with wine, celebration, and, if you’re into that kind of thing, debauchery.
Uncle Cosmo
@JGabriel: Emphasis on Schadenfreude. C’mon, peeps. Bad enough to misspell words from our own language, do we have to extend the practice to ones we steal from someone else’s? Repeatedly???