Predictable as the sunrise, Twitler reacted badly to the narcissistic injury of having a court swat down another of his attempts to give force of law to anti-immigrant bigotry. The sting was amplified by timing since Team Trump is desperately cobbling together participation trophy-fodder to counter the narrative that his presidency is in shambles at the 100-day mark.
Trump went on a fact-challenged rant on Twitter this morning, blaming the wrong court and vowing ultimate victory in the SCOTUS. But the truly deranged response was a statement issued on official White House letterhead last night:
The Twitter rant and official statement are designed to “otherize” a populated swath of the country. They baldly question the jurisdiction of the 9th Circuit or a judge in San Francisco to make rulings affecting “real America.” This echoes the incredulity of the diminutive racist occupying Eric Holder’s old office over the jurisdiction of a court on “some island in the Pacific,” i.e., the State of Hawaii.
But as appalling and divisive as that notion is, more ominous, IMO, is the overheated language about undocumented immigrants in this statement — the conflation of the folks who pick America’s tomatoes, design our software, landscape our office parks, excel in our finest universities, etc., with violent criminals who shoot innocent blond women for sport.
It’s based on a lie; undocumented immigrants are generally more law abiding than the native born. But worse, it’s a particularly corrosive and dangerous lie. There are valid questions about immigration law that we can and should debate. But that’s not what Trump’s doing here.
Demonizing an entire class of people amounts to a blood libel, and the murder of legal immigrants like Srinivas Kuchibhotla show how quickly lies about undocumented immigrants can infect the minds of unhinged bigots who would target anyone they see as the “other.”
History is filled with the tragic consequences of such lies. Trump traveled to the Holocaust Museum to commemorate one such consequence yesterday…the same day his press secretary issued the above statement.
Gravenstone
They don’t like judges on islands. They don’t like judges in progressive cities. They don’t seem to like appointed judges in general – except of course those they appoint themselves who know what side of the ideological divide their bread is buttered on (or should that be, they know enough to stay bought?). Seems Twitler just doesn’t care much for reality when it keeps getting in the way of his would be dictatorship.
japa21
As I mentioned yesterday, the GOP was notorious for court shopping in order to overturn some of Obama’s EO’s. And the administration is wrong about the violation of federal law. Most cities do give that information to the government if an undocumented is arrested. The whole point of sanctuary cities is to not require documentation of immigration status for routine interactions, i.e. reporting a crime or providing information relevant to a crime to authorities,
In other words, by being more open to immigrants of whatever status reporting crimes without fear of repercussion sanctuary cities can actually be safer. But as usual, for Trump bigotry trumps facts.
ETA: Trump and the GOP had no problem with unelected judges overturning Obama’s stuff, be it EO’s or parts of ACA, etc. The world has never seen bigger hypocrites than those who now call themselves Republicans.
Nelle
This is not normal. I have all Republican representatives in Congress. My morning call to them resulted in all three offices playing this regime as normal. It is not normal.
Chris
Their general counter to this is that simply by entering the country, they’ve committed a crime. (And then go on about how they’re taking up jobs that would otherwise go to Americans, because clearly the source of our employment problems is the farm jobs that we haven’t even been able to convince convicts to do…)
Timurid
If Putin is half the super genius 19-dimensional chess master he’s made out to be, his agents have spent the last several years gathering kompromat on federal judges.
The federal judiciary is the last thread holding this country together.
Corner Stone
@Timurid:
I wonder if Putin or his team ever even considered “independent” judiciary? It’s difficult to plan for something you have zero experience with.
hovercraft
Feature not a bug.
People keep trying to say that the Shitgibbon is not a bigot just an opportunist who will say anything to get what he wants, BULLSHIT. He’s been demonizing black and “others” for as log as he’s been in the public eye. He was keeping black people out if his apartment buildings, he attacked the Central Park Five with no proof they were guilty, he was demonizing the Japaneses back in the day, that had morphed into the Chinese until they sent him and his daughter a bunch of money his way. You don’t just accidentally fill your cabinet with a bunch of bigots who see black and brown people as inferior and leeches, and who think that all our problems are because there are too many people of color in the country. This is a feature not a bug, there’s a reason all the bigots were drawn to him. The media and his defenders can keep trying to say that he has no control over who supports him but they are simply in denial, not wanting to acknowledge that the president and many in both congress and out there in real America are bigots, period.
sherparick
Yep, all you have to do is substitute “Jews,” “Blacks,” “Catholics,” or “Armenians” and this type of thing could have come out Third Reich, Jim Crow South, 1850s Know Nothing, or the Ottoman Turks. Great Company.@Chris:
randy khan
I have to keep reminding myself that just because I expect stuff like this doesn’t mean it’s normal.
Goku
@Nelle: They want it to be tho
rikyrah
@hovercraft:
PREACH!!!
TELL IT!!!
Chet
So well said, Betty. During the campaign trump was throwing Furguson/Baltimore protestors and drug-dealing gangs into the same mix. All others, all illegals, all persona non grata.
Paul W.
I actually am way more scared by the way they treat the judiciary, throwing around terms like unelected judges and acting as if the judges have NO place in reviewing the constitutionality of actions. They are trying to move the country to the idea of rule by fiat, combined with the fake news bullshit they spout every time an article they don’t like appears it makes every other arena of authority illegitimate and is fundamentally undermining our nation.
There have and always will be racist and inflammatory attitudes to other peoples and minorities, and while this is not a good thing it is something that future generations and most of this nation is already pushing back against. But, breaking the judiciary and demonizing/breaking the nomination process means that the next time around we get a Trump style leader those institutions will be weaker and may not stand as well as they currently are managing.
Tokyokie
If we are going to start deporting all immigrants, I suggest we start with the “model” to whom Humpty Trumpty is married.
LAO
As a lawyer, I find the Administration’s rhetoric to be very problematic — it’s not just the racist anti-immigrant language, it’s the attack on a co-equal branch of government. Trump (and certainly Sessions) are actively trying to de-legitimize the federal judiciary. This will not end well.
ETA: I see Paul W, shares my concern (and he got there first).
randy khan
@LAO:
I agree that it’s the most troubling thing. The line right at the beginning of the statement about the rule of law having “suffered another blow” is really awful (besides being wrong). It’s as if the Administration expects that it can rule by decree and just have everyone follow along. (Which, I guess, they do.)
NorthLeft12
Man, this guy is a real piece of work. And the worst part of this is, that Deadbeat Donald has plenty of supporters and believers.
Wishing you all the best for the next four years…..you are going to need it.
The only good that can come from this reign of error, is that conservatism and the Republicans may be discredited for at least a few years. Keep up the pressure on Donald and his cronies.
hovercraft
Given the craven nature of the GOP, his fellow narcissist James Comey, and with the Judiciary our last hope. We may in the end by “saved”, by which I mean the damage may be limited by his very hubris and incompetence.
Instead of launching tax reform, Trump could ground it The main problem, observers say, is that Republicans are caught between two irreconcilable models for enacting major tax changes.
Just as the the statement released last night is hysterical, overwrought and dishonest, their ham handed approach to everything makes it easier to fight. FSM help us if they ever figure out that doing this stealthily is way more efficient than proposing huge things based on lies they have no chance of ever delivering.
CONGRATULATIONS!
Happy John Wilkes Booth Day!
(today’s the day the murdering sack of shit got what he had coming. I suggest a national holiday be declared.)
Goku
@NorthLeft12: Going by your nym, you might be affected too…
PST
I don’t mean this as a criticism of Betty, who is properly outraged, but I try to avoid the use of the term “blood libel” to refer generally to nasty and outrageous libels. Historically, the term has a gross, literal meaning involving the alleged use of Christian blood by Jews, and has often been used to justify murder, sometimes on a mass scale. I think people often assume that the “blood” in blood libel is merely an intensifier, but it is much more specific. That leads me to steer clear of that usage, like avoiding the word holocaust for anything less than the Holocaust.
ArchTeryx
@LAO: To me, what’s even more frightening is that they’ll readily find and confirm pure partisan hacks into every judgeship they can find. They can yowp all they want about it from outside – they’ve been doing that shit since Andrew Jackson’s day – but undermining it from within is what I truly fear.
Then again, I’ve long thought that the entire Supreme Court mess – lifetime, increasingly partisan appointments – is going to end in a Dune-style War of Assassins, once the court goes full Lochner and starts basically ruling that only rich white men have any rights at all. Once someone actually manages to assassinate a sitting Supreme, maybe there’ll be a real conversation about lifetime appointments vs. changing political winds.
Tokyokie
@hovercraft: I don’t really care whether Humpty Trumpty is an actual bigot or merely plays one on TV. If the rationale behind his policies and the effect of them is to oppress the non-white, non-male, and non-straight, then it doesn’t really matter whether he believes his bullshit or not, because people are being hurt.
As I’m fond of saying, Hitler didn’t kill a single Jew. But those seeking his or his subordinates’ favor killed about 6 million of them. Were all of them anti-Semites? Their beliefs hardly matter, but the results of their actions do.
schrodingers_cat
These policies are a lose-lose proposition for the native born citizenry too.
1. Erode the reputation of the United States as an open society
2. They will negatively affect the bottom line of huge sectors of the economy (Tourism, higher education, medicine, research, agriculture and so on)
ETA: Travel to the United States is down, admissions to universities are down. There is already a shortage of doctors in rural United States about to get worse with these policies.
Goku
@PST: What nuclear holocaust?
hovercraft
@randy khan:
No it’s not normal, apart from some discussion of whether Barrack Obama had a shot of ever getting elected back in ’08, and then some celebratory discussion when he won, I had never discussed politics with my sisters before. Both watch more Access Hollywood, and dumb shit, (in my opinion), like the Bachelor, Survivor and other crap like that, they have never been into politics. But now thanks to this moron they both can tell me what dumb shit he’s done, this morning my sister was ranting about his conflict of interest with Turkey, and how he told Steve Bannon in an interview that he had a conflict. She kept saying that it was with his own mouth, not someone saying he said it, but with his own mouth! Fake News her ass. I just smiled and thought, congratulations moran, you’ve woken a lot of people up.
Roger Moore
@Gravenstone:
They don’t like anyone who disagrees with them.
FlipYrWhig
The idea that “illegals,” “thugs,” terrorists, and refugees were all part of the same lawless brown problem is what swung the post-industrial Midwest and hence the election. It’s disgusting and it’s popular. Eesh.
Chris
@PST:
Radio Rwanda remains the best foreign analogy in my mind for the way they’re behaving. (As I was corrected on this yesterday, Radio Mille Collines, but the other name is better known).
Ian G.
@schrodingers_cat:
Once again, it’s going to be the troglodytes who voted for this clown who will see their hospitals close because there aren’t enough immigrant doctors to staff them. It won’t be those of us in urban areas who voted against him and generally have access to fine hospitals (even the rust belt, think Cleveland Clinic).
Corner Stone
Trump now doing some kind of comedy bit from the podium.
MattF
Sad to say, it’s obviously a good thing that federal judges are unelected.
randy khan
@hovercraft:
We can only hope.
Corner Stone
My God, if we survive we’re going to have nothing left. Trump is signing an EO to allow the mass selloff of public lands.
Kay
Guffaw. I love how mad he is all the time. He never smiles (authentically) or laughs, Donald Trump.
Miserable human being. That this incessant whining he does is supposedly “toughness” is just so embarrassing to me, that our standards are so low.
Did he back down on his stupid war with Canada yet? That’s as good as done. The US President has now managed to alienate North America– the continent. Worst President ever.
germy
There’s a new ugliness spreading across this country.
hovercraft
@Tokyokie:
Reporters, columnists and television talking heads keeps insisting that we not call him what he is in spite of all the evidence right in front of us, I think it’s important to call a spade a spade. He is a bigot, his cabinet is full of bigots, his policies are bigoted. Facts are important, you can not do a real analysis of this administration without acknowledging that this is their starting point, and everything else flows from there. Their policies are all designed to put people of color back where we belong, for those they need, on the bottom rung of society, for the rest, of us, back where we came from.
His actions are a direct result of his beliefs, so it’s important that we get people to see what his motivations are. He may not have literal blood on his hands, but his bigotry is empowering bigots all over the country to act out that bigotry, people are being hurt and in a few cases dying because of this bigotry.
ArchTeryx
@Corner Stone: Good luck enforcing THAT one in court. That, like all his other EOs, is going to run afoul of half a dozen statutes – to start. With this maniac Congress behind him, though, he might just be able to jam it through by force of law.
Chris
@Ian G.:
And it’ll all be the fault of us coastal urbanites and communists, and all the black and immigrant people we keep giving away their services to. So it goes.
Aleta
I fear he will use a worsening economy to feed prejudice (toward immigrants, women, minorities) and increase militarism and nationalism. (You know, like in the history books.)
MattF
@hovercraft: I do wonder what the commentariat thinks ‘bigot’ means, if it doesn’t describe Trump.
ruemara
If you consider that what they’re trying to do is foment violence against those not loyal to them, it makes perfect sense. This has nothing to do with undermining it to regular people. This has everything to do with providing justification for those itching to destroy people who don’t do as they do, think as they think and look just like them. And as they lose everything because of who and what they’ve voted for, I guarantee they’ll be even more violent towards anyone seeming to be liberal.
Meanwhile, progressive betters are having a conniption fit over Obama getting $400k for a speech and Chelsea Clinton existing.
hovercraft
@Corner Stone:
I see he rather enjoys being stopped by the courts. How many lawyers are getting calls from tree huggers and all kinds of conservation groups filing lawsuits as we speak? When they talked about this a few weeks ago, wasn’t there a lot of push back from their people, he seems not to realize that gun lovers love to hunt, and they do most of that hunting on public lands, not mention fishermen. The issue of “public lands” is like Obamacare, they hate it conceptually because of GOP lies, but when you try to take it away and they realize that they are huge beneficiaries of the things they profess to hate, then they discover they don’t hate it after all, they need and or want it. This will not end well for him.
They are about to educate their voters about something else they’ve lied about. How much you want to bet that by the time this over, public opinion on “public lands” will be markedly improved.
gratuitous
Guess what? The President doesn’t have superpowers and can’t call a new reality into being just by signing an executive order. I know that has become an article of faith in some corners of our political world, but it’s simply not true. President Trump thinks it is true, though. Sad!
The question, then, is why isn’t Trump getting the advice of some lawyers about how to go about drafting these orders? (Not that it isn’t hilarious to watch him get smacked down time after time.) If Trump’s supporters are all grrrr mad!, shouldn’t their anger be directed at the political and legal amateur who keeps signing these unconstitutional executive orders? Learn the rules if you’re going to play the game, dumbasses.
I get the distinct feeling that if Trump was a Trailblazers fan, he’d be pouting about how he wants to challenge Steph Curry to a game of HORSE. Grow up, you whiny ass titty baby.
rikyrah
@hovercraft:
Two White Supremacists
One Nazi in the White House
And then we have Attorney General White Citizens Council
FlipYrWhig
@ruemara: I’m sure it’s JUST A COINCIDENCE that the furor over Obama doing something something Wall Street followed a bunch of negative press for the Sage of Burlington’s godawful attitudes about reproductive rights and their place in the pantheon of True Progressive Views.
rikyrah
Trump has 99 problems, but Democratic obstruction isn’t one of them
04/26/17 10:47 AM
By Steve Benen
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” the other day and complained bitterly about congressional Democrats standing in the way of Donald Trump’s qualified nominees for administrative posts.
“We’re behind,” Priebus said about filling key executive-branch posts, “but because of historical unbelievable obstruction from U.S. senators that are acting inappropriately.”
That’s certainly how Donald Trump sees this dynamic. After initially saying he was leaving many key offices empty on purpose, Trump recently reversed course, saying he wants those posts filled but can’t because of “obstructionists.”
Reality tells a different story. The Senate, which is responsible for confirming nominees, is run by Trump’s Republican Party, and under existing rules, Democrats can’t use filibusters to block any executive-branch nominee.
So if Dems aren’t to blame, who is? The Washington Post makes clear that Team Trump should be looking in the mirror.
Goku
@gratuitous: Nope. It’s the mean judiciary’s fault for not obeying God-Emperor. They should just shut up or be eliminated
/alt-reich
FlipYrWhig
@gratuitous:
Because he knows that none of the idiots who adore him pay any attention to anything that happens after the first burst of publicity about That Thing He Did To Stick It To Those People, with the partial exception of paying attention to Unelected Judges Stopping Him From Sticking It To Those People.
schrodingers_cat
@FlipYrWhig:BS exists to destroy the Dems, to complete Putin’s takeover, whether BS is in on this scheme or he is simply the useful idiot I don’t know.
Felonius Monk
But these “idiots” still love him. Go figure.
Boatboy_srq
@randy khan: One of the artifacts of a “CEO pResidency” is the assumption that the courts – SCOTUS in particular – are groups that meet quarterly, review the nation’s progress annually and stay out of the C-level folks’ way, and that cases appealed to SCOTUS are the equivalent of shareholder ballot initiatives (i.e. inconvenient demands by people who should be grateful that the business makes them earnings).
ruemara
@schrodingers_cat: I’m gonna go with Mr. Honeymoon in St. Petersburg as complicit, because the resultant ash heap will then be a call to pure socialism in America and liberal paradise, yadda, yadda. Sometimes, the strange bedfellows are based on a certain naivete that’s easily played on.
hedgehog mobile
@Felonius Monk: Fuckem (quoting efg).
bystander
@Tokyokie: Humoty Trumpty? I’m so stealing that!
hovercraft
@gratuitous:
He’s an outsider, he came to drain the swamp, he doesn’t want anyone with Washington DC cooties contaminating his White House, dammit. His lawyers have done a wonderful job for him for years, they’ll sort this out, and just you wait till it gets to the Supreme Court, they’ll take care f it just you watch, he just put Goresuck there to take care of it. And how dare you suggest he learn the rules, he won, he’s king now and he gets to make the rules, now shut up everyone, he busy turning America into another division of Trump International. If you don’t like it he’ll fire you, he’s very good at that, don’t you know he was the number one show on TV for years.
hovercraft
@FlipYrWhig:
How dare you suggest that the purest people in the land are cynical hacks. Apologize right now, you know deep down that Obama was a neo-liberal, corporatist democrat just like Hillary. Stupid liberals thought that Obama was “the one” back in 208, but he wasn’t, he was a false prophet, the true savior didn’t emerge till 2016, and only he can save us, all bow the the one and only true savior, Saint Bernard.
AliceBlue
@germy:
I clicked on your link and read the whole story and now I’m crying. My god, what a couple of psychopaths.
Gin & Tonic
@schrodingers_cat: I posted in the dead thread downstairs, that I got a fundraising call from the DSCC this morning. About a minute into the script the nice lady brought Wilmer into it. I said “he’s not a Democrat.” Things got a little strident after that. I suggested she speak to her supervisor about editing the script.
hovercraft
@Gin & Tonic:
Mnemosyne
@PST:
I understand your concern, but they’re talking about rounding up “illegals” and detaining them by the millions. Their rhetoric is getting people murdered in the streets and businesses attacked.
If you want to avoid a repeat of what the Nazis did, you need to correctly identify the actions they took to get there, and Trump seems to be using that playbook. So, no, I don’t think Betty is exaggerating or cheapening the term when she uses it. She’s describing what Trump is trying to do and the end he’s hoping to reach.
hovercraft
@germy: @AliceBlue:
That’s why I didn’t click the link, the details you posted were enough. This is when I wish there was a God who could just strike evil people down right in the middle of them trying to commit heinous acts. Not vigilantes, but a supreme being who could just eliminate evil in the act.
D58826
@Corner Stone: Maybe he should just sign an EO dividing the country up among the top 400 families and declaring the inhabitants slaves and not citizens. Would save a lot of time an effort.
aimai
This is the real danger of Trump–that the more he is thwarted in his real goal (plaudits, fake accomplishments, legislation) the more he has to turn to his “hole card” which is anti immigrant and racist policies and speeches. I expect that in order to get his narcissistic supply on he will have descended to full on, staged, WWF/gladiator matches and blood sacrifice for his baying fans. He is discovering he can’t get the same charge he got on the campaign trail just at the White House or Mar A Lago–and his handlers must be hysterical with fear that they are going to be caught bringing torture victims/prostitutes to the white house so he can have his ego fed. So he is going to have to go back and back and back to feeding the beast of his worst and most racist followers just to ride the wave of their adulation. We can expect gibbering rage and anti immigrant speeches very time his feelings are hurt.
ruemara
@germy: How can you do that? That’s your service dog! I… I can’t comprehend what I read, there’s no way I can watch any video. These dogs are some of the most loyal, brave, loving animals you can have. I know one personally that would throw himself between you and fucking dinosaur when he loves you. He deals with PTSD from his canine service and is the biggest, lovingest goofball you can know. I can’t.
aimai
@Gin & Tonic: Absolutely good for you! I will answer the phone call next time they call just to say the same thing.
Mnemosyne
@AliceBlue:
Honestly, I don’t click on links like that. I know animal-abusing assholes do horrible things, and I don’t need to know the details. I’m just glad they’re being prosecuted.
NotMax
Was under the impression that the word hysteria was on the proscribed list. Nearly had my digital head bitten off here once for innocently using it.
SatanicPanic
@hovercraft: Please be polite though guys, these people are just trying to pay their bills.
gene108
They were doing this with the popular vote total for the last Presidential election. Right-wing media immediately said that if you subtracted California’s votes, which Hillary won by a big margin, Trump was the real popular vote winner, in Real America.
aimai
@germy: If you read the story this is a not untypical story about a highly disturbed, possibly mentally ill, woman in an abusive, controlling relationship with a young military guy who uses her relationship with the dog in order to further control her. there is nothing new here and it has nothing to do with Trump. Abusers have been getting their lovers/children/victims to torture and kill animals or other children for centuries.
Mnemosyne
@ruemara:
Some people get a charge out of abusing those weaker than them, often (but not always) because they were abused themselves and spent their time waiting for the day they could turn around and make someone else feel as helpless as they did. I’m not sure if it’s a lack of empathy or a denial of their own pain and helplessness that’s so strong that they have to turn it on someone else so they don’t crumble.
SatanicPanic
“Trump’s just using racism to get votes, he probably doesn’t really believe it” is a great example of how cynicism without knowledge doesn’t fix stupidity, it makes it worse.
laura
Not for nothing, tonight’s the first episode of The Handmaid’s Tale.
Elmo
@AliceBlue: Nothing on this Earth could compel me to read that story. I’m nauseated and near tears from reading the excerpt.
Mnemosyne
@SatanicPanic:
I would say, if your go-to blaming mechanism is racism, then you’re a racist, no matter how much you try to plead that you’re not “really” a racist because you totally know Black people who don’t start vomiting as soon as they see you.
ArchTeryx
@gene108: And my usual answer to that is, “And if you subtract the EC votes from Texas, Hillary won the electoral college. In REAL America.”
Let those assholes put that in their pipe and smoke it.
germy
@hovercraft:
There would suddenly be a lot more elbow room in this world.
ruemara
@SatanicPanic: I see it as people trying to spare themselves that they voted for a racist. Not really a racist, just a guy using a ploy because… winning is critical. Ergo, i’m not racist for supporting him or my beloved granddaughter isn’t just because she voted for him. Just giving cover.
@laura: I can’t watch while we’re LARPing the prequel.
ArchTeryx
@germy: As has been pointed out, psychopaths torturing and killing animals is nothing new under the sun. That some of those assholes are veterans is nothing new either – stop off at your local VFW post if you want evidence of that.
Not going to get out of the boat this time. Some people just need to be given the same treatment they give to others, and some rabid dogs just plain need to be quarantined from the rest of us. Permanently.
Quinerly
@germy:
A friend from the Fayetteville area posted that piece to me on FB, wondering if I had heard about it (I’m from near Greenville, NC originally). The Daily Mail has a piece up on it too. The entire community is up in arms about it. They have raised her bail amount from the original amount. The boyfriend is out..I guess because he is on active duty he was transferred back to FT Bragg for the Army to deal with him. The community is afraid that the military will let him go quietly and he’ll just be deployed. All over the local news as far as Raleigh and over to Greenville, NC. It’s big news. Just so horrible. I cried this AM when I read all the articles on it. She could have just let her husband have that dog.
Mnemosyne
@aimai:
Since I know you’re working on a professional degree in this — is it a way to threaten the abused/controlled person, kind of a look what I’m willing to do to your dog, now imagine how I’m willing to hurt you? Or is it more of a way to demonstrate how much the abuser controls the person?
IANA psychologist, but if it is an abusive relationship, it makes sense that the abuser would want to get rid of her other sources of emotional support, maybe even pressure her into it to “prove” she really loves him.
SatanicPanic
@ruemara: I hear it from white liberal dudes every now and then. To get into their heads, I think they don’t feel comfortable calling people racist and will try to explain it away whenever possible.
Gin & Tonic
@SatanicPanic: I was under no impression that the woman reading the script wrote it and was not verbally abusive toward her, but I did want to make sure that when she reported up the chain, she was also able to convey the intensity of my feelings.
aimai
@ruemara: I think Republicans have a really hard time admitting that to the extent they knew Trump was a horrific candidate and they voted for him anyway that they put party loyalty above service to country. They simply couldn’t imagine relinquishing the chance for party power and whatever policies they thought Republicans stood for, even though they were putting a crazed, racist, ignorant, narcissist in an incredibly powerful role. If our positions had been reversed and the Republicans had put up a boring but honest functionary and competent technocrat and the Democrats had put up a gibbering loon I would have voted for the Republican and I am a yellow dog democrat. I can’t forgive them. But they will always excuse themselves either by denying that their choice was that bad, or denying that they could have known how bad he was.
Barbara
@aimai: This kind of invective doesn’t really feed the beast either, even though it is horrifying, more so that it is an official press release. Issuing White House press statements isn’t the same as fomenting rage in an arena with a few thousand people parroting back your revulsion that brown immigrants are taking over the country. And his followers aren’t the kind of people who feed or resolve their anger by reading such a press release. The motto of many of the worst of Trump’s supporters seems to be, “To the extent that I can envision the future, I don’t like it. To the extent that other people embrace that future and make me feel useless and bypassed I hate them too. I want the glory of yesterday.” I have no clue what to do about any of that.
hovercraft
@SatanicPanic:
I worked in retail management or almost for over 17 years I am very adept at telling people where to go without cursing or raising my voice, but believe you me I get my point across. Yes the person on the phone will merely be reading off a script, but they need to be able to report back that mentioning BS is not going over well with the people who actually fund the democratic party. There’s a reason we still get calls from Obama and the rest of them, we are their donors.
ArchTeryx
@SatanicPanic: I have no trouble calling people racists and bigots when they fit the part, but then, I’m an unemployed nobody with nothing left to lose, who’s long ago learned that such genteel decorum will just get me dead.
Yarrow
@gene108:
This had two goals: otherize California and all those liberal coastal elites and brown people plus add some fuel to the Putin-backed California secession movement. Anything that causes chaos in the US and push toward a breakup is good in Putin’s book. All the people who get hurt by any of this are just collateral damage.
Mnemosyne
@Quinerly:
I think other people have said here before that the Army does have regulations against animal abuse, so the guy could well end up facing a court-martial over this.
Barbara
@SatanicPanic: Cynicism is not a get out of jail free card for people trying to leverage the racism of others. If Trump is using the racism of his followers he is a racist because he doesn’t care whether he puts people of color at risk. Their interests are not important to him. Would he do the same with other groups that I am pretty sure he holds in contempt? For instance, would he go to a rally in North Carolina and tell people that they are a bunch of dupes for giving money to a church? And would those people vote for him if he did that? And yet, these same people profess to be mystified that women and minorities refuse to vote for Trump based on his racism and sexism even though he has some good ideas (which is itself a highly debatable proposition).
LurkerNoLonger
@germy:
The only just punishment for these 2 pieces of shit: tie them to a tree and have someone dressed as a dog shoot them multiple times.
aimai
@Mnemosyne: I come at this from years of feminism and watching this stuff, not just from the perspective of my nascent professional degree. I think its really obvious from the article that she was a highly disturbed person (her friends describe her as getting in trouble with her military supervisors and possibly fabulating stories). The dog was her first husband’s and she seems to have requested to keep it when he had to travel for work, had it certified it as a service dog (whether you can do that or not I don’t know) and it represented to her something she claimed to need for emotional support. So the dog was hers and she had gone out of her way to control it and take care of it. New boyfriend films her shooting it and shoots it himself and they both pretend to her friends that they are rehoming the dog? You can take your pick of reasons why this is happening but its her dog and her friends who will reject her once it becomes known, its her dog and she who loses the dogs companionship (which she fought for). There’s no hint in her past of any such behavior or attitude towards the dog and it doesn’t sound like she was in the active military with a history of being trained to kill anything or issues to work out related to violence.
I think we have to assume that it was his idea and that it satisfies some need he has to abuse animals and to abuse her by getting her to join him in the act. Its not really all that different from gang initiations where would be gang members are forced to “jump in” by committing a horrific act that cuts them off from their previous social identity. Master/servant relationship? Dom/Sub? Who knows. I just think the whole thing is sad and sick–but not new in any way.
SatanicPanic
@Gin & Tonic: @hovercraft: OK, sorry, just making a plea for the poor phone workers. They’re between a rock and a hard place thanks to dumb old Wilmer. He could just join the party and not be a jerk. I’d be a lot less critical if he did.
tobie
According to a diary at DailyKos linking to this article in Politico, the Trump White House has drafted an executive order withdrawing the US from NAFTA. If this is true, turbulent times, they are a-comin’. It will be interesting to see whether Wilmer, Ellison, or Tim-the self-styled representative of the white working class–Ryan (D-OH) sign on to this turd.
Mnemosyne
@aimai:
Since it looks like it was originally her ex-husband’s dog, that might be another motivation for the new boyfriend to want to kill it, and to want her to help him do it — he needs to remove all evidence of the previous relationship from her life, including the dog, and he needs her to go along with that.
What a sad, sick story.
amk
Well said, BC. The gutless media minions will never say it.
Quinerly
@Mnemosyne:
I’m hoping and I would think so. I’m just relaying what the civilians in the community are saying based on my friend’s post. I read through a lot of the comments in the comment section of the local paper. A lot of angry people that have lived in the community for years and have military connections who are afraid that it will be swept under the rug re the boyfriend because he’s active duty and Special Ops.
Tokyokie
@hovercraft: I agree wholeheartedly, and although I try not to hate on people, I have extraordinary difficulty doing so with bigots. I know we’re not supposed to call bigots what they are because of their precious fee-fees, but really, fuck every last one of them. Anybody who supports policies they wouldn’t wish enacted upon themselves that are enacted upon others because they’re different can go to hell. (And in a just moral universe, most certainly will.)
TenguPhule
Reflect on the fact that Trump’s judge Gorsch wanted a black driver to have to decide between his life and his job.
Having to place one’s faith in the SC on Kennedy is not a good sign.
hovercraft
@aimai:
Republicans can never accept responsibility for any damn thing, Bush’s failures weren’t their fault, the ideas were great, but his execution was bad. Obama and Pelosi were mean to them so they had to say no to everything, lose their minds and elect a bunch of crazy people. The Tangerine Blob is failing because democrats and the media and the courts and logic, math and reason are all conspiring against them. The majorities can’t get anything done because they were in opposition for so long, all of four years that they’ve forgotten how to govern. No one thinks to ask them how it is that they were in congress and never had any alternative proposals, isn’t that how our system is supposed to work, each side comes up with legislation, with real numbers that can be analyzed and they are debated and one or the other is adopted or a compromise is reached? Instead they simply opposed everything and crippled themselves.
SAD!
Speaking of the party of personal responsibility.
These people just can’t help themselves, they can’t let her go.
CNN’s Amanda Carpenter: Ivanka is ‘Becoming Like Hillary Clinton in the Worst Ways’
NN political commentator and former Ted Cruz communications director Amanda Carpenter said tonight that Ivanka Trump is “becoming like Hillary Clinton in the worst ways.”
“She’s sort of becoming increasingly unlikable,” Carpenter said, “she keeps trying to get these jobs that she’s not qualified for based on family connections, and every time when given the chance she’s asked about President Trump‘s poor track record towards women, she defends the bad conduct that he has exhibited in the past.”………………..
Carpenter said it’s a “joke” that Ivanka is being held up as a symbol of female empowerment “when she’s gotten everything in her life because of her father.” She also observed that foreign leaders don’t appreciate being put in the position of having to “babysit the First Daughter on these national stages.”……..
Carpenter was discussing the First Daughter’s less-than-positive reception during a women’s conference in Germany, but Erin Elmore––a former Apprentice contestant who worked on the Trump campaign––brought up how many women voted for the president.
Elmore defended Ivanka and Trump’s other adult children by saying that compared to the children of other celebrities, “You don’t see them on the cover of tabloid magazines. You don’t see them falling out of nightclubs and into taxis. You don’t see them with mugshots.”
Carpenter again insisted that Ivanka is “mak[ing] herself” like Clinton. Elmore shot back that only a “very small number of people” buy into that negative narrative about the First Daughter instead of the “true narrative.”
——————————————————————————————————————————-
Hillary was accomplished in her own right, she made more than Bill for most of their marriage, he didn’t give her anything you dammed morons.
Tokyokie
@bystander: I stole in from The Guardian, but it’s good enough for everybody to steal.
ArchTeryx
@Quinerly: He killed a service dog. They should be howling bloody murder about it, because if they don’t, they’ve just permanently undermined the legitimacy of their own service dog program as being nothing more then providing fodder for animal abusers.
Chris
@aimai:
I’ve been asked/asked myself this reverse-hypothetical a bunch of times since the election and every time I come back to the fact that that would be tremendously unlikely to happen in the first place. All the elements that favored Trump in the Republican Party may exist to some extent in the Democratic Party, but they don’t control and define it the way they do the GOP. Someone like Trump would find it much harder to make it through the primaries in a party whose voters aren’t plugged into an alternate reality like the Newscorp machine; whose voters give a shit about the basic function of governance, if only in the “keep the lights on and the trains running” kind of way; whose voters expect policy from their politicians and not just empty tribal symbolism; etc.
(And, of course, if a Trump-like figure somehow made it through to the general election, the media would open up on him with both barrels. Picture a candidate with Trump’s wealth of background stories being treated the same way Hillary Clinton was. He’d end up with the worst defeat since Mondale).
JPL
@germy: Words fail me. How sad.
Quinerly
@ArchTeryx:
I agree. Just repeating what some in the community are saying. My friend was concerned about possible special treatment for him. I NEVER read the comment sections of local papers. I did this AM on this, because I was curious what the community was saying…this is Ft. Bragg, Green Berets, 82nd Airborne. Others with the same concerns.
TenguPhule
@tobie:
Oh boy. A test of the Constitutional treaty clause that got the can kicked last time by the SC.
Gee, I wonder how 5 Republicans are gonna decide?
aimai
@hovercraft: Yes, exactly–Hillary Clinton became Senator and Secretary of State all on her own. The knock on her was never that she was an empty headed surrogate for Bill Clinton but that she was a hard driving lawyer and technocrat who sweated the small details of everything. That’s why and how she was incredibly successful as First Lady, Senator, and Secretary of State. These people can’t even get their own propaganda memes correct.
SatanicPanic
@Chris: The closest call was John Edwards. Or maybe Bill Clinton. We can be honest about Bill now, the dude was gross. Neither was an idiot though, just nasty. Most of the left loony tunes end up in the Green Party.
TenguPhule
@Corner Stone:
He wants to be Emperor, not president.
I wonder how long its going to take the Secret Service to figure that out?
TenguPhule
@Mnemosyne:
While avoiding the corollary of what it takes to get rid of actual Nazis when they’re the ones in power.
El Caganer
@hovercraft: Becoming like Hillary Clinton? Well, sure – they’re both white, they’re both female, they both live on planet Earth, and…uh, well, isn’t that enough?
Betty Cracker
Update: Appalling new program from ICE to demonize undocumented immigrants on an ongoing basis.
ruckus
@germy:
It really isn’t a new ugliness, it’s just being more widely shown. It’s the same as faux news, because you didn’t see this kind of local stuff reported before you didn’t know it was happening. Now we see it, now we know it happens we think it’s worse. Not that I’m trying to minimize how horrible this is at all, just pointing out this is not something that is all that new.
liberal
@aimai: yeah, her becoming a Senator had absolutely nothing to do with her ties to Bill. Not.
Mnemosyne
@aimai:
But I think that, underlying all of that, was a feeling that Hillary was just an affirmative action baby who rode her husband’s coattails to power without actually doing any work.
This makes “sense”‘ if you think about how the right wing portrayed Obama as a clueless affirmative action hire who was in over his head while also secretly scheming and pulling the strings behind the scenes.
Misogynists think that Hillary and Ivanka are equally qualified and got to the top the same way. I know it sounds insane to us, but they really believe it.
Mike in NC
When Trump holds his upcoming white power rally in Pennsylvania, be prepared to hear him go off about Second Amendment solutions for unelected judges.
liberal
@SatanicPanic: but those two were personally nasty. Trump OTOH falls into the category “someone who ought not to be trusted with the Button.”
Van Buren
@LurkerNoLonger: I could be persuaded to support the death penalty right about now.
Mnemosyne
@liberal:
Yep, Hillary was just another unqualified affirmative action baby who needed a white man to do anything. I bet Bill was really the one making all of her decisions when she was a senator and Secretary of State. I mean, did they really expect us to believe that a woman was doing all that work? As if!
ruckus
@gratuitous:
Their anger should be aimed at the moron they voted for but remember that if they were capable of seeing what he is now, they should have been able to see it before they voted for him. If they did then, they got what they wanted, a bigot and they didn’t care that he is a moron.
hovercraft
@Mnemosyne:
@aimai:
Their knock on her was that she was an ambitious emasculating b i t c h. Bill cheated because he couldn’t stand being married to Lady Macbeth.
Calling her a affirmative action recipient, is an attempt to diminish her and her accomplishments. To them she can be both simultaneously, just like Obambi was a ruthlessly cruel, evil dictator and a ninety pound weakling.
TenguPhule
@Mnemosyne: Why do you even bother to feed his trolling? It’s not like he hasn’t done this skit and variations of it before.
Bill Arnold
@tobie:
Oh my. Two salient paragraphs from that linked politico piece.
[Bannon and Navarro!!]
[Negotiation tactic that could easily go awry. ]
FlipYrWhig
@Mnemosyne: See, when Bill was president EVERYONE LOVED Hillary Clinton, so it was a snap for her to set up her own second act and get elected to whatever she felt like getting elected to! :/
Mnemosyne
@TenguPhule:
I can’t help it — I love it when the people who whined about a “Clinton dynasty” show up to tell us that the Clintons are still the worst people in the world. They make me laugh, because they’re about to learn what it means to get what you think you wanted when you didn’t bother to think strategically.
stinger
New SCOTUS Associate Justice Gorsuch is an “unelected judge.” And therefore his rulings should be disrespected?
Haven’t read the comments yet; undoubtedly someone else has already called this out. But I can’t get past the FIRST LINE of that press release!
TenguPhule
@Bill Arnold:
Its the economic equivalent of playing Russian roulette with every chamber loaded and volunteering to go first. The potential economic consequences are almost literally unimaginable.
hovercraft
@Mnemosyne:
Think about the people who voted for Nader, hated every minute of the Bush maladministration but have no regrets. These people will never accept the good, they demand the perfect, and when the perfect turns out to not be perfect, they turn on them. They’re not big on logic, if “the one” couldn’t get enough people to vote for him in the primary against a weak, corrupt, doomed candidate, how the hell was he going to get enough people out to beat the shitgibbon?
Mnemosyne
@FlipYrWhig:
I realize that the Clinton haters are going to bitterly cling to their hatred, because they’re invested in their view of themselves as independent thinkers who don’t get fooled by mere politics, when in fact they fell for every drop of right-wing anti-Clinton propaganda, sucked it up, and demanded more.
If they ever admit they were wrong about the Clintons and that their irrational hatred of the Clintons helped Trump get elected, it would force them to examine their entire worldview and self-image, and very few people are willing to do that.
stinger
@hovercraft: Nobody knew “public lands” was so complicated!
TenguPhule
Oh FFS, that damn FWP for mentioning a Russian game involving guns and loaded chambers.
glory b
@PST: To quote someone out there, “Hitler wasn’t Hitler until somebody gave him a country to run.”
glory b
@Gin & Tonic: I’ve heard a few times on the Sirius Progressive channel about the big Town Hall meeting they’re broadcasting this Saturday at noon, featuring “Progressive icon, Bernie Sanders!!!”
I’ll take ego driven useful idiot for $100, Alex.
Это курам на смех
Not that a “mass selloff of public lands” might not be on the table someday, that’s not what this E.O. is about. Under the Antiquities Act, signed and put to very effective use by Teddy Roosevelt, presidents have long enlarged the National Park System by establishing national monuments via executive order. This gives land that is already part of the federal domain special protection from exploitation. Trump wants to undo the new national monuments that Obama recently established in Utah. (It’s questionable whether he actually has the power to do so.) If he can erase their monument status, they are not sold off, they merely lose their new protections and revert to their prior status as federal forest or rangeland.
ruckus
@glory b:
You spelled fucking useless wrong.
PST
@Mnemosyne:
I’m not trying to say that what the administration is doing isn’t bad or that Betty is exaggerating. It’s that “blood libel” has always meant the specific accusation that Jews kidnap and murder Christian children so they can use their blood to make Passover matzoh. It’s a historical libel that refers literally to blood, not just another way of saying a very, very bad libel. That’s why I find it a little jarring when those words are used for something else. I will drop it, though. It’s unpleasant to talk about.
bmaccnm
@Tokyokie: I doubt he’d care- look at his body language when he’s with her. There’s always another “young and beautiful piece of ass.” That’s another frightening realization I’ve had. We assume that the cons would act differently if their own kin were threatened, but maybe not. There’s always more to be bought.
seaboogie
Betty – I thoroughly enjoy your numerous zesty epithets for the one I call “President Personality Disorder” because I am so over him that I cannot bear to say his name, and I think my tag describes him and our situation well, but I would add another that combines two of your concepts in this post, and henceforth shall also use “The Shambolic Twitler” which I think sums him up very nicely.