Trump is winging his way to Poland right now for the G20 meeting. He’s not worried, but his aides have installed Xanax licks at their workstations to cope with the anxiety. Via the NYT:
WASHINGTON — President Trump has been briefed repeatedly. His advisers have alerted him to the web of potential risks, complex issues and diplomatic snags. But even his top aides do not know precisely what Mr. Trump will decide to say or do when he meets President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia face-to-face this week on the sidelines of the Group of 20 economic summit gathering in Hamburg, Germany. And that is what most worries his advisers and officials across his administration as he embarks Wednesday on his second foreign trip, first to Warsaw and then to Hamburg.
It might look something like this when Trump finally catches sight of Putin:
Even Trump’s aides don’t expect him to address in a serious way the fact that Russia interfered in our election:
Mr. Trump’s team said he might bring up Russia’s documented meddling in the 2016 election, but he is unlikely to dwell on it: Doing so would emphasize doubts about the legitimacy of his election.
So there you have it, folks — the President of the United States is unlikely to confront the foreign autocrat who undermined our democracy in 2016 and will undoubtedly keep doing so due to the wildly successful outcome of the last round of meddling. Why? Because upholding his oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic” would tarnish Trump’s glorious Electoral College victory.
The biggest concern, people who have spoken recently with members of his team said, is that Mr. Trump, in trying to forge a rapport, appears to be unwittingly siding with Mr. Putin. Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Putin has expressed disdain for the news media, and he asserted in a recent interview that secretive elements within the United States government were working against the president’s agenda. Two people close to Mr. Trump said they expected the men to bond over their disdain for “fake news.”
Unlike the “team,” I’m not a bit worried about the optics. Beclowning is inevitable. Putin will run circles around Trump. So will Merkel, Macron, et al. It’s not hard; he’s an idiot. The question is, will Trump come home with a pocketful of magic beans? Probably!
jeffreyw
I sure hope no one tells him that Putin cracks his egg from the small end.
Chyron HR
Actually, it’s spelled “whinging”.
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
OT: STOP FUCKING THAT CHICKEN
Redshift
If one takes “fake news” in the sense that both use it, meaning “criticism of me,” this is actually an accurate statement. If course it would be more accurate to say “they are expected to bond over an authoritarian disdain for a free press.”
O. Felix Culpa
I call bullshit on the “unwittingly.” The witless f*ck is quite wittingly siding with the man-crush who helped put him in office.
SiubhanDuinne
Air Force One was late taking off, though. Trump wandered around the tarmac for several minutes until concerned aides took him by the shoulders and gently steered him to the plane.
Ian G.
Poland, huh? So one of our closest allies in Afghanistan and Iraq and a country that loathes Putin for obvious reasons. I cannot wait for Shitgibbon to insult them, I’m just wondering how he’s going to do so.
Hunter Gathers
@Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD): Just what I wanted. Two old fucks arguing over how much of a ball busting bitch Hillary Clinton is.
Trabb's Boy
If I didn’t already worship you, “Xanax licks” would sure have done it..
hueyplong
How is this inconsistent with “too much Fox and Friends before Uncle Don’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis?”
hipstee
I predict a long closed discussion where Putin not only briefs him on how to stifle a free press, but they set up an ongoing formal secret joint operation between the two governments on the subject.
Patricia Kayden
Looking forward to the photos of Trump prostrating himself at Putin’s feet when they encounter each other. And other photos of Trump carrying Putin’s luggage to and from the hotel.
Trump has made it clear that he has more respect for Putin than he does for many of his own people, including those of us on the Left and the MSM.
Villago Delenda Est
Some wise advice from Admiral Josh Painter: Russians don’t take a dump without a plan.
Donald has no fucking plan. Total naif.
Laura
@Ian G.: I cannot wait for Shitgibbon to insult them, I’m just wondering how he’s going to do so.
my guess is 8 ways to Sunday, or in every way possible. Shambolic clown Shoe Tour 2017.
sdhays
@O. Felix Culpa: Yep. “Unwittingly” is what his aides have to say on the advice of their lawyers. He’s a witting traitor and they are, at best, accessories to his continued crimes.
different-church-lady
@Laura: “There’s a book. 1001 Polish Jokes. Have you read it? Bannon gave it to me. Have you read it? It’s a very informative book.”
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD):
Yglesias is a jock sniffing berniebro who doesn’t understand for some reason that Wilmer isn’t a Dem, hasn’t released any personal financial info of his and his grifting wife, and the base of the party can’t stand him, yet those facts never penetrate his dudebro bubble.
Tilda Swintons Bald Cap
@Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD): Not going to happen. The Sarandonistas are going to guarantee a R win in 2020.
Major Major Major Major
What drives me nuts is how mediocre everybody involved is. Trump is an idiot. Paul Ryan is an idiot. Putin isn’t imaginative or particulary smart, though few of history’s great monsters were anyway.
@Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD): he’s got a point, if you ignore Sanders’s age, he’s presently front-runner. Couldn’t come up with a better way to divide the party from within if you tried.
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
I am almost certain this is just not true. At any rate, it’s not an opinion piece and I don’t see much factually incorrect in it.
dr. bloor
The small sliver of my soul that hasn’t been incinerated yet optimistically misread this as “trying to forge a passport.”
More Scotch is indicated.
Spanky
Anyone else unable to bring up a Google page? Everything else seems to run fine.
schrodingers_cat
@Major Major Major Major: Focus on 2020 at this point is premature.
PPCLI
@different-church-lady: Trump’s opening remark: “Like Jimmy Carter, I want to have sex with the Polish people. And I assure you that unlike him I really mean that! But just good looking chicks, and I mean 9’s at least, no browsers.”
Spanky
Dollars to donuts Uncle Vlad will bring it up if Donnie don’t.
gene108
I can’t wait for Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and the rest of right-wing media to declare how great Russia is and how much we should be thankful for Putin and emulate the Russians.
They are unprincipled hacks, who will do anything to buoy Trump and the Republicans.
I await the day Sean Hannity gets ready to interview Putin, by starting off by kneeling before Putin and thanking him for defending America.
The damage Rupert Murdoch has done to the English speaking world really should be examined. He’s helped ruin Australia, the U.K. and the U.S.A.
Tilda Swintons Bald Cap
Read the rest here.
Barbara
@Major Major Major Major: I honestly think the best thing to do about Sanders is ignore him for now. For one thing, the hyper focus on presidential elections has weakened not strengthened democracy and specifically the Democratic Party. It concentrates excitement and mental energy on a single election that comes once every four years and feeds a narrative that there is a savior president who, once elected, will do all the hard work, alone, and without support from Congress. The most important election is the next election, and whatever is most consequential for you — be it Congress, state legislature, governor, etc., that’s the one we need to encourage people to become involved in. This article shows how lazy and fundamentally uninformed people like Matt Yglesias actually are. He can write this article or a variant of it once a month for the next 20 years and no one will call him on it. He could do better, but why bother when his trust fund is calling and it’s so easy to just show up and keep writing the same thing over and over?
Manyakitty
@Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD): OMG. why???? He needs to stop already.
gene108
@different-church-lady:
Considering Poland got their independence from Imperial Russia about 100 years ago, and then was stuck under Russian domination for 50 years out of the past 100, I bet the Poles will find those jokes to be the least of their worries, with regards to Trump’s visit.
They are far more concerned about Trump signing off on some sort von-Ribbentrop- Molotov pact that carves up Poland for Russia again.
Starfish
Do you think he will get out of the golf cart and walk with other world leaders?
Do you think he will be left alone with Russians to burn any more intelligence assets?
Gin & Tonic
In what appears to be an action officially endorsed by Ukraine’s government, billboards like this have gone up around Hamburg.
Manyakitty
@Patricia Kayden: Maybe Uncle Vlady will give him a big necklace and make him bow and curtsey like the Saudis did.
GregB
Thank God Rex Tillerson said the time for talking is over, so that President Trump can go to the G20 and do exactly that.
So strong! Declarative sentences are very strong.
I feel sorry for the South Koreans and the Americans who are getting walked into this gulch of death by this fucking insecure shitheel and his fascist egghead handlers.
Ladyraxterinok
Poland has been taken over by far-right nationalists (aided by Putin wsnting to destabilize NATO and the EU), right? So Trump will feel right at home.
Yarrow
@O. Felix Culpa:
Trump is a fully owned subsidiary of the Kremlin. He’s reporting in to his boss. They own him. He has been very consistent since 1987 in not speaking poorly of first the Soviet Union and then Russia. He can’t because they can bring down the entire charade that is his life very quickly if they choose.
Major Major Major Major
@Barbara: I agree with everything you said except the Yglesias hate.
rikyrah
Indiana GOP request for Obamacare horror stories goes wrong.
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/340627-indiana-gop-request-for-obamacare-horror-stories-goes-wrong
Chris
@Major Major Major Major:
“The single, unpleasant truth is that most people, particularly criminals, are NOT complex. They are shallow, greedy sons of bitches to whom we attribute genius planning or complex motivations in order to preserve a false sense of order in our universe.” John Rogers.
I agree on Putin; I don’t think he’s a cretin on a Trump or Paul Ryan level, but it’s pretty clear that the reason he’s done so much better against the West isn’t that he’s so much smarter than his Soviet predecessors, but just that he’s operating in a much friendlier environment. For which you can entirely thank the far right of various Western nations and (at least in Britain and America) their “center”-right enablers.
Overall, this really does look like what I imagine the run-up to WW1 looked like to anyone sane. A political class overflowing with halfwits, placed and kept there to quite a degree by a population full of xenophobic idiots.
Gin & Tonic
@Ian G.: He won’t insult them. They (PiS) are authoritarians cut from the same cloth as Trump.
Pro tip: “anti-Russian” and “free and democratic” are not congruent.
Barbara
@Major Major Major Major: I don’t hate Matt. He is a good writer and, I think, someone I usually agree with. But he is also immersed in a kind of bubble of presidential politics that we need people like him in particular to break out of and start expanding his scope to reach other political subjects, other messages, other politicians. When you feed a particular narrative you influence its direction.
germy
I think it was very unfair that Nikki Haley had to work on July 4th. “Thanks a alot, NK!”
I thought the cashiers at my local grocery store would also be sympathetic but strangely enough they were unmoved.
Major Major Major Major
@Chris: completely agree about WW1.
MattF
Uncle Vlad will probably bring up the little matter of the Russian compounds that were shut down– and Uncle Don will probably give them back to Uncle Vlad, as a ‘just between pals’ sort of thing. It will then be amusing to ask Congressional Rs what they think about it, but that will be the end of the story.
JCJ
Maybe Donnie will wander around the Jungfernstieg and fall in the Binnenalster while in die schöne Hansestadt.
Mike in DC
Worst case scenario, Trump lifts sanctions unilaterally. Quid pro quo fulfilled.
Of course, he could fire Mueller the same day and 9 out of 10 Republicans would still have his back.
schrodingers_cat
@Barbara: @Major Major Major Major: The focus on Presidential horse race politics when its not even been a year since we elected a new President is lazy at best, when the President is T it is positively a dereliction of journalistic duty. Fuck MY and Punditubbies of the MSM.
Hal
@gene108:
They’ve been doing that for quite some time. Back when Obama was in office and right wingers lamented not having a President as strong as Putin. All those murders and imprisonments are a sign of strength to Fox News viewers.
MattF
@Chris: I can see a WWI analogy in the Mid-East, with deluded empire builders calculating correlations of forces and stumbling into war. But in Europe or Asia, not so much, imo.
Major Major Major Major
@MattF: hasn’t Il Douche already prepared that as an up-front concession? Seem to remember a leak about that.
Barbara
@schrodingers_cat: Fortunately, other reporters at Vox have been doing better, especially on health care related matters, such as the so-called opioid epidemic. They had a great article on maternal mortality and how California has single handedly decreased maternal mortality in California to bring it closer to other developed nations. Maternal mortality in California is now only around 1/3 of maternal mortality in the rest of the nation.
Laura
@different-church-lady: I hear all the best people have read it bigly. . .
Am awaiting the inevitable ‘riding a golf cart while the rest of the leaders of the free world walk’ photos, the open-armed ‘pay attention to me’ signal to Putin followed by the failed attempt at the ‘strong-arm pulling in handshake’ and the tweets, so many tweets.
And who amongst us is not bracing for the news coverage back home, an onslaught of ‘that’s the moment he became president’ or ‘he projected an air of strength’ of some other variation of trying desparately to convince us not to believe our own lying eyes about the fact that this greasy human skid mark is unqualified, illiterate and in way over his head and acting like a comm on trump, as anyone anywhere can so plainly see.
Here’s hoping the good people of Hamburg bring their A game to the streets for a welcome befitting the grifting thin skinned douche nozzle.
Cheryl Rofer
Here’s some interesting news about the investigations into Russian election influence. It looks like this is happening mostly in the House investigation, but the article is vague on that. One direction seems to be toward understanding the fake news activities that supplied anti-HRC material. It’s also looking like some of Wilmer’s support was not entirely on the up-and-up.
MattF
@Major Major Major Major: It does seem that way.
Tilda Swintons Bald Cap
@Cheryl Rofer: No surprise, the Sarandonistas are useful idiots for Putin.
Chris
@MattF:
I don’t necessarily mean a war. I mean “a goddamn catastrophe that nobody knew how to stop or manage because far too many of the people in the decision-making process were just fucking idiots.”
Yarrow
@Cheryl Rofer:
Russia was quite thorough in attacking US elections from all angles. Whatever worked they continued to use. Far left types were just as useful as Trump supporters.
germy
@Tilda Swintons Bald Cap: Doesn’t J. Stein get any credit? Or is she small potatoes?
Iowa Old Lady
I am willing to bet my house that the 2020 D nominee will not be Sanders, Clinton, or Biden. Their time has come and gone. In the meantime, as Barbara says in #27, it’s the next election that matters.
Cheryl Rofer
@Yarrow: Anyone and anything that could damage Clinton.
germy
Back in February, my favorite wingnut online commenter (he shows up almost daily in my local newspaper comment section) said we should be grateful to russia for providing information that allowed voters to make the right decision.
Frankensteinbeck
I would not at all be surprised if Trump admits to quid pro quo collusion with Russia on mic when he meets with Putin. I’m only putting it around 20% odds, but he has demonstrated that level of stupidity before. Repeatedly.
Tilda Swintons Bald Cap
@germy: She gets credit as well. I give Stein and Bernie a part of the pie chart that explains the loss, mostly the MSM and then Comey at the end though. But Bernie and Stein are sure to fuck it up for us in 2018 and 2020, Bernie has done great damage to the only infrastructure we have to defeat Republicans. He continues to this very fucking day to keep at it. He has divided the “not Republicans” and will insure that Republicans continue to win and Democrats lose by just a couple of points.
Barbara
@Iowa Old Lady: To understand how much of our media have so thoroughly become presidential election one trick ponies, you can look no further than the Virginia Democratic primary for governor, which was reported basically as nothing more than a reprise of Clinton v. Sanders. Then, when the “Clinton” faction won decisively, the air went out of the balloon but never once was there a recognition that maybe they had gotten it wrong.
Yarrow
@Cheryl Rofer: Yes, they wanted to damage Clinton but they also wanted to damage our democracy. They worked to cast doubt on the trustworthiness of our elections, our institutions, the media and so forth.
Mike in DC
Mueller has hired 15 attorneys to work on the investigation. Given his initial briefing, he must expect to bring indictments against several people.
Mike in NC
Trump is so addled that he can’t remember what he had for breakfast, but he still recalls plenty of tasteless Polish jokes he heard from Johnny Carson 30 years ago.
Major Major Major Major
@Tilda Swintons Bald Cap: Stein is one of the thousand cuts that killed Hillary’s campaign, Bernie is, like, a hundred.
TriassicSands
@GregB:
I think you mean “declarative sentence fragments.” Trumpsky doesn’t doesn’t waste time with complete sentences — by the time he gets to the verb he’s already forgotten what the subject was.
MattF
@Mike in DC: And Trump is (easily) deluded enough to try to fire Mueller when indictments are brought. I really do expect it.
sdhays
@Barbara: Not to mention the fact that the “Sanders” faction was endorsed by John Podesta, so the whole Clinton vs. Sanders setup was fundamentally stupid on its face.
Chris
@Tilda Swintons Bald Cap:
Yep. Frankly, he’s one of my biggest concerns for 2018 and 2020. If it weren’t for him, I’d give the Democrats good odds for mobilizing anti-Trump backlash into victories in the next midterm and national elections. With him incessantly preening about how both-sides-do-it and Democrats-don’t-care-about-white-people, picking and choosing which Democratic candidates deserve his full-throated support as Chairman of Committee Outreach, and sucking up all the air in the room that could be going to vastly better advocates for his corner of politics like Elizabeth Warren or Keith Ellison… he’s perfectly capable of doing enough damage to cost us another election cycle.
Sanders needs to go the fuck away, yesterday.
Yarrow
@MattF: Wasn’t one of Mueller’s requirements that he be hired under the civil service so that he can’t be fired on a whim by the president? I may have got that wrong, but I remember hearing something about that.
Yarrow
@Chris: The wife of the esteemed Senator from Vermont is under investigation by the FBI. They’ve hired attorneys. Perhaps something related to those investigations will convince him his interests are better served by stepping way from Democratic politics or perhaps even politics in general.
Chyron HR
The senator from Vermont’s not running again. He’ll be anointing Tulsi “Exterminate the Muslim Filth” Gabbard as his successor, and we’ll be expected to recognize her as the new most progressive person in the world OR ELSE.
satby
@rikyrah: The Indivisible groups in Indiana shared that on FB so that people could weigh in.
zhena gogolia
@hipstee:
You, sir (or madam), are in touch with reality, I’m afraid.
pat
@Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD):
Jeezus help us. He’s NOT EVEN A DEMOCRAT ffs.
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
@Chris:
But Clinton, something something charisma, blah blah blah poor tactician, yadda yadda yadda "populist bone in her body," should never have been allowed to run becausereasons, lololololol ur just virtue signaling, I am totally not a dudebro with CDS.Barbara
@Chyron HR: Gabbard has the disadvantage of being of the female gender. I don’t expect dudebros to recognize any woman as worthy to carry the torch. We underestimate bias against women at our peril.
glory b
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: He also doesn’t understand that, having wanted someone to primary Obama, his economic views don’t matter.
He’ll need to apologize for that, and for saying that the votes of southern blacks don’t count. But Wilmer has the Trump Affliction, I’ve never heard him say he was wrong or apologize for anything.
Chris
@Barbara:
Yeah. I’m also not even sure if she’d be better or worse than him – haven’t followed her all that closely.
Major Major Major Major
@Yarrow: he can only be fired by the AG’s office, in this case by the guy who hired him. It would take a Saturday Night Massacre to fire Mueller.
Yarrow
@Major Major Major Major: Thanks. I couldn’t remember the specifics. I wouldn’t rule out a Saturday Night Massacre type of thing but if that happens it’s going to be very, very bad for the Trump administration.
Barbara
@Yarrow: Jane O’Meara Sanders is unlikely to be prosecuted because the most likely criminal charge ultimately rests on a determination of what she might have reasonably thought about such things as what it meant to have “secured” a commitment to donate. While it might have been true that the largest donation was somewhat contingent she might also have thought in good faith that it would become available when it was needed. On the other hand, if there are witnesses who spoke to her or emails exist that show a different state of mind, then she might very well be in big trouble. A plus for her as well is that she did not personally benefit from the loan, which means she had no real reason to misrepresent anything.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
So let’s just say Mueller gets them all under indictment – let’s just say we find out that the entire Republican leadership is complicit, because they sure act like they are – then what? Who steps up? Who’s going to take charge? How on earth do we get our country back?
Barbara
@Chris: I won’t say that I have followed her closely but I will say that she seems rather unserious and inflammatory.
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
@Chris: Significantly worse – at least borderline-Islamophobic, poorer on LGBTQ rights than her political context would justify, and ISTR has taken affirmatively pro-Assad positions.
Yarrow
@Barbara: We’ll see how that goes. Once investigations start they can turn up unexpected things.
MattF
@Yarrow: There’s various ways Trump could work around that. What’s notable is that WH minions claim that Trump has the ‘right’ to fire Mueller– and one should assume that claim comes direct from the source.
Kathleen
@Barbara: Don’t tell Nina Turner that. She will be crushed.
Jeffro
@Tilda Swintons Bald Cap:
I don’t think it’ll be too hard for some up-and-coming Dem to go at Wilmer on any number of fronts, the most obvious being, “You’re not a Democrat; join or shut up”. The second most obvious would seem to be, “I believe in X, Y, and Z (name any 3 basic Dem policy positions) just as much as you do, and can represent our party just fine without all of your baggage, both known and unknown, Wilmer”.
glory b
@Major Major Major Major: In an interview she did with The Nation (I think), Nina Turner said that Our Revolution isn’t going to look for unity with the Democratic party. The statement didn’t make sense to me.
Jeff Weaver seems to no longer have a role. I wonder who stuck that shiv in his back. I recall that the shaky launch of Our Revolution was due to more than half of its staff quitting rather than working with him. Bernie picked him over the staff.
I think the Resistance, which is an outgrowth of the women’s march and is unabashedly democratic, is where Wilmer and Nina thought Our Revolution would be by now. I can’t figure out what role they think it’s going to play if they won’t unite with Dems.
germy
@Barbara:
I admit I’m somewhat vague on this story, but I remember reading something about their daughter personally benefitting?
different-church-lady
@Yarrow: It’s important to remember that they didn’t just meddle randomly. They seemed to have a very good understanding of the diseased part of the American mindset. They didn’t just poke around and experiment: they exhibited a very good understanding of where the buttons were and how to push them.
The psychology gap might be wider than the hacker gap.
Major Major Major Major
@glory b:
Bernie’s always been a mostly-useless purity troll, I don’t see why he wouldn’t be content with Our Revolution being the same.
Chris
@Barbara:
Based on her Wikipedia profile and some quick googling:
The opposition to regime change in Syria, I can understand. Not necessarily agree with, but understand. Especially combined with the assertion that Daesh should be the focus.
The insistence that the U.S. in responsible for the chaos in Syria is less defensible, since it writes the original Arab Spring opposition to Assad off completely. The fanboyism for Modi is worse. The repeated harping on Obama for not using the word “Islamic extremism” enough is simply inexcusable, and straight out of the worst far-right “clash of civilizations” shit. That’s a red flag for me and something she needs to be confronted with and had better have a very good answer for before I’d even consider voting for her in the primary.
Yarrow
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: The entire senior leadership of the GOP is complicit. They will be going down. There are a few Never Trump Republicans who have been quite vocal, so perhaps one of them? Quite a few good Democrats like Adam Schiff have been speaking out as well. It’s going to take work, though.
Adam Silverman had a long comment in a thread yesterday that is worth reading. The whole thing is good but this paragraph is worth repeating:
I love the sentence that we can’t afford to act as if Americans are made of spun sugar and too fragile to be treated as citizens.
Barbara
@germy: Not from the loan, from other aspects of Sanders’ administration of the college. She did not cover herself in glory, there is no doubt, but that’s a long way from committing a crime.
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
@glory b: You would be correct.The Nation is in that fairly unique position where most of the publication is decent but one section (foreign policy) is a fucking malign tumor that’s crushing all the internal organs and also seems to be metastasizing.
@Barbara: AFAICT the main reasons behind supporting Gabbard as a 2020 candidate are:
1. Self-parodic Sanders cultism;
2. A foreign policy moral outlook negligibly developed beyond “the opposite of whatever the US state is doing;”
3. BECAUSE SHE’S HAAAAAAAAWWWWWWT.
Kelly
@Chris: My cousin, a police detective told me years ago “Criminal genus is an oxymoron.”
Yarrow
@different-church-lady: Yes. As Adam Silverman has pointed out several times, the Russians didn’t create the divisions in our society; they took advantage of divisions that already existed and worked to make them larger.
Betty
Re: the magic beans. If only he would climb the beanstalk and leave us alone.
glory b
@rikyrah: Funny that someone wrote that he horror story is that Repubs want to take it away.
different-church-lady
@Yarrow: It’s also a ready-made explanation to the general sense of “WTF is going on here?” in this past election. Maybe Trump doesn’t actually have a his own reality-distortion field — maybe he merely borrowed Putin’s. After all, Russians do have a hell of a leg up on us as far as mass social manipulation goes.
Karen
Can’t seem to shake the feeling that while the rest of world is sending adults to G20, the US is sending a kindergarten reject
Tilda Swintons Bald Cap
@Barbara: I’ll give her the same benefit of the doubt that was given to Clinton over emails, speeches, and foundations. Exactly FUCKING ZERO.
schrodingers_cat
Leave the game theory of if-then-else to Punditubbies of the media. Resist today, resist tomorrow, resist until T is no longer in the WH, PR is not the Speaker and M^2 is not the Senate leader and the number of D governors > the number of R governors.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD): Maybe he’ll die before 2020?
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?: The average lifespan of an American male is 78, so…
Gin & Tonic
@Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD):
While I will hand you that Stephen Cohen is the fucking malign tumor, “fairly unique” really grinds my gears. “Unique” is like “pregnant” – either you are or you aren’t.
Barbara
@Tilda Swintons Bald Cap: She would never have been a president of a college if she had not been married to a U.S. Senator. She used her position to engage in transactions that were tainted by conflict of interest. In the best case interpretation of the loan she applied for, she drove the college into the ground financially, but managed to profit nicely as the Titanic was sinking, slagging one of the few lifeboats available in the form of a golden parachute on her way out. Crony capitalism, you might call it, except that the institution was supposed to be run on a not for profit basis, which makes it even worse.
Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman)
@Trabb’s Boy:
“Librium Licks” or “Benzo Bowls” sound better to me
Gelfling 545
I’m sure there are several here who induvidually or in collaboration could take on this challenge:https://www.nyclu.org/en/freedom-songs
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
@Gin & Tonic: Not just the Cohen/vanden Heuvel couple – James Carden was caught completely off guard by Trump’s Syria hawkishness, and has been pushing the discredited Postol report. The magazine also publishes Patrick Lawrence Smith, who is the fucking idiot’s Stephen Cohen (rather “impressive,” since Stephen Cohen is already the fucking idiot’s Stephen Cohen). Mind you, his hiring was immediately after the new Salon editor-in-chief unceremoniously shitcanned him last July, where Smith had already established himself as Alexander Cockburn for people who can’t read).
Frankensteinbeck
@glory b:
They think the poor and working class will rise in a giant wave against the rich overclass, so they at most need the Democratic Party to get the word out there that someone is finally ready to tear down the 1%. Sanders has dedicated his entire life to this idea that a revolution is waiting to happen. They are convinced that because they care way more about this than mere racism and misogyny, it must be the sweeping attitude of American whites.
Kay
@glory b:
I don’t know (although I met her once and she was a lovely person for those 45 seconds) but Nina Turner might hate the Ohio Democratic Party and there’s some justification for that- it’s pretty stodgy. That’s sort of where she was- mired in that old boy network. That experience might have influenced her.
Her sec of state campaign was just brutal. It was a bad year for her to run and I know she ran into really virulent racism, because I heard it.
I don’t know, like I said, but it was rough. Maybe she didn’t feel like they supported her. It was a sacrificial lamb run, really.
Chyron HR
@glory b:
They want to destroy the Democratic party, the one and only institution that is stifling true progressive progress.
Immanentize
@Chyron HR: This might not be such a bad thing for Democrats — It might open an Overton window on the left which would allow the Democratic Party to push for a great progressive platform without looking like crazies. These folks have been voting for Nader or LaRouche or Sanders or Trump anyway. However, I do not know what the spoiler numbers will look like in 2020….
TenguPhule
@Major Major Major Major:
There is no call to insult mediocre people here. These idiots don’t even pass the pass minimum competence test.
Our political system was designed to be moron resistant, not moron proof.
TenguPhule
@Mike in DC:
That doesn’t even make the top five.
Trump giving Putin a list of our intelligence assets in Russia, that’s a worst case scenario.
TenguPhule
@Chris:
Our country, Jan 21, 2017.
Gin & Tonic
@Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD): Clearly you read the magazine more closely than I do. Not hard to be greater than zero, though.
glory b
@Immanentize: But what could be the purpose of building up this juggernaut (according to MY) if not to join it with the party? He’s going to need both to be a candidate, and according to Turner, that’s not happening.
Going more to the left won’t be enough for them. There were sufficient numbers of discouraged Wilmerites to affect Hillary in the crucial states. It appears that the only thing that makes sense would be for the Our Revolution people to (think they can) take over the party, kick out the existing infrastructure and replace them with Our Revolutionaries.
Mike in DC
@TenguPhule:
Well, that would be straight up treason with zero ambiguity. The IC would dump every bit of dirt they had to the press the next day. Because the CINC just got dozens of agents and sources killed.
glory b
@Frankensteinbeck: When Trump made the “Pittsburgh-not-Paris” statement, someone said his view of the working class was stuck at 1975. I think Wilmer may have a similar problem.
J R in WV
An unusually depressing thread.
The day I cast a vote for Bernie is the day I’m on a jury either indicting or convicting him, for anything. I will write in Ralph my Cat before I cast a ballot for Bernie. Or leave that line blank.
But I don’t think he can win a primary, and so won’t be on the ballot when it counts. Not after the past few months, and his wife’s spectacular failure managing what appeared to be a good college into the ground.
J R in WV
An unusually depressing thread.
The day I cast a vote for Bernie is the day I’m on a jury either indicting or convicting him, for anything. I will write in Ralph my Cat before I cast a ballot for Bernie. Or leave that line blank.
But I don’t think he can win a primary, and so won’t be on the ballot when it counts. Not after his conduct the past few months, and his wife’s spectacular failure managing what appeared to be a good college into the ground.
Barbara
@glory b: Sanders definitely has that problem. Ask him about how Social Security is going to survive the gig economy or whether it’s fair to direct so much money to college tuition when wide swaths of American students go to such poorly funded primary and secondary schools and he will most likely just keep talking about class struggle. We’re not the same. We might have burned the wrong bridges and it can be nice to think about what it would be like if we went backward and rebuilt them but it’s never going to happen and even if it did there is a good chance that it would be more disruptive than doing nothing at all.
Chris
@glory b:
The entire national discussion has this problem – it shines through every time the media waxes poetic about “[insert Democrat]’s working class problem” and forgets to insert the word “white.” The economic view of the working class (heavy industry focused – as opposed to being a whole bunch of different fields whose common denominator is that they simply don’t pay well and aren’t well protected) is half a century out of date. The demographic view (white and male – with the now-enormous number of blacks, nonwhite immigrants, and women of all backgrounds an afterthought if it’s brought up at all) is half a century out of date. The partisan view (New Dealers born and raised who’re swinging Republican but might be re-winnable – as opposed to people who’ve largely been Republican or Democrat their entire life) is half a century out of date. It goes on.
TenguPhule
@J R in WV:
Unusually? This didn’t even make the top 1000.
Mike in DC
@J R in WV:
I think the OPPO dumps on Sanders will happen pre-emptively, likely in the first 3 months of 2019.
TenguPhule
@Mike in DC: And yet technically its not illegal (for a given value of illegal according to 5 SC justices) because our legal system was not designed to handle a traitor at the highest level of government. IC is going to have to break out a lot more then just press releases to end his regime.
JMG
Somewhere on the Internet today I read an excerpt of a paper by a Democratic pollster finding that WWC voters, when asked what kind of job they preferred, factory or office, had about three-quarters of them say “factory.” That’s just nuts. Of course, it’s a poll, so they couldn’t ask the question, “you know that’s never gonna happen, right?” These folks, racism aside, want a late Soviet bloc economy with unprofitable factories turning out shit products so they can have a lifetime sinecure down at the plant. Their sense of entitlement is overwhelming. Also their ignorance of life as it is in 2017.
The Moar You Know
@JMG: It’s not “nuts”, it’s a fucking lie. None of the respondents could have ever worked in a factory. I have. For five fucking years. And it was the very best kind of factory work you could get, building expensive high-end handmade furniture. Was I proud of my work? Oh hell yes, never prouder. Would I go back?
Not under threat of death. The pay is shit (was great by “industry” standards, at the absolute top, but I make more now in a week than I did in a month there). I never worked less than a twelve hour day, usually six days a week. My lower back and right leg are permanently fucked from the experience. And it’s a young man’s game: if I went back now I’d be dead by the end of the workweek. And it’s Wednesday.
Only a complete fucking moron would somehow think an office job is worse than the factory floor. “WWC voters” who’ve actually worked in a factory know that as well as anyone else, and I can only conclude that IF an actual poll was done (I doubt it, people make that shit up all the time) that they polled people who never worked in a factory.
Citizen Alan
@JMG:
This! This! This! It absolutely infuriates me that these entitled wankers don’t believe the government should do anything ever to help anyone else in any way, but where THEY’RE concerned, Congress should pass laws to force multinational corporations to build factories in their little hick towns so that people (mainly men) who have no education past high school can get jobs that pay $75k or more a year to do work that could be performed more efficiently and cheaply by robots!
Chris
@JMG:
@Citizen Alan:
Have been saying it again and again, but this election really drove home just to what extent conservatives are exactly like the bad parodies of what they think socialists are.
Barbara
@Citizen Alan: They would be better served by subsidized universal high speed Internet. That would at least give their communities a claim to being a place where businesses could set up operations without being cut off from the rest of the world.
Seriously, if it were up to today’s Republican Party, some of these places would still be waiting for electricity.
Barbara
@JMG: Look, I used to work in a factory and it is clear to me and has been for a long time that people are confusing the union protections they received, which included relatively high pay, good benefits, secure retirement and a modicum of job protection, with the actual work they were doing. I worked in a non-union factory and made only a little better than minimum wage and even the highest paid worker with the most seniority in that factory made less than half of their unionized counterparts in steel manufacturing. I made more money waiting tables and I told my co-workers that fact, which many refused to believe. They did get benefits, so they were better off in that sense. Most of the people I worked with, if they were young enough, were trying to figure out how to go back to school and train for something else, because it was boring and hard work. Many people used recreational drugs or alcohol to stave off the tedium.
So IMO, they don’t want to work in a factory, they just identify factory work with the other job attributes that gave their lives security and comfort, and importantly, many really don’t have future looking skills and don’t know how to get them. That’s the bigger problem. They don’t even understand what other people are doing, much less why they are paid so well to do it.
gvg
One of the interesting things in the Guardian article Cheryl posted at #52 is the almost throwaway sentence that Russia apparently was working to knock out any hard anti Russia GOP candidates in the Primary too. I would think that might interest some of the GOP.
The interesting thing about Bernie’s campaign is at least one of his own people noticed the odd support from eastern Europe and pointed it out.
Now how would we spot these bots faster next time and what can we do about them?
J R in WV
The guys I know doing industrial work are electricians, mechanics, machinists, guys who program CNC tools, big machining robots controlled by computers instead of a machinist driving the cutters. Same for construction. Skilled trades making $35/hour, and once the building is weather tight they can work all winter.
Those guys with big bucket trucks hanging transformers and pulling power lines – $75-85K a year, depending on where they work. That IS hard work, most hours in terrible weather, either thunderstorms and tornadoes, or winter sleet, freezing rain, heavy wet snow. And they work 16 hour shifts three states away from home.
We had a state wide power outage a couple of years ago. I stopped on the way home after the storm was over and guys from 6 states away were working and got a ton of pecan rolls at a bakery. You should have seen the look on those guys faces when I stopped to say thanks WITH fresh baked goods! They were making good money, but a morale boost for them was worth the small money those rolls cost me.
I tried to get the nephews to look at a trade school, get into wiring new construction, wiring service to new subdivisions or factories, repairing big electric motors. One of the most well-off guys in my home town growing up ran the plumbing company! Had a suburban ranch house on 3 acres that he loved running over with a big power mower on pretty weekends. Plumbers will never be outsourced to anywhere else!
But no, they got degrees in PolySci etc. and are basically unemployable. I guess no counselor ever told them that was training for the LSAT and law school, which is going down the drain faster than factory jobs according to the guy at LGM.
Brachiator
The little girls screaming for Justin could have been the Queen of England and the people of Scotland screaming for the other hot Justin, the prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau.
http://globalnews.ca/news/3577006/trudeau-canada-day-flag-queen/
satby
@Barbara:
Yes, that’s exactly what they’re doing. Most modern factory work isn’t unionized anymore, and isn’t paying that much any more. But the other attractive thing about it is defined shifts and a reasonable expectation of regular hours with paid overtime. You don’t get that in service sector or retail jobs. People can’t plan for childcare or how much money they’ll have each week when they aren’t sure what hours they’re working.
Captain C
@Ian G.: ’70s-vintage Polish jokes.