Exclusive clip of Steve Bannon packed up to leave the Breitbart embassy. pic.twitter.com/QyPfFlO40z
— Adam Smith (@asmith83) January 9, 2018
HuffPost right now pic.twitter.com/YriJVzMokH
— Jillian Stampher (@JillianStampher) January 9, 2018
Details as they emerge, but I imagine that since their advertisers are nonexistent these days and the only thing propping that shithole up is wingnut welfare from the Mercers and others, Bannon just had to go.
Just the Facts
Looks will only get you so far in life.
donnah
Ta ta, Gin Blossom! And good riddance!
Mnemosyne
I’m wondering if Michael Wolff was the beneficiary of that weird thing that sometimes happens where racist white people automatically assume that all white people are secretly with them and just don’t feel comfortable saying it in mixed groups. Bannon saw a middle-aged white guy and assumed that Wolff would go along with everything because of white racial solidarity. Whoops!
jk
Even after Steve Bannon went home to get his shinebox, with that over the top groveling apology, it still wasn’t good enough for the Mercers.
trollhattan
Looks like Breitbart gets to keep its Mercer bucks!
satby
I may OD on schadenfreude this week and it’s only Tuesday.
geg6
Hilarious.
trollhattan
@Mnemosyne:
Possibly. We can blend in pretty easy, just give me a nice enough suit and I can handle choosing the wine and discussing the 17th at Pebble.
Swannie
Bannon plans to spend more time leaking shit about his family while he tries to suck his own dick.
Swannie
@trollhattan: That water hazard on the left is a doozy.
Patricia Kayden
Couldn’t have happened to a nicer bloated bigot. Bye Felicia. Wonder where he’ll wash up next.
Mary G
Ding ding the witch is dead!
jl
@Mnemosyne: In interviews, Wolff said he thinks he survived so long because the Trumpsters had a hard time understanding what the statement ‘I’d like to use this for the book I’m writing’ meant. What was this ‘book’ thing? Also, he said when he told them the book would be published ‘sometime next year’, that time horizon was so much longer than they typically think about, it meant nothing to them. Sort of like trying to imagine a kalpa of kalpa of kalpas.
The Moar You Know
I would say “that guy’s fucked”, but he’s a multimillionaire who will never have to work another day in his life.
I don’t think it’s going to be a very long life, though.
oatler.
He might be a guest star on the new “Rosanne” reboot.
Patricia Kayden
@Swannie: Who is interested in his family unless that’s an euphemism for the Trumps?
Mnemosyne
@jk:
The Mercers are neck-deep in treason with Russia themselves, and all because Mercer Sr got himself in trouble with the IRS and owes millions (possibly billions) in back taxes that he doesn’t want to pay.
Spanky
Huh! Turns out I don’t care. Fuck ‘im.
See ya next thread. (Or the last 2)
Cermet
He broke a cardinal rule – never speak truth in the thug party. Out the door and on his ass. So much for the brain that got the orange fart cloud elected.
Mnemosyne
@jl:
I can believe that. I also think the Trump crowd believed their own PR and actually thought that running the White House would be easy. They didn’t think it actually was hard work, so they would be in control of every narrative and no one would bother to read his book.
Again — whoops!
Major Major Major Major
What a day!
Yutsano
@Mnemosyne: He’s in trouble with the Large Business and Industry division. Those folks don’t play nice. He must have some hella good tax lawyers if he’s still walking around with a billion in tax liabilities.
($1.3 billion last I heard)
@Major Major Major Major: And it’s only Tuesday!
SRW1
Dear Rebekah M,
Good luck with cramming that Neo-Nazi gunk back into the Breitbart bottle.
,
hellslittlestangel
So now Bannon will be outside the tent pissing in, probably literally. Suits me.
waspuppet
Matt Gertz pointed out that the Trump administration has called for the firings of quite a few media figures. Breitbart is the only one that has obeyed. that’s gotta give the people who work there a warm feeling (not that I care about their feelings).
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
@Mnemosyne:
I’m a civil servant, and I’m always dumbfounded by how often this happens to me when I interact with a member of the public in my official capacity – some racist doofus will lean toward lily-white me and stage-whisper something about “the Chinese” or “the Mexicans” or whoever, perfectly sure that I will nod and agree – and we’re in San Francisco. I try not to be racist, but sometimes I fear there is indeed a melanin-intelligence linkage and it goes exactly the opposite of the way these berks think.
/rant. Good riddance, although I almost hope Bannon has a book deal.
Mingobat (f/k/a Karen in GA)
He’s just one pufferfish in a big toxic ocean, but this is still fun to see.
stibbert
wow, Bannon’s out w/ nowhere to go. When Karl Rove left the WH, his bridges weren’t burnt, he did rather well directing (& skimming from) massive Repub media buys. Bannon won’t get any of that action.
WaterGirl
@Mary G: This witch is not dead. I would put money on it.
Jeffro
I’m going to bookmark this thread and re-read it whenever I need cheering up.
jl
@Comrade Colette Collaboratrice: I agree. Same with sexist bigotry. If you’re a white guy, random retrograde white guys often just assume you believe all sorts of toxic ridiculous stuff, just like they do. Some with some white women too, but I see that less frequently.
jk
@Mnemosyne:
Hopefully, the law will eventually catch up to the Mercers.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@WaterGirl: I was just gonna say. He’ll be at the White House, or at least one of the golf courses, by Flag Day. Rumors of phone calls by the Ides of March
jk
@Patricia Kayden:
Fox News
WaterGirl
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Yep. Definitely a question of when, not if.
I have to confess to being surprised, though. I really thought the racists and nazis would pick Bannon over Trump.
Anotherlurker
@Comrade Colette Collaboratrice: This has happened to me multiple time, here in Fl. and when I lived and worked in NY. It seems to happen more to me, here in Fl.
As an O.W.D. (Old White Dude) I have to say that I’m not really comfortable around my age cohort.
Yarrow
All that groveling and…nothing. Hilarious.
Yarrow
@WaterGirl: The money didn’t pick Bannon over Trump. That’s what happened here. The Mercers cut him loose.
The Moar You Know
@SRW1: I don’t think she has a problem with the Neo-Nazi shit. At all. He wasn’t a problem until he admitted that the Trumps and, by extension, the GOP had committed treason, and then he had to go. Immediately.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@WaterGirl: I believe it was Jane Mayer who reported that the real rift between Bannon and the Mercers wasn’t the Wolff book, much less that he was mean to Slabhead Donnie, but he spoke out against the tax bill.
I think Bannon could still win over a sizable chunk of his people, but the Mercers wanted him out at Brietbart. I imagine he could start up his own platform. He could fucking blog. But I think that would take more energy and work than he’s willing to do. He wants to sit and bloviate.
ruemara
@Mnemosyne: I think it’s billions. And fuck Bannon and Breitbart. I don’t care about shakeups in old & evil. Call me when they’re a smoking crater.
rikyrah
Oh well.
Life comes at you fast, Steve.
rikyrah
@The Moar You Know:
Never forget…the data stuff being investigated in 2016 ALWAYS ALWAYS
Leads back to Kushner and The Mercers.
The Moar You Know
@Yarrow: I learned a valuable life lesson the first time I got dumped. NEVER try to crawl back. It ends just like this.
I would assume, perhaps wrongly, that Bannon would have had enough experience in life to know that.
And yes, it’s fucking hilarious.
trollhattan
@Yarrow:
Assuming for a nanosecond that he dried out post-WH, he’s back to the hooch tonight!
WaterGirl
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I can believe that. And speaking of belief, I think Bannon is a true believer of all the hate he spews. It’s a hustle for him, but it’s not just a hustle.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
wasn’t it Bannon who is supposed to have owned a chunk of Seinfled and Rob Reiner’s production company? or was that Manafort?
Yutsano
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: It was Bannon. That’s pretty much how he made his money until Andrew got a hold of him. He still gets a portion of Seinfeld rerun residuals.
Frankensteinbeck
@Comrade Colette Collaboratrice:
I think this is the core phenomenon anyone trying to understand US politics needs to get. Half of American whites find it hard to believe anyone is hiding thoughts like this. The other half believe everyone is.
ruemara
@Frankensteinbeck: And it’s not just conservatives. It’s just phrased in a more reasonable way.
Mike in NC
Bannon to erect puptent in Lafayette Park in order to launch his 2020 presidential campaign.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Good point. I can’t imagine he’s not already in talks.
@Frankensteinbeck: I thought through Obama’s terms I had been underestimating racism in America, now I realize that people who think like my (mostly) dead Archie Bunkerish uncles are everywhere, in every generation.
clay
This is so obvious that it should’ve been the #1 issue about the Trump/Russia connection (going back way before the election), but I don’t think I’ve seen it stated so simply before:
Yeah… why DIDN’T Trump have any (public) business dealing with Russia after repeatedly talking about how he was going to?
schrodingers_cat
@Mnemosyne: People have said blatantly racist things around me too. I am petite. not too dark, I guess I do not look threatening, mostly about Puerto Ricans and sometimes about black people and Jewish people too..
Calouste
I assume Bannon has been bought off, because he is almost the textbook definition of someone who knows too much to be walking around.
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
@Frankensteinbeck:
INORITE!?! If you’re in the “I can’t believe someone who seemed so nice just spewed that hideously bigoted garbage” camp, it’s like seeing half of someone’s chest suddenly peel away to reveal rotting roadkill where his heart should be. I wonder how it feels for those people to discover I’m not one of them. That’s just too big an empathy leap for me to manage.
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: some rich 29 year old NFL heiress was just arrested for a hate crime against Jews in NYC.
The #EconomicAnxiety of the young, trust fund, super rich is the worst.
Steeplejack (phone)
@Jeffro:
Save yourself some time and just leave it open in a tab.
p.a.
Bannon could still resonate with the truly economically anxious WWC, but for a functioning hockey team you need at least 15 players for successful practices. Where the other 9 will come from IDK.
efgoldman
@Comrade Colette Collaboratrice:
Metaphor of the day!
jk
OT
Why has Kellyanne Conway gone into the Witness Protection program since the Fire and Fury story broke last week?
Jeffro
@Anotherlurker: you guys have nothing on us generation Xers … Reagan babies …ugh
Timurid
So the apologies didn’t work and now he’s got nothing left to lose?
Time for some therapy with Dr. Mueller…
Jeffro
@Steeplejack (phone): I might!
Come for the breaking news, pet pics, and occasional recipe, stay for the laffs ?
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
OT:
Haroldo
@Comrade Colette Collaboratrice: It’s delightful to see the use of the word ‘berks,’ one of my favorites, really.
MoxieM
@The Moar You Know: Dancing with the Stars, perhaps? eww.
Yutsano
@Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant): WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOT!!!!
MoxieM
@schrodingers_cat: I’m so white I’m practically transparent, visually speaking, and yeah, all my life. Probably helps that I have a whitey-white name too. Younger, I was just like, “I don’t really think that way.” Now, I’m more like, “That was an outrageous fucking racist thing you said, and unacceptable.” I got a guy thrown out of a restaurant one time, I had youngsters with me and he was setting such an appalling example.
No, I do not deserve a bitch cookie. Just acting human.
(((CassandraLeo)))
@Mnemosyne: Well, if a black guy can do it, how hard can it be?
I’d use sarcasm font here, but it wouldn’t be appropriate. I’m completely certain that was the full extent of their “reasoning”.
Shana
@clay: I suspect it’s ‘cuz Trump didn’t pay off the right people, or couldn’t afford to pay them as much as they insisted on being paid in order to get something built in Russia.
lgerard
So long to the LaVar Ball of politics
Maybe Joe Arpaio will hire him as campaign manager
Mnemosyne
@schrodingers_cat:
They basically do it to try and intimidate you. It’s a power play.
Me, they say that shit because they think I agree with them. Ptui.
Mnemosyne
@Comrade Colette Collaboratrice:
It happened with one of my cousins when she was drunk at a family party. Not surprisingly, she’s also the only one who was pulling for Trump, though now she tries to pretend on Facebook that she didn’t. Doesn’t matter, I don’t speak to her anymore.
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
@Yutsano: Great news indeed.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Just heard on MSNBC that Bannon has lost his Sirius/XM show because they don’t want to be associated with a white supremacist with a history of encouraging racism and anti-semitism.
Just kidding, it’s because the show is a Breitbart outlet. Sirius/XM is cool with the racism.
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
@lgerard: This slanders LaVar, frankly, and I don’t even particularly like him all that much. He’s raised a family and seems devoted to his wife; those two things along make Ball way more useful than that ambulatory STD culture that is Racial Bannon.
schrodingers_cat
@Mnemosyne: I don’t think they are trying to intimidate me. Its often said in conspiratorial tones like they are letting me in on a big secret. Usually by people who I was acquaintances with, kinda like a secret handshake, like now you are part of the gang.
Sometimes I will lull them into a false sense of complacency and innocently ask questions till they get tangled in their own gibberish.
ETA: I had a student like that, who would come and share the most outrageous Jewish conspiracy theories at my office hours.
lgerard
@Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant):
That is a good point
Bannon also raised a family of sorts, his daughter attended West Point, was an outstanding college volleyball player and a Captain in the US Army.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Mnemosyne:
Probably Wolff is an actual moderate conservative so can sympathize enough that the wingnuts forget Wolff isn’t cool with the crazy.
a thousand flouncing lurkers (was fidelio)
@WaterGirl: Bannon cannot sign legislation. Bannon cannot issue executive orders. Bannon cannot appoint people to positions in the executive branch of the federal government. Trump can, and he has been cooperative and complaisant with their requirements. Bannon may say what they want to hear, he may want to work to the same goals they share, but what power does he have, without Trump? Even with a fabulously wealthy backer, he still has to have access to the power of the presidency and majorities in both houses of Congress. Bannon’s assistance was not required to pass the tax bill, and there are other people who can manage Trump while being more discreet–they hope.
I won’t say “Stick a fork in him–he’s done,”, but barring a stroke of luck and a lot of work, he’s reduced to Newt Gingrich’s level–still here, still grifting, still trying to stir up shit, and still largely irrelevant outside of a tightly circumscribed circle.
Jeffro
It’s funny – you know how we joked everything truck touches turns to shit ?
That even includes Steve frickin’ BANNON(!)
I wouldn’t have thought it would be possible to degrade him even further but hey look at that!!
LOLOL
different-church-lady
@clay: Are you trying to tell me that’s a seventy-goddamned-four part Tweet?
different-church-lady
@jk:
We were told somebody already died because of the Fusion testimony release. You don’t suppose…
Gelfling 545
@MoxieM: My son in law has all the markers. Blond, blue eyes, pretty “arayan” surname, military vet, very military bearing. People are always saying stuff like that to him. Thing is, he’s got a way of looking at someone who’s irritating him that can be…scary. No actions, just the look. He gives them the look and says “Do you want to repeat that?” Somehow, they never do. I like to think it’s a good lesson on the old book/cover judging thing for them.
efgoldman
@lgerard:
LaVar at least, is reasonably entertaining part of the time.
Jay S
@different-church-lady: I haven’t checked lately but he was live tweeting his reading of a 300 page document, so he’s probably just getting warmed up by 74 tweets.
Sloane Ranger
@different-church-lady: I think it was the dossier not the testimony. That’s probably me being pedantic but we need to be careful. We don’t want rumours started that Feinstein got someone killed by releasing the testimony.
feebog
From the looks of him, Bannon is about two weeks away from drinking himself to death anyway. You know the saying, “I wouldn’t piss on him if he was on fire”? That joke was about Bannon.
Uncle Cosmo
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: So spozedly
One wonders if Bannon fancies himself Ernst Roehm 2.0 (minus the alleged perversions), leading his brownshirts to take down the elites now that the Party is in power. Yeah, well, good luck with that, Steverino – you’ll be poured a polonium mint julep on the next Night of the Long Sporks. Better you should pull an Otto Strasser & join the witless protection program & end up spearfishing from a leaky kayak in Baffin Bay…
WaterGirl
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I just watched the intro to last night’s Late Late Show. It was a little skit with Reggie Watts as Trump and James Corden as Bannon. Corden was brilliant – he captured Bannon perfectly.
JaneSays
@Mnemosyne: I’m sure he did, but I highly doubt blatant racism would ever be a cause for anybody to get terminated from Breitbart.
He was tossed for expressing insufficient fealty to the king.
kattails
I’m always late to these threads because of odd work hours, but as to the Mercer connection: the clan purchased a small mountain just down the road from me a couple of years ago. Used to be known as Rice Mountain. Several eccentric but fun buildings up there, the former owners were decent people and opened the place up for garden and music fundraisers on a regular basis. You can actually find pics in a book called “The Accidental Architect”. I’ve been there several times.
Well, no more of that Public crap. The property is heavily forested (as is most of the area) and quite well hidden from below, with properly posted no trespassing signs every 30′ along the large perimeter. It is, however, visible particularly at night from a road about a mile away. I say night because these people have no concept of energy conservation, it’s lit up like a Christmas village all the time. Christmas for them, that is, with the latest tax breaks. I’ve noticed that it seems to be much brighter than usual when something’s afloat. More minions, more outbuildings, more security? Aside from that road, I can actually see the damned lights from my house, through at least a mile of trees, with the bare winter branches, right bloody now, if I stick my head out my back door.
It is very strange to read threads with them as background noise and then observe those lights. Makes my hackles rise. And I’m a cat person–do cats even have hackles?
Oh yes, it’s been quite bright the last two nights.
Ruckus
Little Stevie out?
Money sure doesn’t seem to buy the level of hate it used to.
Bill Arnold
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Link? Was it this?
Steve Bannon mocks Ivanka Trump: ‘There’s a special place in hell’ for Republicans who don’t back Roy Moore
My transcript (bold mine):
(IMO he was correct about the corporate tax cut. We shall see. Plenty of smoke obscuring the mirrors ATM. )
Anyway, if S. Bannon wants to continue his project of evisceration of the degenerate amoral Republican Party establishment, I for one am welcome to have him as a temporary ally. We need, eventually, a proper opposition party, even if their members believe in what we (Democrats/Progressives) believe to be evil. We very much do not need the principle-less septic tank that the Republican party has devolved into, where the focus is overtly and proudly on making the rich richer relative to the poor, where “wins” for the tribe are more infinitely more important than the content of the wins, where anything the Democrats, and especially B. Obama, ever did is bad, where a litmus test of preferred policy is that it angers liberals (making them stupidly vulnerable to manipulation), etc.
(Maybe: “Pump out the septic tank!” a better metaphor than “drain the swamp”?)
Have said this before; my favorite (right) wingut, a Breitbart fan, believes in single payer because he doesn’t think private health insurance is workable without un-American levels of regulation. There is common ground. (Also wedges, and lack of trust, and etc, but reformations of canon/dogma, and realignments of the electorate, are possible, and interesting.)
Bill Arnold
@a thousand flouncing lurkers (was fidelio):
IMO he has a lot more talent at political manipulation than Newt Gingrich. Could be broader, but Newt is shallow by comparison.
Could be wrong. The Alabama Jones win was hard fought and I believe that a proper analysis (if it ever happens) will show it was contested in a lot of venues, and that the Democrats and their allies have been rapidly improving their tactics/skills in areas (both geographical and more abstract) where they were relatively weak.
Mnemosyne
@JaneSays:
Sorry, I may not have been clear: I was positing that Bannon was more willing to confide in Wolff the way he did because he automatically assumed that he had racial solidarity with Wolff. Bannon assumed that it was (white) Bros Before Hos and was stunned to discover that he’d been played.