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The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

Republicans do not pay their debts.

Roe isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom.

Conservatism: there are some people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

After roe, women are no longer free.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

Today’s GOP: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

Bark louder, little dog.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

T R E 4 5 O N

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

The GOP is a fucking disgrace.

If you are still in the GOP, you are an extremist.

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

You are here: Home / Politics / Trumpery / Dolt 45 / Schadenfreude Open Thread: Actions Have Consequences (Eventually)

Schadenfreude Open Thread: Actions Have Consequences (Eventually)

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If there were a bright side to this unfolding fustercluck, it would be that some small percentage of the most venal / incompetent / demented Republican parasites might be scraped out of their secure nests within the party…

Reader Interactions

212Comments

  2. 2.

    Felanius Kootea

    I’m curious to see where she’ll end up. I’m curious to see where all the former Trump officials end up (besides jail).

  3. 3.

    NotMax

    Um, who chose and appointed the “The top Leadership … of the FBI and the Justice Department?”

  5. 5.

    Frank McCormick

    Republicans know they are the party of an increasingly small minority, so the only thing they have is to cheat and lie. They are a vicious animal trapped, cowering in the corner.

    Bog help us when we demographically reach the point when “white” people officially are less than 50% of the population.

  6. 6.

    Mike J

    Jonathan Cheng @JChengWSJ
    Hankyroeh: “Matthew Pottinger was reported as saying in a recent closed-door meeting with US experts on Korean Peninsula issues that a limited strike on the North ‘might help in the midterm elections.'”

  10. 10.

    Felanius Kootea

    OT: I just found out today that Betsy McCaughey (the one who helped kill the Clinton health plan in the 1990s, spewed a lie a minute about the Affordable Care Act on every TV show and got the death panel claims going) was once married to billionaire and current Trump commerce secretary Wilbur Ross. She had joined the Trump campaign as an economic advisor in 2016. Wonder where she’ll pop up next.

  12. 12.

    (((CassandraLeo)))

    @Mike J: You’d think these goons would’ve learnt by Fire and Fury at the latest that there’s always a chance someone will repeat their words to a reporter. I’m glad they haven’t, though. Suits me fine.

    @Corner Stone: Well, that’s true, but Faux may have a quota on women above 40. The “think” tank sinecure seems almost assured, though.

  17. 17.

    (((CassandraLeo)))

    @Corner Stone: There’s something about evil that’s difficult for people of conscience to overlook, yes. When people say “hate fuck”, they may be referring to people like her, but I don’t think I could go through with something like that. (On the other hand, I’m also borderline asexual.)

    All that said, I can see why people find her attractive, and if I just saw a photo of her without having any context about her career, I might too. But overall, she’s a case of personality and/or alignments overriding appearance.

  18. 18.

    Felanius Kootea

    @NotMax: Cuba, China, Morocco, Iran and Nicaragua are the only countries with no extradition treaties with the US? That can’t be. Surely the Trumpers can find safe haven in Somalia, Yemen or … North Korea.

  19. 19.

    ET

    If I needed any more evidence (which I don’t) that the Nunes memo was a huge nothingburger, the fact that they put it our on a Friday BEFORE the Super Bowl would be a big clue.

  20. 20.

    (((CassandraLeo)))

    @Corner Stone: Spicer always looked and sounded at least mildly uncomfortable lying that brazenly, as though he had vague memories of who he’d been before the Trump administration. Scaramucci looked and sounded like he honestly believed at least most of what he said. Huckabee-Sanders is completely shameless about it, as though she just flat-out doesn’t give a shit whether anything she says is true. If any of the three is a natural fit for Faux, it’s her (though, knowing how blatantly sexist they are, they might consider her overweight for their standards).

  21. 21.

    Jonny Scrum-half

    KT McFarland is awful, and it’s great that she won’t get the ambassador post, but it’s really a stretch to say that she conceded in an email that Russia had thrown the election to Trump. I thought it was pretty clear that she was saying that’s how the Democrats are portraying the situation.

  24. 24.

    Mary G

    The thing that makes me say OH, FOR FUCK’S SAKE tonight:

    Hankyroeh: "Matthew Pottinger was reported as saying in a recent closed-door meeting with US experts on Korean Peninsula issues that a limited strike on the North 'might help in the midterm elections.'"https://t.co/zm8QrkfRrD— Jonathan Cheng (@JChengWSJ) February 2, 2018

    Bush’s approval ratings went up after the Iraq war started, so let’s get some of that ourselfs…Morons.

  26. 26.

    Corner Stone

    Tweety said the Superbowl was Saturday night and then after the break he corrected it to Sunday.
    The guy is mentally toast.

  28. 28.

    B.B.A.

    @Mike J: 25 million people live in greater Seoul. That’s more than New York. The DMZ is 35 miles away.

    If the GOP really thinks sacrificing them is worth it to keep the House… God help us all.

  30. 30.

    No Drought No More

    ANY CONGRESSIONAL DEMOCRAT UNWILLING TONIGHT TO CALL OUT TRUMP AND THE REPUBLICAN PARTY AS BEING THE TRAITORS THAEY ARE TO THE UNITED STATES THAT THEY HAVE INDISPUTABLY PROVED THEMSELVES TO BE IS A COLLABORATOR. THEIR EQUIVOCATIONS SICKEN ME..

  31. 31.

    Baud

    @ET:

    If I needed any more evidence (which I don’t) that the Nunes memo was a huge nothingburger, the fact that they put it our on a Friday BEFORE the Super Bowl would be a big clue.

    While most of the GOP was out of town.

  32. 32.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Felanius Kootea:

    I just found out today that Betsy McCaughey […] was once married to billionaire and current Trump commerce secretary Wilbur Ross.

    I actually knew that once, and not all that long ago — in fact, it was yesterday — but either I was so bemused by the very idea, or so revolted (or ¡los dos!), or it just got buried under the mudslide of breaking news, that I completely forgot about it. And I was meaning to share it in a comment here, too! Thanks for saving me the effort.

  34. 34.

    (((CassandraLeo)))

    @ET: I generally attribute cases like hers to a lack of curiosity – that is, wilful ignorance – rather than outright stupidity. It can be, and in many cases is, both, but wilful ignorance is generally a much greater problem. Even stupid people are capable of learning to some degree if they want to do so. Smart people who think they already know everything are a much worse problem for society. I get more of a vibe of arrogance from Huckabee-Sanders than anything, as though she’s just flat-out better than other people and doesn’t need to bother paying attention to their pesky facts. This is a common attitude among evangelicals who think they’re already saved.

    @Mary G: There’s a bit in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? where one of the androids flat-out admits that she seduces men in order to protect herself and her friends. I don’t remember the anecdote in all its exact details – I haven’t read the book in about fifteen years, though I’m about to reread it. The details aren’t that important, though. (Warning: Spoilers for the book follow.)

    The thing is, she admits this to one of the men she’s trying to seduce. This completely undoes the whole purpose of her manipulation. Because she’s told him what she’s trying to do, he’s now aware of her motives, and her attempted misdirection has been completely undone.

    The androids have an excuse, though. This particular detail is held off until near the end of the book, but in Dick’s original novel, androids have an artificially imposed lifespan of four years. (This does not hold true for all replicant models in Blade Runner, which changes several crucial details from the book, though some models still have limited lifespans. The most famous change is that Deckard was unambiguously confirmed to be human in the original novel, while it’s deliberately left ambiguous in the films as to whether he’s human or a replicant.) This means that, in several important ways, despite resembling adult humans in every physical fashion, androids are literally children. She doesn’t possess enough of an understanding of human nature to understand the psychology behind it, so she has no idea that this will backfire on her. She’s just proud of what she’s doing and wants to tell someone. You see children do this kind of thing all the time (not with sexual seduction, obviously, but with other things).

    A central point of Dick’s book is that society believes that androids are incapable of empathy, but the actual explanation behind their behaviour is that, because of their artificially imposed lifespan, most of them never live long enough to learn it. The book actually climaxes with an android demonstrating empathy, though. A lot of readers don’t pick up on this, because it’s told from the perspective of survivors of a nuclear war which, it is implied, has caused significant brain damage to the survivors, but Roy Batty demonstrates a clear emotional response to Isidore’s freakout over a dead spider. Androids, despite society’s beliefs, are wholly capable of learning empathy. It’s just that most of them don’t live long enough to do so.

    Anyway, we see Trump people doing what Dick’s android did all the time, but none of them have the excuse of being children. The only even partial excuse I can come up with is that many of them may have been so insulated from the consequences of failure that they can’t actually imagine that anything they do will negatively impact them in any fashion.

    On a related note, I’m becoming increasingly convinced that suffering meaningful consequences for failure (not excessive, life-ruining consequences, to be clear, but not completely meaningless ones, either) is indispensable to the development of empathy. All of these people, and quite a few of our media morans, seem to have spent their whole lives failing upwards.

  36. 36.

    Amir Khalid

    US Ambassador to Singapura sounds like a diplomatic sinecure to me. South-east Asia is generally not a geopolitical hotspot. Singapore is capitalist and pro-Western, and is about as likely to get into a spat with the US as, say, Monaco. The most recent thing I can remember between the two countries was in Bill Clinton’s time, when that 18-year-old American kid was sentenced to the cane for public vandalism. (He’d had a fair trial, his guilt was never in any doubt, and the sentence was not unusually harsh by Singaporean standards,) Pretty much any presentable-looking American could do the job, methinks.

  37. 37.

    Mike J

    @B.B.A.:

    If the GOP really thinks sacrificing them is worth it to keep the House… God help us all.

    Republicans would kill 90% of the people in the US if it won an election for them.

  39. 39.

    Roger Moore

    @Felanius Kootea:

    I’m curious to see where all the former Trump officials end up (besides jail).

    Countries without extradition treaties and/or willing to accept “political” refugees.

  40. 40.

    lahke

    @B.B.A.:
    Does Trump imagine he’ll get cover for his preemptive strike from a UN resolution? I don’t think so. And wouldn’t that be an illegal act, that would result in much of the world imposing sanctions? Imagine, in countries across the globe, it would be illegal to stay in a Trump hotel, golf at a Trump resort…

  44. 44.

    (((CassandraLeo)))

    @Jeffro: @chris: Hope Hicks’ final words before her android/replicant lifespan runs out will probably begin with “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.”

    I don’t want to imagine what those things are, to be clear. I already have severe enough trauma from some of the details in the Stormy Daniels stories.

  46. 46.

    gene108

    @NotMax:

    like sex-offender/film-maker Roman Polanski,

    From your link on European countries that harbor American fugitives.

    The euphemism of “ sex offender” should be replaced with the simple fact he is a convicted child rapist.

    The fact Polanski still makes movies distributed in the USA, and works with big Hollywood actors, and won an Academy Award, in the early 90’s, sort of highlights how little Hollywood cares about sexual assault.

  48. 48.

    Amir Khalid

    @lahke:

    Does Trump imagine he’ll get cover for his preemptive strike from a UN resolution? I don’t think so.

    Trump probably believes he can just order the strike, and the world will be too cowed by his awesome manliness to protest.

  49. 49.

    (((CassandraLeo)))

    @gene108: While I agree on the euphemism, it’s so ubiquitous that I’m not entirely sure how much I can criticise any one source for it.

    And I think #MeToo may be changing some of this. He hasn’t been kicked out of the Academy or anything, but I’ve been seeing reports that Woody Allen is having trouble making his latest film (IDK any specifics because I’ve been preoccupied with other matters). It’s possible Polanski may see similar trouble going forward. I’d like to see them both (and Cosby, and etc.) kicked out, but I also don’t expect change to happen overnight. The Academy has been receiving quite a lot of criticism for not treating other Hollywood rapists as harshly as they did Weinstein, at any rate.

  51. 51.

    TS

    @Jonny Scrum-half:

    I thought it was pretty clear that she was saying that’s how the Democrats are portraying the situation.

    If the parties were reversed, republicans would be demanding jail for someone who said this. Democrats have to stop giving any of them “the benefit of the doubt”.

  52. 52.

    gene108

    @Mary G:

    Bush’s approval ratings went up after the Iraq war started, so let’s get some of that ourselfs…Morons.

    Trump got a lot of love -at least temporarily- from the missile strike on Syria.

    Maybe a bigger strike on N. Korea would get him a bigger tongue bath from the fake news MSM.

  53. 53.

    Jeffro

    @(((CassandraLeo))): Well, we already know that she and Corey Lewan…oh…never mind.

    I had a good time explaining the concept of “Shit Midas” to a like-minded liberal buddy today at lunch. He thought it was so on-point we ought to sell t-shirts. Do I owe someone here royalties for that, or was it just sort of intertubes-generated?

  55. 55.

    Corner Stone

    @Mike in DC:

    WTH is a “limited strike” on NK?

    Paper leaflet bombs of Trump in full flagrante. Sure, it may still qualify as a war crime but the people there could use the paper as a fuel source for fires or TP. Terrifyingly useful, one might say.

  56. 56.

    Felanius Kootea

    @Mary G: How does a war with China help Republicans in the mid-terms (because that’s basically what a pre-emptive strike on North Korea will lead to)?

  57. 57.

    Jeffro

    @Mike in DC:

    WTH is a “limited strike” on NK? 100 cruise missiles and a few MOABs?

    Something like that. More importantly, what do the next couple of hours after a “limited strike” look like? Hmm…probably something like this…

    This is how nuclear war with North Korea would unfold

    …Many North Korean missiles did miss their targets in South Korea and Japan by a few kilometers. But these were fission devices, with yields similar to the nuclear weapons that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the bombs that fell off target still inflicted massive damage on urban areas. The blasts leveled buildings and were followed by massive firestorms that consumed large areas of Seoul, Busan and Tokyo. For at least a few hours, the North Koreans were able to follow the nuclear attack with waves of conventional missiles and long-range artillery. People would remark on the heroism of the surviving firefighters trying desperately to extinguish the flames as missiles, some armed with chemical weapons, continued to rain down on them. The suffering would play out over many days, as survivors, afflicted with acute radiation sickness, picked their way through the rubble to die at home. As it had been in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the infrastructure to provide medical care was overwhelmed.

    North Korea fired a small number of its newer-generation Hwasong-12 missiles, also armed with nuclear weapons, at Okinawa and Guam. But at these ranges, the missiles are quite inaccurate — only about half fall within a few miles of their targets. All of the missiles aimed at Okinawa and Guam dropped into the ocean. A few people were killed in the panic and car crashes that followed the blinding flashes of the atmospheric nuclear explosions, but U.S. military operations out of Kadena Air Base and Andersen Air Force Base continued.

    Kim did not, on that first evening, use nuclear weapons against the U.S. homeland. His strategy had been to halt the invasion and shock Trump. He knew he had 12 longer-range missiles in reserve, massive intercontinental ballistic missiles like the Hwasong-15 that North Korea began testing in late 2017 and that could deliver the North’s powerful new thermonuclear weapons. If Trump continued to threaten Kim’s hold on power, or if he and his family were to die at the hands of the Americans, Kim was determined that these missiles would strike the United States mainland. He hoped the threat would cause Trump to come to his senses.

    But Kim had misread the American mood. With airfields in Okinawa and Guam still working, and long-range bombers perfectly capable of striking North Korea from domestic bases, the United States mounted a massive air operation to kill Kim and destroy any remaining ballistic missiles that could be found. This campaign was, to the surprise of many observers, a conventional air campaign — U.S. officials had concluded that the use of nuclear weapons would undermine the message that the United States was attempting to liberate the people of North Korea. Of course, Kim didn’t know that: Ongoing U.S. airstrikes left him almost completely cut off from communication with his military units, and in the fog of war, rumors about American nuclear strikes spread.

    So Kim gave the order to use the remaining nuclear-armed Hwasong-14 and Hwasong-15 ICBMs against targets in the United States — two each against naval bases in Pearl Harbor and San Diego, along with leadership targets in New York, Washington and — in a personal touch — a single missile aimed at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., to bring the total to a dozen. The targets looked very much like the ones shown on a large map of the United States erected in Kim’s office, in front of which he had authorized the development of a nuclear strike plan in 2013.

    The United States, of course, had a missile defense system in Alaska, along with a small number of interceptors in California. But the system was sized to deal with only 11 missiles. As it was, two-thirds of the North Korean missiles reached their targets.

    The U.S. Missile Defense Agency would later say this was a sign that the system had worked well, downing about a third of the missiles — although experts would argue that the low intercept rate resulted from problems that the Los Angeles Times had reported in 2017. The exoatmospheric kill vehicles had faulty divert thrusters, analysts said, making it unlikely that any had successfully intercepted incoming warheads. It seemed more likely, the experts said, that five of the missiles had simply broken up as they reentered the earth’s atmosphere.

    The remaining seven nuclear warheads landed in the United States. These missiles were no more accurate than the others — but with 200-kiloton warheads, 10 times the power of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, close was enough to count in most cases. Pearl Harbor took a direct hit with a single weapon, while San Diego was lucky: Both of the missiles aimed there failed to arrive.

    One warhead hit Manhattan — which North Korea’s state media had specifically mentioned as a target of its long-range missiles — while the two missiles pointed at Washington struck the Northern Virginia suburbs. Trump, in a makeshift bunker in the basement at Mar-a-Lago, felt the earth shudder as the last warhead landed in the town of Jupiter, Fla., about 20 miles away. The other two missiles fell wildly off course, detonating in the ocean or in rural, sparsely populated areas.

    Something like that, anyway…

  60. 60.

    (((CassandraLeo)))

    @chris: @Major Major Major Major: Concurred with Major^4. Thanks for this – it will come in extremely handy in the future. This may actually be the most useful term I’ve learnt since kakistocracy, or at least blue lies.

    @Jeffro: Internets-generated somewhere. It may be related to Josh Marshall’s “dignity wraith” observation, but IDK who came up with “shit Midas” specifically. I’ve seen it all over the place for years, though.

  63. 63.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @chris:

    I was so impressed with that word, I copied your comment to Notepad the other day so I wouldn’t forget it. Now I just need to use it accurately in three different sentences, and it’ll be mine for life.

  67. 67.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Amir Khalid:

    Michael Fay. I was in a constant state of cringe during that entire time when he was in the headlines. He must be in early middle age by now.

  69. 69.

    But her emails!!!

    @Felanius Kootea:

    How does a war with China help Republicans in the mid-terms (because that’s basically what a pre-emptive strike on North Korea will lead to)?

    Easy. If the infrastructure and populations of our urban centers have been obliterated by nuclear weapons, Republicans are going to dominate the election. The smoldering corpses Democrats can’t exactly cast votes in the piles of rubble that used to be their voting places.

  70. 70.

    Mary G

    @gene108: That’s what worries me. They can’t look forward past a very short term positive, with happy Iraqis pulling down Saddam’s statues, to where Bush’s war went south and his approval rating hit the low 20s.

    I keep telling myself, even Twitler can’t be this stupid, endangering Americans living in South Korea and Japan, and with the Olympics coming up there soon, but then I worry that he can be. He has shown that he knows no shame and will sink to any depth necessary to fuel his delusions, and worse, the Republican Congress has gone all in with him, with very limited exceptions.

  72. 72.

    (((CassandraLeo)))

    @trollhattan: The lack of embedded quotes makes the conversation difficult to follow, but Jeffro was referring to Hicks, not Huckabee-Sanders. Since Jeffro’s post could easily describe either of them, the confusion is understandable.

    (This, IMO, is the main advantage of threaded conversations, which make reply contexts much clearer – of course, their main disadvantage is their lack of chronology, which makes it much less convenient to find new posts once you’ve read the old ones and, if you don’t feel like paying careful attention to timestamps, almost impossible without rereading the whole thing. I’ve been spending the last several months devoting subconscious mental energy to trying to devise a system that has the advantages of both without any other major disadvantages. I have an idea, but I haven’t yet figured out how to translate it to mobile phones, where mouseover isn’t a thing.)

  74. 74.

    gene108

    @lahke:

    Does Trump imagine he’ll get cover for his preemptive strike from a UN resolution? I don’t think so. And wouldn’t that be an illegal act, that would result in much of the world imposing sanctions?

    We have a veto on UN sanctions against us. As long as our UN Security Council rep isn’t taking a potty break during session*, the UN can’t do much.

    What other countries choose to do is unpredictable. They didn’t do anything for the Iraq invasion and aren’t doing anything about our targeted drone asassinations.

    * I believe the U N Security Council voted to intervene on behalf of S, Korea, in 1950, when N. Korea invaded because the USSR member was absent for the vote and so could not veto it.

  76. 76.

    mak

    @Jeffro: have you seen her Twitter feed? She’s every bit as nasty as Trump, with a the side of snide thrown in for good measure. I was actually kind of shocked when I first saw it, to think that this was an actual government employee behaving this way online. Apparently, she got a bit of the dog killing gene, along with her brother.

  78. 78.

    ? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?

    @Jeffro:
    If that happens, I would hope Trump’s own Secret Service detail would summarily execute him in his bunker. If they don’t angry mobs of Americans will do it for them.

  79. 79.

    Roger Moore

    @Baud:

    I hope the Ecuadorian embassy has bunk beds.

    Trump and Assange as roommates in the Ecuadorian embassy sounds like the plot for a very bad sitcom.

  80. 80.

    ? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?

    @gene108:
    But this would much worse than Iraq. Tens of millions would die. That can’t just be ignored. It would be a flagrant war crime. Trump would become known as “Donald the Butcher”.

  81. 81.

    (((CassandraLeo)))

    @debbie: Wrong gender for the horrors I was imagining (unless you mean she suffered the same kind of horrors Ivanka did while modeling). I don’t want to delve into any further detail than that.

    @chris: They certainly did. I might just start using it untranslated, with a definition the first time I use it. “Wilful ignorance” is as good a short approximation as you’re likely to get, but like “Schadenfreude” and “Backpfeifengesicht”, it just sounds better in the original language, and like, say, “Geist”, there are a few senses that aren’t encompassed by an abridged translation. If people use it more often, it will probably gain wider acceptance (as long as its meaning is explained with each first usage).

    @chris: I’d actually seen it before in a song title (“Schemes Amathia” by the now-defunct German metal band Nyktalgia), but the context had for some reason made me assume it was a name, so I never thought to look it up. (TBH, I wasn’t actually even 100% sure what language it was, though “amathia” certainly looked Greek. It looks like the band spliced together an English word and an ancient Greek one, actually – but then, “scheme” is also of ancient Greek origin, but “schemes” doesn’t match any correct inflection of “σχῆμᾰ” or its modern Greek descendant “σχήμα” AFAICT. So I’m not 100% sure what they did. For the record, while the band’s lyrics, which are usually expressions of extreme despair, are mostly in English, more than half of their song titles are in other languages, largely Greek or Latin. There’s another one that seems to mean “tearful lament”, but it looks like it’s got a French or German word spliced together with an Italian, Latin, or Portuguese one, so splicing together multiple languages seems to be a thing with them.) Anyway, because of the song title, there’s little chance of me forgetting it.

    @Mike J: I knew I remembered a much older cultural reference than to Trump specifically. Thanks for reminding me what it was. (The Hollies are a bit before my time, but I’d still seen the song title often enough to have it stored in the back of my mind. I already knew, of course, “Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress” and a few of their other hits, plus that it was Graham Nash’ band before CSN(Y). And that Nash wasn’t on “Long Cool Woman”. And that they’d been around early enough to be considered a British Invasion band. …So I guess I know rather a lot about them, considering my age and how little of their music I’ve actually heard.)

  84. 84.

    cain

    @Felanius Kootea:
    And watch prices go up. American companies like Apple will be very unhappy since they can’t get cheap labor.

    On the other hand, they’ll try to get it in Africa or something and find that the Chinese are already there.

    Then, they’ll try to get American labor, but all they want to do is coal.

  85. 85.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @mak:

    Apparently, she got a bit of the dog killing gene, along with her brother.

    Assume you are referring to Jethrene Jethrene the Possum Queen, but your reply chain tracks back to a Hope Hicks reference. HH is many things I detest, but I don’t believe she has a dog-killing brother. SHS, OTOH….

  87. 87.

    (((CassandraLeo)))

    @Mike J: I did, too, actually, but for some reason they were one of the groups I knew by reputation but never got around to listening to much. (This is probably why I was able to recite so many facts about them from memory.) Another major group in this category, and I have no explanation for why, is the Kinks, whom I feel particularly bad about neglecting. (As with the Hollies, I know the big hits, but nothing else.) I could probably name a few dozen other contemporaries of both bands who are in the same category (the Small Faces and the Byrds in particular, though at least I know about a dozen of the Byrds’ biggest hits), but the Kinks seem like the most egregious case.

  88. 88.

    Steve in the ATL

    @efgoldman:

    Sometimes it’s hard to be coherent when your day starts with whiskey on your Frosted Flakes

    Then he could never make it as a labor lawyer.

  90. 90.

    kindness

    Aww you kid. Republicans haven’t kept other Republicans accountable since the Watergate hearings. They will circle the wagons and protect their own with lies, rage and bluster. Just like they always do when the get caught with their hands in the cookie jar.

  97. 97.

    Roger Moore

    @(((CassandraLeo))):

    This, IMO, is the main advantage of threaded conversations, which make reply contexts much clearer – of course, their main disadvantage is their lack of chronology, which makes it much less convenient to find new posts once you’ve read the old ones and, if you don’t feel like paying careful attention to timestamps, almost impossible without rereading the whole thing. I’ve been spending the last several months devoting subconscious mental energy to trying to devise a system that has the advantages of both without any other major disadvantages. I have an idea, but I haven’t yet figured out how to translate it to mobile phones, where mouseover isn’t a thing.

    The best system I’ve seen to deal with threaded conversations is the one used at LWN. Each comment has a color-coded header. When you first load the page, all the headers are colored. When you hit reload, the header for all the comments you’ve had a chance to read changes to gray, and only new comments get a colored header. It makes it reasonably quick to scroll through a page and find only the comments you haven’t read yet, but the parent comments are still there if you need to go back and re-read them for context.

    That said, I think the best way to make threaded conversations work is for commenters to get in the habit of quoting the specific text they’re responding to. Appropriate quoting minimizes the need to go back to the parent comment to see the context. Unfortunately, it depends on commenters cooperating, which is far from guaranteed.

    More importantly, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a threaded blog commenting system that works well past about 100 comments. When all the comments are on one big page, there’s a natural tendency for commenters to respond to things toward the top of the page while things at the bottom are neglected. The result is a deeply nested series of responses to whomever gets the first post- or the first good post- while excellent points further down the page are ignored.

  100. 100.

    SFAW

    @Amir Khalid:

    Calm down. There’s no need to shout. We can hear you just fine.

    Here’s a question: If we don’t want to read/”hear” shouty stupidity like that, do we put our fingers in our eyes or our ears?

  101. 101.

    (((CassandraLeo)))

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: I’d kinda wondered about that. They always seemed as good as the other major British Invasion groups from what I heard of them, and I didn’t know why they were so much more obscure here. Of course, Small Faces never made it big here, either, and they also seem to have been great, but I think they just weren’t around long enough for that to happen. They eventually morphed into Faces, who in turn spawned Rod Stewart’s solo career (alongside Jeff Beck’s brilliant first couple of albums) and the Stones’ current guitarist. (Though of course Stewart and Wood weren’t in Small Faces.)

    FWIW, bands being well-known in Britain but not here isn’t even a consistent obstacle to my knowing their music well – I’m a large enough Stone Roses fan that, fifteen-odd years ago, I named a message board (which is still up, albeit completely devoid of activity) after their song “Fools Gold”.

    @Steve in the ATL: Thanks for the recommendation; I’ll check it out after rebooting (my computer’s sound is lagging a bit).

  102. 102.

    Roger Moore

    @mak:

    Apparently, she got a bit of the dog killing gene, along with her brother.

    It’s nurture, not nature.

  105. 105.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Baud: Haha. Rachel points out that the NYT is garbage.

    On the Lichtblau “trump not under investigation” story from a week before the election? cause it seems to be a topic of discussion on twitter this evening

    Chris Hayes‏Verified account @ chrislhayes
    A mystery I would like to solve: What the heck was up with this New York Times story, published just 8 days before the election??

    Adam Jentleson‏Verified account @ AJentleson
    I’ll say it: NYT interviewed Reid for this story. He said things contrary to the story. NYT discarded the interview.

    Nate Silver‏Verified account @ NateSilver538
    1) There was a pro-Trump faction within the FBI and the Times’s sources were heavily weighted toward that faction;
    2) For various reasons having to do with its editorial culture, the Times really leaned into the “Russia overblown” narrative instead of hedging.

    I’d say Silver’s take is the most benign imaginable.

  107. 107.

    Roger Moore

    @SFAW:

    Here’s a question: If we don’t want to read/”hear” shouty stupidity like that, do we put our fingers in our eyes or our ears?

    Neither. You put the poster’s name into the pie filter.

  109. 109.

    (((CassandraLeo)))

    @Roger Moore: These observations all seem accurate to me – though did you mean linear conversations in the second paragraph? I’ve sometimes made that observation about linear conversations as well, but I’m very bad about actually following it (this comment demonstrates my point perfectly). It seems like it’s just a convention here not to quote anyone except when doing a point-by-point rebuttal.

    In any case, my idea was to use the mouseover for a name (like the links we have here on BJ) to display a preview of the post being answered, but of course, I can’t think of a functional equivalent of it for mobile phones. Disqus actually does something half-similar to this when you hover over a name being replied to, but it only shows about 50 characters, which is almost useless.

    Disqus also has three different options for comment sorting – upvote count, chronology, and reverse chronology. This results in the problems with people only reading certain comments being somewhat mitigated, since different users have different preferences set, but it doesn’t eliminate them completely. And you’re right – after a certain number of comments, threads just turn into unsalvageable messes. (It doesn’t help that Disqus doesn’t deal well with large numbers of comments, either.)

    I definitely like the colour-coding idea for threaded discussions, though. Of course, the problem with replies clustering to the top in large threads is still there. Though that might also be a product of people simply not reading the rest of the comments, and I’m not sure things would be completely different in a linear thread that had reached two TBogg Units, either. After a certain point, people just don’t have time to read all the comments.

  111. 111.

    James E. Powell

    @?BillinGlendaleCA:

    They had more problems than internal fighting, which was considerable. The one that got them banned was a dispute with the musicians’ union and conflict with a union leader.

  112. 112.

    (((CassandraLeo)))

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: “Editorial culture” might be a euphemism for “kompromat”. Or “Sulzberger being a shameless right-wing ideologue and his views filtering down as a result of the propaganda model”.

    Regardless, it’s not usually Silver’s style to go for the soft pedal, so that’s kind of surprising coming from him.

  115. 115.

    Barbara

    @Steve in the ATL: “Hey Carrie Anne what’s your game now can anybody play?” My favorite Hollies song but I am not sure the lyrics are still PC.

    I have their greatest hits on vinyl.

  116. 116.

    Gin & Tonic

    @(((CassandraLeo))): Some people here quote, some don’t. Some people do it sometimes and not others. But proposing threaded comments is a really good way to get a lot of people pissed off. The idea is very clearly a non-starter.

  118. 118.

    Steve in the ATL

    @Roger Moore: if you never want me to visit this site again, convince Cole to adopt threaded comments. Shit, I told you how to get rid of me!

  119. 119.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @gene108: That is correct, which is why in 1987 I was serving under an HQ that was under UN auspices, and continues to this day.

  123. 123.

    Steve in the ATL

    @Villago Delenda Est: I’m punch drunk, and working on real drunk (Delta wine…yum!). Been in CA for two weeks and finally got TA on a union contract at 5 pm PST. Off to LA now!

    I have vague memories of the ATL….

  126. 126.

    divF

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: A friend from college sent me home for the summer after my junior year with a dozen reel-to-reel tapes to keep me connected with music. One of them was a copy of the compilation double album “The Kink Kronikles”. It is burned into my neurons now.

  127. 127.

    cain

    @SFAW:

    Reasonable suggestion, but I don’t pie commenters, not even the ones who deserve it the most. Probably a failing on my part.

    Naw, I think that’s admirable. I don’t pie anybody either.. but I do get good at skipping past them :) It’s only when it is some kind of spammer or something that I need invoke tools to stop it.

  128. 128.

    Steve in the ATL

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: @divF: pro tip: “All She Wrote”. Ray Davies as a solo artist. [Expletive deleted] awesome.

    ETA: if you need references, Omnes and Mike J will confirm that my taste in music is totally excellent.

  129. 129.

    ?BillinGlendaleCA

    @Steve in the ATL:

    pro tip: “All She Wrote”. Ray Davies as a solo artist. [Expletive deleted] awesome.

    I know that song, it was him singing about Australian bar maids that got you, wasn’t it?

    ETA: Personally I really like “Things are Going to Change”.

  130. 130.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @Mary G:

    Bush’s approval ratings went up after the Iraq war started, so let’s get some of that ourselfs…Morons.

    Bush’s big thing was 911. That won’t happen in an elective war, not to mention both Japan and South Korea will likely veto it.

  139. 139.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    a few years back, Ray Davies wrote a Christmas song (IIRC) with a vocal part that he thought would be perfect for Chrissie Hynde, so he asked their daughter to sound her out about it. She said she would do it, as long as she didn’t have to see, talk to or be in the same room with Ray. The daughter brought those conditions back to her father, who said something like, “Yeah, I figured that was all implied”.

  141. 141.

    Bill Arnold

    @Mike J:
    re

    “Matthew Pottinger was reported as saying in a recent closed-door meeting with US experts on Korean Peninsula issues that a limited strike on the North ‘might help in the midterm elections.’”

    ref: http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_editorial/830615.html
    Perhaps amusing, Sarah Sanders: Never happened. Pottinger is a Marine who served in two wars and doesn’t take military action lightly. Can’t believe @WSJ reporter didn’t reach out for a comment before repeating such a reckless accusation.
    Is she lying, or not. :-)

  142. 142.

    efgoldman

    @sdhays:

    that’s a reason why Singapore wasn’t the best choice for her appointment.

    Or in the asshole “president’s” … mind a perfect reason to send her.

  143. 143.

    Jeffro

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques:

    Bush’s big thing was 911. That won’t happen in an elective war, not to mention both Japan and South Korea will likely veto it.

    Shoot, if Trumpov decides to go with “Operation Bloody Nose” or whatever against North Korea, Japan and South Korea won’t even be able to pick up the phone and voice their discontent. Their ashes and component atoms might, but other than that…

  144. 144.

    Brachiator

    Will R incumbents want to defend attacking FBI/DOJ in Orange County CA, NoVa, NY/NJ, MIA, suburbs of Chicago/Phillie/Denver?

    Sadly, the answer is yes. The Trump base eagerly eat up the idea that the perfidious “deep state” is holding the real America back, and also preventing Dear Leader Trump from doing what he needs to do to make porn stars great again.

  146. 146.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Chris Hayes @ chrislhayes
    To people saying “This isn’t the GOP I know!” a gentle reminder that the GOP Chair of House Government Oversight in the 1990s ****shot watermelon with a pistol**** to reenact what he said was the president’s assasination of Vince Foster.

    and the Dan Burton aide who bought the bullets and the melon (the precise kind of fruit used in Burton’s CSI-Pawnee reconstruction is a matter of some dispute) was David Bossie, a senior staffer on the trump campaign, pretty much Lewandowski’s sidekick, I believe.

  149. 149.

    Bill Arnold

    @Mike in DC:

    WTH is a “limited strike” on NK? 100 cruise missiles and a few MOABs?

    And then, after the artillery bombardment of SK (killing upwards of 100K human beings) lulls everyone into relief, the DPRK military pops the hatch at the end of the long (60km) and hitherto undiscovered tunnel to Seoul, hoists then rolls the thermonuclear device (or high-yield boosted fission device) into the living room of the safe house, scurries a couple of kilometers back down the tunnel, closing 8 blast doors behind them, then boom. (Oh, and world economy collapses, and 10s/100s of millions die of starvation down the road. )
    Or more likely, something similarly unexpected. “Who could have imagined.” (Speaking as somebody who, the very first time they played a Microsoft Flight simulator with a 737 circa 1999, flew it to the World Trade Center. OK, was trying to go between them, but oops hit one instead.)

  150. 150.

    JGabriel

    laura:

    Traitors, All. THE. WAY. DOWN.

    To be fair, that’s nothing new. The GOP have been traitors all the way down ever since Nixon made a deal with the North Vietnamese to scuttle peace talks in 1968 – resulting in the further deaths of tens of thousands of American soldiers. The death of every American soldier who died in Vietnam after the middle of 1968 is the result of Republican treason.

    And it continued in 1980, when Republican interference and treason in hostage negotiations resulted in Americans being held hostage another 3-6 months longer than they might have been held otherwise. Then continued again when the Reagan administration, in defiance of Congress, repeatedly sold weapons to the same Iranians who held Americans hostage, for the purpose, against the will of Congress, of funding right-wing mercenaries in Central America.

    And yet more treason, or gross incompetence at the very least, occurred when the Bush fils administration allowed Al Qaeda to attack the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, despite repeated warning from both the Clinton administration and their own intelligence appointees, and then spent the next 7 years letting bin Laden roam free – while betraying and ignoring the Geneva conventions, and everything America previously stood for with respect to torture and human rights.

    So. While the Russian particulars and extent of Trump’s treason may be new, the general tropism, tendency, and skew of Republicans towards treason is not only nothing new, but follows an at least half century old GOP tradition.

    But they, the Grand Old Party, are the party of law and order, these honorable men, the party that will keep us safe, and they are all honorable men.

  154. 154.

    efgoldman

    @Jeffro:

    if Trumpov decides to go with “Operation Bloody Nose” or whatever against North Korea, Japan and South Korea won’t even be able to pick up the phone

    I remain absolutely, totally convinced that (a) he simply does not understand (and doesn’t want to know) chains of consequences and (ii) that the casualty figures, that I’m sure his military advisors have at least told him, are not human beings or even abstract numbers; they’re something like ducks at a carnival shooting gallery or the score of a pinball machine.
    The question is, will the pentagon, knowing that (how can they not?) go ahead and start the war.
    Every senior officer, I’m sure, has war gamed Korea many times since Academy days. They understand the consequences

  155. 155.

    Brachiator

    @Jeffro:

    Shoot, if Trumpov decides to go with “Operation Bloody Nose” or whatever against North Korea, Japan and South Korea won’t even be able to pick up the phone and voice their discontent.

    I think was Edward Luttwak I heard on a BBC interview arguing that a U.S. strike against North Korea was long overdue. He dismissed any concerns that South Korea might have and blamed them for not creating enough shelters to protect their people for whenever the U.S. decided to go to war.

  158. 158.

    Amir Khalid

    @sdhays:
    Then maybe Trump should have appointed her ambassador to a Muslim-majority nation in the region, like Indonesia or even Malaysia. I’m sure Malaysian Official One would love to have her around.

  165. 165.

    Steve in the ATL

    @Omnes Omnibus: evidence clearly demonstrates that you and I have nearly identical musical tastes. Likewise, Mike J and I have never disagreed on the subject.

  168. 168.

    Bill Arnold

    @Gin & Tonic:

    But proposing threaded comments is a really good way to get a lot of people pissed off. The idea is very clearly a non-starter.

    The idea is an abomination.

  172. 172.

    Viva BrisVegas

    @(((CassandraLeo))):

    I’d like to see them both (and Cosby, and etc.) kicked out

    Due process, is that a thing anymore?

    Polansky got his day in court, as did Cosby.

    But if a seven year old manipulated during an acrimonious breakup to perhaps create false memories of abuse says it’s true, it must be true.

  175. 175.

    Steve in the ATL

    @Omnes Omnibus: no, we are taking judicial notice of the fact that our musical taste is excellent. And “salvation” has been a hotel gym staple of mine this week thanks to you.

  176. 176.

    Repatriated

    @Bill Arnold: Wouldn’t even need to bring it to the surface.

    I’ve long wondered why I hadn’t seen anyone bring up that possibility. We know they can dig tunnels, and we know they have nukes. On the other hand, we have geology tech that can find tunnels, so pre-positioning a weapon wouldn’t be a risk-free tactic (would probably be legitimate grounds for war if discovered).

  177. 177.

    efgoldman

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    No fucking threaded comments!

    You just wake up? Or do you have some kind of autobot or macro that sees “threaded comments” and generates the response?

  184. 184.

    (((CassandraLeo)))

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: I have no doubt you’re correct. I was attempting (apparently ineptly) to comment on his usage of it.

    @efgoldman: He’s a solipsist. I genuinely don’t think he’s capable of contextualising other people as human beings. I’ve generally attributed this to malignant narcissism, but whatever the cause, it makes him a grave threat to world civilisation, perhaps on a scale we’ve never seen before. The old “a million is a statistic” apocryphal Stalin quote is probably fairly reflective of what he believes. I don’t think anyone with such a damaged perception of the world has ever before been in control of an arsenal that could literally destroy world civilisation. Dr. Strangelove was presumably meant to be over-the-top satire when it was created (“I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed, but I do say no more than 10 to 20 million killed, tops! Uh, depending on the breaks”), but I’m not sure it’s actually exaggeration with him.

    I’ve been saying this since before the election, as those of you who were around LGM at the time may remember (I didn’t comment that often here until sometime midway through last year, I think, though I’d been lurking for a long time by then). That there was a nonzero chance that this administration could end up starting a nuclear war. Most of my other predictions about this administration have not merely been borne out but have turned out worse than I predicted. I really, really hope I’m wrong about this one.

    On the other hand, I’ve also predicted that, if Trump tried to start a nuclear war, one or more of the IC/military/Secret Service would intervene in some fashion before things got there. If things get that bad, I hope that one is correct. It would, however, result in an unprecedented constitutional crisis – and yes, I realise we’re already in the midst of an unprecedented constitutional crisis, but the resulting one would be even worse. I don’t entirely care for the idea of a military overthrow, but it’s preferable to nuclear winter, and I’d feel a lot more conflicted about the idea if Trump were legitimately elected. It’s not a great precedent to have, but the precedent of “even the president of the U.S. doesn’t have the authority to annihilate world civilisation” isn’t the worst one to have, as long as it stops there.

    This scenario would also require the military chain of command to recognise when an attack would result in nuclear war, though – and perhaps more importantly, to be able to demonstrate it to the public afterward.

    Things are well and truly fucked. This post is pretty demonstrative of why I haven’t been sleeping much on some nights.

  185. 185.

    Steve in the ATL

    @efgoldman: you said to me the other night that “not everyone does conflict for a living”. I shared that with my bargaining team and they loved the insight. Then we drank ourselves into a stupor.

  187. 187.

    Bill Arnold

    @?BillinGlendaleCA:

    Everybody did that.

    Exactly. And then you had people like Condoleezza Rice:

    And I said, No one could have imagined them taking a plane, slamming it into the Pentagon — I’m paraphrasing now — into the World Trade Center using planes as missiles. As I said to you in the private session, I probably should have said, I could have not imagined.

    Who apparently cannot think of such scenarios by themselves, and so need scenario briefings to compensate for their deficiencies in this area, and are at the intellectual mercy of the people who create the briefings. And some of them have … agendas.

  189. 189.

    (((CassandraLeo)))

    @Viva BrisVegas: The court of public opinion is not the court of law, as you no doubt well know, and being kicked out of the Academy is not the same thing as imprisonment. Moreover, being acquitted on a technicality is not indicative of innocence; there may not be enough evidence to justify imprisonment in some cases, but there’s more than enough to justify throwing every name I mentioned out of the Academy. You may wish to refresh your understanding of the First Amendment, because its deficiencies are glaringly obvious.

    So is your lack of good faith. I have better things to do with my time than engage you further. Fuck off and eat some pie.

  192. 192.

    OGJamie

    Slightly off topic but Maher’s panel tonight was Frum and Brazile with guest Mooch. Frum made a very serious accusation against Mooch that both Maher and Brazile seemed to want tabled. Not because it was untrue, I assume, but because it was.

    I know Brazile is persona non grata for many these days but her mocking Mooch’s Harvard boast by saying, “I went to LSU…shhh!” was hilarious, more to my LSU grad wife than me.

  194. 194.

    Steve in the ATL

    @OGJamie: I went to Harvard too. When I was in the Boston area a few months ago. It was pouring rain, like torrential rain, and I saw hundreds of our best and brightest [sic] walking around Cambridge without umbrellas or raincoats. Dumbasses.

  195. 195.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @OGJamie: Frum made a very serious accusation against Mooch that both Maher and Brazile seemed to want tabled.

    You just wanna tease it ? the man blew off his new-born son to dance attendance on trump. I don’t really need to know more about him. But you’ve made me curious enough to maybe look at the Maher show for the first time since the Ben Sasse interview.

  197. 197.

    Another Scott

    @Steve in the ATL: I guess that’s my cue.

    “Hi, OO!!”

    Threaded comments were solved decades ago on Usenet. Users could use whatever reader they wanted (there were many, many choices) to display the comments however they wanted – threaded, flat, nested, folded, whatever. They could participate in near-real-time, or comment hours or days later.

    But of course all that knowledge had to be thrown away when everything was web-ified. FYWP doesn’t work very well – at all – for non-real-time discussions after a few dozen comments. But it’s what we’ve got, and we’ve learned to live with it.

    A decent conversation-forum software package wouldn’t care how the conversations are presented to the reader and would let the reader choose – with a sensible comment ID system, and a “mark read” button that keeps track of what’s been read at a particular timestamp (e.g. via cookies), and CSS we should be living in a golden age. “You want to have display Pied comments in 2-point Comic Sans? You want OO’s comments in 14-point New Century Schoolbook? You want Adam’s comments in 18-point Courier New? You want the right column smaller? You want the comments folded up until you click on the header? You want to go away for a day and come back and know what comments you’ve already read? No problem!”

    tl;dr – The problem isn’t “threaded comments” – the problem is the limits of the software that presents the conversations to the reader. Since there’s no money in fixing it, we have to live with it.

    My $0.02.

    Cheers,
    Scott.
    (“Who loved Yarn and Souper on OS/2 but recognizes that those were different times.”)

  198. 198.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Another Scott: Who has the time to bother with that? I need to fight with trolls and pick at people about minor details. Are you unfamiliar with this forum?

  199. 199.

    Another Scott

    @Omnes Omnibus: If we had [expletive deleted] we wouldn’t have to have these quasi-periodic discussions about the obvious benefits of [expletive deleted]. That much is clear to all [expletive deleted] people.

    ;-)

    Pies are the super-weapon against trolls. Changing a font once or twice should be as easy as doing it in Word or Pages – it should take a user no time at all. But, yeah, there’s no money or available time in it. :-)

    Cheers,
    Scott.
    (“Yes, I will indeed send my demands to JGC in ALL CAPS first thing in the morning. My dizzying intellect is sure to convince him this time!!1”)

  204. 204.

    Corner Stone

    “This young girl started singing in the plaza. And you won’t believe what happened next!”

  205. 205.

    Corner Stone

    “This street bum started playing piano in a Costco. You won’t believe what people did next!”

  207. 207.

    J R in WV

    @?BillinGlendaleCA:

    @(((CassandraLeo))): My roommate for 3 out of 4 years as an undergrad was a Kinks fan, I became one as well.

    I was in Philadelphia for a few months before I was drafted, getting the big city experience, and seized the opportunity to see the Spirit, the Chambers Brothers and The Kinks IIRC at the Spectrum or whatever the big arena was in 1969 Philly.

    Spirit was really good, one of those bands that could work with the crowd but sounded flat in recordings. The Chambers Brothers was a Philly band with a ton of fans in the crowd. The Kinks – I don’t know, they were too high or something. They were terrible. I left after a very few pieces. Walked north til I came to a subway stop. Was really high myself, but I remember the night well.

  208. 208.

    efgoldman

    @(((CassandraLeo))):

    This scenario would also require the military chain of command to recognise when an attack would result in nuclear war,

    The point in regards to Korea is that NK’s conventional artillery can, and probably would, cause tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of deaths in and around Seoul within the first couple of hours, without the cover being taken off a nuclear button. These are the people (approximately 100k Americans and millions of Koreans) for whom the empathy-deprived ferret head cares not one fucking thing.
    Ask Glendale Bill how he feels about it.

  209. 209.

    efgoldman

    @Steve in the ATL:

    Then we drank ourselves into a stupor.

    Just as only a few people are good at commission sales (most of us prefer a regular check), only a few have the aptitude and ability to do conflict for a living.

  210. 210.

    efgoldman

    @Steve in the ATL:

    I saw hundreds of our best and brightest [sic] walking around Cambridge without umbrellas or raincoats. Dumbasses.

    It has ben ever thus for high school and college students, school affiliation and geography don’t matter

  211. 211.

    Robert Sneddon

    @Amir Khalid: US Ambassadors are not chosen for their competence or abilities, they’re political freebies handed out to friends and well-connected family members of the Government. The current US Ambassador to the Court of St. James (i.e. Britain) is a football team owner (NY Jets), the British Ambassador to the US is a forty-year veteran of the Foreign and Commonwealth office and a previous national security advisor as well as having held other important posts around the world.

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