Giuliani really has a talent for putting defense arguments as unconvincingly, unappealingly, and suspiciously as possible.
If his son were a Manhattan gynecologist he’d go around saying “my boy spends his days fingering women near the park.”
— ProveItHat (@Popehat) August 19, 2018
Back when I was a young grad student and budding young fascist, I remember giving my thorough opinions on what I thought of postmodernism. I’m sure I was a real treat in those classes. And, apparently, conservatism has also moved on from their thorough disdain of postmodernism:
President Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani on Sunday claimed “truth isn’t truth” when trying to explain why the president should not testify for special counsel Robert Mueller for fear of being trapped into a lie that could lead to a perjury charge.
“When you tell me that, you know, he should testify because he’s going to tell the truth and he shouldn’t worry, well that’s so silly because it’s somebody’s version of the truth. Not the truth,” Giuliani told Chuck Todd on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday morning
“Truth is truth,” Todd responded.
“No, no, it isn’t truth,” Giuliani said. “Truth isn’t truth. The President of the United States says, “I didn’t …”
A startled Todd answered: “Truth isn’t truth?”
Giuliani: “No, no, no.”
Todd said: “This is going to become a bad meme.“
Giuliani‘s remark was not the first time he has gone down this road.
The times, they are a changing.
BGinCHI
When Giuliani gets to a fork, he takes it.
zhena gogolia
Why did John Edwards have to leave public life? He didn’t commit one tenth of the sins Twitler has.
I asked this down below and everyone ignored me. I’m serious. I’d really like to know.
Suzanne
I am still just totally hornswaggled that anybody would actually hire Rudy Giuliani because he thought that Giuliani would actually do a good job of anything other than scrubbing a toilet with his tongue.
Like, if I was in even a fraction of the legal jeopardy that Comrade Trump is in, I would be looking high and low for a ***good*** attorney. All that money, and he still hires trash trash trash.
zhena gogolia
@Suzanne:
He’s not serving as an attorney. He’s serving as a “celebrity” who can get on TV and emit clouds of BS that confuse the dimwitted even further, in an authoritative, important-white-guy voice. Mission accomplished.
Ruckus
@Suzanne:
I thought that RG was not being paid.
And someone thought he’s not stupid. This sort of deflection must be worth tens of dollars.
Wag
@zhena gogolia:
For the same reason that Al Frankin got chased out of the senate.
He was a Democrat. Duh.
BruceFromOhio
RG: Everything I you is a lie .
CT: **smokes from ears**
RG: haha now i can escape. stupid androids.
lamh36
This was last night…has the WH still not issued a statement on Kofi Annan? I’ve been working all day
Jim, Foolish Literalist
He got worse as the day went on
It’s not a hundred percent clear, because it’s the poo-flinging ranting of a mentally unbalanced sleaze bag, but I think Rudi might be, intentionally or not, getting himself confused about an old Homeland plot line– the quoted part is only half of lunatic ranting
Citizen Alan
@lamh36:
I would honestly rather the swine stay silent than say something idiotic as part of a crude effort to dispute their racism and white supremacist tendencies.
lollipopguild
@zhena gogolia: A lot of people in the Democratic party were very tired of Edwards stuff. I liked a lot of what he said but he came across as way too slick. I always wondered what he was hiding.
lollipopguild
@Suzanne: Trump favors old friends over good lawyers. Good lawyers will tell trump the truth and he would fire/not hire them. Better to have and old buddy like Rudy who can get on any TV show and emit clouds of bullshit.
gene108
@lamh36:
I bet a large percentage of the State Department people apointed by Trump do not know who he is.
West of the Rockies
@zhena gogolia:
I think his general slimy behavior in regards to his wife, reports of $400 haircuts, and a kind of disingenuous demeanor did him in. YMMV.
Ruckus
@lollipopguild:
You’d think that rudy being 74 he couldn’t shovel that much bullshit in one day. It’s impressive that he can actually do this much every day, day in and day out. I guess it helps that he’s been doing this for years.
JDM
Need to edit this: “giving my thorough opinions on what I thought of postmodernism”
into this: “giving my thorough opinions on what I thought WAS postmodernism”.
It’s the most basic rightwing problem, common to all pseudoscience as well, that they end up criticizing strawmen, things they just made up out of things they don’t understand. We’re soaking in it now.
Ruckus
@zhena gogolia:
From wiki.
dmsilev
@BGinCHI: Also, remember, no matter where you go, there you are.
TS (the original)
@Ruckus: Edwards was a democrat – answers the question.
The revelation that trump was chasing women while his 3rd wife was nursing her new babe, enhanced his public image & won him the presidential election.
lollipopguild
@Ruckus: It’s easier to shovel bullshit when so much of your life and career was bullshit.
Suzanne
@zhena gogolia:
BUT WHO THE FUCK IS ACTUALLY FOOLED BY THIS?!?!
I just don’t get it. I just do NOT grok it.
Re: Edwards: fuck that guy. I don’t like the double standard that IOKIYAR, but I also don’t like that guy and fuck that guy.
Baud
@Suzanne: People whose privilege demands that they be fooled by this.
lollipopguild
@TS (the original): I would say that all the cheating did not hurt trump because he was an open public racist and he went after everything that his potential voters wanted to hear him go after.
Suzanne
@TS (the original):
I swear, it’s time for us to engage in some voter suppression of our own, by demoralizing the toxic masculine garbage trash hypocrites who voted for him.
You know what? Fuck them all. I hope they all lose their jobs and their healthcare and their homes.
Baud
@TS (the original): Exactly. If he were a Republican, he’d be second runner up to a child molester for a senior leadership position in Congress.
Suzanne
@Baud: I know. I KNOW. The unrelenting desire to preserve white patriarchy is one hell of a drug. And the people who fight so hard for it are those who know on some level that they would be scrubbing toilets without it.
But GOD people are stupid and it makes my mind hurt.
lollipopguild
@Suzanne: No one is fooled by this, this is the modern version of “The Emperor’s new clothes” his side loves him and does not care what rules/laws/moral standards he has broken or will break in the future. He is their Cult Leader and they will support him to the end. Our side knows that it is all bullshit and lies and always has been.
sukabi
@JDM: what helps him is his undeserved elevation to “America’s Mayor” by the media and their blind loyalty to the myth THEY created.
Another Scott
@Ruckus: The “Breck Girl” preening with a compact mirror was probably a huge factor as well.
Cheers,
Scott.
sukabi
@sukabi: weird, I replied to Rukus and JDM got the reply…broken site is broken.???
burnspbesq
I imagine that if he were still around to see it, Jacques Derrida would not be especially impressed with Rudy’s schtick.
zhena gogolia
@Ruckus:
@Another Scott:
I know, but he had a lot more redeeming qualities than Twitler does.
Suzanne
Digging up an old quote I enjoy:
“It’s difficult to admit white privilege is real when you’ve amounted to very little despite it.”
zhena gogolia
@Suzanne:
I don’t like Edwards either. I was just musing on the fact that he was reviled as history’s greatest monster for cheating on his wife and paying a mistress with campaign funds. And now someone much worse is in the White House.
Ivan X
Back in late 2016, when we all assumed a Clinton victory was a fait accompli, I sat behind Giuliani on a flight from NYC to New Hampshire. I feel guilt and shame that I didn’t garrotte him with my iPhone charging cable. What if it had made the difference? It would be worth prison. Also, when we deplaned, we both used the bathroom, and he didn’t wash his (very hairy) hands.
sukabi
@Ivan X: when you use tweezers you don’t get your hands dirty.
The Pale Scot
@BruceFromOhio #7
I commented a few weeks ago that we are all Normans in this brave new world
FelonyGovt
@lamh36: one of the many things I miss about Obama. So gracious, and he always knew just what to say. His statements on deaths of prominent people made me proud to be an American. These days I just cringe.
joel hanes
@zhena gogolia:
Why did John Edwards have to leave public life?
1. He was a Democrat, and we Democrats pay more than lip service to our standards, and despise hypocrisy.
Republicans talk a good game, but do not let ethical lapses nor hypcrisy stand in the way of retaining power.
2. The wife whom he betrayed was widely beloved among Dems, really better liked than John, and IIRC was suffering from cancer when he had his little fling on the side. I don’t know of anyone who really felt attached to Marla Maples or Ivana, and given that Trump is who he’s always been, it’s hard to argue that they were deceived about what they were getting into.
Gelfling 545
@Suzanne: That’s what comes of him always wanting to be the smartest person in the room. It leaves him with a really stupid and/or demented crowd to pick from.
Damned at Random
When the White House selectively edited the Helsinki press conference so the Putin response to the query about assistance to the Trump by David King about the editing of photos – during the Stalin dictatorship- to remove undesirables. . Real1964 stuff:
https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=Awr9DRX2_XlbHmYAJQJXNyoA;_ylu=X3oDMTEycWM5amxrBGNvbG8DZ3ExBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDQjI5NDRfMQRzZWMDc2M-?p=the+commissar+vanishes+before+after&fr=yset_ff_syc_hp-s
Ruckus
@zhena gogolia:
shitgibbon has ZERO redeeming qualities.
He is in fact in negative numbers.
A bag of burning dogshit on your front porch has more redeeming qualities.
Ken
After Todd said “This is going to become a bad meme”, Giuliani said “Don’t do this to me!” Don’t do what? Ask Giuliani questions and let him run his mouth?
Come to think of it – this was exactly what they’re afraid of with Trump, except not under oath.
Ruckus
@Suzanne:
How about when you actually amount to a hole in the space/time continuum?
Brachiator
@zhena gogolia:
A lot of people thought that Edwards was the real deal, the true populist, the firebrand who truly cared for the little guy. Turns out not to have been entirely true.
But I guess the example of Trump suggests that the Democrats don’t need candidates with scruples, just candidates who will get things done. Maybe even a candidate who will sell us out to the Russians.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
The ones that need scruples and morals are the supporters. How many of shitgibbon’s supporters have shown they have none? A portion of the wealthy have always been, throughout history, people without scruples and morals. That’s how they got wealthy. Rarely have they had so many people who actually supported their lack of scruples and morals. Sure they had people who would do horrible things because that’s all there was, be a victim or be the perp. But the big takeaway is that the ultra wealthy with no scruples or morals figured out how to win over enough of the masses without hiring hit squads, and that’s teaching them that not having or ignoring scruples and morals in the name of winning was cheaper, easier and safer. It’s worked great, it’s only taken them what, 50 yrs? In the history of man what’s 50 yrs?
Brachiator
@Ruckus:
There are scum in every social class. No group has a monopoly on either villainy or morality.
And winning over the masses is nothing new. The tyrants of ancient Greece and Sicily pandered to the middle class and peasants instead of resorting to overt oppression. Later Roman emperors used bread and circuses.
People refuse to learn from history, and keep falling for the old tricks.
Citizen Alan
@Ivan X:
I am occasionally haunted by the fact that in April of 2000, I attended a reception for Antonin Scalia and actually talked with Fat Nino for about ten minutes with no security anywhere nearby. Bush v Gore was 8 months later. 9/11 was 9 months after that.
Amir Khalid
@zhena gogolia:
I agree. People will now be talking about Giuliani’s bizarre “truth is not truth” statement instead of his more or less explicit admission that what his client tells Mueller will not match what Mueller already knows is true.
John Thomson
@zhena gogolia: He fucked over his woman. We don’t like that.
donnah
My question is this: is there any way to NOT let Trump be the headline, day in, day out? He thrives on attention, especially negative attention, and it seems like everyone just keeps pumping oxygen into the room. If we could shut it off, would the raging fire of his ego be stilled?
Wouldn’t it be great if the very press people he insults would just not show up for a presser? What if Sarah Huckleberry Sanders got to the podium and everyone got up and walked out? Maybe it would make the Trump people happy, but maybe they’d be peeved.
I dunno, but it seems like we all keep talking about everything Trump does, and every day he does something more egregious and we all get angry and nothing happens. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Hoping for a bunch of votes in November to stifle the Trumpness.
Sherparick
@zhena gogolia: Because he is a Democrat & IOKIYAR since Iran- Contra.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
I believe that was my whole point.
And I never said the wealthy alone had no scruples. Basically only that they were able to take advantage of that lack to get wealthy. Or they inherited it.
Platonailedit
Fuck chuck toad.
Platonailedit
How did a thread on scum rudey got six degreed into Edwards who?
MobiusKlein
Speaking of things that make my skin crawl,
My daughter (clever girl) found the missing heating system filter, (San Francisco ‘summer’).
So we proceeded to take out the old one with 3 years of accumulated dust and replace it with the fresh one.
In the process, some amount of dust landed on me, and even after a shower, I feel like dust mites are eating my epidermis. But on the bright side, at least I don’t have to interview Rudy. Or be him
Brachiator
@Ruckus: Fair enough. Maybe we agree more than we disagree.
The promise of democracy is that the mass of the people don’t have to depend on the machinations of the wealthy to get what they want. Something is broken, and I’m not sure what that is.
Brachiator
@Ruckus: Fair enough. Maybe we agree more than we disagree.
The promise of democracy is that the mass of the people don’t have to depend on the machinations of the wealthy to get what they want. Something is broken, and I’m not sure what that is.
ETA. Mobile browser is acting up again. Hard to compose and post. Time for a break.
Ivan X
@Citizen Alan:
What did you talk about?
Aleta
zhena gogolia
August 19, 2018 at 5:29 pm
Why did John Edwards have to leave public life? He didn’t commit one tenth of the sins Twitler has.
It’s an interesting question. My 2 cents:
—Edwards wasn’t a reality show star. For years people believed T’s character on the show was real and they still can’t let their belief in the actor go. I guess it’s a brain thing, similar to how people believed characters played byJimmy Stewart or Andy Griffith or Julia Roberts were the actual person.
—The press exposed Edwards after he lied, more than once, so they were excited by being in charge of the story and wouldn’t drop it. Also his girlfriend was helping them, probably feeding them information.
—T took charge of the press (has done it for decades). Most women with stories about him were afraid to talk. The few who did were threatened; the few who were about to talk were threatened, paid and made to sign agreements.
— T already had tough lawyers and previous experience keeping women quiet. They’d prepared to handle these stories for a few years at least.
Edwards didn’t scare Hunter and he tried to keep her quiet by continuing to see her.
—It’s never been about politicians’ infidelity or how they treat women; it’s always been about the publicity. Until Hart and Clinton, the press stayed quiet I think. Even for Clinton they were mostly quiet for the first 5 or 6 years.
—When the recording of T was played, they tried to pass the story off as ‘locker room talk,’ a lie that might not have worked if there was a current women (not ones from way in the past) in front of cameras at the same time. There was no campaign worker or whatever who’d been asked to claim paternity of a baby. What if reporters had asked T directly if he was sleeping with a woman, he had said no on camera and then photos or people contradicted him (as with Hart, Clinton, Edwards).
—Edwards was forced out not only by donors and the party and press, but by the pregnancy and girlfriend and by the need to protect his children and by his wife’s condition. If he tried to run again, made the right confessions on TV, and if the right people stood next to him, I don’t know what would happen.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
Oh I think we agree far more than not.
I’ve been watching politics for most of my close to 70 yrs and I’ve watched the republicans (who I was mostly talking about) try and get rid of the federal government for all of it. They weren’t obvious until Ronnie but that was the real green flag for them. And a number of the republican nut jobs from then are still around and active. R Stone, P Manafort, just to name some names. Some of the rabble is on the ends of their struggle to get this done but there are true believers among the youngsters as well.
Your graph,
Is almost perfect, I’d change want to need and say done. Do remember that we live in a representative republic, not a democracy, there is a difference and it’s important. It’s why we are where we are today, over the last few decades the wealthy have been able, for a number of reasons, to effectively purchase the government. We have 3 old guys, without a lick of sense between them running the VA, with no experience of any kind, other than massive self importance. We have a grifter moron in charge of the Dept of Education. We had an oil guy trying to run/ruin the EPA. We have a massive narcissist moron as our president. And all of this was bought and paid for by the wealthy that want everything for themselves. The problem is that we have unfettered capitalism now. We’ve been building towards this for decades. It’s not a 100% done deal but it’s fucking close. Small business is what, anything below 5 million gross a year? My family owned a business that affected a lot of people, hopefully in positive ways, they didn’t know that, they didn’t care and we never made anywhere near that. We employed a lot of people over the years, that paid for a lot of houses, educations, healthcare, beer and chips…….We weren’t the only ones either, but take a look around, at the small businesses of today. Most of the lumber yards are long gone, you have HD and Lowes. Small retail stores, no, you have walmart and that family of what, 6 people makes billions a year. All the while screwing their employees out of every last dime.
Unfettered Capitalism.
People buy and sell stocks to make money not to own companies. And often get screwed to the bone when one of the financial wizards fucks up but rarely pays for that. Like the last recession. The rich often pay less taxes than their employees.
Unfettered Capitalism.
moops
@Suzanne: Nobody is really fooled. Rudy makes for good TV. It’s win-win for the networks that give him a platform to pitch his spin. They get a sticker next to their name for the WH, then can turn around and make fun of him and it’s all fine for ratings.
Uncle Cosmo
@joel hanes:
This. Many Democrats thought Edwards was a too-slick, sleazy ambo-chaser – but everybody who knew Elizabeth loved her, to the point where it approached a cult following, & a lot of folks climbed on board the Edwards train because she assured them that John-boy was the real deal. Which to them made his betrayal of her about 100x worse than it would otherwise have been. Frankly I think the level of sheer hatred from those “friends of Elizabeth” was so high that many if not most of them would have celebrated if someone had murdered him in cold blood.
FTR I was an Edwards supporter back then, but not because of Elizabeth. His life trajectory (“mill-town kid” who made good but never forgot where he came from) was very close to my own (subtracting out the major bucks chasing ambos). More to the point, he was saying things that consistently pushed the Democratic primary debate leftward, where I was convinced it had to go; “Two Americas” still resonates with me. (Anyone with a memory that stretches back 10 years can remember how the whole campaign turned into a horse-racey he-said/she-said once Edwards dropped out & it was down to Obama & Hilary.)
Emily B.
Thank you, John! As an English major who graduated from college in the late 1980s, I’ve been flabbergasted by the way the right has moved from complaining loudly that poststructuralist criticism would lead to factual relativism—to making said factual relativism the basis of their politics. They saw an opportunity there, I guess.
efgoldman
@zhena gogolia:
Two decades ago, and IOKIYR