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“woke” is the new caravan.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

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The words do not have to be perfect.

After roe, women are no longer free.

When do the post office & the dmv weigh in on the wuhan virus?

We still have time to mess this up!

Everybody saw this coming.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

The GOP is a fucking disgrace.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

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

We are aware of all internet traditions.

You are here: Home / Past Elections / Election 2016 / It was all true.

It was all true.

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Remember when the Trump’s baby-snatching strategy blew up in his ugly orange face, and in the aftermath, it seemed that his minions didn’t have even the most cursory plan in place to track the people they’d taken into custody or reunite the families they’d torn apart?

That’s because they took less care with the thousands of human beings they snatched than your local Kwikie Mart manager does with packages of ramen noodles. Everything we feared upon the election of that monster was true, and then some.

Reader Interactions

98Comments

  2. 2.

    Corner Stone

    I’m tired of hearing how the chaos at the border is giving Trump exactly what he needs to rile up his base, and otherwise fulminate about the god damned wall. The blonde nazi lady had people fire tear gas on largely women and children after actions were taken to abrogate the right to seek asylum. Surely the 60%+ of the nation can’t be ok with any of this.

  3. 3.

    Raoul

    Greg has a piece up today on all the ways T’s immigration bluster and aggressive nastiness is failing. And on why the hot takes that this crisis ‘helps’ him are junk.

    The soulless freak can’t comprehend that things are so bad in the countries being fled that his ‘deterrent’ ideas are meaningless.

    So we get bullshit ideas, incompetently implemented. It turns out governing is difficult, policy options are constrained and complicated, and the black guy who did it last wasn’t just skating along on affirmative action.

  5. 5.

    Corner Stone

    When I saw just the headline of this post I thought for sure it was going to be by Cole. He was going to finally come clean and admit once and for all that the post he did a few years back stating he was a she and really named Jane Coal was the truth all along.

  8. 8.

    Corner Stone

    @schrodingers_cat: All of them are hideous people. I think about nazi lady standing at the podium and flat out knowingly lying about this “policy”. Just bold as brass. I think that’s why such awful people gravitate to jobs in this admin. Because they know that the worse you act the more protected you are. I want to see someone, anyone I beg you, nail the nazi lady to the wall over this and see what scope of lie she answers with.

  9. 9.

    MattF

    It’s four b’s: bluster, bullshit, bluff, and being assholes. ‘Reality’ doesn’t feel a need to cooperate.

  12. 12.

    TenguPhule

    Everything we feared upon the election of that monster was true, and then some.

    And the Southern border is looking to become the updated remake of Kent State.

    Don’t tell me its impossible. Trump controlling the fucking nukes was supposed to be impossible.

  13. 13.

    TenguPhule

    @JR:

    Honestly we may need a Nuremberg trial when this is all over

    I don’t think they have enough gallows. We may have to help them build more.

  14. 14.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Corner Stone: Let’s not forget that this was the brain child of her mentor to snatch children from their parents when he headed the DHS. He still manages to get glowing dispatches about himself of how he is the man standing between us and the Orange abyss.

  15. 15.

    TenguPhule

    That’s because they took less care with the thousands of human beings they snatched than your local Kwikie Mart manager does with packages of ramen noodles.

    This is sadly true.

    Ramen noodles are scanned and tracked, handled with care and considered of value by the ones in charge.

  16. 16.

    TenguPhule

    @Corner Stone:

    Surely the 60%+ of the nation can’t be ok with any of this.

    40% of the nation is okay with this. another 19% apparently are too busy, too tired or too stupid to give a shit.

  18. 18.

    TenguPhule

    @Raoul:

    The soulless freak can’t comprehend that things are so bad in the countries being fled that his ‘deterrent’ ideas are meaningless.

    The freak’s solution is to make America worse then the countries they’ve fled.

  19. 19.

    boatboy_srq

    @schrodingers_cat: This is the backstop to throwing out Atwaterian dogwhistle. Dogwhistle presumes that there are some who would be squeamish about calling GOTea policies and perspectives what they really are: deliberately not using it shows the MAGAts that those sensitivities don’t matter. Cruelty was always the point; it’s the overt nature of the cruelty now that is significant.

  20. 20.

    Betty Cracker

    @Raoul: I agree with Sargent. The garbage hot takes are tacitly accepting Trump’s framing — that his “base” is real America — which is a load of horse shit.

  21. 21.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Corner Stone: It absolutely does shore up his base. They’re loving all of this and they are actually scared of the migrants. But his base isn’t big enough, in the face of concerted opposition. He also needs apathy or paralysis from everyone else. He got that to some degree in 2016. Isn’t getting it now.

  22. 22.

    Corner Stone

    @TenguPhule:

    I don’t think they have enough gallows. We may have to help them build more.

    Don’t need to go that far, we can just take them to Mississippi. Apparently someone placed a couple nooses and some hate signs in the state capitol grounds. The nooses were lovingly hung from a tree branch with care.

  25. 25.

    TenguPhule

    @Corner Stone:

    Apparently someone placed a couple nooses and some hate signs in the state capitol grounds. The nooses were lovingly hung from a tree branch with care.

    The woodwork is like clown cars apparently. They’re bigger on the inside.

  27. 27.

    Corner Stone

    @Matt McIrvin:

    they are actually scared of the migrants

    Probably concerned the migrants are going to come in and steal those 15,000 GM jobs in Ohio and WI.

  29. 29.

    The Moar You Know

    I’m tired of hearing how the chaos at the border is giving Trump exactly what he needs to rile up his base, and otherwise fulminate about the god damned wall. The blonde nazi lady had people fire tear gas on largely women and children after actions were taken to abrogate the right to seek asylum. Surely the 60%+ of the nation can’t be ok with any of this.

    @Corner Stone: You may be tired of hearing it, but it’s working. My Trump-loving relatives in Ohio are super pissed.

    That the Army is not shooting every brown person they see.

    I’m fucking serious. They are enraged. That the United States Army is not shooting asylum seekers.

  31. 31.

    TenguPhule

    @The Moar You Know:

    I’m fucking serious. They are enraged. That the United States Army is not shooting asylum seekers.

    Give Sec Kelly another few weeks and that will probably change.

  32. 32.

    Roger Moore

    @Raoul:

    The soulless freak can’t comprehend that things are so bad in the countries being fled that his ‘deterrent’ ideas are meaningless.

    So understanding the world is a necessary part of formulating effective policy? Hoocoodanode!

  35. 35.

    Ken

    @Corner Stone: Or the Foxconn jobs in WI. Except I haven’t heard that any of the migrants are Chinese middle-managers or robots, which is apparently the labor mix that the taxpayers of Wisconsin are paying for.

  36. 36.

    Cermet

    @TenguPhule: Don’t worry too much; when this very issue was in the news the Generals in charge of Looking Glass (the ONLY people that can launch our land based nukes) and no doubt with the full backing of the Navy Admirals, made it very clear that they will not react to any signal/command from the orange fart cloud. They will use their own sources to decide if a launch is needed/real.

  37. 37.

    TenguPhule

    @JPL:

    Next time one mentions something just say hitler found the gas chambers more efficient.

    Not the ideal time to give them suggestions.

  38. 38.

    TenguPhule

    @Cermet:

    They will use their own sources to decide if a launch is needed/real.

    That sounds about as comforting as the op-ed about a “resistance” in the White House. If they want to have a coup, they should stop being chickenshits and do it rather then try to pretend this is all going to go back to normal. Because that’s what they’re doing.

  40. 40.

    Patricia Kayden

    Trump’s lie that Presidents Bush and Obama treated migrant children in ways similar to his have already been repeated ad nauseum in the Rightwing echo chamber. It’s important to push back on that lie (which he told again after the 60 Minutes story came out) because he’s trying to make it seem as if his outrageous anti-migrant policies are the norm. Nothing Trump does has been normal and this must be stated time and time again.

  44. 44.

    Spanky

    (CNN) An associate of Roger Stone said Monday he is refusing to sign a plea deal offered by special counsel Robert Mueller.
    Jerome Corsi, whose role in Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election largely revolves around the possibility that he was an intermediary between Stone and WikiLeaks, said he was offered a deal to plea on one count of perjury.

    “They can put me in prison the rest of my life. I am not going to sign a lie,” Corsi told CNN in a phone call.

    Ohpleaseohpleaseohplease …

  46. 46.

    rp

    GG is of course arguing that libs are the real villains because ICE tear gassed some people in 2013 and liberals didn’t complain.

  47. 47.

    Cermet

    @TenguPhule: Not sure what the issue here is – Generals do not ever involve with the function of the civilian gov nor do I want them too. They will not launch just because of the orange fart cloud says so; as such, he has no real control over the nukes. That is what I assume you were worried about and in that, they will follow logic and proper procedures to determine if any launch orders are necessary. That makes me feel far better.

  49. 49.

    TenguPhule

    @Cermet: Its trading a short term crisis for a longer on-going crisis in the military.

    To be blunt, the military leaders have been subverting civilian control since President Obama and Trump is making it worse. As Kay likes to put it, “they’re doing things that’s not their job all in the name of “saving” the rest of us.”

  51. 51.

    TenguPhule

    Jennifer Jacobs
    ✔
    @JenniferJJacobs
    Scoop: John James, the Michigan businessman who ran for U.S. Senate this year, is one of the people that Trump is considering as a replacement for UN Ambassador Nikki Haley. @JohnJamesMI lost his challenge against Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow.

    39
    8:48 AM – Nov 26, 2018

    Its going to be one of those days ending in day again.

  52. 52.

    Cermet

    @TenguPhule: I am lost what military leaders are subverting civilian control? I’d like to be on the same page so we are talking about the same issues. Kelly isn’t a general in the military anymore nor controls any military policy relative to the chain of command. While in the US it is really the Admirals that control the real policy decisions for the active military (under leadership and direction of the orange fart cloud), so far as I know, they stick to military issues only.

  53. 53.

    Aziz, light!

    @Cermet: I recall some general saying if the order comes down from the CIC it’s his duty to obey it. So let’s hope what you said is true for all concerned.

  54. 54.

    TenguPhule

    @Cermet:

    I am lost what military leaders are subverting civilian control?

    the Generals in charge of Looking Glass (the ONLY people that can launch our land based nukes) and no doubt with the full backing of the Navy Admirals, made it very clear that they will not react to any signal/command from the orange fart cloud.

    This. Its not comforting to me to see one Constitutional crisis being countered by another one. The admirals and generals have been dancing around the line of civilian control and oversight over them for a long time. They came close to and probably stepped at the very edge with President Obama. Now, there’s strong incentives to cross the line because its fucking Donald Trump. But as the last two years have shown us, staying to “keep him from doing anything crazy” tends not to work out the way people think it will.

  55. 55.

    Aleta

    (WaPo) [Trump is aided by] one of the worst conventions in political reporting — the habit of asserting that a given occurrence “provides fodder” for a politician’s attacks or arguments, simply by virtue of the fact that the politician will try to use it that way, regardless of whether facts or logic support it. For example, the New York Times claims “the unrest” will “likely provide him with additional ammunition” to keep out the migrants.

    So let’s be clear on the real meaning of the latest mayhem: It doesn’t give Trump “ammunition” at all. Instead, it shows that Trump’s immigration agenda is a total and abject failure and that he is covering up this glaring reality with lies.

    Trump had to drop the separations due to the political and legal backlash. He’s now saying that means he’ll have to release the parents, and that this will help adults game the system by disappearing into the interior — what he calls “catch and release” — thus encouraging more asylum-seekers to come. In short, Trump blames the current crisis on being hamstrung in one way or another from deterring them with cruel and inhumane policies — he can’t separate the kids, and he can’t detain families indefinitely.

    But this whole argument is based on a lie. We already know that cruelty as deterrence doesn’t actually work — and we know this because Trump’s own effort to do this failed.

    Vox’s Dara Lind examined the data and found that even during the period of family separations, there was “no evidence” that this “harsh treatment … actually works as a deterrent.”

    The whole premise of Trump’s approach to the migrant crisis — that the answer is ever-escalating deterrence, which is supposed to showcase his “toughness” — has already been revealed as a failure. Indeed, as BuzzFeed points out, the administration has also done other things to try to dissuade migrants, such as eliminate fear of gang violence as a criterion for asylum, yet they keep coming. Trump’s decision to send troops to the border — in addition to using the military as a prop in the GOP’s failed midterm propaganda message — can also be seen as an attempt at deterrence (remember when Trump suggested migrants might be shot?), one that also failed.

    Trump is trying to mask this epic failure with other lies. The suggestion that the failure to build the wall is to blame — and that funding it would stop this situation — is absurd, since asylum seekers want to turn themselves in at the border so their claims can be heard. The whole narrative of a “catch and release” criminal menace is itself based on lies and wild exaggerations.

  56. 56.

    gvg

    @sukabi: It’s actually their job not to obey illegal orders, even if they come from the President. The tricky part is what’s an illegal order? I do think it’s not to commit a war crime because those are set by treaties we signed and were ratified into our laws. Which means firing on would be immigrants is illegal. Anything Trump wants to do with nukes are almost certainly illegal. this isn’t the cold war and he keeps talking big when it’s just his feelings hurt.
    Other things like slow marching legal if bad ideas are more problematic. However they can defend those usually because this idiot doesn’t bother to follow legal procedures nor have his whims vetted for legality before saying he has given an order, so chances are he actually didn’t officially give an order or the order is illegal. He also doesn’t give a time frame nor follow up something is done mostly. He also has given orders to agencies that don’t have that authority and given orders that are actually physically impossible (like imagining that we have an infinite number of troops ready to go where ever he mentions)
    So it’s not as bad a precedent as it might be. Provided we don’t elect an idiot again too soon.

  57. 57.

    TenguPhule

    @gvg:

    Anything Trump wants to do with nukes are almost certainly illegal.

    Unfortunately no. This was actually under “norms and presumed moral compass of the office holder.”

  59. 59.

    FlipYrWhig

    @rp: Ya know, if I were a gay libertarian, I imagine that I’d have probably learned by now not to be so arrogant about other people’s supposed hypocrisies and logical inconsistencies.

  60. 60.

    Roger Moore

    @TenguPhule:

    To be blunt, the military leaders have been subverting civilian control since President Obama

    They’ve been doing it for a lot longer than that. The generals have been pushing around the civilians who are supposed to be overseeing them for a long time. An important part of the Cold War was the idea that we needed to have a hair-trigger military that could respond to events faster than civilian government could, and that led to loss of civilian control. Not to mention all the politicking that went on around military procurement.

  62. 62.

    Cermet

    @Roger Moore: That is Looking Glass, in fact. That is why those Generals saying what they said (and there has been zero push back to it by the White House, I notice) is reassuring. While I recall no such similar issue with Obama, they did “rebel” under bush (really cheney) when he started to get an atomic attack against Iran past the planing stage. In fact, the entire pentagon group of all colonels in all branches (and the captains there who are equivalent in rank) threaten to resign in mass or so the Wash. Post reported. That apparently stopped cheney.

  63. 63.

    Gin & Tonic

    The Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, has just voted to declare martial law in response to Russia’s naval aggression in the Kerch Strait.

    Things have nowhere to go but south at this point.

  64. 64.

    TenguPhule

    @Gin & Tonic:

    The Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, has just voted to declare martial law in response to Russia’s naval aggression in the Kerch Strait.

    Things have nowhere to go but south at this point.

    What could possibly go wrong? //s

  65. 65.

    Raoul

    @Betty Cracker: So much of the NYT and others in search of Trumps America is about saying his base matters more than the majority does. Even after Dems kicked him a few weeks ago.

    Dammit.

  67. 67.

    Corner Stone

    @Gin & Tonic:

    The Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, has just voted to declare martial law in response to Russia’s naval aggression in the Kerch Strait.

    Interesting move. Faux show of strength or bad political miscalculation. Or both?

  71. 71.

    Mnemosyne

    @rp:

    Yep, that’s all over the Twitterverse being pushed by bots. They all seem to cite the same local news story with zero follow-up. ?

  72. 72.

    Gin & Tonic

    @Corner Stone: Probably both. At the moment, this declaration appears to be only for the regions bordering Russia and Transdnistria, and Poroshenko is careful to say that it doesn’t affect civil liberties nor is it to delay the March election (which he will lose.) I haven’t yet read the decree, so I can’t be sure of its extent.

    Russia seems not to have had ay supporters in the UN Security Council, for what that’s worth.

  73. 73.

    Gin & Tonic

    @schrodingers_cat: IIRC, BiP was banned by Adam after some particularly unhinged rant a couple of years ago. I think Mnem exchanged some e-mail with him after that, but my memory could be playing tricks.

  74. 74.

    sm*t cl*de

    @Spanky:

    “They can put me in prison the rest of my life,” Corsi told CNN in a phone call.

    “Your counter-offer is acceptable.”

  75. 75.

    Mnemosyne

    @Gin & Tonic:

    I dunno, some random dude from Canada whose wife’s family immigrated there 100 years ago says he understands the current situation better than you do because he knows a couple of insults in Ukrainian. ??
    /sarcasm, in case the emojis don’t come through

  76. 76.

    GregB

    Don the Cowardly Con has also been railing on about how every president prior to him were idiots and crafted crappy policy, yet now claims that he is just implementing their crappy policy.

  77. 77.

    sm*t cl*de

    it seemed that his minions didn’t have even the most cursory plan in place

    “Selling the stolen children for adoption” is a kind of a plan.

  78. 78.

    Corner Stone

    @schrodingers_cat:

    Will BiP resurface to inform us about the Nazis in Ukraine? He and mclaren completely disappeared after 2016 elections.

    I think BiP was promoted and assigned to a different desk. As for mclaren – PFC Butterfield finally tracked him down and terminated with extreme prejudice.

  79. 79.

    Gin & Tonic

    @Mnemosyne: Yeah, whatever. He showed his hand and I’m done. Life is short. BiP was at least unhinged enough to occasionally be entertaining.

  80. 80.

    Betty Cracker

    @Gin & Tonic: I never could decide if BiP was an actual paid troll or a garden-variety crackpot. I leaned toward the latter because it used to seem unlikely to me that a hostile foreign government would pay trolls to haunt a joint like this. But now we know that sort of thing definitely happened.

  81. 81.

    tokyokie

    @Gin & Tonic:

    The Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, has just voted to declare martial law in response to Russia’s naval aggression in the Kerch Strait.

    Things have nowhere to go but south at this point.

    If things go south, they wind up in Turkey.

  83. 83.

    Mnemosyne

    @Gin & Tonic:

    Programming Note: I did not exchange any email with him, he tracked down my email address via my blog and I knew better than to engage directly. That way lies even more madness than was on public display here.

  85. 85.

    Gin & Tonic

    @Betty Cracker: I think he was (is?) an ideologically-consumed crackpot. Those here with long memories or an interest in searching the archives can find plenty of evidence via his “theories” on the origin of AIDS. While politically dissimilar, he reminded me of some LaRouchies I’ve had the displeasure of encountering years ago.

  87. 87.

    GregB

    By the way, the official Trump line has now gone from “No one in my campaign had contact with Russians” to “Why didn’t Mueller talk to the people in my campaign who didn’t have contact with the Russians?”

  88. 88.

    TenguPhule

    @Corner Stone:

    It does make one wonder why the white fundies actually *wanted* brown babies.

    They read a Modest Proposal and thought it sounded mighty fine.

  89. 89.

    sm*t cl*de

    @Corner Stone:

    It does make one wonder why the white fundies actually *wanted* brown babies.

    At some level they may realise that the ‘brownness’ of Central-American asylum-seekers is a feaure of racial ideology rather than actual skin coloration.

  90. 90.

    J R in WV

    @Cermet:

    While in the US it is really the Admirals that control the real policy decisions for the active military (under leadership and direction of the orange fart cloud), so far as I know, they stick to military issues only.

    Nope. Just not accurate. Admirals are ONLY for the US Navy, Generals do everything else, Army, Air Force (with the Minuteman II missles and the Strategic Air Command long range nuclear bombers) and the Marine Corps.

    Admirals do the SSBM submarines, aircraft carriers, etc. The Army has no role so far as I know in any of the triad of nuclear deterrent forces. Our current policy is to only launch a nuclear attack in response to a detected attack on our nation, which would prompt a pre-arranged counter attack on the attacking nation(s). Cheryl or Adam can correct this if any of it is wrong.

    My dog is sleeping beside me, and is engaged in an illegal gas attack on me. Oooh that’s bad!

  92. 92.

    Mnemosyne

    @Gin & Tonic:

    Yep. The kids “adopted” this way are treated as second-class citizens inside their new “homes” and expected to be eternally grateful for being “rescued” by Good Christian People. Any display of temper or emotion is harshly punished.

    There have been cases where kids who were adopted from overseas by “Christian” families have died from the abuse that was meted out. I fully expect to hear about another rash of similar cases in about 4 or 5 years when the new “parents” get frustrated that they’re not getting the docile little automatons they were promised and instead are having to deal with traumatized children.

  96. 96.

    Neldob

    Thank you for keeping this up front and not under the rug. It should be on the front page of every newspaper like they did to the hostages in Iran back in the day. How many days kidnapped children have been separated from their families… etc. ranting.

  97. 97.

    MomSense

    @Betty Cracker:

    He was a crackpot and a regular commenter at Booman’s Place. I think he accused you, OO, and I of posting from our cubicles at the CIA where we ran some kind of psy ops.

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