Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

with the Kraken taking a plea, the Cheese stands alone.

DeSantis transforms Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

“In the future, this lab will be a museum. don’t touch it.”

Somebody needs to explain to DeSantis that nobody needs to do anything to make him look bad.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

I’m just a talker, trying to find a channel!

The new temporary speaker of the house is a spiteful little shit.

He imagines himself as The Big Bad, Who Is Universally Feared… instead of The Big Jagoff, Who Is Universally Mocked.

There is no compromise when it comes to body autonomy. You either have it or you don’t.

Let there be snark.

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

I was confident that someone would point it out and thought why not me.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

The words do not have to be perfect.

A consequence of cucumbers

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the GOP

And so it is for the politically and morally bankrupt Kevin McCarthy.

It’s easier to kill a dangerous animal than a man who just happens to have different thoughts/values than one’s own.

You are here: Home / Foreign Affairs / Saturday Night Horrorshow Open Thread: YOUUUKRANE!!!!

Saturday Night Horrorshow Open Thread: YOUUUKRANE!!!!

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Not much joy in sercon dissection of the latest foreign policy revelations at this hour on a holiday weekend, but: This man is still, theoretically, the Oval Office Occupant’s personal lawyer.

Earlier this month, Rudolph W. Giuliani made an unexpected trip to Ukraine, accompanied by a TV crew from One America News Network (OAN), a little-known American channel to the right of Fox News. Giuliani’s mission was to exonerate his client, President Trump, of the charge in the articles of impeachment that he tried to bribe Ukrainian officials into investigating Joe Biden ahead of the 2020 election, and to dig up incriminating information on Biden and his son Hunter.

The documentary of that trip has now been released, and it tells a truly fantastic tale, as presented by OAN correspondent Chanel Rion. As she and Giuliani tried to uncover the truth, Rion claimed, 1,000 Ukrainian troops were deployed in Kyiv as part of an effort to find them. Once they were found, they raced to the airport, where Jewish Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Pinchuk and Jewish businessman and philanthropist George Soros were waiting for them with “human Dobermans in little black Mercedes.”

For journalists like me who have lived and worked in Ukraine for years, these claims were comical. Kyiv’s main international airport is about as much of a hub for intrigue as La Guardia. There is no evidence of a mobilization of Ukrainian troops in Kyiv while Giuliani and Co. were there. Soros does not live in Ukraine and hasn’t visited since 2016, and no one else has reported Pinchuk lurking at the airport. (Rion later tried to hedge her claim about Pinchuk and Soros, if only halfheartedly.)…

On cable news shows and Twitter, Giuliani has been echoing the same outlandish claims made by the documentary. He stated that one former Ukrainian prosecutor they spoke to who had proof of a Biden conspiracy had been poisoned with mercury, died twice and been revived. With Trump putting on pressure, the Senate Judiciary Committee has agreed to hear Giuliani and his evidence. In short, Giuliani’s claims about information coming from Ukraine look like they are going to become ammunition for Trump’s eventual impeachment trial in the Senate…

Man who wrote the tweet at the top is a former president of Estonia, where they don’t have our (literally) insular privilege to treat all this as a wacky TV serial.

Also, Rudy has a new “communications director”:


Additional nightmare fuel, via Politico: The mystery of Rudy Giuliani’s spokeswoman. Over the river and off the map!

Reader Interactions

135Comments

  1. 1.

    Villago Delenda Est

    One can only wildly speculate what qualifications this 20 year old woman has to be a “communications director”.

  2. 2.

    My Side of Town

    So I will post my most recent comment on facebook:

    Have Evangelicals become the religion of corruption, indecency, and immorality after iTrump
    Their women will be whores, their men will be pimps, their children will be disciples of Lucifer. Their religion will be shunned. Their souls will reside in the same hell as iTrump and his family of thieves.

    Edit or delete this

  4. 4.

    CaseyL

    @Villago Delenda Est:  According to the Politico article, she lies like she breathes, is relentlessly self-promoting, and constantly showing up at important events whether invited or not.

    So, no, Trumpists are not dying off. New ones pop up all the time. If humanity was an Order, in taxonomy terms, then the fastest-growing Family in that Order is parasites.

  8. 8.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @CaseyL: “Shows up at important events whether she’s invited or not”.

    That’s ripped directly from Donald’s playbook!

  9. 9.

    Roger Moore

    @Villago Delenda Est:

    One can only wildly speculate what qualifications this 20 year old woman has to be a “communications director”.

    It’s natural to suspect her primary qualification is as “traveling companion”, and the communications director job is just an excuse to put her on payroll.  It is always possible that she really was hired as communications director, and Giuliani just can’t afford to hire anyone with a more complete resume.

  18. 18.

    feebog

    @Roger Moore:

    It’s natural to suspect her primary qualification is as “traveling companion”, and the communications director job is just an excuse to put her on payroll. It is always possible that she really was hired as communications director, and Giuliani just can’t afford to hire anyone with a more complete resume.

    I’m beginning to understand why Rudy is walking around with his fly open and drooling on his sweater.

  19. 19.

    Shalimar

    My speculation is he likes looking at her.  If she let him get any further than that, she would be getting paid.

  23. 23.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Villago Delenda Est: I think the larger issue, and I had this discussion with a friend the other day because he was in the same doctoral cohort as that Christian Post editor who so publicly quit last week (I was two cohorts ahead of them), is that what that guy doesn’t understand, and what he’s doing in so publicly quitting and how he’s gone about doing so, is that Evangelicalism, and specifically white Evangelicalism, across all the sects is religion as performance, not practice. Evangelicals perform their religion, publicly perform piety, as the practice of their religion because they think this is how they witness the gospels to others. And they mistake this very public performance for actual, personal, and private practice of the actual religion and its tenets. Evangelicalism has very little theology compared to other Christian denominations and sects. It is almost completely dogmatic. And what theology they have, such as their bioethics, is borrowed and not clearly understood because the emphasis on scriptural hyper-literalism privileges dogma and dogmatism over the nuance of theology.

    When this is combined by the fact that white Evangelicalism has always had a heavy component of its leaders scamming and fleecing and grifting their congregants, the affinity for the President and how he behaves, acts, and conducts business becomes much clearer. From the point of view of the adherents, the connection in in the public performance of his identity. For the leadership it is the scaling, fleecing, and grifting through this public performance.

  28. 28.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Villago Delenda Est: I am quite aware. I tried explaining that to the now former editor once in grad school. He didn’t get my point. He grew up in one of the Evangelical sects. If I’m recalling correctly his father is a minister. He’s smart, he means well, I don’t think he has a mean bone in his body, but he’s not very self aware. Nor is he introspective. Also, and I say this as someone who actually respects and appreciates what he has done and was once the strategic communication advisor, among my other duties, for an Army program, he needs serious coaching before going on CNN again. He was terrible.

  29. 29.

    NotMax

    @Adam L. Silverman
    Flash from the past (and a perhaps unexpected side of the fence):

    “Our problem is with these neoconservatives, the radical right, the religious extremists whose interpretation is very narrow, and who want to destroy everyone who doesn’t agree with them. I see them as betrayers of the fundamental principles of conservatism. A lot of so-called conservatives don’t know what the word means.”
      – Barry Goldwater

  30. 30.

    Jay

    Shocking! Russian spies involved in Catalonia referendum. Who would have thought? To date Russia has ran operations in over 35 countries to attempt to sow chaos/assist in installing Kremlin friendly politicians who in return will weaken post WW2 allianceshttps://t.co/noEvlFOhE2— Olga Lautman (@olgaNYC1211) December 28, 2019

    Kyiv Court of Appeal just released 5 murderers who were accused of killing 48 Maidan protesters. Tomorrow is the prisoner exchange and Russia has requested them on the list. Horrific— Olga Lautman (@olgaNYC1211) December 28, 2019

  32. 32.

    Roger Moore

    @Villago Delenda Est:

    Performance is pretty much totally at odds with Matthew 6:5.

    Sure, and the Prosperity Gospel is totally at odds with everything that Jesus taught.  This ties in to Adam’s point about Evangelicalism going for dogmatism over theology.  For all they talk about Biblical literalism and the importance of reading the Bible, they mostly depend on other people to interpret it for them, and those people are free to come up with the most strained interpretations to justify what they already believe.

  33. 33.

    Raoul

    Driving up the Avenue of the Saints today (the linkage of St Louis and St Paul, but we took it to Minneapolis, as we’re philistines), I saw just beyond the shoulder in some rural eastern Iowa area (I think perhaps north of Waterloo), a landowner had put up a very tall cross, and on it mounted a sign saying:

    Protect Our

    Heritage

    I remarked to the BF that I didn’t really think this sign was about their Christian heritage, but rather their white, rural, formerly more blatantly KKK heritage. (OK, I had to look that last part up after arriving home. And ugh, what a drive. 6 hours of fog, followed by 3 hours of rain with temps falling from 39 to 33 deg. No ice, thankfully, and made it home in one piece!)

  40. 40.

    Jay

    OCCRP has named Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat the OCCRP 2019 Person of the Year in Organized Crime and Corruption. Other finalists were Donald J. Trump, Rudy Giuliani & Denis Christel Sassou Nguesso, son of the president of the DRC.https://t.co/dRe0hssOkW— Anders Åslund (@anders_aslund) December 27, 2019

  42. 42.

    Ruckus

    I like her picture on the left that looks like she has her hands behind her head, as some are told to do when being arrested so they can easily be handcuffed from behind and one can always see the hands.

  43. 43.

    Roger Moore

    @Raoul:

    I remarked to the BF that I didn’t really think this sign was about their Christian heritage, but rather their white, rural, formerly more blatantly KKK heritage.

    I don’t think you can separate the two. Christianity has long been used to justify pre-existing cultural beliefs regardless of whether the correspond to what Jesus said.

  44. 44.

    HalfAssedHomesteader

    @Anne Laurie: It’s almost like they’ve internalized Trump’s cheating of contractors. Why bother charging when you know you’ll never get paid anyway?  Save yourself the aggravation and humiliation and just say you’re working for free.

  45. 45.

    Jay

    Rudy did a documentary with OAN that seemed to be targeted directly to Trump rather than any rational viewer. Big name stars like "Andrii Telizhenko, Michaelo Okhendovsky, Andrii Artemenko" provided tabloid quality proof to clear impeachment accusations. https://t.co/oKpN9qCz0o— Robert Young Pelton (@RYP__) December 28, 2019

  50. 50.

    NotMax

    @Adam L. Silverman

    Entirely unrelated other than being unexpected, recently came across this from Douglas MacArthur:

    “Our country is now geared to an arms economy bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and an incessant propaganda of fear.”

  51. 51.

    Kent

    @Adam L Silverman: I recall reading it back in the day.  But it’s worth another read.  After Trump we tend to forget how horrible the other “mainstream” GOPers like Romney, and of course Bush were.  But it is one long thread going back to Reagan, or perhaps Goldwater.

  52. 52.

    Jay

    @HalfAssedHomesteader:

    In the “New Meritocracy” this is an Internship. Attach yourself like a remora to someone “famous”, feed off the flotsam and “network” your way into the Griftopia.

    The money comes later.

  53. 53.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Raoul:Actually, I think that means “protect our hate” because “heritage, not hate” is on of the slogans of the neo-Confederates who hates them some darkies.

  54. 54.

    Jay

    NEW: I went to 'TRUMPSTOCK' in rural AZ for my latest story on white identity and the GOP. How white fears + conspiracy binds the base to POTUS, and how, for many Trump voters, his 2016 story starts w/ birtherism, not that escalator. I hope you'll read ithttps://t.co/mk9fmHkXo9— Steadman™ (@AsteadWesley) December 28, 2019

  65. 65.

    NotMax

    @Adam L. Silverman
    Filling the void.

    A Florida man who accidentally shot himself in the leg while “playing cowboy” lied about the incident because he’s not supposed to own a gun, according to the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office. Source

    Walt Disney World employees who portray Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse and Donald Duck each filed police reports this month claiming they were inappropriately touched by tourists. Source

  72. 72.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Jay: Let’s put these together – the economic anxiety of not being able to own black people as property anymore.

  77. 77.

    The Pale Scot

    @Adam L Silverman:

    specifically white Evangelicalism, across all the sects is religion as performance, not practice

    That has always offended me, the whole Jack Chick “if a serial murderer declares a certain long-haired Iron Age socialist is his “personal savior” (what ever that means) moments before he’s hung his slate is clean yada yada. The hippy specifically said that public demonstration is hypocrisy. None more illiterate than the Sola Scriptura crowd.

    To follow on the Jews don’t proselytize comments in the last thread. It seems to me that most religions don’t. Just the ones that were run by con artists. Paul, Constantine, that other guy were in it for the power and the mulla. The tenacity of the Hebrew faith was twisted into blind obedience useful to TPTB.  How else does a power dieting ascetic become a chubby with a gold fetish? Maybe all religions would, they just haven’t found the marketing strategy.

    How it was explained to me is that the Druze decided to keep it in the shade to avoid Sunni bigotry. They were handy to have around against the Crusaders, but once the barbarians were gone the Sunnis got down their favorite game “who’s the heretic?”

  79. 79.

    Adam L Silverman

    @The Pale Scot:

    How else does a power dieting ascetic become a chubby with a gold fetish? 

    If you’re referring to Ho Ti the laughing Buddha, this is an example of religious syncretism. When Buddhism moved into China it absorbed the local deities as avatars of the historical Buddha. It is why you have the laughing Buddha, the Buddha of Compassion (Kwan Yin), the Buddha of War, etc, etc. These avatars, or boddhisatvas, were a bridge from the older traditions to the new ones.

    You see this in other religions, almost all secondary. For instance, the reason we have a dog breed named St. Bernard is because when the Christian missionary named Bernard got to that part of the Alps the locals worship the dog. So he got one. And associated himself and the religion he was teaching with the dog in an ultimately successful attempt to move the locals worship from the dog to Jesus through the Church.

  82. 82.

    Villago Delenda Est

    I might that ONAN is a Trump propaganda channel, on the order of Pravda or Deutsche Beobachter.

  92. 92.

    Anne Laurie

    @Adam L Silverman: Evangelicals perform their religion, publicly perform piety, as the practice of their religion because they think this is how they witness the gospels to others. And they mistake this very public performance for actual, personal, and private practice of the actual religion and its tenets.

    Quoted for truth!

    And this clarifies a recent conversation for me, with a long-term acquaintance who grew up religious & working-class in the South.  He’s ‘matured’ into prosperous Episcopalianism, but he became extremely agitated during a discussion of religious symbols on public lands… because, he kept insisting, if he couldn’t proclaim his faith even in absentia, his religious freedom had been compromised!!!

    If ‘performance’ is the mainstream of one’s religious behavior, it would make more sense than my (unexpressed) religious conviction that public display of one’s faith is like public display of the bodily functions — you can’t always help sneezing (or worse) at a party, but making a point of calling attention to your momentary slip is just rude.   We all may have ’em, but not that many people wanna see yours at the bus stop or the drive-thru…

  93. 93.

    James E Powell

    I’m settling in for a good night’s sleep after watching my beloved Buckeyes shoot themselves in the foot enough to lose to Clemson. Victory eluded us, but that’s no matter. Next year we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine evening —-

    Now the question for tomorrow is, do I start watching The Witcher or 6 Underground?

  94. 94.

    Mary G

    Five people stabbed in apparent anti-Semitic attack at a Hanukkah party tonight in a rabbi’s home in Monsey, NY. Possibly no fatalities. #Gun control now
    ETA:

    In November, a man was stabbed while walking to a Monsey synagogue. The man required surgery. It’s unknown if the person suspected in that stabbing has been arrested.

    Around New York City, police have gotten at least six reports this week — and eight since Dec. 13 — of attacks possibly propelled by anti-Jewish bias.

    I live in Monsey, NY. We are all terrified.

    — Eliyahu Fink (@efink) December 29, 2019

  95. 95.

    Martin

    @Adam L Silverman: I thought it was a very interesting observation that conservatives choose their religion to match their politics, not the other way around, which is why cries of hypocrisy by the left doesn’t land – we have it backward.

    So that’s just part of the performance.

  96. 96.

    Bruuuuce

    @Mary G: News is that gun sales in those communities are rising fast. That’s bad in whole lots of ways, from the usual (kids finding them or angry shooters) to the possibility of right-wing slander about “disloyal Jews preparing for revolution” and massive preemptive strikes that are officially sanctioned or looked the other way from.

     

    To compound the problem, now the Guardian Angels have announced that they’re going to patrol Jewish neighborhoods. Just what we need, is a group that wants to bash heads in an area already seeing too much violence.

    Do. Not. Like. (fsvo of that =”oy, sheeeeeit!”)

  98. 98.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Mary G: It could have been much, much worse. If this happened anywhere but New York, which has pretty strong firearms laws and regulations, the attacker would have more likely used a gun, even a handgun, not a knife. The fact that the attacker used a knife and not a gun is likely to make this, while bad, a less than lethal attack.

  99. 99.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Bruuuuce:

    News is that gun sales in those communities are rising fast. That’s bad in whole lots of ways, from the usual (kids finding them or angry shooters) to the possibility of right-wing slander about “disloyal Jews preparing for revolution” and massive preemptive strikes that are officially sanctioned or looked the other way from.

    Gun sales are up across all ethnic and religious minorities, as well as the LGBTQ community. Given the amount of white supremacy, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, xenophobia, and nativism that has been mainstreamed over the past three years and given official top cover by the President and some of his most senior and notable aides and surrogates, I’m not sure anyone can tell a member of one or more of these groups that they shouldn’t consider arming themselves however they see fit for self defense purposes. I’d argue this includes appropriate training and storage. The one truth amid all the lies and spin and barbered history that the 2nd Amendment absolutists regularly tell is that gun control in the US has historically been done by the white Christian majority to disarm non-white and non-Christian minorities in order to make it easier to oppress them.

  100. 100.

    NotMax

    @James E Powell

    If violence is not offputting to you, you might check out the Sundance TV series Hap and Leonard, available on Netflix (and also. IIRC, Prime).

    Although increasingly heavy-handed as the seasons progress, quite well cast and fetchingly enough filmed to stick with.

  101. 101.

    Bruuuuce

    @Adam L Silverman:  Yes, all of what you say is true, including that members of minorities have reason to arm. Doesn’t make it less sad, especially as most won’t get the training and many won’t use proper storage, continuing to prove that shootings are directly proportional to the number of guns available.

    I’m just glad this isn’t happening during the hot, long, summer of a Presidential campaign that includes the wannabe-Fuhrer.

  106. 106.

    Jay

    @sab:

    funny thing is, when I went back to the front page and reloaded, it was fine, but when I was staying in the thread, nothing but 502’s in the 604.

  110. 110.

    sab

    Wide awake at 4 am in my time zone. I would love to go downstairs and do something/anything, but I do not want to wake up any of our five cats. Sigh.

  113. 113.

    Bruuuuce

    @Amir Khalid: Thanks. Mostly okay, though I could use three months off of work and $25K to handle various non-life-threatening but problematic body parts (eyes, teeth, feet). I do read here, but have recently gotten to the point where I’m on the phone more than the desktop (especially at work), which dissuades me from commenting unless it’s really important.

  114. 114.

    Amir Khalid

    I just took a moment to put The Girl in Keef tuning: removed the 6th string and saddle, and retuned to 5-string open G. Surprisingly quick job. I look forward to many happy hours of Stones riffs.

  115. 115.

    frosty

    @Amir Khalid: I expect you’ll find the shuffle rhythm in Keef tuning is so easy you won’t want to go back. I never mastered playing the 6th with my pinky while barring an E fingering. It’s been open tunings (and slide) for me for a long time now.

  117. 117.

    Amir Khalid

    @germy:

    This Christianné L Allen person also bleeds white and blue? Has she spoken to her doctor about this?

    Also, too: Christianné?

  118. 118.

    germy

    Interesting thread on writers:

    Writers have been culturally poised between two bad stereotypes:

    1) The insecure worm crippled by anxiety and self doubt.

    2) The Hemingway bravura monster who needs nothing except booze, a secure place in history and an early death.

    Join me in rejecting both.

    — Michael Green (@andmichaelgreen) December 29, 2019

  120. 120.

    Richard Guhl

    @Adam L Silverman:  It’s critical to always keep in mind that white evangelicalism is descended from the sects that vociferously defended both slavery and secession. Their hyperliteralism and dogmatic approach to scripture was born out of their need to explain why the worst institution ever created by human imagination was actually morally good.
    One need only google Waco lynching to understand what they really stand for.
    A first century Jew put it succinctly when he declared that a bad tree cannot bear good fruit.

  121. 121.

    Amir Khalid

    @Adam L Silverman:

    I have always liked this succinct illustration of Evangelical Christians’ idea of virtue:

    I was drivin’ home early one morning through Bakersfield,

    Listenin’ to gospel music on the colored radio station

    When the preacher said, YOU KNOW YOU ALWAYS HAVE THE LORD BY YOUR SIDE!!

    I was so pleased to be informed of this that I ran twenty red lights in His honor

    Thank you Jesus, thank you Lord

    — The Rolling Stones

  124. 124.

    Miss Bianca

    @kindness: it’s so weird, since the decline of actual newsprint newspapers and therefore of the funny pages, I keep forgetting that comic strips I’ve loved all my life, like “Doonesbury”, still publish – online.

  127. 127.

    jc

    The Onan network is to the right of Fox News? I don’t think they’re to the “right” — the reason they appeal to Trump is because they’re even more willing to say whatever will benefit Trump, and thereby themselves, or give them political advantage. Just like Trump. It isn’t about where they sit on the political spectrum, they’re just shameless opportunists who will cheat however is necessary in order to “win.” Just like Trump.

  128. 128.

    Kathleen

    @Anne Laurie: I’m not even going to write the first thing that popped in my mind when I saw her picture and “bio”. And it has nothing to do with a relationship with Rudy.

  129. 129.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @Adam L Silverman: The narrative I was told about modern American Evangelicalism; American society goes threw these cycles of belief and skepticism, WW2 happened during a belief cycle. This got unnaturally extended by the Cold War, the Soviets were atheists so we Americans were Christians. End result in the ’50s preachers were making fat bank then because everyone went to church.  Then came the 70s, the Cold War eased up and the cycle started moving again and that meant skepticism is on the rise, church attendance plummeted.

    Naturally this was a horror story to all these preachers who were seeing their business decline, a group of preachers like Bill Graham came up with Charismatic Christianity, which is basically using sales and marketing methods bring people back to church.  That’s why they all sound like door to do door salesmen, because they are.  It’s not about did the person embrace the belief, it’s was the pitch enough to make the sale. This is also why Evangelicalism is so white male, that’s the target demographic and it’s commandments are “Don’t be poor”, “Don’t be a homosexual”, all easy stuff for a middle class, heterosexual white male.

    Even then, from 2000 on, religious belief in the US has been imploding and heading towards European lines of 33% believer 33% agnostic and 33% unbeliever. This will not do for this big business Mega Churches, the pastor has his vacation home and Mercedes to pay for. So now they’ve up the game to outright mind control cult were the believers entire social life are in the church, so if they say something their pastor doesn’t approve of they get shunned by their friends and family.  In other words lots of Evangelicals don’t believe this nonsense, but they have to say it publicly.  Jones Town, here we come on a nation wide scale.

    Also, let us not forget the children, who are overwhelmingly unbelievers because having hypocrites scream in their face for years about how these kids are worthless sinners and they needed to grow up and be like the hypocrite. Lot’s of broken families because of Evangelicalism.

    I suspect that bit about the mind control cult aspect is something you would have a lot to say about Adam with your background if you looked into it.

  130. 130.

    Jinchi

    @Jay: The money comes later.

    In Giuliani’s case it comes now. He gets it by selling access to American power.

    It’s a sign of how corrupted our politics have become that Giuliani could publicly declare he was working pro-bono for a billionaire American president and it took years before the press thought to ask “Why?”

  131. 131.

    Bill Arnold

    @Martin:

    which is why cries of hypocrisy by the left doesn’t land – we have it backward.
    So that’s just part of the performance.

    The cries of hypocrisy, and Matthew 6:5-6 do land, because they are saying that evangelicals are engaged in unconvincing bad acting, and many rank-and-file evangelicals are quite sincere believers.
    Critics need to make it more explicit though, and much more theologically informed and pointed. Adam mentioned religious syncretism above; the mixing of Republican political dogma and evangelical Christian dogma[1] is a toxic form of religious syncretism.
    [1] both are cobbled-together and deliberately simplified, so the mixing is possible, albeit with additional inconsistencies in the resulting dogma.

  133. 133.

    J R in WV

    @Adam L Silverman: 

    And what theology they have, such as their bioethics, is borrowed and not clearly understood because the emphasis on scriptural hyper-literalism privileges dogma and dogmatism over the nuance of theology.

    And they are very picky about their chosen bit and pieces of their scripture, which excludes all the parts of the Bible about helping others, all the parables of Christ, suffer the little children, etc, etc.

    My understand of Christianity would make anyone participating in caging little kids at the southern border liable for shunning and jail time. But that’s just me, and I’m not a Christian… closer to pagan.

    NOTE to Watergirl: I didn’t get both tabs for this comment post. just the text tool bar, although it isn’t displaying all the code as I type, as I would expect the Text tab to display it. Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS and Firefox 71.0

  134. 134.

    J R in WV

    @Kent:

    But it is one long thread going back to Reagan, or perhaps Goldwater.

    It goes way back before that… remember that FDR, fabulously wealthy scion of ancient heritage, was called a commie for not wanting people to starve during the Hoover Depression.

    And of course, the very idea that the Federal Government might interfere with the Free Market to keep people from starving was out of the question to those “conservatives” !!

    Anti-Trust work by the government was also a communist plot! Trying to keep poison out of the food supply was also un-American! They’ve been feudal lord worshippers and wannabees for at least a century and a half.

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