Sound The TRUMPets! A Thread for Presidential Pondering 2016-2020(?)

[Todd]

Also . . . a fleeting but telling example of how Republicans are unable to conceal their contempt for Trump's harebrained ideas.

Ms Rubin's case would be stronger if she could point out where Trump suggested the Constitution needed to be changed as a result of the budget deal.  Maybe she thinks filibustering has its basis in the Constitution rather than tradition, or that a temporary shutdown of the government - essential employees excluded - is somehow unconstitutional.  If so, the Amazon Post may want to hire better op-ed scribblers.

[drogulus]

     He wants to amend the First Amendment to make it harder to say bad things about him. The filibuster is a tradition, one that McConnell said he wanted to protect when he was in his man of principle phase.

     The government has abandoned the practice of holding hearings for important legislation like repeal and replace. It draws attention to matters that are no business for ordinary citizens. Donors don't need no hearings to write legislation. Their representatives don't need them, they know who they represent and what for.

     We can see now that some unreformed Repubs hate the Obama part of ObamaCare quite a bit more than the care part. It was initially HeritageCare, then RomneyCare, then Obama tainted it. The only fix for that would involve a time machine that allowed Repubs to pass such a plan before the Kenyan Socialist dictatorship embraced it.

     Give Obama credit, that was one fine piece of political Jiu Jitsu to get Repubs to unanimously oppose their own "alternative" and make it law, forcing them to reach their present wallow in nihilism and cruelty.

[Todd]

He wants to amend the First Amendment to make it harder to say bad things about him.

True, though this will fail, but Ms Rubin specifically tied changes to the Constitution to the filibuster and the budget process.*  You're conflating two different things. 

* What she wrote: In other words, the thin-skinned president's ego was bruised, so he lashed out, suggesting that the Constitution needed to be changed so that he would not be out-negotiated again.

[snyprrr]

"Fair and square"? That depends upon how fair or square anyone might think failure to achieve a majority of the popular vote to be (irrespective of the way in which the system in US "works")...

why did you cut off the part about the ClintonBodyCount?

[snyprrr]

Setting aside questions of what I understand about socialists or churches (whose relevance here escapes me rather) thank you for exemplifying my point that for some voters, Clinton corruption is Bad, and the gaze is artfully turned away from El Tupé corruption.

Breaking news:  Clinton lost.  But rather than open one's eyes to El Tupé's con, focus on the Clinton bugbear.

The latest sign of The Con:

Republican voters supposedly elected a "fighter," yet neither the president nor the Republican leadership seem to have fought for much of anything in this round.

maybe her point is that you seem not to believe there IS any ClintonKorrupshun, and that is why it needs to be hammered. As for you and your constant "he's lying about the color of his underwear", well, uh,... isn't it obvious you're coming to this with some of your own personal baggage?

So WHAT if Trump is a lying cheating stealing scumbag... it didn't bother you about Clinton, so, ergo, it doesn't bother Trumpsters about him. Pit, pat, poof!! There, done.

And again, haven't heard a peep from anyone about President Kushner...


seems to me, Karl, that you're running interference for President Kushner by paying sooooooooooo much attention to the man IN FRONT OF THE CURTAIN, instead of wondering who might be BEHIND the orange curtain. So, you're just a Karl Rove wanna be, is that it, Karl? That's a pretty risky gambit you got going...


z-bird made a good point about the churches and politicians, and you act like you don't know what she's saying, - oy vey





I had wanted to bring up this Stravinsky/Mussolini love affair thing, where Iggy goes on to say something like, "Oh, well, maybe I AM a fascist after all.."

[Karl Henning]

why did you cut off the part about the ClintonBodyCount?

You don't get it that "Clinton Scare" is not any defense of El Tupé.

Repeat after me:  She lost the election.  She lost the election.  She's no use as a scapegoat anymore.

[Karl Henning]

maybe her point is that you seem not to believe there IS any ClintonKorrupshun

If that is the point, it is mistaken.

The point is that in May of 2017, Clinton corruption is no justification of The Lumbering El Tupé Swamp Monster.

[Todd]

snypss, the rule in the US is this: If your opponent is right of center at all, he or she is a fascist, or at least a horrible authoritarian; if your opponent is left of center at all, he or she is a socialist, or at least blinded by Political Correctness.

[arpeggio]

Karl,

Unlike some I like you posts.

As a former Goldwater Conservative, I can see the elephant in the room.

One of the reasons I left the conservative movement is that I discovered that how conservatives characterized liberals was completely bogus.  I recently had a discussion with a conservative friend who blamed liberals of believing something.  I can not remember what it was but that is really not the point.  When I told him that I had never met a liberal who felt that way he started arguing with me that I was wrong and all liberals were like that.

I found that most liberals are pretty open minded and tolerant of opposing points of view.  You can rarely convince a conservative of that.  We have 300 million people in the US.  I am sure we can find a hundred thousand who think all conservatives should be banished from the country.  If conservatives really understood liberals they would find that we have more in common than they think.

What has happened in this election is that we are very angry at what has just happened.  Conservatives think that we liberals hate America and they have to fight us to protect America.  That is completely bogus.  In order to protect our values we are going to have to fight back.  They feel that they have a mandate to do whatever they want and they really do not.  No more touchy feely.

[drogulus]

True, though this will fail, but Ms Rubin specifically tied changes to the Constitution to the filibuster and the budget process.*  You're conflating two different things. 

* What she wrote: In other words, the thin-skinned president's ego was bruised, so he lashed out, suggesting that the Constitution needed to be changed so that he would not be out-negotiated again.

     I was conflating one different thing. I don't know what Rubin is referring to.

[drogulus]

I found that most liberals are pretty open minded and tolerant of opposing points of view.

     In a selfish kind of way, that's so. I mean that for the purpose of arriving at decisions about what the future will be like liberals, whose business the future is, must foster arguments that oppose each other and hold ideas provisionally while they thrash it out.  The culture war over political correctness and forms of identity politics is within the liberal left. Conservatives have nothing to offer unless they adopt liberal arguments against illiberal leftism. If they formulate these arguments better than liberals do, good on them. Only liberal arguments matter for tolerance, and conservatives know this when they know something. I used to marvel at how the conservatives could only use liberal arguments against postmoderist truthyism, just as I marvel now at how totally postmodernly truthyist conservatism has become.

[drogulus]

     The Trump administration hired an official who was accused of sexually assaulting five students

     If the WH vetted the guy, was it for or against? I'm just asking, because well.....you know.

     Dept. of Decline and Fall:

     I was talking to my brother today, who is far more plugged in than I am about what's coming down the road. He says TrumPutin is much worse than what the media has been willing to describe thus far.  Basically investigators are well past the point of speculation about how double sided the operation was. Putin did not "gift" Trump. Trump did not just publicly ask Russia/WikiLeaks to run black ops against his opponent. I don't think he would commit an impeachable offense by getting himself taped trying to obstruct the Russia investigation if there wasn't something bigger he was trying to ward off. At last we have a *****Gate worthy of the original.

[Florestan]

I found that most liberals are pretty open minded and tolerant of opposing points of view. 

Except when they are not, which is often the case on campuses.

And not only in the US: in France highschool pupils marched recently chanting "Ni Macron, ni le Pen!", thus showing not only that they are immature, but that there is little hope they will ever grow up.

[zamyrabyrd]

Except when they are not, which is often the case on campuses.
And not only in the US: in France highschool pupils marched recently chanting "Ni Macron, ni le Pen!", thus showing not only that they are immature, but that there is little hope they will ever grow up.

Bien sur, and if you don't want to bake them a cake...

[drogulus]

Except when they are not, which is often the case on campuses.

     There are illiberal leftists on college campuses who encourage illiberal traits in students (not that they don't have them on their own). Free speech threatens their fiefdoms. More traditional liberals went to war against the trend, and there were some conservatives who joined in on the liberal side, supporting objectivity, fairness and open debate. I hope conservatives will continue to support values they hold in common with liberals, those that do.

[Todd]

If Reuters is to be believed, the US will place less emphasis on human rights as it pertains to foreign policy.  It's about time, though I am skeptical that the entire diplomatic corps, or even a majority of it, will really toe the new party line.  Institutional inertia, even at an agency facing deep cuts, is hard to reverse.

[amw]

Friendly reminder for some people here who seem to need it.

I do want to find some way to work the phrase "traveling horror show of deranged murder-cultists" into casual conversation somehow.

[Karl Henning]

People don't realize, you know, the Civil War, if you think about it, why? People don't ask that question, but why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?

What is most alarming (and mortifying to the University of Pennsylvania, from which he graduated) is not that [El Tupé] has entered his eighth decade unscathed by even elementary knowledge about the nation's history. As this column has said before, the problem isn't that he does not know this or that, or that he does not know that he does not know this or that. Rather, the dangerous thing is that he does not know what it is to know something.

The United States is rightly worried that a strange and callow leader controls North Korea's nuclear arsenal. North Korea should reciprocate this worry.

C'mon, George, give him a chance! Your criticism is "over the top"!

[André]

Republicans want to exempt their own insurance from their latest health care proposal.


https://www.vox.com/2017/4/25/15429982/gop-exemption-ahca-amendment

[Karl Henning]

G.O.P. Congressmen have a pre-existing condition, and it's costing the American public.