"The butt of global jokes": who might this be? (Talk Trump)

[Animavore]

And yet still Trump supporters, drunk on power and completely lacking sefl-control, won't say, "Enough!"

[Seabass]

So some nutjob Trump worshipper just tried to assassinate a bunch of people who have been targets of Trump vilification, and Trump's secretary of the Department of Homeland Security is down at the border doing Fox News interviews and assuring us that there are currently no plans to shoot at the men, women, and children in the migrant caravan that is currently over a thousand miles away.


DHS Secretary says no plans ‘right now’ to shoot at migrant caravan
https://thinkprogress.org/kirstjen-niel ... f2b9fd934/

[Scot Dutchy]

They can put up Farage's poster at the border. Fill in the empty space.

[Seabass]

I cannot for the life of me understand how so many of these idiots are dumb enough to fall for this guy's horseshit.

Trump Says Democrats Won’t Protect Patients With Pre-Existing Conditions, His Most Bizarre and Extravagant Lie About Health Care Yet
https://slate.com/business/2018/10/trum ... s-lie.html

Donald Trump lies. Extravagantly. Obviously. Constantly. He is especially prone to lying about public policy issues where he is on the wrong side of public opinion (or, if you want to split hairs, he has a habit of saying untrue things that he may or may not personally understand to be false, and that he often appears to make up from whole cloth). And now that we are approaching the final days of the midterm races, his flights of fabulism seem to be reaching bizarre new altitudes. For instance:



This is the sort of night is day, black is white, opposite-day variety of lie that Trump sometimes resorts to when he is desperate or frustrated—the health care equivalent of when he stood on stage with Hillary Clinton and insisted, “I’m not the puppet! You’re the puppet!” Republicans spent much of 2017 attempting to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which bans insurers from discriminating against patients with pre-existing conditions. Democrats fought to protect it. Meanwhile, the White House has backed a federal lawsuit in Texas that seeks to strike down all of Obamacare, including its pre-existing condition rules, as unconstitutional. To say Democrats “will not” protect Americans with pre-existing conditions, while Republicans “totally” will is a simply surreal and childlike argument.

[Animavore]

They're winning.

[Tero]

Elsewhere

Maybe Trump has a point about the media not doing the country any favors.

Er, no. The story has to have some relation to reality. Trump says something: it has some relevance to some current issues. But it has always been given some spin. Half the time it is just a lie.

It’s not the press’s fault if they have to use facts!

[Animavore]

The President* Is Totally Unaffected By Events in the Country He Governs

Except for his concern about how the bombs and shootings affect him and his cheap political ends.

CHARLOTTE, N.C.—On Friday night, the President* of the United States held one of his now-familiar rallies here. Friday was the day that law enforcement arrested the man allegedly behind the attempted murder by bombing of two ex-presidents, one ex-senator and Secretary of State, several members of Congress, and an odd lot of pundits, newspeople, and other stars of cable television who for whatever reason had touched off his fevered brain.

Friday was the day that a heavily armed man in Kentucky tried to shoot up an African American church and, foiled because the door to the churchwas locked, went next door and killed two African American people at a grocery store. Friday was the day before a gunman shot up a synagogue in Pittsburgh in the country's 275th mass shooting of 2018. This is how the president* of the United States began his address on Friday night as his adoring acolytes clapped and cheered.

"Packages and devices."

"A number of high-profile individuals."

He couldn't say "bombs." Worse, he couldn't even say any names. He couldn't say, "Barack and Michelle Obama," or "Bill and Hillary Clinton," or "Maxine Waters," or "John Brennan," or even "CNN." But he found room later in his speech to use some of their names to draw adoring applause and angry chants from the mindless drones who turn out to watch him stroke himself, and all of them, until the ragegasm rises and sends them spiraling upwards into orgiastic glee in the misfortune of others.

He went on to explain why he, himself, and all of them, were the real victims of the past week. We quote from the CSPAN transcript of his remarks so that all of the audience reaction is available.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/p ... 3Dq1qu5SZ4

[JimC]

His political philosophy is centred on division and hatred, which is why I will always use the acronym DSA instead of the USA...

[Scot Dutchy]

His political philosophy is centred on division and hatred, which is why I will always use the acronym DSA instead of the USA...

Adversarial politics.

[Svartalf]

like adversarial justice, it's bound to produce horrors.

[Brian Peacock]

There's nothing wrong with adversarial politics if all parties approach it with a sense of civil duty and with respect for democratic institutions and processes - where such institutions and processes are robust and secure of course.

[Svartalf]

problem is that , in the US at least, at least one party has forgotten all this, and I don't swear the other hasn't either

As for the UK, I'll trust your judgment, but I wouldn't trust the tories even if I were paid to... and the whigs are little better when I think of the last string of labour PMs.

[Scot Dutchy]

There's nothing wrong with adversarial politics if all parties approach it with a sense of civil duty and with respect for democratic institutions and processes - where such institutions and processes are robust and secure of course.

Everything is wrong with adversarial politics. One of our greatest statesmen died last week. He was the father of consensus politics in all walks of life. He introduced the "Polder Model". He always said the talking is never finished. Something never learnt in the UK. He was one of the greatest post war trade union leaders.

[Svartalf]

well, not to support Dutchy, but Frump as POTUS is the pure and unadulterated fruit of US adversarial politics... the will to win, and the demonisation of the other side have led them to choose the most unsuitable canidate for the post, problem is, thanks to an obsolete and unjust indirect suffrage system, he won to boot, and now the US are the laughingstock of the world, or would be if there wasn't a dangerous moron in possession of the nuclear codes.

[Brian Peacock]

There's nothing wrong with adversarial politics if all parties approach it with a sense of civil duty and with respect for democratic institutions and processes - where such institutions and processes are robust and secure of course.

Everything is wrong with adversarial politics. One of our greatest statesmen died last week. He was the father of consensus politics in all walks of life. He introduced the "Polder Model". He always said the talking is never finished. Something never learnt in the UK. He was one of the greatest post war trade union leaders.

I think you need to expand your definition of politics to account for the fact that different political parties compete adversarially for public attention, then acknowledge that systems like the Polder model represent the aforementioned democratic institutions and processes, before drawing a hard line between what you call adversarial and consensus politics. I await your equivocation in earnest.