45th President of the United States of America

Mr. Magoo wrote:

It's still a good thing that Trump won, and not Clinton.  She'd have dropped two of them, probably.  You know her!

That is one thing one could get from it. As far as I am concerned the job of POTUS includes doing what the real rulers want. Trump lasted nearly four months before being maneuvered into following orders. Hilary we all knew would be happy to take orders from the same players. 

You don't actually believe the US is a functioning democracy, do you? As long as he keeps the bombing class happy he will not have to worry about being impeached. Bonus points for Trump that the bloddthirsty American voters have started taking a shine to him now that he is acting tough and firing off his penis.

Quote:

I remember several people here saying don't bother to vote however that is such bad advice as things like a Trump Presidency occurs when people don't bother to vote

That advice (and/or, the fact that significant numbers of electors seem to take it) also means that it's just plain silly to ever say "the fix was in" on any election.

How can the results of any election be "inevitable" if 35% of the electorate stayed home for "Netflix and Chill"?

Who could NOT have won, instead of losing, with the electoral support of those 35%?  Sure, I guess the People's Patriotic Animal Marijuana Party, with 0.2% + 35%, but pretty much anyone else?  Yes, they could have.

Trump pardons former sheriff Joe Arpaio

Quote:

The action came several days after Trump, at a rally in downtown Phoenix, strongly hinted that he intended to issue a pardon.

“So was Sheriff Joe was convicted for doing his job?” Trump asked supporters. “I’ll make a prediction. I think he’s going to be just fine, OK.”

This should really be the topic of several different threads.

One on how Trump ignores and belittles the judicial branch.

One on how Trump scratches the backs of "friends" even in his role as POTUS.

One on how Trump doesn't really care at all about you if you're brown.

And just for fun, one "wild card" thread for anything I didn't mention.

Fucks sake.  Arpaio wasn't even sentenced before The Donald decided his sentence was too harsh.  This isn't even a "dog whistle" -- it's just a regular whistle that everyone can hear, including dogs.

Rev Pesky wrote:

That would fit in perfectly with his petulant 10-year-old personality. The only hope now is that he is either impeached, or resigns fairly quickly. Unfortunately many of the House Republicans are 'Tea Party' Republicans, and the impeachment won't happen without a serious  battle within that party. I think the Senate is more likely to accept that Trump has to go. The House has been more or less gerrymandered, but you can't gerrymander the Senate.

Impeachment only takes a majority, conviction in the Senate a two/thirds majority. Voter supression works in the Senate as well as the House.

Matt Taibbi argues that the media is largely responsible for creating the conditions that enabled Trump to become POTUS. His conclusion:

Matt Taibbi wrote:

Donald Trump didn't just take advantage of these conditions. He was created in part by them. What's left of Trump's mind is like a parody of the average American media consumer: credulous, self-centered, manic, sex-obsessed, unfocused, and glued to stories that appeal to his sense of outrage and victimhood.

We've created a generation of people like this: anger addicts who can't read past the first page of a book. This is why the howls of outrage from within the ranks of the news media about Trump's election ring a little bit false. What the hell did we expect would happen? Who did we think would rise to prominence in our rage-filled, hyper-stimulated media environment? Sensitive geniuses?

We spent years selling the lowest common denominator. Now the lowest common denominator is president. How can it be anything but self-deception to pretend this is an innocent coincidence?

re: Tabibi

So, then how come the idiot racist Rob Ford, the closest thing that Canada has had to Trump, won in Toronto, whereas the more cereberal, non-racist Naheed Nenshi won in Calgary? Cowtown is less saturated by the "rage-filled, hyper-stimulated media environment" than T.O.? I find that somewhat hard to believe. 

And how come in 2017 even Republicans are now denouncing Trump for his racism, whereas back a hundred years ago, a liberal icon like Woodrow Wilson could segregate the army and screen Birth Of A Nation at the White House, with hardly anyone seeing it as anything more than just reasonable policy? That was long before the television age with its short attention spans and sex-obsessed advertising. 

I agree there are problems with the way news media operates, but to imagine that an age like ours is uniquely constituted to produce racist, fear-mongering politicians just isn't backed up by the evidence. I think Tabibi is beholden to an inverted version of the Whig fallacy, ie. assuming the age you live in is worse than all the others that came before it. 

I read Taibbi as saying that the quality of public debate, the ability to think and argue and have words mean the same thing to all participants in a discussion is what is changed.   That we are in an environment that makes it hard to think, let alone debate or discuss.   I don't think that his point was our society is more rage filled or racist than in the past.   

"We decimated attention spans, rewarded hot-takers over thinkers, and created in audiences powerful addictions to conflict, vitriol, fear, self-righteousness, and race and gender resentment."

I read this as a lament for public discourse, as something that is a problem for and on both the left and right.

Mark Twain used the 'n' word many times in his writing, but he was definitely not a racist. Any reading of his various writings, especially "Pudd'nhead Wilson" should convince the reader of that.

So the question arises, why did he use that word? He wrote in the language of his time, he had to. If one is trying to create a character and make that character believeable, the character must reflect some sort of reality.  

Overall, my point is that just because someone used a particular word or phrase in their writing doesn't make the writer a racist.

Why Are Progressives Stupid..?

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/08/30/why-are-progressives-stupid-its-...

"Many progressives are stupid. Unless they get smart soon, 'The Resistance' to Donald Trump will fail..."

That Counterpunch piece is confused right from the get-go... 

Know the cliché, “if you’re not angry you’re not paying attention”? If you didn’t see Trump’s victory coming, you weren’t paying attention to the anger of your fellow citizens — and neither was the Democratic Party. NAFTA cost a million Americans their jobs. Since the 1970s automation has put 7 million people out of work. Democrats marketed themselves as the party of Joe and Jane Sixpack, but Bill Clinton pushed for and signed NAFTA, a Republican idea. Neither Clinton nor Obama lifted a finger to save the Rust Belt; as a candidate Hillary Clinton didn’t care either.

For those who opened their eyes to see, every aspect of Trump’s “surprise” win was visible in plain sight.

2016’s Rust Belt Trumpers were yesteryear’s Reagan Democrats and the “angry white males” of the 1990s.

First, the writer tells us that Trump voters voted for him because they don't like NAFTA and want the government to save the Rust Belt. 

Then he tells us that they are the same as Reagan Democrats in the 80s and "angry white males" in the 90s. 

Well, I was around for the Reagan Democrats and the angry white males, and I can assure you that what they were voting for was NOT an expanded government role in the economy. Quite the opposite. Reagan rose to prominence by telling his fan base that government was the whole problem, and the solution was to  eviscerate it. And Newt Gingrich's angry white males weren't angry at big corporations; they were angry at feminists, government bureaucrats, and "politically correct" campus activists. 

I agree that Trump was preaching a(limited) form of government interventionism, but that was certainly not in the tradition of Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich. And, yes, some people, especially in the Rust Belt, voted for him because of his quasi-left economic policies. But he got at least as many votes, and quite likely more, from people who just didn't like Mexicans, or wanted to get more right-wingers on the Supreme Court, or had just been voting Republican since forever because they like what the party stands for. 

progressive17 wrote:

There is this old movie channel called "Silver Screen". One day they played "Dambusters", which was a propaganda movie about certain operations of the Royal Air Force in WW2. I'd watched the movie a couple of times as a kid in the late 1960s.

What stuck out like a sore thumb from a late 20th - 21st century viewpoint was that one of the commanding RAF officers named his dog the N word, as the dog was black. I was flabbergasted. The word was used many times in reference to the dog, and I winced every time I heard it. I was surprised that Silver Screen didn't bleep it, or put up some kind of notice that the film contained racist language which might be offensive. I suspect that nobody at Silver Screen even bothered to view the movie before putting it on air. 

What was even more disappointing for myself was that I didn't even notice the racist language when I watched "Dambusters" as a kid.

This was probably the case for voice of the damned's babysitter in "Gone with the Wind". She probably didn't even notice the glorification of the Confederacy.

In the same vein, Sean Connery's version of James Bond (especially in the earlier movies) legitimizes rape and battery of women. He didn't back off when his verbal advances were rebuffed. He would force himself on women in a manner which would now legally constitute sexual assault.  I didn't notice that when I watched the Bond movies in the 1960s and 1970s. 

To allow oppression to go on, we have to be conditioned not to notice it.
 

There are 1) things you do not notice and 2) things that you are so conditionned to think are normal, or unchangeable that even if you notice them you don't remark on them or make an effort to resist or change them.

With the benefit of more life years I think about what I previously saw and did not notice. The entertainment, humour I did not remark on at the time now is often offensive to me today. When I was younger I think much of the canned humour was hurtful -- racist, homophobic, body shaming, sexist. Our expectations were different. It is certain that we will look back on this itme and see things that are equally appalling. I think of the times I was complicit by doing nothing or even laughing at what I would find unfunny and offensive today.

In some ways I think we have made a lot of progress, however, there are things we see today that suggest that not that much progress has been made.

Some of these horrible ideas are just under the surface, part of the thinking of many people but where they cannot be challenged. Looking for them and challenging them remains important. The rise of certain political movements also has served to remind us not to be complacent or to presume that progress is irreversible.

I must say that some things I did notice and find offensive from my youth. It was an eye-opener to discover that these views are coming now from people often younger than me. This is a warning that change is not always positive and progressive. Of course this is true in terms of democratic as well as social progress. Backsliding is not as much of a fear as it should be as many think there is this linear progression but it is not so uniform and there are reversals.

There are also things I am ashamed to say that I should have noticed and resisted but I did not.

The problem with recognizing progress, is  assuming it is permanent, this makes us unprepared to defend what has been fought for. And the better things may appear at one point the less prepared we are to fight for more progress.

I think the sorts of people here always think of ourselves as correct in vision. If old enough we realize we always did think of ourselves that way when now we can look back and realize we were not. In the future we will look back at this time and think the same thing, I think. Progress is easy to acknowledge in society but a little harder to recognize within oneself, particularly if we have always seen ourselves as progressive (or whatever word we use for that concept).

The Politics of Military Ascendancy   -   by James Petras

http://petras.lahaine.org/b2-img/PetrasPoliticsMilitaryAscendancy.pdf

"Clearly the US has escalated the pivotal role of the military..."

Mobo2000 wrote:

What do babblers make of Trump's recent about-face on DACA and possibly the Paris Climate accord?   I don't know the ins and outs of American politics, and I've seen many different interpretations of his motives.   I don't know what to make of it.   Like many other Trump moves it has the peculiar quality of seeming like it is either an implusive blunder or a secret master plan.

I'm not familiar with all the details of the Paris opt-in but I suspect that someone on Team Trump calculated that the US loses alot of "soft-power" advantage if they antagonize the whole world over Climate Change. Pulling out of Paris isn't something like, say, the Iraq War, where sure, France and Germany opposed them, but the UK, Spain, South Korea and a few others went along. Anyone withdrawing from Paris, especially a country the size of the US, is gonna have pretty much the whole world against them. 

As for DACA, that's the Dreamer thing, right? I haven't been following that closely either. I do get the impression that a lot of the debate around immigration in the USA is quietly influenced by business concerns, corporations not seeing much advantage in deporting people who often constitute a ready supply of labour(though I'm not sure how much that applies to the Dreamers). Also, the Democrats have an electoral interest in the immigrant vote, and might have convinced Trump to go along in exchange for co-operation on other issues.  

Michael Moriarity wrote:

It seems likely to me that Trump's recent agreements with "Chuck and Nancy", first on the debt limit, then on DACA, are more about his desire to humiliate "Mitch and Paul" for their repeated failures to pass legislation he wanted to sign than any actual policy positions.

Yeah, this is a guy who publically humiliates his own cabinet-members, so I wouldn't put it past him to strike a deal with the Democrats just to give the middle finger to the congressional GOP. Or at least, he'd be less reticent than most politicians about doing so, in a situation where there might be other advantages to that particular approach.

Shortly before the 2016 election, Richard Branson wrote a blog post, describing a luncheon meeting he had with Trump, which seems to show that Trump is almost totally ruled by petty desires for revenge. Key grafs:

Richard Branson wrote:

Some years ago, Mr Trump invited me to lunch for a one-to-one meeting at his apartment in Manhattan. We had not met before and I accepted. Even before the starters arrived he began telling me about how he had asked a number of people for help after his latest bankruptcy and how five of them were unwilling to help. He told me he was going to spend the rest of his life destroying these five people.

He didn’t speak about anything else and I found it very bizarre. I told him I didn’t think it was the best way of spending his life. I said it was going to eat him up, and do more damage to him than them. There must be more constructive ways to spend the rest of your life. (Hopefully my advice didn’t lead to him running for President!)