As if I didn’t already want to dunk my own head in a deep fryer, I have to read stuff like this from Alex Shephard’s review of the new book Let Trump Be Trump by Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie?
Lewandowski and Bossie even suggest that Trump is a student of Jungian psychology:
“Although the mainstream media and other haters give him little credit for his intellect, Donald Trump has more than a fundamental grasp on a surprising number of fields, including Jungian psychology. One of his favorite books is Memory, Dreams, Reflections, Jung’s autobiography. Steve Bannon insists that Trump came up with the idea of the names Lyin’ Ted, Little Marco, Low-Energy Jeb, and, later, Crooked Hillary, from his knowledge of Jungian archetypes.”
I felt pretty confident that this made no sense, but it’s been thirty years since I studied Jungian archetypes, so I figured I’d do a quick refresher on Wikipedia to see if I’d forgotten something crucial. I can assure you that I didn’t.
I’m also having grave difficulties believing that Donald Trump has ever read Carl Jung’s autobiography. The latest paperback edition is 430 pages long, which is approximately 429 pages too long for Donald Trump. It was also published originally in 1961, while Trump was fifteen and enrolled in New York Military Academy because his parents could do nothing with him. The man studied real estate in college.
In any case, you’d probably want to read Carl Jung’s writings on Archetypes rather than his autobiography if you wanted to know to apply the concepts to winning a presidential campaign.
I don’t dispute that Trump tapped into some kind of rot in the collective unconscious. If I had to guess at a psychological book that Trump might have actually read and applied to his campaign it would be Wilhelm Reich’s Listen, Little Man!. It actually describes how people are attracted to demagogues, and it’s only 144 pages.
“I am very proud now that we have a book in the library where people can learn about Carl Jung, and so many other things, Carl Jung is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice”
******************
There is no evidence that Trump has read anything at all since Green Eggs and Ham.
Facts not in evidence that Trump read Green Eggs and Ham or even Dick Jane and Sally.
Back at some point in the campaign Trump was asked what he was currently reading and said All Quiet on the Western Front, which back in his high school days was a standard literature assignment where he undoubtedly encountered it.
I think it was Michael D’Antonio in his Trump biography who noted that in several visits to the rococo mess that is Trump’s NY apartment never saw one book anywhere.
Jung, LOL! Trump hasn’t even read his own books.
Likely Trump reading material:
Facts not in evidence that Trump could even read and comprehend a Dummies (for anything) book.
LOL! You do raise a valid point.
FFS. Like Martin, it has been (for me) literally decades since I read Jung and his followers (like Ira Progoff), but at one time in my life, I did some serious study of Jung, the architypes, the shadow, etc.
There’s simply NO WAY Dolt 45 read Jung and even less likely that he would have comprehended anything from Jung’s books or those of his followers.
Utterly ridiculous. Am I supposed to also credibly believe that the majority of Dolt 45’s fans even know who or what a Jung is (other than the name sounds vaguely Nazi-ish), much less care??
Puh-leeze. Pull the other one.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump and his following confuse him with the Johnny Depp character in Blow.
If I remember correctly, Jung posited the shadow as both a personal subconscious archetype for issues that need clearing up in the individual’s life, and as an archetype of the collective unconscious. But, in his later years, especially after the destruction of World War Two, Jung kicked it up a notch, and described the collective shadow in the way Nazi Germany as a nation created scapegoats, and projected all kinds of nastiness into ethnic and religious groups. The Third Reich never came to terms with its own shadow, and this brought about its demise. I’m thinking Trump and Trumpistas have a Jungian connection all right, one, they’re collectively unconscious of (!) but any good therapist would advise them to work with that shadow instead of projecting it in others. Collectively, it’s a dangerous form of projection.
Very good points. I quite agree. Not that Trump or his followers exhibit the slightest capabilities to be self-reflective enough to get in touch their inner shadows, much even comprehend how much they project their sh*t out there onto “the other.”
Trump’s summary of Jung’s Answer to Job:
Suck on it, loser!!
I discovered Jung in college and instinctively liked his insights and he is a very readable philosopher. That said, it is inconceivable that Trump has even heard of Jung much less read his work; same with Reich. It is much more likely that it is the authors (at least Bossie, doubt that Lewandowski has heard of Jung) that have invented the philosophy-reading Trump. Bullies are well-known to be name-callers; it’s nothing more than that. Trump is an idiot, a dangerous idiot for sure but not a learned, reflective person.
Moore and Trump both like ’em Jung.
If Trump is a student of Jungian psychology, then I’m Albert Einstein.
In a real sense, Trump is a long term practitioner of all that NLP/positive/mindful/corporate psychology for “highly effective people”. There is much playing with shadows and other Jungian stuff there — more than you may guess from “Get rich…” titles and Trump’s act. Top social predators are superb hands-on psychologists, whether they read original Jung or not. Encountering him in person would be an experience for anyone, even if prepared.
The Dilber creator is still eager to explain Trump’s psychological subtleties. He just wrote this book:
You better regard it seriously.
Win Bigly Bonus Chapter
You’re on track with this because one of the few “literary references” that Trump has made that seem to be true is his fandom for Dale Carnegie and Vincent Norman Peale. Trump even went to Peale’s Church when he was younger and he officiated Trump’s first wedding.
Peale and Carnegie are the godfathers of the self-help genre. From them flow Tony Robbins AND Joel Osteen. That’s a hat trick.
Trump may not be a Jungian psychologist, but I’ve often thought that there are insights in Jung that can explain Trump.
Right before World War 1, Jung had a dream (describe in Memories, Dreams, Reflections) in which the continent of Europe was drenched in blood. He said that when the war broke out, he was a bit relieved, because it meant that he was perceiving something that was actually happening, rather than being personally crazy.
Just as the pre-WWI society, the most advanced and civilized in the world, seemed to have some kind of unconscious death wish that lead to the slaughter of the World Wars, so does our society seem to have a death wish that seems to be leading straight to the slaughter of global climate change, and possibly nuclear war. Trump is not the cause, but the embodiment of that death wish.
I don’t understand it, but I can’t help but think that something very profound, that we don’t understand, is happening.
My guess for the deep reason of the death wish is along these lines:
People may collectively recognize a population overshot… in 1914 or 2017… just when everything looks greater than ever… and have a carnal sense of much death ahead… as that is the “established” way to relieve overpopulation pressure
. . . so I went looking for data to validate or refute my misgivings.
Specifically, the notion that the World Wars were enactment of a “death wish” in response to a “population overshot” (implied merely temporary or episodic, e.g., “current”, “oscillating”).
This does not concord with my own longstanding understanding of human population growth as inexorable and exponential, with events such as the deaths of millions in World Wars not registering as so much as discernible blips at the scale of human population. I.e., if they were “corrections” for “population overshots”, then they failed dismally.
With “risks of overpopulation” having become permanent (not “oscillating”) a very long time ago. (One could quibble about when human population first became “overpopulation”, i.e., overtaxing the planet’s resources and life support systems and endangering the rest of life cursed by the fate of sharing a planet with the likes of us; but whenever that was, it has remained in the rearview mirror for a long, long time, now, with no sign of that ever changing short of our self-annihilation.)
Sure enough:
Interestingly, there is a single period of actual (though minimal) human population decline from 1200-1400 (you can see this by hovering your mouse over the plotted points to see a popup with the year and population). Just guessing that’s the Black Death (too lazy at the moment to check). Whatever the cause, it was the last time a mass mortality event was large and sustained enough to swamp (briefly!) the underlying growth rate and make a discernible dent in the human population.
. . . with Mongol Hordes and climate change (end of “Medieval warm period), at least according to this source.
There is much pulling, “awaiting”, latent, contingent, delegated causality here. For one thing, the death wish can be more related to (subtle or mindful) perceptions of overpopulation rather than the objective situation. Europe has been in nearly permanent war state for centuries. That may largely reflect its limited resources and constant struggle for (yes, ever improving) good life. The Western Europe had a civilized break since the Franco-Prussian War in 1870-1871, while the population growth was picking up. This happy demographics can be attributed to benefits of industrialization, colonization and emigration. But war as a norm was never deep below the surface. WWI still looks premature for the “demographic” concern. On the other hand, how would you imagine the population growth in Europe without the two World Wars? Or China’s demographics without Mao?
Locally, absolute population numbers tend to follow economic (or ecological) fortunes of the region. See ancient Greece, for example. The post-industrial population explosion was allowed by the the same industrialization, or more fundamentally, by the progress in extraction of energy resources. If I remember right from this book, human biological metabolism is around 90W, but civilized externalities raise the effective metabolism to the average number 1200W. Our magical agriculture uses 7 calories to deliver 1 calorie of food, I heard. The real Malthusian trap is when population numbers and utilized resources start to mismatch. In this light, the modern situation does not necessarily unique. Only the global scale is unprecedented.
A good place to look for restricted population dynamics is Pacific islands. They tend to have outrageously crude or dangerous rituals for coming of age and marriage, arguably suitable for dampening reproduction. Japan is a Pacific island with a distinctive culture as well; their isolated but prosperous Edo period had surprisingly stable population.
What can we notice in the Chinese history? China was ruled by a dozen of dynasties, whose fortunes were arguably determined by accidental success in managing economic prosperity and demographic consequences. Incidentally, China (and Persia) had to deal with Northern Nomads for centuries, hence the Huns and the Mongols are lesser historical aberrations than it looks from the West. Genghis Khan was from a tribe that was relatively far from the goods of the Silk Road. When he started his conquests, there was no measure. The role of demographic factors is worth pondering. The Mongol Empire actually made the Silk Road more secure, thereby contributing to the fast spread of the Black Death.
India must have an interesting demographic history. Extreme inequality and the caste system could be “coping models”… In the Middle East, Islam is arguably well adopted for maintaining adequate population in the desserts. Further, ecological source of Aztec human sacrifices is within academic discussion. Overpopulation was a factor in the Rwanda crisis. The suggested conclusion is that humans have been swimming in demographic predicaments for ages.
. . . this way: those demographic specifics you cite are just temporary/localized eddies in the rising tsunami of overpopulation that dooms us and the other life that we will take (actually, are already taking) down with us.
You write:
Yes!!!
Precisely.
Something huge is happening.
Those of us who live long enough will see its true shape and consequences.
The rest?
All guesses and…as always with sea changes like this…a mile wide of the truth(s) of the matter.
AG
Why does this comment warrent two 1 (Troll ratings). I consider those an abuse of the rating system. Save your ones for comments you truly find offensive or inflammatory.
I would also recommend to read Wilhelm Reichs book Mass psychology of fascism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mass_Psychology_of_Fascism
He published it 1933. Still relevant.
I haven’t seen or heard anything about Wilhelm Reich since I was in college. It’s kind of hard to separate his early writing (and “Listen Little Man” is nothing if manipulative in its own right) and the orgone mystique that eventually sent him to jail.
No need to struggle on this one. He didn’t. It’s just another whopper by him or one of his sycophants. A bizarre choice considering that if true, it would cast Trump as an intellectual, a species that his base disdains.
As there is nothing Jungian in how Trump operates — the closest he comes to a notable psychiatrist is Freud as applied by his nephew Bernays (who was not a psychiatrist or psychologist but a mass market ad-man) but P.T. Barnum is closer to Trump’s schtick — why the Jung claim? Not mysterious. Rightwingers with intellectual pretensions like Jung for two reasons: 1) white/male/christian (IOW not Jewish like the most famous of shrinks) and 2) “Were you to google “Carl Jung and Nazism”–and I’m not suggesting that you do–you would find yourself hip-deep in the charges that Jung was an anti-Semite and a Nazi sympathizer.” These Jung fans mistake Jung’s curiosity about the phenomenon of Nazism and Hitler (albeit mixed with a slight admiration in the early years and Jung’s own cultural roots) and attempts to explain it through his archetypes as genuine and high admiration.
Jung in his own convoluted fashion come closer to getting it right a few years later:
However, is the myth based, collective unconscious Jungian proposition — specifically the cult of Wotan in that instance — real or an intellectual artifact? Not necessary when looking at Trump. His differences with Republican politicians (and many Democrats as well) over the past fifty years is more one of style than substance. He’s brasher, doesn’t mince in public what they all say privately, cruder, and channels all the preexisting anger and fear that the white man is losing his/her status at the top of the pecking order. It’s raw and ugly well in tune with a ‘let it all hang out’ era. What he doesn’t have is a majority plus one.
Unfortunately, what Democrats and the MSM have been doing over the past year and a half is going to get him to that majority unless they change ASAP.
On that last point: The U.S. Media Yesterday Suffered Its Most Humiliating Debacle in Ages: Now Refuses All Transparency Over What Happened (Title is hyperbolic, but so too was the fake news. The U.S. media reports on Iraq’s WMD was a much bigger debacle that led to serious consequences and not exposed as false within a few hours. Still the article is solid. Fake crap or even extremely hyped, minor crap is not going to take Trump down. Did ‘the left’ not notice that both were tried and failed by the rightwing to take down Bill Clinton and Barack Obama? Only dummies adopt a failed strategy from the opposition.)
Is this your opinion, or is it today’s message from the Lizard People?
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If Greenwald really wanted to persuade people instead of running interference for Trump, which is what he’s doing, he wouldn’t be hyperbolic. This wildness filters from the header into the reporting, which is jam packed with personal animus and insufficiently supported claims. The article’s not “solid”.
The substantiated news we’re getting on Trump, the stuff that the Trump team has conceded, is “minor crap,” you say.
Four people on the Trump team have been indicted. Two have recently pled guilty to felonies and have been cooperating with Mueller’s team. We can see that there’s more to come.
What has happened to you? You’ve lost your bearings. I don’t know why. You used to be better than this.
Nonetheless, it is noted that there have been other misreporting, aka fake news. That kind of thing is unhelpful and feeds directly into Trump’s accusation of fake news reporting. And his audience notices. His audience is not sophisticated and will take this as proof the MSM is out to get him. And when the date is so obvious, as this case, there is little to argue about an innocent mistake. Somebody really secreted up on the networks.
Glenn Greenwald disappears from twitter when substantive Russia news happens, but writes 50 obsessive tweets over a mistake that we don’t even know how it happened yet.
Meanwhile, he has never once apologized for any of the mistakes he and his publication have made in the past, particularly in regards to Syria, Assad, and chemical weapons.
. . . fraud that I detect?
The similarities are striking (note Greenwald’s accurate — undisputed to my knowledge — point re: the problem explaining how multiple sources supposedly provided the same false date of the e-mail to CNN; compounded by the journalistic malpractice of publishing without having the e-mail itself in possession, hence without ability to verify the info):
1. Source offers damning, but false info to reporters.
2a. WaPo fact-checks the source (O’Creep’s fraud-flunky), then outs and burns her when that due diligence exposes the fraud.
2b. CNN runs with the unverified “scoop”, thereby burning . . . CNN! Will CNN similarly burn the sources who misled, embarrassed, and discredited them? (That they haven’t already suggests “no”.) That’s the obvious next step to recovering any semblance of credibility. Not doing so amounts to a confession of incompetence, which will of course be taken as a confession of complicity by all rightwingnut ratfuckers and their dupes.
This is exactly what I’d expect a “successful” implementation of the failed ratfucking that O’Creep attempted against WaPo to look like, including the objective of discrediting media deemed hostile to Trump.
Heckuva job, CNN!
(Aside to some critics in this thread: Greenwald’s often problematic: e.g., biased selectivity of outrage and targets. But when he’s right, he’s right [cuz the facts are the facts]. And here he’s right. CNN evidently fucked up . . . bigly. We don’t do ourselves or our movement any favors by looking the other way or glossing over that out of animosity towards the messenger. Even earned animosity.)
I don’t believe the 2a and 2b reportings were on the same issue. Let me know if I’m mistaken, but I believe they were two different subjects of reportings.
The CNN incident referenced in Greenwald’s piece happened yesterday. To draw such a conclusive judgment on the incident and CNN’s response is quite literally playing into Trump’s hands. Worse, Glenn draws his venomous conclusions after an incomplete summary of the facts. CNN has had more to say about the incident than he reports in his piece. It’s disappointing that he did that.
The CNN reporter who got burned here by multiple sources, Manu Raju, has been doing a ton of reporting, and he hasn’t been burned by anonymous sources he’s cited in the past. His reporting has been reliable; he hasn’t given the Trump movement a bunch of stuff they could legitimately claim was false.
To run for the hills and wave our hands around saying “See, Trump can say he was right about fake news!” is baloney. The vast majority of the biggest revelations from reporters have actually been admitted to by the Trump team.
Let’s keep our heads.
CNN corrected the story Friday afternoon (it’s on the internet) after WaPo obtained the e mail. The first story appears to be the woman with the story about Roy Moore that the WaPo outed.
Yes, CNN corrected the reporting later on the same day it was originally reported.
(No, obviously 2a and 2b are about different incidents with “striking” “similarities”, as I said. Apologies, I presumed you’d been paying attention.)
Is anyone anywhere disputing that CNN wrongly reported the date of the email as 9/4 (damning in the extreme) when it was in fact 9/14 (i.e., innocuous)?
Has anyone credibly disputed Greenwald’s characterization that “CNN strongly implied it had exclusively obtained and had in its possession” the damning (if it had actually been from 9/4) email, when in fact it hadn’t?
Has CNN (contra Greenwald) offered any reasonable explanation of how this was anything other than a monumental fuckup of journalistic malpractice?
(“Yesterday” is an eternity ago in the current hyper news cycle.)
If the answer to any of the above is “yes”, then links to factual evidence would be far more useful than condescending admonitions about losing our heads.
Unless the answers to all the above are “yes”, backed by factual documentation, then “quite literally playing into Trump’s hands” merits a response that I am self-censoring, at least for now.
Obviously, the problem with such a monumental fuckup is precisely that it feeds and validates the (false!) narrative ‘saying “See, Trump can say he was right about fake news!”‘
That‘s what’s “quite literally playing into Trump’s hands”!
BTW ABC got the Flynn story wrong as well.
Yes. They corrected the report later on the same day it was originally reported. They also held the veteran investigative reporter who filed the original story accountable by suspending him for four weeks for not following ABC’s editorial standards.
. . . (no thanks to you or anyone posting in this thread!) CNN’s televised revision and print correction.
They seem adequate as far as they go (but they don’t go so far as explaining how purportedly “multiple sources somehow innocently provide you with the wrong date for the email; nor why you publish with no way to verify that; nor why you’re still not outing and burning those sources).
But the damage is done, and the notion this was anything but a massive journalistic failure “quite literally playing into Trump’s hands” remains laughable.
CNN and Raju fucked up here. But they corrected it promptly, their beat reporting on the Trump scandals has been solid, and the mistake CNN reporters made on another story earlier this year was also corrected promptly and dealt with harshly.
And you don’t know how Raju and CNN are responding and will respond to the sources who gave them bad info and the editorial practices which failed to prevent them from making this error. Given that Raju has done a ton of beat reporting this year and had not made a significant reporting error before, I don’t know why I should agree with your claim that he and CNN will be eternally reporting bullshit from ratfuckers.
By holding the position you’re stating here you’re actively supporting the incredible asymmetry that the conservative movement has worked for decades and that Trump has weaponized to absurd degrees.
Example: Fox News has been running attacks on Mueller and his team for many weeks now, well before the reports by ABC and CNN which were corrected on the same day they want up. Fox hosts, analysts, reporters lied, lied like hell, outright lied and mischaracterized facts day after day after day. No corrections to these lies have been on offer. No journalists have been held accountable. Outright venomous liars have been rewarded. And that volume and level of dishonesty and bad faith has been dwarfed by the number of preposterous lies and mischaracterizations made by the rest of the right wing media during these weeks.
And here you’re essentially lodging the claim that a rare mistaken report by another network, a report which was corrected within hours, justifies the conservative movement’s “fake news” claims. I disagree. As you yourself state, their general claims are false, and we shouldn’t perpetuate their false claims.
I’m not a Pollyanna expecting the field to be entirely even here. I am expecting liberals to avoid enabling the “Fox gets to lie all the time, CNN can’t make a single honest mistake” frame that the right wing is trying to demand of us all.
. . . CNN will be eternally reporting bullshit from ratfuckers.”
What?
The?
Fuck?
Quite obviously, I never made any such “claim”.
Take a few deep breaths. Get a grip.
Kudos though on finally, if belatedly, acknowledging the obvious, i.e., a point I actually did make: “CNN and Raju fucked up here.”
Too bad about your unwillingness or inability to acknowledge another (also obvious) point I made, i.e., that CNN’s fuckup hurts our cause thusly (quoting me!):
(Also noting, however, that both those points were in a parenthetical aside to the actual substance of my comment, so this has become quite the circuitous detour from what my comment was mainly about. Perhaps you should read it!)
What you appear to be advocating here is “only notice/condemn wrongdoing/incompetence/malfeasance by the avowed enemy; turn a blind eye if “we” or an ostensibly neutral/objective 3rd party do it.”
A position that fits neatly into rightwing propaganda strategy. Rove and Gingrich would be so proud!
What a supertanker-load of bullshit that is! (Unless “essentially” means “not at all, in any way whatsoever”. Pretty sure it doesn’t.) Let’s unpack that, shall we?
[1] You falsely attribute to me another claim I (again, obviously) have never made. (Your apparent reading-comprehension challenges are not my responsibility.)
[2] You “disagree” with this “claim” I never made, but which you’ve falsely attributed to me!!!
[3] Then you cite what I actually did say to support your “disagreement” with what I didn’t say, but which you falsely attributed to me!!!
Wow. Just wow. The degree of difficulty of the backflips you’re putting yourself through, all to evade the validity of what I in fact did say (all quite mundane and uncontroversial, at least here in the land of Reality and basic ethics) is impressive.
No, I don’t(/didn’t/never have)
That’s so ludicrous (and, as you did manage to grasp, directly contradicted by what I actually did say) that it leaves me wondering if you’ve ever read and comprehended anything I’ve written here.
I simply noted that that’s (utterly predictably!) how they will (attempt to) use CNN’s fuckup (now undisputed even by you), which is why CNN’s fuckup is so consequential and damaging. Which is why “conservative” ratfuckers like O’Creep attempt to fraudulently trigger such fuckups! And again (back to my actual, original, main point!), the similarities to O’Creep’s failed ratfucking of WaPo are striking, and the contrast between how each handled the similar situations stark. Including that, as far as I’ve seen so far, CNN’s response to this massive fail has been woefully inadequate, failing to either explain how they got so badly tooken; or how allegedly “multiple sources” committed exactly the same wrong-date error; or out and burn those sources or justify why not; or why they implied they were in possession of the email when they weren’t; or why they unethically rushed to publication without verifying the info (which would have precluded publication, since it was false!).
Yet despite this ongoing failure to adhere to the most basic journalistic ethics, you want to credit CNN for having “corrected” the error, then let’s move along, nothing to see here.
But, no, they don’t get a pass unless and until they rectify the error with an adequate response that credibly addresses the inadequacies noted above. (That Greenwald made this point does not invalidate it! It’s still correct!) Unless and until they do so, their credibility remains in tatters, and they have no one to blame but themselves. They could fix this, and then move on to recover some (but still-damaged) credibility. But, so far as I have seen, anyway, they haven’t. And they need to.
I apologize for inaccurately paraphrasing your posts.
I feel strongly that you’re inaccurately paraphrasing my posts here.
We each have points worth considering, but we’re just talking way past each other. It’s disappointing, but I accept it.
. . . paraphras[ed your] posts here”, but since (despite declaring you “feel strongly” that I have), you offer no examples or specifics, that leaves me no means to rebut your (vague and unsupported) claim.
For future reference, probably the most reliable way to get crossways with me is to put words in my mouth that I didn’t say, then debate your misrepresentation instead of what I did say and criticize/condemn me over your false version. Just so you know.
I don’t care to extend the disagreement over who misrepresented what. Enough.
Allison makes the point regarding journalistic ethics much more skillfully than I did:
“…I know in the minds of the tote-bag audience there is a massive vast unwashed group of people out there who are “on the fence” about whether the president and his sycophantic cult members are correct that journalists should die quickly, and these types of transparency audits would really persuade those persuadable people and get them to become informed and vote in their own interests and value democracy and American values. I think that is the biggest pile of horseshit I have ever seen and you can dig in it if you want but I’m done looking for the pony here.
Just stop wasting time. We can have a thousand ethics panels. We can have daily seminars on How Journalism Really Works. We can be Totally Transparent and Completely Honest and Prostrate Ourselves Before the People, and you know what’s going to happen?
A bunch of Pepe-wearing Nazi sympathizers are going to show up at our doors in “Rope. Tree. Journalist. Some Assembly Required.” t-shirts and demand our swift demise in the ovens of Auschwitz because THAT’S WHAT THEY FUCKING DO. It is all they do. It is all they want to do. It’s not based on a lack of transparency and it’s not based on a lack of understanding and it’s not based on anything we do anymore than the actions of a schoolyard bully are on the attributes of his victims…”.
. . . cleanly right to the most plausible explanation for why you “don’t care to extend the disagreement over who misrepresented what”.
That being that you misrepresented me and I did not misrepresent you (hell, most of my “representation” of you was directly quoted!).
Ockham’s Razor also points to the most obvious explanation for why you’ve consistently declined to offer any support for your baseless counter-accusation that I misrepresented you in any way. (Reminds me of a “slapsuit”, whereby the party sued on the merits responds with a meritless counter-suit, to keep up publicly the pretense that they, too, have a legitimate grievance.)
Which, from my perspective, encapsulates what I see as your insulting, lecturing, chickenshit passive-aggressiveness throughout this exchange (well represented by this most-recent post above). I think you should be ashamed of your conduct here, though I’ve seen no evidence (beyond an “apology” belied by subsequent conduct) that you are.
Yes, but at least we don’t have the Goldman candidate as POTUS, and a woman at that! So at least you know your (and Putin!) efforts to prevent that were not wasted. Please keep your personal skills sharp, and your foreign contacts available. We might have another woman running in 2020, and it will again be ‘all hands on deck!’.
.
“Unfortunately, what Democrats and the MSM have been doing over the past year and a half is going to get him to that majority…”.
First off, Trump’s approval ratings are cratering. He’s not building his base; he’s starting to lose some of his unnaturally small base. This year’s election results are showing that the damage is filtering down to hurt the electoral chances of other Republicans.
But let’s get real with each other. You came to this community to organize against Clinton’s campaign from August to November. You and others played with fire, and we all are getting burned.
You organized for this result. You looked at the Clinton/Trump matchup and you decided to share news and opinions intended to organize people against Clinton’s campaign. That’s what you did. It was despicable. You didn’t have the guts to tell people to vote for Stein or others, but your rhetoric was pitched to discourage people from supporting Clinton.
I don’t want to play games with you anymore. This is what you did then, and it’s what you’re doing now. Own it, and spare us the exceedingly bad faith “advice”.
In fact, what we see here is that you’re not offering any real advice at all. You’re just blaming and taking exactly zippo responsibility yourself.
Why don’t you try doing something different? You could be making a skilled and good faith effort to improve the Democratic Party. But that’s not what you are doing here. And if this is the sort of rhetoric you sling around in face to face and phone conversations with other Democrats, you’re not making a skilled and good faith effort to improve the Democratic Party in those conversations either.
Don’t you know…..it’s best not to fight back, because if you make a mistake, it ruins your moral authority, and you can never fight back again.
Plus,
‘Any mistake that the media makes while taking on republican perfidy is automatically a mistake that is shared by ALL democrats’ is pretty basic Lizard Speak.
.
Current ‘lizard speak’ is Russia-Putin-Russia. Lizards that can’t even mount an authentic and effective opposition to moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem because half of the Democrats in Congress approve of it and one of the top Democratic donors is out there praising Jared Kushner.
Team Trump/GOP is triangulating you all and you can’t even see that. Trashing lefties must make you feel real good because it cements GOP wins because you can’t win without us.
Triangulation? What shit.
Whatever you call what Trump is doing, boy, it’s really been a legislative and electoral juggernaut in 2017, right?
And thanks for inadvertently admitting in your last sentence that you withhold electoral and rhetorical support for the resistance to the toxic Trump movement out of spite.
Every Democrat votes against corporate tax cuts but Marie thinks that we’re living in the 90’s again.
I “organized blah, blah, blah” when I didn’t even see a Trump general election win? That’s bonkers. (Doesn’t matter that I got the actual results a lot closer than those predicting a landslide win for Clinton, I still didn’t see MI, PA, or WI in Trump’s column — any one of which would have given him the win.)
Unlike you, I haven’t subsequently looked for scapegoats and illusions to explain those results. Trump is, IMO, a disgusting, ignorant, and loathsome creature. Exactly the same opinion I hold of all skilled hucksters. (A huckster in this instance that I remind you was the opponent team Clinton chose along with fixing the nomination for her. They — and all their sycophants — are responsible for this mess. Not observers or messengers. Killing the messengers never works.)
You came here to discourage people from voting for Clinton from August to November 2016. It’s what you did.
You’re not trying to help the Democratic Party now. It’s what you’re doing.
It’s what Republicans do, they discourage democrats from voting.
The easiest way is to tie ALL Democrats with the flaws of individual Democrats.
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A Bernie type Democratic Socialist in Alabama wrote an article saying he wouldn’t vote for Doug Jones over Roy Moore because Jones doesn’t support single payer healthcare. He won’t support a Democrat in Alabama over a radical extremist Republican pedophile.
Think about that! That’s the kind of shit we’re dealing with in these Marie types. They’re demanding purity tests….in Alabama!!!
This stunt reminds me of the time when Bush was made to be seen exiting AF1 with a copy of The Stranger in his hands as if anyone would believe he had the intellect and curiosity to read or want to read Camus. It’s an old pose. Maybe Trump should take up oil painting too.