It’s pretty desperate for the president at this point, which is clear from the fact that his lawyer is seriously considering becoming a cooperating witness against him and his former campaign chairman just spend the first night of, probably, the rest of his life in prison. But, it’s okay because he’s referencing the wrong IG report to exonerate himself from any wrongdoing. It’s one of the silliest things I’ve ever seen. A report that looks at the FBI and DOJ’s performance in the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails and has absolutely nothing to do with Donald Trump is supposed to somehow clear Donald Trump because it doesn’t say he did anything wrong.
He might as well look at an IG report on Ben Carson or Scott Pruitt to prove his innocence, because it would be no different. He looks tired, puffy, and has a lost look in his eyes. His lies no longer even have a tether to a distorted version of reality.
And, as embattled as he is, his solution is to salute North Korean generals and make more apologies for Vladimir Putin. He wants to have Kim visit him in the White House and have a meeting with Putin, he wants to end joint military exercises with South Korea and is telling our European partners that Crimea belongs to Russia and Russia should be readmitted to the G7. He’s telling anyone who will listen that Kim has a winning personality and runs his country like a champion.
He’s fucking crazy, folks. This is not going to end well.
Being a man of impulse and instant gratification, Trump views facts as obstruction, they just get in his way.
I agree with MSNBC’s new commentary that fact checking Trump is like pissing into a hurricane.
But the cavalcade of untruths is slowly grinding away at not just the understanding of his lack of character, but it’s making it harder and harder for Fox & Breitbart to defend him, to find a plan or logic hidden within his utterances. btw Breitbart viewership is a mere 1/3 of what it was a year ago.
Yes, Trump is losing it and the Rep leadership can’t keep up. They too have relied on instant gratification with no attempt at foresight to see how many cliffs Trump has them teetering on. That they can’t recognize where this is all going has got to be one of their greatest weaknesses. They see polling that has 87% (Axios) of Rep backing Trump and think that will translate into a get out of jail card not just for Trump but for them as well. They are not even acknowledging that they are living in a historical house of cards.
Fact checking Trump is like pissing into a hurricane?
Yes.
Of course.
That’s the idea, mainsailset!!!
And…so far?
It’s been working!!!
Fact checking Trump is like fact checking the Devil.
The Devil has been around for quite a while, and on any rational observation he’s been wildly successful for eons.
We shall see how Trump fares.
He has so far lied himself into the single most powerful office in the world…with of course the help of other liars and also other incompetent opponents. Basically, the same liars and incompetent opponents comprise most of the power structure of the United States of Omertica.
Is the Meuller organization any different?
We shall see.
Soon enough.
Let us pray it so.
Later…
AG
. . . in that regard, with the critical exception that your serial lying, grotesque dishonesty, and continuous running away from thorough, definitive, factually documented refutation of those lies and dishonesty hasn’t “been working”.
My prayer in refutation of this particular, serial-posting dybbuk:
Amen.
*[ref.]
Maybe you oughta take a quick breather, aguabonita.
A few days off.
Really.
Your obsession is beginning to sound…dangerous.
Really!!!
Take a vacation.
Take a pill.
Take something!!!
Your truly…
ASG
This place would certainly benefit from a vacation from your serial lying and grotesque dishonesty. The longer the better. Permanent best.
Have you considered the possibility of just scrolling past A.G.?
I don’t just scroll past A.G., I maybe skim responses to A.G. also, if I don’t just scroll past responses to A.G.
It’s all pretty boring.
. . . For a long time. During all that time, I also would have opposed banning him, despite finding his garbage very degrading to this place.
Then he did this.
I suppose you could call that a tipping-point of dishonesty so outrageous I decided it should not be allowed to just disappear down the memory hole (and he should not be allowed to just go on participating “normally” here, i.e., unconfronted by it) as though it had never happened (as ag would obviously prefer).
That explained, I’ll forgive you if you choose to just keep on scrolling past my occasional accountability exercises confronting ag with the factual documentation that refutes (a few of!) his lies and grotesque dishonesty — and with his running away from that accountability — as you scroll past his shit. Really, do it, I won’t be offended in the slightest! I completely understand.
Yes, Arthur’s poster boy for the kind of thinking that brought us Donald Trump.
I do scroll past him. And typically past all the responses to one of his steaming turdpiles. But you have to be careful about indentation, or you’ll scroll too far. I’d really like it there were a way to collapse a subtree of comments, like in Disqus.
Oh, look.
The Ron Paul and Cliven Bundy evangelist is back, offering his condescending lectures to the community he hates.
It appears he will never tire in his deceptive attempts to convince voters to keep Donald Trump and the Republican Party in power.
He brings nothing worthwhile to us.
I refer any questioning readers regarding this comment to my post above… the one that includes the following phrase:
Thank you…
AG
P.S. Centristfield…I am saving so much time with this disclaimer idea!!! You haven’t a clue.
Hours!!!
Arthur’s not trying to improve the Democratic Party.
Arthur’s not offering constructive criticism, at all.
Arthur is attempting to discourage progressives from voting for candidates from the Democratic Party. He did this even when Donald Trump and his Republican enablers were the only viable option. He’s doing it today.
Arthur’s a Ron Paul and Cliven Bundy evangelist. His real motivations are understandable to us.
I’ve no idea what his motives may be but he’s absolutely the kind of alleged-liberal (or independent or libertarian or whatever it is he considers himself) who threw in the towel and brought us Donald Trump.
I didn’t “throw in the towel,” Parallax…the Democrats did when they blocked the Sanders candidacy. Sanders might have won and he also might have lost, but either way the Democrats wold have been seen as a real opposition to bad government instead of just another wing of the anti-Trump PermaGov. Trump’s win was an anti-Permanent Government win. He sold people a bill of goods, but his voters…and many, many of the non-voters, bet on it…were not so much voting for him as voting against both the Democratic/Republican Parties and the Deep State.
I’m still fighting, the only way I know how.
With independent thought.
AG
Arthur’s not trying to improve the Democratic Party.
Arthur’s not offering constructive criticism, at all.
Arthur is attempting to discourage progressives from voting for candidates from the Democratic Party. He did this even when Donald Trump and his Republican enablers were the only viable option. He’s doing it today.
Arthur’s a Ron Paul and Cliven Bundy evangelist. His real motivations are understandable to us.
Your disclaimer is written as if you are one of many posters being attacked by this “cadre”.
I see only one person being regularly criticized. I think it’s because your posts are tedious and predictable.
. . . ag’s comments/”articles” (LOL!) are not “attacked” for the reasons he routinely lies that they are, e.g., here:
This is complete bullshit, as many of ag’s critics (e.g., me!) have carefully explained both the motivations for and substance of our criticisms, often quoting and linking factual documentation, and ag just ignores all that and repeatedly, self-servingly lies that it’s instead about “criticism of the Democratic Party as it stands today”.
Anyone who reads here with any regularity knows that commenters here — probably to a person! — are very frequently critical “of the Democratic Party as it stands today”, across a broad range of topics.
But ag has latched onto that lie as an excuse to run away from the actual substance of the actual criticism and refutations he’s been confronted with. Seems quite obvious by now that this is because it allows him to pretend he has an excuse for running away from — without addressing in any way that’s actually responsive — those actual critiques.
The Democrats don’t have an unified pushback to the deluge of Republican attacks.
Where are Sanders, Biden, and Obama?
Sanders probably has some credibility amongst the Trump supporters. But he has not been able to be an effective voice in opposition.
The problem is that the final resistance is the voters, and November is still far away!
where are they? we’ll never know, because the owners of the media don’t want them covered.
A speaker with no microphone is never going to be able to be an effective voice.
This has driven me crazy for years — the constant howl from the left of “Why won’t [Dem politician of one’s choice] speak up, fight back, go on the Sunday talk shows, trumpet from the rooftops?!? Cowardly scum!” Which utterly overlooks or dismisses the hard truth that if the media choose not to cover what one says, then no matter how loudly one shouts, one will not be heard.
. . . the WHOLE truth. (I suspect there’s also some keeping dry of the powder by, e.g., Obama, Sanders, Clinton, Pelosi, etc., while Mueller does his thing . . . along with other political calculations whose wisdom I’ll leave to the political game theorists.)
But I do think it contains a great deal of very important truth.
Jesus, Arthur. Give it a rest. Give the readers of this blog a rest. Put a sock in it.
Trump no doubt is a dangerous lunatic, made even more so with access to nuclear launch codes. The more he’s pushed into a corner, the higher the risk he will ultimately destroy this country to save himself.
The GOP is cravenly gambling they’ll get all they want politically by leveraging Trump and his cultish hold on the base; that the resulting disaster and whatever level of blame they get for not having used their power to stop him will be worth it. They’re banking on their powers of misdirection and obfuscation to avoid any responsibility, which is reasonable given all they’ve gotten away with before.
How does a political party and its president start a war based on proven, documented lies that ends in the deaths of over 5,000 Americans, millions of Iraqis and others in the Middle East, spawns a barbaric terrorist group in ISIS, resulting in a refugee crises that is overwhelming Europe, and essentially walk away with no responsibility?
“We want to look forward, not backward.”
That’s how. Its also why it is reasonable for the GOP to take the risk of not doing anything about Trump and continue to reap the political rewards. If Trump implodes in the most devastating way, the likelihood is they will not be held accountable. Again.
You write:
Yes.
Indeed.
And exactly who is to blame for that?
The same party that did not haul Kissinger, Cheney and various other participating individuals (on up to and including presidents) before war crimes courts for their involvement in the Vietnam and Iraq fiascos when it had a chance.
The Democratic Party!!!
The “good cops” not indicting the “bad cops.”
Has anything whatsoever changed?
Not as far as I can see.
Sad…
AG
Oh, look.
The Ron Paul and Cliven Bundy evangelist is back, offering his condescending lectures to the community he hates.
It appears he will never tire in his deceptive attempts to convince voters to keep Donald Trump and the Republican Party in power.
He brings nothing worthwhile to us.
Original sin.
Politics is an only-occasionally-effective effort to mitigate the consequences of this.
People are essentially wicked creatures. That’s not a reason not to try, but it’s a reason not to expect much.
Yes but the Trump cult — AKA the Republican Party — just absorbs the alternate reality. I’ve somehow gotten on the e-mail list of Judicial Watch, and they push out five or six e-mails every day parroting and defending every insane thing he says and does. Yes, they’re claiming the IG report vindicates him and proves that the FBI is trying to frame him. A few of the Republicans in congress occasionally utter some weak dissent, but most of them never do. They’re cooperating in the attacks on the Justice Department and FBI, and they’ve abandoned their positions on trade, immigration and international relations without even apparently noticing that they’ve done it. It makes no difference how crazy he gets and any connection to reality has long since become irrelevant.
A few of the Republicans in congress occasionally utter some weak dissent, but most of them never do.
The ones that do never vote against him, which means two things. One, talk is cheap and they’re cowards. Two, they’re chasing appearances on the Sunday morning circle jerks.
It means they can’t win. Vote against him and get primaried (and lose). Or vote with him, draw the ire of Democrats and other voters and lose.
The reason any sane person would vote for the Democratic Party, even if they’re super ultra mega left-wing progressives, is to blunt the damage from an outright fascist who has millions of right-wing authoritarian followers.
Get out and vote this November, and make sure your family and friends do so too. Don’t try to make an argument with non-voters that Democrats will solve all of the country’s problems – they aren’t stupid.
It’s about survival of the Republic. Full stop.
Good observation, Booman.
It’s also another piece of evidence that runs counter to the “Nothing Sticks To Trump” thesis. (See: June 15 post)
Not only do Trump’s approval ratings continue to suffer (if the election were today, and based on Trump’s approval ratings, the Democratic candidate would win over 300 electoral votes…and that’s with a 4% unemployment rate), the more he and his administration attempt to move forward with their agenda, the harder it is for them to advance.
Trump is like a general with an army whose supply lines are increasingly overextended on multiple fronts. Sooner or later, he’s going to start losing battles and territories in ways that feed on each other.
“Trump is like a general with an army whose supply lines are increasingly overextended on multiple fronts.”
Napoleon in Egypt
that’s a very interesting parallel, since Napoleon (though not that French army IIRC) got out of Egypt and went on to several more years of victories.
Booman, I read you a lot but basically never participate in the comments.
But I wanted to tell you that this may be your most quotable line of your whole career:
“He’s fucking crazy, folks. This is not going to end well.”
Thanks for all the years of your writing.
Have not read one Democrat complain about Trump’s Apology for Being Free tour.
Helping Republicans realize their goals to be the most Fascist, Racist, Misogynist, Xenophobic, Homophobic Greedy little shits they are.
HRRTG-FRMXHGLS
It works better with a heel click and Seig Heil!
Which of Trump’s travesties is the one you label as this tour?
The G7 Hell Froze Over Escape to Singapore World Tour..
With Trump opening for the Last Dictators.
Sen. Schumer rips President Trump over summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un
By DENIS SLATTERY
JUN 12, 2018 | 11:50 AM
Sen. Chuck Schumer dismissed President Trump’s sitdown with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un as nothing more than “a reality show summit.”
Schumer, speaking on the Senate floor Tuesday, said Trump has already given up American leverage on North Korea.
Trump denied making any concessions to North Korea….
Nancy Pelosi hits Trump for receiving ‘vague promises’ from Kim Jong Un on denuclearization
by Al Weaver
| June 12, 2018 09:10 AM
President Trump got nothing more than “vague promises” from North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un that do not show a clear pathway to denuclearization as part of their deal Tuesday morning, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said.
Pelosi said the president moved in “haste” to get a deal with Kim after announcing that the North Koreans will move on denuclearization, which Trump says will “go very quickly.”
“Nuclear nonproliferation is a pillar of America’s national security. We respect any serious and real diplomatic efforts to achieve that goal on the Korean peninsula,” Pelosi said in a statement hours after the agreement. “Apparently, the President handed Kim Jong-un concessions in exchange for vague promises that do not approach a clear and comprehensive pathway to denuclearization and non-proliferation.
“In his haste to reach an agreement, President Trump elevated North Korea to the level of the United States while preserving the regime’s status quo. The millions of families currently living in fear of nuclear weapons in the region deserve strong and smart leadership built on diplomacy and engagement with our regional partners and allies.”
The House Democratic leader also said the president’s actions at the G-7 summit in Quebec and “habitual disparaging” of U.S. allies hurts the prospects for peace.
“The President’s marginalization of the vast expertise of the State Department and his habitual disparaging of our allies as demonstrated at the G7 Forum hinders a lasting, stable pathway to peace,” Pelosi said.
Yup, and all this makes him extraordinarily popular with Republican voters.
Trump’s not losing it. The Republican Party is losing it, and has been for years.
. . . approval among Banana Republicans is mostly/entirely a tribal circle-the-wagons effect (around “our” preznit), enabled by the Reality-Denial brainwashing from decades of living within the rightwing media bubble, with its impenetrable Reality filters.
The silver lining is that that’s 90% of only 26% (remarkably, Banana Republicans are one point UNDER the “crazification factor” constant), i.e., [checks math] only 23% of the electorate (though it’s also not the entirety of Trump’s approval, as indies and Dems contribute smaller levels).
They are both losing it.
if having the presidency, both houses of congress, and the supreme court is “losing”, I’d hate to see “winning”.
. . . They’re different!
He lost it. Mueller has all of Manafort’s and Cohen’s paperwork. Mueller now knows all the LLC acct #s, fake names, and can trace where the money comes from and where it when. This is going to end up being the biggest RICO/money laundering case ever. I don’t see an out for the Donald.
You just don’t recognize all the ‘winning’ Booman. You’re getting your information from the Fake News media who want to destroy ‘Murika’…..so says seemingly half a benighted country.
It ain’t half!
Clinton got three million more votes than he did, so that cannot boil down to “half.” The hard core Trump morons make up about a third, if that. And when you subtract from his total votes the hard core racist/cultists that make up the deplorable base, the remainder are the malleable idiots — former Obama voters, “independents” etc too shallow and stupid to see that just because Trump “wasn’t” a politician and “is a businessman” and thus an “outsider” therefore he will “bring change.” Or, “The Apprentice.” That’s how these idiots think.
Bottom line is, due to a really effed up quirk in the system — the Founders were hardly perfect — we got this ignorant narcissist who has no business in any role of public responsibility, in the highest office in the land. They say, we need to accept every crazy/criminal thing Trump does because, “the voters knew” and “the country” elected him anyway, so therefore, “America” is fine with it. Hell no! Thanks to a really f*cked up flaw in the system, a minority foisted this devil on us.
We gotta stop saying “half the country” when it comes to those morons because it gives them literal legitimacy they don’t have.
Over on Balloon Juice there is speculation in a comment thread that Trump is suffering from congestive heart failure. Apparently some of the symptoms are tiredness, getting winded easily, confusion, and obstinate refusal to believe the diagnosis. That red mark on his hand after the Marcron handshake is also indicative of heart failure. Given how poor his doctors are, it wouldn’t be surprising.
. . . wondering what Sen. Dr. Frist’s remote diagnosis is.