Donald Trump and the Fellowship of the Alternative Facts (Part 14)

[iweartanktops]

Has anyone seen this? 

Quote

 

Yesterday, documents surfaced showing that former Trump Campaign Chair Paul Manafort had received at least $750,000 in illegal payments from former Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych, who is about to be tried for treason in absentia in Ukraine.

Today, Denis Voronenkov was shot to death in the streets of Kiev in broaddaylight, just a few weeks after he said he would testify against Yanukovych and his cohorts — Manafort included.

This is only the latest in a list of Russian dissidents to be murdered or die under mysterious circumstances since the U.S. Election. The timing of Voronenkov’s murder in conjunction with the latest revelations about Manafort — a man he was likely to incriminate — makes this latest tragedy all the more suspect.

 

More at the link:

http://occupydemocrats.com/2017/03/23/man-testified-trumps-campaign-chair-just-shot-dead/

2 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Holy shit. Read this transcript from an interview Time did with the tangerine toddler. Prepare yourself though. If you thought he's idiot, this just might be definitive proof. And I'm not kidding when I say that.

http://time.com/4710456/donald-trump-time-interview-truth-falsehood/?xid=homepage

This is just the beginning of the interview. It gets more convoluted as it goes on. It's pretty hard to follow exactly what he's trying to say, but I can't help but get the impression that either the man's going senile and only has a limited understanding of what's going on and keeps repeating things he's been told to say, or what he believes he should be saying, or he's a complete moron and only has a limited grasp of what's going on and keeps repeating things he's been told to say, or what he believes he should be saying.

Either way... holy shit!

What the fuck? He is truly an incoherent moron. 

2 hours ago, Fascinated said:

I actually think he might believe what he's saying. Who else reads his words in his smarmy voice?  Ugh.  Forcing myself to channel Alec Baldwin. More palatable. What an enormous dick. 

Hahaha! 

[Howl]

Quote

Today, Denis Voronenkov was shot to death in the streets of Kiev in broaddaylight, just a few weeks after he said he would testify against Yanukovych and his cohorts — Manafort included.

This is just horrifying and beyond brazen.  Sends a clear message to anyone else thinking about testifying.  Putin is a murderer and people in the US just. don't. get. it.  Denis Voronenkov is the latest  victim in a string of assassinations of Putin critics.  It makes Manafort look pretty damn bad.  And sends Manafort a pretty clear message to hold the line for Russia and Ukraine, unless he wants to have, I don't know, an early and unexpected heart attack or car wreck or plane crash. 

On  a somewhat different note, Comey was in my city today at a conference about security, held at the University.   A student asked him if the FBI had changed their policies,  based on Comey's pre-election statement about the FBI investigating more Hillary Clinton emails.  Comey just laughed and said he wasn't going to talk about it. Very dismissive, as though it were irrelevant.  Like, "Hey!  I got away with it!"  Sigh. 

[candygirl200413]

The stories I've heard about this reporters is just absolutely frightening. I read a few days ago about a Ukraine reporter that Preet Bharara was working with as a witness for something against trump was "mysteriously" pushed off a building. Just so terrifying!!

Also is anyone just exhausted with the winning we have accomplished so far in this country?!

[GreyhoundFan]

"Welcome to the pre-truth presidency"

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Forget the post-truth presidency, when it didn’t matter — or so the Trump White House hoped — whether the president told the truth. In retrospect, those seem like the good old days. We have now entered even scarier territory, the pre-truth presidency: If an assertion isn’t true, no worry. President Trump will find a way to make it so, or at least claim it is.

In The World According to Trump, the president makes a baseless assertion — perhaps to distract from bad news, perhaps to vent, perhaps simply to attract attention, the narcotic he craves in ever-larger doses. Then Trump or his hapless aides scramble to collect evidence, however sketchy, to back him up. Or, scarier still, he relies on his Twitter-fueled, sycophant-enabled capacity to create his own reality-distortion field.

Trump gleefully elaborated on this approach in a revealing interview with Time magazine’s Michael Scherer.

“Sweden. I make the statement, everyone goes crazy. The next day they have a massive riot, and death, and problems,” Trump said, referring to his unfounded comment last month about “what’s happening last night in Sweden.”

In this way, Trump serves as a human Heisenberg principle, changing a measurable phenomenon by observing it. If he is wrong, it is only a matter of time until he becomes right, at least in his own head. As he told Scherer, “I predicted a lot of things that took a little of bit of time.”

So it will be, Trump predicted, with his reiterated, if slightly revised (“mostly they register wrong”) assertion that his popular-vote loss was the result of 3 million or more undocumented people voting. “Well I think I will be proved right about that too,” Trump said. “We’ll see after the committee. I have people say it was more than that,” he added.

Most politicians recoil from controversy. Trump seems to be convinced that controversy serves to amplify his message. The burden of added scrutiny is outweighed, in this Trumpian calculus, by the benefit of extra attention for whatever message he is peddling.

The consequent irony is that a president who denounces serious reporting and unwelcome facts — “Any negative polls are fake news,” Trump tweeted last month — has no qualms about relying on the fakest of news, either as unchecked fodder for a tweet or to back it up after the fact.

Pressed by Scherer about his campaign trail insinuation that Sen. Ted Cruz’s father was connected to Lee Harvey Oswald, Trump was characteristically unrepentant: “Why do you say that I have to apologize? I’m just quoting the newspaper just like I quoted the judge the other day.”

The newspaper — that would be the National Enquirer. Enough said. The judge — that would be Andrew Napolitano, the former New Jersey Superior Court judge and Fox News commentator who claimed to have three intelligence sources saying the British had helped President Barack Obama spy on Trump, a claim that Fox News itself said it could not confirm before yanking Napolitano off the air.

Scherer, pressing gently: “But traditionally, people in your position in the Oval Office have not said things unless they can verify they are true.”

Trump: “I’m not saying, I’m quoting, Michael, I’m quoting highly respected people and sources from major television networks.” He’s just quoting — this in the face of the statement by a British intelligence agency that it was “utterly ridiculous” to suggest it spied on Trump and testimony by National Security Agency Director Michael S. Rogers that such an allegation “clearly frustrates a key ally of ours.”

Yet it is not simply that Trump refuses to accept reality, it is that he bends it to his will. In this Trump tower of dreams, if he tweets it, the truth — or some asserted version thereof -- will come.

...

Quoting the National Enquirer. Um, how does Agent Orange put it? SAD!

 

 

3 minutes ago, candygirl200413 said:

The stories I've heard about this reporters is just absolutely frightening. I read a few days ago about a Ukraine reporter that Preet Bharara was working with as a witness for something against trump was "mysteriously" pushed off a building. Just so terrifying!!

Also is anyone just exhausted with the winning we have accomplished so far in this country?!

Yes, Rachel Maddow talked about the man who was "pushed" or "fell from" the fourth floor of a building. He survived, but has serious head trauma.

And, yes, I'm completely exhausted.

[Audrey2]

10 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Welcome to the pre-truth presidency"

Quoting the National Enquirer. Um, how does Agent Orange put it? SAD!

 

Snip 

Is anyone else thinking that we need to get Trump a subscription to the old Weekly World News? As I recall, it was the wildest of the tabloids, usually involving aliens. His tweets would be really entertaining then!

[Cartmann99]

3 minutes ago, Audrey2 said:

Is anyone else thinking that we need to get Trump a subscription to the old Weekly World News? As I recall, it was the wildest of the tabloids, usually involving aliens. His tweets would be really entertaining then!

Is that the one with stories about Bat Boy and finding Satan's skull in New Mexico? 

[onekidanddone]

I just tried to keep up with this tread and I just can't. Too much.  From the Putin approved murders to Orange Julius Cesar incoherent ramblings to the fucked up TumpCare  let the poor people fuck off and die health care bill.  Oh and the stabbing in NYC commuted buy some fuck stick who tarted a man because he was Black. 

I scares the fuck out of me that Agent's critics here are going to start having accidents.  I know our country is supposed to be a "country" and we are not like Russia (yet).  I just sputtering freaking out.

[GreyhoundFan]

5 minutes ago, Audrey2 said:

Is anyone else thinking that we need to get Trump a subscription to the old Weekly World News? As I recall, it was the wildest of the tabloids, usually involving aliens. His tweets would be really entertaining then!

Yeah, that's about his level.

 

I don't think this has been posted, apologies if it has: "‘There’s a Smell of Treason in the Air’"

Quote

The greatest political scandal in American history was not Aaron Burr’s shooting of Alexander Hamilton, and perhaps wasn’t even Watergate. Rather it may have been Richard Nixon’s secret efforts in 1968 to sabotage a U.S. diplomatic effort to end the Vietnam War.

Nixon’s initiative, long rumored but confirmed only a few months ago, was meant to improve his election chances that year. After Nixon won, the war dragged on and cost thousands of additional American and Vietnamese lives; it’s hard to see his behavior as anything but treason.

Now the F.B.I. confirms that we have had an investigation underway for eight months into whether another presidential campaign colluded with a foreign power so as to win an election. To me, that, too, would amount to treason.

I’ve been speaking to intelligence experts, Americans and foreigners alike, and they mostly (but not entirely) believe there was Trump-Russia cooperation of some kind. But this is uncertain; it’s prudent to note that James Clapper, the intelligence director under Barack Obama, said that as of January he had seen no evidence of collusion but that he favors an investigation to get to the bottom of it.

I’m also told (not by a Democrat!) that there’s a persuasive piece of intelligence on ties between Russia and a member of the Trump team that isn’t yet public.

The most likely scenario for collusion seems fuzzier and less transactional than many Democrats anticipate. A bit of conjecture:

The Russians for years had influence over Donald Trump because of their investments with him, and he was by nature inclined to admire Vladimir Putin as a strongman ruler. Meanwhile, Trump had in his orbit a number of people with Moscow ties, including Paul Manafort, who practically bleeds borscht.

...

Many Democrats are, I think, too focused on Jeff Sessions and have too transactional a view of what may have unfolded. Treason isn’t necessarily spelled out as a quid pro quo, and it wasn’t when Nixon tried to sink the Vietnam peace initiative in 1968.

In the past, as when foreign funds made their way into Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign, Republicans showed intense interest in foreign interference in the political process. So it’s sad to see some Republicans (I mean you, Devin Nunes!) trying to hijack today’s House investigation to make it about leaks.

Really? Our country was attacked by Russia, and you’re obsessed with leaks? Do you honestly think that the culprit in Watergate wasn’t Nixon but the famed leaker Deep Throat? Republicans should replace Nunes as head of the House Intelligence Committee; he can’t simultaneously be Trump’s advocate and his investigator.

The fundamental question now isn’t about Trump’s lies, or intelligence leaks, or inadvertent collection of Trump communications. Rather, the crucial question is as monumental as it is simple: Was there treason?

We don’t know yet what unfolded, and raw intelligence is often wrong. But the issue cries out for a careful, public and bipartisan investigation by an independent commission.

“There’s a smell of treason in the air,” Douglas Brinkley, the historian, told The Washington Post. He’s right, and we must dispel that stench.

 

[onekidanddone]

2 minutes ago, Cartmann99 said:

Is that the one with stories about Bat Boy and finding Satan's skull in New Mexico? 

Satan is pregnant with Bill O'Reilly's baby

[GreyhoundFan]

5 minutes ago, onekidanddone said:

Satan is pregnant with Bill O'Reilly's baby

I don't know who I'd feel sorrier for in that situation.

[GreyhoundFan]

A couple of Tweets that I enjoyed:

[Cartmann99]

21 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I don't know who I'd feel sorrier for in that situation.

The baby. The baby has Satan and Bill O'Reilly for parents. 

[AnywhereButHere]

6 minutes ago, Cartmann99 said:

The baby. The baby has Satan and Bill O'Reilly for parents. 

Seriously. Damien himself would run screaming in terror from that family unit!

[GreyhoundFan]

7 minutes ago, Cartmann99 said:

The baby. The baby has Satan and Bill O'Reilly for parents. 

That's very true.

 

A couple more Tweets that I thought were good:

[RoseWilder]

Well, this is interesting: 

http://www.palmerreport.com/politics/mike-pence-appears-donald-trump-transition-team-member-caught-wiretap/2036/

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This week House Intelligence Committee chair Devin Nunes got his hands on some kind of classified intelligence through unofficial channels, and it spooked him to the point that he broke every protocol – and may have broken his career in the process. Nunes insists someone on the Donald Trump transition team was legally picked up on a wiretap that was targeted at someone else. And it appears the person incidentally surveilled was Vice President Mike Pence.

Based on Nunes’ description, someone on the Trump transition team was picked up while speaking on the phone with someone who was the subject of a FISA warrant. Widespread media reports have long pegged four people in the Trump campaign’s orbit as being under FBI investigation: Michael Flynn, Carter Page, Roger Stone, and Paul Manafort. These are the four who could realistically have been the subject of a judge-issued FISA surveillance warrant.

Of the four men, the only one who is known to have had phone conversations with anyone on the Trump transition team during the transition was Manafort. And the one person Manafort kept calling? Mike Pence (source: Daily Kos. The two have long been aligned; Manafort went to great lengths to ensure Pence was Trump’s running mate. So it appears that Devin Nunes learned this week that Pence had been caught saying something disconcerting on Manafort’s wiretap. And that may explain why Nunes did what he did from there.

I can't really get too excited about this, since Pence being impeached would leave us with President Paul Ryan. About 5 or 6 people have to be impeached before we get to someone sane. 

[Howl]

It's official!  Devin Nunes is officially an idiot.  Now he's not sure about these documents, he has to get some more information.......maybe someone wasn't overheard after all .......or something. 

[MarblesMom]

1 hour ago, Audrey2 said:

Is anyone else thinking that we need to get Trump a subscription to the old Weekly World News?

They almost always featured BatBoy, one of my very favorite imaginary critters.  I hear he is working in Congress now.

[GreyhoundFan]

7 minutes ago, Howl said:

It's official!  Devin Nunes is officially an idiot.  Now he's not sure about these documents, he has to get some more information.......maybe someone wasn't overheard after all .......or something. 

I hope this ends his political career. He's another one who needs to be far, far away. The WaPo published this about him and his buddy, Agent Orange: "Intelligence Chair Nunes apologizes for disclosing surveillance information to the White House"

Quote

House Intelligence Committee Democrats said Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) apologized to them Thursday during a closed-door meeting for his handling of revelations about surveillance that potentially could have been collected about President Trump and his associates during the transition period.

Nunes’s apology was “generic,” Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.), a member of the Intelligence Committee, said on CNN, adding that it was “not clear” precisely which actions his apology covered.

Nunes came under heavy fire from Democrats on Wednesday after going first to the press, then to the White House, and then to the press again before consulting with committee colleagues about what he said was fresh intelligence about the president and his campaign aides.

On Thursday, Nunes said it was a “judgment call” to personally brief Trump before speaking with his Intelligence Committee colleagues, who are actively investigating allegations that Russia interfered in the 2016 elections and suspected links between Trump aides and the Kremlin.

When he made his apology, Nunes stressed “that he really wanted us to be bipartisan,” said Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), a member of the Intelligence Committee. “He was contrite. Internally on the committee, he’s a very reasonable guy. But outside, on a number of occasions, he’s acted in the interests of the Trump campaign.”

...

The bolded sentence is the crux of the problem. Well, that, and the fact that he's a douchecanoe.

[Cartmann99]

9 minutes ago, Howl said:

It's official!  Devin Nunes is officially an idiot.  Now he's not sure about these documents, he has to get some more information.......maybe someone wasn't overheard after all .......or something. 

Devin, honey, stop digging. You're just making it worse.

[kpmom]

A little bit off topic, but does anyone know how to request FB remove fake news stories?

I know they said they wanted to remove them.

A story came across my feed that "Whoopie Goldberg lost everything because she's said so many negative things about Trump".  They then showed a picture of Whoopie, probably from one of her movies, that made her look like a homeless person.

It went on to say she should be deported (pretty sure she was born in the U.S.).

Anyway, it was from something called American News. 

How do we report these types of things?

[Cartmann99]

10 minutes ago, MarblesMom said:

They almost always featured BatBoy, one of my very favorite imaginary critters.  I hear he is working in Congress now.

Speaker of House is usually considered pretty prestigious...

[MarblesMom]

I also saw this today and had to share.  Apologies if someone beat me to it:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

12 minutes ago, Cartmann99 said:

Speaker of House is usually considered pretty prestigious...

Well, it WAS, before the shitweasel slithered in there.

 

This book looks good (check out some of the illustrations included in the article): "A New Yorker cartoonist is creating a new book that illustrates President Trump’s tweets"

[Cartmann99]

41 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Well, it WAS, before the shitweasel slithered in there.

They're going to have to get some of those folks who clean up crime scenes, to prepare his office for the next occupant. 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump is not so Machiavellian after all"

Quote

Many people do crazy things in middle age. I decided to write the libretto for an opera about Niccolò Machiavelli. It’s called “The New Prince,” premiering here this weekend at the Dutch National Opera.

When I began work on this project in 2014 with composer Mohammed Fairouz, the possibility that Donald Trump would be president of the United States — or that the Machiavellian aspects of his personality would be a subject of global concern — was nearly unimaginable. But that was then.

Two days after Trump’s election, I wrote that he embodied some of the amoral qualities that the Florentine philosopher recommended in his masterpiece, “The Prince.” Certainly, Trump is ruthless. He lies, deceives and manipulates where necessary. And he is lucky, a quality Machiavelli thought was crucial in politics, but one that he rarely experienced in his own life.

But on further consideration (which, surely, a librettist is allowed), I don’t think that Trump, with his braggadocio and contempt for fact, really embodies the spirit of “virtue” that Machiavelli regarded as essential for political success. Machiavelli believed in the fact-based life. He insisted on telling the truth to his princes, no matter how painful or scandalous it might be. In this sense, Trump, the serial fabricator, may be the anti-Machiavelli.

Trump often seems to be embracing one of the ideas that Machiavelli feared most, which is that politics can transform culture and, indeed, human character. There’s a distant echo in his populism of Girolamo Savonarola, the fanatical friar who sought to cleanse Florence of the contamination brought by the Medici banking family that had ruled the city-state before. This call to deconstruction and reformation has been summed up by Trump in the phrase “Drain the swamp.”

The clearest advocate of Trump’s revolutionary ideology has been Stephen K. Bannon, his chief strategist. Bannon has expressed admiration for Thomas Cromwell, the shrewd Machiavellian adviser to King Henry VIII who is featured in Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” trilogy. But Bannon sounds to my ear less like the supple, calculating Cromwell, and more like his idealistic, die-hard nemesis, Thomas More.

We hear Bannon’s voice in nearly every proclamation and executive order from the White House. But perhaps the clearest distillation was a 2014 address to a conference at the Vatican that was, in effect, a mobilization for cultural war. I quote Bannon:

“We’re at the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict . . . to fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity that’s starting, that will completely eradicate everything that we’ve been bequeathed over the last 2,000, 2,500 years.”

Bannon warned about what he called the “jihadist Islamic fascism” of the Islamic State, and also about the “immense secularization of the West.” He told the Vatican audience: “As you’re in a city like Rome, and in a place like the Vatican, see what’s been bequeathed to us — ask yourself, 500 years from today, what are they going to say about me? What are they going to say about what I did at the beginning stages of this crisis?”

How would Machiavelli respond to this call to arms? We can only guess. But everything I’ve learned over the past few years of research tells me that he would have been skeptical of such extremism. He didn’t believe in either the elites or the fanatics who would overthrow them.

...

The sturdy citizens of the Netherlands might be offended if I described them as Machiavellian. But as I visit Amsterdam, the Dutch have just rejected the right-wing nationalist party of Geert Wilders. If 2016 was the year of populism’s rise, the year of Brexit and Trump, of deconstruction of the liberal political order, then 2017 has begun here in the Netherlands with the rejection of an extremist party and the continuation of the orderly, tolerant state. May this trend continue.

I don't think Machiavelli would have spent his time playing on Twitter.