I have seen higher proof dumbfuckery in the last 72 hours than I have seen in my entire life, and I’ve lived through Dan Quayle, George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, and MSNBC’s short-lived show Alan Keyes is Making Sense.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
Trump’s call to Taiwan is just batshit crazy. Who knows if it’s because he wants buildings there, or because Bolton put him up to it. Either way we are fucked.
But I hear Chelsea Clinton has friends…so both sides.
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I had coffee with an old friend from Britain this morning. I asked him if he had heard about Trump contacting the president of Taiwan for a casual chat. He commented, “I’m still catching up with yesterday’s Trump gaff. I simply cannot keep up with the amount of stupid things this Trump idiot comes up with on a daily basis. There’s so much verbal diarrhea. It’s an exhausting task.” I love my friend’s phrasing.
The media will be completely neutered by the non ending waves of his mistakes.
In the meantime his family will clean up.
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Apparently put on Trump’s “to do list” by his advisor John Bolton. Although Bolton envisioned a slower roll-out or playing cards until a trump card is laid down:
Trump prefers to skip the cat and mouse stuff and go straight for the jugular. He’s now made Bolton look measured, strategic, and patient by comparison. Time to hide “the button” in a secret location and come January 20 hand Trump whatever dummy “button” was put in Reagan’s hand.
…
The stunning irony is that the old reprobate, Kissinger himself, was being received in state as Trump’s representative the previous day. Ha ha. Serves him right.
This may not be a bad move, really, Chinese response was tardy and petulant. He totally caught them by surprise. Also nullified their shenanigans with Duerte as reported in the same FT article. Would have loved to see the look on Xi Jinping’s face when this was reported. Yikes!
The stunning component is that Trump has assumed control of the USG before he’s officially POTUS and not wasting anytime in changing long-standing US policies. Obama now looks as small and irrelevant as GWB did eight years ago.
How are Democrats going to criticize Dr. K as Trump’s emissary when they were perfectly fine with Hillary bragging about her tight relationship with the old war criminal who has been a fixture around the WH since the late 1960s.
Considering Democrats had no problem criticizing Clinton for daring to mention his name I don’t see any difficulty.
I think you two have gotten to the crux of the matter – what does it mean to be a democrat?
Everybody has a different definition for that , and they’re all wrong… except for mine.
Democratic Party partisans were just fine with Kissinger in Hillary’s corner. It was those that I was referring to and not those on the left that have loathed Dr. K for near fifty years. But you knew that didn’t you? How are you guys going to be credible in your on-going battle against Trump when he affiliates with the same war criminal as your hero Clinton?
Might I suggest your understanding of the nature of the Democratic party, or party politics in general for that matter, is Manichean and infantile? There’s no conflict between supporting Clinton against Trump and opposing her palling around with Kissinger. Parties are coalitions and no politician is ideally matched to my policy preferences. It’s easy to criticize Trump for working with Kissinger, just like it was easy to criticize Clinton for referencing Kissinger, and for the same reasons.
And considering I voted and supported Bernie in the primary I’d hardly consider Clinton “my hero”.
There’s no conflict between supporting Clinton against Trump and opposing her palling around with Kissinger.
Or palling around with Lloyd Blankfein or Donald — freaking — Trump. (Two name just two of her bffs.) Exactly how do you take the measure of any man or woman if you exclude all their close associates that you oppose? Birds of a feather?
What an odd question. I’m not “taking the measure of (Hillary)”. I’m voting for her to be president. The choice was Clinton or Trump. It wasn’t a hard choice.
Do you want a mass party or a vanguard party?
No way forward till this question is answered.
It’s funny, I can almost guarantee I’m further to left on policy, especially economic policy, than most everyone who comments here. But there are too many who think of politics as some psychosocial morality play where your vote represents some kind of innate virtue instead of the flawed and depressing system that turns policy into action. Was Hillary a shitty candidate? In a lot of ways she was. She wasn’t the candidate I wanted to win the primary. But the alternative was Trump. I can see how delusional right wing trolls like AG would be fine with that result. I don’t see how any self-respecting liberal or leftist would find it preferable.
It’s one of the strange things here. Object to the republicans that post here, object to their alt right memes, and it’s YOU who is not ‘left’.
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You really are a piece of work, marduk.
Nice.
How very…”progressive”…of you.
AG
I was one of the Democrats criticizing Clinton, you ignorant buffoon.
Marie3 wrote:
That was a negatively loaded question, as in “What right will Dems have to criticize the Trump/Kissinger alliance when they did not criticize the HRC/Kissinger alliance?”
You wrote:
Kindly forgive me for not knowing that you were one of the Dems criticizing the HRC/Kissinger thing. You see…after your blizzard of cowardly downratings I don’t generally pay much attention to anything that you say.
My mistake.
On both counts.
ASG
You might wonder why I do not downrate you in retaliation…in fact, I have been uprating you and some of the other, more vicious so-called centrists here.
Why?
Because you are useful.
You abundantly illustrate the impotent tail-end of the…now thoroughly proven to be…failed neoliberal Dem Party takeover with every post and downrating.
I thank you all for your 24+ years of (
dis)service.So do Trump and the rest of the alt. right winner/losers.
Good work!!!
Go downrate them. That would do no more good than playing that game here. Even if you were successful in downrating me and several other out-of-the-box thinkers here right out of this little blog box all you would be doing is turning this blog into dKos Jr…another clomp clomp clomping DemRat centrist digital rag that no longer has any pull whatsoever.
Keep trying though, marduk, and once again…thank you for your service.
AG
How about you provide evidence of comments you made here that criticized Clinton. I, and apparently AG, never saw any of that. Rarely saw you comment at all. What we did see was a plethora of troll ratings that you slapped on comments that did criticize Clinton, the DNC, and Democratic Party elites.
Absent such evidence the only logical conclusion is that you’re a liar and hypocrite.
I’m sure you can find any number of posts around the various liberal blogs I made criticizing Clinton before the primary ended. And very few afterward. Why would I help elect Trump?
Your claim. You prove it.
Who do you think you are — Donald-freaking-Trump that can make any claim that sounds good today, not offer evidence of the claim, and tells other to do the research?
Yeah, I’m not going to google search my internet presence from last spring and package it up for you. If you doubt that I supported Sanders then more power to you. The fact that that’s hard for you to believe says more about your Manichean view of politics than it does about me, IMO.
If not for your freely dispensed downratings since whenever you arrived here (always for those that for years have been honest about their political positions and oppose the New Democrats as much as the Republicans and in 2016 supported Sanders), I wouldn’t have noticed your presence. Odd that you would come here and use downrates to trash Sanders supporters and post pro-Sanders comments on other blogs but unable to produce any of your pro-Sanders comments. Sounds like trollish behavior to me.
btw — people lie in blog comments all the time. There were people here that claimed to support Sanders but their comments betrayed an affiliation with and/or support for New Democrats. Brock had a paid army of trolls going after leftists. And some used standard “agent provocateur” tactics.
Enjoy your nutso paranoia.
You write:
They will try, of course.
And fail.
Why?
How?
Because in a Permanent Government, Uniparty duopoly, it will always be the same old actors…including the media…playing the same old roles. The media will adjust…gradually, because they don’t want to lose their core audiences…to the new normal. Bet on it. And the sheeple will follow their chosen Judas goat(s) to the new shearing pens and/or slaughterhouses. The old neolib rags…WAPO, the NY Times, etc…will transform into the loyal (read “obedient”) opposition, the old opposition rags will become the new normal and the fence sitters (CNN, CBS, NBC ABC, Time, Newsweek etc.)…having realized the error of their ways due to getting the plausibility shit kicked out of them by Trump for a year and a half…will resume their positions on the fence.
And the world will keep right on turning.
Watch.
The “Oh!!! Oh!!! Oh!!! The sky is falling!!!” media bullshit will subside after the shock of the new recedes while it simultaneously dawns on them that business is continuing pretty much as usual. They don’t want to become old news…that would be bad or their business.
Just like when Reagan won.
Watch.
ASG
P.S. Unless…and this is quite possible…the deepest parts of the Deep State decide that Trump is not to be trusted with their 50+ year old basket of golden eggs.
We won’t know until it happens.
It could be wet work or it could be dry. ..a well-engineered, sudden economic collapse, a heretofore unreleased piece of shocking info about Trump (truth or falsity not an issue if done right…please remember the Watergate hustle for more on that idea) or another “war emergency”…whatever.
Recognize it for what it is, when and if it happens.
Watch.
If Trump goes down during his term(s) in office…in any way whatsoever… watch out!!!
Oh come on. The media and “perma-gov” know how to adjust and get their way out of any politician to the right of Gandhi. Like Dr. K they are wily and have no trouble worming their way into every administration. And they bump off those they can’t buy before they ever get close to assuming any official and substantive power.
That’s pretty much what I was saying…
AG
The Guardian— UN to pursue further inquiry into death of Dag Hammarskjöld
Not a peaceful period of time and the USG obstructed the efforts of truth-tellers for an exceedingly long period of time:
It has always been immensely frustrating to have to do a diplomatic dance instead of rewarding Taiwan for becoming a much freer better country than China.
But FFS man, we’d lose a war against China over Taiwan.
I am with Atrios on this one.
http://www.eschatonblog.com/2016/12/protocols.html
I think you and Karl Rove might disagree. But surprisingly not by much if you discount Rove’s spin.
Rove starts a WSJ op-end with the syncophantic assessment,
But I wonder if there’s some sarcastic humor implied by the word “impressive.” He then offers what seems like scornful damning praise, “Mr. Trump is now viewed favorably by the same share of Americans that he won at the ballot box.” which is not impressive until Rove explains, “That’s a big improvement from exit polls on Election Day,…”
My bet: Rove just identified the high water mark of Trump’s approval rating, and it will slide, slide, slide into the swamp Trump is building.
Trump’s post-election honeymoon may have already seen its best days.It’s not a good sign that Trump’s first self-proclaimed “win” of his neonatal presidency is shot down by another loud conservative populist as “crony capitaliswm.”
This is a very strange time when viewed from every perspective. It would only make some sense if Rod Serling’s voice could be heard doing a voice-over narration.
Shouldn’t we be long past the point of declaring that this time Trump has hit his peak and it’s downhill for him from now on? First time was when he took the lead in the GOP primary polling. Then the first debate. Then, then, then. And he keeps pulling rabbits out of a hat to the applause from some and shock and horror to others. Actually not so hard to do if everyone else is playing by some conventional rules and one feels free to break with those conventions and be completely outrageous and inappropriate. A seventy year old shock-jock that has been dispatching his opponents with spitballs for the past year and a half and appears not to have accepted that POTUS is the top of the ladder.
Almost the identical reaction to Reagan.
The cycle:
Trump hasn’t lost a news cycle yet that I can see since he won.
In 2015 we sold 1.8 BILLION in weapons to Taiwan. There is a de facto military commitment to defend it in case of an invasion.
Does anybody actually believe the US does not have significant conversations with Taiwan? The cross border trade between Taiwan and China is in the billions.
So excuse me for not believing the call to Taiwan is not the end of civilization – particularly given how strongly it favored the TPP which Trump is killing.
Or our hungry press encouraging China to have hissy fit–clicks, you know?
A less adrenalized report…http://michaelturton.blogspot.com/2016/12/trump-calls-tsai-world-commentariat-iq.html
seriously. Just completely fucking ridiculous.
I don’t even know what to say, And like you, I lived through W. And, for that matter, Reagan.
Trump may (or may not) be a great businessman. But as a government employee, he’s entry-level and we made him the boss.
if you are serious about that, then I want to know what you store in your head, since it sure ain’t a brain. That is the stupidest fucking thing I have read in a LONG time, and that’s saying a lot.
If you’re NOT serious… carry on.
It’s Davis X Machina, fercryinoutloud. Door number 2 is almost always the correct choice.
And he’s not even in office yet.
46 percent of the voters approve of the f*** China policy. This is entirely consistent with his sales pitch throughout the election.
That assumes China has no recourse. What will be the effect of China selling off our bonds? Do they start assembling Chinese cars in south america? Or do they just steal all of Apple’s tech and put their name on it? The alt right lives in the small world of the 20th century. China has a global reach and have learned a lot from Obama.
All true, but why is anyone here is shocked or surprised that he’s doing something incredibly stupid when it fits within the campaign narrative that got him elected?
Adrenal exhaustion in trying to maintain the outrage levels induced by Trump’s Gish Gallop. And the press making money hand over fist revving it up.
Take care of yourselves, folks.
None of Trump’s voters are offended by this. All Trump has to do is violate some “norm” and it drives process liberals crazy and drives media attention for days.
As far as real policy… Trump seems to be listening to hawks who want to take a harder line when it comes to Iran, terrorism, and the world, in general. There’s a number of Russia haters in his orbit who want to do a lot worse than criticize Putin for election interference.
I’m curious to see how long the Trump-Putin honeymoon lasts. Putin may regret backing that horse as no one knows what Trump believes about anything and he’s easily influenced.