I’m not glib about the people who will be impacted over the holidays, but I actually do hope that President Trump forces a government shutdown over his stupid border wall that the he promised us repeatedly the Mexicans would pay for.
For starters, Trump will be bucking his own Senate majority. They are going to send him a spending bill and if he vetoes it he will be vetoing a bipartisan bill.
The only other possibility is that the House Republicans can be convinced not to agree to any compromise with the Senate, in which case the shutdown will be blamed on congressional Republicans who can’t get their crap together to send anything to the president’s desk. I don’t see that happening, but I’m completely okay with it if it does.
In order for Trump to actually prevail in a shutdown showdown, he’d need at a minimum for the Senate to play ball and force the Democrats to filibuster (what was) a bipartisan bill they’d already agreed to, and that is something the Senate Republican leadership has been clear that they will not do.
Maybe that changes, although I see it as highly unlikely. If the GOP reneges on the deal, the Dems will probably be content to let parts of the government remain shuttered until they control the House and can get a better deal.
So, bring it on, Trump.
I agree, Martin, though there will be squeals of “both siderism” from the MSM if the Democrats lift even a finger to prevent something horrible from being rammed down their (and our) throats.
Ah! But it 3as different when the Republicans wanted to shutdown the government. You might want to go back and read what you wrote then.
You write:
That’s where you go wrong, Booman. Neither the Republican Party nor the Democratic Party are “Trump’s parties.” He is a party unto himself….he and his few real backers. The rest? Including whatever nominal Dems swing his way? They are mostly the equivalent of the Vichy government that worked with Hitler in France…working for their own profit and/or survival. Plus of course a few real patriots who have maintained contact with him in order to be in positions where they might be able to moderate the consequences of his insanity as much as possible.
He wants to cripple the government as much as severely as is humanly possible. He thinks…perhaps correctly…that doing so will:
1- Solidify his position with his base.
and
2-Lead to more power for him.
Bannon 101.
Take the government down, one brick at a time.
Hitler 101 as well.
The “government” is too weak…too indecisIve and too frightened of the possible consequences of less than effective actions against him, actions which could very well expose their own criminality or open them up to retribution should Trump come out on top.
Almost everybody of any real seniority and consequence in “the government” is simply hunkering down behind their media shields and praying for a miracle.
I hope they get one, but the recent spate of supposedly left-centrist media articles suggesting that there is a slow Civll War going on now throughout the country …like these(<http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/11/maybe-its-time-for-america-to-split-up.html> <https://www.salon.com/2018/11/17/slow-motion-civil-war>)…does not bode well for either official party or the for the continuance of the U.S. in its present form.
Whatever…
Neither option will be without risk.
We shall see.
Won’t we.
I will be here any which way it goes, living as happily as possible in the most integrated borough of the most integrated city in the U.S…da Bronx!!!
Bronx nation!!!???
Could happen…
AG
Arthur – I don’t see how you can claim that the republicans are not Trump’s party. What have they done other than kowtow, cower and acquiesce to show otherwise?
the repubs can’t be Trump’s party because it’s central to AG’s worldview that both parties are the same.
At the top of their food chains, the two parties are same, esquimaux. Just two gangs working different sides of the street.
Proof?
Sure.
We have been at permanent war since Korea, through every possible permutation of presidential and congressional party dominance. No change whatsoever is this state of affairs has occurred. And…the major political money for both parties comes from the same military industrial complex about which Eisenhower warned us…now further buttressed by other big money corporate interests like the Big Insurance/Big Med/Big Pharma triumvirate and Big Wall Street money.
It is a mutually held belief by both party’s controllers that ending the PermaWar system would break the economic back of this country and cause massive damage domestically. They might even be right, but the damage that is resulting from the continuation of that PermaWar approach is now approaching a crisis state. Something is going to have to give.
Either the Dems will change their tack and approach the voters with a real alternative rather than the same old same old that has sustained over the past 50+ years, or a hostile force…Trump or the Military/Intelligence Complex…is going to take over.
The crisis approaches apace.
Which option would you like to see?
AG
Which option would you like to see, Arthur? For chrissakes, just provide a straight answer.
I wrote:
I wrote that sentence after several paragraphs bemoaning the Permanent War government of his country and laying the blame for our sad state of affairs right, square at the feet of that system.
And you need to ask which option I would prefer?
Sigh…
Sometimes I wonder about the sanity and/or intelligence of many of the people here.
I really do.
Straight answer?
OK.
I would like to see a successful, left-leaning revolution in the Democratic Party.
Before 2020.
That idea holds the only chance remaining to this country of avoiding a total collapse of the ideas of free speech and freedom of thought and action. The present major media’s gush over Pelosi’s continuation as Speaker of the House indicates to me that the manufacturers of consent do not want to see a revolution of that sort happening. They want business as usual.
And what exactly is “business as usual” in the U.S.?
War business.
And in the long run, war business is bad business.
Bet on it.
I am sad to say that you neocentrists are probably going to win.
I look forward to the spectacle of a Biden/Trump 2020 campaign, with Biden winning and Pelosi/Schumer still propped up in their leadership chairs. (If of course Pelosi hasn’t already died and been replaced wth a relatively primitive animatronic device.)
Y’all remind me of Hubert Humphrey.
I don’t like being reminded of Hubert Humphrey, because that makes me think of Richard Nixon. And I really don’t like being reminded of Richard Nixon, because when he was elected I seriously considered leaving this country.
Wouldn’t it be a wonderful drama…a true unmasking of the media’s role in manufacturing consent…if in 2020 instead of Biden or some other old Dem neocentrist, the Dem candidates turned out to be…oh, say Beto O’Roark and Alexandria Ocasio-Lopez…against Trump? And the media wouldn’t be able to back either slate of presidential candidates?
WTFU.
AG
P.S. “O’Rourke” above. Not “O’Roark.”
I have relatives who spell it the other way and I keep on making that mistake.
Duh.
AG
The two parties ARE exactly the same. For example, the Democrats want to make it easy for people to vote, but the Republicans want to make it difficult. Now, any fool can do a bit of Hegelian analysis here to see that while “easy” and “difficult” seem to have opposite meanings, they actually mean the same thing, namely, whatever Arthur Gilroy wants them to mean.
. . . for Humpty Dumpty.
I wrote above:
The centrist RatPubs fear him. If he seriously falters, they’ll be on him like dogs on a bone. Trump is not a Republican…or even a conservative… he’s just the current King of Thieves.
Watch.
AG
We will always be on the defense with the 2 Rs for every D (or 2 Rs per corporate media journalist) mainstream media. It’s time for Dems to start working the refs like Rs have down for decades. The mainstream media is biased against Ds. Say it everytime a D is interviewed in print, on radio or on the TV. It’ll be easy because unlike Rs with their Fox and radio Wurlitzer, it’s demonstrably true with respect to Ds. All one needs to do is look at the Sunday show line-ups. Oh, and even NPR.
You know who’s really bad at this…. Chuck & Nancy! New leadership now!
The donald is going to tweet so much BS after he shuts the government down. The dems need to be strong. There is no deal for the wall. There is no need to go to the WH to just be a photo op for the donald. There is no need to discuss policy on twitter. Smart move would be to put off the spending bill until March when the debt ceiling must be raised. By then the dems will have leadership settled and hopefully a plan for resistance Really, how do you decide on spending when you don’t know how the donald’s tariffs are going to effect the economy. The tariffs are the donald’s ball…let him play with it…and what is the probability he will fumble his ball?
Well, our poor-man’s Fuhrer is “strong” when it come to harassing helpless women and children, and firing his motley collection of absurd WH courtiers and Crackpot Cabinet clowns. But he is disgustingly weak when confronted with those whose have power independent of the executive branch, such as the foreign leaders he has to deal with. Weak, because insecure and essentially simpleminded. That’s our “strongman”–a sadistic bully, basically, afraid even to talk to Merkel!
So it would be quite remarkable after having clearly lost a national election and being confronted with an incoming hostile Dem House for him to buck whatever Addison McConnell III places on his desk now. Mitch is going to be his savior in the coming two years, and Der Trumper is going to do exactly what Mitch tells him to do. So get out your signing pen or else, you unqualified imbecile.
Thus the nauseating Trumper will tweet and whine and tweet again, but even a confirmed fool like Trumper must know that if he couldn’t get his Repub[!] Congress to waste money on TrumpWall right after his “election”, then he surely isn’t going to get Mitch’s LameDuck Congress to do it, if Reichsfuhrer McConnell doesn’t want to. So more impotent wailing and tweeting is what we’ll see from Der Trumper.
. . . [sic] to . . . firing . . . ‘
Nah, the guy whose claim to fame was saying “you’re fired” on a fake-reality teevee show always makes his flunkies do that dirty work in real life. Further evidence what a pathetic coward he actually is behind all the bluster.
This comment thread is a nice illustration of Godwin’s Law. Der Trumper. Reichsfuhrer McConnell. And the Hitlerian endpoint was reached in what was perhaps record time.
. . . has
Trump is exactly like Hitler. Well, except for directing genocide and dispossessing & enslaving his neighbors. But that’s a quibble.
. . . with the common misrepresentation of “Godwin’s Law” (per Godwin hizownself — did you click the link?): the false premise that validly noting actual similarities = declaring “exactly like”.
For one very obvious example, Banana Republicans going back decades now have been very routinely engaging in Hitler’s Big Lie tactic. By your reasoning, observing and noting this reality = declaring they’ve already murdered millions . . . which is, of course preposterous as “reasoning”.