“I’m concerned about what happened in Syria and then the comments about Afghanistan,” said Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee. “To me these are two decisions that, No. 1, probably should have been discussed with me and others and, No. 2, I don’t think were good decisions.”
He said he planned to talk to Mr. Mattis on Friday and called Mr. Trump’s decision not to take the counsel of his military advisers “inappropriate.”
This is what fatal damage look like.
Of course, Inhofe is probably one the least smart man in Congress.
True, which actually argues for the point. On his own, based on the usual party-before-country considerations, a guy like Inhofe would stick with Trump forever. If even an idiot like Inhofe gets it (and I am sure he had some help), something major is up.
There’s rhetoric, and then there’s action.
I don’t care about the rhetoric unless there’s appropriate action. A typical x-ohilic will tell you any number of stories and reasons why this time it’s gonna be different. But when it comes time to actually act…nothing.
I come here for the amazing and prescient analysis. So, there’s a huge part of me hoping you’re right. But the realist/pessimist/whatever thinks that none of this ends without some real life bloodshed.
But, again, I’m here because you’re absolutely essential in everyday political absorption and analysis, so…
Please let it be fatal damage.
If I recall right, the senate passed Mitch’s continuing resolution funding the gub’mint 100-0. Presumably Ryan’s Reprobates had intended to go along with this (especially considering that Der Trumper destroyed their majority.) So an actual first step to taking control of the Madmanderer-in-Chief (should Repubs actually wish to do this) is simply overriding any Trumper veto threat and ending the shutdown by Congressional action today. Nothing can be done by Trumper against veto-proof majorities.
Yet Repubs refuse even to contemplate that little act of insubordination. Worse, Ryan’s House as its last hurrah passes the Trumper’s Wall nonsense solely to “prove” Pelosi’s prediction wrong.
Absent ANY Repub action contra Trumper whatsoever, everything else is wishful thinking.
Yes, that is what should happen, if these Congressional leaders meant what they said, or had any spine whatsoever. But Trump was provoked by the sneering conservative media, the same media which claimed that Congressional Republicans could rip out the ACA by the root by shutting down the government until President Obama complied with their demands.
The leader who astounds me here is Ryan. There’s no need for him to maintain support from his Republican caucus, since he’s literally leaving Congress in days. He could get a bipartisan House supermajority to override a Trump veto. Yet the spineless worm went to the White House and acquiesced to the lunatic President’s shifting whim.
The most wasteful thing about all of this is that if the House had voted the Senate bill through and placed it on the President’s desk along with a declaration that is was a win for his wall funding, Orange Mussolini probably would have signed it. He’s not good at real confrontations, and he changes his specific positions on a dime all the time.
Indeed – I guess, & can only guess, it’s tipping his hand to what his next gig/paymaster is – it’s somebody or something close to the Trump-line.
. . . said Senate was likely to re-pass (i.e., amend bill House Banana Repubs sent over including “Wall” — or steel slats! — funding back to the one they’d already passed, w/o that funding, and pass it again). Then send it back to the House. Report included that House Banana Repubs (and presumably Dems, too) had been told to stick around for that eventuality if it happens. Don’t know what’s happened since, but would welcome enlightenment from anybody who does.
I, along with many others, certainly hope this is correct.
But somehow it feels like this is the “sternly worded letter” phase. And we have all seen over the years how effective that turns out to be.
Time will tell.
It reminds me of a grandmother speaking out about accusations against her favorite grandson. “He made inappropriate decisions,” she said.
Throwing the switch on him? Don’t think we’re close.
Oh, good. Inhofe is talking to Mattis. Problem is, Mattis already quit, he’s not going to un-quit. Like so many previous Trump-manufactured crises in the Trump administration we now have somebody “responsible” on the scene, claiming to do some kind of damage control, polishing their “responsible” credentials in front of a credulous media. But the horse is already out of the barn, the damage is out of control; all the Republican Senators have known, for two years, that it’s out of control and still they did nothing but protect Trump.
Electing Trump was “fatal damage”, and there wasn’t a single institution or individual in the whole political system willing or able to stop him though they could (or at least should) have seen the damage coming. Standing idly by for two years, watching him tear up what remained of the post-WW II global political consensus, was “fatal damage”, and it’s the same institutions and individuals (Inhofe among them) who are again responsible and who are again doing nothing but talking about how “inappropriate” Trump’s latest outrage is. There will be another outrage next week, and the week after that, and the week after that one — and they’ll all be “inappropriate” and the Inhofes will go around tut-tutting about it on cable news. By paying attention to them, giving them our time and consideration, we make ourselves part of their charade.
Show me what personal, direct, individual self-interest Inhofe has in doing something more than bleating about “inappropriate”, while he waits and prays for the next election. It’s only 22 months away, we can hang on until then, Trump is sure to lose and then we can all go back to making money the good old-fashioned way. Right, Mr. Inhofe?
Thank you very much, VidaLoca!!!
You’ve nailed it:
If there were more stars available in the ratings system, I’d lay them on you.
Thanks again…
AG
Yes, and that fatal damage is what you, Arthur Gilroy, openly campaigned for from August to November 2016. You came to this progressive community, and likely pestered other progressive communities, lecturing us to withhold our votes from the only candidate capable of defeating Donald Trump in the general election.
The coup de grace is when you described yourself touring through Trump Country in narrative diaries you wrote here in 2016. Did you describe yourself lecturing Trump supporters so they could help avoid the “fatal damage” that would come from a Trump Presidency? Fuck no you didn’t. You said explicitly that you avoided confronting them on their views.
You were on the Trump Train, that’s why. This should not be surprising, since you are an admirer of Ron Paul, who has his own sexist, racist, regressive agenda, one which has much in common with the Trump agenda.
You followed up that shameful performance by campaigning in 2017 and 2018 for progressives to deny their votes for Democratic Party candidates, making yourself a de facto supporter of not just Trump, but the most loathsome Congressional leadership in our lifetimes. You wanted to help Sen. Inhofe’s Caucus maintain majority control, and that happened. You wanted to deny Pelosi the Speaker’s gavel, and that failed, thank God.
Fuck you and your crocodile tears here.
More bullshit from centristfield. You have no idea about my motives for writing what I write, although I have plainly and repeatedly stated them here.
You are a latter-day McCarthyite, nothing more. I disagree with you so I must be an enemy of the country.
Did I “lecture” Trump voters in the hinterlands of PA + NY???
Outnumbered, not from the area and without a weapon to defend myself?
Hell no!!!
Wake the fuck up.
I am not a “de facto supporter” of Trump, I am a supporter of government that is not owned and operated by the .01%.
Will we ever see something like that in the U.S.?
I don’t know, but it won’t be because I didn’t try to awaken the unwoke.
Bet on it.
AG
P.S. You also say “[I] came to this progressive community, and likely pestered other progressive communities, lecturing us to withhold our votes from the only candidate capable of defeating Donald Trump in the general election.”
I have been here…what, since the late ’90s? Early 2000s? My user number is 1721.
And I post nowhere else on sociopolitical matters.
You?
User number 112677.
I been here, centristfield!!!
You?
You came late to the party.
So it always seems to go.
The latecomers try to monopolize things.
Lame, as usual.
Go away.
You’ve already lost.
Oh, I’m aware that you’ve been here for a while. You are a community member who is held in increasingly greater disrespect because of your regressive views and extremely bad faith critiques of the Democratic Party.
The politician whose agenda you most consistently invoke as one you admire is Ron Paul. The Paul agenda in full is simply incompatable with any progressive agenda. And with the vile sexist and racist things you have shared here from time to time, it helps us understand your motivations. You’re a conservative and Trump supporter attempting to engage in transparent progressive cosplay.
Your costume used to fool some community members here, but your critical thinking skills deteriorated and almost all of your supporters here have fallen away.
I’ve resigned myself to you being here. You’ll have to do the same.
This from the dishonest, lying asshole who’s had explained to him clearly, in exquisite detail, the reasons and motivations of those criticizing/downrating your shit, and just went right on endlessly lying the contrary:
That kid who murdered both parents, then threw himself on the mercy of the court as an orphan had nuthin’ on you for chutzpah!
And “a de facto supporter of Trump” is precisely what you are (evidently “de facto” is yet another on the seemingly infinite list of words/phrases whose meaning you don’t understand — or self-servingly pretend not to). Enabling, aiding, and abetting all the way. It doesn’t even matter if cfdj is right or wrong about your motivations, that’s the effect. (Your “mind” is such a confirmation-biased, Reality-filtering mush that I can’t imagine it really mattering what your motivations are, since any connection between them and any intended outcome accomplished by what you do here could only occur by random chance.)
Translation:
Thanks, nit-picker.
You don’t have a clue.
AG
. . . user number!
Jesus, can it get any more pathetic than that? (No, it can’t. Though, remarkably, it’s been tried before.) Remarkable too (well, ok, maybe not that remarkable) that ag could be so clueless as to try it anyway, despite how thoroughly the pathetitude of that previous deployment was exposed.
Deserves formulation as a law analogous to the (bogus) one wrongly attributed to Godwin: You know you’ve lost when you’re reduced to unzipping in order to pull out and wave around your user number . . . to show everybody how small it is!
This bears repeating. Trump is fucking very hard with the military industrial complex. He’s screwing their profits badly. See, they plan for what the military needs and mission are going to be, probably years in advance. You can’t just change the mission and pull out of somewhere we have a major commitment without advance planning, and long range forecasting – to the defense industry so they can plan ahead.
And Trump just had a brain fart and decided to withdraw from Syria. No reason, except that he’s desperate to strengthen his political hold over the base in the face of increasingly probable impeachment. He’s terrified and looking to do anything to prevent any erosion of his political support among his rabid followers.
That is very, very bad for business. And those businesses have contributed a LOT of money to GOP Senators over the years. Northrop Grumman, the largest campaign contributor spent $11m on lobbying efforts in 2018.
And that is just the surface money. The official money. There’s a lot of dark money too that is not publicly tied to Northrop Grumman, but is effectively under their control, just the same.
The big contractors have LOTS of different lobbying firms each specializing in lobbying a specific part of their interest. And they all are going to be calling their Senators that Trump is fucking with their profits.
We need 20 GOP Senators to vote to remove Trump from office and we know they will never do it for any reason like Trump is a proven criminal, who violated his oath of office and engaged in various felonies, and financial crimes, and obstruction of justice, perjury and so on. They don’t care.
But, go against the defense industry? They will make the lives of GOP Senators very, very uncomfortable. They will be put between the upper millstone of the defense and financial services and other lobbies, and the lower grindstone of the MAGA morons and Fox News.
But, the MAGAs aren’t going to hire them or their family members as lobbyists after their day in the Senate is done. They aren’t going to fund fact finding trips and pleasure junkets to exclusive resorts paid for by lobbyist money. But, Northrop will.
If things spiral out of control enough, and Trump makes more and more wild and irresponsible decisions that fuck with the military then yes, eventually, I think even the GOP Senators are going to reluctantly come around to the conclusion that Trump needs to go and they need to bite the bullet and make it happen.
It’s a long shot still, but it’s the only shot we have. The Democrats will never possess enough power to impeach Trump and remove him from office. We need 20 GOP Senators and we can’t expect them to do it for OUR reasons. It is sufficient if they will do it for their own reasons, related to war industry lobbying.
Why do you assume his withdrawal threatens the MIC? We had 2000 troops there, largely as a “presence” than combat. We are selling arms to Turkey. No evidence the drone strikes will stop. Etc.
It isn’t the withdrawal from Syria per se. They can plan for that. They probably already have planned for it. It’s the fact that Trump is unstable and making wild decisions with zero planning that is problematic to them.
Your job as a defense contractor is to plan for military needs, and that is defined by the mission parameters. So they talk to the military all the time. “Do we need X widgets next quarter or Y? Do we need to invest capital in increasing production to produce X or do we scale back to produce fewer? And all that is planned out, often years in advance.
Why do you think the military is so upset with Trump right now they’re practically in a state of open rebellion? There is supposed to be planning and coordination. The President gives them the mission, they execute the mission, in coordination with the defense industry.
Only Trump is so erratic that nobody can tell them anything. Nobody, not even his closest advisors can tell them from one minute to the next what insane thing he’s going to suddenly decide to do – like withdraw from Syria.
Up till now they’ve been scared but trying to manage things, ride it out. But, take a look at the reaction in the media from the entire right wing military industrial complex – that includes all kinds of public officials and private groups, plus the serving military. They can’t tolerate this level of dysfunction in the White House – Trump was always bad but this is getting worse.
You can’t plan in this environment and that is bad for business. They aren’t calling on their paid Senators to impeach Trump right now, they are biting their tongues and trying to figure out what is happening and how they can cope.
But, they are not happy. And Wall Street isn’t happy. The Stock Market just tanked again. Such instability is bad for investors and it makes people clamp down on investment and that will drive markets and profits down.
And as Trump continues to spiral further and further out of control, it’s only going to get worse and worse.
We need 20 GOP Senators to agree to remove him, and the only way that can happen is if enough very rich people decide that he has to go.
Why the hell do you think an imbecile like James Inhof, Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee is making that public statement? I would think this would be obvious. That committee is the focal point of all the lobbying efforts of the entire defense industry. They’re the ones who fund the military. Every military lobbyist in Washington DC has to have connections to Inhof and his committee. When he says something like this against Trump, it’s not just noise.
He’s really unhappy because some lobbyists are making him unhappy or he can anticipate he’s going to be receiving some unpleasant phone calls from lobbyists wanting to know what he’s going to do about this. What’s going to happen. This is hurting us, etc.
Like I said, it’s not a the level that they would take any action against Trump yet. Syria is certainly not the breaking point yet for any of them. But, like gamma rays given off by stars falling into a black hole, the faster it goes, the brighter it glows. The radiation gets more and more intense as matter swirls down the drain.
We can anticipate the same thing. It’s our one hope of convincing 20 GOP Senators to repudiate Trump and remove him from office. No, we’re not there yet.
But, Martin is right that this is fatal. Trump is breaking fatally with his own military. They’re not going to sit idle and watch everything they’ve built into a nice cosy system get destroyed by his random bumbling. There’s too much money at stake for them to sit there and permit that. And they alone have the power to compel results from the soul dead minions among the Republican Senators (and quite a few Democrats too).
Cugel…
A hearty “Yes!!!” to this and your followup to seabe’s reply.
That’s the way it’s going to go, barring such an insane fuckup from Trump…like seriously threatening a major power or one of its important allies with armed war…that “the military” (including the intelligence services) decide that they are going to have to step in and stop him for good.
But…I must add a sad note to this idea.
Isn’t it a shame that in order to get rid of someone like Trump we must hope for interference by the largest, most efficient “Murder Inc.” system ever to soil the face of this good, green earth?
Scylla and Charybdis cubed, I think.
Unlike Homer’s version…where the two monsters cooperate by only picking off the ships that sail closer to one than the other…now it’s likely to be the stronger monster eliminating the weaker one and then taking over the entire passageway.
Is there no other route for us Odysseuses to sail for Ithaca than through the Straits of Messina?
Damned if I know.
Later…
AG
I’d buy the Military-Industrial-Complex argument more readily if it weren’t for Trump’s constant push for more military funding, which will end up in corporate pockets one way or another. But if the pain becomes bad enough, this is very plausible.
It’s a sad state of affairs when we have to rely on the corruption of senators (“whose got the bucks to pay me after I leave the Senate?”) to help the country.
It’s not simply the military if it ever was. It’s the entire elite establishment led by Wall Street:
Yeah. I’m thinking that whole “we can control Hitler once he’s in power. And he’ll give us really big tax cuts and he’ll keep the socialists in their place” kind of thinking isn’t looking to sound on Wall Street right now. They are going to lose their shirts with Dear Leader in charge.
Now, if there’s no other scandal than shamelessly bad management of the economy, then Wall Street, the Military Industrial Complex, and their lobbying armies, would be just stuck with it until the next election. They could raise hell with their tame Congressmen but unless they found some mechanism to impeach the president they could never get rid of him for losing billions of $. But, there’s the whole impeachment scandal, together with the fact that Trump is unquestionably guilty of multiple felonies. Lots and lots as Mueller will soon disclose.
So, there’s an out – impeach and remove Trump. And you can justify it any way you like. As long as you get 20 GOP Senators to vote for it.
And they are increasingly being given reasons to think about it, completely different reasons than Democratic concerns about lying to Congress or obstruction of justice or violating federal election laws, or lying about that.
Although there is much truth to your MIC argument, the real issue is simpler and more basic. This is really about fundamental military and intelligence considerations. If the financial markets are also worried, they have reason to be.
It’s simply this: You don’t have to be part of the MIC to understand that Trump is an extreme danger to domestic and international security. At this point he’s little more than a chimp flinging shit. We can’t have a president like that. I mean, we all get this — it’s the premise of this whole discussion, is it not?
Try this simple thought experiment: Who do you trust more on matters of national and international policy — Trump or Mattis? I don’t care whether you like Mattis or not, just stick to the question, because those are the only options available at the moment.
Yes, Mattis is out, but he represents the U.S. military, and they aren’t going anywhere. And intelligence is out of favor with Trump BECAUSE they know perfectly well how compromised he is, and what a moron he is. Trump is a puppet of Russia, the Saudis, Turkey, and North Korea, just for starters.
And that’s why even idiots like Inhofe are speaking up all of a sudden. Because they are literally getting their wakeup calls from the grownups. True, in themselves statements like Inhofe’s don’t DO anything — but what Booman is saying is, they are SIGNS of the the times that are a-changin’.
Yeah, this is the way to look at it. It’s not threatening the MIC, it’s Humpty Dumpty about to fall and we won’t be able to put him back together again. Trump has already caused permanent damage, but most can be recovered. Now he has his hands on the big boy toys and he’s pulling levers and working the state apparatus. Now it’s for keeps, and permanent reshaping of the international order.
. . . in presuming that because Banana Republicans and their enablers haven’t yet reached a tipping-point in their ability/willingness to continue tolerating Trump, that therefore no such tipping-point can exist, i.e., they will never do so.
You’ve helpfully added a couple scenarios sketching out quite plausible mechanisms by which that might come about.
I like!
I was struck by the resonance with a point Booman also made recently: that they will never be tipped past tolerance by the accumulation of the things we have found so intolerable all along, but rather when things become intolerable from their point of view. Your insights are helpful examples of what that might look like.
No damage whatsoever. Have you asked yourself why it is that Sen. Inhofe has the luxury of speaking in this manner? What is it that his constituents know about him that transcends and neutralizes this kind of posturing?
Please, for once, think something through.
…it is more than noteworthy that a platinum-grade wingnut such as Inhofe would go public with this, even if the intent is only to pull a Jeff Flake-style con to make some feel he does have principles. Not that “principles” have ever been a real concern for Inhofe before.
Just a few weeks ago for someone of his ilk to choose to face the triumvirate of Trump mean tweets, wrath of the base and RINO debasement on Fox by voicing this criticism of the Orange Fuhrer would have been unthinkable. And not just out of fear, but out of “love.”
Fear is one thing, but if the love is starting to wane, it could be a sign that they’re starting to see the risk of keeping Trump around and having him seriously blow up some shit with even more immediate, dire consequences, and then go down with him, is not worth any further political benefit there may be left in him. Besides, even though Trump backtracked on the wall funding after getting called out by Coulter et al, he’s proven himself, once again, to be unreliable with the own the libs crowd.
Trump is making doubters out of supporters and creating more opponents at an increasing rate, and all against the backdrop of Mueller and other investigations picking up steam. The Inhofes of the world see the ship is taking on water, and are preparing their exit.
Inhof is not just some random right wing Congressman. He’s one of the most powerful committee chairmen in Washington. The Senate Armed Services Committee where THIS just happened – the GOP Senate is launching an investigation into the Syrian withdrawal decision. Nothing good for Trump will come out of that investigation:
So, Lindsay done come off the reservation now! They are throwing down the gauntlet on this and actually hold hearings. The only purpose of such hearings would be to embarrass Trump and pressure him to reverse his decision. You can bet that the Democrats in the House will be doing exactly the same thing, they just haven’t announced it yet with the whole shut-down thing that’s going on.
So, come January there could be TWO separate investigations going on both meaning a joint attack on the administration from both wings of Congress. That is not going to go well for the administration.
Remember that a lot of these senators will not face re-election until 2022; they might very well conclude that they can survive the fallout from attacking Trump on this – because the donor class demands it.
Now you’re talking.
Inhofe is motivated by the oil industry. The donald’s management of the economy is driving a barrel of oil under $50. Corporate America is speaking…will the donald listen?
This is all normal, right?
Republican politicians have been “concerned” about Trump’s actions since he rode down the escalator and started ranting about Mexican rapists.
Meanwhile, the House and Senate just backed his move to shut down the federal government over Christmas.
Fatal damage won’t happen until they stop catering to his whims and act to shut him down, instead.
And both republican led houses could come up with a veto proof bill any time they wanted.
.
This whole thing about a government shutdown is GOP posturing. They worked it out so it’s a cheap vote for the base, but in reality it means practically nothing. The House Democrats show up in a little more than a week and that’s the end of the fun and games.
Three things cook Trump’s goose.
* Signing an immigration reform bill that has NACA normalization and a pathway to citizenship for those who are already here undocumented.
* Summit meeting or similar with the leaders of Black Lives Matter.
* Signing a renewal of the assault gun ban.
This is not one of them.
His base will tolerate any level of corruption, any degree of connivance with a foreign country, any display of personal grossness or incompetence.
And other Republican elected officials know that.
They’ve given him the power of life and death over them, because he has the voters. What’s his approval rating among GOP voters? 90%?
No Senator or Representative can survive flying in that kind of headwind.
All true, but what you’re not getting is that this is no longer about the base. The powers that be are telling the GOP: fuck the base.
Once again.
Sigh…
I am not going away, neocentrists.
But sooner or later…2020, maybe as long as 2022…you will be the old news.
Can’t wait.
Bye-bye!!!
Later…
AG
*P.S. I am going to add the following statement to many of my replies to your “standalone articles” (LOL!) and comments…for the benefit of new readers here. It applies to the comment that replies to as well:
*[ref.]
Also too, STILL waiting, liar!
link
link
link
. . . I
see.
Dishonest, hypocritical, and pathetic as always.
It’s telling that he and AG are so tight, innit?
. . . This one’s especially hilarious in light of ag’s repeated, phony, high-minded posturing and preening about how beneath him that downrating stuff is! Plus for how obviously a tribal-solidarity-downrating abuse of the ratings it is, given that that trollrated post has no remotest element of “trolling”, no matter how violently you stretch any definition of trolling.
Too pathetic!
Too funny!
Yep. Noticed that. Been using the little bit of spare time I have to visit here uprating to mitigate the damage.
Behold the shabby man who deigns to lecture this community on How To Be A Real Progressive: the man who expressed these views on the murder of Trayvon Martin:
1-The kid was suspended from high school because he was busted w/a bag of marijuana leavings. Does that automatically make him a bad kid? No, of course it doesn’t. But it also means that he was no saint, for sure.
2-There are a 911 call, an eyewitness account, and physical evidence of injury that all point towards the fact that Zimmerman was indeed under physical attack and losing. Does that mean he should not have confronted the kid in the first place? Shot him? No, but it does mean that something other than this supposed “vicious, racist killing of an unarmed, innocent, sweet-faced young boy” was happening.
3-Trayvon Martin was 17 years old. He played football and appears to have decked this grown man with one punch. That sweet picture of him, the one that’s being used to fuel this whole dustup by our OH so impartial media??
I teach kids this age almost every weekend who are from the same sort of middle-class/working class/mixed-race neighborhoods as this boy came from…the Newark area version (I live in one as well, inna Bronx.)…and lemme tell you right now, it looks to me like that’s about a 14 year old boy in that picture, not 17. Those 3 years can make a world of difference in how kids look and how they act, especially if they’re getting high and acting out. Bet on it.
This rush to judgement is absolutely unconscionable. Lay the fuck off and let’s see if the Omertican InJustice system can get its act together here.
At long last, folks…have you no decency left? Must it all be about politics now?
Enjoy AG’s development of this worldview as he debated BooMan on the issue in a lengthy colloquy in the comment thread to that post.
With views like these, perhaps it is wise to dispense with the idea that Arthur’s critiques of Democrats and progressives are offered in good faith.
Where do you live, centristfield?
How many of your colleagues, friends, students and…especially…teachers and models have been from the blighted black and hispanic ghettoes of the U.S.?
I speak from 50 years of personal experience.
You?
I stepped away from your privileged white leftiness world when I was 18 years old. Younger, actually. Booman knows my real name and artistic history…if I was jiving I am sure that he would have called me out on it years ago. I have performed and recorded with the best of the best in the jazz and latin music worlds in NYC for 50+ years now. And…I have lived, worked and been a ell-functioning part of my ghetto border neighborhoods…by conscious and honorable choice…for easily 40 of those 50+ years.
And you sit there in your entitlement-poisoned, white, neocentrist world and presume to throw shit at me?
People like you are the prime reason that…so far, at least…the Democratic Party has failed so miserably in its attempts at fixing this country’s problems.
Go post on dKos.
At least there, Little King Kos would make sure that you wouldn’t be bothered by truth-tellers like me.
Go away.
You’re old news.
Old fake news.
Disgusting!!!
AG
I live in Oakland. I also don’t have a record of spewing racist-enabling swill again and again.
It’s striking that you appear to have no second thoughts about the things you wrote about Trayvon and his murder.
There’s plenty more of your ignominious writings here. Shall we continue, or do want to try backing off for once?
. . . for the evidence that once upon a time Booman apparently hadn’t yet written ag off as a loon, but was still willing to engage in a fairly lengthy exchange, with ag profiting exactly zero from it (no surprise in that part).
You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him . . . well . . . recognize that it’s water even as he drowns in it.
With the apparent exodus from this site of marie3 and the others who kept writing apologia for Putin and dismissing Trump as merely a buffoon, AG has become a sort of lightning rod. But I don’t see any strong reason to believe that Arthur Gilroy is a right-wing mole, actually. His incessant sectarian sniping and self-indulgent cutesy rhetorical style are sufficiently off-putting.
Opinions differ.
At one point, I considered AG a particularly obstinate contrarian. But the evidence piled up and up and up over the years. There’s plenty, plenty more, believe me.
Arthur wants to drive wedges in the Left; that’s clear. He’s told us directly that he doesn’t want to split the Right, or even ask Trumpsters to reconsider the terrible man and terrible policies they support.
After years and years of this, it becomes worthwhile to apply Occam’s Razor. A man who evangelizes for Ron Paul, a sexist, racist, regressive politician, a man who writes racist and sexist and regressive things here in his unguarded moments, a man who persistently attempts to suppress votes for the only viable alternatives to Trump, McConnell, Ryan and their Party candidates, is actually a sexist, racist, regressive man.
When your anti-Party rhetoric is entirely the same before and after the primaries, when you run your Party-attacking rhetoric all the way to the 2016 and 2018 general election days, when you offer very little criticism of Trump and Republicans, you’re no longer trying to improve the Democratic Party.
Arthur was not sent here as a right wing mole. He appears to have changed from a dogmatic, self-regarding person to a man whose ideology comfortably takes in all major aspects of the Trump movement.
If you wanna get a real hoot, take a look at this diary of Arthur’s where he unsuccessfully tried to talk BooMan and the rest of the community into supporting Hillary over Obama and the rest of the Party’s 2008 POTUS candidates. Read as AG gushes over Clinton’s political skills, and defends quite vigorously Hillary’s liberal record and electoral viability.
I wasn’t here at the time, so I don’t know what kind of progressive community member he was. I know what kind of community member he’s become.
Wow. Reading that diary just now, I felt like someone had snuck in and slipped a hit of acid in my glass of wine, because I was definitely transported to a whole new reality.
. . . to my confrontations of ag (and, yeah, why would you, I get that; the confrontations are almost as tedious as the lies confronted — for me, too!), then you already know that of all the annoying and offensive things ag does, it’s the serial lying and related hideous dishonesty that trumps all the rest.
In particular, as I’ve noted repeatedly, it was this stupendously brazen and grotesque dishonesty that was a tipping-point for me, from usually just scrolling past as soon as I recognized ag as the author to confronting his dishonesty whenever appropriate (and I could find the time and muster the motivation to do so). He should have been banned for that. (Noting, he’s been confronted with that lie literally dozens of times in the intervening 7+ months, and has never so much as acknowledged the existence of the objection, much less retracted, corrected, or even tried to “explain” it away somehow, euphemize it as a “mistake”, “not what I meant”, etc. Nothing. Always just runs away.)
He. Should. Be. Gone.
Mexico agrees to pay for Trump’s therapist