I sure am glad it’s Friday. I know it has been a demoralizing week in politics when something like this fails to bring a smile to my face and winds up just making me more dispirited about the state of the nation:
Fox News host Sean Hannity fanned the flames of his feud with Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) late Thursday, saying he has “done nothing” in Washington and to “call me when you repeal ObamaCare loser.”
Hannity and Sasse have gone back and forth over President Trump’s criticism of news outlets and his recent tweets suggesting television news outlets’ licenses be evaluated and possibly revoked.
The latest jab by Hannity was in response to Sasse suggesting he supports the Constitution and Hannity does not. Sasse’s comment was made after Hannity said he regretted supporting Sasse as a candidate because of his Trump criticism.
I’m all for seeing the Republicans in disarray, but this is more an example of the president empowering people to act like him in a bullying and demeaning way.
If I could, I’d impeach the president just for having this kind of influence on people. I’d impeach him so my son doesn’t have to witness this and maybe think this is how powerful and successful people normally behave.
Even though I don’t write much on the weekends anymore, I usually keep up with the political news. This weekend is going to be different. I’m unplugging from this travesty. I need a break from the crap. It’s gonna all about soccer and baseball and a new puppy that is joining the family.
I’m sure things will be far worse by Monday. These days, they always are.
What, and miss Der Trumper’s weekend news manipulation Scheme of the Week? As well as the usual Friday Afternoon Firing?
Tuning out Trumper’s manufactured Weekend Shit is the strongest indicator of one’s sanity these days…
A puppy joining the family will keep you distracted as long as you desire. Ours is 4 months old now, and the joy he brings to me by simply watching him with my kids is a welcome respite at the end of each day. Have fun.
The other day one of Lamar Alexander’s people told me my language wasn’t acceptable.
I asked them, “why not? It’s OK for the president but not ordinary Americans?”
No response to that one.
No injuries on the soccer field.
They all have to emulate Trump if they are to hold onto an audience conditioned to think that WWE bouts are how you conduct politics. But, I think these Republican critics are on to something. Sen. Sasse is as right wing as you could want, even for Nebraska. But, he can see the handwriting on the wall and is not afraid to criticize Trump.
Of course he’s coming up for re-election in 2020, and we can see that Trump is wildly unlikely to be the Republican nominee by then. He’ll either have resigned to avoid impeachment or his health will give out, probably the latter if he keeps getting fatter and fatter.
It seems like the GOP Senate is just waiting for an excuse to turn on Trump and get rid of him, mostly in self-preservation. He’s destroying them, criticizing them to their base supporters, leaving them to twist slowly in the wind and blaming them for his own stupidity and failures. Worse, he’s making impossible demands on them and setting them up for failure. They probably despise him with a withering hatred and contempt. They are in the worlds’ most exclusive club and he’s making it impossible for them to enjoy it.
Any sensible president would be consolidating his hold onto power by reaching out to the middle, thus cementing GOP rule for the next decade, but not Trump.
Sen. Sasse is as right wing as you could want, even for Nebraska. But, he can see the handwriting on the wall and is not afraid to criticize Trump.
Let me know when he actually votes against Trump on anything of substance. Until then he’s just trying to become a younger version of McCain, in that he’s all hat and no cattle.
McCain actually did help shut down the Obamacare repeal bills (twice) so I give him a little credit.
That is not the point at all. Why has he criticized Trump but votes with him? It shows he’s not ideologically opposed to Trump on any principled basis, it’s just that he hates Trump and is willing to attack him personally for Trump’s lack of competence.
For rock-headed Conservatives, that is remarkable. It indicates an unravelling. Imagine Bernie Sanders attacking Elizabeth Warren on a personal basis. It just wouldn’t happen.
He’s poison. He taints everyone around him and everything he touches. He makes everyone a worse person for listening to him. I see it on Booman Tribune in the comments, and I see it within my own house.
It’s going to take years and years after he is gone to wash his taint off of us. Probably a generation.
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I now see it in my small rural community where it used to be possible to disagree without being disagreeable, as the saying go.
I personally hit bottom today, but I fear it wasn’t truly the bottom and I can fall even farther.
Hannity, Trump or both?
Longer than that. Think about it if Trump manages to somehow survive to 90-100 years old — given his diet and overall health, this doesn’t seem likely, but it’s possible with modern medicine and luck. Think of if he loses in 2020. Is he going to slink away and be quiet? We are stuck with this circus until he’s dead, and if civil society hasn’t collapsed by then it will take a generation to recover.
Given his diet, health and emotional state, which can adversely affect health, I don’t think he’ll last that long. There’s only so much medication can do before the side affects start to incapacitate.
But yeah, for now, we’re stuck with this ugliness, and even if he does leave at some point he’s hooked on the sick adulation of the “deplorables” and may keep them riled up for years.
Puppy?
PUPPY!!!!
Your son will be over the moon!
Pix ASAP, please!
The ACA “signing” clip is interesting. He talks about everyone receiving great hc, then basks in the applause and starts to walk out. transparently [to use a Zinke related word] it’s a stunt to garner adulation. his mental illness is destroying things right and left, we’re all just props propping up his narcissism, providing occasions for him to stand in front of an audience and be applauded. another interesting thing, along those lines, was his comment about the stock market and the debt – as if the us economy is his own personal finances.
It will be interesting how this all plays when the market turns on him.
If the donald destroys NAFTA Wall St will abandon him.
If the donald destroys NAFTA Wall St will abandon him.
They’d be smarter to abandon him before he trys to repeal NAFTA.
I want puppy news!!
Maybe we can all post something funny/strange/enraging on the weekends while you rest and recharge.
California Fires Are Destroying Marijuana Farms
[First the wildfires in Northern California came for your wine. Now they’re coming for your weed.
Twenty-two fires have destroyed more than 17,000 acres of the Golden State, and pot growers are beginning to report devastation to their crops, some of which would be the first legal recreational weed in the state.
The state has an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 marijuana farms, and a spokesman for the California Cannabis Association says it’s too early to say how many will be lost. But the damage will be more than just a minor bummer.]
the Puerto Rica news is horrifying. did you see the seg in Rachel Maddow – the hospital ship treated 7 people one day, 8 the next. how the FEMA workers took at spa day and used the sterile tent facilities? someone must have given an order not to help ppl. the hospital ship is sitting there, not being used.
Yes. It’s just awful. In comparison to help provided to FL and TX, it’s an out and out travesty.
I don’t know if they got direct orders to do that bc of what the San Juan Mayor said about Trump, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
Of course, Trump’s fans could care less about brown skinned PR citizens, whom, no doubt, they don’t reeeaaallly view as citizens, anyway.
It’s horrible.
Betcha just about anything those acres are still sitting right there, right where they’ve been all along.
https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/western-wildfires/california-s-multi-million-dollar-pot-farms-are-
going-smoke-n810451
non-link “link” work since it appears you missed the point entirely, so I feel quite confident the link contains no support for the notion that any acres were “destroyed”. (If I’m wrong, what’s there now . . . a mini black hole?)
So – do you get paid to police the comments at this site, or do you just do it out of the goodness of your heart? I have three English teacher sisters-in-law so you don’t scare me.
Bit of background might make you feel a bit better (or not? ymmv!): WaPo once published my LTE taking to task reporters/editors engaging in similarly ridiculous wildfire-related hyperbole (in that case, the statement that ____ acres of forest were “destroyed” by that week’s media-obsessing forest fire [in fact, in case this needs explaining, those acres of forest were simply reset to an earlier successional stage, as fire and other natural disturbances have been doing since long before any humans got the notion of “managing” forests into their heads]). Neither the forest nor the acres were “destroyed”.
This is a standard — and very harmful to public understanding of natural disturbances like forest fires — flaw of the Corporate Media (variation of “if it bleeds, it leads”), which promotes ignorance, and hence bad, anti-scientific policy.
So scaring you in spite of your insulation by English-teaching sisters is completely irrelevant.
It’s about accuracy regarding scientific Reality, not grammar/usage policing (not that I’ve never done that; just irrelevant here).
Is Reality someone in the scientific community? Is that his/her first name, or last?
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Hannity?
This is reason 1,597,643 (a) (i) why I refuse to watch anything that passes as “nooz” or “politics” on tv. I don’t own a tv and studiously avoid even glancing at the politainment crap when I’m working out in my gym.
I did happen to glance (my eyes! my eyes!) at a tv the other day in the gym and saw smug Hannity rabbiting on about Harvey Weinstein. Ugh. As If.
Of course, the ONLY reason why some Fox propagandist is whining about Weinstein is to distract and deflect attention from the REAL national travesty that is Trump. Plus, of course, Fake Noise can spin it that somehow Democraps “get away” with all kinds of heinous stuff. They are in NO WAY concerned about how those women were treated. Eff Hannity. Awful piece of garbage.
For you, BooMan!
Sasse, Heller, Corker, McCain, Collins and Murkowski could shut Trump down in an hour if they wanted to.
They’ve enabled some pretty serious abuses of power. This isn’t just a Trump problem. It’s a Republican party problem.
Its always big news when one of these republicans are on the TV, in a public, pearl clutching fit of conscience over the latest Trump atrocity or idiocy. Thanks to the media they get a lot of mileage out these appearances of “principled” opposition. But at the end of the day they can be counted on to fall in line with the party and support whatever Trump does.
As bad as he is, Trump is a symptom of the GOP’s illness. He’s like the mole that appears indicating a deeper problem. But the GOP is the tumor draining the life out of the American democracy. We’re focusing on that ugly mole, but the tumor is killing us.
Your comment reminded me of Suderman’s op-ed in yesterday’s Times.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/13/opinion/trump-republican-party-mess.html?_r=0
What’s really depressing is the sheer number of Americans who either excuse or celebrate Trump’s bad behavior and ugliness as virtues, only because he hates what they hate. The shallowness of these people adoring Trump for reciting the same old right wing shibboleths — marauding, undeserving non-white people taking everything they have; the evil, America-hating Obama, Clinton, all powerful even out of office, raising their taxes, taking their guns and controlling their lives; the war on Christmas and attacks on the piously pure, upstanding “family values” republicans gets to be too much. What’s worse, the media normalizing all this with their obsession with rationalizing The Trump Voter.
I’m sorry, but there’s not a damn thing good about any one who would support this man given the example he sets.