Want another example of how Donald Trump is living in a fantasy land?
“It seems like I’m sort of the whipping post because I bring it up. And I don’t understand whether you are liberal or whether you are conservative or whether you are Republican, Democrat — why wouldn’t you talk about a problem?” Trump said Saturday. “The crime is raging. It’s violent, and people don’t want to even talk about it. If you talk about it, you are a racist. I don’t understand it.”
Crime is raging, huh?
Okay, let’s take a look at that.
If you make up a fake problem and blame Latinos for it, you should expect to have people, including business executives, shun your ass.
Maybe we need another graph, for financial crimes. Which are mostly white-on-everybody crimes.
Maybe we should start deporting high-level white collar criminals? They could go live with their tax dodges.
(As an additional benefit, that might result in fewer rapes as well. I wouldn’t be surprised.)
Trump decoded: “Crime must be up– minorities are still around. Crime is so bad I even see the blacks on TV.””
No doubt that he also sees terrorists on every street corner.
Street corners he only sees from the back of his bullet proof limo. From his privileged and protected perch, the 99% are all terrorists.
Well, this hits it big. Trump has no idea what is life is really like outside his cocoon. He probably watches Fox all the time and of course Fox runs stories of black criminals as much as they can curing the day, and thus this forms his impression.
An ordinary person who is as old as Trump might remember, for example, that in the mid-1980s you ventured into downtown New York or Chicago only after being fully prepared for possible assault – knowing how to act (don’t look at anyone on the subway), how to anticipate attacks, how to avoid them. And that in 2015 kids feel safe traveling the same cities on public transport.
Yeah, it’s changed that much. The wonders of getting rid of lead in gasoline.
Careful, Booman. Expect someone…probably not Trump because he is simply too crude, but someone on the right…to counter your graph with something like this:
Followed of course by claims that incarcerated criminals are by definition unable to commit crimes that police report and that a “falling crime rate” is proof that mass incarceration works to make law abiding citizens safe. Further references will then be made to the ethnic percentages of these incarcerated individuals, of course, and there we are…white votes sliding ever-rightward.
It would be too complicated and subtle an argument for our Loony Tunes-level political dialogue to be able to handle to counter that it is poverty that breeds the kinds of crime reported by police. Poverty and lousy schools, the lot of most people of color here in Omertica for multiple generations. Further, that “white” crime…although most commonly not police matters, really (Too high level for our beloved Keystone Kops brigades to krack.)…that “white” crime harms the average Omertican much, much more than does street crime because it is done with trickery on a huge scale. Smoke and mirrors in back rooms, media-supported boondoggles, banksters and other criminal hustlers stealing trillions from the unwashed Omertican sheeple.
Trump-level.
Bush-level.
Their owners and bosses-level.
And yes, Obama and Clinton-level as well.
Bet on it.
So it goes.
Ever downward until the inevitable, bubble-bursting crash.
When?
I dunno.
Sooner rather than later, I’m thinking.
Whenever…all bubbles burst eventually.
Bet on that as well.
Did you know that a subtle, soapy hand will not burst a bubble?
Yup.
Watch.
At about 0.33 of the following video is striking image that parallels how the .01% manipulates our big, BIG bubble. They just reach right in and take what they want.
Smoove!!!
Watch. Keep watching through to the end.
Eventually some crude fool like Trump or Cruz is going to poke a clumsy, dry finger into our bubble or some enemy that we have earned will shoot a giant BB through it, and that will be all she wrote.
Or…maybe Life ain’t through with us yet and we can change.
Let us pray for the latter.
Please.
Let us pray, and also let us take action!!!
PLEASE!!!
More Clinton/Bush-style elections with all the fixings?
PLEASE!!!
Ain’t you turkeys been served up enuf already?
WTFU.
Please.
Later…
AG
OK, I’ll bite. Just what sort of action are you proposing? Supposing one were to Wake The Fuck Up, what would one do next?
Elect John Galt. Because He knows best.
Weak.
Very weak.
I thought there was more to you.
Guess not.
So it goes.
Sleep the fuck down.
AG
The only actual thing that can be done is violent revolt. By which I mean dragging well educated, socially liberal, upper class urbanites out from the major blue cities and hanging them in the street. If we aren’t willing to do that, than the economic fight is already over.
Of course if we do that, we kill the very people who’s money and power gives us victory on social issues. So we lose that.
So the question is, total oligarchy and corporate control with a smiling face where the left controls the culture… or we give up the culture and engage in violence for economic change.
Not choosing one of the two means choosing option one. And since we value social issues on the left and dislike violence, our party is the party of NYC oligarchy and should quit fucking pretending to give one shit about the economic woes of flyover bible pounders.
Well put.
Elegant.
Harsh, but…there it is, I guess.
Thank you.
Caught between a rock, a hoard place…errr, ahhh, I meant hard place… and something else.
What?
Damned if I know.
It will all play out as it must.
That’s a sure thing. Like death, taxes and an infinite universe.
So it goes.
Thanks again.
Later…
AG
Wake others up, just for starters.
Your family. Your friends. Your acquaintances. Your fellow workers. Whomever.
Stop swallowing the lies of the media.
Go work for someone who is trying to change things.
Really change things.
Go work for yourself, if need be. I do.
Support anti-PermaGov politicians. Work for them, in any way possible.
Above all, do not vote for or support ClintonBush. Do not vote far any PermaGov owned and operated politicians.
Buy as few hype-supported goods as possible. Got a choice between a local store and a chain? Go local. Buy your food as close to the producers as is possible. That’s what farmer’s markets are about.
In general…live on the edge.
i dare ya.
AG
That’s it? Well, I do shop at the local farmers market, for whatever that’s worth. I even belong to the co-op!
But this mindless opposition to government just doesn’t do it for me. Go ahead and tell yourself it’s because all of the media lies that I’ve swallowed, but I do happen to think that PermaGovs are useful for some things. It’s easy enough to rail against drones and the NRA, but what about climate change? We need to drastically cut our carbon emissions starting 20 years ago (speaking of WTFU), and dismantling the government is more or less guaranteed to have the opposite effect.
But when your only tool is a sledgehammer…
The companies that own the PermaGov are the ones who are fighting hardest against regulations that will in any way interfere with their own short-term profits, Steven.
Bet on it.
AG
Come on Arthur, you’re talking to liberals here. We’re well aware that big corporations will always oppose regulations. That doesn’t mean we’re going to give up. And it sure as hell doesn’t mean we’re going to support some libertarian jackass who doesn’t even take climate change seriously.
Sigh.
Yes. I know I am talking to liberals. The new kind.
They’re called “neoliberals.”
You know…hard on the issues but soft on the candidates? Their candidates…Obama, the Clintons…are owned by the same forces as are the candidates of the neoconservatives who are supposed to be their supposed bitter enemies.
Good cop/bad cop. An act to fool the prisoners.
Nothing more.
Sleep on.
AG
Both graphs can be reconciled by the aging of the population. When boomers were young, crime soared, then leveled off, then fell. It’s hard to make a getaway in a motorized scooter.
This would seem to be a good explanation except that many countries around the world have seen similar spikes and drop offs in crime rates that don’t have similar population waves. One thing that does seem to fit the pattern well nearly everywhere is childhood lead exposure, primarily from leaded gasoline.
I caught a glimpse of CNN in the gym this morning (the only time I ever watch CNN for any length of time) and they had the stupid headline along the bottom “Can Trump be fact-checked?”. I mean, he says things and facts exist which confirm or refute what he says, so…yes? They then interviewed someone from Politifact who discussed how, by their calculations, 75% of what Donald Trump says is manifestly untrue. The CNN anchor then asked what Hillary’s untruthful percentage was, and the Politifact representative didn’t directly answer – she said that “polished politicians” usually give vetted speeches and rarely talk “off the cuff” like Trump likes to do, and when they do that, they basically tend to have much, much lower rates of lying (of course, the “L” word wasn’t used). I took that to mean that Hillary’s currently at 100% truthfulness, according to Politifact, and this is making them uncomfortable. By answering this way, they also suggested that other “polished politicians” who don’t disagree with Donald Trump are somehow more truthful than him, which of course doesn’t make any sense, but if you don’t treat the words from Politifact as skeptically as the words coming out from Donald Trump’s, you might be left with the impression that the rest of the Republican field are 10% liars to Trump’s 75%, rather than 70%.
Oh, how I hate our media…
I want him in the GOP debates. It will be off the chain.
Oh, a political figure on the American right can never go too far wrong with demagoguery about violent crime—“who ya gonna believe, some elitist so-called crime statistics or your own eyes watching the local eyewitness news?”—programs which never fail to lead with the violent local crime-o-the-day. Violent crime never appears to be falling in real time.
This guy is clearly appealing to the disgruntled white working class voter, and “victimized” quotes like this are going to be seen as absolutely accurate. As we saw from Repub campaigns 2012 and 2014, the facts don’t matter to the corporate media, although perhaps they will try to put their thumb on the scale when dealing with a mere primary. But Rmoney also couldn’t win with a campaign solely targeting the white voter. Perhaps Trump calculates he can somehow get more of ’em with greater vitriol.
Who knows, maybe the American Fascist Party has waited a little too long to find its Hitler. Several of the Repub 2016 field look like they are going to give it a run nevertheless. Hitler had his plutocrat corporate backers, however, and there does seem to some CEO quailing at Trump’s brownshirting, at least so far. But Trump’s presenting himself as a hate-filled, fact-free clown certainly does not disqualify him, especially in a Repub primary.
In real time we had “the summer of the shark” in 2001.
Maybe some day we’ll learn to be guided by real facts and not MSM hype.
Was the #1 story that summer the missing Congressional staffer?
You know. Cute female Congressional office worker dies (well, at the time was presumed dead). Speculation that she was having an affair with male Congressman. US media works hard to cover-up the incident and rehabilitate the Congressman as a talk show host.
No, wait – sorry – that was the story of Joe Scarsborough the very same year. But of course he was Republican. No, that summer it was a Democrat who was caught in a similar situation – well, actually similar except that there was zero evidence linking him to the crime whereas there is a lot of suspicious stuff on Joe. Since he was a Democrat the US Media made the entire summer about him – so much so that CNN was often referred to as the Condit News Network.
I suppose that we should note that there were differences in the two situations. Scarborough had divorced in 1999 and had announced in April or May 2001 that he would be resigning from Congress which happened that September. Whether or not he was having an affair with his married local office staffer is unknown, but nobody in her family raised any objection to the police and autopsy official findings that there was no foul play. (Her husband, Dr. T J Klausutis works at Eglin in a high level, high tech capacity.)
Levy disappeared. So, naturally a full investigation into her personal life was SOP and that’s how her affair with the married Condit was discovered. Not knowing precisely when and where she’d gone missing made it more difficult to clear Condit.
Donald Trump gets into Twitter war with Modern Family writer and is obliterated.
Some funny stuff from Danny Zucker and Trump comebacks too lame for a ten year old with an IQ over 85.