Obviously there are presumably different levels of classification, some which many thousands of people can access, according to the New York Times, and some where access is likely limited to a few people. I have no experience whatsoever in this area, I cannot even confirm if experienced operatives commonly announce their expertise. There are reasons to believe that the mighty ships of cynicism and flippancy were launched many years ago, and not by a recent post clearly meant to be taken with utmost seriousness.
It is likely that important government business happens in areas even more learned and lofty than the politics area of a public and prestigious message board. You may be surprised to learn how little my opinions influence world politics. No doubt much classified information is critical and its disclosure can be genuinely dangerous and disruptive. But if my sad attempt at humour made you feel particularly cynical or flippant, I apologize.
I once had a learned mentor who used to make jokes about hospital politics and other serious matters. His favourite saying was that it is sometimes healthier to try to laugh about things than to cry about them. I am sure intelligence officers serving Trump or career military experts sometimes felt the same way. A hurricane and its consequences can be serious, a map clearly modified by hand to incorporate executive opinion is so strange that it is arguably without precedent.
This is certainly a comedic list, but it fails to make a salient point.
Imagine you, in your lowly status, came into contact with such documents and you:
took them
without checking with anyone and ignoring any advice you might have been given
and then when the authorities came asking about them, you lied, blustered, and dragged your feet for a year
turned over some of them, and, regardless of the actual seriousness of the documents, revealed that you had lied, blistered, and dragged your feet for a year, and that you were still lying about what you had and what you had tuned over
How do you suppose the justice system would have dealt with you? How do you suppose it should have dealt with you?
Should anyone buy the argument that you were making some kind of important point about the misclassification of documents? Because this, my friend, is not how civil disobedience works.
Fired, clearance pulled, unable to work in my field, arrested, deposed, tried, fined, and imprisoned. I assume that’s what would happen to me if I mishandled just a handful of Confidential docs that had now other caveats. Signals or human intelligence info? Definite long prison time. If I lied to the Feds, or refused to return docs - long prison time.
And that would be for just a few docs, not necessarily highly classified. If a normal guy, call him Nonald J Ntrump, had that volume of docs, he’d be interrogated VERY thoroughly to help determine the damage. Add in signals AND human intelligence, and Nonald would never be free again. If any human assets were harmed, I assume Nonald would be executed. Which is why I’m happy to not work in that world. If screw up, my current job nobody dies.
Comedians complained how hard it was to joke about Trump. He would say something outrageous about the wonderful people of Mexico. A few days would pass. When it became time to tell the joke, attention would now be focused on a new comment insulting handicapped reporters or decorated war veterans or respected politicians.
To be clear, when one jokes about Trump it might not sound that different from justifications from his supporters. I do not think he was an effective president and I feel he caused much damage to democracy, precedent, decency and political systems. I cannot really understand how he still has any substantial support, and it makes me realize how little I understand the United States - a country I thought I knew pretty well.
It’s not a US thing. It’s a human thing. Right now, it happens to be striking the US, but it’s struck other countries in the past, and will strike other countries in the future. Humans are difficult to understand.
I never understood how he ever had any kind of support. I never followed celebrity news, and never watched his apprentice show, but I knew long before that fateful escalator ride that he was a worthless piece of shit. And he’s fucking worshipped by an embarrassingly large percentage of Americans. But I think they’ll forget him fast if he ever dies.
If you view things here in a framework of a longstanding cultural and racial majority seeing its electoral domination slipping away, things kinda fall into place.
We will always have conservatives with policy views deserving of hearing. But a lot of our current divisiveness can be explained by people feeling displaced and who don’t have the intellectual capacity to fight in the War of Ideas.
I don’t. I think he’ll be venerated and worshiped like St. Ronnie. Death will only serve to erase whatever “minor flaws” may have been present while he was alive.
He tells them that their grievances are just and righteous
He reassures them that they are the “true” Americans, and he tells them that their fear that liberals are actively and evilly trying to destroy the America that they love is justified
He tells them that there are simple solutions to the complex problems in the world
He is unfiltered, and says mean things about people that they, too, would like to say mean things about
Not the way it looks on her own page, she seems to sell something that looks like a wobbling blue turd and several protraits of herself in aquarelle, highly flattering, but it strikes me as weird that she seems to have adapted her signature to look like her husband’s. Her way to show adulation? Never mind, I really don’t care either.
They hear on right wing media a constant stream of "Socialist bad. Marxist bad. Biden Marxist. Biden bad. Trump anti-Marxist. Trump save you from Marxist. Trump good. "
And so they support Trump, without being able to articulate
The order would effectively bar federal prosecutors from using a key piece of evidence as they continue to investigate whether the former president illegally retained national defense documents at his estate, Mar-a-Lago, or obstructed the government’s efforts to get them back.
[…]
In her order, issued on the Labor Day holiday, Judge Cannon said she made her decisions “to ensure at least the appearance of fairness and integrity under the extraordinary circumstances.” Her order would not, however, affect a separate review of the documents being led by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
This is so sick. And who, pray tell, is this Special Master going to be? Let me guess… Jared?