Yeah, apparently so does this guy.
Whom, as it happens, Trump recently praised in one of his “comically out-of-context quote” tweets. Completely ignoring the thrust of the article, which is that Trump and his lackeys are huge liars who are throwing Flynn under the bus.
I can’t actually find the direct quote he based his tweet on, so I’m not sure if it’s paraphrased AND truncated, or came from a different article.
I’m curious what we can do to “up our game”, as you so put it. Start lynching people at town hall meetings? Not that I wouldn’t mind seeing Jason Chaffetz have to run for his disgusting little life, but how do you react when half the country has gone insane and absolutely refuses to hold their representatives responsible for anything?
I’m curious. Does Flynn’s resignation, the constant lying, the handling classified documents at a dinner table, the unsecured telephone, and the links to Russia bother you at all? I get that we are never going to agree politically with a lot of stuff, but I’m not sure you can chalk up the concerns over Trumps’ presidency to simpe derangement.
Same here.
And elbows saying he posted it in the wrong thread…well, what does that have to do with anything? He was gonna post it somewhere on this board, so he was gonna get this same set of questions wherever it was. So he might as well answer them here.
Unless, of curse, he has subsequently posted that post in another thread, in which case he could at least give us a link.
All of those things are appalling, and I think Trump is an absolute catastrophe. However, I’ve noticed recently that anyone who does anything other than express full-throated condemnation of his administration’s every action or (heaven forbid) suggests his opponents’ tactics (be they marching or merely a determination to dwell on worst case scenarios) may be unproductive, are immediately jumped on and presumed to be “the enemy”.
For instance, contrary to your assertion, I imagine we would agree on quite a lot. I consider myself very liberal and have the same reservations about Trump that you seem to.
I believe it’s less than half the country gone insane. 27% or so of them are very diligent about showing up to vote, too many thought Hillary was a lock thanks to a lazy press, Comey, Russia, fake email & Benghazi news, cheating, Electoral College etc. all combined to make it close enough to successfully steal the election, like 2000.
Totally agree re: Chaffetz disgusting little life…
And the worse part is that unless republicans decide that, for the first time in over a decade, they want to, collectively, be ethical, it doesn’t matter what Trump or Pence or Flynn or Chaffetz does. It’s their responsibility to police themselves, and there are disturbingly few effective checks on them if they refuse to do that. They’ve already demonstrated their willingness to ignore the judicial branch, and in many cases, the judicial can’t stop them from taking those actions. So there’s really nothing to be done for the next two years. Well, other than “second-amendment solutions”, that is. Except for some reason I feel like a monster for suggesting that totally standard right-wing talking point. :rolleyes:
I think/hope poking, ridiculing and exposing the so-called president, may result in him leaving, one way or another, and/or causing his support to greatly diminish, as well as the apathetic electorate to vote.
What can I say, I’m an eternal optimist :rolleyes:
Thanks, raventhief!
First, I contradict myself, and now I’m just repeating. It’s cool if you don’t understand this stuff. Most people don’t.
You are making assumptions about me. For one, I don’t work for the ACHP and never have. No desire for a political position, thanks. I work for an agency that gives loans and grants to communities for certain kinds of development projects. My job is to make sure the recipients follow the regs. There are people in the Army Corps with the same job, and they’re who I’m ranting about. Projects in my group can’t go forward without my okay, and that’s the same in every permitting, funding, or land managing agency. So, actually, I do have the power to halt projects.
I’m not an idiot, and I’m perfectly capable of doing cost-benefit analysis just like everyone else. There are plenty of projects that I’ve worked on where I was perfectly okay with destroying a resource because the outcome was important. There are also projects where I’ve carefully recorded and insisted on saving something I don’t give a flying fuck about because it is an important resource, just not one in a time period or of a type I’m interested personally in. Historic railroad properties still deserve my professional consideration because plenty of other people do care.
What it comes down to is that I believe that, as flawed as CRM laws are, they are the best way we’ve come up with for ensuring that properties that are important to any group at least get consideration in project planning and that every interested group has a voice. Maybe I’m biased, but so are you, Mr. But Mah Portfolio. And you’d be damn glad to have the voice that I insist on if the bulldozers ever head towards places you care about.
These are not inconsistent claims. You’re going back and forth on whether or not the ACOE is the final word on the regs, saying in substance that they are but in words that they’re not. And you keep at this again and again in post after post, which means that you’re repeating yourself.
No assumptions, sorry, I only go with what you’ve said. You said you had worked in cultural resource management and had a similar background to others in the field etc. etc.
That’s fine. I didn’t raise the issue of your bias when you first described your background, but if you’re going to point to me I’ll note that you too have a bias, if of a different sort.
This reaction, right here, made me think better about reposting my remark anywhere, to be honest.
He’s turning y’all into the boy who cried wolf, I think. By the time he gets round to doing truly shocking things everyone will have grown deaf to the Left’s screaming, unending outrage fest!
He’s pushing all their buttons and they’re busy dancing for him. He’s working hard to exhaust their outrage, and based on results I’d say he’s winning that war.
Demanding the WH scold Kellyann, the ninth circuit decision, the harsh words from the ethics committee, insisting Republicans have investigations into the latest misconduct, and marches are great responses if you just want to feel better, like you’re actually doing SOMETHING. (And I get the need to feel you’re doing something.) But it’s clear he knew all along how to skirt each of these tactics.
I think everyone can see how impotent these approaches will eventually prove to be. I don’t claim to have any answers, but the playbook they’re currently using isn’t going work I think. I feel it’s the gravest error, which is often repeated here, to believe, for one minute that he doesn’t know what he’s doing.
When he clearly knows exactly what he’s doing. Every step of the way, he has out played them, from where I sit. And they just continue on in the same fashion, seemingly unaware.
(Also, FYI, I’m a she, not a he!)
I agree that there are people who take the Trump hate too far, but I have no idea why anyone would focus on them instead of the actions of the President of the United States and his comrades. It seems like nothing more than a distraction to point out that there people who have gone overboard when they are of so little relevance to the bigger picture. This focus on how liberals react to Trump (which could be a good part of why Trump came to power) rather than what Trump has done, is exactly what Trump wants. Don’t pay attention to what I’m doing. Look over there at those people, aren’t they horrible!
Many, many reservations.
I guess the Trump apologist debate strategy has moved on from “it’s all fake news!” to “you’re slightly overstating the degree of confidence in some small part of the overall story!”
I probably have reservations as well, but they are buried under the shock, horror, and dismay.
Yeah, let me know when the volume of calls to Congress tails off. And when people stop showing up in yuuuuge numbers at town halls. Unusually high outrage is not, in and of itself, evidence of exhaustion of outrage, you know. Evidence of exhaustion would be when the evidence of outrage actually, you know, diminishes.
Anyway, you have no suggestions about how we can up our game. So we have to do what we can. The Daily Kos gang raised half a million bucks for a Dem who’s running for the seat that Tom Price just vacated to become HHS secretary. I suppose you have some reason why that’s also not upping our game. And word from present and former Congressional staffers is that phone calls make the biggest difference in terms of pushing Congresscritters one way or another, and we have cranked that dial up to levels that have exceeded anything in history. Guess that doesn’t count either.
And meanwhile, instead of rushing Obamacare repeal through in the first minutes of the new Congress, we’re a month and a half in, and they have no idea what they’re going to do about repeal, or when they’re going to do it. So something’s working so far, and I’d say part of it is this wave of activity that started with the Women’s March on January 21.
And while marches don’t do much by themselves, you know what that one did? It made millions of us aware that we’re not a drop in the bucket - that if we show up at a town hall, or call our Congresscritter, we won’t be doing this just by ourselves, with our call getting lost in the white noise. Lots of other people will be calling our Congresscritters, on our side, about the same stuff.
This is important. People need reason to believe their activism will be efficacious. The wingnuts have always had that - when Rush Limbaugh or Pat Robertson tells their listeners to call their Congresscritters, the switchboards light up, because each listener knows they’re part of something bigger, and they’ll make a difference.
Now we’ve got that too. The four million marchers on January 21 did that. Now we’re a mass movement. We weren’t before. So you can take your ridicule of marches and showing up at town halls and stuff, and shove it where the sun don’t shine.
Oh yeah: another piece of evidence that the playbook isn’t working will be when Congress does shit like repealing Obamacare, either because the calls stop coming, or because they do it anyway, despite the calls. Maybe they’ll outlast the abuse, and repeal Obamacare before going on August recess. But they haven’t done jack shit yet, and that’s way better than I would have expected by this point. To me, that says the playbook is working so far. The time to reappraise tactics is when they stop working. But we have no evidence that that’s happening.
Your concern is noted.
Another thing is that the Women’s March turned a whole bunch of formerly not-very-politically-involved people into activists. I used to be the political junkie of my family, and my wife voted Dem when elections came up, but otherwise stayed on the sidelines. Not any more - she’s paying more attention than I am these days, and that’s a pretty high bar. And lots of people I know have witnessed this same thing happening.
I don’t know how that somehow plays into Trump’s hands. Sure, a fair number of these people will lapse back into their old ways at some point. But that will still leave us with a great many more politically active left-of-center types than we used to have. Feel free to spin that as a Bad Thing. And good luck with that.
You really believe they can keep this up? This level of outrage has an arc, like everything else, I suspect.
And do you really believe any of it will work? Yes, you’re hoping, it’s worked before, it ought to work. But this isn’t then, this is now, there’s never been a presidency like this before. I just feel they need to move on from what worked last century.
They need to calm the hell down, dial back the rhetoric and start behaving like the adult at the table, in my opinion. The protests seem to inevitably boil over into some smallish skirmish that ends up detracting from the message, and making for bad optics.
Where’s the reporting on the security costs of securing Trump tower, or Maralago? Rooms for everybody from visiting leaders, to security staff, on both sides are all being paid for by the tax payer…to Donald Trump! Y’all paid to turn his maralago resort into a intel secure spot. Those costs have to be high dontcha think? I mean, every round of golf he plays, he gets paid for cause it’s on his course! All in addition to the costs of maintaining/staffing already secured locations intended for these purposes. Now imagine this story delivered without the outrage, as just the photos and the dollar amounts. A running tally perhaps?
I just feel they’d be getting further, delivering their message with less screaming outrage and more cold, quiet, calm voices.
As a liberal, I do see some merit in elbow’s critique, now that she’s clarified it. We do have to be careful to avoid expending too much energy, too soon. I DON’T think it’s an issue of “crying wolf” – each Trump/Repub action has deserved MORE pushback, not less – but there are PHYSICAL LIMITATIONS to consider. There are only so many hours in a day; most of us have families and/or jobs …