The Trump Administration: A Clusterfuck in the Making Part Deux (Part 1)

[asahi]

Don’t blame the Trump administration; I blame Mitch McConnell a lot more than I blame DJT, to be completely honest. Trump is a shit bird for sure, but it’s McConnell who has ruined the senate and most likely ruined the judiciary as well. Just fuck, fuck, fuck that guy.

[rocking_chair]

that picture of mitch mcconnell may be why they are really pushing the court pick through so fast, he may not have time to wait until after the election.

[simster]

It’s halloween - he’s finally taken off his costume.

[Skypist]

Well if that’s true he shouldn’t be running for re-election. I don’t think he would if he thought he was going to keel over soonish. Maybe I’m wrong. But what would happen if he’s on the ballot and dies during or right after the voting period? He would probably take that into consideration since he’s always thinking about the next political move.

[TroutMan]

My mother is around the same age, and her hands often look like that even though she’s perfectly healthy. On her, it’s age, old sun damage, and general clumsiness.

It certainly isn’t proof of McConnell’s impending demise.

[rocking_chair]

i believe sen. mcconnell is the die in the saddle type.

[Skypist]

Yeah, my mom is around his age has a lot of this kind of bruising on her hands and arms. She is not on blood thinners. However, this looks maybe a little worse than hers and she doesn’t have bruising around her mouth like he does. He’s probably too mean to die, just like trump.

[BlankSlate]

@rocking_chair

i believe sen. mcconnell is the die in the saddle type.

Then by all means let’s start a GoFundMe and buy a horse.

[not_what_you_d_expect]

The look on Trumps face when he doesn’t get the reaction he was looking for.

The Recount

Priceless.

[ThelmaLou]

@TroutMan

It certainly isn’t proof of McConnell’s impending demise.

Buzzkill.

[CalMeacham]

@CalMeacham

Slate has published a useful Skeleton Key to Trump’s far-right references during last night’s debate, for those of us who aren’t Fox News aficionados:

Here’s more on that:

Before Thursday night’s final presidential debate, Axios circulated a tweet that anticipated a line of attack Donald Trump was likely to hurl at his Democratic challenger Joe Biden. “Watch for President Trump to address Joe Biden as ‘the big guy’ or ‘the chairman’ at tonight’s debate as a way of dramatizing the Hunter Biden emails,” it said.

I didn’t get it. I’m paid to follow the news and I honestly had no idea what this supposed gotcha attack line meant.

…

When I first saw that Axios tweet Thursday, I quote tweeted it, writing, “I have literally no idea what this means. Neither will a single voter Trump needs to win now.”
Following the debate, Angelo Carusone, president and CEO of Media Matters for America, a progressive media watchdog that tracks Fox and other right-wing outlets, tweeted, “If Trump ends up losing, his reliance on Fox News will have helped pave the way. He’s so foxed up right now that he can’t see the field.”

…

Donald Trump, who has spent his life living in a state of unreality, supercharged this effect. The sea of toxic conspiracy theories that he and his coterie swim in quickly overran Fox until the sludge it was spewing was no longer even minimally related to reality any longer.

On Thursday night, Trump did nothing to help himself with any of the 60-some percent of voters he must win over to be viable in this election. It’s poetic justice that Fox News has helped hermetically seal him and most Republicans from any hints of reality that might give them a fighting chance in this election.

How Fox News became a death knell for Trump's reelection bid

[Folly]

Seems like a little late in the game to be campaigning via dog whistles and (relatively) obscure references that only reach your base.

[Maus_Magill]

He needs to win over people who have already decided against him. He doesn’t know how to do that. He keeps going back to the techniques that he used against Hillary, because he believes that if they worked last time, they’ll work again.

[Darren_Garrison]

Doubly bad for Trump–coming from Fox and a bonde.

Conservatives' latest smear against Joe Biden gets debunked -- by a Fox News...

[Deeg]

Hasn’t stopped Fox from flogging this story. I keep tabs on thor website and this has been the top story by far. Usually with a big headline and followed by a number of ancillary links.

[KarlGauss]

@asahi

Don’t blame the Trump administration; I blame Mitch McConnell a lot more than I blame DJT, to be completely honest. Trump is a shit bird for sure, but it’s McConnell who has ruined the senate and most likely ruined the judiciary as well.

If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell - The Suffocation of Democracy by Christopher Browning

[Rick_Kitchen]

A friend of Jared, who also worked for him as the editor of the New York Observer and was also Rudy Giuliani’s campaign manager, has been charged with cyberstalking and harrassing people.

Trump Family Ally Is Arrested on Cyberstalking Charge (Published 2020)

[TroutMan]

The Biden campaign trolls Trump with trumpcovidplan.com. It starts at a “not found” page.

https://www.trumpcovidplan.com/

[eschereal]

If you keep tabs on that site, have you noticed that stories often are generously larded with links, and almost all of those links point to another story on that site (“our post is our cite”), with only a rare few leading offsite? I observe this because my browser is currently set to open a new tab for a different domain, so I notice when a link opens in the same tab.

[Guest-starring_Id]

@asahi

Don’t blame the Trump administration; I blame Mitch McConnell a lot more than I blame DJT, to be completely honest. Trump is a shit bird for sure, but it’s McConnell who has ruined the senate and most likely ruined the judiciary as well. Just fuck, fuck, fuck that guy.

@KarlGauss

If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell - The Suffocation of Democracy by Christopher Browning

To augment (sorry - lengthily)

Been meaning to post some of this excellent Jane Mayer New Yorker article when it came out in April - better now than never. I’d actually be surprised if this is the first time the article has been brought up at this board, and if so, a reiteration wouldn’t hurt at right about this time.

(paywalled if you’ve had more than five free peeks - heh, I think):

Mitch, you’re just plain shit. (No, not actual title, but might as well be), the article basically amounts to a Profile (love capitalizing that ‘p’). Way too much to extrapolate from the scumwardly trajectory of The Turtle, so I’ll try to find choice bits.
Up to the '90s, that is. (firstly, though - a look at his daughters’ current outlooks)

McConnell also appears to have lost the political support of his three daughters. The youngest, Porter, is a progressive activist who is the campaign director for Take On Wall Street, a coalition of labor unions and nonprofit groups which advocates against the “predatory economic power” of “banks and billionaires.” One of its targets has been Stephen Schwarzman, the chairman and C.E.O. of the Blackstone Group, who, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, has, since 2016, donated nearly thirty million dollars to campaigns and super pacs aligned with McConnell. Last year, Take On Wall Street condemned Blackstone’s “detrimental behavior” and argued that the company’s campaign donations “cast a pall on candidates’ ethics.”

Porter McConnell has also publicly criticized the Senate’s confirmation of Justice Kavanaugh, which her father considers one of his greatest achievements. On Twitter, she accused Kavanaugh’s supporters of misogyny, and retweeted a post from StandWithBlaseyFord, a Web site supporting Christine Blasey Ford, one of Kavanaugh’s accusers. The husband of McConnell’s middle daughter, Claire, has also criticized Kavanaugh online, and McConnell’s eldest daughter, Eleanor, is a registered Democrat.

All three daughters declined to comment, as did their mother, Sherrill Redmon, whom McConnell divorced in 1980. After the marriage ended, Redmon, who holds a Ph.D. in American history, left Kentucky and took over a women’s-history archive at Smith College, in Massachusetts, where she collaborated with Gloria Steinem on the Voices of Feminism Oral History Project. In an e-mail, Steinem told me that Redmon rarely spoke about McConnell, and noted, “Despite Sherrill’s devotion to recording all of women’s lives, she didn’t talk about the earlier part of her own.” Steinem’s understanding was that McConnell’s political views had once been different. “I can only imagine how painful it must be to marry and have children with a democratic Jekyll and see him turn into a corrupt and authoritarian Hyde,” she wrote. (Redmon is evidently working on a tell-all memoir.)

From the earliest days of McConnell’s political life, he has had questionable relationships with moneyed backers. His salary as county judge / executive was meagre, and, in an arrangement that troubled some in the community, a group of undisclosed Louisville business leaders quietly threw in extra pay, ostensibly for his giving speeches. David Ross Stevens, who briefly served as McConnell’s special assistant, told me, “It was like the big boys got together and gave him a pool of money.” Stevens said of McConnell, “He was the most shallow person in politics that I’d ever met. At our first staff meeting, McConnell said, ‘Does anyone have a project for me? I haven’t been on TV for eleven days.’ He was very clever, but it was all about ‘What’s this going to do for me?’ ” Stevens quit in disgust.

What I’ve bolded encapsulates, to me, the very kernel, the very shitnugget, from which Turts sallies forth on his very raison d’etre.

As McConnell gained power, Louisville’s liberal élites, including the wealthy Bingham family, which owned the Courier-Journal, grew disenchanted. The paper had endorsed him as county judge / executive, and therefore felt some responsibility for having launched him. Runyon, the former editorial-page editor, said, “He managed to get our endorsement by being what we thought was a sincere reformer.” Runyon recalled that in 2006, as Barry Bingham, Jr., the paper’s publisher, lay dying, “he had a frank talk with me—he said, ‘You know, Keith, the worst mistake we ever made was endorsing Mitch McConnell.’ ”

To say that on a deathbed…yeah, ouch.

And then - enter a very valuable friend…

In 1984, McConnell ran for the Senate against the Democratic incumbent, Walter (Dee) Huddleston. McConnell later admitted that he’d begun planning his campaign the moment he’d been sworn in as county judge / executive. Nobody expected an unprepossessing, little-known local official to defeat Huddleston, but in the final weeks of the campaign McConnell surged to an upset victory, thanks, in large part, to a television ad created by Roger Ailes, the Nixon media adviser who later became the mastermind behind Fox News. Ailes was helped by Larry McCarthy, a virtuoso of negative campaign ads who later made the racially charged Willie Horton ad, attacking the 1988 Democratic candidate for President, Michael Dukakis. The McConnell ad depicted a pack of bloodhounds frantically hunting for Huddleston, ostensibly because he’d missed so many Senate votes while off giving paid speeches. It was funny, but Huddleston’s attendance record, ninety-four per cent, wasn’t out of the ordinary, and his speeches violated no Senate rules. Yet, as McCarthy proudly told the Washington Post, “It was like tossing a match on a pool of gasoline.” That year, McConnell was the only Republican who defeated an incumbent Democratic senator. Two years after criticizing Huddleston’s outside speaking fees, McConnell went on a lucrative eleven-day speaking tour of the West Coast. (McConnell’s spokesman says, “The Leader never missed a vote.”)

In 1990, Ailes helped McConnell paint his Democratic challenger, Harvey Sloane, as a dangerous drug addict. Television ads showed images of pill containers as a narrator warned of Sloane’s reliance on “powerful,” “mood-altering” “depressants” that had been prescribed “without a legal permit.” Sloane, an Ivy League-educated doctor whom McConnell mocked as “a wimp from the East,” had gone to Kentucky through a federal program that provides medical services to the rural poor, and went on to become Louisville’s mayor. During the Senate campaign, Sloane, who had postponed a hip replacement until after the election, renewed a prescription for sleeping pills although his license had expired. It was a real lapse in judgment, but he didn’t have a drug problem. Sloane said of McConnell’s attack, “It was craven. He’s just a conniving guy. He’s the Machiavelli of the twenty-first century.” McConnell himself has summarized his approach to campaigns simply: “If they throw a stone at you, you drop a boulder on them.”

What a princess. Wonder if Moscow Mitch still had scotch and sodas with that Ailes pukeface after the latter got extruded from Fox.

I coulda gone on.