The Trump Administration: A Clusterfuck in the Making

[SteveG1]

@Great_Antibob

Of course.

Many gun owners don’t feel the need to engage in ape-ish dominance displays, like brandishing weapons or boasting about their proficiency with said weapons.

It’s the loudest, stupidest voices that get heard, especially online, not the Teddy Roosevelt types.

We (or at least I) don’t brandish any weapons. I want it to be a surprise.

[kaylasdad99]

@Nava

Not even. It sounds like the kind of stuff that’s added to a test data set with the notion of removing it later and then there’s too many cooks for one pot, the person who added that line is shuffled to do something else and nobody remembers to remove that line.

True. Just the other day, I found a test deck of envelopes that we don’t use any more (because we’ve stopped using the sorting machines that they were created for). One of the envelopes was addressed to an address in Xanadu.

[Johnny_L.A]

@SteveG1

I want it to be a surprise.

Never reveal security measures. Need-to-know only.

[margin]

@Johnny_L.A

Yeah, I’m a Liberal, and I probably have more firearms than many Conservatives.

Yeah, WTF was that, SDMB?

I’m a liberal and a combat veteran and a woman. I can do shit with garden tools that’s scary, but Trumpanzees don’t think women are in the military.

[Bryan_Ekers]

@asahi

Fifth pentagon official retires – within a week.

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/475205-fifth-pentagon-official-announces-resignation-in-seven-days

Is that a lot? I mean, is it a statistically significantly higher rate than usual? Wikipedia sez there are “23000 military and civilian employees” at the Pentagon. Even if we only consider 1% to be “senior”, there must be periods where a few of them retire/resign in a coincidentally short period for unrelated reasons. Unless they specifically say “This president is a fucking asshole and he can shove this job up his stupid ass if he can manage to get it past his brain, which I’m sure is located firmly in his ass” (or, y’know, some diplomatic variant thereof), is it fair to blame this on Trump? He has so much other stuff to be unambiguously blamed for already.

[River_Hippie]

@Johnny_L.A

Yeah, I’m a Liberal, and I probably have more firearms than many Conservatives.

I used to have a bunch of guns but I was rowing them across a lake in a rowboat and they all fell out and sank. And I forgot which lake. It was a lake in Canada. You wouldn’t know it.

[Ukulele_Ike]

@River_Hippie

I used to have a bunch of guns but I was rowing them across a lake in a rowboat and they all fell out and sank. And I forgot which lake. It was a lake in Canada. You wouldn’t know it.

I have a fireplace poker! Somewhere. I read that it was a good defense against the Invisible Man.

[Sherrerd]

@Ukulele_Ike

I have a fireplace poker! Somewhere. I read that it was a good defense against the Invisible Man.

I would think a bucket of paint-mixed-with-acid would be a better defense against the Invisible Man. (Or perhaps several buckets.)

[Sherrerd]

@Rick_Kitchen

A second Chinese national was arrested for trespassing at Mar a Lago while carrying electronic equipment, and refusing leave.
https://time.com/5752694/chinese-national-arrested-mar-a-lago/

You have to wonder if at some point Congressional Republicans might start to care about US national security…just a tiny tad.

I think we’ve all just emotionally checked out on the enormity of Trump Administration security violations. The list is so long.

[Morgyn]

@aruvqan

[I actually have a doc file now with all sorts of resources so all I need to do is a copy paste into chat =) Who knew paralegal training would come in handy debating these morons … ]

Gimme!

Please?

[romansperson]

Christianity Today Magazine says in an op-ed that Agent Orange should be removed from office (link to WaPo).

The evangelical magazine founded by the late evangelist the Rev. Billy Graham published a surprising editorial by its editor in chief on Thursday calling for President Trump’s removal.
…

The piece, which appeared to draw so many readers that the magazine’s website crashed briefly, was written by Mark Galli, who called Trump “a near perfect example of a human being who is morally lost and confused.”

Well, that’s a charitable way to put it …

But the editorial didn’t just call out Trump. It called out his devout Christian supporters.
"To the many evangelicals who continue to support Mr. Trump in spite of his blackened moral record, we might say this: Remember who you are and whom you serve,” Galli wrote. “Consider how your justification of Mr. Trump influences your witness to your Lord and Savior.”

The article notes that the editor who wrote the piece, Mark Galli, is retiring on January 3rd. Had to get it all out before leaving?

[Happy_Lendervedder]

One of those fine Christian supporters of Trump, Sarah Huckabee Sanders (yes, it’s actually listed *first *on her Twitter bio: “Christian”), the daughter of celebrity pastor Mike Huckabee, just tweeted out such a loving & Christ-like message to our former Vice President who has struggled with a stutter his entire life:

I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I hhhave absolutely no idea what Biden is talking about.

I know she’s not part of the administration anymore, but what the everloving fuck, Sarah?

[dasmoocher]

@Happy_Lendervedder

One of those fine Christian supporters of Trump, Sarah Huckabee Sanders (yes, it’s actually listed *first *on her Twitter bio: “Christian”), the daughter of celebrity pastor Mike Huckabee, just tweeted out such a loving & Christ-like message to our former Vice President who has struggled with a stutter his entire life:

I know she’s not part of the administration anymore, but what the everloving fuck, Sarah?

She saw her idol go after the widow Dingell last night and was inspired to dish out insults of her own.

[Ike_Witt]

What does the tweet say? The link says ‘page does not exist’ when I click on it.

[Aspenglow]

@Ike_Witt

What does the tweet say? The link says ‘page does not exist’ when I click on it.

Happy Lendervedder’s post #39590 contains the quote.

[Lurking_Quahog]

“I take it all back!” Sarah apologizes. Please go away, Sarah. Just. Go. Away.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/20/politics/sarah-sanders-biden-stutter/index.html

@Happy_Lendervedder

One of those fine Christian supporters of Trump, Sarah Huckabee Sanders (yes, it’s actually listed *first *on her Twitter bio: “Christian”), the daughter of celebrity pastor Mike Huckabee, just tweeted out such a loving & Christ-like message to our former Vice President who has struggled with a stutter his entire life:

I know she’s not part of the administration anymore, but what the everloving fuck, Sarah?

[Mijin]

Well the fact that she’s apologizing now shows she’s no longer part of the administration

[CalMeacham]

I agree entirely with this Salon piece by Amanda Marcotte:

Are Republicans afraid of Trump? Hell, no — he's destroying democracy and...

Whatever word you want to use for it — fascism, authoritarianism, pick your poison — the grim reality is that Republicans, both politicians and voters, appear to be all in on this project. It’s painful to admit this, but Republicans have flat-out rejected democracy. As a group, they are pushing towards replacing democracy with a system where a powerful minority holds disproportionate and borderline tyrannical control over government and blocks the majority of Americans from having meaningful say over the direction of the country.

Republicans are not cowering in fear of Trump. On the contrary, they are exalting in his shamelessness. Watching Republicans at impeachment hearings, where they performed outrage for the cameras, lied with obvious glee and gloried in sharing conspiracy theories, it did not appear that they were intimidated by their president or anyone else.

No, Republicans clearly feel empowered by Trump. He frees them to reveal their darkest desire — which is to end democracy as we know it, and to cut any corners or break any laws necessary to get the job done.

And the Republican voter base is right there along with the politicians. A new Washington Post/ABC poll found that, despite recent hearings that made it almost comically obvious how guilty Trump is, Republican voters are standing by their man. When asked if Trump should be impeached and removed from office, 86% of self-identified Republicans said no. In fact, in the face of mounting evidence of Trump’s guilt, Republicans are digging in even more. Fewer Republican voters support impeachment now than a similar poll showed in October.

It’s easy to write this off as pure tribalism, and there is no doubt that’s a big factor. But that can’t account for the entire phenomenon, especially since Democrats have shown no interest in pursuing evidence that Vice President Mike Pence was involved in the crime (though it does appear he is implicated), which would mean that dumping Trump wouldn’t actually cost Republicans the White House.

No, the darker truth is that Republican voters, like Republican politicians, see clearly what Trump did — use the power of his office in an overt attempt to cheat in the 2020 election — and they love it. Like their leaders, Republican voters are feeling done with democracy and eager to follow Trump into a new world, where the majority of Americans who vote for Democrats are kept out of power, by any means necessary.

As a Twitter user claiming to be “a white male in a red rural area of a red southern state” explained in a persuasive and widely shared thread on Monday, conservative voters have convinced themselves that they “are fighting for their lives and country,” which they believe is under threat from racial diversity. They therefore “feel justified in voter [s]uppression as a result” and “in winning by any means necessary.”

[CalMeacham]

You cannot make this up. For the Xmas season until the bill of impeachment goes to the Senate, Trump wants to be able to fund-raise and frame media with historical revision by claiming he hasn’t been (yet) impeached.

Only in America. Because lawfare trumps semantics.

Note that this gaslight manufacturing attempt also leverages meaning away from the House, as though a bicameral Congress is less than binary. Sorry, orange shysters, he’s still impeached and will be in perpetuity.

disinformation is so important that Trump lawyers now want to nullify the...

[DesertDog]

@Nava

Not even. It sounds like the kind of stuff that’s added to a test data set with the notion of removing it later and then there’s too many cooks for one pot, the person who added that line is shuffled to do something else and nobody remembers to remove that line.

Source: I create stuff with names such as MyBluePony, MyPinkPony, MyYellowPony… so far none of them has made it into Production but that’s only because I always follow a create-check-remove routine.

The military contractor I worked for years ago made, among other things, radar warning devices for warcraft. Rather more sophisticated than your car’s detector, it would show what type the emission was (missile, AAA, etc.), the direction it was coming from, and how serious a threat it was.

While the TPTB went back and forth about what the most threatening symbol should be, the programmers made a placeholder symbol that was a, um, single digit salute. The first engineering prototypes what went out into the field for testing still had the placeholder, and the pilots loved it. It was made a feature.