Trump escalates campaign of retribution as Republican senators shrug
Asked whether he was recommending the military take disciplinary action against Vindman for his House testimony in the impeachment proceedings, Trump replied, “They’re going to certainly, I would imagine, take a look at that.”
Trump also leaped to the defense Tuesday of Roger Stone, his longtime former adviser and friend who faces a prison sentence after being convicted by a jury of obstructing Congress and witness tampering in connection with the Russia investigation.
Stoking new worries about improperly politicizing the Justice Department, Trump admonished federal prosecutors for recommending a seven- to nine-year sentence for Stone, which the president felt was too long.
“That was a horrible aberration,” Trump told reporters gathered in the Oval Office. “They ought to be ashamed of themselves,” he said, adding that the prosecutors were “an insult to our country.”
So, in post-impeachment Trump-world, decorated veterans like Vindman need to be disciplined for telling the truth, long-time rat-fucker Roger Stone has been treated unfairly, and prosecutors doing their jobs are a disgrace to the nation.
“It completely explodes this delusion that he’s learned his lesson and he will turn over a new leaf, which was magical thinking from the start and a fig leaf for a number of my Republican colleagues,” [Sen. Richard; D-Conn.] Blumenthal said. “We ought to be very, very afraid of this kind of dictatorial personal vengeance against dedicated public servants who stepped forward to tell the truth.”
Wishful thinking, indeed.
dasmoocher:
Trump escalates campaign of retribution as Republican senators shrug
Wishful thinking, indeed.
Related article:
[URL=“Trump Fires Defense Official for Refusing to Break the Law ”]
The New York Post reports that the administration is retaliating against Elaine McCusker, whose nomination for Pentagon comptroller and chief financial officer has been pulled.
What’s especially chilling about this move is the reason for the retaliation. McCusker is losing her job because she attempted to follow the law. There’s no cover story to rationalize it. That is the cover story. “This administration needs people who are committed to implementing the president’s agenda, specifically on foreign policy, and not trying to thwart it,” a White House official tells the paper.
McCusker’s crime is quite literally having attempted to follow the law. Over the summer, the Office of Management and Budget was trying to hold up aid for Ukraine that Congress had passed into law, because it was trying to extort Ukraine to investigate Trump’s rivals. Defense Department officials, who were supposed to allocate the funds, attempted to implement the policy. Just Security obtained the email chain.
…
The message sent by McCusker’s punishment dovetails not only with the Friday Night Massacre, but other recent moves. The Department of Justice has opened an official process to allow Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, the current target of an investigation, to take and sift through his Russian-financed dirt. (There is no such avenue available for lawyers representing other presidential candidates.) And after Trump floated a pardon for his Russia-scandal accomplice Roger Stone, who is being charged with obstructing an investigation in order to protect Trump, the Justice Department has proposed reducing his sentence.
Trump is making it perfectly clear throughout the federal government. Anybody who stands in his way will be punished, even if they are on the side of the law. And his allies will be protected, even if they violate it.
This “law” thing — so 2019. This is the new reality.
Why Bill Barr’s DOJ replaced Catholic Charities with Hookers for Jesus
In a new grant award, senior Justice officials rejected the recommendations of career officials and decided to deny grants to highly rated Catholic Charities in Palm Beach, Fla., and Chicanos Por La Causa in Phoenix. Instead, Reuters reported, they gave more than $1 million combined to lower-rated groups called the Lincoln Tubman Foundation and Hookers for Jesus.
Why? Well, it turns out the head of the Catholic Charities affiliate had been active with Democrats and the Phoenix group had opposed President Trump’s immigration policies. By contrast, Hookers for Jesus is run by a Christian conservative and the Lincoln Tubman group was launched by a relative of a Trump delegate to the 2016 convention.
That Catholic Charities has been replaced by Hookers for Jesus says much about Barr’s Justice Department. Friends of Trump are rewarded. Opponents of Trump are punished. And the nation’s law enforcement apparatus becomes Trump’s personal plaything.
asahi
February 12, 2020, 3:14am
40510
Just a reminder: there are no do-overs in elections.
If Trump gets elected again in 2020, good night America. We may be there already.
Aspenglow:
Whose.
That is all.
GAH! :smack: Hoist by my own petard!
I really ought to know better than to put an apostrophe on a possessive pronoun!
margin
February 12, 2020, 2:07pm
40513
dasmoocher:
Trump escalates campaign of retribution as Republican senators shrug
Wishful thinking, indeed.
So Vindmann----wounded in the service of his country----gets punished, while Eddie Gallagher-----who murdered and committed war crimes------gets rewarded, as do at least three other war criminals.
How long before Trump’s rivals start dying mysteriously?
margin
February 12, 2020, 2:10pm
40514
Yeah, the whorehouse madam just called a competitor promiscuous.
margin:
So Vindmann----wounded in the service of his country----gets punished, while Eddie Gallagher-----who murdered and committed war crimes------gets rewarded, as do at least three other war criminals.
How long before Trump’s rivals start dying mysteriously?
Ask Jeffrey Epstein. Sure, he was more of a potential witness than a rival, but you get the idea.
asahi:
Just a reminder: there are no do-overs in elections.
If Trump gets elected again in 2020, good night America. We may be there already.
Jabba the Barr has politically weaponized the Justice Department. Gaining power is his goal, handing out true justice is his last aim. He sees himself as God’s instrument and no accusation of criminality is going to deter him.
Add that to the destruction of the environment, undermining public education, hollowing out of the State Department, concentration camps, constant streams of disinformation and massive concentrations of wealth, all of which will go far worse if Orange Cheeto is reelected, November 3 becomes our last chance at resisting the on-coming fascist dictatorship. Truly a clusterfuck of the first order.
BigAppleBucky:
JAdd that to the destruction of the environment, undermining public education, hollowing out of the State Department, concentration camps, constant streams of disinformation and massive concentrations of wealth, all of which will go far worse if Orange Cheeto is reelected, November 3 becomes our last chance at resisting the on-coming fascist dictatorship. Truly a clusterfuck of the first order.
[my bold]
Interesting article on the disinformation campaign:
The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President
How new technologies and techniques pioneered by dictators will shape the 2020 election
What I was seeing was a strategy that has been deployed by illiberal political leaders around the world. Rather than shutting down dissenting voices, these leaders have learned to harness the democratizing power of social media for their own purposes—jamming the signals, sowing confusion. They no longer need to silence the dissident shouting in the streets; they can use a megaphone to drown him out. Scholars have a name for this: censorship through noise.
After the 2016 election, much was made of the threats posed to American democracy by foreign disinformation. Stories of Russian troll farms and Macedonian fake-news mills loomed in the national imagination. But while these shadowy outside forces preoccupied politicians and journalists, Trump and his domestic allies were beginning to adopt the same tactics of information warfare that have kept the world’s demagogues and strongmen in power.
…
The Trump campaign is planning to spend more than $1 billion, and it will be aided by a vast coalition of partisan media, outside political groups, and enterprising freelance operatives. These pro-Trump forces are poised to wage what could be the most extensive disinformation campaign in U.S. history. Whether or not it succeeds in reelecting the president, the wreckage it leaves behind could be irreparable.
The article is a long read but has disconcerting bits like these:
The campaign doesn’t run just one ad at a time on a given theme. It runs hundreds of iterations—adjusting the language, the music, even the colors of the “Donate” buttons. In the 10 weeks after the House of Representatives began its impeachment inquiry, the Trump campaign ran roughly 14,000 different ads containing the word impeachment. Sifting through all of them is virtually impossible.
Both parties will rely on micro-targeted ads this year, but the president is likely to have a distinct advantage. The Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign have reportedly compiled an average of 3,000 data points on every voter in America. They have spent years experimenting with ways to tweak their messages based not just on gender and geography, but on whether the recipient owns a gun or watches the Golf Channel.
…
It’s a lesson drawn from demagogues around the world: When the press as an institution is weakened, fact-based journalism becomes just one more drop in the daily deluge of content—no more or less credible than partisan propaganda. Relativism is the real goal of Trump’s assault on the press, and the more “enemies of the people” his allies can take out along the way, the better. “A culture war is a war,” Steve Bannon told the Times last year. “There are casualties in war.”
This attitude has permeated the president’s base. At rallies, people wear T-shirts that read rope. tree. journalist. some assembly required. A CBS News/YouGov poll has found that just 11 percent of strong Trump supporters trust the mainstream media—while 91 percent turn to the president for “accurate information.” This dynamic makes it all but impossible for the press to hold the president accountable, something Trump himself seems to understand. “Remember,” he told a crowd in 2018, “what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”
[underlining in the original]
Trump supporters, of whom "91 percent turn to the president for “accurate information.” ", eat this disinformation up with a large spoon and ask for it on an all-you-can-eat buffet.
dasmoocher:
Trump escalates campaign of retribution as Republican senators shrug
So, in post-impeachment Trump-world, decorated veterans like Vindman need to be disciplined for telling the truth, long-time rat-fucker Roger Stone has been treated unfairly, and prosecutors doing their jobs are a disgrace to the nation.
Susan Collins’ hands hurt and she has a headache. From all the hand wringing and brow furrowing.
But She still thinks Trump learned his lesson.
BigAppleBucky:
JAdd that to the destruction of the environment, undermining public education, hollowing out of the State Department, concentration camps, constant streams of disinformation and massive concentrations of wealth, all of which will go far worse if Orange Cheeto is reelected, November 3 becomes our last chance at resisting the on-coming fascist dictatorship. Truly a clusterfuck of the first order.
[my bold]
Interesting article on the disinformation campaign:
The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President
How new technologies and techniques pioneered by dictators will shape the 2020 election
What I was seeing was a strategy that has been deployed by illiberal political leaders around the world. Rather than shutting down dissenting voices, these leaders have learned to harness the democratizing power of social media for their own purposes—jamming the signals, sowing confusion. They no longer need to silence the dissident shouting in the streets; they can use a megaphone to drown him out. Scholars have a name for this: censorship through noise.
After the 2016 election, much was made of the threats posed to American democracy by foreign disinformation. Stories of Russian troll farms and Macedonian fake-news mills loomed in the national imagination. But while these shadowy outside forces preoccupied politicians and journalists, Trump and his domestic allies were beginning to adopt the same tactics of information warfare that have kept the world’s demagogues and strongmen in power.
…
The Trump campaign is planning to spend more than $1 billion, and it will be aided by a vast coalition of partisan media, outside political groups, and enterprising freelance operatives. These pro-Trump forces are poised to wage what could be the most extensive disinformation campaign in U.S. history. Whether or not it succeeds in reelecting the president, the wreckage it leaves behind could be irreparable.
The article is a long read but has disconcerting bits like these:
The campaign doesn’t run just one ad at a time on a given theme. It runs hundreds of iterations—adjusting the language, the music, even the colors of the “Donate” buttons. In the 10 weeks after the House of Representatives began its impeachment inquiry, the Trump campaign ran roughly 14,000 different ads containing the word impeachment. Sifting through all of them is virtually impossible.
Both parties will rely on micro-targeted ads this year, but the president is likely to have a distinct advantage. The Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign have reportedly compiled an average of 3,000 data points on every voter in America. They have spent years experimenting with ways to tweak their messages based not just on gender and geography, but on whether the recipient owns a gun or watches the Golf Channel.
…
It’s a lesson drawn from demagogues around the world: When the press as an institution is weakened, fact-based journalism becomes just one more drop in the daily deluge of content—no more or less credible than partisan propaganda. Relativism is the real goal of Trump’s assault on the press, and the more “enemies of the people” his allies can take out along the way, the better. “A culture war is a war,” Steve Bannon told the Times last year. “There are casualties in war.”
This attitude has permeated the president’s base. At rallies, people wear T-shirts that read rope. tree. journalist. some assembly required. A CBS News/YouGov poll has found that just 11 percent of strong Trump supporters trust the mainstream media—while 91 percent turn to the president for “accurate information.” This dynamic makes it all but impossible for the press to hold the president accountable, something Trump himself seems to understand. “Remember,” he told a crowd in 2018, “what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”
[underlining in the original]
Trump supporters, of whom "91 percent turn to the president for “accurate information.” ", eat this disinformation up with a large spoon and ask for it on an all-you-can-eat buffet.
SteveG1
February 12, 2020, 3:28pm
40521
… especially Putin’s dick.
SteveG1
February 12, 2020, 3:29pm
40522
He had too much dirt on too many powerful “people”.
SteveG1
February 12, 2020, 3:30pm
40523
He “learned” once again that he can and will get away with anything and everything.
Gyrate
February 12, 2020, 3:35pm
40524
margin:
So Vindmann----wounded in the service of his country----gets punished, while Eddie Gallagher-----who murdered and committed war crimes------gets rewarded, as do at least three other war criminals.
How long before Trump’s rivals start dying mysteriously?
Do try to keep up - “mysteriously” is passé. The new thing is “brutally and for obvious reasons ”.
