I read an opinion piece in the Washington Post that described Trump’s reign as entering the “terrible twos,” and dissected all his behavior from the point of view of how Doctor Spock says to treat a recalcitrant two year old. It’s actually a great article that you can find here. . The point is that you know a normal two year old is going to grow out of it, but it’s becoming abundantly clear that Trump is never going to change. If anything, he’s going to get worse.
Let’s be clear about this: If Fox & Friends said, “You know what, Mr. President? You’ve proven your point. Now get the government back up and running and save the fight for a wall for another day,” then this shutdown would be solved before close of business the same day. But instead Fox remains in the pocket of the right (although they should be commended for ruthlessly fact-checking his speech and Chris Wallace roasting Sarah Sanders idiotic talking points). Meanwhile all his adult advisors have been tossed out, and Mitch McConnell has abrogated the responsibility of balance of powers by refusing to do something they would have done in a heartbeat during the Obama administration: send him a bill he’ll veto and then override the veto.
And speaking of Obama, in the post-Obama term, Trump had a majority in both the House and the Senate for two years. Couldn’t get the wall built then. Wasn’t a big deal because no one really wanted it and it was just a fantasy from the campaign. But now suddenly it’s a do-or-die concept. And this wall, which Mexico was going to pay for and for which he assured Schumer and Pelosi ON CAMERA that he would shoulder the blame if the government shut down, is suddenly the fault of the Democrats.
And what’s really incomprehensible is his supporters. The minority rank and file continue to abide by his every lie, his every fabrication. Their current favorite line is twofold:
1). Obama lied–indeed, every politician lies–so therefore it doesn’t matter that Trump lies. It’s their ultimate “what aboutism.” They hold Obama up as an example of everything that’s done wrong, except for this which they use to support their leader. They are incapable of understanding the difference in degrees. For instance, Obama lied nineteen times about health care (“You won’t have to change your doctor.”). Trump, by comparison, lied over 200 times about Mexico paying for the wall. Trump lies thirty times a day, at least. His entire ten minute speech had half a dozen lies, starting with that there’s an emergency on the southern border (there demonstrably isn’t.).
2). Democrats have no grasp of facts.. These dûmbáššëš take Trump’s cacophony of fabrications, “news” reports from Breitbart and Fox as news, and dismiss out of hand coverage from every major news media because they’ve bought into Trump’s entire “enemy of the people,” “Fake news” diatribe. Except as Stephen Colbert said, Facts have a well known liberal bias. The people declaring that liberals don’t know the facts have based their opinions on falsehoods. It would be ironic if it weren’t so dámņëd depressing. I mean, hëll, some of them still believe that Trump represents the majority of the population even though Clinton beat him by three million votes.
Despite the fact that Trump routinely lies, they believe what Trump says without a shred of proof. Then again, why not? They believe Hillary Clinton is a criminal without a shred of proof.
So even though they really shouldn’t have given him the time (the networks refused to air Obama’s speech about immigration some years back), they aired his speech on Tuesday in which he, of course, simply reiterated his lies. He also looked half-stoned, possibly because–according to drug users–he really was half stoned. Schumer and Pelosi then stood behind a single podium, probably to show unity, although they really just kind of looked like conjoined twins, and repeated everything they’ve been saying during the week. That was an error: they should have had Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez make the rebuttal. Not only is she very high profile, but she represents a new group of young, vital freshmen. She could have said, “Look, everyone knows everything he said was BS. You don’t need me to tell you that. This is what we should be talking about: health care. The environment. Making the country better for those who are most desperately in need.” And so on. Instead it was dueling senior citizens saying nothing new and it made both parties look old and stodgy.
There are 800,000 employees being held hostage during this thing, all for political gain. Garbage is piling up in Washington. National parks are becoming literal dumping grounds for everything from litter to human waste. Shuttered museums are losing millions of dollars in income. And Donald Trump, who once said a shuttered government was the fault of a weak leader, is finally going to accomplish something major: he’s shortly going to be holding court over the longest government shutdown in history. So that leaves me with only one question:
Are we great again yet?
PAD
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I still have the same doctor I had before Obama even took office…
I still have the same doctor I’ve had since 2004.
The thing that’s impressed me during the Trump era is how people in my school who were remedial or poor students or spent most of high school in the ‘burnout’ courtyard have become geopolitical experts on social media, and almost always Trumpists.
“Except as Stephen Colbert said, Facts have a well known liberal bias.”
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Actually, it’s because liberals have a bias for facts. Which is not the circular argument it may seem. Colbert just reversed it because it sounds funnier his way.
But, ahem, liberals do recognize facts and adjust their views based on them far, far (, far, far, far) more than “conservatives”. The conservative approach is to determine conclusion, make up šhìŧ to support it, refuse to budge no matter what is repeatedly shown to actually be true.
Literally a part of the discussion on Facebook under Peter’s ‘Bell’ post.
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Peter- “Sorry, James. You’re using the typical right wing tactic: when asked for proof, all you do is come up with excuses not to provide it.”
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Guy Defending Trump- “Sorry, Peter. You’re using the typical left wing tactic: when challenged, ask for proof, complete with bullet points and a bibliography.”
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Guess what ‘Guy Defending Trump’ still hasn’t really bothered to day days later?
Oh God, don’t get me started. Whoops, too late.
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I swear, Facebook is where intellectualism goes to die. I’ve spent a week and a half debating with one doofus and his friends, just to see if–when confronted with facts–how they would react. The response? Links to articles that did nothing to prove their points, and a string of insults including their favorite, “libtard,” which insults not liberals but the mentally challenged.
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I mean, this guy was so stupid that he called me a “crybaby liberal” for making up the word “whataboutism.” When I linked to proof that the term’s been around since the Cold War and suggested he apologize for needlessly insulting me, his response was an apology laced with more insults that ended with a demand *I* apologize, without specifying for what.
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Even when I gave up, it didn’t work. One guy said that it was impossible to deal with stupid, and I said he was correct and then said good-bye to the host because I knew he’d be reading it. The host’s response? Ha-ha, Peter David got mixed up and said good-bye to the wrong person.
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He even wandered over to my site at one point but got so roundly clobbered by people pointing out the same deficiencies that he skedaddled.
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PAD
Most of them aren’t interested in debate, facts, analyzing ideas. They’re only interested in two things: winning and energyzing themselves and their own side.
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Are there Liberals that also have this mindset? Absolutely. Many of the most extreme SJWs, for instance. But even deeper into the SJW-sphere you will still find an attempt to analyse and debate things, even if sooner or later they get curtailed by more enthusiastic toe-the-line folks.
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In Conservative places? Anyone actually interested in debate and analysis already left that room a long time ago.
PAD – ” and a string of insults including their favorite, “libtard,””
I’m not normally given to autograph hunting but, when given the chance to get Isaac ‘The Good Doctor’ Asimov’s, I had him sign one of the (original) FOUNDATION trilogy with one of his favourite quotes: “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”
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Sadly, I have come to realize this also extends to verbal violence where ad hominem attacks and insults are the preferred tools of the debate challenged. Feh.
As a contractor working on an ongoing mission, I am allowed to come in and plan maneuvers, etc. at NASA Goddard. My wife is a government employee and is working on proposals for upcoming missions. She hasn’t been to work all of this time and an important site visit scheduled for this month has been cancelled. Many future missions are falling further and further behind due to this shutdown.
One thing that many people don’t understand is that a shutdown end up costing a lot of money. Meanwhile, many government employees are not getting a paycheck this week and bills are due. Other arrangements must be made. The president has failed this country.
The “Arrow” meme is practically writing itself right now.
I was driving with my wife this morning and I remarked how I’m really losing patience with the deliberately stupid. They’re the ones with facts before them that stick their fingers in their ears and scream LA LA LA LA! Reality is not multiple choice.
Oh, and, Neil? I am insanely jealous of both you and your wife’s careers.
Huh?
Thanks
I’m not sure ACO would have been the right choice, but here’s what Pelhumer should have said (wordy, but using politicalese)…
“If the President, backed by careful analysis from the DHS would like to present a clear and present need for certain border reinforcements, we’d be pleased to consider any reasonable request.”
“That, however involves research, science, facts and careful study, something this administration has shown continuous lack of respect for, so the answer continues to be. No.”
“We know that the President thinks most Civil Servants are Democrats and thus unworthy of his attention, but we have legislation passed and ready to go to get them back to work. All it takes is for the majority leader to allow a vote. Your move, Mitch.”
“a shuttered government was the fault of a weak leader”
Fake quote do a google search.
I checked Snopes. They said it was true. Good enough for me.
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PAD
I just put the quote into Snopes and nothing came up.
Funny
I don’t know if you’re just rude or stupid or perhaps both. I suspect you’re certainly right wing, because you dismiss my proof out of hand while failing to provide any of your own.
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At any rate, here.. I went to Snopes and found it in thirty seconds.
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Feel free to apologize for doubting me.
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PAD
The specific and oft cited quote is “A shutdown falls on the President’s lack of leadership. He can’t even control his party and get people together in a room. A shutdown means the President is weak,” attributed to Donald Trump in 2013. That quote, specifically, can’t actually be verified anywhere, and is likely not real.
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HOWEVER, the man IS on record as repeatedly expressing that exact sentiment, using different phrasing and word choice, several times in the latter half of 2013, so disputing the specific wording it largely pedantic. We should strive for accuracy, yes, but the accurate fact of the matter is, Trump has absolutely said that a shutdown is the leader’s fault.
Well, that excuses Trump.
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I doubt that anyone who’s smart enough to know what “leader” actually means would ever accuse him of being one.
Of course, Trump’s paragons of leadership are guys like Putin, Erdogan, Kim Jong-un, dictators and murderers.
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But even by those standards, Trump is a failure, as he is too stupid to be a effective dictator. He only attained power because America’s Conservative movement is terminally diseased.
You should be using groundless facts in an article about facts.
Here’s an article that has footage of Trump denouncing President Obama on Fox News about a shutdown in 2013:
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-says-president-when-asked-who-gets-fired-in-obama-shutdown_us_5c1ebfbae4b0407e907b9d10?ncid=engmodushpmg00000004
Don’t confuse her. She has alternative facts.
The closest thing I could find in the snopes article was a tweet from a us representative, but snopes “best” judgment was a “paraphrase” from a 2013 Fox & Friends appearance.
“Problems start from the top, and they have to get solved from the top, and the President’s the leader, and he’s got to get everybody in a room, and he’s got to lead. And he doesn’t do that, he doesn’t like doing that, that’s not his strength.
So, your quotes is fake in blunt sense.
The previous post will be my last.
Of course it is, because even though Snopes described it as a true quote–the sense is the same even if the exact wording is slightly different–you cannot admit you were wrong because you’re a typical right winger. I called it.
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PAD
Promise? Really really promise?
I ask only because I’ve already had my daily quota of alternative fact-based b.s. for the month and I can’t take any more.
Actually, not only is “a shuttered government was the fault of a weak leader” a genuine quote, it’s a genuine quote which a Google search turns up immediately!
It’s by Peter David, from a recent blog posting in which he is accurately paraphrasing things which Donald Trump said in 2013.
If you didnt get far enough in school to have covered things like quotes and paraphrases, direct quotes usually have quotation marks (these things => “) around them and paraphrases don’t.
So when you put the phrase “a shuttered government was the fault of a weak leader” in quotation marks, you were quoting something Peter David said; and when Peter David said (without quotation marks) that Donald Trump once said a shuttered government was the fault of a weak leader, Peter was paraphrasing something Donald Trump said.
I hope this is helpful to you. A lot of people today don’t seem to understand how quoting and paraphrasing work, so if you encounter other people with the same misunderstanding you had I hope you will pass the information on quoting and paraphrasing along to them.
At this point, Trump has lied, deflected, and obfuscated so much, he can’t back off. He’s painted himself into a corner and can’t get out of it without admitting past mistakes, and we know he’ll never, ever do that.
My son is in the Coast Guard. He and his wife just had a baby a week ago, my first grandchild. Because the USCG is part of Homeland Security, none of our Coastguardsmen are getting paid. They are having to take out loans from credit unions and banks to make ends meet. Thankfully my son is with the Navy Credit Union and isn’t getting charged interest during the shutdown. The NCU will get paid back when the USCG gets their backpay owed them. Other coasties aren’t with that credit union and therefore are being charged interest. This has to stop! I’m sure those on boarder patrol are dealing with the same awful financial mess. The toddler in Chief wants boarder security, but those keeping it secure are not getting paid. I hope karma bites him in the butt very soon.
It will, because of the simplest reason of all: he’s a bad guy. And in this world, the bad guys tend to lose. It sometimes takes a while, but they typically come to a bad end.
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The only difference is that Trump will never take responsibility and always be the victim.
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PAD
And Rudy Giuliani just crafted the ultimate meme of the Trump Presidency:
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“Truth isn’t truth.”
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And also this little gem: “Nowadays, facts are in the eye of the beholder.”
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And to think that Giuliani used to be thought of as one of the “good” Republicans.
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Mark my words, the backlash to Trump’s Presidency will be HIDEOUS for the American right-wing.
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You eventually pay a price for this kind of shenanigans. Mass hysteria can only last for so long before it crashes.
“Mark my words, the backlash to Trump’s Presidency will be HIDEOUS for the American right-wing.”
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No, it won’t be.
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Sadly, it won’t be.
Jerry –
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I still have hopes. Bad things ultimately pass. Yeah, I know that it has become harder to believe in a progressive trend in history, with Nationalism and Fascism making a comeback, not to mention the extremist Free Market of the last 40 years.
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But if not a progressive trend, then at least I believe in cycles. The Conservative movement in America has gained in craziness and power for decades now. That wave HAS to crash some time, right? I am too terrified of thinking that things have still plenty of room for getting worse before they get better…