DWill wrote:

ant wrote:With the type of willful ignorance being committed by Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferers who turn a blind eye to the unchecked violence being committed in liberal run cities and states I think it's time to consider casting a vote for Trump this time around,


Anything to try and offset the type of vile hypocrisy going on.

My gosh.. truth is indeed stranger than fiction.

It all comes down to salience, doesn't it, what stands out most prominently in the negative sense. With these two candidates, the least bad choice seems to summarize it. You see 'unchecked violence' as a reason to keep Trump in the WH. I look at a president who says that a 75 y-o protester who was thrown to the ground by police, suffering brain damage, worked for Antifa and faked the incident. Trump had that from a good, apparently Russian, source.

Right, I condemned both incidents in a discussion recently.

What I haven't heard is any democratic leader or democratic supporter condemn the unchecked violence that is being committed by the left during these past few weeks.

It's certainly not right wing ideology that's publicly or silently supporting the mayhem.

People who live in sleepy small towns in comfortable bubbles do not know the reality that's on the ground in large liberal governed cities that have failed to protect law abiding tax paying citizens.

Until of course the violence comes to their doorstep.

Harry Marks wrote:And now, according to John Bolton, we learn that Trump was angling for re-election with the items he asked from China in the trade talks. Umm, sorry Mr. Bolton, but picking negotiation strategy to favor electoral victory is as old as democracy. This is a clear case of the Dershowitz Doctrine: Trump's intent was probably corrupt, but you can make a good case that even a disinterested politician would have asked for the same purchases of farm products.

That sounds right to me, in the same category as Trump wanting the country to reopen quickly. A good case can be made that the quick reopenings were a bad idea, but there were reasons in their favor in addition to the help that a reviving economy would give Trump's reelection chances. More of a problem, politically, for Trump is whether his worry about the trade deal made him praise Xi for the coronavirus response after it was pretty clear that China was anything but transparent in its handling of the outbreak.

I'm more worried by Bolton's accusation that Trump praised the re-education camps for Uighurs, but that is so obviously Trump just being Trump that it's hard to conclude any new ground or "depths of his depravity" was demonstrated.

I don't plan to read Bolton's tome, but I'm curious to see whether it breaks new ground, as you indicate, or is maybe more of an attempt by Bolton to assuage his wounded pride. Biden wants to play up a new quid pro quo in Bolton's report on Trump and Xi, but I agree that this doesn't appear "Ukraine-like."

ant wrote:

DWill wrote:It all comes down to salience, doesn't it, what stands out most prominently in the negative sense. With these two candidates, the least bad choice seems to summarize it. You see 'unchecked violence' as a reason to keep Trump in the WH. I look at a president who says that a 75 y-o protester who was thrown to the ground by police, suffering brain damage, worked for Antifa and faked the incident. Trump had that from a good, apparently Russian, source.

Right, I condemned both incidents in a discussion recently.

What I haven't heard is any democratic leader or democratic supporter condemn the unchecked violence that is being committed by the left during these past few weeks.

Usually, we have seen language from those siding with the protesters that disapproves of violence. We've also seen the organizers plead for the violence-prone to stay away. But it depends on what "condemning" is; it's a matter of forcefulness and emphasis. I'm going into possibly questionable territory by asking whether it's possible to be truly on both sides: to strongly condemn the looting and violence (the latter happening on the police side, too) and to join with Black Lives Matter. Which is, for an individual, the salient message that he or she will take away and support?

It's certainly not right wing ideology that's publicly or silently supporting the mayhem.

Recent reports on Bugaboo (or Bugaloo?), a right-wing group that may be infiltrating protests in a false-flag manner.

People who live in sleepy small towns in comfortable bubbles do not know the reality that's on the ground in large liberal governed cities that have failed to protect law abiding tax paying citizens.

To be very personally affected is to know something that those unaffected can't know. However, it isn't true, either, that just being more in the midst of things confers an individual's possession of the truth, because there still will be more than one way to view the reality.

ant wrote:With the type of willful ignorance being committed by Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferers who turn a blind eye to the unchecked violence being committed in liberal run cities and states I think it's time to consider casting a vote for Trump this time around,

Anything to try and offset the type of vile hypocrisy going on.

My gosh.. truth is indeed stranger than fiction.

I am not sure I am getting the point. Is the violence unchecked? I saw the National Guard called in, in many states. Is a blind eye being turned? I saw the press running pictures of looted stores, burned police stations and torched police cars.

I also saw leaders of Black Lives Matter marches pleading for calm and circumspection. I saw violent protesters being arraigned in court, with several admitted false flag right-wingers and no admitted antifa fighters. Above all, I saw demonstrations going on long after the violent parts had been brought under control, by curfews and other means. So what exactly is a blind eye being turned to?

Granted that "liberal run cities and states" have had a disproportionate share of violence, but I think the causality runs the other way. Places with high concentrations of excluded and marginalized people are both more likely to vote for liberal leadership and more likely to have riots. What we know about liberal policies in policing strongly suggests that community-friendly policing helps to hold down crime and citizen violence as well as police abuse. "Dominating" plays well with some corners of the public, so it sometimes wins elections (see Joe Arpaio's career in Arizona) but it doesn't particularly get the job done. And it does build up trauma within ordinary people harassed for having the wrong profile.

Watch out for those Friday nights. On this one, Barr announced the removal of Geoffrey Berman, the prosecutor who went after Michael Cohen. Berman is not obligated to step down because he was formally appointed by the judges of the U.S. District Court. He had been initially named by Jeff Sessions, but Trump (for God knows what reason) did not send his nomination to the Senate. When the Senate approves the current nominee, a corporate lawyer with no experience in prosecution or even litigation, Jay Clayton, then Berman's term is up. Or at least that is what Berman argues.

Expect a fight in the Senate over Clayton.

I am concluding that Trump Derangement Syndrome is what has happened to the Republican Party. They are merrily rubber-stamping the return to J. Edgar Hoover style of law enforcement (with the possible exceptions of Mitt Romney and Chuck Grassley) in which your guilt or innocence is a function of your political positions. Have they thought about what it means for the law enforcement powers to become an arm of a political party? I'm betting Jeff Sessions has given it some thought. No one is safe from corrupt law enforcement unless everyone is safe.

Quote ant: “it’s certainly is not right wing ideology that’s publicly or silently supporting mayhem “.

It is for certain that right wing ideologies are the root motivation for these sparse examples of mayhem.

Taylor wrote:Quote ant: “it’s certainly is not right wing ideology that’s publicly or silently supporting mayhem “.

It is for certain that right wing ideologies are the root motivation for these sparse examples of mayhem.

LOL!


Okay

Hey, all.. serious question:

Why is it that when something goes horribly wrong in a Democratic run city it's never the fault of the democratic party?

You know, like for example all the mayhem going on in cities like Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco, New York, and Chicago?

So now Trump wants to stop testing. Why? Because we will find more cases of Covid. So simple. So ingenious. We stop the epidemic by refusing to notice it. All those people died of something else. The ICU's of Florida, Texas and Arizona are full because of something else. Some random fluctuation. We don't know what it is, but it isn't Kung Flu.

His staff, with something resembling a straight face, tried to say he was kidding. Because they have, you know, follow up questions to face. And what did our Oh Dear! Leader respond? "I don't kid." All Cretins are liars, and I am not a Cretin.

I suspect he is still upset about the crowd size in Tulsa. Okay, the prank by K-pop stans (who knew "stans" was a word?) and Tik-Tok followers contributed to the debacle, but it seems the form you had to sign stating that the Republican Party and the President were not liable for you or your kids dying of coronavirus may have played an even bigger role. If there is one thing Trump understands it is the need to lawyer up.

Speaking of which, there is now damning testimony from prosecutors who were driven to resign from the Roger Stone case after Bill "No politics in our prosecutions" Barr violated all the guidelines and the whole idea of rule of law to reverse the government's position on Stone's sentencing. Basically you can break every rule in the book, presumably now including shooting people on Fifth Avenue, and be confident the President has your back, as long as you are on his side. We have Newspeak to thank for being able to call it the "Department of Justice."

I'm beginning to sense what it was like to live in a Southern town in the 50s, with a big-bellied sheriff whose job it was to make sure no people of conscience ever became people of power. But I am unfair to the South. We know that similar behavior went on in the other states as well.

Popcorn time? Sit back and enjoy the show? But this thin-skinned bed-wetter can destroy the world by declaring yet another fictional emergency and pushing the little red button. I'm counting down til he hands over the keys to the White House with a big sigh of relief (his as much as mine) in January, at which time we can get back to solving serious problems.

Harry Marks wrote: I'm counting down til he hands over the keys to the White House with a big sigh of relief (his as much as mine) in January, at which time we can get back to solving serious problems.

I just have to believe you're right that Trump will experience defeat as an escape. He can't seriously believe this is all going well for him and that he can survive another four years--politically and perhaps physically and financially (as much as he's making off the presidency, his businesses are tanking). If he can make his defeat look crooked in the eyes of his acolytes, and ramp up his victimhood to new levels, he can exit not as a loser, in his eyes and theirs. He can win when he's on the outside once again, maybe set up a media business or Trump Network. We won't have seen the last of him, I'm afraid.