Solidly surprised that no one has mentioned the recent trip to Mar-E-Lago by the UK's very own self-servicing greasy spiv Farage:
The original article was in the Telegraph, but I refuse to link to that. The highlight for me is:
At one point, Mr Farage told Mr Trump: “You’re the only guy that can do it. No one has your charisma.”
Hahahahahahahahaha
Holy cow.... That tweet!
That bloke has not only kept digging his own hole, not content with his downward progress he's just broken-out a JCB
Still grifting for all that he's worth. He really doesn't look or sound terribly well either.
If he were anyone else, I'd almost feel sorry for him.
Qanon fans must be very confused that the secret paedophile ring was one of their own all along
Given that Trump was a friend of Jeffrey Epstein, and judged a beauty pageant where a few suspected paedophiles operated, they shouldn't be confused.
They’ll claim they were infiltrators.
The deranged orange gibbon just will not let it lie!
https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/trump-mar-a-lago-arizona-recount-white-house-035847717.html?guccounter=1
off his **** rocker
He is just doing the ground work to establish that as a defence.
It’s not just in America he’s grafting, he’s doing it in Scotland, too; his golf clubs took hundreds of thousands of pounds from the pandemic fund for employees and laid most off, and he hasn’t paid taxes, although that’s just normal business practice for the Orange Anus.
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/trump-organization-scottish-golf-resort-job-subsidies_n_608f3deae4b02e74d228a542?ri18n=true
Yep, you only have to scan through the mad utterings of STW's pet troll to see how people get suckered in.
Yup. Just human nature sadly, once people have been fooled it's easier to fool them again than it is to get them to accept that they were fooled. The wronger you are the more important it gets to continue being wrong.
The wronger you are the more important it gets to continue being wrong.
Just look at all the arguments on the soccerball thread....
Newsmax have settled with Dominion seems fox will settle to avoid Discovery
Astonishing that every time some-one does something idiotic because they are either presenting on/or have watched Fox, the Fox defence is always "You shouldn't do that, we're not a news programme, we're just entertainment"
I wonder how much longer that will last.
He still has the Republican mainstream in tow... tragic.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/06/trump-republicans-liz-cheney
It's quite bizarre how Republican voters think they're the party of hard-working, honest, law-and-order types. Without realising that those things are completely incompatible with believing in weirdo nut job stuff like QAnon, adrenochrome, pizzagate and stolen elections.
I think the Dominion case against Newsmax is still ongoing, the settlement is with Coomer personally?
He still has the Republican mainstream in tow… tragic.
I note that Elise Stefanik uses twitter in a very similar way to the orange buffoon too. Many random tweets, capitalisations, unsubstantiated claims and outrage....
@scuttler More than that.
McCarthy is doubling down on the Tango Fascist and seems to be making it a personal goal to work against Biden. Ditching Cheney who, although a Republican, seems to be a reasonable person, just seems to be evidence of him dragging the party further to the lunatic fringe.
Cheney who, although a Republican, seems to be a reasonable person
She isn't.
She was a staunch defender of the torture program. “Well, it wasn’t torture, Norah, so that’s not the right way to lay out the argument,” she instructed Norah O’Donnell in 2009, looking on the bright side of waterboarding.
Cheney who, although a Republican, seems to be a reasonable person
She doesn't support overthrowing a democratic election, which should be the absolutely minimal standard for anyone. However, she's a hard-core right-wing conservative and her father bears a lot of responsibility for driving the Republican Party to where it is now. She's definitely better than Trump, but that doesn't make her a reasonable person.
I stand corrected. My statement should likely have the clarification “in comparison to the other nutjobs in the GOP…”.
It is also a damning state of affairs when someone advocating torture is considered a moderate.
My apologies.
It's a sign of the awful state of politics in the US now that the likes of Cheney, Romney et al appear like moderates. And the Lincoln Project, made up of centrist Republicans, looks like a hotbed of social activism.
I can only hope that Lindsey was right:
https://twitter.com/LindseyGrahamSC/status/727604522156228608
Regarding Cheney, that whole European Super League football thing turned those arch-scumbags at UEFA and FIFA into altruists overnight. Scary isn't it.
It is also a damning state of affairs when someone advocating torture is considered a moderate.
My apologies.
To be fair, G.W. Bush and John McCain are pinko-liberals compared to the current Republican Party. Ronald Reagan would be hounded out as too moderate.
It is also a damning state of affairs when someone advocating torture is considered a moderate.
To be fair, Obama didn't say it this publicly but he also didn't close Guantanamo Bay or persue any kind of prosecution for the torturers.
America has a long history of using torture. They only look to stop it when it's carried out by other governments.... but... only those that have America's oil/minerals under their sand.
For example, Assange, for all his faults, outed US torture in black and white. The result was not to arrest the torturers it was to go after him.
Cheney is awful but she still just represents the establishment line, left or right, that torture is OK but please don't talk about it, or mention it, or we'll come after you.
To be fair, Obama didn’t say it this publicly but he also didn’t close Guantanamo Bay or persue any kind of prosecution for the torturers.
Obama was a constitutional law professor and was very serious about following written and unwritten constitutional norms. The problem with Guantanamo Bay, as I understand it, was that they would have had to transfer the prisoners back to a U.S. prison, which would have raised intractable legal issues - they weren't prisoners of war, but many of them weren't really charged with criminal charges either. On top of that, some of them were very nasty pieces of work and Obama would suddenly have had full access to the classified material explaining why they were being held, with constant pleas from military and intelligence officers to not release them. That was a fight that he was never going to win.
The problem with trying to prosecute the "enhanced interrogators" was that they were mostly following orders that had been signed off by lawyers. Some of the worst offenders were prosecuted when they started going freelance, but the Bush administration got legal rulings saying that it wasn't torture. Although it was a new administration under Obama, standard procedure is that administrations continue supporting the legal positions adopted by the lawyers for previous administrations (in other words, the U.S. Government never admits it was wrong). In practice, they change policy and may advocate for changes in the law, but they generally don't come out and say that previous legal advice was incorrect.
On top of that, if you start prosecuting your own people for following orders, morale will collapse. A quiet change of policy and warning everyone not to do it again is about as much as you can realistically hope for.
Trump assumed he could just walk into office and change policies on a whim, but mostly found himself entangled in a legal and bureaucratic quagmire and he really got very little done. The U.S. government is an enormous beast and getting anything to chance is a monumental task. Dick Cheney was a very experienced bureaucrat and he know how to go about getting what he wanted. Donald Trump didn't.
^ that's hilarious. Clearly Trump's "official" statements aren't even being proof-read any more, let alone reviewed by a lawyer.
Is calling somebody a fraud, a lowlife, and a phony not just libelous when you aren't president any more?
How? How is that man not sued into bankruptcy by now? Why is he still a force in politics? That statement is like the ramblings of an old, confused man?
If this is a consolidating force in US politics I genuinely wonder where it will end. Is he just a vehicle for the journey they want to take? Is he a front for people far more clever, or is America really _that_ messed up?
I guess the U.K. has similar issues with Johnson, knowing that he’s self servicing, corrupt and can barely string a sentence together. I still wonder why people don’t see through it.
That is the utterly chilling thing about both Trump and Johnson - people know that they are thoroughly dishonest, corrupt, in Trump's case insane, and will jump on any populist bandwagon to stay in power - but they just don't care and keep voting for them.
Seems the Republicans are still under his spell. Loathsome as she might be as a politician, and she may be going it for her own benefit, but she's taking the sensible line here
BBC News - Liz Cheney: Republican ousted from leadership for challenging Trump election claims
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-57090202
The gop leadership and the qanon nutters are still under his spell, but his polling numbers even in gop strongholds are awful.
I think it shows that trump and johnson are just lucky, everything fell into place for them. They are not great Machiavellian strategists, there is no co-ordinated evil plan that they were in control of, the dice just kept coming up sixes for them.
Cheney knows this, that they can't just rely on dumb luck every time, but the gop leadership are like gambling addicts chasing their losses by continuing playing the same game making bigger bets.
I think it shows that trump and johnson are just lucky, everything fell into place for them.
I think Trump has a natural flair for showmanship and sensing what a crowd wants. When he first started out doing his rallies, he tried out a bunch of different things and spotted what the crowds responded to, "Lock her up," for example. He just keeps on hammering away on those things and drops anything that doesn't work. That got him support from a majority of Republicans (>50% of 35% of the electorate = roughly 20% of Americans). That support got him the nomination. A lot of people didn't take his more extreme stuff seriously, they assumed he was a smart guy who knew how to run a huge company and would get stuff done. Hillary Clinton was a dreadful candidate with decades of baggage so Republican voters voted Republican despite reservations about Trump.
As soon as Trump was inaugurated, his incompetence was obvious and his approval ratings pretty much never got over 50%. The 2018 midterm elections were brutal for Republicans, Trump motivated millions of voters to switch their votes from Republican to Democrat. Same with 2020 - Trump did motivate the Republican base voters to turn out, but he motivated Democrats even more.
Problem is, he still has the support of >50% of Republicans, despite being extremely unpopular overall. Republican politicians know this so they're all too scared to cross him. Most seats in Congress are safe seats so the only threat to the sitting members is a primary challenge from other Republicans. They all know that what they're doing is crazy, but they have no incentive to say what they really know is true.
At some point in the near future, Trump's "less than legal" relationship with other peoples/banks money is going to come knocking on his front door, and if they're not careful, it will spiral out of control to those closest to him. While it would be sort of funny from a distance to watch previously Trumpian hand-puppets get taken away in handcuffs, I don't think it will do anything good in the short term for US politics.
it's hard not to conclude the the GOP while knowing that they're on a downward spiral, because of the choices they made, are still going to make everyone else suffer for their mistakes.
it’s hard not to conclude the the GOP while knowing that they’re on a downward spiral, because of the choices they made, are still going to make everyone else suffer for their mistakes.
Yep. There's a whole lot of Republican politicians waiting for Trump to get out of the way so they can try to pick up his base voters. That means they are competing to be even more extreme than he was. If he does end up in jail, the obvious campaign promise will be to pardon him and his buddies for any federal crimes and to "investigate" any state attorneys general that prosecuted him. Gonna get worse, not better.
