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Post by pim on Jun 3, 2020 17:40:35 GMT 10
Enjoy your “fun”. The rest of us will react in our own way. We’re not interested in your schadenfreude. Sorry you don’t understand.
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Post by KTJ on Jun 3, 2020 17:58:40 GMT 10
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Post by Deleted on Jun 3, 2020 20:29:28 GMT 10
Not all Americans are fuck-knuckles....those that would have voted for Bernie.
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Post by pim on Jun 3, 2020 23:23:30 GMT 10
Another geriatric whitefella. Honestly is that the best the Democrats can do? Don't they want to win?
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Post by Deleted on Jun 4, 2020 0:02:47 GMT 10
Bernie ain't runnin', the crusty ol' honky democratic elite were against him...the elite ol' guard have to have control of the democrats ripped from their grubby claws before change can happen.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 4, 2020 9:36:45 GMT 10
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Post by KTJ on Jun 4, 2020 12:24:44 GMT 10
from The Press…Every bully boy dictator has a bunker to hide from those he vowed to serveHaving Donald Trump in a bunker is a good start, writes Joe Bennett.By JOE BENNETT | 5:00AM — Wednesday, 03 June 2020Donald Trump's braggadocio has been “reduced to a whimper,” writes Joe Bennett. — Photograph: Associated Press.AS I WRITE, Trump is hiding in a bunker under the White House terrified of what his compatriots might do to him if given the chance. The bully is chalk-faced and trembling, his braggadocio reduced to a whimper.
The last tweet I saw from him consisted of three words, typed in block capitals because everyone knows that block capitals make things come true. The three words were those favourites of authoritarians, LAW AND ORDER. Ha.
Trump despises the law. He routinely breaks laws when he finds them inconvenient. He's done so all his life. His so-called university broke the law. His so-called charity broke the law. He is the unindicted co-conspirator in the case for which his long-time lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen went to prison. He'll face that rap when he leaves office.
He surrounds himself with thieves. His campaign manager went to prison. His deputy campaign manager avoided prison only by ratting on his campaign manager. His adviser Roger Stone, as nasty an operator as you could meet, is off to prison this month. Team Trump is a walking crime wave. Twenty women have accused Trump of sexual assault. And here he is screaming for law and order. You have to laugh.
By law and order Trump means something else entirely. He means a society that's skewed in his favour, a society that continues to protect him and others like him from the consequences of their greed and lust and crimes. He means the status quo, that keeps the poor and black-skinned polishing his golf clubs for a pittance. That's law and order to Trump.
No doubt the Secret Service will have urged Trump to withdraw to the bunker, because that's their job, but a president can overrule the Secret Service. A president with a whole heart and a clear conscience can stand and say that if the people who elected him have a beef with him then it's his duty to go and meet them so they can thrash this out. But not this timorous dough boy. Not this lardy child of privilege. Not this coward. He couldn't get to the bunker fast enough.Police stand near an overturned vehicle near the White House during protests over the death of George Floyd. — Photograph: Associated Press.Every bully boy dictator from Hitler to Yanukovych has kept a bunker as a refuge from the people he vowed to serve. But a bunker doesn't just protect the bully from the mob. It also protects his fantasy from reality. Behind its walls of inch-thick steel the little bigman can continue to move hypothetical troops on maps, plan triumphal arches with his statue on the top, order the assassination of his enemies.
But eventually even the bunker falls and after that there's nothing for it. Hitler and Jim Jones killed themselves. Ceausescu was hauled out and shot, Mussolini strung up, and Gaddafi dragged from a length of sewer pipe and ripped apart. That's what Trump fears, viscerally, because he knows it's what he deserves.
And that terror is Trump's first punishment. With luck there'll be more to come. Let's hope there's a humiliating landslide defeat in the coming election. Let's hope he is hissed from the White House by a crowd of a million delighted people. Let's hope the Southern District of New York already has the charge sheets ready and that the Feds come knocking on his door the very next day. Let's hope he's perp-walked in cuffs down Fifth Avenue, his hair hanging lank to his shoulder, his pate as bare as a balloon, his face the colour of milk and twisted with dread. He deserves every bit of this and more.
And right now he's holed up in a bunker and sweating. That's a good start.__________________________________________________________________________ • Julian “Joe” Bennett is a writer, columnist and retired English school teacher living in Lyttelton, New Zealand. Born in England, Bennett emigrated to New Zealand when he was twenty-nine. www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/opinion/121689428/every-bully-boy-dictator-has-a-bunker-to-hide-from-those-he-vowed-to-serve
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Post by pim on Jun 4, 2020 12:24:59 GMT 10
Let's call it by its name: martial law. That's in response to Ponto. Dunno what KTJ posted 'coz I leapfrogged it.
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Post by KTJ on Jun 4, 2020 20:23:18 GMT 10
from The Washington Post…Trump has turned America into a pitiful pariahThe world isn't laughing at us. It is weeping at what we have become.By MAX BOOT | 1:40PM EDT — Tuesday, June 02, 2020Protesters march in front of Trump Tower during a solidarity rally for George Floyd on Saturday, May 30 in New York City. — Photograph: Wong Maye-E/Associated Press.NEARLY TWO MONTHS AGO, a headline in that venerable British newspaper The Guardian proclaimed: “US's global reputation hits rock-bottom over Trump's coronavirus response.” Now I'm wondering what's lower than rock bottom? Because that's where we are today after President Trump's response to the demonstrations that have swept the United States.
Trump's inability to fight a pandemic that has killed more people in the United States than in any other country revealed that our government is dysfunctional and incompetent. In the past, the United States would send disaster assistance to other countries; now other countries were sending disaster assistance here. “Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger,” columnist Fintan O'Toole wrote in The Irish Times. “But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.”
To have the rest of the world pity the United States — that's a humiliation I never thought I would see. But pity doesn’t seem so bad compared with how the world feels about us now.
We have become an international pariah because of the way that our police forces mistreat people of color with the encouragement of our racist president. Trump is, as journalist Windsor Mann notes, “a weak man posing as a strongman.” The bone-spur commando cowered from protesters in the White House bunker on Friday night while unleashing salvo after salvo of blood-curdling threats to shoot looters and to unleash “the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons.”
On Monday, Trump raged at governors that they would look “weak” if they don't use force to “dominate” demonstrators. He pledged to put General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in charge of dealing with protests, while Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper spoke of the need to “dominate the battlespace” — i.e., American cities. Sure enough, troops streamed into the nation's capital and military helicopters buzzed demonstrators as if they were insurgents in Iraq. On Monday night, Trump ventured out of his lair, employing security forces to tear-gas and bludgeon peaceful protesters so he could stage a bizarre photo op in front of a church, brandishing a Bible as if he had never seen one before. He is acting like a Central Asian autocrat rather than the leader of a constitutional republic.President Donald J. Trump walks past law enforcement officers at Lafayette Square across from the White House on Monday. — Photograph: Patrick Semansky/Associated Press.President Donald J. Trump walks from the White House through Lafayette Park to visit St. John's Episcopal Church on Monday. — Photograph: Patrick Semansky/Associated Press.President Donald J. Trump holds a Bible as he visits outside St. John's Church across Lafayette Park from the White House on Monday, June 1, 2020, in Washington D.C. Part of the church was set on fire during protests on Sunday night. — Photograph: Patrick Semansky/Associated Press.The world is watching, and it is appalled by what it sees. Germany's Süddeutsche Zeitung summed it up: “Trump declares war on America.” Our allies are mortified; our enemies are gleeful, because Trump has handed them a priceless gift. Every tinpot dictator can now savor a moment of unearned moral superiority over a country that has spent decades lecturing them on human rights. Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov: “I am horrified by watching the situation in the United States, where members of the authorities brutally violate the rights of regular citizens.” The Iranian press quotes Ayatollah Khomeini: “America has begun the process of its own destruction.” A North Korean newspaper decries “a white policeman's brutality.”
It was only last week that Trump rightly condemned Beijing's move to take away Hong Kong's freedom. Now China has an unanswerable riposte. After State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus tweeted that “freedom loving people around the world must stand with the rule of law and hold to account the Chinese Communist Party,” a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman replied: “I can't breathe.” Meanwhile, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif took to Twitter to rewrite one of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's condemnations of Iranian abuses into a condemnation of U.S. abuses — including the mistreatment of protesters.
This is, of course, unfair; even under Trump, the U.S. human rights record is infinitely better than Iran's or China's. But it is a measure of Trump's international isolation that no one is coming forward to defend us. “America First” leaves America alone.
Just this week, Trump canceled a planned Group of Seven meeting in the United States after German Chancellor Angela Merkel — the true leader of the free world — refused to attend. This was an unprecedented snub. Desperately trying to save face, Trump expressed his desire to hold an expanded meeting in the fall that would include Russia, but both Britain and Canada expressed opposition to including Vladimir Putin.
Even before our current disasters, the United States' standing in the world had plummeted. A Pew Research Center survey found that the percentage of people around the world with confidence in the U.S. president had fallen from 74 percent under President Barack Obama to just 31 percent under Trump. More people expressed “no confidence” in Trump than they did in Putin or Xi Jinping. And that was back in 2019 — before the pandemic, before the economic meltdown, before the riots. How low can we go? We are about to find out what is lower than rock bottom.
Trump has often said that he would stop the world from laughing at us. Mission accomplished. Instead of laughing, the world is weeping at what we have become.__________________________________________________________________________ • Max Boot is a historian, best-selling author and foreign-policy analyst who has been called one of the “world's leading authorities on armed conflict” by the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, a columnist for The Washington Post and a global affairs analyst for CNN. Boot's latest book — “The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right” — was released in October 2018 by Norton/Liveright. His previous book, “The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam”, came out in January 2018 and became a New York Times bestseller. It was named an Amazon Best Book of the Month and praised as an “epic and elegant biography” by The Wall Street Journal, “judicious and absorbing” by The New York Times and “a superb scholarly achievement” by Foreign Policy. Boot is also the author of three previous books that were all widely acclaimed: The New York Times bestseller “Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present” (W.W. Norton & Co./Liveright, 2013), which The Wall Street Journal said “is destined to be the classic account of what may be the oldest as well as the hardest form of war”; “War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today” (Gotham Books, 2006), which was hailed as a “magisterial survey of technology and war” by The New York Times; and “The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power” (Basic Books, 2002), which won the 2003 General Wallace M. Greene Jr. Award from the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation as the best non-fiction book pertaining to Marine Corps history and has been placed on Army, Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy professional reading lists. Boot has served as an adviser to U.S. commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was a senior foreign policy adviser to John McCain's presidential campaign in 2007-08, Mitt Romney's campaign in 2011-12 and Senator Marco Rubio's campaign in 2015-16. Boot is a frequent public speaker and guest on radio and television news programs. He has lectured on behalf of the State Department and at many military institutions, including the Army, Navy and Air War Colleges, the Australian Defense College, the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare School, West Point and the Naval Academy. In 2004, Boot was named by the World Affairs Councils of America as one of “the 500 most influential people in the United States in the field of foreign policy.” In 2007, he won the Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism, given annually to a writer who exhibits “love of country and its democratic institutions” and “bears witness to the evils of totalitarianism.” In 2018, he was named one of America's “Great Immigrants” by the Carnegie Corporation. Before joining the Council in 2002, Boot spent eight years as a writer and editor at The Wall Street Journal, the last five as op-ed editor. From 1992 to 1994 he was an editor and writer at the Christian Science Monitor. In more recent years, Boot has been a columnist for Foreign Policy, a contributing editor to the Los Angeles Times, a member of the USA Today board of contributors, and a regular contributor to many other publications, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. He serves on the boards of Intelligence Squared U.S. and the Renew Democracy Initiative. Max Boot holds a BA in history from University of California at Berkeley; and a MA in history from Yale University. __________________________________________________________________________ Related to this topic: • VIDEO: This is propaganda • Trump's use of the Bible was obscene. He should try reading the words inside it. • Colbert I. King: Trump desecrates the character of St. John's church for foul political purposes • Jennifer Rubin: What we pray for after Trump's debacle at St. John's church • Katrina vanden Heuvel: Time to fundamentally rethink what Trump means by security • Paul Waldman: Trump's failures of leadership keep compounding • Dana Milbank: This is the consequence of Trump's reign of rage • Michael Gerson: Every crisis America faces has been made worse by Trump • The Washington Post's View: President Trump's snarling demands for rough policing are the opposite of law-and-order • The Washington Post's View: As the nation burns, Trump's bullhorn drowns out the voices of our better angels • Kathleen Parker: We are tipping into chaoswww.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/02/trump-has-turned-america-into-pitiful-pariah
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Post by Deleted on Jun 6, 2020 13:35:25 GMT 10
Trump is now losing his evangelist base as their parents are dying of covid-19 and tire of his hate speech..
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Post by Stellar on Jun 6, 2020 15:14:04 GMT 10
“When individuals get crow bars, and start prying open doors to loot, they’re not protesting. They’re not making a statement. They’re stealing”.
“They’re committing arson, and they’re destroying and undermining businesses in their own communities. They need to be treated as CRIMINALS!”.
What do you think?
ps … this wasn't said by Trump, lol.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 6, 2020 19:00:57 GMT 10
What drives them to be criminals when protesting which is a legal right....??..Australians will protest with out the criminal looting,....give it time when the wealth is continuing to go to the elite.
Obama is no longer the president yet he recognized the in equality in America, the crime that happens is not Obamas making, it has been in the making for a very long time.
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Post by KTJ on Jun 7, 2020 11:32:35 GMT 10
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Post by Deleted on Jun 7, 2020 12:11:01 GMT 10
Ironic the cartoonist name is Murdoch...
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Post by KTJ on Jun 7, 2020 13:05:28 GMT 10
Ironic the cartoonist name is Murdoch... Sharon Murdoch couldn't possibly be further politically from the Rupert Murdoch you are thinking of.
Click on the cartoon to open the post on Twitter, then click on her name to open her Twitter page and see for yourself what her political views very obviously are.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 7, 2020 13:46:40 GMT 10
I knew S. Murdoch is not prick related..share the same name is all.
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Post by pim on Jun 8, 2020 18:37:53 GMT 10
U mad bro? America’s troll-in-chief thrives on the triumph of destruction
Far from being a failed presidency, Donald Trump has achieved exactly what he set out to achieve: the destruction of the capacity of government to make American lives better.
Bernard Keane Crikey 5 June 2020
Donald Trump’s presidency is finished, we’re hearing, as his tragic bungling of the COVID-19 pandemic has given way to his tragic bungling of the protests against police murders of African Americans. Trump’s presidency is over, declared Robert Reich. Trump was the new Jimmy Carter (ouch) without the latter’s patriotism, wrote Matt Bai for the The Washington Post. Trump has a failed presidency wrote Vanity Fair, echoing a recent Brookings Institution op-ed. Except, commentators have routinely called time on Trump — so often that it’s even been the subject of other commentary. Measured by the normal standards of presidents, Trump is indeed a spectacular failure, one to make even James Buchanan look competent, so awful even that reliable sycophant of duds and despots Greg “George W. Bush is one of the great presidents” Sheridan has been moved to find fault with him. But to conclude that 110,000 dead and counting, a wrecked economy, the worst civil unrest since the 1960s, a plague of white supremacist and incel terrorism, a rebuke by his own military leaders and the erosion of the international standing of the US among enemies and allies alike represents failure is to apply entirely the wrong standard.
As a project, the Trump presidency welds two disparate aims: the profound, tribal sense of loathing of many low and middle-income white males toward 21st century America, and an extreme, plutocratic form of neoliberalism devoted to serving the interests of US corporations and its wealthiest elite. To achieve this, Trump — a wholly establishment figure, albeit more arriviste and gauche than traditional East Coast Republicans — has posed as an anti-establishment outsider determined to impose change. As it turns out, that change has not been an overturning, but a confirmation, of key elements of the US model of neoliberalism that has immiserated so many blue-collar Americans. But Trump can successfully pull this off because he understands the intersection of these two divergent interests — their hostility to government. It’s a longstanding trope of US politics that corporate interests have used racism to distract white working class voters from voting in their economic interests. Trump’s presidency dramatically scales this up: he doesn’t just use race, he uses the full spectrum of identity politics.
For many white American males, particularly working class white males, government has become a hated entity, one that has retreated from supporting American communities and white male jobs while — in their eyes — providing unmerited support to African-American and Hispanic communities, women, LGBTIQ people and other minorities. Government has, in their eyes, abandoned them while backing those they have traditionally regarded as their inferiors. For corporate plutocrats, of course, government is a tax and regulatory burden that must be curbed or even removed altogether to maximise corporate profits and shareholder returns. As m’colleague Guy Rundle has perspicaciously noted, this leads to a form of “wrecking crew” politics, in which the purpose of the incumbent is not to achieve policy goals or deliver a certain philosophy of government, but to simply destroy the capacity of government to achieve anything positive and, ultimately, even the faith of the governed in the capacity of government to effect worthwhile change.
Until this year, Trump painted with a somewhat limited palette in that task: important administration positions were left unfilled, or filled with utter incompetents; the US budget deficit was exploded with a company tax cut that funnelled tens of billions to US shareholders; officeholders who displayed a reality-based approach to their jobs, or who took oversight roles seriously, were dumped; entire functions, such as preparing for pandemics, were shuttered; blatant corruption became an acceptable standard for public office. But COVID-19 has presented the opportunity for implementing this strategy on a far broader scale. Through a combination of denialism, partisanship, refusal to take action, incitement of armed white supremacists to break lockdown laws and promotion of deadly “cures”, Trump added the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans to his resumé of governmental incapacitation.
The eruption of protests over police murders was a kind of contorni to that rich meal; even conservatives were appalled that Trump’s instinct was to inflame the protests and divide Americans, as if anything in his presidency had suggested he might do otherwise. With these actions, Trump has come significantly closer to the ultimate goal of disabling, if not permanently then long-term, the capacity of the US federal government to govern effectively, and the belief of Americans in its potential to govern effectively for them. If that’s the strategy, Trump’s tactics are also noteworthy. Trump is a troll. His real political slogan isn’t “Make America Great Again”. That was only ever a reference to a kind of pre-modern America, where women, and blacks, and other minorities knew their place and never challenged the right of heterosexual white males to social, political and economic dominance. His true slogan is “U Mad Bro?”, that smirking declaration of triumph by the internet troll to anyone who takes their abuse, derision, pranking or transgressive mockery seriously.
Trump’s lies aren’t the LBJ-style self-convinced declarations of a president who, famously, was the first victim of his own whoppers, but the goadings of a troll, someone who doesn’t care about the truth or otherwise of their statements, only that they enrage opponents and amuse supporters. Trump himself is notoriously racist, but his own personal prejudices are less relevant than his self-appointed role of premier Twitter flamebaiter. His statements are, like those of an internet bulletin board troll, intended to amuse and enrage, not be taken seriously; he would find it bemusing that even many Trump supporters have killed themselves with poison or died from COVID infection — U Dead Bro? — based on his advice, given his statements were acts of trolling, not statements of fact or even personal belief.
To accuse a troll of failing to unite is thus absurd, akin to lamenting a vampire’s pale complexion. Their very existence is dedicated to dividing, enraging, alienating, infuriating, with a gloating delight at causing offence with ever more absurd, transgressive statements. So Trump’s presidency, far from being over, is at its zenith, even if it has come at the cost of the president having to flee in terror to the White House bunker as protesters raged outside. Far more than George W. Bush — a former contender for worst ever president, who now looks comparatively benign and moderate — Trump deserves a “Mission Accomplished” moment. If not a fighter jet to an aircraft carrier, then perhaps a triumphant emergence from a White House bunker “inspection” to walk over the bodies of protestors, spent teargas canisters and tattered Black Lives Matter placards, and stand in front of a desecrated church to hold aloft some Trump merchandise, proudly surveying the wreckage of a failed state.
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Post by KTJ on Jun 9, 2020 6:56:23 GMT 10
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Post by pim on Jun 9, 2020 8:42:02 GMT 10
You don’t get it. You either didn’t read the Crikey article or you didn’t understand it.
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Post by Gort on Jun 10, 2020 22:03:00 GMT 10
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Post by Gort on Jun 10, 2020 22:08:16 GMT 10
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Post by Deleted on Jun 11, 2020 0:56:24 GMT 10
Trump lies not to deceive, he lies to install fear, and a leader who governs by using fear is a megalomaniac.
People will say Trump is stupid, he knows exactly what he is doing.
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Post by pim on Jun 11, 2020 7:00:00 GMT 10
As the Crikey article I posted says: “Far from being a failed presidency, Donald Trump has achieved exactly what he set out to achieve: the destruction of the capacity of government to make American lives better.“
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Post by Deleted on Jun 11, 2020 7:18:45 GMT 10
And yet Trump may win the next election...🤷♂️
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Post by pim on Jun 11, 2020 7:33:52 GMT 10
I don’t see how this from you ... And yet Trump may win the next election...🤷♂️ contradicts this from me ...
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