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It doesnt mean its insane either. Duh.
Long game, who knows? Insta-hating it as insane isn't a useful way to debate it, though.
A Futile and Stupid Gesture: The History of the First Trump Presidency & Q-Anon
- Thread starter Grand Potentate
- Start date
It doesnt mean its insane either. Duh.
Long game, who knows? Insta-hating it as insane isn't a useful way to debate it, though.
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Wow,
doghouse
. This is so poorly considered, I don't have a response, even to string you along with.Stop man, this is just so dumb. It's a step beyond Trump Derangement Syndrome into Self Induced Trump-bipolarization.
InstaHate
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Right, but the OP (doghouse?) didn't suggest it was insane because Trump did something he wasn't allowed to.
But in a world as stupid as this one, instahating everything is the sanest thing left to do.
InstaHate
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Lucian Wintrich summing up my approach to all news outlets:
"“They’ll keep calling up with lies,” he said. “If the story sticks around for over a month before changing then I’ll start to believe it."
AP/Reuters are an exception to this. I'll trust them after a week.
Also, fun theory: what if Wintrich is doing the altright thing because he loves to get hatefucked? You know if he's a bottom he's getting crazy laid at the clubs. And getting it real hard.
"“They’ll keep calling up with lies,” he said. “If the story sticks around for over a month before changing then I’ll start to believe it."
AP/Reuters are an exception to this. I'll trust them after a week.
Also, fun theory: what if Wintrich is doing the altright thing because he loves to get hatefucked? You know if he's a bottom he's getting crazy laid at the clubs. And getting it real hard.
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do we have a conspiracy theory thread? this one's heating up
viaattovannucci
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Why contain it in a single thread when we can let it loose on the entire forum in copious amounts?
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just wait until the holocaust conspiracies start getting rolled out!
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They’re concerned not so much about the president’s ability to protect state secrets as they are with the depravity of the “deep state” and the lying mainstream media.
“It’s total bullshit,” said Charles Johnson, a prominent internet troll close to the administration. “I think the Washington Post is way over their skis.”
How does one apply to this position and how big of a troll does one need to be to become the official White House troll?
“It’s total bullshit,” said Charles Johnson, a prominent internet troll close to the administration. “I think the Washington Post is way over their skis.”
How does one apply to this position and how big of a troll does one need to be to become the official White House troll?
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It wasnt.
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When Oxymorons Attack.
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Trump is not playing 4D chess anymore, he's moved on to 16D backgammon
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He's playing Go in hyperspace.
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Vox is still hilarious.
Lord Buckley
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I need to catch up with all of this, thankfully there's plenty of pundits on Youtube!
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Here also. All willing to spread the fake news.
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Keep supporting the DNC everyone.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/201...contact-with-wikileaks-investigator-says.html
Democrat city??
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/201...contact-with-wikileaks-investigator-says.html
Democrat city??
InstaHate
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Who here still supports the DNC? I thought all the Dems on this board were Bernie Bros and hate the DNC more than anyone.
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Well, judging by the derangement against Trump, I suppose many do. The Democratic party is a disgusting mess, and by attacking Trump with all measure of false narrative, you are by proxy supporting the way, way, way more corrupt entity.
People should think about that before they feed this thread more of the fake crap.
I've known for a long time that Seth Rich was likely murdered for his leaks, the Democrats are absolute trash. Of which Bernie resides.
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Here is another piece of class act:
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/...or-life-to-customers-that-punch-steve-bannon/
Are these the shit people that posters in this thread want to associate themselves with?
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/...or-life-to-customers-that-punch-steve-bannon/
Are these the shit people that posters in this thread want to associate themselves with?
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More importantly, how can one become an internet troll close to the administration??
InstaHate
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I think you are imposing a false dichotomy, that people are either a Trump supporter or a DNC/Dem Establishment supporter.
DNC is a toilet and HRC was a big ole turd that was floating in it. I've not seen anyone here express anything which contradicts this.
Both political parties use the piano wire when it comes to maintaining their power. I'll say this about Johnny T, I don't see him ordering an assassination to preserve his power.
Run for president against HRC
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There may be no pair of dots directly connected to both, but you can easily draw an implicit connection. All of this fake shitting on Trump helps the democrats, surely you're not going to suggest this isn't the case.
You can make the claim this is not the case genuinely if this irrational hatred didn't exist, but it does, and it's being pushed regularly by some folks in this thread.
The way Trump is being treated in the media is tremendously irresponsible. You had someone in this thread actually suggest people were going to die because of this phony story of leaking intelligence to Russians. This is the same crowd in the media that ALL votes democratic.
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Ha.
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InstaHate
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If it's fake, it's fake, if it's true, it's true. Who it helps or hurts is irrelevant, and caring about that inhibits people's ability to recognize the difference. People who don't like Trump and are looking for validation are not going to question what they read on CNN or MSNBC. Same goes for the rabid MAGA crowd and BB or National Review.
Personally, the only news outlets I don't approach with massive, massive amounts of skepticism are Reuters, AP, and Real Clear Politics. Maybe WSJ as well.
I will say this, the Democratic Party is sunk unless they exorcise Pelosi and her ilk.
Lord Buckley
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In a universe where everything is possibly fake, you can just about get away with everything, "Nothing is true: everything is permitted" in the words of William Burroughs. He also recommended storming the reality studio, which Trump has done most successfully.
You can see this now in Europe: Macron's alleged coke, MDMA and sexual adventurism is being ignored. Same too with Keith Vaz in the UK. Everything is now permitted if you're part of the political elite.
You can see this now in Europe: Macron's alleged coke, MDMA and sexual adventurism is being ignored. Same too with Keith Vaz in the UK. Everything is now permitted if you're part of the political elite.
InstaHate
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Coke, MDMA, and sexual adventurism?! Is this guy French or something?
Also, The Hill and Politico reporting on an AP report that a European official has said his country may stop sharing intelligence with the US if Johnny T actually has given classified info to the Russkies, but I can't find the report on the AP website. #fakenues?
Also, The Hill and Politico reporting on an AP report that a European official has said his country may stop sharing intelligence with the US if Johnny T actually has given classified info to the Russkies, but I can't find the report on the AP website. #fakenues?
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Where is the suggestion that people were going to die as a result of what Trump shared with the Russians? I just read some broad generalization that you can apply to almost anything.
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It's relevant because this is the grandest hatchet job in history. You have an entire media establishment completely out of their minds trying to destroy this guy with everything they can possibly invent. You're assuming the average person has enough sensibility to sort this grand and growing lie out, and that their developing completely false perceptions of the President.
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Have you ever considered that you might be the one with false perceptions?
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I'd say it's being celebrated, not ignored, of which I wholeheartedly approve. We should remove the age requirement for President and replace with a check list of mind altering substances and sexual conquests.
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The frustrated ambitions IT professional? Get the fuck outta here...
PBS/NPR.
InstaHate
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Yes, I have. I read hit job after hit job and see absolutely no evidence of any wrong doing whatsoever. So no, my perceptions are pretty spot on, and you don't have even a shred of evidence Trump has done anything wrong.
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Preach brother.
Scherensammler
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You want Berlusconi back?
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Preaching would be an apt description, since Evan reminds me of those bullshitters at the pulpit asking for blind faith.
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New Cold War
I don’t often “talk of court news” these days, but over the weekend I had occasion to watch CNN as the lastest tsunami of outrage over Trump was breaking, and it was quite something. (CNN is extremely loud, and clearly engineered to stoke the maximum of fear and outrage in its viewership. Hilariously, James “Not Wittingly” Clapper, seems to have become a paragon of truthtelling and a Hero of the Republic. I suppose this is not unlike rehabilitating George W. Bush, Hero of the Iraq War, because he has a lovely family. Liberals seem increasingly strange to me.) Be all that as it may, the current cycle of outrage has gone through four phases: (1) the original story, (2) reactions to the original story, (3) Trump’s tweets, and (4) reactions to Trump’s tweets. Obviously I’m not going to be able to process everything, even if I could stand it, in the time available for Water Cooler, but I’ll try to hit the salient points in each phase.
(1) The original story from WaPo, headline: “Trump revealed highly classified information to Russian foreign minister and ambassador.” There are two sections that seem salient to me. The first concerns process after the meeting:
Senior White House officials appeared to recognize quickly that Trump had overstepped and moved to contain the potential fallout. Thomas P. Bossert, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, placed calls to the directors of the CIA and the NSA, the services most directly involved in the intelligence-sharing arrangement with the partner.
One of Bossert’s subordinates also called for the problematic portion of Trump’s discussion to be stricken from internal memos and for the full transcript to be limited to a small circle of recipients, efforts to prevent sensitive details from being disseminated further or leaked.
This certainly suggests an effort by White House worker bees to (mixing metaphors) put the toothpaste back in the tube. But the nature of the toothpaste is unclear. Here it is, still from the WaPo story:
Trump went off script and began describing details of an Islamic State terrorist threat related to the use of laptop computers on aircraft
The “laptop computers” part makes sense to me; speculating freely, I bet Trump got an earful about the laptop ban from his golfing buddies, since the ban would make international business travel more painfui even than it already is. Murdoch’s Daily Telegraph (Australia) is somewhat more skeptical:
The information in question is now said to have been about ISIS plots to sneak a bomb on to an airliner in a laptop, a plot device easily imagined by any Hollywood TV writer or paperback spy thriller author.
Fine. The rest of the story is that anonymous officials in the intelligence community are very, very unhappy about “the information in question” and how Trump went off-script (assuming the story is correct). I won’t bore you with the details, since my expertise in intelligence tradecraft — rather like, I suspect, most of the scribes in the Beltway — comes from John LeCarré novels. The bottom line — and this may be one reason I don’t write much on court news these days — is that I see no reason whatever to regard intelligence sources, especially anonymous ones, as credible, nor access journalism based on those sources. If these stories are that important — and remember, in strong form, one theory pushed by these anonymous sources is that Trump is, quite literally, a Russian agent — than it’s more than a little incongruous that sources that claim to have evidence for them will show neither the evidence, nor their faces. WaPo’s new motto is: “Democracy dies in darkness.” Very well. Then let its sources come out into the light, where the public can see their faces.
(2) Reactions to the original story. Of the various reactions, this one from Bloomberg seems to me most level-headed: “Trump’s Best Defense on Russia Is Incompetence,” from Eli Lake:
But in light of that, it’s also important to get some perspective. Let me make a prediction here. Whichever allied intelligence service had its sources and methods endangered will not end intelligence sharing with the U.S. I base this on the fact that in the last seven years, the U.S. has endured worse. American allies were also exposed by the State Department cables shared with the world by WikiLeaks and the NSA documents provided to journalists by Edward Snowden. The Obama White House blamed a 2012 Associated Press story on another threat to airlines for disclosing a source from an allied intelligence service within al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Today we remember this incident primarily for the extraordinary steps the Justice Department took to monitor the phone records of AP reporters in its subsequent leak investigation.
And importantly, Bloomberg’s “McConnell Calls for ‘Apolitical’ FBI Director, Less Trump Drama.” McConnell is the big dog here. He doesn’t have to set his hair on fire to get people to pay attention.
(3) Trump tweets (naturally). Here they are:
(4) Reactions to Trump’s tweets. I can only quote a few, but they’re all alike. CNN’s Chris Cilizza, quoting the Post’s Ashley R. Parker, is the best:
Trump confirmed the story only if you believe that “facts” (Trump) are “literally” (Parker) the same as “highly classified information” (WaPo). Of course, if you’re an access journalist in the Beltway, you may actually believe that. (Parker is also wrong that what Trump says contradicts what McMasters said: “At no time, at no time, were intelligence sources or methods discussed. And the president did not disclose any military operations that were not already publicly known.” Not all “facts” have to do with “intelligence sources or methods” or “military operations!” The upside is that you can cross both Cilizza and Parker off your list of journalists worth reading (if they were ever on your list).
Presidents come and go, even bad Republican Presidents. Look at Obama! But the damage that is being done to the Constitutional Order right now — and not only by conservatives — will last for a long time. We’re seeing many, many figures in the press using “any stick to beat a dog tactics”; and we’re seeing the “intelligence community” emerging as a Praetorian Guard. It’s possible to make the argument that Trump is so bad that any means, extra-constitutional or no, are appropriate to get rid of him (although Nazi gleischaltung went down as far as picking the leadership for stamp collectors’ clubs, and Trump has yet to populate the blanks on the Justice Department org chart). But those who make that argument need to be very, very careful about getting what they wish for. Overturned elections have consequences.
UPDATE “McMaster: Trump’s sharing of sensitive intelligence with Russia was ‘wholly appropriate’” [WaPo].
“In the context of that discussion, what the president discussed with the foreign minister was wholly appropriate to that conversation and is consistent with the routine sharing of information between the president and any leaders with whom he’s engaged,” McMaster said. “It is wholly appropriate for the president to share whatever information he thinks is necessary to advance the security of the American people. That’s what he did.”
Remember that McMaster was the guy The Blob allowed Trump to install after they defenestrated Flynn. So some of those anonymous sources in the intelligence community must be ticked.
Oh, and the story is from — drumroll, please! — Ashley Parker. She writes:
McMaster’s pushback came just hours after Trump himself acknowledged Tuesday morning in a pair of tweets that he had indeed revealed highly classified information to Russia — a stunning confirmation of the Washington Post story and a move that seemed to contradict his own White House team after it scrambled to deny the report.
Read Trump’s tweets. If words have meaning — granted, we’re talking Trump, here — Trump’s words do not say what Parker says they say. “Facts” and “highly classified information” just aren’t the same, any more than toast is the same as avocado toast.
I don’t often “talk of court news” these days, but over the weekend I had occasion to watch CNN as the lastest tsunami of outrage over Trump was breaking, and it was quite something. (CNN is extremely loud, and clearly engineered to stoke the maximum of fear and outrage in its viewership. Hilariously, James “Not Wittingly” Clapper, seems to have become a paragon of truthtelling and a Hero of the Republic. I suppose this is not unlike rehabilitating George W. Bush, Hero of the Iraq War, because he has a lovely family. Liberals seem increasingly strange to me.) Be all that as it may, the current cycle of outrage has gone through four phases: (1) the original story, (2) reactions to the original story, (3) Trump’s tweets, and (4) reactions to Trump’s tweets. Obviously I’m not going to be able to process everything, even if I could stand it, in the time available for Water Cooler, but I’ll try to hit the salient points in each phase.
(1) The original story from WaPo, headline: “Trump revealed highly classified information to Russian foreign minister and ambassador.” There are two sections that seem salient to me. The first concerns process after the meeting:
Senior White House officials appeared to recognize quickly that Trump had overstepped and moved to contain the potential fallout. Thomas P. Bossert, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, placed calls to the directors of the CIA and the NSA, the services most directly involved in the intelligence-sharing arrangement with the partner.
One of Bossert’s subordinates also called for the problematic portion of Trump’s discussion to be stricken from internal memos and for the full transcript to be limited to a small circle of recipients, efforts to prevent sensitive details from being disseminated further or leaked.
This certainly suggests an effort by White House worker bees to (mixing metaphors) put the toothpaste back in the tube. But the nature of the toothpaste is unclear. Here it is, still from the WaPo story:
Trump went off script and began describing details of an Islamic State terrorist threat related to the use of laptop computers on aircraft
The “laptop computers” part makes sense to me; speculating freely, I bet Trump got an earful about the laptop ban from his golfing buddies, since the ban would make international business travel more painfui even than it already is. Murdoch’s Daily Telegraph (Australia) is somewhat more skeptical:
The information in question is now said to have been about ISIS plots to sneak a bomb on to an airliner in a laptop, a plot device easily imagined by any Hollywood TV writer or paperback spy thriller author.
Fine. The rest of the story is that anonymous officials in the intelligence community are very, very unhappy about “the information in question” and how Trump went off-script (assuming the story is correct). I won’t bore you with the details, since my expertise in intelligence tradecraft — rather like, I suspect, most of the scribes in the Beltway — comes from John LeCarré novels. The bottom line — and this may be one reason I don’t write much on court news these days — is that I see no reason whatever to regard intelligence sources, especially anonymous ones, as credible, nor access journalism based on those sources. If these stories are that important — and remember, in strong form, one theory pushed by these anonymous sources is that Trump is, quite literally, a Russian agent — than it’s more than a little incongruous that sources that claim to have evidence for them will show neither the evidence, nor their faces. WaPo’s new motto is: “Democracy dies in darkness.” Very well. Then let its sources come out into the light, where the public can see their faces.
(2) Reactions to the original story. Of the various reactions, this one from Bloomberg seems to me most level-headed: “Trump’s Best Defense on Russia Is Incompetence,” from Eli Lake:
But in light of that, it’s also important to get some perspective. Let me make a prediction here. Whichever allied intelligence service had its sources and methods endangered will not end intelligence sharing with the U.S. I base this on the fact that in the last seven years, the U.S. has endured worse. American allies were also exposed by the State Department cables shared with the world by WikiLeaks and the NSA documents provided to journalists by Edward Snowden. The Obama White House blamed a 2012 Associated Press story on another threat to airlines for disclosing a source from an allied intelligence service within al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Today we remember this incident primarily for the extraordinary steps the Justice Department took to monitor the phone records of AP reporters in its subsequent leak investigation.
And importantly, Bloomberg’s “McConnell Calls for ‘Apolitical’ FBI Director, Less Trump Drama.” McConnell is the big dog here. He doesn’t have to set his hair on fire to get people to pay attention.
(3) Trump tweets (naturally). Here they are:
(4) Reactions to Trump’s tweets. I can only quote a few, but they’re all alike. CNN’s Chris Cilizza, quoting the Post’s Ashley R. Parker, is the best:
Trump confirmed the story only if you believe that “facts” (Trump) are “literally” (Parker) the same as “highly classified information” (WaPo). Of course, if you’re an access journalist in the Beltway, you may actually believe that. (Parker is also wrong that what Trump says contradicts what McMasters said: “At no time, at no time, were intelligence sources or methods discussed. And the president did not disclose any military operations that were not already publicly known.” Not all “facts” have to do with “intelligence sources or methods” or “military operations!” The upside is that you can cross both Cilizza and Parker off your list of journalists worth reading (if they were ever on your list).
Presidents come and go, even bad Republican Presidents. Look at Obama! But the damage that is being done to the Constitutional Order right now — and not only by conservatives — will last for a long time. We’re seeing many, many figures in the press using “any stick to beat a dog tactics”; and we’re seeing the “intelligence community” emerging as a Praetorian Guard. It’s possible to make the argument that Trump is so bad that any means, extra-constitutional or no, are appropriate to get rid of him (although Nazi gleischaltung went down as far as picking the leadership for stamp collectors’ clubs, and Trump has yet to populate the blanks on the Justice Department org chart). But those who make that argument need to be very, very careful about getting what they wish for. Overturned elections have consequences.
UPDATE “McMaster: Trump’s sharing of sensitive intelligence with Russia was ‘wholly appropriate’” [WaPo].
“In the context of that discussion, what the president discussed with the foreign minister was wholly appropriate to that conversation and is consistent with the routine sharing of information between the president and any leaders with whom he’s engaged,” McMaster said. “It is wholly appropriate for the president to share whatever information he thinks is necessary to advance the security of the American people. That’s what he did.”
Remember that McMaster was the guy The Blob allowed Trump to install after they defenestrated Flynn. So some of those anonymous sources in the intelligence community must be ticked.
Oh, and the story is from — drumroll, please! — Ashley Parker. She writes:
McMaster’s pushback came just hours after Trump himself acknowledged Tuesday morning in a pair of tweets that he had indeed revealed highly classified information to Russia — a stunning confirmation of the Washington Post story and a move that seemed to contradict his own White House team after it scrambled to deny the report.
Read Trump’s tweets. If words have meaning — granted, we’re talking Trump, here — Trump’s words do not say what Parker says they say. “Facts” and “highly classified information” just aren’t the same, any more than toast is the same as avocado toast.