Another WH staffer bites the dust
 

[i]Il Duce[/i] has tweeted again! H.R McMaster is out. The new national security advisor will be John Bolton.

[url=https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/976948306927607810]3:26 PM - 22 Mar 2018[/url]
[quote]I am pleased to announce that, effective 4/9/18, @AmbJohnBolton will be my new National Security Advisor. I am very thankful for the service of General H.R. McMaster who has done an outstanding job & will always remain my friend. There will be an official contact handover on 4/9.[/quote]

Bolton proved unconfirmable as UN Ambassador under Dubya, who put him in by recess appointment.

According to a New Years Day item from [url=http://insider.foxnews.com/2018/01/01/john-bolton-trump-us-goal-should-be-regime-change-iran]Insider Fox News[/url],

[quote]He called for Trump to pull out of the Iranian nuclear deal, resume all previous sanctions to put increased economic pressure on the regime, provide material and financial support to the opposition and work with intelligence services from other countries.

"There's a lot we can do to, and we should do it," Bolton said. "Our goal should be regime change in Iran."[/quote]

As recently as February 28, he advocated for a preemptive military strike on North Korea: [url=https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-legal-case-for-striking-north-korea-first-1519862374]The Legal Case for Striking North Korea First[/url]

With him "mediating" national security dicussions, perhaps the best chance of avoiding war is that, in the manner of [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buridan%27s_ass]Buridan's Ass[/url], Bolton will be so torn between the options of starting wars in Iran or North Korea, he will be unable to do either.

[QUOTE=Dr Sardonicus;483124][i]Il Duce[/i] has tweeted again! H.R McMaster is out. The new national security advisor will be John Bolton.[/QUOTE]

Ugh - Bolton is a consummate deep state neocon creep:

[url=www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/why-a-john-bolton-appointment-is-scarier-than-you-think-mcmaster-trump/]The Untold Story of John Bolton's Campaign for War With Iran[/url] | The American Conservative

Even worse, these kinds of administration-hopping warmongers are fixtures in both parties. W. Bush, and now Trump, have Bolton; Obama, and likely Hillary-had-she-become-president, have the likes of the marital Kagan/Nuland foreign policy axis, just as happily mass-murderous under their ostensibly noble "liberal interventionist" guise. It seems our best hope w.r.to Bolton is that his yuuuge ego will clash with Trump's and get him fired. IOW, humankind should hope for more Trumpian administration-personnel turmoil here.

[QUOTE=ewmayer;483111]
That kind of attempted obliteration of an artistic work for money-grubbing's sake is just evil.
[/QUOTE]
Of course, if said attempt is [i]successful[/i] -- and was done by [i]Il Duce[/i] himself, I suppose that's different. The first Trump Tower stands on the site formerly occupied by [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonwit_Teller]Bonwit Teller[/url], which had acquired the building (whose architect removed the interior decor before Bonwit Teller occupied it) from Stewart & Company. The exterior featured two limestone relief sculptures, which the Metropolitan Museum wanted, and Trump had, apparently, promised them.

[quote]Over time, the 15-foot tall limestone relief panels, depicting nearly nude women dancing, at the top of the Fifth Avenue facade, became a "Bonwit Teller signature".[2] Donald Trump, who purchased the building thanks to Genesco's CEO John L. Hanigan,[4] wanted to begin demolition in 1980. Trump "promised the limestone reliefs" to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. When they were "jackhammered" "to bits" the act was condemned.[2] Through a spokesman named "John Baron" - who turned out to be Trump himself[5] - Trump said that his company had obtained three independent appraisals of the sculptures, which he claimed had found them to be "without artistic merit."[6] An official at the Metropolitan Museum of Art disputed the statement, stating: "Can you imagine the museum accepting them if they were not of artistic merit? Architectural sculpture of this quality is rare and would have made definite sense in our collection."[6] In addition to the relief panels, the huge Art Deco nickel grillwork over the entrance to the store, which had also been promised to the museum, disappeared.[7] Again masquerading as his own spokesman "John Baron," Trump said, "We don't know what happened to it."[7][/quote]

A video clip [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4XWoirFToY]here[/url] from a [b]Frontline[/b] program about [i]Il Duce[/i]'s career describes the reaction at the time.

Saving the sculptures would have delayed construction, and so cost money. [i]Il Duce[/i] claimed it wasn't worth the effort. So, he obliterated an artistic work for money-grubbing's sake.

Former US Attorney Joseph DiGenova has gone from denouncing a woman accusing US Senator Brock Adams (D-WA) of sexual assault (see, e.g. this [url=http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1991-04-14/features/9102030190_1_kari-tupper-sen-brock-adams-league-baseball]April 4, 1991 Chicago Tribune story[/url]) to spouting conspiratorialist whack-jobbery on Faux News. Being a Faux News commentator made him a prime candidate for a job at the White House.

(BTW, after the Seattle Times did its own investigation of Sen. Adams, and found about 20 other women who claimed Sen. Adams had made unwanted sexual advances on them, he dropped out of the race. Patty Murray was elected to that seat in 1992, and has been in the Senate since then.)

But DiGenova's latest gig has ended before it even started. Last Monday, it was announced that he and his wife Victoria Toensing were being hired onto [i]Il Duce[/i]'s Russia probe legal team, three days before John Dowd quit on Thursday. Now, it seems, the couple have -- wait for it -- [i]conflicts of interest[/i] that preclude their representing [i]Il Duce[/i] in Russia-probe-related matters. If only the WH staff [i]checked[/i] on people before [i]Il Duce[/i] hired them... Oh, well, they can still represent him in matters related to [strike]bribery[/strike] "emoluments."

This thread prompted the following post. The Slime was and is a major player in getting us into this hand basket to hell.
[URL]http://mersenneforum.org/showpost.php?p=483440&postcount=917[/URL]
Linked, instead of embedded, to maintain the solemn decorum of this very serious thread. :smile:

Deplorables II: The Dismal Dems in Stormy Times
 

I'm showing the intro and finale of this article, which, in between, is a bullet list of how the Dems gave us the Orange Menace.
[URL]https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/03/23/deplorables-ii-the-dismal-dems-in-stormy-times/[/URL]
[QUOTE]Beneath the endless madness of the Today in Tangerine Satan (TITS) show, aided and abetted by the Radically Regressive and Reactionary Republicans (the R4 Party), it’s easy to forget that the [U]Inauthentic Opposition Party (IOP, also known as the Democratic Party)[/U] installed the malignant presidential apprentice in the White House in the first place. The deplorable, dollar-drenched Democrats (the 4D party) seated moronic mogul Donald Trump in the Oval Office in at least ten key ways:[/QUOTE][QUOTE]Maybe instead of running silly old Joe Biden (who recently proclaimed that he would have kicked Trump’s ass in high school – that’s telling-em, Joe-boy!), the Democrats should run Michael Avenatti and Stephanie Clifford (aka Stormy Daniels) in 2020. [U](Avenatti and Daniels could run against the R4 and 4D parties as the leaders of the 36DD Party)[/U]. [U]:devil:
[/U]
These may finally be the folks who have really figured out how to screw Donald Trump in a reality television political culture. They are the Authentic Opposition now, inauthentically speaking. They’re beating David Dennison at his own sordid game.

Rachel Maddow’s RussiaGate timelines and charts are nothing compared to Stormy Daniels’ lascivious revelations in this Huxleyan state.

A final observation on a more serious note. Please observe the habitual “mainstream” media references to the Tangerine Satan (and to right-wing neo-fascist parties in Europe) as “populist.” This is meant, I think, to smear the real and left-leaning thing that is actual economic and political populism.

Yes, some smart left thinkers will remind you that the left has no monopoly on populism – that there’s reactionary white nationalist populism and there’s progressive left working-class populism. I get that. Point taken. But don’t look for that distinction to be made in the “mainstream” media. They just say “populism.” They don’t differential between reactionary populism and egalitarian populism. That’s on purpose and it’s cynical as Hell.
[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=kladner;483505]I'm showing the intro and finale of this article, which, in between, is a bullet list of how the Dems gave us the Orange Menace.
[URL]https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/03/23/deplorables-ii-the-dismal-dems-in-stormy-times/[/URL][quote]Maybe instead of running silly old Joe Biden (who recently proclaimed that he would have kicked Trump’s ass in high school – that’s telling-em, Joe-boy!), the Democrats should run Michael Avenatti and Stephanie Clifford (aka Stormy Daniels) in 2020. (Avenatti and Daniels could run against the R4 and 4D parties as the leaders of the 36DD Party).[/quote][/quote]

Recently? Seems to me I saw this [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UilzDRQXES4]during the 2016 campaign[/url]. Oh, well, I guess we're into rerun season...

[quote]These may finally be the folks who have really figured out how to screw Donald Trump in a reality television political culture. They are the Authentic Opposition now, inauthentically speaking. They’re beating David Dennison at his own sordid game.
[/quote]

Well, ain't that dandy. The heck with standing up for what's right, eh?

How many times have we heard Sarah Huckabee Sanders say things like, "People knew X about him and voted for him anyway" (implying that X -- be it sexually assaulting women, being a racist, a narcissist, a liar, a bully, a demagogue, or whatever -- is therefore "all right") -- or, trying to rationalize [i]Il Duce[/i]'s repeated grovelling to Putin, equating a refusal to recognize the legitimacy of a rigged election, or otherwise standing up for American principles, to "dictating" how other countries run their affairs.

In [url=http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/01/18/threat-of-moral-authority-john-lewis-trump/]The Threat of Moral Authority[/url], [b]Masha Gessen[/b] wrote,

[quote]Autocratic power requires the degradation of moral authority—not the capture of moral high ground, not the assertion of the right to judge good and evil, but the defeat of moral principles as such. Once cynicism triumphs, wrote the dissident Václav Havel in a 1975 letter to the Communist leader of Czechoslovakia, “everyone who still tries to resist by, for instance, refusing to adopt the principle of dissimulation as the key to survival, doubting the value of any self-fulfillment purchased at the cost of self-alienation—such a person appears to his ever more indifferent neighbors as an eccentric, a fool, a Don Quixote, and in the end is regarded inevitably with some aversion, like everyone who behaves differently from the rest and in a way which, moreover, threatens to hold up a critical mirror before their eyes.” The majority then stands to applaud his humiliation.[/quote]

[QUOTE=Dr Sardonicus;483533]"People knew X about him and voted for him anyway" (implying that X -- be it sexually assaulting women, being a racist, a narcissist, a liar, a bully, a demagogue, or whatever -- is therefore "all right")[/QUOTE]

This keeps happening to me. With every new "Trump Crisis" my liberal friends are rejoicing that "the end of Trump is near." I say "People knew X about him and voted for him anyway, so this won't make any difference, either." But my liberal friends think I said "is therefore all right" instead of "won't make any difference, either." I've given up trying to have the discussion.

[QUOTE=wblipp;483570]This keeps happening to me. With every new "Trump Crisis" my liberal friends are rejoicing that "the end of Trump is near." I say "People knew X about him and voted for him anyway, so this won't make any difference, either." But my liberal friends think I said "is therefore all right" instead of "won't make any difference, either." I've given up trying to have the discussion.[/QUOTE]
To conclude that "this won't make any difference either" is fair enough. I often make substantially the same observation myself. As a purely political observation, it seems valid. Those in a position to defend America from the man whom that arch-liberal George Will dubs "the most dangerous man in America" are cravenly failing to do so. An illustration of this form of "doesn't matter" idea may be found [url=https://cmgajcluckovich.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/lk032118_color.jpg]here[/url].

But then, you (AFAIK) and I (speaking for myself) aren't trying to defend [i]Il Duce[/i]'s awfulness as a human being, or rationalize his abject failure to stand up for quintessentially American ideals and principles.

Yes, it is true that [i]Il Duce[/i] is not being stopped, let alone held to account for his despoliation of everything that made the good ol' USA [i]good[/i]. But IMO it [i]does[/i] matter, because it is something that we, as a nation, and most of us as individuals, will be paying for dearly.

[QUOTE=Dr Sardonicus;483600]But IMO it [i]does[/i] matter, because it is something that we, as a nation, and most of us as individuals, will be paying for dearly.[/QUOTE]

IMO, as an outside observer, this is what you (read: the electorate) asked for.

Perhaps with some outside influence....

Such as Cambridge Analytica? 50,000,000 Facebook [STRIKE]accounts[/STRIKE] profiles. They weren't selling miracle quack cures, either, unless that's what you call the election.

WRT Facebook, and other venues:
It is always good to repeat, "If the product is free, [U]you[/U] are the product."