Leo

Well-known member
of course, it could all be russian "fake news" with the motive not to make Trump look bad but to allow him to say something to the effect of "see? see how low my dishonest enemies will stoop to attack me? they even made up this terrible story, which is disgusting and totally untrue."

and to distract attention from the confirmation hearings.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
'I’m not releasing the tax returns because they’re under audit ... The only people that care about my tax returns is the reporters ... I won. I became president. I think you care. First of all you learn very little from tax returns.'

When will this madness end.
 

droid

Well-known member
The intelligence services hate him and I doubt the military will be too far behind. Id say there are all kinds of establishment elites very angry at the Russian entanglements - and thats where assassination plots come from.

His support ratings have plummeted back down to 37%. Millions of soft trump voters will be equally disturbed by Russian ties, golden showers and the effects of the repeal of ACA - thats where pressure on GOP Senators and congressmen will come into play - only 3 votes needed to stop anything he wants to do.

Massive marches already planned for 21st, potential escalation of a large scale civil movement there, along with a predictably hard law and order response and the backlash that follows, heightened by the economic strife to come when the markets tank.

Assassination, impeachment, coup - or civil chaos leading to one of the aforementioned, they're the futures I see.
 

vimothy

yurp
Corey Robin (on FB):

So the one part of this whole story that has significance—that has had significance, since it first came to light following the election, and continues to have significance—is that the intelligence agencies are clearly out to get Trump. (One could make the claim that the slow drip-drip [sorry] of these revelations will undermine Trump's legitimacy. I do happen to believe, in my old-fashioned political theory way, that authority and legitimacy matter a lot for the exercise of power, but if you want to attend to that, I'd focus more on Trump's catastrophically low poll numbers and the growing divisions within the Republican Party. In our fear-driven zeal to paint Trump out to be a populist Hitler, we've not sufficiently attended to the fact that he really lacks a popular base of support.) But back to the intelligence agencies. The question is: What is driving them? Greg Grandin and I were just chatting and we speculated that rather than it being some grand structural battle within the security establishment over the fate of US global power and alignments, it might be much pettier. This is the intelligence agencies' personal retribution for his attacks on them, Chuck Schumer's "six ways from Sunday" that they have to get back at him. Maybe, but it seems like they picked the fight with him, not vice versa. But if it is over grand strategy—they fear his Russian overtures, etc.—why are they being so hapless about it? These are *intelligence* agencies. Surely they have to understand that Trump is not shameable either on sexual grounds or even on his ties to Russia (again, that's hardly a new story). The one possible thing that I could imagine would embarrass and compromise Trump politically is what Hillary Clinton said in the debate: he's not nearly as rich as he says he is, and in fact, may be one step away from debtors' prison. But if that is true, the intelligence agencies surely could release his tax forms, surely could dig up old depositions that have been sealed and all the rest. So I'm left with two questions here: First, what is the intelligence agencies' end game, and, relatedly, why are they doing this? Second, why are they so bad at it?
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Give that BBC caption writer a Nobel prize!

attachment.php


Edit: a mate who works at the BBC says it's fake. It's just so hard to tell these days.

Still funny anyway.
 

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firefinga

Well-known member
The intelligence services hate him and I doubt the military will be too far behind.

Well, Trump critisized a core project of the military-industrial-political complex, namely the Lockheed F-35 fighter jet programme (most expansive weapons system of all time so far). That made A LOT people angry I assume.
 

Leo

Well-known member
sounds familiar...

AT THE height of Silvio Berlusconi’s power, as the billionaire-politician brushed scandals and lawsuits aside with the ease of a crocodile gliding through duckweed, a professor at an Italian university described to Lexington how the terms furbo and fesso helped explain the then-prime minister’s survival.

In those bits of Italian society from which Mr Berlusconi drew his strongest support, it is a high compliment to be deemed a furbo, or a sly, worldly wise-guy. The furbo knows how to jump queues, dodge taxes and play systems of nepotism and patronage like a Stradivarius. In contrast the fesso is the chump who waits his turn and fails to grasp how badly the system is rigged, or how much of his taxes will be stolen.

The fesso might cheer a new clean-air law in his city, naively taking an announcement by the elites at face value. The furbo wonders who in the environment department may have a brother-in-law with a fat contract to supply chimney scrubbers. Mr Berlusconi’s fans saw him as the furbo to end all furbi. He showed that he heard them, offering them crude appeals to wise-guy cynicism, as when he asserted that any Italians who backed his centre-left opponents were not just mistaken, but were coglioni or, to translate loosely, “dickheads”, who would be voting “against their own interests”.

http://www.economist.com/news/unite...ons-his-best-chance-surviving-his-term-donald
 

vimothy

yurp
Cold world out there:

They are some of the biggest names in the Republican national security firmament, veterans of past GOP administrations who say, if called upon by President-elect Donald Trump, they stand ready to serve their country again.

But their phones aren’t ringing. Their entreaties to Trump Tower in New York have mostly gone unanswered. In Trump world, these establishment all-stars say they are “PNG” — personae non gratae.

Their transgression was signing one or both of two public “Never Trump” letters during the campaign, declaring they would not vote for Trump and calling his candidacy a danger to the nation.

One letter, with 122 names, was published by War on the Rocks, a website devoted to national security commentary, during the primary season in March. The other, with 50 names, including some repeat signatories, was published by the New York Times during the general-election campaign in August.

Now, just days before Trump is sworn in as the nation’s 45th president, the letter signers fear they have been added to another document, this one private — a purported blacklist compiled by Trump’s political advisers.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...b5164beba6b_story.html?utm_term=.0b27266ea40b
 

Leo

Well-known member
is that surprising? in fairest, trump has every right to do this and these ex-military people should have expected as much for their very public opposition, no?
 
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