Eyeball_Kid
Eyeball_Kid's JournalNiccolle Wallace...
Did a great show today.
Find it on a podcast or network replay. Worth the time.
Oh. I’m not affiliated with Wallace or MSNBC in any way.
Guess what? Stephen Miller, the self-proclaimed child torturer,
HAS NO CHILDREN!
This is according to Wikipedia.
Miller has no empathy and can't even have sympathy. He doesn't know what it's like to be a parent, doesn't care. His policy to torture children is one of the more enjoyable aspects of his present position. "It was a simple decision," he proclaims. Miller is married to evil.
MSNBC, NYT's Michael Schmidt, and the 49 questions
I've heard Mr. Schmidt, a frequent MSNBC guest, and others on MSNBC's shows refer to the now-famous "49 questions" as a list of questions that Mueller wants to ask Trumpy in the ever-unlikely event that Trumpy submits to an interview. By now, the list of questions is taken for granted that it came from Robert Mueller, or his team of investigators.
IT DID NOT!
To the MSNBC staff: please correct Michael Schmidt every time he asserts that these questions came from Mueller. It is fundamentally dishonest not to acknowledge that the questions came from Trumpy's defense team, and NOT from Mueller. The questions were reportedly assembled by Mr. Sekulow, who's hired by Trumpy to PROTECT HIM. These questions were strategic in their placement in the media, but the NYT and Michael Schmidt are inaccurate and irresponsible in NOT attributing the questions to Trumpy's legal team, and not Mueller. Indeed, the MSM, the NYT, Schmidt, and the MSNBC staff are treating the questions' false origins as fact. Stop this nonsense and speak the truth.
Mentioning the unspeakable: suicide
Don't laugh. Don't cry. Don't dismiss.
Trumpy's been manic about his influence over the nation ever since he opened his campaign. We know it was for all the wrong reasons.
We know that Trumpy can best be described as narcissistic in a malignant sense. He's dangerous and self-righteous.
We can assume that Trumpy is evil, misdirected, mentally deficient, foaming-at-the-mouth mad, supremely vain, or anything else that makes sense. It doesn't matter. Trumpy ACTS as if he doesn't know the extent to which he's caused pain and suffering for those who were left in the wake of his dishonesty, deceit, and destruction. He acts as if he is so enraptured by his election win, he can't pay attention to anything else, including all of the damage he's done.
As the pressure mounts to hold Trumpy accountable for all of his crimes and misdeeds, he resists. He always resists. He knows the charges. He knows which are true. But he doesn't care because he truly believes he knows how to win against all odds. He can commit atrocities, and ruin the lives of countless victims, but he believes that the legacy of his life, that of an unrelenting winner against all legal limits, moral boundaries, and even common sense, is a glorious human triumph of exceptionalism over the mundane.
But the closer his perceived and real adversaries get to pulling away his cloak of exceptionalism and superiority, the less Trumpy will have to mentally and emotionally stay intact.
As a mental health worker for several decades, I once came upon an expert in what was then called "The Criminal Personality." In one of the lectures he gave, he commented on the likelihood of suicide by someone described as sociopathic. In essence, he spoke of the potential in sociopaths of having a "clear moment" in which the person has a truthful and impactful insight regarding all of the people who were hurt by the sociopath-- a moment when the defenses against responsibility and accountability temporarily disintegrate, leaving the person overwhelmed with guilt, sadness, and unworthiness. The tidal wave of emotions can be so devastating that the person may conclude that there is no positive aspect to living beyond any given moment, and decides that the only way to stop the pain (both in others and within) is to stop living.
I relate this comment made over thirty years ago to what I'm inferring is happening to Trumpy. He may very well be on the same path of eventually realizing the massive suffering he's caused not only the individual people in his life, but, as a political leader, also to the millions of people whom he's never seen or heard. And from there, it's quite possible that the overwhelming emotions, compounded by impending political, personal, and financial doom, may be what takes him over the edge.
I'm not interested in seeing him off himself, whether in or out of office. But I think that those around him ought to be thinking of this possibility. Trumpy is only human and will always react to situations in a human manner. No one in the media or in everyday conversation is accustomed to thinking about this possibility, but it may be time to do so. It may soon be time to put Trumpy on a suicide watch.
Here's a crazy-ass prediction: Trumpy's gone in six weeks for six reasons.
Maybe I'm living in my own carefully designed bubble, but I think something's afoot that's going to take most of us by surprise. Trumpy will leave the White House much sooner than the paid pundits expect. Here are the reasons:
1. Avenatti and Daniels are screwing Trumpy big-time. I don't know who paired these two, but they'e a dynamite team. Avenatti is at the top of his game. Right now. And Daniels is seemingly pushing him to new heights. Both know Trumpy's huge weak spot and they're blowing it wide open.
2. The weak spot? Loss of media exposure. It castrates Trumpy and shrinks him to the size of a prune. This is the strategy to which Avenatti refers when he characterizes his moves as "three-dimensional chess". Trumpy has no way to keep himself in office without constantly owning the narrative and flooding the media with his presence. We all know that he's all flash and no substance, but we didn't calculate that someday or other, his ability to own the media with his personal narrative would collapse. And it has, right now. Without media manipulation, Trumpy can't have tantrums, he can't shout and point, he can't hold events or create controversies or distract from the Mueller investigation. He clearly can't govern, so that's out. What's left is a heap of hair and flesh gulping a diet Coke, plumped in front of a flat screen replaying segments of Fox and Friends. Oh. He's a "friend." And the TV sofa chattlings are likely his only friends.
3. Trumpy can't hire lawyers to defend against Mueller or Daniels/Avenatti. He can't replenish his departed staff. He's trying to bring back banished former staffers, but that's not happening because everyone to whom he talks has to hire an attorney. He may even fire Kelly and be his own Chief of Staff, which will be another rolling disaster. So now he has ONE defense attorney who's sadly overmatched by Mueller and his A team.
4. Trumpy is not following the Roy Cohn Commandment: When attacked, counterattack with ferocity, every time, with overwhelming force, and never admit a mistake. Trumpy is failing because he's not attacking Daniels/Avenatti in the Roy Cohn tradition. Of all the possible symptoms of his demise, this is perhaps the most serious. Daniels and Avenatti have taken away his Cohn-ness. Now Trumpy looks ineffective, weak, cowardly, and sniveling. Melania has symbolically left him to avoid imagining herself as the shamed and smitten wife. He's alone with few confidantes, if any.
5. Left to his own devices, without the media clutching at his every pause, and with an emptied White House staff, Trumpy is barely holding on to any semblance of an ability to govern. He has no agenda of his own, except to keep his base skittish and jumpy: for the next rally, the next bevy of accusations toward his usual suspects, for the next media spin. All of his distractions are losing their spark. He's coming face to face with his enemies: his ignorance, his low self-esteem, his impulsiveness, his narcissism, his cowardice, his lies,... and the Special Prosecutor. And for good measure, let's remember the AG of New York, lurking just behind Mueller.
6. Even Congressional Republicans, all of them Trumpy's equal in the cowardice department, will publicly talk about Trumpy's inability to manage a governing administration. Trumpy is besieged by investigations, lawsuits, a fleeing Administration staff, and an increasing flock of veteran losers as replacements. Trumpy was disillusioned with DiGenova and sent him packing. He'll likely do the same with TV terror John Bolton, whose bloodlust won't go down well with Trumpy's two scoops and chocolate cake. When hiring Bolton proves to be yet another big error, Trumpy's circus tent will begin to fold and he'll look for the most direct escape route out of DC. He'll neglect to feed the lions on the way out.
Pence, who's got his own problems with Flynn and giving him access to classified information, may not be heir to the throne when Trumpy leaves his golden toilet behind. But that's a discussion for another time.
Trumpy's fanboys are flailing for a fascist dictatorship. But it doesn't matter to them.
They want Trumpy to lead them to WHITENESS, unfettered by any Constitution or law. They see Trumpy as the strong leader who can crash through the Constitution and all of the laws supporting it. They see a revolution driven by rage.
"Facts matter"? Not so much. What matters to them is white America, where caucasians of a distinct variety dominate the cultural and economic landscape. The ugly side of their dream is that their definition of nonwhite America means that Semites (who are, by definition, caucasian), Hispanics (mostly of caucasian stock), and, of course, African Americans are objects of ridicule and hatred.
What they don't see is everything else. They've been told that any resistance to Trumpy is a conspiracy to pour water on their dreams, a conspiracy by ANYONE who can fit their need to alienate and vilify.
Notice that by most observations, Trumpy's base is driven by emotions: fear and rage. This is by design, as we now know from disclosures recently exposed regarding Cambridge Analytica. CA targeted voters who are driven by emotion, not by issues or by reasoning ability. These voters generally have fewer intellectual resources to effectively use critical thinking skills: an ability that is anathema to CA's microtargeting tactics. And let's be honest. Half of the nation's citizens have BELOW AVERAGE INTELLIGENCE, and those citizens generally rely on emotional charges to make decisions (such as who they favor in elections) because they have, by definition, fewer internal resources to rationally discriminate. They are the low hanging fruit being picked by Cambridge Analytica.
So, the entire Trumpy movement is driven by big-money data miners (the Kochs, the Mercers, etc.) who duped and manipulated a "white" population generally occupying the lower end of the intellectual spectrum.
Isn't it strange?
So many of us know, for certain, that Trumpy must bend over for Putin, or he'll have worse than hell to pay. It's becoming so obvious, even in the past few days.
Trumpy fires T. Rex right after Tillerson condemns Russia, and since then, Nikki Haley and the "Press Secretary" in the White House have denounced Russia, while Putin's water boy drinks a diet Coke and pisses in the planter box.
Isn't it obvious that Trumpy can NEVER cross Putin? NEVER can he do this. And we're stuck with Trumpy while Putin walks all over him and the rest of us.
In a way, it doesn't matter if Trumpy is cognitively impaired, or if he's a zillion dollars in debt, or if he had orgies with penguins. The result is the same: Trumpy can't stand up to Putin, and he will NEVER do so. Putin knows this and will act accordingly.
The Trumpy/Putin alliance has the character of a chaotic mass shooting.
Putin's methods in spreading his power and influence begins with fomenting chaos in any and all western democracies. He encourages doubt, fear, confusion, cynicism, apathy, and the abandonment of social norms and expectations. His objective is to weaken nations and increase their vulnerabilities to Russia's advantage.
In any mass shooting and in any situation in which gunfire dominates, chaos reigns. Victims abandon their sense of order, security, and rationality and end up panicking to survive. For any strategist who is intent on planning for domination by the Trumpy/Putin alliance, fomenting chaos is a primary objective. What can be more consistent with tactical planning for chaos than to set the conditions for violent outbursts to frighten and disempower large swaths of the citizenry?
Mass shootings and other forms of violence with guns are part of the tactical pattern with which Putin is comfortable. We now know that the NRA has been collaborating with Russia to strengthen the unregulated gun policies within the US with "the more guns, the better" themes in the NRA and the GOP's lexicon of themes that promote chaos, and ultimately, authoritarian social control (as a subsequent next step). The NRA has been funneling millions from Russia into GOP campaigns and has established a comfortable alliance with Putin to destroy the social order in the US. Why? For the NRA, it means money: huge profits from the gun-buying free-for-all that spikes every time a massacre erupts. So what we have is a convergence of similar interests among the GOP, Putin's Russia, and the NRA. It's a cozy arrangement, for as long as there's "plausible deniability" that these three forces are collaborating.
Mueller's investigations are exposing this alliance. And quite frankly, the Special Counsel's office is the ONLY entity in the nation that is properly addressing the Russian coup that's taken over the White House. The SC's office is our last and final defense. Trumpy would like nothing more than to dismantle the SC's office and get rid of the investigation. It only takes a smidgeon of rational thought to conclude that Trumpy is a Russian stooge, a Russian agent of influence, and a traitor, and the reason that so many people connected to Russia who were in the Trumpy campaign, the transition, and the White House is the fact that Putin wanted his people in the White House to set up a fundamental change in governance. He succeeded, partly due to his ability to foment chaos.
A Democratic theme for the coming elections.
This is a time for change. The Democratic Party has to stand for something. Here are four policy issues, interconnected, that should be the tip of the spear of Democratic Party leadership:
1. Infrastructure improvement paid by the federal and state governments.
2. Definitive increases in funding for public education, at all levels of education. Education is paid with taxpayer dollars.
3. Universal healthcare.
4. Renewable energy development.
We want a nation that's healthy, well educated, and is open to commerce and a sustainable high quality of life.
These policy areas will all be paid for by INCREASING TAXES ON THE WEALTHY and CORPORATIONS. Taxes on these segments MUST increase for a healthy economy. For the cost of universal health care and education, progressive taxes should be paid by all.
The current tax structure is simply not sustainable. It will crush the economy and transform the nation into a third world oligarchy.
Bernie Sanders was right and continues to be right: these policies are backed by the vast majority of citizens. The Dems must seize the moment and show the way.
The Logic of the Situation:
1. Nunes and the House GOP members negotiated in BAD FAITH when they demanded and received classified information from DOJ, then exposed that classified information to their members and then to the public.
2. Trumpy used that exposed classified information, through BAD FAITH negotiations, to smear the Department of Justice and the FBI.
3. Robert Mueller, now working for the FBI, knows that both the House GOP members AND Trumpy used classified information to sully and degrade the FBI and the entire system of justice. Mueller, based upon evidence, can now strike down any pretense of GOOD FAITH negotiations with Trumpy's legal team as they are negotiating with the Mueller's attorneys for a more "protective" deal for Trumpy.
4. Mueller can easily conclude that since Trumpy is in collusion with House members who negotiated in BAD FAITH, Trumpy, too, will risk BAD FAITH negotiations to further his agenda.
5. Mueller, then, is entirely justified in ending the negotiations with Trumpy's lawyers and issue a subpeona for Trumpy to appear, without his lawyers, before a Grand Jury to answer questions about Obstruction AND Conspiracy. Trumpy proved that he cannot be trusted in ANY negotiation setting.
Profile Information
Member since: Thu Dec 29, 2016, 11:41 AMNumber of posts: 7,431