Ted Cruz BEGS Trump For Help

Ted Cruz is America’s BIGGEST cuck. Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian, hosts of The Young Turks, break it down.

The Trump Administration Wants To See How Racist It Can Be

Posted by Rude One

You've heard it over and over from Republicans: they are just concerned about undocumented immigrants (or "illegal aliens," as the Justice Department has been ordered to say). If you ignore the fact that Customs and Border Protection treated asylum seekers who presented themselves as such at the proper border crossings - doing everything legally -  like they were undocumented migrants, and if you ignore the mostly-Muslim ban, well, you could maybe sort of believe Republicans if you squinted and stuck your fingers in your ears.

Of course, mistreating the undocumented was never the full plan. Because, see, White House adviser and Man Most Likely to Be Caught Eating Hamsters Whole, Stephen Miller, is a fucking ghoul, and he's getting the Trump administration to change how legal immigrants are treated. And if you're thinking, "Oh, they must be getting extra nice to documented immigrants because they've been such pricks to undocumented ones," then you're a fucking idiot who doesn't understand the level of cruelty for cruelty's sake these shit heels exist on.

What they want to do now is get rid of legal immigrants and they're gonna contort the fuckin' law to do it so they don't need congressional approval. The plan: "immigrants living legally in the U.S. who have ever used or whose household members have ever used Obamacare, children's health insurance, food stamps and other benefits could be hindered from obtaining legal status in the U.S." You got that? You have a kid who's a U.S. citizen and is on CHIP? No green card for you. You have a green card and get an Obamacare subsidy? No citizenship and, hey, we'll take that green card away. Back to the unstable visa system for you or, the real goal, deportation.

How fucked do you have to be to believe that this is in any way good for the country? You gotta be some bullshit white genocide-believing, Nazi-loving motherfucker to go along with this. Or, you know, an average Republican in this worthless age of Trump.

So you can live in this country legally for years, have kids here, and pay your taxes. But if you avail yourself of something that your taxes are helping to fund, you can go fuck off back to Mexico or whatever shit hole you came from. You're a "public charge" now, even if you're just getting the barest of help from the government.

Trumpistas also say that they are targeting people who did something else wrong at some point in their lives, like lie on a visa application. But, as is the way with Donald Trump, who never met a contract he wouldn't violate, even people who had an agreement with the government are finding that the deal has been broken by this administration.

In one example, a Haitian man who has a green card "had used a fake passport given to him by smugglers when he entered the U.S. from Haiti in 1989, but confessed to border officers and received a waiver from USCIS absolving him of his wrongdoing and allowing him to obtain a green card in 2011." Now, though? Fuck the waiver we gave you. "When he went for his citizenship interview in August 2017, the USCIS officers told him they were going to revisit the decision to waive the fake passport incident, meaning he could potentially lose his green card as well." And then he found out he was denied citizenship. The man works 80 hours a week and takes care of a disabled daughter. He's further fucked because he has used public assistance to help with his American kid. How does this make America great again? If "great" means "whiter," then, sure, goal met.

Here you go, Republicans. Another shot to stand up and say to Trump, "No. Fuck this. This is too far. Fire that Miller cockhole and act like you're a goddamned human being." Except you won't. Because it is you. It has been you for decades. You're just finally getting to be your worst selves.

Trump handed off the VA to three Mar-a-Lago fat cats who have been running it in secret

By Mark Sumner  

Daily Kos Staff

As it turns out, there are secret masters of the government, pulling the strings without the benefit of an election, nomination, or appointment. As a Propublica investigation has discovered, Donald Trump handed off control of the Department of Veterans Affairs to three members of his Mar-a-Lago golf resort. These three have been issuing orders to the people who are supposed to be running the department forming a “previously unknown triumvirate that hovered over public servants without any transparency, accountability or oversight.”

Known within the VA as “the Mar-a-Lago Crowd,” the three were Marvel Entertainment chair Ike Perlmutter, New York attorney Marc Sherman, and Bruce Moskowitz a “concierge” doctor who runs a service catering to the Palm Beach elite.

What reporter Isaac Arnsdorf discovered, through interviews and thousands of documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, is that these three have been ordering members of the VA around for over a year. At the beginning of the year, Trump’s appointment of Ronny Jackson, the doctor who had proclaimed that Trump has “great genes,” as the VA secretary ran into issues when reports of both abuse and incompetence surfaced around Jackson. After leaving the position vacant for months, Trump finally nominated acting director Robert Wilkie in May. But as it turns out, little of that maneuvering matters. Because when Trump wants to talk to the man in charge, he calls Perlmutter.

The documents turned up by Pro Publica don’t just show Perlmutter issuing orders to VA, but reviewing policy, and making personnel selections. VA officials, at taxpayer expense, traveled to Mar-a-Lago to “consult” with Perlmutter and get his approval.

“Everyone has to go down and kiss the ring,” a former administration official said.

If the idea that the chairman of Marvel Entertainment is running the VA makes it sound that there at least might be an injection of creativity into the agency, that’s not this guy. Perlmutter mounted a series of hostile takeovers—Revco, Coleco, Remington—and gained control of Marvel during a series of buyouts and bankruptcies. He was paid $800 million by Disney when that company bought out Marvel, mostly to go away. The company was specifically split in half so that Perlmutter had nothing to do with the films—because he’s famously abusive and bigoted.

Perlmutter also has a history of behavior that’s distinctly odd. That includes turning a fight with a neighbor over the condition of a private tennis court—surely one of those issues that affects all Americans—into a hate mail campaign in which Perlmutter accused the neighbor of, among other things “illegally harvesting his DNA.” As the Hollywood Reporter explains, Perlmutter sent out unsigned mailings around the exclusive community attacking his neighbor, then turned his attention to the man’s workplace, where he accused the neighbor of being a Nazi and covering up sexual assault. And then … Perlmutter really did show some creativity.

One series of mailings allegedly went out to more than a thousand inmates in prisons across Florida and Ontario, Canada, in [neighbor Harold] Peerenboom’s name, with provoking statements like, "While your [sic] in jail, I am writing to your mom, telling her exactly what kind of scumbag you are."

The guy who tried to get his neighbor killed by sending provocative notes to over 1,000 inmates … that’s the guy Trump has secretly put in charge of the VA.

It was Perlmutter who put together the “troika” now running the VA. Of the other two, at least Moskowitz is a doctor, and while his specialty of finding pricey experts to pay house calls on nervous Palm Beach millionaires may be miles away from providing service for millions of veterans, at least it’s health care adjacent. Sherman is a lawyer who specializes in white collar crime. As in, defending those accused of it. That’s likely endeared him to both Perlmutter and Trump, but none of his background indicates any knowledge of health care, veterans, or running a large organization.

The troika has been in place from the beginning of Trump’s time in office. With former VA chief David Shulkin forced to fly down to Mar-a-Lago for his ring-kissing in February of 2017.

Moscowitz then nicely informed Shulkin that he didn’t have to make a monthly appearance before the three actual heads of his agency. Instead, they would “set up phone conference calls at a convenient time.”

All those stories about how Shulkin was resisting implementing Trump’s policies, really boil down to his growing reluctance to take orders from the secret masters of his agency, who were ruling on the lives of wounded and ailing veterans between tee times. And they didn’t hesitate to bypass Shulkin.

The Mar-a-Lago Crowd bombarded VA officials with demands, many of them inapt or unhelpful. On phone calls with VA officials, Perlmutter would bark at them to move faster, having no patience for bureaucratic explanations about why something has to be done a certain way or take a certain amount of time, former officials said.

Much of what the troika kicked off seemed to be generated by hearsay, antecedents picked up from TV, and cases mentioned by friends. That included one example Perlmutter was particularly keen on that originated with ... the woman in charge of the disputed tennis court.

At the moment, he doesn’t appear to have written to thousands of inmates attempting to get them to murder David Shulkin. But at least that was some out of the box thinking. If sanity is a box.

https://www.propublica.org/article/ike-perlmutter-bruce-moskowitz-marc-sherman-shadow-rulers-of-the-va

Sitting Rep’s Campaign Collected Dead Man’s Signature On Challenger’s Behalf

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/sitting-reps-campaign-collected-dead-mans-signature-on-challengers-behalf

The Stupidverse

The comical myth of Abraham Lincoln Trump

By Jon Perr  

 

Conservative Rod Dreher on the Trump-as-Lincoln claim: "What kind of crackhead do you have to be to take that seriously?"

If nothing else, Donald Trump is a one-of-a-kind occupant of the Oval Office. His jaw-dropping corruption, staggering incompetence, mind-numbing policy ignorance, puerile penchant for payback, and unprecedented deceit put the Trump residency in a class by itself.

 Nevertheless, Trump’s courtiers, sycophants, and water-carriers have tried to elevate his leadership to a place among the greatest figures in human history. Liberty University President Jerry Falwell, Jr. was not alone in comparing Donald Trump to King David, who “may have committed adultery and arranged the death of his mistress’s husband in battle, but despite these considerable failings he had still retained the full favor of God.”

After Trump announced his decision to move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, Benjamin Netanyahu joined American evangelicals in declaring Trump a 21st century version of Persian King Cyrus, who 2,500 years earlier “proclaimed that the Jewish exiles in Babylon can come back and rebuild our temple in Jerusalem.” And no Republican president can last long without the inevitable comparison to Ronald Reagan. In Trump’s case, the task was perhaps best performed by the Rev. Robert Jeffress. Having previously accused Barack Obama of “paving the way for the future reign of the Antichrist,” Jeffress explained last week that evangelicals knew that the thrice-married, serial adulterer Trump was “no altar boy.”

“The reason we supported President Reagan was not because we were supporting womanizing or divorce. We supported his policies.”

But no conservative hagiography of the current Republican resident can ever be complete without the invention of parallels to the first one. (After all, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Fox News anchor Bret Baier and Dubya himself equated President George W. Bush with President Abraham Lincoln.) Within days of Donald Trump’s inauguration, The Federalist offered “5 Ways Donald Trump Is Abraham Lincoln’s True Successor.” Fellow thrice-married, serial adulterer Newt Gingrich agreed, telling Sean Hannity on July 23, “I think the person whose situation is most like President Trump's was Abraham Lincoln, adding, “Lincoln is fighting to preserve the Constitution. He's fighting to preserve the union and he's having to do a lot of different things that are very bold and in some cases very radical.” Dishonest Donald himself went a step further, boasting “Wow, highest Poll Numbers in the history of the Republican Party. That includes Honest Abe Lincoln and Ronald Reagan.”

At the head of the “45=16” pack is pardoned campaign finance fraudster Dinesh D’Souza.

But D’Souza’s paeans portraying Trump as the new Lincoln aren’t merely an expression of gratitude for the man who voided his conviction. Donald Trump plays a vital role in D’Souza’s ongoing project to whitewash history by falsely claiming Democrats were, are, and forever will be the party of slavery, the Klan, Jim Crow and racism. (That history didn’t end in 1965 when the parties’ role-reversals on civil rights began in earnest is well-documented. Despite his repeated historical bludgeonings by Princeton’s Kevin M. Kruse, D’Souza has continued to advance his bogus claims.)

 In D’Souza’s Bizarro World in which Democrats are still the “party of slave plantations,” Donald Trump by necessity must be the Second Coming of Abraham Lincoln:

Lincoln united his party and saved America from the Democrats for the first time. Can Trump—and we—come together and save America for the second time?

That is the premise of D’Souza’s new book and ersatz documentary, Death of a Nation. But reality, as Stephen Colbert famously told George W. Bush to his face in 2006, “has a well-known liberal bias.”

Republicans are now the party of states’ rights, nullification, Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, and white rage. The Democrats are the party of civil rights, equal protection of the laws, Dr. King and John Lewis. In 2018, Donald Trump is the Divider, not the Uniter. And that means the shoes Trump now fills would be more likely to fit Jefferson Davis than Abraham Lincoln.

For starters, consider the xenophobia and nativism at the heart of Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” appeal. His diatribes against “thugs” and Mexican “rapists and drug dealers,” his disdain for those from “shithole countries” and fondness for (obviously white) immigrants from places like Norway are just the latest updates to Nixon’s 50-year old “Southern Strategy.” In stark contrast, Abraham Lincoln had little use for the “America Firsters” of his day, the Know-Nothings. As he wrote to Joshua Speed in 1855:

I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor or degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics." When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy [sic].

The obvious problems with the myth of Abraham Lincoln Trump hardly end there. Trump, after all, has repeatedly come to the defense of Confederate monuments and statues. In the wake of the violence triggered by white supremacists last August in Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump tweeted that it was “sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments.” But those supposedly “beautiful” monuments were primarily erected in the early 1900's and again during the Civil Rights era precisely to glorify the Lost Cause of the Confederacy and to act as powerful symbols of white supremacy. In 1855, Lincoln proclaimed that “the slave-breeders and slave-traders, are a small, odious and detested class, among you; and yet in politics, they dictate the course of all of you.” In 2017, Donald Trump defended those who would celebrate the leaders, fighting men and the cause of that “odious and detested class” by applying the “both sides do it” argument to the alt-right instigation in Charlottesville:

“You’re changing history, you’re changing culture, and you had people – and I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally – but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly. Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people, but you also had troublemakers and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets and with the baseball bats – you had a lot of bad people in the other group too…
The other group didn't have a permit. So I only tell you this: there are two sides to a story. I thought what took place was a horrible moment for our country, a horrible moment. But there are two sides to the country.”

The Great Emancipator didn’t have much patience for the “both sides do it” sham. As Lincoln reflected in September 1862:

In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party.

This was a central theme of President Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address delivered on March 4, 1865. As he so eloquently put it just six weeks before his assassination, slavery was the national tragedy and the Civil War the inevitable and necessary price America had to pay for its extirpation.

If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether." [Emphasis mine.]

If Lincoln was quick to admonish both North and South for believing they each enjoyed God’s providence, the 16th president was also able to show understanding and compassion for those on either side of the Mason-Dixon line. Even as seven states has already seceded from the Union, Lincoln closed his First Inaugural Address on March 4, 1861 this way:

In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to "preserve, protect, and defend it."
I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

With the war nearly won four years later, Abraham Lincoln nevertheless extended the hand of brotherhood to those who sought to destroy the country he had fought so hard to preserve:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

It is inconceivable that Donald Trump could ever imagine, let alone utter, words like these. (That goes for his son Donald Jr. as well, who co-hosted the opening of D’Souza’s fictional film.) His speeches, rallies, and tweets are designed only for the consumption of his base. On July 1, Trump told Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business, “I hope the other side realizes that they better just take it easy," he said. "They better just take it easy because some of the languages, some of the words you —even some of the radical ideas, I really think they’re very bad for the country." Asked what he would do to bring the country together, Abraham Lincoln Trump responded:

" Our people are so incredible. Do you know, there's probably never been a base in the history of politics in this country like my base."

Not, at least, since Jefferson Davis’s backers in 1861.

If Trump’s base wants anything, it is to keep things the way they are. Or, rather, were. “Make American Great Again” is by definition a backward-looking worldview to a time when a white, post-war America was militarily and economically unchallenged. “Our ancestors tamed a continent,” Trump proclaimed in May, adding “We’re are not going to apologize for America.” But in the second decade of the 21st century, the United States is at a crossroads. The rise of China as a military and economic superpower, the transformation of the worldwide economy, and global challenges like climate change, international terrorism, and transnational criminal enterprises mean the United States cannot withdraw into itself. More than ever, the U.S. needs allies in Europe and the Pacific along with strong global institutions led by America. From trade policy, the withdrawals from the Paris Climate Accords and the Trans-Pacific Partnership to the threats to NATO and North American allies, Trump is doing the reverse.

In his time, Abraham Lincoln faced even more difficult choices for a nation literally at a life-and-death crossroads. Certainly no firebrand of abolitionism, he soon understood there was simply no going back to the United States of America as it had been. As President Lincoln said in his message to Congress on December 1, 1862, just one month before the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect:

The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise -- with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.
Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We -- even we here -- hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free -- honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. [Emphasis mine.]

In the Gettysburg Address in November 1863, Lincoln explained to his countrymen not just the meaning of thinking and acting anew, but of the Civil War itself. America wasn’t merely being saved, but reborn. And the definition of “American” would necessarily and rightly include the four million slaves still held in bondage by the rebels.

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

(Abraham Lincoln was successful; government of the people, by the people, for the people, did not perish from the earth. It’s no wonder that Frederick Douglass said of him in 1876, “Infinite wisdom has seldom sent any man into the world better fitted for his mission than Abraham Lincoln.” Such words will never be spoken about Donald Trump, even if he believes Frederick Douglass is “an example of somebody who's done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more.”)

If Abraham Lincoln’s project extended the notion of the American family to include black citizens, Donald Trump’s has been its restriction. His Muslim ban, draconian immigration crackdown, his wink and a nod to foes of equal rights for LGBTQ Americans, and his campaign to limit women’s reproductive rights constitute a mockery of the 14th Amendment’s guarantees that “all persons” shall enjoy due process and equal protection of the laws. Trump’s ban on transgender troops in the U.S. military and his executive order ending protections for the 700,000 immigrants brought as children (the “Dreamers”) to the United States represent promises broken by the federal government.

While Donald Trump has double-crossed tens of thousands of people for political gain, Abraham Lincoln kept his promises to a group despised by most in both the North and the South even as America’s national survival was in doubt. In August 1863, months before he used the Gettysburg Address to declare America "dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal," Abraham Lincoln defended his Emancipation Proclamation as inextricably linked to the preservation of the Union. Noting reports from some of his commanders that "the emancipation policy, and use of colored troops, constitute the heaviest blow yet dealt to the rebellion," Lincoln reminded his critics:

"You say you will not fight to free the negroes. Some of them seem willing to fight for you."

Lincoln did not waiver in his commitment to a "new birth of freedom" even as he endured the darkest days of the Civil War in the summer of 1864. With Grant stalemated in front of Petersburg after the brutal fighting that spring and summer, Lincoln's re-election seemed an impossibility. But when Northern War Democrats and some in his own party were urging him to abandon the emancipation of the slaves, Lincoln was having none of it.

"I am sure you will not, on due reflection, say the promise being made must be broken at the first opportunity...As a matter of morals, could such treachery escape the curses of Heaven or any good man? As a matter of policy, to announce such a purpose would ruin the Union cause itself. All recruiting of colored men would cease and all colored men now in our service would instantly desert us. And rightfully too. Why should they give their lives for us, with our full notice of our purpose to betray them?"

Were he to return black soldiers to slavery, Lincoln declared:

"I should be damned in time and eternity."

Donald Trump would do well to heed Lincoln’s warning. So, too, would Dinesh D’Souza.
Given his mugging by the reality above, D’Souza is feebly left to assert of his “provocative analogy between Lincoln and Trump” only that “not that they’re the same people, but that they’ve fallen into the same situation.” Lincoln detested slavery because, D’Souza explains, of his belief in free labor.

“As each man has one mouth to be fed, and one pair of hands to furnish food,” Lincoln said, “It was probably intended that that particular pair of hands should feed that particular mouth.” Et voila, Lincoln is a modern-day free-market Republican who hates big government and handouts for the undeserving just like … wait for it … Donald Trump. Unfortunately, President Abraham Lincoln also said this in his First Annual Message to Congress:

Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.

That view was doubtless one factor in the correspondence between Karl Marx and President Lincoln in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation taking effect on January 1, 1863.

But in the bigger picture, Lincoln dramatically expanded the scope of the government in Washington.

He not only introduced the first national income tax to help pay for the war, but signed the Homestead Act in 1862. Those federal land grants to western settlers constituted one of the biggest—and most effective—handouts in American history. As Kruse put it in one his many D’Souza beat-downs:

Yes, Republicans in the 1860s *did* end slavery and promote civil rights.
They also significantly expanded the federal government, built up the income tax, funded a huge system of public colleges, embraced reparations for slavery and, um, impeached an incompetent president.

Which brings up another point in the demolition of the Trump-as-Lincoln comedy. Donald Trump has, after all, threatened to arbitrarily fire cabinet officials and given aid and comfort to white supremacists all while embracing an American adversary in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. As Manisha Sinha, the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut, recently detailed, once before in our history the president of the United States behaved this way. He wasn’t Abraham Lincoln, but his successor Andrew Johnson. And back then, Republicans in Congress impeached him for it.

In any event, some Trump defenders will continue to peddle the jaw-droppingly ridiculous notion that Donald Trump is the reincarnation of Abraham Lincoln. Some, like Dinesh D’Souza, will profit from propagating that pathetic falsehood. (Apparently, you can fool some of the people all of the time, and that’s his target market.) Mercifully, even some conservatives are red in the face over this butchery of American history for the red party. As an incredulous Rod Dreher said of D’Souza’s “right-wing porn” in the American Conservative:

What kind of crackhead do you have to be to take that seriously?
I would say that Dinesh D’Souza ought to be ashamed of himself, but you can’t shame the shameless.

Now that sounds a lot like Donald Trump.
NOTE: There is a modern American president one could more plausibly argue is Abraham Lincoln’s heir.

Why are Republicans so opposed to protecting November's election from Russian hackers?

By Joan McCarter

It's almost enough to make you think the Russian fix is already in with Republicans for November.

House Republicans have repeatedly resisted Democrats' efforts to fund election systems protection.

Russian asset Donald Trump spent less than half an hour with his national security team to discuss the issue, and now Senate Republicans are opposing the grants to states that the House Republicans blocked, as well.

Senate Democrats are trying to get $250 million in grants to states as soon as possible to upgrade their systems and make necessary fixes. Republicans say they've got enough money, ignoring the reports from the intelligence community that Russia is interfering right now. Ignoring the Russian hacker attack on Sen. Claire McCaskill's campaign. Ignoring the discovery by Facebook of a new "sophisticated" attack possible from Russia showing that they are at it again. That's not to mention the infrastructure hacking they've been doing.

That gives plenty of fodder for Democrats to turn this into a sustained floor fight, which is precisely what they intend to do.

Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-VT) is sponsoring an amendment to a "minibus" spending bill the Senate is considering, a bunch of smaller, less controversial spending bills Congress hopes to dispense with before dealing with the remainder in a continuing resolution to keep government open past September 30. "The Trump budget would ZERO OUT election security funds,"  Leahy tweeted. "My Senate amendment, blocked by House GOP, would continue much-needed funding for election security grants. The Senate should be allowed to vote on it."

It's needed. A bipartisan group of 21 states attorneys general is pleading with Congress to pass this funding. "The integrity of the nation’s voting infrastructure is a bipartisan issue, and one that affects not only the national political landscape, but elections at the state, county, municipal, and local levels," they wrote in a letter to Rep. Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee and Sen. Roy Blunt, Senate Rules and Administration Committee Chairman.

The only reason Republicans could possibly have for opposing this is that they think they’ll need all the help they can get to win in November.

Note To Democrats: Fuck The White Working Class

Posted By Rude One

I'm a very white person. My background is so European, it's painful: Russian, Polish, Swedish, and, in the only nod to a smidge of color, Italian. And myfamily history is pure worker: My father was a trucker. Mom was a secretary. My grandfather was an electrician and my grandmother worked in a factory. I tell you this to prove my bona fides when I say, with no due respect, it's time for Democrats and the left to say, "Fuck the white working class."

That doesn't mean neglect white workers. As I said back in November (and repeated in December), "The only way to help the white working class is to abandon the white working class when it comes to trying to get votes." It means that we concentrate on uplifting all people in this country, no matter the skin color, and we stop this bullshit outreach to the very white people who don't understand that it's good for them, too.

It's just pathetic that this keeps coming up again and again, as if Trump voters and the white working class are the only goddamn prize in the electorate. Democrats, we're told, and liberals, especially, have to, got to, must try to get them on board or our victories are hollow and our policies are meaningless.

Thomas Frank, a progressive darling for his books, including What's the Matter with Kansas? (the answer he didn't get around to is the obvious one: racism), asked in his column this weekend for The Guardian, "Can liberals please work out how to win back the working class?" It offers the usual stuff we know, that Democrats should embrace a genuinely liberal platform, that they blew it by not punishing Wall Street back in 2009, and that they embrace the wealthy in ways that alienate the left.

But what's missing is a recognition that the non-white working class is firmly with the Democratic Party. In fact, it's the base that has sustained the Democrats for several elections, and if the policies of the party are accepted by the non-white working class, then you're either saying that non-whites don't know that Democrats are bad for them or you're just fucking privileging white workers as being the only representatives of a class.

Fucking hell, not a single goddamn factory worker voted for Trump because they were sad Barack Obama didn't lock up someone from Goldman Sachs. They voted for him because he was gonna chase out the Mexicans and Muslims and he was gonna teach that Hillary bitch a lesson. It's not that fucking complicated. And it's fucked up that someone as genuinely smart as Frank can't just accept that.

Then, today, in the New York Times (motto: "We will keep publishing dumb shit until someone from West Virginia subscribes"), in one of the most tragically stupid columns I've ever fucking seen (and I've been reading this shit for years), ostensibly liberal writer Margaret Renkl offers advice on "How to Talk to a Racist," subtitled, "White liberals, you’re doing it all wrong." You might look at that and think, "Oh, c'mon. That's gotta be a joke."

Nope. Renkl wants us to reason with the unreasonable: "Somehow you need to find enough common ground for a real conversation about race. Very few people are stupid or irredeemably mean. They’ll listen to what you have to say if they trust you’ll listen to what they have to say back." Look at that shit. It's like she's talking about racists like they're particularly dumb dogs, not adult humans who could, if they wanted, try to find common ground with liberals.

It gets worse. You should, she says, stop and take a breath "when you encounter a person who believes he’s merely honoring his ancestors by driving a car with an image of the Confederate battle flag on the tag [or] when a Facebook friend announces that it’s disrespectful to take a knee during the national anthem." I'll take a breath if the exhale is me saying, "Racist asshole."

I've said this before and I'll say it again: Why is it just up to liberals? Unlike writers like Renkl, I'm not gonna act like racists are children. I'm gonna treat them like fuckin' grown-ups and not fuckin' patronize them and speak gently so they don't roll on the ground in a tantrum. I'm gonna tell 'em they're fuckin' racist and that racism is objectively wrong and they should be ashamed of their ignorant selves. And if they don't like being made to feel bad for being racist, don't fucking be racist. Now, tell me whatever stupid shit you wanna say about how you have black friends.

Democrats and the left need to get over this obsession with making the white working class happy. Reaching out to them only makes them hate us more. Why do we need them all? There is already a good percentage of them that do vote Democratic because they're also not all racist morons. Those white working class members are pretty sick of the idiots in their demographic, too.

Besides, it ain't like the white working class has a monopoly on rage or morality. Holy Republicans may hammer the Bible like it's their mistress's ass, but your evangelicals haven't got shit on the black church or the enormous growth of Hispanics as part of church congregations. Go get your voters there.

And the rise of women candidates, both non-white and white, as well as LGBT candidates, demonstrates that the future sure as hell ain't the white men that still make up the vast majority of Republican elected officials. The awesome thing about these new candidates is they are coming up with ways to present that liberal, pro-worker agenda as something that is simply common sense. That goes across the board, from Beto O'Rourke in Texas, a white Congressman who is uniting constituencies (mostly not white) in a real shot to take down Ted Cruz, to Jeannine Lee Lake in Indiana, a black woman who won the Democratic nomination in a district that once had Mike Pence representing it. The DNC and the DCCC better get the fuck on board or the party is gonna leave their old asses behind.

Just think: non-white Americans, with an assist from some white Americans, could end up being responsible for changing things to actually make shit better for the white working class. That many of them won't understand it, as they didn't when Barack Obama was getting them health care, is the triumph of the GOP politics of hate and fear and ignorance.

[Note: Yes, in very white places like West Virginia, where Democrats still have a chance, you might have to pander a bit, but the basic message doesn't need to change.]

Goofball And Galahad

Donald Trump is not a traitor. It's much worse than that

By Aldous J Pennyfarthing

The Surrender Summit ended nearly two weeks ago, but something about the post-capitulation rhetoric still doesn’t sit right with me.

This notion that Donald Trump is a traitor to his country is flat-out wrong.

Treasonous? Hell, yeah. In thrall to a brutal foreign adversary? Of course.

But he’s not a traitor.

To be a traitor, one has to have been loyal to something or someone (aside from oneself) at least once, and Trump clearly doesn’t qualify. Trump is loyal to precisely two things: his rapacious id and his ravenous ego.

Apart from those cherished jewels of the Trumpian dunce cap, our resident cares about nothing and no one.

Was he loyal to our country when he failed to pay his income taxes?

Was he loyal when he took $150,000 in federal money earmarked for small businesses impacted by 9/11?

Was he loyal when he bragged, just hours after the World Trade Center towers came down, that his building was now the tallest in Manhattan?

Was he loyal when he bone spurred his way out of the military?

Was he loyal when he did business in Fidel Castro’s Cuba in defiance of strict American trade bans?

Was he loyal when he failed to learn the words to “God Bless America” and “The Star-Spangled Banner”?

Was he loyal when he failed to donate — until he was caught red-handed — the $1 million he’d promised to veterans charities?

Was he loyal when he savagely mocked a sitting senator and war hero, as well as a Gold Star family?

Was he loyal when he approved his son’s rendezvous with Russian agents in order to get dirt on Hillary Clinton?

Was he loyal when he encouraged the rat fucking of our election by Russia and Julian Assange’s Wikileaks?

Was he loyal when he promoted a scam university in order to fleece his fellow citizens out of their retirement money?

And what about his loyalty to his family and employees?

Was he loyal to any of his wives?

Was he loyal to his current wife when he cheated on her with a porn star and a Playboy model?

Was he loyal to his family when he cut off his gravely ill nephew’s health insurance out of spite?

Was he loyal when he stiffed hundreds of real estate contractors, many of whom were struggling small business owners?

Was he loyal when he left investors in his public casino company in the lurch while personally making out like a bandit?

Was he loyal (you might want to grab an air-sickness bag for this one) when he blamed two former employees who had died in a helicopter crash for his own ongoing failures in the casino business?

Of course he wasn’t. Because he’s never been loyal to anyone, ever. Michael Cohen, et al., are learning that right now.

No, Donald Trump isn’t a traitor. It’s much more banal — and frightening — than that.

He’s just an evil asshole.

Donald Trump: Resident For Life

By Louis C

Oh, silly me, did I say "resident for Life". I'm sorry, I meant "Life for resident". Life in prison, that is.

Donald Trump has said 2083 false things as U.S. resident

The Toronto Star is keeping track of every false claim U.S. resident Donald Trump has made since his inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017. Why? Historians say there has never been such a constant liar in the Oval Office. We think dishonesty should be challenged. We think inaccurate information should be corrected. And we think the sheer frequency of Trump’s inaccuracy is a central story of his residency.

If Trump is a serial liar, why call this a list of “false claims,” not lies? You can read our detailed explanation here. The short answer is that we can’t be sure that each and every one was intentional. In some cases, he may have been confused or ignorant. What we know, objectively, is that he was not telling the truth.

http://projects.thestar.com/donald-trump-fact-check/

Trump accused of making hush payments to 3 more women

By Joe Tacopino

Could be more stormy weather ahead.

Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for porn actress Stormy Daniels, said on Thursday night that he is representing three more women who claim to have been paid hush money by President Trump or his associates.

“Three additional women. All paid hush money through various means,” Avenatti tweeted late Thursday, after discussing the new clients with an audience at a public event in California.

“Time for Michael Cohen and Donald Trump to come 100 percent clean with the American people. All the documents, all the tapes, NOW. No more lies or lip service. #Basta.”

Daniels says she was paid $130,000 by Trump lawyer Cohen to sign a nondisclosure agreement about her alleged 2006 affair with Trump just a month before the 2016 presidential election. Trump has denied having an affair with Daniels.

Avenatti said the three women claimed they were paid to keep quiet by Trump, Cohen or the National Enquirer’s parent company, American Media Inc.

He did not explicitly say that the women had affairs with the resident.

Avenatti also told the audience at the event in West Hollywood that “at least one of those women claimed to be pregnant at the time” the agreement was signed.

Sean Spicer Wrote A Book. The Reviews Are Not Kind

Sean Spicer left his role as resident Trump's first press secretary one year ago, and to mark the occasion, he's releasing a book called "The Briefing" about his experience with the Trump campaign and administration. It is, according to the early reviews, not good.

In perhaps the harshest review of them all, ABC reporter Jonathan Karl (writing in the Wall Street Journal) says "The Briefing" is "littered with inaccuracies," is "light on insider detail" and "annihilates strawmen."

Mr. Spicer's book is much like his tenure as press secretary: short, littered with inaccuracies and offering up one consistent theme: Mr. Trump can do no wrong. Mr. Spicer has not been well served by the book's fact checkers and copy editors. He refers to the author of the infamous Trump dossier as "Michael Steele," who is in truth the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, not the British ex-spy Christopher Steele. He recounts a reporter asking Mr. Obama a question at a White House press conference in 1999, a decade before Mr. Obama was elected.

[Wall Street Journal] 

The Washington Post's Erik Wemple has little good to say about the book, and is struck by how weak Spicer's attempt to come to terms with his actions as press secretary:

Even a half-witted political memoir would grapple with such a disconnect — perhaps by acknowledging some fault in the boss, or perhaps by comparing his low points with those of other presidents. Yet "The Briefing" isn't a political memoir, nor is it a work of recent history, nor a tell-all, or tell-anything. Rather, it is a bumbling effort at gas-lighting Americans into doubting what they have seen with their own eyes as far back as June 2015... To hear Spicer lecture about errors, one might suppose he'd show some concern about the false and misleading tweets that Trump blasts daily to his 53 million followers.

[Washington Post] 

NPR's Annalisa Quinn notes that "The Briefing" has some merits, including his discussion of Washington's conservative circles and the interplay between the media and social media, but gets hung up on Spicer's continued lies: 

Spicer leaves out important context and doubles down on some of the lies he became famous for as press secretary, including his absurd claims about crowd size at Trump's inauguration. Spicer's transparency on some points also makes his moral double standards more disappointing. For instance, he denigrates Hillary Clinton for being married to Bill Clinton, who has been accused of sexual misconduct. "Many people had to ask themselves: if what those women said is true, what kind of a woman would stand by a man who did such things?" Probably the same kind of person who would stand by a president who bragged about sexually assaulting women. Or who would praise former congressman Mark Foley as "smart and ambitious... and fun to be around" — without mentioning that he solicited nude photos and sex from teenage boys employed as congressional pages.

[NPR]

In a one-star (out of five) review, The Telegraph's Harriet Alexander found "The Briefing" a major disappointment:

Entitled The Briefing, it is Spicer's attempt to clear his name. His first press briefing, when he berated the bemused reporters for downplaying the size of Mr Trump's inauguration crowd, set the tone for his seven month tenure at the White House. At times hostile, at times hilarious, his briefings got higher ratings than the actual soap operas airing at the same time. So how has he managed to make his account of the time so dull?

[The Telegraph] 

While The Guardian calls it an "an essential narrative by a non-family member who once possessed Oval Office walk-in privileges," it also notes how Spicer massively undercuts Trump's current line that Paul Manafort wasn't deeply involved with his campaign:

Inexplicably, Spicer does his best to undercut his own and his ex-boss’s credibility. When it comes to Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, Spicer’s story appears to have evolved. For three consecutive pages, The Briefing: Politics, the Press and the President graphically details how Manafort beat back the efforts of Never Trump Republicans to steal the presidential nomination. Spicer gushes: "How Manafort and company did this was a scene out of 1950's politics – alternating between carrot and stick and sometimes bat."

[The Guardian]

https://digg.com/2018/sean-spicer-book-briefing-is-it-good 

A Startling Admission

Republicans Won't Save Us Because Their Voters Don't Want To Be Saved: A Farce In Six Acts

Posted by Rude One

1. In another of its ongoing series "Do the Editors of the New York Times Really Think the Yokels Will Ever Love Them?" reporters interviewed an assortment of the aforementioned yokels, along with a scattering of rubes and yahoos, all who voted for Donald Trump, to find out what they think of the resident in the wake of his bowing down to Vladimir Putin. And, surprise, surprise, the yokels, rubes, and yahoos are almost all still on board.

One dumbass in Indiana said, "It is strictly a witch hunt" against Trump, while a shit-for-brains in Louisiana proclaimed, "They’re just trying to make Trump’s election look fraudulent" and some fucking moron in Arizona said that Trump is a strategic master because "No one really thinks it’s a true friendship" with Putin.

2. National Public Radio did the same kind of thing, talking with Trump voters who barely blinked about his weird damn support for Russia. They talked to stupid assholes in Central Bumfuck, Texas, who said things like, "[Trump's] smart. He knows how to negotiate" and that Trump has "done a lot of things that other presidents haven't had the guts to do."

3. When Harley-Davidson said it had to shift some of its operations overseas because of the tariffs that Trump has imposed, NPR went to an actual Harley plant in Wisconsin that might lay off workers because of the shift. Even these workers who may lose their jobs as a direct result of Trump's policies are standing by their Orange God. One really said, "I mean, he wouldn't do it for no reason. I look at him as a very smart businessman. And, I mean, if he feels that's what he needed to do, that's what he needed to do."

4. At a nail factory in Missouri that has already laid off 60 workers due to the steel tariffs, workers couldn't turn against Trump. "I understand why he's doing it," one pathetically mewled to MSNBC, while another still has faith in the man: "I want him to fix it so it’s better." The slobbering support for Trump goes on unabated as workers are let go. Said one, "I support him 100%. In fact, I’d like to shake his hand. He’s doing a great job.” And asked directly if she'd change her mind on Trump if she lost her job, a worker replied, "Overall, he’s done good. I’m not going to be selfish just because of me.”

(Just to get this right: President Obama asked everyone to get into the health care system in order to make insurance affordable for all, and that was the worst thing anyone could do because fuck those takers. But you're willing to sacrifice your job because you have to keep supporting the man who made you lose it? That's some Jedi-fuckin' mind trick right there with a heavy dose of racism.)

5. Soybean farmers who are expecting to see massive losses as a result of the trade war with China believe that this is all a part of Trump's genius at work. One delusional Arkansas farmer said, "resident Trump is a businessman. He’s making a high-risk business decision that probably should have been made a long time ago. But it’s definitely a risk." Another utter imbecile, who is going to lose half his farm revenue this year, praised Trump with, "The one thing I admire about the guy is that he’s fulfilled or tried to fulfill" his campaign promises.

6. On C-SPAN Monday, an awful caller from Connecticut said, awfully, "I’ll try not to sound too awful, but I want to thank the Russians for interfering with our election to stop Hillary Clinton from becoming president."

And you can fucking well bet that that's what many of Trump's idiot horde are saying. Because of that, Republicans are going to walk the fuck away from the whole Trump and Russia issue because Trump might be a motherfucking traitor, but that motherfucking traitor is the only thing holding the Republican Party together.

From the Start, Trump Has Muddied A Clear Message: Putin Interfered

By David E. Sanger and Matthew Rosenberg

WASHINGTON — Two weeks before his inauguration, Donald J. Trump was shown highly classified intelligence indicating that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had personally ordered complex cyberattacks to sway the 2016 American election.

The evidence included texts and emails from Russian military officers and information gleaned from a top-secret source close to Mr. Putin, who had described to the C.I.A. how the Kremlin decided to execute its campaign of hacking and disinformation.

Mr. Trump sounded grudgingly convinced, according to several people who attended the intelligence briefing. But ever since, Mr. Trump has tried to cloud the very clear findings that he received on Jan. 6, 2017, which his own intelligence leaders have unanimously endorsed.

The shifting narrative underscores the degree to which Mr. Trump regularly picks and chooses intelligence to suit his political purposes. That has never been more clear than this week.

On Monday, standing next to the Russian president in Helsinki, Finland, Mr. Trump said he accepted Mr. Putin’s denial of Russian election intrusions. By Tuesday, faced with a bipartisan political outcry, Mr. Trump sought to walk back his words and sided with his intelligence agencies.

On Wednesday, when a reporter asked, “Is Russia still targeting the U.S.?” Mr. Trump shot back, “No” — directly contradicting statements made only days earlier by his director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, who was sitting a few chairs away in the Cabinet Room. (The White House later said he was responding to a different question.)

Hours later, in a CBS News interview, Mr. Trump seemed to reverse course again. He blamed Mr. Putin personally, but only indirectly, for the election interference by Russia, “because he’s in charge of the country.”

In the run-up to this week’s ducking and weaving, Mr. Trump has done all he can to suggest other possible explanations for the hacks into the American political system. His fear, according to one of his closest aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity, is that any admission of even an unsuccessful Russian attempt to influence the 2016 vote raises questions about the legitimacy of his residency.

The Jan. 6, 2017, meeting, held at Trump Tower, was a prime example. He was briefed that day by John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director; James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence; and Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency and the commander of United States Cyber Command.

The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, was also there; after the formal briefing, he privately told Mr. Trump about the “Steele dossier.” That report, by a former British intelligence officer, included uncorroborated salacious stories of Mr. Trump’s activities during a visit to Moscow, which he denied.

According to nearly a dozen people who either attended the meeting with the president-elect or were later briefed on it, the four primary intelligence officials described the streams of intelligence that convinced them of Mr. Putin’s role in the election interference.

resident-elect Donald J. Trump on Jan. 6, 2017, the day he was briefed on cyberattacks designed to sway the 2016 American election.CreditSam Hodgson for The New York Times

They included stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee that had been seen in Russian military intelligence networks by the British, Dutch and American intelligence services. Officers of the Russian intelligence agency formerly known as the G.R.U. had plotted with groups like WikiLeaks on how to release the email stash.

And ultimately, several human sources had confirmed Mr. Putin’s own role.

That included one particularly valuable source, who was considered so sensitive that Mr. Brennan had declined to refer to it in any way in the Presidential Daily Brief during the final months of the Obama administration, as the Russia investigation intensified.

Instead, to keep the information from being shared widely, Mr. Brennan sent reports from the source to Mr. Obama and a small group of top national security aides in a separate, white envelope to assure its security.

Mr. Trump and his aides were also given other reasons during the briefing to believe that Russia was behind the D.N.C. hacks.

The same Russian groups had been involved in cyberattacks on the State Department and White House unclassified email systems in 2014 and 2015, and in an attack on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. 

They had aggressively fought the N.S.A. against being ejected from the White House system, engaging in what the deputy director of the agency later called “hand-to-hand combat” to dig in.

The pattern of the D.N.C. hacks, and the theft of emails from John D. Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, fit the same pattern.

After the briefings, Mr. Trump issued a statement later that day that sought to spread the blame for the meddling. He said “Russia, China and other countries, outside groups and countries” were launching cyberattacks against American government, businesses and political organizations — including the D.N.C.

Still, Mr. Trump said in his statement, “there was absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election.”

Mr. Brennan later told Congress that he had no doubt where the attacks were coming from.

“I was convinced in the summer that the Russians were trying to interfere in the election,” he said in testimony in May 2017. “And they were very aggressive.”

For Mr. Trump, the messengers were as much a part of the problem as the message they delivered.

Mr. Brennan and Mr. Clapper were both Obama administration appointees who left the government the day Mr. Trump was inaugurated. The new resident soon took to portraying them as political hacks who had warped the intelligence to provide Democrats with an excuse for Mrs. Clinton’s loss in the election.

Mr. Comey fared little better. He was fired in May 2017 after refusing to pledge his loyalty to Mr. Trump and pushing forward on the federal investigation into whether the Trump campaign had cooperated with Russia’s election interference.

Only Admiral Rogers, who retired this past May, was extended in office by Mr. Trump. (He, too, told Congress that he thought the evidence of Russian interference was incontrovertible.)

resident Trump, meeting with Mr. Putin in Helsinki, Finland, on Monday, said he accepted Mr. Putin’s denial of Russian election intrusions.CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times

And the evidence suggests Russia continues to be very aggressive in its meddling.

In March, the Department of Homeland Security declared that Russia was targeting the American electric power grid, continuing to riddle it with malware that could be used to manipulate or shut down critical control systems. Intelligence officials have described it to Congress as a chief threat to American security.

Just last week, Mr. Coats said that current cyberthreats were “blinking red” and called Russia the “most aggressive foreign actor, no question.”

“And they continue their efforts to undermine our democracy,” he said.

Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, also stood firm.

“The intelligence community’s assessment has not changed,” Mr. Wray said on Wednesday at the Aspen Security Forum. “My view has not changed, which is that Russia attempted to interfere with the last election and continues to engage in malign influence operations to this day.”

The Russian efforts are “aimed at sowing discord and divisiveness in this country,” he continued. “We haven’t yet seen an effort to target specific election infrastructure this time. We could be just a moment away from the next level.”

“It’s a threat we need to take extremely seriously and respond to with fierce determination and focus.”

Almost as soon as he took office, Mr. Trump began casting doubts on the intelligence on Russia’s election interference, though never taking issue with its specifics.

He dismissed it broadly as a fabrication by Democrats and part of a “witch hunt” against him. He raised unrelated issues, including the state of investigations into Mrs. Clinton’s home computer server, to distract attention from the central question of Russia’s role — and who, if anyone, in Mr. Trump’s immediate orbit may have worked with them.

In July 2017, just after meeting Mr. Putin for the first time, Mr. Trump told a New York Times reporter that the Russian president had made a persuasive case that Moscow’s cyber-skills were so good that the government’s hackers would never have been caught. Therefore, Mr. Trump recounted from his conversation with Mr. Putin, Russia must not have been responsible.

Since then, Mr. Trump has routinely disparaged the intelligence about the Russian election interference. Under public pressure — as he was after his statements in Helsinki on Monday — he has periodically retreated. But even then, he has expressed confidence in his intelligence briefers, not in the content of their findings.

That is what happened again this week, twice.

Mr. Trump’s statement in Helsinki led Mr. Coats to reaffirm, in a statement he deliberately did not get cleared at the White House, that American intelligence agencies had no doubt that Russia was behind the 2016 hack.

That contributed to Mr. Trump’s decision on Tuesday to say that he had misspoken one word, and that he did believe Russia had interfered — although he also veered off script to declare: “Could be other people also. A lot of people out there.”

Follow David Sanger and Matthew Rosenberg on Twitter: @SangerNYT and @AllMattNYT.
Adam Goldman contributed reporting.

 

A version of this article appears in print on July 19, 2018, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: From Start, Trump Has Muddied Clear Message: Putin Interfered. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Random Observations On A Traitor

Posted by Rude One

1. I'm not gonna pretend to know the ins and outs of Russian/American relations in the Putin era. Yet, I know it ain't the Soviet Union, but many of the totalitarian impulses of the Soviet era continue on under the reign of Putin and the oligarchs. Now, during the end of the Cold War, when I became politically aware, I thought the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union was just pathetic dick-measuring played out on a global scale, with proxy wars and constant threats of nuclear annihilation, not to mention endless espionage on both sides. I have done more than my share of research into the Communist witch hunt by the House Un-American Activities Committee, including the Hollywood Ten (check out John Howard Lawson, a badass motherfucker of a writer as there ever was in that time), as well as the other victims of Red Scares and anti-Communist hysteria.

So I can say without equivocation that, today, at his press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump offered more aid and comfort to Russia than any victim of Joe McCarthy and HUAC ever did. When Trump blamed the United States for, in essence, not doing more to prevent Russia from hacking the DNC and electoral interference, when Trump declared the investigation into Russia's election fuckery a "disaster for our country" because "I think it's kept us apart, it's kept us separated," when Trump said of his own Director of National Intelligence, "My people came to me, Dan Coats, came to me and some others they said they think it's Russia. I have President Putin. He just said it's not Russia," he did more to undermine the United States than all the poor saps that McCarthy, Roy Cohn, and Dick Nixon accused of being spies and traitors combined.

There is a lot of shit I might be naive about when it comes to the filthy world of politics, but I'm pretty sure the president doesn't get to trust a foreign country over the one he leads. Or, if a president thinks the intelligence agencies have gone rogue, he can fire people. Instead, he deflected to Hillary Clinton's emails, Peter Strzok, and every other dumbass conspiracy theory that Fox "news" fucked into his addled brain.

2. Republicans have put out mighty statements of outrage, but until GOP senators say, "Nope, fuck this shit. No more judges, nothing, until we can figure out, as the man himself said, what the hell is going on" and GOP representatives say, "Yeah, this fucking sucks. Time to get impeachy," then all their words are bullshit.

As was once explained to me by a Republican consultant, one big reason that they won't cross Trump is that they get pummeled with not just angry emails from his idiot hordes (which, to be completely fair, are all Republicans' idiot hordes until they turn against the orange god), but death threats and rape threats and threats to kill and rape their children, along with doxing of them. To be sure, as someone who gets the occasional death threat, almost every single one is completely fake and the motherfucking pieces of their whore mothers' twat scabs who send them aren't gonna do shit.

Except here's the fuckin' deal: Would you speak up if someone sent you your college-age daughter's dorm room address along with a rape threat?

And here's the flip side of that fuckin' deal: How many of those fuckin' trolls are Russian scumfuckers?

If Republicans have been cowed into silence, which is just a piece with their general state of being chicken shit, then perhaps if they came out as a group, a bunch of 'em, and said, "Yeah, there is some shit we will not eat. Let's shitcan this asshole president," well, it'd show the scribblers of murder notes that they have a fuck of a lot of work to do. And there is even the possibility that a few of the idiot horde might look up from hunching in a ditch and shoving dingleberries up their noses to let a rational thought pierce their thick, troglodyte skulls and think, "Huh, Congressman Cockknob has always been a stand-up guy. He hates queers and immigrants. Maybe I should listen if he's turned against Trump."

2a. At the very least, a couple of Republican senators should switch to caucusing with Democrats and have hearings that'll make the entire White House piss itself.

2b. Yeah, I think some of them are compromised. I think the rest are just opportunist pussies who wouldn't know the civic good if it bit them in the ass and screamed, "I'm the Civic Good."

3. Trump's obsession with the 2016 election is his biggest tell. He can't stop talking about. Multiple times in the past week, he's brought up his electoral vote victory. Today, with Putin smirking that fuckin' Ernst Blofeld/gargoyle smirk of his, Trump went on a couple of tears about 2016. Asked about whether Russia intervened in the election, he shimmied, "[I]t came out as a reason why the Democrats lost an election, which frankly, they should have been able to win because the electoral college is much more advantageous for Democrats, as you know, than it is to Republicans. We won the Electoral College by a lot. 306 to 223, I believe." He had announced his Electoral College total at his press conference after the NATO summit, too.

You know when you don't talk about how great it is you won? When you know you won legitimately. If there's something sketchy about how you won something, you can either shut the fuck up about it and hope no one notices. Or you can keep talking and hope you can create a story that people believe when the truth comes out. And you proclaim yourself the real victim of any chicanery.

So this motherfucker is so guilty, he's fuckin' oozing lies through his rosacea-lined skin.

4. Here's the kindest fucking spin I can put on this debacle, this plunge from incompetence and fealty into full-blown traitorous behavior. Trump is begging for Congress to end his residency. He's saying in so many words, "You have to stop me. You have to remove me from office. Putin won't let me resign. So you have to do it."

If that's not the message that Republicans got from that utter humiliation, that deranged babbling, that press conference from Hell, then we're well beyond fucked. We're being prepped for some kind of takeover.