We’ve Got a Problem. A Big Problem.

[boutons_deux]

There are certain frameworks and situations in the law in which

it does not matter why something happened,

it simply matters that something has demonstrably happened, to establish the point, making the finding or act.

I have thought for some time that we face a similar situation with the man who currently holds the U.S. Presidency.

Over the course of 16+ months,

President Trump has acted consistently and with some success to destabilize and break up the western alliance (both its formal manifestation in NATO)

but also its less formal dimensions in trade and other partnerships.

He has also worked consistently on really every front to advance the interests of Russia.

Less obviously to many Americans, he’s been doing something similar in East Asia.

The U.S. alliance with Japan and South Korea, which in recent years we’ve taken steps to extend to other states on the periphery of the East Asian landmass (which is basically to say, China) is not simply to protect against North Korea. It is to build a series of security relationships with countries on that periphery to act as a counterweight to the regional (perhaps world) great power, China.

Allies in the region are closely watching President Trump’s apparent desire to remove U.S. troops from South Korea for that reason, among others.

The last twenty four hours of attacks on our closest allies capped by

President Trump’s seemingly out of the blue

demand to bring Russia back into the G-7 (making it again the G-8

which it was for most of the post-Cold War era

until Russia was expelled over the annexation of Crimea)

simply brings the matter into a newly sharp relief.

If candidate Trump and President Putin had made a corrupt bargain

which obligated President Trump to destabilize all U.S. security and trade alliances (especially NATO, which has been Russia’s primary strategic goal for 70 years) and advance the strategic interests of Russia,

there’s really nothing more remotely realistic he could have done to accomplish that than what he has in fact done.

Take a moment to let that sink in.

I need to take a moment to let it sink in.

It’s shocking to me.

It’s shocking to me what’s happening.

Now I said above “remotely realistic.”

A critic of what I wrote above might note that Trump could, in fact, have taken steps to abrogate the NATO treaty commitments.

He might have said publicly that the U.S. would not aid the Baltic states or Poland against a Russian invasion.

We can also note that he has approved very limited sale of weaponry to Ukraine, which is of course still battling Russian proxy forces in the eastern part of the country.

But the things he could have done but has not done really to me fall into the category of things that are unnecessary and probably still beyond what the President could remotely get away with.

Sanctions are an instructive example.

The administration did finally impose a limited version of the sanctions Congress authorized early in Trump’s presidency.

But on every sanctions front, it has been always absolutely as little as possible and always kicking and screaming.

He has also been surrounded by people like H.R. McMaster and many others of a similar outlook, who clearly aren’t friendly to the strategic interests of Russia. So Trump has been operating to a degree within the constraints of U.S. public opinion and the heavy remonstrations of his top advisors. And yet …

at every opportunity, he did everything he could realistically do to advance that agenda.
Back to the main point.

We have a President who clearly got a great deal of assistance from Russia in getting elected.

We can argue about how important it was to his victory. But the reality of the help is not in any real dispute.

His campaign at a minimum had numerous highly suspicious contacts with people

either in the Russian government or

acting on behalf of the Russian government while that was happening.

That is a very generous interpretation.

He’s doing all the stuff he’d have been asked to do if such a corrupt bargain had been made.

At a certain point – and I’d say we’re clearly at or past that point – it really doesn’t matter whether we can prove such a bargain was made.

I’m not even sure it matters whether it was explicit or even happened. The bank robber helped the teller get the job and now the teller just won’t seem to lock the safe or even turn on the alarm. We can debate forever whether the teller is just absent-minded or has some odd philosophical aversion toward locks.

The debate may be unresolvable. It truly doesn’t matter.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/weve-got-a-problem-a-big-problem

Hey, Trash fellators,

all y'all's PVL illegit so-called Pres is

IN FUCKING FACT

a Pootin, pro-Russian conspirator, a fucking traitor to the USA

And I bet Mueller can and will prove it.

[ducks]

Lol trump has been harder on Russia then any president

[ducks]

Mueller can not prove shit on trump all this talk is making trump more popular

[Isitjustme?]

Lol trump has been harder on Russia then any presidentJFK threatened them with a nuclear holocaust

[boutons_deux]

Trump Has Access to Everything A Dictator Could Want

He is consolidating power based on deceit at an alarming rate, and getting more popular as he goes.

Here’s what I learned during my brief sabbatical last week: if you ignore it, it only gets worse.

The president*, installed at least in part by ratfckers in the employ of a former KGB thug now running a murderous kleptocracy, has at his easy disposal everything a dictator could possibly want.

He has combined an instinctive contempt for democratic government with a swindler’s nose for easy cash and a junkie knifepoint robber’s reckless disregard for consequences.

He has a tight, loyal cabal of flunkies who’d be chasing ambulances if it weren’t for their talents as sycophants.

He has a largely impotent political opposition and a largely supine congressional majority.

He is one vote away from a rubber-stamp Supreme Court.



He is succeeding in his campaign to delegitimize any criminal investigation of his various schemes;

he’s managed to put Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III on the right side of things.

Hostile press, he can easily ignore.

He is consolidating power based on deceit at an alarming rate, and,

worst of all, he is becoming more popular for doing so among the only voters that matter to him.

According to the good folks at Gallup (https://www.axios.com/trumps-500-day-coup-of-the-gop-conservatism-5f1f129d-22c3-4f53-b9f1-d957eb1ef05c.html), the president*’s approval rating among Republicans is the highest of any Republican president since World War II at this point in his administration* with the exception of where George W. Bush was at immediately after the attacks of 9/11.

He stands at 87 percent approval among Republicans.

(Administration remoras already are fudging this data to imply that the president* is the most popular president at 500 days since World War II. A considerable number of people probably believe that by now.)

I know I occasionally am criticized for being harder on the NeverTrump Republicans than I should be—any port and all that—but

many of them played prominent roles over the past four decades in fashioning a political party 87 percent of which approve of the slow-rolling catastrophe that is only now really picking up speed.

It is entirely possible that the momentum now is unstoppable.

The country is hurtling toward the destruction of its most basic ideas about itself, and some of these people played a leading role in constructing the handbasket. There has to be an accounting for that, somehow.

The prion disease began

when the party ate the monkeybrains provided by Ronald Reagan,

who served up crackpot economics leavened

with a cynical alliance with splinter American Protestantism.

It has gathered strength within the party, its symptoms becoming more and more obvious year after year.

Iran-Contra.

Willie Horton.

Atwater.

Rove.

Falwell.

Graham.

Luntz.

Bauer.

Gingrich.

The Impeachment Kabuki.

Florida.

The lies undermining the Iraq War.

Gay-baiting in the 2004 elections.

The U.S. Attorneys scandal.

Phony charges of voter fraud.

The barbaric use of Terri Schiavo for political gain.

The unprecedented obstruction, based in overt racism, of Barack Obama.

The tolerance of
Louie Gohmert,
Steve King,
Blake Fahrenhold, and
Michele Bachmann.

The endless flogging of the events at Benghazi.

And, finally, confronted with genuine, uncut, unfiltered, un-consulted authoritarianism,

these people affect surprise that their party was ready for this president* or someone like him?

Or that their party was helpless to stop him, or to confront him once in office?

The Republican party abandoned its political innocence long ago. It’s only now just noticing.

As for the Democrats, they proved completely unable to accomplish the fundamental democratic duty of an opposition party:

to crush the cruelty and lunacy of the Republicans at the polls until the Republicans regained their sanity.

Over that same span of time, we saw too many powerful Democrats wasting time and money and political credibility wooing

people so far gone with the prion disease that they no longer recognized the reality of their own lives,

let alone the fact that those people were complicit in the destruction thereof.

People voted against their own interest because, for too long, there was nobody capable of explaining that they were doing that.

And, finally, confronted with genuine, uncut, unfiltered, un-consulted authoritarianism,

Democrats affect surprise that the country isn’t more outraged than it is? The Democratic Party surrendered its innocence long ago. It’s only now just noticing.

Now,

the president*’s legal team is being quite plain that it believes he literally is a law unto himself (https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a21068275/trump-above-the-law-authoritarian/).

First, a memo to that effect gets leaked (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/02/us/politics/trump-lawyers-memo-mueller-subpoena.html) stating that proposition quite openly.

Then, Rudolph Giuliani, legal rodeo clown, is dispatched to the media to make that case in his own, inimitable drunk-uncle fashion. (https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/03/politics/rudy-giuliani-trump-shoot-comey-impeachment/index.html)

This was so obvious that even the largely anesthetized elite political class began to howl.

It was followed by a Monday Tweetstorm that pretty much quintupled down:

Not that anyone actually is doing anything about it.

Speaker Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin, is cruising into comfortable retirement.

The rest of the party looks at that 87 percent approval rating among the zombified, afflicted masses and hides behind the drapes.

And the elite political media wavers between wringing their hands and marveling at the magnitude of the disaster.

Case in point:

Axios (https://www.axios.com/trumps-500-day-coup-of-the-gop-conservatism-5f1f129d-22c3-4f53-b9f1-d957eb1ef05c.html), the website aimed at those people who miss the empty starfcking, historical illiteracy, and moral vacuity of the original Politico:

In 500 days, Trump’s hijacking of the formerly conservative GOP is complete — an astonishing accomplishment.

The majority party in America is fully defined

by his policies,

his popularity with the base,

his facts-be-damned mentality,

his ability to control and quiet virtually all Republican elected officials.


This is all my bollocks.

This administration* is the obvious culmination of 40 years of conservative Republican politics.

A crude culmination, truly, but if you can’t see the through-line from

Reagan’s assertion in November of 1986 that he had not “traded arms for hostages,”

through the blizzard of untruth behind the push to invade Iraq,

to this president*'s casual disregard of even a head-fake toward the truth,

it’s because you’re not looking for it.

Worse than that is the tone of the piece. It reminds me of this passage (https://web.archive.org/web/20140904084107/http:/www.wsmr.army.mil/PAO/Trinity/Pages/RalphSmithseyewitnessaccountoftheTrinitytriptowatc hblast.aspx) from long ago:

I dropped the glass from my left eye almost immediately and watched the light climb upward.

The light intensity fell rapidly, hence did not blind my left eye but it was still amazingly bright.

It turned yellow, then red, and then beautiful purple (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionized_air_glow).

At first it had a translucent character, but shortly turned to a tinted or colored white smoke appearance.


That was a scientist named Ralph Carlisle Smith. He was describing the first atomic explosion in the history of the world.

Look at all the pretty colors!

God, it’s good to be back.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/06/05/trump-has-access-everything-dictator-could-want?utm_term=Trump%20Has%20Access%20to%20Everythi ng%20A%20Dictator%20Could%20Want&utm_campaign=What%20Happens%20When%20People%20Who% 20Hate%20You%20Run%20the%20Country%20%28and%20the% 20World%29%20%20%7C%20Your%20Week%20in%20Review&utm_content=email&utm_source=Weekly%20Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&cm_mmc=Act-On%20Software-_-email-_-What%20Happens%20When%20People%20Who%20Hate%20You% 20Run%20the%20Country%20%28and%20the%20World%29%20 %20%7C%20Your%20Week%20in%20Review-_-Trump%20Has%20Access%20to%20Everything%20A%20Dicta tor%20Could%20Want

iow, and in short, America and Americans of the lower 4 quintiles are fucked and unfuckable, as is the AGW planet.

Why are the Repugs so fucking fucked up?

They are paid to be so by the oligarchy, the REAL VILLAINS

[Blake]

Lol trump has been harder on Russia then any president

:lol

[ducks]

JFK threatened them with a nuclear holocaust

Lol threat trump action

[benefactor]

Boutons, get out and get some sunshine bro. Maybe take some of that trust fund money and head to the beach for a week.

[Chris]

"Yeah breh get out there and toss back a few IPA's and get woke"

[Chucho]

LOL, what a shit article. Written for bat shit crazy Alt Leftists like OP.

[dabom]

Orange shot is a puppet. :lol

[koriwhat]

damn i wish boutons would stop posting every damn stupid article he refuses to read himself.

all your shit comes from the farthest reaching of the far left. it's like you're trying to brainwash us all into your sick fucking cult of losers.

[boutons_deux]

Why We’re Repeating the Great Mistakes of History, Step by Step

Why This is an Age of Tragedy, Dystopia, and Rage

https://scontent-dfw5-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t31.0-8/p843x403/20988844_10155225817744652_7901494789769700701_o.j pg?_nc_cat=0&oh=0a267a88c65d744e68d0fad7ec271b58&oe=5BB2EF2A


"stuck, you and I, in an age that’s hell-bent, dead-set on repeating on the mistakes of the past. The Greeks might have smiled, and called that tragedy.

But not just any mistakes.

The biggest and ugliest ones.

The ones the world made in the fatal decade that saw stagnation, depression, and disintegration lead to war, atrocity, and holocaust.

Yet even that understates it.

We’re not just remaking the great mistakes of the 1930s.

We seem relentlessly, unwaveringly, unfalteringly committed, strenuously devoted to repeating them.

Lovingly attached to and reverently admiring of them.

We’re stuck in an age that has come to somehow believe, like an imbecile, that the mistakes of the past are somehow its greatest glories and triumphs."

https://eand.co/the-age-of-tragedy-6b30fcf7ed1e (https://eand.co/the-age-of-tragedy-6b30fcf7ed1e)

[boutons_deux]

The Plot Against America

If President Trump devised

a plan to break up the Western alliance and advance the strategic interests of Russia,

the plan would look pretty much like what we’re watching unfold in front of us.

Why he’s doing this doesn’t really matter.

That he’s doing is the only thing that matters. And he is doing it.

Look at how Trump treats the people who work for him.

Almost without exception he treats them like crap.

Michael Cohen is the archetypal example:

total and extreme subservience which is repaid with a litany of slights and insults and indignities.

But we see it with basically everyone in Trump’s orbit:

insulting behavior,

outbursts to let them know who’s boss.

To work for Donald Trump is to surrender dignity.

We’ve all marveled at how freely people seem to make this bargain.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-plot-against-america?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+tpm-news+%28TPMNews%29

[boutons_deux]

Trump Tries to Destroy the West

The alliance between the United States and Western Europe has accomplished great things.

President Trump is trying to destroy that alliance.

If a president of the United States were to sketch out a secret, detailed plan to break up the Atlantic alliance, that plan would bear a striking resemblance to Trump’s behavior.

It would involve outward hostility to the leaders of Canada, Britain, France, Germany and Japan. Specifically,

it would involve picking fights over artificial issues —

not to win big concessions for the United States,

but to create conflict for the sake of it.

a United States intent on wrecking the Atlantic alliance would meddle in the domestic politics of other countries to install new governments that also rejected the old alliance.

Check. Check. Check. Check. Trump is doing every one of these things.

The meeting’s central disagreements were over tariffs that Trump has imposed for false reasons (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/09/opinion/debacle-in-quebec.html).

He claims that he’s merely responding to other countries.

But the average current tariff of the United States, Britain, Germany and France is identical,

according to the World Bank (https://twitter.com/JustinWolfers/status/1005477243437580288):

1.6 percent.

So Trump isn’t telling the truth about trade,

much as he has lied (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/14/opinion/sunday/trump-lies-obama-who-is-worse.html)

about Barack Obama’s birthplace,

his own position on the Iraq War,

his inauguration crowd,

voter fraud,

the murder rate,

Mexican immigrants,

the Russia investigation,

the Stormy Daniels hush money and

several hundred other subjects (http://projects.thestar.com/donald-trump-fact-check/).

He is threatening the Atlantic alliance over a lie.

While Trudeau and other historical allies get disdain,

Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un and various aspiring authoritarians are bathed in praise.

Trump and his aides have promoted far-right politicians in Germany and elsewhere.

In Quebec, he made excuses for Russia’s annexation of Crimea and

argued that Russia should be readmitted to the G-7

the only explanation for all of Trump’s behavior: He wants to destroy the Western alliance.

his behavior requires a response that’s as serious as the threat.

“The Western alliance and the global trading system are coming under the same intense strain that Trump has created for our domestic institutions.”

For American voters, it means understanding the real stakes of this year’s midterm elections.

They are not merely a referendum on a tax cut, a health care plan or a president’s unorthodox style.

They are a referendum on American ideals that are older than any of us.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/10/opinion/g7-trump-quebec-trudeau.html?action=click&module=Ribbon&pgtype=Article

[RandomGuy]

Lol trump has been harder on Russia then any president

How so? When he thanked Putin for kicking our staff out of the country?

Be specific, parrots.

[AaronY]

https://scontent-dfw5-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t31.0-8/p843x403/20988844_10155225817744652_7901494789769700701_o.j pg?_nc_cat=0&oh=0a267a88c65d744e68d0fad7ec271b58&oe=5BB2EF2A




He's literally Hitler!

[Brazil]

Lol trump has been harder on Russia then any president

what

:lmao