Donald Trump

The Trump Tapes make the Watergate Tapes seem like Polyanna. It’s not like a 10x or a 100x — it’s like a 1000x Watergate.

Here is the full audio of the President of the United States essentially verbally abusing GA SecState Brad Raffensperger for over an hour on Saturday, January 2: Trump Tapes: phone call and transcript

There’s the usual chatter in legal, justice, and natsec communities about whether or not this constitutes a crime — the consensus seems to be strong that it does, but then again any smidgeon of wiggle room leaves me feeling a little bit queasy.

If this isn’t a crime; if this isn’t an impeachable offense — then nothing is. If a President can get away with this to keep tyrannical grip on power after losing an election quite resoundingly, then the republic is dead and all its ideals of self-governance with it.

New year, new Lost Cause: The Sedition Caucus

And yet… that’s not all. 11 additional Republican Senators have come forward to follow Josh Hawley’s lead in objecting to one or more states’ count of electors in the ceremonial Jan. 6 readout of the state certifications. The new Sedition Caucus is led by Texas lawyer and newfound facial hair enthusiast Ted Cruz, who is in danger of winning a Daytime Emmy for his crisis acting on the Fox News network.

Along with Senators Ron Johnson (R-WI), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), James Lankford (R-OK), Steve Daines (R-MT), John Kennedy (R-LA), Mike Braun (R-IN), and Senators-Elect Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), Roger Marshall (R-KS), Bill Hagerty (R-TN), and Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), Mr Cruz presented evidence that the people they told to believe the election was rigged then did in fact believe that the election was rigged, and for this reason required another dangerous — and admittedly symbolic! — delay in securing the sovereignty of the nation.

Essentially they are making an argument to keep this President’s fragrantly, steamingly, scathingly unethical, anti-democratic, and anti-conservative, institution-destroying behavior protected and reinstalled against the will of the people for another 4 years of “deal-making” just like this. They haven’t been silently seething at or embarrassed by Trump’s behavior this whole time. They’ve been licking it up — “finally, a guy who will really keep fighting forever!”

However, now The Sedition Gang have been caught flat-footed by the timing of the Raffensperger call breaking — even Tom Cotton has now changed his tune and come out against the coup (though not without getting a few digs in at the Democrats). That is going to start turning the momentum back the other way, with luck. Even Lindsey Graham is inching back from the ledge a bit. The Jan. 6 reception may be chillier than they think.

Hoping it’s all fuel for the blue trifecta in Georgia.

🤞🏾💃🏼

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Cult leader playbook:

1. Position himself (and the group — his extension) as the benevolent safe haven to turn to when afraid

2. Isolate the follower from other sources of safe haven

3. Arouse fear in the follower

Rinse; repeat.

Qualities of a Cult Leader

  • Narcissistic — highly self-absorbed, they demand excessive admiration and slavish devotion to their whims.
  • Charismatic — they have a way of grabbing attention, whether positive or negative.
  • Unpredictable — erratic behavior keeps enemies on their toes and fans “on edge” with desire to please Dear Leader.
  • Insatiable drive — it could be status, money, sex, power, or all of the above, but they feel they deserve it more than anyone else on the planet.
  • Lack of conscience — they have no shame and will demand things a decent human being would not.

Trump has all the cult leader qualities and follows the playbook to a tee — doing little else, in fact. He should be considered highly armed and dangerous. An emotionally unstable individual with access to the United States’ greatest powers and deepest secrets. A threat to American life and liberty. Dictator Don.

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In contrast to the cult of personality, the rule of law is a moral force. It’s an ethical tour de force that’s been hard-fought and won in democracies around the world beginning with the French Revolution. And it’s still going on today — everywhere citizens are struggling to achieve political power and equality.

When justice holds sway, there is a true objective arbiter and an ethical framework society can hang from. Imperfect though its actual execution by actual humans may be, the rule of law provides a fundamental basis for agreement on what is right, what is wrong, and how best we shall live in our societies.

The Right-wing and the rule of law

The right-wing faction once gave lip service to the rule of law — when they still had a monopoly over it. Now that they no longer do, the extreme right has abandoned it in favor of a venal power grab in the form of an essentially fascist idea: the Cult of Personality.

In Donald Trump and in authoritarian leaders around the world, the Cult of Personality reigns. These leaders go out of their way to flout the law. They repeatedly allege or assert that they are above it; that they are special. They allege that they’re so special as to be immune to application of the rule of law that applies to other citizens.

When the justice goes dark, trouble brews. When the cult of personality holds sway, entire societies become vulnerable to propaganda, disinformation, gaslighting, fakery, and lies of all kinds. Without a grasp of the truth — and mechanisms within the structure of society to champion it and root it out — societies cannot make informed decisions. They cannot effectively self-govern, and cannot wholly wield the political power a democracy is meant to endow them with. Without the rule of law, freedom is not just imperiled — freedom is dead.

It is most certainly a dark and stormy evening.

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More proof that narcissist Donald Trump is a narcissist:

It’s a hallmark of NPD to first dramatically underreact (“coronavirus is a Democratic hoax!”) and then suddenly dramatically overreact (threatening military-enforced quarantine of NYC). Donald Trump narcissist-in-chief is followed by fellow egomaniacs who see themselves in him — and see themselves getting away with murder no matter what they do. They’re the kings of word salad.

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Did Russia hack the 2016 US election? Most certainly. The FBI, CIA, and entire intelligence community is in agreement on this point. Russian information warfare has been infamous the world over for decades — with a recent flare up starting with the Brexit vote as an obvious canary in a larger coalmine, and extending to the proliferation of right-wing movements around the world: particularly in Eastern Europe on Putin’s doorstep.

The following list is an attempt to demystify the language surrounding Russian interference in the election of Donald Trump, and Vladimir Putin’s efforts to undermine the Western order — in retaliation for the fall of the Soviet Union which happened under his watch as a young KGB agent stationed in Dresden, Germany.

See also: the RussiaGate Bestiary which lists the individuals involved in the Russian 2016 election interference investigation of Trump campaign conspiracy and fraud. Please note: both of these resources are works in progress and are being updated frequently.

TermDefinition
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The FBI took the extraordinary step of initiating a counterintelligence investigation into the President of the United States, based according to the New York Times on the firing of James Comey and Trump‘s public actions surrounding that event, in which he linked the firing to the Russia investigation vociferously several times.

This is a historical first.

Hold on to your hats.

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Gather ’round, y’all — it’s the fight of our times…

How much decision-making should be privately made, vs. collectively? Arguably, decisions that affect most of us ought, in some way, to incorporate input from the public.

But as Elizabeth Warren 2020 (!!) notes — it’s getting harder and harder to do that, even as economic opportunities dry up and the wealthy capture more and more of the political class.

With Senate giants Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, and Bernie Sanders all exploring bids too, it’s shaping up to be a very interesting 2020 indeed. With so many all-star Democrats in this mix, it’s hard to imagine we won’t come out of this with an interesting campaign season — beginning approximately now, with Warren’s semi-official entry into the arena and owning the airwaves as Trump comes unhinged at “Pocahontas.”

She dressed him down easily, gracefully, and quickly — before moving on into substantive economic issues most Americans are going to want to hear a lot more about. Trump cannot speak this way about the economy, which means his ruse on the Hillbilly Elegies of the world is about to come to an abrupt end, with many of their rude awakening.

For some it will never dawn on them that the man of the golden toilets (and golden showers!) who inherited hundreds of millions of dollars from his New York real estate mogul father before bankrupting himself 4 times in the casino business, in point of fact can in no way understand their experience living in a motor home or ramshackle apartment complex in some run-down suburb in the rust belt. But many may finally see that he’s just been pretending, like all the other rich people who still rule their damn lives despite all the promises to “drain the swamp” of corruption.

Let’s hope.

Here’s to 2020! 🥂

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Without the doing of some thing brand inappropriate 
Something unmonetizable 
Unclickable 
Untraceable 
Untradeable   
| 
If i don't rend the cloth of this Culture Fit soon 
i will die 
Like the coral 
Like two-thirds of the wild 
Like the humans on the edge of a rising shoreline 
In a ceaseless world 
With iceless poles 
And icy proles   
| 
As the planet heats, 
Civilization chills; 
Swallowing our red or our blue pills; 
Interned into camps of grievers and shills 
| 
Grieve i do and for the West 
Our president the Bigly Best! 
We'll come and go at his behest 
Put down your Freedom of Info Requests 
Baby, you just ain't seen nothin' yet 
| 
Joe Walsh got his balls out, and his musket too 
The Lefties dream of Saskatoon 
We're all gonna get that Change real soon 
You'll see when fascism hits High Noon 
| 
We'll finish tearing ourselves apart 
In the streets and in the dark 
Can no longer recreate in this park 
Leslie Knope didn't fit the part 
| 
She had the mighty audacity 
To take purview over Benghazi 
Once Bush and Blair left Qaddafi 
Those GOP goons would never get off me 
| 
My God, all the emails 
The Chaffetz' anemic security details 
At least we're swaddled by all this retail 
Black Friday's never been so beyond the pale 
| 
Pale as a ghost 
White as a sheet 
Our New Balance host 
Circle jerks its meat 
| 
Of all the PUAs and all the Teas 
Even the most mundane of these 
See the female as a tease 
Hang the browns up in the trees 
We're all strange fruit upon our knees 
| 
Ain't no more reason to appease 
Already done killed off all them bees 
Turnt up the thermostat a few degrees 
TVs blaring back our postmodern sleaze 
| 
Found ourselves a favorite scapegoat 
And a good long length of real strong rope 
The corruption will be all excised 
By the 'tubes chock full of Russian spies 
This revolution will be televised 
As America just dies and dies
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The creator of the also excellent Century of the Self film series released his latest film in October, 2016. Dubbed HyperNormalisation, it offers both a history lesson of the complicated relationship between the West, the Middle East, and Russia, as well as an unflinching look at the roles played by technology, surveillance, and the media on our modern condition of general confusion, destabilization, and surrealism.

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Be careful of our barnacled, crusty cynicism and the cavalier rabbit hole it could lead us down — away from the longest-running success story in human rights.

Democracy works only if political leaders put the common good ahead of personal interest. There is zero evidence Trump would even be equipped to deliver on this, should the interest in it ever be made to enter his mind.

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