Random Politics & Religion #22

I find that offensive as a people !

This entire thread is a passive aggressive victim complex. Not just a few users...

This entire thread is a passive aggressive victim complex. Not just a few users...

Wait, that's your shtick!

Protip: I already did. Who's playing the "passive aggressive victim complex" card again?

I don't know....pleebo didn't quote anybody....

I have a guess for paranoid persecutory delusion complex now though... >.>

The river of facts I don't like continues to run unabated.

It’s not even 100 days into the Trump presidency, and already the man is finished. Unprecedented turmoil and mayhem. Chronic infighting. Can’t get anything done. Even Republicans in Congress are turning on him.

Then, suddenly, lob a bunch of missiles into Syria, and the guy is Abraham Lincoln.

Nothing like a little warmongering to get all the establishment toadies on both sides of the aisle around here excited. And, by the way, has anyone noticed that old Honest Abe was a bit of a white nationalist too?

I mean, both he and Donald Trump were white. And they are both nationalists. In fact, Lincoln invented the whole “America First” platform that Mr. Trump ran on.

“A house divided against itself cannot stand” is about as “America First” as you can get. Then going to all-out war to make sure the nation “will cease to be divided” is belligerently “America First.”

And now that Mr. Trump has gotten a little into the war game, he’s smelling more and more like Lincoln every day!

So much for all the facts I don't like about Mr. Trump’s doomed presidency.
Remember Bleeding Kansas? Mr. Trump’s popularity was so far down the throat of the toilet that even in fiery-red Kansas, voters were turning Democrat.

It wasn’t so much that Democrats were going to gain one seat in their 44-seat deficit in the House. It was what the stunning upset was going to mean about Mr. Trump’s current popularity and for midterm races next year.

Not only would Mr. Trump be limping along, he would be all alone as Democrats would ride into power on a wave of historic anti-Trump rage among voters.

Just look at Kansas’ 4th District. Endless stories revealed that Democrat Jim Thompson would beat Republican Ron Estes.

SPOILER ALERT: Republican Ron Estes wins.

Despite a healthy 7-point margin, The New York Times declared Mr. Estes “Survives Tight House Race.”

Largely unmentioned is that Mr. Estes was actually dragged down by an unpopular Republican governor — not Mr. Trump — and that special elections always bring out the crazies.

On top of that, Kansas Democrats did their best to trick voters by running a candidate who, well, ran as a Republican. Mr. Thompson is an Army veteran who, until last year, was a registered Republican.
For America’s next great rebuke of Mr. Trump and the party he owns, please now turn to Georgia, another fiery-red Republican state about to be infested by a wave of Democratic voting.

In Georgia’s 6th District, Democrat Jon Ossoff is the latest canary in the coal mine to prove the certain demise of Mr. Trump. Anti-Trump sentiments are so far off the charts there that Mr. Ossoff (who cohabitates with a woman not his wife in a home not in his district) will somehow lock up a majority of the vote and win the seat without facing a runoff.

The only reason we are even talking about this prospect is that there are a dozen Republicans splitting the vote against Mr. Ossoff. Everyone agrees that in a runoff, the Democrat would be doomed. And, anyway, even if he were to pull off an upset, he would go down as a very short-lived congressman — surely booted in the midterms next year.

But just read the papers: The intensity of anti-Trump sentiment in this reliably Republican district is palpable. So intense, in fact, is this anti-Trump sentiment that when Mr. Trump was actually on the ballot in Georgia’s 6th District last year, he won.

See, that’s the great thing about facts I don't like: Not only does it not have to be news, it can be entirely made up. And, like all the best children’s games, facts I don't like can report what is the precise opposite of what is true.

It’s going to be a long eight years for these people.

This entire thread is a passive aggressive victim complex. Not just a few users...

Now, when is he going to be impeached again?

Looks like Bill O'Reilly has been fired from Fox News for not being able to keep it in his pants. Trump has already backed him in the scandal, maybe he will give him a cushy job in the WH. Sexual predators have to stick together after all.

I haven't kept up with the oreily saga. Is here actual evidence or just another he said she said back and forth.

Is a feminist lawyer involved?

I haven't kept up with the oreily saga. Is here actual evidence or just another he said she said back and forth.

Is a feminist lawyer involved?

Indeed. If you settle out of court, it usually means you actually did what you're being accused of, especially where sexual harassment and racial bigotry are concerned. If you were innocent, you would've fought the charges in court.

.... Sexual predators have to stick together after all.

This does not happen when the coin flips to the other side.

If you’re one of the millions of Americans who get their news from thrice-divorced supplement salesmen on right-wing radio, then you’re probably aware that Susan Rice wiretapped Donald Trump’s phone in a nefarious plot to steal the 2016 election for serial murderer (and/or Muslim Brotherhood sleeper agent) Hillary Clinton.

If you’re one of the dozens of Americans who get their news from The Wall Street Journal editorial page, then you’re probably aware that Trump transition officials had their communications intercepted when they communicated with foreign agents who were under the surveillance of the U.S. spy state. And you know that this was perfectly legal — but, you also know that when private citizens are incidentally surveilled in this fashion, their names are masked to protect their privacy. And yet, Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice asked to unmask the name of at least one member of the Trump team — and personally reviewed other intelligence summaries that “technically masked Trump official identities” but “were written in such a way as to make obvious who those officials were.” And you know that this is all “highly unusual—and troubling,” and an abuse of the Executive’s surveillance powers that exposes the hypocrisy of the Democratic Party’s self-styled civil libertarians.

If you are one of the handful of House members who’ve seen the actual intelligence documents on which this whole hullabaloo is based, you’re aware that both those narratives are *** — and that the real story goes something like this:


One Saturday morning last month, our Fox News grandpa-in-chief woke up, misread a Breitbart article, and announced that the former president had wiretapped his phone. Unable to admit that he had baselessly defamed his predecessor, President Trump ordered his staff to validate his paranoid delusion. Weeks later, James Comey announced that the FBI was looking into ties between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. The White House decided it could change the subject — and prove that the president had never been wrong on the internet — by feeding a story about incidental surveillance and improper “unmasking” to Devin Nunes, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee and head of the lower chamber’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

But the intelligence reports that the administration fed to Nunes, which he dutifully represented as scandalous, expose nothing but the competence of America’s intelligence community. And Susan Rice’s requests to unmask certain names in those documents were neither unusual nor inappropriate.

Or so those of us who get our news from CNN and The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza now understand. Last week, the cable network reported that Republican and Democratic House members who examined Nunes’s documents “found no evidence that Obama administration officials did anything unusual or illegal.” This week, anonymous intelligence sources briefed Lizza on the details of those innocuous documents — and on the nefarious process that turned them into front-page news:

What the intercepts all had in common is that the people being spied on made references to Donald Trump or to Trump officials. That wasn’t even clear, though, from reading the transcripts. The names of any Americans were concealed, or “masked,” the intelligence community’s term for redacting references to Americans who are not the legal targets of surveillance when such intelligence reports are distributed to policy makers.

… I spoke to two intelligence sources, one who read the entire binder of intercepts and one who was briefed on their contents. “There’s absolutely nothing there,” one source said. The Trump names remain masked in the documents, and Rice would not have been able to know in all cases that she was asking the N.S.A. to unmask the names of Trump officials.

… The intelligence source told me that he knows, “from talking to people in the intelligence community,” that “the White House said, ‘We are going to mobilize to find something to justify the President’s tweet that he was being surveilled.’ They put out an all-points bulletin”—a call to sift through intelligence reports—“and said, ‘We need to find something that justifies the President’s crazy tweet about surveillance at Trump Tower.’ And I’m telling you there is no way you get that from those transcripts, which are about as plain vanilla as can be.” (The White House did not respond to a request for comment.)
To review: The (non-tin-foil hat-wearing) conservative narrative about all this is that Susan Rice legally — but inappropriately — requested to unmask the names of Trump transition officials who were legally surveilled, for no other reason than to satiate her “political curiosity” about the incoming administration. And, somehow, this distasteful exercise of legitimate authority deserves equal billing with an FBI investigation into collusion between a foreign power and the American president’s 2016 campaign.

If Lizza’s reporting is true, then the actual story is:

(1) Trump transition officials didn’t have their communications intercepted, but were merely discussed by foreign agents under surveillance.

(2) Their names remained masked in the intelligence reports presented to committee members.

(3) Rice requested to unmask some of the names without knowing that the individuals in question were affiliated with Trump.

(4) The White House leaked, and misrepresented, classified intelligence material to validate the president’s tweet.

(5) The Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee know this.

And yet:

Last week, Democrats and Republicans finalized their witness lists, and the names tell a tale of two separate investigations. The intelligence source said, “The Democratic list involves all of the characters that you would think it would: Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Carter Page,” speaking of the three Trump campaign officials who have been most closely tied to the Russia investigation. “The Republican list is almost entirely people from the Obama Administration.”

The fake scandal created by Trump and Nunes is not over yet. The first name on the Republican list is Susan Rice.
The show must go on. There are bad headlines to distract from, and supplements to sell.

Nausi, admit it: You're a moron.

I imagine the threshold of evidence in the opinion of a high-profile media conglomerate isn't too high.