President Trump & the USA

[Merging Cultures]

I do think that Al Green blew his load a bit too early.

 

They should have let Comey testify first, and probably waited another month for some details from the special investigation and for more leaks.

 

But I am sure he will be impeached and tried.

 

 

[Vacamion]

 

It's really easy to get caught up in the excrement hurricane that has been his presidency so far.  Every night, dependent on which report you read, he's a manchild, illiterate, moody, corrupt, a mole, an enemy plant, incompetent, lazy, entitled or all of the above.

 

If my Twitter timeline is to be believed, it's going to be a short presidency.

 

However, part of me wonders whether all these stories are just a liberal media circle jerk and it will all come to nothing and he'll still be in office in 2020.

 

My Trump-supporting mate in the USA says it's just liberals, who were never going to accept his election anyway, just desperately trying find ways to thwart "the will of the people" and it will all come to nothing, ie there will be hearings and embarrassing revelations, like there were with Bill Clinton, but Trump won't be impeached.

 

 

[DJ Barry Hammond]

 

Trump is nothing compared with what's going on in Brazil! 

[Detroit Blues]

4 hours ago, Vacamion said:

 

It's really easy to get caught up in the excrement hurricane that has been his presidency so far.  Every night, dependent on which report you read, he's a manchild, illiterate, moody, corrupt, a mole, an enemy plant, incompetent, lazy, entitled or all of the above.

 

If my Twitter timeline is to be believed, it's going to be a short presidency.

 

However, part of me wonders whether all these stories are just a liberal media circle jerk and it will all come to nothing and he'll still be in office in 2020.

 

My Trump-supporting mate in the USA says it's just liberals, who were never going to accept his election anyway, just desperately trying find ways to thwart "the will of the people" and it will all come to nothing, ie there will be hearings and embarrassing revelations, like there were with Bill Clinton, but Trump won't be impeached.

 

 

 

Bill Clinton was impeached though. There's just a difference between getting impeached, and being found guilty by the senate (and then removed from office). Right now, with a republican controlled congress, it's going to take some damning evidence to break party lines and get the majority required in the house of representatives to impeach Trump, but I wouldn't bet against it. They just named Robert Mueller, the former FBI Director to lead the Russia investigation. Firing Comley is going to come back to haunt Trump. 

[Vacamion]

1 hour ago, Detroit Blues said:

 

Bill Clinton was impeached though. There's just a difference between getting impeached, and being found guilty by the senate (and then removed from office). Right now, with a republican controlled congress, it's going to take some damning evidence to break party lines and get the majority required in the house of representatives to impeach Trump, but I wouldn't bet against it. They just named Robert Mueller, the former FBI Director to lead the Russia investigation. Firing Comley is going to come back to haunt Trump. 

 

 

Sorry DB, I meant *successfully* impeached, a la Nixon.

 

[Merging Cultures]

It will happen. 

 

The Repubs thought that he'd be useful as he'd blindly just do their bidding and sign a billion EOs. But now he is a huge liability, and they will not be able to move policy through. They will want to move him out quickly, restore their own credibility and get back to trying to push their agenda through. Remember, removing him from office doesn't mean a new election. It just means the Presidency passes down the chain of command. Which means that the Republicans will still hold Congress and the Presidency. And it will give them time to rebuild for 2018 elections, and plenty of time for damage control for 2020. The longer they wait, the tougher that will be.

[leicsmac]

25 minutes ago, Vacamion said:

 

 

Sorry DB, I meant *successfully* impeached, a la Nixon.

 

As it happens, Nixon was never impeached - was pretty clearly going to happen, but he bailed out before the plane hit the ground.

 

There's never been a successful impeachment (the House impeaching and the Senate then reaching a two thirds majority to make it successful) of a sitting president, now that I've read about it.

Edited 18 May 2017 by leicsmac

[Merging Cultures]

3 minutes ago, leicsmac said:

As it happens, Nixon was never impeached - was pretty clearly going to happen, but he bailed out before the plane hit the ground.

 

There's never been a successful impeachment (the House impeaching and the Senate then reaching a two thirds majority to make it successful) of a sitting president, now that I've read about it.

Correct, Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton were impeached by the House of Reps and acquitted by the Senate.

 

If they do start the impeachment process (I think they will!), Trump most likely will fain illness and resign, if he doesn't I think there are too many scandals and flipping alleged collusion and treason with Russia, that's a lot bigger than lying under oath a la Clinton, if proven.

 

 

[leicsmac]

28 minutes ago, Merging Cultures said:

Correct, Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton were impeached by the House of Reps and acquitted by the Senate.

 

If they do start the impeachment process (I think they will!), Trump most likely will fain illness and resign, if he doesn't I think there are too many scandals and flipping alleged collusion and treason with Russia, that's a lot bigger than lying under oath a la Clinton, if proven.

 

 

I'm with you on this. If things even look like they're going to reach critical mass, he'll take the Nixon route - bail out and get the inevitable pardon from Pence.

[DJ Barry Hammond]

1 hour ago, leicsmac said:

I'm with you on this. If things even look like they're going to reach critical mass, he'll take the Nixon route - bail out and get the inevitable pardon from Pence.

I'm not so sure... I don't see it in him to admit defeat.

 

Plus as we all saw in 24, even when a president is guilty of major criminality, they only get put under house arrest and even then swan about in relevative freedom in later series, so there's not much to be scared about.

 

(yes I have just referenced the TV series 24)

[leicsmac]

16 minutes ago, DJ Barry Hammond said:

I'm not so sure... I don't see it in him to admit defeat.

 

Plus as we all saw in 24, even when a president is guilty of major criminality, they only get put under house arrest and even then swan about in relevative freedom in later series, so there's not much to be scared about.

 

(yes I have just referenced the TV series 24)

 

Regarding your first sentence...that's entirely possible, though purely in the interests of self preservation I think that if he knew, REALLY knew, that impeachment was inevitable and with dire criminal consequences to follow, that he'd take the path of least resistance.

[kushiro]

This is one of the best things I've read in ages - from Rolling Stone about the death of Fox News founder Roger Ailes:

 

On the Internet today you will find thousands, perhaps even millions, of people gloating about the death of elephantine Fox News founder Roger Ailes. The happy face emojis are getting a workout on Twitter, which is also bursting with biting one-liners.  When I mentioned to one of my relatives that I was writing about the death of Ailes, the response was, "Say that you hope he's reborn as a woman in Saudi Arabia." Ailes has no one but his fast-stiffening self to blame for this treatment. He is on the short list of people most responsible for modern America's vicious and bloodthirsty character.

 

We are a hate-filled, paranoid, untrusting, book-dumb and bilious people whose chief source of recreation is slinging insults and threats at each other online, and we're that way in large part because of the hyper-divisive media environment Roger Ailes discovered. He was the Christopher Columbus of hate. When the former daytime TV executive and political strategist looked across the American continent, he saw money laying around in giant piles. He knew all that was needed to pick it up was a) the total abandonment of any sense of decency or civic duty in the news business, and b) the factory-like production of news stories that spoke to Americans' worst fantasies about each other.

 

Like many con artists, he reflexively targeted the elderly – "I created a TV network for people from 55 to dead," he told Joan Walsh – where he saw billions could be made mining terrifying storylines about the collapse of the simpler America such viewers remembered, correctly or (more often) incorrectly, from their childhoods

 

In this sense, his Fox News broadcasts were just extended versions of the old "ring around the collar" ad – scare stories about contagion. Wisk was pitched as the cure for sweat stains creeping onto your crisp white collar; Fox was sold as the cure for atheists, feminists, terrorists and minorities crawling over your white picket fence. Ailes launched Fox in 1996 with a confused, often amateurish slate of dumb programs cranked out by cut-rate and often very young staffers. The channel was initially most famous for its overt shallowness ("More News in Less Time" was one of its early slogans) and its Monty Python-style bloopers. But the main formula was always the political scare story, and Fox quickly learned to mix traditional sensationalist tropes like tabloid crime reporting with demonization of liberal villains like the Clintons. Hillary Clinton in particular was a godsend for Fox. The first lady's mocking comments about refusing to stay home and bake cookies – to say nothing of the "I'm not sitting here, some little woman, saying 'Stand By Her Man' like Tammy Wynette" quote – were daggers to the hearts of graying middle Americans everywhere. What's the matter, Ailes' audiences wondered, with Tammy Wynette?

 

So they tuned into Fox, which made ripping Hillary and other such overeducated, cosmopolitan, family-values-hating Satans a core part of its programming.

But invective, like drugs or tobacco or any other addictive property, is a product of diminishing returns. You have to continually up the ante to get people coming back. So Ailes and Fox over the years graduated from simply hammering Democratic politicians to making increasingly outlandish claims about an ever-expanding list of enemies. Soon the villains weren't just in Washington, but under every rock, behind every corner. Immigrants were spilling over the borders. Grades were being denuded in schools by liberal teachers. Marriage was being expanded to gays today, perhaps animals tomorrow. ACORN was secretly rigging vote totals.

 

Hollywood, a lost paradise Middle America remembered as a place where smooth-talking guys and gals smoked cigarettes, gazed into each others' eyes and glorified small-town life and the military, now became a sandbox for over-opinionated brats like Sean Penn, Matt Damon and Brangelina who used their fame to pal around with socialist dictators and lecture churchy old folks about their ignorance. The Fox response was to hire an endless succession of blow-dried, shrieking dingbats like Laura Ingraham, author of Shut Up and Sing, who filled the daytime hours with rants about every conceivable cultural change being the product of an ongoing anti-American conspiracy. Ingraham even derided muffin tops as evidence of America's decaying values.

 

Ailes picked at all these scabs, and then when he ran out of real storylines to mine he invented some that didn't even exist. His Fox was instrumental in helping Donald Trump push the birther phenomenon into being, and elevated the practically nonexistent New Black Panthers to ISIS status, warning Republicans that these would-be multitudinous urban troublemakers were planning on bringing guns to the GOP convention. The presidency of Donald Trump wouldn't have been possible had not Ailes raised a generation of viewers on these paranoid storylines. But the damage Ailes did wasn't limited to hardening and radicalizing conservative audiences.

 

Ailes grew out of the entertainment world – his first experience was in daytime variety TV via The Mike Douglas Show – but he later advised a series of Republican campaigns, from Ronald Reagan to George H.W. Bush to Trump. So when he created Fox, he merged his expertise from those two worlds, mixing entertainment and political stagecraft. The effect was to politicize the media, a characteristic of banana republics everywhere. When Ailes decided to cordon off Republican audiences and craft news programming targeted specifically to them, he began the process of atomizing the entire media landscape into political fiefdoms – Fox for the right, MSNBC for the left, etc

 

Ailes trained Americans to shop for the news as a commodity. Not just on the right but across the political spectrum now, Americans have learned to view the news as a consumer product. What most of us are buying when we tune in to this or that channel or read this or that newspaper is a reassuring take on the changes in the world that most frighten us. We buy the version of the world that pleases us and live in little bubbles where we get to nurse resentments all day long and no one ever tells us we're wrong about anything. Ailes invented those bubbles.

 

Moreover, Ailes built a financial empire waving images of the Clintons and the Obamas in front of scared conservatives. It's no surprise that a range of media companies are now raking in fortunes waving images of Donald Trump in front of terrified Democrats. It's not that Trump isn't or shouldn't be frightening. But it's conspicuous that our media landscape is now a perfect Ailes-ian dystopia, cleaved into camps of captive audiences geeked up on terror and disgust. The more scared and hate-filled we are, the more advertising dollars come pouring in, on both sides.

 

Trump in many ways was a perfect Ailes product, merging as he did the properties of entertainment and news in a sociopathic programming package that, as CBS chief Les Moonves pointed out, was terrible for the country, but great for the bottom line. And when Ailes died this morning, he left behind an America perfectly in his image, frightened out of its mind and pouring its money hand over fist into television companies, who are gleefully selling the unraveling of our political system as an entertainment product. The extent to which we hate and fear each other now – that's not any one person's fault. But no one person was more at fault than Roger Ailes. He never had a soul to sell, so he sold ours. It may take 50 years or a century for us to recover. Even dictators rarely have that kind of impact. Enjoy the next life, you monster.

 

 

 

 

 

[leicsmac]

That is utterly spot on.

[fuchsntf]

On Thursday, May 18, 2017 at 15:19, Merging Cultures said:

Correct, Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton were impeached by the House of Reps and acquitted by the Senate.

 

If they do start the impeachment process (I think they will!), Trump most likely will fain illness and resign, if he doesn't I think there are too many scandals and flipping alleged collusion and treason with Russia, that's a lot bigger than lying under oath a la Clinton, if proven.

 

 

Depends how..Trump himself sees it. If he wants to give it a fight..He aint a type to runaway from, media-liberal driven accusationd..And its exactly this group he wants to target....

Far too many Assumptions...

In fact so far the accusations....seem just that, with a "So What" address card attached..

[leicsmac]

8 minutes ago, fuchsntf said:

Depends how..Trump himself sees it. If he wants to give it a fight..He aint a type to runaway from, media-liberal driven accusationd..And its exactly this group he wants to target....

Far too many Assumptions...

In fact so far the accusations....seem just that, with a "So What" address card attached..

He strikes me as the kind of guy who only would start a critical fight like that unless he was sure he would win.

 

If it looks like that isn't the case, I'm not sure that he'll want to carry things through, not when there's a lesser risk way out. Self preservation, again.

[fuchsntf]

20 minutes ago, leicsmac said:

He strikes me as the kind of guy who only would start a critical fight like that unless he was sure he would win.

 

If it looks like that isn't the case, I'm not sure that he'll want to carry things through, not when there's a lesser risk way out. Self preservation, again.

So far, we have only heard one side crowing and stamping its feet.....

[leicsmac]

6 minutes ago, fuchsntf said:

So far, we have only heard one side crowing and stamping its feet.....

The various Tweets and the speech given to the Coast Guard a few days ago don't count, then?

[Bobby Hundreds]

 

[fuchsntf]

8 hours ago, leicsmac said:

The various Tweets and the speech given to the Coast Guard a few days ago don't count, then?

I am not leaning one way , or another, I for one in this debate take no sides...

I just see an aggressive, push on Trump, from apolitical side trying to win points and gain points, to build up some case.

If they are  proven to be right..history will have its story. I just find it strange that dark corners are now being chased down,

Now he is President...!!

Plus I dont understand the strengths and true meanings of the accusations.

 

[MPH]

Probably my favorite political parody account..

 

 

 

[Merging Cultures]

17 hours ago, fuchsntf said:

Depends how..Trump himself sees it. If he wants to give it a fight..He aint a type to runaway from, media-liberal driven accusationd..And its exactly this group he wants to target....

Far too many Assumptions...

In fact so far the accusations....seem just that, with a "So What" address card attached..

Trump thinks he is tough, he often talks it. His actions speak otherwise. He's an incompetent bully, who only succeeds when he is the far larger party, e.g. not paying small businesses, and telling them to take him to court for payment. That works because they are too small to compete. "I never settle" Trump has had to settle in other cases (Trump Uni, and over 100 other cases). He talks big, but he's really not tough.

 

China, no longer a currency manipulator.

His Saudi speech, won't mention "Radical Islamic Terror". 

 

What a tough guy!!

 

He goes against the media because it is a populist thing to do. His base love it. And he can bully the media face-to-face, because what are they going to do and say to the President? It makes the man-child feel powerful.  What are the assumptions you are referring to? The anonymous sources are a bit annoying, but the media also report direct quotes from either Trump himself or people like Comey, Yates, Rosenstein... it's clear  that this is beyond assumptions and accusations.

[fuchsntf]

1 hour ago, Merging Cultures said:

Trump thinks he is tough, he often talks it. His actions speak otherwise. He's an incompetent bully, who only succeeds when he is the far larger party, e.g. not paying small businesses, and telling them to take him to court for payment. That works because they are too small to compete. "I never settle" Trump has had to settle in other cases (Trump Uni, and over 100 other cases). He talks big, but he's really not tough.

 

China, no longer a currency manipulator.

His Saudi speech, won't mention "Radical Islamic Terror". 

 

What a tough guy!!

 

He goes against the media because it is a populist thing to do. His base love it. And he can bully the media face-to-face, because what are they going to do and say to the President? It makes the man-child feel powerful.  What are the assumptions you are referring to? The anonymous sources are a bit annoying, but the media also report direct quotes from either Trump himself or people like Comey, Yates, Rosenstein... it's clear  that this is beyond assumptions and accusations.

Fairly well put...

Exception.... Media quotes, or reported direct quotes...for the good and bad...stay in the assumption bracket/box

Just like a good ol football forum....

[fuchsntf]

Here is something I just want to put out....

Trump and other promis, when making snide female remarks, or when making fraternising remarks...

 

World press....Various " how to do" top magazines plus all the Broadsheets...

Pipa middletons wedding..It seems it was ok to carry on about her posteria, and also reverting back to "That Royal po " photo

I thought it was the best photo at Kates Wedding, but I am a chauvinist, patronising swine when it comes to the ladies.

 

Thats why I may not understand the difference, in platforms or usage, or why one is excepted the other seen has Society PC fop.

 

Again please understand I dont like any of the decorum around Trumps and many promis.....let alone uncontrolled

out of place statements over our beautiful, softer side of our species...

[Facecloth]

30 minutes ago, fuchsntf said:

Here is something I just want to put out....

Trump and other promis, when making snide female remarks, or when making fraternising remarks...

 

World press....Various " how to do" top magazines plus all the Broadsheets...

Pipa middletons wedding..It seems it was ok to carry on about her posteria, and also reverting back to "That Royal po " photo

I thought it was the best photo at Kates Wedding, but I am a chauvinist, patronising swine when it comes to the ladies.

 

Thats why I may not understand the difference, in platforms or usage, or why one is excepted the other seen has Society PC fop.

 

Again please understand I dont like any of the decorum around Trumps and many promis.....let alone uncontrolled

out of place statements over our beautiful, softer side of our species...

Anyone care to translate? 

[Buce]

13 minutes ago, Facecloth said:

Anyone care to translate? 

 

It looks like Google has already had a go..