Trump cheats at golf - the ONE and ONLY politics thread

He'll hire people to get sick for him!

 

Didn't this absolutely kill Alan Eagleson? (Which led to Sargent Shriver as VP choice for McGovern)? But that was '72, its 2016.

 

I'm sure if it was true, the kind, caring liberals would never think of piling on someone who chose to get help.

 

Fixed ...

 

Rachel Maddow is running a few quotes from a cover story Newsweek is running tomorrow regarding Trumps business ties. Top of her page now.

The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC

 

What's wrong, buttercup, afraid of a little scrutiny? What's the worry if there's nothing to hide?

 

Well, that should do it for Trump.
He'll probably apologize and then withdraw.

 

Garrison Keillor:

I saw Hillary once working a rope line for more than an hour, a Secret Service man holding her firmly by the hips as she leaned over the rope and reached into the mass of arms and hands reaching out to her. She had learned the art of encountering the crowd and making it look personal. It was not glamorous work, more like picking fruit, and it took the sort of discipline your mother instills in you: those people waited to see you so by gosh you can treat them right.

So it’s no surprise she pushed herself to the point of collapse the other day. What’s odd is the perspective, expressed in several stories, that her determination to keep going reveals a “lack of transparency” ---- that she should’ve announced she had pneumonia and gone home and crawled into bed.

I’ve never gone fishing with her, which is how you really get to know someone, but I did sit next to her at dinner once, one of those stiff dinners that is nobody’s idea of a wild good time, the conversation tends to be stilted, everybody’s beat, you worry about spilling soup down your shirtfront. She being First Lady led the way and she being a Wellesley girl, the way led upward. We talked about my infant daughter and schools and about Justice Blackmun, and I said how inspiring it was to sit and watch the Court in session, and she laughed and said, “I don’t think it’d be a good idea for me to show up in a courtroom where a member of my family might be a defendant.” A succinct and witty retort. And she turned and bestowed her attention on Speaker Dennis Hastert, who was sitting to her right. She focused on him and even made him chuckle a few times. I was impressed by her smarts, even more by her discipline.

I don’t have that discipline. Most people don’t. Politics didn’t appeal to me back in my youth, the rhetoric (“Ask not what your country can do for you”) was so wooden compared to “so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past,” so I walked dark rainy streets imagining the great novel I wouldn’t write and was still trying to be cool and indifferent well into my thirties, when other people were making a difference in the world.

Hillary didn’t have a prolonged adolescence and fiction was not her ambition. She doesn’t do dreaminess. What some people see as a relentless quest for power strikes me as the good habits of a serious Methodist. Be steady. Don’t give up. It’s not about you. Work for the night is coming.

The woman who does not conceal her own intelligence is a fine American tradition, going back to Anne Bradstreet and Harriet Beecher Stowe and my ancestor Prudence Crandall, but none has been subjected to the steady hectoring that Mrs. Clinton has. She is the first major-party nominee to be pictured in prison stripes by the opposition. She is the first cabinet officer ever to be held personally responsible for her own email server, something ordinarily delegated to anonymous nerds in I.T. The fact that terrorists attacked an American compound in Libya under cover of darkness when Secretary Clinton presumably got some sleep has been held against her, as if she personally was in command of the defense of the compound, a walkie-talkie in her hand, calling in air strikes.

Extremism has poked its head into the mainstream, aided by the Internet. Back in the day, you occasionally saw cranks on a street corner handing out mimeographed handbills arguing that FDR was responsible for Pearl Harbor, but you saw their bad haircuts, the bitterness in their eyes, and you turned away. Now they’re in your computer, whispering that the economy is on the verge of collapse and for a few bucks they’ll tell you how to protect your savings. But lacking clear evidence, we proceed forward. We don’t operate on the basis of lurid conjecture.

Someday historians will get this right and look back at the steady pitter-pat of scandals that turned out to be nothing, nada, zero and ixnay and will conclude that, almost a century after women’s suffrage, almost 50 years after Richard Nixon signed Title IX into law, a woman was required to run for office wearing concrete shoes. Check back fifty years from now and if I’m wrong, go ahead and dance on my grave.

 

Not to defend Trump, exactly, but...you say that as if that's a bad thing . Given a choice, I'll take the "eighth-grader" over Hitler.

(I agree with the gist of the rest of your post, though. Your analysis of Trump's methods is spot-on). That's exactly what it seems like he does.

 

Yeah, it's hard to articulate, but nobody is worse than Hitler. That's not what I'm trying to say. What I mean was Hitler had a strong belief system, was a powerful speaker and writer, knew exactly what people to target in the beer halls and carried out a plan to build a base and gain power over a period of several years. Those are impressive skills if not put to use for pure evil.

Trump hasn't ever seemed to have a real plan. He stumbled on to some wall mumbo jumbo that appealed to enough people to come out of a primary when the reasonable vote was split too many ways. Now he's hanging around in the general election because it happens to be an opponent many people have hated for years. It's a strange confluence of circumstance, not a well-executed plan.

 

Read the rest of his timeline. The Trump medical story isn't what's coming out tomorrow, it's the one about Trump's business ties.

 

Pence's visit to DC went super!

Mike Pence Is Rebuffed as He Tries to Rally G.O.P. Leaders Over ‘Deplorables’