President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

More from the Eli Lake article:

"But Rice's multiple requests to learn the identities of Trump officials discussed in intelligence reports during the transition period does highlight a longstanding concern for civil liberties advocates about U.S. surveillance programs. The standard for senior officials to learn the names of U.S. persons incidentally collected is that it must have some foreign intelligence value, a standard that can apply to almost anything. This suggests Rice's unmasking requests were likely within the law."

If you want to debate whether our intelligence communities have too much power, I'd certainly listen. But in this particular instance as it relates to Trump, the story has nothing to do with Trump's tweets (as Inky highlighted earlier), and the request appears to be legal.

Fox has clearly laid the groundwork for this story to be today's shiny object. Dems would be wise not to take the bait.

 

Good thing Trump spends more time watching their show than reading briefings!

 

Stephen King interviews six fictional Trump voters. Seldom has such fiction imparted such clarity.

Stephen King on Donald Trump: ‘How do such men rise? First as a joke’

 

Very interesting timing on this story as it relates to white nationalist shithead Mike Cernovich. He posted this yesterday:


Contrary to assertions, this indicates that the white supremacist movement has a pretty strong connection with the WH.

 

What's the evidence that Cernovich is a white supremacist?

 

L.A. Times series, Part II ...

Trump’s easy embrace of untruth can sometimes be entertaining, in the vein of a Moammar Kadafi speech to the United Nations or the self-serving blathering of a 6-year-old.

But he is not merely amusing. He is dangerous. His choice of falsehoods and his method of spewing them — often in tweets, as if he spent his days and nights glued to his bedside radio and was periodically set off by some drivel uttered by a talk show host who repeated something he’d read on some fringe blog — are a clue to Trump’s thought processes and perhaps his lack of agency. He gives every indication that he is as much the gullible tool of liars as he is the liar in chief.

He has made himself the stooge, the mark, for every crazy blogger, political quack, racial theorist, foreign leader or nutcase peddling a story that he might repackage to his benefit as a tweet, an appointment, an executive order or a policy. He is a stranger to the concept of verification, the insistence on evidence and the standards of proof that apply in a courtroom or a medical lab — and that ought to prevail in the White House.

Why Trump lies

 

You can quibble all day over what to call Cernovich, but no one can deny he is a Grade-A shithead.

 

Just a complete coincidence.

 

He's white.

Related, if everyone who is white and says something controversial becomes a "supremacist," the word will lose its meaning. You'd think liberals would stop doing that with the language.

 

YGBFKM.

 

Can we split the hair finely enough to agree that "Diversity is bad for national security" at least makes him a white nationalist? As if that's a meaningful distinction?