President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

James Comey is the wrong messenger. He's sanctimonious, and while I (at least) am certain he is an honest man, he acts like he's the only honest man ever in the room. The message about Trump being an ammoral fuckhead gets lost because like all bullshit artists, Trump just turns around and makes it personally about Comey. And Comey has given him the material.

That said, I don't understand how anyone with the power of reason reads a tweet like that creating an equivalency between Michael Flynn and James Comey, and doesn't shake their head and pray that the national nightmare that is this presidency ends without it feeling like an eternity.

I still say America got what it deserved -- whether it was Hilary Clinton or Donald Trump, although Trump's brand of bullshit is something, um, special. I actually hoped it would be entertaining when he won. Instead, it has made us all worse. It has lowered the level of discourse and tried to eat away at any values we have that prize honesty and integrity.

People are intentionally ignorant, and want to remain so to embrace simple narratives for why their lives suck (and the politicians they turn to have been a major reason for it), so I am certain there are people who have no clue just what a dishonest sleaze Michael Flynn is, and they have no ability to look at what James Comey did objectively, which had political ramifications if you disagree with his judgment calls (and I'd argue that an FBI director shouldn't have been in that position, and a sanctimonious boy scout who got full of himself was particularly bad at that moment in time), but wasn't dishonest or criminal.

People will forget, but Trump LOVED Comey. Loved, loved, loved, loved him. ... Comey was the one who "got" Hilary Clinton. Trump loved him. ... until Comey showed a degree of independence and Trump had to start to worry that all of his dishonest and likely illegal behavior wouldn't be shielded by Comey. Now it's a full out assault to destroy the man. I just wish Comey didn't do that morally superior thing, because it isn't helping him. He may be morally superior, but that turns A LOT of people off.

 

I don't know where to begin with this one.

1) The Federal Reserve has shit all over the dollar -- what Trump has expressed wanting, a weak dollar. Because he believes (like a typical hyena politician) that it juices the economy (even though it is artificial -- it is all debt and credit driven; we no longer have economic cycles driven by savings and investment, we have credit cycles driven by price administrators). A weak dollar boosts oil prices. The only things that suppressed oil prices for several years were an anemic global economy for the last decade that suppressed demand (what central banks caused by doing what Trump has endorsed by creating massive credit cycles, and one that ended with disaster in 2008) and the fact that all of the debt that central banks created via interest rate suppression since (rather than allowing the necessary deleveraging) created a shale oil boom in the U.S. creating way more supply than demand in that crummy global economy.
2) So now, we are starting to pay the price for what they did artificially for a decade (think stagflation starting to rear its head) and oil prices have risen a little. It's being helped along a little by the fact that Venezuela is a shit show and can't produce (decreasing supply) and we are talking about sanctions against Russia and Iran again, which the oil market has reacted to, thinking it will choke off even more supply. This has zero to do with OPEC, which doesn't have the power it once did (U.S. shale production has more impact on prices that OPEC does).
3) Putting all of that aside, the populist bullshit just maddens me. On the one hand, the dipshit has instituted tariffs on things like steel and aluminum, because it was just imperative that we protect those workers in America and the companies they work for (even though they are inefficient producers) -- even if it means higher prices for companies that use steel and aluminum as their inputs (prices that get passed along to the consumer level). Fine, if that is your third-grade "policy" approach -- straight out of the 19th century. But then he turns around and this tweet is the exact opposite bullshit, and equally as ignorant. We are getting slightly higher oil prices now, which benefits U.S. oil shale producers -- which have overexpanded (due to endless cheap credit for even crummy credit risks -- and there is a shitshow of defaults coming when rates normalize because you can't juke interest rates to near zero forever without inducing a credit crisis due to all the insanely bad debt that gets issued) and need to pump like mad to just service all of their debt. When oil prices are low, they need to pump like crazy to avoid bankruptcy. When oil prices go up, they pump like crazy too, because it's cheap to borrow, and there are few lending standards, so they overexpand. We CREATED the mess -- which would be the honest tweet. In this case, though, even given his idiotic understanding, which is it? We need to boost steel prices and go to protectionist lunacy to protect some jobs of steel workers (at the expense of the rest of us). But those shale workers are different somehow (why not endorse higher oil prices and all the jobs it creates for shale and how those companies benefit)? The endless tweets, ignorance, hypocrisy and bullshit drive me crazy.