President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

It's a little bit like the Roy Moore story you and I (I think it was you and I) were talking about last night.

It was icky that Roy Moore dated the 17-year-old, but it wasn't illegal.

It was icky, and probably inaccurate, that Trump said there were "very fine people" marching alongside the neo-Nazis, but he didn't say that the neo-Nazis were "very fine people."

 

You can keep saying it ...

 

Conyers retires, effective today.

 

I don’t think @typefitter will accuse Preet Bharara of punching up, so folks might want to listen to Bharara’s take on the Flynn guilty plea.



He doesn’t think it’s likely that Flynn got the “deal of the lifetime”. He thinks it’s very possible this is all they could convict him of. He thinks there’s a chance they might charge him with additional crimes later, but that if that was the case, they would normally keep the initial plea under seal.

And, he lays out, as I stated previously, that if he did get the deal of the lifetime, then a prosecutor would have to put a witness on the stand who has not pled to the crime the prosecutor is trying to convict others of, but who is an admitted liar.

Does any prosecutor want to be in that position?

 

Careful ... just a dab more persnickitiness and you're going to be consigned to the "Nazi apologist" camp ... you're already tentatively approved for the "rape apologist" designation.

 

But the English professor said otherwise!

 

You are chlamydia.

 

Dude, it's super hard.

 

I think I'm gonna go with "Fascist enabler" from now on for the people who think they're just Asking Important Questions. "Nazi apologist" is more for the people who want to say "I'm not a Nazi but they have some good ideas when they aren't going too far" crowd.

 

Interesting. I never heard the criticism that Charlie Rose didn’t have a diverse staff, or roster of guests.

Did none of his viewers, or the executives at PBS who bought the show, notice?

It’s the very kind of thing they usually do notice.

If I pushed back on anything race-related, I was silenced or punished. In one particular interaction, Charlie asked me to produce a panel on the Steven Spielberg film, Amistad. He wanted Spielberg and the stars of the film to talk about the movie in a straightforward way, which I found problematic and contrived. Instead, I suggested a different approach: to discuss the exploitation of slave history, black bodies, and black culture through a white lens—and whether that can be done successfully, or at all. The opposing idea made Charlie so irate that he cancelled the whole segment and didn’t assign me anything else for days.

In the nearly two years I worked for the show, a mere fraction of the guests were black—more than one of whom told me in confidence after their appearance that they’d found Charlie’s tone condescending and dismissive. This was the infrastructure of the show: All the valuable, sought-after guests were white—a common occurrence across media platforms. And while many of us on staff were subject to Charlie’s unsolicited shoulder massages and physical intimidation, as he towered above us at a height over six feet tall, the women Charlie preferred and preyed upon—at least that I witnessed—were white. It was an environment that all but erased me, while simultaneously exploiting me as a black woman.

 

True. Sometimes you spend a lot of time with a subject, and still miss the big story.

 

What's bigger than Penelope Cruz looking good in her underwear?