President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

One for every occasion...

 

Only Trump would take credit for promoting a faith that's exissted for 2,000+ years.

 

Ponder this, because this is America today:

"The expectation of integrity has given way to a cynical acceptance of deceit. As much as anything Mueller uncovers, this is the scandal of our time."

Review | The presidency survived the Watergate, Iran-contra and Clinton scandals. Trump will exact a higher toll.

Normally, revelations of presidential deceit are consequential. When Nixon speechwriter Patrick Buchanan, among the most devoted of the president’s men, explained to Nixon family members why a damning Oval Office recording meant that resignation was inevitable, he emphasized not law but dishonesty. “The problem is not Watergate or the cover-up,” he argued. “It’s that he hasn’t been telling the truth to the American people. The tape makes it evident that he hasn’t leveled with the country for probably eighteen months. And the President can’t lead a country he has deliberately misled.”

When Sen. Susan Collins of Maine (one of a handful of Senate Republicans who ultimately voted against both articles of impeachment for Clinton) was agonizing over the decision, her misgivings centered on the president’s forthrightness. “She could not get over Clinton’s recklessness — it was as if he could not stop doing wrong, could not tell the truth,” Baker reports. And some of Reagan’s worst Iran-contra moments came in statements the president made in late 1986 and early 1987, when his questionable mastery of details and shifting rationales received tough scrutiny. In a March 1987 Oval Office speech, he finally (and mostly) fessed up. “A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages,” Reagan said. “My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.”

The current president does not even attempt to save face. Fact-checkers have documented so many of Trump’s false or misleading statements during the 2016 campaign and into the first year of his presidency that there is no presumption of honesty left to squander. Even when Trump dismisses the fact checks as fake news — in effect, being dishonest about his dishonesty — it doesn’t seem to matter. Trump’s relentless attacks against anyone seeking to hold him accountable help neutralize the impact on his supporters.

During Watergate, top Nixon aides worried that the material on the Oval Office tapes — not just the disclosures of wrongdoing but also the “amorality” of Nixon’s words and thoughts — would hurt the president and the presidency. Ziegler was adamantly opposed to releasing transcripts, Woodward and Bernstein write, because “there was rough language on the tapes,” candid discussions that would “offend Middle America, destroy his mandate.” Once certain transcripts were made public, Nixon lawyer Leonard Garment worried that president had “allowed America into the ugliness of his mind — as if he wanted the world to participate in the despoliation of the myth of presidential behavior. . . . That was the truly impeachable offense: letting everyone see.”

With Trump, we’ve already seen it, and we already know it. His tweets are his Nixon tapes; the “Access Hollywood” recording his Starr report; his heedlessness for checks, balances and the rule of law his Iran-contra affair. Offending does not destroy his mandate, it fulfills it. The expectation of integrity has given way to a cynical acceptance of deceit. As much as anything Mueller uncovers, this is the scandal of our time.

 

But, we all know this already.

What might be very interesting is what Mueller finds the Deep State has been up to from 2015-17.

I think this cuts both sides, and Teflon Don is damaged the least.

Oh, Merry Christmas!

 

This shit has partially ruined the entire Christmas season for me. I’m bitter and cynical to begin with. And the fact that this gasbag has turned Christmas into a political stunt just irritates me to no end.

Oh, Merry Christmas to everyone, even the haters and YF.

 

Pope Francis issued a strong defense of immigration in his Christmas Eve mass Sunday, saying faith demands foreigners be welcomed, even as support for far-right parties has risen in Europe. ...

Rather than react to migration and those seeking refuge with hostility, Francis said, people should work to create a "new social imagination ... in which none have to feel that there is no room for them on this earth."

Pope Francis speaks out for immigrants in Christmas Eve message - CNN

 

No tweets this morning? Surely Donald awakens very excited each Christmas morning. Maybe there was a new golf cart under his tree and he's driving it around Mar-a-Lago.

 

No longer a 'lonely battle': How the campaign against the Mueller probe has taken hold

 

Merry Christmas, Tubby.

 

Eh, can't be much worse than the shit it pulled from 1947-2015.

 

Both parties, actually ...

Republican Rep. Charlie Dent said Sunday the GOP is "alienating" voters by running candidates that appeal to small swath of the electorate. ...

"Our primary process leads to the candidates who tack to the fringe or tack to the to the base," he said. "And I think we've seen too much of that, there’s too much political reward for tacking really hard to the base and not enough reward for consensus and agreement, or heaven forbid, compromise." ...

Dent, who was first elected in 2004 in a swing district in Northeastern Pennsylvania, said one of his reasons for retiring is that Washington is paralyzed by gridlock — and was even before President Donald Trump was elected.

"The simple basic tasks of government have become Herculean tasks," Dent said Sunday. "There are too many people here who've taken saying no to an art form, a lot of people here just can't get to yes."

Rep. Dent: GOP alienating voters

 

Actually a pretty good Christmas Day clip, except when Trump wraps himself in the Bible again.