Indeed it is... My concerns spring from the body language displayed by PM . Turnbull when addressing a press conference on the matter and saying what he said. SBS world news I think. For it to go from media beat up to something beyond, for me, normally takes at least three hits...from three "independent from each" other sources... so I guess we shall have to wait and see... The whole thing seems to be heavily scripted and timed ...which adds to it's ominous nature. maybe so, but launching punitive strikes with out declaring war .....hmmm It may be a case of: If the USA doesn't Israel will ...sort of problem.. and it would be better if the USA did it due to Israel's geographical ballistic missile proximity to Iran. Regardless, it exemplifies the Trump Administration's constant reliance on hard ball bullying to achieve their ends.
and that Republicans are more inclined to participate and vote than democrats ( generally) so yes... Trump ain't going no where unless Democrats get of their arses and start voting...
The Republican vote in the US has been a minority - smaller than the Democratic vote - in most recent national elections. It was significantly smaller in the 2016 elections, for example - for Congress, the Presidency, and the State offices, total. Trump will resign only if facing impeachment and trial.
Trump can, as far as I'm concerned, leave in just about anyway he wants, graceful or otherwise, so long as he'd just do it ASAP -- now wouldn't be too soon -- and get it over with. The moment he does, I'll be sure to find something nice to say about him.
Why? He's loving the job and has plenty of support. You need to remember that he was the star of a reality tv show. The more people attack him, the stronger he becomes. I've been avoiding these threads because I know Trump is a sensitive subject for you guys. I tell you this without contempt, but with sympathy, the Blue Wave will fizzle, It has nothing to offer to the working class and makes no promises that most people want to hear. Maybe in the next decade.
Several of his closest advisers said he didn't want to win. He said that "even if I lose, I win" - because he wanted to be more popular, not to be president. And when he won on election night, he was stunned - and his wife started crying. "Plenty of support" - 52% of Americans disapprove of him. Problem there is that Daniels and Omarosa may become more popular because they have better stories. And if the presidency is a reality TV show, then they "win."
The promises you want to hear are usually not the ones that are good for you. I have more respect for politicians who break their promises than for politicians who make stupid promises and keep them. Of course Trump has neither the intention nor the ability to keep his promises.
Do any of y'all watch anything but CNN? This is just ridiculous. As is Trump, just to make sure you understand me. When Nixon was told to resign, several of the Joint Chiefs were under soft detention in the basement of the Commerce Department building, where my father worked. Shall we say it was a busy day for all but the ones drinking coffee behind locked doors, with Marine guards at those doors? If there's a real problem, Trump will be out the door, quick as a wink, just like Nixon was. He'll be pardoned, just like Nixon, as well. Just sit back and shut up, watch and wait. Wailing at the Democrat's defeat last time around is counterproductive, and demonizing some fool who loves the spotlight is just as damned stupid.
CNN has a strong rightwing, corporate, even Republican, bias. It has for years now. Have you caught on to that yet? Nixon was threatened, not told. He was threatened with impeachment by the House and conviction by the Senate, and the House and Senate leadership validated that threat. And that was six years in. Nixon was re-elected - he resigned in his second term. Trump faces no such threat, by any such leadership. It took six years, and "they" had already got rid of Agnew. This time around "they" have much less support and a significantly bigger problem. That was before Reagan, before the fascist takeover. The Republican Party still had honorable men in Congress. The honorable Republicans who still existed in 1968 no longer exist. The Party was purged of them, and filled with Limbaugh and Gingrich Republicans. So Trump is still in power, despite the real problems now more than two years old. How much more shame and damage are we supposed to accept quietly? How long do we sit back while a fascist government dismantles the checks and balances on its behavior, and the internationally wealthy consolidate their hold on the US economy? Your presumption of an inner cadre of real conservatives, strong and foresighted men who know what they are doing and have the best interests of the country at heart, no longer applies to the Republican Party or the institutions of government its tenure in power has damaged. It has not applied for thirty years now. The people who set up Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Gitmo are in power. The people who lied the US into invading Iraq are in power. The people running ICE are in power. K Street and the wingnut welfare think tanks who wrote the latest tax bill are in power. That's your Republican government, 21st Century. That's not what's going on. That's the Bannon, Brietbart, Limbaugh, Fox, and Friends line - the bullshit wingnut spiel, to sucker the rubes. And you are posting it here.
Hell, yeah, he could could! He could hire Iceaura, and within weeks he'd be burned for witchcraft. Right, there, CNN puppet? Damned fool can't or won't think. It must really hurt.
But they can remember. They can remember noticing that the wingnut media feed had switched hype bogeys, and all of a sudden it was CNN leading the liberal fake news charge instead of MSNBC. For some reason. Maybe it was easier to spell. And the patsies lined up like a flock of parrots on a power line. Not so much a Greek chorus (those have independent parts, accurate commentary) as a chorus enjoying Greek. And there was nothing CNN could do about it. They've been trying, of course, selling what was left of their soul to pad their Fox hires and get some wingnut cred: https://www.adweek.com/tvnewser/cnn-hires-kirsten-powers-as-political-analyst/302516 https://www.thedailybeast.com/fox-n...as-thats-journalistic-malpractice-experts-say - ( they already had the most embarrassing single event of Trump coverage of any news station, with their half hour of prime time live footage of an empty podium in North Dakota edging out Joe Scarborough's devoting his show to the favor of a phone call from Trump on live TV ) - but you can't wag a dog like that by the tail.
That's how we got Trump in the first place. Heck, that's how we got Pearl Harbor, 9/11 and the AIDS epidemic. The time for letting "someone else" fix things is past. And the fantasy that there are competent leaders ready to step in and fix things is perhaps the most dangerous delusion there is.
Remember The Maine! That was an example you forgot. Who is in a position to manipulate "information" better than the government? Who can tell the truth about said manipulations? Fox? CNN? I'm not suggesting that there are droves of competent people who just stand in the wings awaiting their cue, I'm saying that bureaucracies by their very nature tend to protect themselves by maintaining the status quo, and therby protect the organization from radical change. That's the freshman year version. The delusion comes from thinking that radical intervention does anything more than kill a bunch of people and make bread and milk something you can't afford any longer. Or making someone a criminal because he disagrees with you...
The Fox News warmongering operation of its time, yes. The lefties were bringing that up in 2002, when the news media of the US were pimping W's war instead of exposing W's administration. That was an example of news manipulation by the press - by a media outlet with a defined and overt political agenda, pushing for war. As far as who is likely to tell you the truth about your government? The people who told truths about the Maine were the lefty intellectual elites (Mark Twain and the like). The people who told you truths about Vietnam were the lefty intellectual elites (Noam Chomsky and the like), the people who told you truths about Iraq were the lefty intellectual elites (the people who were objecting to the NYT publishing rightwing authoritarian war propaganda, and pointing out that it was compromising its journalistic integrity with an idiotic "both sides" schtick more and more over time, for example), so what's your guess this time? And so political movements that set out to corrupt that bureaucracy, to fill it with political loyalists rather than essentially neutral bureaucrats whose defense of their little fiefdoms has little effect except inefficiency and expense, can destroy a functioning government - it can take decades of good faith effort to recover what was essentially a form of accumulated wealth. Remember W&Cheney's loyalty oaths, their assignment of a political overseer with budgetary and personnel control to dozens of government agencies, their prohibitions on government scientists and engineers and so forth speaking directly to the press as they always had before? These agencies have in some cases not fully recovered yet. If Trump gets another two, three years of unimpeded control of the FBI and the DOJ, how long will it take to repair and recover from his damage? Will we lose the US Post Office permanently? Will we lose, permanently, "common good" management of the American landscape and environment? Inquiring minds would rather not find out. The Republican Party is a "radical intervention" of that kind.
