US Politics May 2019: " If I was burned at the stake, I would ask for a mirror"

Eh, the metaphor I'd use is more like being kidnapped and stuck in the backseat of said tornado chaser, or learning the bus driver on a mountain road is a member of a death cult.

https://makeagif.com/gif/christopher-walken-annie-hall-gvf8Pt

Or rather

https://dz7u9q3vpd4eo.cloudfront.net/wp-content/legacy/posts/d0744f52-b206-49ea-a7c9-27f820968fbf.jpg

Taken aback by the Senate Intelligence Committee’s subpoena issued to Donald Trump Jr., President Trump on Thursday defended his son, leaning on special counsel Robert Mueller’s report to do so.

...“He’s now testified for 20 hours or something — massive amount of time. The Mueller report came out. That’s the bible. The Mueller report came out and they said he did nothing wrong. The only thing is, it’s oppo research,” Trump continued, arguing that his campaign was simply engaged in a routine search for damaging information on Hillary Clinton.

...“My son is a good person. My son testified for hours and hours. My son was totally exonerated by Mueller, who frankly does not like Donald Trump — me, this Donald Trump,” he said. “And frankly for my son after being exonerated to now get a subpoena to go again and speak again after close to 20 hours of telling everybody that would listen about a nothing meeting, yeah, I’m pretty surprised.”

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/donald-trump-surprised-subpoena-son-don-jr

confirmation that trump did not read the mueller report

or rather, he's read as much of the mueller report as he has the bible

You got it wrong: this Donald Trump.

Mueller, who frankly does not like Donald Trump — me, this Donald Trump

omg

This Donald Trump is the new This Fuckin' Guy.

Confirmation that the hole in the front of Donald Trump's head is capable of emitting words that adhere closely enough to the general structure of our language that people still hopefully insist that the sound they hear is anything more than a random collage of words not terribly unlike the utterances of a parrot.

i read that as him saying his son didn't like him

"According to his first wife, Ivana, Donald Trump was never keen on bequeathing his name to anybody," Julia Ioffe wrote in GQ. "It was Ivana who wanted to call their newborn Donald junior. 'You can't do that!' Trump is quoted as saying in Ivana's memoir, 'Raising Trump.' 'What if he - as in that Donald Trump, not this Donald Trump - turns out to be a loser?'"

that would have been embarassing

That anecdote, in complete isolation, is sufficient justification for the woodchipperizing of its subject imo. Who but an irredeemable POS worries that their unborn/newborn baby might be a loser.

I mean, it was a legitimate worry in this instance, but still.

loooooool

"I don't know WHAT TO DO!!"

"Look I can prove I'm the real Donald Trump, and that man is an imposter"

"Me, this Donald Trump, is the real one the other is a fake!"

BAM!

"Phew! That was a close one. You almost shot the fake Donald Trump!"

this guy makes his living by stamping his name on tacky shit

Look, if you're gonna throw shade, at least wait until Congress is done with the guy so he can defend himself.

Personally, I think Tacky Shit Trump has more of a ring to it than Donald Jr., but I can see where it might've made his schooldays rough.

Trump's "joke" about shooting migrants last night has inspired a fraction of the blowback that Ilhan Omar's critique of AIPAC did. Which is telling. https://t.co/yZlepmj1Il pic.twitter.com/Kn8IQfYaGW

— Eric Levitz (@EricLevitz) May 9, 2019

oh for the Left to have one tenth the energy, strategy, and media’s deference of the rightwing outrage machine

media’s deference of the rightwing outrage machine

the right wing controls most of the media. the whole myth of a liberal media bias is the product of the right wing and has been propagated through... the media.

Only someone brainwashed by the liberal media would make such a preposterous assertion.

well, good morning!

it's kind of amazing how an ideology that's supposedly 'losing the culture war' has done such a thorough job of shaping the narrative of liberal bias, conservative victim mentality, both sides-ism (but always always always the left side *more*) etc

i've got casually engaged liberal friends who've parroted the "librul media" line in the post-Obama era about every mainstream entitiy outside of Fox and i'm just how the fuck are you even for real

I remember a kind of hilarious segment on like On the Media (?) where Ira Glass was saying he didn't hear any bias in NPR's reporting, then they brought on a conservative who thought NPR was a liberal Gomorrah and asked him to point out all the liberal bias he could find. Mostly he was mad that the reporters didn't explicitly spell out conservative dogma, or implied that there was a correlation between taxes and govt. revenue.

i think there's an idea even among libs that if you're not actively demonizing gays and POCs, or only doing so 'a little', then you're totally in the tank for the liberal agenda.

corporatism & rah rah militarism/ imperialism? nbd

media bias is real, for example I've noticed sports media is very biased against the Miami Marlins these days

^^We joke, but I saw somewhere that Disney is selling (or trying to sell) Fox Sports Network to Sinclair.

already did:

https://blogs.fangraphs.com/how-sinclairs-purchase-of-baseball-sports-networks-will-affect-you/

House Ways and Means Committee subpoenas Steve Mnunchin over Trump's taxes.

Steve Mnuchin already sadly with the state of his sub poenas

damn, i can't even form a poenas joek properly

tgif

Time to dig up the 10,000 quotes from Republican senators and representatives deploring "the imperial presidency" and extolling the oversight functions of Congress. You could make a one hour supercut of the highlights.

of course, one effect of their constant obama-era complaints is that now that the democrats are making similar claims, the whole thing comes off to the general public as more partisan bickering - this is just a thing that happens in politics now, the opposing party claims that the president and his administration are corrupt and that the only reasonable reaction is to try to grind what they're doing to a halt. 'republicans had #benghazi, now democrats have russiagate, it's all the same', etc

in other words, it's in the GOP's interest to be outraged over bullshit when they're the minority party, because that way when Democrats are outraged over ACTUAL THINGS when they're the minority party, it all starts to seem the same to an outside observer

i agree - i think it is part of this ongoing, multifaceted, almost rhizomatic nonsensical-ization of public life which has the effect of allowing those in power to perpetuate it

just thinking as these subpeonas roll out and are ignored, DNC and the candidates as a chorus should bleat away from here to Nov 2020 a simple refrain w the same frequency and volume as "No Collusion"

WHAT IS THE PRESIDENT HIDING?

over and again ad nauseum. It's dumb but simply demanding the taxes is a rhetorical dead end, it fails to frame GOP's concealment as a tacit admission that something is dirty there

yeah but qualmsey did it

I think he got burnt out because it wasn't working

All these subpoenas just underscore how boneheaded it was for Mueller and his team not to subpoena Trump. Because, what, they were worried it was going to take too long? Boo hoo. They didn't do it and because of their decision report offered no closure, so here we are more or less back where we started.

can't the supreme court just unilaterally impeach trump, for "closure"? i mean they unilaterally made george w bush president because of the dangers of uncertainty or whatever. oh... right

Looks like Mueller is also not planning to show up to his hearing next week

Possibly blocked by DOJ

Trump told POLITICO on Friday that it would be “appropriate” for him to speak to Attorney General Bill Barr about launching an investigation into his potential 2020 rival, Joe Bidenhttps://t.co/f3FGEBoRA4

— POLITICO (@politico) May 11, 2019

cool

can't wait for Dems to strongly condemn this and then fully cooperate with the investigation without even being asked

The question of whether Trump could pressure Barr to probe Biden is coming under scrutiny after Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal attorney, said he would be traveling to Ukraine to urge the incoming government there to look at Hunter Biden’s involvement with a Ukrainian energy company that has reportedly been in prosecutors’ crosshairs. The efforts appear to be part of a broader campaign by Trump’s allies to damage the former Democratic vice president’s White House campaign and have raised questions about whether Trump’s team is trying to enlist a foreign government to aid the president’s re-election bid.

questions

lol why wouldn't you if you were him

one tv star is using rudy giuliani, the greatest mind of the 20th and 21st century, to ask another tv star for a favor

Hunter Biden being hired to ‘work’ for Burisma was clearly an attempt to influence Joe - and reflects badly on all involved - but there is no indication that it worked. Biden sr pressured the Ukrainian government into sacking an anti-corruption prosecutor who had absolutely no interest in prosecuting anyone for corruption, least of all Burisma.

He might have a bit more luck with the other strand - potential election interference by the Ukrainian government / security services.

It doesn’t sound like Zelenskiy is going to meet Giuliani personally, though, and he seems smart enough to not want to bet the house on Trump getting re-elected,