US Politics, October 2019 — I guess statement you could say with thread. I made a thread. The thread was PERFECT.

lock'em up!

Iirc Carter did not throw out a pitch as a sitting present.

president

Hard to throw a baseball while wearing a cardigan and having the burden of a malaise iirc

lol Carter threw first pitch in 1995?

Reagan threw first pitch from inside a Bradley tank iirc

Controversial opinion: I'm sick of everyone trying to make hate porn out of pictures or videos of Trump and other idiots. Not because I wouldn't watch a looping gif of him getting kicked in the balls all day, but because the interpretations of an unflattering pic of him, say, winding up for a sneeze ends up spinning out of control into all sorts of pathetic fan faction about how "he knows he's fucked" or "he's having a tantrum cause Pelosi just owned him". Even if the narrative is close to the truth it still gets all sorts of melodrama pumped into it in an unsubtle attempt to pretend karma actually exists.

With this booing video, you have the one with audio where you can see him and everyone else standing there smiling and clapping through the boos, then there is the one without audio that claims to be the same moment and yet he claps for a second by himself and does a timid little wave and his face drops (this is supposed to be where he feels bad about the booing). They were different moments. Maybe they booed that time too. Or maybe that time the jumbotron cut elsewhere and that's why his face dropped. I wasn't there.

I'm not defending him; I hate him more than I've ever hated anyone in my entire life. I'm just sick of this corny caption contest thing we do to make ourselves feel better. I think youtube reaction video title cards and other clickbait is to blame, combined with the lack of consequences for any of these jackasses so far.

Good Morning!

i agree with evan

yeah I agree with that for the most part too, I remember how every pic of Obama frowning was co-opted in a dozen different ways and it's dumb to assume Trump is capable of any sort of self-reflection whatsoever. that said I think the booing video is something different, it is one of the very very few times he's appeared in a crowd that he wasn't able to hand-select & I think he legitimately felt like he'd be treated like a hero cuz they got some ISIS guy

well no shit everything is a lame meme on the stupid social medias . it all sucks what are ya gonna do ?

Yes, frogs is otm. This is usually a dumb game to play and we could be totally wrong even in this instance but the particular context of this moment lends a lot of credence to the interpretations. You're still allowed to not GAF about the interpretations, though, of course.

He’s instantly transported back to the times his father dressed him down and humiliated him. The time his narcissism took hold and he vowed he would never feel that way again. Trump flinched and stepped outside of his carefully crafted life bubble and is now feeling humiliated.

— Triciav (@TriciaV1374) October 28, 2019

I would hope that we could all agree, as Americans, that it is wrong to laugh at the public humiliation of an angry old man in a diaper.

the memes just seem like a level of mockery that is totally unequal to the moment. he's not someone he can get "caught" doing something embarrassing -- everything he says and does is frighteningly unhinged and bizarre

xp

Like I can imagine having a huge crowd of people booing you feels shitty as a general thing, but when you're someone who doesn't even believe that such a thing could be possible (particularly when you've just single-handedly dismantled ISIS), it's gotta leave you feeling a little shook.

Yeah but the close up reaction video and the video with audio are entirely different moments. Maybe they were booing in the close up one too? The audio didn't work for me.

Anyway it was just an example. There were other recent pictures within just this past month as well that inspired the short rant.

xposts to old lunch / frogbs

The only other instance of interpretation along these lines that I've personally been onboard with was Pence's flubbed applause line in Poland.

I'll repeat, comparatively speaking the booing crowd means everything, his reaction means almost nothing.

it's a balm for the soul to see this guy square up against a torrent of violent disapproval, will watch ad infinitum

really though for me it has less to do with any imagined stock-taking on his part than the phenomenon of tens of thousands of ppl cashing in a solid opportunity to vent in person

tbf I also enjoyed a loop of guying throwing his shoe at W

nice, too, to see Lindsey Graham and Matt fucking Gaetz get a taste of it outside their bubble

^GUY throwing

I will almost certainly never get to see video of someone giving Trump an atomic diaper front wedgie so I will humbly accept this consolation prize.

to be clear, the overt booing itself is fantastic

The quick camera switch to military personnel captioned THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE once the jumbotron people realised there was booing is yet another example of this draft-dodging fuckwit hiding behind Our Brave Boys, yuck yuck yuck.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EH-kvVwWsAASD2M?format=jpg&name=small

sweet I've waited for this take all day

Schadenfreude is an understandable if impotent gesture with an administration this despicable; I understand the impulse. I also get how it might make others fume to see people slacktivist cosign the UTTER TAKEDOWN OF LIL DONNY TRUMP rather than actively fight his policies. Basically we're all horrible, but they're more horrible and getting angry because our horrible edges toward their horrible inspires a different level of horrible, still far inferior to their horrible but perhaps equal to the horrible that is our new horrible.

ps fuck the internet and computers, i'm gonna go listen to spotify and watch plex instead

Nationals fans made a rudimentary political mistake: Expressing opinions about Trump in a stadium, instead of a rust belt diner.

— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) October 28, 2019

Frankly i think all political memes are overwrought garbage, even if i agree with the message. I usually block people that do nothing but post that shit without comment all day.

Some ate funny but those tend to be the exception.

The more the right wing punditocracy explains away the booing, the more widely and more often the booing will be disseminated, helping it to take on an independent life in people's minds as "that World Series game where everyone in the stadium booed Trump". The Republican flaks'd be better off burying the story than trying to disarm it.

A stadium full of Americans booed their president, and that's okay, and here's why.

Not just memes. The erotica tweet KM posted upthread is a great example of what I'm complaining about.

xxp

Kay Hagan has died.

he's not getting removed, but this was a pleasant read https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/it-feels-like-a-horror-movie-republicans-feel-anxious-and-adrift-defending-trump/2019/10/28/b4510698-f75f-11e9-a285-882a8e386a96_story.html

I feel like the Post has been running one of those stories almost daily recently. I hope the reps they're siting really are feeling the squeeze, but am somehow not convinced.

I like Robert Costa as a reporter but he's run a variant on this story once a week.

not sure what the off-the-record Senators hope to accomplish by putting their quotes out there

Sometimes you send a message in a bottle in hopes of rescue.

Except this bottle is broken and it's traveling through sand.

i always figure that's more of a favor between senators and costa - they want to maintain a non-negative relationship with costa (and other reporters writing their version of "Trump becoming unhinged" for the week) but don't want to make the big idiot mad, so they go off the record

another asshat

Coming in the middle of our national pastime’s championship series, the “Lock him up” chant was some of the most striking evidence to date that we live in a country where portions of both parties believe the leaders of the others should be in prison. https://t.co/GP6hMs5UzV

— Michael S. Schmidt (@nytmike) October 28, 2019

I mean, when said leaders commit crimes, yes

but her emails

Gee it's almost as if one side was chanting to lock up a political enemy simply because they didn't like her and the other actually wants their enemy locked up because he has committed crimes that a non-sitting President would be sitting in prison for

Xpost DAMMIT

You could arguably prosecute Hillary Clinton for something that happened during her tenure as Secretary of State but it's very, very unlikely to be successful, largely because she is such a process freak that you would likely need to change the law to make her actions retroactively illegal; on the other hand, I would bet money that Trump committed tax fraud as a private citizen.

the most striking evidence to date that we live in a country where portions of both parties believe the leaders of the others should be in prison.

ah, the observant insight haver has logged on.

truly, we live in a society

Your honor, we feel that it's only fair and balanced to consider whether there might not be a reason to incarcerate the plaintiff, as well.

there was also that whole NYT tax fraud investigation thing from last year that literally zero people on the entire planet cared about:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/02/us/politics/donald-trump-tax-schemes-fred-trump.html

Mr. Trump won the presidency proclaiming himself a self-made billionaire, and he has long insisted that his father, the legendary New York City builder Fred C. Trump, provided almost no financial help.

But The Times’s investigation, based on a vast trove of confidential tax returns and financial records, reveals that Mr. Trump received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire, starting when he was a toddler and continuing to this day.

Much of this money came to Mr. Trump because he helped his parents dodge taxes. He and his siblings set up a sham corporation to disguise millions of dollars in gifts from their parents, records and interviews show. Records indicate that Mr. Trump helped his father take improper tax deductions worth millions more. He also helped formulate a strategy to undervalue his parents’ real estate holdings by hundreds of millions of dollars on tax returns, sharply reducing the tax bill when those properties were transferred to him and his siblings.

These maneuvers met with little resistance from the Internal Revenue Service, The Times found. The president’s parents, Fred and Mary Trump, transferred well over $1 billion in wealth to their children, which could have produced a tax bill of at least $550 million under the 55 percent tax rate then imposed on gifts and inheritances.

The Trumps paid a total of $52.2 million, or about 5 percent, tax records show.