At the risk of stating the obvious, the July 2019 US Politics Thread is horse-sh*t

Why can't they just shout the f-word in private, at their kids, like normal people.

A reporter should ask him what the f-word is

ah more sweet, sweet projection

his latest "Israel" spasms must mean Adelson has even more dough coming thru this election

maybe this will be the thing that finally causes him to stroke out. these women are not going to back down, and I feel like it's impossible for Trump to back down either unless someone in his orbit manages to find a way to distract him.

How many hours until there's a Politico article about how unnamed House Dems feel frustrated that they have to defend the Squad

Just watched the squad response video this morning and my goodness, AYANNA PRESSLEY DID NOT COME TO PLAY.

I mean they were all good in that clip but her delivery is A+++ would subscribe to her newsetter.

referring to them as "the Squad" is an intentional ploy to make them seem high schoolish, right? I can't imagine a group of male reps being referred to in this way.

I'm pretty sure they started calling themselves the Squad but it's impossible to verify at this point

AOC is definitely leaning into it on Twitter.

oh yeah here it is (from November):

New progressive members of Congress posted photos on social media on Monday celebrating the diversity of the freshman class headed to Washington, D.C.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shared a photo of herself with fellow Democratic representative-elects Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib, aptly captioned: “Squad.”

right on...as you were :)

All this hubbub the last couple days has knocked the Epstein/Acosta/Trump connections right out of the headlines, as was intended. If Dems don’t treat “Trump was friends with a pedophile” as the “But her emails” of 2019-2020, they are complete idiots. They should be smearing Trump with this stuff right up to accusing him of being a pedophile himself.

It’s not like he will sue for defamation and it would be great for Dems if he did!

Can you think of a possible rightwing response to “Trump was friends with Epstein”?

Hint: they are mildly obsessed with the Clintons

in a better world the Epstein scandal would rid us of both forever

Those Tweets were NOT Racist. I don’t have a Racist bone in my body! The so-called vote to be taken is a Democrat con game. Republicans should not show “weakness” and fall into their trap. This should be a vote on the filthy language, statements and lies told by the Democrat.....

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 16, 2019

.....Congresswomen, who I truly believe, based on their actions, hate our Country. Get a list of the HORRIBLE things they have said. Omar is polling at 8%, Cortez at 21%. Nancy Pelosi tried to push them away, but now they are forever wedded to the Democrat Party. See you in 2020!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 16, 2019

Oh, ok. I guess that settles it.

even if clinton weren't involved, do you think republicans would care that trump hung out with a pedophile? donald trump has probably raped multiple women, there are 2 sitting supreme court justices that have assaulted women, and republicans (and democrats) have a long history of looking the other way at sexual abuse in the church. what do they care about epstein and trump? we have to stop pretending like some sort of damning fact about what they've done will "bring them down".

JUST NOW: I asked @KellyannePolls, who’d just said @realDonaldTrump was not telling Omar/Tlaib/Pressley/AOC to go back to Somalia/Gaza/Puerto Rico/etc, which countries he was referring to.

She responded by asking me where my ancestors came from, thereby confirming what he meant

— Andrew Feinberg (@AndrewFeinberg) July 16, 2019

Omar is polling at 8%, Cortez at 21%

Omar is not polling at 8%.
Cortez is not polling at 21%.

Capitalizing 'Racist' appears to be Very Important for him. Perhaps he's subtly signifying that he's just a run-of-the-mill, lowercase racist.

I do believe Trump when he says he doesn't have a racist bone in his body. I think his body cavity is just filled with a semi-solid protoplasmic ooze of undiluted racism, like imagine a banana slug comprised entirely of race hate.

Racist exoskeleton with a Jame Gumb-style flesh suit.

really proud of the house leadership for starting this whole fucking shitshow on friday night and leaking that wack ass poll to axious, that is now being cited in bad faith by president caligula. good job.

axiooooooooooooooos

Any serious policy solution to racism must begin with some kind of racist bone detector.

— Russell Brandom (@russellbrandom) June 30, 2019

good morning!

donald trump doesn't have a racist bone in his body!

he does have a racist brain, tho.

He only cares about blood.

AAAAAAAGHGHGHGH

even if clinton weren't involved, do you think republicans would care that trump hung out with a pedophile? donald

trump has probably raped multiple women, there are 2 sitting supreme court justices that have assaulted women, and republicans (and democrats) have a long history of looking the other way at sexual abuse in the church. what do they care about epstein and trump? we have to stop pretending like some sort of damning fact about what they've done will "bring them down".

Who said anything about bringing them down? You just want to browbeat them with it so it dominates the conversation and suppresses turnout on the margins by 2-3% which could be decisive in a close election (which this will be).

https://img.fireden.net/tg/image/1495/82/1495825236912.jpg

I like to imagine after four years of 'Troll troll troll, bleepity-blorp, troll troll, derpy-derp. SAD!' tweets, some non-negligible portion of the population will have developed the skills to effortlessly mutter 'fucking ANYway...' and get on with discussing absolutely anything other than what the Troll-in-Chief wants us to be discussing. It's a dream I have, a beautiful dream.

Who said anything about bringing them down?

"Bringing them down" means defeating trump at the polls.

at this point, trump is who he is. everyone has formed an opinion about him, and not too many minds are going to change as a result of whatever new terrible thing he does. his support may drop 2-3%, as you say, and then a week later it will go back up to where it was. we've seen almost 4 years of this now (counting his campaign). he was right when he said he could shoot someone on 5th avenue and no of his supporters would care.

so we know who he is, and we know how is immune. so take the fight to those who enable him - the racist republicans who don't have a word to say when the president says blatantly racist things. trump is immune. not all of the republicans are. it's time to stop ASKING republicans what they have to say about trump's racism. they have nothing to say. the baseline understanding, now, should be that they are all racists and that they enjoy the benefits of being leaders of the party at the twilight of the Southern Strategy.

it wouldn't solve the root problems but I wake every day hoping he died in the night

On one hand I can't believe that more people wouldn't care that there's a record of him raping 13-year old children. But on the other hand there's no sign that his supporters have cared about anything else he's done.

Here's the thing, though: none of that is true, it's just a figment conjured up by the fake news media.

It really is that simple for these people.

also did you hear about bill clinton and the 12 year old?

it's a page from the climate change denier playbook: it's not real, and if it is, it's actually not as bad as something else

They genuinely believe it too. Or so it seems.

the pee tape could show up and now it would be dismissed as a deep fake

Empirical reality has long vanished. It's just a mythological battle of archetypes at this point, the neolithic age is back.

I can't tell if I hate him more every day or if the hate has maxed out and it just manifests differently from day to day. But in any case, the guy who swears at rallies and is on tape saying "I moved on her like a bitch" and "grab em by the pussy" can get way the fuck out of here with his pearl-clutching wrt foul language.

Trump doesn't think women should poop or swear.

I feel increasingly like the core of the problem is that, because the current context is sui generis in so many ways and was just suddenly plopped into this central position in our lives, we just don't have any pre-existing experience from which we can draw an effectual response and it's made everyone varying degrees of crazy. On every side you have people who can't wrap their heads around the behavior of this figure who's been imposed on everyone's life, and on one side they try to pretend that the worst stuff isn't happening or try to twist it into something they can still support, while on the other side people are just staring aghast with no idea of what to do. It's like the time my roommate walked into my bedroom at 4 AM and started pissing on my floor. I had no immediate means of understanding or responding to the acceptable parameters of reality being so rudely shattered.

Good luck winning while talking about “the issues.”

I think you misunderstand me: don’t say he said something racist, say he is racist. Don’t say he knew a pedophile, say existing evidence points to him being a pedophile. Don’t say these things once or twice: they should be the core of the strategy. Repetition is how Trump beats his phrases into the media’s and public’s heads and controls the narrative - Dems must use the same strategy or they will lose (and maybe will anyway).

The American public is too dumb and uninformed to care about issues.

We really need to cut it with that talking point already. The extent to which it's true is largely systemic and intentional and potentially-reversible if we refrain from treating the mass of the American public like a bunch of subhuman rubes.

Like, yeah, without some effort to counter the effects, the kids currently being educated under the DeVos regime are likely to develop into incurious drudges. It's not like it's inherent to their character.

cf one of Hillary's many errors was the deplorables thing, which succeeded in doing nothing except rallying the right wing.

Right. Dems need to cut it with the snoot. No one who's on the fence wants to join a team that's looking at them like a bunch of unwashed dipshits.

So what doesn't count as an error when faced with this monstrosity?