US Presidential Election 2016: Sidney's Victory Lap

You didnt realise that?

That sounds like an almost exact definition of what Saddam Hussein and Comical Ali did.

And what’s happening is most certainly Comical Ali-esque.

Again, more moronic rhetoric.
Did you have a problem with Obama holding very few news conferences, and rarely taking questions?
Trump’s treatment of CNN is no different to Obama’s treatment of Fox News. Obama’s administration openly treated Fox News as a political opponent and openly called them out for fake news (sometimes accurately, just as CNN openly embraces fake news).
The left can suck it up, you lost.

I do love when you say that. Instance #479229 of your utter hypocrisy flying over your head, given that nobody produces more moronic rhetoric on this forum than you.

[quote=“anon7035031, post:5699, topic:19437”]
Did you have a problem with Obama holding very few news conferences, and rarely taking questions?Trump’s treatment of CNN is no different to Obama’s treatment of Fox News. Obama’s administration openly treated Fox News as a political opponent and openly called them out for fake news (sometimes accurately, just as CNN openly embraces fake news). [/quote]

Fox has a long record of being by far the least reputable major network. Obama never refused questions from them at press briefings or called them “fake news”. And everything he said about them was demonstrably true.

Whereas everything Trump says about the media is demonstrably false.

But nice attempt to muddy the waters away from reality.

I love when you Trumpbots resort to this. You always think you’re saying something so profound when you say it, don’t you?

Newsflash: The election is long gone, and Tiny Hands needs to get over the fact he won. He can’t. Which is why he keeps railing against Hillary Clinton and is holding rallies with paid audience members to distract from the fact he’s already well on course to be the worst president in history.

The worst president in (recent) history award is jointly held by Bush jn and Obama, both of whom were rubbish both domestically and internationally. Trump has been in office for 26 days, a little early to be judging his achievements. Forget all the noise, he will be judged on two things, and two things only.

  1. Can he work with congress and business leaders to reinvigorate the economy, through investment and tax reform. If he can succeed, where administrations for the past 20 years have failed, that will bring a major boost to working people ,in particular people who have ambition.

  2. Can he extract the US from stupid unwinnable wars in the Middle East.

If he can accomplish those two items, he will have done more than Bush and Obama combined.

Whatever about their past, right now Fox is a far more even handed news channel than CNN and MSNBC. I don’t watch much of either, but from what I have seen Fox are finally living up to their name of balanced, whereas CNN and MSNBC are wall to wall anti-Trump. You would think it was 1963 with the incessant focus on the evil Russians.

I’ve already helpfully included the official historical rankings of since World War II.

It isn’t bias to call out a president as being out of his depth and not up to the task when it’s so obvious it’s like an elephant camping on your sofa, which you can’t see despite being in an adjacent armchair.

Keep spinning for Trump, especially re Russia. Keep denying. Keep deluding yourself, by all means.

Interesting take - Trump is merely an utter, utter cunt, according to an eminent psychiatry professor.

N.B.: This was written before the press conference.


Fevered media speculation about Donald Trump’s psychological motivations and psychiatric diagnosis has recently encouraged mental health professionals to disregard the usual ethical constraints against diagnosing public figures at a distance. They have sponsored several petitions and a Feb. 14 letter to The New York Times suggesting that Mr. Trump is incapable, on psychiatric grounds, of serving as president.

Most amateur diagnosticians have mislabeled President Trump with the diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder. I wrote the criteria that define this disorder, and Mr. Trump doesn’t meet them. He may be a world-class narcissist, but this doesn’t make him mentally ill, because he does not suffer from the distress and impairment required to diagnose mental disorder.

Mr. Trump causes severe distress rather than experiencing it and has been richly rewarded, rather than punished, for his grandiosity, self-absorption and lack of empathy. It is a stigmatizing insult to the mentally ill (who are mostly well behaved and well meaning) to be lumped with Mr. Trump (who is neither).

Bad behavior is rarely a sign of mental illness, and the mentally ill behave badly only rarely. Psychiatric name-calling is a misguided way of countering Mr. Trump’s attack on democracy. He can, and should, be appropriately denounced for his ignorance, incompetence, impulsivity and pursuit of dictatorial powers.

His psychological motivations are too obvious to be interesting, and analyzing them will not halt his headlong power grab. The antidote to a dystopic Trumpean dark age is political, not psychological.

ALLEN FRANCES

Coronado, Calif.

The writer, professor emeritus of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University Medical College, was chairman of the task force that wrote the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV (D.S.M.-IV).

What the fuck is the problem with Russia? We’ve been prodding them unmercifully for decades, installing NATO forces in every country surrounding them, overthrowing the democratically elected govt in their one ally (Ukraine), imposing sanctions on them for relatively minor international infringements compared to what the US and their European allies has been up to. Talking to them is a crime?

Oh dear, the commies have a nuclear capable ship near the US, what should we do? Blow it out of the water?
The mainstream media are a pack of idiots mate, and you are falling for it hook, line and sinker.

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Ah right, so now you’re pigeon holing your enemies (that’s anybody an inch to the left of you) as wanting to blow a Russian nuclear ship out of the water?

You make this so easy.

The problem with Russia, mate, is that
i) Trump publicly appealed to the Russians to hack a political opponent’s emails.They did this. Russia intervened in the election campaign on Trump’s behalf and this is agreed on not just by by the CIA and the FBI but reluctantly admitted by Trump himself.
ii) The Trump campaign was in regular contact with Russian intelligence throughout the campaign.
iii) Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort was forced to resign in part due to his inappropriate links to Russia and another aide, Carter Page was also forced to resign due to inappropriate Russian links.
iv) Michael Flynn broke the law by trying to influence the actions of the Russian government as a private citizen.
v) Trump can’t get his story straight about whether he authorised it or not and whether Flynn did anything wrong (he clearly did - and he lied to the FBI about it - a clear felony).
vi) Donald Trump Junior has said that Russians “make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of our assets”.
vii) Rex Tillerson has strong links to Russia and Vladimir Putin.
viii) There are serious questions about the sale of 19% of Rosneft and that Trump may be personally enriching himself from such to a vast scale.
ix) Everything in the way Trump behaves indicates he is using Putin’s Russia as the model for how he wants to run the US.

All of these are extremely pertinent points or questions and you brush over every single one of them because it doesn’t suit your agenda.

Fox News’s Shepard Smith nails it:

Your opposition was hacked, and the Russians were responsible for it, and your people were on the phone with Russia on the same day it was happening, and we’re fools for asking the questions? No sir. We are not fools for asking this question. We demand to know the answer to his question. You owe this to the American people. Your supporters will support you either way. If your people were on the phone with [them], what were they saying? We have a right to know. We absolutely do, and that you call us “fake news” and put us down like children for asking these questions on behalf of the American people is inconsequential. The people deserve that answer, at very least.

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I couldn’t be arsed reading the last 100 post’s but like Kelly Spicer will be gone next week

I won’t gloss over it mate, I’ll answer each and every point and demonstrate it is mainly horseshit. The majority of it is speculation, the same type of speculation that you cried foul when leveled at HRC.

So, there are three issues, as outlined in the vox article that you sourced this (very poorly) from:

  1. Trump’s and members of Trump campaign staff business dealings in Russia. Trump was a global businessman who did business in Russia, as did some of his campaign staff and now cabinet. Nothing to see here, move along. As private citizens, they were free to conduct business where they choose, as long as it was legal. Manaford was fired / resigned after the news emerged about his murky dealings in the Ukraine.

  2. There is no evidence that Trump or any member of his team colluded with Russia to influence the election, its speculation and even vox admit that if you read the article. However, the bigger issues here (and you constantly miss the big picture) are the utter stupidity of claiming Russia influenced the election, and the lack of evidence that Russia was involved in the wikileaks hacks. HRC needed no help from the Russians or anyone else to hand the election to Trump, she did that all by herself. There is also speculation (with the same amount of actual evidence as the Russians did it, close to none) that the DNC and Podesta hacks came from within the US intelligence community from individuals who hated Clinton or both Clintons. The US intelligence agencies are extremely powerful, as Trump and his team are finding out.

  3. The Flynn issue is the only one that has any substance. Contrary to your claim (which even vox do not make) there is no evidence that Flynn broke any laws, even the 200 year old Logan law that has never been prosecuted. Until the transcripts of his calls are made public (and one has to wonder why they ave not been?), again we are dealing with speculation. No question Flynn appeared to mislead Pence however, which has rightly cost him his job.

The bigger bigger picture is that nobody with a functioning brain in the US outside the large national media outlets desperate for a story give a shit about these Russia stories. You still don’t get why Trump was elected, now three months on. In the swing states that decided the election, a significant enough portion of the electorate were fed up enough of both parties for the past 16 years to elect an effective outsider. The policies and greed of both parties have resulted in the destruction of the middle class, and rather than going with a candidate who they were 100% certain would continue the same policies, they said fuck it to the establishment and gave the green light to the orange monster. Live with it you Washington cunts, you created him. Maybe he will push through some badly needed legislation, such as corporate tax reform, the useless cunts haven’t been able to do it for at least 20 years.

Regardless of how Trump might want to do things, the US is a nation of laws and checks and balances, as he has discovered with the travel ban. However, the outrage over the travel ban is quite stunning. I find all the protests a bit ironic over a small number of people being delayed coming into the country from known territories where ISIS operates, when where was the outrage when Bush and Obama were dropping bombs on said countries, killing thousands of civilians? Delaying people is an outrage worthy of mass protest, but bombing innocent civilians to bits is meh! How fucked up is that?

The so called progressive left are so far up their own arseholes I doubt they will ever see the light of reason again. I blame social media, Mark Zuckerberg and his “social infrastructure for communities”, politically correct “news” delivered by robots and turning former humans into robots.

Trump is revolutionising communication though his use of Twitter and the looney left press hate it, Hon Trump

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More yawn inducing cliched nonsense, “you still don’t get it”, “politically correct”, blah blah blah blah blah, and whataboutery and furious denials and blind defence of Trump in the face of facts.

If you were in Ireland you’d be the type that would be all over forums furiously defending Noirin O’Sullivan and Martin Callinan.

I sourced my previous post from, you know, my head, from reading the news over the last year, basic knowledge, not a Vox article, by the way.

You would do well to start reading Vox because all the yawn-inducing cliched accusations you laughably throw around about “living in a bubble”, “one track mind”, “tunnel vision”, are ones that you yourself are so flagrantly guilty of.

There’s that hypocrisy again. In all my my years of reading forums, you are by far the biggest hypocrite I’ve ever come across.

I’d imagine it’s becoming a badge of honour in the media to be branded as fake news.

Not really, since everything critical of Trump is being branded fake news. Being singled out by him is probably worth a book deal at this stage alright. I didn’t think he was at all unhinged in that press conference the other day. It was a surreal episode for sure but he was fairly composed throughout.

There’s a big risk of the mainstream media falling in love with this idea that they are the real martyrs in all of this. They love nothing more than the idea that they are brave crusading journalists. That’s a narrative that will do zero damage to Trump, as the mainstream media are universally regarded as cunts, while also allowing his real policy moves to slip under the radar.

Yesterday’s tweets:

Out of all Donald Trump’s Cabinet picks, it’s hard to find anyone who’s been more overtly hostile toward the agency he’s about to lead than Scott Pruitt has been toward the Environmental Protection Agency.

Pruitt made no secret of this; during his tenure as Oklahoma’s attorney general, his bio page called him “a leading advocate against the EPA’s activist agenda.” Over the last six years, Pruitt has filed lawsuit after (mostly unsuccessful) lawsuit to halt EPA rules on mercury pollution from coal plants, thwart EPA plans to clean up the Chesapeake Bay, block President Obama’s efforts to tackle climate change — and much, much more.

Pruitt’s record is so stark that nearly 800 former EPA employees signed a letter opposing his confirmation. They criticized Pruitt’s cozy ties with Oklahoma’s oil and gas industry, his opposition to the federal government regulating air pollution that crosses state lines, his history of downplaying global warming. “Mr. Pruitt’s record,” the letter states, “raises serious questions about whose interests he has served to date and whether he agrees with the longstanding tenets of U.S. environmental law.”

But none of this was enough to derail Pruitt’s nomination. Trump wanted an EPA head who would roll back Obama’s climate policies. And the modern-day GOP is in sync with Pruitt’s views on environmental regulation — namely, that the feds should do far less of it. Pruitt also enjoyed widespread support among industry groups and conservatives, who have been running ads in his favor for months.

Sweep, sweep

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