Author: tristero

Short Answer to a Dumb Question 

by tristero

The NY Times headline reads: Who Is the Republican Heir to Trump?

Every single Republican today is a potential heir to Trump. Trump owns them all.

There Are No Moderates in the GOP 

by tristero

If you don’t follow politics regularly, you might be shocked by the dismissive attitude many of us — including me — have towards the GOP and their politics. You might think, “Not everyone is as bad and extreme as Trump.”

I’m sorry, but that just isn’t so. An overt white supremacist, Steve King, votes Trump 92% of the time.  So you’d think that a moderate like Mitt Romney would vote the Trump agenda far, far less. But that just isn’t so. Romney votes Trump an incredible 81% of the time. 

The “mainstream” GOP is simply insane right now.

Ravelry Gets It 

by tristero

Indeed they do:

Ravelry is a website where both millennials and knitting grannies (among other demographics) meet to talk about knitting, crocheting, weaving, and other craft and fabric arts. But if you plan to crochet a MAGA hat or knit a Trump sweater, think twice about posting it on Ravelry. The forum-style website, which is often described as “Facebook for knitters,” recently issued a statement that they would ban open support of Donald Trump on their site. 

The reason: it has become abundantly clear to the owners of Ravelry (following the RPGNet forums) that Trump is a white supremacist, and that his followers are cynically exploiting the tolerance of the knitting community in order to spread hate and divisiveness. Trumpists can post about knitting but they don’t want them promoting white supremacist memes (like MAGA). Ravelry has standards.

Trump supporters, of course, are free to form their own knitting online community, and I hope they do. That’s called support for freedom of speech. For all I care, they can collaborate with knitters in the KKK and Stormfront and run their own Web site.

If they can find a company that will host it.

Constructing Anti-Liberal Bias 

by tristero

WaPo:

Going into the meeting, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) attacked the idea that Congress would provide billions of dollars in more funding to detain unaccompanied children apprehended at the border. She cited numerous recent reports detailing the poor conditions at U.S. facilities.

“That’s not due to a lack of resources; that’s due to a desire — an active desire by this administration to hurt kids,” she said. “We need to stop funding the detention of children under any and all circumstances.” 

But other Democrats have struck a more measured tone…

Implying that Ocasio-Cortez is somehow not measured, i.e., that she is unhinged. I can imagine similar authors back in the 1930’s deciding after hearing Churchill sound the alarm against the Nazis to seek an oh so much more measured response from someone more level-headed.  Somehow, WaPo’s finest think that there is something defensible about this.

Seriously, I can’t remember the last time I saw the condescending, patronizing phrase “But other Republicans have struck a more measured tone…” from any major media outlet.

An Obvious Answer to an Absurd Question  

by tristero

The New York Times published an op-ed by someone whose church traumatized her when she was a child. Her ministers were obsessed with a sexual fetish, their particular kink being a hyper-Puritanical “purity” obsession:

One piece of youth-group folklore was a “game” in which a cup would be passed around a circle. At each turn, someone would spit in the cup, until the last person had a cup full of spit. “Would you want to drink this?” the youth pastor intoned. “No. And that’s how others will see you if you sleep around.” 

And now, as an adult, she is plagued by doubts and worries about what she can and can’t do when it comes to sex. She can’t fully grasp what was done to her and how to let go/move on. The title of the op-ed succinctly summarizes her present confusion over physical intimacy:

How Should Christians Have Sex?

What an absurd question. How should Christians have sex? Any way Christians want to, as long as everyone’s comfortable doing whatever it is they want to do.

Y’know, it’s a free country, and people are entitled to worship (or not) however they see fit. But I’m finding it hard be tolerant of what was done to her and to so many other children. It’s the American  equivalent of female genital mutilation.

I hope she can continue to recover.

I Don’t Believe a Thing the Trump Administration Says About the Oil Tanker Attack 

by tristero

And no one else should, either. These guys have less credibility than an 80’s infomercial hawking baldness cures.

An independent international commission is needed.

“Suck on This Again”— aka The Ledeen Doctrine Redux

by tristero

A coda to Digby’s earlier post about Lindsey Graham wanting to put “points on the board” by invading Venezuela which will somehow show other countries we mean bizness:

This kind of loony, cynical thinking has a looooong history in America. And it is the height of dangerous, murderous stupidity.

Here are some samples of the same mindset from the Bush/Iraq War:

Andrew Card, Bush’s White House Chief of Staff:

‘From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products [i.e., the invasion of a country for no legitimate reason] in August.’

NY Times Columnist Thomas Friedman:

I think it [the invasion of Iraq] was unquestionably worth doing, Charlie.
…
We needed to go over there, basically, um, and um, uh, take out a very big state right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble, and there was only one way to do it.
…

What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, “Which part of this sentence don’t you understand?”

You don’t think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we’re just gonna to let it grow?

Well, Suck. On. This.

Okay.

That Charlie was what this war was about. We could’ve hit Saudi Arabia, it was part of that bubble. We coulda hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.

And of course, there’s Michael Ledeen, as big a damn fool as ever lived:

[E]very ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.”

And how did Bush/Iraq work out? 

It turned out to be the worst foreign policy disaster in American history, with more than 4,500 Americans dead, 32,000 wounded, trillions of dollars spent and a region thrown into chaos with the rise of the Islamic State just one of the eventual consequences, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who died.

And that’s what will happen again if Graham gets his way.

Fuck points on the board. Let’s get these crazy people out of our public lives.

Trump Administration Repurposes Japanese Internment Camp 

by tristero

Nearly missed this one.  Suffice it to say that once again, those arguing that the decision to impeach is a political decision (OMG! OMG! It”ll never pass the Senate and it will really upset some mean Republicans!!!) don’t have a moral leg to stand on:

The Trump Administration has opted to use an Army base in Oklahoma to hold growing numbers of immigrant children in its custody after running out of room at government shelters. 

Fort Sill, an 150-year-old installation once used as an internment camp for Japanese-Americans during World War II, has been selected to detain 1,400 children until they can be given to an adult relative, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

That’s right, the Trump administration has repurposed the infamous Japanese concentration camps to contain the latest menace to the white man. What’s next, reviving Zyklon B? I truly don’t get it. My parents didn’t raise me to back away from a moral outrage, let alone the perfect clusterfuck of moral outrages that is the present Republican/Trump regime.

Something is truly sick in this country when the argument “The Politics Aren’t There!” is considered a legitimate excuse not to do the obviously right thing.

 Impeach. Keep on impeaching. Now.

Hat tip, Michelle Goldberg.

Talk is So Fucking Cheap

by tristero

This is the behavior of a moral coward. I’m talking about both Trump and Pelosi:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday that President Donald Trump’s openness to a foreign government offering damaging information about a political rival is “a very sad thing” and “appalling,” pointing to legislation from Democrats calling on campaigns to report foreign offers of assistance. 

“The President gave us once again evidence that he does not know right from wrong,” she said at her weekly press conference. “It’s a very sad thing, a very sad thing that he does not know right from wrong.” 

She repeated her belief that Trump has participated in “a criminal cover up.” 

… 

Pelosi said Trump’s comments to ABC were “appalling” but suggested it would not trigger any sudden impeachment push.

Trump Lied About the Mexican Tariff Trade Resolution 

by tristero

Of course, Trump lied:

The deal to avert tariffs that President Trump announced with great fanfare on Friday night consists largely of actions that Mexico had already promised to take in prior discussions with the United States over the past several months, according to officials from both countries who are familiar with the negotiations. 

Friday’s joint declaration says Mexico agreed to the “deployment of its National Guard throughout Mexico, giving priority to its southern border.” But the Mexican government had already pledged to do that in March during secret talks in Miami between Kirstjen Nielsen, then the secretary of homeland security, and Olga Sanchez, the Mexican secretary of the interior, the officials said.