Doesn’t Matter Who Wins the K Race; We’re All the Same

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Pretty Little Flower

If nobody expected it, how was it not unexpected? The weak passive voice of your second sentence does not save it from irreconcilability with the first. This is just another example of poor writing completely failing to distract from unpersuasive excuses that are being made in order to justify yet another bloviation proven false.

I'm, uh, second guessing myself for ironic effect.* But you knew that. Or maybe you didn't. (Look, I just did it again.)

Trump is alleged to have stolen a lot. In that basket is your sense of humor. Since this guy's been elected, you've become tediously self-righteous. It reminds me of that line from the James' tune:

The therapist said not to see you no more
She said you're like a disease without any cure
She said I'm so obsessed that I'm becoming a bore, oh no

Trump, a first rate buffoon, has turned you into an earnest dullard. You have to be better than that.

There's also this line in the tune:

Ah you think you're so pretty

______
* This gimmick is perhaps overused regarding Trump, and it might not even really be entirely ironic. I'm not sure Trump or his administration are sure why they do anything.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

Can't be sure that there's any connection between Barr's visit with Murdoch, and Shep Smith's departure from Fox News, but the lack of transparency certainly leaves a bad look for the Fox.

Also, what Rick Wilson says.

Smith has been on the edge of leaving for some time. He's been making crazy cash for so long, he doesn't even need to work anymore. Hell, he hasn't had to work in years. And obviously, for personal reasons, the guy has been at odds with Fox's catering to social conservatives.

He also has gravitas the network craves. I doubt they fired him. I think he fired them. The place is supposedly a lunatic asylum, more fractured than the fictional network in HBO's Succession, which is based on the Murdochs and Fox.

The Murdoch kids supposedly want to take Fox to the middle, but the old man can't keep his hands out of the network. Every time the kids tried to tack to the center, Rupert would kneecap the effort. The result is an economically weak news division chaffing under the pressure to stay right exerted by the opinion division that makes all the money.

I don't think Murdoch or his kids can control his opinion people anymore. These people drive enormous ratings and cash into the company. Without that right lean, the network would sink to CNN or MSNBC level ratings.

If Fox News were a stock, however, it'd be something to short in a few years. As its older viewers die off and are not replaced by new younger viewers (as people aren't watching TV anymore), being #1 in cable news is being the world's most profitable maker of buggy whips.

And this can't happen fast enough, as cable news is perhaps the most socially damaging thing on earth behind Facebook.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

Uh, hello? Trump betrayed the Kurds this week just to show that he can do whatever the fuck he wants.

And if he took a lesson from L'Affaire Mueller, surely it was that with an Attorney General who won't recuse, he has no need to fear federal law enforcement investigations.

I disagree on the first point. I tend to side with Adder's suspicion that he thinks he'll be getting something from Turkey or Russia. What it is, I have no idea.

Re Barr, I'm not sure Trump is clever enough to realize how he can used the AG. He doesn't know whether Barr is a bishop, knight, or rook. I suspect he's just blundering and Barr is protecting him as his mistakes and overreaches unfold.

I don't think one can conspire with Trump, as Trump neither makes nor follows any plans. One can only abet or cover up. To assess what you see taking place between Barr, Trump, Pompeo, Guiliani, and the rest as a conspiracy is to mistake people acting with personal and selfish aligned goals as people acting in coordination with each other. I think it was Gore Vidal who said most conspiracies are fiction -- that in reality, it's usually just a bunch of people complimenting each other's efforts for greedy individual purposes. I see that here. It's a bit like Russia under Yeltsin. Those looking to capitalize in the moment all have a shared interest in protecting the befuddled man at the top.

[Hank Chinaski]

So The Wire, my best, hell THE best Wire joke ever, is when my daughter is living in New York and trying to think of a career. We were watching a parking cop write tickets and we speculated about her becoming a parking cop. But she said she wouldn’t want to be involved in shooting. I say, “I don’t care about your damn bodies, I’m a parking police!”

But trying to find the Bunk quote. “I don’t care about your damn drugs, I’m a murder police,” isn’t going well. I got it wrong? (PS my daughter got the reference and her memory is steel trap)

[Adder]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

If Fox News were a stock, however, it'd be something to short in a few years. As its older viewers die off and are not replaced by new younger viewers (as people aren't watching TV anymore), being #1 in cable news is being the world's most profitable maker of buggy whips.

And this can't happen fast enough, as cable news is perhaps the most socially damaging thing on earth behind Facebook.

I hope you're right, but one of the scariest bits of the rally here last week was the number of young men in the crows. They probably aren't watching a lot of Fox News, but they're consuming similar content from somewhere, I assume.

[Oliver_Wendell_Ramone]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

I'm, uh, second guessing myself for ironic effect.* But you knew that. Or maybe you didn't. (Look, I just did it again.)

Trump is alleged to have stolen a lot. In that basket is your sense of humor. Since this guy's been elected, you've become tediously self-righteous. It reminds me of that line from the James' tune:

The therapist said not to see you no more
She said you're like a disease without any cure
She said I'm so obsessed that I'm becoming a bore, oh no

Trump, a first rate buffoon, has turned you into an earnest dullard. You have to be better than that.

There's also this line in the tune:

Ah you think you're so pretty

______
* This gimmick is perhaps overused regarding Trump, and it might not even really be entirely ironic. I'm not sure Trump or his administration are sure why they do anything.

Wait, are you saying Flower slept with Trump?

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Oliver_Wendell_Ramone

Wait, are you saying Flower slept with Trump?

Phone sex.

Maybe some FaceTiming.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

From the Skunk at the Garden Party Desk:

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/were-in-a-permanent-coup

[sebastian_dangerfield]

This is great. The first part shreds a lot of the credulous views you’ll see on this board. The second part reads like Ty criticizing the shit out of me, and it has a good bit of heft to it: https://www.pastemagazine.com/articl...nt-indict.html

[Adder]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

From the Skunk at the Garden Party Desk:

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/were-in-a-permanent-coup

I'm confused about why he thinks this is "new" (there's a long history of intelligence leaks both in support of and opposition to administration policy) or why he sees danger in leaking accurate information.

Keeps reading... ah. He's going with "Russiagate was phony." Okay. Don't need to read him anymore.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Adder

I'm confused about why he thinks this is "new" (there's a long history of intelligence leaks both in support of and opposition to administration policy) or why he sees danger in leaking accurate information.

Keeps reading... ah. He's going with "Russiagate was phony." Okay. Don't need to read him anymore.

To write a story about leaks during the Trump administration and focus only on intelligence leaks (of which, as Adder says, there is a long as storied history) and not on all of the other leaking from the Administration (which is crazytime and not precedented at all) -- it's a pretty blatant case of selective myopia.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Taibbi says:

CIA/FBI-backed impeachment could also be a self-fulfilling prophecy. If Donald Trump thinks he’s going to be jailed upon leaving office, he’ll sooner or later figure out that his only real move is to start acting like the “dictator” MSNBC and CNN keep insisting he is.

That's not a "self-fulfilling prophecy" unless you pretend that the media causes Trump to do things he otherwise would not do. If the risk of losing power prompts Trump to act like a dictator, that's not the media's fault.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

D’oh! https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/ar...990s-economics

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

Taibbi says:



That's not a "self-fulfilling prophecy" unless you pretend that the media causes Trump to do things he otherwise would not do. If the risk of losing power prompts Trump to act like a dictator, that's not the media's fault.

Actually, it is. If actions have consequences, then saying hyperbolic things all the time might result in extreme consequences.

I agree with you that it shouldn’t. In fact, I think freedom of speech should be so absolute that people should not suffer any consequences for anything they say (that sounds extreme, but it’s actually built on an intellectual argument I don’t have the time to set forth in detail here).

But that’s not the system we have. In the system we have, we have people throwing wild accusations at politicians, and now we have a crazy politician in office. So if this screwball turns into a dictator, to an extent, the extremists in the media bear some responsibility. So do the extremists in the media who said crazy shit about Obama, Bush, and the Clintons. He who engages in a “total war“ with his pen may get it.

I think Taibbi might be a bit hysterical, however, as he misses the most important point: The media as we know it is becoming increasingly irrelevant, at a very rapid clip.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

In the system we have, we have people throwing wild accusations at politicians, and now we have a crazy politician in office. So if this screwball turns into a dictator, to an extent, the extremists in the media bear some responsibility.

No. If Trump becomes a dictator, it is because he and his supporters wanted that power, not because people saying stuff somehow made it happen. This is the worst sort of conservative-enabling nonsense, that people support conservatives because liberals are mean to them. Please stop it.