6578

My son once asked me what would happen if honest-to-goodness-trying-to-commit-genocide Nazis ever took power in the US. I told him I didn’t know, but I’d be too busy reloading to find out. While Bannon isn’t at that level, he’s certainly a move in that direction.

6579

This is awesome.

So says he didn’t say it, and that it’s fake news.

Then they play a clip of him saying it.

Then they say, “That’s fake news?”

And he literally lies about a statement he made one minute earlier, in the same interview, “I didn’t say that’s fake news.”

6580

I can only facepalm so hard, you know?

6581

Yeah, don’t hurt yourself doing that. It is a danger with this administration, and the Republicans all but fellating their Dear Leader.

6582

Man, speaking of that, I remember Brad Wardell and some others just terrified of the “cult of personality” around Obama back in 2008/9. Wonder what they think of these cringe-inducing and disturbing public fellating sessions.

It’s just fucking weird. As @Timex speculated in another thread, is it because the Russians have info on people like Lindsey Graham, Hatch, etc? Or just a ploy to manipulate Trump (I find the latter less convincing, given Trump’s polling numbers). What really explains that sort of abrupt 180 and public fawning?

6583

I think the Occam’s Razor solution is these men have figured out that the best way to get what you want out of Trump is to constantly massage his ego.

I mean, the guy ran on a populist platform and literally called himself ‘blue collar,’ and now they’ve got him blithely signing a plutocratic wealth transfer to the richest Americans. Congressional Republicans are gonna try to squeeze every win they can out of this moron.

6584

My guess is they would say something like how can you compare the greatness of Trump with Obama. Even the few republicans I have seen admit what a tool Trump is are still happy with the results they are seeing, they just wish someone would take away his tweet machine.

6585

I agree. Kneel, worship, and you have a better chance of getting what you want from the guy. Try to reason and suggest something other than what he thinks, and he will push you away. Trump is really transparent to anyone with half a brain, and Rs like Hatch may be somewhat despicable, but they have at least half a brain.

6586

To be fair, Brad’s learned the hard lesson of keeping his politics out of the public eye/using an alias (I would assume) for P&R stuff. So it could be that he hates Trump and his alt is actually Armando.

6587

I’ll vouch for Armando here. He is not Brad. He can wax poetic about Trump both online and offline.

6588

To be clear, I wasn’t trying to single Brad out for derision or anything like that. I just remember he wrote a blog and discussed it quite a bit on this forum. I’m curious if the same worry holds true for Trump (and if so, if he’s really worried now), or if it’s not seen as much of an issue as long as they have the correct letter prepended to their name.

6589

No worries. Honestly, I think this is the exact political inversion of that fear, so I get the comment. It’s just that Brad can’t really answer in response without risking fallout for Stardock. Obama had something of that going for him, but not too bad.

Obama had that earnest professor thing where he could have been spouting compete hogwash and I’d believe him until I took a moment to think (some people have that gift). Here, we get loyalty oaths, etc… As with everything else, Trump seems like he needs to either one-up or destroy whatever Obama did on the personality front. What Obama did with genuine expression (whether one agrees with him or not), Trump seems to do with manufactured rage.

6590

Why would you suggest this to people? It’s not even April 1st.

6591

It’s freaking awesome, I kid you not.

6592

Thank you comrade. Zee check is in zee mail.

6593

This is the same crap that poisoned Microsoft and a lot of other big companies, where one executive got fired or left for greener pastures, and the next one in would try and wipe all remnants of his projects away no matter how much it hurt the company. An attitude and management style Microsoft got rid of when Steve Ballmer finally left.

6594

I don’t think any president has so relentlessly tried to undo everything his predecessor did to the degree that Trump is. It’s obviously personal and I’m convinced that while he began the Birther bullshit just to get attention and feel out his deplorable base, it became completely personal at the White House Correspondents’ dinner.

One downside of 4 year executive terms is that they don’t really lend themselves to coherent long-term policy. Well, we may be cured of that problem soon enough!

6595
6596

Also related to the whole Boomer thing:

6597

I wonder what happened in 1980.

Oh yeah, I remember now: Ronald Reagan.