The Atlantic has video of that talk Richard B. Spencer gave at the neo-Nazi meeting Saturday evening after most of the journalists had left.
I hit the stop button after he said “It’s not just that they are leftists and cucks. It’s not just that they are stupid.” That’s 50 seconds in.
It’s only a few men in a room. But…they’re connected to the next president.
Ok the Trump-Macri story may not be true. It’s not completely clear that the reporter wasn’t joking.
On his popular Sunday night program “Periodismo para Todos” (Journalism for All), the muckraking Argentine reporter Jorge Lanata and his guests delivered an explosive claim: U.S. President-elect Donald Trump asked the country’s president for help getting permits for a stalled Trump tower project in Buenos Aires.
The story caught fire, but it may be just more fake news.
Ivan Pavlovsky, a spokesman for Macri who was present in the room during their call, said the claims were false and that “nothing like that ever happened.”
“They didn’t talk about any investments or any tower,” said Pavlovsky, reached by phone in Buenos Aires. “They talked about good relations between Argentina and the United States and the time they first met each other, more than 20 years ago” in New York City, said Pavlovsky.
A Trump spokes also denied it but we know how worthless that is. Sorry, Donnie, but if you lie your lying ass off throughout the campaign, we’re not going to believe you now.
The allegation that caught fire on social media Monday started the previous evening’s broadcast of “Journalism for All.”
Lanata, best known in Argentina as a fierce and irreverent critic of former president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, said during the show’s opening monologue that he had a story about Trump that was “half joking, half serious.”
“Macri called him,” Lanata told his audience. “Trump asked him to approve a tower he’s building in Buenos Aires. It wasn’t only a conversation about geopolitics.”
It wasn’t clear whether Lanata meant the allegations were “half serious” or if the story so defied credulity as to seem like a joke. Nor did he reveal the sources for his claim.
So, not a very solid story then. Marked “doubtful” for now.
For a number of years, Trump and his Argentine partners have been trying to build a major office building in Buenos Aires. The project has been held up by a series of complications tied to financing, importation of building materials and various permitting requirements.
According to a report out of Argentina, when Argentine President Mauricio Macri called President-Elect Trump to congratulate him on his election, Trump asked Macri to deal with the permitting issues that are currently holding up the project.
Pause to stare at the screen in frozen horror.
This comes from one of Argentina’s most prominent journalists, Jorge Lanata, in a recent TV appearance. Lanata is quoted here in La Nacion, one of Argentina’s most prestigious dailies. Said Lanata: “Macri called him. This still hasn’t emerged but Trump asked for them to authorize a building he’s constructing in Buenos Aires, it wasn’t just a geopolitical chat.”
…
Why aren’t we hearing about this in the American press?
Well, remember, no one knew anything about the visit from Trump’s Indian business partners until it appeared in the Indian press either. It seems like this is likely happening on many fronts. It’s just being hidden from the American press. We only hear about it when it bubbles to the surface in the countries where Trump is pushing his business deals.
Trump has denied it. Macri has denied it. The Embassy of Argentina has denied it.
But you know what? I don’t believe them. Trump is a chronic and unabashed liar, so why should I or anyone believe him? And I don’t.
Robin Lustig sees a dangerous world ahead.
What scares me most about Trump is not only that he is a deeply unpleasant man with deeply unpleasant views but also that he is grotesquely, frighteningly incompetent and woefully unprepared for the task ahead. His reputation as a successful businessman is as phony as everything else about him, and he is a man who has no experience whatsoever of politics even at the very lowest level, who apparently had no idea of what was involved in putting together a new White House team.
More than a week after his election, no one from his team had been in touch with either the State Department or the Pentagon, and when the Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe became the first foreign leader to meet him since the election, none of the Japanese leader’s aides could find anyone on the Trump team to brief them ahead of the meeting. (After they met, Mr Abe called the president-elect a man in whom he has ‘great confidence’, which suggests both his well-honed diplomatic skills and his love for whistling in the dark.)
Trump is the man – and this is the team (his daughter and son-in-law were both with him when he met Mr Abe) – who will now have to deal with some of the most skilful and experienced political operators on the planet: put Trump up against Putin, Erdoğan, or Xi Jinping and I’m pretty sure that we won’t have to wait long to see who gets the better of whom.
I think that’s right. Trump has the illusion that he is a brilliant operator, because look how rich he is, but I think he’s mistaken about that.
Trump’s supporters say that we commentators have failed to appreciate that what he said during the election campaign should never have been taken literally. He is, after all, a showman, a man who has likened putting together his administration to picking finalists on his TV show. That’s another reason that he is so dangerous: quite apart from his terrifying character flaws, he can never be believed. ‘Don’t take him literally’ is another way of saying ‘Don’t believe a word he says.’
And we have many reasons independent of the whole “it’s just a political campaign” argument for not believing a word he says. He lies relentlessly and without shame. We’re told he was legitimately elected, but I say he absolutely was not, in large part because of all those lies.
It is hard to avoid the suspicion that Donald Trump never really expected to end up where he is. So far, he has shown little sign of having given the mundane nitty-gritty of the presidency much serious thought. Apparently, when he finally got round to chatting to Theresa May on the phone the other day, he told her that if she happened to be in the US any time soon, she should definitely get in touch. He clearly neither knows nor cares how such matters are usually handled. On its own, it doesn’t much matter, but as an example of his ignorance and lack of preparedness, it matters a great deal.
It’s not good to have an ignorant liar in that job.
For the next four years, the world will scarcely dare to breathe as we learn to live with a dangerous and unpredictable president in the White House.
That about sums it up.
Michael Goldfarb says “The term alt-right needs to be replaced by NYTimes/NPR et al and pronto.” He cites Joseph Goldstein’s story in the Times yesterday on a day-long meeting of followers of Richard B. Spencer near the White House on Saturday.
In 11 hours of speeches and panel discussions in a federal building named after Ronald Reagan a few blocks from the White House, a succession of speakers had laid out a harsh vision for the future, but had denounced violence and said that Hispanic citizens and black Americans had nothing to fear. Earlier in the day, Mr. Spencer himself had urged the group to start acting less like an underground organization and more like the establishment.
But now his tone changed as he began to tell the audience of more than 200 people, mostly young men, what they had been waiting to hear. He railed against Jews and, with a smile, quoted Nazi propaganda in the original German. America, he said, belonged to white people, whom he called the “children of the sun,” a race of conquerors and creators who had been marginalized but now, in the era of President-elect Donald J. Trump, were “awakening to their own identity.”
As he finished, several audience members had their arms outstretched in a Nazi salute. When Mr. Spencer, or perhaps another person standing near him at the front of the room — it was not clear who — shouted, “Heil the people! Heil victory,” the room shouted it back.
They now have a voice in the next administration. Steve Bannon is their guy.
At the conference on Saturday, Mr. Spencer, who said he had coined the term, defined the alt-right as a movement with white identity as its core idea.
“We’ve crossed the Rubicon in terms of recognition,” Mr. Spencer said at the conference, which was sponsored by his organization, the National Policy Institute.
And while much of the discourse at the conference was overtly racist and demeaning toward minorities, for much of the day the sentiments were expressed in ways that seemed intended to not sound too menacing. The focus was on how whites were marginalized and beleaguered.
Reporters peeled away as the evening went on, and some of the veils were thrown off.
Mr. Spencer’s after-dinner speech began with a polemic against the “mainstream media,” before he briefly paused. “Perhaps we should refer to them in the original German?” he said.
The audience immediately screamed back, “Lügenpresse,” reviving a Nazi-era word that means “lying press.”
Yeah. Do let’s revive Nazi slogans. “Lügenpresse” isn’t merely Nazi-era, it’s Nazi. Art deco is Nazi era; Lügenpresse is Nazi propaganda.
“America was, until this last generation, a white country designed for ourselves and our posterity,” Mr. Spencer thundered. “It is our creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us.”
But the white race, he added, is “a race that travels forever on an upward path.”
“To be white is to be a creator, an explorer, a conqueror,” he said.
More members of the audience were on their feet as Mr. Spencer described the choice facing white people as to “conquer or die.”
…
Mr. Spencer said that while he did not think the president-elect should be considered alt-right, “I do think we have a psychic connection, or you can say a deeper connection, with Donald Trump in a way that we simply do not have with most Republicans.”
Yes I think that’s right. They have “psychic connection” with him because he’s a cruel amoral bastard.
A story in four parts pic.twitter.com/9M85K9o4JQ
— Pointless Letters (@pointlesslettrs) November 19, 2016
Jim Rutenberg at the Times on Megyn Kelly’s book.
On Tuesday, she was in her office at the Fox News headquarters in Midtown Manhattan, taking stock, preparing for the next phase — a Trump presidency — and warning fellow journalists to look at her experience during the campaign as a potential cautionary tale.
“The relentless campaign that Trump unleashed on me and Fox News to try to get coverage the way he liked it was unprecedented and potentially very dangerous,” she said, casual but animated behind her translucent desk. If he were to repeat the same behavior from the White House, she said, “it would be quite chilling for many reporters.”
He has been railing at the Times in recent days.
Mr. Trump’s spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, declined to comment on Ms. Kelly or her book.
But speaking broadly about Mr. Trump’s expectations for his relationship with the press as president, Ms. Hicks said that he would abide by “standard press protocols that are in place now, the traditions,” and that he saw his presidency as “a fresh start” for his relationship with the news media.
No.
No, he does not get a “fresh start” after being such a complete shit. It doesn’t work like that. The perp doesn’t get to say “let’s have a fresh start now” after a long career of abuse. He’s still the same cruel bully, so he’s not the one who gets to declare a fresh start. Being elected president doesn’t magically transform a cruel bully into a decent human being.
During the interview, Ms. Kelly said she feared the election sent a troubling message to women.
“There were a few themes that came out of 2016, and one of them is, as women, we have a long way to go, a long way to go,” she told me. Emphasizing that she takes “no position on the election,” she said the campaign showed “there is a tolerance for some considerable level of sexism and in some corners — let me underscore I’m not referring to Trump specifically, just what we saw this year — even misogyny.”
I am referring to Trump specifically: the garbage that has come out of his mouth about women is indeed misogyny. He is a misogynist. Nobody who wasn’t a misogynist could talk about women the way he does.
Slate had a piece about Trump and his team a few days ago that’s so horrifying I had to pause in reading it. It’s about how they echoed threats against Megyn Kelly to the point that a Fox executive had to explain to them that it wouldn’t help their campaign if she were murdered.
Donald Trump’s feud with Megyn Kelly was way darker than any of us knew. Kelly received so many death threats and so much harassment from Trump supporters after confronting him at the first Republican debate with a challenging question about his many, many misogynistic statements that she needed a special security detail for a year.
The Trump campaign stoked the flames of the Kelly hate, the Fox News host told CNN’s Anderson Cooper in an interview on Wednesday, to the point that one of the top executives at Fox News had to explain to one of Trump’s top employees why if she “gets killed” it might be bad for their campaign.
“Michael Cohen, who is Trump’s top lawyer and executive vice president with the Trump Organization had retweeted ‘let’s gut her,’ about me,” Kelly said. “At a time when the threat level was very high, which he knew. And Bill Shine, an executive vice president of Fox, called him up to say, ‘You got to stop this. We understand you are angry but she’s got three kids and is walking around New York.’ ”
The “let’s gut her” made me gasp.
This is why this new regime is not legitimate and never will be. Their chief selling point is bullying and cruelty. We know where bullying and cruelty lead when they are fostered and encouraged, as Trump fosters and encourages them as well as modelling them himself. This is what makes the comparison to Hitler entirely apt. Hitler didn’t campaign on a platform of killing millions of people because he hated them. He campaigned on a platform of hating millions of people, and then went on to the genocide later. People who love bullying and cruelty the way Trump does cannot be trusted not to put them into action.
We’ve never had a president like this before. We’ve had plenty of bad ones, but never ones who would stand up in front of crowds and mock a disabled reporter, mock a woman who tottered because she had pneumonia, mock a woman reporter for menstruating. He’s a mean bastard all the way through, and mean bastards are not safe. He’d kill us all if he felt like it and had the power.
And – we already know this, sadly – even if he doesn’t organize a few genocides, his presence in the job is valorizing and encouraging mean bastards everywhere. Bullying has been given a veneer of legitimacy by the election of this evil piece of shit. That’s why we’re all so plunged in despair.
Cohen is no stranger to elaborate threats against journalists. When the Daily Beast republished an account of a sworn deposition from Trump’s first wife Ivana in which she had used the word rape to describe something Trump did to her, Cohen said “you cannot rape your spouse” and then threatened the reporters.
“I will make sure that you and I meet one day while we’re in the courthouse. And I will take you for every penny you still don’t have. And I will come after your Daily Beast and everybody else that you possibly know,” Cohen told the Daily Beast at the time. “So I’m warning you, tread very fucking lightly, because what I’m going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting. You understand me?”
“You write a story that has Mr. Trump’s name in it, with the word ‘rape,’ and I’m going to mess your life up … for as long as you’re on this frickin’ planet … you’re going to have judgments against you, so much money, you’ll never know how to get out from underneath it,” he added.
He’s Trump’s consigliere.
As ABC News reported in 2011, Cohen is a fan of violent metaphors, if not violence itself:
Cohen, 44, is known around the office—and around New York—as Trump’s “pit bull.” Some have even nicknamed him “Tom,” a reference to Tom Hagen, the consigliore to Vito Corleone in the “Godfather” movies.
“It means that if somebody does something Mr. Trump doesn’t like, I do everything in my power to resolve it to Mr. Trump’s benefit,” Cohen said in an interview with ABC News. “If you do something wrong, I’m going to come at you, grab you by the neck and I’m not going to let you go until I’m finished.”
Yeah that’s really what we want in the White House.
In an interview with the New York Times, Kelly said her experience should be troubling to anyone worried about how a free press might be treated and might operate under President-elect Trump’s incoming administration:
“The relentless campaign that Trump unleashed on me and Fox News to try to get coverage the way he liked it was unprecedented and potentially very dangerous,” she said … If he were to repeat the same behavior from the White House, she said, “it would be quite chilling for many reporters.”
Just a tad.
A few years ago Stephen Fry drove around the US in a London cab with a tv crew. I’ve seen a couple of episodes of the resulting tv series, and liked them. One of the places he visited was Atlantic City…
Would it not have been better to let the home of Monopoly, this seedy resort town and remnant of another way of holidaying, simply fall into the sea? Instead we are given an obscene Gehenna, a place of such tawdry, tacky, tinselly, tasteless and trumpery tat that the desire to run away clutching my hand to my mouth is overwhelming. But no, I must brave the interior of the most tawdry and literally trumpery tower of them all … The Trump Taj Mahal.
For taking the name of the priceless mausoleum of Agra, one of the beauties and wonders of the world, for that alone Donald Trump should be stripped naked and whipped with scorpions all along the boardwalk. It is as if a giant toad has raped a butterfly. I am not an enemy of developers, per se; I know that people must make money from construction and development projects, I know that there is a demand and that casinos will be built. I can pardon Trump all his vanities and shady junk-bonded dealings and financial brinkmanship, I would even forgive him his hair, were it not that everything he does is done with such poisonously atrocious taste, such false glamour, such shallow grandeur, such cynical vulgarity. At least Las Vegas developments, preposterous as they are, have a kind of joy and wit to them … oh well, it is no good putting off the moment, Stephen. In you go.
He’s exactly right, isn’t he – such poisonously atrocious taste, such false glamour, such shallow grandeur, such cynical vulgarity. That living room in Trump Tower…
Here’s another image of that living room, the one that inspired me to go looking for more:
It is repellent. It would be less hideous if he had simply constructed the whole thing out of blocks of cash.
He goes in.
All you need is here: mini-streets complete with Starbucks for people who hate coffee and KFC for people who can’t abide food; there is even a shop devoted entirely to the personality of Donald Trump himself, with quotes from the great man all over the walls: ‘You’ve got to think anyway, so why not think big?’ and similar comforting and illuminating insights that enrich and nourish the hungry human soul.
There’s a lot of horrible tat for sale.
There is nothing here that I would not be ashamed to be seen owning. Not a thing. Oh, must we stay here one minute longer?
Then he goes on into the casino.
Above my head glitter the chandeliers that for some reason Trump is so proud of.
‘$14 million worth of German crystal chandeliers, including 245,000 piece chandeliers in the casino alone, each valued at a cost of $250,000, and taking over 20 hours to hang,’ trumpets the publicity.
‘An entire two-year output of Northern Italy’s Carrera marble quarries – the marble of choice for all of Michelangelo’s art – adorn the hotel’s lobby, guest rooms, casino, hallways and public areas.’
And there you have it. It’s expensive. The end. That’s his entire aesthetic: it’s expensive.
Writing in the present (or rather, last April), Stephen Fry sums up:
Do please believe that to decry such offences against taste is emphatically not a kind of snobbery. Doubtless Trump and his supporters would see any attack on him on aesthetic grounds as sneering metropolitan elitism because they would choose not to understand the moral dimension at play here. It must be understood that bad taste on the monstrous scale that Trump disseminates and embodies is the most brutal crime against the human spirit – a snobbery that looks down with contempt.
If you don’t know Peter York’s book Dictators’ Homes you really should try to get hold of it. It demonstrates quite wonderfully and hilariously how a gross, shatteringly greedy appetite for power and gross, shatteringly vulgar taste go hand in hand. The ‘ruthless, ill-educated, ignorant and trashily vainglorious’ who want to rule us at any price can be read through their bedrooms, dining-rooms and studies.
And, leafing through the book, whose execrable, vomitous taste do you think is shown most exactly to match that of Trump and his towers and foul resort hotels? Why Saddam Hussein’s of course. Indistinguishable.
Maek you think.
H/t Emily
I don’t much admire Theodore Roosevelt, apart from the National Parks thing (which admittedly is a lot), but he said a good thing about our current issues.
To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.
From an editorial he wrote for the “Kansas City Star” during World War I…when he was no longer president, of course.
H/t Steve Watson
The vulgarity of Trump Palace is breathtaking. US Magazine did a piece on it a year ago, so we can see how hideous it really is.
Compare the White House.
You don’t need eye protection in the second place.
Trump’s national security guy is a conspiracy-monger. Business Insider reports:
The retired general whom President-elect Donald Trump tapped to advise him on matters of national security has promoted stories involving conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton.
Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn shared two thinly sourced articles on his Twitter account alleging that Clinton was involved in everything from “money laundering” to “sex crimes with children” just days before the election.
On November 2, the general tweeted a link to a website called True Pundit, which claimed to have spoken with “NYPD sources” involved in the investigation of Anthony Weiner. Flynn called it a “must read” — which many supporters likely did, since it was favorited and retweeted more than 12,000 times.
In other words he tweeted the link with a strong recommendation.
The fabricated news story originated on a number of right-wing blogs that were reporting little more than anonymous postings on internet message boards. As PolitiFact pointed out, the conspiracy theory that implicated Clinton in a “political pedophile sex ring” being investigated by the NYPD and FBI had no basis in fact.
Spokesmen for both agencies denied any investigation, according to PolitiFact.
So he’s precisely the wrong kind of person for that job, isn’t he. He’s another Jack D. Ripper, and we don’t want those as national security honcho.
Flynn headed the Defense Intelligence Agency from 2012 to 2014 before he was reportedly forced out for mismanagement of the agency. Flynn has repeatedly claimed his firing came because of his views on radical Islam.
A drawback to getting news online is that one doesn’t necessarily see how the news is presented and ordered – what is above the fold in huge headlines and what is below it in ordinary headlines. Jamison Foser has shown me what I’ve been missing.
Reminder: The entire @NYTimes front page above the fold was devoted to … possible existence of new email. pic.twitter.com/T0mv0ZVQv7
— Jamison Foser (@jamisonfoser) November 19, 2016
Big headlines right at the top of the page, the whole entire above the fold occupied by Clinton email news.
On the other hand…
Today, @NYTimes gives news of the apparent president-elect paying $25 million to settle a fraud lawsuit more subdued treatment. pic.twitter.com/rbGatOSoEr
— Jamison Foser (@jamisonfoser) November 19, 2016
See there? The “email news” was empty bullshit, calculated to damage Clinton and help Trump. The Trump Not-University fraud suit is not empty bullshit – it’s about real fraud, in which Trump – the president-elect – cheated gullible people out of a lot of money. A hugely rich man cheated people with little money (if they had much money they wouldn’t bother with any real-estate “university”) out of a big chunk of money – yet that gets muffled treatment, while Clinton’s mistake with emails gets reported like high treason.
The email story was before the election and the fraud story was after, but that’s not a sufficient reason for such disproportionate coverage.
Just looked at the @nytimes and HAMILTON BOOS PENCE is huge headline, while TRUMP SETTLES FRAUD SUIT is THIRD story, small font. Wow. https://t.co/z4ti2PDDmh
— Melissa de la Cruz (@MelissadelaCruz) November 19, 2016
The fraud suit is a very important story. The guy who will be president in under 9 weeks settled a lawsuit over his cheating a bunch of people out of thousands of dollars each. Our next president is a rich guy who preys on poor people and steals what little money they have. That is a major story.
Recall the Clinton Foundation stories then read this, which doesn't mention conflict of interest until paragraph 12. https://t.co/OVOTYQ9SHn
— Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler) November 19, 2016
I guess we should look on the bright side? He doesn’t roast and eat babies, that we know of?
The Times suggests Trump’s imbecilic tweeting may be an intentional diversionary tactic.
But even as Mr. Trump’s transition team appeared eager to embrace a more disciplined approach to the process of building out his administration, the president-elect’s Twitter complaints about “Hamilton” and “Saturday Night Live” provided a distraction.
That may have been the intention. Mr. Trump’s Twitter posts diverted attention from other issues, including a $25 million settlement in a lawsuit against Trump University, concerns about conflicts of interest involving the president-elect’s business dealings, and questions about the propriety of potentially appointing his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to a White House post.
Not around here they didn’t. I posted about both.
That’s the thing about Trump, as I keep saying – he’s so horrible on so many fronts, it’s very difficult to keep track of them all. But it’s not impossible. His childish tweets aren’t going to prevent me from pointing out his fraud and corruption and nepotism, along with his racism and misogyny and fascism.
He may succeed in trashing everything, but we will keep the records.
Our petulant imbecile of a president-elect is still whining and complaining on Twitter, along with trying to tell us all what to do. He is so confused. He seems to think the president (and even the pres-elect) can just bark out orders and have them obeyed. That’s not how this works.
The cast and producers of Hamilton, which I hear is highly overrated, should immediately apologize to Mike Pence for their terrible behavior
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 20, 2016
God he’s stupid. He really is like a child, a very young and very spoiled child. That interpolated “which I hear is highly overrated” – that’s so transparent and so goofy. No he doesn’t hear that, except from people who are sucking up to him, which they’re doing because he’s rich and tragically powerful. How can he be dense enough to take that at face value? And dense enough to say it in public in aid of his pissy resentment? How can he not notice what a fucking fool it makes him look?
I know; he’s always looked like a fucking fool and he got elected as such. I know. But the election is over now – he shouldn’t still be performing the fucking fool routine.
Numerous patriots will be coming to Bedminster today as I continue to fill out the various positions necessary to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 20, 2016
Spoken like a true fascist. (Seriously. That’s what fascists say, apart from “Bedminster” and “America.”)
I watched parts of @nbcsnl Saturday Night Live last night. It is a totally one-sided, biased show – nothing funny at all. Equal time for us?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 20, 2016
Again – he shows himself up. “Nothing funny at all” – because it made fun of him. Not presidential, Donnie from Queens. And the suggestion of “equal time” is ludicrous. It’s a satirical show, and it gets to choose its own subjects.
General James "Mad Dog" Mattis, who is being considered for Secretary of Defense, was very impressive yesterday. A true General's General!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 20, 2016
Uncomplicated disgust. He’s rejoicing in a Defense Secretary nicknamed “Mad Dog” – as if frenzied rage is what the job calls for.
Oh look, Milo Yiannopoulos being oh so amusingly “provocative” at Breitbart a few weeks ago – women should have stayed home hawhaw, they were better off there hawhawhaw, having babies is all they’re good for hahahaha.
Feminist propaganda shoved in the faces of previously-content housewives told ladies they would be less happy if they weren’t working a gruelling job like their husbands were. This sort of thinking was designed to make women feel strong and empowered. But the fact is, women have become far more unhappy in the last 35 years.
…
The role of the housewife has been thoroughly and ritually humiliated by successive waves of feminism — as if raising well-adjusted children, keeping a beautiful home and marrying a loving husband is worthy of derision and ridicule. In fact, it’s one of the most important things a woman can do with her life and may be one of the only things women can actually do better than men.
No offense! I mean, sure, if men could bear children we’d have the process streamlined and pain-free by now, but for now, women are the only gender capable of bringing another life into existence. That is a genuinely beautiful thing that should be respected and celebrated, not looked down upon by menopausal, droopy-eyed office drones who spend their nights at home with a wine bottle, wondering where the stench of cat piss is coming from. (It’s coming from them.)
Isn’t he a card? I just love people who say vicious shit on purpose to annoy the people they say it about, don’t you? They’re such fun. Their hair may look like the icing on a party cake, but they’re fun fun fun.
Birth control makes you fat, and as we all know being fat is disgusting and should never be allowed in a civilised society. A 2009 study from the University of Texas found that women using DMPA gain an average of 11 pounds over three years, a 3-4 per cent increase. Ladies: are you really so desperate to get laid that you’d willingly fatten yourself up like a prize-winning sow?
Healthy, fertile women seek out men who are genetically different to them. Women on the Pill do the opposite, seeking out men who are closer to their own tribe. This perhaps is an explanation for the rise of feminized males, so desperate to get laid that they mimic the behaviour and mannerisms of women.
Now at the heart of the executive branch of the US government. Such drollery.
This is completely astounding.
Friday evening, the Washington Post reported that about 100 foreign diplomats gathered at President-elect Donald Trump’s hotel in Washington, DC to “to sip Trump-branded champagne, dine on sliders and hear a sales pitch about the U.S. president-elect’s newest hotel.” The tour included a look at the hotel’s $20,000 a night “town house” suite. The Post also quoted some of the diplomats saying they intended to stay at the hotel in order to ingratiate themselves to the incoming president.
ARE YOU SERIOUS???
He is marketing his new hotel to foreign diplomats?
I’m out of swears, out of facial expressions, out of anything that can express my disgust.
“Why wouldn’t I stay at his hotel blocks from the White House, so I can tell the new president, ‘I love your new hotel!’” said one diplomat from an Asian nation. “Isn’t it rude to come to his city and say, ‘I am staying at your competitor?’”
No. No no no no no. No no no. What’s rude, and corrupt beyond belief, is for a new president to flog his new hotel to visiting diplomats.
The incoming president, in other words, is actively soliciting business from agents of foreign governments. Many of these agents, in turn, said that they will accept the president-elect’s offer to do business because they want to win favor with the new leader of the United States.
There’s a word for that. The word is “bribery.” Can you say “bribery”? I thought you could.
Trump should set up a catering business in the White House kitchen and make all visitors pay him for their meals. That would be dignified.
John Lewis won a National Book Award on Wednesday.
Watch him accept it.
The Times does a story on Trump’s temper tantrum about the “Hamilton” rebellion.
The clash between the “Hamilton” actors and Mr. Trump captured the sharply divergent feelings of many American voters 11 days after the election: a showdown between the values of multiculturalism on the left, including the racially diverse “Hamilton” cast and the world of entertainment, and the conservative principles of the incoming Trump administration, which was backed strongly by working-class white voters and traditional Republicans.
Actually no. It’s not “the conservative principles” that have so many of us fighting back. It’s the noisy racism, the venom, the bullying, the sneering, the insults. It’s the calling a senator “Pocahontas” and the many years as a birther and the refusal to acknowledge that the Central Park 5 were innocent. It’s shit like that. It’s the open racism. That’s not any kind of principle, including conservative. Many conservatives are also racists, yes, but that doesn’t make racism a principle. I think the cast was appealing to Pence to get Trump to be less horrible.
His maneuver, in two posts to Twitter on Saturday morning, stunned the cast members and, judging by social media, jolted many Americans who are worried about the President-elect’s tolerance for dissent after a campaign in which he was criticized for inflaming racial tensions.
I’m not worried about Trump’s total lack of tolerance for dissent. That’s one thing I think he has no power to put into practice. He can’t make us shut up. Ironically, making himself president means anyone can say almost anything about him with impunity, since he’s about as public a figure as we can have in this country. The idea of suing us for libel is laughable. I’m disgusted by his intolerance of dissent, but not worried about it.
The values and politics championed by the cast are in sharp relief to remarks and actions by Mr. Trump, who has called for deporting undocumented immigrants, declined to forcefully denounce expressions of bigotry among his allies, and so far has appointed only white men to major cabinet positions. He has also pledged to change libel laws and sue news media organizations whose coverage he does not like, and has demonized street protesters who have criticized him.
He can pledge until his comb-over flies upward, but it won’t do him any good. He can’t change the libel laws, and if he sues media organizations he will lose bigly.
Mr. Trump lashed out at the show, the most acclaimed Broadway production in years, at a time of demonstrations against his coming presidency. Those include frequent street protests outside Trump Tower along Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, which is less than a mile from the theater showing “Hamilton.” The president-elect has both castigated the protesters and, after being chided for those remarks, praised them for their passion. Advisers, however, say he has been frustrated by the suspicion and hostility that the demonstrators and other Americans continue to hold about his election.
Good. Good good good. I want him to be frustrated. I want him to be miserable with it. Yes, I’m that vindictive.
Some Republican strategists said they were not surprised that Mr. Trump chose to attack “Hamilton,” noting that the president-elect believed deeply in trying to project strength in the face of any kind of opposition.
That is to say, noting that the president-elect is a bully and an asshole.
“Even though many are unhappy with his election and might show disrespect, his victory is legitimate and he will demand respect for his presidency and those that he chose to serve with him,” said Ed Rollins, a veteran adviser to Ronald Reagan and many other Republicans. “This is how he will govern with strength.”
He can demand all he likes, but we don’t have to obey him. That’s not how this works. He’s not god, he’s not The King, he’s not an absolute dictator, and he can’t make us submit to him. I’m not going to respect his presidency. He attained it by relentlessly lying, just for one thing – why should I respect the outcome?
Nope. He’s going to wreck the country, but he can’t make us shut up. Get used to it, Donnie from Queens.
