Suspicious packages sent to Clinton, Obama, CNN

[_Water Dog]

Still dodging the obvious, sis?

Don't be coy, say what you want to say.

[_Jersey Girl]

Still dodging the obvious, sis?

Don't be coy, say what you want to say.

I already have.

[_EAllusion]

Don't bet on Trump being introspective, though. Ain't gonna happen.

- Doc

He's already commented on the suggestion of toning down his rhetoric by threatening to "tone it up" because of how "unfair" the media is to him.

https://Twitter.com/johniadarola/status ... 3025440768

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

Lol... I don't know what to say. People want to believe in mysterious forces at work.

Like Russian election hackers. Conservative crazy is dismissed. The left wing crazy wins FISA requests and runs on CNN 24/7. I have to wonder too, is this even real? Not that it matters. Half of pol is pure trollbait just to see what conspiracy they can make viral.

I don't know about 'hackers', but agitprop op was definitely happening and in play.

- Doc

[_EAllusion]

Sure, right-wing crazy like chemtrails gets dismissed, but what about leftwing crazy like global warming and evolution? What about that!?

[Guest]

1. You prefer the narrow audience of "tweets", i get it...but to ignore his other public statement just makes your posts seem more disingenuous on this topic....

Hey there, math-challenged fellow. Trump’s Twitter account has over 50 million followers. They’re members of that thing called the public.

Pretty sure that his verbal ‘public statement’ was made to a substantially smaller immediate audience than his typed ‘public statement’.

ETA: I see that Chap already mentioned this. He also noted, on the prior page:

Please remember - if the guy who sent these is a white Christian, he probably isn't a terrorist, he's mentally ill.

[_ajax18]

I don't see how him being a registered Republican or not makes any difference. What do you think about it?

So whether he's a registered Republican or not DJT is still the cause of this? Is that what you're saying?

[_EAllusion]

I don't see how him being a registered Republican or not makes any difference. What do you think about it?

So whether he's a registered Republican or not DJT is still the cause of this? Is that what you're saying?

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... ne/574150/

Since the beginning of his presidential campaign, Donald Trump has weaponized his insincerity and the bad faith of his supporters in order to deny his own accountability for the things he does and believes.

If critics took at face value Trump’s praise for mass deportations or internment camps, they were guilty of taking Trump too literally. If Trump praised violence against the media, or called for a foreign government to aid his campaign, his detractors were informed that the president was only kidding—when he absolutely wasn’t. Whenever Trump says or does something horrible, his defenders insist he did not actually do or say what was done or said, and then attack Trump’s critics for misrepresenting him. Yet everyone involved in the charade knows which Trump is the real Trump, his defenders most of all. It’s why they like him.

During the 2016 campaign, reporters and political analysts would frequently discuss a hypothetical Trump “pivot,” imagining the moment at which he would cease his appeals to prejudice or use of casual falsehoods in order to embrace a more traditional political persona. That never happened.


As Trump assumed the office of the presidency, those desperate for the pivot that never came indulged in another frequently mocked rhetorical device. Whenever Trump publicly performed the traditional duties of the office in a satisfactory fashion, they declared, he “became president.”

Inevitably, Trump would soon return to form. We don’t frequently hear either of those rhetorical devices invoked often anymore. The beginning of the end was when Trump initially condemned the white supremacists whose rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, ended with the murder of the counter-protester Heather Heyer, and then turned around, withdrew that condemnation, and insisted there were “some very fine people” on both sides. Despite Trump’s initial condemnation, white nationalists were left convinced that the president, whatever his aides might convince him to say publicly, was sympathetic to their movement.

This all established a clear pattern: Fake Trump is magnanimous, Real Trump is petty. Fake Trump represents all Americans, Real Trump only cares about his base.

The problem is not, as some have suggested, an eroding standard of “civility” in political discourse. Even early in the Republic, politics at the presidential level were often nasty. But there is a distinction between speech that is mean, objectionable, or even false, and speech that explicitly justifies violence. In a democracy, civility is optional. Nonviolence is essential. Which is why condemnations of political violence against their opponents by American presidents must be genuine.


That is what makes Trump’s frequent, obvious insincerity dangerous, because there are times when the president must be trusted. On Friday, Cesar Sayoc, a 56-year-old Florida Republican, was arrested for sending explosive devices to Democratic leaders and prominent Trump critics, including the cable-news network CNN. For the past week, the president has issued the rote condemnations of political violence that one would expect from a U.S. president. The problem is that there’s no reason to believe he means a word of it.

As my colleague David Frum writes, Trump has not made any gestures of sympathy towards those targeted, he has framed himself as the true victim of an attempt to assassinate leaders of the opposition party, and he suggested that the anger that led to the bombs was the result of the media being too critical of him. Last week, the president praised a congressman who, in an act of utter cowardice, physically attacked a reporter who asked him a question; at other times the president has encouraged his supporters to attack anti-Trump protesters by offering to pay their legal bills. In the meantime, the Republican Party has been running ads accusing Democrats of encouraging violence, even as the president does just that publicly, a gambit some in the media have rewarded by suggesting that left-wing protesters heckling politicians in restaurants is a kind of violence.

An irony of this discourse is that conservative Trump defenders, and some in the media, have adopted a version of the oft-parodied argument among some on the left that words can constitute violence: Left-wing words are violence, and right-wing violence is just words.

Suffice it to say that individuals on both the left or right are capable of political violence, as we saw with the mass shooting at a congressional baseball practice that ended with Republican Representative Steve Scalise being shot and nearly killed. Neither side of the aisle has a monopoly on virtue, and leaders from both parties should take care to ensure they are not encouraging violence from their supporters. Nevertheless, acts of terrorism on the far right are more common in the United States than terrorism on the far left, and there is no figure in the Democratic Party celebrating or encouraging political violence against his opponents the way Trump has done.

Trump is not personally responsible for the actions of a lone bomber—but he is responsible for how he handles those actions, and for the messages he sends to his supporters about the acceptability of political violence.

During an appearance at the White House Friday for an event with a black conservative group, Trump told reporters: “We must never allow political violence to take root in America. We cannot let it happen. And I am committed to doing everything in my power as president to stop it—and to stop it now.”

Shortly afterwards, some of those assembled began chanting “Soros,” referring to George Soros, the wealthy Jewish philanthropist who has been a frequent object of right-wing conspiracy theories, and who was targeted with a bomb earlier this week. Then they chanted “lock them up” and “CNN sucks.” Trump laughed.

The president condemned political violence and called for unity. And not even his own supporters believed it. They, like Trump, were in on the joke.

[_Water Dog]

I don't know about 'hackers', but agitprop op was definitely happening and in play.

Technically, not practically. It will be interesting to see what Mueller has. If it's not huge, as in impeachment worthy, or drop a few missiles on Russian interests worthy, then he's as much if not more a meddling influence in all this.

Options, Trump is illegitimate, Mueller is illegitimate, Putin has pit us all against each other, or some combination thereof.

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

I don't know about 'hackers', but agitprop op was definitely happening and in play.

Technically, not practically. It will be interesting to see what Mueller has.

Dude. I like you. I do. But if you keep up with this horse crap you're going to lose me. I would think you of all people would be a little more attuned to national security interests, and how foreign actors buying and selling political assets go down.

I get being disgusted by nutjob Leftists and out-of-their-gourds Liberals, but we know what the Russians are about and they are, in fact, not aligned with us in any sense.

- Doc