The emergence of our new authoritarian government

And yet, you guys always come back with the same inanity.

 

I'm saying that when you read multiple articles on the same topic, you get a lot of people just repeating the same thing. Sometimes five stories from five networks, and they are all just recycling the same exact story, without even questioning a bit of it.

For example, during the Trump-Russian collusion frenzy, many of the same like-minded news outlets were all claiming they either had proof, or they had unnamed sources who had proof. In hindsight we now know they never had any proof, and their sources lied to them. But if you read enough of these reports from different news outlets all claiming the same thing, did that make it true? No.

So just because a lot of people are claiming to report the same thing, does not make it true. You need to challenge them when you see ambiguity, or snippets of quotes with a total lack of context, disregard the rumors and gossip from actual facts. If they show a three second video snippet as "proof," then go find a 15 minute video source from that three second snippet, and make up your own mind.

It's sad, but you cannot trust our biased media, more and more often you need to find the proof yourself.

 

The three years of MSNBC, BBC, CNN, ABC, NBC, Bloomberg, WaPo, NYT, et al, and all of the so called experts they keep putting on TV and quoting in the news papers, claiming they had proof of Trump-Russia collusion, should have been enough proof for you.

 

I don't go that far. I doubt that any of my conservative friends here do, either. I do say that when the press errs, or makes a prediction that turns out unfounded, it seems never, ever to be a an error that puts Trump in a good light. Maybe he doesn't deserve it. But why is this happening? Is it the press's job to get stories wrong just so long as they cast Trump in a bad light? It's insane.

I won't go dig them all up, but the first one I remember was an error by a journalist named Brian Ross, a man I once respected . It's been forgotten by now, I'm sure, but it made the "ladies" on The View orgasm with delight:

On December 2, 2017, Ross was given a four-week suspension without pay after erroneously stating during a special report that Michael Flynn was preparing to testify that Donald Trump had directed him to make contact with Russian officials during his presidential campaign. Ross issued a clarification on World News Tonight later in the day, explaining that Flynn had not been told to make contact with Russian officials until after the election, and that Trump had only asked Flynn and other advisors to "find ways to repair relations with Russia and other world hot spots" during his campaign. The incorrect report was criticized by conservative commentators, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by 350 points after the report. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Ross_(journalist)


Now, I don't know how a reporter of Ross's stature could make that mistake in the first place. It's so "off" that you have to wonder if it was a mistake at all. But that's not even the problem. The problem is that the erroneous version made Trump look like a co-conspirator in foreign meddling, and a liar for having denied it.

The next one that comes to mind is the story that Michael Cohen, Trumps's lawyer, was preparing to make a deal with prosecutors to dish on all these shady deals Trump made in exchange for a recommendation for leniency, particularly that Trump knew in advance about the Trump Tower meeting with that nobody Russian woman lawyer. It's not a far fetched story. Seems perfectly plausible. But it was wrong. Cohen himself so stated. And of course it got liberal audiences to salivate because it made Trump look bad.

The next one I remember involved Anthony Scaramucci, a one time director of communications in the Trump administration:

On June 22, 2017, CNN reported that Trump aide Anthony Scaramucci was involved with the Russian Direct Investment Fund, under Senate investigation. He was not. CNN retracted the story and forced the three reporters who published it to leave the network. https://theintercept.com/2019/01/20...-u-s-media-failures-on-the-trumprussia-story/

Again, it's not just the mistake; we all make them. But how can you not suspect at some point that when the mistakes always, always casts him in a bad light, that there isn't an agenda here? It's not exactly a conspiracy. It's a kind of hive mind.

Does anyone even remember the urinating Russian prostitutes? Boy, that one was sure to sink him. But it was a bogus story, and of course, cast Trump in a bad light.

Why was it universally assumed that Mueller would discover a conspiracy between Trump and Putin.

The walls are always "closing in on Trump," never "It looks like this investigation is going nowhere."

What possible innocent explanation is there for these errors ?

 

His words do none of those things, other than state his opinion of those who are openly hostile to him.
The President -does- have the 1st Amendment right to do that.
Try again.

I have. Nothing in it supports your point.
Disagree? Quote the text.

Alone, this means nothing - the President a has as much a right to sue as anyone, in office or not.

This was not done for the sake of one-man rule, it was done for the sake of border security.
Sorry - try again.

How is stopping in Scotland to stay at one of his properties a "personal political" move?
Oh - it's not. Thanks.

Alliance has a specific meaning. You haven't cited one, and so your response does not demonstrate the validity of the charge.
Have another go.

Remembering that "alliance" has a specific meaning....
Nowhere here is an example of Trump dismantling an alliance as all of these alliances are intact.
And, of course, the Paris accords are not an alliance, and in any case, the Senate never ratified our membership in it.
Try again.

I see a lot of tired, meaningless and unsupportable rhetoric, without specifics or citation.
Try again.

And again:
I see a lot of tired, meaningless and unsupportable rhetoric, without specifics or citation.
Try again.

Wow.
There's no evidence here that you even understand what it means to "conflate the person of the ruler"
Give it another shot.

Ohh, sorry...
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/07/trump-wins-appeal-of-emoluments-clause-lawsuit-by-democrats.html

Since you have a negative score at the end of the second round, you are ineligible for Final Jeopardy.

 

Careful what you wish for. See #47.

 

Of course Trump colluded with Russia. He knew they were helping him all during the campaign, he didn't say "oh no Russia, back off. This is the USA and we don't allow Russia to help any of our candidates". Did he say that? No, he didn't and as a matter of fact he encouraged their help.
“Russia, if you're listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing” “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.” And bingo! As it turns out, that same day, the Russians — whether they had tuned in or not — made their first effort to break into the servers used by Clinton’s personal office, according to a 29-page indictment unsealed by the special counsel’s office that charged 12 Russians with election hacking. Would you call that 'collusion' or 'cooperation' ?

Then there is the 2016 Trump Tower meeting. I would argue that the publicly available information pertaining to that episode amounts to proof of Trump campaign collusion with Russia. You have a Russian agent dangling Russian assistance in the election (“part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump”), and the offer of help being accepted (“if it’s what you say I love it”). It doesn’t even matter to what degree or even whether the offer was actually followed through. If you take a meeting to plan a crime, and the crime later happens and you benefit, you are an accessory to the crime whether or not you participated after the meeting. There is clear forensic evidence to show that Donald Trump, Jr. called somebody, quite likely his father, while he was rushing to set up the Trump Tower meeting. House Republicans blocked an effort to prove that Donald Trump was the person he called.

Trump did lots of real estate deals with Russians before running for president. Had he made his tax returns public, voters would have known where his money came from — and properly informed voters might have changed the election’s outcome. Trump has been involved with laundering money for the Russians back to his casino days.

You republicans from Donald Trump on down have made “no collusion” a mantra. The term itself is ill-defined in this context; you won’t find it in the US code, it's not even a crime. But it's clear that the campaign got involved with Russian agents who committed computer crimes to help Trump win the 2016 presidential election.

Bill Barr, Trump's henchman, went through great pains to completely misrepresent the Mueller report, and Mueller stated so under oath. Robert Mueller also made it clear that Trump needed to be investigated by Congress for multiple instances of obstruction of justice.

Trump is guilty and rotten to the core.

 

Brian Ross of ABC paid for that with his job and career because unlike Fox Network, ABC has integrity. He's been gone from ABC since July 2018. Shall I go through the list of 'personalities' that Fox has fired for sexual misconduct? The only person they've fired is Trish Regan after she called the coronavirus a "scam" on air. The only reason Fox fired her is because the network got a backlash from scientists, physicians, virology experts, not from any other network or press. They fired her because the experts exploded onto Fox for the intentional lying and calling this deadly virus a "scam".

 

And I honestly hated that it happened. I think he's a good guy. But how could that happen in the first place without Ross having a blind spot? And naturally, it's an anti Trump blind spot. That's the problem. They learned NOTHING from 2016. Nothing. If anything, they're worse.

I didn't even vote for Trump, and I have problems with him. But the media is going to help re-elect Trump with its bias and tunnel vision. The montage of media errors and bad predictions his campaign is putting together right now is going to make them look like Democratic stooges. And I am afraid that that's what they've become.

 

We'll find out on November 3rd, that's if Trump doesn't outright cancel or 'postpone' the election. The American voters are sick of Trump and his lies and mis-management of government. He'll be defeated easily. His polling numbers have dropped sharply in the past two weeks. People are not happy with how he's handling this pandemic and his authoritarian streak is showing up more clearly now.

 

The emergence of an ever more authoritarian US government began with Woodrow Wilson, accelerated by FDR, extended by Truman who created the CIA, enabled further (reluctantly) by Eisenhower, briefly challenged by JFK resulting in his assassination, welcomed by LBJ, expanded by each POTUS thereafter, regardless party , until Trump halted this “progressive” onslaught abruptly in 2016.

Unfortunately, however, it appears that Trump has been misled by “virus experts” who are nothing more than left biased authoritarians themselves, residue from the Obama regime, whom Trump should flush out of the swamp

 

THE PATRIOT ACT

Ta Ta 4th Amendment!



What part doesn't any PF Boardie get?



Moi
The Most Freedomist on PF!

& Australia
UNFREE ​

 

And then, post #55.

 

1) Trump called "fake news" the enemy of the people, and it is. When news organization run with utterly false stories concerning very important matters, and claim they are true, it is very destructive to the nation

2) Trump has freedom of speech to comment on whatever he likes. And the notion presented is that no one else was politicizing?? That is a laugh, the entire Trump-Russia collusion investigation was one giant politicization of events.

3) That article is full of speculation. Of course we want to prevent future wards of the state from entering the US. And as long as our Congress turns a blind eye to the harm that illegal immigration does to our country, I'm sure we will see Trump use whatever measures are within his power, to try and mitigate that harm.

4) A rambling article, using 202/20 hindsight to bemoan the coulda, shoulda woulda? Sorry, but that was lame.

5) That's just a silly rant

6) More of the same, just a rehash of three years worth of hate Trump TDS.

7) That ignorant race card crap?? very Republican president over the last 50 years has been labeled with the same crap. All the haters ever do is insert current Republican president's name, and reprint the same crap.

The dems live off fear, it's why all they do to win elections is create victim groups and claim "Vote Democrat, cuz the mean old Republicans want to kill you."

9) Using Comey and McCabe as pillars of virtue? Those two men are prime examples of corrupt bureaucrats, the type we never ever want to see work in our government ever again.

10) The emoluments clause????? Gee, golly wow, I guess dumb assed Schiff and Pelosi clean fergit to impeach Trump for violating the emoluments clause. At least citing that would have been listing an actual crime, instead all the dems impeached Trump for was their own biased speculative assumptions as to what they think Trump might have secretly thinking of doing.

Post #47 is a giant fail.

 

I have never seen CNN, MSNBC, NYT, WaPo, ABC, NBC, CBS et al, write a positive story about Trump, and then have to retract it because their source was wrong. They always, always, always, jump out with negative headlines calling Trump a liar, or traitor to the nation. Then, ooops a daisy, they write a retraction that is buried somewhere where barely anyone sees it. This is the fake news that Trump says is the enemy of our nation. Running a front page news headlines with a false story, which maligns, and attempts to destroy a president.

The sad thing, is that their are dozens and dozens of these fake news stories. There are soooo many, that the average American cannot keep track as to which stories about our nation's politics were false and which were not. The enormity of false, fake news, creates it's own destructive urban myths which greatly distort and damage our nation.

 

So sad. The truth could smack you upside the head and you'd never notice.

Just one example, when Trump said "Russia, if you're listening..." It was a joke. And for the record, Hilary's email domains (clintonemail.com, wjcoffice.com, and presidentclinton.com) were already taken down, and all of her servers were already in the hands of the FBI labs. So there is no way in hell Russia could hack into those servers and find all those missing emails. BTW, the FBI did find a lot of e-mails, classified and unclassified, on those servers even after Hilary's team unsuccessfully tried to delete them all.

 

Better tell Mueller - he concluded otherwise.

 

To be fair, what president or governor knows anything about epidemiology? He listened to the experts, who exaggerated, suffered from hubris, and were grandstanding. Trump and our governors only followed the advise of these experts. Live and learn, hopefully.

 

Sorry, the American people are not ready for Joe "you know, the thing" Biden, who can't remember where he is half the time.

 

The left will never accept the Mueller Report. Face it

 

They do - but just the parts they choose to misinterpret.

 

Trump is dust. Just a blob in the annals of American history who will be reviled in the future as long as this country exists.

 

Trump i have noticed doesn't look back very much. His news conferences are full of boasting about the people who are really doing the work.. he does very little," i wish we would have......" and to be honest thinking about the past right now is very unproductive. The lessons we learn from this are not to fix next week, they are to fix things for 10 years from now when it happens again.

None of this is anyones fault... let's just get over it and move on.

 

Agreed. Hopefully some of the measures Trump has put forward will become permanent for future national emergencies. Measures such as the changes to multiple FDA regulations and rules, which prevented the nation from responding quickly to this pandemic.

I also hope that now our bureaucrats will actually be ensuring our national stockpiles are replenished in a way that makes sense, and ensures we will have the PPE and equipment ready.

 

Maybe every US embassy should have room
To isolate Americans traveling abroad for 14 days if there is another situation like this
You go to the embassy stay there until the quarantine period is over or until you test negative, then you come home via military transport.

After all the problem was people bringing the virus into the country. Maybe if we do more to keep it from coming here, or at least limit it to early travels it'll be easier for resources inside the USA to used effectively.