Just Saying Who's Trumping der Fuhrer?

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Richard Stanley

Well-Known Member
For anyone familiar with the surrounding peripheral narratives of the JFK assassination, this story linking Trump to Nixon (and John Connally) is fascinating. The latter actually took one of the bullets, and Nixon was in town at the time. Of course, Poppy Bush was doing some interesting things too.

Nixon was a strange bird, and here we have an seeming prediction out of the blue sky that connects them together. The younger Trump is described as being down to Earth, and not the seeming "unpresidential" bull in the (C)china shop that he portrays for the camera and his audiences. Which indicates to me that Trump is indeed 'acting' as was my opinion of Dubya's early years in the Presidency. Similarly, as per the forum topic heading, it is thought that Hitler's public persona was groomed.

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It happened one weekend in March 1989.

It was one of Nixon’s first public appearances since the Watergate scandal had forced him to resign in 1974. And it was one of Mr. Trump’s first presidential experiences, as he socialized with and had the ear of a former president for two days in Houston at a gala event, an impromptu after-party at Tony’s, a Sunday brunch the next day at a River Oaks mansion and later aboard his plane.

“I think you can see a core of Trump in this,” said Barry Silverman, a Houston advertising and marketing consultant who helped coordinate the gala and was a longtime friend of the Connallys. “He obviously had a road map a lot bigger than any of us ever thought about.”

Mr. Silverman and Mr. Vallone said they did not know what, specifically, Mr. Trump and Nixon had talked about at the gala or at Tony’s. But the time they spent together that weekend most likely fed Mr. Trump’s fascination with and admiration of Nixon. During the campaign, Mr. Trump borrowed phrases from him, used his speech at the 1968 Republican convention as a template for his own convention address, and spoke glowingly of Nixon in interviews.

The Connallys helped bring the fallen president and the future president-elect together.

They had met Mr. Trump a few months earlier at a wedding in New York in December 1988, and Mr. Connally had been a close friend of Nixon’s, serving as his Treasury secretary. Nixon was already familiar with Mr. Trump. The former president had written an unsolicited letter to Mr. Trump in 1987, informing him that Nixon’s wife, Pat, had predicted “that whenever you decide to run for office you will be a winner!”
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“There was tremendous enthusiasm and electricity in the air,” Mr. Vallone said. “Trump had a commanding presence. People say he’s pompous, but he was not pompous. He was very approachable. He’ll talk to the waiters. After that, I went out and bought six or eight of his books and gave them away as gifts, I was so impressed with Trump.”
...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/18/us/politics/when-donald-trump-partied-with-richard-nixon.html?_r=0​
 
R

Richard Stanley

Well-Known Member
An interesting article from the neocon National Review discusses Trump's betrayals of his electorate. At the beginning of the article is a quote from Eye of Newt Gingrich who overheard The Donald state that he was tired of the Drain the Swamp mantra, and apparently Gingrich felt he had license to run with that. Now he had to go and say he made a big Boo-Boo, see further below. The Grop'n Fuhrer followed that up by saying that they would "always be trying to drain the swamp." I thought that the Grop'n Fuhrer was much stronger than that, that he would just drain it and be done with it.

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For Trump, it was all tactics. And he appears to think it was just tactics for his supporters as well.

Perhaps nothing sums up Trump’s insincerity more than his secretary-of-state pick. To the extent that there was any cornerstone to Trump’s thoughts on foreign policy, it was his visceral disgust at George W. Bush and Bush-era interventionism. That was “globalist.” That was “nation-building.” He even went so far as to echo far-left talking points and claim that Bush lied his way into the Iraq War.

But in nominating the CEO of one of the world’s largest multinational corporations, Trump has nominated the very definition of a globalist. And just as Rex Tillerson has come under fire for his close ties to Vladimir Putin, the people who’ve rallied most strongly to his side are members of the Bush foreign-policy team — foremost among them Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld — and Bush himself, who in a private phone call last week lobbied Bob Corker on Tillerson’s behalf. Where are the sneering anti-globalists now?
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It’s as if the people stormed the Bastille and set up the guillotines, only to find their leader feasting with King Louis. It turns out he was a member of the ancien régime all along. ...
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/443251/donald-trump-abandons-movement-campaign-promises​

On "Draining the Swamp":
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But in an online video posted Thursday, Gingrich said that the statement was "a big boo-boo," adding that Trump assured him in a conversation Thursday that "he intends to drain the swamp."

Without mentioning Gingrich by name, the president-elect skewered him Thursday morning in a tweet, saying "Someone incorrectly stated that the phrase "DRAIN THE SWAMP" was no longer being used by me. Actually, we will always be trying to DTS."

Someone incorrectly stated that the phrase "DRAIN THE SWAMP" was no longer being used by me. Actually, we will always be trying to DTS.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 22, 2016​

Gingrich is not the only Trump ally to say that the oft-repeated campaign pledge is taking a back seat to other policy initiatives. Speaking on FOX News on Thursday, former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said of Trump's priorities that "If you had to put them in a chronological order, drain the swamp is probably somewhere down at the bottom."...
Address : <http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/whi...-drain-swamp-gingrich-walks-back-boo-n699146>​
 
R

Richard Stanley

Well-Known Member
The following, seemingly off topic, article excerpt is the hopeful conclusion from an interesting article about the massively changing Trumpscape coming in all levels of American governance. It correctly mentions that change can indeed be a good thing. However, I suspect the actuality may be much darker than that alluded to in the article. If nothing else, from the radical positions held by Bannon and Pence and others of the crypto-Church Militant. Early in the article it ponders if Trump will remain the divisive PR trumpet while Pence works behind the scenes as the nuts and bolts governance geek.

In any case, the excerpt suggests that we have been witnessing a compromise return to cultural moderation on both sides that would otherwise bode well for us.

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Hearing both sides
In many ways, the shape of the battle to come will depend largely on Evangelicals like Cox. On one hand, the church lay leader would like to see a more conservative Supreme Court. But given that forgiveness and seeing every human as evidence of God’s greatness are key Christian tenets, he thinks of the issue along the lines of a covenant he entered into with his wife upon their marriage: “I can be right, but that doesn’t mean she’s wrong.”

Along those lines, the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, an evangelical group, is pushing for a “Fairness for All” national law that mirrors a compromise hammered out in conservative Utah, which secured LGBT rights while also carving out solid exemptions for religious people.

“Rights need not always be secured by one group at the expense of another group,” Shapri LoMaglio, the CCCU’s vice president for government and external relations, told Christianity Today.

And there are other signs of compromise. On Wednesday, Massachusetts officials agreed to revise the state’s Gender Identity Guidance after four churches brought a lawsuit. As part of the agreement, the state admitted that the First Amendment does allow religious expression in community outreach activities like spaghetti suppers.

At the end of the day, Cox argues that Americans, including conservatives, need to stop being fundamentally offended by other people’s beliefs.

“You can’t ever prevent someone from being offended, because when you remove what’s offensive to you, that removal becomes offensive to me,” says Cox. “It seems like we’ve forgotten that we’re a melting pot where we all have to learn to live together. I’m hopeful that we can do better, and ultimately love each other as God’s creatures.”
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politi...s-Trump-brings-new-hope-and-a-thorny-question​
 
R

Richard Stanley

Well-Known Member
Such as the following is the reason for my pessimistic doubt expressed in the prior post. The Berlin attack seems to have (like 9/11) featured another attacker that conveniently (for the authorities) loses his ID for them to find. If one desires a Just War (for Christianity's feel good sake) then you either must get someone to attack you, or make it appear so. And after 15 years of Bush / Obama war, mostly not targeted on Al-Qaeda, in the Middle East should we expect less Islamic radicalism? Well, at least war is ultimately good for creating domestic jobs. As is the case for modernizing our nuclear Rockettes. Old Rockettes will be fired for not performing at the inauguration.

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While Ms Clinton eventually used the phrase, Mr Obama said that while it was correct to talk of the fight against radical extremism, labelling a religion as “extremist”, threatened to undermine such efforts by insulting those communities required to help in the battle.

Indeed, critics of Mr Trump’s latest comments said that his remarks were very dangerous.

slaughter you. This is a purely religious threat, which turned into reality. Such hatred! When will the U.S., and all countries, fight back?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 23, 2016​

Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Washington-based Council on American–Islamic Relations, told The Independent: “During his entire campaign and pending presidency, he appears to have been adopting the false Isis worldview of a clash between Islam and the West.

“This feeds into their narrative and should be avoided by any sensible elected official.”

Twelve people were killed and more than fifty injured earlier this week when a truck was driven through a Christmas market in Berlin. The man suspected of carrying out the attack, Anis Amri, 24, was shot dead in Milan in a clash with police.

His mother, Nour El Houda Hassani, told reporters in Tunisia that she wanted to know who had been "behind him" but feared they would never know. “Within him is a great secret. They killed him and buried the secret with him," she said. ...
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/p...ack-religious-threat-fight-back-a7493466.html
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R

Richard Stanley

Well-Known Member
As I mentioned in passing about wars historically being good for jobs in the just prior post, the first excerpt is from an article first posted in India, about the nature of Trump's cabinet appearing to have completely different motives than his populist campaign rhetoric. It's conclusion references a speech of Steve Bannon's previously brought to our attention by member CplCam on this thread. I discussed this article but did not make the connection that the writer below did about Bannon's linking his economic antidote to the "Church Militant" objective of launching a crusade against Islam (and explicitly also against domestic secularism). In any case, Bannon's claimed goal of reining in the excesses of capitalism is at odds with the likes of Trump's nominated cabinet members, especially the ones from Goldman Sachs, who Trump had railed against both regarding Hillary and Cruz. It's all spin.

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Stephen Bannon, Trump’s adviser, gave a speech to the Vatican in 2014 where he bemoaned the excesses of free-market capitalism and of crony capitalism. Profit and corruption, he said, should not define the economy. Other values need to be promoted, values of nation and religion. Bannon argued that the antidote to free-market and crony capitalism is “Judeo-Christian capitalism”. “People are looked at as commodities,” Bannon complained of the current order. He wants “Judeo-Christian” values to constrain the profit motive. The road to this kind of “Judeo-Christian” capitalism, Bannon said, was to be through the production of a “church militant”, which would be strengthened by a war against Islam. The leap from the problems of free-market and crony capitalism to a war against Islam is confounding. It is what anchors Bannon’s views. To bring the wealthy and the generals into the Cabinet goes along the grain of this kind of approach. Problems of the “forgotten Americans” will not be solved by compassionate social policy. They are to be solved by more social inequality and more wars. ... http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/deeper-look-trump-team-more-scary-and-depressing-every-day​

Trump's trade rhetoric will face some significant pushback from such as China on matters like their huge Boeing jetliner orders and agricultural imports from the American Midwest. Republicans are claiming they will balk at too much public spending on things like infrastructure, and so will private capital markets be likely to pony up for such as toll roads? Most likely the interstate highway system will go up for auction as part of the deal for spending on bridges and such to create fewer jobs. War will do Bannon's jobs and Trump now has generals up the ying yang.

Interesting to see is if Trump will insist on retaining his private security forces, not trained to the same degree as the Secret Service, at least according to this article. Considering the polarity surrounding Trump and that it doesn't seem to be dying down, then does this suggest an Achilles Heel that will be part of the Machiavellian script? In this case, Trump at least owns plenty of garish and tacky resorts around the world where he could go hide in case of a fake assassination .. by fake freedom haters. Then we would be saddled with President Pence, another of the Church Militant.

BTW, the spinner Kellyanne Conway is also a member of the Church Militant, now another part of Trump's official top advisor staff.
 
R

Richard Stanley

Well-Known Member
Trump the King is Born Today, Hallelujah!!!

The Republican National Committee came under fire on Sunday after some said its Christmas message compared Donald Trump to Jesus Christ.

“Over two millennia ago, a new hope was born into the world, a Savior who would offer the promise of salvation to all mankind,” the message from RNC chair Reince Priebus and co-chair Sharon Day said. “Just as the three wise men did on that night, this Christmas heralds a time to celebrate the good news of a new King.”

The “news of a new King” set off social media users, including some who saw the statement as a clear reference to Trump’s election. ...
http://fortune.com/2016/12/25/rnc-new-king-trump-christmas/​

Prince Priapus left himself some plausible deniability for sure.

Well, we know what happened to dictator Julius Caesar when speculation about his being king started to fly. Julius was not forceful in rejecting this suggestion shortly before his final (public) performance at Pompey's Theater. His dictatorship had ended the Roman Republic, leading to his nephew, Octavian Augustus Caesar, becoming the Prince of Peace for Virgil's New World Order of the day. Julius was seen rising to Heaven on the third day, the Jews in attendance the loudest to mourn their savior (who had defeated the hated Pompey - defiler of their Temple). Julius's wax effigy was hung on a ceremonial tropaeum, and the crowd went into a frenzy when Marc Antony revealed the depicted wounds in the effigy's abdomen.

How prescient for my upcoming article on the End Times.
 
R

Richard Stanley

Well-Known Member
Thanks for the link.

The Secret Service didn't exactly do itself any good with its 'hungover' performance in November 63, or with the more recent drunken whore parties in South America. The exposure of latter had to be fairly chilling to help keep Obama in line.
 
R

Richard Stanley

Well-Known Member
The following excerpted article is a pre-election piece wondering about the Grop'n Fuhrer's covert connections to Russia. Obviously, the Russian intelligence agencies would not be interested if the Groper was groping while on his various visits there. Or would they? The article does indeed ponder Melania's role. See her smoking gun picture again, below.

Now look, we know we shouldn’t even be writing this post, because the New York Times so COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY debunked any real connections between Russia and Donald Trump, and it definitely didn’t have anything to do with how all these Trump/Russia stories came out at the same time, when these two Times reporters, Eric Lichtblau and Steven Lee Myers, weren’t even finished with their big hot scoop story on Trump’s connections to Russia. UNFAIR! So they called the FBI and got some bullshit non-exculpatory quotes and solved the case all by theirselves, decided there are definitely not any bad connections between Trump and Russia, case closed, let’s go out for a beer and pat each other’s fannies for a Job Well Did!

FBI Sure Managed To Light A Fire Under Its Ass To Clear Donald Trump Of All Crimes Past, Present And Future

Still, though. That David Corn story in Mother Jones, about how an old spy from a “Western country” with a really good reputation is pretty sure the Russian government has been “cultivating” and using Trump for years now? And the thing in Slate about how there is, for real, a secret server in Trump Tower that only communicates with Alfa Bank in Russia, that actually was reset and given a new name when reporters started asking questions? And the thing about how the FBI has opened an “inquiry” into former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort for his weird ties to Russia? And that thing where Sen. Harry Reid very vaguely suggested in his “fuck you” letter to FBI Director James Comey that the FBI is sitting on some truly explosive shit about Trump? THAT IS A LOT OF CURIOUS THINGS!

Contra the New York Times‘s surely excellent reporting, is it possible there is indeed a “there” there? Let’s take a closer look at David Corn’s Mother Jones piece and apply the old Wonkette #JustAskingQuestions treatment to it! ...
http://wonkette.com/608153/no-for-real-though-is-donald-trump-a-russian-intelligence-asset

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C

CplCam

Member
Thanks to you and Jerry for running this site and filling it with content. I usually don't see much I could say that would add to the conversation but it's all fascinating reading.
 
R

Richard Stanley

Well-Known Member
Thx CplCam

J Orlin Grabbe left a big void when he left and went to Bitcoin Heaven. Hopefully Jerry and I have done him proud in our attempts at emulation. It's a dirty job in Plato's Cave, but someone has to keep the illuminating lights on.
 
R

Richard Stanley

Well-Known Member
The following excerpted article discusses the changing dynamics that Netanyahu faces with Trump's election. This might be a case of being careful what you wish for. The subtext revolves around the age old issue of nationalist Jews versus the liberal Hellenizers, Jews included in the latter, especially American ones.

But also see below the excerpt about the announcement of Trump heralding the new messiah, a theme which I am working on from a secular perspective.

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In September, Netanyahu announced at the General Assembly that Israel had broadened its diplomatic relations, not just with traditional allies in the West, but with emerging powers and markets in Africa, Asia and Latin America. But many of these “new allies” were part of the 14 nations that voted unanimously for the resolution last week. Netanyahu speaks with Vladimir Putin more frequently than any Western leader, but Moscow voted in favor. He has spent years cultivating ties with tiny Senegal, which benefits from a major Israeli agricultural aid program. When it came time to vote at the Security Council, though, they supported the resolution.

And, at a news conference last year, Bennett said that Asian countries could become Israel’s closest friends, because they “lack a heritage of anti-Semitism” found in the West. But China and Japan backed the resolution, too. In fact, Asian diplomats in Tel Aviv tend to laugh when asked whether they would play a role as Israel’s protectors at the United Nations. “We’re not a very active player in this conflict, and I think that would continue to be the case,” one high-ranking Asian diplomat told me. “We want to maintain our distance and focus on other issues.”

Israel’s newest allies, in other words, are happy to increase trade, tourism and security cooperation—but when it comes to diplomacy, they won’t stick their necks out. And if the Netanyahu government provokes a stronger reaction from the U.N., they might even retreat.

Even more worrisome for Israel, however, is the growing alienation of American Jews, who find it more and more difficult to support a religious, right-wing government that they perceive as supporting Israeli racism and endless occupation. The tension between liberalism and Zionism, always lingering below the surface, has become more pronounced. And the Israeli government’s embrace of a president-elect [Trump - rs] (and his controversial political coterie) loathed by the vast majority of American Jews will only widen the chasm. ...
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/12/trump-israel-worst-nightmare-netanyahu-214565​

As well, the article links to another one discussing that the radical right in Israel is gleeful with Trump, to the point that one lawmaker has stated that Trump heralds the coming new messiah:

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Trump’s election, he added, presages the coming of the Messianic Age.

“If such a miracle can happen, we have already reached the days of the Messiah. Therefore, we are really in the era of the birth pangs of the Messiah when everything has been flipped to the good of the Jewish people.” ...
http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Trumps-election-heralds-coming-of-Messiah-says-Deri-472282​
 
R

Richard Stanley

Well-Known Member
The following excerpted article wonders why the MSM is treating the Grop'n Fuhrer with kid gloves, all the while of course, he is complaining about them constantly lying. The pot calling the kettle black?

The problem is that the writer doesn't really provide a satisfying answer to his question. If we also include the fact that the vaunted Clinton political machine seemed to be asleep at the wheel, on messaging and attending to the critical states, then perhaps we have to look at a better answer. The underlying dynamics of the Electoral College system assure that an election can be steered much easier than should be the case otherwise. States like CA and NY can be completely ignored by the campaigns, allowing focus on the so-called 'battleground states' to determine the outcome. The Clintons can maintain deniability that they were snoozing because they clinged to a lead till near the very end. And then the odd October Surprises took there toll. Jesuits abound, including John Podesta. And now we have an incoming WH full of Jesuits? WTF?

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A plurality of Americans think he will be a “poor” or “terrible” president. His cabinet picks enjoy historically little support, and 54 percent of adults say they’re either “uncertain (25 percent) or pessimistic and worried (29 percent) about how Trump will perform during his presidency.” Meanwhile, 68 percent would describe the president-elect as “hard to like,” and less than half of Americans are confident in Trump’s ability to handle an international crisis.

Those numbers are off-the-charts awful for an American president-elect. On average, 71 percent of Americans were confident that Presidents Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton could handle an international crisis, when polled after each was newly elected. Today, just 46 percent are confident about Trump’s ability to handle such a crisis.

Modern American history hasn’t seen anything like this. So what explains the media’s passive, often genuflecting coverage of Trump since November?

“Watching the formation of Donald Trump’s presidency, the press coverage is disappointingly weak and thin,” John Dean recently wrote in Newsweek. “The news coverage of the transition of the most unqualified man ever elected to the White House is as weak and wishy-washy as it was at the outset of his campaign.”

And as Media Matters stressed last month:

In the weeks since Election Day, political journalism has largely fallen short both in style and substance. Journalists watching from the sidelines have been reduced to parroting Trump’s publicly available tweets — allowing him to drive the news cycle — and have bungled one of the most important roles the press plays during a transition period: the vetting of President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet nominations and appointments.

If Trump had just posted a 49-state, Reagan-esque landslide victory, I could more readily understand why the press would be acquiescing so regularly. But Trump just made history by losing the popular tally by nearly three million votes and remains, without question, the least popular president-elect since modern-day polling was invented.

Yet members of the press seem unduly intimidated by his presence, and have even rewarded him with chatter of an invisible “mandate.” (He has none.) Noted John Nichols at the Nation, “It’s absurd to claim that [Trump’s] administration and this Congress enjoy enthusiastic popular support. They don’t.” ...
http://www.salon.com/2017/01/06/a-g...ight-trump-is-historically-unpopular_partner/
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R

Richard Stanley

Well-Known Member
Besides all his other entanglements in foreign countries, Trump 'coincidentally' is partners in some real estate with the Kennedy interests. And, unstated in the article, Kennedy in-law, Arnold Schwarzenegger, is now Trump's apprentice on the TV show, The Apprentice, which Trump is still producer of. Is Trump's criticism of Arnold just part of the bamboozling ... of us?

Given the theme of this thread, it's interesting to note that Joseph Kennedy was also a Nazi sympathizer. During the time that he was ambassador to England he eventually had to be replaced because of this. Of course, most of the royal family was too, but they could not be replaced so easy. During the early part of the war period, JFK was dating a Nazi spy and refused to stop doing so. Because of this he had to be transferred to remote Pacific Ocean duty where this led to his PT109 legend.

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The man who has the most impact on what happens to those shares is not Trump but Steven Roth, the billionaire CEO of Vornado. Three months before Trump was elected president, he named Roth to his economic advisory council.


“That’s the one ray of hope I have about the Trump presidency,” Christopher Kennedy said, adding that recent politics haven’t changed the way the family thinks about its investment. “We invested in Steve Roth’s judgement and his vision and his wisdom, and we would do so again.”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/danalex...vested-alongside-donald-trump/2/#28f577414146​
 
R

Richard Stanley

Well-Known Member
The next excerpted article below is interesting, especially to me considering the reference to Moses, who inverted the culture of a people who became the Hebrews, actually the Jews. They had been typical pagans before this time, otherwise there was no need for Moses' 613 laws in the first place.

Moses was an Egyptian elite and they synthetically created a counter culture, as part of an ingenious and diabolical divide and conquer scheme. One that is still in play today.

As noted below, Trump may not generally read books, but according to his first wife he kept Mein Kampf at his bedside. And he did attend the Jesuit's Fordham University, so he is not completely unlettered. Hitler's little misadventure had a child and that is modern Israel, where the fundamentalist Jews are itching to build their second Third Temple, so that the Christians can destroy it in a few decades, maybe 2070.

Again, running against the grain of the article, his top advisor, Steve Bannon was not only from Goldman Sachs, but was a Georgetown alum. This elite egghead makes a living today looking and acting like a bumpkin, while he has made an address to a Vatican audience asking for a Holy Crusade against secularists and Islam. WTF? This guy was a top level advisor in the Pentagon during his Navy career.

The writer also references the Great Awakening evangelical movement, and all this phenomenon are linked, driven by elite human shepherds pretending to be bumpkins and populists.

...
And so the fabled tradition of Government Sachs continues unabated!

The question now is whether the millions of people who voted for Trump because they thought Clinton was corrupt and believed he would clean things up will realize that they were conned by a charlatan. Or will they continue buying into his faux-populist rhetoric, while his administration dismantles the regulatory apparatus and liberates big banks on Wall Street (ensuring a bigger and better economic crisis in the near future)?

Of course, it’s not quite that simple.

As Trump has packed his administration with lobbyists and industry insiders, many liberal commentators have mocked Trump voters as misinformed, credulous idiots, while shoving his swampy cabinet picks in their faces. Such liberals have missed something fundamental about Trump’s populist rhetoric. For many of the millions who voted for Trump, the “swamp” in Washington doesn’t necessarily denote corporate insiders, Wall Street executives and K-Street lobbyists — as those of us on the left visualize — but arrogant technocrats, bookish intellectuals and politically correct liberal elites who are indifferent to the struggles of the “forgotten men and women” in middle America.

In other words, Trump’s populism has always been more anti-intellectual than anti-elitist. (Of course many Americans perceive intellectuals and academics as the ultimate elites, even though they have little political or economic power.) Trump is loud, obnoxious, unlettered and uninformed. Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t read books. At the same time, he is proud, supremely confident, practical and enormously wealthy. Trump may be an economic elite, but he sure as hell ain’t no egghead.

Is it any surprise, then, that he has become the anti-intellectual Moses of the 21st century?

Anti-intellectualism has a long history in the United States, and the leftist historian Richard Hofstadter wrote an entire book in the 1960s documenting anti-intellectual movements in America — from the “Great Awakening” evangelical movement to the nativist “know-nothings” of the mid-19th century to the John Birch Society in his time. Hofstadter is even more famous for his 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” in which he documented how many such anti-intellectual movements featured a “paranoid politics” rooted in conspiracy theory. That also has echoes in the Trumpian present.

It has always been ironic that a country founded by Enlightenment philosophers and bookish intellectuals like Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton has long been a hostile environment for intellectuals, who are widely distrusted by much of the populace, not least because they are often irreligious or skeptical of religion (as were many of the beloved founders). ...
http://www.salon.com/2017/01/07/don...lism-drain-the-swamp-just-meant-the-eggheads/​
 
R

Richard Stanley

Well-Known Member
"Trumputin" LOL


...
Hamill's Joker reading of Trump's tweet came following an idea seeded by comedy writer Matt Oswalt, who tweeted on December 31st of Trump's New Year's message, "This sounds like something the Joker would say right before releasing a swarm of killer bees into Gotham."

On Saturday, Oswalt tweeted, "BILLION DOLLAR IDEA: an App that you can feed every Trump tweet into that plays it back in @HamillHimself Joker voice," a concept that was endorsed by Oswalt's brother Patton Oswalt.

Soon after, Hamill himself tweeted to the Oswalts, "As soon as I figure out how to tweet soundbites, I'd LOVE to. Nobody writes better super-villain dialogue than #Trumputin! #KremlinCandidate." Twitter followers quickly came to Hamill's aid and the audio clip was created. ...
http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/...-read-donald-trump-tweet-as-the-joker-w459623​
 
R

Richard Stanley

Well-Known Member
Singer Rebecca Ferguson, not even an American, has accepted Trumputin's offer to perform at his inauguration, on one condition:

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In the unlikely event Trump took Ferguson up on her offer, it wouldn’t be the first time she performed a song popularized by Holiday: She recorded an entire album of Holiday covers in 2015, though “Strange Fruit” wasn’t among them. The song was originally written as a poem inspired by a gruesome photograph of the 1930 lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith and paints a nightmarish vision of the American South:

Pastoral scene of the gallant South,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.
​
It’s unclear if Trump is much of a Billie Holiday fan—he’s never tweeted about her—but he did express his love and admiration of violent mobs several times during the campaign, earned the enthusiastic support of white supremacists, and carried every state of the old Confederacy except Virginia. He has yet to tweet a response to Ferguson’s offer. ...
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat...on_wants_to_sing_strange_fruit_for_trump.html​

As we have learned recently, the Second Amendment was passed to enable the slave states to righteously put down sacrilegious slave rebellions. Christianity, as from its Bible, is highly in favor of slavery. The solution to our eliminating slavery was get a bunch of commies and other Third World yutzes to build our Christmas toys and other trinkets. Now Trump is threatening to make white people go back to work? These people had decades to get off their asses and become crony magnates like ousia and Trump. Oy veh!!!
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Richard Stanley

Well-Known Member
The following excerpted article demonstrates just why the Russians were celebrating Trump's election win. The Russian oligarchs saved Trump's financial ass, and likely arranged his marriage to Melania.

Of course, apologists for Trump can claim that George Washington was similarly saved by Albert Gallatin, the immigrant scion of Swiss bankers, the source of the sweetheart loans to later do the Louisiana Purchase. A young Gallatin immigrated to America immediately after the close of the revolution, claiming that he was taken with the American spirit. He moved to western Pennsylvania where he became a successful real estate speculator and a political manipulator. His reputation led a financially failing George Washington to seek his help. Gallatin would go on to become Secretary of Treasury for three Presidents, and the 'AG' in AG Edwards bank.

The BIG QUESTION here is just why US intelligence agencies were not aware of all this, or are choosing to remain mum.

Let's also remember that Clinton boy, Larry Summers, and friends were sent to Russia to advise on the takeover of Soviet assets to the Russian oligarchs. It wouldn't be kosher for the common Russian to share in inheriting the wealth would it?

And why did the vaunted Clinton political machine not discover such, as was covered in The Financial Times, as opposition research to be used in the campaign?

...
Why was RACC’s background filled with so many holes? The Financial Times quotes former Russian MP Konstantin Borovoi in tagging the chamber as a front for intelligence operations that dates back to Soviet times.

“The chamber of commerce institutions are the visible part of the agent network . . . Russia has spent huge amounts of money on this.”​
Millian helped arrange for Trump to visit Moscow in 2007, and had other outings with Trump in the states, including a visit to horse races in Miami. Millian claims that he had the right to market Trump properties in Russia.

“You could say I was their exclusive broker,” he told Ria. “Then, in 2007-2008, dozens of Russians bought apartments in Trump properties in the US.” He later told ABC television that the Trump Organisation had received “hundreds of millions of dollars” through deals with Russian businessmen.​
Despite documents and photos showing Trump with Millian, Trump denied their association during the campaign.

Hope Hicks, Mr Trump’s campaign spokeswoman, said Mr Trump had “met and spoke” with Mr Millian only “on one occasion almost a decade ago at a hotel opening”.

The second Financial Times article puts Trump at the middle of a money laundering scheme, in which his real estate deals were used to hide not just an infusion of capital from Russia and former Soviet states, but to launder hundreds of millions looted by oligarchs. All Trump had to do was close his eyes to the source of the money, and suddenly empty apartments were going for top dollar.

Among the dozens of companies the Almaty lawyers say the Khrapunov laundering network used were three called Soho 3310, Soho 3311 and Soho 3203. Each was a limited liability company, meaning their ownership could easily be concealed.

The companies were created in April 2013 in New York. A week later, property records show, they paid a total of $3.1m to buy the apartments that corresponded with their names in the Trump Soho, a 46-storey luxury hotel-condominium completed in 2010 in a chic corner of Manhattan.

Why would Trump’s organization make such a good means of laundering funds? Because real estate has an arbitrary value. Is that apartment worth $1 million? Two million? Why not $3 million for a buyer who really wants it? When the whole transaction is just one LLC with undisclosed ownership paying another LLC with undisclosed ownership, it’s even neater than hiding the money in an offshore account. And while some businesses require due diligence in looking at the source of funds, real estate is a bit more … flexible.

The laws regulating US real estate deals are scant, experts say. Provisions against terrorism financing in the Patriot Act, passed in the aftermath of the September 11 2001 attacks, obliged mortgage lenders to conduct “know your customer” research. But money launderers pay in cash. Sales such as those of the Trump Soho apartments have passed through this loophole, which was partially closed only this year.

Converting funds stolen overseas into property in the US and cash in the account of an LLC represented a win for both the oligarchs and Trump. Best of all, Trump’s sole requirement was that he pay scant attention to the deal—something at which he was already a proven master. For example, the actual owners of the Trump Soho were another limited liability company, Bayrock. Trump was a partner in the LLC and Bayrock cut the checks Trump received when those apartments were sold. And yet ...

In a 2011 deposition, given in a dispute over the Fort Lauderdale project, Mr Trump said he had “never really understood who owned Bayrock”. Jody Kriss, a former Bayrock finance director, has claimed in racketeering lawsuits against his former employer that Bayrock’s backers included “hidden interests in Russia and Kazakhstan”. Bayrock has denied Mr Kriss’s allegations but declined to answer questions about the source of its funds and its relationship with the Khrapunovs.

The third article digs more deeply into the origins of Bayrock and its connection with Trump. That connection … was very close.

The Republican presidential nominee and Bayrock were both based in Trump Tower and they joined forces to pursue deals around the world — from New York, Florida, Arizona and Colorado in the US to Turkey, Poland, Russia and Ukraine. Their best-known collaboration — Trump SoHo, a 46-storey hotel-condominium completed in 2010 — was featured in Mr Trump’s NBC television show The Apprentice.

This is the same group about which Trump said he “never really understood” the ownership.

...
The Trump Organization was a hollow shell and Trump was bankrupt, but Donald Trump the public figure was a “successful businessman,” a screen behind which criminal activity could be carried out on a massive scale. Throwing his name at every scheme in existence wasn’t a strategy, it was a fire sale on Trump’s respectability. Steaks? Water? Vodka? Fake real estate school? You pony up the cash, and Trump will slap his name on it. Because by the early 2000s, Trump wasn’t just broke, he had nothing left to pawn. He wasn’t a successful businessman, but he still played one on TV. His image had more value than his real estate portfolio.

But the apartments and buildings where Trump held some degree of ownership could be turned into value again. All it took was partnering with foreign crime bosses looking for a place to stash their cash. To inflate the value of his portfolio, Trump had to do nothing other than look away as the dirty money poured in from one LLC to the next. Citizens in Russia, Kazakhstan, and other former Soviet states lost hundreds of millions, but Trump got a cut as looted funds flowed through offices and apartments in buildings that carried those critical gold letters.

Horton’s evaluation of this material in coordination with the declassified DNI report is that Trump actively worked with and for Russian interests. ...
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/donald-trump-was-bailed-out-bankruptcy-russia-crime-bosses​
 
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