On Postponing The 2020 Election.

Republican. A synonym for every evil thing.

A chilling new poll conducted by scholars Ariel Malka and Yphtach Lelkes, which they write about in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog today, finds that not only do nearly half of Republicans falsely believe that President Trump won the popular vote in 2016 and that nearly 70 percent believe that “millions of illegal immigrants voted” in the election, but that  more than half would support postponing the 2020 presidential election “until the country can make sure that only eligible American citizens can vote” if Trump were to propose it.

Malka and Lelkes caution that this whole situation is hypothetical and that people’s views might be different if faced with the situation in reality. But they write that their findings, at a minimum “show that a substantial number of Republicans are amenable to violations of democratic norms that are more flagrant than what is typically proposed (or studied).”

It’s worth remembering that one of the many conspiracy theories that the right-wing media propagated about President Obama was that he would invent some kind of crisis in order to justify staying in office for a second term, or even indefinitely.

Just in case Trump doesn’t nuke us all to death, we can look forward to this shit. RWW has the full rundown on all the conspiracies which were rife when an actual President was in office.

Real Men With Testosterone!

Wayne Allyn Root is thrilled, right down to his little…toes. He’s swimming in a sea of testosterone, and loving it. There’s an abundance of eyeroll coming up, guard yourself.

Root, who just last month repeatedly voiced his disgust that Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand had cursed during a speech, couldn’t stop praising Scaramucci’s vulgarity or his amazing manliness.

“It looks like we’re getting the trannies out of the military and we’re getting the real men in the White House,” Root crowed as he bragged that he, like Scaramucci, grew up in New York and therefore knows how to fight and has no problem knocking people’s teeth out.

Root is always talking about fighting, about being able to beat anyone up. In my experience, people who talk constantly about their ability to fight aren’t any good at it. Also, in my experience, reasonable people don’t take glee in the idea of physically fighting. No, transgender people in the military aren’t going anywhere. Just because Donny tweets something, doesn’t make it the TwitterLaw™ of the Land.

“Real men with testosterone, that’s what needs to run America,” he said. “He’s my kind of guy, he’s a real man with testosterone … We finally got people in office with personality instead of a bunch of country club losers and the whole world is freaking out that Trump is going to block transgenders from being in the military and that you’ve got guys like Trump and Scaramucci with our locker room conversation. You know what? This is the real world! Wake up. This is how you become successful. I’ve made millions of dollars in the business world and everyone I’ve dealt with talks like this.”

A vulgar asshole who is incapable of keeping his own counsel. Yeah, that’s what needs to run America. Oh, people with personality, that’s what all this is! Yes, I think we’re all aware that government in this lost country is now an incredible cringefest of a reality show. Far be it from me to decry your personal taste in entertainment, Mr. Root, but this pile of shit does not belong in government, on any level. Just how do you think the Tiny Tyrant is going to block transgender people from the military? He doesn’t have the power to wrinkle his nose and twitch it so.

You know what? That’s not the real world, you dipshit. That’s your fantasy land. The fantasy land of incompetent sociopaths. So, every single person you have ever dealt with talks like that. I guess you would deal mostly with organized crime a great deal then. Good to know.

“In private, this is how guys talk,” Root continued, “and unfortunately, we have a society that doesn’t want men to be men anymore. You want men to be women! I’m sorry, men aren’t supposed to be women, men aren’t supposed to be gay, men aren’t supposed to be transgender, men are men! And you gotta let us be. We like football, we like wrestling, we like MMA, we like boxing, we like beautiful women in bikinis and we say it out loud and if you don’t like it, we don’t really give a damn. That’s what guys are like and Anthony Scaramucci and Donald Trump and Wayne Root are men and you know what? Tough.”

Sigh. Yes, cupcake, we all know what regressive assholes are like, everyone gets to deal with them. That does not mean people approve, or like you. Most of us just don’t want to be trapped in the same room with any of you, and wish to the universe you would learn to shut the fuck up. Men do not have to be neutered willow wands to enjoy homosociality, and there’s nothing wrong with men being able to be free and open about the things they like and dislike. Like sportsball? Great. Don’t like sportsball? Great. You’re one of the worst things to happen to the concept of masculinity, Mr. Root, and thankfully, most men are well aware of that. All you do is follow an outdated concept of masculinity which traps you in a tiny bubble of thought and action, forcing you to live next to no actual life, because you have to constantly feed this notion of what a manly man you are. It’s a fake masculinity, one which demands of men that they never be who they actually are, and that is  terribly pathetic.

Via Right Wing Watch.

It’s All About The Pizza, Ayyyy!

Palermo’s Pizza.

“What part of Donald Trump is not elite? The business side, the politics side, the inheritance side?” BBC reporter Emily Maitlis asked.

“Oh my god, there’s so many things about the president. How about the cheeseburgers, how about the pizzas that we eat?” Scaramucci replied.

“Everyone eats cheeseburgers, pizzas, what are you talking about?” the reporter fired back.

I’m with the reporter. A love of certain foods does not make an everyman.

Scaramucci then accused Maitlis of “coming across a little elitist” and said he grew up in a middle-class family with a “tight budget” and “little to no money.”

He said Trump understands the “common struggle” even better than he does.

“He knows how to operate in the elitist world and has unbelievable empathy for the common struggle that’s going on with the middle-class people and the lower middle-class people,” he said.

Oh sure, he understands the “common people”. Having daddy hand you a million bucks in seed money, that’s a very typical thing, happens to most commoners, right? Oh, and the language! “Common struggle”, pretty sure that’s shortspeak for commoners, because Tiny Tyrant fancies himself royalty. As for empathy? Oh, please. Pull the other one, it has bells on. It is totally unbelievable that Trump has any empathy at all. I would love to see someone point Trump at a typical lower middle class house, and tell him he had to take all his vacations in it, rather than his mansion in Florida, for a month. He wouldn’t be able to do it. Although you probably could park him in a Pizza Hut for a day, if the pizza was free.

Via The Hill. (Video at the link.)

The Most Precedential Presidential Of All!

Toddler Trump, by Sham.

In one of his “FEED MY EGO” rallies, the Tiny Tyrant waxed idiotic about being presidential:

At a campaign-style rally in Ohio, President Donald Trump claimed he could act more “presidential” than any previous White House occupant, with the exception of President Abraham Lincoln.

“And I say – great schools, smart guy – it’s so easy to act presidential,” Trump claimed. “But that’s not going to get it done.”

“With the exception of the late, great Abraham Lincoln, I can be more presidential than any president that’s ever held this office,” Trump claimed.

“It’s real easy,” Trump added.

I agree, it’s easy enough to act presidential. That’s not the same as being presidential. And I wouldn’t be so fast to rate your acting abilities, Donny, they are abysmal. You haven’t been able to get one fucking thing done, unless you count regressively banning transgender people from the military. That’s hardly some great feat, you incompetent fuckwit. The only reason that was done was to give the Religious Reich another gift from their Theocalypse wishlist.

Have you informed the ghost of Andrew Jackson that he’s been supplanted by Lincoln?

You can see some of the replies to this latest declaration at Raw Story.

Speaking of Neo-Nazi Assholes…

Tucker Viemeister.

In the previous post, Richard Spencer’s sugar daddy was revealed. Now, Spencer and his nazi buddies are busy talking themselves up again, and just loving the current regime in all its chaos and idiocy.

As Salon reports, Michael Peinovich, the creator of alt-right podcast network The Right Stuff, spoke with leader Richard Spencer and an anonymous former GOP staffer ‘Jazzhands McFeels’ on Sunday about the administration’s lack funding for domestic terrorist groups.

“He’s going to give us space to operate, and frankly, it is space to destroy,” Peinovich said of Trump.

“Now is the time that we have to make hay while the sun shines,” ‘Jazzhands McFeels’ argued, insisting the alt-right should take advantage “while these investigations of ‘domestic terrorist groups’ are not being funded by the government, they’re not being pushed by the Department of Homeland Security.”

Contrasting Trump’s administration with a hypothetical Hillary Clinton presidency, Peiovich added the alt-right would “probably be facing f*cking [racketeering] charges or some shit like that,” adding the movement has “to use these four years to grow into something that can’t be defeated by that kind of thing.”

[…]

“I hope the way that [Trump] is looked back on in history is that he was the vehicle that moved the alt-right movement, the white identity movement in the United States, back into the forefront of the political scene,” Peinovich said.

And that alone should be reason enough for impeachment. Via Raw Story.

“The velvet tyranny of political correctness.”

Richard Spencer and William H. Regnery II.

Lance Williams at Reveal has an absorbing article up about the person and money behind neo-nazi Richard Spencer. For many years, Regnery’s notions about race got him kicked out of one organization or another, but the rise of the Tiny Tyrant has made many of  his dreams come true.

Long before Donald Trump’s election ushered in an era of resurgent white nationalism, a disaffected Republican named William H. Regnery II was brooding about the demographic plight of white people and plotting their rescue.

Like Trump more than 20 years later, Regnery, the wealthy scion of a famous GOP family, had an increasingly dark view of a changing America: As he wrote, the U.S. had become a crime-ridden society with bad schools, high taxes, an intrusive government and a penchant for political correctness that was “morphing into an intellectual tyranny.”

Worse, “a flood of immigrants were changing the look of America from a palette of prime colors to a third-world monochrome,” he wrote in a rant that would be at home on the bookshelf of Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon. “Instead of a lingua franca, the country clanged with many foreign tongues.”

By 1999, he had come to believe that the only future for white people in North America was a reconfigured continent with a white-only homeland carved out of the former United States.

[…]

Through his family’s famed conservative publishing house, Regnery had been on a first-name basis with the cream of the Republican establishment. But by 2006, his public views on race left him ostracized from the GOP.   

Now, he’s back. Working behind the scenes, the retired Chicago business executive has played an important role in making his ultra-right views a part of America’s political conversation in the era of Trump.

In what he has described as his crowning political achievement, Regnery discovered Richard Spencer, the mediagenic agitator who invented the term “alt-right.” In 2011, Regnery made him the frontman for his white nationalist think tank, the National Policy Institute, providing Spencer the platform to launch the alt-right movement.

The full article is here, recommended.

Scaramanga Scaramouche Scaramucci: Two-Faced Turnabout.

Anthony Scaramucci CREDIT: AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster.

Oh what a different song he sings! Scaramucci was no fan of the Tiny Tyrant, but of course, he’s contorted himself into a complete 380. While he has been busy scrubbing his past tweets, he can’t control all the times he ranted about what a rotten egg Trump is, and how he should stick with real estate. Whatever Scaramucci’s talents might be, he’s not so great at the spokesperson business, having attempted a tight mouth denial about Russia, citing an anonymous source, only to spill that his source was Trump in the overwhelming heat of a second question.

This is Scaramucci, ranting about Trump in 2015:

In 2015, Scaramucci appeared on the Fox Business Network to talk about politics. They played a clip of Donald Trump attacking “hedge fund guys.”

Scaramucci responded with an extended rant against Trump, calling his new boss “another hack politician” and “anti-American.” He said Trump’s rhetoric is “very, very divisive.”

He wasn’t done.

“It’s very very divisive. I’ll tell you who he’s going to be president of,” he said, looking into the camera, “you can tell Donald I said this, the Queens County Bullies Association. You gotta cut it out now and stop all this crazy rhetoric spinning everybody’s heads around.”

Another host interjected that it was rich that Scaramucci finally drew the line with Trump’s rhetoric on “hedge fund guys,” after everything Trump had said about women.

Scaramucci agreed with her.

“I don’t like the way he talks about women, I don’t like the way he talks about our friend Megyn Kelly, and you know what, the politicians don’t want to go at Trump because he’s got a big mouth and because [they’re] afraid he’s going to light them up on Fox News and all these other places,” he said. “But I’m not a politician. Bring it. You’re an inherited money dude from Queens County. Bring it, Donald.”

Think Progress has the full story.

Sunday Facepalm: The Destruction of All Media.

At yesterday’s Phyllis Schlafly Collegians D.C. Summit, an event for college students hosted by the late Schlafly’s group Eagle Forum, Breitbart’s Washington political editor Matt Boyle boasted that his publication’s goal is to completely destroy and eliminate the “mainstream media,” leaving Brietbart and other fringe organizations as the only available media outlets.

“The goal eventually is the full destruction and elimination of the entire mainstream media,” Boyle said. “We envision a day where CNN is no longer in business; we envision a day where The New York Times closes its doors. I think that day is possible, I think that we can get there.”

No subtlety there. Unfortunately, I think that day is all too possible too. Perhaps not probable, but still, I think we are far more weighted towards the fascism side these days. Certainly the Tiny Tyrant and the rethuglicans wouldn’t have much of a problem with this scenario.

“But when that happens,” he added, “the public still needs an information stream. And again, as much as we love Trump’s Twitter account, as much as we love the White House press releases and briefings and all that, there needs to be an independent and strong media in the United States, and that’s where we come in.”

Independent. Is that what toadying and the fostering of hate is called now? I think we can stick with propaganda, as that one is accurate.

Via Right Wing Watch.

‘America must be ready to nuke first’

Wikipedia.

Donald Trump’s nominee to be an assistant secretary for the Defense Department’s nuclear, chemical, and biological defense programs believes that the U.S. has the right to preemptively unleash nuclear weapons on other countries.

The New Republic‘s Emily Atkin wrote on Friday that Trump has nominated Guy B. Roberts to — according to the job description posted on the DoD website — “prevent, protect against, and respond to weapons of mass destruction threats” and advise Defense Sec. James Mattis on “matters concerning nuclear, chemical, and biological defense programs.”

Roberts, Atkin said, has a strong resume. He is a 25-year veteran of the Marine Corps and has worked in nuclear weapons policy for NATO.

However, he is a strong proponent of the controversial doctrine of “first-use nuclear policy,” the belief that the U.S. reserves the right to strike other countries with nuclear weapons at will.

Pres. Barack Obama considered joining a “no first-use” pact, which Roberts responded to in 2016 with an essay for The National Interest titled “America Must Be Ready to Nuke First.”

In the essay, Roberts argued that the U.S. must function as a bulwark against Russian military aggression.

Mr. Roberts seems to have missed the memo detailing how Russia is our best fucking friend forever these days. It’s bad enough being stressed to the limit by every single day the Tiny Tyrant remains in office. It’s bad enough that there are calls to beef up the military even more, because the Great American Empire™ is collapsing, and military dominance is the holy solution, you bet. Now we get an idiot with an itchy trigger finger. I am now more worried about nuclear war than I was back in the 1960s and 1970s, and I was fair worried back then.

Via Raw Story.

“Napoleon finished a little bit bad,”

The Tiny Tyrant has been talking again. It’s not good.

Donald Trump gave a long, rambling interview to the New York Times on Wednesday in which he mangled facts about French history.

Reflecting on his time in France earlier this month, the president talked about the downfall of Napoleon and showed a high level of historical illiteracy.

“Napoleon finished a little bit bad,” the president began. “His one problem is he didn’t go to Russia that night because he had extracurricular activities, and they froze to death. How many times has Russia been saved by the weather?”

Trump then reflected that Hitler made the same mistake in his decision to wage war in Russia during the winter.

“Same thing happened to Hitler,” he said. “Not for that reason, though. Hitler wanted to consolidate. He was all set to walk in. But he wanted to consolidate, and it went and dropped to 35 degrees below zero, and that was the end of that army.”

[…]

“But the Russians have great fighters in the cold,” he said. “They use the cold to their advantage. I mean, they’ve won five wars where the armies that went against them froze to death. It’s pretty amazing. So, we’re having a good time. The economy is doing great.”

Oh hey, here’s everything I know about French military history: Napoleon, well, bad. Russia, great! Hey, this is a good time. Is there chocolate cake? Oh yeah, the economy is doing great! Bottomed out, but great! Jesus Fuckin’ Christ.

Via Raw Story.

“What do you want us to do?”

Photo illustration by Sagmeister & Walsh. Set painters: Colossal Media.

The Atlantic has an article up about what congressional rethugs think about the whole Trump/Russia business. Turns out, they don’t much care. I’m sure we’re all veddy surprised. This little bit stood out though:

Like many of his colleagues, the aide expressed profound annoyance when I asked him if there would ever come a time when Republicans turn on Trump. “What does that even mean? What do you expect us to do?” he replied. “I hear this with every little Tweet [from Trump]: ‘Oh, when are Republicans going to put an end to this?’ What do you want us to do, seize his Twitter account?”

No, you silly twit. I’d like for you to do your fucking job, and impeach this illegal, traitorous idiot. That’s what I want. Now that you know, perhaps you could all do your job?

Full story at The Atlantic.

Oh There’s Crazy Alright.

Donny Trump: “The Senate must go to a 51 vote majority instead of current 60 votes. Even parts of full Repeal need 60. 8 Dems control Senate. Crazy!”

The only thing crazy here is just how utterly ignorant the Tiny Idiot Tyrant happens to be. The Senate doesn’t work that way. The Murica Excuse for Healthcare crashed and burned, in large part due to some republicans getting a half ounce of sense, and fearing for their careers in the face of constituent anger. Not that there’s reason to be happy here, there isn’t. Yes, action by people forced this travesty to be trashed, but there won’t be any replacement which is remotely workable, which is not what the rethugs ever wanted anyway. They’re simply appalled by the idea of healthcare, and don’t want there to be any at all, and that’s exactly what they are going to do, repeal, make some noises about replace later, and drop it like a radioactive potato.

Some reading:

Trump reacts to Trumpcare failure by revealing he has no clue about Senate rules.

Repeal and delay is back, and even worse than Trumpcare: The CBO estimates that if Congress repeals Obamacare, 18 million would lose coverage next year alone.

Trump vows to let ACA fail.

The Twitterati respond to Trump’s most impressive failure.