NSFW THE TRUMPOCALYPSE

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Trump's climb-down was impressive, I thought, the clever would -> wouldn't: "I meant to say ‘I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia.’".

I'd love to learn the story behind that, how his spin doctors worked overtime to convince Trump he had crossed the line and find a strategy to make his outrageous statements more palatable.
 
A very good explanation - and why this is “business as usual” was in the link I recently shared ...

Trial Runs for Fascism Are in Full Flow

Fintan O’Toole said:
To grasp what is going on in the world right now, we need to reflect on two things. One is that we are in a phase of trial runs. The other is that what is being trialled is fascism – a word that should be used carefully but not shirked when it is so clearly on the horizon. Forget “post-fascist” – what we are living with is pre-fascism.

It is easy to dismiss Donald Trump as an ignoramus, not least because he is. But he has an acute understanding of one thing: test marketing. He created himself in the gossip pages of the New York tabloids, where celebrity is manufactured by planting outrageous stories that you can later confirm or deny depending on how they go down. And he recreated himself in reality TV where the storylines can be adjusted according to the ratings. Put something out there, pull it back, adjust, go again.

It is this next step that is being test-marketed now. It is being done in Italy by the far-right leader and minister for the interior Matteo Salvini. How would it go down if we turn away boatloads of refugees? Let’s do a screening of the rough-cut of registering all the Roma and see what buttons the audience will press. And it has been trialled by Trump: let’s see how my fans feel about crying babies in cages. I wonder how it will go down with Rupert Murdoch.

To see, as most commentary has done, the deliberate traumatisation of migrant children as a “mistake” by Trump is culpable naivety. It is a trial run – and the trial has been a huge success. Trump’s claim last week that immigrants “infest” the US is a test-marketing of whether his fans are ready for the next step-up in language, which is of course “vermin”. And the generation of images of toddlers being dragged from their parents is a test of whether those words can be turned into sounds and pictures. It was always an experiment – it ended (but only in part) because the results were in.

‘Devious’ infants

And the results are quite satisfactory. There is good news on two fronts. First, Rupert Murdoch is happy with it – his Fox News mouthpieces outdid themselves in barbaric crassness: making animal noises at the mention of a Down syndrome child, describing crying children as actors. They went the whole swinish hog: even the brown babies are liars. Those sobs of anguish are typical of the manipulative behaviour of the strangers coming to infest us – should we not fear a race whose very infants can be so devious? Second, the hardcore fans loved it: 58 per cent of Republicans are in favour of this brutality. Trump’s overall approval ratings are up to 42.5 per cent.
 
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Trump's climb-down was impressive, I thought, the clever would -> wouldn't: "I meant to say ‘I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia.’".

I'd love to learn the story behind that, how his spin doctors worked overtime to convince Trump he had crossed the line and find a strategy to make his outrageous statements more palatable.

Well, I wouldn't say it was "clever".... :p There was probably a lot of scrambling to find anything that would help him save face... this was the only option... and a ridiculously weak one at that. I liked Pelosi's tweet yesterday.... :lol:
 
https://www.rawstory.com/2018/07/mi...posing-photo-op-mueller-indicted-russian-spy/

So this begs the question: Did Trump win Michigan because HRC ran a lousy campaign there, or because the GOP got help from the Russians to “fix” the vote in that state?
NPR is doing a story about how Wisconsin went from progressive to conservative. I don't know whether it has aired, but I'd sure like to listen in for the theories. They mention GOP gerrymandering as one of the reasons. I wouldn't be surprised if the Russians were involved in Wisconsin as well. This whole campaign toward conservatism, nationalism and tribalism among other thins is just plain scary.
 
NPR is doing a story about how Wisconsin went from progressive to conservative. I don't know whether it has aired, but I'd sure like to listen in for the theories. They mention GOP gerrymandering as one of the reasons. I wouldn't be surprised if the Russians were involved in Wisconsin as well. This whole campaign toward conservatism, nationalism and tribalism among other thins is just plain scary.
You can find most NPR pieces online.
 
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Today’s cartoon, by Ellis Rosen:

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