A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
VIEWED: 755368
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Quote:Trump is silly in the head. So is his son-in-law, and you just shrug it off as nothing but the Democrats' fault for pointing it out :
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
So. Insanity and an actual desire for violence and bloodshed stated twice here is where you're going to choose to go next since nothing else has worked so far for the Democrats then?
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Jared Kushner Reportedly Still Convinced Grisly Bone-Saw Murder Will Blow Over
The media ignored Saudi atrocities in Yemen, so why not a missing journalist?
“Trust me, it’s not a big deal. A month from now, no one will even remember you were accused of murdering and dismembering a man; this is no worse than that time your army accidentally slaughtered a bunch of kids, and no one ever mentions that anymore.”
www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/10/jared-kushner-still-convinced-grisly-b
one-saw-murder-will-blow-over
Hard-line Republicans and conservative commentators are mounting a whispering campaign against Jamal Khashoggi that is designed to protect President Trump from criticism of his handling of the dissident journalist’s alleged murder by operatives of Saudi Arabia — and support Trump’s continued aversion to a forceful response to the oil-rich desert kingdom.
Those aspersions — which many lawmakers have been wary of stating publicly because of the political risks of doing so — have begun to flare into public view as conservative media outlets have amplified the claims, which are aimed in part at protecting Trump as he works to preserve the U.S.-Saudi relationship and avoid confronting the Saudis on human rights.
The smears have escalated. Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son and key political booster, shared another person’s tweet last week with his millions of followers that included a line that Khashoggi was “tooling around Afghanistan with Osama bin Laden” in the 1980s, even though the context was a feature story on bin Laden’s activities.
www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/conservatives-mount-a-whisper-campaig
n-smearing-khashoggi-in-defense-of-trump/2018/10/18/feb92bd0-d306-11e8-b2d2-f397227b43f0_story.html
The White House hates journalists, and not just Saudi journalists:
We knew Trump wouldn’t condemn a congressman for assaulting a reporter. Now, he celebrates it. Twice in two months, Trump has gone to Montana and praised that state’s congressman for assaulting a reporter. On Thursday, Trump outright celebrated the incident, which led to Rep. Greg Gianforte (R-Mont.) eventually pleading guilty to a misdemeanor. A judge called Gianforte’s behavior “totally unacceptable.”
www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/10/19/we-knew-trump-doesnt-condem
n-congressman-assaulting-reporter-now-he-celebrates-it/?utm_term=.f4ace1da4ebe
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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I'm not talking about what Trump or any other politician said here. I'm talking about what you said, twice.
Quote:
I sure hope he is not faking. The closer to election day he does it, the better to show voters Trump can create chaos with a Presidential order: Stop all traffic. Close the roads to and from Mexico. Shoot-to-kill orders for anybody approaching the border, especially women and children. It will be a great news opportunity. Might even affect the election.
Quote:
The Mexicans' job is NOT to protect America from Hondurans. I really hope Trump feels the need to close the Mexican border just before the election. I really want him to give the shoot-to-kill order: "Shoot the children first. Then their parents will turn back."
This just amounts to another reason why the Democrats are losing so bad.
I expect this type of talk from Reaverfan. I'd expect you to be calling him out on his bullshit.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:Did you expect the following from the GOP and Trump? For their willingness to promote propaganda, Trump and Gaetz earn Four Pinocchios. (The bigger lie, the bigger the nose)
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
I'm not talking about what Trump or any other politician said here. I'm talking about what you said, twice.Quote:
I sure hope he is not faking. The closer to election day he does it, the better to show voters Trump can create chaos with a Presidential order: Stop all traffic. Close the roads to and from Mexico. Shoot-to-kill orders for anybody approaching the border, especially women and children. It will be a great news opportunity. Might even affect the election.Quote:
The Mexicans' job is NOT to protect America from Hondurans. I really hope Trump feels the need to close the Mexican border just before the election. I really want him to give the shoot-to-kill order: "Shoot the children first. Then their parents will turn back."
This just amounts to another reason why the Democrats are losing so bad.
I expect this type of talk from Reaverfan. I'd expect you to be calling him out on his bullshit.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
“BREAKING: Footage in Honduras giving cash 2 women & children 2 join the caravan & storm the US border @ election time. Soros? US-backed NGOs? Time to investigate the source!”
— Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), in a tweet, Oct. 17, 2018
“Can you believe this, and what Democrats are allowing to be done to our country?”
— President Trump, in a tweet, Oct. 18, 2018
“Now we’re starting to find out, and I won’t say it 100 percent, I’ll put a little tiny question mark at the end … a lot of money’s been passing through people to come up and try and get to the border by Election Day, because they think that’s a negative for us. … They [Democrats] wanted that caravan, and there are those that say that caravan didn’t just happen, it didn’t just happen.”
— Trump, in a rally in Montana, Oct. 18, 2018
What’s happening in this grainy and abbreviated footage from Central America? Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) tweeted a video he said was from Honduras of women and children receiving cash to “join the caravan” and “storm” the U.S.-Mexico border.
A caravan of Honduran migrants crossed the border into Guatemala on Oct. 15. The next day, President Trump threatened Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández on Twitter, saying that if the group didn’t turn around, there would be “no more money or aid.”
Gaetz’s tweet and the video in question appeared just a day after that. Without offering evidence, Gaetz said liberal billionaire George Soros or nongovernmental organizations were paying the migrants.
The day after the Gaetz tweet, Trump tweeted the same video. And hours later, at his Montana rally Oct. 18, Trump floated his own conspiracy theory: that this was all a big ruse financed by his political opponents. The caravan “didn’t just happen,” and “a lot of money has been passing through to people to come up and try to get to the border by Election Day because [Democrats] think that’s a negative for us,” Trump told the crowd.
More at www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/10/19/grainy-video-guatemala-spar
ks-trump-conspiracy-theory/?utm_term=.47e364fdbcc8
According to Trump, Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen is not being tough enough on migrants heading to the southern border, not deterring them fiercely enough.
Think about that for a moment. Nielsen, whose DHS stole migrant children from their parents, put the children in pens, made babies defend themselves in immigration court, made immigration policy the subject of investigations by global human rights organizations, was being derided by the President and Bolton for being too soft on immigration.
Family separation? Deporting soldiers who served their country? Deploying National Guard? Defying court orders? None of these were tough enough for Donald Trump and Bolton, who apparently were arguing that we need even more odi
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It's not fear mongering.
I don't want them here. Most Americans don't want them here.
Most Americans aren't afraid to say that anymore either.
Go ahead and call me a Nazi.
They can go home. Mexico doesn't want them there either.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:Trump is saying ‘It doesn’t matter.’ and ‘We’ll see.’ more and more frequently. The Trump Doctrine is sounding more fatalistic every day.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
It's not fear mongering.
I don't want them here. Most Americans don't want them here.
Most Americans aren't afraid to say that anymore either.
Go ahead and call me a Nazi.
They can go home. Mexico doesn't want them there either.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
It is not about what you want or anybody you know wants. It is about what Homeland Security wants.
Homeland Security is Trump's radio controlled toy car. It will go in whatever direction he wants in order to get more votes in November, which means it all comes down to what Trump thinks is best for himself and the GOP.
As far as I can tell, the only thing Trump hasn't done yet is announce that he has ordered Homeland Security to kill the children, because all the lesser steps have already been ordered.
Trump has said they must be stopped before they get to the border. Announcing he will kill them on sight ought to do the trick. If it does not, he can go the next step and actually pull the trigger and kill them. I'm pretty sure he won't actually go that far because that is a guaranteed vote loser.
Trump profoundly believes nothing matters because he usually isn’t the victim of his own mistakes.
“In the end it will work out,” Trump said in May. “I can’t tell you exactly how or why, but it always does.”
In 1989, when Trump was 43, three of his young employees died in a helicopter crash on the way to Atlantic City. A tragedy “can have two effects,” Trump told Larry King. “You can cherish life more because of it, or it can have the tendency to cheapen it. And unfortunately, it cheapened a little bit for me, because these were three incredible people to die like this.”
For a man so rich, life got cheaper. For a man who likes to define life on his terms — he’s an existentialist, in practice — he talks like a fatalist, resigned to the chaotic but predetermined mechanics of the universe.
“Life is what you do while you’re waiting to die,” Trump told Playboy in 1990. “ . . . We’re here and we live our 60, 70 or 80 years and we’re gone. You win, you win, and in the end, it doesn’t mean a hell of a lot.”
“I’m very much a fatalist,” he told the New York Times in 2016, when asked about the hereditary specter of Alzheimer’s disease, which afflicted his father.
“I’m a great fatalist,” Trump told Newsday in 1991, as his business empire was teetering. “Whatever happens, happens, and you just have to go along with it.” What will Trump do if the refugees approach the Texas border? Will he kill them? I and Trump don't know.
www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/it-doesnt-matter-well-see-the-t
rump-doctrine-is-sounding-more-fatalistic-every-day/2018/10/18/218d3b8a-d14d-11e8-83d6-291fcead2ab1_story.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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President Trump broke with his own intelligence agencies on Friday, appearing to accept Saudi Arabia’s explanation that the journalist Jamal Khashoggi was killed by accident during a fistfight, while the United States’ spy agencies are increasingly convinced that he was assassinated on high-level orders from the Saudi royal court.
Mr. Trump, who has cultivated Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and made Saudi Arabia the linchpin of his Middle East strategy, has been deeply reluctant to point a finger at the prince, despite evidence linking him to Saudi operatives who entered the country’s consulate in Istanbul the same day that Mr. Khashoggi disappeared there.
More at www.nytimes.com/2018/10/19/us/politics/trump-saudi-arabia-journalist-k
hashoggi.html
After lying for more than two weeks about the death of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi government has now announced a series of new lies about his murder in ways that insult both Jamal’s memory and our intelligence.
The Saudi government on Friday issued a statement claiming that Jamal was killed when a fistfight went bad in its consulate in Istanbul. Really? This is a fistfight to which the Saudi goons reportedly brought a bone saw so that they could dismember him afterward; by some accounts, they began the dismemberment while he was still alive.
It’s also grotesque for the Saudi authorities to claim that a journalist whose fingers they reportedly amputated as part of their torture somehow managed to engage in a fistfight. Jamal had no fists left.
I had known Jamal for more than 15 years, and I’m appalled by every element of what happened: By what appears to have been his brutal torture-murder, by the cover-up afterward, by President Trump's downplaying of Jamal's killing, and now by the effort by the Saudi government to set up scapegoats to take the fall.
These lies are so blatant and implausible that they suggest Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman believes he will have the backing of the United States in this cover-up. That’s a good bet, since Trump has lately celebrated the assault on a journalist by a Montana congressman and previously suggested that maybe a rogue killer was responsible for killing Jamal.
The Crown Prince has already gotten away with kidnapping Lebanon’s prime minister and starving eight million Yemenis; if he also gets away with murdering Jamal, who was an American resident and Washington Post columnist, as many believe happened, then that’s a green light to him and any other autocrat who wants to make a troublesome journalist disappear. Journalists and democracy activists all over the world will have targets on their backs.
So what we really have now is a test of Trump and of America itself. Will Trump go along with the cover-up, or will he attempt to uphold America’s honor and dignity in this instance?
More at www.nytimes.com/2018/10/19/opinion/saudi-arabia-mohammed-bin-salman-ja
mal-khashoggi-lies.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:Don't skip
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I was going to skip this thread entirely . . .
The Hell of Good Intentions - Stephen Walt (Harvard University, Foreign Policy)
America’s Foreign Policy Elite And The Decline Of U.S. Primacy
The bit torrent link to the book is df4aab819243e1daab1752bf4e77769574ad80bf
This book seeks to explain why the United States spent the past quarter century pursuing an ambitious, unrealistic, and mostly unsuccessful foreign policy. Having won the Cold War and achieved a position of primacy unseen since the Roman Empire, why did U.S. leaders decide to maintain a military establishment that dwarfed all others and expand an already far-flung network of allies, client states, military bases, and security commitments? Instead of greeting the defeat of its principal rival as an opportunity to reduce America’s global burdens, why did both Democrats and Republicans embark on an ill-considered campaign to spread democracy, markets, and other liberal values around the world?
This strategy—sometimes termed “liberal hegemony”—has been a costly failure. Yet three successive administrations—under Clinton, Bush, and Obama—clung to it, even as the costs mounted and the quagmires multiplied. Why did Washington persist in the face of repeated setbacks, and how did the foreign policy establishment convince the American people to support policies that were neither necessary nor successful?
Instead of pursuing a more restrained grand strategy, U.S. leaders opted for liberal hegemony because the foreign policy community believes spreading liberal values is both essential for U.S. security and easy to do. They convinced ordinary citizens to support this ambitious agenda by exaggerating international dangers, overstating the benefits that liberal hegemony would produce, and concealing the true costs. And because members of the foreign policy elite are rarely held to account, they were able to make the same mistakes again and again.
Trump may have been largely correct when he called U.S. foreign policy “a complete and total disaster,” but he failed to develop a coherent alternative to liberal hegemony, and his errors in judgment, poor personnel choices, and ill-advised decisions only made things worse.
Chapters
1. A Dismal Record
2. Why Liberal Hegemony Failed
3. Defining the "Blob": What is the "Foreign Policy Community"
4. Selling a Failing Foreign Policy
5. Is Anyone Accountable?
6. How Not to Fix U.S. Foreign Policy
7. A Better Way
https://bloggingheads.tv/videos/53879?in=1:04
1:04 Steve’s new book, The Hell of Good Intentions
7:13 Steve: “Liberal hegemony” has been almost a complete failure
16:24 Why foreign policy watchers were so optimistic in 1993
24:03 Bill Clinton’s foreign policy blunders: Expansion of NATO and “dual containment” of Iran and Iraq
32:23 Steve: Within the foreign policy establishment, failure has no consequences and dissent is punished
42:31 How both Obama and Trump were captured by the foreign policy “blob”
49:42 Why are so many think tanks interventionist?
53:24 Steve’s proposal for a smarter foreign policy: “offshore balancing”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Having won the Cold War and achieved a position of primacy unseen since the Roman Empire, why did U.S. leaders decide to maintain a military establishment that dwarfed all others and expand an already far-flung network of allies, client states, military bases, and security commitments? Instead of greeting the defeat of its principal rival as an opportunity to reduce America’s global burdens, why did both Democrats and Republicans embark on an ill-considered campaign to spread democracy, markets, and other liberal values around the world?
This strategy—sometimes termed “liberal hegemony”—has been a costly failure.
I like that.
I'm going to start calling 3rd wave Feminism "Feminist Hegemony".
"We already achieved everything we set out to do. Why stop now?"
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:You didn't download the book, did you? If you had, you'd see that your new terminology "Feminist Hegemony" does not shine new light on an old subject -- women. Getting back to foreign policy, there is Chapter 2 of the book:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Having won the Cold War and achieved a position of primacy unseen since the Roman Empire, why did U.S. leaders decide to maintain a military establishment that dwarfed all others and expand an already far-flung network of allies, client states, military bases, and security commitments? Instead of greeting the defeat of its principal rival as an opportunity to reduce America’s global burdens, why did both Democrats and Republicans embark on an ill-considered campaign to spread democracy, markets, and other liberal values around the world?
This strategy—sometimes termed “liberal hegemony”—has been a costly failure.
I like that.
I'm going to start calling 3rd wave Feminism "Feminist Hegemony".
"We already achieved everything we set out to do. Why stop now?"
Do Right, Be Right. :)
2. Why Liberal Hegemony Failed
The previous chapter described how the optimistic hopes with which the post–Cold War era began had come crashing to earth by 2016. Longtime adversaries were stronger and more assertive; traditional U.S. allies were weaker and more divided; and America’s ambitious attempt to shape regional politics, spread liberal values, promote peace, and strengthen global institutions had mostly come to naught despite repeated and often costly efforts.
The taproot of these failures was the U.S. commitment to a grand strategy of “liberal hegemony”: an ambitious effort to use American power to reshape the world according to U.S. preferences and political values. Despite important differences in style and emphasis, the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations were all deeply committed to this basic approach.
Yet liberal hegemony proved an elusive goal. At its most basic level, the strategy failed because it rested on mistaken views of how international politics actually works. It exaggerated America’s ability to reshape other societies and underestimated the ability of weaker actors to thwart U.S. aims. The United States had enormous power and in some cases good intentions, but these virtues could not overcome the strategy’s inherent flaws.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Trump Is Having a Meltdown Over the Migrant Caravan
Donald Trump, who’s been stumping for congressional Republicans, is now calling the November midterms the “election of the caravan,” and says that the Democrats support the “illegal immigration onslaught” because they “figure everybody coming in is going to vote Democrat.”
In the last several months, over the objections of regional experts and diplomatic staff, officials at the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security have wound down a number of programs meant to provide legal relief to those seeking refuge in the U.S. This summer, Attorney General Jeff Sessions unilaterally redrew decades of jurisprudence on asylum law to make it significantly more difficult for migrants fleeing gang violence and domestic abuse to seek asylum.
None of Trump’s strategies have helped stem the flow. According to unpublished government data obtained by the Washington Post, Border Patrol has apprehended more than a hundred thousand migrants in the last year, which is about thirty thousand more arrests than the previous peak, in 2016. The rationale for the President’s harshest measures, from the indefinite detention of asylum seekers to the separation of families at the border, was that they would deter other migrants from making the trip. The government’s own data contradicts that, and so Trump’s enforcement policy is stuck in a feedback loop: he’s been defending actions that haven’t changed migration patterns, while simultaneously citing a “border crisis” as the reason to double down.
For months, the President has blamed Kirstjen Nielsen, the Secretary of Homeland Security, for the increase in immigration, even though she’s been a reliable enforcer of Trump’s agenda.
More at www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/why-the-trump-white-house-is-having-a
-meltdown-over-the-migrant-caravan
More than 5,100 migrants have been registered in three shelters in the Mexican border town of Ciudad Hidalgo, while another 2,000 had camped out for the night in the town’s central square, said Gerardo Hernandez, head of the local government’s emergency services.
“It’s really full. You can’t even walk, there’s just so many people,” he said referring to the plaza. “So far, they’re all peaceful, thank God.”
More at www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-caravan/thousands-of-carava
n-migrants-take-shelter-in-southern-mexico-idUSKCN1MU05Y
I await Trump’s next move. Maybe threaten Mexico if it does not stop the caravan? Maybe drone strikes on the caravan? Maybe blame the Democrats? Oops! He already did that. Maybe he will repeat himself?
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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