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2 minutes ago, Geoff Woade said:

I thought when he won the first time, the look on his face was of a man thinking ‘I was only messin’ 

Like with Johnson he’s probably realised it’s not the wheeze he thought it would be.

The Michael Moore film Fahrenheit 11/9 basically says they never, at any point, wanted or expected to win. Melania was crying on the night and Trump was shell-shocked, the only people who were buzzing were Steve Bannon and chums. 

 

He only ran for president because Gwen Stefani was getting paid more by the network he was on at the time and he wanted to up his public profile. All the shit he said and did was probably designed to stop people voting for him but it just made them vote for him more. 

 

The whole thing was one of history's daftest jokes. 

 

Should have known what the presidency would be all about when Melania sued the Daily Mail for saying she'd been a ho, that she actually sued them for 'loss of potential earnings' as 'first lady'. 

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A racist TV idiot beating a seasoned politician to the highest position of public office, in a race he didn't actually want to win, is quite the indictment of a country's political and media landscape. Excited to see how Resetting To How Things Were Right Before It Happened works out as a strategy for ensuring it isn't repeated.

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Haha this is excellent. Mental that he has given 115 interviews to Fox news and not a single one to CNN. Fucking walrus cunt 

 

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/10/21/politics/60-minutes-lesley-stahl-trump-2020/index.html

 

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump abruptly ended an interview with Lesley Stahl of "60 Minutes" and refused to return for a second interview alongside Vice President Mike Pence.

Why? CNN's Kaitlan Collins and Khalil Abdallah explain: "Trump walked out of the interview because he was frustrated with Stahl's line of questioning, one source said. Another person said the bulk of the interview was focused on coronavirus."

Which makes perfect sense given what we know about the President.

 

This is a President who has, throughout his life, lived in a self-created bubble. He keeps a very tight inner circle, which he populates, primarily, with family members and "yes" men and women. Anyone who veers from the preferred storyline -- which is, always, "you're great, Mr. President" -- is either pushed out of his inner circle or fired.

(Note: Ivanka Trump said Monday that her father "actually wants to hear from people who vehemently disagree with him." Which is a very funny joke. Except I think she was serious.)

 

This bubble extends, typically, to the media interviews the President chooses to grant. On Tuesday morning, Trump called into "Fox & Friends," the morning show on the conservative cable network that effectively functions as a cheerleading squad for the President and all of his policies. On Wednesday night, he will appear in an hour-long town hall hosted by Eric Bolling of Sinclair Broadcast Group, another conservative TV outlet.

 

According to CBS News White House Correspondent Mark Knoller, Trump has given 10 times as many interviews to Fox as he has to any outlet since he became president. Here's Knoller's count:

 

Fox News (all platforms): 115

Wall Street Journal: 10

NBC/CNBC: 9

Washington Post: 8

Reuters: 8

New York Times: 8

ABC: 7

CBS: 7 (including Tuesday's "60 Minutes" interview)

Associated Press: 2

CNN: 0

 

As the 2020 election has grown closer -- and poll after poll suggests that Trump is a clear underdog against former Vice President Joe Biden -- the President has retreated deeper and deeper into the comfy confines of the conservative media world -- where he is still portrayed as a winner fighting for America and Democrats and the media are deeply corrupted forces, covering up various illegal activities. Or something.

 

But occasionally, Trump is forced to break out of that bubble in hopes of reaching voters outside of his hardcore base. And that's when the trouble arises. Because actual journalists outside of Trump's self-affirming bubble ask real and tough questions. Questions about his mishandling of the coronavirus. Questions about his trouble with telling the truth. Questions about his questionable Twitter habits. 

 

Last week, Trump sat down for a primetime town hall with NBC's Savannah Guthrie. And, predictably, it didn't go well for Trump. Mostly because Guthrie refused to let him just say things that were untrue or filibuster on things he didn't want to answer. Trump made news -- not the good kind -- with his refusal to disavow QAnon, an Internet conspiracy theory that the FBI labeled as a potential domestic terror threat, and his rambling but revealing answers on his own tax returns.

 

Trump, with his bubble pricked, responded as he always does -- with personal attacks.

"Everybody thought it was so inappropriate," Trump said of Guthrie at a campaign stop the day after the town hall. "Savannah -- it was like her face, the anger, the craziness." He also suggested that Guthrie had "disappeared" after the town hall. "Nobody can find her. She's not too popular right now." Guthrie, it's worth noting, was hosting the "Today" show -- like she always does -- the morning Trump claimed she had "disappeared."

 

Which brings me to Trump's 60 Minutes walkout.

 

Trump, being Trump, immediately sought to spin it in his favor. He tweeted out a snippet of video of Stahl not wearing a mask as evidence of the alleged hypocrisy in the media. A person familiar with the situation told CNN that the video tweeted by Trump came in the immediate aftermath of Trump ending the interview. 

 

As Collins and Abdallah noted: "Stahl had not yet gone back to get her personal belongings to put her mask back on. She had a mask on from the time she entered the White House and just before the interview began."

 

Trump also threatened, via Twitter, that "for the sake of accuracy in reporting, I am considering posting my interview with Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes, PRIOR TO AIRTIME! This will be done so that everybody can get a glimpse of what a FAKE and BIASED interview is all about."

Which he might do! But the interview will almost certainly not show any sort of bias. Rather, it will show Stahl asking hard (and fair!) questions about Trump's handling of Covid-19, which has sickened more than 8 million Americans and killed more than 221,000.

 

Because Trump rarely is forced out of his fantasy bubble, he can't take the heat when real reporters ask him real questions. So he took his ball and went home.

 

 

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All the billionaires are in the corrupt club together. Murdoch and Trump probably high fived eachother over a drugged up teenager in Epstein's mansion one time. So they have reason to look after eachother.

 

House of cards if one falls, so they won't allow it.

 

 

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1 hour ago, Section_31 said:

Why does Murdoch never get any grief for the bias? Saw some clips of Sky News Australia recently and all they talk about is fucking Biden falling asleep in the chair and stuff, utterly bizarre. 

There's bias everywhere in America though. It works both ways. For instance download "all in with Chris Hayes" podcast which is taken directly from his show on NBC. There's just no effort at all to hide the liberal agenda and the utter contempt he (and I assume the station as a whole) hold trump in. It's a good listen, but a completely one eyed view. 

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20 minutes ago, Barrington Womble said:

There's bias everywhere in America though. It works both ways. For instance download "all in with Chris Hayes" podcast which is taken directly from his show on NBC. There's just no effort at all to hide the liberal agenda and the utter contempt he (and I assume the station as a whole) hold trump in. It's a good listen, but a completely one eyed view. 

 

Thing is though, sometimes there's not two sides of a story, sometimes one side is just wrong. 

 

Said in the Murdoch thread but look at the English speaking countries where he holds least sway, New Zealand and Canada.

 

Look at the ones he does hold away in. The states, the UK, Australia. Media absolutely dripping with lies and poison, almost permanently right wing, climate change denying barmpots.

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16 minutes ago, Section_31 said:

 

Thing is though, sometimes there's not two sides of a story, sometimes one side is just wrong. 

 

Said in the Murdoch thread but look at the English speaking countries where he holds least sway, New Zealand and Canada.

 

Look at the ones he does hold away in. The states, the UK, Australia. Media absolutely dripping with lies and poison, almost permanently right wing, climate change denying barmpots.

I get that, but that doesn't stop the media and whatever agenda they have. As I say, download Chris Hayes and listen for a few days, you'll see what I mean. He never even as much as invited on a republican guest to get their point of view. 

 

I don't doubt Murdoch influences where he spreads his hate. I just don't think anyone really makes any effort for balance there. I actually think that is part of the whole hate and entrenched positions people have there and are increasingly doing so here. I always remember a mate of mine from over there saying "this is a country of extremes, it doesn't matter if it's too much ice in the coke, too much spice in the chilli or too much  wealth with the rich and poverty with the poor, everything is an extreme"

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Ouch.  From The Atlantic, today....

 

In 1973, a United States Air Force officer, Major Harold Hering, asked a question that the Air Force did not want asked. Hering, a decorated Vietnam War veteran, was then in training to become a Minuteman-missile crewman. The question he asked one of his instructors was this: “How can I know that an order I receive to launch my missiles came from a sane president?”

 

The writer Ron Rosenbaum would later call this the “forbidden question.” Missile officers are allowed to ask certain sorts of questions—about the various fail-safe systems built to prevent the accidental launching of nuclear weapons, for instance. But the Air Force would not answer Hering’s question, and it moved to discharge him after determining that officers responsible for launching nuclear weapons did not “need to know” the answer. “I have to say I feel I do have a need to know because I am a human being,” Hering said in response.

 

Hering’s question was taboo because the national defense strategy of the United States is built on the unstated assumption that the American people will not allow a lunatic to become president. If that assumption is wrong, then no procedural, legal, or technological mechanisms exist that are able to fully protect the human race from such a lunatic. Hering discovered a catastrophic flaw in U.S. nuclear doctrine, and for this he was driven from the Air Force.

 

In most matters related to the governance and defense of the United States, the president is constrained by competing branches of government and by an intricate web of laws and customs. Only in one crucial area does the president resemble, in the words of the former missile officer and scholar Bruce Blair, an absolute monarch—his control of nuclear weapons. Richard Nixon, who was president when Major Hering asked his question, was reported to have told members of Congress at a White House dinner party, “I could leave this room and in 25 minutes, 70 million people would be dead.” This was an alarming but accurate statement.

 

When contemplating their ballots, Americans should ask which candidate in a presidential contest is better equipped to guide the United States through a national-security crisis without triggering a nuclear exchange, and which candidate is better equipped to interpret—within five or seven minutes—the ambiguous, complicated, and contradictory signals that could suggest an imminent nuclear attack. These are certainly not questions that large numbers of voters asked themselves in 2016, when a transparently unqualified candidate for president won the support of 63 million Americans.

 

At the time, Donald Trump had not yet served in public office, so concerns about his ability to protect the United States from harm were hypothetical, though grounded in his long and terrible record as a human being. As The Atlantic stated in its October 2016 endorsement of his opponent, Hillary Clinton, Trump “traffics in conspiracy theories and racist invective; he is appallingly sexist; he is erratic, secretive, and xenophobic; he expresses admiration for authoritarian rulers, and evinces authoritarian tendencies himself … He is an enemy of fact-based discourse; he is ignorant of, and indifferent to, the Constitution; he appears not to read.”

 

What we have learned since we published that editorial is that we understated our case. Donald Trump is the worst president this country has seen since Andrew Johnson, or perhaps James Buchanan, or perhaps ever. Trump has brought our country low; he has divided our people; he has pitted race against race; he has corrupted our democracy; he has shown contempt for American ideals; he has made cruelty a sacrament; he has provided comfort to propagators of hate; he has abandoned America’s allies; he has aligned himself with dictators; he has encouraged terrorism and mob violence; he has undermined the agencies and departments of government; he has despoiled the environment; he has opposed free speech; he has lied frenetically and evangelized for conspiracism; he has stolen children from their parents; he has made himself an advocate of a hostile foreign power; and he has failed to protect America from a ravaging virus.

 

Trump is not responsible for all of the 220,000 COVID-19-related deaths in America. But through his avarice and ignorance and negligence and titanic incompetence, he has allowed tens of thousands of Americans to suffer and die, many alone, all needlessly. With each passing day, his presidency reaps more death.

 

But let us lay all of this aside for the moment. Let us even lay aside the extraordinary fact that Donald Trump has been credibly accused of rape. Compelling evidence suggests that his countless sins and defects are rooted in mental instability, pathological narcissism, and profound moral and cognitive impairment. Which returns us to the subject of Major Hering.

 

Trump’s opponent, Joe Biden, is in many ways a typically imperfect candidate, but if we judge these men on two questions alone—Who is a more trustworthy steward of America’s nuclear arsenal? Which man poses less of a threat to our collective existence?—the answer is spectacularly obvious.

 

The Atlantic has endorsed only three candidates in its 163-year history: Abraham Lincoln, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Hillary Clinton. The latter two endorsements had more to do with the qualities of Barry Goldwater and Donald Trump than with those of Johnson and Clinton. The same holds true in the case of Joe Biden. Biden is a man of experience, maturity, and obvious humanity, but had the Republican Party put forward a credible candidate for president, we would have felt no compulsion to state a preference. Donald Trump, however, is a clear and continuing danger to the United States, and it does not seem likely that our country would be able to emerge whole from four more years of his misrule. Two men are running for president. One is a terrible man; the other is a decent man. Vote for the decent man.

 

 Jeffrey Goldberg, on behalf of the editors of The Atlantic

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