[Tsundoku]

Because his incoherent dribble strongly intersects their worldview. Including the part about lashing out at and revenge on those they believe wronged them, even if it's only in their heads.

[HoosierDaddy]

Gaetz is an example of just how easily Trump is manipulated into doing what other people want. Also, he'll hurt the right people without question (i.e., he'll truly weaponize the DOJ).

[amphibian]

Briar King, on 14 November 2024 - 01:09 AM, said:

The President-Elect did indeed tap Gatez who was I believe only now under a congressional ethics probe and even that is now gone cause he has resigned from Congress… Other stuff was squashed awhile ago. I’m not a fan of this pick.

Pete is actually interesting. The left is going crazy over it but hell he is decorated and educated. I would prefer at least a full bird colonel but major is a perfect balance between boots on the ground and pencil pusher. Watch his hearing and then judge.

None of these picks are good and you're going to see the most corrupt/dysfunctional administration in American history get going.

[worry]

Pete Hegseth was head cheerleader for Trump pardoning extreme war criminals during his term. And not just as a pundit on his show -- he frequently consulted Trump on the matter in private, off-air, without disclosing it. Rather, other news outlets found out and reported on it. He's also a Christian Nationalist (an oddly pro-Crusades one in a very literal sense), and thinks U.S. military leadership has been overrun by liberals. Notably, he has expressed open admiration and support for Netanyahu and Putin regarding their proactive and invasive wars of empire, and is himself a war hawk regarding Iran in particular.
If confirmed don't be surprised if two specific things happen 1) a bloodbath among high ranking military officials, and 2) significant escalation of hostility towards Iran, through Israel at the least, but up to and including a hot war. But those things might not be as controversial with Senate Republicans as the choice of Gaetz is. They did just choose Thune as leader over Rick Scott (Trump's personal pick), so I guess we'll see how much backbone they have about his cabinet picks.

[Abyss]

Garak, on 14 November 2024 - 10:29 AM, said:

How the fuck do his voters not notice this or care?

willful blindness/self-involvement/external locus of blame/deep delusion/unreasoning hate/etc/etc/etc

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

amphibian, on 14 November 2024 - 02:06 PM, said:

Briar King, on 14 November 2024 - 01:09 AM, said:

The President-Elect did indeed tap Gatez who was I believe only now under a congressional ethics probe and even that is now gone cause he has resigned from Congress… Other stuff was squashed awhile ago. I'm not a fan of this pick.

Pete is actually interesting. The left is going crazy over it but hell he is decorated and educated. I would prefer at least a full bird colonel but major is a perfect balance between boots on the ground and pencil pusher. Watch his hearing and then judge.

None of these picks are good and you're going to see the most corrupt/dysfunctional administration in American history get going.

Gaetz is pro-cannabis though... which has been good for my cannabis stocks. (Though I personally avoid marijuana smoke---makes me very sleepy, but makes anxiety worse... edibles have a better effect---pleasurable body sensations, no anxiety iirc---but still mainly make me sleepy.)

Of course he (and Trump's transformed federal law enforcement) could selectively enforce federal drug laws to punish those on their enemies lists, or demographic groups they disfavor... and use easily planted drugs as smoke-screens to imprison their "enemies", etc.

So long as the green is flowing... well, I'd rather not think about how he probably used drugs to help with the sex trafficking... even if it made it a little bit less bad for the girls (aside from any brain damage or other lasting biological damage from the drugs (etc.)...).

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 14 November 2024 - 03:32 PM

[Mezla PigDog]

RFK Jr as pick for Health Department. Well.

I don't understand how Larry David's wife could be married to that guy.

[Cause]

The Host of the apprentice really picked RFK jnr. I didnt think he would acctually do it. Embarressing.

To have a vaccine skeptic in charge of the department of health. People will die, simple as that. Even if the republican senators roll over for Trump and their may be one or two who wont, the confriamtion hearings will be incredibly embarrassing for repulbicans. They have however shown they are immune.

Also not that I expected it to ever get used but these all but insure Trump will have no fear of the 25th ammendment no matter what he does.

[amphibian]

Mezla PigDog, on 14 November 2024 - 09:31 PM, said:

RFK Jr as pick for Health Department. Well.

I don't understand how Larry David's wife could be married to that guy.

He's very fit and charming in a weird way. I think Hines happily puts up with the cheating and the bonkers stuff because she doesn't care about much beyond the name and the bod.

[Mezla PigDog]

Anti-vax stuff spreads faster than the infections vaccines are supposed to prevent. So I'm genuinely worried about what this means for the myself, nevermind the US. And the rest of the world really. CDC is one of the major contributors to flu surveillance for planning the annual vaccine.

I hear white males had it all good in the stone age, so we can look forward to heading back there.

Not to say I wasn't genuinely worried already but shits starting to get real.

This post has been edited by Mezla PigDog: 15 November 2024 - 07:32 AM

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

 Mezla PigDog, on 15 November 2024 - 07:31 AM, said:

Anti-vax stuff spreads faster than the infections vaccines are supposed to prevent. So I'm genuinely worried about what this means for the myself, nevermind the US. And the rest of the world really. CDC is one of the major contributors to flu surveillance for planning the annual vaccine.

I hear white males had it all good in the stone age, so we can look forward to heading back there.

Not to say I wasn't genuinely worried already but shits starting to get real.

Quote

Vaccine makers down, psychedelic shares up

https://seekingalpha...delic-shares-up

Happy my psychedelic stocks are finally up---my top performers today.

Unfortunately I have 3x as much in Astrazeneca, Pfizer, and GSK... and that's not even counting all the vaccine makers in my ETFs.

They're calling it "MAHA"... Make America Healthy Again, lol

Or maybe the "H" stands for "hell"? Putting the "hell" back into "healthy"!

Who needs vaccines when you're tripping and you're down with death (because you're in the Heaven of the now, and your heart is filled with the passion of the Trump)?

As for Gaetz (in cased you missed this in the Guardian):

Quote

[Trump] chose Gaetz[...] after [he] told Trump: "Yeah, I'll go over there and start cuttin' fuckin' heads."

Others considered for the post were dismissed as too concerned with legal concepts or constitutional niceties.

[...] a White House lawyer in Trump's first presidency, called Gaetz's nomination "a big f… you to America".

"Matt Gaetz is just simply unqualified … academically, professionally, ethically, morally and experientially," he told CNN

Fears mount over Trump's second term amid flurry of shock selections | Trump administration | The Guardian

As a political scientist who studies populist autocracies (particularly the transition to autocracy in Hungary and Russia) puts it:

Quote

"Liberal democracy offers moral constraints without problem-solving" — a lot of rules, not a lot of change — while "populism offers problem-solving without moral constraints."

[...] he will likely begin by getting rid of experts, regulators and other civil servants he sees as superfluous, eliminating jobs that he thinks simply shouldn't exist.

[...] autocratic breakthrough as the transition from the rule of law to the law of rule. When Putin campaigned for president in 2000, his slogan was "Dictatorship of the Law."

[...] Project 2025 [...] is [...] a blueprint for trampling the system of government as it is currently constituted, a blueprint of destruction.

This Is the Dark, Unspoken Promise of Trump's Return - The New York Times

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 15 November 2024 - 02:58 PM

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Quote

The number one person who called [Trump's nominee for Secretary of Defense] Pete Hegseth an extremist is Pete Hegseth. It's page one of his new book, The War on Warriors. It's the way he leads out his interviews, this idea that he was too extreme for today's "woke" military, dominated, as he puts it, his words, by trans, lesbian, Black females. And so, he tells a story of being pushed out of the military. [...]

Hegseth promises in his book the first war he's going to wage is against the U.S. military — that's whom he describes as the domestic enemy, the enemy within — to purge the generals who are disloyal to Trump and replace them [with those] who will do absolutely the commander's will.

[...] he's a Christian nationalist. He believes absolutely in the idea of the ingathering of Israel as a stage toward the Book of Revelation in the Bible. So, he sees Israel's war on the Palestinians as biblical prophecy and one that must be supported for the sake of Christendom. [...]

In Hegseth's book, he talks at great length about the story of Gideon from the Book of Judges. [...] the part that he really likes is that after they won the battle, Gideon orders his men to hunt down every one of the other force and, in Hegseth's words, "eliminate them all."

A new crusade? Trump taps Christian Nationalists to top posts - Alternet.org

Yikes...

And that's the guy they had doing "fun" daytime chats on Fox and Friends?... And advocating for war criminals, of course...

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 15 November 2024 - 08:53 PM

[Macros]

Yeah I'm done.
Blow the world up or don't
But in 4 years time

Every
Single
Fucking
American

Needs to register and vote. And fuck this shit

[Tsundoku]

A nice summary of this nominations shitfight:

‘Deluded themselves’: Republicans’ fantasy about a second Trump term brutally shattered
It sounds stupid, after all these long years of Donald Trump dominating politics, but his own party appears to have misjudged him.

https://www.news.com...045588be0e4c0c3

Sam Clench

Analysis

This admittedly sounds rather stupid after nine years of Donald Trump showing us all, over and over again, what his priorities are, but I think his supporters among elected Republican politicians were, somehow, genuinely surprised by what he served up this week.

Republicans in Congress seem to have deluded themselves into thinking a second Trump administration would look pretty much identical to the first. The President-elect’s nominees for key government jobs have shattered that fantasy.

At this point in 2016, after his victory over Hillary Clinton, Mr Trump was announcing his nominees for these same jobs, and for the most part they were reassuringly serious.

His pick to lead the Justice Department was former prosecutor and state attorney-general Jeff Sessions. His defence secretary was the decorated general Jim Mattis. The treasury secretary was investment banker Steve Mnuchin. Another respected general, John Kelly, was chosen to be the secretary of homeland security. Dan Coats, a long-serving US senator and diplomat, was Mr Trump’s director of national intelligence.

All qualified, sober people. Yes, there were a few less conventional picks: oil company executive Rex Tillerson as secretary of state, and the rather eccentric retired surgeon Ben Carson as head of the housing department, for example.

But on the whole, it was a cabinet that would not have looked too out of place under any other Republican president in recent decades.

Compare those names to the following.

This time around, Mr Trump’s nominee for attorney-general is Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz. Former congressman now, actually. He abruptly resigned from his job on Thursday, US time, in what was quickly interpreted, even by his fellow Republicans, as an attempt to avoid the release of an ethics committee report into his behaviour.

Mr Gaetz has been under investigation by the House’s ethics committee over allegations that he “engaged in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use, accepted improper gifts, dispensed special privileges and favours to individuals with whom he had a personal relationship, and sought to obstruct government investigations of his conduct”.

He was previously subject to a criminal investigation, as part of a broader sex trafficking case, into whether he had sex illegally with a teenage girl. That investigation was ultimately closed without charges being brought against him.

This is the person Mr Trump has selected to be America’s chief law enforcement officer.

Then consider Mr Gaetz’s qualifications for the job. The aforementioned Mr Sessions had a long career as a prosecutor and state attorney-general before he entered the Senate.

Mr Gaetz graduated from law school in 2007, worked for about two years in private practice, and then ran for Congress. That is the full extent of his legal experience.

Another comparison. Mr Trump has nominated former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, who was a Democrat for many years, to be his director of national intelligence, whose role is to oversee US intelligence agencies and act as their liaison with the president.

Ms Gabbard is a military veteran but she has no experience whatsoever in intelligence; she served in Iraq as part of a medical unit and in Kuwait as a member of a police unit.

She also has a history of credulity, particularly when it concerns murderous dictators. Ms Gabbard infamously met with the Syrian ruler, Bashar al-Assad, during his country’s civil war, and expressed scepticism about his well-documented war crimes (he used chemical weapons against his own people, among other things).

In recent years she has been consistently sympathetic towards Russian President Vladimir Putin, blaming NATO for his invasion of Ukraine and opposing American aid for the country, which has relied on the international community, and the United States in particular, to help it defend itself against Putin’s aggression.

The charitable explanation for Ms Gabbard’s views is that she’s stridently anti-interventionist, and thinks the United States should stay out of the world’s affairs. The harsher explanation is that she’s a dupe.

Whichever you pick, this serial apologist for the world’s worst regimes, who also happens to have no relevant experience, will soon be overseeing America’s intelligence agencies.

Next up we have Pete Hegseth, another military veteran, who in recent years has been a TV host on Fox News. Mr Hegseth, by most accounts a quite genial and unobjectionable man, has been selected to run the Department of Defence.

Mr Hegseth served in Iraq and Afghanistan; there is no problem with his military resume. But the department he is now slated to run is no joke. We are talking, here, about an organisation that costs $US900 billion each year. It has 700,000 civilian employees. It oversees about 2.5 million troops, including the reserves and national guard.

There are few organisations on the planet whose leaders have such vast, humbling responsibilities, and this man is a TV presenter who has never run anything larger than a platoon in his life.

Our last example, and the most recent major nominee put forward by Mr Trump, is Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist who has been tapped to run America’s federal health department.

This nomination aligns with Mr Trump’s pledge, offered shortly before the election, to let Mr Kennedy “go wild” on health policy – an apparent reward for the former Democrat dropping his independent presidential bid and endorsing Mr Trump.

The New York Post, a conservative newspaper (which also endorsed the President-elect, for what it’s worth), published an editorial overnight describing Mr Kennedy’s views on health as “a head-scratching spaghetti of what we can only call warped conspiracy theories”.

The paper’s editorial board recalled an interview it conducted with Mr Kennedy last year, in which he expressed a series of bizarre beliefs.

“We came out thinking he’s nuts on a lot of fronts,” the board noted, adding that giving someone like Mr Kennedy such a powerful office could do real harm to Americans’ health, leading people to “wind up harmed or even dead”.

To pick one of his weird views at random, here is something he said about Covid.

“Covid-19. There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted,” said Mr Kennedy.

“Covid-19 attacks certain races disproportionately,” he added.

“It is targeted to attack caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”

So Covid was engineered to attack everyone except Chinese and Jewish people. In case you missed his meaning, there. (Need I say there was never any evidence to back that up? I would hope not.)

Mr Kennedy has also said that a second Trump administration would, among other things, ban fluoride from water, citing thoroughly debunked theories about its effects.

This is the person Mr Trump wants to run health policy; to be in charge of massive health programs like Medicare and Medicaid; to oversee the CDC, which played such a pivotal role during Covid, and the FDA, which regulates medicines; and to be in charge of the American government’s investment in medical research and drug development (something Mr Kennedy has said he wants to stop, entirely, for a period of eight years).

Making this guy the head of a health department is like appointing a Holocaust denier to run a World War II museum.

The point, here, is that Mr Trump’s second administration will look nothing like his first.

We heard quite a bit, before the election, about the President-elect’s critics using overblown rhetoric. Do not concern yourselves with Mr Trump’s more extreme promises, we were told, because he didn’t follow through on them during his first term. Don’t be an alarmist.

But this isn’t his first term. Matt Gaetz is not Jeff Sessions. Tulsi Gabbard is not Dan Coats. Robert F. Kennedy Jr is not Tom Price, the equivalent nominee from eight years ago, who was an orthopedic surgeon before he entered politics (RFK’s pre-politics career was as an environmental lawyer, if you’re interested).

Where previously he chose serious people to fill the most important roles in government, now Mr Trump is picking loyalists, kooks and extremists. The difference matters. These people are not being selected for a reality show, they’re going to run the most powerful government on the planet, and oversee bureaucracies that collectively employ millions.

One last point: we have received reassurance in recent days from conservative media personalities, particularly regarding Mr Gaetz, that we need not worry because the Republican-controlled Senate will not confirm him.

“Trust the Senate. He won’t be confirmed,” was the stance of pro-Trump conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, for example.

First of all, some scepticism is required here. Congressional Republicans do not have great form when it comes to defying Mr Trump’s wishes; their first instinct has always been to tick off on whatever he wants.

Putting that aside: if Mr Gaetz is such an obviously, manifestly unacceptable pick to become attorney-general that the likes of Mr Hewitt are saying these things, what conclusions can we draw about the judgment of the man who nominated him?

Mr Trump unambiguously, unrepentantly wants Mr Gaetz to be the attorney-general. And we have people on his own side of politics acknowledging that it’s a terrible idea, while declining to criticise the person whose idea it was.

It’s like complaining about the muscle aches and congested nose you’re enduring during a bout of the flu without mentioning the virus itself, as though the symptoms and their cause are entirely unrelated.

If you think Mr Gaetz, Mr Kennedy, Ms Gabbard, Mr Hegseth and the rest are inappropriate nominees for serious government roles, but you have nothing to say about the person who put them forward for those roles, then what are you?

No, honestly, what are you? I’ll leave that question hanging in the air, because we all know there is no good answer.

------------------------------------------

The part I find funniest is where the GOP seem amazed by this shitfuckery. "Oh wow, I did not have any idea he was going to do something so odd" seems to be the gist of it - without mentioning the Dear Leader by name, or inferring any fault was his, of course.
Except, you know, for the part where he has been telegraphing or outright stating his intentions to be a fucking deluded maniac who rewards personal loyalty above all else the whole fucking time.
Maybe now they'll start taking his stated intention to be a dictator a little more seriously.
I did like the whole bit about Gaetz "cleaning up the DOJ and de-weaponising it". And how, exactly? "Going after everyone who did or said mean stuff about the Dear Leader". Yep, sounds like de-weaponising the DOJ to me.

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Macros, on 16 November 2024 - 12:19 AM, said:

Yeah I'm done.
Blow the world up or don't
But in 4 years time

Every
Single
Fucking
American

Needs to register and vote. And fuck this shit

So long as we remain bound by the geographical distortions of the electoral college, the Senate, and gerrymandering, that would probably only make things worse.

But to get rid of the electoral college and the Senate, we'd have to go through... the Senate (2/3rds majority). And then have 75% of the state legislatures (dominated by Republicans even moreso because of gerrymandering) approve.

An executive with the loyalty of the military who would be willing to forcibly abolish the current system and replace it with a more just one might actually be welcome, if it could be done with minimal carnage.

Even so, I don't think democracy is the best answer for the future. Most Americans are too ignorant, too gullible, and too evil.

But Go*-Emperor Trump---or Musk, or Vance---is also even worse...

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 17 November 2024 - 11:25 AM

[Cause]

The next four years are just going to be one thing after the another. The Oklahoma state superintendent tried to mandate that the Bible must be taught in school, and also wanted every class to watch a video of him praying for president trump. Even the republican attorney general had warned him his actions are unconstitutional.

I’m not sure why these asshats are able to proliferate so well but this won’t be the last overreach. Volley enough balls over the net and eventually one won’t be returned. They are crawling forward an inch at a time.

[Tsundoku]

I see Matt Gaetz withdrew his nomination for AG. What a noble sacrifice.

I'm betting someone showed him the pictures.

This post has been edited by Tsundoku: 21 November 2024 - 08:02 PM

[Cause]

Not like Matt Gartz to pull out.

Not while the opportunity hasn’t fully matured yet

[QuickTidal]

Tsundoku, on 21 November 2024 - 08:00 PM, said:

I see Matt Gaetz withdrew his nomination for AG. What a noble sacrifice.

I'm betting someone showed him the pictures.

From what I understand, a second woman was going to come forward with a credible story, so he turned and ran like the giant foreheaded botoxed garbageman he is.

[Macros]

Can we continue and prosecute the fucking shit bag please.
Life nothing else to highlight the calibre of fucknut Trump wants