Octopus Overlords

Grifman wrote:

PLW wrote:Demagoguery playbook:
1. Our country used to be strong and now it's weak.
2. Traitors foreign and abroad are the reason.
3. You and your family are threatened.
4. Only I can fix it, and only if you give me extraordinary powers.
5. This is the last chance. If you miss it now, everything goes to hell.

It's as old as Cleon, if not before.

It was pretty popular in 1930's Germany too.

Donald Trump plans to create and fund super-PACs specifically aimed at ending the political careers of Ted Cruz and John Kasich should either run for office again, after both snubbed the Republican nominee during his party's convention this week, a person familiar with Trump’s thinking told Bloomberg Politics on Friday.

DONALD J. TRUMP, until now a Republican problem, this week became a challenge the nation must confront and overcome. The real estate tycoon is uniquely unqualified to serve as president, in experience and temperament. He is mounting a campaign of snarl and sneer, not substance. To the extent he has views, they are wrong in their diagnosis of America’s problems and dangerous in their proposed solutions. Mr. Trump’s politics of denigration and division could strain the bonds that have held a diverse nation together. His contempt for constitutional norms might reveal the nation’s two-century-old experiment in checks and balances to be more fragile than we knew.

Any one of these characteristics would be disqualifying; together, they make Mr. Trump a peril. We recognize that this is not the usual moment to make such a statement. In an ordinary election year, we would acknowledge the Republican nominee, move on to the Democratic convention and spend the following months, like other voters, evaluating the candidates’ performance in debates, on the stump and in position papers. This year we will follow the campaign as always, offering honest views on all the candidates. But we cannot salute the Republican nominee or pretend that we might endorse him this fall. A Trump presidency would be dangerous for the nation and the world.

Ralph-Wiggum wrote:The Washington Post has already declared that there's no chance they will endorse Trump.

Ralph-Wiggum wrote:The Washington Post has already declared that there's no chance they will endorse Trump.

em2nought wrote:the thinking populace.

hepcat wrote:I'm guessing that's the equivalent of a sex tape for Trump. He's probably wrestling the bald headed champ to it even as I write this.

Holman wrote:More on the Trump-Putin Axis:

Trump’s New Russia Adviser Has Deep Ties to Kremlin’s Gazprom.

Putin’s Puppet. If the Russian president could design a candidate to undermine American interests....

Trump & Putin. Yes, It's Really a Thing.

The Kremlin’s Candidate: In the 2016 election, Putin’s propaganda network is picking sides.

tl;dr:

Trump is knee-deep in Russian money. Putin is talking up his candidacy the same way he talks up far-right European parties that he believes are favorable to him and opposed to the United States.

If Trump thinks his ability to game the American real-estate market, and his success at swindling the rubes who signed up for Trump University, makes him ready to deal with a guy who managed to survive a career at the top-level of the KGB only to make himself the presiding autocrat of the world's leading kleptocracy, I'd like to be there when he finds out how wrong he is.

GreenGoo wrote:I mean, he bamboozled the entire Scottish government to their detriment

GreenGoo wrote:I'd just like to remind everyone that the current nominee for the Republicans was a vocal Birther.

What times we live in.

malchior wrote:. You can list 30 things he said in the last couple of weeks any of which should banish him from POLITICS but 50% of the electorate is ready to pull a lever for him not Hillary?

hepcat wrote:

malchior wrote:. You can list 30 things he said in the last couple of weeks any of which should banish him from POLITICS but 50% of the electorate is ready to pull a lever for him not Hillary?

I think that's the whole thing in a nutshell.

malchior wrote:Wow - someone is really pushing the Russia connection. There are some things that should be verifiable such as whether he truly has been blackballed by 'western banks'. This seems like a reasonable claim due to his serial bankruptcies but the assertion that a good part of his money flows in from Russia? That would be likely hard to prove.

"I want them to pay," he said. "They don’t pay us what they should be paying! We lose on everything. Folks, we lose on everything."

He went on to criticize former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's foreign policy record: "She makes it impossible to negotiate. She’s not a negotiator. She’s a fool.”

"We have to walk," Trump added. "Within two days they're calling back! Get back over here, we’ll pay you whatever the hell you want."

"They will pay us if the right person asks," he said. "That’s the way it works, folks. That’s the way it works."

TheMix wrote:I suspect that he's never been in any kind of negotiation like the ones he would be called into as President. He's used to being the BigDogAtTheTable. So, yeah, in the past he's been able to threaten to walk away to get what he wants. But to think that he will be able to do the same thing on the world political stage? As much as I'd love to see him get his ass handed to him, I live in this country.