Even Right Wing Rupert Murdoch and His Wall Street Journal Are Trashing This President

As said in the title, this is great. Even uber Right Wing, ultra conservative Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal is calling this President out for what and who he is now, thank goodness.

WSJ slams Trump for ‘hurting the country’ by ‘debasing’ the presidency: ‘Ugly even for him’

The article:

A Presidential Smear

A bit of the article:

Donald Trump sometimes traffics in conspiracy theories—recall his innuendo in 2016 about Ted Cruz’s father and the JFK assassination—but his latest accusation against MSNBC host Joe Scarborough is ugly even for him. Mr. Trump has been tweeting the suggestion that Mr. Scarborough might have had something to do with the death in 2001 of a young woman who worked in his Florida office when Mr. Scarborough was a GOP Congressman...

...There’s no evidence of foul play, or an affair with the woman, and the local coroner ruled that the woman fainted from an undiagnosed heart condition and died of head trauma. Some on the web are positing a conspiracy because the coroner had left a previous job under a cloud, but the parents and husband of the young woman accepted the coroner’s findings and want the case to stay closed...

...Mr. Trump always hits back at critics, and Mr. Scarborough has called the President mentally ill, among other things. But suggesting that the talk-show host is implicated in the woman’s death isn’t political hardball. It’s a smear. Mr. Trump rightly denounces the lies spread about him in the Steele dossier, yet here he is trafficking in the same sort of trash.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a Republican from Illinois, had it right when he tweeted on the weekend: “Completely unfounded conspiracy. Just stop. Stop spreading it, stop creating paranoia. It will destroy us.”

We don’t write this with any expectation that Mr. Trump will stop. Perhaps he even thinks this helps him politically, though we can’t imagine how. But Mr. Trump is debasing his office, and he’s hurting the country in doing so.

I love the smell of Right Wing and Republican Party destruction in the morning.

And afternoon. And evening.

Don't you?

Think happy thoughts.  Have a great day.

And vote blue, folks.

Links:

New Polls Show Trump’s Re-election Chances are Diminishing

Anxious About the Virus, Older Voters Grow More Wary of Trump

Finally, Older Voters are Starting to Move Away from Trump

This Trumpian Republican Party

I caught an excellent article, thanks to a friend, over the weekend on this President and what has morphed into his political party:

We Need to Speak Honestly About the GOP’s Evolution Into a Conspiracy Cult

One of the challenges in analyzing modern American politics is accurately describing the Republican Party without seeming unserious and hyperbolic. Major publications are understandably in the habit of presenting both sides of the partisan divide as being inherently worthy of respect and equal consideration, both as a way of shielding themselves from accusations of bias and as a way of maintaining their own sense of journalistic integrity.

Unfortunately, the modern Republican Party’s abdication of seriousness, good faith and reality-based communications or policy-making has stretched even the most open-minded analyst’s capacity for forced balance. Donald Trump’s own inability to string together coherent or consistent thoughts has led to a bizarre normalization of his statements in the traditional media, as journalists unconsciously try to fit his rambling, spontaneous utterances into a conventional framework. This has come at the cost of Americans seeing the full truth of the crisis of leadership in the Oval Office for what it is. For instance, it was ironically salutary for the American public to witness Donald Trump’s bizarre pandemic press conferences where he oddly attacked reporters for asking innocuous questions and recommended researching bleach and sunlight injections, because they got to see Trump raw as he truly is, without the normalization filter. Republicans have long argued that the “mainstream media filter” gives them a bad shake, but the reality is the opposite: sure, it’s not as good as being boosted by Fox News’ overt propaganda, but it does them a greater service than letting the public see them unfiltered at all...

...Being a Republican now requires believing in a jaw-dropping series of claims that, if true, would almost necessitate anti-democratic revanchism. One has to believe that 

• a cabal of evil scientists is making up climate science in exchange for grant money; 
• that there is rampant, widescale voter impersonation fraud carried out by thousands of elections officials nationwide; 
• that the “Deep State” concocted a scheme to frame Trump for Russian collusion but chose not to use it before the 2016 election; 
• that shadowy forces are driving migrant caravans and diseases across American borders in the service of destroying white Republican America; 
• that the entire news media is engaged in a conspiracy against the Republican Party; 
• that grieving victims of gun violence and their families all across America want to take away guns as a pretext for stomping the boot of “liberal fascism” on conservative faces; and so on. 

That and much more is just the vanilla Republican belief system at this point (not even touching less explosive academic fictions like “tax cuts pay for themselves” or “the poor will work harder to better themselves if you cut the safety net.”}

I personally can't recommend the complete above article enough.

Meanwhile, this happened two days ago, Saturday.

Trump retweets a message calling Hillary Clinton a 'skank' and spreads sexist insults about other prominent female Democrats

On Saturday, President Donald Trump shared a series of sexist insults and personal gibes about prominent female Democrats.

Trump has a long record of aiming sexist insults at female critics.

Who does this?

What public person, let alone government representative, let alone 74 year old, let alone Congressional representative or, I don't know, what PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES talks like that?  What adult calls another, a woman, a "skank"?  Who does that??

This President is frightening but as that first article above shows, much of the Republican Party has gotten scary, honestly, no overstatement, scary.

Fortunately, there are a few, a very few Republicans out there warning people about him and this. People like Utah's Mitt Romeny, conservative writer George Will, uber-conservative Bill Kristol and others.  It's not enough but it's something.

Then there's the fact that this President has repeatedly tried to spread an untrue and extremely irresponsible murder conspiracy theory, of all things, about Joe Scarborough.

Trump uses Twitter to push 

murder conspiracy theory 

And this was yesterday at the Memorial Day activities. As this President and again, his political party would have it, it's "sleepy Joe" Biden we have to worry about, no one else. And yet...

Trump’s struggles to stand still didn’t go unnoticed during Memorial Day visit to Arlington

Oh sway can you see.

President Trump’s struggles to stand still during a Memorial Day visit to Arlington National Cemetery lit up social media Monday, prompting users to recall past incidents in which the commander in chief, who turns 74 next month, battled to find a balance.

“Is the President having trouble standing up straight as the National Anthem begins at Arlington Cemetary (sic) or am I seeing things?” Joshua Potash from Queens asked on Twitter.

The Trump critic posted that video, along with another clearly showing the president swaying in front of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

Between this President's ravings, his questionable health and his political party's going off a d eep end, it seems clear we don't lack for things we have to work on, let alone be concerned of.

Thanks, Republicans.

"Only the best people."
"So much winning."

Links:

Op-Ed: Let’s count the ways Donald Trump has gone where no president has gone before

Are White Working Class Folks Tiring of Trump's Act?
Trump Sabotaged America's Recovery Even Before COVID-19 Began

24 conspiracy theories Donald Trump has floated

6 months on, Trump hasn't completed his physical. The White House won't say why.

Editorial: If the pandemic-preparedness cupboard was bare, it was Trump's doing

Quote of the day--on Newt Gingrich

"I wouldn't let that guy run a 7-11, let alone a country."  --David Brooks on Newt Gingrich's candidacy for the Presidency

Thank you, Mr. Brooks.

Link:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Brooks_(journalist)

A staunch Republican, on the Health Care Reform Act of 2010

Former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) on the Health Care Reform Act of 2010:


 "I like the bill" and "From a justice, fairness and equity standpoint, I'm very proud of this administration and that America has addressed this."


Frist said the above at the American Hospital Association's annual meeting.  And he said it about this Obama Administration.


It would be really nice if the Republicans in the House would stop wasting their and our time and go forward, instead, with other good, intelligent, helpful work for the country, instead of trying to "make points" in Washington by re-hashing this important, already-done work and bill.


Heaven knows we've got plenty of problems as a country.  Their wasting this time and energy is shameless.  


Too bad they're not smart enough to be embarrassed.


Link:  http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2011_01/027582.php

It's one thing to say we shouldn't tax companies much...

But it's quite another, I think--and easily done--to say that we shouldn't be giving tax breaks to big, extremely profitable industries, don't you agree?

Like "Big Oil"?

Check this out, from Political Animal and The Washington Monthly this morning: 

GET THE ENERGY SECTOR OFF THE DOLE.... With global warming deniers about to take charge of the House of Representatives, there would seem to be little hope for major clean energy legislation in this Congress. But all is not lost, argues Jeffrey Leonard in the latest issue of the Washington Monthly. Last fall's election let loose political forces that President Obama can tap to set us on a path to a sustainable energy future with a simple proposal: eliminate all energy subsidies.

 Yes, eliminate them all -- for oil, coal, gas, nuclear, ethanol, even for wind and solar. It will be better for national security, the budget deficit, and, believe it or not, the environment. Green energy sources get only the tiniest sliver of the overall federal subsidy pie, so they'll have a competitive advantage in the long term if all subsidies, including the huge ones for fossil fuels, are eliminated. In addition, deep trends in America's energy supply, including discoveries of huge natural gas reserves, will over time create favorable terrain for wind, solar, and other energy sources that liberals love -- but only if our entrenched system of subsidies doesn't gum up the works. And while getting the energy sector off the dole may have once been politically impossible, with anti-pork Tea Partiers loose in Washington and deficit cutting in the air, the moment may finally be right.

From the original article Mr. Benen is referring to:

Energy subsidies are the sordid legacy of more than sixty years of politics as usual in Washington, and they cost us somewhere around $20 billion a year. To put that sum in perspective, that’s more than the State Department’s entire budget. It’s also enough to send half a million Americans to college each year with all expenses paid. Energy subsidies undermine the working of the free market, and they make rational approaches to long-term energy challenges and climate change impossible. They are not an aid to energy independence or environmental stewardship. They are an impediment.

 Doesn't this make sense? 

Why should we give tax breaks, for pity's sake, to the oil industry?  Does anyone think they won't make a profit?  Who could be for keeping things as they are, I mean, besides the industry itself? 

Libertarians, Conservatives, the Tea Party, Democrats, Consevatives, Liberals--everybody ought to be behind this.

And while we're at it, let me bring up here, yet again, why doesn't some Congressional representative bring up a bill to do away with tax deductions to any industry to take manufacturing offshore?

You know, sometimes things just aren't that difficult.

This is an example of two right here.

Link to original post:  http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2011_01/027369.php
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2011/1101.leonard-2.html

Ain't dat just a danged shame?

Posted by stevebenen at 12:44 pm on "Crooks and Liars"

May 24, 2010

Republican National Committee Very, Very Low on Cash

This post originally appeared on Washington Monthly.

Since Michael Steele took over as chairman of the Republican National Committee, the party’s budgetary decisions have been the subject of widespread consternation, intensified by the fact that RNC fundraising has fallen far short of expectations.

These concerns have escalated in recent months, in light of expense reports pointing to unnecessary spending on private planes, limousines, catering, flowers, softball equipment, and an outing at lesbian-themed bondage nightclub.

A CNN report this afternoon will likely raise the anxiety levels among Republicans to new heights.

An internal Republican National Committee document obtained by CNN paints a damning picture of the committee’s financial standing compared to the past five election cycles.

The document, pulled together during a recent review sparked by concerns over RNC spending practices, said the committee had $12.5 million in cash on hand at the end of April.

By comparison, the average cash on hand at the end of April from 2002-2009 was $40.4 million. And that average includes the odd numbered years when there are fewer election contests.