"The base are incredibly stupid, though, and might love daddy-Trump more when he abuses them."
Hmm. I wonder why the name Maggie Thatcher just popped up in my head.
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Good point. As I was driving today and thinking about my life, as one does, i was pondering an acquaintance of mine, and realized that the source of their power in a lot of their relationships is their unpredictability and the fact that the folks who choose to keep that persons company are a variety of well meaning people who do not see how they are being taken advantage of (and mocked behind their backs for it).
I was thinking the base might want Daddy Trump, because as a narcissist he is so unpredictable (to most people), to be the protector by scaring the foreign baddies. They think he will. What happens when he fails to be scary and instead becomes scared is going to be ‘interesting’ to watch. I give him 16 months at the outside.
Shall we start a pool?
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Yup, Newt is slippery, among other things. But he did explicitly say that just letting Trump get away with this was not the right thing to do.
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Citation needed.
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President of the Imperial Galactic Government
The President is very much a figurehead - he wields no real power whatsoever. He is apparently chosen by the government, but the qualities he is required to display are not those of leadership but those of finely judged outrage. For this reason the President is always a controversial choice, always an infuriating but fascinating character. His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it.
An orange sash is what the President of the Galaxy traditionally wears.
On those criteria Zaphod Beeblebrox is one of the most successful Presidents the Galaxy has ever had. He spent two of his ten Presidential years in prison for fraud. Very very few people realize that the President and the Government have virtually no power at all, and of these very few people only six know whence ultimate political power is wielded. Most of the others secretly believe that the ultimate decision-making process is handled by a computer. They couldn’t be more wrong.
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Of course, you can read whatever you want into what he said. I’m arguing that it is bad reporting to do so. What he actually said was that something should be done about it. You may not be happy with how lukewarm he is on actually doing something about it, and it would be entirely valid to criticize him for supporting Trump up to the election.
But that’s not what I’m complaining about. The headline of this article misquotes him in a way that materially contradicts the meaning of what he actually said. That is what I am complaining about.
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Um, I already gave you the citation. It’s in TFA.
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And it’s not even about Republicans vertebrating themselves (though they’d certainly fail at that too). Some of them might be thinking “I can’t believe he’s shitting all over our principles” but I bet a lot of them are thinking “wow, even pretending to have principles was superfluous all along”.
Those are the ones who’ve spent decades testing the limits of elected evil, step by cautious step, and now here comes Turmp, charging into the darkness with the heedlessness of a brain-damaged rabid pig, and it turns out the core Republican vote is more than OK with it. There is going to be a stampede of what you might call Banana Republicanism before this is done.
I’m afraid hope is in the past now. The bus has hit the bridge, and there’s nothing left to do but go limp and wait to see how many times it flips over.
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Nope. Let’s read the transcript together:
GINGRICH Well sure. I mean, I think first of all the Congress always can hold hearings and can examine any kind of, you know, any kind of conflict of interest. I think second, the Congress can try to figure out how do you do this. My point is we have never seen this kind of wealth in the White House, and so traditional rules don’t work, and we’re going to have to think up, you know, a whole new approach.
I’ve suggested that people who are widely respected, like Attorney General Mukasey, might – that the president-elect might want to form a panel who are sort of a review group, if that makes sense, and that the panel would monitor regularly what was going on and would offer warnings if they get too close to the edge. I think it’s a – you know, it’s a very real problem. I don’t think this is something minor. And I think certainly in an age when people are convinced that government corruption is widespread both in the United States and around the world, you can’t just shrug and walk off from it. It’s an issue that we have to think through, and we have to find a solution for.
Newt did not “explicitly say that just letting Trump get away with this was not the right thing to do.” Nor did he admonish Trump against violating the anti-nepotism law. Nor did he say that Trump should not issue pardons to get away with violating the law, even if he “could” do it.
If Newt was actually against corruption, and specifically against Trump hiring family members, and had explicitly said so it would sound something like this:
“Corruption in Washington is unacceptable. We have anti-corruption laws, including laws against hiring family members. Trump needs to follow the law and not hire any relatives to work in government. While it is technically possible that Trump could pardon people for violating the ethics laws, it would be unethical for him to do so and congress should impeach him should he attempt it.”
That ain’t what Newt is saying, not even remotely close.
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This is the part that worries me most. The base are angry (for mostly stupid reasons), xenophobic, and childishly petulant. All he really has to do prove he’s the alpha male is attack the enemies he’s invented to keep them happy. He’ll be in a good position to pound on - “elites,” scientists, “liberals,” political correctness, immigrants, Muslims, minorities, international cooperation, uppity women, etc. I’d guess he’ll be invading Iran within 16 months, and once the war starts the base will likely grow even more loyal as polls suggest his supporters care a lot less about things like the economy and jobs, and more about pounding immigrants, muslims, and especially intellectuals.
While the base live in a bubble of curated ignorance and misinformation, they also just don’t care about facts. They care about loyalty to the tribe. They see Trump as a strong leader who will hurt their imagined enemies and get revenge on the “elites,” “insiders,” “liberals,” and minorities they loathe. You can see it already in their constant gloating about “liberal tears.” More and more they’re jettisoning social norms and any investment in society, and mimicking Trump’s childish belligerence and hostility, and so long as they want to see society torn up in a revenge fantasy, Trump’s just the guy to fuck shit up.
Even if facts matter to some, the base is consciously cultivating ignorance and misinformation to the point that they’ve demonized virtually every mainstream news source as lies told by the hated “elites”, while Trump’s got control of Fox and Breitbart. The core Trump base may well never wise up.
He’ll have to screw up in an unintuitive way for the base to ever wise up. A screw up by failing in terms of policy or competence won’t matter. His total lack of competence, and his ignorance, sexism, racism, deceitfulness, and crassness are to his supporter’s mind a slap in the fact of the “elites” and something they love since it’s an attack on the hated Other. He’d have to screw up by being mature. To really alienate them, he’d have to calm down, behave like a responsible thoughtful person, or act like he had any sense of the gravity and enormity of impact his choices he was making. In this case they managed to select the most belligerent, irresponsible, flippant, thin-skinned, un-self-reflective narcissist imaginable, so they may be cheering for years as Washington and the country burn.
Worse, the base don’t care about corruption (that’s only problem for “elites”, for members of the tribe getting rich by whatever means is what leaders should do). So Trump’s obvious ongoing corruption might just gain him more support.
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Hermeneutics of a Gingrich quote are tricky. Since you know he’s a pathologically lying sophist rationalizing whatever is convenient at the moment, it’s best not to take anything he’s said purely at face value, but to contextualize it in the context of current projects he’s involved with.
The quote tells a story. In this case Gingrich’s current project is installing Trump in the White House after having worked to get him elected. He’s not speaking as an impartial historian, a policy wonk, or a disinterested panelist/commentator, but as Trump’s advisor working on dealing with these problems of nepotism and corruption.
He began by discussing his ideas for how the Congress should deregulate nepotism and conflicts of interest to accommodate Trump’s inherent nepotism and conflicts of interest and permit Trump to break laws such as they exist now. Then he moved on to discussing what his client, Trump, could do in the face of that not happening by issuing pardons for Trump’s administration’s criminality. You’re right that he didn’t use the word “should,” but wrong in that Gingrich was discussing plans for what Trump should do to deal with nepotism and conflicts of interest that Gingrich takes for granted as inevitable and innate to a Trump presidency. His solutions were either Congress legalizing nepotism and corruption or Trump pardoning nepotism and corruption.
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Sadly, I don’t think everyone “knows” his shtick. “I think he’s really sincere this time!”
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How does a deceptive headline help to express this? I get that Gingrich is not our friend. Deceptive headlines aren’t either.
The hed seems close enough to me, but perhaps “Gingrich: We’ll either get Congress to legalize Trump’s nepotism and corruption or Trump will pardon it” would work better? Then you get rid of that “should” and carry the sense of “shall” for the plans he’s working out and describing.
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And yet you played that game yourself when you wrote:
Goose meet gander.
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Did you check his hands? His fantastic sounding advice is for other people, not for Newt.
What has he done, not just said, to that end, towards ending corruption? Other than talk about how “we” can’t do nothing.
Started an inaptly named PAC to pay other politicians to talk about ending political corruption, is my guess.
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This deception you speak of is awfully Trumped up.
You go ahead and express your creative license with your own blog headlines, k? Market forces and the invisible hand will prove you correct if you are, RIGHT?
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Well, not to defend @abhayakara but fake news clicks better on FB than real news, and Trump’s blatant lies got him elected, so not sure that “market forces” are really a good metric for what we ought to be doing as moral human beings concerned about corruption and lies by Trump and Newt. We should lead by example, not by joining the swamp.
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it’s okay. she’s got several body doubles – on account of her failing health – they’ll keep up the pretense she’s alive for the next few years.
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