The Gallery of Trump-Inspired Assholes (Part 1)

this story is almost a decade old but it seems reaspnable to include it with the other greenwald stuff–

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Usually guys who go on this journey—starting from a principled far-left position, later blaming “liberals” for all the left’s problems, ultimately settling in the conservative sphere because that’s where most of the liberal-haters are—these people have historically been called “neocons”

but Trump is explicitly against the traditional neocon agenda, which was a sort of inverted Trotsky-style “permanent revolution” of endless reactionary interventions in foreign affairs, à la the Bush family

so I’m not sure how to label the New Glenn Greenwald

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Or maybe not? Maybe it’s easier that way? Not to have to do any hard work putting together policies that reflect your values… Honestly, the only things they seem to have to offer are 1) deregulation, 2) tax cuts, 3) enshrining “Christian” values into the constitution however they can (by gaming the judicial system, primarily), 4) GUNS, and 5) the democrat party are commies. But they really aren’t addressing the concerns of real people at all.

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In the past few days, he’s lambasted Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, Attorney General William Barr, and even Donald Trump himself, calling them “weak” for not pushing for, or bringing about, the immediate firing of FBI Director Christopher Wray.

I guess that he’s upset because the laptop story fizzle probably means that he won’t be getting that pardon.

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asshole works for me.

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It may be that Wray hasn’t been fired because they are waiting to do so until after the election is definitively lost. The steps of the plan could be:

  1. Exhaust all legal options to have Trump declared president.
  2. Replace Wray with Giuliani.
  3. FBI “investigates” Biden.
  4. FBI arrests Biden.
  5. Trump declares emergency powers, nullifies election results (including the senate) and remains dictator for life, all before Biden even gets a trial on the made up charges.

If Trump is elected then all of this is moot and Trump will not have to look like replacing Wray was purely political.

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I’ve rarely read the comments, but they are seeming pretty libertarian-Reason right wing… have they always been so?

Also, is this comparing Biden to Hitler? Can’t be? I’m guessing he means Omidyar not Biden here?

I’m not surprised that things went sour at the Intercept. Greenwald in his talk to Tucker Carlson highlighted Silicon Valley as a key ally of the security state. The Intercept’s moneybags, eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar, is a big Democratic party donor. I sincerely doubt the editors consulted with Omidyar in their defacto refusal to run Greenwald’s Biden piece or in the blowup that ensued. But the flip side is I doubt they had to….in classic working towards the Fuhrer behavior.

I do have to say, if Omidyar was/is the principle funder of the Intercept, that’s not new. It would have been the case since GG has been there. So, it’s only a problem now? I guess they could mean he’s (Omidyar) making greater demands to come into line with his ideological views, but that why start now if he has not done so previously?

Last, I get that the Democratic party is deeply problematic, and riven through with neoliberalism that undermines progress. But the GOP at this point have gone pretty openly fascists under Trump. Again, I’d argue that Biden/Harris is not ideal, but at the very least they aren’t out and out fascists with a racist agenda.

So, I don’t know… this whole thing is a clusterfuck that’s depressing as hell.

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at this point we can’t let the problematic outweigh the desperate importance of getting rid of the utterly hideous.

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i’ve said this in other threads but it bears repeating: if you want to change the outlook of the democratic party get in there and participate. depending on the size of your community that either means being a member of the party at either the precinct, city, or county level. get in there and work for electing candidates, canvassing, phone banking, etc. if you work hard enough at it you can become part of the leadership at the local level and go on to take part in the discussions and debates that can move your ideas up t the state level. i’ve managed to get ideas of mine incorporated into the texas state democratic platform helping to pull the state party to the left.

yes, it takes time, it takes effort, it takes patience and the ability to know when to push and when to hold back. but you aren’t going to make the democratic party a place for progressive ideas by voting for the green party. i’m not going to make fun of you for voting third party but don’t tell me you did something to change where things are going by doing so.

i’ve had major health issues since last december that have greatly reduced my ability to work for the party this year. i still made phone calls and worked to try to get warren as our candidate but once we had settled on biden i started working for him. i don’t usually go for “motivational poster” type statements but when it comes to the u.s political system–
be the change you seek!

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Yeah well, that’s pretty easy to say, but it’s gotta be more complex than that.

This piece takes an opposite stance from the Naked Capitalism one, a more convincing stance, seems to me, despite its brevity. Maybe it does all boil down to “Oh well, for some indiscernible reason, a super smart warrior against the elite has turned into an unwitting pawn for them. Christ, what an asshole.”

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I don’t know. I used to go there more when Corey blogged here about pieces he found there. Lots of smart work going on there.

But yeah, lately, there’s a lot of use there of the term TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome, for example. As an overly broad way, it seems to me, of dismissing a lot of criticism of Trump, and thus as a label for the supposed failure to see the corrupt wretchedness of the Dem establishment as the cause of conditions that brought us Trump in the first place. The constant use of TDS over there doesn’t seem far from the use by Trumpkins of “orange man bad.”

Anyway, their going to bat now for Greenwald is a bad look indeed, even if it does help me see that in tossing GG onto the Worthless Assholes pile, we run the risk of losing what insights he may still have to offer about just how corrupt American neoliberalism is. And maybe of how the “liberal media” (ha, corporate media, more like) really is liberal in a sense, what with its refusal to look behind the curtain at the rot of the Dem establishment. I haven’t spent enough time there to figure out if the editors (let alone commenters) see any truth in the failed “Hunter’s laptop” effort, but they and commenters there do seem disgusted with how the right generally gets tarred with the “money-grubbing fuckheads” brush, leaving the money-grubbing Dem establishment untarred by it. I think there’s a lot of truth to that.

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This whole thing wouldn’t be the first bad take by Greenwald.

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The same Joe Rogan who is now being paid millions of dollars by Spotify and brought on Alex Jones this week, after Spotify kicked Alex Jones and his bullshit off their platform back in 2018.

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$100 million I think.

What a world.

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fzcfmwi368w51

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Boom

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What is somehow getting lost in this, at least in the media, is that the Biden email scandal is a huge scandal. It’s just not a scandal against Biden. It’s a career-ending scandal for any candidate whose name isn’t Trump. For anyone else, this issue alone would sink them. I mean, his lawyer and his former campaign manager and strategist fed a trove of faked information to the media, and all reputable outlets (& some disreputable ones) turned them down. The faked information, as well as the whole strategy around it, appear to be taken straight from a hostile foreign government with such a strong history of hostile election interference that they were heavily sanctioned by the US government.

Again, in anything but the stupidest timeline, this is a career-ender, with a side of possible fraud charges. Just not for Joe Biden.

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