stay tuned!

[iambiguous]

'Now the president is threatening another crisis, tweeting that we might have to delay the election because there could be mail-in voting fraud.

'In his view, either he wins or the election is rigged. He’s trying to make mail-in ballots socially unacceptable the same way he made masks socially unacceptable for the first five months of the plague.

'The Washington Post reports that backlogs at the U.S. Postal Service are causing some employees there to worry that the Trump lackey in charge, a top donor, is intentionally gumming up the works just in time for the election. It is astounding the corrupt lengths the administration seems willing to go to — destroying the Postal Service to win the election. Ben Franklin would be incensed.

As Axelrod notes, “Whatever happened back in the Bush v. Gore recount days will seem like the Garden of Innocence compared to what’s going to happen now. Trump is not going to walk to the rostrum and say, ‘The people have spoken and I accept their verdict.’’’

Even Trump’s closest allies in Congress, Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, couldn’t stomach the idea of postponing the election, and both have swallowed a lot over the last three years. Trump’s little trial balloon blew up like the Hindenburg.'

Maureen Dowd

On the other hand, I'm actually beginning to think that Trump really will refuse to step down unless Putin and others can once again rig the election in his favor. After all, are the Democrats really a match for Vladimir when it comes to rigging elections?

As always though with things like this, it's not the moral or the political arguments that count, but what Trump can actually accomplish in regard to those who have the boots on the ground power either to stop him or to do his bidding.

[promethean75]

Like I was saying months ago... this guy is such a perfect moron I have trouble believing all this is by accident. It almost seems staged somehow.

[iambiguous]

'Gail Collins: You told me once you thought Trump was too cowardly to actually try to pull off a coup. I can’t tell you how much comfort I’ve been taking from that thought. So — just checking — is that still your opinion?

'Bret Stephens: Still is. What I think this tweet tells us is that Trump knows in his heart that he is likely to lose in November. He’s laying the groundwork not for a coup but for an excuse, both for himself and for his followers. It creates a mythology to explain defeat, attack Joe Biden and keep the Trump family relevant in the Republican Party. The fact that he’d pull a stunt like this is another reason it’s so important that he lose in a landslide in November.' NYT

Wow, just bringing up the possibility of a "coup" should Trump lose in November is unnerving. Then the question becomes, if he goes there, how will those in the military/"tactical teams"/police etc., react to orders from him to go there?

Though, sure, he could just be hinting in that direction in order merely to have that as an excuse should he lose. He does leave office quietly [more or less] and then immediately gets behind Don Jr. -- Ivanka? -- for 2024.

Stay tuned.

[Meno_]

Don't dismiss a wag the dog scenario, as commander in chief he may consider it as a final option.

Remember, he can not pardon himself against any civil or criminal prosecution once he leaves office, wasn't he the one to proclaim "lock her up" in reference to Clinton's problems.

Willing up a war scenario becomes easy to conjure among the type of constituancy that appears oblivious to anything but the virtues of this administration, and violence can commence at that point both nationally and/or internationally.

[iambiguous]

Uh-oh...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national ... Fstory-ans


'The government of China prefers that President Trump not win reelection in November, seeing the incumbent as “unpredictable,” and Russia is using a range of measures to try to “denigrate” the president’s opponent, former vice president Joe Biden, including selective leaks of information and efforts on social media, a top U.S. intelligence official said in a statement Friday.

'The statement by William Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, was notable for identifying three countries seeking to influence the 2020 election — China, Russia and Iran. But he portrayed Russia as the most active source of interference. Evanina also said that a Ukrainian lawmaker who has been in contact with Rudolph W. Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, is part of a Russian disinformation effort.'

In other words, aside from all the accusations regarding what Trump might do to steer the election in the right direction [and what Trump claims the Democrats are up to], we have these "foreign powers" pitching in as well.

On the other hand, the stakes here for those who own and operate the global economy are enormous, aren't they?

"Show me the money", as it were.

Makes you wonder if how the high school civics texts portray democracy might have been a bit off.

You know, if there still are high school civics text.

Like back in my day.

[iambiguous]

Here's the part where we assume Trump loses the election but then refuses to leave office:

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/202 ... -coup.html

'Two retired Army officers have written an open letter to Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, basically urging him to mount a military coup if President Donald Trump loses the upcoming election but tries to remain in power on Jan. 20.

'“If Donald Trump refuses to leave office at the expiration of his constitutional term,” they write for Defense One, a widely read national security site, “the United States military must remove him by force, and you must give that order.”'

To wit: we can discuss "philosophically" as, say, "political scientists" how nations like America are run "socially, politically and economically". But the bottom line historically always revolves finally around who has the actual military and police power to enforce any particular interpretation of any particular context.

Sure, that's become buried deep in the background in our modern industrial world. A world where "democracy and the rule of law" seem so deeply entrenched that nothing could possibly upend them.

But let a "crisis" [or crises] be deep enough and prolonged enough, coupled with an authoritarian leader chummy with national security factions of the MIC and, well, who the hell really knows?

Still, let's be optimistic:

'The fear that Trump will refuse to leave office, even if he loses the election, has been circulating for over a year now. I addressed the fear in a June 1 Slate column, arguing that Trump may want to lock himself in the Oval Office, but “he wouldn’t get away with it.” At 12 p.m. on Jan. 20, 2021, wherever Trump may choose to plant himself, all but a small retinue of security guards will abandon him, the nuclear launch codes will change, his Cabinet secretaries and ambassadors will lose all authority, and the entire U.S. military establishment will pivot away from ex-President Donald Trump to salute President Joe Biden. “The principle of civilian control is hammered into American officers from the time they’re cadets,” I wrote, “and the 20th Amendment of the Constitution states, ‘The terms of the President and Vice President end at noon on the 20th day of January’—no ifs, ands, or buts.”

'The Secret Service will escort Mr. Trump out of the office. If a mob of Trump’s favorite sheriffs and militias block the doors and circle the White House—if, in short, a few tanks need to roll down Pennsylvania Avenue to restore order, then it will be Biden, the duly elected and sworn-in commander in chief, who gives the order.'

Stay tuned...

[Meno_]

If a security risk can override the politically divisive intelligence, ( military, FBI, CIA, Interpol, them a guy like Trump may see this as easy entrance into a nuclear issue.

Using nuclear in a very general sense.

Murphy's law suits well with the kind of constituancy he relies on, for remember it hasn't been that long ago that the FBI director was brought to task and let go, and other assets were equally dealt with. harsh blows of the kind which formerly were in inconceivable.

[iambiguous]

Using nuclear in a very general sense.

Here, however, we can only imagine a particular president in a particular context with access to the football codes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_football

What could he do with those nuclear warheads all the way up to an election that he sees he is clearly going to lose?

Wag the dog? At home in regard to antifa...or abroad in regard to the "terrorists"?

What orders would or would not be obeyed?

On the other hand, given the existence of the "deep state" [in whatever manner it is imagined] even here -- especially here? -- shit will unfold behind the curtain that none of us here are likely to have access to.

[Meno_]

The 'Deep State' could incite a reversely manufactured scenario, where a sent black mail could divide military type intelligence and conquer.

This may fit the fodder of the overused distinction between fact and fiction, the accounted root of which may be lost by now. Any incidence could be invented as trigger, and the nuclear option could be initially used as a hidden possibility, as it always had

The neo Kantian approach of centering , a recurrent mode of procedure applied , could literally explode the 'is' and the 'ought', figuratively reducing the difference between a dialectic between the material and the quasi trace of the spiritual.

This mix, utilizes simplified reconstitution of familiarly resembling motives.

Trump is famous of this kind of amphitheatre of absurdity, as the incident that created an effective sense of incredulity, when he bible thumped in midst of the protestations. .

This theater appears nowadays as an unstoppable trainwreck in the making.

[iambiguous]

Then this part:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/13/opin ... e=Homepage

'Last week, NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro asked Joe Biden whether, if elected, he could envision Donald Trump being prosecuted. Biden replied that the prosecution of a former president would be a “very, very unusual thing” and probably “not very good for democracy.” The former vice president said he would not stand in the way if the Justice Department wanted to bring a case, but when Garcia-Navarro pressed him, he suggested she was trying to bait him into a version of Trump’s threat against his 2016 opponent: “Lock her up.”'

Clearly, to the extent that Trump feels threatened -- in a truly existential sense -- by the prospect of prosecution after leaving office, is the extent to which staying in office "by any means necessary" becomes a prospect that cannot be ignored.

If Biden wins the election for the White House and the Democrats retake the Senate, will the Democratic Party "establishment" go the way of Gerald Ford in pardoning Nixon? In other words, claim that for the good of the country it is time to "heal old wounds" blah, blah, blah and go back to reconfiguring the crony capitalist "deep state" juggernaut so as to reflect the days before Trump.

Here we can only check in from time to time with Biden, Schumer and Pelosi and see where the soundbites take us.

[iambiguous]

Then there's this...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... Fstory-ans

'President Trump said Thursday that he does not want to fund the U.S. Postal Service because Democrats are seeking to expand mail-in voting during the coronavirus pandemic, making explicit the reason he has declined to approve $25 billion in emergency funding for the cash-strapped agency.

'“Now, they need that money in order to make the post office work, so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” Trump said in an interview with Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo. He added: “Now, if we don’t make a deal, that means they don’t get the money. That means they can’t have universal mail-in voting, they just can’t have it.”

'Trump has railed against mail-in balloting for months, and at a White House briefing Wednesday, he argued without evidence that USPS’s enlarged role in the November election would perpetuate “one of the greatest frauds in history.”'

A sign of just how far he is willing to go to stay in office. And it's not even September yet!

On the other hand, maybe the Trumpworld folks here can provide us with ample evidence to back up his claims.

Let's all exchange political prejudices [rooted in dasein] with as many actual facts as we can.

[Ecmandu]

Then there's this...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... Fstory-ans

'President Trump said Thursday that he does not want to fund the U.S. Postal Service because Democrats are seeking to expand mail-in voting during the coronavirus pandemic, making explicit the reason he has declined to approve $25 billion in emergency funding for the cash-strapped agency.

'“Now, they need that money in order to make the post office work, so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” Trump said in an interview with Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo. He added: “Now, if we don’t make a deal, that means they don’t get the money. That means they can’t have universal mail-in voting, they just can’t have it.”

'Trump has railed against mail-in balloting for months, and at a White House briefing Wednesday, he argued without evidence that USPS’s enlarged role in the November election would perpetuate “one of the greatest frauds in history.”'

A sign of just how far he is willing to go to stay in office. And it's not even September yet!

On the other hand, maybe the Trumpworld folks here can provide us with ample evidence to back up his claims.

Let's all exchange political prejudices [rooted in dasein] with as many actual facts as we can.

I would not want to be Trump. He’s been trying to destroy democracy around the globe (including the US) since he became president. But now the pressure is REALLY on him!!!

He will be sent to prison for obstruction of justice if he loses. If he wins.... he can probably destroy destroy democracy enough to stay out of prison entirely.

Even the elites who always wanted to destroy democracy (and did about 30 years ago) see trump as a liability. *shh... people aren’t supposed to know that yet trump!*. If trump continues on this path of revealing that democracy no longer exists, not because he said it, but because he’s such a colossal asshole... the elites will have no choice but to make an example of him.

[Meno_]

Then there's this...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... Fstory-ans

'President Trump said Thursday that he does not want to fund the U.S. Postal Service because Democrats are seeking to expand mail-in voting during the coronavirus pandemic, making explicit the reason he has declined to approve $25 billion in emergency funding for the cash-strapped agency.

'“Now, they need that money in order to make the post office work, so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” Trump said in an interview with Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo. He added: “Now, if we don’t make a deal, that means they don’t get the money. That means they can’t have universal mail-in voting, they just can’t have it.”

'Trump has railed against mail-in balloting for months, and at a White House briefing Wednesday, he argued without evidence that USPS’s enlarged role in the November election would perpetuate “one of the greatest frauds in history.”'

A sign of just how far he is willing to go to stay in office. And it's not even September yet!

On the other hand, maybe the Trumpworld folks here can provide us with ample evidence to back up his claims.

Let's all exchange political prejudices [rooted in dasein] with as many actual facts as we can.

I would not want to be Trump. He’s been trying to destroy democracy around the globe (including the US) since he became president. But now the pressure is REALLY on him!!!

He will be sent to prison for obstruction of justice if he loses. If he wins.... he can probably destroy destroy democracy enough to stay out of prison entirely.

Even the elites who always wanted to destroy democracy (and did about 30 years ago) see trump as a liability. *shh... people aren’t supposed to know that yet trump!*. If trump continues on this path of revealing that democracy no longer exists, not because he said it, but because he’s such a colossal asshole... the elites will have no choice but to make an example of him.

Or worse.

[iambiguous]

viewtopic.php?f=48&t=195930

[iambiguous]

One month to go, right?

Still...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... orst-last/

On Friday, as the New York Times first reported, Trump met at the White House with retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, a pardoned felon, and attorney Sidney Powell, who was fired from the Trump legal team after promoting conspiracy theories about the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez too wacky even for Trump. Trump reportedly discussed with the duo Flynn’s idea of declaring martial law and having the military “rerun” the election — or, failing that, appointing Powell as a special counsel to probe (nonexistent) election fraud.

These dangerous ideas may not be implemented, but simply the fact that they are being discussed marks a new low. Never before in U.S. history has there been a record of a president discussing a military coup to stay in office. Is there any doubt that if Trump could find any active-duty generals willing to carry out this plot against America, he would give it the go-ahead? In this instance, all that is preserving the Constitution is the military’s fidelity to the rule of law.

my emphasis

How about this: stay tuned.

[Meno_]

Especially so, since he is on top of the heap of the chain of command until Jan 20, 2021.

[iambiguous]

What to make of this...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/29/opin ... e=Homepage

President Trump recently tweeted that “the ‘Justice’ Department and FBI have done nothing about the 2020 Presidential Election Voter Fraud,” followed by these more ominous lines: “Never give up. See everyone in D.C. on January 6th.”

The unmistakable reference is to the day Congress will count the Electoral College’s votes, with Vice President Mike Pence presiding. Mr. Trump is leaning on the vice president and congressional allies to invalidate the November election by throwing out duly certified votes for Joe Biden.

Mr. Pence thus far has not said he would do anything like that, but his language is worrisome. Last week, he said: “We’re going to keep fighting until every legal vote is counted. We’re going to win Georgia, we’re going to save America,” as a crowd screamed, “Stop the steal.”

This is one of things that most of us "outside the beltway" are just not sure exactly how much it can be taken seriously.

There's this take...

But as a matter of constitutional text and history, any effort on Jan. 6 is doomed to fail. It would also be profoundly anti-democratic and unconstitutional.

Both Article II of the Constitution and the 12th Amendment say that the votes of the Electoral College are to be opened by the “president of the Senate,” meaning the vice president. The Electoral Count Act, passed in 1887 to avoid chaotic counts like the one that followed the 1876 election, adds important details. It provides a detailed timeline to tabulate electoral votes, culminating with the final count to take place on Jan. 6, and it delineates the powers of the vice president.

He is to be the “presiding officer” (meaning he is to preserve order and decorum), open the ballot envelopes, provide those results to a group of tellers, call for any objection by members of Congress, announce the results of any votes on objections, and ultimately announce the result of the vote.

Nothing in either the text of the Constitution or the Electoral Count Act gives the vice president any substantive powers. His powers are ministerial, and that circumscribed role makes general sense: The whole point of an election is to let the people decide who will rule them. If an incumbent could simply maneuver to keep himself in office — after all, a maneuver to protect Mr. Trump also protects Mr. Pence — the most foundational precept of our government would be gravely undermined. In America, “we the people,” not “we, the vice president,” control our destiny.

The drafters of the Electoral Count Act consciously insisted on this weakened role for the vice president. They guarded against any pretense he might have to throw out a particular state’s votes, saying that the vice president must open “all certificates and papers purporting to be” electoral votes. They further said, in the event of a dispute, both chambers of Congress would have to disagree with a particular state’s slate of electoral votes to reject them. And they made it difficult for Congress to disagree, adding measures such as a “safe harbor” provision and deference to certification by state officials.

In this election, certification is clear. There are no ongoing legal challenges in the states of any merit whatsoever. All challenges have lost, spectacularly and often, in the courts. The states and the electors have spoken their will. Neither Vice President Pence nor the loyal followers of President Trump have a valid basis to contest anything.

Still, we're talking Trumpworld here, right?

[iambiguous]

The Washington Post is bursting at the seams with op-eds today reminding us to "stay tuned":

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... able-test/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... n-do-over/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... s-failure/

January 6th. Mark it on your calendar.

There's what the liberal press assures us will happen, and there's the "chaos" that Donald Trump revels in in order to keep those on the left at least a bit anxious.

And this only a day after the Georgia rerun elections to decide the fate of the Senate.

So, stay tuned.

One thing for sure, I suspect: the Deep State will settle for anything.

[iambiguous]

Stay tuned indeed!

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/03/us/p ... e=Homepage

WASHINGTON — President Trump pressured Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find” him enough votes to overturn the presidential election and vaguely threatened him with “a criminal offense” during an hourlong telephone call on Saturday, according to an audio recording of the conversation.

Mr. Trump, who has spent almost nine weeks making false conspiracy claims about his loss to President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., told Brad Raffensperger, the state’s top elections official, that he should recalculate the vote count so Mr. Trump, not Mr. Biden, would end up winning the state’s 16 electoral votes.

“I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” Mr. Trump said during the conversation, according to a recording first obtained by The Washington Post, which published it online Sunday. The New York Times also acquired a recording of Mr. Trump’s call.

The president, who will be in charge of the Justice Department for the 17 days left in his administration, hinted that Mr. Raffensperger and Ryan Germany, the chief lawyer for secretary of state’s office, could be prosecuted criminally if they did not do his bidding.

One thing seems crystal clear: Trump is deadly serious about all this.

Who really knows how far he is willing to go in the next 17 days to stay in power.

I always imagined him instigating a foreign policy crisis and then arguing that he must remain in power in order to contain it. Will he?

And the January 6th showdown in the Congress: https://www.npr.org/sections/biden-tran ... ge-results

The liberal press assures us that it is all futile. But, again, we're talking Trump here.

I'm actually beginning to imagine that he really will have to be forcefully removed from the Oval Office! The sheer spectacle of it!!

[iambiguous]

Stay tuned...on steroids.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/04/us/p ... e=Homepage


WASHINGTON — President Trump’s relentless effort to overturn the result of the election that he lost has become the most serious stress test of American democracy in generations, led not by outside revolutionaries intent on bringing down the system but by the very leader charged with defending it.

In the 220 years since a defeated John Adams turned over the White House to his rival, firmly establishing the peaceful transfer of power as a bedrock principle, no sitting president who lost an election has tried to hang onto power by rejecting the Electoral College and subverting the will of the voters — until now. It is a scenario at once utterly unthinkable and yet feared since the beginning of Mr. Trump’s tenure.

The president has gone well beyond simply venting his grievances or creating a face-saving narrative to explain away a loss, as advisers privately suggested he was doing in the days after the Nov. 3 vote, but instead has pressed the boundaries of tradition, propriety and the law to find any way he can to cling to office beyond his term that expires in two weeks. That he is almost certain to fail does not mitigate the damage he is doing to democracy by undermining public faith in the electoral system.

What to make of liberal reactions like this. On the one hand, we are always assured that all of this bluster on Trumps part is just that, a tempest in a teapot.

On the other hand, there seems to be a real concern brewing that anything is possible between now and January 20th.

Or, sure, just your typical inside the beltway crisis being built up to create new subscriptions.

[Meno_]

These appearent either/or choices only serve to reinforce the fact/ fiction general contriversy, a literal description of the need to refo m ulate the existing bathos in the mire of the supposed sinkhole , to show how deep and filthy , as all pervasive is the swamp.

[d0rkyd00d]

With the escalated rhetoric right now, I would be surprised if we make it through the next year without a major political assassination taking place. Truly unfortunate IMO.

[iambiguous]

With the escalated rhetoric right now, I would be surprised if we make it through the next year without a major political assassination taking place. Truly unfortunate IMO.

And would it really surprise anyone if the assassin was someone who is posting here?

[d0rkyd00d]

With the escalated rhetoric right now, I would be surprised if we make it through the next year without a major political assassination taking place. Truly unfortunate IMO.

And would it really surprise anyone if the assassin was someone who is posting here?

lol no but sadly there are 74MM other potential suspects.

[Peter Kropotkin]

one of the points to understand is that
IQ45 is physically a coward....he would make absolutely
sure he wasn't involved in any kind of physical work himself....

personally, I wouldn't be surprise if violence or blood, makes him
physically ill.... just another right wing gutless coward...

the only reason a right winger feels like a man his because he has
his gun... take away a right wingers gun and you emasculate him.....

the right winger "gun" is impotent so he makes it up with real guns..

no wonder the right are so attached their guns......

yes, why do you ask that I am anti-right wing these days?

fucking gutless cowards....

Kropotkin