Senate The US Politics discussion

Yeah, I've been dismayed by how many times Trump's statements have been met with a "he only said what we're all thinking." Excuse me? Speak for yourself. I think the people saying these things really believe that we're all thinking it though. They've had to keep their mouths shut about a lot of their more repugnant views over the past several years and now they're getting the chance to say these things. Problem is they assume that the rest of us agree and have also just been keeping our mouths shut because of societal pressure. Nope, sorry; I am not a seething pot of resentment, misogyny & racism. That's just you, buddy.

 

The problem is, when the man who is in control of the most powerful nation and the most powerful army in the world behaves this way, it encourages many people to do the same...

Many of you may be unaware of it, but here in Canada, for a year or so, Trump's behavior and words seem to have encouraged some people to go to such extremes... Like some right wing groups doing a demonstration in front of a mosque in Montreal, after a journalist's mistake in the news... And a pro-firearm group who wanted to organize another demonstration on the memorial of tragic mass shooting event which has killed many young women in an engineering school 28 years ago...

I don't recall having ever heared about such extremists group in my home country, Canada, before Trump's election...

 

They were probably there, but they weren't given the courage to speak up that he's given them. We see these things more clearly because of someone's actions having the effect of opening eyes that were normally closed off to such things. Whether ignorantly or blatantly.

 

It's the way people are parsing what the president said. It's one thing to think that one of the poorest nations on earth is a ****hole, it's another thing to think "that place is a ****hole, therefore the people who live there aren't worthy. They don't deserve to be able to change their lives. If the place they come from is ****** then those people must stink like **** and probably behave like **** too." That's what the president said and meant, and I honestly do not believe that's what everybody is thinking.

 

Well unfortunately, some people, many more that we could think, must also be thinking the same way... -_-

 

It's falling under the radar, but I hope people are writing to their governor to support Medicaid for unemployed people, since Trump's executive action yesterday made it legal for state governments to deny healthcare to unemployed people now.

 

All I have to say, is thank goodness I have an outgoing and incoming Democrat as Governor. Also that said incoming Governor is a pediatric Doctor.

 

I knew there had to be a reason why we're in the drama cycle again.

 

Apparently the Trump WH can mess up a conference call:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/white-...ction-on-iran-conference-call-with-reporters/

I swear some of these people would mess up a cup of coffee.

Also reporters were yelling, "Are you a racist?" to Trump has he left the MLK press conference.

And it's not even my birthday in a few weeks.

@Ghost

Trump is going to lose his crap over that. He thinks there is all these people on Medicad who are not working but can. Imagine his reaction to when he sees that the vast majority of people on Medicad that can work do. Be worst then his reaction when he found out Bernhard Langer was incorrect and he didn't win the popular vote after all.

 

Here's a good Washington Post piece about Trump's "****hole" comment. It expands more on what I was saying with regards to Haiti.

 

Page isn’t there. It’s been removed.

 

We don't really need the article, Guy. Your post went right to the heart of the matter.

 

lol, the link broke because the boards auto-censored the word "****hole" in it. Brilliant.

Here it is:

The president had no respect for Haiti. He could see as well as anyone following the news that the country was a basket case — racked by political unrest, filthy, incapable of handling its own affairs. There was no doubt his opinion of the black republic was informed by his blatant racism, which included praising members of the Ku Klux Klan. He had criticized his predecessors’ foreign wars while running for office. But in the White House, he realized he was willing to flex the country’s muscles abroad, as long as the mission fit his motto: “America first.”

Taking Haiti was a U.S. priority, he decided. The United States would invade.

That president was Woodrow Wilson. The year was 1915. And if that was the beginning of a story you’ve never heard before, you aren’t alone.

Since news broke that Wilson’s unwitting heir, President Trump, called Haiti — along with El Salvador and seemingly all 54 nations in Africa — “****hole countries,” the president’s defenders made it clear not only that they do not know Haiti’s history but also that they’re unaware of their own. As soon as they heard his comments, Trump’s partisans went defensive, claiming that while Trump might have been rude, he was right.

Fox News regular Tomi Lahren tweeted: “If they aren’t ****hole countries, why don’t their citizens stay there?”

“Trump should ‘vehemently condemn’ the Haitian government for running a ****hole country,” wrote Will Chamberlain, one of the organizers of last year’s inaugural “DeploraBall.”

Some on the right particularly applauded a segment on CNN in which National Review editor Rich Lowry asked political commentator Joan Walsh whether she would “rather live in Norway or Haiti.” It was a reference to Trump’s reported wish that the United States ring in more Nordic immigrants instead of those from Latin America or Africa. Walsh refused to answer, noting she’d never visited either country. Tucker Carlson accused her of dishonesty. “Those places are dangerous, they’re dirty, they’re corrupt and they’re poor,” the Fox News host said, with an indignation Wilson would have admired. “Why can’t you say that?”

Trump’s supporters on cable news appear to believe that they, and he, are brave tellers of unvarnished truths others are too timid or politically correct to say out loud. (Never mind that Trump is a notorious, if not pathological, liar — or that, hours later, he tried weakly to walk back the “****hole” remark after his favorite TV show told him to.)

But in reality, they don’t know many truths at all. To rail against poverty in countries such as Haiti and argue that it’s some naturally occurring, objective reality ignores why that poverty exists and what the United States’s role has been in creating it. And ignoring that means not only making bad and hateful decisions today but risks repeating the errors of the past.

***

Haiti was founded Jan. 1, 1804, by people of African descent who were tired of being slaves. They fought and won a revolution against France, ultimately defeating an expeditionary force of Napoleon Bonaparte’s army, then the most powerful in the world.

France fought so hard to keep the colony because it was basically the Saudi Arabia of coffee and sugar at the time, providing the majority of both commodities consumed in Europe. The money it generated fueled the entire French empire. But it was made with blood. The slave regime necessary to produce those crops was so deadly that 1 in 10 enslaved Africans kidnapped and brought to the island died each year. As historian Laurent Dubois has noted, the French decided that it was cheaper to bring in new slaves than to keep the ones they had alive.

[Who suffers when disasters strike? The poorest and most vulnerable.]

As soon as Haiti was free, the world’s most powerful empires did everything they could to undermine it. France refused to acknowledge the new nation existed. In the United States — then the only other independent country in the Americas — President Thomas Jefferson, a slaveholder, was uninterested in seeing a free black nation succeed nearby. The slaveholding powers refused to set up official trade with Haiti, forcing the country into predatory relationships. Haiti’s independence remained a cautionary tale U.S. slavers used to counter abolitionists until the Civil War.

France finally offered much-needed diplomatic recognition in 1825, at gunpoint. King Charles X demanded the Haitian government pay restitution of 150 million gold francs — billions of dollars in today’s money — to French landowners still angry about the loss of their land and the Haitians’ own bodies in the war. If they didn’t pay, he would invade.

Haiti’s leaders agreed. They spent the next decades raiding their own coffers and redirecting customs revenue to paying France for the independence they had already won, ravaging the economy. By the 1880s, Haiti had paid what France had wanted. But now it owed huge sums to foreign banks, from which it had borrowed heavily to make ends meet. In the early 20th century, much of that debt belonged to banks in the United States. Americans had also established extensive business interests in Haiti, exporting sugar and other commodities.

The United States, meanwhile, was looking to expand. Starting in 1898, we began using our military to secure new territory and markets overseas. By 1914, we had annexed the Philippines, Hawaii, Guam and other islands in the Pacific. In the Caribbean, we had Puerto Rico and a permanent base in Cuba at Guantanamo Bay. The Marine Corps had also helped carve out a new Central American country, Panama, in exchange for rights to dig a canal providing a trade route to Asia — and the United States invaded Nicaragua, Honduras, Mexico and elsewhere.

Haiti was next. Haiti’s politics, roiled by the economic turmoil caused by the debt, were in a tailspin. Presidents were repeatedly assassinated and governments overthrown. The banks demanded payment; U.S. businessmen wanted more security and control. Newspapers had been paving the way for U.S. public opinion — a New York Times dispatch in 1912 declared, “Haitians acknowledge the failure of a ‘Black Republic’ and look forward to coming into the Union.”

In late 1914, U.S. Marines came ashore in Port-au-Prince, marched into the national reserve and carried out all the gold. It was hauled back to the National City Bank in New York — known as Citibank today. Months later, declaring his concern that European powers, especially Germany, might gain a foothold in the Caribbean (even though they were all busy with World War I), Wilson ordered an invasion, then a full occupation.

The U.S. flag was run up Haiti’s government buildings. The Haitian government and armed forces were dissolved. For the next 19 years, the United States ruled Haiti. U.S. Marines fought a bloody counterinsurgency campaign to stamp out resistance. The Haitian government, constitution and army were disbanded and replaced with new U.S.-friendly ones. Intending to embark on a major public works program, the Marines instituted a system, drawn from Haitian law, called the corvée, in which peasants were essentially re-enslaved. Many of the occupation’s leaders were explicit white supremacists who used lessons they had learned instituting Jim Crow at home to create new, American forms of discrimination in Haiti. One major organizer was Col. Littleton W.T. Waller, a child of antebellum Virginia who assured his friend Col. John A. Lejeune — the future commandant of the Marine Corps: “I know the n—– and how to handle him.”

Not all Americans were fans of the colonial regime in Haiti. Anti-imperialist lawmakers, journalists and organizations including the NAACP protested, held hearings and wrote screeds against the occupation. But most Americans, then as now, were essentially unaware. As reports of massacres and other abuses mounted, though, embarrassment grew. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had served in the occupation of Haiti as assistant secretary of the Navy, came to office promising to end U.S. imperial policies in this hemisphere. The occupation ended in 1934. Haiti had some new roads and buildings, a legacy of scars and abuse and a new U.S.-made economic and political system that would keep wreaking havoc over the decades to follow.

In 1957, a U.S.-trained physician, François Duvalier, came to power. Known as Papa Doc, he was a black nationalist who positioned himself in part as an heir to the Haitian Revolution and an opponent of U.S. imperialism, but he also knew how to manage a nearby superpower. U.S. presidents gave him, and his son who succeeded him, support at key moments (when they weren’t trying to sponsor coups against him), until the dictatorship ended in 1986.

***

So in light of all that history, to be convinced that Haiti just happens to be a failed “****hole” where no one would want to live, you’d have to know nothing about how Haitians view their country and themselves. You’d have to know nothing about the destructive U.S. trade policies that continued past the end of the dictatorship, destroying trade protections and, with them, local industries and agriculture. You’d have to not know about the CIA’s role in the 1991 coup that overthrew President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, or the U.S. invasions in 1994 and 2004. You’d have to know nothing about why the United States sponsored and took the leading role in paying for a U.N. “stabilization mission” that did little but keep a few, often unpopular, presidents in power and kill at least 10,000 people by introducing cholera to Haiti for the first time. And you’d have to not understand the U.S. role in the shambolic response to the Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake — which was a mess, but possibly not in the way that you think.

[Haiti’s ‘redevelopment’ hasn’t been about helping Haitians]

Haiti is indeed a difficult place to live for many of the people who live there. Poverty is rampant. There is no good sanitation system, in part because the same international system that introduced cholera in 2010 steadfastly refuses to meet its promises to pay to clean it up. (Before the outbreak, the United States withheld funds to pay for water and sanitation infrastructure for more than 10 years for purely political reasons.) After centuries of exploitation and abuse, the best hope for many Haitians is to move away — and suddenly encountering infrastructure and opportunities, they thrive. For many migrants, the ultimate goal is to earn enough money to retire, build a home in Haiti and go back.

In trying to walk back his slur Friday, Trump insisted that he “has a wonderful relationship with Haitians.” There is no evidence of that. As he decided to move forward with forcing the deportation of tens of thousands of Haitians allowed to take refuge after the 2010 earthquake, Haiti’s leading newspaper pronounced him the country’s “worst nightmare.” Last summer, he reportedly said all Haitians have AIDS — a slur that cuts deep in the Haitian American psyche. And now this.

I lived in Haiti for 3½ years, by choice. I saw many people struggling, many beautiful and terrible sights, and lived through some of the hardest days of my life. I learned a lot about the complicated relationship between that country and ours — the ways in which our power can be used for good, and to do incredible harm. Many people pointed out this week that Haitians have been through far worse than a racist president calling their country a “****hole.” The question is whether, knowing the truth, we all want to go through it again.

 

I couldn't stop laughing when watching this.

Very good!

 

Well, there's no surprise there. Those who really liked Trump's ****hole comment were those who still want to make Haiti and Africa great again by making racism and colonialism great again, after having successfully made America great again I guess:

 

This seems like a case of "burying your lede" to me. For a long time it's been overwhelmingly obvious to anyone who is not delusional or an idiot or a racist in self-denial that Trump is a rabid racist (yes, absolutely everyone).

What's really more troubling is the timing of this particular unforced error and how the Republicans have reacted to it.

After the Wolff book, Trump was supposed to be on "good behavior," and it's clear he knew that. That's what that DACA meeting was supposed to all about. Of course, Trump looked like a complete idiot there, first agreeing with Feinstein's proposal, then rejecting it after McCarthy guided his feeble mind back to towards terms conservatives liked, but that's beside the point. Trump allowed that meeting to be filmed for one reason -- to show us that he was not an incurious, half-demented ignoramus. Of course, he failed that test, but what's important was his intention, and he did manage to avoid being openly bigoted when the cameras were rolling.

Of course, pretty much all of these same conditions still applied to Trump's meeting with Durbin and his Republican colleagues. If Trump weren't half-senile or a full-blown idiot, he would've refrained from bursting into a racist tirade in front of Durbin because it should've been totally obvious to him that his ****hole comments and love of blonde blue-eyed people would get out, but despite this being the case, Trump clearly lacked the intelligence and self-control to remain on message for a single meeting with the opposition party. Yeah, he's a racist. Duh. We knew that. However, Trump is so intellectually incapacitated that he didn't have the self-restraint to conceal that fact during the one week when his psychological temperament is most under scrutiny.

Then, on top of that, it seems that the Republicans have completely ceded control to the white supremacist wing of the party (not meaning to insult any posters on this thread, though I would point out to some here that it might be useful to do some self-examination just to be sure that you don't unwittingly belong to it). Not a single Republican in that meeting would dare repeat what Trump said, and we know it's the truth, as word of it got out to Flake before Durbin spoke to the press, and Flake admitted that he learned of it from a Republican who was at that meeting. For some reason, Graham has even gone from calling Trump a kook to becoming a Trump defender. In a sad move to redeem his legacy, Graham will probably claim he wanted to keep Trump in a good mood because a grumpy Trump might nuke Korea, but really what it is is that Trump is a useful fool for your side when you keep him happy but he's an out of control demolition man to your side whenever he's unhappy with you.

 

To get away from Trump for a moment: If those in Virginia have WHRO on their television systems, the station will be carrying Ralph Northam's Gubernatorial Inauguration tomorrow, starting at 11:30 am.

 

I see from my newsfeed that the president is in "excellent health," which is a bit worrisome. That seems like a significant decline from "probably the healthiest man who has ever served or will ever serve in the office of the presidency."

It's a long way from stroking out, but the slope is steep.

 

Vincente Fox's tweet sums up my feelings on Trump's comments perfectly:

Vicente Fox Quesada‏Verified account @VicenteFoxQue
FollowFollow

@VicenteFoxQue​

More
.@realDonaldTrump, your mouth is the foulest ****hole in the world. With what authority do you proclaim who’s welcome in America and who’s not. America’s greatness is built on diversity, or have you forgotten your immigrant background, Donald?

 

I am doing about as well as I can. Between my very timid and nervous nature and my total lack of confidence in anything, a grunt worker bee job is about all I can handle. Every day I wake up and don't kill myself is an accomplishment.

 

CNN did some interviews in Alabama about Trump's comments. They had no issues with them. "Crude but I can live with it," said that last fella.

I tell ya, the 24/7 news folks have been cursing up a storm on live broadcasts quoting Trump without censor.

 

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

https://news.sky.com/story/trump-supporters-demand-london-mayor-sadiq-khan-arrest-11205566