The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age

    BrightBarf Spews -Who will Listen?

    By PeraclesPlease on Tue, 02/14/2017 - 8:26am | Media, Politics

    Picking up a reference to a (Not-so-)BrightBarf header on Flynn's resignation at RCP, I was intrigued - while Pat Buchanan was telling those damn Negroes and Hippies to Behave, the Prez's virtual news rag of record was declaring Flynn's resignation was a bad sign - for everyone else. 

    How do they start this - oh, the sanctions on Russia were: " to substantiate the Democratic Party’s sore-loser conspiracy theory" - nothing to do with annexing Crimea, apparently.

    Then, "there is no evidence (yet) that Flynn did anything but discuss sanctions in the most general terms" - oops, guess they didn't read last night's papers. (Maybe Steve Bannon can provide a phone transcript if you guys need - he is in the NSC chain of command, right?).

    But Flynn was caught "because the Department of Justice had been eavesdropping on the conversation" - uh, he was a suspicious character making international calls to Russian leaders - those calls are monitored by NSA, not the DoJ. Info *might* be shared with others, however. [Perhaps they know not to intercept North Korean mobile calls on the Prez's unsecured phone, but I'd guess it's got more taps than a Hollywood jacuzzi.]

    The BrightBarf Brayniacs continue with "The fact that the contents of Flynn’s phone conversation — highly sensitive intelligence — were leaked to the media suggests that someone with access to that information also has a political axe to grind."  Sensitive, yes - intelligence, unlikely.

    The Bozos finish with speculating that the IC might be keeping an eye on the Transition Team itself - like doh. The IC team isn't tasked with maintaining PC niceities - it's supposed to track threats to US security, and right now the biggest one isn't Al Qaeda or ISIS or North Korean nukes - it's the braying amateurs dining at Mar-a-Gogo and the once white-now tarnished new Trump Suite on Penn Ave.

    But however ridiculous this all looks to me, it's important to remember that I'm not the audience for this jackassery - and we need to question whether they're keeping the dyke intact with this kind of nonsense.

    As Politico noted this week, the white mid-American support of Trump seems to be holding. Those of us with an education and a sane outlook on life may have trouble believing, much less understanding that absurdity, but it's no more gonzo than the fact that the Orangutan was elected in the first place.

    In alt-truth fashion, the problem isn't that Flynn was coordinating policy with the Russians even before Trump was elected (and defanging the efforts of the then Administration), it's that the Intelligence Community doesn't like Trump - a fine thing when the FBI was derailing Hillary's efforts, but no longer needed or in fashion.

    So what does his paper of record import for the coming alternate factual world - salvation or collapse? And if it does fall, what kind of alternate reality will go into designing its replacement?

    PS - while it seems amazing at this point to think that Breitbart was really named & started by a seemingly real but lunatic person named Andrew Breitbart, 2017 Alternate Reality tells us it and he really are a figment of Matt Groening's fervent imagination - both came from or at least play well on Fox, after all.

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    And the beat goes on ... the Gateway Pundit now has a correspondent attending WH press briefings!  Yea!!

     

     


    by barefooted on Tue, 02/14/2017 - 1:21pm

    It is important that we realize that small town American hates urban and educated America. There are no political concessions that can be made to Trump supporters. They will not.belive any political appeals that come from outside their bubble. They are the elitists, rejecting all who don't measure up to their standard. We should have a 50-state campaign policy, but realize that our main pickups will be in the cities and surrounding areas.


    by rmrd0000 on Tue, 02/14/2017 - 2:34pm

    The veil of unknowing may keep those readers safe from the shenanigans of foreigners and DC denizens but it will not help them not know when their jobs and their kids jobs start to dwindle in the face of international boycotts and trade wars.
    When you elect someone to be your sugar daddy, there is only one thing that can let you down.


    by moat on Tue, 02/14/2017 - 3:39pm

    It's on.

    No, really. It's on. American politics finally starts to take shit seriously. 

    Women, the Left, the whole damned lot, are hard at work, for real, to make sure these ass-clowns are once and for all flushed. 

    One way or another, the game changes now. 

    Either we move a long yard toward a reality-based, human-based politics... or we get the psycho-monsters that've been bred in our basements and penthouses these past decades.

    YES.


    by Anonymous (not verified) on Tue, 02/14/2017 - 5:11pm

    C'est moi.


    by Quinn the Obfuscator (not verified) on Tue, 02/14/2017 - 5:11pm

    Since I don't speak French I can only assume that means, "we'll see" as in we'll see how long this lasts or we'll see if they actually vote in the midterms.


    by ocean-kat on Tue, 02/14/2017 - 5:26pm

    From a Driftglass explanation of where we are:

    And as the election of 2016 shows with tragic clarity, the Republican Party is simply incapable of healing itself.  There is not enough "internal fortitude" left in that entire shitpile of bigots and imbeciles and con men and looters to organize a game of charades, much less any serious opposition to the whims and ravings of the puppet of a hostile foreign power who is using The Bastard President to smash the last of our democratic institutions to bits.  Hell, the other elected leaders of the Party of Lincoln are so frantic to slash taxes and regulations for their paymasters and gut the social safety net for everyone else that they can't even manage a collecting finger-wag as The Bastard President openly sides with Vlad the Elector against his own country.

    Remember, these are the same Republican elected officials who lost their collective shit every hour on the hour for the last eight years over nonsense like Barack Obama wearing a tan suit or putting his feet up on his desk.  The same Republican elected officials ho lied and slandered and held the United States government and the global economy hostage over and over again.  Whose major accomplishment were meaningless votes to strip people of their health insurance and endless witch-hunts over manufactured "scandals".

    And the reason for they did all of it -- the reason for eight years of berserk rage against a decent man over shit they invented followed by weeks of craven groveling before a racist lunatic who actually is wrecking the place -- is the worst kept secret in America.  The reason they did it all is because the paranoid,  malignantly ignorant, racist base of the party love this shit.


    by NCD on Tue, 02/14/2017 - 5:57pm

    No.

    The red states aren't filled with monsters. Hmn,  I could narrow that generalization to more closely  reflect geographical variations .....but let's put that aside.  

    Soon  after I got  back to the Emerald City after about 10 years abroad  I was on a subway platform as a blind woman- white- passed behind me using her white cane in the normal fashion..I observed her as the saying goes "out of the corner of my eye" when -unusually I think- her cane missed an obstacle  and she was about to walk straight into a metal pole. A black woman literally jumped a couple of feet to save her from that while I ,with pretty nearly the same chance to help,  didn't. 

    Despite some claims  to the contrary -which I challenge- I'm actually not a monster myself . But to stick to the facts I didn't help and the black woman did. Which left me to reflect that whatever I had been  reading in the Guardian, FT or Herald Trib race relations in the States hadn't descended to such a level as to prevent  instances of everyday kindness such as I had just witnessed.

    And today? The  City hasn't changed. You see the same casual helpfulness when it's needed. Say in last weeks snow storm.

    And in the out back? If I can judge from the couple of months I spend each year away from the City-  and I think I can- and anyway I do- those Trump voters still stop if you're out of gas.

    When the first anti discrimination legislation started to emerge from Carter's Government I happened to pass behind the Human Resources guy who was getting ready to explain it to the area VPs.  He had written in  caps at the top of his speech WE ARE NOT  BAD PEOPLE to remind himself to soften the resistance to"government interference"  by saying that all Washington wanted us to do was to act the way that good people like us really want to do anyway.

    When we  write here about the 48% of the country who made the mistake of voting for our current president we should remind ourselves to remember Obama's margin in 2008. Sure an important chunk of that came from blacks who, bless them, voted for Barak in the same numbers that Catholics ,bless them, supported JFK. But along with that perfectly appropriate "identify" voting neither Obama nor Jack could have gotten elected unless they were  supported by millions of others voting for them mostly because they felt they were the best candidates  but also- face it- in part because they felt "let's give them a chance."

    And you know what I'm going to say next so you can skip  it. Or hang on if you want and I'll prove you're right. We aren't bad people. And neither are most of Donald's 48% . We're not going to get them to give us the extra 3 senate seats we need in November of 2018  by shouting at them that they're evil (even though some of them are. As another saying goes " a fish rots from the head".) 

    But even though you may not feel like feeling  that the rest of those live fish are not bad people,  do it.

    First because it's true. But ,putting the turkey on the table, because we can't get that extra 3 seats in 2018 unless we do. People don't vote for people who don't like them.

     

     

     

     


    by Flavius on Wed, 02/15/2017 - 12:20am

    Well said I think. And, I agree. 


    by A Guy Called LULU on Wed, 02/15/2017 - 2:26am

    Sorry, Flav, but that anecdote can be "Southern racist helps black lady", or "young gangbanger let's blind woman walk into bar, steals her purse" or countless others.

    Sure, people do nice things, and like Brexit was 52%-48%, a region's deplorability isn't 100% in either direction. But check out Alabama's voting record, for example, and you find it pretty much 65-70% deplorable. Alright, that's a bit simplistic, but life is too short to dig into every goddamn detail and minutia (see Kahnemann's "Fast and Slow Thinking" - we make assumptions, not always valid, but often valid enough).

    Hillary was trying to peel off enough people with a conscience against despicable behavior - and largely failed. You're describing an impromput spur-of-the-moment act of kindness (and besides, it's not so surprising that a black lady would be kinder and faster reacting than the rest of us - who else as a group has carried more extra burdens and relied on the kindness of strangers than they?)  The elections are acts of premeditated selfishness and often meanness.  I would contend that the latter give a better insight into character than the former - everyone can learn a bit of holding-door-open-for-strangers. To be a thorough gentleman or lady requires practice and desire and commitment.


    by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 02/15/2017 - 3:18am

    Flavius, the majority of the white people who voted for Trump, be they Northerners or Southerners, will not lift a finger when Sessions DOJ nationalizes Stop and Frisk. They will be reassured by the fact that blacks are told to give up their civil rights to make Trump supporters feel comfortable. Trump has the approval of 42% of the country despite evidence that he has been compromised by Russia and is a racist. Trump voters do not care about black people. They openly voted for the racist. The problem to be addressed is not messaging by the Democratic Party the majority of voters voted for Hillary. The problem is the pathology of the Trump voter. Trump voters put my family and friends at risk, 


    by rmrd0000 on Wed, 02/15/2017 - 8:00am

    The Trump administration has enough ties to white supremacists that one has to question whether Kellyanne Conway's retweet to a white supremacist was a mistake or intentional. 

    http://thedailybanter.com/2017/02/kellyanne-conway-nationalist-tweet/

    MLK noted that people of good conscience could not vote for Goldwater. The same rule applies to Trump.

    Edit to add:

    If BlackLivesMatter had voted for Louis Farrakhan, there would not be a push to appease those voters. Those voters would be criticized for supporting an anti-Semite. Concern over what happened to the black race in America would be expressed. Yet we are told to coddle voters who voted for the racist Trump. 

    I use the above analogy because I think that is the double standard expressed by telling people to treat Trump voter's with kid gloves. Latinos, blacks, and Asians would not get the same courtesy.


    by rmrd0000 on Wed, 02/15/2017 - 10:55am

    Alt-Right blaming "The Jews". But wait, can't they blame The Blacks *AND* The Jews? Unfair!


    by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 02/15/2017 - 11:22am

    Heck, I'd be happy to take the credit for Flynn's resignation.  Where's the template affidavit?


    by Bruce Levine on Wed, 02/15/2017 - 11:28am

    The Template Mount? sorry...


    by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 02/15/2017 - 12:34pm

    The folks pleading for "understanding " trump voters fail to realize that these Neo-Nazis are now Trump supporters allies and Putin is their new best friend. Black people understand that people they work with every day voted for Trump. These Trumpkin co-workers will do nothing when blacks are under assault by the Trump administration. It is hard to have a Kumbaya moment when this is the case.


    by rmrd0000 on Wed, 02/15/2017 - 11:45am