Trumpland U.S.A

[elfstone]

 

[elfstone]

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/taibbi-trump-russia-mueller-investigation-815060/

Quote

Taibbi: On Russiagate and Our Refusal to Face Why Trump Won

Faulty coverage of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign later made foreign espionage a more plausible explanation for his ascent to power

 

The problem lay with the precursor tale to Russiagate, i.e. how Trump even got to be president in the first place.

The 2016 campaign season brought to the surface awesome levels of political discontent. After the election, instead of wondering where that anger came from, most of the press quickly pivoted to a new tale about a Russian plot to attack our Democracy. This conveyed the impression that the election season we’d just lived through had been an aberration, thrown off the rails by an extraordinary espionage conspiracy between Trump and a cabal of evil foreigners.

This narrative contradicted everything I’d seen traveling across America in my two years of covering the campaign. The overwhelming theme of that race, long before anyone even thought about Russia, was voter rage at the entire political system.

The anger wasn’t just on the Republican side, where Trump humiliated the Republicans’ chosen $150 million contender, Jeb Bush (who got three delegates, or $50 million per delegate). It was also evident on the Democratic side, where a self-proclaimed “Democratic Socialist” with little money and close to no institutional support became a surprise contender.

 

 

Because of a series of press misdiagnoses before the Russiagate stories even began, much of the American public was unprepared for news of a Trump win. A cloak-and-dagger election-fixing conspiracy therefore seemed more likely than it might have otherwise to large parts of the domestic news audience, because they hadn’t been prepared for anything else that would make sense.

This was particularly true of upscale, urban, blue-leaning news consumers, who were not told to take the possibility of a Trump White House seriously.

Priority number-one of the political class after a vulgar, out-of-work game-show host conquered the White House should have been a long period of ruthless self-examination. This story delayed that for at least two years.

It wasn’t even clear Trump whether or not wanted to win. Watching him on the trail, Trump at times went beyond seeming disinterested. There were periods where it looked like South Park’s “Did I offend you?” thesis was true, and he was actively trying to lose, only the polls just wouldn’t let him.

Forget about the gift the end of Russiagate might give Trump by allowing him to spend 2020 peeing from a great height on the national press corps. The more serious issue has to be the failure to face the reality of why he won last time, because we still haven’t done that.

In the fall of 2015, when I first started covering Trump’s campaign, a few themes popped up:

First, like any good hustler, Trump knew how to work a room. At times, he recalled a comedian trying out new material. If he felt a murmur in the crowd in one speech, he’d hit it harder the next time out.

This is how a few offhand comments about the “bad deal” wars in the Middle East turned into what seemed like more planned shots at “nation building” or overseas wars that left us “flat broke” and unable to build schools at home.

These themes seemed to come from feeling out audiences and noting these lines were scoring with veterans in his crowds. (Studies have since shown Trump did well in areas with returning vets).

 

As time went on, he made the traveling press part of his act. The standard campaign setup was perfect for him. We were like zoo animals, standing on risers with ropes around us to keep the un-credentialed masses out.

Even that small symbol of VIP-ism Trump turned to his advantage. Behind the ropes we were what national campaign reporters mostly always are: dorky blue-staters with liberal arts degrees from expensive colleges dressed in gingham and khaki, and looking out of place basically anywhere on earth outside a trendy city block or a Starbucks.

Trump, the billionaire, denounced us as the elitists in the room. He’d call us “bloodsuckers,” “dishonest,” and in one line that produced laughs considering who was saying it, “highly-paid.”

He also did something that I immediately recognized as brilliant (or diabolical, depending on how you look at it). He dared cameramen to turn their cameras to show the size of his crowds.

They usually wouldn’t – hey, we don’t work for the guy – which thrilled Trump, who would then say something to the effect of, “See! They’re very dishonest people.” Audiences would turn toward us, and boo and hiss, and even throw little bits of paper and other things our way. This was unpleasant, but it was hard not to see its effectiveness: he’d re-imagined the lifeless, poll-tested format of the stump speech, turning it into menacing, personal, WWE-style theater.

Trump was gunning for votes in both parties. The core story he told on the stump was one of system-wide corruption, in which there was little difference between Republicans and Democrats.

He destroyed Jeb Bush by caricaturizing him as a captive of corporate interests (noting, for instance, that Pharma bigwig Woody Johnson was Jeb’s finance chair), then used the exact same tactic on Hillary Clinton. He often mentioned them together.

On the same day he did the “Cruz is a pussy” routine, he told a story about how Jeb Bush said, (here he put on a Thurston Howell III-artistocrat voice) “I don’t like Donald Trump’s tone.” This was right after claiming Hillary Clinton said the exact same thing. In the same mock-aristocrat voice, he’d done a Hillary impersonation: “I don’t like Donald Trump’s tone.”

 

The message was clear: Jeb and Hillary were the same political animal, snobs and elite phonies. This dovetailed with his general pitch, which claimed most Americans were struggling because both parties were feeding from the same campaign-finance teat, pimping themselves out to huge job-exporting corporate donors. Which, let’s face it, is more than a little true. Less obviously true was his solution, putting a blabbermouth reality star in charge of fixing it all. But the pitch was scoring for a reason.

Like a con man who can lift a wallet in the middle of a melee, Trump thrived amid the chaos. He drank in the condemnation when he denounced McCain for being “captured,” or when he doubled down on absurd claims he’d seen Muslims dancing in New Jersey after 9/11.

Most politicians come crawling to the press begging forgiveness fter they say dumb things. Trump did the opposite and went on the offensive. It took a while to grasp that what he was really selling was the image of an outraged political establishment. He wanted his voters to see how much he was getting to “us.”

Perhaps just by luck, Trump was tuned in to the fact that the triumvirate of ruling political powers in America – the two parties, the big donors and the press – were so unpopular with large parts of the population that he could win in the long haul by attracting their ire, even if he was losing battles on the way.

If Trump insulted an innocent person like Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, who is disabled, his goal wasn’t to try to win a popularity contest. He was after the thing that always came next: the endless “scornful rebukes” from press and celebrities. These rituals always went on just a bit too long, to the point where it was clear both Trump and the media were milking the incidents for publicity.

Trump would push right up until he caught the press having too much fun with something outrageous he’d done (the Washington Post running “Donald Trump’s ‘Schlonged’: A linguistic investigation” was an infamous example), at which point he’d declare victory and move on to the next outrage.

 

The subtext was always: I may be crude, but these people are phonies, pretending to be upset when they’re making money off my bullshit.

 

I thought this was all nuts and couldn’t believe it was happening in a real presidential campaign. But, a job is a job. My first feature on candidate Trump was called “How America Made Donald Trump Unstoppable.” The key section read: 

In person, you can’t miss it: The same way Sarah Palin can see Russia from her house, Donald on the stump can see his future. The pundits don’t want to admit it, but it’s sitting there in plain view, 12 moves ahead, like a chess game already won:

President Donald Trump…

It turns out we let our electoral process devolve into something so fake and dysfunctional that any half-bright con man with the stones to try it could walk right through the front door and tear it to shreds on the first go. 

And Trump is no half-bright con man, either. He’s way better than average.

Traditional Democratic audiences appeared thrilled by the piece and shared it widely. I was invited on scads of cable shows to discuss ad nauseum the “con man” line.

This made me nervous, because it probably meant these people hadn’t read the piece, which among other things posited the failures of America’s current ruling class meant Trump’s insane tactics could actually work.

Trump was selling himself as a traitor to a corrupt class, someone who knew how soulless and greedy the ruling elite was because he was one of them.

His story of essentially buying the attendance of the Clintons at his wedding – no matter what you think of it – resonated powerfully with voters. He sneered at Hillary as the worst kind of aristocrat, a member of a family with title and no money. She and Bill were second-tier gentry, the kind who had to work, and what work! Hillary was giving speeches to firms like Goldman Sachs for amounts of money Trump would probably say he spent on airplane snacks (even if it were a lie).

 

He claimed Goldman “owned her.” Having watched Trump wipe out Jeb using similar arguments, I thought a race against Hillary Clinton, who was running on her decades of experience residing in hated Washington, “would be a pitch right in Trump’s wheelhouse.”

Trump’s chances increased when pundits ignored polls and insisted he had no shot at the nomination. The universality of this take reeked of the same kind of single-track, orthodox official-think that later plagued the Russia story.

Nate Silver, the ex-baseball stats guru and renowned “National Oracle™” (as Gizmodo cheekily called him), laughed at Trump’s chances^[1].

His site, FiveThirtyEight, ran a story called “Why Donald Trump Isn’t a Real Candidate, In One Chart.” The piece said Trump was more likely to “play in the NBA finals” or cameo in another Home Alone movie than win the nomination.

Dana Milbank in the Washington Post: “I’m so certain Trump won’t win the nomination that I’ll eat my words if he does. Literally.” Milbank ended up actually doing this, for which he deserves a lot of credit.

“Donald Trump is going to lose because he is crazy,” was the take of Jonathan Chait, who would soon be writing Trump might have been recruited by the KGB in 1987.

It isn’t just that wizards of prognostication were wrong. The bigger issue was why they were so confident. A common take was the political establishment just wouldn’t allow it.

Former “The Note” writer Mark Halperin used to talk about having his finger on the pulse of the “Gang of 500,” which he described as “campaign consultants, strategists, pollsters, pundits and journalists who make up the modern-day political establishment.” The subtext of Halperin’s pieces was that the Gang of 500 decided elections.

It’s hard to understand how it never occurred to Halperin or anyone else that people might be grossed out by the concept of 500 self-appointed guardians of democracy deciding the presidency for 300 million people.

 

In this case, just by saying out loud the idea that the people who mattered would never let Trump win, probably helped Trump win. It validated his talk about “elites.”

Nate Cohn of The New York Times wrote Trump had “just about no shot of winning the nomination no matter how well he is doing in the early polls.” He prefaced this by saying it is “the party elites who traditionally decide nomination contests.”

When Trump defied these predictions and sealed up the Republican nomination, he immediately became subject to a new legend, about how he was destined to be the biggest landslide loser in history of general elections: bigger than Alf Landon or even George McGovern, whose very name in America is synonymous with “loser.”

Here are some takes on Trump’s campaign after he sealed up the nomination:

David Brooks: Trump will be the “biggest loser” in American politics.

The Week: “Trump is poised to lose the biggest landslide in modern American history.”

George Will: “Donald Trump may find a place in history – by losing just that badly.”

I belong on this infamous list myself. In one of the worst mistakes of my career, I ended up changing my mind about “free-falling” Trump’s chances, spending the stretch run predicting doom for Republicans. I read too many polls and ignored what I was seeing, i.e. that even the post-Access Hollywood Trump was still packing stadiums.

Trump would already be president-elect before he was taken seriously as an electoral phenomenon. Right up until the networks called Florida for him on election night, few major American media figures outside of Michael Moore – who incidentally was also right about WMDs and ridiculed for it – believed a Trump win possible.

The only reason most blue-state media audiences had been given for Trump’s poll numbers all along was racism, which was surely part of the story but not the whole picture. A lack of any other explanation meant Democratic audiences, after the shock of election night, were ready to reach for any other data point that might better explain what just happened.

 

Russiagate became a convenient replacement explanation absolving an incompetent political establishment for its complicity in what happened in 2016, and not just the failure to see it coming. Because of the immediate arrival of the collusion theory, neither Wolf Blitzer nor any politician ever had to look into the camera and say, “I guess people hated us so much they were even willing to vote for Donald Trump.”

Post-election, Russiagate made it all worse. People could turn on their TVs at any hour of the day and see anyone from Rachel Maddow to Chris Cuomo openly reveling in Trump’s troubles. This is what Fox looks like to liberal audiences.

Worse, the “walls are closing in” theme — two years old now — was just a continuation of the campaign mistake, reporters confusing what they wanted to happen with what was happening. The story was always more complicated than was being represented.

It still is, which is important to note as we wait for the final release of the Mueller report, which incidentally also won’t be the last word on what happened in the last few years.

There are a lot of mysteries left with this affair, and none of them will be cleared up anytime soon. We still don’t even understand the beginning of this story.

 

 

 

[bebop2015]

Jussie Smollett just saved the Democratic Party with his new campaign slogan:

 

“Give me whatever I want and please don’t get pissed when I do something stupid”

[CandleVixen]

3 hours ago, bebop2015 said:

Jussie Smollett just saved the Democratic Party with his new campaign slogan:

 

“Give me whatever I want and please don’t get pissed when I do something stupid”

That is Awesomely funny!

[bebop2015]

8 hours ago, CandleVixen said:

That is Awesomely funny!

 

Except when you watch the live show ....

[CandleVixen]

17 hours ago, bebop2015 said:

 

Except when you watch the live show ....

But that makes it even better to me! But I’m warped and have a strange sense of humor.

[elfstone]

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/was-ending-the-draft-a-grave-mistake/

 

Quote

Was Ending the Draft a Grave Mistake?

I spent last week at Angelo State University in remote central Texas as a panelist for the annual All-Volunteer Force (AVF) Forum. It was a strange forum in many ways, but nonetheless instructive. I was the youngest (and most progressive) member, as well as the lowest-ranking veteran among a group of leaders and speakers that included two retired generals, the chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, a few former colonels and several academics. Despite having remarkably diverse life experiences and political opinions, all concluded that America’s all-volunteer military is not equitable, efficient or sustainable. The inconvenient truth each of the panel participants had the courage to identify is that the end of the draft in the U.S. had many unintended—and ultimately tragic—consequences for the republic.

The oft-praised U.S. military is, disturbingly, the most trusted public institution in the country. These days, active service members and veterans are regularly paraded before an otherwise apathetic citizenry at nearly every sporting event. Public figures and private citizens alike fawn over and obsessively thank the troops at every possible opportunity. It seems strange, however, that Americans are so hyperproud of their military, seeing as it neither reflects society nor achieves national objectives overseas. After all, the military only accounts for about 0.5 % of Americans and, as  recent statistics indicate, the Army is falling well short of its recruiting goals. Not to mention that for all the vacuous pageantry and celebrations of a military that is increasingly divergent from civil society, few seem to ask an important question: When was the last time the AVF won a war?

The AVF is ultimately an unfair, ineffective and unsustainable organization charged with impossible, ill-advised missions by policymakers and a populace that actually care rather little for the nation’s soldiers. As the AVF nears its 50th anniversary, there’s no better time than now to assess the model’s flaws and its effect on American democracy.

Way back when the U.S. military was bogged down in an unwinnable, immoral and ill-advised war in Vietnam, newly elected President Nixon faced a serious problem. Tricky Dick, as he is sometimes known, wanted to prolong and escalate the war into Cambodia and Laos in order to achieve “peace with honor”—in other words, seem tough and save some American face. Only the growing domestic anti-war movement that was gaining influence in Congress stood in his way. No doubt cynically, but also astutely, Nixon surmised that fear of individual conscription largely motivated youthful anti-war activists. Thus, in a Faustian devil’s bargain, he helped end the draft and usher in a brand-new all-volunteer force. Surprisingly, his gambit worked, and the steam blew out of the anti-war movement over time. Today, it is with the same all-volunteer force Nixon left us with that the U.S. wages war across the breadth of the planet.

 

Proponents of the volunteer military force promised equity. No longer would the poorest Americans be forced to serve in foreign wars. Rather, only those who truly wanted to serve the nation would do so. On the surface, this seemed intuitive. What actually happened was a different matter entirely. In a sort of economic draft, the military mostly began to draw servicemen from the third and fourth income quintiles. Those who needed the money the military offered and were lured by modest cash bonuses would serve, while the wealthiest, perhaps unsurprisingly, opted out. This meant the U.S. elites would no longer serve and, in fact, would become almost totally absent from the new AVF. The tiny percentage that would serve America’s neo-imperial war machine wouldn’t reflect U.S. society at all. Today, volunteers are far more rural, Southern and likely to hail from military families than their civilian peers. Thus, an unrepresentative warrior caste—not the citizens’ Army that won World War II—became the norm.

While most Americans and their political leaders seem completely fine with the glaring injustice inherent in such a system, those who serve have had to deal with the consequences. America’s soldiers have been subject to multiple combat tours, while reserve and National Guard troops have been activated for war at record rates. As a result, post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide rates have skyrocketed, topping off recently at 22 self-inflicted veteran deaths per day. To keep these soldiers “in the fight,” damaged individual troopers were loaded up with psychotropic medications and sent back overseas. What’s more, a dangerous civil-military gap opened between the vast majority of Americans—who are rarely exposed to real soldiers—and a military that has learned to resent the populace. And when a military becomes so professionalized and distant as to resemble a Roman Praetorian Guard, the republic is undoubtedly in peril.

Contrary to early optimistic promises, the U.S. military since 1973 sports a poor efficiency record. Especially since 9/11—the real first test of the new system—American armed forces have produced exactly zero victories. Prior to the World Trade Center attack, it can be argued that a much larger AVF crushed Saddam Hussein’s poorly led and equipped Iraqi army in 1991, but it’s important to remember that that war was an anomaly—Saddam’s troops fought us in an open desert, without any air support, and according to the conventional tactics the U.S. military had been training against for years. I also refuse to count the imperial punishments inflicted on Panama (1989) and Grenada (1983) as victories, because neither was a necessary or even a fair fight. Besides, the invasion of the tiny island of Grenada was more fiasco than triumph.

Worst of all, the AVF is inefficient because it enables the militarization of U.S. foreign policy, ensuring high costs and much wear and tear on equipment and personnel. The lack of a draft means the loss of what the co-founder of the AVF Forum, retired Maj. Gen. Dennis Laich, calls “skin in the game.” When the citizenry isn’t subjected to the possibility of military service, it becomes apathetic, ignores foreign affairs and fails to pressure Congress to check presidential war powers. Without this check, president after president—Democrats and Republicans—have centralized control of foreign affairs in what has resulted in increasingly imperial presidencies. With its huge budget, professional flexibility and can-do attitude, the military has become the primary—in some ways, the only—tool in America’s arsenal as presidents move living, breathing soldiers around the world like so many toy soldiers.

Completely Unsustainable

The AVF could also bankrupt us, or, at the very least, crash the economy. Thanks to the influence of the military-industrial complex and the militarization of foreign policy, U.S. defense budgets have soared into the stratosphere. At present, America spends more than $700 billion on defense—a figure greater than all domestic discretionary spending and larger than the combined budgets of the next seven largest militaries. As the Vietnam War should have taught us, skyrocketing military spending without concurrent tax increases often results in not only massive debt but crippling inflation. After 18 years of forever global war without any meaningful increase in taxation on the nation’s top earners, get ready for the next crash. Trying to stay a hegemon (a dubious proposition in the first place) with rising deficits and a paralyzing national debt is a recipe for failure and, ultimately, disaster.

As recent recruitment shortfalls show, getting volunteers may not be a sustainable certainty either. This also increases costs—the military has had to train more full-time recruiters, pay cash bonuses for enlistment and retention, and hire extremely expensive civilian contractors to fill in operational gaps overseas. Nor can the AVF count on getting the best and brightest Americans in the long term. With elites opting out completely and fewer Americans possessing the combination of capacity—only 30 percent of the populace is physically/mentally qualified for the military—and propensity to serve, where will the military find the foot soldiers and cyberwarriors it needs in the 21st century?

In sum, throughout this century the U.S. military has won zero wars, achieved few, if any, “national goals” and cost Americans $5.9 trillion tax dollars, more than 7,000 troop deaths, and tens of thousands more wounded soldiers. It has cost the world  480,000 direct war-related deaths, including 244,000 civilians, and created 21 million refugees. Talk about unsustainable.

An Unpopular Proposal

At the recent forum, Laich proposed an alternative to the current volunteer system. To ensure fairness, efficiency and sustainability, the U.S. could create a lottery system (with no college or other elite deferments) that gives draftees three options: serve two years on active duty right after high school, serve six years in the reserves or go straight to college and enroll in the ROTC program. Additionally, this lottery would apply to both men and women, and would require only one combat deployment from each reservist. Whether or not one agrees with this idea, it would create a more egalitarian, representative, affordable and sustainable national defense tool. Furthermore, with the children of bankers, doctors, lawyers and members of Congress subject to service, the government might think twice before embarking on the next foolish, unwinnable military venture.

Few Americans, however, are likely to be comfortable delegating the power of conscription to a federal government they inherently distrust. Still, paradoxically, the move toward a no-deferment, equitable lottery draft might result in a nation less prone to militarism and adventurism than the optional AVF has. Parents whose children are subject to military service, as well as young adults themselves, might prove to be canny students of foreign policy who would actively oppose the next American war. Imagine that: an engaged citizenry that holds its legislators accountable and subsequently hits the streets to oppose unnecessary and unethical war. Ironic as it may seem, more military service may actually be the only workable formula for less war. Too bad returning to a citizens’ military is as unpopular as it is unlikely.

 

[elfstone]

 

[Prettyphile]

Still not tired of winning.

[elfstone]

 

[elfstone]

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/03/greg-grandin-end-of-the-myth

 

Quote

A Monument to Disenchantment

In 1787, James Madison wrote that “an ever-enlarging republic would dilute the threat of political conflict and factionalism.” He was wrong on two counts: that expansion could continue indefinitely and that expansion could ease conflict. Settlers certainly pushed west, to the Alleghenies, to the Mississippi, then to the Missouri, and when they finally hit the Pacific coast they kept pushing out and onward — on to the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, as well as the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, and Panama. And when traditional colonialism was no longer feasible or tolerated, they pushed into market expansion, war, and outer space. As Greg Grandin notes in his new book, The End of the Myth, “expansion became the answer to every question, the solution to all problems, especially those caused by expansion.”

But this ever outward, expansive push of the imperium has also been accompanied, in the last century, by a selective locking down of the border. Though Grandin isn’t the first to note the irony, his engaging analysis and illuminating exhumation of key, overlooked historical moments on and around the frontier provide a critical lens to understand both today’s border obsessions and the white-nationalist resurgence that has long accompanied the nation’s insatiable, hypocritical fervor for “more, more, more” (one of Grandin’s chapter titles).

Grandin unpacks Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis,” which postulated, much like Madison’s starry-eyed hope a century earlier, that the West gave the republic room to expand, that the territorial breathing room could act as a safety-valve, “a magic fountain of youth in which American continually bathed and was rejuvenated.’” The individualism espoused in the myth of the frontier, however, drew a straight line to rapacity and exploitation — including indigenous genocide, the entrenchment of slavery, the near extinction of the Buffalo, massive deforestation — generating deep inequalities and a lasting and racist plutocracy. “The frontier,” Grandin writes, “was a state of mind, a cultural zone, a sociological term of comparison, a type of society, an adjective, a noun, a national myth, a disciplining mechanism, an abstraction, and an aspiration.” It was a cure-all and an alibi, and it fostered the delusion of exceptional greatness just as it spurs today’s calls to make America, for a select few, “great” again. “Empire was a safety valve for all the pent up passions and explosive or subversive tendencies of an advanced society,” Grandin quotes Massachusetts congressman Caleb Cushing, writing in 1850.

Today, the idea of the frontier — frontier as myth — is waning. The safety valve, it seems, is shut. And yet, Grandin argues, “the kinds of treaties and agreements represented by NAFTA have given corporations their own endless horizon,” the same sort of “open range” that the erstwhile settlers despoiled. Except that the corporate kind of “open range” needs a border wall even more than an open horizon to keep the displaced peoples at bay, and to exploit those who are able to cross the line. Today, the border packs in just about as much diversity of meaning, where, as Grandin writes, “an obsession with fortification against what’s outside is symptomatic of trouble that exists inside.” That is: the paroxysms on the borderline reveal a deeper internal pathology, one that has plagued the nation for centuries: papering over violence and racism with a Gadarene rush for more.

Today, instead of  the frontier, Trump uses the border — whether tariffs or walls — to answer any and every question. The End of the Myth, as the title suggests, reads like an obit to an idea, and sometimes even an obit to a nation. The “eight [border wall] prototypes in Otay Mesa,” Grandin writes, “loom like tombstones.”

 

[Stromboli1]

On 4/7/2019 at 8:36 AM, Prettyphile said:

Still not tired of winning.

 

What are you going to do when AOC takes over?

[Prettyphile]

3 hours ago, Stromboli1 said:

 

What are you going to do when AOC takes over?

Move to Japan.... 

Truth be told, I won't even acknowledge AOC becoming President because that walking definition of Autism has about as much chance of winning as you or I do.

[Stromboli1]

I don't think the Donald will lose in 2020 as of right now. The Democratic nominees look to be garbage right now.

[Stromboli1]

12 hours ago, Prettyphile said:

Move to Japan.... 

Truth be told, I won't even acknowledge AOC becoming President because that walking definition of Autism has about as much chance of winning as you or I do.

 

Saying AOC has autism is insulting people with autism. She's a twit that is a hypocritical walking contradiction who thinks her shit doesn't stink and doesn't know shit how the real world works.

[Prettyphile]

15 minutes ago, Stromboli1 said:

 

Saying AOC has autism is insulting people with autism. She's a twit that is a hypocritical walking contradiction who thinks her shit doesn't stink and doesn't know shit how the real world works.

LOL Sorry

 

Is this better for AOC?

[Stromboli1]

I've met some truly remarkable people with autism.

 

Yeah that's about right give or take a few more connections.

[Enrico_sw]

@Stromboli1 Thanks for sharing this guy's videos. I didn't know him before, but he's really interesting. I think he has a talent to discuss with people in a sensible manner in order to make them explain their thinking thoroughly.

 

The more I watch his videos, the more I think that your country has a lot of conspiracists. Unfortunately, I think the mainstream media are the prime ones.