Elections; 2024 by THG

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Hey buddy. All I know is that nothing they're doing right now works at all.

Maybe if the people we granted power to lead actually lead and weren't all a bunch of self-serving dog shit we might not find ourselves in this predicament.

The USA had it all. I don't think that can be said anymore.

--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

You see "good people" in trouble because of the government. I see the same people, Trumptards, in trouble because they are stupid lazy assholes -- the literal embodiment of Homer Simpson.

Trump is a live action version of a rich and twisted Homer, but without any of cartoon Homer's redeeming qualities:
https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2024/10/20

Trump calls the Prime Minister of Israel about their unbelievable similarities:
"Bibi, you released 1,000 terrorists and one of them planned October 7th. I released 5,000 terrorists and they took over Afghanistan. Also, we both committed fraud, so you need to stay in office to avoid prison and I need to return to office to avoid it."

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, October 20, 2024 12:52 PM

Jack likes to claim others are war mongers even though no one here called for a war but Jack.

Typical Jack, typical MAGA. Say negative shit about others when it's their behavior that you actually hear being described.

T

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Sunday, October 20, 2024 2:54 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Jack likes to claim others are war mongers even though no one here called for a war but Jack.

Typical Jack, typical MAGA. Say negative shit about others when it's their behavior that you actually hear being described.

T

You're going to have to post links to prove that I've advocated for war. I won't wait because you won't find them.

Trump was the only President in this millennia that hasn't started any new wars.

All of the warmongering NeoCons the actual Liberals that used to go to this site railed against everyday support your girl.

Look in the mirror, dummy.

--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

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Sunday, October 20, 2024 2:59 PM

--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

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Sunday, October 20, 2024 4:16 PM

Early voting in battleground states doesn't appear to be breaking for Harris.

Ruh Roh!

--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

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Sunday, October 20, 2024 5:56 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Kamala Harris is likely to win in November:

My guess is that Trump's ceiling lies in his favorability rating: around 44-45%. Conversely, Harris's ceiling is everyone who doesn't view her unfavorably: around 52-53%.

My reasoning is simple: Trump is a very well-known quantity. The only people who will vote for him are those who actively approve of him. If you don't, or if you're still not sure after eight years, you just aren't going to vote for the guy.

Harris, conversely, is new on the scene for most people. Even if you're not sure you like her, it's a lightly held opinion. You might still vote for her.

This puts Harris ahead of Trump by 7-9 percentage points in potential support. I don't think Trump can overcome this in the next two weeks.

https://jabberwocking.com/heres-the-simple-reason-i-think-harris-will-
win/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, October 20, 2024 6:23 PM

On this day in History, October 20th:

0000000000000000---2024----000---2020---000----2016-----
National00000000Harris +0.9000Biden +8.6000Clinton0 +6.4
--------------------------------------------------------
Wisconsin0000000Trump0 +0.2000Biden +6.3000Clinton0 +6.5
Pennsylvania0000Trump0 +0.7000Biden +3.8000Clinton0 +6.2
Ohio000000000000Trump0 +7.0000Trump +0.2000Trump000 +0.4
Michigan00000000Trump 0+1.2000Biden +7.2000Clinton +12.0
Arizona000000000Trump0 +1.6000Biden +3.1000Clinton0 +1.5
Nevada0000000000Trump0 +0.8000Biden +5.2000Clinton 0+4.7
North Carolina00Trump0 +0.5000Biden +2.3000Clinton 0+2.8
Georgia000000000Trump0 +1.8000Biden +1.2000Trump000 +5.3
Florida000000000Trump0 +7.3000Biden +1.6000Clinton0 +4.0

Here's where Trump stands in the battleground states compared to 2020...

National:000000 Trump +7.7
--------------------------
Wisconsin:00000 Trump +6.1
Pennsylvania:00 Trump +3.1
Ohio:0000000000 Trump +6.8
Michigan:000000 Trump +8.4
Arizona:0000000 Trump +4.7
Nevada:00000000 Trump +6.0
North Carolina: Trump +2.8
Georgia:0000000 Trump +3.0
Florida:0000000 Trump +8.9

And here's where Trump stands in the battleground states compared to 2016...

National:000000 Trump +5.5
--------------------------
Wisconsin:00000 Trump +6.3
Pennsylvania:00 Trump +6.9
Ohio:0000000000 Trump +6.6
Michigan:000000 Trump +10.8
Arizona:0000000 Trump +3.1
Nevada:00000000 Trump +5.3
North Carolina: Trump +3.3
Georgia:0000000 Trump -3.5
Florida:0000000 Trump +11.3

Trump now leads in the polling aggregate for EVERY swing state.

Ohio isn't really even a swing state anymore, but on this day 4 years ago it was the only state on the list that Trump was winning.

Democrats have routinely fallen apart in the month leading up to the election the last two election cycles and it appears that this cycle isn't any different in that regard. If the fall is on pace with what it was for Biden* and Clinton, there's a really good chance that we enter election day with Trump up enough points in the Popular Vote that he wins outside of the margin of error.

For more comparisons, I got the actual vote percentages in the battleground states to compare.

https://ballotpedia.org/Presidential_battleground_states,_2020

2020 Presidential Election vote margins by battleground state:

National:000000 Biden +4.4
--------------------------
Wisconsin:00000 Biden +0.3 (49.4% Biden / 49.1% Trump)
Pennsylvania:00 Biden +1.2 (50.0% Biden / 48.8% Trump)
Ohio:0000000000 Trump +8.1 (53.3% Trump / 45.2% Biden)
Michigan:000000 Biden +1.8 (50.6% Biden / 47.8% Trump)
Arizona:0000000 Biden +0.3 (49.4% Biden / 49.1% Trump)
Nevada:00000000 Biden +2.4 (50.1% Biden / 47.7% Trump)
North Carolina: Trump +1.3 (49.9% Trump / 48.6% Biden)
Georgia:0000000 Biden +0.2 (49.5% Biden / 49.3% Trump)
Florida:0000000 Trump +3.3 (51.2% Biden / 47.9% Trump)

What do those numbers mean in relation to the numbers posted earlier?

Let's compare the polling averages 4 years ago today with the actual election results...

National:000000 Biden POLLS: +6.3 - ACTUAL: +4.4 = -1.9
--------------------------
Wisconsin:00000 Biden POLLS: +6.3 - ACTUAL: +0.3 = -6.0
Pennsylvania:00 Biden POLLS: +3.8 - ACTUAL: +1.2 = -2.6
Ohio:0000000000 Biden POLLS: -0.2 - ACTUAL: -8.1 = -7.9
Michigan:000000 Biden POLLS: +7.2 - ACTUAL: +1.8 = -5.4
Arizona:0000000 Biden POLLS: +3.1 - ACTUAL: +0.3 = -2.8
Nevada:00000000 Biden POLLS: +5.2 - ACTUAL: +2.4 = -2.8
North Carolina: Biden POLLS: +2.3 - ACTUAL -1.3 = -3.6
Georgia:0000000 Biden POLLS: +1.6 - ACTUAL: +0.2 = -1.4
Florida:0000000 Biden POLLS: +1.6 - ACTUAL: -3.3 = -4.9

For the above table I flipped any state that Trump won to negatives for Biden instead so the numbers make more sense. In the national polling on today's date 4 years ago, they had Joe Biden +1.9 higher than the actual vote count. As you can see, every battleground state was polled hard in favor of Democrats compared to actual voter turnout, many of them far outside their stated margin of errors. This was just as bad if not worse in 2016. Maybe I'll get around to doing comparisons to both years as election day draws near for comparison too.

Now let's take the Democrat bias in the polls from 2020 and apply them to our current day polling...

National:000000 Harris POLLS: +0.9 - 2020 BIAS: -1.9 = Trump + 1.0
--------------------------
Wisconsin:00000 Trump POLLS: +0.2 - 2020 BIAS: -6.0 = Trump +6.2
Pennsylvania:00 Trump POLLS: +0.7 - 2020 BIAS: -2.6 = Trump +3.3
Ohio:0000000000 Trump POLLS: +7.0 - 2020 BIAS: -7.9 = Trump +14.9
Michigan:000000 Trump POLLS: +1.2 - 2020 BIAS: -5.4 = Trump +6.6
Arizona:0000000 Trump POLLS: +1.6 - 2020 BIAS: -2.8 = Trump +4.4
Nevada:00000000 Trump POLLS: +0.8 - 2020 BIAS: -2.8 = Trump +3.6
North Carolina: Trump POLLS: +0.5 - 2020 BIAS: -3.6 = Trump +4.1
Georgia:0000000 Trump POLLS: +1.8 - 2020 BIAS: -1.4 = Trump +3.2
Florida:0000000 Trump POLLS: +7.3 - 2020 BIAS: -4.9 = Trump +12.2

Am I saying Trump is going to win all the battleground states by those huge margins? Maybe. I'm not ready to make that prediction right now. But I have just illustrated that historical polling trends suggest this outcome to be a possibility.

--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

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Monday, October 21, 2024 8:02 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

For the book tied to the movie, Trump gave an interview to the "Vindicating Trump" movie director/writer.

The Afterword from "Vindicating Trump"

An Exclusive Interview With Donald Trump

Q: The Democrats have a horrible candidate. They’ve got horrible policies. Usually when you’re in that situation, you think, how do I cheat? How do I cheat my way to victory? Now, I think it’s probably fair to say that in different elections, the cheating isn’t exactly the same. In 2020, they use one strategy, you know, the mules, in 2022, suddenly the tabulators don’t work in Maricopa County, suppressing the Republican vote. And my question is, are you confident that between the Trump campaign, between the RNC, the new RNC, that you got your eyes on this election and that you’ll be ready if the Democrats try to pull something.

Trump: You can never be too confident. I’d love to tell you I’m confident. But they cheat in many different ways. That’s all they’re good at. They’re not good in policy. They’re not good in government. They’re not good running things. They’re good at cheating in elections or they couldn’t get in. You can’t get in when you’re in favor of open borders. You can’t get in when you are in favor of things that are just so outlandish, so ridiculous. You know, no water coming out of your faucets, no water coming out of your shower. Men in women’s sports. You have to use electric cars. You know, you can’t win that way. You can’t win. You win only by cheating. So when you say, are you confident, I don’t even want to say that. I can say that we’re working very hard and spending a lot of money on stopping it. And the one thing that is, and even that is not conclusive, but too big to rig is a statement that we use. But if you take a look at Pennsylvania, I was so far up in Pennsylvania, then all of a sudden I’m like tied. I said, what happened? Now I tell my people, don’t help me with getting out the vote. We have all the votes we need. All I want you to do is guard the vote. When that vote comes in, make sure it’s not swamped. It’s not thrown out. Bad things don’t happen. They don’t drop ballots. And, as you know, this stuff happens. A lot of people don’t know it. But as you know, it happens and it happens at levels that nobody’s ever seen before. So now we have bad elections and we have bad borders. And those are the two things you have to have to have a great country. We don’t have either. We’re going to be focused very strongly, strongly on elections. But we have to get there first. We have to win. If we don’t win, we can’t fix that problem. We want to go to paper ballots. Do you know, paper ballots would cost 8 percent of what all of those fancy equipment costs. And they go out and they buy the most sophisticated equipment in the world. And then they say they’ll have the election result in nine days! If you get paper ballots, they read it off that night. France had mail in a while ago and they had a lot of fraud. Any time you have mail in ballots, you’re going to have massive fraud. And they went directly to paper ballots, so they had 38 million votes. It was all done by ten o’clock in the evening. And nobody complained. All paper ballots!

Q: I was going to ask you about this because one of the things that we expose in this film is that since we don’t have any kind of marking on a ballot, it doesn’t have a code, it doesn’t have a watermark, you can actually buy ballots. And by that I mean you can buy the legitimate ballot paper from the very people who make it. Then you can then go online and get or even request an absentee ballot. You can then copy the absentee ballots onto the paper and you’ve got a ballot. Then you can just make copies and you got multiple ballots.

Trump: That’s right. You’re 100 percent right. But that’s one of many things. People need to know we have very dishonest elections and we’ve got to straighten it out.

Q: There are going to be some Americans who have heard about the fraud, and they’ve heard about it going back now for a midterm election, the 2020 election. And they go, if the Democrats have got this heist down, that discourages me. I don’t want to vote. What do we say to those people?

Trump: You got to get out and vote. We got to take back the system. Once we take back the system, we’re going to fix it. We’re going to fix it for good. But you have to get out and vote. If we vote, we’re going to win. We’re going to win. We have a lot of eyes open this time that we didn’t have in 2020, and a lot of people are watching. It’s much more difficult for them to do it. We’re going to take back the system and we’re going to fix our borders, and we’re going to fix our elections.

Q: You’re saying you’ll do your part. You want them to do their part.

Trump: They have to do their part.

Download the "Vindicating Trump" book from the mirrors at https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Vindicating+Trump

Want more free books by the same author? Download from the mirrors at https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Dinesh+D'Souza

Books by the same author:

1) "Stealing America: What My Experience with Criminal Gangs Taught Me about Obama, Hillary, and the Democratic Party"

2) "Death of a Nation: Plantation Politics and the Making of the Democratic Party"

3) "The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left"

4) "United States of Socialism: Who's Behind It. Why It's Evil. How to Stop It"

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, October 21, 2024 11:07 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

But the analysis includes other possibilities that show far higher deficits under Trump. If his tariffs raised less money and there were higher costs for his mass deportations and tax breaks, the national debt could jump by $15.2 trillion.

https://apnews.com/article/budget-deficit-trump-harris-kamala-debt-1ee
3ff65e22ccf19d19b792ee22c46da

$15.2 trillion is not out of line with Trump's previous increase in the National Debt:

The national debt has risen by almost $7.8 trillion during Trump’s time in office.

https://www.propublica.org/article/national-debt-trump

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, October 21, 2024 11:23 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The growth in the annual deficit under Trump ranks as the third-biggest increase, relative to the size of the economy, of any U.S. presidential administration, according to a calculation by a leading Washington budget maven, Eugene Steuerle, co-founder of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. And unlike George W. Bush and Abraham Lincoln, who oversaw the larger relative increases in deficits, Trump did not launch two foreign conflicts or have to pay for a civil war.

https://www.propublica.org/article/national-debt-trump

Donald Trump Promise to Eliminate National Debt.
The National Debt Increased Under Trump Despite His Promise to Reduce It

https://www.newsweek.com/trump-deficit-debt-cbo-data-obama-1463802
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-national-debt-promise-biden-mcca
rthy-1803344

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, October 21, 2024 2:47 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SECOND:
The growth in the annual deficit under Trump ranks as the third-biggest increase, relative to the size of the economy, of any U.S. presidential administration, according to a calculation by a leading Washington budget maven, Eugene Steuerle, co-founder of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. And unlike George W. Bush and Abraham Lincoln, who oversaw the larger relative increases in deficits, Trump did not launch two foreign conflicts or have to pay for a civil war.

Covid, stupid.

And despite many claims to the contrary these last 4 years, the Harris/Biden* administration did not rein in that extra Covid-era spending long after Covid disappeared.

--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

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Monday, October 21, 2024 3:37 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Jack likes to claim others are war mongers even though no one here called for a war but Jack.
Typical Jack, typical MAGA. Say negative shit about others when it's their behavior that you actually hear being described.

You're going to have to post links to prove that I've advocated for war. I won't wait because you won't find them.
Trump was the only President in this millennia that hasn't started any new wars.
All of the warmongering NeoCons the actual Liberals that used to go to this site railed against everyday support your girl.

Look in the mirror, dummy.

--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

THUGR likes to claim that people said things they never did, and think things they don't.

THGR, one reason why you'd stop being so triggered if you would actually read what people wrote instead of injecting your own fears into what other people say.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Monday, October 21, 2024 3:56 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Jack likes to claim others are war mongers even though no one here called for a war but Jack.
Typical Jack, typical MAGA. Say negative shit about others when it's their behavior that you actually hear being described.

You're going to have to post links to prove that I've advocated for war. I won't wait because you won't find them.
Trump was the only President in this millennia that hasn't started any new wars.
All of the warmongering NeoCons the actual Liberals that used to go to this site railed against everyday support your girl.

Look in the mirror, dummy.

--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

THUGR likes to claim that people said things they never did, and think things they don't.

THGR, one reason why you'd stop being so triggered if you would actually read what people wrote instead of injecting your own fears into what other people say.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

The funny thing is, if you strip away national policy, I think Ted and I actually agree on a great majority of policy positions. He's so confused because he'll still be the first to call somebody he doesn't like a Nazi, but he has come out and said that he's strongly against things like CRT in the classroom. He doesn't EVER share an opinion on it because he's been conditioned not to, but I don't imagine he's at all on board with things like Drag Queen Story Hour either. There's a lot of topics that Ted just doesn't comment on at all and I could be wrong but I've got him pegged that it's because he personally doesn't agree with the Media Narrative on them either, but he wouldn't be a good little soldier for his party if he were to speak up out against them. The fact that he was so strong about his opinion on CRT in the classroom actually blew my mind a little bit when that happened.

20 years ago, or around the first time I started posting to this site, you could have arguments about Topic X, but be in complete agreement in another thread about Topic Y. You and I still do that all the time here, Sigs. And I appreciate that even if we say something shitty to each other that you hold no grudges about that outside of that particular thread just like me.

But after they were gifted with Trump, TPTB have been able to drive a hard wedge straight through the heart of the country with him. I still know people in real life who have nothing to do with each other just because of who they vote for. Some of them were really close before too. It's a really sad thing.

So when it's just two strangers online who don't agree on things, there's just no way to even have a real conversation. And because of my own honesty and how much I've said about my own life in the past, any time I'm getting somewhere I just get a past mistake thrown in my face for it. They certainly have me at an extreme advantage there, since I know nothing at all about either of them, let alone any of their own dark secrets.

BTW... If you've wondered why I don't talk about my family much anymore it's not because we don't still do stuff. I just don't like it when Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumb start bringing up people I care about in their shitty tirades. I'd like them to keep that at just throwing my own bad decisions in my face and leaving my friends and family out of it, but knowing them like I do the only way I can get that outcome is by not talking about my relationships at all in this forum anymore. That's also a really sad thing.

--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

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Monday, October 21, 2024 4:21 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by SECOND:
The growth in the annual deficit under Trump ranks as the third-biggest increase, relative to the size of the economy, of any U.S. presidential administration, according to a calculation by a leading Washington budget maven, Eugene Steuerle, co-founder of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. And unlike George W. Bush and Abraham Lincoln, who oversaw the larger relative increases in deficits, Trump did not launch two foreign conflicts or have to pay for a civil war.

Covid, stupid.

And despite many claims to the contrary these last 4 years, the Harris/Biden* administration did not rein in that extra Covid-era spending long after Covid disappeared.

--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

The correct label is "Act to Bribe Voters for Trump's Reelection", not "Covid Relief". Trump knew his reelection chances were dropping and so he gave away money to improve his chances.

The only material thing Trump accomplished is run up the National Debt and ignite inflation. Trump screwed America and the Trumptards blame Democrats because retards do NOT understand that there is a time delay between handing out free money to everybody and price gouging that follows months later when sellers all realize that Trumptards are still stupid and will pay whatever price increase sellers choose, until the money runs low.

Prices always increase until sellers have taken all of the dumbest buyers' money. Only then do prices stop rising. Retards never understood how Capitalism sets prices and never will. They have some vague notion of "Fair" prices while a true Capitalist sets prices to take the maximum amount from each buyer. There is nothing "Fair" about that.

Tax cuts and pandemic relief measures enacted during the Trump administration added $8.4 trillion to the national debt.

https://thehill.com/business/4426965-trump-added-8-4-trillion-to-the-n
ational-debt-analysis/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, October 21, 2024 4:33 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Jack likes to claim others are war mongers even though no one here called for a war but Jack.

Typical Jack, typical MAGA. Say negative shit about others when it's their behavior that you actually hear being described.

T

You're going to have to post links to prove that I've advocated for war. I won't wait because you won't find them.

Trump was the only President in this millennia that hasn't started any new wars.

All of the warmongering NeoCons the actual Liberals that used to go to this site railed against everyday support your girl.

Look in the mirror, dummy.

You really are stupid. It's you who is always saying others here are promoting war. I never called for war. I just support those who have been attacked.

My larger point is overall behavior. Like making false claims against others which you do all the time. All the trash behavior, all the immoral points of view in these threads are yours and sigmans and Putin's and Trumps.

T

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Monday, October 21, 2024 5:06 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

"Immoral?"

Tell me, how am I immoral?

(I think you're finally getting to your ACTUAL objection to my opinions.)

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Monday, October 21, 2024 5:26 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
"Immoral?"

Tell me, how am I immoral?

(I think you're finally getting to your ACTUAL objection to my opinions.)

First, you hate America because you're a Russian troll. How's that you ask? All your posts suggest America is decadent and in decline.

Second, it doesn't matter what evidence is out there that disputes what you post, you ignore it. Why, because you are a Russian troll, and you hate America.

I could go on, but why? Your posts expose who you are, better than I ever could comrade. Hell, you support Putin who is wanted for crimes against children. The warrant issued by the International Criminal Court, says arrest on sight.

And Trump, convicted of 34 felonies, sexual assault, and is indicted and awaiting trial on dozens of other charges. Then there is his stealing from charities and other assorted frauds he perpetrated.

Are you kidding me? You support these two over someone who has worked in law and order all her life. As well as being vice president. You want us to believe you have a higher moral base then those you support, bullshit. You and Jack are the same as the scum you hang around with comrade. And you can't wash it off. It a pigment that sticks to you throughout. Even in the dark, it glows exposing you as morally deficient, and morally corrupt. And those opinions, are who you are dummy.

Let me say it as an American; you're a low-life.

T

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Monday, October 21, 2024 6:14 PM

You are a ridiculous person Ted.

One day you will wake up and be embarrassed about all that time you just left the keys in the car and let somebody else do all the driving for you.

--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

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Monday, October 21, 2024 6:32 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You are a ridiculous person Ted.

One day you will wake up and be embarrassed about all that time you just left the keys in the car and let somebody else do all the driving for you.

He will also be your next President.

I'll tell you what I told signym. First, you hate America because you're a Russian troll. How's that you ask? All your posts suggest America is decadent and in decline.

Second, it doesn't matter what evidence is out there that disputes what you post, you ignore it. Why, because you are a Russian troll, and you hate America.

I could go on, but why? Your posts expose who you are, better than I ever could comrade. Hell, you support Putin who is wanted for crimes against children. The warrant issued by the International Criminal Court, says arrest on sight.

And Trump, convicted of 34 felonies, sexual assault, and is indicted and awaiting trial on dozens of other charges. Then there is his stealing from charities and other assorted frauds he perpetrated.

Are you kidding me? You support these two over someone who has worked in law and order all her life. As well as being vice president. You want us to believe you have a higher moral base then those you support, bullshit. You and Jack are the same as the scum you hang around with comrade. And you can't wash it off. It a pigment that sticks to you throughout. Even in the dark, it glows exposing you as morally deficient, and morally corrupt. And those opinions, are who you are dummy.

Let me say it as an American; you're a low-life.

T

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Monday, October 21, 2024 8:34 PM

There has been a 13.2 point swing towards Trump in Ohio and a 12.2 point swing towards Trump in Florida since 2016.

That's interesting.

Nobody cares about your opinions about other people, Ted. You are a terrible judge of character because you don't even understand yourself.

Are you making sure you're not going to lose your mind on the morning of November 6th?

You should be making those preparations right now.

--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

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Monday, October 21, 2024 8:56 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
"Immoral?"
Tell me, how am I immoral?

(I think you're finally getting to your ACTUAL objection to my opinions.)

THUGR First, you hate America because you're a Russian troll. How's that you ask? All your posts suggest America is decadent and in decline.

Second, it doesn't matter what evidence is out there that disputes what you post, you ignore it. Why, because you are a Russian troll, and you hate America.

I could go on, but why? Your posts expose who you are, better than I ever could comrade. Hell, you support Putin who is wanted for crimes against children. The warrant issued by the International Criminal Court, says arrest on sight.

And Trump, convicted of 34 felonies, sexual assault, and is indicted and awaiting trial on dozens of other charges. Then there is his stealing from charities and other assorted frauds he perpetrated.

Are you kidding me? You support these two over someone who has worked in law and order all her life. As well as being vice president. You want us to believe you have a higher moral base then those you support, bullshit. You and Jack are the same as the scum you hang around with comrade. And you can't wash it off. It a pigment that sticks to you throughout. Even in the dark, it glows exposing you as morally deficient, and morally corrupt. And those opinions, are who you are dummy.

Let me say it as an American; you're a low-life.

How about addressing the question: How am I immoral? How am I a "low life“?

I went to university and studied hard.
I did my best at every job I ever had, from telemarketer to grocery store cashier to technician to chemist. I have an honest day's work at whatever pay and whatever job.

I am the best wife and mother I know how to be.

Like SECOND continually trumpets, I pay my taxes! I don't cheat! And don't do drugs!

I don't overspend.

I am honest with others and myself. (Apparently this gets me in trouble with you!)

I do my best to understand the world around me, physically, ecnomically, politically, and socially ... and even militarily ... which TBH, altho important, bores me to tears (Apparently this gets me in trouble with you too!)

I care about my fellow Americans, all of humanity, and the environment.

I have worked most of my professional life working to improve the environment.

I want everyone to be prosperous and in control of their future.

So what's the problem?

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Monday, October 21, 2024 9:02 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

There has been a 13.2 point swing towards Trump in Ohio and a 12.2 point swing towards Trump in Florida since 2016.

That's interesting.

Nobody cares about your opinions about other people, Ted. You are a terrible judge of character because you don't even understand yourself.

Are you making sure you're not going to lose your mind on the morning of November 6th?

You should be making those preparations right now.

Ah, I'm hurt. I thought you cared about my opinions because you always comment on them. That said, the republicans are doing what I call, poll dumping. As I've just recently said, like the polls that created the panic about a red wave that fell flat. You remember, Polls meant to do what you, dummy, buy into.

T

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Monday, October 21, 2024 9:25 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
"Immoral?"
Tell me, how am I immoral?

(I think you're finally getting to your ACTUAL objection to my opinions.)

THUGR First, you hate America because you're a Russian troll. How's that you ask? All your posts suggest America is decadent and in decline.

Second, it doesn't matter what evidence is out there that disputes what you post, you ignore it. Why, because you are a Russian troll, and you hate America.

I could go on, but why? Your posts expose who you are, better than I ever could comrade. Hell, you support Putin who is wanted for crimes against children. The warrant issued by the International Criminal Court, says arrest on sight.

And Trump, convicted of 34 felonies, sexual assault, and is indicted and awaiting trial on dozens of other charges. Then there is his stealing from charities and other assorted frauds he perpetrated.

Are you kidding me? You support these two over someone who has worked in law and order all her life. As well as being vice president. You want us to believe you have a higher moral base then those you support, bullshit. You and Jack are the same as the scum you hang around with comrade. And you can't wash it off. It a pigment that sticks to you throughout. Even in the dark, it glows exposing you as morally deficient, and morally corrupt. And those opinions, are who you are dummy.

Let me say it as an American; you're a low-life.

How about addressing the question: How am I immoral? How am I a "low life“?

I went to university and studied hard.

You should get a refund comrade. As for answering the question again, give me about a month to stop laughing.

T

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Monday, October 21, 2024 9:45 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
"Immoral?"
Tell me, how am I immoral?

(I think you're finally getting to your ACTUAL objection to my opinions.)

THUGR First, you hate America because you're a Russian troll. How's that you ask? All your posts suggest America is decadent and in decline.

Second, it doesn't matter what evidence is out there that disputes what you post, you ignore it. Why, because you are a Russian troll, and you hate America.

I could go on, but why? Your posts expose who you are, better than I ever could comrade. Hell, you support Putin who is wanted for crimes against children. The warrant issued by the International Criminal Court, says arrest on sight.

And Trump, convicted of 34 felonies, sexual assault, and is indicted and awaiting trial on dozens of other charges. Then there is his stealing from charities and other assorted frauds he perpetrated.

Are you kidding me? You support these two over someone who has worked in law and order all her life. As well as being vice president. You want us to believe you have a higher moral base then those you support, bullshit. You and Jack are the same as the scum you hang around with comrade. And you can't wash it off. It a pigment that sticks to you throughout. Even in the dark, it glows exposing you as morally deficient, and morally corrupt. And those opinions, are who you are dummy.

Let me say it as an American; you're a low-life.

How about addressing the question: How am I immoral? How am I a "low life“?

I went to university and studied hard.

You should get a refund comrade. As for answering the question again, give me about a month to stop laughing.

T

You still haven't figured out how to use an apostrophe and you're drawing a Social Security paycheck.

Keep those stones to yourself, boy.

--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

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Monday, October 21, 2024 10:25 PM

MSNBC asks AZ voters on Trump's mental acuity

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Monday, October 21, 2024 10:37 PM

Trump Years Reality Check

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Monday, October 21, 2024 10:43 PM

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Monday, October 21, 2024 11:23 PM

Nobody cares about your MSNBC clickbait, Theodore.

You're about to lose an election.

--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

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Monday, October 21, 2024 11:25 PM

The Hill: What if Joe Biden was the better candidate all along?

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4941734-biden-harris-woodward-pre
sidential-election/

Womp, Womp.

--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

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Tuesday, October 22, 2024 12:39 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
"Immoral?"
Tell me, how am I immoral?
(I think you're finally getting to your ACTUAL objection to my opinions.)

THUGR: First, you hate America because you're a Russian troll. How's that you ask? All your posts suggest America is decadent and in decline.

I think America is decadent and in decline.
You seem to be very authority-minded. What if I told you there are quite a few colonels, generals, former Cabinet members, intelligence officers who say the same?

Quote:
THUGR: Second, it doesn't matter what evidence is out there that disputes what you post, you ignore it. Why, because you are a Russian troll, and you hate America.

YOU NEVER POST ABOUT AMERICA.
Russia and Putin? Endlessly!
China? You bet!
America?
NOT SO MUCH.
Post about America... where we're successful. I'll read it.

Quote:
THGR: I could go on, but why?

No, you can't. I have asked you multiple times to explain yourself on various issues in your own words, and you can't.
If there isn't a cartoon or a video for you, you're stuck.

Quote:
THGR: Your posts expose who you are, better than I ever could comrade. Hell, you support Putin who is wanted for crimes against children. The warrant issued by the International Criminal Court, says arrest on sight.

One of your precious publications was so exercised about the fact that Russia's child protection agency wouldn't release a young child to her 16 year old cousin.
That's no crime
Meanwhile, the ICC can't squeeze out an arrest warrant for Netanyahu, who is carrying out a genocide killing 30,000 women and children so far.
Politicized, much?

Quote:
THGR And Trump, convicted of 34 felonies, sexual assault, and is indicted and awaiting trial on dozens of other charges. Then there is his stealing from charities and other assorted frauds he perpetrated.

And then there is the Biden International Grift. The only things protecting Biden are the FBI and senility.

Quote:
THGR Are you kidding me? You support these two over someone who has worked in law and order all her life. As well as being vice president.

And what has Kamala done, for SanFran, California , and the USA?
You can't answer. Neither can I!

Quote:
You want us to believe you have a higher moral base then those you support, bullshit. You and Jack are the same as the scum you hang around with comrade. And you can't wash it off. It a pigment that sticks to you throughout. Even in the dark, it glows exposing you as morally deficient, and morally corrupt. And those opinions, are who you are dummy.
Let me say it as an American; you're a low-life.

SIGNY: How about addressing the question: How am I immoral? How am I a "low life“?
I went to university and studied hard.

THUGR: You should get a refund comrade. As for answering the question again, give me about a month to stop laughing.

You didn't answer it the first time.

I keep looking for evidence that you can actually explain yourself..

Sadly, so far there isn't any.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Tuesday, October 22, 2024 7:59 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
"Immoral?"

Tell me, how am I immoral?

(I think you're finally getting to your ACTUAL objection to my opinions.)

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

Signym, when I see people like you, I don't have to take samples and send out to a laboratory for conformation of your shitty life. YOU go to the effort to tell the world you are a horror and don't know it. I will hint at how that works for other horrors because using YOU as the only example, you would not understand. Example 1: Every slave-owner was "moral" in their own estimation. They lived free after losing their slaves (except the slave-owners killed in retribution by slaves and soldiers; not everybody believes that only the courts can decide who deserves punishment) but they were guilty of horrible behavior. Example 2: Every Nazi prison camp guard would declare they were highly moral. Their behavior was horrible but they didn't suffer and lived free after all their prisoners were dead or released. Example 3 (the one Signym will never understand): Every defender of Trump would say there is no final proof he is a crook, thief, rapist, tax cheater, nor that Trumptards are attracted to Trump because they do what he does and remain out of jail as Trump does.

Trump and his Trumptards will not admit what he is. And so long as they won't, they firmly believe they can't be convicted without their confession. Who else was like that? Nazi prison guards thought they were moral and most didn't get punished. (Guards should have remembered to burn the payroll records before the last day at work or else the Nazi hunters might find them when they are 95 years old.) All that happened to most of the guards was losing a high paying job. They found other work instead of incinerating prisoners. Slave-owners thought they were moral. The worst that happened to most of them is losing an unpaid work force. Instead, they had a minimum wage work force and no control of the Federal government and no way to make slavery legal, again. Trumptards think Trump and they are moral. (Trump's lawyers will keep him out of jail until the day he dies, therefore he is not guilty. Even if he is jailed, he is not guilty in their minds.) The worst punishment that can happen to Trump and his Trumptards is not controlling the entire Federal government and making not paying income taxes legal, again. The sad Trumptards won't have all their evil dreams come true.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, October 22, 2024 12:42 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
SECOND: Signym, when I see people like you

Uh huh.

Here's the thing: You don't know me. How do you know what I'm "like"?

You don't.

All you have is your imagination. You are reacting to a figment of your imagination.

What you DO know about me is my posting history, just like I know yours. And you know that I am consistently evidence- based. I use reason and logic. I speak for myself. I don't lie, so I don't contradict myself a dozen times a day. I don't threaten people, or wish ill on on others. I don't advocate war, regime change, or destabilization. I speak for the environment. I am not in favor of greed. I want people to have agency over the most important aspects of their lives, and be able to make a decent living thru honest work. I support our Constitution.

It goes without saying that I'm against slavery.

I look for the greatest good for the greatest number, starting with Americans.

IMHO that, in itself, demonstrates my morally upright character and my patriotism. Just as your posts demonstrate your moral decrepitude.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Tuesday, October 22, 2024 5:36 PM

Looks like Democrats all spent Tuesday collectively pissing themselves.

--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

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Tuesday, October 22, 2024 5:46 PM

Betting Markets today...

Trump: 60.1 / Harris: 38.4

--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

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Tuesday, October 22, 2024 7:06 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:

SECOND: Signym, when I see people like you

Uh huh.

Here's the thing: You don't know me. How do you know what I'm "like"?

You don't.

Dummy, you've been posting here for years. We know exactly who and what you are comrade.

First, you hate America because you're a Russian troll. How's that you ask? All your posts suggest America is decadent and in decline.

Second, it doesn't matter what evidence is out there that disputes what you post, you ignore it. Why, because you are a Russian troll, and you hate America.

I could go on, but why? Your posts expose who you are, better than I ever could comrade. Hell, you support Putin who is wanted for crimes against children. The warrant issued by the International Criminal Court, says arrest on sight.

And Trump, convicted of 34 felonies, sexual assault, and is indicted and awaiting trial on dozens of other charges. Then there is his stealing from charities and other assorted frauds he perpetrated.

Are you kidding me? You support these two over someone who has worked in law and order all her life. As well as being vice president. You want us to believe you have a higher moral base then those you support, bullshit. You and Jack are the same as the scum you hang around with comrade. And you can't wash it off. It a pigment that sticks to you throughout. Even as you post from the shadows, it glows exposing you as morally deficient, and morally corrupt. Those opinions you post, tell us everything about you.

Let me say it as an American; you're a low-life.

T

Student to Trump: ‘Do you see me as human?’

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Tuesday, October 22, 2024 7:52 PM

You are never going to win another election again if you keep talking down to people like you do, Theodore.

--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

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Tuesday, October 22, 2024 7:59 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
THGR First, you hate America because you're a Russian troll. How's that you ask? All your posts suggest America is decadent and in decline.

THUGR, let's start with something simple: What is it about my posts that makes you think I "hate" America?

Yes, I think America is decadent and in decline.
But if I truly hated America, I'd be advocating everything I thought was BAD for America, just to kill it off sooner

I'd be posting "Yeah! Run up the debt!"
Or, are you saying the massive indebtedness is GOOD for America?

I'd be posting "Yeah! Let's deindustrialize some more!"
Or, are you saying deindustrialization is GOOD for America?

I'd be posting "Yeah! Let piss off the whole world!"
Or are you saying that being surrounded by enemies is GOOD for America?

I think you need to wake up to the fact that we face some seriously bad problems, and ignoring them isn't gonna make them go away.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Tuesday, October 22, 2024 8:12 PM

But! But! But!....

HOPE AND JOY!!!!

--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

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Tuesday, October 22, 2024 8:49 PM

It's seriously not even worth taking any time to try to have a conversation with somebody like Ted. He's just simply not intelligent enough to grasp anything beyond the superficial, and he lives in a black and white reality where there is never any nuance.

As such, he is easily manipulated and he is behaving like a good little soldier, repeating the type of words and insults that his Masters at MSNBC tell him to say to anybody who doesn't agree with them.

Even if it were possible to educate somebody as stupid as Ted with the Truth, they've made that impossible because he's completely shut himself inside his echo chamber and he will attack anybody who doesn't believe what he believes.

--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

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Tuesday, October 22, 2024 9:19 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

He seems to think that criticizing somebody is "hating" them

If I knew a junkie and I really hated them, I'd go buy them more heroin, with the hope they'd kill themselves off.

If I cared about them, I'd be nagging them.

He just doesn't "get it".

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Tuesday, October 22, 2024 10:16 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
SECOND: Signym, when I see people like you

Uh huh.

Here's the thing: You don't know me. How do you know what I'm "like"?

You don't.

All you have is your imagination. You are reacting to a figment of your imagination.

I never knew any slave-owners, but they left a written record of their belief in being superior. They should have been killed for what they did. (I don't find it confusing that the Founding Fathers were slave-owners. Even totally evil people can competently administer a complex hierarchy if they benefit.)

I've got an opinion about Nazis. I've known a few. (Same comment. Even totally evil people can competently administer a complex organization. They were killed by the millions but they all should have died.)

I have known thousands of Trumptards. (Different comment. These people are evil but also incompetent. No surprise how much trouble they get into while in America. See the last 40 years of Trump's life for what "trouble" means.)

Then there are super-assholes who are indifferent or even support Russia's invasion of Ukraine and murdering Ukrainians and cheering for Putin, indelibly marking themselves as the worst people here and now. I know what you are "like", Signym and 6ix, your beliefs and afflictions.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, October 22, 2024 10:17 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Kamala Harris leads Trump by 24 points among recent deciders

From an Emerson poll a few days ago:

“Voters who made up their mind in the last month or week break for Harris, 60% to 36%,” Kimball said. “The three percent of voters who said they could still change their mind currently favor Harris, 48% to 43%.”

This gibes with my belief that most people who haven't already committed to Trump are likely to vote for Harris when they finally make a decision. We'll see.

https://jabberwocking.com/kamala-harris-leads-trump-by-24-points-among
-recent-deciders/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, October 23, 2024 3:14 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by SECOND:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
SECOND: Signym, when I see people like you

Uh huh.
Here's the thing: You don't know me. How do you know what I'm "like"?
You don't.
All you have is your imagination. You are reacting to a figment of your imagination.
I never knew any slave-owners, but they left a written record of their belief in being superior

OMG!! Are you posting about ... YOURSELF??? WTH, man? That's all we ever read about!

Quote:
SECOND I've got an opinion about Nazis...

Given your propensity to want to "annihilate" those "inferior" to you ... which is at least half the world ... I guess you qualify here too.

Quote:
I have known thousands of Trumptards...

I doubt you've known 100 people your entire life.

Quote:
blah blah blah... cheering for Putin... blah blah blah

Just bc I predict that Russia will win doesn't mean I'm "cheering him on". All it means is that I don't partake of your delusions.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Wednesday, October 23, 2024 4:10 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Just bc I predict that Russia will win doesn't mean I'm "cheering him on". All it means is that I don't partake of your delusions.

Vladimir Putin continues his campaign to elect Donald Trump

Vladimir Putin is doing whatever he can to help Donald Trump win:

U.S. intelligence officials on Tuesday said Russians seeking to disrupt the U.S. elections created a faked video and other material smearing Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz.... They added that Russian government agencies and contractors, which generally seek to boost Republican former president Donald Trump’s campaign, are considering trying to instigate physical violence in the fraught period after voters cast their ballots.

....Russia is “potentially seeking to stoke threats towards poll workers, as well as amplifying protests and potentially encouraging protests to be violent,” the official added.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/10/22/russia-ele
ction-disruption-tim-walz/

Why is Putin so enamored of Trump? Lots of reasons, but I suppose the biggest one right now is that he thinks Trump will cut off aid to Ukraine and guarantee a Russian victory. If I were Putin, I suppose I'd prefer Trump too.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, October 23, 2024 4:12 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Just bc I predict that Russia will win doesn't mean I'm "cheering him on". All it means is that I don't partake of your delusions.

This is from Ukraine/Russian thread. Signym did not respond.
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=64887&mid=1
203850#1203850

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

So, just OOC what are your dark predictions for a Trump second term? I would like to know what worries you most, thanks.

Trump’s $2.7 trillion in tariff revenues would be unable to cover $9.2 trillion in tax cuts.

https://apnews.com/article/budget-deficit-trump-harris-kamala-debt-1ee
3ff65e22ccf19d19b792ee22c46da

Signym, $9.2 trillion does not sound too bad to you, does it? But the analysis includes other possibilities that show far higher deficits under Trump. If his tariffs raised less money and there were higher costs for his mass deportations and tax breaks, the national debt could jump by $15.2 trillion.

Signym, I say $15.2 trillion for electing Trump is too high a price to pay for him saving Putin from the consequences of invading Ukraine.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, October 23, 2024 5:17 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Trump: ‘I Need the Kind of Generals That Hitler Had’

The Republican nominee’s preoccupation with dictators, and his disdain for the American military, is deepening.

Jeffrey Goldberg | October 22, 2024, 3:38 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/10/trump-military-ge
nerals-hitler/680327/

In April 2020, Vanessa Guillén, a 20-year-old Army private, was bludgeoned to death by a fellow soldier at Fort Hood, in Texas. The killer, aided by his girlfriend, burned Guillén’s body. Guillén’s remains were discovered two months later, buried in a riverbank near the base, after a massive search.

Guillén, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, grew up in Houston, and her murder sparked outrage across Texas and beyond. Fort Hood had become known as a particularly perilous assignment for female soldiers, and members of Congress took up the cause of reform. Shortly after her remains were discovered, President Donald Trump himself invited the Guillén family to the White House. With Guillén’s mother seated beside him, Trump spent 25 minutes with the family as television cameras recorded the scene.

In the meeting, Trump maintained a dignified posture and expressed sympathy to Guillén’s mother. “I saw what happened to your daughter Vanessa, who was a spectacular person, and respected and loved by everybody, including in the military,” Trump said. Later in the conversation, he made a promise: “If I can help you out with the funeral, I’ll help—I’ll help you with that,” he said. “I’ll help you out. Financially, I’ll help you.”

Natalie Khawam, the family’s attorney, responded, “I think the military will be paying—taking care of it.” Trump replied, “Good. They’ll do a military. That’s good. If you need help, I’ll help you out.” Later, a reporter covering the meeting asked Trump, “Have you offered to do that for other families before?” Trump responded, “I have. I have. Personally. I have to do it personally. I can’t do it through government.” The reporter then asked: “So you’ve written checks to help for other families before this?” Trump turned to the family, still present, and said, “I have, I have, because some families need help … Maybe you don’t need help, from a financial standpoint. I have no idea what—I just think it’s a horrific thing that happened. And if you did need help, I’m going to—I’ll be there to help you.”

A public memorial service was held in Houston two weeks after the White House meeting. It was followed by a private funeral and burial in a local cemetery, attended by, among others, the mayor of Houston and the city’s police chief. Highways were shut down, and mourners lined the streets.

Five months later, the secretary of the Army, Ryan McCarthy, announced the results of an investigation. McCarthy cited numerous “leadership failures” at Fort Hood and relieved or suspended several officers, including the base’s commanding general. In a press conference, McCarthy said that the murder “shocked our conscience” and “forced us to take a critical look at our systems, our policies, and ourselves.”

According to a person close to Trump at the time, the president was agitated by McCarthy’s comments and raised questions about the severity of the punishments dispensed to senior officers and noncommissioned officers.

In an Oval Office meeting on December 4, 2020, officials gathered to discuss a separate national-security issue. Toward the end of the discussion, Trump asked for an update on the McCarthy investigation. Christopher Miller, the acting secretary of defense (Trump had fired his predecessor, Mark Esper, three weeks earlier, writing in a tweet, “Mark Esper has been terminated”), was in attendance, along with Miller’s chief of staff, Kash Patel. At a certain point, according to two people present at the meeting, Trump asked, “Did they bill us for the funeral? What did it cost?”

According to attendees, and to contemporaneous notes of the meeting taken by a participant, an aide answered: Yes, we received a bill; the funeral cost $60,000.

Trump became angry. “It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a fucking Mexican!” He turned to his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and issued an order: “Don’t pay it!” Later that day, he was still agitated. “Can you believe it?” he said, according to a witness. “Fucking people, trying to rip me off.”

Khawam, the family attorney, told me she sent the bill to the White House, but no money was ever received by the family from Trump. Some of the costs, Khawam said, were covered by the Army (which offered, she said, to allow Guillén to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery) and some were covered by donations. Ultimately, Guillén was buried in Houston.

Shortly after I emailed a series of questions to a Trump spokesperson, Alex Pfeiffer, I received an email from Khawam, who asked me to publish a statement from Mayra Guillén, Vanessa’s sister. Pfeiffer then emailed me the same statement. “I am beyond grateful for all the support President Donald Trump showed our family during a trying time,” the statement reads. “I witnessed firsthand how President Trump honors our nation’s heroes’ service. We are grateful for everything he has done and continues to do to support our troops.”

Pfeiffer told me that he did not write that statement, and emailed me a series of denials. Regarding Trump’s “fucking Mexican” comment, Pfeiffer wrote: “President Donald Trump never said that. This is an outrageous lie from The Atlantic two weeks before the election.” He provided statements from Patel and a spokesman for Meadows, who denied having heard Trump make the statement. Via Pfeiffer, Meadows’s spokesman also denied that Trump had ordered Meadows not to pay for the funeral.

The statement from Patel that Pfeiffer sent me said: “As someone who was present in the room with President Trump, he strongly urged that Spc. Vanessa Guillen’s grieving family should not have to bear the cost of any funeral arrangements, even offering to personally pay himself in order to honor her life and sacrifice. In addition, President Trump was able to have the Department of Defense designate her death as occurring ‘in the line of duty,’ which gave her full military honors and provided her family access to benefits, services, and complete financial assistance.”

The personal qualities displayed by Trump in his reaction to the cost of the Guillén funeral—contempt, rage, parsimony, racism—hardly surprised his inner circle. Trump has frequently voiced his disdain for those who serve in the military and for their devotion to duty, honor, and sacrifice. Former generals who have worked for Trump say that the sole military virtue he prizes is obedience. As his presidency drew to a close, and in the years since, he has become more and more interested in the advantages of dictatorship, and the absolute control over the military that he believes it would deliver. “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had,” Trump said in a private conversation in the White House, according to two people who heard him say this. “People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.” (“This is absolutely false,” Pfeiffer wrote in an email. “President Trump never said this.”)

A desire to force U.S. military leaders to be obedient to him and not the Constitution is one of the constant themes of Trump’s military-related discourse. Former officials have also cited other recurring themes: his denigration of military service, his ignorance of the provisions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, his admiration for brutality and anti-democratic norms of behavior, and his contempt for wounded veterans and for soldiers who fell in battle.

Retired General Barry McCaffrey, a decorated Vietnam veteran, told me that Trump does not comprehend such traditional military virtues as honor and self-sacrifice. “The military is a foreign country to him. He doesn’t understand the customs or codes,” McCaffrey said. “It doesn’t penetrate. It starts with the fact that he thinks it’s foolish to do anything that doesn’t directly benefit himself.”

I’ve been interested in Trump’s understanding of military affairs for nearly a decade. At first, it was cognitive dissonance that drew me to the subject—according to my previous understanding of American political physics, Trump’s disparagement of the military, and in particular his obsessive criticism of the war record of the late Senator John McCain, should have profoundly alienated Republican voters, if not Americans generally. And in part my interest grew from the absolute novelty of Trump’s thinking. This country had never seen, to the best of my knowledge, a national political figure who insulted veterans, wounded warriors, and the fallen with metronomic regularity.

Today—two weeks before an election that could see Trump return to the White House—I’m most interested in his evident desire to wield military power, and power over the military, in the manner of Hitler and other dictators.

Trump’s singularly corrosive approach to military tradition was in evidence as recently as August, when he described the Medal of Honor, the nation’s top award for heroism and selflessness in combat, as inferior to the Medal of Freedom, which is awarded to civilians for career achievement. During a campaign speech, he described Medal of Honor recipients as “either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead,” prompting the Veterans of Foreign Wars to issue a condemnation: “These asinine comments not only diminish the significance of our nation’s highest award for valor, but also crassly characterizes the sacrifices of those who have risked their lives above and beyond the call of duty.” Later in August, Trump caused controversy by violating federal regulations prohibiting the politicization of military cemeteries, after a campaign visit to Arlington in which he gave a smiling thumbs-up while standing behind gravestones of fallen American soldiers.

His Medal of Honor comments are of a piece with his expressed desire to receive a Purple Heart without being wounded. He has also equated business success to battlefield heroism. In the summer of 2016, Khizr Khan, the father of a 27-year-old Army captain who had been killed in Iraq, told the Democratic National Convention that Trump has “sacrificed nothing.” In response, Trump disparaged the Khan family and said, “I think I’ve made a lot of sacrifices. I work very, very hard. I’ve created thousands and thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of jobs, built great structures.”

One former Trump-administration Cabinet secretary told me of a conversation he’d had with Trump during his time in office about the Vietnam War. Trump famously escaped the draft by claiming that his feet were afflicted with bone spurs. (“I had a doctor that gave me a letter—a very strong letter on the heels,” Trump told The New York Times in 2016.) Once, when the subject of aging Vietnam veterans came up in conversation, Trump offered this observation to the Cabinet official: “Vietnam would have been a waste of time for me. Only suckers went to Vietnam.”

In 1997, Trump told the radio host Howard Stern that avoiding sexually transmitted diseases was “my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave soldier.” This was not the only time Trump has compared his sexual exploits and political challenges to military service. Last year, at a speech before a group of New York Republicans, while discussing the fallout from the release of the Access Hollywood tape, he said, “I went onto that (debate) stage just a few days later and a general, who’s a fantastic general, actually said to me, ‘Sir, I’ve been on the battlefield. Men have gone down on my left and on my right. I stood on hills where soldiers were killed. But I believe the bravest thing I’ve ever seen was the night you went onto that stage with Hillary Clinton after what happened.’” I asked Trump-campaign officials to provide the name of the general who allegedly said this. Pfeiffer, the campaign spokesman, said, “This is a true story and there is no good reason to give the name of an honorable man to The Atlantic so you can smear him.”

In their book, The Divider: Trump in the White House, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser reported that Trump asked John Kelly, his chief of staff at the time, “Why can’t you be like the German generals?” Trump, at various points, had grown frustrated with military officials he deemed disloyal and disobedient. (Throughout the course of his presidency, Trump referred to flag officers as “my generals.”) According to Baker and Glasser, Kelly explained to Trump that German generals “tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off.” This correction did not move Trump to reconsider his view: “No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him,” the president responded.

This week, I asked Kelly about their exchange. He told me that when Trump raised the subject of “German generals,” Kelly responded by asking, “‘Do you mean Bismarck’s generals?’” He went on: “I mean, I knew he didn’t know who Bismarck was, or about the Franco-Prussian War. I said, ‘Do you mean the kaiser’s generals? Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals? And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals.’ I explained to him that Rommel had to commit suicide after taking part in a plot against Hitler.” Kelly told me Trump was not acquainted with Rommel.

Baker and Glasser also reported that Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, feared that Trump’s “‘Hitler-like’ embrace of the big lie about the election would prompt the president to seek out a ‘Reichstag moment.’”

Kelly—a retired Marine general who, as a young man, had volunteered to serve in Vietnam despite actually suffering from bone spurs—said in an interview for the CNN reporter Jim Sciutto’s book, The Return of Great Powers, that Trump praised aspects of Hitler’s leadership. “He said, ‘Well, but Hitler did some good things,’” Kelly recalled. “I said, ‘Well, what?’ And he said, ‘Well, (Hitler) rebuilt the economy.’ But what did he do with that rebuilt economy? He turned it against his own people and against the world.” Kelly admonished Trump: “I said, ‘Sir, you can never say anything good about the guy. Nothing.’”

This wasn’t the only time Kelly felt compelled to instruct Trump on military history. In 2018, Trump asked Kelly to explain who “the good guys” were in World War I. Kelly responded by explaining a simple rule: Presidents should, as a matter of politics and policy, remember that the “good guys” in any given conflict are the countries allied with the United States. Despite Trump’s lack of historical knowledge, he has been on record as saying that he knew more than his generals about warfare. He told 60 Minutes in 2018 that he knew more about NATO than James Mattis, his secretary of defense at the time, a retired four-star Marine general who had served as a NATO official. Trump also said, on a separate occasion, that it was he, not Mattis, who had “captured” the Islamic State.

As president, Trump evinced extreme sensitivity to criticism from retired flag officers; at one point, he proposed calling back to active duty Admiral William McRaven and General Stanley McChrystal, two highly regarded Special Operations leaders who had become critical of Trump, so that they could be court-martialed. Esper, who was the defense secretary at the time, wrote in his memoir that he and Milley talked Trump out of the plan. (Asked about criticism from McRaven, who oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, Trump responded by calling him a “Hillary Clinton backer and an Obama backer” and said, “Wouldn’t it have been nice if we got Osama bin Laden a lot sooner than that?”)

Trump has responded incredulously when told that American military personnel swear an oath to the Constitution, not to the president. According to the New York Times reporter Michael S. Schmidt’s recent book, Donald Trump v. the United States, Trump asked Kelly, “Do you really believe you’re not loyal to me?” Kelly answered, “I’m certainly part of the administration, but my ultimate loyalty is to the rule of law.” Trump also publicly floated the idea of “termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” as part of the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election and keep himself in power.

On separate occasions in 2020, Trump held private conversations in the White House with national-security officials about the George Floyd protests. “The Chinese generals would know what to do,” he said, according to former officials who described the conversations to me, referring to the leaders of the People’s Liberation Army, which carried out the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. (Pfeiffer denied that Trump said this.) Trump’s desire to deploy U.S. troops against American citizens is well documented. During the nerve-racking period of social unrest following Floyd’s death, Trump asked Milley and Esper, a West Point graduate and former infantry officer, if the Army could shoot protesters. “Trump seemed unable to think straight and calmly,” Esper wrote in his memoir. “The protests and violence had him so enraged that he was willing to send in active-duty forces to put down the protesters. Worse yet, he suggested we shoot them. I wondered about his sense of history, of propriety, and of his oath to the Constitution.” Esper told National Public Radio in 2022, “We reached that point in the conversation where he looked frankly at General Milley, and said, ‘Can’t you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something?’” When defense officials argued against Trump’s desire, the president screamed, according to witnesses, “You are all fucking losers!”

Trump has often expressed his esteem for the type of power wielded by such autocrats as the Chinese leader Xi Jinping; his admiration, even jealousy, of Vladimir Putin is well known. In recent days, he has signaled that, should he win reelection in November, he would like to govern in the manner of these dictators—he has said explicitly that he would like to be a dictator for a day on his first day back in the White House—and he has threatened to, among other things, unleash the military on “radical-left lunatics.” (One of his four former national security advisers, John Bolton, wrote in his memoir, “It is a close contest between Putin and Xi Jinping who would be happiest to see Trump back in office.”)

Military leaders have condemned Trump for possessing autocratic tendencies. At his retirement ceremony last year, Milley said, “We don’t take an oath to a king, or a queen, or to a tyrant or dictator, and we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator … We take an oath to the Constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America, and we’re willing to die to protect it.” Over the past several years, Milley has privately told several interlocutors that he believed Trump to be a fascist. Many other leaders have also been shocked by Trump’s desire for revenge against his domestic critics. At the height of the Floyd protests, Mattis wrote, “When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens.”

Trump’s frustration with American military leaders led him to disparage them regularly. In their book A Very Stable Genius, Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, both of The Washington Post, reported that in 2017, during a meeting at the Pentagon, Trump screamed at a group of generals: “I wouldn’t go to war with you people. You’re a bunch of dopes and babies.” And in his book Rage, Bob Woodward reported that Trump complained that “my fucking generals are a bunch of pussies. They care more about their alliances than they do about trade deals.”

Trump’s disdain for American military officers is motivated in part by their willingness to accept low salaries. Once, after a White House briefing given by the then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, Trump said to aides, “That guy is smart. Why did he join the military?” (On another occasion, John Kelly asked Trump to guess Dunford’s annual salary. The president’s answer: $5 million. Dunford’s actual salary was less than $200,000.)

Trump has often expressed his love for the trappings of martial power, demanding of his aides that they stage the sort of armor-heavy parades foreign to American tradition. Civilian aides and generals alike pushed back. In one instance, Air Force General Paul Selva, who was then serving as vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the president that he had been partially raised in Portugal, which, he explained, “was a dictatorship—and parades were about showing the people who had the guns. In America, we don’t do that. It’s not who we are.”

For Republicans in 2012, it was John McCain who served as a model of “who we are.” But by 2015, the party had shifted. In July of that year, Trump, then one of several candidates for the Republican presidential nomination, made a statement that should have ended his campaign. At a forum for Christian conservatives in Iowa, Trump said of McCain, “He’s not a war hero. He is a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

It was an astonishing statement, and an introduction to the wider public of Trump’s uniquely corrosive view of McCain, and of his aberrant understanding of the nature of American military heroism. This wasn’t the first time Trump had insulted McCain’s war record. As early as 1999, he was insulting McCain. In an interview with Dan Rather that year, Trump asked, “Does being captured make you a hero? I don’t know. I’m not sure.” (A brief primer: McCain, who had flown 22 combat missions before being shot down over Hanoi, was tortured almost continuously by his Communist captors, and turned down repeated offers to be released early, insisting that prisoners be released in the order that they’d been captured. McCain suffered physically from his injuries until his death, in 2018.) McCain partisans believe, with justification, that Trump’s loathing was prompted in part by McCain’s ability to see through Trump. “John didn’t respect him, and Trump knew that,” Mark Salter, McCain’s longtime aide and co-author, told me. “John McCain had a code. Trump only has grievances and impulses and appetites. In the deep recesses of his man-child soul, he knew that McCain and his achievements made him look like a mutt.”

Trump, those who have worked for him say, is unable to understand the military norm that one does not leave fellow soldiers behind on the battlefield. As president, Trump told senior advisers that he didn’t understand why the U.S. government placed such value on finding soldiers missing in action. To him, they could be left behind, because they had performed poorly by getting captured.

My reporting during Trump’s term in office led me to publish on this site, in September 2020, an article about Trump’s attitudes toward McCain and other veterans, and his views about the ideal of national service itself. The story was based on interviews with multiple sources who had firsthand exposure to Trump and his views. In that piece, I detailed numerous instances of Trump insulting soldiers, flag officers and veterans alike. I wrote extensively about Trump’s reaction to McCain’s death in August 2018: The president told aides, “We’re not going to support that loser’s funeral,” and he was infuriated when he saw flags at the White House lowered to half-mast. “What the fuck are we doing that for? Guy was a fucking loser,” he said angrily. Only when Kelly told Trump that he would get “killed in the press” for showing such disrespect did the president relent. In the article, I also reported that Trump had disparaged President George H. W. Bush, a World War II naval aviator, for getting shot down by the Japanese. Two witnesses told me that Trump said, “I don’t get it. Getting shot down makes you a loser.” (Bush ultimately evaded capture, but eight other fliers were caught and executed by the Japanese).

The next year, White House officials demanded that the Navy keep the U.S.S. John S. McCain, which was named for McCain’s father and grandfather—both esteemed admirals—out of Trump’s sight during a visit to Japan. The Navy did not comply.

Trump’s preoccupation with McCain has not abated. In January, Trump condemned McCain—six years after his death—for having supported President Barack Obama’s health-care plan. “We’re going to fight for much better health care than Obamacare,” Trump told an Iowa crowd. “Obamacare is a catastrophe. Nobody talks about it. You know, without John McCain, we would have had it done. John McCain for some reason couldn’t get his arm up that day. Remember?” This was, it appears, a malicious reference to McCain’s wartime injuries—including injuries suffered during torture—which limited his upper-body mobility.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Trump: Americans who died in war are ‘losers’ and ‘suckers’

I’ve also previously reported on Trump’s 2017 Memorial Day visit to Arlington National Cemetery. Kelly, who was then the secretary of homeland security, accompanied him. The two men visited Section 60, the 14-acre section that is the burial ground for those killed in America’s most recent wars (and the site of Trump’s Arlington controversy earlier this year). Kelly’s son Robert, a Marine officer killed in 2010 in Afghanistan, is buried in Section 60. Trump, while standing by Robert Kelly’s grave, turned to his father and said, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” At first, Kelly believed that Trump was making a reference to the selflessness of America’s all-volunteer force. But later he came to realize that Trump simply does not understand nontransactional life choices. I quoted one of Kelly’s friends, a fellow retired four-star general, who said of Trump, “He can’t fathom the idea of doing something for someone other than himself. He just thinks that anyone who does anything when there’s no direct personal gain to be had is a sucker.” At moments when Kelly was feeling particularly frustrated by Trump, he would leave the White House and cross the Potomac to visit his son’s grave, in part to remind himself about the nature of full-measure sacrifice.

Last year Kelly told me, in reference to Mark Milley’s 44 years in uniform, “The president couldn’t fathom people who served their nation honorably.”

The specific incident I reported in the 2020 article that gained the most attention also provided the story with its headline—“Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers.’” The story concerned a visit Trump made to France in 2018, during which the president called Americans buried in a World War I cemetery “losers.” He said, in the presence of aides, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” At another moment during this trip, he referred to the more than 1,800 Marines who had lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for dying for their country.

Trump had already been scheduled to visit one cemetery, and he did not understand why his team was scheduling a second cemetery visit, especially considering that the rain would be hard on his hair. “Why two cemeteries?” Trump asked. “What the fuck?” Kelly subsequently canceled the second visit, and attended a ceremony there himself with General Dunford and their wives.

The article sparked great controversy, and provoked an irate reaction from the Trump administration, and from Trump himself. In tweets, statements, and press conferences in the days, weeks, and years that followed, Trump labeled The Atlantic a “second-rate magazine,” a “failing magazine,” a “terrible magazine,” and a “third-rate magazine that’s not going to be in business much longer”; he also referred to me as a “con man,” among other things. Trump has continued these attacks recently, calling me a “horrible, radical-left lunatic named Goldberg” at a rally this summer.

In the days after my original article was published, both the Associated Press and, notably, Fox News, confirmed the story, causing Trump to demand that Fox fire Jennifer Griffin, its experienced and well-regarded defense reporter. A statement issued by Alyssa Farah, a White House spokesperson, soon after publication read, “This report is false. President Trump holds the military in the highest regard.”

Shortly after the story appeared, Farah asked numerous White House officials if they had heard Trump refer to veterans and war dead as suckers or losers. She reported publicly that none of the officials she asked had heard him use these terms. Eventually, Farah came out in opposition to Trump. She wrote on X last year that she’d asked the president if my story was true. “Trump told me it was false. That was a lie.”

When I spoke to Farah, who is now known as Alyssa Farah Griffin, this week, she said, “I understood that people were skeptical about the ‘suckers and losers’ story, and I was in the White House pushing back against it. But he said this to John Kelly’s face, and I fundamentally, absolutely believe that John Kelly is an honorable man who served our country and who loves and respects our troops. I’ve heard Donald Trump speak in a dehumanizing way about so many groups. After working for him in 2020 and hearing his continuous attacks on service members since that time, including my former boss General Mark Milley, I firmly and unequivocally believe General Kelly’s account.”

(Pfeiffer, the Trump spokesperson, said, in response, “Alyssa is a scorned former employee now lying in her pursuit to chase liberal adulation. President Trump would never insult our nation’s heroes.”)

Last year, I published a story in this magazine about Milley that coincided with the end of his four-year term. In it, I detailed his tumultuous relationship with Trump. Milley had resisted Trump’s autocratic urges, and also argued against his many thoughtless and impetuous national-security impulses. Shortly after that story appeared, Trump publicly suggested that Milley be executed for treason. This astonishing statement caused John Kelly to speak publicly about Trump and his relationship to the military. Kelly, who had previously called Trump “the most flawed person I have ever met in my life,” told CNN’s Jake Tapper that Trump had referred to American prisoners of war as “suckers” and described as “losers” soldiers who died while fighting for their country.

“What can I add that has not already been said?” Kelly asked. “A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs, are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’ A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.’ A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family—for all Gold Star families—on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.”

When we spoke this week, Kelly told me, “President Trump used the terms suckers and losers to describe soldiers who gave their lives in the defense of our country. There are many, many people who have heard him say these things. The visit to France wasn’t the first time he said this.”

Kelly and others have taken special note of the revulsion Trump feels in the presence of wounded veterans. After Trump attended a Bastille Day parade in France, he told Kelly and others that he would like to stage his own parade in Washington, but without the presence of wounded veterans. “I don’t want them,” Trump said. “It doesn’t look good for me.”

Milley also witnessed Trump’s disdain for the wounded. Milley had chosen a severely wounded Army captain, Luis Avila, to sing “God Bless America” at his installation ceremony in 2019. Avila, who had completed five combat tours, had lost a leg in an improvised-explosive-device attack in Afghanistan, and had suffered two heart attacks, two strokes, and brain damage as a result of his injuries. Avila is considered a hero up and down the ranks of the Army.

It had rained earlier on the day of the ceremony, and the ground was soft; at one point Avila’s wheelchair almost toppled over. Milley’s wife, Hollyanne, ran to help Avila, as did then–Vice President Mike Pence. After Avila’s performance, Trump walked over to congratulate him, but then said to Milley, within earshot of several witnesses, “Why do you bring people like that here? No one wants to see that, the wounded.” Never let Avila appear in public again, Trump told Milley.

An equally serious challenge to Milley’s sense of duty came in the form of Trump’s ignorance of the rules of war. In November 2019, Trump intervened in three different brutality cases then being adjudicated by the military. In the most infamous case, the Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher had been found guilty of posing with the corpse of an ISIS member. Though Gallagher was found not guilty of murder, witnesses testified that he’d stabbed the prisoner in the neck with a hunting knife. In a highly unusual move, Trump reversed the Navy’s decision to demote him. A junior Army officer named Clint Lorance was also the recipient of Trump’s sympathy. Trump pardoned Lorance, who had been convicted of ordering the shooting of three unarmed Afghans, two of whom died. And in a third case, a Green Beret named Mathew Golsteyn was accused of killing an unarmed Afghan he thought was a Taliban bomb maker. “I stuck up for three great warriors against the deep state,” Trump said at a Florida rally.

In the Gallagher case, Trump intervened to allow Gallagher to keep his Trident insignia, one of the most coveted insignia in the entire U.S. military. The Navy’s leadership found this intervention particularly offensive because tradition held that only a commanding officer or a group of SEALs on a Trident Review Board were supposed to decide who merited being a SEAL. Milley tried to convince Trump that his intrusion was hurting Navy morale. They were flying from Washington to Dover Air Force Base, in Delaware, to attend a “dignified transfer,” a repatriation ceremony for fallen service members, when Milley tried to explain to Trump the damage that his interventions were doing.

In my story, I reported that Milley said, “Mr. President, you have to understand that the SEALs are a tribe within a larger tribe, the Navy. And it’s up to them to figure out what to do with Gallagher. You don’t want to intervene. This is up to the tribe. They have their own rules that they follow.”

Trump called Gallagher a hero and said he didn’t understand why he was being punished.

“Because he slit the throat of a wounded prisoner,” Milley said.

“The guy was going to die anyway,” Trump said.

Milley answered, “Mr. President, we have military ethics and laws about what happens in battle. We can’t do that kind of thing. It’s a war crime.” Trump said he didn’t understand “the big deal.” He went on, “You guys”—meaning combat soldiers—“are all just killers. What’s the difference?”

Milley then summoned one of his aides, a combat-veteran SEAL officer, to the president’s Air Force One office. Milley took hold of the Trident pin on the SEAL’s chest and asked him to describe its importance. The aide explained to Trump that, by tradition, only SEALs can decide, based on assessments of competence and character, whether one of their own should lose his pin. But the president’s mind was not changed. Gallagher kept his pin.

One day, in the first year of Trump’s presidency, I had lunch with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, in his White House office. I turned the discussion, as soon as I could, to the subject of his father-in-law’s character. I mentioned one of Trump’s recent outbursts and told Kushner that, in my opinion, the president’s behavior was damaging to the country. I cited, as I tend to do, what is in my view Trump’s original sin: his mockery of John McCain’s heroism.

This is where our conversation got strange, and noteworthy. Kushner answered in a way that made it seem as though he agreed with me. “No one can go as low as the president,” he said. “You shouldn’t even try.”

I found this baffling for a moment. But then I understood: Kushner wasn’t insulting his father-in-law. He was paying him a compliment. In Trump’s mind, traditional values—values including those embraced by the armed forces of the United States having to do with honor, self-sacrifice, and integrity—have no merit, no relevance, and no meaning.

About the Author

Jeffrey Goldberg is the editor in chief of The Atlantic and the moderator of Washington Week With The Atlantic.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, October 23, 2024 7:59 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

No wonder SECOND tried to bury this, and why he won't respond to this post ...

*****

Quote:
SECOND: Signym, when I see people like you

Uh huh.
Here's the thing: You don't know me. How do you know what I'm "like"?
You don't.
All you have is your imagination. You are reacting to a figment of your imagination.

Quote:
SECOND: I never knew any slave-owners, but they left a written record of their belief in being superior ...

SIGNY OMG!! Are you posting about ... YOURSELF??? WTH, man? That's all we ever read about!

Quote:
SECOND: ... I've got an opinion about Nazis...

SIGNY: Given your propensity to want to "annihilate" those "inferior" to you ... which is at least half the world ... I guess you qualify here too.

Quote:
SECOND: I have known thousands of Trumptards...

SIGNY: I doubt you've known 100 people your entire life.

Quote:
SECOND: blah blah blah... cheering for Putin... blah blah blah

SIGNY: Just bc I predict that Russia will win doesn't mean I'm "cheering him on". All it means is that I don't partake of your delusions.

*****

So, WTH, SECOND? Gonna post MORE about your superiority???

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Wednesday, October 23, 2024 8:36 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
No wonder SECOND tried to bury this, and why he won't respond to this post ...

This is your third chance to respond, Signym. And you are cheering Russia on, the infamous country that killed 64 million of its people, including 4 million Ukrainians back when it called itself the Soviet Union. Name changes didn't change its nature as a mass murderer. I can't say every Russian is an accessory to murder but pretty close to every Russian has amnesia about those murders, as do you, Signym.

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Just bc I predict that Russia will win doesn't mean I'm "cheering him on". All it means is that I don't partake of your delusions.

This is from Ukraine/Russian thread. Signym did not respond.
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=64887&mid=1
203850#1203850

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

So, just OOC what are your dark predictions for a Trump second term? I would like to know what worries you most, thanks.

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Wednesday, October 23, 2024 8:52 AM