Jake Tapper is a miserable partisan. He's the only journolist who stooped to personally tweet me when I called him out once. I hope his career crashes and burns one day.
Nope. When you're in agreement with 70% of the country it's no longer called being a partisan. It's called being a populist. Of the non-authoritarian variety. Watch as more strike downs of Republican gerrymandered districting plans turn the country back over to the people.
He's the only journolist who stooped to personally tweet me when I called him out once.
Oh the horror! He actually put in the effort to correct your almost certainly erroneous "call out." I don't think you've ever called something correctly once in your life - outside of anything related to chemistry other than biochemistry. It's good that there are reporters who understand that arrogant ignorance doesn't become less pernicious even when held to by lowly "common folk" like yourself.
I hope his career crashes and burns one day.
I hope your butt feels less hurt someday. Stop being vengeful. You seem to resent people for actually doing their jobs.
1. Today is the 150th anniversary of the impeachment of Andrew Johnson.
2. Questioning whether Jake Tapper wrote with intentional misdirection, anticipating pushback that he would then refute.
3. Wondering if Tapper is slavering for a Trump impeachment...
4. ... or just catering to his viewership and revealing what he thinks of them.
5. Wondering if Tapper actually didn't anticipate having to redirect attention to Bill Clinton and whether he wouldn't have tweeted like that if he'd known where he'd end up.
Tapper is probably smart enough to realize the first tweet would be interpreted by both sides to refer to Trump- otherwise he is unlikely to have written that sentence. It was tweet-bait.
From Althouse's comment- I pick 2, 3, and 4. Also, I don't interpret Nurbs as being fooled by the tweet- it looks to me that Tapper "pushed back" on a fellow traveler who was mocking Shapiro, not Tapper.
Tapper needs to get the Emmy for the most concerned face in cable TV. That man looks highly concerned about Trump's doings at all times. He has resting dog face while the hate Trump guests rant on and on.
But he used a supporter rather than a detractor to deliver his planned retort.
I wonder if that was intentional, to make himself seem even less partisan than his original "innocent" supposition that it was Bill Clinton he was talking about?
I read through the Tapper re-tweet and then over to the original Beschloss tweet as well.
Most followers on both tweets originally jumped to Trump. Looks like Tapper re-tweets many Beschloss history tweets - but WITHOUT comment for the most part. He chose to comment on this one.
So, I select Althouse Door No. 2: Jake Tapper wrote with intentional misdirection, anticipating pushback that he would then refute.
I doubt it was intentional- he probably didn't read the reply carefully enough before landing the retort. I had to read it twice before I realized that Nurbs was referring to someone else misinterpreting it.
You know, earlier today on your Trump-CPAC post I posited that you and I don't have much in common. But I retract that. You and I do have something in common. We're both prone to over-analyzing things. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Who knows what Jake Tapper wants - other than what most of the country wants: Truth and accountability. This is why the vast majority of the country, i.e. we, want him gone. The country is ready for it but the power he rules - along with his loudmouth supporters in the minority - don't. They may get there, once they acknowledge how truly destructive Trump is - as they were forced to realize on a much smaller scale how destructive W. was. But the country will move on with or without them. Disconnected numerical minorities cannot rule forever without bringing too much of the country down with them to allow itself to be dragged along any further with their mad scientist experiments.
I get Tapper's animus towards the President: Trump singles out his employer quite frequently. However, a majority of people recognize that CNN started the feud.
TTR: Yes. What's going on is simple determinism. It's hard to be objective about evolutionary political affiliation. To make it fit, you must deploy epicycles within epicycles. That's why the best go to response political news is: NothingBurger
1. Today is the 150th anniversary of the impeachment of Andrew Johnson.
2. Questioning whether Jake Tapper wrote with intentional misdirection, anticipating pushback that he would then refute.
3. Wondering if Tapper is slavering for a Trump impeachment...
4. ... or just catering to his viewership and revealing what he thinks of them.
5. Wondering if Tapper actually didn't anticipate having to redirect attention to Bill Clinton and whether he wouldn't have tweeted like that if he'd known where he'd end up.
chick: they started calling me that in 3rd grade. Howard the Duck came as an adult with the movie release. I can't believe you can be so cruel, is that again teh rulse
By "employer" you mean the American people who outsourced to the Electoral College hiring committee their decision to hire him? Yes, he singles out and shits on the American people quite regularly.
"Wondering if Tapper actually didn't anticipate having to redirect attention to Bill Clinton and whether he wouldn't have tweeted like that if he'd known where he'd end up."
Of course Tapper is savvy enough to predict the direction of the response. The whole thing reads 'You guys had the last one, now it's our turn if you want to be fair'. Pretty transparent.
Yes. What's going on is simple determinism. It's hard to be objective about evolutionary political affiliation.
Althouse seems to be watering the right-wing need to be objective about Trump's abject abomination of a presidency when the vast majority of the country sees it a mile away and just wants accountability and to minimize his oncoming train wreck. The right-wingers here don't seem to understand that the rest of the country doesn't have the political chip on their shoulder that they nurture with this immature, purely emotional need to see a nasty, rich loudmouth ranting on about their ideological grievances. It's not only that through him they can minimize and elide the facts. Through him they can disregard them altogether and just go on a distorted complaint-fest of 100% raw emotion and nihilism.
TTR said... The right-wingers here don't seem to understand that the rest of the country doesn't have the political chip on their shoulder that they nurture with this immature, purely emotional need to see a nasty, rich loudmouth ranting on about their ideological grievances.
Haha. Well, yes, we do.
But enough about Nancy Pelosi. It's the Democrats that really have to move on from her, isn't it?
And that's the trouble with stupidity, gilbar. Check out how EDH confuses not only a pronoun but Trump with Nancy Pelosi.
If he calls her a "rich nasty loudmouth" then he really has some issues. He must have been raised by docile angels who never missed an opportunity prove what pushovers they could be.
Abraham Lincoln was the first American President to be assassinated, but not the last. Then post a picture of JFK. Go for the full troll.. Americans like to be told the news of the day by overt trolls.
The Toothless Revolutionary said... "...You know, earlier today on your Trump-CPAC post I posited that you and I don't have much in common. But I retract that. You and I do have something in common. We're both prone to over-analyzing things."
Toothless Rev, I believe you could find many commonalities with Althouse if you opened up your perspective.
You are both American. There are many more non-Americans in the world, so you already share a smaller subset.
You both have access to the Internet. 49% of the world doesn't have internet access.
You both enjoy using the Internet to employ Free Speech. An internet stat claims that more than 40 percent of the global population live under regimes that do not allow freedom of the press.
You both are fluent in English. Only 20% of the world speaks it; indeed, in America those who speak a foreign language at home, 25.1 million (41 percent), told the Census Bureau that they speak English less than very well.
You are both white. I could be wrong on this, but you write rather white from what I see on the screen. Non-Hispanic whites totaled about 197,870,516, or 62.06% of the U.S. population.
Neither of you are Muslim. Muslims are 24% of the world population: a rather large group that neither of you belong to.
Neither of you are currently in prison. In 2016 there was 0.71% of the population was behind bars. So you are sharing a large group here, but it is always good not to be having your services sold for cigarettes.
You both can be very strong-willed in your opinions, and share a boldness in not wilting under what other people think of you.
I would imagine that a large percentage of the world would view you two as very, very similar.
Probably a lot of the world would have no idea of what you two even have to argue about.
Especially the 11% of the world experiencing hunger. You two might as well be trying to explain the difference between McDonald's and Burger King to them.
There are only so may times you can fold the sheet of paper in half until you physically can't fold it in half anymore.
Ah Jake. How many ways can I think "take a hike" whenever I see something by you.
No doubt little Jakey was squealing his widdle head off in horror!!!! in October 2016 when Trump responded to a question as to whether he would graciously accept the outcome of an election won by Hillary. The Trumpster said something along the lines of he'd have to think about it. Little Jakey and his mob of minions reacted as though Trump had shredded the Constitution.
Well the national electorate got up on the wrong side of the bed--as far as widdle Jakey is concerned--and it's been non stop BS and rebellion ever since. Projection is a progressive trait.
But I retract that. You and I do have something in common. We're both prone to over-analyzing things.
So Toothless considers himself too analytical. What an interesting self-criticism, self-approbation in sheep's clothing, as it were. And from the commenter whose sole self-assigned function is to deal out delusional opprobrium at every turn. As well as interesting I find it surprising, nay amusing, given the dearth of analysis typically on display under the Toothless Revolutionary banner.
But perhaps I am being not analytical enough. The augurs of Molloch probably considered their pontifications on the subject of a sheep's spotty liver and its relation to the will of the gods as analysis.
But you are as bitchy and opinionated as a 14-year old girl. You should remove the letters from your keyboard and replace them with eye-rolling emoticons, since that's basically the only form of self-expression that you understand and are familiar with.
It takes a remarkable degree of tonedeafness to write "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" in the context of Clinton's impeachment. That was when we learned what some of us would rather not have known, that sometimes a cigar is a sex toy.
Andrew Johnson SHOULD have been impeached. JFK (or whoever ghosted "Profiles In Courage" for him) was wrong to praise Sen. Edmund G. Ross for voting against removing Johnson from office. Johnson was the most "accidental" of presidents. Although he was a supporter of the Union (which was why Lincoln picked him as a running mate), he had Southern sympathies, and was opposeded to civil rights for Blacks. He never could have been elected President in 1864, an election in which pro-civil rights Republicans dominated Congress. But after Lincoln's assassination, Johnson used his position to obstruct Republican efforts to protect the civil rights of southern Blacks. Had Johnson been impeached it would have sent a strong message to supporters and opponents of civil rights.
In contrast, the impeachment of Clinton was based on his character flaws (in particular, perjury). As Americans have proved time and time again, if the President delivers the goods for which we elected him, we don't really care what kind of lying SOB he is. If the Democrats take control of the House in the 2018 elections, they should remember that. But they won't.
Andrew Johnson was impeached, but not "convicted." The question is if he should have been impeached on the grounds used.
Personally, I think he - not Buchanan - was the worst American president ever. Andrew Johnson was a Democrat who hated everybody and was cordially hated in return by just about everybody - including the revanchist Southerners he sided with. The almost 4 years of Andrew Johnson allowed the KKK, etc. to take root in the former Confederacy and achieve power that, if not exactly "nullified" the Civil War, made the Union victory almost meaningless for so many in the South and set the region, and indeed the nation, back for a century and more.
The radical Republicans in Congress wanted to punish the South after the Civil War. Neither Lincoln nor Johnson did. Lincoln's reconstruction plan was even more lenient on the South than Johnson's plan. When Johnson opposed their efforts to punish the South, Congress impeached him.
Blacks in the South were able to claim their civil rights from the period immediately after the war up until the election of 1876 because federal troops enforced the civil rights laws. It was only after the unholy bargain made to settle the election of 1876 that Jim Crow and White supremacy settled on the post war South.
Andrew Johnson was indeed deplorable - so much so that I would also wonder why he wouldn't be ranked dead last. Isn't Buchanan's infamy based on not preventing the Civil War? How preventable was that conflict anyway, though. But Johnson did indeed ensure that emancipation could not be immediately followed by complete enfranchisement and was instead followed by a hundred or so (depending on how you calculate it) more years of brutal race wars and civil conflict that we still to some degree or another live with to this day. He is a blight on the presidency - although one that Trump is doing his utmost to reach or even surpass.
But you are as bitchy and opinionated as a 14-year old girl. You should remove the letters from your keyboard and replace them with eye-rolling emoticons, since that's basically the only form of self-expression that you understand and are familiar with.
Like I said — the commenter whose sole self-assigned function is to deal out delusional opprobrium at every turn.
How gratifying it is when Toothless confirms his perceived low character with solid self-supplied evidence.
Check out the bitchy lil' ole email message that our resident bitch, Quaestor, scribbles out. What a paragon of civic engagement this little old bitch is! Such angry, long-winded scrawls haven't been seen in government (or government watch lists) since prolific writer Ted Kaczynski!
F*** you, Kay. You and Lord Zero have put us this position with your profligate spending on key interest groups (people who mostly don’t pay Federal taxes, btw) at the expense of hard-pressed middle-class people like me who can’t even afford a new car (and can hardly find a decent and cheap used car thanks to “Cash for Clunkers”, thank you very much, Barack Hussein Obama) If you think the sequestration, a mere 2.4% of last year’s record spending of 3.6 X 10^12 USD is tough now (one must realize how f’ed we really are when deficit spending is more easily handled using scientific notation), what will you say when the interest on the federal debt becomes the biggest line item in the budget… Budget? What the hell am I thinking, there hasn’t been a budget resolution brought to the Senate floor in almost four years -- in direct contravention of the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921 and the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, I might add. Fortunately for you and Harry Reid these two federal laws have no sanctions clause so you’re in no danger of the leg irons and orange jump suit awaiting me if I stray one iota from the laws you like to impose on the little people (you remember, the people whose duty is to pay up and shut up?). But I digress, the fact is the sequestration is minuscule in relative terms to what little people like me have to endure in this low-to-no growth economy your lord and master promised to solve in his first term, not to mention the creeping inflation that makes it nearly impossible to travel or even afford to eat. I’ve pared back my lifestyle at least 150% from the Bush days, therefore I don’t see why a bunch of smart people with fancy degrees can’t make do with 97 cents where you had a dollar before. Don’t knock it before you try it, you might even discover the Government can live a bit more cheaply and still not actually starve (I’ve learned Spaghetti-Os three nights a week helps make the occasional meal out with friends more affordable.)
And that's just THE FIRST PARAGRAPH! There are three more little gems just like this one.
Ahh. The state of the North Carolinian Republic is quite a thing to behold. There must be something in the water that Quaestor and his fellow North Carolina-based activist David Thompson share that make them feel a need to address their government in such a stunningly deranged and intemperate way.
TTR quotes something another commentator wrote on his blog five years ago this coming Thursday as if it were written just now - all his verbs are present tense - and thinks the other person is a "bitch"? Astonishing lack of self-awareness!
Right Weevil. I'm sure our esteemed anti-congressional kvetch has matured greatly in those five short years. I'm sure his character has developed beyond measure since then. Everyone knows that, in all their self-awareness, since those five years passed, anti-congressional agitator Quaestor was just a wee little lad, with much to learn and much education - both personal and professional - to get. For crying out loud, he wasn't even advanced enough in years to know about "scientific notation" when he wrote that letter! He was probably not even old enough to drink, to die for his country or even to grow a pubic hair. Let's give him a break!
Or maybe, like fellow Republican Henry Hyde, he thought that actions committed in his 40s could be called "youthful indiscretions." Lol! You guys are hilarious.
Let's hear it for all the maturity Quaestor has gained since writing that letter. His maturation is made evident by all the much more mature and temperate blog posts he's uploaded since then. Which number precisely zero.
It's his most recent entry. So I naturally conclude that it's still the most recent reflection of his mindset and capacity for conflict resolution.
@Tootless: At 6:48 pm you showed yourself capable of posting a cogent comment relevant to the topic under consideration. Then you spoil it with a whole bunch of ad hominem crap that only you and the crapee care about or even understand. Why?
Because not taking crap is as important as posting cogent comments. I wish it were not so but it seems it is. Maybe it's not. Maybe I take things personally that I shouldn't. But I do know that cogent comments only get someone so far in life. Apologies for offending you with my descent into a different kind of arena.
Again, astonishing lack of self-awareness: Quaestor may say offensive things now and then, but they tend to get lost in the huge pile of assholery and obvious lies (a "vast majority" of Americans oppose Trump?!) piled up by TTR on damned near every thread. That boy just ain't right in the head.
Well Weevil, since you're so invested in preventing "piling up" you might want to take note of your boy FullMoon - who likes to pile in with the sloppiest of sloppy seconds and thirds and fourths there is. Not only is his passage nearly five years post-date, his is going on nearly eight. But of course he's one of your boys so that's ok - even though he can't even come up with an original thought of his own and seems to specialize in regurgitating the distant past for his unoriginal assholery.
And yes, a large, significant majority are not into Trump. His support is around 30%. That's low. If you got your Republicans to gerrymander less then maybe you'd suffer under fewer delusions surrounding his alleged popularity. Pennsylvania just de-gerrymandered their districts and Republican false "advantage" dropped from like two-thirds to dead even. Amazing what happens when the politicians no longer get to pick the voters.
How many misrepresentations can one troll pack into an average-sized comment? Let's see: 1. FullMoon is not one of "my boys". He (she?) is a mere name to me, who has never stood out one way or the other as worth reading or worth avoiding, unlike TTR, who combines high quantity with low quality in a way that puts him in a class with Inga and one or two others. 2. There is no one here I consider an ally or one of my "boys", except possibly YoungHegelian, whom I knew in real life long before I ran into him here. Even that makes him more friend than ally, though we do tend to agree on a lot of issues. Sensible people usually do. 3. Gahrie has already corrected the lie about Trump's approval rating - it is much higher than 30%, apparently around 50%, and higher than Obama's 8 years ago. Possibly much higher: there is huge social pressure to pretend one approves of cool Obama, and disapproves of uncool Trump, even if one doesn't, and that undoubtedly skews the polls at least a little bit. 4. Even if it were 30%, that hardly means that "the vast majority of the country . . . want him gone". To be "vast", a majority surely needs to be at least 80%, better 85% or 90%. Otherwise it's merely "solid" or "substantial". Vast is a really strong word, totally unjustified in this case. 5. Disapproving of Trump, as roughly 50% of Americans do, is hardly the same as "want[ing] him gone". A huge percentage of those ~50% realize that impeaching him without far more evidence of wrongdoing than we have seen would cause social chaos at best, civil war at worst, assassinating him would be extraordinarily evil and extraordinarily stupid, and undoubtedly bring about civil war, and even having him die of natural causes would leave Pence as president - not a good thing for the anti-Trumpers. 6. Gerrymandering has been going on for decades, and the Democrats have traditionally been far more shameless and skillful about it. In 1982, the Democrats in California managed to turn a 49.9% vote in congressional elections into 60% of the seats, a gain of nine seats, by the most blatant and open kind of gerrymandering. "Congressman Burton would boast that the bizarrely shaped map, which included a 385-sided district, was 'My contribution to modern art'." Details here. Democrats have only turned against gerrymandering now that Republicans control most state legislatures, and still support it in those they still control. 7. I note that TTR does not deny writing what FullMoon quotes in his 9:21pm comment, only objects that it's eight years old. Does he not see that an eight-year-old quotation demonstrating that he is nothing but a troll is far more damning, and far more pertinent, than a five-year-old quotation from a totally different site, on a totally unrelated subject? "My opponent has admitted to trolling on this very site" is far more damning than "My opponent wrote something really stupid on an unrelated subject long ago and far away" (even assuming it was stupid - I didn't read enough to judge, because I don't care what someone I don't know writes elsewhere). To conclude, TTR's last comment, like most of his comments here, is about as valuable as Jual Vimax Obat Pembesar Penis's last comment, which at least has a penis to amuse us, along with a TTR level of gibberish.
You know, Ritmo, I hear what you're saying about the take no crap, but...
What you do, or essay to do, is rhetorical arclighting.
Think smart bomb. Or mini-nuke, if you must have it so. But one and done. Don't bomb the rubble. Or, as Cpl Hicks said to Lt Ripley, "You're just grinding metal! C'mon, ease down!"
As Allan Ginsburg once told me at a poetry contest, his only "secret" or advice to a young writer was, Brevity. The fewest words.
Take some time and whittle down your posts - believe it or not, you'll hit harder that way. Fewer posts is fine, kill fewer Vietnamese peasants and water buffalo that way, while taking out the tunnel entrances.
Plus we have sooo much less to read! I mean, I'm way behind on the blog, been busy, but I'm going backwards from today and I'm like WTF. But that's just me.
I do think you get caught up in your own son et lumiere, and maybe enjoy the combat too much, the destruction, the grinding the foe, for its own sake - but the game is not annihilation, its capturing the flag. The point is to make and win arguments - and the audience.
Look at J. Farmer. I find his defeatist politics, to use a current cliche,autistic - but that doesn't mean he doesn't come to play. He's read shit. He's compiled evidence. He's a debater, on his hobbyhorse, picks his spots. He's very hard to rattle. Scores what according to the rules in his mind are points.
Very uptight though. "Oh, ho, personalities are illogical, irrelevant in a lady's salon!" like a Vulcan or a Dalek, or, as he has said, like someone who has little to do with women. He needs to tie one on methinks, have a stick of tea, let his hair down. (For that matter, so do we all.)
The ultimate goal of a salon, Which Althouse is, is to shape minds through conversation, persuasion, discourse, recourse, logic, rhetoric, English and metoric. It has been suggested that we here at the ol' Microcosmic Watering Hole have more influence than we know. As such, spewing one-way traffic is not to the point.
With Pascal, I'm sorry I haven't had the time to shorten this.
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76 comments:
Jake Tapper is a miserable partisan. He's the only journolist who stooped to personally tweet me when I called him out once. I hope his career crashes and burns one day.
Sure he was.
Maybe Nurbs was being sarcastic.
Did this post have a point?
Jake Tapper is a miserable partisan.
Nope. When you're in agreement with 70% of the country it's no longer called being a partisan. It's called being a populist. Of the non-authoritarian variety. Watch as more strike downs of Republican gerrymandered districting plans turn the country back over to the people.
He's the only journolist who stooped to personally tweet me when I called him out once.
Oh the horror! He actually put in the effort to correct your almost certainly erroneous "call out." I don't think you've ever called something correctly once in your life - outside of anything related to chemistry other than biochemistry. It's good that there are reporters who understand that arrogant ignorance doesn't become less pernicious even when held to by lowly "common folk" like yourself.
I hope his career crashes and burns one day.
I hope your butt feels less hurt someday. Stop being vengeful. You seem to resent people for actually doing their jobs.
This post has many points:
1. Today is the 150th anniversary of the impeachment of Andrew Johnson.
2. Questioning whether Jake Tapper wrote with intentional misdirection, anticipating pushback that he would then refute.
3. Wondering if Tapper is slavering for a Trump impeachment...
4. ... or just catering to his viewership and revealing what he thinks of them.
5. Wondering if Tapper actually didn't anticipate having to redirect attention to Bill Clinton and whether he wouldn't have tweeted like that if he'd known where he'd end up.
6. ...
Tapper is probably smart enough to realize the first tweet would be interpreted by both sides to refer to Trump- otherwise he is unlikely to have written that sentence. It was tweet-bait.
From Althouse's comment- I pick 2, 3, and 4. Also, I don't interpret Nurbs as being fooled by the tweet- it looks to me that Tapper "pushed back" on a fellow traveler who was mocking Shapiro, not Tapper.
When you're in agreement with 70% of the country
Yeah, they say you're an asswipe.
Tapper needs to get the Emmy for the most concerned face in cable TV. That man looks highly concerned about Trump's
doings at all times. He has resting dog face while the hate Trump guests rant on and on.
Most on the internet would have written:
I was referring to Clinton, moron.
So a well done to young Tapper.
Tapper was trolling with that tweet.
But he used a supporter rather than a detractor to deliver his planned retort.
I wonder if that was intentional, to make himself seem even less partisan than his original "innocent" supposition that it was Bill Clinton he was talking about?
I read through the Tapper re-tweet and then over to the original Beschloss tweet as well.
Most followers on both tweets originally jumped to Trump. Looks like Tapper re-tweets many Beschloss history tweets - but WITHOUT comment for the most part. He chose to comment on this one.
So, I select Althouse Door No. 2: Jake Tapper wrote with intentional misdirection, anticipating pushback that he would then refute.
Trivia question --
So who was Tapper tapping before Bill Clinton got to her? Or maybe after, I can't remember which.
EDH,
I doubt it was intentional- he probably didn't read the reply carefully enough before landing the retort. I had to read it twice before I realized that Nurbs was referring to someone else misinterpreting it.
This post has many points:...
You know, earlier today on your Trump-CPAC post I posited that you and I don't have much in common. But I retract that. You and I do have something in common. We're both prone to over-analyzing things. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Who knows what Jake Tapper wants - other than what most of the country wants: Truth and accountability. This is why the vast majority of the country, i.e. we, want him gone. The country is ready for it but the power he rules - along with his loudmouth supporters in the minority - don't. They may get there, once they acknowledge how truly destructive Trump is - as they were forced to realize on a much smaller scale how destructive W. was. But the country will move on with or without them. Disconnected numerical minorities cannot rule forever without bringing too much of the country down with them to allow itself to be dragged along any further with their mad scientist experiments.
6. Is Jake Tapper Nurbs?
Tapper doing Trump Ju Jit Sue. We all know he meant Trump but used Clinton as plausibility in a classic strawman with a boobie-trap.
I get Tapper's animus towards the President: Trump singles out his employer quite frequently. However, a majority of people recognize that CNN started the feud.
TTR: Yes. What's going on is simple determinism. It's hard to be objective about evolutionary political affiliation. To make it fit, you must deploy epicycles within epicycles. That's why the best go to response political news is: NothingBurger
in addition to epicycles, some use the Toddler mantra of He did it First.
6... Tapper is flaunting his knowledge of recent American history.
Howeird
Ann Althouse said...
This post has many points:
1. Today is the 150th anniversary of the impeachment of Andrew Johnson.
2. Questioning whether Jake Tapper wrote with intentional misdirection, anticipating pushback that he would then refute.
3. Wondering if Tapper is slavering for a Trump impeachment...
4. ... or just catering to his viewership and revealing what he thinks of them.
5. Wondering if Tapper actually didn't anticipate having to redirect attention to Bill Clinton and whether he wouldn't have tweeted like that if he'd known where he'd end up.
6. ...
My thoughts too. Exactly. In order.
chick: they started calling me that in 3rd grade. Howard the Duck came as an adult with the movie release. I can't believe you can be so cruel, is that again teh rulse
Trump singles out his employer quite frequently.
By "employer" you mean the American people who outsourced to the Electoral College hiring committee their decision to hire him? Yes, he singles out and shits on the American people quite regularly.
"Wondering if Tapper actually didn't anticipate having to redirect attention to Bill Clinton and whether he wouldn't have tweeted like that if he'd known where he'd end up."
Of course Tapper is savvy enough to predict the direction of the response. The whole thing reads 'You guys had the last one, now it's our turn if you want to be fair'. Pretty transparent.
Yes. What's going on is simple determinism. It's hard to be objective about evolutionary political affiliation.
Althouse seems to be watering the right-wing need to be objective about Trump's abject abomination of a presidency when the vast majority of the country sees it a mile away and just wants accountability and to minimize his oncoming train wreck. The right-wingers here don't seem to understand that the rest of the country doesn't have the political chip on their shoulder that they nurture with this immature, purely emotional need to see a nasty, rich loudmouth ranting on about their ideological grievances. It's not only that through him they can minimize and elide the facts. Through him they can disregard them altogether and just go on a distorted complaint-fest of 100% raw emotion and nihilism.
If he was trolling, that wouldn't seem to be appropriate for someone in his position.
TTR said...
The right-wingers here don't seem to understand that the rest of the country doesn't have the political chip on their shoulder that they nurture with this immature, purely emotional need to see a nasty, rich loudmouth ranting on about their ideological grievances.
Haha. Well, yes, we do.
But enough about Nancy Pelosi. It's the Democrats that really have to move on from her, isn't it?
By "employer" you mean the American people ?
that's the Trouble With Pronouns; if someone is stupid, they don't know what person the pronoun is referring to
And that's the trouble with stupidity, gilbar. Check out how EDH confuses not only a pronoun but Trump with Nancy Pelosi.
If he calls her a "rich nasty loudmouth" then he really has some issues. He must have been raised by docile angels who never missed an opportunity prove what pushovers they could be.
TTR, you really think that my 'someone' refers to EDH?
sounds like we need to stop using sophisticated things like pronouns around you
Abraham Lincoln was the first American President to be assassinated, but not the last. Then post a picture of JFK. Go for the full troll.. Americans like to be told the news of the day by overt trolls.
Oh, you're a clever one, gilbar.
Just don't go telling anyone how clever you are. They might not believe you.
Your Trumpian inability to sense the smell of your own stink is impressive.
Annnnd TTTR extrudes merde all over yet another comment thread.
"If he was trolling, that wouldn't seem to be appropriate for someone in his position."
When you're in the opposition to the Troller in Chief it seems perfectly appropriate. Fight fire with fire.
No, he's not. If he was he would have named Clinton. I call BS.
The Toothless Revolutionary said...
"...You know, earlier today on your Trump-CPAC post I posited that you and I don't have much in common. But I retract that. You and I do have something in common. We're both prone to over-analyzing things."
Toothless Rev, I believe you could find many commonalities with Althouse if you opened up your perspective.
You are both American. There are many more non-Americans in the world, so you already share a smaller subset.
You both have access to the Internet. 49% of the world doesn't have internet access.
You both enjoy using the Internet to employ Free Speech. An internet stat claims that more than 40 percent of the global population live under regimes that do not allow freedom of the press.
You both are fluent in English. Only 20% of the world speaks it; indeed, in America those who speak a foreign language at home, 25.1 million (41 percent), told the Census Bureau that they speak English less than very well.
You are both white. I could be wrong on this, but you write rather white from what I see on the screen. Non-Hispanic whites totaled about 197,870,516, or 62.06% of the U.S. population.
Neither of you are Muslim. Muslims are 24% of the world population: a rather large group that neither of you belong to.
Neither of you are currently in prison. In 2016 there was 0.71% of the population was behind bars. So you are sharing a large group here, but it is always good not to be having your services sold for cigarettes.
You both can be very strong-willed in your opinions, and share a boldness in not wilting under what other people think of you.
I would imagine that a large percentage of the world would view you two as very, very similar.
Probably a lot of the world would have no idea of what you two even have to argue about.
Especially the 11% of the world experiencing hunger. You two might as well be trying to explain the difference between McDonald's and Burger King to them.
There are only so may times you can fold the sheet of paper in half until you physically can't fold it in half anymore.
The Germans have a word for this.
William: "Abraham Lincoln was the first American President to be assassinated, but not the last. Then post a picture of JFK."
I hadn't realized until recently that it wasn't a communist neer-do-well who killed JFK, it was....you guessed it..the NRA.
At least, according to some Dallas dems....
The More You Learn.....
gilbar: "TTR, you really think that my 'someone' refers to EDH?
sounds like we need to stop using sophisticated things like pronouns around you"
Pronouns are literally nothing more than violent language weapons wielded by white supremacist members of the patriarchy.
Obviously.
Ah Jake. How many ways can I think "take a hike" whenever I see something by you.
No doubt little Jakey was squealing his widdle head off in horror!!!! in October 2016 when Trump responded to a question as to whether he would graciously accept the outcome of an election won by Hillary. The Trumpster said something along the lines of he'd have to think about it. Little Jakey and his mob of minions reacted as though Trump had shredded the Constitution.
Well the national electorate got up on the wrong side of the bed--as far as widdle Jakey is concerned--and it's been non stop BS and rebellion ever since. Projection is a progressive trait.
If only me and those other strong-willed types could get along with each other better.
The rest of the post reminded me of this pretty cool book.
But I retract that. You and I do have something in common. We're both prone to over-analyzing things.
So Toothless considers himself too analytical. What an interesting self-criticism, self-approbation in sheep's clothing, as it were. And from the commenter whose sole self-assigned function is to deal out delusional opprobrium at every turn. As well as interesting I find it surprising, nay amusing, given the dearth of analysis typically on display under the Toothless Revolutionary banner.
But perhaps I am being not analytical enough. The augurs of Molloch probably considered their pontifications on the subject of a sheep's spotty liver and its relation to the will of the gods as analysis.
But perhaps I am being not analytical enough.
You can say that again. And over and over again.
But you are as bitchy and opinionated as a 14-year old girl. You should remove the letters from your keyboard and replace them with eye-rolling emoticons, since that's basically the only form of self-expression that you understand and are familiar with.
It takes a remarkable degree of tonedeafness to write "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" in the context of Clinton's impeachment. That was when we learned what some of us would rather not have known, that sometimes a cigar is a sex toy.
I think the intelligence community would call what Tapper said a "plausible denial."
Andrew Johnson SHOULD have been impeached. JFK (or whoever ghosted "Profiles In Courage" for him) was wrong to praise Sen. Edmund G. Ross for voting against removing Johnson from office. Johnson was the most "accidental" of presidents. Although he was a supporter of the Union (which was why Lincoln picked him as a running mate), he had Southern sympathies, and was opposeded to civil rights for Blacks. He never could have been elected President in 1864, an election in which pro-civil rights Republicans dominated Congress. But after Lincoln's assassination, Johnson used his position to obstruct Republican efforts to protect the civil rights of southern Blacks. Had Johnson been impeached it would have sent a strong message to supporters and opponents of civil rights.
In contrast, the impeachment of Clinton was based on his character flaws (in particular, perjury). As Americans have proved time and time again, if the President delivers the goods for which we elected him, we don't really care what kind of lying SOB he is. If the Democrats take control of the House in the 2018 elections, they should remember that. But they won't.
Heh, heh.
Andrew Johnson was impeached, but not "convicted." The question is if he should have been impeached on the grounds used.
Personally, I think he - not Buchanan - was the worst American president ever. Andrew Johnson was a Democrat who hated everybody and was cordially hated in return by just about everybody - including the revanchist Southerners he sided with. The almost 4 years of Andrew Johnson allowed the KKK, etc. to take root in the former Confederacy and achieve power that, if not exactly "nullified" the Civil War, made the Union victory almost meaningless for so many in the South and set the region, and indeed the nation, back for a century and more.
"Had Johnson been impeached it would have sent a strong message to supporters and opponents of civil rights."
That's a good point.
Chernow's Grant biography discusses that quite a bit,
The radical Republicans in Congress wanted to punish the South after the Civil War. Neither Lincoln nor Johnson did. Lincoln's reconstruction plan was even more lenient on the South than Johnson's plan. When Johnson opposed their efforts to punish the South, Congress impeached him.
Blacks in the South were able to claim their civil rights from the period immediately after the war up until the election of 1876 because federal troops enforced the civil rights laws. It was only after the unholy bargain made to settle the election of 1876 that Jim Crow and White supremacy settled on the post war South.
Even then the blacks had some rights in the federal government until Wilson resegregated the Civil Service.
Michael Beschloss: "Andrew Johnson became the first President of the United States to be impeached, 150 years ago tomorrow."
Jake the Snake Tapper: "But not the last." The audacity of hope.
Andrew Johnson was indeed deplorable - so much so that I would also wonder why he wouldn't be ranked dead last. Isn't Buchanan's infamy based on not preventing the Civil War? How preventable was that conflict anyway, though. But Johnson did indeed ensure that emancipation could not be immediately followed by complete enfranchisement and was instead followed by a hundred or so (depending on how you calculate it) more years of brutal race wars and civil conflict that we still to some degree or another live with to this day. He is a blight on the presidency - although one that Trump is doing his utmost to reach or even surpass.
But you are as bitchy and opinionated as a 14-year old girl. You should remove the letters from your keyboard and replace them with eye-rolling emoticons, since that's basically the only form of self-expression that you understand and are familiar with.
Like I said — the commenter whose sole self-assigned function is to deal out delusional opprobrium at every turn.
How gratifying it is when Toothless confirms his perceived low character with solid self-supplied evidence.
Tapper: "I was referring to Clinton."
Which Clinton?
Keep up that bitchiness, Quaestor. Soon you'll be auditioning for a role in a newly revived Gilmore Girls or a Heathers reboot!
And no, being a bitch is not the sign of elevated moral character that you ascribe to your bitchy, opprobriating, smug little self.
Check out the bitchy lil' ole email message that our resident bitch, Quaestor, scribbles out. What a paragon of civic engagement this little old bitch is! Such angry, long-winded scrawls haven't been seen in government (or government watch lists) since prolific writer Ted Kaczynski!
F*** you, Kay. You and Lord Zero have put us this position with your profligate spending on key interest groups (people who mostly don’t pay Federal taxes, btw) at the expense of hard-pressed middle-class people like me who can’t even afford a new car (and can hardly find a decent and cheap used car thanks to “Cash for Clunkers”, thank you very much, Barack Hussein Obama) If you think the sequestration, a mere 2.4% of last year’s record spending of 3.6 X 10^12 USD is tough now (one must realize how f’ed we really are when deficit spending is more easily handled using scientific notation), what will you say when the interest on the federal debt becomes the biggest line item in the budget… Budget? What the hell am I thinking, there hasn’t been a budget resolution brought to the Senate floor in almost four years -- in direct contravention of the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921 and the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, I might add. Fortunately for you and Harry Reid these two federal laws have no sanctions clause so you’re in no danger of the leg irons and orange jump suit awaiting me if I stray one iota from the laws you like to impose on the little people (you remember, the people whose duty is to pay up and shut up?). But I digress, the fact is the sequestration is minuscule in relative terms to what little people like me have to endure in this low-to-no growth economy your lord and master promised to solve in his first term, not to mention the creeping inflation that makes it nearly impossible to travel or even afford to eat. I’ve pared back my lifestyle at least 150% from the Bush days, therefore I don’t see why a bunch of smart people with fancy degrees can’t make do with 97 cents where you had a dollar before. Don’t knock it before you try it, you might even discover the Government can live a bit more cheaply and still not actually starve (I’ve learned Spaghetti-Os three nights a week helps make the occasional meal out with friends more affordable.)
And that's just THE FIRST PARAGRAPH! There are three more little gems just like this one.
Ahh. The state of the North Carolinian Republic is quite a thing to behold. There must be something in the water that Quaestor and his fellow North Carolina-based activist David Thompson share that make them feel a need to address their government in such a stunningly deranged and intemperate way.
TTR quotes something another commentator wrote on his blog five years ago this coming Thursday as if it were written just now - all his verbs are present tense - and thinks the other person is a "bitch"? Astonishing lack of self-awareness!
Right Weevil. I'm sure our esteemed anti-congressional kvetch has matured greatly in those five short years. I'm sure his character has developed beyond measure since then. Everyone knows that, in all their self-awareness, since those five years passed, anti-congressional agitator Quaestor was just a wee little lad, with much to learn and much education - both personal and professional - to get. For crying out loud, he wasn't even advanced enough in years to know about "scientific notation" when he wrote that letter! He was probably not even old enough to drink, to die for his country or even to grow a pubic hair. Let's give him a break!
Or maybe, like fellow Republican Henry Hyde, he thought that actions committed in his 40s could be called "youthful indiscretions." Lol! You guys are hilarious.
Let's hear it for all the maturity Quaestor has gained since writing that letter. His maturation is made evident by all the much more mature and temperate blog posts he's uploaded since then. Which number precisely zero.
It's his most recent entry. So I naturally conclude that it's still the most recent reflection of his mindset and capacity for conflict resolution.
And finally, I'm already aware of myself.
Whether you all are aware of Queestor, and the screeds he types while sitting on his keister, that's a different story.
It's 9:50 PM. Do you know where your North Carolina registered voter is?
@Tootless: At 6:48 pm you showed yourself capable of posting a cogent comment relevant to the topic under consideration. Then you spoil it with a whole bunch of ad hominem crap that only you and the crapee care about or even understand. Why?
Because not taking crap is as important as posting cogent comments. I wish it were not so but it seems it is. Maybe it's not. Maybe I take things personally that I shouldn't. But I do know that cogent comments only get someone so far in life. Apologies for offending you with my descent into a different kind of arena.
Again, astonishing lack of self-awareness: Quaestor may say offensive things now and then, but they tend to get lost in the huge pile of assholery and obvious lies (a "vast majority" of Americans oppose Trump?!) piled up by TTR on damned near every thread. That boy just ain't right in the head.
Well Weevil, since you're so invested in preventing "piling up" you might want to take note of your boy FullMoon - who likes to pile in with the sloppiest of sloppy seconds and thirds and fourths there is. Not only is his passage nearly five years post-date, his is going on nearly eight. But of course he's one of your boys so that's ok - even though he can't even come up with an original thought of his own and seems to specialize in regurgitating the distant past for his unoriginal assholery.
And yes, a large, significant majority are not into Trump. His support is around 30%. That's low. If you got your Republicans to gerrymander less then maybe you'd suffer under fewer delusions surrounding his alleged popularity. Pennsylvania just de-gerrymandered their districts and Republican false "advantage" dropped from like two-thirds to dead even. Amazing what happens when the politicians no longer get to pick the voters.
His support is around 30%. That's low
The numbers I see show Trump close to 50% and with higher numbers than Obama at this point in their presidencies.
How many misrepresentations can one troll pack into an average-sized comment? Let's see:
1. FullMoon is not one of "my boys". He (she?) is a mere name to me, who has never stood out one way or the other as worth reading or worth avoiding, unlike TTR, who combines high quantity with low quality in a way that puts him in a class with Inga and one or two others.
2. There is no one here I consider an ally or one of my "boys", except possibly YoungHegelian, whom I knew in real life long before I ran into him here. Even that makes him more friend than ally, though we do tend to agree on a lot of issues. Sensible people usually do.
3. Gahrie has already corrected the lie about Trump's approval rating - it is much higher than 30%, apparently around 50%, and higher than Obama's 8 years ago. Possibly much higher: there is huge social pressure to pretend one approves of cool Obama, and disapproves of uncool Trump, even if one doesn't, and that undoubtedly skews the polls at least a little bit.
4. Even if it were 30%, that hardly means that "the vast majority of the country . . . want him gone". To be "vast", a majority surely needs to be at least 80%, better 85% or 90%. Otherwise it's merely "solid" or "substantial". Vast is a really strong word, totally unjustified in this case.
5. Disapproving of Trump, as roughly 50% of Americans do, is hardly the same as "want[ing] him gone". A huge percentage of those ~50% realize that impeaching him without far more evidence of wrongdoing than we have seen would cause social chaos at best, civil war at worst, assassinating him would be extraordinarily evil and extraordinarily stupid, and undoubtedly bring about civil war, and even having him die of natural causes would leave Pence as president - not a good thing for the anti-Trumpers.
6. Gerrymandering has been going on for decades, and the Democrats have traditionally been far more shameless and skillful about it. In 1982, the Democrats in California managed to turn a 49.9% vote in congressional elections into 60% of the seats, a gain of nine seats, by the most blatant and open kind of gerrymandering. "Congressman Burton would boast that the bizarrely shaped map, which included a 385-sided district, was 'My contribution to modern art'." Details here. Democrats have only turned against gerrymandering now that Republicans control most state legislatures, and still support it in those they still control.
7. I note that TTR does not deny writing what FullMoon quotes in his 9:21pm comment, only objects that it's eight years old. Does he not see that an eight-year-old quotation demonstrating that he is nothing but a troll is far more damning, and far more pertinent, than a five-year-old quotation from a totally different site, on a totally unrelated subject? "My opponent has admitted to trolling on this very site" is far more damning than "My opponent wrote something really stupid on an unrelated subject long ago and far away" (even assuming it was stupid - I didn't read enough to judge, because I don't care what someone I don't know writes elsewhere).
To conclude, TTR's last comment, like most of his comments here, is about as valuable as Jual Vimax Obat Pembesar Penis's last comment, which at least has a penis to amuse us, along with a TTR level of gibberish.
Humperdink said...
As I posted 10 hours ago, when the Ritster appears
the thread is dead. Need evidence? Read the previous
30 or so comments. Need more evidence? Wait for his
next guest appearance.
4/6/13, 6:36 AM
Doofus gets older, but never grows up.SAD!
@Althouse: Isn't there some stuff to be deleted here -- even if the commenter doesn't add extra spaces?
Just asking.
You know, Ritmo, I hear what you're saying about the take no crap, but...
What you do, or essay to do, is rhetorical arclighting.
Think smart bomb. Or mini-nuke, if you must have it so. But one and done. Don't bomb the rubble. Or, as Cpl Hicks said to Lt Ripley, "You're just grinding metal! C'mon, ease down!"
As Allan Ginsburg once told me at a poetry contest, his only "secret" or advice to a young writer was, Brevity. The fewest words.
Take some time and whittle down your posts - believe it or not, you'll hit harder that way. Fewer posts is fine, kill fewer Vietnamese peasants and water buffalo that way, while taking out the tunnel entrances.
Plus we have sooo much less to read! I mean, I'm way behind on the blog, been busy, but I'm going backwards from today and I'm like WTF. But that's just me.
I do think you get caught up in your own son et lumiere, and maybe enjoy the combat too much, the destruction, the grinding the foe, for its own sake - but the game is not annihilation, its capturing the flag. The point is to make and win arguments - and the audience.
Look at J. Farmer. I find his defeatist politics, to use a current cliche,autistic - but that doesn't mean he doesn't come to play. He's read shit. He's compiled evidence. He's a debater, on his hobbyhorse, picks his spots. He's very hard to rattle. Scores what according to the rules in his mind are points.
Very uptight though. "Oh, ho, personalities are illogical, irrelevant in a lady's salon!" like a Vulcan or a Dalek, or, as he has said, like someone who has little to do with women. He needs to tie one on methinks, have a stick of tea, let his hair down. (For that matter, so do we all.)
The ultimate goal of a salon, Which Althouse is, is to shape minds through conversation, persuasion, discourse, recourse, logic, rhetoric, English and metoric. It has been suggested that we here at the ol' Microcosmic Watering Hole have more influence than we know. As such, spewing one-way traffic is not to the point.
With Pascal, I'm sorry I haven't had the time to shorten this.
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