fix

to

trying

just

 Lazy8 wrote: 
 
 

For this election—yes, yes it is!

kcar wrote:
Bonus!

 Lazy8 wrote:
Well yes, but she's also speaking the truth. 

 

 Red_Dragon wrote:
She's endorsing Gary Johnson.

Senior ex-CIA official: Putin made Trump 'an unwitting agent' of Russia

 NoEnzLefttoSplit wrote:

 
 

No rational explanation, just a gut feeling (for the last few months) that this will happen before November. Either a heart issue, stroke, or aneurysm. Though that fake tan, he does not look well to me.

 ScottN wrote:

 

 kurtster wrote: 
Not sure what you mean by borked, but the text display is now manspreading beyond the limits of my screen. I have to side-scroll to read a single line of text in someone's post. 

Our political system functions better when both the GOP and Dems are responsible, engaged with each other and functioning well. The GOP's slide into dysfunction started long before Trump's entry into the 2016 race, but I think he's accelerated its decline and put the news spotlight on it. 

If Trump's failure helps the GOP reinvent itself more effectively and more quickly, great. If his implosion causes the GOP to go into permanent decline, well you can't really blame Trump alone for that.

Hopefully both parties will try hard to address the anger and concerns of people who have felt screwed over by our politics and who turned that anger into support for Trump and Sanders. Supporters of Trump and Sanders have good reasons to be angry but support of "outsider" candidates who make unrealistic promises deepens their mistrust of our politics almost inevitably leads to belief that we can't fix our problems through normal political processes. 

 

 VV wrote: 
Band name!

So I wonder if Trump has a "Wheel of Crazy" that he spins each morning to help him decide his daily gaffe?

First, is this thread borked or is it just me ?

Second, instead of lighting up the repub thread, I'll just put it here cuz it does involve Trump.

So, if Trump implodes and destroys the repub party in the process, what's wrong with that ?  
 

Trump's "Greatest Mentor" was Red-Baiting Aide to Joseph McCarthy and Attorney for NYC Mob Families
(DemocracyNow)

Amy Goodman: We visited Wayne Barrett at his home. He talked about Trump's longtime lawyer and mentor, Roy Cohn....

Wayne Barrett: Roy himself told me they talked 15 times a day. But there’s no question that next to Fred Trump, Roy Cohn was the single greatest influence in Donald’s life. And Roy is incandescent evil.

 Lazy8 wrote: 
*At his final, pre-election press conference in November, he will take off his latex mask and reveal himself to be Andy Kaufman.

 Steely_D wrote: 
Actually that is what I was thinking, what if of course completely unbeknownst to him, he becomes the catalyst for the inevitable and much needed disintegration of the 2 party duopoly.  I mean Clinton was always going to be President anyway so it is not hurting anything. 

 kcar wrote: 
You know when apple trees come to the end of their life and throw off a lot of fruit? That's how I see Trump. An old man who knows his remaining days on the planet limited, someone whose physical prowess is probably already waning and is quite happy to take everyone else down with him in one final - and vain - burst of trying to prove himself. He is a bit like a tragic king in a Shakespearean tragedy, just making things worse from step to step and falling very rapidly from grace.  

ok, I might of mixed a couple of metaphors there, but you get the idea. He is certainly acting like a man who has got nothing to lose. A gambler who puts his entire wealth on one last bet, hoping to score big or die in the process.

 

Kurtster, I am having problems with the inline reply feature of RP's forums, so my response to your latest post of  8/4/16 @6:37 pm may look a bit unusual. Anyway...

You have a point about Scarborough's statement, but then again you don't because Trump asked that famous question during an interview back in March with Chris Matthews. I have provided a link to a video of that excerpt of the interview and another link to the transcript of the whole interview. 

Even if Trump never asked the foreign policy expert during a briefing that if we have nuclear weapons, why don't we use them, I am less assured of Trump's fitness after watching excerpts from the Matthews interview and from a Bloomberg TV interview (link to the excerpt of that latter interview provided below). 

Yes, when I first posted my remark about Trump apparently asking a foreign policy expert three times during one briefing that if we had nuclear weapons, why don't we use them, I did not state or indicate that my sole source for that apparent story was Joe Scarborough. On responding to your request for proof, I looked on Google and noted that a number of reliable news sources reported on Scarborough's nationally televised recounting of what he'd heard about the conversation between Trump and the foreign policy expert. 

So basically I was repeating (without attribution) the Scarborough statement. I did not look at your snopes.com link before posting—my bad. The snopes.com piece points out that Scarborough was not with Trump and the foreign policy expert when that briefing apparently took place several months before Scarborough talked about it this week, and that Scarborough learned of this story only a few days before repeating on air (according to an unnamed MSNBC executive). However—and this may be an incidental point—Scarborough never claimed to be in the room when Trump and the expert talked and never claimed that he learned of the apparent exchange around the time that it took place. 

You have a point in that any non-response from the Trump campaign to a reporter's statement is not the same as admission. This Huffington Post piece 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/scarborough-trump-nukes_us_57a1e47ae4b0693164c347d0

quotes Paul Manafort as denying on Wednesday 8/3/16 that the exchange between Trump and the foreign policy expert about the use of nuclear weapons took place:

Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort denied the claim on Wednesday morning.

“Absolutely not true,” he said in an interview with Fox News. “The idea that he’s trying to understand where to use nuclear weapons? It just didn’t happen. I was in the meeting, it didn’t happen.”

HOWEVER: the Huffington Post article also notes that in March of this year, Trump in interview with Bloomberg TV refused to rule out using nuclear weapons against ISIS and indicated that his refusal was based on the desire to have ISIS think that we might use them and to convey an image of unpredictability. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSnVb4i_ZZ4

The meat of his answer comes between 0:35 and 1:00  in and the interview moves away from the topic around 1:40 in. Trump says around the 1:35 mark that he thinks nuclear weapons should definitely be a last resort. 

Chris Matthews followed up that Bloomberg TV interview with his own questions during an interview with Trump on MSNBC:

http://www.msnbc.com/hardball/watch/donald-trump-won-t-take-nukes-off-the-table-655471171934

The Huffington Post piece I referenced above (again here ) notes that Trump did ask Matthews why we shouldn't use the nuclear weapons we have. Here's an excerpt of the Huffington Post piece (the links in the excerpt are included in the Huffington Post piece):

In a followup interview with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, Trump sounded unconcerned by the prospect of mutual assured destruction, going so far as to ask why the U.S. constructed nuclear weapons if it couldn’t use them.

“Then why are we making them? Why do we make them?” he asked.

“I was against Iraq. I’d be the last one to use them,” he added. (Trump initially supported the Iraq invasion.)



The "followup interview" link embedded in the Huffington Post piece excerpt leads to a Twitter post. You and others might find the transcript of the Trump-Matthews interview more reliable:
http://info.msnbc.com/_news/2016/03/30/35330907-full-transcript-msnbc-town-hall-with-donald-trump-moderated-by-chris-matthews?lite


Trump does come off during the Bloomberg TV and Matthews interviews as sounding more measured and intelligent than the Scarborough recounting of the apparent exchange between the foreign policy expert and Trump indicates. He does say that he would use nuclear weapons as a last resort. However, here is Matthew's response to Trump's rhetorical question about why shouldn't we use our nuclear weapons, copied from the transcript:

TRUMP:  Look, nuclear should be off the table.  But would there be a time when it could be used, possibly, possibly?

MATTHEWS:  OK.  The trouble is, when you said that, the whole world heard it.  David Cameron in Britain heard it.  The Japanese, where we bombed them in '45, heard it.  They're hearing a guy running for president of the United States talking of maybe using nuclear weapons.  Nobody wants to hear that about an American president.

TRUMP:  Then why are we making them?  Why do we make them?  We had (inaudible). 

MATTHEWS:  Because of the old mutual assured destruction, which Reagan hated and tried to get rid of.

So Trump has his own reasons for not explicitly ruling out nukes when fighting ISIS (keep the enemy guessing, convey an aura of unpredictability—Nixon tried to have the North Vietnamese think the same thing. I believe he and Kissinger called it "The Madman theory"). He also refuses ruling them out in Europe.
But my take is that Trump doesn't understand the theory of mutual assured destruction or that even the limited use of tactical nuclear weapons would severely and perhaps permanently damage our relations with allies and the rest of the world.  Despite Paul Manafort's assurance that from the Huffingington Post piece, I don't believe that Trump has any idea about when to use nuclear weapons.