Asked if the Republican Party in the Trump years has become an outfit free of governing ideas, Stevens went even further: “It was all a lie.”
He noted that this was word-for-word the title of his forthcoming book, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump.
The modern GOP, he said, never truly cared about the ideas it claimed to care about.
This was a stunning indictment coming from a longtime political consultant who had toiled on five Republican presidential campaigns and numerous Senate and gubernatorial races.
“The Republican Party has been a cartel,” Stevens said excitedly. “And no one asks a cartel, ‘What’s your ideological purpose?’ You don’t ask OPEC, ‘What’s your ideology?’ You don’t ask a drug gang, ‘What’s your program?’
The Republicans exist for the pursuit of power for no purpose.”
He huffed that the Republican Party had not merely drifted away from its core positions, as sometimes occurs with political parties: “Fair trade, balanced budgets, character, family values, standing up to foreign adversaries like Russia—we’re all against that now.
You have to ask, ‘Does someone abandon deeply held beliefs in three or four years?’
No. It means you didn’t ever hold them.” He added: “I feel like a guy who was working for Bernie Madoff.”
✁
Acknowledging his role, Stevens writes, “So yes, blame me.
Blame me when you look around and see a dysfunctional political system and a Republican Party that has gone insane.”
The book offers one overarching prescription for the GOP: “Burn it to the ground and start over.”
One of the most frustrating things, for both Democrats and the investigative journalists who worked tirelessly to expose Donald Trump’s seemingly unending frauds, was how little Trump’s base seemed to care that he was a liar and a cheat.
✁
Trump cheated people who worked for him, finding ways to refuse to pay them.
He spent decades engaged in tax fraud, reaping hundreds of millions through the process.
Trump’s claims to be a billionaire appear the inverse of reality, where he was a billion dollars in the red, making him the photonegative of a billionaire.
Trump University was a scam, described in court as preying “upon the elderly and uneducated to separate them from their money.”
Trump’s supposed charitable foundation was also a scam that faked giving to worthy causes but operated largely as a way for Trump to pay bribes and pay down his personal debts with other people’s money.
Trump’s real estate business was drowning in fraud, with the entire family engaging in practices that should have resulted in criminal charges, such as lying to potential buyers about how well their condos were selling.
✁
Unfortunately, Trump isn’t just lying about his sketchy personal finances anymore.
He’s lying how many people are dying due to his negligent and even malicious handling of a major public health crisis.
It was inevitable that Trump would do this to his own voters sooner or later.
His assurances that he would be a lying fraud, but one who was always on their side, were always the empty promises of a con man to his marks.
“If he can in any way profit from your death, he’ll facilitate it, and then he’ll ignore the fact that you died,” Trump’s niece, the psychologist Mary Trump, writes in her book “Too Much and Never Enough.”
Russia may be reeling from a collapse in oil prices and one of the highest rates of COVID-19 infection in the world, but Moscow relies on pushing the idea that it’s the West that is really in trouble, racked with violent culture wars and suffering from a profound loss of faith in its own values.
The Kremlin’s new party line is: we may have it bad, but their crisis is much worse.
And where Putin’s propagandists lead, its trolls and hackers follow.
If recent history is anything to go by, the raging divisions around the Black Lives Matter movement are also a sweet spot for Russian trolls set on fanning the flames of the West’s self-immolation — in the UK, in the EU and especially in America.
A Senate Intelligence Committee investigation into the 2016 US presidential election concluded that a Russian fake-news campaign targeted ‘no single group… more than African Americans’.
Russian operatives used social media to suppress black voter turnout and stoke division along racial lines.
One Facebook page that the group operated, Blacktivist, racked up 11.2 million user engagements and more than 360,000 likes by September 2017 — compared with the 301,000 likes of the verified Black Lives Matter Facebook account.
Russian trolls are equal-opportunity provocateurs.
Between 2014 and 2017 the Internet Research Agency, a troll farm based in St Petersburg funded by close Putin ally Yevgeny Prigozhin, ran thousands of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube accounts propagating both pro-black and pro-Southern culture themes in the US — as well as pro-Scottish independence and Brexit-related tweets and posts.
This would be alarming stuff, if it were true. Portland, where I (the writer) live(s), has been the site of ongoing protests against police brutality and racism since the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, a 54-day stretch of activism as of this writing.
Over the past two months, mostly peaceful demonstrators have filled bridges, parks, and Interstate 84, sometimes numbering in the thousands.
In what is now a predictable pattern, each night a group converges near the Justice Center and Federal Courthouse downtown.
Usually small provocations—tossed water bottles or fireworks or a Granny Smith apple with a bite out of it—spark a wave of violence from law enforcement.
Occasionally, there have been more overt acts of vandalism, particularly in the immediate wake of Floyd’s death, including broken windows and small fires. (For more detailed timelines of the protests in Portland from local reporters, read this and this.)
But the city is hardly wracked by chaos.
Outside of the few square blocks downtown that are marked by graffiti, boarded-up windows, and metal fencing, things feel normal—or rather, as normal as possible given the impact of Covid-19, which has had a far more disruptive effect than have the protests.
The bulk of the “violence” cited by Wolf amounted to graffiti and other property damage.
Meanwhile, his agents and other federal officers have seriously injured a number of protesters, including a Navy veteran who had his hand broken by federal officers after he tried talking to them.
The mood in the crowd downtown is often jovial—at least until law enforcement arrives—
Kurtass Premium Member about 4 years ago
Where is the second amendment people to save Winslow from a tyrannical government?
braindead Premium Member about 4 years ago
Very, very, bad, yes.
Also, very, very, predictable.
.
And Trump Disciples celebrate every abduction and every bashed in skull. Just like they did in Selma.
And for the same reasons.
.
#TraitorTrump
nosirrom about 4 years ago
Absentee ballots in Nevada – BAD
Absentee ballots in Florida – GOOD
Absence of leadership in WH – VERY BAD!
William Robbins Premium Member about 4 years ago
Stantis does redeem himself now and again.
Silly Season about 4 years ago
Asked if the Republican Party in the Trump years has become an outfit free of governing ideas, Stevens went even further: “It was all a lie.”
He noted that this was word-for-word the title of his forthcoming book, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump.
The modern GOP, he said, never truly cared about the ideas it claimed to care about.
This was a stunning indictment coming from a longtime political consultant who had toiled on five Republican presidential campaigns and numerous Senate and gubernatorial races.
“The Republican Party has been a cartel,” Stevens said excitedly. “And no one asks a cartel, ‘What’s your ideological purpose?’ You don’t ask OPEC, ‘What’s your ideology?’ You don’t ask a drug gang, ‘What’s your program?’
The Republicans exist for the pursuit of power for no purpose.”
He huffed that the Republican Party had not merely drifted away from its core positions, as sometimes occurs with political parties: “Fair trade, balanced budgets, character, family values, standing up to foreign adversaries like Russia—we’re all against that now.
You have to ask, ‘Does someone abandon deeply held beliefs in three or four years?’
No. It means you didn’t ever hold them.” He added: “I feel like a guy who was working for Bernie Madoff.”
✁
Acknowledging his role, Stevens writes, “So yes, blame me.
Blame me when you look around and see a dysfunctional political system and a Republican Party that has gone insane.”
The book offers one overarching prescription for the GOP: “Burn it to the ground and start over.”
~
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/08/racism-republican-party-stuart-stevens/
Silly Season about 4 years ago
One of the most frustrating things, for both Democrats and the investigative journalists who worked tirelessly to expose Donald Trump’s seemingly unending frauds, was how little Trump’s base seemed to care that he was a liar and a cheat.
✁
Trump cheated people who worked for him, finding ways to refuse to pay them.
He spent decades engaged in tax fraud, reaping hundreds of millions through the process.
Trump’s claims to be a billionaire appear the inverse of reality, where he was a billion dollars in the red, making him the photonegative of a billionaire.
Trump University was a scam, described in court as preying “upon the elderly and uneducated to separate them from their money.”
Trump’s supposed charitable foundation was also a scam that faked giving to worthy causes but operated largely as a way for Trump to pay bribes and pay down his personal debts with other people’s money.
Trump’s real estate business was drowning in fraud, with the entire family engaging in practices that should have resulted in criminal charges, such as lying to potential buyers about how well their condos were selling.
✁
Unfortunately, Trump isn’t just lying about his sketchy personal finances anymore.
He’s lying how many people are dying due to his negligent and even malicious handling of a major public health crisis.
It was inevitable that Trump would do this to his own voters sooner or later.
His assurances that he would be a lying fraud, but one who was always on their side, were always the empty promises of a con man to his marks.
“If he can in any way profit from your death, he’ll facilitate it, and then he’ll ignore the fact that you died,” Trump’s niece, the psychologist Mary Trump, writes in her book “Too Much and Never Enough.”
~
https://www.salon.com/2020/08/04/trumps-base-loved-that-he-was-a-liar-and-a-cheat—but-now-its-coming-back-to-bite-them/
Silly Season about 4 years ago
Russia may be reeling from a collapse in oil prices and one of the highest rates of COVID-19 infection in the world, but Moscow relies on pushing the idea that it’s the West that is really in trouble, racked with violent culture wars and suffering from a profound loss of faith in its own values.
The Kremlin’s new party line is: we may have it bad, but their crisis is much worse.
And where Putin’s propagandists lead, its trolls and hackers follow.
If recent history is anything to go by, the raging divisions around the Black Lives Matter movement are also a sweet spot for Russian trolls set on fanning the flames of the West’s self-immolation — in the UK, in the EU and especially in America.
A Senate Intelligence Committee investigation into the 2016 US presidential election concluded that a Russian fake-news campaign targeted ‘no single group… more than African Americans’.
Russian operatives used social media to suppress black voter turnout and stoke division along racial lines.
One Facebook page that the group operated, Blacktivist, racked up 11.2 million user engagements and more than 360,000 likes by September 2017 — compared with the 301,000 likes of the verified Black Lives Matter Facebook account.
Russian trolls are equal-opportunity provocateurs.
Between 2014 and 2017 the Internet Research Agency, a troll farm based in St Petersburg funded by close Putin ally Yevgeny Prigozhin, ran thousands of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube accounts propagating both pro-black and pro-Southern culture themes in the US — as well as pro-Scottish independence and Brexit-related tweets and posts.
~
https://spectator.us/putin-plans-make-west-destroy-itself/
fuzzbucket Premium Member about 4 years ago
Portland could have their police protect them from the unknown Feds—- No, wait. They’re fighting the police, too.
Silly Season about 4 years ago
This would be alarming stuff, if it were true. Portland, where I (the writer) live(s), has been the site of ongoing protests against police brutality and racism since the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, a 54-day stretch of activism as of this writing.
Over the past two months, mostly peaceful demonstrators have filled bridges, parks, and Interstate 84, sometimes numbering in the thousands.
In what is now a predictable pattern, each night a group converges near the Justice Center and Federal Courthouse downtown.
Usually small provocations—tossed water bottles or fireworks or a Granny Smith apple with a bite out of it—spark a wave of violence from law enforcement.
Occasionally, there have been more overt acts of vandalism, particularly in the immediate wake of Floyd’s death, including broken windows and small fires. (For more detailed timelines of the protests in Portland from local reporters, read this and this.)
But the city is hardly wracked by chaos.
Outside of the few square blocks downtown that are marked by graffiti, boarded-up windows, and metal fencing, things feel normal—or rather, as normal as possible given the impact of Covid-19, which has had a far more disruptive effect than have the protests.
The bulk of the “violence” cited by Wolf amounted to graffiti and other property damage.
Meanwhile, his agents and other federal officers have seriously injured a number of protesters, including a Navy veteran who had his hand broken by federal officers after he tried talking to them.
The mood in the crowd downtown is often jovial—at least until law enforcement arrives—
~
https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/portland-secret-police-trump/
Bookworm about 4 years ago
“He’s your friend, young lady? Maybe you should come along with us, too.”
Durak Premium Member about 4 years ago
Shut up or you’re next.
rossevrymn about 4 years ago
Oh, wait, Stantis has the liberal being dragged away? I guess this is “Get it historically accurate” week.
dlaemmerhirt999 about 4 years ago
Now the #TrumpGestapo took WINSLOW?!? This is getting even MORE insane!!!
bigal666 about 4 years ago
The 2nd Amendment protects the 1st.
Plods with ...™ about 4 years ago
They came for my friend and I said nothing…
Kip W about 4 years ago
Reach into your Conservative soul, Carmen. I’m sure you can find a way to justify this!
Kip W about 4 years ago
I like the box below this: “Scott Stantis Recommends: Scott Stantis (by) Scott Stantis.”