Pictures and Videos for R&P

[gilraen]

...and now to the tune of West Side Story:

[Isgrimnur]

[Holman]

Tan suit 2014: unpresidential, shameful, scandalous

Tan suit 2020: conservative, statesmanlike, patriotic

Professional-class men's fashion changes so quickly in DC. You have to be David Bowie just to keep up.

[Alefroth]

How it looks online vs. how it arrives.

[Isgrimnur]

That's what happens when you order your politicians off of Wish.

[YellowKing]

Who wore it better?

[naednek]

Who wore it better?

Here you go. I borrowed your idea

Sent from my SM-G975U using Tapatalk

[Tao]

That looks like the male lead from Pentatonix in the Fauci song.

[Smoove_B]

[Holman]

If we do this right, history is going to wonder why it was an even a question.

[Defiant]

[malchior]

[Skinypupy]

I’m actually a little surprised all the people he tagged aren’t actually in the painting. Hannity next to Lincoln, Boningo in front of Washington, Tucker just to the left of Regan.

I mean, they’re all great Americans, after all.

[Jaymann]

All it needs is a photoshop of Person, Woman, Man, Camera, TV onto the paper in front of him.

[malchior]

I think John Adams looks a little concerned personally. Maybe it was being stolen away from the choir of angels. Maybe because he is wondering how Trump got all these people into his fucked up death cult.

Edit: There is a nice 'easter egg' in the back row.

[Alefroth]

It looks like an intervention.

[Defiant]

One hundred years ago:

[Freyland]

Is that authentic? Because it's downright scary.

[Max Peck]

It's somewhat correct.

In this case the attribution to Henry Louis Mencken, a prominent newspaperman and political commentator during the first half of the 20th century, is accurate. Writing for the Baltimore Evening Sun on 26 July 1920, in an article entitled “Bayard vs. Lionheart” (and reprinted in the book On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe), Mencken cynically opined on the difficulties of good men reaching national office when the scale of their campaigns precluded them from directly reaching out to large segments of the voting public:

The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.

The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

(Contrary to the wording presented in the graphic above, Mencken’s original statement made no mention of fools or narcissism.)

[naednek]

Is that authentic? Because it's downright scary.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/menck ... use-quote/

Accurate

[Holman]

Edit: There is a nice 'easter egg' in the back row.

In addition to R.E. Lee, the back row features Andrew Breitbart, who I guess is a hero on the level of Abraham Lincoln?

I'm confused about some others.

back row, 2nd from left: Is it a bad rendition of Jerry Falwell Jr?
back row center: no idea.
back row far right: no idea, but presumably someone modern.

[Unagi]

I think back row, 2nd from the left is Jon McNaughton

[Alefroth]

I think back row, 2nd from the left is Jon McNaughton

That was my guess too.

[malchior]

We must demand a *better boat parade* for Biden!

[LordMortis]

How are you both more enthusiastic than any in history and the silent majority? And how do you reconcile that with losing the popular vote? "Many" always idiots without naming doesn't it?

[Holman]

How are you both more enthusiastic than any in history and the silent majority? And how do you reconcile that with losing the popular vote? "Many" always idiots without naming doesn't it?

"Many people are saying" is one of his tells: he presents his own wishful thinking as either popular opinion or as an appeal to unnamed authorities.

[Defiant]

[Paingod]

A million+ in "re-education" concentration camps, and Trump could care less. I believe in that, he mentions Trump basically told everyone "I want them to do business with (China). What's good for the country is good for me."

[LordMortis]

A million+ in "re-education" concentration camps, and Trump could care less. I believe in that, he mentions Trump basically told everyone "I want them to do business with (China). What's good for the country is good for me."

You can't put this on Trump other than the lens he looks at Chinese Authoritarianism and its institutional bigotry with envy. Obama did nothing. W did nothing. Quite frankly, Donald unilaterally pulled us out of the Pacific Trade Agreement (which we never should have entered, another Obama failing, wherein Warren was right to oppose it) after Congress allowed him to abuse authority he didn't have.

But anyhow, I knew none of this. How depressing.

[Paingod]

But anyhow, I knew none of this. How depressing.

I didn't either, but knowing makes me wonder why anyone is still trading with China. In some cases they're using these people as slave labor.

The rest of the world really needs to look around and agree that they're willing to trade with each other openly and fairly, and exclude anyone who isn't adhering to that. Things may cost a little more, but I think it'd be worth it to economically isolate China and other nations that refuse to provide basic human rights and free speech. There'd probably be a remarkable shift, or it would just be China and Russia trading back and forth with each other.

[malchior]

Years worth of the press obsessing over Trump's Presidential tone. There is a companion piece at Media Matters if interested in the deep dive.

All of these professional analysts and journalists were put to absolute shame by a prescient woman in a CBS focus group.

“That’s not the Donald Trump that I’ve seen for the past 30 days,” she said. “Where is that guy? Where’s that guy that says what he wants to say, that is loud, that says everything is fake news? Where’s that guy? … I’m going to look for him on Twitter tomorrow and see what he really thinks. Great job to the speechwriter, but I will see Donald Trump at 12 a.m.”

She called it. Just four days later, Trump accused former President Barack Obama of having his “wires tapped” in the Trump Tower. “This is McCarthyism!” Trump tweeted, calling Obama, “Bad (or sick) guy!”

This example raises an important question. How are people whose entire livelihood revolves around following politics less in tune with current events than a focus group member whose life presumably doesn’t involve the non-stop consumption of political news? It comes down to a desire for something resembling a normal world with a normal president.

Members of the press contort themselves in an effort to find something positive they can say about Trump, and that often comes at the expense of accurately portraying what’s happening in the world. Instead of providing context for what is happening, these analysts find still frames completely detached from time and meaning from the Trump presidency. That’s not good journalism. If a food critic goes to a restaurant three times and gets food poisoning twice, would it make sense for them to separate the one trip that didn’t make them sick for its own four-star review? Of course not. Honest journalism relies on adding context that lets you know that the time you don’t get food poisoning is an aberration and not an excuse to ignore the bad.

[Defiant]

But anyhow, I knew none of this. How depressing.

I had originally thought of putting it in the China thread (where I had posted a few times before about this), but now I'm glad I didn't if it's made more people aware of it.

[LawBeefaroni]

But anyhow, I knew none of this. How depressing.

I didn't either, but knowing makes me wonder why anyone is still trading with China. In some cases they're using these people as slave labor.

The rest of the world really needs to look around and agree that they're willing to trade with each other openly and fairly, and exclude anyone who isn't adhering to that. Things may cost a little more, but I think it'd be worth it to economically isolate China and other nations that refuse to provide basic human rights and free speech. There'd probably be a remarkable shift, or it would just be China and Russia trading back and forth with each other.

Bannon was on CNBC spouting tough-on-China rhetoric because they are at fault for all our COVID woes. he compared the people to Russian serfs from he 1700s (?). Expect this kind of angle from the White House.

[malchior]

A million+ in "re-education" concentration camps, and Trump could care less. I believe in that, he mentions Trump basically told everyone "I want them to do business with (China). What's good for the country is good for me."

You can't put this on Trump other than the lens he looks at Chinese Authoritarianism and its institutional bigotry with envy. Obama did nothing. W did nothing.

Lords you can definitely pin some...even a lot on Trump. To unpack our recent history of China is troublesome because picking the beginning is tricky. Is it the Nixon reset? Tienanmen Square? Some people would go back to the decision to grant them MFN status in the first Bush administration but over time US leaders took advantage of Chinese industrialization to avoid making hard choices at home. By the time it rolled around to W, his administration failed to recognize the change in internal politics that led to the communist party turning into a personalistic autocracy. He failed to contain or address that initial expansion.

Obama actually did quite a bit more than nothing. He focused heavily on trying to address the imbalance with China. In fact, he moved 60% of air force/navy resources in the military to face the Asia-Pacific sphere. One part of why we had so many naval accidents in the Pacific was likely linked to their busting ass flexing against the Chinese. He negotiated the TPP agreement to check Chinese growth in manufacturing. And an important note was that the Uighur camps didn't exist in the same way for Obama or W; however, US administrations and the business community were all too soft on human rights issues in China. But Americans wanted cheap crap so they went with it and more importantly the wealthy saw investment potential so they went with it.

Quite frankly, Donald unilaterally pulled us out of the Pacific Trade Agreement (which we never should have entered, another Obama failing, wherein Warren was right to oppose it) after Congress allowed him to abuse authority he didn't have.

That was an accomplishment of Obama's. In the big picture, pulling out of TPP pretty much ceded the entire Asian business sphere to China and greatly reduced our influence there. If you don't want China flexing their authoritarian muscle then you don't feed the communist party cash. The TPP was designed to reduce Chinese influence. Could it also have cost us jobs? Yes, but without TPP long-term we might lose much more. It was a strategic view on the problem. China has outfoxed us on long-term strategy and this was one time we were going to get an upper hand and we squandered it. It is an outcome of American decline. And yes Clinton said she was going to pull out of it too but she was lying.

Worse, you can draw political dots between pulling out of TPP and what eventually happened to Hong Kong and the Uighurs. Maybe we couldn't stop it but Trump gave them the green light when he cancelled the TPP. It signaled to the Chinese that America wasn't going to defend APAC and then he amplified that message with his ridiculous overtures to North Korea, and antagonism of South Korea and Japan.

But anyhow, I knew none of this. How depressing.

It is and Trump did more than waste 4 years. He enabled and encouraged it. Last in a line maybe but still he did a *lot* of harm.

[Holman]

According to John Bolton, Trump (angling for a trade deal) actually encouraged XI to build the concentration camps.

The most damning passage comes when Trump, in Bolton’s telling, on two occasions actually encouraged Chinese President Xi Jinping to use concentration camps for Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang province:

Trump asked me at the 2018 White House Christmas dinner why we were considering sanctioning China over its treatment of the Uighurs, a largely Muslim people who live primarily in China’s northwest Xinjiang Province.

At the opening dinner of the Osaka G-20 meeting in June 2019, with only interpreters present, Xi had explained to Trump why he was basically building concentration camps in Xinjiang. According to our interpreter, Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do. The National Security Council’s top Asia staffer, Matthew Pottinger, told me that Trump said something very similar during his November 2017 trip to China.

The reported exchange in Osaka came just a month before Trump in July 2019 met with victims of political persecution, including Uighurs, and declared of his devotion to religious rights, “I don’t think any president has taken it as seriously as me.”

[hepcat]

I think we got a hit on our hands.

[Paingod]

Too good not to share.

[Defiant]

[TheMix]

Bravo.

[Max Peck]

To be fair, even the people who originally made the show didn't know that bit of trivia.