ninemiletree posted:

No. Fox News has normalized racism, lying, scapegoating and corruption. Trump is just another rich, narcissistic sack of poo poo that has gleefully embraced Fox News' weaponization of propaganda and managed to coast into the presidency because he simply emulated at the podium the type of bullshit that Republican voters were accustomed to hearing on the television 24/7.

For gently caress's sake, I remember during the Obama administration when Fox News would have Donald Trump call in all the god drat time and talk about global loving warming, and they would treat him as if he was in any way, shape or form qualified to talk about that loving subject. Or when they'd let him call in to talk about Obama's loving birth certificate, and nod along when he was talking about all the evidence he had that Obama was born in Kenya that he never produced and never will because he loving lied and made it up.

Fox News acted like that was an actual news story, instead of the horribly transparent publicity stunt of this imbecilic, racist man child. And do you think for one loving second Fox News would have ran that story if, say, Joe Biden were President? gently caress no, they ran it because they're racist and they give their viewers racist scraps of raw meat.

Fox News was created to function as a machine to make up the deficit for the terrible policies and reprehensible behavior of Republicans by keeping the voter base distracted, cripplingly misinformed, and angry at everything except for the real problems and the real enemies.

Fox News perfected the language of racist dogwhistles (welfare, food stamps, "Chicago") that made it extremely easy for Republican voters and politicians to espouse obviously racist and primitively tribalist views in public with the thinnest amount of plausible deniability for their racism.

Fox News perfected lying. They lie constantly. They omit truths to shape their headlines and their content. They misconstrue facts. They fail to notify their viewers when, say, one of their "legal experts" happens to be the lawyer for an accused Russian spy. Fox News is so prolific at lying that they're loving motto for YEARS was "fair and balanced", and that's just loving hysterical because they're literally the exact opposite of fair and balanced in every conceivable way, shape and form. They also call themselves "news," which is a lie; they're propaganda, and their most popular product are pundits and talking heads at their station who make up whatever bullshit they want and then this is repeated as though its true on their news segments.

Fox News perfected scapegoating (everything is the Democrats' fault, even mistakes clearly made by inept Republicans). Hillary Clinton literally hasn't even held public office in three years and holds absolutely no power or authority and someone on Fox News blames her for something every god drat night. Someone at the daily show ought to just pour over Fox News feeds for the last three years because you could absolutely find footage of someone blaming Clinton for something every. loving. Night.

Fox News is the actual embodiment of political corruption. They provide a propaganda service for Republicans who in turn pass policies that are good for Murdoch's bottom line. They don't inform. They don't report.

Without Fox News, the world world would be a dramatically better place. Nixon was forced out of office because we didn't have Fox News.

And now that we do have Fox News, suddenly, coincidentally, Republicans find it infinitely easier to root themselves into their offices despite a mind-boggling litany of crimes that now, thanks to Trump, includes high treason against America.

gently caress you, Fox News. The damage you've done to the fabric of Democracy is incalculable.

EDIT: And I want to add one more thing. I despise Donald Trump. And the Trump administration is a fascist catastrophe that threatens our entire democracy.

But Donald Trump is not the problem. Donald Trump is a fat, spoiled rich baby. He's ambitious, and spiteful, but he's not intelligent. He isn't. The proof is overwhelming. He inherited a real estate business and made some money until nosediving it into the ground. He's sustained himself with various criminal enterprises and maneuvers that he's escaped prosecution for mostly because we do a loving poo poo job of bringing justice to the wealthy.

And once you realize that Donald Trump is a really stupid human being, you have to ask - then why is he President?

And the answer is because for the last half a century, Republicans have built one of the largest and most extensive organized crime rings in existence. They have built a system that legitimizes preposterous levels of corruption.

They seized on the fact that the constitution grants disproportionate representation in congress and the executive to those who hold the most states, even if those states are mostly empty.

Mitch McConnell got less than eight hundred thousand votes in his 2014 election, and now he has a stranglehold over the Senate. That's loving incredible.

For comparison, Chuck Schumer got over five MILLION votes, and he's the minority leader and almost entirely powerless.

Who the ever-loving gently caress thinks that a party that never wins the popular vote, that has a terrible approval rating and has never represented a majority of Americans should hold literally all the ratchets of power?

So you have these petty criminals and crooks rising up in essentially third-world states, like Kentucky. They've banded together. Now they have a propaganda network. They get their funding from wealthy donors that want to pass laws to legalize their unethical business practices, almost always to the detriment of the American people. And thanks to Fox News, they have an easy-to-access non-stop propaganda stream that passes itself off as news and tells a fictional fairy tale about a Republican party that doesn't exist.

Take away all their bullshit. Take away all the window dressings, the family values. Look at what they do. Dick Cheney spent trillions of our tax dollars on a war to make him and his buddies rich. I say Dick, because Bush was mostly window dressing to draw attention away from him. Now Trump is running America like a business - which is to say, he's running it like an entity which exists entirely to make him wealthy and which he has full control and ownership over.

Look at the tax bill 1.5 trillion, written by lobbyists, to make the tax evasions and other fuckery of their corporations legal, to the detriment of America.

Everything they do is nakedly, openly criminal. But they've found the Thieve's Loophole - it isn't a crime if you ARE the law.

If you just look at them without the trappings - without the suits, without the pomp and prestige of their offices - they are bare-assed crooks. And I know people say that about politicians. And politicians get up to a lot of poo poo - in any country, in any party.

But Republicans are not just individually criminal. Republicans are a criminal organization. They behave identical to one. Their entire legislative approach is basically a protection racket. Corporations pay them, and in return they don't unleash the law on them, or regulatory agencies on them. Other countries play ball or they unleash their horrendously bloated military on them. Which Republicans always want to make bigger. Because what gangster doesn't want more guns?

Even liberals are, in a way, in denial about the extent to which the entire Republican party is an organized crime operation. In some way we believe their legitimacy, because, they're politicians, right? They do fundraisers and speak at colleges. George W. Bush slaps Obama's rear end with a binder, so they can't be all bad, right?

But as we speak Republicans are refusing outright to put any money towards literally protecting our Democracy from the attacks of a hostile foreign nation. Republican Senators are standing up and saying we should reduce sanctions on Russia. They loving stole 1.5 trillion dollars from all taxpayers to give it to the very, very select few who pay them. They are conspiring to insulate their own President, a man who may just be the most corrupt human being to have ever lived, from any form of justice, while simultaneously refusing to impose any of the checks and balances on him that are their constitutional responsibility to impose, all to keep voters happy so that they, personally, can keep their precious seats and can continue to personally profit from their stations.

Trump admitted on live TV he fired the FBI director to protect himself in a legal investigation into his complicity in helping a foreign government attack us.

Republicans did nothing.

Trump called the media - a cornerstone of our Democracy and the shining pillar of the first amendment - the "enemy of the people," because they report "fake news", a word which by Trump's own public admission means stories that paint him in a negative light, regardless of their accuracy or veracity.

Republicans did nothing.

Trump has refused to divest from his business and forced the federal government to pay millions of dollars staying at his properties in the most obvious and blatant corrupt uses of federal power I've ever seen.

Republicans paid.

When a child acts like a selfish brat, and the parents reward them for it, you don't blame the child.

This is who the Republican part is at it's core. Every piece of their apparatus - from congress to their SCOTUS picks to Fox News - is a part of it. They are criminals. They wear suits and robes, but at the end of the day they're just the most successful version of the mob. They are the mob that finally achieved legitimacy and became the law.

CommieGIR posted:

It gets better:

https://twitter.com/RMac18/status/1037084428147642369

orange juche posted:

I wonder, is there a reason you never see oxygen and acetylene bottled in the same bottle?

like why in the gently caress would you own an oxyacetylene torch and not know what happens to them when they mix?

DoktorLoken posted:

https://twitter.com/mflynnjr/status/1037389353234956290?s=21



These people can’t stop with the amazing self owns.

facialimpediment posted:

It's social media junk in general. Twitter sent Jack, Facebook sent their COO, and Google sent absolutely nobody, so they left the chair empty and yelled at it a bunch.

This also happened.

https://twitter.com/willsommer/status/1037359643734028301?s=19

facialimpediment posted:

It got worse for her.

https://twitter.com/frankthorp/status/1037416569117335552?s=19

I YIELD BACK

DoktorLoken posted:

Whoa, can you cite an example of this? That's whack.

Duzzy Funlop posted:

From the GBS thread:

Those sandbags are in for some work

quote:

Gavin Wood, the cofounder of multibillion-dollar cryptocurrency project Ethereum, wrote a graphic blog post in 2013 in which he described having sex with an 11- or 12-year-old girl dying of AIDS.

Wood confirmed he authored the blog post, but in a statement to BuzzFeed News described it as fiction and “a made-up story meant to spark debate and conversation.”

“My blog posts at the time were meant to provoke intellectual debate and discussion around generally taboo subjects like the nature of consent,” he wrote. “Nothing about it should be taken as indicative of my personal position.”

sharknado slashfic posted:

ded posted:

When I hear lots and lots of gunfire my first reaction is to stand around outside and say 'oh my god' instead of taking cover.

Gota get those sweet twitter views and likes.

facialimpediment posted:

lol this could all be nothing because the president hates firing people and is a pissbaby bitch

https://twitter.com/grynbaum/status/1044249865344176128?s=19

Roddy might go on SECRET DOUBLE PROBATION

Tryzzub posted:

12pm sep 24 2018.

at the white house, rod rosenstein is given a phone. “daddy president daddy has something he wants to tell you”, says ivanka.

three dots appear on the screen. minutes pass.

trump tower. donald sits atop his golden toilet, phone in hand. he struggles to type the words “you’re fired”, partly out of fear but mostly because his brain is smooth, like velvet.

as he presses send, fear overtakes donald and he evacuates the contents of his bowels.

“you’re fred”

...

“hand phone bac to ivanka”

...

“daddy wants three scoops 2night”

pantslesswithwolves posted:

Am I thinking of the wrong guy, or was he the one that built up a lot of his conservative bona fides on being some rugged masculine manly man? If so then just loving lol at getting a blister in a 3/4 mile walk.

Mr. Nice! posted:

https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/me...ed-states-day-5

Here's the Ford hearing. Live now.

not caring here posted:

I don't know what a supreme court justice interview thing is supposed to be like as I've never seen one before, but I'm absolutely loving positive it isn't meant to be the poo poo show going on right now.

ded posted:

Owning a tesla is going to be like owning a delorian.

only not as cool.

As Nero Danced posted:

Yeah but burning rubber is only cool with cars going forward. When it's burning rubber and standing still we all point and laugh.