Bunker Baby Hides from protesters, encourages violent response

"No domination, you have to dominate." LOL, IPOTUS thinks he's back in Moscow, barking orders at Russian hookers.

Then, because he got made fun of for hiding in the bunker, he tear-gassed and rubber-bulleted a lot of peaceful protesters because he was scared to come out and give a little speech with them there... and he wanted to be seen outside the White House.

Then, he basically declared martial law. The stupidest thing he could do, and the most dictatorial. Count on the same people who screamed about dictatorships when Obama was in office (and didn't start one) to not only support Trump dismantling the Constitution... count on them to cheer for it. They've never really liked liberty... just authority.

It's really pathetic. We have a weak, stupid president followed by a cult of weak, stupid people, and it's destroying everything that was good about this country. America's going to be decades regaining its world standing... and if this asshole gets re-elected, we'll probably never get it back. And I do not trust this fuck to let us have a fair election. The GOP's always been some gerrymander-happy bastards, but other than that, much as I hated Dubya, as much as was wrong with him, I could trust him to respect the American process. I have no such faith in Trump.

Today he's claiming that the 75-year-old guy who the cops pushed down was a "set up" and he knocked himself down and cracked his own skull just to make the cops look bad.



Sometimes I try to wonder what it's like to be so conspiracy-minded that things like that (and all the other ridiculous shit conservatives buy into) seem like they'd be plausible. I know they get a lot of aggressive "encouragement" from their media (OAN is apparently hiring Russian propaganda agents - https://www.thedailybeast.com/oan-trumps-new-favorite-channel-employs-kremlin-paid-journalist ), but still, the viewer should have a stopping point somewhere. Nobody's going to deliberately crack their own skull and make blood come out of their ears in the hopes that it's being filmed, and then will get shown, to make the police -- who already look bad enough right now -- look a little worse.

And yet this is the kind of silly shit that conservatives buy into all the fucking time now. I've had conservatives swear to me that Obama's birth announcement was planted in Hawaiian newspapers back then because a secret cabal planned to install that baby as president 50 years down the road.

They're nuts. They don't ever bother to verify anything or learn anything about what they're talking about, or use even basic reasoning skills. They never ask, "Is this plausible? Would I be making a fool of myself for believing this?"

Whenever I hear something against Trump that sounds too good to be true, I immediately become skeptical and start trying to look into it. I'm an Occam's razor guy -- if some scenario is too frickin' complicated, it's almost always going to be some bullshit.

But conservatives? They buy into "birther" shit and "QAnon" shit and "Uranium One" shit and there is no set of data that you can give them that they won't deliberately misunderstand to make their opposition look worse. "Fast and Furious" being a case in point -- you've gotta be raised from birth to be dumb-as-shit to not understand what that was, and yet we're constantly running into morons who will not have that debunked for 'em because they have so much riding on such a ridiculous scenario as "the government sold guns to Mexican cartels because they're that eeeeeeevil! and that stupid!"

I honestly don't know what we're gonna do with these folks. I really don't. It's like around 30% of our population now belongs in an asylum. They're too goddamned stupid to function. Absolute nonsense seems perfectly plausible to them.

Definition: In Article III, Section 3 of the United States Constitution, treason is specifically limited to levying war against the US, or adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. [2]

Penalty: U.S. Code Title 18: Death,[8] or not less than 5 years' imprisonment and not more than life imprisonment without the possibility of parole (minimum fine of $10,000, if not sentenced to death). Any person convicted of treason against the United States will lose the right to hold public office in the United States. [9]

Isn't it treason to attempt to call out the military against US citizens exercising their First Amendment rights?

Trump wanted to deploy 10,000 troops in Washington D.C., official says

June 7, 2020

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump told his advisors at one point this past week he wanted 10,000 troops to deploy to the Washington D.C. area to halt civil unrest over the killing of a black man by Minneapolis police, according to a senior U.S. official.

The account of Trump’s demand during a heated Oval Office conversation on Monday shows how close the president may have come to fulfilling his threat to deploy active duty troops in U.S. cities, despite opposition from Pentagon leadership.

At the meeting, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, and Attorney General William Barr recommended against such a deployment, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. The meeting was “contentious,” the official added.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Trump has since appeared satisfied with deployments by the National Guard, the option recommended by the Pentagon and a more traditional tool for dealing with domestic crises. Pentagon leaders scrambled to call governors with requests to send Guard forces to Washington. Additional federal law enforcement were mobilized too.

But also key for Trump appears to have been Esper’s move to preposition — but not deploy — active duty soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division and other units in the Washington D.C. area. Those troops have since departed.

“Having active duty forces available but not in the city was enough for the president for the time,” the official said.

Barr told CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday that no active duty troops were deployed on Washington streets, but there were some military police nearby.

“We had them on standby in case they were needed,” Barr said.

Trump’s bid to militarize the U.S. response to the protests has triggered a rare outpouring of condemnation from former U.S. military officials, including Trump’s first defense secretary, Jim Mattis, and retired four-star generals who normally try to steer clear of politics.

Those comments reflect deep unease inside and outside the Pentagon with Trump’s willingness to inject the U.S. military into a domestic race relations crisis following the killing of George Floyd, 46, who died on May 25 after a Minneapolis policeman knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes.

Floyd’s death has led to a wave of protests and national soul-searching over the country’s legacy of violence and mistreatment of African Americans and other minorities.

It has also led some Pentagon leaders of color to issue unprecedented statements bit.ly/30mxTlD about their experiences dealing with issues of race in the U.S. military.

ESPER’S FUTURE?

Esper publicly voiced his opposition on Wednesday to invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy active duty forces — remarks to reporters that did not go over well with either Trump or his top aides.

The senior U.S. official said Trump yelled at Esper after that news conference.

As speculation swirled over whether the president might fire him, White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany said Trump “remains confident in Secretary Esper.”

“Secretary Esper has been instrumental in securing our nation’s streets and ensuring Americans have peace and confidence in the security of their places of business, places of worship, and their homes,” McEnany said in a statement.

Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy told reporters on Sunday he believed “we came right up to the edge of bringing active troops here,” but added that he did not speak to the president. He expected all National Guard who came from out of state to be heading back home within 72 hours as the crisis eased.

Esper issued a memo on Tuesday reminding Defense Department personnel “we commit to protecting the American people’s right to freedom of speech and to peaceful assembly.”

Milley issued a similar statement reminding troops of their oath to the U.S. Constitution, which protects the right to peaceful protests.

Those statements by Milley and Esper came after they took fierce criticism for using military planning terms like “battlespace” to describe American protest sites during a conference call with state governors that Trump hosted on Monday, a recording of which leaked.

At the time, the Pentagon was concerned that Trump might deploy active duty troops if the governors did not sufficiently employ the National Guard, the official said.

Esper and Milley have also faced criticism for accompanying Trump for a photo opportunity outside a church near the White House on Monday after police cleared the area by firing smoke grenades and chemical irritant “pepper balls” and charging into peaceful protesters.

Reporting by Phil Stewart; Additional reporting by Steve Holland; Editing by Daniel Wallis

Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-minneapolis-police-protest-troops/trump-wanted-to-deploy-10000-troops-in-washington-dc-official-says-idUSKBN23E0DY

*************