OMG Politics, I'm over it already Mk III, The Search for Spock

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Peen Simmons said:
Trump as a political creature is advised by unrepentant Nixon scum (Stone) and has used the apparatus of the modern post-Nixon/post-Reagan GOP to come to power—a process that implicitly requires the racialized Southern Strategy and the mobilization of aggrevied working class Rust Belt whites (Reagan Democrats). The modern GOP is grounded in a paranoid tough guy foreign policy designed and implemented by Nixon flunkies like Cheney and Rumsfeld taking the lessons of Nixon and Kissinger to their logical conclusions.

Plus Trumpism is fueled by conspiracy thought that was given legs by the exposure of Nixon’s REAL LIFE CONSPIRACIES. The POTUS really can be a power mad criminal...so the tin foil hat crowd could be right. OMG!

Maybe a thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters could make Trump happen without Nixon, but Nixon makes Trump both possible and likely.
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All of that just flew over Trump's head. You're giving a lot of credit to someone who doesn't know shit about history.
 
rickenvox said:
The McCarthy hearings were a conspiracy theory and the closest thing to a witchhunt in the 20th century.
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People knew they existed. They happened in public as a matter of public record. Their aims were clear and well-understood—the systematic persecution of political nonconformists and those who—for personal and political reasons—might be blackmailable by foreign agents.

The Salem Witch Trials were also not a conspiracy...they were an official function of local political and religious bodies...until they tried to point the finger at the governor’s wife and everyone snapped out of it.
 
Nixon authorized Elvis' murder and was behind crop circles.

people-have-openly-admitted-to-making-them-photo-u1
 
Peen Simmons said:
People knew they existed. They happened in public as a matter of public record. Their aims were clear and well-understood—the systematic persecution of political nonconformists and those who—for personal and political reasons—might be blackmailable by foreign agents.

The Salem Witch Trials were also not a conspiracy...they were an official function of local political and religious bodies...until they tried to point the finger at the governor’s wife and everyone snapped out of it.
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Umm not keeping up with you here. The McCarthy hearings were a conspiracy about the infiltration of communism into America on the part of McCarthy, and the conservative American public bought into it. Not sure what you're saying above. There's a big difference between reading about things in history books and understanding how the common American understood these things at the time. I wasn't there for McCarthy but I was for Watergate.
 
Peen Simmons said:
He’s a bastard and a manipulative little weasel, but he’s not an idiot.
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He doesn't have the ability to create a documentary or script on any historical event or period without a staff of researchers/ writers to do all of the groundwork. People who cite Howard Zinn (like Will Hunting, fictional genius in all disciplines, right and left brain) are idiots, pseudo-intellectuals.
 
rickenvox said:
Umm not keeping up with you here. The McCarthy hearings were a conspiracy about the infiltration of communism into America on the part of McCarthy, and the conservative American public bought into it. Not sure what you're saying above. There's a big difference between reading about things in history books and understanding how the common American understood these things at the time. I wasn't there for McCarthy but I was for Watergate.
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McCarthy’s investigations (and the similar but different HUAC) proposed a conspiratorial Line of thought—America was besieged by corrupters from within. Which was and wasn’t true. The entire state department wasn’t lousy with commies...though there likely were compromised folks at State...if only because they could be blackmailed as closeted homosexuals or former party members. But the McCarthy’s bipartisan investigation eventually got shut down as a fraud by other Senators.

There was even a hearing about how McCarthy had been manipulating folks behind the scenes to for some compadre in the Army. And Nixon and Bobby Kennedy and Roy Cohn and all sorts of Cold Warrriors were up to this kind of paranoid fun...in public. Not lurking about in the shadows.

Cold Warriors in general proposed a conspiracy theory that THE REDS were going to subvert us. And this was both true and untrue. At the same time we were conspiring to fuck over the USSR.

But McCarthy was not running a conspiracy in the same way that Nixon was masterminding a clandestine operation to bug opponents, use the IRS as a weapon, and cover up a burglary involving former CIA assets. McCarthy did his dirt in public...he was proud of it...just like when Nixon took down Hiss.
 
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rickenvox said:
He doesn't have the ability to create a documentary or script on any historical event or period without a staff of researchers/ writers to do all of the groundwork. People who cite Howard Zinn (like Will Hunting, fictional genius in all disciplines, right and left brain) are idiots, pseudo-intellectuals.
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Roger Stone. Political operative. Member of Nixon’s Committee to Re-elect the President. Not Oliver Stone—he’s a filmmaker.
 
Peen Simmons said:
Roger Stone. Political operative. Member of Nixon’s Committee to Re-elect the President. Not Oliver Stone—he’s a filmmaker.
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Ahhhhhh. never mind (think Gilda Radner SNL)

Apparently I'm an idiot.

Although I would venture to guess that Oliver's conspiracy theories have had a greater impact on Trump in that they were movies and not words on a piece of paper which he can't read.
 
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Peen Simmons said:
McCarthy’s investigations (and the similar but different HUAC) proposed a conspiratorial Line of thought—America was besieged by corrupters from within. Which was and wasn’t true. The entire state department wasn’t lousy with commies...though there likely were compromised folks at State...if only because they could be blackmailed as closeted homosexuals or former party members. But the McCarthy’s bipartisan investigation eventually got shut down as a fraud by other Senators.

There was even a hearing about how McCarthy had been manipulating folks behind the scenes to for some compadre in the Army. And Nixon and Bobby Kennedy and Roy Cohn and all sorts of Cold Warrriors were up to this kind of paranoid fun...in public. Not lurking about in the shadows.

Cold Warriors in general proposed a conspiracy theory that THE REDS were going to subvert us. And this was both true and untrue. At the same time we were conspiring to fuck over the USSR.

But McCarthy was not running a conspiracy in the same way that Nixon was masterminding a clandestine operation to bug opponents, use the IRS as a weapon, and cover up a burglary involving former CIA assets. McCarthy did his dirt in public...he was proud of it...just like when Nixon took down Hiss.
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So not all American communists were aligned with or supported the USSR. Going after those people is the equivalent of going after Literature majors studying Marxist criticism. McCarthy also knowingly targeted people he already knew were not communists, but he wanted them silenced (very Nixon-like, actually worse in that people were actually incarcerated). But the bigger subject I thought we were talking about was whether Watergate opened up Americans to a wider acceptance of conspiracy theories in general. Which I was saying had always been around. Watergate did steeply increase the average American's mistrust in government. Did that kind of mistrust directly fuel 911 conspiracy theories for example? Maybe, but the ability of unqualified, unpublished citizens to write any crazy thing they want on the internet and get exposure is a bigger factor in my eye.
 
rickenvox said:
So not all American communists were aligned with or supported the USSR. Going after those people is the equivalent of going after Literature majors studying Marxist criticism. McCarthy also knowingly targeted people he already knew were not communists, but he wanted them silenced (very Nixon-like, actually worse in that people were actually incarcerated). But the bigger subject I thought we were talking about was whether Watergate opened up Americans to a wider acceptance of conspiracy theories in general. Which I was saying had always been around. Watergate did steeply increase the average American's mistrust in government. Did that kind of mistrust directly fuel 911 conspiracy theories for example? Maybe, but the ability of unqualified, unpublished citizens to write any crazy thing they want on the internet and get exposure is a bigger factor in my eye.
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Well, the king hell bastard of American conspiracy thought is JFK...which originated on the Left-ish. As did a lot of anti-corporate health and pollution conspiracy fears. And of course fears about THE MAN and how THEY were conspiring against freaks and free people...which wasn’t unfounded of you look at the FBI’s involvement with infiltrating protest movements, etc.

Of course there’s anti-Masonic fears and anti-Catholic fears back in the 1800s. And the perennial fears around slave revolts or the Brits secretly running things or staging a comeback.

But Watergate was a smoking gun about how dirty THE MAN was—and Nixon was already a loathsome figure—at a time when people were already primed to distrust the natural order given that things seemed to be falling apart.

I think 9/11 conspiracists are more inclined to cite Northwoods, Tonkin, and other CIA schemes vs. Watergate. Plus the general INTERNATIONAL JEWERY bullshit—though a lot of 9/11 conspiracies did point the finger at the Bush cabal...so its not all BLAME THE JEWS...at least not directly.
 
mongooz said:
Judge tosses Manafort lawsuit challenging Mueller's authority
http://thehill.com/policy/national-...-manafort-suit-challenging-muellers-authority

"A federal judge on Friday tossed out former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort's lawsuit challenging the scope of special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation."

"A civil case is not the appropriate vehicle for taking issue with what a prosecutor has done in the past or where he might be headed in the future," wrote Berman Jackson, who was appointed by President Obama.

"It is a sound and well-established principle that a court should not exercise its equitable powers to interfere with or enjoin an ongoing criminal investigation when the defendant will have the opportunity to challenge any defect in the prosecution in the trial court or on direct appeal.

"Therefore, the Court finds that this civil complaint must be dismissed."
[the trial is set for september, btw]

rotflmao
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That is pretty boilerplate law. Exhaustion of remedies and all that.
 
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