Saturday, October 8, 2016

The Orange Martyrs Brigade

Republicans are now in full and complete crisis mode as a result of the Washington Post/NBC story on Trump's awful misogynist 2005 interview.  Several Republicans have withdrawn their endorsements in the wake of the revelations, including GOP Sens. Mike Crapo, Kelly Ayotte, and Lisa Murkowski.  Others are now calling for Trump to drop out of the race entirely and let Mike Pence be the nominee.

The party's past nominees were unflinching in their condemnation.

“Hitting on married women? Condoning assault? Such vile degradations demean our wives and daughters and corrupt America's face to the world,” Mitt Romney, the party’s last GOP presidential nominee, wrote on Twitter. And Arizona Sen. John McCain, the 2008 nominee, said Trump could have no excuse: "No woman should ever be victimized by this kind of inappropriate behavior. He alone bears the burden of his conduct and alone should suffer the consequences.”

Even within Trump’s own campaign, there was an overriding sense of doom. One aide expressed doubt that the GOP nominee, who has successfully weathered a number of scandals, would be able to ride the current firestorm.

There's "absolutely no excuse to ever talk about women in such a crude and demeaning way," Trump’s Texas chair, Dan Patrick, was quoted as saying.

As the hours passed, some Republicans began to call for Trump to step aside, leaving the presidential race to vice presidential nominee Mike Pence. Rob Engstrom, the Chamber of Commerce’s national political director, was the first to call for Trump to quit, followed by Rep. Mike Coffman, former N.Y. Gov. George Pataki, Virginia Rep. Barbara Comstock and Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse.

Utah Sen. Mike Lee said: “You are the distraction... I respectfully ask you, with all due respect, to step aside.”

Trump of course has no plans to drop out and is meeting this afternoon with his "brain trust" to decide a course of action.

Meanwhile Reince Preibus and the RNC are apparently cutting Trump off.

The Republican National Committee on Saturday appeared to at least temporarily halt the operations of some of the “Victory” program that is devoted to electing Donald Trump.

The move comes as the GOP nominee is under mounting pressure from elected Republicans to step aside after he was caught on tape bragging about sexually assaulting women.

In an email from the RNC to a victory program mail vendor, with the subject line “Hold on all projects,” the committee asked the vendor to “put a hold” on mail production.

“Please put a hold/stop on all mail projects right now. If something is in production or print it needs to stop. Will update you when to proceed,” Lauren Toomey, a staffer in the RNC’s political department, wrote in an email that was obtained by POLITICO.

The email was sent to at least one RNC victory program vendor. Rick Wiley, a top RNC official, was cc’d on the email.

At this point the Trump campaign is in total and complete freefall.  And please note all the people who were cool with Trump through his racism, misogyny, bigotry and white supremacist garbage, what actually pissed them off was realizing he was going to most likely lose a ton of working-class white women over this.  It didn't affect any of these newly-minted converts to women's rights until it was Trump offending people that were going to vote GOP and looked like them.

So no, zero sympathy.

When these same Republicans looked the other way and allowed Trump to be the nominee, they did nothing.

They did nothing for months when the target was "Mexican rapists" or "The blacks living in hell" or "China" or Clinton herself.

Now that Trump blew it so badly that they are going to be hurt by it, only now is it a problem to them.  Only now is Trump unacceptable.  Only now do they care.

They can burn along with him and the party in the dumpster fire they made.


Tell 'Em Bobby D Sent You To Vote

Robert De Niro takes a minute out of his busy schedule of being awesome to read Donald Trump like a book and slams it shut in his face.



I think we're done here.

Orange, Crushed

Donald Trump continues to be an awful human being in every sense of the word, and he's been that way for decades, folks. No wonder then that somebody did enough actual opposition research to catch this gem of an interview with the man in 2005 where he basically admits to sexually assaulting a woman.

Donald Trump bragged in vulgar terms about kissing, groping and trying to have sex with women during a 2005 conversation caught on a hot microphone, saying that “when you’re a star, they let you do it,” according to a video obtained by The Washington Post.

The video captures Trump talking with Billy Bush, then of “Access Hollywood,” on a bus with the show’s name written across the side. They were arriving on the set of “Days of Our Lives” to tape a segment about Trump’s cameo on the soap opera.

The tape includes audio of Bush and Trump talking inside the bus, as well as audio and video once they emerge from it to begin shooting the segment.

In that audio, Trump discusses a failed attempt to seduce a woman, whose full name is not given in the video.

“I moved on her, and I failed. I’ll admit it,” Trump is heard saying. It was unclear when the events he was describing took place. The tape was recorded several months after he married his third wife, Melania.

“Whoa,” another voice said.

“I did try and f--- her. She was married,” Trump says.

Trump continues: “And I moved on her very heavily. In fact, I took her out furniture shopping. She wanted to get some furniture. I said, ‘I’ll show you where they have some nice furniture.’”

“I moved on her like a bitch, but I couldn’t get there. And she was married,” Trump says. “Then all of a sudden I see her, she’s now got the big phony tits and everything. She’s totally changed her look.”

At that point in the audio, Trump and Bush appear to notice Arianne Zucker, the actress who is waiting to escort them into the soap-opera set.

“Your girl’s hot as s---, in the purple,” says Bush, who’s now a co-host of NBC’s “Today” show.

“Whoa!” Trump says. “Whoa!”

“I’ve got to use some Tic Tacs, just in case I start kissing her,” Trump says. “You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait.”

And when you’re a star, they let you do it,” Trump says. “You can do anything.”

“Whatever you want,” says another voice, apparently Bush’s.

“Grab them by the p---y,” Trump says. “You can do anything
.”

And America, about sixty million of you are gonna vote for this guy for president. What the hell is wrong with you?  Oh, and just so you know, Billy Bush?  Dubya's cousin. Billy's dad is Jonathan Bush, Poppy Bush's younger brother. Isn't that just perfect?

Seriously though, if this isn't the end of Trump's run, then there's no hope for the country.  We're done.  There are some indications that this may be the event Republicans needed to jettison the man, but as I have said countless times, Trump is merely the symptom of a diseased and debased Republican party that is frankly headed for the dumpster fire of their own making.

Racism, bigotry, misogyny were all problems with the party and with its supporters long before Trump, and the ugly truth is that the real problem has long been the "moderate Republicans" who looked the other way and allowed that hatred to take root in order to gain ephemeral political power, especially in the last eight years.

Your white sheets were showing long before Trump was your candidate, guys.  I have no sympathy for you now that you finally disagree with your standard-bearer. You voted for him in the primaries, you still plan to vote for him for president, and the rest of your party still looks the other way as your elderly frat boy pig of a candidate hoots and hollers because you still want to "Trump That Bitch".

No.  Take the loss.  Take the Goldwater/Dukakis level loss in November and rebuild into a party that Lincoln founded and America needs in order to keep the Democrats honest.  People are already voting and there's no way you can get him off the ballot now.  Frankly, most Republicans don't care anyway, because Trump That Bitch, right?

And the best part is that Republicans are wishing Mike Pence was at the top of the ticket, himself a vile, bigoted misogynist who signed into law making LGBTQ folks into second-class citizens and forcing women to pay for funerary services for their own aborted fetuses just to shame them for having an abortion.

Finally, how did Trump's primary opponents, ONE OF WHOM WAS THE COUSIN OF THE MAN TRUMP WAS TALKING TO IN THIS INTERVIEW miss this as a possible way to stop him from becoming the nominee?

Take the L, GOP.

Do that or stay in the trash where you belong.