Sept. 9 Open Thread: Anonymice, a Failed State and Insubordinate Hillbillies

Filed in National, Open Thread by on September 9, 2018

An anonymous White House source has outed himself. No, not the writer, the one who spoke the obvious. Mick Mulvaney, one of the sneakiest rats on the USS Trump, is the one who told donors that Ted Cruz could lose his Senate race. The notion that this is news makes sense only in GOP World, where stating the truth out loud is strictly taboo. It’s impossible to definitively state that Cruz will lose, but it’s going to take every ugly trick in the Republican bag to lug him over the finish line — especially if Cruz keeps telling rally crowds that Beto O’Rourke wants to bring “tofu, silicon and dyed hair” to Texas. Makes you wonder if Cruz has ever been to Dallas.

Offered without comment: If you think you know who wrote the infamous op-ed piece, you can place a bet on your hunch.

Anne Applebaum, who lives in Wisconsin, writes that Washington “feels like the capital of a state where the legal order has collapsed.” She makes pointed parallels to Warsaw Pact states under communism, where public events took on political significance and people spoke of their resistance without ever identifying their oppressor by name. Sounds about right.

Most people fail to realize the significance of so many intelligence-community veterans speaking out against the Trump regime. The CIA’s former acting director, John McLaughlin, explains why they’re doing it:

All of us in intelligence have been shaped by careers assessing societies where free speech, democratic institutions and rule of law don’t exist or are under attack — places such as Russia and China. We have also seen how fragile democracy can be and how it can be eroded almost imperceptibly — consider Turkey and parts of Central Europe. So our senses are finely tuned to the classic warning signs: attacks on institutions, neutralization of opponents, cowed legislatures, publics numbed by repeated falsehoods. All those are now visible here to various degrees. While others may say our democracy can’t erode that way, we know we’ve heard that before, somewhere else. The stakes are too high for complacency here.

Quote of the Day: “What the president needs to do today is very clear. He should fire Jeff Sessions, send the Keebler elf, send the insubordinate hillbilly, back to Alabama.” Roger Stone, to the 200 humans and juggalos who swarmed the Mall in Washington for the right-wing Mother of All Rallies.

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  1. jason330 says:

    Bookies are great at odds making, or they aren’t in the business long. I would hesitate to scoff at the Anonymice betting lines:

    Pence (2-to-3)
    Education Secretary Betsy Devos (2-to-1),
    Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (4-to-1),
    Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin (4-to-1),
    chief of staff John F. Kelly (4-to-1),
    Defense Secretary Jim Mattis (5-to-1),
    Attorney General Jeff Sessions (5-to-1),
    Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke (6-to-1),
    Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue (6-to-1),
    Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross (7-to-1)
    Labor Secretary Alex Acosta (7-to-1),
    HHS Secretary Alex Azar (8-to-1),
    HUD Secretary Ben Carson (8-to-1),
    VA Secretary Robert Wilkie (8-to-1),
    Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen (10-to-1),
    Ivanka Trump (12-to-1)
    Jared Kushner (12-to-1).