Megathread: Sean Spicer Resigns from White House Press Secretary Position

Shaper_pmp · 2017-07-21T23:16:45+00:00

That's a pretty accurate prediction, but you omitted the unseemly slurping and gurgling sounds each time the tip of the nominee's penis passes the GOP Senator's tonsils.

Shaper_pmp · 2017-07-21T23:12:55+00:00

All you have to do to end his presidency is get Trump under oath and ask him "what he thinks of the fact that is was Obama's idea to collude with the Russians to get Trump elected".

He'd reflexively claim it was all his own idea even before his brain parsed the rest of the question, and from there his huge ego and narcissistic inability to admit fault or mistakes would see him talk himself straight into an espionage conviction.

Any time he ground to a halt just suggest that some random detail was Bannon's idea, or Sessions', and watch him dig himself in deeper.

Shaper_pmp · 2017-07-21T23:07:10+00:00

I thought we already established it most likely meant "The President is sundowning".

Shaper_pmp · 2017-07-21T23:04:27+00:00

Nah, just regular old 4D watersports.

That's where you keep frantically try to piss all over Obama and Clinton, but it keeps following a convoluted path through the complex multidimensional topology of spacetime and somehow always comes out splashing onto the back of your own head.

Shaper_pmp · 2017-07-21T22:57:40+00:00

if that's true it's the lamest last straw imaginable

It always is, though. The straw that breaks the camel's back is always just a nondescript little straw.

It was like how the thing that suddenly made even the GOP talking heads turn on Trump was his random claim that he refused to let Mika Brzezinski join him at Mar a Lago because she "was bleeding badly from a face-lift".

I mean on the scale of things Trump has said about people that was fucking nothing, and it wasn't even about anyone particularly untouchable or well-loved.

This is a guy who's advocated and admitted to sexual assault, and the thing that made a bunch of Republicans conspicuously stand up and say for the first time "this is too far now, do that again and we'll ^you ^know ^{^perhaps} ^{^maybe} ^{^{^think}} ^{^{^about}} ^{^{^actually}} ^{^{^doing}} ^{^{^something}} ^{^{^at}} ^{^{^some}} ^{^{^point}} " was randomly claiming someone's face was bleeding from a facelift she probalby never had?

But that's the way it works - no one snowflake is responsible for the avalanche, but at some point one lands, and the next thing you know you're down one village and three ski resorts.

Shaper_pmp · 2017-07-21T22:26:22+00:00

That's a massive time period.

Bear in mind that 1945 is the end of the first period the Air Force were researching the Stargate, and the second time they had Daniel Jackson and Samantha Carter, fifty years more knowledge of Egyptian culture and hieroglyphics, 1990s technology and supercomputers to help decrypt the gate, and they still barely managed to crack it until Jackson and Carter worked together on it.

The first time around you've got just 17 years to:

Dig up the stargate
Transport it to the USA
Realise it's a technological artifact (not just a stone monument)
Get the Air Force interested in it
Stand up a research team
Realise the Stargate was a transportation device
Learn how to dial the gate (by sheer fluke/trial-and-error, given they had no supercomputers to calculate stellar drift in the 1940s)
Send an expedition through
Have something awful happen as a result
Have the political fallout
Get shut down

I mean it's not impossible, but that's a pretty compressed timeframe, and that version is just a stale retread of the SG-1 episode.

It's less credibility-straining if the stargate was stolen at some point by another group who would have to do most/all of those steps themselves, before being reacquired by Langford and the Air Force and their work replicated (which would at least be an original story), but that just makes the timeframe even tighter, and either of the two possibilities kind of retroactively make Jackson and Carter look more and more like a pair of dickheads if it took two of the finest experts in the world in their respective fields and all the resources of a classified 1990s military project to reproduce what a bunch of guys (and possibly two different bunches of guys) with slide-rules managed to achieve in the 1940s and then promptly forgot all about.

Oh, and then you also still have to satisfyingly explain why all of that additional detail is missing from the entire SG continuity to date.

It's not impossible, but it's really, really hard to do well, in a way that doesn't violate the established continuity and includes a novel plot and doesn't retroactively weaken the existing shows and explains why nobody in the main continuity ever bothered to mention anything about it.

Shaper_pmp · 2017-07-21T22:02:21+00:00

We all know how virtually every historical setting will play out.

Yes, but the attraction of historical stories are the characters and the small-scale drama.

The main driver of Stargate (in fact all sci-fi of that type) is the epic ongoing storyline and "future of the human race"-type stuff, not really the small-scale character-driven stuff (that's fine for an episode here and there, but it just doesn't carry the whole series). They tried an unusual amount of character-driven stuff with SG:Universe, and look what happened.

I'm gonna let you in on a little secret writing is about tension. When anything becomes possible tension is non existent and the show turns into crap.

In general, sure, but you're ignoring the fact that this is part of a franchise that's already three series' and severalmovies deep (four series if you count Infinity), and already has a well-defined and widely anticipated appeal to viewers.

You can write a good slapstick comedy and you can write a brilliant period drama, but try to make Anchorman 2 into serious period drama or a comedy spin-off of Game of Thrones that focuses on madcap physical humour and you're going to get panned because that's not what audiences want or expect from those franchises.

As I said, Universe was a good show that had real promise, but it flopped because people were expecting a big, lighthearted but engaging show like SG-1 or Atlantis, and they were given Battlestar-Dawson's-Creek.

You could make a great character-driven show that focuses on human interpersonal drama in the 1940s, with basically zero alien or sci-fi involvement, beyond one series-ending alien macguffin, and it might be very good. Call it Stargate and set it in the franchise continuity, however, and you're going to get cancelled in the first season.

Shaper_pmp · 2017-07-21T21:47:40+00:00

See, I could buy that if it was a completely different group involved - some private group that had no connection or continuity to the US Government or Air Force, so that their knowledge could plausibly have been lost when the Air Force acquired it.

The problem there is:

Paul Langford (Cathering Langford's father) who dug up the Stargate was also involved with the early Air Force experiments with it, so there's no real way to break that continuity.
There's hardly any time for Langford (or anyone else) to acquire, decode and begin using the Stargate between 1928 (when Langford dug it up) and 1945 (by which point langford had the gate back again, the Air Force had already opened the gate, lost Littlefield through it and then closed it down again).
The other stargate lay (completely undisturbed and unknown) in Antarctica until 1998, when it was discovered by SG-1.

I mean it stretches credibility that Langford and the Air Force opened the Stargate in 1945, lost a man through it and then completely forgot about the entire thing for forty years, but at least that's canon.

If they re-tread those same events then it's going to be old and stale (you might as well just re-watch the SG-1 episode), and the idea that they managed to open the Stargate twice, twice something horrific happened and twice they shut it all down and forgot everything about it is just getting silly.

The idea that there was a third stargate is getting silly too, and there's no point in the continuity when "the nazis" (or whoever) could have acquired a gate - that's a perfect example of them ignoring continuity and blowing gaping plot-holes in the original series.

Plus "the Nazis had a gate, something awful happened and then the Nazis killed everyone who knew about it" is a great example of an anticlimax ending and a lame premise, because all the waythrough you know that it all has to come to nothing, or else it would have factored into the SG-1 plot.

Shaper_pmp · 2017-07-21T18:45:31+00:00

Spicer has a political career outside of Trump

Had, anyway.

We'll have to see if he can sew enough of the tattered shreds of his professional reputation back together to know whether he still has one.

Shaper_pmp · 2017-07-21T18:39:07+00:00

How the fuck is the antichrist a Catholic?

Shaper_pmp · 2017-07-21T18:36:58+00:00

Where's he going to pop up now he's leaving the Whitehouse - Fox News, RT, or is there a new opening at MiniTrue I haven't heard about?

Shaper_pmp · 2017-07-21T17:51:57+00:00

When it's drip-fed over weeks, it can sure feel like it!

Especially when we already know all the major details of the continuity, meaning that either nothing new will happen in the prequel show, or anything that does won't ultimately matter because we already know it never goes anywhere, to the point it's completely forgotten about by the time of SG-1.

The most they can do without violating continuity is lead up to Earnest Littlefield walking through the gate in 1945, and that's a limp ending to the show because it's a huge anticlimax, and because we already have an ending to that story in SG-1, and there are no more hooks left in it to hang any more story off.

Shaper_pmp · 2017-07-21T17:43:39+00:00

You have no evidence!

Plenty of circumstantial evidence, (with Trump Jr's e-mails) an explicit statement of intent, and mountains of suspicious and suggestive behaviour.

Just no direct evidence yet.

and making racist claims about Russians

Oh don't cheapen this with childish rhetoric like that. You're clearly not an idiot, and you understand perfectly well why entanglements with foreign powers are sketchy for a candidate.

Trying to re-frame a national security issue involving a geopolitical competitor as some bizarre racist prejudice against Russians is beneath us both.

perjury... requires intent

Right - that's a judgement call on my part. I should have said "possibly perjure" or "make factually inaccurate andeasily-checked claims under oath".

Putting wrong information down on a form isnt perjury

I didn't say it was. I said it was "a federal crime" - specifically, it's a violation of US Criminal Code title 18, section 1001.

Shaper_pmp · 2017-07-21T17:17:00+00:00

Did you watch the same video as me?

Already we've seen one head resign, our sources within the DNC say they believe more heads are going to roll

He's talking about Wasserman-Schultz, and speculating that more resignations were to come (in the end DNC CEO Amy Dacey, CFO Brad Marshall and Communications Director Luis Miranda also resigned over anti-Sanders corruption).

I swear, it's distressing how some people on this sub will even disregard basic English comprehension in order to twist evidence to support their existing beliefs. :-/

Shaper_pmp · 2017-07-21T16:58:57+00:00

What makes Russia a "hostile

They're not an ally, and (along with China) they're the USA's primary geopolitical opponent.

foreign government

This doesn't even need explaining, right? ;-p

intent on influencing the US election"?

The part where they're introduced in the e-mail as "part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr Trump"?

There's no meaning to that statement other than "the Russian givernment is trying to influence the election".

Seriously, what else do you think the point is of offering dirt on one candidate and "support[ing]" if not "attempting to influence the election"?

I guess I must have missed it where we are at war with Russia.

"Hostile" doesn't just mean "firing missiles at each other".

The point is that this is being presented as completely unheard of behavior from Trump Jr. In reality, this is totally normal, people are happy to accept dirt from everyone.

I agree anyone presenting any contact at all with foreign indivduals or even governments as unprecedented is making a nonsense argument, so there's no argument here.

That said the Trump Jr e-mails show a pretty unusual degree of willingness to collude with a pretty unusually unfriendly foreign power in a pretty unusually direct, intentional and overt way.

Look at the picture I linked of what the media is calling a "secret, unreported meeting" between Russia and Putin. Its at a table with 100 other people!

Agreed - the media are chasing the narrative to ridiculous extremes, like the one you mentioned.

Thay said, that doesn't mean there's not plenty of meat there, just because there's also a fair big of some overreaching bullshit.

as I said there are thousands of meetings with dozens of other countries. So they didnt remember to list every one. Big deal, these people are incompetent. Whats the evidence they "lied" and didnt just neglect to report every single meeting?

The fact that all of them neglected to mention meetings involving Russian contacts, actively denied meeting over and over again when specific occasions were mentioned (despite the fact that they would have business records and documentation they could check to confirm in almost every case), and then some of them went so far as to perjure themselves or commit federal crimes by filing false information in security clearance applications.

Beyond a certain point mere incompetence doesn't plausible cover it any more.

Normally before an investigation there is probable cause.

Right, and we have that - internal government memos and escalated IC warnings about inappropriate relationships, classified IC reports leaked to the press, combined with transparent lies (or if you prefer "repeated factual misstatements") from the individuals concerned in response.

That's more than enough for probable cause.

Also, the NSA has been collecting every phone call, email, etc on everyone in the US and many other countries, especially Russia, for over a decade. They cant find a single shred of evidence though?

Who says they haven't? The FBI is still investigating, and we won't find out either way until it finishes. "Absence of evidence", and all that...

You are forgetting this is a witch hunt.

That's circular reasoning - you're demanding direct evidence on the basis it's a witch-hunt, but claiming it's a witch-hunt because there's no direct evidence.

You haven't yet demonstrated it's a meritless witch-hunt, so until you do claims predicated on that aren't very persuasive.

I am offering their arguments because they are true arguments!

To be fair things like "it's a witch-hunt", "but Hillary did worse", "Russia aren't a hostile foreign power" and "there's no incontrovertible direct evidence when most of the evidence is still classified and the investigation is still in progress" are not "true" arguments - they're deeply flawed and debatable ones at best, and irrelevant or misleading at worst.

Shaper_pmp · 2017-07-21T16:12:45+00:00

Yeah - I knew about that specious argument, but I didn't realise there was such unambiguously and intentional exposure of confirmed classified information to a non-cleared individual.

Shaper_pmp · 2017-07-21T12:55:45+00:00

Fucking hell. That's pretty fucked up - thanks for posting it.

Shaper_pmp · 2017-07-21T09:28:37+00:00

Right - either it's going to be a long, slow, character-driven drama set on earth and the crescendo of the entire first season is going to be opening the stargate (something we've already seen a million times, and something we already know the result of the first time they did it), or they're going to completely ignore continuity and leave a gaping plot-hole as to how we could have been popping back and forth to other worlds in the early 20th century, but then we (and everyone else in the galaxy) had conveniently forgotten about it by the time SG-1 came along.

Shaper_pmp · 2017-07-21T09:02:55+00:00

we know he was being sent classified information to print out even without appropriate security credentials

Source?

I've heard about Clinton making a request to print off supposedly non-classified emails that were sent to her over sent a classified network that she couldn't access (hence the request to resend them to a less secure account without the automatically-applied metadata from the classified network), but I've never heard of a proven example of her asking someone to strip classified markings from a legitimately classified email!

Do you have a link?

Shaper_pmp · 2017-07-21T00:54:27+00:00

Oh No! He was happy to hear that someone offered him dirt on Clinton! Oh but these were Russians aka untermenchen.

No, these were (apparently) agents of a hostile foreign government intent on influencing the US election.

You keep trying to avoid the central fact here by pretending they're "just people" or insinuating that there's some weird racist angle about them specifically being Russian.

That's diversionary bullshit though - they could have been from any hostile foreign nation, because their race isn't the issue - it's the fact they were (at least presented as) agents of a hostile government trying to influence the US political process. That's the total extent to which their nationality is relevant.

That makes it soooooo much different than cases like this where it was regular human Ukrainians, not filthy Russian scum...

Sorry to shit all over your mental stereotype, but in addition to having nothing against Russians I'd happily see Clinton in jail too, and I'd be ecstatic if she was also under investigation for her decades of shady crap.

But that's completely irrelevant to the question of Trump's morally questionable choices and possible criminal guilt. It does make for a great diversionary tactic from the topic under discussion though, right?

I like how you put innocent in scary quotes. Do you have any evidence these "innocent" contacts were anything but innocent? Of course not.

Other than the fact they were epeatedly lied about? That's suggestive, right there. How often do you lie about completely innocent things... let alone repeatedly lying with different lies as each one is revealed to be untruthful?

What you're basically asking for is absolute, incontrovertible proof of intentional collusion with Russia, but:

That's why we have investigations, and what's what's going on right now. If we had that already there would be no need for an investigation, and they could move straight to impeachment (or criminal charges for anyone underneath the president)
It's also a wildly unrealistic standard of evidence. If you spot a guy standing over the body of someone he hates, covered in blood and with a knife in his hand, technically that's only circumstantial evidence. Nevertheless, it's perfectly sufficient to convict in a murder case, because almost no investigations ever turn up a recording or credible eye-witness (the only forms of direct evidence) to a serious crime... and these days when recordings can be faked and the credibility of witnesses can be impugned, it's doubtful whether such a thing as unimpeachably credible direct evidence even exists.

This case - like almost every case as far back as our tradition of jurisprudence stretches - will be settled on the question of reasonable doubt, and will be informed primarily (perhaps even exclusively) by indirect and circumstantial evidence.

Hopefully they'll turn up direct evidence either way so limit the amount of baseless conspiracy theorising that hang arond after the investigation (and any ensuing legal processes) completes, but I really, really doubt it.

I dont think Trump is on my "side" and I am certainly not on his.

Apologies for impugning your motives for your position, then. I got the impression you were a hardcore Trump fanboy because you were offering so many of their arguments, but if you're genuinely a neutral skeptic then I apologise unreservedly for judging you so inaccurately.

Can you explain, then, why you think Clinton's behaviour is remotely relevant to Trump's case, if you weren't merely seeking to derail the conversation?

Shaper_pmp · 2017-07-20T15:40:11+00:00

There's a world of difference between a ping and a port-scan, and between a port-scan and proactive attempts to exploit possible vulnerabilities in open ports.

I don't know what level of attack they experienced, but I'd be fascinated to know how you know so confidently that it was nothing but a few ICMP echoes.

Shaper_pmp · 2017-07-20T15:03:43+00:00

"To be fair I only played a very limited role in my own finances for a limited time”.

Shaper_pmp · 2017-07-20T10:41:56+00:00

this quick summary.

Thanks - I'll give them a look!

Shaper_pmp · 2017-07-20T10:40:51+00:00

none of that stuff is verifiable evidence of collusion

I see your point, but if you find someone standing over a freshly-stabbed body or someone they hated with the knife in their hands, a scowl on their face and blood all over them... well, technically that's "just" circumstantial evidence unless someone actually saw them stab the guy... but it's plenty of reason to conclude they killed him, and people have been convicted on far less. In fact it's relatively rare that criminal convictions rely on non-circumstantial evidence, because such an eventuality pretty much relies on recordings or direct witnesses of the act.

It's also worth unpacking your term "verifiable evidence", because it's a bit misleading. The Trump Jr. e-mail is the only direct evidence of an intention to collude, you're right... and direct evidence is the opposite of circumstantial evidence.

A huge amount of the circumstantial evidence is "verifiable" though - who met with who, when they met, in many cases the subjects that were discussed and the fact one or both parties lied repeatedly (orten multiple different sequential lies) about it afterwards.

TL;DR: Yes, you're right that the only direct evidence is Trump Jr's e-mail, and that's technically evidence of intent to collude, not the fact of collusion (unless you consider taking the meeting in the first place to be colluding, which is possible).

However, you're not correct that the circumstantial evidence is not "verifiable", and your implication (or at least my inference) that circumstantial evidence is not damning or sufficient to form judgements is likewise incorrect... especially given the mountains of it we have available, and the fact the suspects have repeatedly lied about almost every detail of it and been repeatedly caught out.

And certainly pales in comparison to what's been alleged about collaborating to hack the DNC/Clinton campaign and spread Russia-sponsored propaganda in the US.

I agree that conflating the DNC leaks/hacks with the Trump campaign is overreaching, and likely even counterproductive to the left (eg, if the DNC e-mails are proven to be leaks, it provides a "fake news!" counter-narrative that might muddy the waters of any collusion in other areas). That said, I haven't seen anyone really claim Trump or his campaign was actively trying to spread Russian propaganda in the USA - more that he knew Russian was supporting his campaign, and was quite happy to enter into quid pro quo agreements (eg, lifting sanctions in return for support/not revealing kompromat on him, etc).

I'm not saying nobody is claiming Trump knowingly spread Russian propaganda - just that it's not really a significant part of the allegations against him.

Shaper_pmp · 2017-07-20T10:23:54+00:00

To be fair I was using it according to the idiomatic meaning, but it's interesting to hear that there are dissenting opinions, even if they're from someone whose company was implicated in the hacks.

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