Flash drive. Tweet. Even condo was still a fresh neologism, back in those days.
Forty-five years, and (despite what the Never-Trumpers and their media supporters would like us to believe) the rot at the heart of the Republican Party is the same as it ever was. Also, Mr. Trudeau is one of the great artists of our era…
(Doonesbury via GoComics.com)
Reader Interactions
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danielx
I must say the idea of a Trump presidential library doesn’t work for me, somehow.
hells littlest angel
I have no doubt the library will contain every document ever generated by the Trump White House. It will also be an old-fashioned (great again!) rental library.
NotMax
Final design: 10% library, 90% gift shop. Oh, and only pay toilets.
“We do NOT validate parking.”
//
Ohio Mom
I know the idea of a Trump presidential library sounds like a contradiction in terms but this presidency needs to be documented for the future.
As I often remind Ohio Son, “Mistakes are how we learn.”
Now are Trump and his pals the ones to spearhead this effort? Obviously, we need somebody else.
Patricia Kayden
sab
@Ohio Mom: Are you near Columbus, Dayton or Cincinnati? Someday I hope to meet you. I know that sounds stalky, but I learn a lot from your comments.
Jager
Many of us West Coast, Liberal, Elitists call the Reagan Library Fantasy Land North. There is even a room full of all the military uniforms St Ronnie wore in his fcking movies.
Patricia Kayden
The grifting continueth.
JPL
Until the last cel, I wasn’t impressed. It does seems appropriate that his library is located in Moscow though and I don’t mean in Idaho.
JPL
@Jager: hahaha trump is going to have the unedited version of Home Alone 2 and all the Apprentice shows, so there.
lollipopguild
@Patricia Kayden: Only a third of the days? Seems like a lot more.
hells littlest angel
@JPL: I don’t think so. I have nothing but ill will toward the Russians these days, but they do respect literacy. Meanwhile, the current plan is for the Trump library to be located in a trailer park in Florida. Really.
hells littlest angel
@JPL: Don’t forget Melania’s soft-core porn photos.
JPL
@lollipopguild: Washington Post was being conservative, since other sites have it higher.
JPL
@hells littlest angel: Teachers all over the country are going to wonder why teenage boys are interested in trump’s trailer park museum.
Jeffro
@hells littlest angel: and her “lost decade” ahem
anyway, re: trumpov/Nixon, everything old is new again…Doonesbury is a treasure again, too
WaterGirl
@Patricia Kayden: I don’t mind so much that he goes there 1/3 of the time, the problem is that he RETURNS.
Roger Moore
@hells littlest angel:
They really ought to put it at Mar-a-Lago. That way it will be destroyed by rising sea levels– a truly fitting end to the place.
Roger Moore
@hells littlest angel:
But not, I think, Donald’s soft-core porn appearances. I wonder about his professional wrestling work…
JoyceH
Wow, blast from the past! I remember reading Doonesbury during the Watergate investigation. I specifically remember the “guilty, guilty, guilty!” strip.
OzarkHillbilly
Poteca is in the oven. Looking good.
Amir Khalid
The Trump Presidential Library will contain nothing Trump ever read, because he’s too lazy to read; and nothing he ever actually wrote, including the tweets attributed to him.
OzarkHillbilly
@JPL:Teachers all over the country know all about teenage boys.
JPL
@OzarkHillbilly: Then they already know about the photos.
OzarkHillbilly
@JPL: Indeed.
ETA: Men all over the world are at heart, teenage boys.
Another Scott
Nancy Letourneau at WaMo has been covering some of what we were talking about earlier today:
Stuff like this – scurrilous charges that are never substantiated – isn’t going to go away until it stops working. What’s the best way to fight it? Dunno. But a strong case can be made that repeating scurrilous accusations just makes it worse, no matter how strongly it is rebutted. Our brains aren’t logical…
This isn’t an argument against Biden – it’s an argument for coming up with ways for front-runners to fight against lies without reinforcing them.
Cheers,
Scott.
swiftfox
Still have a copy of the Doonesbury Chronicles but it’s been a long time since I read them.
oatler.
@swiftfox: I think it went to Sunday-only. My Doonesbury anthology is a perfect history of the 80s.
Mo MacArbie
Not just Melania. I’m sure he’ll have a RealDoll trophy room of all his conquests.
MJS
@Another Scott: A start would be that everyone on our side, including presumably Hunter Biden’s attorney, learn to use the words “lie”, “liar”, and “lying”. “Scandalous allegations” isn’t going to get it done.
OzarkHillbilly
@Another Scott: What our candidates need are some good old fashioned sex scandals. trump has the porn star and the playboy playmate of the month, what do we have? A 25 year old Marine? C’mon, we can do better than that. No Gary Hart and Donna Rice weak tea will do. We need a menage a trois or even better a good old fashioned orgy.
JPL
@Another Scott: Is there a reason why spokes people can’t point out that most boards are made up of folks who are high level or know high level people. Gen. Mattis was on the board of Theranos and I doubt he knew anything about the company. (at least I hope not)
JPL
@OzarkHillbilly: You mean someone who had an affair with a porn star while wife is home with a weeks old baby. Rush and company would feign outrage while preaching about family values.
BBA
@Another Scott: We need to fight fire with fire – more and better ratfuckers!
The problem is that Trump is damn near impossible to ratfuck. I can’t think of a single thing you could accuse him of that his voters wouldn’t instantly insist is a good thing.
“He murders homeless people for sport!” “So what? Who doesn’t? Suck it libtard!”
trollhattan
@danielx:
Nah, it’s as off-brand as a Jimmy Carter Golf Resort.
trollhattan
@BBA:
About all I can come up with is “Trump’s a closet socialist. Pass it on.”
HalfAssedHomesteader
@danielx: The way I heard it the Trump library will be a book cart he pushes around the prison block with signed copies of The Art of the Deal.
Gvg
I think you can’t merely say, “ some Trump supporter is lying about Hunter (or something else)”, you have to say “some Trump supporter filed a law suit which made lying conspiracy theory claims about Hunter with no supporting evidence and the courts threw it out immediately, because it was so stupid and made up. They did it just so they could SAY Hunter is being sued/investigated and if you believe it, you are a gullible fool. The company that did the “investigation” only ever files these suits for foolish conspiracy theories about important democrats.”
i mean we have to really really spell it out and use simple words….while trying to not be too wordy. That’s actually hard.
sab
@Another Scott: Has Hunter Biden ever run for office? He got a an overseas corporate board job, and his dad pulled the rug out from under him. Why is he even under discussion?
These “squirrels” aren’t even very big or actual news squirrels. Kind of like the stuffed ” sqirrtles” in the dog toy from Chewy that my pre-school grand-daughter loves. Tiny stuffed animals. Why does the press jump every time one of these little critters is tossed up in the air?
JPL
@trollhattan: He’s in the closet is what I heard.
Ohio Mom
That trailer park thing was a trial balloon sent up by the trailer park itself. It doesn’t have the money to do needed much needed infrastructure repairs (IIRC, sewers and some other big ticket items) and someone got the idea, We could sell it to Trump for his library! Then it would be off our hands.
As I understand it, they are big Trump fans, and so believe he wouldn’t even miss the millions they would charge. And of course he’d want to help them out, being the swell guy he is.
It’s pitiful.
Gvg
@swiftfox: I notice that Mark’s hair is now white. Wah!
OzarkHillbilly
He broke a fingernail pressing the button on his stun gun.
Another Scott
@sab: I take it you don’t remember Billy Carter.
The substance doesn’t matter. It has never mattered. What matters is whether some RWNJ can construct a story to damage Democrats.
We need to find ways to fight these things. I like to think that we’re getting better at it, but it takes constant struggle.
Cheers,
Scott.
Ohio Mom
Sab, you make me blush. I am in Cincinnati, and I think you are somewhere near Cleveland? We should plan a Columbus meet-up for the spring, for a Saturday afternoon. I would like to meet you too.
I think Debbie lives in Columbus, and there might be other Juicers who are in Central Ohio or could make the drive. What do you say?
Roger Moore
@JPL:
That may be the way it actually works, but it’s not the way it’s supposed to work. The board is supposed to oversee the senior management on behalf of the shareholders. Nobody wants to admit the board is just rubber stamping what the senior management wants, since it’s a failure of their responsibilities to the shareholders.
Keith P
@NotMax: It’ll end up being like a polished brass (aka “gold”) version of the Zoolander Center for Kids Who Can’t Read Good.
opiejeanne
@Jager: I never visited the Reagan Library nor the Nixon one. Disneyland had its “character prom” at the Nixon Library one year when my youngest worked there. It was a “rogue” library at the time and was a very nice facility with pretty gardens, but offered a fantasy image of Nixon’s presidency. That was changed a few years ago.
I have been to the Eisenhower library, and the Truman library. Very sedate places. I can’t imagine how hilariously awful the Trump library will be.
opiejeanne
@hells littlest angel: Isn’t it a trailer park that floods whenever there’s a “king tide”?
noncarborundum
I can’t wait to see all the documents that had to be taped together by the White House staff after Trump tore them up.
OzarkHillbilly
@Another Scott:
I truly think we need to embrace them. “They mowed down 17 “Teen Seniors for trump” and gang banged a gaggle of small town cheerleaders all on the same day!”
“Yep, you betcha. Top it, mfers.”
OzarkHillbilly
@Roger Moore: I must be nobody.
Citizen Alan
@Another Scott: We could always ask every single Republican to respond to rumors about their pedophilia and bestiality.
p.a.
How long will the US Dept of Justice hold the complete output of the Trump Admin before it is no longer needed as evidence and can therefore be turned over to the Trumpository?
O. Felix Culpa
@Ohio Mom: Ms. O – who is actually from Ohio – and I are considering a trip to Columbus in June/July. A meetup, if possible, would be grand.
sab
@Another Scott: I remember Billy Carter. Back in the day, he was just the president’s fun brother who drank too much. He was never the prospective president’s corrupt son who endangered America’s freedom while the actual president’s actual children sell us out to the Russians and the Chinese.
Whole different ball game of corruption. I feel safe in assuming that the Biden’s are not even contemplating keeping up. They might stumble into an occassional improper act.
Bidens won’t be up to their eyeballs in the trough, snorting and snuffling.
sab
@O. Felix Culpa: Please, please, please do that. It would indeed be grand.
sab
@Ohio Mom: I am in Akron, 35 miles south of Cleveland. I go to Columbus ( 2 hours away) at least a couple of times a year. Sort of a routine trip for me.
Roger Moore
@OzarkHillbilly:
Excuse me: nobody on the boards or in senior management wants to admit this stuff, because they know it will end their cozy arrangement. They’re both fleecing the shareholders, and everyone at that level is in on it. The big thing is that nobody wants to admit it, even if it might get them out of personal trouble right now, because it would spoil the party for everyone.
Ohio Mom
@Scott: The thing about Billy Carter is, he was Jimmy’s brother and I think people accepted that a problematic sibling could happen to anyone. Some were probably reminded of their own deadbeat brothers-in-laws and sympathized. At any rate, Billy was a clownish figure, and the right-wine media machine didn’t yet exist.
Hunter Biden is Joe’s son, and lots of people blame how kids turn out on the parents.
And while Hunter appears to have settled down, he was a drug abuser and a skirt-chaser; getting involved with Beau’s widow was tacky to say the least. There’s lots of tabloid-level material there.
Maybe the Bidens could have spun it as, “Our family hasn’t been immune from the scourge of drugs, we know the pain too many other families face,” but I think it’s too late for that now.
Of course the Trump children are all sleezebags, liars, crooks and threats to national security, but as they say, It’s okay if you are a Republican.
Amir Khalid
@p.a.:
Is my understanding correct that Republican administrations of the recent past have tended to neglect their record-keeping, even when it is required by law? Or to actively evade it, for instance by using personal email accounts rather than official ones?
Ohio Mom
Our meet-up already has Ohio Mom and Dad, Sab, and the O. Felix Culpa’s, as well as a vague date of June/July, and its only been one short thread. we’re in business!
frosty
@Amir Khalid: You’ve noticed that, eh?
Another Scott
@sab: FTFNYT from June 1981:
FTFNYT and RWNJs will dig up, and make up, stuff about anyone associated with important Democrats if they think there is political advantage in doing so. It’s what they do, and will continue to do, as long as it continues to work. That is what I was trying to say earlier.
You can bet your bottom dollar that if Warren were leading in the polls, there would be stories about her children and family members somehow being corrupt. “Questions and Shadows” – it’s what they do.
Cheers,
Scott.
frosty
@Ohio Mom: Time to give the new site features a spin?
https://balloon-juice.com/meetups/
Amir Khalid
@frosty:
I guess it was kind of hard to miss. By the way, you’re absolutely right about Keef tuning.
Ohio Mom
@frosty: I was going to look for that, thanks for the link!
p.a.
@Amir Khalid: Yes, their m.o.
WaterGirl
@frosty: I was just thinking the same thing!
WaterGirl
@Ohio Mom: Send me the info you know now, and I’ll set it up under meetups.
sab
@Ohio Mom: Hunter Biden was a drug abuser who got hooked on morphine aftera terribly painful automobile accident where half his family, including his mother, died, when he was a tiny child.
My stepson got hooked on heroin, after he wad recovering from a cocain and alcohol addiction when his family was getting divorced, and he was traumatized by his mother’s alcoholism.
Somehow Hunter’s story seems worse and sadder.
rekoob
@Ohio Mom: For what it’s worth, even though I’m not near there (central Virginia at the moment), I can suggest meeting at the Brewdog brewery and restaurant outside Columbus (full disclosure: I’m a [tiny] shareholder). There’s also a hotel at the brewery and other places nearby.
sab
@sab: My stepson has got his life together. I just think he had a shorter path. Hunter’s route was hellish. I am not sure he is onshore yet.
Actual thoughts and prayers.
Dadadadadadada
@Roger Moore: I believe the trailer-park site is right on the coast, so it will be one of the first parts of Florida to be permanently flooded out, well before Mar-a-Lago.
Bill Arnold
@BBA:
His weak points include (a) his actual net worth, (b) dementia (his father), intelligence, and a few others. Plus a few we don’t know about.
More practically electorally, his support base has fault lines that can be actively wedged open. This is being done to Democrats.
He can be trolled into being eye-rolling (even among his supporters) ridiculous. His twitter and right wing media habits (fed in turn by 4chan, Russia, other operators, etc) are a vulnerability, and not just his; some others in his administration (and probably in the deep state) are at least as gullible[0]. Problem is that well-crafted memes/source material can live a long time, accreting additional right-wing flourishes, and can be forced by him to become part of the “conservative” normal. (Do not ask…)
[0] to be clear, the left has it’s own gullibilities.
hitchhiker
Yup. Hunter Biden’s kind of a jerk for cashing in on his family’s name.
That’s what he did.
What trump did was ignore his entire national security team in the name of scoring political points off that dumb greediness. State, Defense, everybody tried to tell him this was a bad idea and possibly illegal. He doesn’t get to use the presidency to benefit himself … that’s called corruption.
It’s abuse of power. And then trying to hide it, refusing to allow people directly involved to testify, and locking down documents is called obstruction.
That’s all we have to say, but we have to say it with one loud voice about a million times.
Hunter’s an asshole, but he’s not the most powerful person in the world. When trump abuses the power we entrusted to him, there have to be consequences. He’s not fit for office.
joel hanes
@Dadadadadadada:
I believe the trailer-park site is right on the coast
Briny Beach is south of Miami, and has salt water both to the east and the west of it, and according to Wikipedia, has an elevation of 13 feet above mean sea level.
Another Scott
@Bill Arnold: “Trump’s a Loser.”
He can’t stand that. Remember his tantrums when Cruz won Iowa. And why he didn’t want a son named Donald Jr – “What if he’s a loser?”
Cheers,
Scott.
Ivan X
I have met Garry Trudeau, more than once, and he’s an all around good guy.
Also, his overlooked series Alpha House on Amazon Prime Video is a hilarious gem. Highly recommended for all here, even if it’s about the kind of Republicans whom we wish actually existed, as opposed to the ones we have in real life.