When I swore in I had no “loyalty to the president” clause. That darned Constitution was all the rage twenty-five years ago. Fashions come and go, though, don’t they?
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Yup. “Stasi” is the nickname for “Staatssicherheitsdienst” (complete: Ministerium für Staatssicherheit) – the East German continuation of the SD
But the Stasi built up and relied heavily on a web of neighbors, co-workers, and even family who spied on each other and reported to them. When the Wall disappeared, people could access their Stasi files and were devastated to find out who had turned in information on them. Many friendships and family relationships were completely destroyed as a result.
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Wow. Good. So good.
See the new spring line at L.L. Bean
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How shocking that we had to do this experiment in order to find out that an incompetent, inexperienced, ignorant, lying, unpatriotic con artist cannot perform the duties of POTUS. That shock blinds us to the obvious fact that we are rapidly sliding into the abyss of dictatorship. But, none of that can top the shock from finding that roughly 50% of our voters are utterly stupid. No democracy can survive with that level of stupidity of the voters.
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Trump was just trying to get a few billion US dollars to pay his debts. I still can’t figure out what the motives of his incredibly gullible and stupid voters was.
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Actually, the Trump administration is taking care of the personal loyalty (to Trump) thing at the front end too - vetoing any appointee seen as being insufficiently loyal to Trump. For instance, they vetoed Tillerson’s first choice for Undersecretary of State - the person who keeps the wheels turning.
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That is very consistent with the known facts, and is about 99% likely to be the true reason for why we are in this ever deepening morass now. Now we know just how ingrained into our psyche our national racism is.
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Nice compilation/reminder. It is so easy to get caught up in the recent whirlwinds and Trumpadmin caused frenzies to loose track of that which is consistent. This is, indeed consistent. Perhaps the timing ala the Deep State conspiracy theories (that are confounding the Trumpadmin) is just coincidental.
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GEE, folks, I wonder WHERE he got the idea for putting Commisars at the various agencies to guarantee loyalty??
Let’s see…perhaps a FORMER KGB SPOOK during the Soviet Union days clued him in to this…da, comrade?
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Let me guess, every Commissar was a College Republican in its youth.
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What? this surprises you?
Under the current circumstances (underline that caveat) lack of appointed leadership isn’t entirely a bad thing. Unlike appointees, senior civil servants (SES officers) are usually quite competent people. An agen=cy without political leadership is handicapped, but not totally rudderless.
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They wanted “change” after eight years of a Democratic President. Be careful what you wish for, as Mr. Wilde famously said.
Chris Ladd (a ‘recovering Republican’) makes some good points
He says when many countries created their social security nets after WWII, the US opted for a system of employer-provided benefits, subsidized by the govt through deductions and write-offs. Since mostly white men held the good jobs, white families benefited from this through their male breadwinners, and this ‘white socialism’ is what they are still yearning for. Women and minorities were left out of this net till the Civil Rights Acts, and the coverage outside this net is of third-world standards. Naturally, the white men/ white families want to go back to the days when ‘white socialism’ took care of their needs. But since it came through their employers, they think they ‘earned’ those benefits, not seeing the taxpayer subsidies behind them. I mangled the idea a bit in my summary, but read the whole article.
It’s the first time those ‘feelings’ made sense to me.
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You don’t need Political Commissars if you’re actually, you know, popular.
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Will the oath that high government officials take to swear allegiance to the Constitution be changed to swear allegiance to Trump?
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I would argue that that isn’t true.
And maybe a forum moderator kommissar on librul sites like this one. After all, we know Donnie is bigly concerned with “the cyber”, which I think may include the Internet. Or not - I’m not fluent in trumpeese.
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That Stasi’s MO was inherited directly from the SD. And that was the only thing.