Jeffrey Epstein certainly lies in an unquiet grave…

Talon @ 23 The only one that reached out to the FSB, who the KGB became, was the Clinton campaign. She funneled money from her campaign through the DNC in order to get the money to Fusion. Fusion reached out to Steel, a former MI6 member with the directive to reach out to his FSB contacts to create a dossier on Trump. Members of the FSB were paid millions, of which Putin got a cut. The dossier was never meant to be based on anything real, since it had to be rushed. It was fabricated over the course of 2 weeks. Hillary Clinton violated campaign finance laws and was the only one to reach out to the Russians. BobRyan

Talon @ 26 As a conservative I could not hold my nose and vote for Trump. There are a lot of things he has done that I disagree with in and out of office. He is good on the economy, but not tough enough on China. No one has been tough on China and it's going to cost us in the long run. I also don't believe he should be pulling out of anywhere militarily. Let's take a look at long term consequences. The summer of 1993 was called the summer of terror. Al Qaeda attacked the United States on multiple occasions. Bill Clinton did not see it as a military issue and lacked the resolve to deal with it early on. Even after the Cole was attacked, he still left it to the FBI. The attacks continued every year he was president. George W Bush had to recognize it as military due to the second attack on the World Trade Center. Bill Clinton's weakness lead to the towers coming down. Bill Clinton wanted a win with North Korea. He thought he could get their leadership to keep their promise. He made a deal with them that loosened sanctions and placed a lot of money at their disposal. They did what they have been doing all along. Violated their agreement and became a nuclear power. Obama tried to make the same deal with Iran and Trump did the right thing, because they are hellbent on becoming a nuclear power and no agreement with any nation will stop them. Bill Clinton got on Epstein's place at least 5 times without the Secret Service. He forced them to stay behind and not one word of criticism from the Democrats. BobRyan

Insofar as Trump made an excellent living in hotels, casinos, and entertainment generally, it was easy to intuit that he would make a living inside the heads of those who gravitate to the fun and high living he offers. Saying Trump has made an excellent living in the entertainment/luxury business is a bit of an exaggeration, to be kind. Trump filled for business bankruptcy 7 times, burned bridges with American banks such that they stopped lending him money, Trump University was shuttered for fraud, he was nearly wiped out by the 2008 real estate crash and somehow mismanaged his opulent Taj Mahal project into the ground. How does one bankrupt a casino? The house has the clear advantage and almost always wins. I'm beginning to think some folks will defend and glamorize Trump simply because he attacks the left, eagerly swallowing the "alternative facts" and public image he spins for himself while they insist the left or RINOs or NeverTrumpers or the "Deep State" are the source of all dishonesty and break down in discourse. A number of conservatives are happy to consume his snake oil and no longer value the truth either. Trump is no messiah, no master businessman who became a billionaire by his own work alone, The Apprentice was a reality TV show which gave Trump an appearance of excellence, competency and leadership but it was all Hollywood magic, escapism for the masses. Talon

BR @ 22

Bill Clinton flew on Epstein’s plane more than 2 dozen times and at least 5 of those trips he had forced the Secret Service Agents to stay behind.

Yeah, but that doesn’t mean that there was necessarily any kind of hanky-panky going on… Yeah, right. john_a_designer

Well, if there is one thing this thread has conclusively shown it's this: Donald Trump has singlehandedly discovered the secret of living in the heads of those who hate him. Not just Americans. The Chinese would love to know his secret. His victims do it willingly; they are not coerced. How ergonomic of him to develop so energy-free a method! Insofar as Trump made an excellent living in hotels, casinos, and entertainment generally, it was easy to intuit that he would make a living inside the heads of those who gravitate to the fun and high living he offers. But he also succeeds with those who hate him? I do not yet understand... So sad that my proposed discussion of: "How #MeToo activism can so easily disintegrate into a senseless primeval witch hunt against a comparative non-entity" was hijacked. But I am a big enough person not to blame US45. Say what you want about him, he is not holding a gun to anyone's head here. I wish all Hongkongers and Uyghurs could say the same where they live. News

VividBleau, you are aware that Mueller did NOT exonerate Trump, nor did he conclude that there was no Russian collusion, correct? He claimed it could "not be established" and cited lies by Trump campaign members and "inadequate" written testimony from Trump. Mueller report stated that at least 2 members of Trump's campaign including Trump lawyer Cohen attempted to contact Russia looking for help, Don Jr. met with Russian representatives in Trump tower and would have been charged with campaign violations had council not suspected Jr. was too stupid to know what he was doing. Trump has even said he would accept and use foreign dirt on his opponents, prompting FEC head Ellen Weintraub to issue a statement explaining why it was illegal to do so. As we speak, the trial of Roger Stone is linking the Trump campaign (via Steve Bannon) to Wikileaks and the release of the DNC hack, if it can be established Wikileaks has been acting as a Kremlin cutout, Russian collusion is a reasonable conclusion. At minimum, Trump can be charged with obstruction when he leaves office and his impeachment proceedings may uncover more. Trump poses no threat to corrupt forces because he is compromised and readily manipulated due to his narcissistic personality, his relationships with questionable figures like Felix Sater and Jeffery Epstein and his admiration for strongmen and autocrats like Kim Jong Un, Xi Jinping and Rodrigo Duterte. Russian leader Putin is former KGB and a Russian intelligence official knows quite well how to use people like Trump for his own ends. Extorting Ukraine for dirt on the Bidens, the betrayal of the Kurds to Erdogan, ending the nuclear agreement with Iran and the Nuclear Arms Treaty with Russia has all benefited Putin. Even Trump's tariffs have created new opportunities for Russia to expand trade with China and profit while our farmers scrape by with taxpayer funded bailouts. If Trump isn't a Russian asset he's doing one hell of an impersonation. Talon

Bill Clinton flew on Epstein's plane more than 2 dozen times and at least 5 of those trips he had forced the Secret Service Agents to stay behind. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/may/14/bill-clinton-ditched-secret-service-on-multiple-lo/ BobRyan

That you atheistic trolls on UD are unanimously against Trump is suppose to convince ID advocates to be against Trump how exactly? I mean really, it is not as if you guys have a stellar track record with integrity and honesty towards the evidence here on UD. :) Personally, I think you guys are just shooting yourself in the foot, again! bornagain77

Re 18 On election night I told my wife that everyday will be a war. Trump is such a threat to so many special interests that what we are witnessing was very predictable. As for impeachment that was guaranteed from the moment he was elected. All one needs to know is that at 12: 19 am Jan 20th the Washington Post reported that impeachment was under way....19 minutes into his term!! Vivid vividbleau

How can you continue to support someone who just admitted to a court that he looted nearly $3 million from a charity that was supposed to help veterans?

The evidence doesn't support that charge. ET

An observation: I posit that none of the commenters here has a personal knowledge of Donald Trump. That is to say, that EVERYTHING you and I "know" about Trump comes from the media, and mostly the mainstream media. It is no secret that the MSM absolutely hates the man. After all, he beat their prized contestant whom they had all supported outright. As noted above, they will grab anything that even smells like it might be anti-Trump and hype it up. Trump has called them out on their blatant and extreme bias, and turned away from talking to them. All this to say, you and I are getting a very skewed understanding of Trump the man and president from the MSM. Now I do not claim that the man is a wonderful guy or the best president ever, but just try to be aware of the ongoing and unending bias against the man that you are exposed to daily. Fasteddious

Jon Cooper ???????? @joncoopertweets · 3h A question for Trump voters ONLY: How can you continue to support someone who just admitted to a court that he looted nearly $3 million from a charity that was supposed to help veterans?

The obvious answer is because they're people of the same character. DerekDiMarco

Vivid at 11, here's the clip

Overtime: Ronan Farrow, Rick Stengel, Christina Bellantoni, Dennis Prager, Dr. Jay Gordon (HBO) https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=160&v=FVoi-KV6D90&feature=emb_logo

bornagain77

Derek:

“The 15 most educated states are all Team Blue"

Education does not = intelligence. ET

Axel November 9, 2019 at 2:19 pm “Vividbleau, you may have made some good points there, but when you ‘drop a wally’, it’s a really, really enormous one. And you seem to have dropped two :” Go big or go home eh? Those points are from Dennis Prager and the point he is making is that left and right have different perceptions of reality. Vivid vividbleau

Vividbleau, you may have made some good points there, but when you 'drop a wally', it's a really, really enormous one. And you seem to have dropped two : 1) In its insatiable thrst for plunder, the US has been responible for many, many millions of innocent deaths (not to speak of torture, including latterly, sodomizing, and under Pinochet, the bestial rape of women) of people in countries cross the globe, just going about their daily business - and on pretexts as transparently specious as Britain used to claim when increasing and maintaining its empire. Although they did at least leave appreciable legacies in some cases, notably India, such as a judicial system (I believe including travelling magistrates) a British common law and statutory laws, with indigenous, personal law left in place. Another significant legacy was the Indian railway system, unifying the various states. And the mischief, again still ongoing , the US has been responsible for in South America is also 'off the dial'. As for Capitalism 'lifting billions of people out of poverty', under Chairman China fed clothed and housed a fifth of the world's population and that inlcudes the less worldly, more spiritual souls that the US, UK and the West, have consid=gend to the scrap heap aka as the pavement, sidewalk, etc, and 'foodbanks', if you please ! The freedom to dine at the Ritz... or to sleep under a bridge. And this, mark you, while the rich have been busy siphoning off the little wherewithall that the former possessed in the fisrst palce ! None so blind, Vividbleau, as those that will not see - especially the economic right-wing. Keynes and Galbraith saw through them very clearly : "Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone." - J M Keynes. (love the way Google try to attenuate the message, claiming that the latter was recently attributed to Keynes). “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” - J K Galbraith. Axel

JAD “The mere hint of an allegation is all that is required to turn it into “breaking news.” Dennis Prager said it well” the left does not value truth”. Alan Dershowitz just wrote a book pointing out that the left no longer believes in innocent until proved guilty, their standard now is guilty by accusation. Vivid vividbleau

“Left and right have different perceptions of reality. I have been aware of this for many years, but it was dramatically brought home last week when I was a guest on “Real Time With Bill Maher.” Given that the other two guests on the panel and more or less the entire studio audience were on the left, their reactions to what I said proved my point. For example, I said that though there are, of course, racists in the United States, America is the least racist multiethnic and multiracial country in the world. I was booed. I said the United States military has brought so much liberty to the world it deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. I was booed. Clearly, there is an unbridgeable divide in the way we perceive the reality of the American military’s role in the world. I said that it turned out the Russia-Trump campaign collusion never happened. I was booed. There is an unbridgeable divide in the way left and right perceive this reality. I said the Trump-Ukrainian president phone transcript did not show a quid pro quo. I was booed, and one of the other panelists said it actually showed “extortion.” This, too, constitutes an unbridgeable divide between the way left and right view reality. I said John Brennan, the former CIA director, has voted communist. (He has admitted that he voted for the Communist Party USA presidential candidate Gus Hall in 1976.) I was dismissed as having made something up. Bill Maher sarcastically responded that he didn’t recall Mao having been on any ballot. And I said that people on the left say men can menstruate. For that, I was not merely booed; I was laughed at by the panel, Maher and the audience. Anyone can Google this and learn that I was entirely right. Just type “can men menstruate.” One of the first results will be from the popular left-wing website The Daily Beast: “Yes, Men Can Have Periods and We Need to Talk About Them,” reads one of its headlines. “How is this possible?” you might ask. Well, if a woman declares herself to be a man, then “a man” can have a period. In fact, last month, Procter & Gamble announced that it will remove the female Venus symbol from its Always line of menstrual products. After all, not only women menstruate. The irony is that as soon as most progressives become aware that LGBTQ groups say that men menstruate, they will say that men menstruate. And that will be another differing perception of reality. On each of these issues — all the issues for which I was booed — right and left have different perceptions of reality. That — even more so than differing values — makes the left-right divide unbridgeable. When you cannot agree on what is real, there is no possible bridging of the gulf. The left believes the president colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election. The reality is that there was no collusion. This is the conclusion of the Mueller report, but still, the left doesn’t accept it. The left is certain President Trump said the neo-Nazis are “very fine people” when referring to the protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia. The right is certain the president didn’t say there are good neo-Nazis any more than he said there are good “antifa” members. When he said there were “very fine people on both sides,” he was referring to those demonstrating on behalf of keeping Confederate statues and those opposed. See “The Charlottesville Lie” by CNN analyst Steve Cortes. The left believes socialism is economically superior to capitalism. But the reality is that only capitalism has lifted billions of people out of poverty. This is, therefore, not an opinion divide — “You prefer capitalism. I prefer socialism” — but a reality divide. The reason this is so frightening is that it means one side has lost its grip on reality. If half of this country cannot distinguish truth from falsehood, that is not a good sign for the nation’s future. On that point, ironically, left and right can agree.” Dennis Prager vividbleau

This is no surprise: "The 15 most educated states are all Team Blue. Of the 15 least-educated states, 13 are Republican. Support for Trump and Republicans in general negatively correlates to education." And as Trump proved when he beat the 15 or so other Republicans in the primaries, they prefer a dumb and racist celebrity more than any other option. DerekDiMarco

Hey, combox: Say what you want about US45, he can sure live in people's heads and hijack a discussion from right inside. Never seen anything like it myself. The OP's point is that the witch hunts against Epstein's erstwhile associates following his singular demise are starting to sound unbalanced. One wants to ask, Do the current protestors have a concrete case of some kind against the people they are pursuing? What, exactly, is that case? What law, rule, or policy did each such person violate? Believe it or not, just disliking a prof because he knew Epstein is not grounds for his destruction. Many Americans today seem profoundly unhappy with the idea that the United States is supposed to be a country of laws, not of men, as the old saying puts it. We will see where abandoning that standard leads, I fear. News

Trump won. And now liberals are left whining. If only they had a better candidate or a better plan. They have the House and yet cannot do anything but conspire against the President. How pathetic is that? ET

Trump won because the alternative would have been the very worst thing this country has ever encountered. And he has been under attack ever since winning- under attack by ignorant cowards, hypocrites and lowlifes (like Ed, who lies and seeks to divide). Liberals have become so ignorantly desperate they had to make stuff up and look for minutia. And the country has prospered, despite them. The "constant lying and flaming divisiveness" comes from those who oppose Trump. ET

DDM

Ed: Trump’s 46% of the vote revealed to us that a great many Americans, but fortunately not quite a majority, are of low character.

Sadly, I think you are correct. It is not the right vs left issues that concern me. I consider myself to be a fiscal conservative but a social liberal. It is the constant lying and flaming divisiveness that is dangerous. Ed George

@Ed: Trump's 46% of the vote revealed to us that a great many Americans, but fortunately not quite a majority, are of low character. DerekDiMarco

Ed George:

Trump has done things that would make any other politician run and hide, …

Nonsense. Politicians are the worst people and Trump is NOT a politician. Ed, you are a liar and a loser. What you say is meaningless and most often immoral and spiteful. You are just a jealous imbecile. ET

DDM, Trump has done things that would make any other politician run and hide, but in spite of his reprehensible actions nothing seems to sway his supporters. This says more about the moral bankruptcy of his supporters than it does about him. Ed George

There is an incredible double standard, on part of the MSM, when it comes to reporting sexual misconduct when it comes to people who support secular progressive causes. Consider what happened recently at ABC which deliberately covered up what they had discovered about Epstein.

In a leaked video posted Tuesday by the right-wing activist group Project Veritas, news anchor Amy Robach expresses her frustration to a colleague over ABC's failure to broadcast her interview with a key accuser of Epstein. Robach complains that the network "quashed" her interview, suggesting that ABC had yielded to threats from powerful forces, including Buckingham Palace. Prince Andrew is among those men whom the accuser alleges Epstein trafficked her to for sex. The prince's representatives have denied that claim… Robach's comments in late August 2019 came just two days after an NPR story disclosed the existence of Giuffre's interview and ABC's failure to broadcast it… "I've had the story for three years," Robach says in the video. "We would not put it on the air. Um, first of all, I was told, 'Who was Jeffrey Epstein? No one knows who that is. This is a stupid story.' Then the palace found out that we had her whole allegations about Prince Andrew and threatened us a million different ways…" “I freaking had all of it," Robach says on the tape. "I'm so pissed right now. Like, every day I get more and more pissed, 'cause I'm just like, 'Oh my God! It was — what we had, was unreal.' "

https://www.npr.org/2019/11/05/776482189/abc-news-defends-its-epstein-coverage-after-leaked-video-of-anchor The double standard is obvious when you compare the way the MSM has recently covered alleged sexual misconduct when they discover it on the political right-- no sensitivity or tiptoeing around the evidence there. Indeed, most of the time the evidence is not as strong. The mere hint of an allegation is all that is required to turn it into “breaking news.” john_a_designer

Trump associate Epstein was in federal custody, under the watch of direct Trump appointees. And Trump appointed Haspel head of the CIA. I wasn't exactly shocked that the Feds' cameras malfunctioned during the event. DerekDiMarco