Trump Transition and Torture Back on the Table: ‘BradCast’ 11/10/2016

Guest: Heather Digby Parton of Salon...

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Today on The BradCast, the transition officially begins and the prospect of years of progressive policies begin to roll back. [Audio link to show posted below.]

Donald Trump met with President Obama at the White House today for a chilly, if cordial transition meeting, as the world continues to try and make sense of it all. Joining us to help in that task today is award-winning opinion journalist and our old friend Heather Digby Parton of Salon and the Hullabaloo blog, back by popular demand. She was with us to warn, on the day Trump entered the race in June of 2015, that he would be a force to be reckoned with, while so many others scoffed.

Today we examine, among many other things, the media’s role in helping to normalize Trump while demonizing Hillary Clinton, and we begin to process just some of the dangers that the ‘President-elect’ now presents to not only Obama’s eight years of progress, but to the world and the planet. For example, see Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) minimizing waterboarding again, and suggesting that torture will once again be back on the table — just as Trump had promised during the campaign.

“What I saw [on Election Night] was the [media’s] shift to suddenly seeing Donald Trump as a normal politician,” Parton explains. “The campaign has been disappeared. That odious campaign that we just watched him run. The one where he promised to lock up his rival, torture terror suspects, put guns in schools, the most horrifying agenda we’ve ever seen from a major party candidate, and delivered in the most cretinous fashion that it’s ever been delivered — that is gone. There is no remnant of it in the media. What we’re seeing now is a nice, mainstream Republican candidate who appealed to ‘Real Americans’ and spoke to their needs, and we need to welcome him. A lot of the commentary is that Democrats really need to reach out to him and to his followers and make up for the fact that they were so rude to him.”

We try to un-disappear some of Trump’s “disappeared” campaign promises a bit today, while noting that there is now little, if anything, to stop the very worst of those them — from torture to massive tax cuts to gutting any and all financial and environmental regulations — from being adopted by the new Administration and a compliant Congress and Supreme Court. We also discuss the role that Obama and the Democrats have in Republicans’ ability to revive the very worst of the George W. Bush Administration war crimes and more, since they refused to bring accountability previously. And, speaking of accountability, Parton offers her thoughts on progressives who voted for third parties this year.

Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for a our first Green News Report since the election, for a look at what President Trump will mean for the environment, energy and the UN climate agreement….

The BradCast with Brad Friedman 11/10/2016
Trump Transition and Torture Back on the Table: ‘BradCast’ 11/10/2016  |  Guest: Heather Digby Parton of Salon...   · · · · ·   Trump Transition and Torture Back on the Table: ‘BradCast’ 11/10/2016  |  Guest: Heather Digby Parton of Salon...
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Reader Comments on

Trump Transition and Torture Back on the Table: ‘BradCast’ 11/10/2016

16 Comments

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16 Responses

  1. 2)
    nemo said on 11/10/2016 @ 7:42pm PT: [Permalink]

    oh and this website is still really hard to deal with

    maybe you could put the stuff on the right side on a separate page?

    all that extra material doesn’t do us any good if it uses so much memory that my browser freezes up 🙁

  2. 3)
    Larry Bergan said on 11/11/2016 @ 3:11am PT: [Permalink]

    That must have been awkward.

    My stepdad once tried to shake hands with Trump. Sensed he was afraid of germs.

  3. 4)
    BROKENSPELL said on 11/11/2016 @ 3:12am PT: [Permalink]

    “Put the stuff on the right side on a separate page”
    Adblock/UserScript/Greasemonkey Select/Hide

    bradblog.com##.MarqueeFeatureBox
    bradblog.com###contentrightbar

    “That odious campaign”
    This is poor language of Trump, like myself, I find myself lacking descriptive words, and I say things that are then taken way out of context. The only thing thats going on here is the restoration of the Rule of Law.

    Guns in schools why you ask? I will tell you why because right now if someone goes into a school with a firearm, and I am disarmed, I consider myself DEAD Right then and there.

    I might as well RUSH the person, if I stand around I will be dead, if I rush I will be dead, but at least I have a chance of stopping it. Now with a gun in the school, there’s no waiting to stop it.

    Much of disappearing campaign promises are because a potus doesn’t have such powers granted to him in the first place, but nobody in media ever BOTHERED to question it. What legal authority have you for X, Y, Z in your mandate mr trump. such questions were not asked, you know very well what played on your screens following it all. A big media disconnect with no real content, just perception management. Also these are corrupt deep state based deceptions.

    There is a TIMING thing going on here. My “spidey
    senses” are saying, it’s so that OBAMA can’t pardon criminals. But then we are talking intuition here you could call it tin.

  4. 5)
    Larry Bergan said on 11/11/2016 @ 3:19am PT: [Permalink]

    Please put a cork in it BROKENSPELL/whoever. You couldn’t flummox a potato bug with your bad writing.

  5. 7)
    Larry Taylor said on 11/11/2016 @ 4:38am PT: [Permalink]

    You said that the DNC didn’t try to tip the scales to favor HRC against Bernie? Brad, you have blinders on. Don’t blame people ranting on the DNC. I think it is time for another party. And do you think with a Republican majority, the American people can try to do election reform? Just kidding.

  6. 8)
    Dredd said on 11/11/2016 @ 8:41am PT: [Permalink]

    RE: Electoral College

    “While there is evidence that the founders assumed the electors would be independent actors, weighing the merits of competing presidential candidates, they have been regarded as agents of the public will since the first decade under the Constitution. They are expected to vote for the presidential and vice presidential candidates of the party that nominated them. Notwithstanding this expectation, individual electors have sometimes not honored their commitment, voting for a different candidate or candidates than the ones to whom they were pledged; they are known as “faithless” or “unfaithful” electors. In fact, the balance of opinion by constitutional scholars is that, once electors have been chosen, they remain constitutionally free agents, able to vote for any candidate who meets the requirements for President and Vice President. Faithless electors have, however, been few in number (in the 20 century, one each in 1948, 1956, 1960, 1968, 1972, 1976, 1988, and 2000), and have never influenced the outcome of a presidential election.

    (Electoral College History).

    Trump is not qualified because of his advocacy for unconstitutional behavior (torture, racism, etc).

  7. 10)
    Columbus said on 11/11/2016 @ 2:41pm PT: [Permalink]

    Even Democrats can be dead brains. I was a Bernie supporter from day one; but I knew the GOP is too corrupt to take over our government. The GOP is more scary than Trump.

  8. 12)
    David Lasagna said on 11/11/2016 @ 4:46pm PT: [Permalink]

    Brad–I just sent you the exit poll data from comment #9 above. What’s your take?

  9. Avatar photo
    13)
    Brad Friedman said on 11/11/2016 @ 9:55pm PT: [Permalink]

    Larry Taylor said @7:

    You said that the DNC didn’t try to tip the scales to favor HRC against Bernie? Brad, you have blinders on.

    When the hell did I say that?! Pretty sure you either misheard me (or, I suppose, it’s possible that I mispoke, but I don’t recall having done so.) I wouldn’t have said it, because they definitely did try to tip the scales in favor of HRC — as I’ve reported many times, going back to very early in the primaries.

    Don’t blame people ranting on the DNC.

    I don’t “blame people” for that at all.

  10. 15)
    Jim Spriggs said on 11/12/2016 @ 11:36am PT: [Permalink]

    Columbus @ #10

    Even Democrats can be dead brains. I was a Bernie supporter from day one; but I knew the GOP is too corrupt to take over our government. The GOP is more scary than Trump.

    Columbus, We’re getting the whole package, the deluxe edition. The GOP will take over in January. They will have all three branches of government and the corporate media as their stenographers.

    Trump, someone who can’t even run a business without cheating people, has no clue about being a politician, let alone president of the United State. Who do you think he’s going to put in his cabinet? Who will be his advisers? Who do think he’s going to nominate for the Supreme Court? And don’t forget Mike Pence, Trump’s vice president, who wants to turn our country into a real life version of The Handmaid’s Tale.

    The most we can hope for now is a huge midterm backlash in the house–a serious uphill battle. If you’re not already an active member of Brand New Congress and/or Our Revolution I urge you to pitch in and help make a change.

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