a quick poll about Russia and Donald Trump

the left is merely saying that the liberal view of Russian interference is overemphasized to diminish the blame on other parties... like the American people and the Democratic and Republican parties.

... ... ... ... okey dokey. Maybe I don’t spend enough time on Twitter, I might understand. I live among a shitload of veterans, minorities, civil servants and scientists, so I have no clue about how America actually works.

SV and SH at least have the excuse of being foreigners who get their confirmation bias of “many libs” via teh internets. But fuck all of you for telling me what and how I think.

If it seems like I’m taking this personally and I shouldn’t be, well, we all know patriotism is for assholes, so you win again.

And the above tirade aside - how in the fuck are we “libs” avoiding the issues of racial injustice, income inequality, endless war, and environmental destruction while we point out that motherfuckers interfering in our election by any means is completely unacceptable? Why does THE LEFT, the proudest and most ineffectual bag of self-sucking dicks in the history of politics, get to dictate what problems get to be solved sequentially instead of in parallel? Because one time your guy convinced insurance companies to demand seat belts at the same time they were going to do it anyway?

Phew

My only thing is I like calling his son DJTJ because it makes him sound like a robot. Or a DJ.

― Josh in Chicago,

Idk why Donaldinho hasn’t caught on.

If I were him, I’d want to be called that. I’d also want to die.

Where is the left on redistricting?
Is the left busting all their asses to find a way for Guam, USVI, American Samoa, Puerto Rico, Northern Marianas, and the District to all have Senate and House representation?

And the above tirade aside - how in the fuck are we “libs” avoiding the issues of racial injustice, income inequality, endless war, and environmental destruction while we point out that motherfuckers interfering in our election by any means is completely unacceptable?

because none of the candidates the majority of liberals would ideally replace Trump with effectively oppose any of those things?

Because as far as I’m concerned the Russians only even got close to getting what they thought they wanted because we have failed miserably to provide the franchise to at least a Louisiana’s worth of our citizens. Easy fix! Right? I mean, Left?

Oh hey you’re up, good

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Barack_Obama_Supreme_Court_candidates

President Barack Obama made two successful appointments to the Supreme Court of the United States. The first was Judge Sonia Sotomayor to fill the vacancy created by the retirement of Justice David H. Souter. Sotomayor was confirmed by the United States Senate on August 6, 2009, by a vote of 68–31. The second appointment was that of Solicitor General Elena Kagan to replace the retired John Paul Stevens. Kagan was confirmed by the United States Senate on August 5, 2010, by a vote of 63–37.

Morbius cosplayers, all y’all

You and I have different ideas of what fundamental change looks like and that's fine

You’re also Canadian and I escaped from Alabama so that’s OK too. I’m gonna count to 100 and blame milo for everything.

<3

Russiagate might be real but liberals’ emotional investment in it has a lot to do with wishful thinking. The strength of their conviction isn’t solely due to the evidence; it also “feels” right. “Russia” is a convenient explanation for the terrifying unmooring of our media and politics that is happening. It’s comforting, like all conspiracy theories. It gives shape and order to chaos.

Like, people went bananas for that simplistic “game theory” twitter thread. That narrative was meeting a need people had — a need to believe that whatever Trump was, he wasn’t truly American. He was a fake president put in placd by sinister forces. He could be replaced and reality as we once knew it could be restored..

Again, this doesn’t mean Trump and co didn’t collude with Russia. It does mean, thiugh, the nation wasn’t brainwashed by those Russian facebook pages and Twitter bots. These things just amplified a culture war that was raging on its own and they didn’t even reach that many people iirc

Is the left busting all their asses to find a way for Guam, USVI, American Samoa, Puerto Rico, Northern Marianas, and the District to all have Senate and House representation?

Are liberals?

Having read your rant multiple times, I'm not entirely sure what offends you, you seem to agree with the general position that Russia was not responsible for the turn of the election. So is it just that people aren't properly, viscerally angry at Russian interference?

I resent that my wholesome, thoroughly proper, and well-considered fury at highly probable Russiananigans in our democracy is being construed as a lack of interest in resolving all the other effluvial cancers affecting our democracy. I resent that assumption greatly. I resent it so much that I would hoist the flag to prove my point. And I have.

“Russia” is a convenient explanation for the terrifying unmooring of our media and politics that is happening.

we became unmoored when reagan announced his candidacy at the neshoba county fair, or maybe when nixon scuttled johnson's vietnam peace talks, or maybe when FDR redlined african americans, or maybe when the north allowed reconstruction to end, or maybe when . . .

I'm not entirely sure what offends you

speaking for myself what offends me is the over-the-top stupidity, selfishness, and tackiness of the trumps as the apotheosis of american neo-feudalism. i almost admire the russians for exploiting them and fox nation. they probably see trump as a buffoonish fyodor pavlovich karamazov, easy to stroke, a trojan horse for their maskirovska into the west. but regardless i'm way less interested in the russia side of things than i am in the prosecute-the-trumps side of things. and yes, anyone who thinks that that would 'fix' america is being totally simplistic: equally simplistic is projecting that easy fix fantasy onto "liberals", no?

Good read on how this is all making it hard for Putin's oppostion

Haven’t read the article but I heard it also makes a good point regarding how hard it is to acquire decent cheese in Moscow

Bring proper communism back, I say! Make cheese great again!

Read the latest answers before posting!

aargh I did a search for the URL, sorry!

No worries, he exclaimed.

way less interested in the russia side of things than i am in the prosecute-the-trumps side of things

Yeah I don't personally give a shit if it's Russia, Rwanda, or Rochester that embarrasses and hobbles them. Those mousefuckers need to be fought with whatever weapons come to hand. If it frustrates their knavish tricks, if it brings some consequences down on some of them, even if it just makes them look bad and costs them, I'm for it.

Is Trump the only problem? Of course not. Will restoring Democrats to national power usher in a reign of equality and justice? Of course not, but it would still be a preferable outcome. Are there lots of other priorities to pursue? Of course.

well we wouldn't want to lose our russian medal of friendship or anything, now would we

http://thehill.com/policy/international/357445-tillerson-eliminates-key-state-department-sanctions-office-report

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2017/11/24/a-trumprussia-confession-in-plain-sight/

Interesting take. I presume ShariVari would enjoy it.

http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/11/29/donald-trump-has-been-torture-for-foreign-correspondents-in-russia/

The conclusion, which I can buy:

But even if we were to gain access to the upper echelons of Russian government, there’s plenty of reason to doubt we would ever find a way to make all the pieces of the puzzle fit together into a single master plan. In recent weeks, independent Russian journalists have painstakingly tried to explain what the West, namely the U.S. media, has been consistently getting wrong about this story. The bottom line: The Russian government is a chaotic institution, not a streamlined machine. Putin is no arch strategist, but someone who acts on compulsion, and often at cross-purposes with himself.

And so it’s unlikely Putin ever signed off on a clear plan about how, and to what extent, to interfere in the U.S. election. The motley, continually expanding cast of Russian characters to appear in the scandal were almost certainly trying to impress the Kremlin, not acting on orders from it. A lot of guesswork has always gone into trying to figure out what Putin’s Kremlin wants — and that includes people with power, as well as foreign journalists.

Not that there was never a plan or NO plan, just that we may be seeing reflective venality every which way here.

Of course we are.

The paradox of thinking about foreign policy, defense and intelligence at the strategic level is that if you don’t think of the enemy as having a clear order of battle, a strong focus, and hidden capabilities, you will get fucked.

If you think that they DO have all of those characteristics, you will be overly gunshy and miss chances to fuck with your adversaries.

I thinks it’s clear which side of that Janus coin ShariVari and I represent; I respect his correctives but I also used to think that way and, well, see

Sorry, that’s presumptive re SV.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/11/30/president_trump_reportedly_keeps_pressing_senate_republicans_to_end_russia.html

Xp

Strategically it makes sense not to underestimate the capabilities of any notional threat but the default assumption of ‘organised state actor vs organised state actor’ has huge problems unless it’s grounded in something solid, imo.

That’s for a variety of reasons - if the threat comes from a diffuse, unconnected net of grifters and opportunists rather than a top-down government structure, responding to it as though it is a top-down structure isn’t necessarily going to be effective. You can’t address the fact that Montenegrin teenagers or Russian troll factories can monetise millions of clicks with news stories about Clinton having Morgellons by restricting the press access of Russian journalists, you can’t stop the shady commercial activities / lobbying of bit-part goons out to make a quick buck by sanctioning Rosneft, or w/e.

Another risk is that the absence of hard evidence of an organised plot with Trump collusion, should that be the case, might allow the clearly corrupt, entirely inappropriate, activities of his team to be spun as a ‘fake news’. Anything less than nailing him for the worst case scenario allows him to present the more lurid allegations as a witch hunt.

The article a few days ago about Russian liberals being disappointed in the tone of the coverage had some problems but one of the key things that rings true is that the ‘organised threat’ theory has massive echoes of Russian thinking on the risk posed by the US. Call it paranoia or sensible strategic thinking but the assumption that every embassy worker, every American journalist, every US politician, every US NGO and every Russian with ties or sympathies to them are part of a Washington plan to bring down the government has contributed to a fairly toxic environment for Americans and, if there was Putin vision of getting Trump into power, was probably the main driver. In that scenario, the outcome wasn’t gun-shyness, it was a completely unnecessary and counterproductive escalation.

Putin is no arch strategist, but someone who acts on compulsion, and often at cross-purposes with himself.

sounds like someone else we know

goin' with "something" today

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/11/michael-flynns-guilty-plea-sends-donald-trumps-lawyers-scrambling

Shortly after the news broke, Comey, referring to the Biblical Book of Amos, tweeted, “But justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

actually it was on instagram FAKE NEWS

also that's totally a piss tape reference right

he cross-posted to twitter /factcheckingcuz

It’s a pretty corny and self-aggrandizing tweetagram wherever it was posted.

That deal [Trump Tower Moscow] never came to fruition, but the intent expressed on both sides is deeply troubling.

vlad is maybe waiting on don to deliver rosneft from sanctions, jeff

picture yourself at the great gates of kiev, an exhibition of baba yaga huts

rolling trump-russian collusion

let's hear it for the "something" voters

pretty sure even I did not vote "nothing"

i bleeve everyone knew about his money laundering dating back to the '80s

he's still president last time i checked

big oaks from little somethings grow

donald trump: a grower not a shower, asserts ilxor dot com poster ‘aimless’

an oldie but goodie

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/03/a-series-of-revelations-about-jared-kushner-have-added-further-credence-to-a-key-claim-of-the-steele-dossier.html