Impeach Trump Y/N

America is an imagined community, just like any other nation

― Sally Jessy (Karl Malone)

ok, all nations are imaginary, and so when we cease to believe in the collective lies they're built on, like, say, that governments possess a monopoly on the legitimate use of force...

The rats are abandoning ship

The first Republican House member has announced support for the impeachment inquiry against President Trump: Representative Mark Amodei of Nevada

See the full list: https://t.co/nnYylNUBSA pic.twitter.com/7SUfyj48Sq

— The New York Times (@nytimes) September 27, 2019

Kurt Volker just resigned lol

what the...

Hannity is losing it pic.twitter.com/HTXgj0kQK1

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 27, 2019

the ship is made of rats

But her actions have an influence beyond her constituency.

This is your absolute dumbest and worst opinion, FTR. This repeated belief that we have to somehow worry about "riling up" people who have existed in a state of frothing rage since mid-2016. Who are these "middle ground" people you seriously think a) exist and b) will be driven into the arms of the Republican party by too-overt displays of anti-Trumpism from Democratic politicians?

Tell the truth - are you Rahm Emanuel?

― shared unit of analysis (unperson), Friday, September 27, 2019 3:58 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

i was in therapy for the last hour (unrelated to assholes i know on the internet), so just seeing this. i have waaaaaay dumber and worse opinions, you're totally wrong

also i'm not sure where you got the "riling up" quote because the closest thing i've said to that is when i "said hi to a neighborhood dog named riley" the other day

This Albert Burneko piece is good, and worth keeping in mind at all times.

Donald Trump is not trying to get impeached. He does not want to be impeached, and he definitely does not have a sophisticated dastardly plot to turn his impeachment into greater personal power or as a strategy to create a more solidified and motivated political base. He does not have a sophisticated dastardly plot to do anything, or any other kind of plot. The man is not capable of sophistication, or any but the basest sensation-seeking dastardliness; it’s all he can do to get the fast food from its cardboard container to the appropriate face-hole. He is a big stupid idiot, is what I am saying, and he likes things that feel good and wants them right now and doesn’t like things that don’t feel good and doesn’t want them ever, and that is the extent of him.

...

None of this is a part of some scheme. There is never a scheme. He is not sandbagging. He is not playing four-dimensional chess. Donald Trump is not capable of four-dimensional chess. Put Donald Trump in a thumb war against a department-store mannequin and he will be lucky to escape with a draw. He will call it victory. What’s infinitely depressing is how many of his nominal political opponents will believe him.

The weirdest, saddest, and most unhelpful people, maybe in all the world, are: boomer liberals (like the leadership of the Democratic party, for example) who look upon Donald Trump’s lifelong track record of failing at petty crook shit—doing petty crook shit and not only getting away with it but in many cases declaring his failure a great success, and then being rewarded with greater fame and stature in turn—and insist they are seeing the work of a mastermind, rather than the tides of American life and culture carrying yet another born-rich shit-for-brains white asshole past and above any and all demands and consequences. The idea of Trump is the sucker-ass belief in meritocracy, in hoary old Great Man bullshit, twisted into its most horrible gargoyle incarnation. He’s rich and famous, he’s the president of the country, and therefore it just simply must be the case that he has earned this station for himself, one way or another, via some expression of traits that make him equal to it. He has to be some kind of genius, even if it’s the evil kind. There is no way that a braying worthless dope, a man with no qualities of any kind to recommend him, could have ended up where Trump has ended up.

And now that investigations into Donald Trump’s campaign and also into his efforts to thwart and obstruct those same investigations—investigations about which he has been in a panicky and very public rage since well before his inauguration—have moved him into the crosshairs of impeachment, the meritocracy dead-enders in the opposition party believe that this must be happening because he wills it. His almost comically brazen and plainly illegal attempts to silence, discredit, and outright threaten the people doing and/or cooperating with the investigations must reflect some active and strategic desire to be impeached. He must be laying a trap: If Congress impeaches him, he will not be mad, he will be laughing actually. The alternative is that the very obviously hopelessly dimwitted lifelong failure currently sitting atop a pile of inherited and/or pilfered cash in the most powerful office on earth is precisely as stupid and balloon-handed and incompetent as he has spent his entire adult life proving himself to be. America just doesn’t work like that.

That’s the thing being fought over, ultimately. The question of whether to impeach Donald Trump is, among other things, the question of how to defeat him. The question of how to defeat him is, among other things, the question of what he really is in the first place: Is he just Donald Trump The Illiterate Racist Sex Clown or is he the Republican Party or is he the deeper and more fundamental articles of American life and history? That, in turn, is the question of what kind of society this really is. Is it one in which vast material inequalities are mere flukes of circumstance, or is that situation the just allocation of reward, or is it the residue of systemic theft by a class of cruel moral dwarves, or what?

Which is to say: When you credit Donald Trump, in the absence of absolutely any evidence, with possessing the Mephistophelian cunning to bring about his own impeachment, deliberately, for the purpose of bringing to fruition some long-simmering plot to consolidate his political support, you are finally saying that you agree with him. Not just on the baseless claim that he’s actually in possession of one (1) Whole Adult Brain, but on his broader infantile idea of what kind of place this country is. He believes that he deserves what he has because he has it, and his every decision flows from that belief; he believes that being rich and famous, alone, is proof that he should be rich and famous. To see him as he sees himself—as a sinister mastermind—and treat him as he believes he should be treated is to agree with him on all that.

otm x 1million

the first House Republican, Rep. Mark Amodei (R-NV) has come out in support of an impeachment inquiry, albeit in a somewhat mealy-mouthed way. “Let’s put it through the process and see what happens.” Amodei would not say whether he believes the President committed an impeachable offense.

the art of the deal

NYT reports that NRA could be willing to bankroll some of Trump's impeachment defense if Trump opposes gun control legislation. https://t.co/JU3XRUl8rQ

— Matt Pearce 🦅 (@mattdpearce) September 27, 2019

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/26/opinion/trump-economy.html#click=https://t.co/jeoiTNBOve

Krugman makes the economic case for impeachment

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/trump-told-russian-officials-in-2017-he-wasnt-concerned-about-moscows-interference-in-us-election/2019/09/27/b20a8bc8-e159-11e9-b199-f638bf2c340f_story.html

"President Trump told two senior Russian officials in a 2017 Oval Office meeting that he was unconcerned about Moscow’s interference in the U.S. election because the United States did the same in other countries"

Wtf?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5tnHqKk5ko

xpost Remember when he was on some show years ago (sigh ... ) and when asked about how Russia (or whomever) kills people it disagrees with, he more or less sneered "oh, and we don't?"

Beginning to think impeachment is actually a win/win for Trump. He won't have to be president anymore, he'll get pardoned by Pence, he'll get to go back to his shady bullshit family business, and he'll get to spend the rest of his life ranting with impunity about his innocence, the Clintons, servers, immigrants, whatever he wants. And people (barf) will keep listening, keep reporting on him, keep putting him on stage and on TV ...

Josh, go to bed.

you know a thing called "dying" exists, right? xpost

going to bed is another thing that does it, and it's temporary. the whole dying thing is so...fatalistic, you know?

lol I meant Trump wasn't gonna live forever

Okay so here's a thing that's only just now occurring to me for some reason: one whistleblower was so gobsmacked by the president's actions that he/she made a stink and now here we are, inching right astride articles of impeachment. So. The question now poking me in the side is: how many other people in a position similar to that of our whistleblower have held their tongues up 'til now despite severe misgivings but who may, given the evolving climate, feel emboldened to come forth with an absolute avalanche of dirt on Mr. Wonderful?

i have a special batch of popcorn waiting for the revelation that one of the transcripts filed in the Double Secret Server documents MBS offering dirt on Bezos in exchange for a slow-roll on Khashoggi

kay so here's a thing that's only just now occurring to me for some reason: one whistleblower was so gobsmacked by the president's actions that he/she made a stink and now here we are, inching right astride articles of impeachment. So. The question now poking me in the side is: how many other people in a position similar to that of our whistleblower have held their tongues up 'til now despite severe misgivings but who may, given the evolving climate, feel emboldened to come forth with an absolute avalanche of dirt on Mr. Wonderful?

― Steampunk wasn't in my vocapulary 6 days ago. (Old Lunch), Friday, September 27, 2019 10:31 PM

*fart*

farts are *kind* of whistleblowing

Alf, I am both disappointed and tickled by your response. It's a weird feeling, not altogether unpleasant.

Solid, sound fart.

a meh

xpost Remember when he was on some show years ago (sigh ... ) and when asked about how Russia (or whomever) kills people it disagrees with, he more or less sneered "oh, and we don't?"

― Josh in Chicago, Friday, September 27, 2019 6:21 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Trump otm

when asked about how Russia (or whomever) kills people it disagrees with, he more or less sneered "oh, and we don't?"

it's just a variant on the tu quoque argument, put into the service of excusing obvious criminality or immorality. Or to use more modern terminology "both-sides-ism".

it's an ideological barndoor left wide open by a multigenerational rejection by the entire political mainstream of any serious critique of US foreign policy premises or practice which u should continue to expect cynical adventurers to walk thru

“He’s a killer”

“There are a lot of killers. There are a lot of killers. What, do you think our country is so innocent?”

the way he embraced it was memorable

kinda semiswiped from The Godfather, which I bet he's seen more often than Citizen Kane

Giving him way too much credit there. Dude’s favorite movie is Bloodsport.

https://i.imgur.com/CBvwrYA.jpg

This was good

This interview was so good. pic.twitter.com/1jrPnr70Ou When the whole clip becomes available I will post it. Timothy Snyder is among the best we have.

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) September 28, 2019

Ooh, I like the theory that one reason Trump's people put all those communications in the classified server was to hide them from Mueller and other investigators. Maybe it's a Pandora's black box of misdeeds.

https://newrepublic.com/amp/article/155202/impeachment/

“Whataboutism” could still be a powerful weapon for the Trump side. His criminality is more explicit than the “soft” corruption that had dominated Washington forever, and was more or less enshrined into law by Citizens United. His corruption is far worse because he is clearly soliciting personal favors, using the power of the state as leverage, and trying to cover up evidence of it, but the Dems need to make sure the public sees that.

but the way things have gone wasn’t great either, which puts Dems in a weak position. Trump never coukd have rose in the first place if he couldn’t convincingly make the swamp argument

is there anything in your view that doesn't put the Dems in a weak position

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruaeusy4aOE

I just know pelosi lurks so i want to remind her of things to watch out for

good advice, also Nancy watch out for FlopsyDuck, I just don't think you should trust that poster

Trump never coukd have rose in the first place if he couldn’t convincingly make the swamp argument

I don't think so. He rose on the wings of the birther conspiracy theory.He rose by calling Mexicans rapists and criminals. He rose by pinning nasty sarcastic nicknames on his hapless opponents and claiming they would pay for a border wall. He rose by making outlandish promises about delivering health care that was better and cheaper than Obamacare and about winning so much we'd tire of it. He rose by pledging fealty to the evangelicals over abortion and federal judgeships.

"Drain the swamp" was just another empty slogan aimed at voters who hate national politics for a multitude of reasons, both petty and principled, but without ever having to make clear what "drain the swamp" would look like in terms of specific actions.

Damn. claiming Mexico would pay for the wall, not his opponents.

Trump is president because he triggered enough racists to vote for him.

sucks that we have no control over the political landscape and that it would be irrelevant to what is happening to us even if we did. sure hope no one triggers enough racists again

wat

JUST IN: Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe Pres. Trump's encouragement of a foreign leader to investigate a political rival and his family is a serious problem, according to a new @ABC News/Ipsos poll. https://t.co/RxPL49EOYi pic.twitter.com/68qjjuDyli

— ABC News (@ABC) September 29, 2019