Impeach Trump Y/N

Well, yeah. But the way I look at it, this is all so blatant and clear as day that if Republicans accept it, we essentially are now a dictatorship and we shouldn't worry about another party taking power any time soon.

There's a really fringy element out there who might initiate violence, which would of course be a very bad thing, but there's nothing in Trump's agenda comparable to the slavery issue that could foment another full-blown US civil war if he's impeached and successfully removed from office (fat chance of that), unless that war is a couple of decades of further deepened divisions from now. What we're more likely to get are smoldering resentments that play out in tribal national politics for a while until new issues finally intervene to make all this look like ancient and irrelevant history.

Look how long people actively resented Clinton's impeachment and the 2000 'hanging chad' election. Maybe three years, with a lingering tail for a decade at most. Look at the Merrett Garland affair and how much it affects politics today. Not much at all, except for the general sense of Republicans as dirty players who hit below the belt.

I don't necessarily think an all out war will happen, but I think a peaceful transfer of power following a Democratic victory next year may not happen either.

Look how long people actively resented Clinton's impeachment and the 2000 'hanging chad' election. Maybe three years, with a lingering tail for a decade at most...

aw c’mon I still actively resent that bullshit

I keep thinking about a recent Adam Serwer article that spelled out the fact that Republicans see their own unlawful actions as justified because they view Democrats and Democratic power as intrinsically illegitimate.

Speaking of impeachment...

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/10/02/were-looking-near-raw-bribery-house-dems-investigating-whether-groups-tried-curry

I keep thinking about a recent Adam Serwer article that spelled out the fact that Republicans see their own unlawful actions as justified because they view Democrats and Democratic power as intrinsically illegitimate.

obv the model where one geographical half of the country neatly divides itself from and fights a war with the other half is not going to happen again but if democratic collapse is not reversed i do think we can expect more and more political violence, mostly from expanding police occupation (w support from various kinds of brownshirt) and solidifying resistance to it. eventually it will be at a point where if you dropped someone in from 2000 they would be like "wow it almost seems like there's a civil war going on" but there's not gonna be a fort sumter.

despite ample opportunity trump does not seem to me to have actually cultivated the institutional support that would allow him to remain in office after losing an election, unless of course the result can be sent to a republican supreme court again.

"ample"'s a bit of an overstatement there. someone could prob have done it tho

Look at the Merrett Garland affair and how much it affects politics today.

Merrettless Garland

Not much at all, except for fundamentally, in ways that have shifted the entire function of the government in America

mitt romney has 45% concerns

― mookieproof, Friday, October 4, 2019 2:15 AM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

and a mitch is one

I recommended a really good podcast about these potential for civil war on esbys civil war thread and was mocked as a "paranoid white liberal" for my efforts.

yeah he does that

No, not esby.

I recommended a really good podcast about these potential for civil war on esbys civil war thread and was mocked as a "paranoid white liberal" for my efforts.

― ☮ (peace, man)

hi! i post to this thread too!

honestly peace, man, you weren't the target there, it was more of a self-clown. i worry about this shit too, i would look at syria and i would think "oh my god that could be america", and i genuinely did/do appreciate the podcast and plan on listening to it more because it's great at demonstrating the mistakes i make when i go off on these civil war jags.

it's sort of what we were taught, as white americans. we were taught to believe in the system, to believe in objective principles, to believe in liberty and justice for all, and we were taught, at least implicitly, that it was the only alternative to anarchy, not the cool guy fawkes mask sort but syria.

americans who aren't white get taught those too, but it's easier for them to see what a complete lie the Princples they're taught are. black americans are taught about the "virtues" of founding fathers who owned slaves and wrote a constitution to protect that "right", that "freedom". in america today a police officer can kill a person of color for any reason and face no consequences. this is not novel.

you want to call it a civil war? you want to look at people who literally cannot bring themselves to even say that black lives matter, let alone live those principles? the fear you feel now is the fear millions upon millions of americans have felt every day of their lives for as long as they can remember. get used to it. and for god's sake, put away your guns, they aren't going to help "defend your freedom" here.

guys Garland's name is Merrick

xp: Thanks for responding more in depth, rushomancy! I definitely don't want to push off the horrors that black americans and other persecuted minorities have been feeling all this time. I grew up in a very utopian, "united colors of benetton" suburb, so the increased awareness in the last decade or so of the problems that EVERYONE else has been facing all this time has been sobering, and a bit of a stumbling block for me but I'm working on it.

However, I do think that things have been getting increasingly worse year after year in the past decade and have the potential to continue getting that trajectory before they get better.

One of the things the guys says at one point during the series is that for certain groups on the radical right and the vulnerable populations they prey on, in many ways the war has already begun. And while he mentions his own gun ownership at a number of points, the series is definitely not specifically a call to arms to defend your freedom with them.

This has all been a lesson in the perils of pervasive corruption, from a practical standpoint. With the involvement of Pence or even Pompeo (lots of Ps in this post) the Dems have been pushed into an almost untenable position. Getting rid of Trump was always a long shot, but getting rid of Trump *and* Pence *and* Pompeo *and* even Barr, perhaps? And installing ... Pelosi? Absolutely no way will that happen. But I'm not sure what choice there is. Say Trump were removed and Pence installed. Is Pence suddenly tolerable, even though he is linked to the same stuff that (hypothetically) took down Trump? Would or will Pompeo and Barr tolerated in any administration? It's a total constitutional mess that we probably all saw coming, just not in this exact clusterfuck form.

I don't really get why that is a problem for Dems, though?

Because they can't wipe out virtually the entire top line of the GOP administration *and* automatically take back the White House in the same move without playing in to all the current bs talk of a coup. Constitutional or no, taking out the president, VP, AG and SoS all at once seems impossible. So does leaving any of them where they are.

As if the Senate would convict!

I know, exactly. If anything, the Senate's unwillingness to convict, like I think I said days back, gives the Dems cover to go forward, because they get to impeach without having to deal with the headache of getting rid of all these people. And yet in the end, they (and we) will still be stuck with all these people, which is pretty bad. There's your 2020 campaign slogan: vote for the democrat or all these assholes will get even worse.

For sure it worked last time ...

That's always been my wish.

And in that case they get a good slogan out of it? It's really not a problem for Dems that the Trump administration is so absurdly corrupt that they can't just easily cut it out. To both sides it a bit, it's like in Virginia, all three top Dems in the line of succession should have probably resigned, but then none of them did. That's a win for Republicans.

Leaving them where they are isn’t a problem for the Dems, it’s a problem for GOP Senators up for re-election in 2020, when the vote comes around and they have to decide that the most unpopular president in living memory is actually OK and not at all guilty.

Also, IF everybody really wanted to leave a GOPer in power, isn't the solution pretty easy: Begin by going after Pence, have Trump name a new vice president, then have him resign? Kinda like what happened in 74

In this administration we'd get an Acting Vice President.

i could see trump gladly throwing pence under the bus thinking it would save his skin.

for sure

Get Pence off the table, force Trump out of office... President Pelosi, baby!

all the shit still popular in those states with more cows than people

Rank State Human Cattle Ratio
1 South Dakota 844,877 3,650,000 4.32
2 Nebraska 1,868,516 6,150,000 3.29
3 Montana 1,015,165 2,550,000 2.51
4 North Dakota 723,393 1,770,000 2.45
5 Wyoming 582,658 1,270,000 2.18
6 Kansas 2,893,957 5,800,000 2.00
7 Idaho 1,612,136 2,190,000 1.36
8 Iowa 3,090,416 3,700,000 1.20
9 Oklahoma 3,850,568 4,300,000 1.12

do rats:people next

surely Manhattan would top that list

Brooklyn has more of both i think

but we are not states

I'm trying to figure out where we're hiding all these cows tbh

In burgers.

if we could count rats in the census then the Blue states would have all the Reps

it was a rhetorical device, mh

you can't divert my momentary curiosity

the manhattan ratio depends on whether you count tourists as rats

wildebeests

I agree with you that things are certainly getting worse. I do believe, honestly, that we are seeing the collapse of liberal democracy, and speaking as someone who grew up believing in liberal democracy, believing that it was the least worst political system, that's scary.

But it's also liberating, there's also a lot of hope there, and that's part of the reason I don't pay attention to the polls because according to the polls basically nothing has changed. Ask me in 2016 how I felt about Trump and the response would be "strongly negative". Ask me now and the response would be "strongly negative".

I already had my doubts about liberalism, but after coming out as trans I can't any longer see a political ideology that's willing to compromise on the apparently complicated and challenging question of whether or not I deserve human rights as an ideology I need to defend at all costs.

The fear of civil war, at its root for me, is the fear that, oh my God, what if we don't all basically want the same things at heart? What if we can't compromise for the common good? What if the people on the other side actually hate me and want me dead?

Which I think is what I feel like I can relate to with the paranoid right. It's not a triumphalist ideology. It's built on twisted excuses for why it's necessary for them to violently oppress their opponents. Most of what they say seems to amount to "We have to kill them, because if we don't THEY'RE GOING TO KILL US FIRST."

The first episode of the podcast, I don't want to nitpick everything it gets wrong - there's a lot - but one of the things it gets wrong is the first American Civil War. The notion that it was some explosive conflict that magically erupted at Fort Sumter is ludicrous. The conflict was a slow build from the time Andrew Jackson got elected, from the time defenders of slavery started to posit it as a positive good. Over the twenty years before the civil war the nation truly split over slavery. Every facet of American life diverged over the issue - churches, businesses, political parties, were all torn apart, and not just on geographic lines. Decades of violent outbursts, praised as "justice" by the people on their side and denounced by the other side.

The point here is not to evoke how much those times are like ours, but to see what it actually took for what we call the "Civil War" to start. It took no less than a professional military insurrection before opponents of slavery were willing to take up arms. The Commander in Chief can call for armed insurrection to the fullest extent that Twitter will countenance (by the way, I would like to make one of my periodic requests that anybody who uses Twitter consider not doing so), but he's yet to inspire anyone more organized than the partisans of Bleeding Kansas were. It is not valid to assume that anybody who "supports the President" is on board with his calls for violence, or even if they are, if they will do anything more than follow the example of their virile leader and tweet about it (at which point, presumably, Twitter will suspend them because they're not the commander-in-chief of anybody).

All this shit is scary, sure, but I am very optimistic about the other alternatives. The choices are not liberal democracy or violent armed conflict. The choice I have asked myself over the past few years is, well, to what extent do I go along with this? And if I decide that I am not going to go along with this, then what?

I'm not suited to "defend my freedom" by force of arms, so that's out. What's changed for me is that I realize how much I've bent over backwards, how much of myself I've compromised or denied, in the service of the ideals of liberal democracy, and how much I've hurt myself by doing so. Am I going to respond in kind to people who request that I kill myself? No, but I'm also not going to view their opinions as valid, or them as worthy of consideration or discourse with. I believe in "going along to get along", I think it's a good principle, and here we have some 40% of the country who I absolutely fundamentally cannot get along with politically (I can get along with some of them fairly well personally, even though I will never be able to trust them or consider them friends.)

So I, and other people, we're trying to work around the problem. The Republicans can't govern, can't lead, can't _rule_. But shit's still got to be done. People still have problems, and we all still need to be valued and cared for and heard. I sure as hell need that, and the people around me are doing that for me, like I'm trying to do that for them. Now that I'm out, I necessarily live in fear, but it's a different sort. Instead of spending my days worrying about what could happen to me, I ask myself what I can do, what I need to do, and I let the fear push me forward instead of holding me back.

Magnificent response - thank you!

Now that I'm out, I necessarily live in fear, but it's a different sort. Instead of spending my days worrying about what could happen to me, I ask myself what I can do, what I need to do, and I let the fear push me forward instead of holding me back.

Now that is one hugely inspiring post! Thank you for being able to live that thought, let alone elucidate it so clearly to the rest of us.

jfc, just listen to him here:

Trump goes on rant about the UK, Australia and Italy plotting against him during the 2016 campaign. pic.twitter.com/8pDZxd6IKT

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) October 4, 2019

his new theory is that "the UK", australia, and italy were all possibly plotting against him in the 2016 election.

*over the roar of helicopter noise*

"I was investigated. I was investigated. ME. ME."

"2016. I ran. I won. You probably won't say that."
Should be on his tombstone

hooked on a feeling