US Politics, December 2019: Profound procedural deficiencies

seems like compartmentalization to a silly degree

the president is illegitimate; his NAFTA replacement is p much a matter of putting his name on something

I think it will be taken in the spirit it was intended and that the GOP will tip their cap to their coworkers across the aisle. They may not agree with them, but dammit they have to respect them.

was thinking about this, because it does seem intentional. i guess the message is "we [democrats] are not obstructionists who are against everything the president does - we are working with him wherever we can bla bla bla" and/or countering the republican talking point that nothing is getting done in congress because of the democrats' obsession with impeachment

brilliant move Nancy, now Republicans are sure to never use that criticism again

the neverending Dem wimp factor

Anytime you temper your response in an attempt to deflect GOP criticism, you walk into their trap and you lose.

What are they going to do, hold up the deal? This is a no-brainer. Get out in front of it, take credit b4 they do.

In general I'd say there are ways to attempt to take the wind out of their sails. However letting them drag you into their narratives by arguing their talking points directly is definitely getting caught in their trap.

Well, I suppose she could potentially sell it as a Dem win for the election. "Trump wanted to tax Canadian toilet imports, but we talked him out of it" or whatever.

truly a gamechanger

"Even a blind pig finds an acorn once in a while, and President Blind Pig has found a trade deal. That'll do, pig."

In an interview with ABC News, Wray declared there was “no indication” that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election. And then he went a step further: He urged people to be savvier consumers of news.Not to put too fine a point on it, but he’s basically saying he doesn’t want them listening to the president of the United States.

“We have no information that indicates that Ukraine interfered with the 2016 presidential election,” Wray said, adding: “Well, look, there’s all kinds of people saying all kinds of things out there. I think it’s important for the American people to be thoughtful consumers of information and to think about the sources of it and to think about the support and predication for what they hear.”

letting them drag you into their narratives by arguing their talking points directly

this isn't a narrative or a talking point though, it's an immensely complex hemispheric trade deal they've working on for a long time

Trump is going to tout the deal no matter what, why not deprive him of the "do-nothing Democrats" line?

Well, he sure can't use it now! What a frustrating development for him.

I know it's like when Liz shut down the whole "Pocahontas" thing and he's never said it since

He said it a couple of days ago.

Republican: That rotten democrat keyed my car!
Democrat: (supplies the in-depth results of a year-long investigation which proves beyond all doubt that they were not the party responsible for keying that car)
Republican: Just what I'd expect from a no-good, car-keying democrat!

xp Exactly.

I'm loving the subtly variegated shades of irony this morning.

xxp I shouldn't say "deprive"—of course he'll keep saying it—but at least they're providing a counternarrative that they are in fact legislating

there are a lot of people who don't understand how many bills the house has passed and have been convinced the impeachment process has taken over the entire agenda

I don't believe this group^ is 100% MAGA

There's a very large portion of Americans who don't understand how Congress works and sees its failings as just a general problem with politicians rather than the partisan obstructionism that it really is.

yes

it's been an essential component of the GOP playbook for twenty years to wreck the workings of government enough so that when Dems take one of the two chambers and/or the presidency the GOP can blame the cleanup as part of the Failings of Gummint.

I sort of have the impression that Democrats are voting for this trade deal because it's good policy that's likely to help insulate the people they represent from Trump's insane "who kissed my ass suffiicently hard this week" approach to global trade. Yes Trump will assert it as a victory. And if they didn't pass it he would assert whatever crazy shit he did instead as a victory. That is all Trump does! The people who are inclined to believe it are going to believe it!

The Dems should counter his Do-Nothing Dems claims by calling themselves the Can't-Do-Nothing Dems, and then blaming the Republicans for being dicks. Just offer the litany of "things that would benefit you that would get passed or happen if it weren't for those assholes."

dems should call themselves the 49er Joe Montanas, and then call the republicans the Arizona Dbags

I think we could maybe just dispense altogether with diplomacy when discussing the GOP and maybe describe them as the overtly- and intentionally-malignant force they are to everyone below a particular income bracket (and, well, I guess anyone who values a livable planet).

Yeah, I wonder how far off we are from someone during a debate just calling the Republicans full of shit assholes.

cage match, no subs, no backsies

xp people do that, but then they get escorted out while everyone else in the room pretends to not notice what's happening

Judiciary releases impeachment articles profoundly flawed by the fact that they will be practically meaningless to those who don't understand the highly complex argument about why the national security of the United States requires giving military aide to Ukraine; and 1/2

— Rick Perlstein (@rickperlstein) December 10, 2019

...highly offensive to those who understand the argument but disagree. This in an explicit attempt to make them as understandable, consensusual, and politically galvanizing as possible. This is truly a token of how out-of-touch Democratic Party leaders in Washington are.

— Rick Perlstein (@rickperlstein) December 10, 2019

cage match, no subs, no backsies

We already have a wrestling heel as president. Going full UFC (with free KFC) would only expand the electorate, imo.

I don't understand Perlstein's point.

I'm not sure I do either. He has been pretty much anti how the Dems have been handling this for weeks.

Similar to O’Heir’s I think. By making this about Ukraine it’s confusing to a lot of voters. Maybe he’d rather they went after him for emoluments stuff instead.

Perlstein's point is stupid, the national security argument is there to embarass/persuade GOP Senators. The general public won't gaf.

This is the simplest case they can make, that's why they've focused on it

Oh wait, I get it now. I misread "in" as "is," which made me think that his second sentence contradicted the first.

abuse of power and obstruction of justice come down to things that the president did which damaged national security. and why did they damage national security? because they resulted in funding being withheld from ukraine. and why is that bad for national security? that's where perlstein's tweet comes in. most americans have no idea where ukraine is, and/or think maybe it is part of russia. americans have no fucking clue, in general. and then there are people who do know about ukraine/russia and disagree that we should be militarily supporting ukraine (that's a far smaller number)

counterpoint: americans during watergate had no clue what was going on either. we may all have globbed onto the idea that nixon was trying to interfere with elections, but the mess of proceedings and exposes over the next year or two were very complex. to this day, most people don't know why nixon was impeached, in the end.

xps

I kinda agree. The people trying to make this confusing would be doing it no matter what the impeachment was about. I understand that US-Ukraine politics isn’t something most people gaf about but bribery and election tampering seem to be the most unassailable reasons for impeachment that exist.

obnoxious pedant voice: nixon was not impeached

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-n35wAjB_u78/T1G-sL_peBI/AAAAAAAABJc/UZc0x2bI0M8/s1600/Caveman+Lawyer+Jury.png

yeah. i can understand perlstein's point, but what is the more obvious set of charges that he recommends that would be more viscerally understood by americans?

xp dr casino ugh, i do that all the time. but YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN

On climate change I'm afraid that them moving past outright denial isn't necessarily any kind of progress on the issue. It's getting to where outright denial is becoming politically untenable

Update: the PM has ruled out any emergency funding because the firefighters “want to be there.”

For anyone not following, there are over 100 wildfires in two states, many of which have been burning for a month. Over five million acres of bushland and 700 homes have been destroyed. The air quality in Australia’s most populous city is E L E V E N times above “hazardous” level, and fires to the north of it have joined into a 60-km-long “megablaze.”

Climate change denial is working just fine for the Prime Minister, who attends a pentecostal / prosperity gospel megachurch, and has a personal QAnon adviser.

(At the time Ukraine were trying to negotiate around the Biden / Burisma demand, this PM attempted to quid pro quo bringing his pastor, who funded conversion camps for lesbian teens and covered up his own pastor /father’s multinational child molestation for years, along on his White House visit.)

i believe perlstein's thesis is they should throw everything at him, maximalist charges, because 1) they won't impeach him again 2) the overhwelming maximalist "this man is a huge crook" blunderbuss case is easier to make than the "this specific set of acts is a high crime" case.

they (the democrats) won't vote to impeach him again because that's a political impossibility from their POV.

but also 3) the senate won't vote to remove, so they may as well throw it all out there. he calls their current strategy "narrow bore"

I just heard a smart liberal say the very least this inquiry will provide a check going forward on Trump using state power to sabotage his enemies. I think that's goofytown. The calamity of the narrow-bore impeachment strategy is... 1/4.

— Rick Perlstein (@rickperlstein) November 14, 2019

At least they could include obstruction of justice articles based on the Mueller Report, since Mueller already did all the leg work for them and tied it all up in a neat package with a ribbon and handed it to Congress, saying "here's a little something you may want to impeach him for, 'cuz my hands are tied".