a quick poll about Russia and Donald Trump

Because Russiagate was about being sad that Obama wasn't President anymore and Hillary got cheated out of the Presidency by external forces rather than America itself being the problem - from the Electoral College to voter suppression to evangelical Christianity in the hinterlands.

isn’t the ilx US politics thread chock full of actual leftists, many of whom aren’t even particularly dull witted, who were cautiously cheering on Mueller?

Yea but milo and man alive would rather post this boring take ad nauseum

Russiagate was about being sad that Obama wasn't President anymore and Hillary got cheated out of the Presidency

imo, Russiagate was about having a criminal and con man elected president by a minority of the popular vote, and attempting to establish whether this was a result of a hostile foreign power manipulating public opinion in his favor through a covert campaign of disinformation and propaganda, and whether the winning candidate actively conspired with that foreign power.

it was also about having undeserved faith in legacy institutions to hold rich, powerful people accountable for their extremely likely crimes

it did take a certain kind of credulous liberal to think Russiagate was going to amount to anything real.

There's a big difference between it being real (it was quite real) and it resulting in Trump removed from office and the Republicans who supported him being disgraced. This is as stupid as saying contending that Irangate wasn't "real" because Reagan stayed in office and many of those indicted were pardoned with minimal public backlash as a result.

"amount to anything real"

that only makes sense if only a very limited set of consequences are defined as "amounting to anything real"

yeah that's exactly it. we don't even know the full extent of what Mueller et al found yet. and he's already put a few people in prison, and dredged up seemingly a ton of general malfeasance from the trump org. it's not mueller's fault if the republicans have made it so anything short of trump tearing out the heart of an unborn child with his bare hands means that he suffers no consequences whatever and his administration stays in place.

but that said, the iran-contra stuff is a sobering analogy. nobody even remembers that shit now, and the Republicans have deified St. Reagan. they even named an airport after the POS.

that only makes sense if only a very limited set of consequences are defined as "amounting to anything real"

'In any way act as a constraint on the Presidency of Donald Trump' isn't particularly limited, and the Mueller investigation hasn't done that. House investigations might.

and attempting to establish whether this was a result of a hostile foreign power manipulating public opinion in his favor

have u established this yet, or is there still some awful chance our country might be responsible for itself

in retrospect it's clear that watergate wasn't so much the "system working" so much as it was a glorious anomaly that would never be repeated

gore vidal once told a story about talking to a well-known newspaper publisher in the late 80s (i think it may have been katharine graham) and asking why the media hadn't gone after reagan for iran-contra as hard as it had gone after nixon, and the response was "oh, we couldn't go through that all over again"

'In any way act as a constraint on the Presidency of Donald Trump' isn't particularly limited, and the Mueller investigation hasn't done that.

That would depend on whether the Mueller investigation's series of indictments and convictions affected the midterm elections. I think they did.

is there still some awful chance our country might be responsible for itself

this seems like a rather un-nuanced perspective. do you think that psychological manipulation, through carefully feeding susceptible people misinformation has no effect on their decisions?

even if carefully feeding susceptible people misinformation were on the top of the list of things i want to stop happening so we can have democracy, "the russians" would be near the bottom of the list of people i'd want to stop doing it

and not only because they'd be the furthest from my reach, but it helps

like, do you think "psychological manipulation" is why we are in an emergent fascist situation? no, you'll say: there are many Nuanced reasons and the political sophisticate must engage all of them. but if only we could find a pie chart, where one slice was "russian psyops" and another was "white supremacist oligarchy" and a third was "no functioning workers' party" and-- on that psychological tip-- maybe another was "decades of fascist propaganda from domestic media outlets", we could allocate our engagement accordingly and decide what to do, or at least what to post about.

if the new line is "actually we don't even post about the russia stuff that much", that's great, but i think if we tried we could still post about it less. it is unpolitics.

do you think that psychological manipulation, through carefully feeding susceptible people misinformation has no effect on their decisions?

as a non-yank, I always wondered how this is different from what limbaugh/fox are doing 24/7. the fact that it came from "outside" seems inconsequential to me

What if what came from "outside" was stolen information and it was provided in exchange for foreign policy favors?

*downloads peepee tape*

What if what came from "outside" was stolen information and it was provided in exchange for foreign policy favors?

then literally nothing-- about my obligations, my assessment of correct political strategy, or my expectations-- would change

What if what came from "outside" was stolen information and it was provided in exchange for foreign policy favors?

This should supply even more motivation to mobilize for more decisive popular victories from the left to help enact laws (or at least establish norms) to disincentivize influence from foreign powers (or non-foreign special interests). Electoral victories that are presumably easier to mobilize if people aren't idly waiting around for Republican lawyers to save them from reality.

or....what dlh said

if it were actually my technical job to protect "america" from precisely these sorts of attacks, i suppose i would have to be more interested-- but i hope i wouldn't be egotistical enough in that case to think i was a particularly vital part of the country's antifascist defense system, or that, the rest of it having failed, i'd have any hope of saving us

I guess I don't see where people are just idly waiting for Mueller to save them. There was just a fairly decisive election, that was probably driven in part by what we've seen from this investigation. We have to assume part of why so many Democrats won was because their constituents wanted to see Congress take decisive action on the players in the investigation. The previous Congress did nothing but provide cover for the administration. I don't see how that contrast is anything less than a political question.

I'm completely on board with using this to fuel further political victories, and I absolutely think Congress has many different goals to pursue beyond this. But I strongly don't believe this is nothing, inconsequential, unrelated to politics, etc. It's an important topic and should not shock anyone when people want to talk about it.

Russian interference ranked low among the issues even for Democrats.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/244367/top-issues-voters-healthcare-economy-immigration.aspx

that was probably driven in part ... We have to assume part of why so many Democrats won

i think the two big parts, in steeply descending order, were: seeing donald trump get elected president and fill the government with nazis; seeing the democratic party get a little less certain about whether or not it was absurd and jejune to expect to be able to see a doctor. after that i think you get into trivia.

however upthread gummy gummy notes

none of the presidential candidates, and nearly none of the congressional/senate candidates from last year, were doing this, for one thing. a lot of the most high-profile candidates, many of whom won, had hardly anything to say about russiagate.

this is true (afaict even of the most radical centrists, like beto or biden) and good, and as with most political arguments that come down to "well that's not what MY feed looks like" i am forced to acknowledge that if these friends of yall's who post 24/7 about dumb libs are real then their praxis is bad. but i am hoping my mom stops telling me the president is going to be arrested.

xp.

Yeah, I don't get people who were expecting him to be dragged off to jail by Mueller. It's a long process, and it's a political process that's going to be carried more and more by Congress and less by the FBI going forward. It eats up a lot of oxygen, but I don't think other important issues are being ignored as much as it may seem sometimes.

'In any way act as a constraint on the Presidency of Donald Trump' isn't particularly limited, and the Mueller investigation hasn't done that. House investigations might.

constituents wanted to see Congress take decisive action on the players in the investigation

Meanwhile: "Elijah Cummings: The White House hasn’t turned over a single piece of paper to my committee." That committee being the House Oversight and Reform Committee.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/elijah-cummings-presidential-harassment-more-like-unprecedented-obstruction/2019/03/19/8382d0fc-4a6a-11e9-b79a-961983b7e0cd_story.html?utm_term=.cc0e78d18bdc

Not trying to Debbie Downer it ("Mueller can't save us and neither, apparently, can Congress, because Trump's response to Congressional 'oversight' is basically 'neener neener, I have an army and you don't.'").

Just saying the main takeaway is that these fuckers need to be decisively defeated in elections, and they need to be continually redefeated.

Poll should have had an option for "Something but enough to matter". "something" alone covers a lot of stuff

We have to assume part of why so many Democrats won was because their constituents wanted to see Congress take decisive action on the players in the investigation

I don't know, a year earlier and I might have agreed, but by late 2018 I think its more that constituents are looking forward to voting him out. The early stages of the administration voting out seemed a long way off and I can understand putting some hope (no matter how misguided) in non-election removal. But as the clock winds down and election comes closer, that hope/need is of less importance

For me at least, its not dunking on liberals, it was more a frustration at magical thinking - this wasn't always there, its something thats grown over time. And probably more at CNN etc than just regular people. That being said, I don't really understand the angle of people like Michael Tracey who seems like a professional contrarian. Being so 100% sure there's nothing there at all is also pretty dubious

One of many deep ironies is that the FBI probably did more to elect Trump than Russia. I mean it’s obviously fucked up and wrong that anyone esp working on behalf/in concert with a foreign government hacked and disseminated the private communications of a major political organization but I personally don’t even remember any of the “stories” that came out of those leaks. Whereas I definitely remember Comey reopening the investigation of Hillary one month before the election.

We all know what's going to happen. The Mueller report will get processed and presented, Trump will get let off the hook, he'll crow about it, he'll get re-elected in 2020. And then the week after he takes office the pee tape will leak and so will his tax returns and the tax returns will reveal any number of criminal acts, and he'll just shrug and give that stupid "you got me" smirk (like when Letterman called him on making his ties in China).

i dunno. I don't think the two are all that linked. I don't think it follows that because he beats this he then goes on to get re-elected, at all!

He's hugely beatable in 2020, regardless of anything to do with russiagate, corruption, or anything else. Thats actually the frustration with emphasis on Russiagate. The guy is super vulnerable in an election but there are more effective tools than Mueller and Russia. Its always seemed unlikely to deliver any blow to him, but conversely I dont think he gets any boost out of it either.

I understand disappointment that this unreliable weapon didn't hit the target, but there are these other much better weapons next to it. Hopefully now the fantasy of this is gone, can now focus on using those instead and vote this prick out next year

thread on the Maddow Democrats

However the Russiagate aficionados in the media and public respond to the conclusion of the Mueller investigation without indictments for collusion, the damage that has been done to Democratic Party attitudes on foreign policy will be hard to undo, and is an ongoing danger. /1

— Dan Kervick (@DanMKervick) March 22, 2019

So that's a big laundry list of stuff that a supposedly large portion of Democrats now embrace? I call bullshit.

that thread is full of shit

who is Dan Kervick

another Perrin pseudonym?

Oh for sure, and I don’t have any grudge against those people for it, because Trump is a dangerous president and it’s natural to hope for any possible way out. But the media have whipped people into a frenzy about it and built completely unrealistic expectations.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Saturday, March 23, 2019

well, it's whipped you into a neener-neener frenzy out of proportion to how many posters discuss "Russia."

a sizeable portion of Dems in It's Mueller Time t shirts, YEAH

God u ppl

who?

and are they politicians

or are they "maddow democrats" which i gotta say is pretty easily replaced by "strawpeople"

Yeah, she has no viewers thx for the correction

bye phoenicia

or are they "maddow democrats" which i gotta say is pretty easily replaced by "strawpeople"

― jolene club remix (BradNelson), Sunday, March 24, 2019 8:56 AM (fifty-five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

bingo

there are so many people in the country, and even so many people on social media, that you can find a few examples of almost anything. "god, i hate that those people who deny the moon landing was real are taking over the democratic party!" [points to two twitter accounts of moon denialists who also tweet about politics]

it's also true that it can be very difficult to figure out what matters and what doesn't; what is truly representative of a slice of the public and what is just a noisy outlier. i think we all struggle with that. i tend to think that the number and impact of russiagate obsessives is not really that significant. that the people who count--in terms of numbers and influence--recognize that trump isn't going to be swept out on a rug labeled "the rule of law."

maybe morbius et al have different social media feeds and different "real-life" milieux and therefore see things differently.

though frankly i'm inclined to think that the incessant dunking on "russiagate-philes" serves some purpose other than the desire to course correct.

there's a way of writing (academics do it, journalists do it, etc.) where you find the worst take possible -- even just some marginal piece of work that happens to make a terrible historical argument -- and you base your own writing around the putative ignorance or misunderstanding that take suggests. you have to implicitly or explicitly inflate the significance of this one terrible take (or even a few terrible takes) to make your corrective or criticism seem vital. but it's ultimately a sad sort of thing--a kind of bad-faith way of weaseling into the conversation, or making your own contribution seem more daring or important or singular than it is.

Apparently according to Matt Taibi 'Russiagate' has been 'this generations WMD' which is as unhinged and delusional as anything.