a quick poll about Russia and Donald Trump

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.

i mean this is a basic human thing, not really a political thing, and you see it in every domain -- not just politics.

xpost

yeah that's ridiculous on its face!

to start with, nobody started a war that killed 100,000s of people in the middle east on the basis of supposing that russia interfered with an american election.

and then there's the rub that they /did/ interfere, while IIRC there were no WMD in iraq.

is taibbi just trolling at this point? or has he reconstructed his entire persona around wanting to distance himself from the normie "liberals" in his milieu?

(taibbi is very smart, and a good writer, and i like his stuff a lot of time.)

One last time (I promise!): the Mueller report, **no matter what it says**, cannot and will not change the key fact: Mueller has freely & voluntarily ended his investigation without indicting even one American for conspiring with Russia over the 2016 election.

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 24, 2019

Coming from Greenwald, who denied Russia even interfered in the election until Mueller indicted a bunch of Russians, that's some beautiful goalpost-moving.

Taibbi is not a smart and good writer

Read this crucial passage from @benjaminwittes. The whole argument that "no conspiracy charges=vindication for Trump and/or pops liberal bubbles" is based on a *willful* bad-faith misrepresentation of what's really happening right now and what it means: https://t.co/UdJAhXoGcf pic.twitter.com/3eeePxCLZo

— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) March 24, 2019

Ok, but I don't understand what the practical difference is between the described bad-faith misrepresentation and what is is stated in that tweet. The end result is the same surely?

Taibbi has specifically said the WMD comparison related to impact on faith in the press, not real-world outcomes.

The vast majority of people I’ve seen crowing about the report are journalists taking shots at other journalists - sitting somewhere on a continuum between railing at poor professional standards and settling personal grudges. I suspect the only reason this gets transposed into attacks on ‘liberals’ is because the media critiquing the media is immensely boring for most people.

This is fucked

A “reckoning” for the media of the opposition but not for the fascist president.

A comment from Lawyers, Guns and Money about who the deniers are:

One is just conservatives.

The second are true leftists who think some version of (i) this isn't a big deal because this is what conservatism has always been and you're just noticing it now (e.g. Corey Robin) and (ii) the real struggle is class/racial struggle and this sort of geopolitical stuff is who cares, it's a class/race issue and focusing on this particular thing is dumb.

The third group is the one that fascinates me the most. I think of this as the Matt Bruenig group, and perhaps Taibbi falls in here, though I don't know. This is the group of people who saw Democrats lose to Donald Trump, and rather than realize the moral urgency of the situation, sort of turned into Jack Nicholson's Joker - laughing at the absurdity of someone like Trump winning, and despising the people who could possibly lose to him. They know Trump is terrible, but they seem to hate the weakness and feckless of anyone who could lose to him more than they hate him himself. They find his victory funny in that way, confirming their priors and their hatred of the weak people who could possibly lose to a fool like that. And as time goes on and his badness becomes worse, it makes them hate not him, but more and more they hate the people who lost to him for having the temerity to lose.

rather than realize the moral urgency of the situation, sort of turned into Jack Nicholson's Joker

hahahahahahahaha

I think the grotesquerie and abominableness of Trump led the press to be too credulous about the dossier, etc... to WANT to believe

People who were more out there on the radical left didn’t have an emotional investment in the integrity of the presidency—they had been disillusioned long ago. They were kind of inured from the trauma. I thought I was pretty left but I wasn’t, I guess, because I was traumatized by Trump for sure

good mourning!

The Lawfare Blog pretty much sums up my feelings beautifully.

Getting tired of every aspect of politics essentially becoming Stephen A Smith level sports prognostication

The people who say that it's no big deal that a hostile foreign government tried to hijack our elections forget that numerous hacking and phishing attempts of state elections offices were detected in 2016 and many states conduct elections on computerized voting machines without paper trails. Mysteriously, the Republicans do not seem to view this as a good reason to intervene to ensure the integrity of national elections.

Report coming to Capitol Hill in 30-45 minutes.

That crepitating fraggle Nunes already on TV saying it should be burned.

BYE INTERNET SEE YOU IN A WEEK

I think other fine posters such as DLH have already covered a lot of how I feel about this, but I guess my big concern about the Russia thing all along has been that it's a mechanism for both the party and voters to avoid recognizing Trump as a symptom rather than the problem. If we can blame Trump for racism, instead of racism for Trump, then we can just root out Trump. I know this is a reduction/simplification and I know few people have focused *exclusively* on russiagate as a way out. I know I have seen lots of energized political activism among people who also watch a lot of Maddow and buy heavily into russiagate, and on balance that's good. But the false hope of a deus ex machina ending to Trump is still dangerous and still provides cover to avoid doing the harder work of building a real political majority through policy, coaltion building, shoeleather activism, etc.

Look at the Crowley/AOC race -- he was absent and thought he could keep being absent. She and her campaign won by doing real, old-fashioned politics, knocking doors, building relationships with constituencies. How does the democratic party respond? Pelosi threatens to cut off any consultancy or firm that works for a challenger to an incumbent. The democratic party is still looking for an easy way out so they can maintain their third way centrism. Russiagate looked like it was going to provide that for a time, but it won't.

And I don't think the number of seats picked up in Congress should be used as evidence of much of anything except a typical midterm with a divisive president. We did ok, but I wouldn't exactly say we beat the spread. Long term the same concerns remain. I hope that the sheer amount of energy and youth and talent the whole phenomenon has injected into left-to-liberal politics will pay dividends in the future, but the party already seems determined to quell that.

Good source: pic.twitter.com/RvpUL6gE2N

— Virginia Heffernan (@page88) March 24, 2019

We did much better than okay in 2018. Long term the same worries remain.

Wtf it was the biggest House pickup in 40 years for Dems. People keep foolishly comparing it to the 2010 midterms, but how the fuck is 40 seats not "beating the spread". It literally beat the spread on actual betting markets!