US Politics April 2019 Thread: 'I find that pretty hard to believe'

I study Greenwald and NRO like pathogens.

lol, as a longtime lurker if i actually thought morbs could step away i would be pissed. the levels of sanctimony and self-righteousness his pseudo-retweets provoke is truly wonderful.

also, glennwald can be a truly odious prick and correct on this one issue, which it kinda seems like he is (on both counts)

Morbs, this type of "humor" is far less amusing than you may think.

"Making people laugh is the lowest form of comedy." - Michael O'Donoghue

Yeah, I liked that quote a lot when I was a nihilistic teenager, too.

"Making people laugh is the lowest form of comedy."

Ilxor itself was relatively split on the merits of impeachment

Impeach Trump Y/N

I'm in favor of impeachment, but I'm also fine with Putin deciding Trump is no longer of value and slipping some polonium into his KFC.

but i'll see you poltics guys just b4 the Iowa caucuses, ta

constantly threatening to leave a thread that you’ve single-handedly turned unreadable is the purest form of comedy

trump said the report was "total bullshit" today

tbf he's an expert in total bullshit

trump said the report was "total bullshit" today

And apparently reached orgasm and passed out right after, because that tweet ends with an ellipse that's never picked up in the next one.

the more i get a chance to dig into the mueller report, the more slimy barr's pre-emptive press conference yesterday morning seems. he completely distorted the tenor of the report, and he did so before anyone could call him out on it because it wasn't even released yet. what a fucking asshole

If impeachment isn't a valid option in this instance I don't understand why it exists as an option at all.

impeachment is only an option when the opposing political party has at least 67 members in the senate, as the founding fathers intended

failing that, all consequences for being the slimiest human in the executive branch must be deferred until after the subsequent presidential election, when the enlightened masses have had their say

Trump spazzing on twitter all morning about the report seems to hint that the shifting narrative on this away from 'total exoneration' to 'actually no.... should probably go to congress' is rattling him.

all consequences for being the slimiest human in the executive branch must be deferred until after the subsequent presidential election, when the enlightened masses have had their say they can be forgotten about because we must "look forward"

we must issue pre-emptive pardons to the entire trump administration so that we can look forward. we must manufacture our own blinders and then tend to them. there is no present or past, only the exponential future

bloop beep doop 0101

Yes I melted your entire family but let us look together upon the promise of a new day

It's the narcissism. Exonerate or no, the smartest thing he could do is just let it slide. But he can't do that, so he will keep bringing it up again again again. The guy on the TV yesterday expressed amazement at how close he came to cooking up an obstruction charge all by himself, digging the hole deeper again and again even as those around him kept filling the dirt back in.

So the report that he yesterday claimed exonerated him, today is bullshit?

Bummer - time for a second investigation then.

popping in to register my appreciation of Morbs’ consistent cultural touchstones

Impeachment is only for presidents who shoot someone on 5th Avenue iirc.

Third Avenue is fair game

If impeachment isn't a valid option in this instance I don't understand why it exists as an option at all.

The convention that wrote the constitution struggled with this, too. They were fixated on the English example, that found no better method to resolve a deep conflict between the legislative and executive than to behead the king and fight a bloody civil war. The founders' eventual compromise was to make the grounds for impeachment very open-ended, but conviction hard to accomplish. They were dissatisfied with this 'solution', but could think of nothing better.

If impeachment isn't a valid option in this instance I don't understand why it exists as an option at all.

impeachment is only an option when the opposing political party has at least 67 members in the senate, as the founding fathers intended

a big argument against impeachment is the political risk, but i don't see it, not now. if anything it seems politically advantageous for democrats, now that the mueller report is out. if the house impeaches, the senate holds a trial and the very obviously guilty donald trump's slimy behavior is the news for several months, and the GOP embrace of trump will either grow tighter or looser - either way leading to negative political consequences, imo

exactly

you'd think that would work, Karl, but Trump's slimy behavior was no secret in 2016, nor was the GOP full embrace of Trump and their blind eye to his sliminess. we've come a long way down that road since then and nothing ever seems to change in regards to Trump's immunity from his own toxic bacteria.

It's not clear Trump really won in 2016, it's sounding more and more like a number of battleground states had their results fiddled with by Russian hackers. That election was likely stolen. The Mueller report itself addresses this.

Aimless I’m not sure this is true any longer

Every aspect of the report is going to be publicly scrutinized by subpoena now, on TV.

A vote not to convict also risks siding w/ the defense in SDNY in the coming months.

I don’t think obv that they could get 2/3 but they can box in a lot of purple-staters

p4reene on impeachment:

Democrats who preemptively declare impeachment off the table are mistakenly (or intentionally) conflating one possible end result of the impeachment process for the process itself. The Republican members of Congress who voted to open an impeachment inquiry into Nixon’s conduct didn’t necessarily want it to end in his removal from office; even up until his resignation it was an open question whether there were enough votes in the Senate to remove him. They were trying to get at the truth about the administration’s actions, and using impeachment to gather evidence. (They didn’t even limit themselves to Watergate. The committee eventually also voted on whether to impeach Nixon for the illegal bombing of Cambodia and for failure to pay taxes.)

As Patrick Blanchfield says, impeachment, even if it “fails” in the Senate, is a chance to take a moral stand against corruption and unaccountable elites. As Jeff Hauser writes, it is a chance to weave the disparate (and quickly forgotten) scandals of the entire Trump presidency into a single narrative that the easily distracted (and even more easily spun) mainstream press can follow.

The problem is, Hoyer apparently doesn’t want to do those things. What Hoyer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (who ruled out impeachment well before anyone read the Mueller Report) want is to write op-eds about how many bills they are passing, despite the fact that those bills (like, uh, impeachment) will never get through the Senate.

Democratic leadership seemingly believes that the party can’t let its candidates campaign on promises to materially improve the lives of voters while also letting its elected officials carry out the responsibilities of their offices. They also believe, deep in their bones, that the country is not on their side. They believe going after Trump too directly will stir his mighty base, rather than imagining that full and transparent investigations into his various fraudulent and corrupt activities may demoralize his staunchest supporters—just as Trump himself was demoralized at the prospect of Mueller’s investigation—while also persuading those people who aren’t already in the cult of MAGA that this administration, and the party that abets it, need to be soundly defeated.

https://newrepublic.com/article/153629/democrats-hoping-dont-understand-impeachment-entails

They also believe, deep in their bones, that the country is not on their side.

what about in their brains?

idiots

I don't know whether rapidly proceeding to impeachment would hurt Trump's chances for re-election compared to using House committees to investigate and publicize his misdeeds with no formal commitment to proceed to impeachment. I do know that if articles of impeachment are brought to a vote in the House and pass, no further political issues will receive a single moment of media attention for the rest of 2019. That includes M4A, GND, and every other policy on the progressive wish list.

After Trump is not convicted by the Senate, not only would he sell this as complete exoneration, but the 2020 election would be fought on the issue of whether the Democrats had overreached their just powers by attempting to overturn Trump's election through impeachment, which you can't trust the voting public to answer as you would like them to. I think it is safer ground to fight the election on whether Trump is a good president who is steering the country in the right direction.

That said, I hate that political expediency is going to override civic responsibility. He has committed offenses for which he ought to be removed from office. But there is no national appetite for impeachment and for now Pelosi is reading the country correctly. To impeach, that fundamental political fact must change.

I think it is safer ground to fight the election on whether Trump is a good president who is steering the country in the right direction.

that's the thing, though - a large part of the argument that Trump is not a good president is that he has repeatedly acted in ways which are impeachable. But if that's the case, why didn't they impeach him?

Democrats who preemptively declare impeachment off the table are mistakenly (or intentionally) conflating one possible end result of the impeachment process for the process itself.

I'm sayin'. Some people act like impeachment is like a presidential ejector seat. I just want to see the fucker get grilled on the record, for chrissakes.

As I said, if you want impeachment, Congress is first going to have to lay a solid factual groundwork, with a convincing narrative. Up until yesterday, the full contents of Mueller's findings were a closely held secret. People could read Trump's tweets, or WaPo and NYT articles based on investigative reporting and leaks by non-Mueller lawyers, and everything was contested or speculative. That clouds the facts.

Congress needs to push the facts further into the open and pound them into the public mind before impeachment can get off the ground. Jumping straight to articles of impeachment will instantly draw battle lines based on where the public stands as of today and freeze most voters into their present position. More people need to be on your side of the battle before the real shooting starts.

Yeah, by that standard, impeachment or censure for their own sake sounds good. Question: if a pres is impeached does it *automatically* go to the Senate, or can Mitch just say fuck it?

Mitch could delay it, but if he stonewalled it, it would be a HUGE gamble and basically break the system entirely.

If there are impeachment proceedings could they get trump to testify in front of congress in an open setting?

The stupidest piece of nonsense was the face that mueller didn’t subpoena trump. “Afraid it would delay the investigation” — the thing already took twelve years

If Democrats & Republicans agreed on one thing it was that Mueller was a straight shooter and that they'd accept whatever came down in the report. Even the White House (idiotically) championed the report after Barr intentionally misled the press and claimed exoneration before anyone had read it. I get that there's nothing really ~new~ here, but the right can no longer hide behind the "FAKE NEWS" or "WITCH HUNT" defense, not only was it all true but there is a clear and consistent pattern of Trump lying to everyone about everything and misleading the country. Impeachment won't succeed but you need to get everyone in Congress on the record, right now: are they willing to condone lying, traitorous behavior, and selling out their country to save face and remain in power? Any Dems who think this will galvanize the GOP is insane. They're not acting on a Buzzfeed article or a mysterious dossier. They're not still "reeling" from the 2016 election. The only people who are gonna revolt against this are the ones who were voting Trump in 2020 anyway. It's time for them to finally do their damn jobs.

sorry to ask pointless questions that cannot be answered, but in this case, i must:

what are the chances that trump has read more than 25% of the mueller report?

a HUGE gamble and basically break the system entirely.

hmm, doesn't sound like Mitch McConnell

there is no chance Trump has read an entire page of the Mueller report

Seriously. Unless someone tweeted it at him page by page, it'll never happen.

the role seth abramson was was born to play