US Politics, November 2019: These people are truly sick.

buzzfeed article is illuminating. thank you evan.

xp

true it is absolutely embarrassing how many people legitimately believe the "Mueller thing" was some grand hoax to take down Trump. even from people who didn't vote for him. the GOP is absolutely winning the messaging war but then again Facebook is super friendly to them so it's not really a surprise

mueller didn't do himself any favors with that ridiculous conclusion. "if we could say the president did not commit a crime, we would have done so" like come on.

xp

the strategy is to overwhelm the uninformed with contrary information, so that have trouble figuring out which news they can and cannot trust.

Nailed it. This is what folks have been saying specifically about Russian disinformation tactics for a while. Here a main source of news is Yahoo for me.

Apart from the incredible fact that "centrist" in the USA does indeed now mean giving credence to Breitbart-style bs in addition to all the Fox News falsehoods, what is remarkable is that Democratic candidates like Mayor Pete are treated much more favorably than Sanders and particularly Warren lately. This is coming from Bloomberg, USA Today etc.

Yeah I get their whole post truth schtick. But don't get how their tactics with this hearing can be said to be working. I'm gonna need at least 5 old guys in bibbers at a rural diner to be interviewed about it before conclusion can be made.

Tbh I can see how people in the middle who aren't too invested in the whole spectacle so far might expect a smoking gun to sort it all out. What I wonder now is whether Nixon could have gotten away with it, if he hadn't made the tapes.

Working refers to its ability to persuade people but it doesn't speak to the level in which it's working.

I accept that their consistent on-message rhetoric persuades people. Even lots of them.

But, the impeachment polls have sharply broken in the opposite direction. Remember when it seemed like having a plurality of people supporting an inquiry seemed like a pipe dream? A recent poll had 51% that believed he should be *impeached AND removed*.

That movement, yes, some of it is coming from previously on-the-fence Democrats, but it's also coming from independent voters, many of them likely low info voters.

GOP's disinformation campaign is holding the levee from breaching, and we probably will get no smoking gun larger than Sondland or Hill's testimony. But I would argue that they aren't winning.

Some of the people they are swaying are the type that come Election Day....might not even vote.

Admittedly, there is wild, wild variance in said polls. Emerson for example has Independents swinging six percent back towards opposing, yet have 22% of Republicans supporting it, which frankly, seems like a ridiculously high outlier.

Interested to see them a week or two from now

Dems otoh need to repeat "Trump is a criminal and he will keep breaking the law" type soundbytes ad nauseum for the next year

what happens if he is impeached, not removed, and inevitably does something wrong again? can he be impeached twice? and if there is no further punishment beyond impeachment, what's to stop him from doing something even more egregious?

Then they can Superimpeach him

The biggest impeachment you've ever seen

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/50/AhuTongariki.JPG/330px-AhuTongariki.JPG

At first glance, this moment in Fiona Hill's testimony seems like she's immunizing Trump.

She's actually damning him. pic.twitter.com/9hYAql7v4b

— Vox (@voxdotcom) November 21, 2019

Ok i didnt get a chance to see this before. She fucking rules.

can he be impeached twice?

yes. ofc he can be impeached as often as he commits crimes. nothing in the constitution limits this possibility. the only limit is what is viewed as meriting impeachment by the members of the House - who will assuredly take the politics of it into consideration, as they did with the results of the Mueller investigation.

what is remarkable is that Democratic candidates like Mayor Pete are treated much more favorably than Sanders and particularly Warren lately. This is coming from Bloomberg, USA Today etc

This is STANDARD. The only lib the Dems have nominated in the last 43 years was Mondale, and he was a sacrificial lamb. (Maybe Dukakis if you grade on a curve and allow for being put to sleep.) Jimmy Carter's unlikely victory was both post-Dick "moral" appeal and that he was a centrist at best. Bootyjudge is like the worst elements of Carter, Clinton and Obama put together. Journalists in the "liberal media" are provably to the base of the Dem Party. They loved McCain!

There isn't going to be an emoluments-related Article of Impeachment bcz Dems think that phone zombies can't understand the POTUS literally fleecing the public.

*Journalists in the "liberal media" are provably to the right of the base of the Dem Party.

Bernie is probably personally leftist, but his policies are merely centrist. This reads as radical in post-Nixon America.

Bootyjudge is like the worst elements of Carter, Clinton and Obama put together.

are you talking about Bill Clinton here? because I don't think Buttigieg's lows are quite that low.

he might surprise you if he were president, cuz the job almost always makes em worse

"Bernie is probably personally leftist, but his policies are merely centrist." That's nonsense. Maybe in some other scale, but on the scale of politics in the US, he is not centrist. The only people who have this view have a very skewed idea of where much of the country lies. And I say that as a liberal who lives in Berkeley.

it's certainly an indictment of the US that his ideas are NOT centrist. But they are not in the center of the political spectrum in the US. they just aren't. The US is extremely polarized. It's sad and true.

bernie is not a centrist even in europe, wth

like in cuba maybe?

https://otb.cachefly.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Fidel-Castro-570x321.jpg

"Bernie was never one of us. He lacked revolutionary fervor."

https://i.ibb.co/r6bxr4t/TLNWRAACMII6-VFIYDZ3-KXQEIWY.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/vE7NrWq.jpg

https://www.instagram.com/p/B5HemK_H2f9/?utm_source=ig_embed

for party of Law and Order they sure do tolerate (or even encourage) a great deal of corruption & other "rule bending" from their ppl, while the freewheeling godless Dems don't to anywhere near the same degree

― A True White Kid that can Jump (Granny Dainger), Thursday, November 21, 2019 11:58 AM (ten hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:

There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time."

Wilhoit.

He would be center-left in Denmark.

i feel relieved that justice will finally be served

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/11/lindsey-graham-biden-investigation-senate-impeachment

Backtracking a bit because I'm curious: the standard Republican talking point against this is that it was legitimate to investigate the Bidens over this, and that there is evidence of Ukraine meddling in the election in some way. So I tracked down the article that spurred this, by Vogel in Politico. Has this all been widely debunked? It seems to have but Vogel stands by his reporting.

The Biden thing and the alleged Ukrainian interference thing are pretty much completely unconnected afaict.

The latter hasn’t been debunked, as such, but the importance / significance has been questioned.

The Ukrainian interference Trump spoke about was the 'server' thing, which is completely debunked. And insane. It seems beyond doubt that someone in Ukraine spoke to someone about what a piece of shit Manafort and Trump is, no?

I know this is duh obvious but the thing is, IT DOESN'T MATTER.

If the Bidens were up to no good, if Ukraine interfered, that's a matter for our own DOJ.

Even cracking the door to this as part of the converstaion is a terrible mistake.

this slate piece explains ukrainian "interference" really really well, for the curious

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/11/impeachment-hearings-underscored-cost-of-trumps-narcissism.html

The server thing was bizarre but not what Vogel was talking about,

There are main two elements to the broader allegations - that the Ukrainian government was giving information to Andrea Chalupa when she was working as a consultant for the DNC and that the Ukrainian security services conducted a campaign against members of Trump’s staff.

The problem with Chalupa, from both sides, is that she’s, to put it mildly, an unreliable narrator. She massively hyped up the nature of relationship with her sources, the importance of the information she allegedly received, her relationship with the DNC, etc, in a way that has ended up backfiring. She’s an odd character - not far off being another Louise Mensch conspiracy nut. There isn’t really evidence that she was in a position of any authority or any way to verify she was asked by someone at the DNC who was to tap up the embassy,

The other part is pretty murky. Manafort’s emails and phone logs were hacked and released by someone. The ledger of alleged payments made to him appeared more or less out of nowhere and has never been used as evidence in any criminal trials in Ukraine, despite the fact that it contains similar alleged payments to scores of other people. It seems plausible the security services put both out there.

What that doesn’t do, however, is prove anyone from the DNC asked them to or encouraged it.

*two main elements* I am typing on a train, gah.

This is terrible but I got to "Andrea Chalupa" and stopped reading because I now really want Taco Bell

Yes, they’ve just launched in the U.K. and there are big adverts everywhere saying IT’S CHALUPA TIME. It’s very distracting.

my Trump fanfic ships her and Matthew Calamari

was very sad that my twitter post @tacobell, devin nunes, devin nunes' cow, and alexandra chalupa asking that Nunes step down and become a spokesperson for Taco Bell got no traction.

Thanks ShariVari for the decent synopsis; yes I understand the crowdstrike bullshit very well since I work with a competitor of theirs and know exactly what their engagement was and how that works. I was uncertain about the Chalupa and Manafort shit. also it seems...somewhat irrelevant.

That Slate piece is excellent, and seems so common sense for anyone who has any.

The Ukrainian "interference," as I understand it, is mostly that they, like everyone, expected Clinton to win, so planned on that; as Hill indicted, if Trump insisted on holding a grudge against everyone that was anti-Trump, there wouldn't be any countries left to work with. But Russia, as Hill stressed yesterday, works as a chaos agent, and would have worked against any leading US candidate to foment confusion and conflict. The way I heard Russia described yesterday was as a Super PAC of interference, distributing money and support to a bunch of secondary players. (Hill, fwiw, said she thinks Christopher Steele got played.)

The server conspiracy stuff, on the other hand, is total bullshit.

And, btw, that's not to say that Trump Inc. didn't try for Russian help, or that Russia didn't offer it. They were just too inept to take advantage of it, leading to mess investigated by the Mueller Report. The reason the Ukrainian stuff is a bigger deal is that Trump Inc. can't claim ignorance or innocence. It was a concerted effort to fuck things up not as a DIY pre-election Trump Tower meeting snafu but wrapped up directly with US policy through the official power channels.

We used to have a fat cat named Tallulah that my sister in law called Chalupa.

the most infuriating thing about these hearings and all the other ones is the Republicans' assumption that it's somehow a sign of liberal bias to think that Trump is a giant dumbass