That’s my take as well. The certainty of prison now is worse than the possibility of prison later.
I honestly think Graham’s secret is that he’s gay. For normal, nice people that’s not a thing to worry about. In the Republican party it’s a death sentence.
On the ‘tempering expectations’ side:
And on the ‘it almost doesn’t matter what the report says’ side:
Here’s a fun thread. Marcy Wheeler and others have been beating this particular drum long before the whole thing about seizing translator’s notes came to light.
Before, it seemed like conspiracy mongering. Maybe it still does. But it sure seems a lot more plausible when laid out as it is here.
You mean the House, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they did.
I know it all goes without saying, but I really feel like our country is in a dangerous place. We have some really scary indicators that our President is a Russian agent of some sort. At a minimum, we know his campaign and administration are riddled with them. But we’re too politicized to even do anything about it.
The Mueller report could come out with damning accusations with detailed evidence to back it up… and 40% of the country will do the Fake News Shrug and go on shouting for The Wall.
I think that’s what scares me the most. Trump is a total buffoon, but the next one probably won’t be. And there will most certainly be a next one. Anyone want to talk me down from feeling like our republic is teetering on the edge of the abyss?
When we actually pass the point of no return, it will probably be a moment so subtle, so seemingly innocuous, that it will only be after decades of rigorous scholarly debate between Cockroach Herodotus and Animate Fungus Thucydides that anyone ever agrees it was actually the inflection point in the death of the American Republic and, eventually, humanity as a whole.
So, realistically, you shouldn’t worry about whether we’re still teetering. For all you know, we could already be plummeting toward fullbore societal collapse without any possibility of salvation!
Yeah that makes me feel so much better. Thanks Armando!
NRA
They were all getting big dollars from the NRA. Interesting to see where all that money originated from.
I think we have to be very thankful that Trump is such a buffoon and hope that his example provides some sort of temporary inoculation (assuming we make it out of the current administration reasonably intact). Ideally his example should be enough to give even hard-core Republicans pause, but realistically it is my hope that it shaves off enough of them to put the Presidency outside of Republican reach for long enough for the “fever to break” if that is ever going to happen.
The existential problem is that so many of Republicans who should know better only - literally - think in terms of paying less taxes. There’s no hole too deep they’re willing to stick their heads down in order to not pay taxes. Republicans - who remain Republicans anyway - cling to Fox News like Climate Change deniers cling to the conspiratorial infotainment and petroleum industry funded studies in order to maintain their worldview, and many just “turn their faces away” and try not to think about it. Both sides are bad! they say. What about Clinton/Obama not funding X? they say. And then go back to the status quo, content they’ve hand waved the present back into irrelevance.
Such is the hatred of taxes that basically no bridge is too far. I genuinely believe that a substantial portion of the conservative population needs to suffer in order to be healed. What i mean by suffer is that because they don’t believe that government, or taxes, do anything other than take money from them, they actually need society to fall apart and be forced to put it back together again, so that they know that Government is necessary and Taxes are necessary.
Kansas on a larger scale, perhaps? :)
It’s part of my Too Stupid For Salvation hypothesis. If God appears in the clouds in such a way that his/her/its divinity is beyond question, how do you save a Cletus who looks up from his tractor, scratches his ass, and drawls out “whats he sayin’?” and then shrugs and goes back to work. Religions are premised on the idea that people are rational and intelligent: how do you save a population too dumb to be saved?
Which leads to my Too Stupid for Democracy corollary, and which is the actual scary bit. The frustrating thing to me though isn’t Cletus but all those college educated, professional Republican who should know better but happily wallow in the whataboutism of their preferred media when it aligns with their interests and priors. For whom no tax rate is too low, and no government agency too small, and for whom the seething, wretched masses of common society too far gone to save; certainly not anything they’re going to pay for.
Not that people can’t be converted to a religion through rational argument, but I really doubt that this is the most common path.
This is a ridiculous statement. But I hope this entire thread doesn’t now turn into debating just how ridiculous it is.
Really? I thought it was just the opposite, that it is based on people (speaking of the masses here, not at an individual level) not having the capacity to think beyond their own needs to what is in the collective interest. But @Oghier is right. That’s a discussion for a different thread.
I didn’t mean rational in a philosophical sense but in a 1+1=2 sense.
IE, if you do X, you get Y. You have to be intelligent enough to understand If X Then Y. If the person goes “wha?” every time you say If X, Then Y, they’re not rational in the sense i was using the word.
“If you believe in the FSM, you get neverending pasta bowls in heaven!”
“What r u sayin’? You ain’t makin’ sense.”
“Never mind.”
I thought our republic capped itself in the head in November 2016, so I’m slightly pleased it hasn’t been worse. The midterms also gave a welcome shot of hope, for two reasons: 1) They showed our electoral system still sometimes functions, and 2) They showed there are a lot of Americans who really want to stop Trump.
Also, at the risk of overdosing on pollyanna, the Mueller investigation itself is a minor miracle. I mean, it didn’t have to happen. It was a consequence of Trump’s recklessly firing Comey, and of the steadfastness of those two Heroes of the Republic, Jeff Sessions and Rod Rosenstein.
Seriously, that such a supremely competent operator has been conducting this investigation with adequate political cover amid eighteen months of a supine Congress is a lucky break.
If you want to look on the bright side, think of this as a test of our Democratic Republic as enshrined in the Constitution.
Thus far, our Democratic Institutions have held up fairly well (this time around - not like the Civil War era). Senate and House voted to ensure sanctions were upheld, the people have voted (generally) against the threatening behavior (see 2018 Blue Wave), the Mueller Investigation was established and is proceeding despite attempts to interfere, Trump is (so far) not resorting to the Authoritarian Declaration of a National Emergency and claiming extraordinary powers (in reality, not his head)., etc.
While there are some cracks (McConnell, the Shutdown, etc.), the base structure is proving fairly resilient thus far (though the wheels of justice do grind slowly). 2020 will be another big test, as will what happens with the Mueller report, etc.
Wow. That is… Holy shit.
Unfortunately, I don’t know if there’s a way to get at the truth in a proveable way but circumstantially that theory adds up perfectly. The whole, Trump disctatets Jr’s response thing was already really fucking bad for them but if Trump got the framework for that statement literally from the mouth of Purin himself that is, I mean, fuck. That’s about a million times worse than the already completely fucked Manafort and Gates passed internal polling data to Kremlin assets story.