Yep. Heads Republicans win, tails Democrats lose. Republicans have no shame, and they don’t care about the beltway pundits or the “liberal media.” I have yet to see any push back by any prominent Democrat that the Barr letter is not the Mueller report, but you wouldn’t know that from the media hyperbole.
I thought media reached its nadir in 2016 with its political coverage. I was wrong.
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And the actual takeaway.
The best argument that’s presented by Trump supporters when faced with the fact that his campaign manager is going to jail for multiple felonies (with a mistrial declared on 10 more, which they could technically decide to prosecute him for in the future), is “Oh, well all those felonies were from BEFORE he was trump’s campaign manager!”
As though that’s totally normal. To hire a felon to be your campaign manager.
And then it ignores that Manafort worked with the Russians during the actual campaign (which is not a felony, but which he then lied about, which was in fact a crime).
The bar for “normal” has been pushed down into the center of the earth at this point. And it’s gonna be nuts, because the Democrats are gonna end up doing crazy crap in the future, and the GOP is going to have totally destroyed any sense of normalcy. At this point, you can do literally anything, and it doesn’t matter. No one could possibly be WORSE than Trump at this point.
In terms of basic morality, Trump is so far below what anyone would have considered even remotely acceptable, even as recently as 2 years ago. There’s nothing that anyone could do that is going to be more depraved than the stuff Trump’s done. No one else is gonna have cheated on their wife with a freaking porn star. Cheating on your wife is now totally acceptable.
All the ethical standards in terms of profiteering while president? None of that stuff matters any more.
And I’m not so naive as to believe that Democrats are going to hold themselves accountable if such things happen. They’re gonna do what the GOP is doing. They’re gonna circle the wagons around whoever that depraved idiot is, and point out the absurdity of folks who defended Trump leveling attacks on anyone. Because again, it’s basically impossible that anyone could be more unethical, lazy, dumb, or depraved than Trump. I can’t even imagine what that would look like. Some kind of retarded monkey that just jerks off in public while literally crapping on the constitution and somehow committing treason? I really don’t know.
It’s just that no one is gonna give a crap about anything, ever, any more.
Republicans have lost all sense of shame and irony and will totally pretend like Trump never happened the next time a Democrat dares wear a tan suit, fist bump his wife, ask for special mustard, or slightly bow to the Emperor of Japan.
There will be no equivocating. It’ll just be straight to TRAITOR and LOCK HIM UP.
It’s just so weird to witness. As someone who used to be on that side, to see the GOP just abandon everything they used to believe is crazy to me. Like, being totally immoral… that used to matter. It was a major argument against Clinton, that he was a sleazy pig, and we shouldn’t want to have a sleazy pig be President. And the Democrats didn’t care at that point, and that was wrong… but now, apparently it’s not wrong any more?
Or the Russians… a few years ago we all knew they were bad. The GOP was much more hawkish against the Russians than the Democrats. Like when Romney suggested that the Russians were gonna be one of the biggest security threats to the US. And the Democrats laughed at him… and now here we are. Romney was clearly right, but now the GOP doesn’t seem to actually care any more.
Or North Korea… when Obama suggested that the US President should have bilateral discussions directly with NK, the GOP was apoplectic. They, rightfully, said that such discussions would elevate NK’s leadership, and wouldn’t achieve anything, because NK lies… They would just burn us again, like they did when Clinton was in office. But now they’ve changed their tune… and NK has done exactly what they had previously warned Obama that they would do! And none of it matters!
There’s no ACTUAL right or wrong at the core of anything any more. It’s all pure political partisanship and combat. It’s just about winning short term political fights.
Nice!
So much exoneration, but no, you can’t see it.
OMG, this twitter thread, all of it…
You aren’t exaggerating, and it’s not just the US either (because my horse is only tangentially on that fight), it’s everywhere. Every political discussion ends up with everyone picking their own reality, and I’m not immune to it either.
And then I’m watching The Good Fight, where when the liberal protagonists (on issues I can’t even decide if they’re parody) talk about “going low”, I can’t figure out if that would be a good or a bad thing in the real life situation anymore.
I understand that my view of a black and white world when I was young was very wrong, but I’m pretty sure the whole world wasn’t this shade of muddy gray - even if it was mostly pretend, there was something to look up to, now it’s just hard to care about anything but the tribe.
To be clear, I’m not trying to “both sides” this, there are clear differences in intent, no matter how much the center-left disappoints me.
Decency and leadership can and will make a comeback.
Not as long as conservative media in which outrage, lying by omission and disinformation can make tons of money making war against decency and leadership.
Media will continue to be awful because there’s a lot of profit in that. What I meant was that Trump is the only leader in our lifetime who will actively work to divide us rather than unite us. This is a one-time horrendously shitty fucking deal but we can get through it.
Nah it will get worse. What conservative media & politicians want is stasis - an opponent that’s ever present and growing in power but a political system where nothing changes and everything remains the same. They want to gerrymander out the majority and win by energizing a small base of misinformed angry people that have no mandate and really only want tear liberal accomplishments down, not build anything new or make any improvements. Liberalism - change - is the enemy, the monster, is death by taxes. They tell their base that destroying liberalism is an accomplishment and that they’re content with their political activity if that’s all they do.
It’s not going to get better until the forces that brought us to Trump and Brexit change, and whether Trump goes away or Brexit is withdrawn, those forced still persist pushing those agendas. It’s like saying this time it won’t flood because it stopped raining, instead of repairing the dam.
The future (imo) is one where a sclerotic stasis and effective disenfranchisement more or less reduces governance to a stage show that doesn’t matter because no party can or will make any significant difference.
You don’t have to go back to Romney, in 2015 nearly the entire GOP clowncar was strong on Russia, to the point that some of them were all but calling for starting World War 3 over Syria. Now Russia is our best friend who never does anything wrong and we’re subservient to them.
This investigation was terrible.
It resulted in multiple convictions, and seized assets from those criminals that more than paid for the cost of the investigation.
This isn’t what investigations are supposed to be about!
Ah, the classic hotdog in a hallway.
Here it is in essay form:
And a link from that thread, good Christ.
I just… can’t buy in to all this. Barr’s letter says pretty explicitly that the Mueller report finds no conspiracy or coordination with the Russians on election interference, in fact, it quotes the report: “the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities”.
And it says, again, very explicitly, that Mueller left it to the AG to determine if there was obstruction of justice, again, he quotes the report: “this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime”. Yes, and also does not exonerate him, but Mueller knew damn well what the AG would decide. If he thought there was an obstruction case that could be made, he would have to have made it.
I just don’t think Barr would have written these things if they were going to be proven almost immediately to be complete lies. Mueller will almost certainly be going to be in front of a House committee very soon, and if Barr misquoted or seriously misrepresented what it said, we’ll know.
Look, there’s no doubt Trump’s a crook. He’s admitted to several crimes, such as sexual assault and tax evasion (“that just makes me smart”). It’s fairly clear that he’s guilty of numerous other crimes, such as money laundering and fraud. We know he’s violated the emoluments clause. We don’t need to get hung up on conspiracy and obstruction. Maybe he didn’t do those things, and for certain at this point we know he’ll never be indicted for or convicted of them.
The thing that keeps me up at night, the thing that really pisses me off, is that while he and his supporters crow about how there are two crimes he’s not guilty of, his determination to destroy the environment as fast as possible, at a time that we will come to learn was probably the most critical, will end up resulting in more deaths than anyone else in history has managed to cause.
Hi, welcome to America in 2019 where the administration lies non-stop about literally everything all the time, often for no reason.
And if it’s so exonerating then why keep everyone from seeing it? The House voted 420-0 to release it.