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SickZip posted:https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n02/seymour-m-hersh/the-vice-presidents-men yowza. thanks for elucidating thats wild RaySmuckles fucked around with this message at 03:44 on Mar 30, 2019 |
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Mar 30, 2019 03:42
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Gresh posted:It is in the realm of conspiracy. #ReleaseTheFullReport is basically "Release your long form birth certificate" at this point. Its loving unbelievable how many people still won't admit fault and move on. this is a bizarre talking point, as is the convergence on "long form birth certificate"
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Mar 30, 2019 05:00
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The premise for the second chechen war is an actual for real false flag, not like 9/11 which is typical CIA and State department bungling and arming radicals and eating poo poo for it On 22 September, an explosive device similar to those used in the bombings was found and defused in an apartment block in the Russian city of Ryazan.[3] The next day, Putin praised the vigilance of the inhabitants of Ryazan and ordered the air bombing of Grozny, marking the beginning of the Second Chechen War.[4] Thirty-six hours later, local police arrested the perpetrators, who were discovered to in fact be three FSB agents. The Russian government declared that the incident had simply been a training exercise, and the agents were released on Moscow's orders.[5] probably not a big deal or whatever
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Mar 30, 2019 10:23
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Gresh posted:It is in the realm of conspiracy. #ReleaseTheFullReport is basically "Release your long form birth certificate" at this point. Its loving unbelievable how many people still won't admit fault and move on. Just the fact that texts between two of the main investigators admit "there is no big" and "my gut says there is nothing" and that Mueller didn't make Trump sit down should have been enough for most sane people. The case was always about obstruction most likely, from early 2017 on, so you try dragging Trump's kids into it or you stage elaborate predawn raids on acquaintances with media ready hoping to set him off. I mean, the biggest tell was Pelosi weeks ago dropping off impeachment out of nowhere lmao.
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Mar 30, 2019 13:58
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The one conspiracy theory that I pretty much believe is that Yuri Andropov was assassinated just as he got around to tackling the entrenched corruption in ruling USSR circles. Some sort of poison causing kidney failure and a falsified autopsy report would be pretty easy to arrange.
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Mar 30, 2019 15:20
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cargo cult posted:The premise for the second chechen war is an actual for real false flag, not like 9/11 which is typical CIA and State department bungling and arming radicals and eating poo poo for it wasn't there another 'terrorist' bombing that happened after the government announcement of it?
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Mar 30, 2019 15:26
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Mnoba posted:Just the fact that texts between two of the main investigators admit "there is no big" and "my gut says there is nothing" and that Mueller didn't make Trump sit down should have been enough for most sane people. Sorry to inform you that there are no "tells" giving you secret insight everyone is just incompetent and clueless or obsessed with political spin. It's not deeper than that.
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Mar 30, 2019 18:56
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predicto posted:Sorry to inform you that there are no "tells" giving you secret insight i'm not even sure what to say to this, i mean it's a thread about conspiracies for starters so it's kind of implied. but just wading in there saying durr nobody knows anything doesn't sound very fulfilling
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Mar 30, 2019 20:37
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true.spoon posted:Helsing, can you give an example of particularly bad reporting in this regard (preferably mainstream, for example a Rachel Maddow piece, and maybe not older than a year)? This is an honest request, I would like to have something to compare to what will eventually be publicly known to callibrate my worldview so to speak. Even if one disagrees with the conclusions or thinks that he's being unfair (though I think he does a fine job of making the case that journalists acted very inappropriately), this Taibbi article cites a bunch of examples along the lines of what you're talking about : https://taibbi.substack.com/p/russiagate-is-wmd-times-a-million
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Mar 30, 2019 23:31
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https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sou..._k7vQ3y0jbLcNWWquote:There has been much crowing from Trumpsters on the right and Russiagate skeptics on the left about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report. That is, the three-and-a-half-page letter Attorney General Bill Barr sent to Congress summarizing Mueller’s work. (The report itself remains secret and is reportedly over 300 pages.) Pointing to Barr’s citation of a single, partial sentence from the report (“[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities”), Trump and his partisans, as well as the small number of lefty Russiagate deniers, have declared that because Mueller found no direct collaboration, the Trump-Russia scandal is kaput. Some have even declared it was a hoax—and a gargantuan media con job—from the start.
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Mar 31, 2019 03:05
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DaveWoo posted:https://twitter.com/daveweigel/status/1112369508453367808
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Mar 31, 2019 16:31
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true.spoon posted:Helsing, can you give an example of particularly bad reporting in this regard (preferably mainstream, for example a Rachel Maddow piece, and maybe not older than a year)? This is an honest request, I would like to have something to compare to what will eventually be publicly known to callibrate my worldview so to speak. Well, let's just start with the obvious question of proportionality. Can we say that the coverage of this event given by the media was in any way proportionate to the impact it was having, especially in light of all the other stories that necessarily received less coverage? With modern propaganda/public relations/info warfare, or whatever you want to call it, the most important factor is repetition. Plenty of stories that are critical of powerful people or inconvenient for the media itself get published or broadcast - but typically they don't get repeated coverage. You'll get the occasional story on a topic like the Saudi starvation campaign in Yemen but endless discussion of Russia's use of barrel bombs in Syria. While the media has given you information on both topics the amount of coverage dedicated to the one topic in favour of the other inevitably distorts our view. So in what follows I think its crucial to appreciate that emphasis is the key here. What stories get repeated coverage? It might be helpful to think of these stories sort of like coordinate advertising campaigns. A good advertiser will release a variety of different 'spots' as part of the same campaign - huge 5 minute commercials that play in movie theatres, sort 15 second spots that go onto prime time television, glossy magazine ads, banner ads on websites - and then on top of that they'll have "influencers" who promote these products further. A single advertisement wouldn't be very effective but when all of these actions are taken in conjunction over a long period of time they are much more effective at shaping consumer behaviour. Similarly, with propaganda in the news the objective is typically not to fool people with a single piece of incorrect information but instead to shape the overall tone and extent of the coverage dedicated to different issues. Typically you don't necessarily need to lie at all as long as you are good enough at controlling what issues get covered. So with thati n mind let's ask ourselves whether this was what the country actually needed from the media following Trump's victory. Was this a good use of the media's investigative powers? Were these stories that really got to the heart of what was wrong with Trump and what was alarming about his victory? The Hill posted:MSNBC's Maddow covers Russia more than all other topics combined: analysis That analysis only covers a 6 week stretch but it seems pretty representative of MSNBC and CNN's overall approach to this. The Intercept story also offers some good examples of the stories that suffered as a result: The Intercept posted:Missed Opportunities While Focusing on Russia Of course it gets so much worse than this. Because in addition to talking about Trump's alleged Russia ties to the exclusion of everything else, the media also used Trump's alleged connections to Russia to justify some of the most insanely bad pro-war reporting I've ever seen, even in the US media. Here's someone on the Rachel Maddow blog repeating what Maddow herself repeated suggested on air: that Trump's Korean policy is orchestrated by Russia: MSNBC.com, Rachel Maddow Blog posted:Donald Trump’s first big concession to North Korea’s Kim Jong-un came before their summit even began: the American president agreed to a bilateral summit, one of the dictatorship’s long-sought goals, in exchange for practically nothing.  So just to be clear: the United States government runs a massive annual military exercise off the coast of North Korea. It is constantly brought up by the North Koreans as a blatantly provocative power play and it's regularly cited as a major barrier to better relations. Which frankly seems kind of reasonable whatever your feelings about the North Korean regime. The idea that simply meeting with the other side unconditionally to talk diplomacy is some kind of massive "concession" is the kind of mindset that in the recent past was considered the exclusive purview of only the most insane Republican war mongers. Now its a serious talking point pushed by allegedly liberal commentators. Lost in all this is the fact that the main impetus for the negotiations comes from the Koreans themselves or the fact that maybe it's actually a good thing to be de-escalating tensions in that region. What should be an unambiguously positive story with a focus on the Korean experience is very irresponsibly appropriated by liberal hawks who literally suggest that trying to set up an unconditional diplomatic meeting warrants a full congressional inquiry. Also let's be perfectly clear that this news coverage has an agenda. The media is pretty open about the fact that the quickest way for Trump to earn their praise is by dropping more bombs. We also see this with the ridiculously schizophrenic coverage of Venezuela: somehow the media want us to think that Trump and Maduro are both clients of Russia even though Trump is the strongest advocate in the White House of attacking Venezuela. In fact we could do quite a laundry list of specific examples of Trump conducting anti-Russia policies vastly harsher than anything Obama contemplated, but this all goes largely unremarked upon in most of the media. Meanwhile we've gotten an endless drip drip drip of stories like this one: Quartz posted:Russian operatives were promoting sex toys on Instagram to sow discord in the US I could go into this in greater depth because this story is really just remarkable. However, I'm going to assume that the average goon is familiar enough with the internet and such to recognize how fundamentally ridiculous the story above and the statistics it cites are. This is a blatant exercise in using scary sounding out of context numbers to frighten baby boomer news consumers who don't understand how loving silly the underlying premise of the article actually is. All these scary sounding quotes about the reach of instagram sort of rhetorically overwhelm the readers mind to the point that they're maybe less likely to consider how loving stupid an idea it is that instagram sex toy ads are a noteworthy part of some Russian intelligence op. But hey, let's take a moment to talk about the organization behind that story, the Internet Research Agency, because they're a pretty important and largely under explored part of this story: New York Times posted:Secret Experiment in Alabama Senate Race Imitated Russian Tactics Let's pull a couple sentences from early in that article because they deserve particular emphasis: quote:But it was a sign that American political operatives of both parties have paid close attention to the Russian methods, which some fear may come to taint elections in the United States. So first of all notice how techniques used by American firms (and which would be totally familiar to anyone with a background in marketing or branding in corporate America) gets turned into "Russian methods". Do I really need to point out the insanity of taking banal everyday web marketing stuff that corporations and politicians do all the time and trying to present it as some form of advanced Russian propaganda technique? Notice how problems that are completely native to America and directly attributable to American companies are reinvented as a scary foreign threat emanating from Russia, which American firms are merely emulating. Also notice how one of the firms that was drumming up fear about Russian "information warfare" was actually practicing exactly the techniques that we're all supposed to think are destroying American democracy. This is probably the most well documented and direct example of using social media to attack an election and its being done by a Democratic firm to attack a Republican candidate. And of course this has an important function. The endless drip-drip-drip of stories, no matter how individually ridiculous they are, created a widespread atmosphere of panic in which practically anything seemed plausible to a lot of people. It was in that context that the Washington Post actually went as far as promoting a shadowy anonymous group called "Prop or Not" that tried to argue practically every major source of news outside the US mainstream was more or less direct Russian propaganda. Fortunately other media figures pushed back against that excess and the WaPo had to disavow the story, but plenty of other stories drumming up a panic about "fake news" and implying that we needed to crack down on alternative media sources still circulated. Circling back to what I was saying earlier, it's really key to understand that part of what made this whole media process so insidious was how it relied on insinuation and disproportionate coverage of specific events (along with a concomitant lack of coverage on other crucial events that would have contextualized the things that did get covered) the media was able to more or less reassure a large part of its audience that the 2016 election was a fluke produced by forces that were exogenous to the country, and that the logical solution was to adopt a more aggressive foreign policy and double down in our support for established institutions like the media and intelligence agencies. And this is without even going into the specific problems with how the story was reported, the extent to which statements by known liars and perjurers were taken at face value, the credulousness with which the media reported every indictment as though it were a conviction, or the fact that practically none of the people who hosed this story up have shown the slightest contrition now that the whole thing is blowing up in their faces. This also doesn't address the extent to which a story about Russian influence has obscured the much more important question about Trump's relations with the gulf monarchies, MBS, Israel and, worst of all, so called "dark money" from the US billionaire class itself. Cause that's the real story of 2016, which for some reason the mainstream media doesn't want to engage with and which Democratic partisans seem way less hyped about, despite the fact they used to complain endlessly about Citizens United: Mother Jones posted:By Election Day, however, it was clear Trump had run a largely conventional presidential campaign when it came to fundraising. He raised more than $300 million from wealthy givers and small-dollar donors, lobbyists and business executives—the usual suspects. He used those funds to pay a roster of consultants, pollsters, fundraisers, and ad makers, often in ways that obscured the purpose of the campaign’s spending. He ran lots of TV ads. Super-PACs and dark-money groups provided more than $100 million in unofficial support. And in the final week of the campaign, pro-Trump outside groups actually outspent groups supporting Hillary Clinton by a nearly 2-to-1 margin. Funny how we haven't been getting round the clock coverage about the massive flood of unaccountable billionaire money or the fact that both parties have more or less let the IRS going to poo poo meaning there's effectively no oversight of campaign spending whatsoever.
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Mar 31, 2019 18:00
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AJE did a small summary on the russiagate hysteria https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ih-OEW3SbQg
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Mar 31, 2019 18:02
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This article seems to care a lot about the framing of Russia's very small-scale actions as "attacks by Russia," but if you're going to use standards that low the US also "attacks" and is "attacked" by countless countries on a regular basis. Like, once you start defining an attack as "people in a country spying on or trying to influence through propaganda another country" it's hardly anything remarkable or uncommon. It also just takes for granted that it's worse when countries defined as "US enemies" do it than when countries that are actually at least as morally bad - but arbitrarily defined as "not enemies" - do it (with Israel being a prime example). And regardless, it is unquestionable that the way the media dealt with this story is far worse than anything with actual factual basis from the story itself. Pretty much the only thing from "Russiagate" that is even remotely relevant or significant is releasing the DNC e-mails, and that is far less concerning (since the hacking/phishing itself is nothing particularly uncommon, and the solution to it is just "better cybersecurity") than our entire not-explicitly-right-wing mainstream media getting swept up in this insanity for years and repeatedly reporting unverified things or manipulating nonsense into something that sounds sinister. When it comes to Trump specifically, the Russia angle was always one of the dumbest ones to use against him (since there's plenty of other "normal rich person" corruption to work with), but it still received disproportionate focus because it was one of the few things that could be focused on without also implicating many other politicians and rich/powerful people on "both sides of the aisle."
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Mar 31, 2019 18:41
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Ytlaya posted:This article seems to care a lot about the framing of Russia's very small-scale actions as "attacks by Russia," but if you're going to use standards that low the US also "attacks" and is "attacked" by countless countries on a regular basis. Like, once you start defining an attack as "people in a country spying on or trying to influence through propaganda another country" it's hardly anything remarkable or uncommon. It also just takes for granted that it's worse when countries defined as "US enemies" do it than when countries that are actually at least as morally bad - but arbitrarily defined as "not enemies" - do it (with Israel being a prime example). Trump loving loves authoritarians, so he leaned directly into the punches on Russia stuff and took every effort to make it obvious he was colluding with Russia on some level and that this was cool and good because he's the smartest president in history. Never mind that "Russia bad" has become a major plank for both parties so it attracts the most criticism (the establishment right, who still haven't gotten over the Cold War, and the establishment left, who really don't like Putin's authoritarianism). So it became the biggest attractant for attention and the president's people are basically at a loss to explain or defend his behavior, making the coverage even more breathless. The Russia thing is also a major part of Trump's total disregard for the emoluments clause, that is, his regular plain corruption. Meanwhile IT ALSO exposes how dumb American politics are that we have had hearings about Facebook ads that look like they were made with crayons and centrist Democrats were indeed searching for a reason Hillary was betrayed rather than lost a campaign that she ran badly. But, it never the less exposed that social media companies are not our glorious benefactors (ending that 10-year fawning period in the media) and that the the U.S. government's cyber security is weak. Overall it goes to the idea that Trump's election woke a lot of people out of a stupor and there's now a lot of confusion about what must be done next. This is natural when the Clinton wing of the Democratic party has been ascendant for the last 25 years but can no longer win elections, and the establishment Republicans realized that voters do not give a poo poo about any part of their platform.
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Mar 31, 2019 19:28
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Trump's entire persona was to more or less "lean in" to any criticism. He did the exact same thing when Jeb! tried to attack him over his criticism of George W. Bush and his handling of 9/11. When Bush said "my brother kept us safe" Trump had no problem saying "no he didn't, the attack happened on his watch". That's not something you're supposed to be able to say in front of a Republican primary audience in North Carolina, but he said it and won the debate and went on to win the primary and then the presidency. And I think that's the light in which his comments about the Russians should be read. For Trump any conversation is about domination: when somebody accused him of being friendly with Russia he therefore understood the best response was to embrace the criticism and turn the whole thing back around again so it would stay focused on Hilary and 'but her emails". Also something that a lot of people cannot quite accept but which is quite obviously true is that a lot of Americans have a stronger and more visceral hatred for some other part of America than they could possibly have toward any foreign country, which is a big part of why trying to associate Trump with Russia wasn't very effective.
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Apr 2, 2019 17:05
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The Glumslinger posted:https://twitter.com/nycsouthpaw/status/1113647759100456965 Well looks like Barr is stupid too and went with option lol. The cfr is pretty clear on the release of report.
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Apr 4, 2019 04:52
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Helsing posted:Trump's entire persona was to more or less "lean in" to any criticism. He did the exact same thing when Jeb! tried to attack him over his criticism of George W. Bush and his handling of 9/11. When Bush said "my brother kept us safe" Trump had no problem saying "no he didn't, the attack happened on his watch". That's not something you're supposed to be able to say in front of a Republican primary audience in North Carolina, but he said it and won the debate and went on to win the primary and then the presidency. And I think that's the light in which his comments about the Russians should be read. For Trump any conversation is about domination: when somebody accused him of being friendly with Russia he therefore understood the best response was to embrace the criticism and turn the whole thing back around again so it would stay focused on Hilary and 'but her emails". the russia investigation won't find anything, and if it did it won't be anything important, and if it is talking about it is pointless
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Apr 4, 2019 05:05
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Helsing posted:Trump's entire persona was to more or less "lean in" to any criticism. He did the exact same thing when Jeb! tried to attack him over his criticism of George W. Bush and his handling of 9/11. When Bush said "my brother kept us safe" Trump had no problem saying "no he didn't, the attack happened on his watch". That's not something you're supposed to be able to say in front of a Republican primary audience in North Carolina, but he said it and won the debate and went on to win the primary and then the presidency. Just imagine the look on the Bush family's faces in the audience the moment Trump said that along with calling out Dubya's Iraqi WMD lies. They were literally the only two substantive things ever said in the entirety of the 2016 GOP primary "debates". The fact it took a stuttering narcissist to say it makes it even more embarrassing.
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Apr 4, 2019 09:07
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GreyjoyBastard posted:the russia investigation won't find anything, and if it did it won't be anything important, and if it is talking about it is pointless Given that most people on this forum treated the entire thing with an embarrassing degree of credulousness I actually think it's extremely important to talk about. This was such an elementary failure of contemporary liberalism that I really think it behooves us to ask how so many people got this so wrong.
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Apr 4, 2019 13:50
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Apr 4, 2019 20:23
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I'm just shocked that Mueller's investigation might have some classified information in it. This is my shocked face, as it were was.
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Apr 5, 2019 01:21
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From the Washington Post:The Washington Post posted:Members of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s team have told associates they are frustrated with the limited information Attorney General William P. Barr has provided about their nearly two-year investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and whether President Trump sought to obstruct justice, according to people familiar with the matter. The New York Times The New York Times posted:The officials and others interviewed declined to flesh out why some of the special counsel’s investigators viewed their findings as potentially more damaging for the president than Mr. Barr explained, although the report is believed to examine Mr. Trump’s efforts to thwart the investigation. It was unclear how much discussion Mr. Mueller and his investigators had with senior Justice Department officials about how their findings would be made public. It was also unclear how widespread the vexation is among the special counsel team, which included 19 lawyers, about 40 F.B.I. agents and other personnel. Wow it sounds like this case is about to blow wide open!
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Apr 5, 2019 02:16
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This is kind of another perfect example of bad reporting on this. "Some members on the team said a thing" being used to heavily imply "therefore Barr must have misrepresented the report which actually vindicated our expectations in some way" despite no actual specifics.Helsing posted:Given that most people on this forum treated the entire thing with an embarrassing degree of credulousness I actually think it's extremely important to talk about. This was such an elementary failure of contemporary liberalism that I really think it behooves us to ask how so many people got this so wrong. I don't think there's anything that complex about it. Most liberals are just normal people, just like conservatives, and are just as susceptible to being sucked into their ideologically-acceptable Fox News-like media environments. Sodomy Hussein posted:Meanwhile IT ALSO exposes how dumb American politics are that we have had hearings about Facebook ads that look like they were made with crayons and centrist Democrats were indeed searching for a reason Hillary was betrayed rather than lost a campaign that she ran badly. But, it never the less exposed that social media companies are not our glorious benefactors (ending that 10-year fawning period in the media) and that the the U.S. government's cyber security is weak. I actually think the "Democrats looking for an excuse" angle, while true, is kind of overstated and that the poor journalism surrounding "RussiaGate" is far more concerning than anything else (and likely motivated as much by liberal viewers wanting to see it as any sort of top-down Democratic Party desires). There's really not much excuse for the degree of terrible reporting that occurred in liberal-aligned media, that was frequently outright false or completely unsubstantiated. I think that Matt Taibbi was correct when he mentioned one of the problems with our current media environment being that, because it's split along partisan lines, people never actually see fact-checking of stuff from "their side." Liberal media has no incentive to prominently publish when stuff they reported about Trump/Russia was false, so that reporting only shows up in right-wing or non-mainstream media most liberals never see. And likewise, liberal media frequently fact-checks the various wrong things conservative media says, but conservatives obviously don't see it (or take it seriously). Both sides have completely immersed themselves in these closed media universes, and I think that the liberal side of this has become far worse post-Trump.
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Apr 6, 2019 06:13
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Ytlaya posted:I don't think there's anything that complex about it. Most liberals are just normal people, just like conservatives, and are just as susceptible to being sucked into their ideologically-acceptable Fox News-like media environments. A central premise of liberal democracy is the efficacy of a free press acting as a guardian against corrupt politicians, interests and institutions. The fact the media is actively making these problems worse is an extremely serious problem that the current system cannot solve. Events like Russia-gate should be pushing people toward more radical solutions - "radical" in the traditional sense of the word, which says that we must get to the 'root' of problems rather than their surface level manifestations. quote:I actually think the "Democrats looking for an excuse" angle, while true, is kind of overstated and that the poor journalism surrounding "RussiaGate" is far more concerning than anything else (and likely motivated as much by liberal viewers wanting to see it as any sort of top-down Democratic Party desires). There's really not much excuse for the degree of terrible reporting that occurred in liberal-aligned media, that was frequently outright false or completely unsubstantiated. I think that Matt Taibbi was correct when he mentioned one of the problems with our current media environment being that, because it's split along partisan lines, people never actually see fact-checking of stuff from "their side." Liberal media has no incentive to prominently publish when stuff they reported about Trump/Russia was false, so that reporting only shows up in right-wing or non-mainstream media most liberals never see. And likewise, liberal media frequently fact-checks the various wrong things conservative media says, but conservatives obviously don't see it (or take it seriously). Both sides have completely immersed themselves in these closed media universes, and I think that the liberal side of this has become far worse post-Trump. The Democrats looking for excuses and the poor journalism from the media are not two alternative explanations, they are the same explanation described in different ways. I also think you're overlooking the extent to which the media has used this to their own ends: the panic over Russian bots has become an all purpose excuse to justify cracking down on non-traditional forms of media. Remember Prop or Not? Or the move to start actively managing and controlling what is discussed and shared on social media? The Russia-gate narrative has been seized upon as an excuse to shore up the reputation of the mainstream media and to try and justify herding people back toward traditional sources of news. Some of this probably isn't deliberate. It's not as though there's some central conspiracy directing everyone to drum up panic over Russia. But let's not ignore the extent to which the overlapping interests of these different groups create incentives that would make a formal conspiracy redundant. The Democrats and the media don't really need to actively coordinate too much because their interests at a higher level align closely enough that they can each just act out of their individual selfish motivations and it will, to borrow a phrase, as though an invisible hand were guiding them toward protecting the endless cyclone of corruption and graft that is the American establishment. Also notice how just by talking about the "establishment" being corrupt I now sound dangerously close to some Tucker Carlson fan, don't I? After two years of Russia-gate it's remarkable how well the media has trained liberals to react to any sweeping criticism of the media or government as sinister evidence of a red-brown alliance. That's a habit of thought that is going to stick around long after Russia-gate has been forgotten. Liberals are increasingly viewing mainstream American institutions as bulwarks against racist populism (how they square this with their growing recognition of America's fundamentally racist history is am ystery to me but somehow they do it). In previous versions of this thread there were numerous liberal posters arguing that Russia is the greatest threat to the globe right now and is behind a massive upsurge in racist populism - the usually unspoken but implicit implication here being that American state power is therefore the only force in the world that can hold back the rising tide of Russian sponsored fascism. So we end up with the American pseudo-left arguing that America must maintain its vast military empire to hold off the slavic menace. We're apparently not allowed to criticize NATO anymore because if we do that we're somehow siding with Trump and the racists or something. The fact is Russia-gate was very successful in its intended purpose and we're going to be stuck with its legacy for the foreseeable future. A huge number of liberals have been trained to view any systemic critique of American power or corruption in the government as associated with Fox News style racism. I don't think that is going away any time soon and its a very dangerous attitude.
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Apr 6, 2019 14:59
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Awfully quiet in this thread today. How does that Mel Brooks joke go? We Romans, we gotta lotta gods, only thing we don't have a god for is premature ejaculation. But I hear ones coming too soon.
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Apr 18, 2019 16:40
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I feel like some of these people might want to redact their statements.
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Apr 18, 2019 16:48
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greenwald status:
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Apr 18, 2019 17:48
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i agree with glen, i also thought they would get carter page. lamo
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Apr 18, 2019 18:49
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seems like papadopoulos was an israeli agent. kinda interesting i guess, maybe people knew that
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Apr 18, 2019 19:11
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So Mueller's report more or less openly states that there was no viable way for the executive branch to hold itself accountable. Of course some of us warned of this back in 2017 quote:Thanks to the constitution and the period it was drafted in Trump is effectively an elected king. However (and the founders didn't anticipate this when they vested all these kingly powers in the office of President) he's a king operating in a highly partisan system with opposing political parties. So unlike most heads of state the office of President is very politicized and also has substantial political power. He's got the democratic mandate of a head of government combined with the executive independence and prerogatives of a head of state.
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Apr 18, 2019 19:16
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Though apparently Trump did his best to get himself charged and part of Mueller's strained reasoning for not charging him just hinges on the fact he didn't have sufficient sway over his own staffers:  If nothing else the Mueller report will certainly furnish us with more details of Trump's chaotic first couple years in office.
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Apr 18, 2019 19:34
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BrandorKP posted:Awfully quiet in this thread today. What is there to talk about, the Republican cop investigated the Republican President and said "gee here's all this evidence of crimes, but how can we really ever know what it means, I guess we can't charge him with anything", exactly like every time the cops investigate themselves and say "okay yes he shot that unarmed man on the ground with his hands in the air crying 'don't shoot I am not armed' and then lied about what happened in his report and then bragged about it later, but who knows it might not have been murder in his heart, no charges recommended" which is unchanged from what was said itt last week. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 19:46 on Apr 18, 2019 |
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Apr 18, 2019 19:44
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VitalSigns posted:What is there to talk about, I expect something along the lines following question to be asked when they bring Mueller in to testify: If this were any other individual than the President would you have recommended prosecution for obstruction of justice? Whatever the response it's going to be the news and probably will determine the story.
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Apr 18, 2019 20:10
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I can already tell you the answer "I can't speculate on hypotheticals" but sure call him in and ask him
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Apr 18, 2019 20:21
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BrandorKP posted:I expect something along the lines following question to be asked when they bring Mueller in to testify: Who gives a poo poo about any of this? In the end this turned out to be a bunch of palace intrigue between rival factions of a fundamentally broke and horrible government. All this empty speculation about the report was a massive self indulgence by liberals that came with huge opportunity costs.
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Apr 18, 2019 20:30
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That would determine too wouldn't it.
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Apr 18, 2019 20:31
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Helsing posted:Who gives a poo poo about any of this? Seems like a lot of people. How long they'll give a poo poo for is the more important question.
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Apr 18, 2019 20:42
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That was a rhetorical question. I'm well aware that people give a poo poo and I'm saying its a petty self indulgent habit that has done real harm.
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Apr 18, 2019 20:47
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Helsing posted:That was a rhetorical question. I'm well aware that people give a poo poo and I'm saying its a petty self indulgent habit that has done real harm. so we should ignore executive abuses of power because when actual leftists are running for office they’ll certainly hold back
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Apr 18, 2019 23:54
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