Matt Taibbi

xpost lol ok that link doesn't work. but you can get to it on REalClearPolitics.

also 71% of the Black respondents believed Congress should investigate Russia, which was also the highest response rate among the races surveyed.

louise mensch is obviously a kook, but focusing on her loopy twitter rants as opposed to the actual in-depth coverage of the trump gang's various connections to russia (some of which is probably benign and some of which might not be) that we've been reading in, like, the new york times for months and months strikes me as kind of weird

and yeah i know mensch has been published in the NYT, remembered that a half-second after i hit "submit post"

My encounters with "something Louise Mensch said" align ALMOST entirely with "straw woman being deployed" or "lol what an obvious dipshit". But I still have to see Greenwald unironically referenced as someone of value, which is particularly egregious/trollish wrt this particular issue.

Thanks for jumping in to troll me, Alfred.

If this Russia stuff ends up bringing down Trump, I'll be completely stoked. I just fear we're going to end up in a typical no true quid-pro-quo situation (similar to the Clinton Foundation stories) that will peter out and end up going nowhere. And then we've created our own derangement syndrome, as Taibbi notes, which doesn't actually help convince anyone that dems are better than republicans.

Who cares? It's driving Trump and his supporters nuts!

That's where the GOP is at this point - their entire policy agenda seems to be "what drives liberals nuts? Let's do that!" Are you all looking at that with cold-eyed realism or something and thinking it's a good way to run a party?

This was a more interesting take on liberal conspiracy hysteria than Taibbi's: http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/trump-conspiracy-tweetstorms-are-the-infowars-of-the-le-1793957969

xpost how, exactly, is the left doing that? most of the actions/statements by Dem Congressmen in the last month or so have been in response to the very partisan turn the investigation seemed to be taking, the Sessions controversy, etc. I don't see anybody but Maxine Waters throwing the "i" word around at every turn.

she's getting cosigned by a lot of internet liberals and hillary men, and has had an op-ed in the times, so the idea that her batshittery is irrelevant to the matter at hand doesn't really hold too much water. though she's clearly the ne plus ultra of this shit - i guess along with kendzior.

Even if you set aside the fawning Guardian profile / NYT editorial space and dismiss her as an outlier, there is enough background noise about cracking down on 'fake news' to make journalists worried. Elected officials have proposed banning Russia Today, sites including ProPublica and Alternet have been defamed as Russian shills by unaccountable activist groups given a platform by mainstream newspapers, Facebook has just set up a $14m consortium to 'restore trust to journalism', etc. Greenwald, Taibbi, and even staunch Putin critics like Masha Gessen, are relentlessly accused of being in on, or dupes for, a grand conspiracy.

that was good. xxpost

That's where the GOP is at this point - their entire policy agenda seems to be "what drives liberals nuts? Let's do that!" Are you all looking at that with cold-eyed realism or something and thinking it's a good way to run a party?

We have evidence, they did not; plus, Trump is a minority president whose approval ratings are lower than my cholesterol numbers. That's the difference.

You're edging awfully close to those Dems who think we shouldn't filibuster Gorsuch because of the Sanctity of the Senate.

I thought I was fighting against those people. Dammit.

Wait, we have evidence?

When you are being kicked repeatedly while lying on the ground, the response isn't "be better than them, the punches will stop hurting"

Xpost circumstantial evidence is still evidence. Just because there isn't a magical smoking gun to tie together an explosive conspiracy atm doesn't mean it's only mediocre innuendo

If anything the evidence probably looks weaker because minor details are being leaked in retaliation for Trump's weird offensives. Anything bigger would be too big to reveal (or doesn't exist)

I don't think Putin's stupid enough to leave behind any smoking-gun-level evidence tbh

pee tape or gtfo

Yeah I don't expect anything big to come out either but the fact that Flynn resigned and Sessions recused himself, and Roger Stone openly bragging about colluding means we're past a point where we say things like "there's evidence?"

that's gen called smoke, in legal environments

Still not past that point :P
xpost

...for me

Interested to know what classified info you've seen

It depends on what you want evidence for. The evidence for Russia hacking the DNC was already pretty strong last summer, and Trump-people repeatedly were in contact with Russians anyway, and lied about it. That's scandalous in and of itself.

But evidence of actual collusion... I haven't really seen any.

xpost yeah I don't even know if everybody agrees on what the 'endgame' is likely to be. evidence of what? minor collusion? impeachable offenses?

meanwhile there's an assload of smoke and Trump admin is saying "that smoke is coming from Obama's house, probably some Islamic reefer smoking ceremony or something"

None of this seems anywhere near as scandalous as running a fake university boiler-room scheme that bilked thousands of people out of their life savings. Or running a phony foundation that has been proved to be self-dealing. Or being on tape talking about assaulting women.

Ugh this is why I removed bookmarks on all of the politics threads. Sorry everyone.

None of this seems anywhere near as scandalous as running a fake university boiler-room scheme that bilked thousands of people out of their life savings. Or running a phony foundation that has been proved to be self-dealing. Or being on tape talking about assaulting women.

― DJI, Tuesday, April 4, 2017 5:30 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

all of which the Left talked about at length and still didn't stop him from getting elected.

Exactly.

I don't think you can have a senate investigation into those things, though.

Theoretically, the Senate can investigate anything it damn pleases.

That sounds really scary...

It probably would be good if a figure of influence within the party publily cautioned against conspiracy theories in general, given that that sort of thing became a problem during the primary. You don't want a particularly ridiculous idea to take on a life of its own and distract from substantive but less salacious findings should they come about. YET it is fun to insist that the pee tape is probably real so idk

Could they even impeach him over that? They'd have to demonstrate that he knew he was vulnerable to blackmail by the Russians and didn't tell anyone.

"High crimes and misdemeanors" can be stretched to mean almost anything that the public accepts as being politically fatal to the president.

the Founding Fathers created this as a guarantee that nobody could usurp absolute power but didn't exactly create clear guidelines for its utilization as if they didn't expect Articles to ever be drafted

Impeachment was envisaged as a political solution to an otherwise insoluble political problem within the presidency. Such as Nixon refusing to resign when most of the nation viewed him as having engaged in criminal activity while president, specifically through misusing his powers of office. Without impeachment, Nixon could have thumbed his nose at everyone, or else the Congress and SCOTUS would have been forced to improvise some extra-constitutional response.

The Russian scandal is much more political in nature, though. It's easier to defend investigating Sessions lying under oath during confirmation hearings than it would be looking into whether Trump assaulted women.

But I would agree that Trump assaulting women and bragging about it is much worse than anything Russia-related that we know about.

"misdemeanors" is sufficiently vague enough to include lying to a grand jury

Correct. But in Clinton's case, it was not seen by the public as sufficient cause to overturn his tenure in office, because it was not material to his conduct of office, in contrast to almost all of the Watergate crimes.

I'm aware of that, having lived through the period when Clinton's poll numbers during the crisis were one of the wonders of the world -- I'm noting the word's delicious elasticity.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/taibbi-on-the-new-book-that-brutalizes-the-clinton-campaign-w477978

I think we get it at this point with the Clinton-bashing. Still, it's crazy that actual campaign workers couldn't answer the basic question of why she was running.

Part of me felt like I'd been unfair to Clinton - Maybe she WAS clear about her intentions/motivations, that she DID run on issues other than "I'm not Trump!" That maybe she did try to talk about other stuff, but that the media was only interested in Trump and reactions to Trump. Then I read this, and it sounds like all that was driving her campaign was clueless, tactics-driven nonsense, without any real thought about who she wanted to help or what she was trying to fix.

If you can't figure out who the first woman candidate ever was going to help, or why that message might have backfired, then I really don't know what to say. The slogan 'It's her turn' has a few more connotations to it than Taibbi realizes...

dude he realizes them, all of us realize them here in the united states, it was drummed into our heads for months of media barrage and not just on the web

"does Matt Taibi not realize 'It's her turn' is a phrase meaning it could be time for a well-qualified woman? and that people who are well-qualified deserve a promotion? it's such a double entendre of electability!"

Hey, I was trying to be generous. Ok, he realizes it, but just ignores it and shits on her for trying it out? Is that better?

Either way, he is an asshole.

Or assumes his audience is intelligent enough to know there are two meanings, that he agrees with the fact it's time for a woman president, and it's completely irrelevant to the tone of the campaign's failures?

Although the "it's time for a woman president" still doesn't answer the question of "why this woman?"

And he's an asshole for writing a relatively positive review of a book?

"In the Clinton run, that problem became such a millstone around the neck of the campaign that staffers began to flirt with the idea of sharing the uninspiring truth with voters. Stumped for months by how to explain why their candidate wanted to be president, Clinton staffers began toying with the idea of seeing how "Because it's her turn" might fly as a public rallying cry."

Nah, fuck that asshole.