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Wokko 
Come and take it.
Joined: 04 Oct 2005
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Pies4shaw 
pies4shaw
Joined: 08 Oct 2007
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| It should be a source of some considerable concern to Americans that the "bombshell news" of the weekend is that the President of the United States wasn't positively found to have committed treasonous acts. The good governance bar has been set a little low. |
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thesoretoothsayer
Joined: 26 Apr 2017
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| Pies4shaw wrote: | | It should be a source of some considerable concern to Americans that the "bombshell news" of the weekend is that the President of the United States wasn't positively found to have committed treasonous acts. The good governance bar has been set a little low. |
Well it is "bombshell news" because for the past two years the lamestream media has been telling us that Trump is a Russian agent, spends his spare time getting urinated on by prostitutes and will be arrested and charged at any moment. |
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Pies4shaw
pies4shaw
Joined: 08 Oct 2007
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It was never asserted by anyone sane that he is actually a Russian agent.
The second thing was not the subject of this particular investigation.
The third thing can't happen to a sitting President, although, come the end of his term, it may otherwise still be true.
Putting your empty and irrelevant contentions aside, are you saying that you don't think the good governance bar has been set a little low when the White House claims a "victory" because the President wasn't found to have committed certain particularly serious crimes? If so, on what rational basis would you say that? |
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thesoretoothsayer
Joined: 26 Apr 2017
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Wokko
Come and take it.
Joined: 04 Oct 2005
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David 
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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In the end, it wasn’t even about fighting fire with fire, or taking the gloves off – what really happened is the Democrats and their media supporters just lost the plot, and ended up with egg all over their faces. I couldn’t agree more with this scorching excoriation of the establishment media’s Russiagate hysteria:
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/taibbi-russia-investigation-conclusions-813171/
| Quote: | After the 2016 election, the storyline instantly became that Trump was an illegitimate president, a foreign operative who’d cheated his way into office and would therefore need to be removed ahead of schedule.
[...]
Given that “collusion” has turned out to be [a] dry well, to the ordinary viewer it will look a hell of lot like the MSNBCs of the world humped a fake story for two consecutive years in the hopes of overturning election results ahead of time. Trump couldn’t have asked for a juicier campaign issue, and an easier way to argue that “elites” don’t respect the democratic choices of flyover voters. It’s hard to imagine what could look worse.
For the commercial press to recapture any dignity after this collusion debacle, it has to at least start admitting to its role in artificially raising expectations in the last two years. It’s hard to imagine them doing that, however. This story has been so enormously profitable for cable stations, in particular, it will be hard for them to let go of this narrative. What are they going to do, go back to just reporting the news? |
Also, in Jacobin:
https://jacobinmag.com/2019/03/russiagate-donald-trump-mueller-report
| Quote: | No one can be faulted for initially entertaining the theory. Trump’s ramshackle campaign, like his presidency, was an open invitation for influence peddling and corruption of all kinds, particularly given Trump’s overseas real estate interests. It’s clear the Russian government made attempts to aid or even infiltrate Trump’s campaign, though to what end is still not clear (it’s hard to believe the Kremlin foresaw Trump’s victory when even the candidate himself didn’t, and various reports have the motive as anything from sticking it to Clinton to getting revenge for the release of the Panama Papers). Meanwhile, Trump and his associates did seemingly everything they could to make themselves look as guilty as possible.
But rather than treat these developments with measured skepticism — there was, after all, always a possibility that Trump and his associates were amateurishly lying and obstructing justice to tamp down a scandal that was less criminal than embarrassing and politically damaging — the political and media establishment largely threw caution, care, and, sometimes, professionalism out the window, expecting their conclusions would eventually be proven entirely right. The fact that less than two decades ago denizens of these same journalistic quarters — in some cases the exact same individuals — had been duped by sensationalized, intelligence agency-fed stories about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction apparently gave them no pause.
Instead of removing Trump from power or even weakening him — the real purpose of all this — those who pushed the Trump-Russia scandal have instead handed him an entirely unearned victory. It’s not clear how politically valuable it will prove to be in the long run; Trump’s policies, after all, have been disastrous for the vast majority of voters, and his historic unpopularity has little to do with a scandal that obsessed only a narrow sliver of the US public.
But Trump, who in 2016 ran disingenuously against the establishment before spending his entire presidency coddling it, can now say he’s been vindicated. He’ll point to the last two years as an organized conspiracy by the Democratic establishment, in concert with the media, to destroy his rebel presidency, just as he’s been saying all along. Perhaps it won’t work. But the Democrats, who have only recently begun learning to oppose Trump on anything other than Russia-related nonsense have a lot of catching up to do.
Meanwhile, it’s hard to overstate the damage the media has done to itself, an ominous development when, coming off its role in the Iraq War, its public standing remains low. After spending the last two years both celebrating itself and panicking about Trump’s hostility to press freedom, the media has now appeared to confirm every ungenerous right-wing talking point about itself, and it has done so when press freedoms are increasingly under attack, not from Trump but from the establishment that supposedly hates him. This is a grave unforced error whose exact significance for the press we likely won’t know for some time. |
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Pies4shaw
pies4shaw
Joined: 08 Oct 2007
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They do enjoy talking to themselves about themselves, don't they.
But despite the navel-gazing, one of those articles has managed to identify the moral high-point of this presidency: "there was, after all, always a possibility that Trump and his associates were amateurishly lying and obstructing justice to tamp down a scandal that was less criminal than embarrassing and politically damaging".
It's good that some people can see that as a "victory". Good governance principles, here we come. |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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| David wrote: | | In the end, it wasn’t even about fighting fire with fire, or taking the gloves off – what really happened is the Democrats and their media supporters just lost the plot, and ended up with egg all over their faces. I couldn’t agree more with this scorching excoriation of the establishment media’s Russiagate hysteria... |
Are you sure you're not the one being swept away by the news cycle? No one has read the report yet, while you must be aware that a sitting president would never be prosecuted via this sort of investigation; not now, not ever. There is much more to come in this saga, from the drip feeding and analysis of the Mueller Report to legal action in other jurisdictions.
I think you're right to criticise the silly hysteria, but wrong to forget that serious people have never bought into it, and are appalled for much more sober reasons.
The exposure of the criminal company Trump keeps through this investigation would have seen him run out of government in most advanced nations on earth already. That it hasn't is testament to America's extremism; nonetheless, this sort of information does influence moderate voters.
Further, Trump's shady associations and conflicts of interest - in a context of highly dubious email dumps, intransparent funding, and coordinated outside campaigns - suggest themselves for investigation. Trump had plenty of opportunity to deal with these things in a manner consistent with ethical expectations; instead, he added the stench of medieval nepotism to mud of corruption.
The use of the Republican-built and trademarked Russia petard is a side issue given that the Russian villain is a permanent fixture on the American landscape. The only downside I can see to using it as a metaphor for corruption is that it takes the spotlight off Trump's own swamp petard, gross ethical breaches, relationship with Saudi Arabia, and love-in with the Israeli far right. However, those issues have hardly been obscured, no matter how victoriously he tweets.
You also seem to have forgotten that the Dems won the House on the back of waning support for Trump beyond his fanatical base due to the lack of stability he represents. The constant association with corruption, rightly emphasised, has played a major role in this. In fact, do you see any indication that it hasn't worked?
This is a bloke who has given massive handouts to billionaires and scumbags, benefited from sub-zero media expectations, and used every single demagogic trick in the book to rile and hoodwink the gullible. And yet, in a country divided by a ridiculous two-party system, he still lost the House. The importance of this should not be underestimated, even as Trump reaches for presidential vetoes and waves presidential pardons in the face of the toothless custom.
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In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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Skids 
Quitting drinking will be one of the best choices you make in your life.
Joined: 11 Sep 2007
Location: Joined 3/6/02 . Member #175
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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Glad that that phoney Republican intimidation exercise is over and done with, and that it was called out for what it was.
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All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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| pietillidie wrote: | | You also seem to have forgotten that the Dems won the House on the back of waning support for Trump beyond his fanatical base due to the lack of stability he represents. The constant association with corruption, rightly emphasised, has played a major role in this. In fact, do you see any indication that it hasn't worked? |
It may well have worked as a mud-slinging exercise to an extent (although the issue of Russia consistently rated low in polls about voter concerns), but only insofar as it was considered credible. There's a sting in that tail, of course: the public reaction to this news may well now wipe out any benefit gained from it.
There's also the collateral damage to take into account: whatever your views on the implications of Mueller's report or the recent coverage of it, not only will the broad public perception among swing voters be that they were taken along for a ride by the Democrats and Democrat-friendly media on this issue, but, as the Jacobin article points out, this will in fact deal a blow to the perceived credibility of other claims of corruption against Trump (including much more plausible ones) and lend weight to his assertions about a media conspiracy against him. I don't see how that can't be costly in an environment in which Trump has already made significant electoral gains from his "anti-establishment" posing.
I do concede your points about the lack of info we currently have on the contents of the report, and that it should be assumed on some level that Barr has done his best to spin it in Trump's favour. But his statement does contain (presumably accurate) facts and quotes from the report, and they alone pour cold water on the conspiracy-mongering of the Rachel Maddows of the world. I can only go back to what I posted in this thread in July last year – which, from what I can tell, seems to have been effectively vindicated:
| David wrote: | | I don't know what the probe will end up uncovering. Maybe Trump will turn out to be a Russian agent, but it seems much more likely that he won't, and that what we've learned so far isn't the tip of the iceberg but, like, pretty much the whole thing. And if that's it, then frankly I think it's eaten up way more airtime than it deserved. |
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All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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^But a 'Russian agent'? That's in the same class as alien abductions.
This was about quid pro quos which may meet the technical definition of collusion. Ironically, the point at stake is a technicality far removed from hysteria, and it is only being pursued because there are no laws capable of prosecuting outright abuse of the office of the supreme pharaoh.
_________________
In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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swoop42 
Whatcha gonna do when he comes for you?
Joined: 02 Aug 2008
Location: The 18
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You would think that if you're running for the President of the United States that upon receiving news that a foreign hostile power was looking to meddle in the democracy of your country you would immediately report it to the FBI.
The Trump camp met them for drinks and a chat.
Yeah nothing to see here. A true Patriot.
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He's mad. He's bad. He's MaynHARD! |
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Wokko
Come and take it.
Joined: 04 Oct 2005
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| pietillidie wrote: |
You also seem to have forgotten that the Dems won the House on the back of waning support for Trump beyond his fanatical base due to the lack of stability he represents. The constant association with corruption, rightly emphasised, has played a major role in this. In fact, do you see any indication that it hasn't worked? |
Lost half the seats of Obama and Clinton and gained in the Senate. Only FDR and GW Bush have gained house seats in their first midterms. Your analysis is rubbish.
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