The "Official Nick's BB" Trump Impeachment thread!

[Wokko]

https://www.dailywire.com/news/klavan-the-absurdity-of-the-impeachment-narrative-is-its-only-strength?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=mattwalsh

[3.14159]

...

[Wokko]

Ok Boomer

[Skids]

https://www.facebook.com/376776419037747/posts/2573250332723667/

[Wokko]

[stui magpie]

^

The political science major should ask for a refund on his degree.

[3.14159]

[3.14159]

[pietillidie]

No amount of George W. Bush whataboutery — from the constituency that brought the world George W. Bush — detracts from the fact that Trump is a creepy, corrupt, destructive, highly dysfunctional grandiose narcissist who needs serious treatment. Not only is he still a disaster waiting to happen, but he has added a violent domestic instability and accelerated environmental destruction to the horror show of national decline instigated by George W.

Trump can be considered 'better' than what has come before him only in the sense that George W., who was also a corrupt, nepotistic, incompetent imbecile who cut taxes and environmental protections at the behest of multimillionaires while handing out crooked contracts to associates, readily melds into the vast evils of Anglo-American empire from Africa and the Middle East to Asia and Latin America.

For this alone everyone can be thankful.

Yet, through the abandonment of the Kurds, the flippant showboating with North Korea, the emboldening of autocrats, the purposeful destabilising of the global economy by abusing the power of American economic primacy, the bullying of less powerful neighbours and allies, the expedient support of far right Israel and Saudi Arabia and the economic attack on Iran as payment for their capital and affection, we know full well he stands in the ugliest of American imperial traditions.

The avoidance of Bush's wars is a rhetorical TV stunt alone. Thank mercy, yes. But that's the moral and intellectual depth of it. With Bush's failures still fresh in our minds, Trump is indeed 'better'. But economic warfare and support of dangerous regimes is merely war by other means, and throughout history has inevitably provoked still greater warfare. Nothing at all Trump has done has made either America or the world better; nothing. All he has done is weaken it internally, isolate it internationally, and turn it into farce rather than a pretense, hastening an ugly and dangerous decline.

[David]

[3.14159]

Why don't you care about Trump using Javelin missiles to dig dirt on Biden?
The count there is 16,000 dead since Russia invaded and with-holding that aid is putting 1,000's more at risk.

As for the Saudi Prince, the president of the US is a position powerful enough to curb some of the Princes more bloodthirsty tendencies but instead, the current one is an enabler hell-bent on taking the shackles of off this murderous thug! As long as Trump is power the plight of Yemen will only get worse! The CIA and other Intelligence Agencies around the world agree that MBS was responsible for the murder of journalist Khashoggi but trump gets up there and says "He said he didn't do, maybe he did, maybe he didn't, I don't know! Or pulling US troops out of Syria leaving the Kurds open to slaughter despite the assurances of protection from the US! Trump's justification is they didn't fight for us at Normandy so why should he (and America) care about the blood-stained sands bequeathed to them by arseholes that divided up the region at the end of the second world war. He forgets that the Kurds were the driving force behind defeating ISIS, an organisation born in US jails of Bagdad after Bush disbanded the Iraqi army. The House almost unanimously voted to censure Trump but the damage was done and innocents have died!

But you don't care about that because according to Noam Chomski the World has gone to hell in a hand-basket and bleating/caring about it will not change anything!! But your Pasty-faced mate, you know the one that did his level best to get this toe-rag of a man elected to a position where he could actively make the world a far a worse place, sits in a cell and that is something we should all get upset about! (pounds the table for effect)
Big Deal, measured against the of deaths that have occurred (and will continue to occur) as a result of Trump assuming the Oval office I couldn't care less about whatever fate befalls Assange!
https://www.kurdistan24.net/en/news/dadc2b6a-f0de-42e1-9158-3c94a4e176d

Btw I read Chomski 30 years ago.
He's still around and still has a lot to say, this clip is from 3 years ago before we began to discover the depth and breadth of the corruption of this narcissistic thin-skinned con-man!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jB54XxbgI0E

[David]

Given it’s my partner’s homeland that is being discussed here, I am both well-versed on the situation and emotionally invested in wanting the conflict to end, yet I have to say I’m deeply ambivalent as to whether Ukraine gets more American Javelin missiles or not. Zelenskyy was elected on, among other things, the promise of finding a diplomatic solution to the Russian-backed artificial civil war, which has already dragged on way too long and caused too much suffering, and I hope that he can still achieve that. How many missiles does he need to bring the Donetsk rebel forces to the table, exactly? Is an unending flow of American arms merely perpetuating a "just" but unwinnable conflict? These are questions that, I think, are being overlooked in the back and forth about this impeachment sideshow (which I’m still inclined to view as being a waste of time and energy, much as Russiagate was).

On the other hand, there are many people in the US at the moment, Democrat and Republican alike – let’s call them "war hawks" – who see Ukraine as nothing more than a playground in which to fight Russia in a Cold War 2.0, and who talk a great deal about Ukrainian sovereignty without, I think, caring all that much about the actual well-being of the populace; look up anything John Bolton has said on the conflict as a case in point (he might seem like an oddball psycho, but he’s reflective of a very prevalent ideology in parts of Washington and the intelligence community). Trump’s sympathy for Putin and reluctance to play the chess game against him only complicates that further. And of course he has his own, different, chess game that he wants to play in Ukraine, which is solely based on getting back at Russiagate proponents and, as you say, digging up dirt on Biden (Democrats have also been playing domestic politics in Ukraine, incidentally).

So while his blackmail of Zelenskyy is reprehensible and quite possibly impeachable, I’m also sceptical of any arguments about the moral necessity of US arms funding here, and that aspect of the broader impeachment narrative. We should be prepared to look at American involvement in international conflicts sceptically, whether the cause is broadly good (Kurdish liberation) or evil (Saudi bombing of Yemen). For instance, I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing, broadly speaking, that the US are pulling out of Syria. When so many human lives are on the line, fundamentalist arguments about sovereignty and alliances only get you so far, and one must start from the position that the US always have ulterior motives in any conflict they involve themselves in. Trump’s scattershot, uninformed, self-aggrandising approach has its good and bad points; while I doubt that he ever actually means well, the fact that it so often upsets the Washington establishment is not always a bad thing. We certainly shouldn’t be treating their narratives as gospel here.

(By the way, not to make this Chomsky clips at twenty paces, but you may be interested in his summation of the Assange situation: https://youtu.be/RYdDp4mHDRY)

[MJ23]

^ not bad Dave.....Not bad at all.
I promised I would stay out of the Tav but your post was a good one.
Dont agree with everything but I can see a genuine understanding of all sides here rather than the CNN talking points many are armed with.
Well done.

[pietillidie]

^I disagree. In effect, throwing far-left arguments at an institutional position is nothing more than a rhetorical deflection bomb because the vast majority of people in the discussion don't accept its assumptions. This means they're only going to use the argument as a rhetorical convenience for some other purpose; the last thing they have in mind is David's (and my own) improved imperial ethics.

Furthermore, the belief that 'shaking things up' will result in positive outcomes is not a rational position, but is rather a reflection of psychological style. Change is only as good as the change itself. Just what change is really being proposed here?

The actual change being proposed is an extreme protectionism, starting with the protection of multimillionaires from social and economic cost and international competition, with the magical hope that this will somehow extend to everyone else. Indeed, the very same far left arguments are now being deployed by the far right in a much more violent version of protectionism targeting foreigners and out groups. This unholy alliance can also be seen lurking in the shadows of the Brexit argument.

And it's not just happening at the political extremes. Given protectionism is a natural human inclination (no one wants life to be more difficult for themselves), and zero-sumism is the most common economic error getting around, this new protectionism is seeping into a much broader consciousness. The greatest danger to all of us as the empire declines is this sort of flailing, because it can very easily transmute into an much more dysfunctional panic.

People are not thinking straight if their version of 'shaking things up' includes unprecedented overt corruption and nepotism, dream tax cuts to multimillionaires, the scuppering of serious healthcare, the abandoning of allies including vulnerable peoples, radical efforts to warp election outcomes, an extreme unwinding of already deficient environmental protections, an executive unrestrained by custom (leading to a judiciary made in its image), the unleashing of the uncontrollable forces of trade war, and the creation of general societal instability

The challenge has always been for the far left to take its many reasonable ideas into the mainstream context, otherwise they're forever trapped somewhere between cult and bloody revolution, or what we see at the moment: erratic dabbling and flaky deference to the wrong people.

[David]

I know this is all a matter of perception, but I don't really consider myself to be on the far left – I know plenty of people on the (let's say) "anti-imperialist" left who, I think, take an anti-US position to its extreme, and end up backing brutal authoritarian leaders like Assad, Putin and Xi and buying into their propaganda simply because they are the enemy of their enemy (and some go as far as to support Trump for accelerationist reasons, which I think is a nonsense approach). On the other hand, I think there are many centrists (maybe centre-leftists, if we're being generous) who are much too credulous about US imperial narratives and end up buying into the narrative of anyone who'll say a mean word about Trump (a group which, in the US media/political bubble, contains a great many ghouls, including many of the architects of the Iraq War). So what's a politically engaged person to do if they don't want to fall into either trap? For me, the only reasonable path is to treat all narratives from powerful interest groups with due scepticism, to put a lot of that cable news / press gallery bullshit to one side – and it is bullshit – and to instead get involved in a politics that is centred on the real issues on the ground that people face every day, such as the need for a proper living wage, labour rights, social support mechanisms, civil liberties, equality of opportunity and so on. None of this is inherently radical politics, in my view, and it doesn't preclude voting for less-worse mainstream candidates or being involved in the mainstream contest of ideas. I'm not here to burn things down and hope that something good just happens to come of it; rather, I believe in more or less what you believe in: electoral politics, reform of institutions and not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

I do think an over-investment in American politics from an outside position is a bit of a distraction and maybe one that many of us could learn to temper, but, as an unreformed US politics addict, I'll say this much: my perception of America right now is that, after years of stagnation and inability to reach even a basic Western capitalist standard of living (with areas like healthcare, gun control, minimum wage, prisoners' rights, environmental policy, etc. lagging well behind the rest of the developed world), it's just taken a huge step back and to the side with Trump. Back, because most of the policies he's enacted have hurt regular people and threaten to drag America back into the Stone Age, and come close to undoing all of the very mild incremental achievements of the previous eight years. But to the side because many of the accepted rules of the game have been tipped over. I didn't want that – despite my concerns about Clinton, I thought her opponent's election would be a disaster and still do – but it's happened anyway, and it has provided some opportunities: not for the left to come in and tip the board over themselves and create their own brand of chaos, but rather to demonstrate that some of the cast-iron laws of American politics are a little more flexible than they seemed, and that there may in fact be space for a moderate social reformist administration to come in and supercharge the progress that was held back for so long as a result of small-picture thinking.

That, for me, is the promise of a Sanders or (to a lesser extent) Warren administration. And that's why I support the Greens here, too. Others, understandably enough, just want things to go back the way they were, which is the appeal of a Biden candidacy. But for anyone who actually cares about social progress and doesn't see getting rid of Trump as the ultimate political end goal, the question has to be: then what? Keep things afloat until the next Republican administration tears it all back down again? Australian politics has been trapped in a similarly depressing see-saw for at least two decades now, and I don't see any way out of it here at the moment because we seem to lack the capacity for a Sanders-like insurgency. Surely, there has to be some midpoint between literal revolution and competent, vision-free management; for me, finding that midpoint is the raison d'etre of progressive politics.

So I think one needs to be careful not to buy into the Fox News position of collapsing all approaches to social progress within a "far-left" label, because there's a world of difference between an apathetic both-sides-ist who has no concept of pragmatic politics and a social reformist who just wants democracy to do what it says on the tin. I don't think there's anything cultish or flaky about the latter.