President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

I'm sitting here reading Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann—good book—which is about a murder conspiracy in the 1920s. The judge in the case, advising the jury before trial, said: "There has never been a country on this earth that has fallen except when that point was reached... where the citizens would say, 'We cannot get justice in our courts.'"

I suspect those words will, once again, soon prove tragically applicable.

 

Somebody needs to remind them that their deity commands them to not spread false witness against their neighbor.

 

I generally agree with you on a theoretical level, but IMO that is not our current reality. There are huge swaths of America who refuse to agree on what is "right," even on what should be considered objective facts.

Take climate change. The overwhelming majority of respected experts in the field agree on several basic facts: that the Earth is getting materially warmer, that man-made activity (notably the emission of CO2) is the major driver of said warming, and that said warming is doing some really dangerous things to the planet and humanity that we better take pretty damn seriously. There can be legitimate quibbles on the margins, such as what percentage of the warming is due to human-created emissions, exactly how dangerous the warming is and in what ways, etc. But there is a strong consensus on basic facts, and that they are, indeed, facts.

Yet a handful of scientists disagree in large part. And those "experts" are cited by many GOP leaders, including those who run much of the executive branch – and, most dangerously, by those who are in charge of protecting the environment and responding to the crisis that is global warming. Our own president has called global warming a "hoax" perpetrated by the Chinese. Tens of millions agree with Trump, essentially saying that those 99% of scientists don't know what the hell they're talking about, and that their common-sense, gut-level views on the global climate are just as valid as a bunch of elitist eggheads. "Hey, it's cold out today – I told you global warming was a fraud!"

In your example, I suspect Trump Appointee A would simply say Hawking is wrong; at his most gracious, he might say "Agree to disagree." And I bet he'd cite your contention that nobody needs fancy book-learnin' to have a perfectly valid opinion on any topic, an opinion just as valid as someone who has spent a lifetime studying that very topic. And once you decide there generally isn't something as "accepted fact," or even "objective fact," then, well, here we are.

You may well argue that's not what you mean, and I would even believe that. But IMO your argument is just a cleaned-up way of saying that everyone's opinion on pretty much every topic is as valid as anyone else's. When that belief is coupled with the growing view that there are no facts, but just opinions that are "spun," that's how we've gotten here.

 

Much better than getting 370-odd pages into a novel you suddenly realize is terrible.

That was a fun day.

 

Didn't they learn anything from the NCAA? They're supposed to put Estonia on probation.

(Sorry, couldn't resist).

 

That's not my argument.

My argument is that a person's "opinion" is only as valid as the facts/arguments supporting that opinion.

Stephen Hawking: "Molecules are constructed of empty Meister Brau cans."

Trump Appointee A: "That's actually crazy. Molecules are constructed of atoms. Everyone knows that."

Stephen Hawking: "Too bad, so sad. I'm Stephen Hawking."

 

Alabama man Jonesing for another tweetstorm.

 

I don't know if Jones or someone else wrote that line, but if it was someone else, they should get a raise.

 

#allopinionsequal

 

I've read two substantive pieces by McCarthy since the Flynn news dropped, and I keep coming back to one of the few loose ends he allowed to dangle. While he does an excellent job of laying out and supporting his argument, the entire thing requires us to accept a significant premise that I'm not sure he establishes as valid. He bases his entire argument on the notion that Mueller's investigation has been focused from the jump on a specific violation of federal law, as in the paragraph quoted below:

McCarthy's interpretation, from my understanding:

1. The special prosecutor is investigating whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to affect the outcome of the election.
2. If the prosector had uncovered evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia, he would have charged Flynn with a more serious count than lying to FBI agents
3. The prosecutor's decision to charge Flynn on a count that has nothing to do with collusion is most likely an indication that the investigation has been unable to find evidence of collusion and is now focused on obstruction.

Thing is, the original order outlining the scope of Mueller's investigation does not mention the word "collusion." It says that Mueller is responsible for investigating, "any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump; and
any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation..."

Throughout this whole process, it has struck me how specifically Team Trump has focused its protestations on that word "collusion." That, along with the media coverage, have helped to frame the investigation as something that will eventually render a binary answer to the question, "Was there a top-down working agreement between the Trump Campaign and the Russian Government to attempt to install him as president?"

It's reasonable to think, as McCarthy seems to, that Mueller's team has reached a point where the answer to that question is a definitive, "No." But it is also reasonable to think -- and this is what McCarthy omits from his calculation -- that the question itself long ago ceased being the central focus of the investigation.

I would argue that the question itself was never likely to last as the central focus of the investigation. Kushner had a point when he said that the campaign was too disorganized to collude with Russia in the manner that the popular narrative suggests. The anti-Trumpers tend to get hung up disputing that suggestion (because, I suspect, they are driven in large part by a latent desperation to absolve themselves of responsibility for HRC's loss: "she didn't lose because she was a bad candidate, or she ran a shitty campaign, or she was on the wrong side of the issues, but because Trump conspired with racists, misogynists, and Russian agents to rig the election). Sometimes I think that their insistence that Trump's victory was the result of some orchestrated conspiracy only plays into his hands, because doing so will allow Trump to claim victory in any circumstance other than Mueller issuing a report that says Trump was Stringer Bell sitting in a conference room with a bunch of KGB agents.

At least, that's the focus McCarthy seems to be taking, that if Donald Trump was Stringer Bell, then Michael Flynn was Avon Barksdale and Mueller would not be allowing him to plead out on an ancillary process charge.

He makes that point well, but I feel like his understanding of the "major scheme" that Mueller is targeting relies upon an awfully narrow definition of the phrases "any links" and "any matters that may arise" regarding Trump and Russia. There are a hell of a lot of scenarios in which the president was aware of or authorized some awfully shady shit that wasn't the result of organizational-level cooperation between his campaign and the Russian government.

For instance, which scenario is a bigger threat to our democracy:

1. A Russian agent dresses up like a Cold War Spy and hands Kushner/Manafort an envelope with a thumb drive of DNC emails that make Hillary look bad.

or

2. A Russian oligarch pays Manafort/Kushner double the usual "fee" on a legally questionable transaction and says, "oh, by the way, if you guys happen to win the election, I have some issues I'd like to discuss with the President. I trust you can make that happen."

I understand why people are still convinced that No. 1 occurred. My personal intuition says that, if No. 1 did occur, it would be an open-and-shut case, given the wiretapping evidence that would almost certainly exist on the Russian end of things. And, frankly, if all of those hundreds/thousands of hours of audiotapes and all of the emails/texts Mueller has subpoenaed fails to produce a smoking cannon that shows an indisputable pattern of coordination or organizational quid-pro-quo between the Trump campaign and agents acting on the authorization of the Russian government, then I think it's reasonable to assume that all of the anecdotal evidence we've heard thus far are tangential exceptions that can be explained away as the ill-advised decisions of over-eager, underexperienced, and disorganized individuals (the meeting with the Russian lawyer in Trump tower, Flynn's interactions with his personal Russian contacts, etc). Maybe cover-ups are the one thing Trump and his cohorts don't fuck up, but, given their track record, I don't think it the most probable explanation.

Either way, I think there is a reasonable chance that, whatever Mueller is zeroing in on, it has very little to do with the "major scheme" that McCarthy envisions. Nothing in Mueller's marching orders eliminates the possibility that this is now a money laundering investigation, or a title fraud investigation, or an investigation into the violation of economic sanctions against a foreign power, or any of a number of other crimes that could have arisen in dealings between individuals in the Trump campaign and individuals in Russia.

I guess what I'm saying is that my big hang-up with McCarthy's argument is that there are a vast and unpredictable number of ways this investigation could be going that would make McCarthy correct in his conclusion that this is no longer a collusion investigation, but incorrect in his implication that Trump's chief worry is now limited to impeachment on a charge of obstruction of justice.

 

I understand your argument and, I believe, fairly characterized it. However I feel that, when combined with the related-but-distinct "'facts' are whatever I think, or thought I kinda heard once, and nobody's going to tell me any different no matter who they are," it's a very toxic brew.

Trump: Global warming is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese!

99% of Climate Scientists: No, it's a real and very dangerous phenomenon caused by--

Trump: FAKE NEWS!

Climate Scientists: Pardon us, sir, but we have spent our career studying this, and the facts are alarming--

Trump: Too bad, so SAD!, I'm the President and you're not.

Stephen Hawking: Actually, Mr. President, you should reconsider –

Trump: What are you, a cripple? Can you even speak?

Sarah Sanders: I believe the people spoke in the election that global warming is a hoax.

Trump: Hey, Mr. GOP over there, you hate the EPA and want to eliminate it, right? Howsabout I put you in charge of it? Now let's play 18!

 

The Russians absolutely deserved to be hammered. I don't think they (or too many others) believed that the IOC had the balls to actually lay a substantial penalty on them.

Good on them. Now lets hope that the wheels don't come off of the Olympic movement. It will be interesting to watch developments, given that it looks more and more as though there will be a few cities willing to host a rotating Olympic games and that Russia was one of the potential hosts.