I mean the bitterness caused by reporting of his obvious guilt? Yeah, guilty as charged. Over all division in the country? Trump plays that shit up daily. The reactions to the report have been telegraphed for months, it doesn't matter what was found there are still investigations in SDNY and house committees. The only real wrinkle being the obstruction charge being half answered, which like clockwork is the only focus the media is playing. I am very curious to see the explanation Mueller lays out in the full report. The media and posters here have assured me Trumps twitter shitposting is obvious undeniable obstruction of justice. Not being well versed in this Id be interested in what is outlined. Im wondering if it is just going to be focused on Comey's firing or if they did investigate the twitter "threats."
Fair enough. Its just exciting to watch them eat a plate of their own shit after 2 years of a constant stream of it. As for obstruction, from what I've read, when there is no actual crime thats been committed, the bar to prove obstruction occurred is much higher than if that core crime did happen. So thats three investigations that have concluded roughly the same thing, save for the obstruction question. Who knows what Mueller referred to SDNY and what they are even investigating. Assuming those results are the same as the last 3 investigations, maybe the Democrats should try and nominate a reasonable, appealing candidate to beat Trump. Instead of whining about the electoral college, staging investigation after investigation, making a retarded pivot toward socialism, etc. It really shouldnt be this difficult. I would still vote for one over Trump in a heartbeat, I just dont know if they have it in them.
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/russiagate-is-wmd-times-a-million Is this the beginning of the end? Are the walls closing in on the media and liberal's anti-orange campaign? It was a bombshell, wasn't it?
So, now we know the following: 1. Russia interfered in the 2016 election. 2. Trump didn't collude with them directly. 3. A shit-ton of his inner circle acted illegally. 4. The Mueller investigation made diligent referrals to other jurisdictions. 5. There are 17 investigations around the POTUS right now. I would also add from the looks of it: 6. Not a Goddamned thing was done to Russia in response, and not a Goddamned thing has changed preventing Russia from doing this again in 2020. Why the fuck is ANYONE celebrating? This is the BEST case scenario and there are still 17 active investigations. I can certainly get behind the notion that Mueller as the "Great White Hope" to get rid of the great white (and orange) dope is misplaced. I have faith in his investigation, and can consider the matter of "Did Trump work with Russians to sway the 2016 election?" closed. However, there are still a motherfuck load of oddities and ties with Russian nationals that need answering when it comes to Trump.
So the libs can eat a plate of their own shit. Duh! It’s the most important thing. It’s easy political spin to take what Barr very, very narrowly defined as “collusion” and say the president is totally exonerated.
When the claims were as wild as they were against him yes Barr’s simple summation vindicates trump. As far as Trumps teams vast connections to Russia are a little overblown given the reality of international politics. The podesta group had similar dealings with Russia and Manafort. They just haven’t had a major multi year multi million dollar investigation shine a light on them. It certainly is unsavory how much legal lobbying influence other countries have in our government. Foreign lobbyists schmoozing with DC politicians for billions in aid and international agreements doesn’t sit well with me. Some may be needed for an over all world alignment but the thought of the amounts of money politicians can make after retiring and lobbying for foreign interest over an American first mindset is something that needs to be addressed legislatively.
What do you want to see happen to Russia, exactly? Their un-diversified economy is already faltering due to US oil exports and existing sanctions, the oligarchs outside of Putin's inner circle are fleeing to western Europe and Asia, they have massive under-reported cultural and health problems with addiction and the population of conscription age men has nearly halved in the last 5 years. Passing some present day Smoot Hawley Tariff targeted at Russia will almost definitely radicalize the Russian populace against the west. Sure, we can seize Putin's foreign assets and cripple the oligarchs, which has already started happening. But what is the actual play here, because I don't think anyone has any idea. Further wrecking their economy, inviting Finland into NATO, and issuing embargos will lead directly to a real war. And given the laughable state of the Russian military, they have one realistic card to play which would not be fun for anyone involved.
I would be very interested to see how many folks see the Mueller investigation conclude, with the number of indictments it created and then ask the simple question: Do you think Donald Trump is clean? Follow up: Do you think Donald Trump has committed more or less crimes than his predecessor, Barack Obama? The Muller investigation determined the President didn't illegally collude with foreign entities to sway the outcome of the 2016 election. Good. It did not conclude that foreign entities didn't attempt to sway the election, if anything it determined the opposite. What's been done about that? Not much. It also did not conclude that the President's interests are free of influence from foreign entities, both during the campaign and as President. To Juice's point, I don't think sanctions are in order. I do think sanctions worked to dissuade Russia from a number of things and they should continue. I think the solution is some measure of accountability on the part of the tech companies that allowed this sort of influence to proliferate, some counter-indicative measures to combat foreign social media influence on elections (and I leave to to people far smarter than I to determine how to solve that problem) and the threat of serious consequences for anyone seen facilitating this type of interference. I think the soft targets here are the lobbyists, but I am far from an expert. In short, I agree: I don't think anyone has GOOD ideas. No shortage of bad ones floating around, though.
Same. I dont know how you stop it without actually killing people, but i dont know anything about national cyber defense (or offense) strategies to see what can actually be done aside from fucking with them in a similar way. Problem with crippling physical assets and logistics is that if you go too far, you could disrupt food and energy supplies and then you start wading into crimes against humanity / war crimes territory.
I think the first step is you unleash your forensic accountants and track every single penny you possibly can that has left Russia and is sitting anywhere in the West. If it belongs to an associate of Putin, you seize it. Basically stop treating the Putin regime as a legitimate government and start treating it as a criminal organization.
You think we haven't already done that? Right now, Saudi Arabia is doing just that to Yemen, financed by the U.S. That's just one of the seven wars we're involved in right now. Our defense spending is four times what it was at the height of the Iraq war, our country has the biggest wealth discrepancy since the late 19th centrury, but yeah, let's fuck around with Russia too. This is all just a distraction.
In comparison to Obama I think it’s probably even money. Obama didn’t have a special council investigation so he didn’t have a laundry list of process crimes for his underlings. Which had some of his scandals play out to the fullest by a special council investigation they would have undoubtedly been. Plus he didn’t have an opposing media driving the narrative against him that kept it front and center his whole presidency. I think plenty of people skated on the Louis Lerner IRS targeting and the Fast and Furious gun runner operation.
A targeted resource attack war with Russia to punish them compared to the US involvement in the Saudi-Yemeni war is apples and oranges. Arguably, the US involvement can be distilled down to keeping the entire Middle East from devolving into a larger regional war by protecting the Straight of Hormuz from Iran and Bab-el-Mandeb from a direct Yemeni closure, disruption of either would cause immediate economic consequences world-wide. Thats not excusing the drone strikes that have killed civilians or the weapons provided to the Saudis that killed Yemeni civilians that were arguably fighting with the Saudis in the beginning in any way. But this is the second (or third) three-way civil war in Yemen.
We have very different memories of what the media was like between 2009-2016. I agree, some of the process crimes were confined to this administration and it's....fascinating staffing decisions. I disagree, because Obama's finances are public record, and he hasn't mislead the public or obfuscated the truth on his personal wealth in any meaningful way. He also hasn't had decades worth of business dealings with a bewildering array of foreign nationals recently come under scrutiny. I would also point that Trump's holdings were not placed in escrow during his presidency, or even transferred to someone else's control. That means, he quite literally can make decisions to benefit his businesses as POTUS, and if the Mar-a-Lago receipts are an indication, has done so repeatedly. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that's a crime, albeit a hard one to prove ("What? It was in both my best interest and the countries' best interest! That's how I knew it was a good deal!"). Mueller didn't find collusion. It's a far cry from Trump being clean. Here's another fascinating question: for those of you who support Trump, who succeeds him? What does the Republican party do next after all this "winning"? Who's the heir to the Trump throne? I say this because it's a weird cult of personality around this dude, and it baffles me. He hasn't been particularly successful at legislation, or solving any of the major issues plaguing the country, and I count myself as one of the taxpayer's that's worse off under his tax bill. Aside from all the whargarbll around his personality, lack of sophistication and embodiment of bold idiocy (I'm Southern, it's not that shocking to me), he doesn't seem to be particularly interested or good at running the country. He plays a lot of golf, does a lot of shit-posting, and does a lot of agitating/rallying. I think the key pieces of his administration are packing federal courts with diehard Republican judges, and the tax bill. Everything else can kind of go fuck itself, it would seem, and I can't understand who still believes this is the best out of the 330 million or so potential presidential problem-solvers we have to choose from. He's good at pissing people off, and trolling large swaths of the population. He's been smart enough not to poke the traditional Republican sleeping bears of guns or God, and that's literally the extent I've seen of his "intelligent governance". So, what is it about this dude that makes him so appealing?
He has poked the gun control bear and there are plenty of hardliners that are pissed about the EO fiat on bump stocks setting terrible precedent on future gun control. As much as I support red flag laws his take the guns due process after is unacceptable. You can have red flag laws without trampling on peoples rights. A post Trump world is a mystery since he’s not a principled conservative and his ability to shrug off controversy seems impossible to replicate. So far his shirking of norms on a host of different topics has paid well and are a far cry from the doom predicted by the opposition. The Chinese are starting to come to the negotiating on trade deals and intellectual property theft despite the calamity predicted by his trade war. Same goes with the renegotiated nafta agreement. I’d hope in the vacuum the right would embrace going against the status quo on a lot of topics. I think an America first policy is the best route he could lay out. The Bush era neocon globalism certainly wasn’t the way.