Does Focus On The Mueller Investigation Normalize The Stuff We Know?

John: “it may be hard to sustain outrage regarding a lot of things that are outrageous”

I am not so sure about this. The outrage at Trump seems to be sui generis and deep and his job disapproval still trends upwards slowly. Which is a bit odd. This is happening despite a somewhat better U.S. economy. The outrage at Trump is not because people know that Trump had nothing to do with this economy. Most people don’t know this and they might credit it to Trump. (The economy is still on the linear trend line of the post-crash expansion: if it belongs to anyone, it is still Obama’s economy.) And the outrage may not be about his possible corruption or that fact that he may have colluded with Russian agents to sway the election; these are still under criminal investigation. So the outrage is about something else — perhaps because he didn’t stop acting like a jerk once he took office; or because Charlottesville reopened a deep and frightening wound; or because he’s a personal and symbolic embarrassment; or because he is taking the U.S. into more war. Maybe a mix. So, this outrage may persist no matter what. It could guarantee the Democrats control of the House in 2018 even if the tax cuts work and Trump tries to take credit, and even if Mueller doesn’t return criminal indictments, or hasn’t done so yet.

BruceJ, I think the norm we’re talking about here involves how officials behave in public. John is specifically differentiating between what Trump has done in public, and whatever clandestine behavior Mueller is able to pin on him. To say that past GOP leaders have consorted with the enemy is one thing; to say this is a public GOP norm is another.

I’m not criticizing anyone on the anti-Trump side for playing this wrong. There wasn’t some smarter rhetorical angle for highlighting Trump outrages more effectively in 2017.

I am. Faced with a ton of corruption in both the Republican party and Trump’s administration they chose to focus instead on an imaginary Russian conspiracy. Good job guys.

My guess is they will pretend in public that it didn’t happen, was just talk, the other side would have done it/did do it. And after a short while believe their own spin.

I think the issue for the Republicans is less about the particulars than the way it generates constant negative attention on Trump. Public attention is a scarce and contested resource, and scandals (Moore molests young women! Clintons do dodgy real estate deals! Benghazi!) are a good tactic for getting it. Of course, the outcome also depends on how the focus of attention responds. Bill Clinton, Bush Jr and Reagan could just look folksy, Obama sober and respectable. Nixon looked shifty, Hillary uncertain. Trump looks sleazy. It widens the pool of people who dislike him, always an asset electorally.

The reporting on the Mueller investigation, as typified by the Vox piece linked in the OP, has certainly normalized speculative spiels.

“I’m confident Flynn is singing like a bird to Mueller,” Andy Wright, a law professor at Savannah Law School, told Vox’s Sean Illing.

That is just dreadful journalism and not atypical of the genre. (Oooh a law professor said it! And from such a prestigious school, too! And, he confided in a journalist from our own prestigious website. Wright worked for Barack Obama at the White House — surprising that is not mentioned.) Has anyone watched Rachel Maddow in the land where the hack Mueller is a flawless Man of Integrity?

“The Republicans are not openly and explicitly pro-corruption.” I am not so sure that is true. Many current policy moves look like pro-corruption. Neither the Media nor the Democratic Party are set up to acknowledge that that it is so. It becomes a case of, if a tree falls in the forest and no one says, I hear a tree fall, did it make noise?

The premise that it is the Republicans that have to be forced to acknowledge that corruption is corruption seems to me to be slipping by how we drove into this ditch, where moral outrage is exhausted, in the first place. But, years of making excuses for Obama and Clinton have worn out the moral sense of a lot of Democrats. And, that slide down the slope slippery was set up when the Dems decided they were going to look forward not back. GWB and friends would not be held accountable. And that GFC? So hard to make a case!

I was actually kind of cheered when Manafort was indicted on what are described as money laundering charges — he sure was moving around some eye-popping sums for doing what exactly? And, that indictment led to Tony Podesta quitting. Interesting.
Mueller’s work turned on a light. Not many associated with either Party or in the Media showed much interest. “Forced to acknowledge.” Indeed.

@7
”It’s my belief that among the people who disappr0ve of his performance, the vast majority really hate the sonofabitch in a way that was not true of other presidents.”

You got it and it – isn’t or won’t be some Focus On The Mueller Investigation which normalizes The Stuff We Know?
It will be the outrageous economical Boom which is under way – which will normalize the animals spirits – and some believe of Greed is Great – and that you need to be the utmost F…face von Clownstick to be a ”winner” in ”teh homeland”.

And as I am – like Halle Berry – believe ”that you can be a good person with a kind spirit and still tell people to go F*CK themselves when needed” – there is a lot more need to tell the ”F…face” that he should F*CK himself – before he has ”normalized” every bad thing I know!

A big story coming along is that a lot of Russian money has poured into Republican and Democratic Party coffers, but in the 2015-1016 season the money suddenly swung to the Republicans. Read the bios of some of the people involved (for example, in the op-ed below). Then go back and watch old videos of the U.S. Congresspeople speaking to the cameras, while you realize they already KNOW all of this.

Op-ed (opinion-editorial) in Dallas Morning Herald, Dec. 15, 2017:

https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2017/12/15/putins-proxies-helped-funnel-millions-gop-campaigns

“But Trump’s personal corruption and his Russia connections represent norm breaches that Republicans have not otherwise generally engaged in. ”

It’s impossible to claim that it’s been on this scale. However, it was clear that Cheney stood to profit in some way from the US war on Iraq.

It’s always been suspected that a number of political figures have engaged in shenanigans. There was the October Surprise thing with Reagan. Didn’t Nixon negotiate with Hanoi to sabotage Johnson’s attempt at peace in 1968?

One difference with Trump is the worry that there is ongoing collusion. It’s on a vaster scale. But it’s probably not different in kind.

I agree with John Quiggin.

A big difference with Trump is the sheer insanity of the man. There’s a strange way in which this makes certain fairly usual things in US foreign and domestic policy seem abnormal. Many things our leaders get up to foolhardy and insane and should have been abnormal from the get-go. However, they are defended by politicians and policymakers, and the media rarely bothers to comment on them.

Yes, many are beyond the pale (destroying any hope for Mideast peace, e.g.,) and these wouldn’t be done in quite the same way by a more standard politician. But with the rest, it’s not hard to imagine Bush or some other Republican doing them.

Like Quiggin says above, the outrages have to be met with something system-preserving. Unfortunately, there are many hazards. If Trump is exonerated, it will seem vindicating. If he’s not, everyone will stop paying attention, and many terrible things will happen anyway. Still, it’s better for him to be prosecuted.

There remains a truly disturbing reluctance on the part of a sizeable subset of people inside and outside America who seem unwilling, or unable to come grips with the two possibilities.
The first is that Hillary lost period, and that whatever actions outside parties played, she could well have still lost. The second is that she actually did commit crimes which would have guaranteed a Republican victory irrespective of the the candidate, but was saved by anti-Trump FBI agents working with senior Obama officials receiving large sums from the Clinton – controlled DNC.

That’s certainly the view of CNN’s legal analyst. Why is this important? Two reasons. Hoping for Mueller to pull the magic unicorn out of the pile of crap doesn’t sound like much of promising plan to me, at least. To focus any attention on Mueller is much worse than a simple waste of time.

If I believed otherwise, I’d say so. There’s much clearer evidence that senior FBI officials colluded to keep Ms. Clinton in the race, and out of the courtroom. That information is concrete, with a money trail, with email, with the language of Comey’s exoneration being changed to explicitly limit her exposure to criminal charges. All this according to an anti-Trump CNN legal analyst, who begins his CNN piece by saying how angry he is with Trump most of the time – he begins and concludes by stressing that Trump is right, high-level FBI agents did pull HRC’s fat out of the fire.

Newer evidence confirms that the FBI and Justice started working on statements of exoneration before key witnesses had even been deposed. There’s a real, as in real, inspector-general’s investigation on these questions ongoing right now. And when you have CNN agreeing with Andy McCarthy at the NRO, that’s worth noting.

I’ve no problem with wanting to tell anyone to F.O., go for it. But be clear. I’m not the one who got 2016 wrong. The same partisan blinders that prevented sensible folks from seeing that Trump might very likely win seem glued on. How can you tell? Watch the CNN clip.

If you’re shutting your eyes to the possibility that HRC stole the nomination, and that her cohorts tried to help her steal the election, you’re shutting your eyes, period. Please don’t.

2018 offers the possibility of real change, but that change will require work. The Clinton’s effectively handed control of the US government to Donald Trump. He wouldn’t have won the nomination, and he wouldn’t have won the election if sensible people had looked harder at the corruption inside of the Democratic party, instead of trying to make the Republicans the part of evil. American voters aren’t buying that line. Hoping they will in 2018 is a grave mistake. Democrats lost because they thought making Trump radioactive would be enough. Voters saw through that, and if Democrats try to sell the same bag o’ crap to the same voters two years later what do you bet the outcome’s going to be? This time they buy it? With a soaring economy, low-unemployment, and no new wars? The Mueller magic unicorn is poison, and losing to Republicans again, in order to preserve the fiction, again, that the Clintons play by the rules borders on criminal. Really. Happy 2018.

CNN: Trump is Right about the FBI

The Hill

“…That evidence includes passages in FBI documents stating the “sheer volume” of classified information that flowed through Clinton’s insecure emails was proof of criminality as well as an admission of false statements by one key witness in the case, the investigators said.

The name of the witness is redacted from the FBI documents but lawmakers said he was an employee of a computer firm that helped maintain her personal server after she left office as America’s top diplomat and who belatedly admitted he had permanently erased an archive of her messages in 2015 after they had been subpoenaed by Congress.

The investigators also confirmed that the FBI began drafting a statement exonerating Clinton of any crimes while evidence responsive to subpoenas was still outstanding and before agents had interviewed more than a dozen key witnesses.

Those witnesses included Clinton and the computer firm employee who permanently erased her email archives just days after the emails were subpoenaed by Congress, the investigators said…”

NRO: Collusion story falling apart

By all means investigate Hillary Clinton’s emails and investigate the FBI for bias toward Clinton. Also, investigate the FBI’s NY office for bias toward Trump. Those leaks from NY pretty much threw the election in the eleventh hour. But don’t confuse all the other issues.

The Democratic Party is corrupt (and Sanders supporters know it), but it is not criminally liable in stacking the deck for nominations, because it functions as a private entity that can do whatever it wants to.

Andrew McCarthy gives no evidence that the Steele dossier is false (nor has anyone publicly, to my knowledge). It may be unverified (which is not false) raw intelligence, but we don’t know if it was the only thing in the application for the FISA warrant. Maybe the dossier was just the icing on the cake. Trump’s possible connections to Russian “oligarchs” who are connected to Russian intelligence have been on the radar of Western intelligence and law enforcement since well before 2016.

The Peter Strzok stuff looks bad

One hopes we get to the bottom of this.

@22 I fear you misunderstand me. The Mueller investigation is very likely a steaming pile of Clinton crap. Best leave it and them in the past. Far better to focus exclusively on building better inroads into communities that went to Trump in 2016. Democrats have done nothing to date to get me to drop my own support for Trump. I don’t say this to be provocative, but rather to emphasize I see no change, or lessons learned since 2016.

When the Democrats start behaving like responsible adults instead of paying for piss-dossiers (literally) to try to win elections ,while relying on David Brock for moral clarity, I’ll consider returning to the fold. The Mueller investigation is the son of piss-dossier. Trump won by getting people like you, who I respect, to chase bright shiny objects, such as the ‘on the radar oligarch’ evidence, rather than build coalitions, and do the hard work of winning the confidence of voters. And he’s still driving media cycles, getting Dem to react, not act.

Many continue to believe that Robert ‘the Lone Ranger’ Mueller is going to ride over the horizon in the nick o’ time on his trusty steed Silver, yell hi-ho, wink for the cameras, fire his six-gun into the air and the Orange-Haired monsters and his minions going to melt back into the hills. Guess what? Nobody gives a damn.

Voters had a chance to give Obama a third term and they declined, mostly for economic reasons. That’s it. Too many former Obama voters stayed home, or switched sides. Had Democrats made better decisions, Obama’s Cuba policy cost HRC Florida, eg., run a better candidate, and made more of an effort to re-connect with their base, all this would be moot. The election was close, but elite hubris and over-confidence sealed the defeat. Sad.

The Clintons focus-tested what – 87 different messages? What are the five bullet points that Dems bring to the table today? What is the Dems’ 2018 Build the Wall, or it’s the economy, stupid? Got a clue? Anyone reading got a clue what the 2018 Dem message is?

What five points are going to get voters to the polls in 2018 to pull the handle for Dems? You can’t tell me, and nobody else can either, cause you and the rest (sorry, really) have been doing nothing but reacting to Trump’s latest tweet, or parsing leaks from the Clinton crap bag, otherwise known as the Mueller investigation. Or being shocked!!!! Really!!!

Guess what? You’re running out of time. 2018 is here. Maybe Republicans run Roy Moore in every contested seat in 2018. Or, maybe they don’t. Maybe they go with pablum, run away from Trump and Congress, and ride a booming economy to victory.

Trump couldn’t have won without Clinton, nor could the GOP. Every vestige and element of the DNC’s 2016 campaign’s disastrous influence needs to be cut out and burned. Remember all the election night hubris and bright-eyed talk about a devastated GOP? Flipping Texas, Georgia, Arizona? Remember? -Instead – Surprise!!! Record losses – the least amount of power since 1928? This, you need to protect?

Dems need to walk away from all 2016 disaster, especially the tainted Steele dossier and everything connected with it – including the Mueller investigation. Not because it is, or isnt’ true, but because Mueller is crack for Democrats. As long as Dems have the Mueller investigation in theirhands, Dems aren’t going to do the work of defeating Republicans.

Tell me you’ve been spending more time getting those five points in line than you have fantasizing about Trump’s impeachment, or criminal indictment, and I’ll exclude you from my general critique. And that applies to everyone reading. Democrats didn’t have a compelling message (not Trump!) going into 2016 and lost. Democrats still don’t have a compelling message in 2018, b-b-b-but maybe we won’t need one!! Coz Mueller!! See!

Well, it’s 2018, now. And it’s Access Hollywood time all over again, waiting for the big Mueller shoe to drop, only this time, yes, really!! with an entirely different ending (TM)!

Give people 5 good reasons to return to the fold. A good number will!

ph #22: “I fear you misunderstand me.”

You misunderstand that 1) the Steele dossier is a non-issue, by all the published reporting so far, and 2) in any case, the Steele dossier had nothing to do with the genesis of the Mueller investigation.

Also 3) you keep justifying your vote for Trump by blaming Hillary and the Democrats. Getting stale, ain’t gonna fly. Maybe you should just own up to the obvious fact that you were snookered.

http://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/1974/7/23

Hilary Clinton won the election period. Trump won the Electoral College. The fake news that Trump won the election is a covert way of politically endorsing Trump, Trumpism and the Republican. (Well, yes, some delusional people think they are endorsing Sanders as counterfactual Democratic Party winner…but the effect is exactly the same.)

The Republicans are the dominant party in the states because the states are smaller venues more vulnerable to political corruption by wealth. This is not just a matter of gerrymandering, or even the basic favoritism toward rural voters built into the US system. I think the big advantage Republicans have over Democrats, the supposed alternative for the people, is that mobilizing for state office is like betting on which horse places next to last. State governments do not even promise significant chances. The presidency as the only national office does, and I think that’s why it’s still in play for Democrats. (And given the left sympathies of the population en masse, why they’ve not withered away entirely.)

Trump is a slow learner but he has already enacted a sea change in US politics in regard to the role of the military, delegating them a political role more like imperial Japan than even Eisenhower’s Cold War “McCarthyism,” or Nixon’s crypto-Ruritanian White House. As an owner in a hostile takeover, he has no party. But the system gives the president monarchial powers over war (as it was intended too, I think, whatever The Federalist may have claimed, which I forget at the moment.) Even Trump will figure that out. So the only question is whether the generals are sharp enough to realize how weak the mercenary caste US army is for fighting a real war, and possessed of enough integrity to tell Trump no.

The question then is, which is irrelevant, this comment or the OP?

ph: You assume a lot. Nobody has to deny there was evidence against Clinton. It’s likely the evidence, interpreted in the harshest way, would not have led to felony charges. One can guess at their reasons from Comey’s first press conference. It’s also possible they did not have a smoking gun, or evidence that would lead to an immediate plea deal or successful prosecution. That seemed to be what Comey was hinting at. It would be risky to proceed further, if Clinton were exonerated. Then it would appear the FBI had interfered in the election. Clinton is a lawyer who takes account of the law. A lot rides on motive when it comes to some of the things she’d be charged with.

We can speculate that Mueller could have a similar problem. Trump is much worse at staying within the law or covering his tracks–and he has a much sloppier circle of accomplices. He flouts the law rather than bends it. But it’s a situation where there’d have to be overwhelmingly damning evidence to proceed with charges.

People paying attention to Mueller aren’t necessarily Clinton dupes. Some people may actually believe it’s important for political leaders to be accountable under law. If one believes that, then one can be outraged about other mistakes as well. The refusal to prosecute Bush (politically understandable, maybe) is also on the ledger.

It’s a reasonable conjecture that both the GOP and the Democrats are being short-sighted about where the votes will lie, after this debacle. Trump will be gone, and Tom Cotton or some other fanatic will try to fill his xenophobic shoes–but it’s not clear that whoever jumps in can get the crossover votes that Trump got by speaking out of both sides of his mouth infomercial-style. Once Trump goes, they can’t drum up another populist demagogue who can get past the primaries–and they don’t want a populist demagogue deep down inside anyway. They only won the Presidency because Trump appeared to be something different than their usual schtick. Unfortunately for them, Trump has temporarily energized Democratic voters. Republicans can win the presidency via low turnout on the part of people who would be more amenable to policies the Democrats support. (If there was successful Russian propaganda on a large scale in social media, and that’s not clear, it probably suppressed turnout more than anything else.)

The Democrats, by focussing on Mueller, are not building up their potential base by reckoning with the issues voters care enough about to vote for. So they will also lose something when Trump is gone, because voters may go back to disinterest and skepticism if there’s no madman foaming at the mouth to get them riled up. It’s unclear that the madman is going to motivate non-voters to vote in midterm elections. These non-voters would be the Democrats’ base, if they were willing to do some things they are clearly unwilling to do.

It’s anyone’s guess whether Republicans will pay attention to a huge steaming pile of evidence. After 2018 they might gamble on voters’ short memories, and pretend to care. Or they might all fear being marked as complicit, and try to bury it all. But they are definitely panicked about Mueller’s investigation, and one can’t help wondering why.

I like how the whole Putin Trump collusion theory is completely unaffected by the mounds of evidence that neither Trump, nor his team, expected to win the election. And has remained unaffected by the fact that Trump hasn’t really done a lot for Putin once in office (the opposite if anything). Israel and Saudi Arabia on the other hand…

But it is a shocking departure from previous norms that a President should use the office to enrich himself

So do we think Bill Clinton would have made $200 million if he was merely an ex-governor?

Cian: “So do we think Bill Clinton would have made $200 million if he was merely an ex-governor?”

Is there, in your view, no difference between a President who personally profits while in office and one who does so after leaving office? Should ex-Presidents be prevented from earning money? How would you accomplish that? Or do you have no point to make, just what you consider a witty retort?

Just for context. The social media stuff was irrelivent:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/12/28/theres-still-little-evidence-that-russias-2016-social-media-efforts-did-much-of-anything/?tid=ss_tw&utm_term=.b314610b16ef

Assuming it was intended to influence the election, rather than some kind of scam.

Cian #41: “I’m not sure what to make of an article…”

What I make from it is the possibility that one reason the Congressional Republicans are criticizing Mueller could be that they feel that the general public won’t be happy to learn that the network of Putin-connected Russian oligarchs and money-launders not only contributed to Trump, but ALSO contributed to Congressional GOP campaign coffers.

Other than that, you are about the 500-millionth person to bemoan the influence of money in politics, and on this I agree with you.

Maybe Mueller will turn up something really juicy, but so far I think Russiagate is basically uninteresting. If I wanted to list reasons why all decent people should despise Trump I would point to Yemen or on domestic policy, stories like this —

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-is-nakedly-fragile/2018/01/02/e618a44c-f009-11e7-b3bf-ab90a706e175_story.html?utm_term=.5427fb19d24d

Political scandals in the US are almost by definition relatively trivial things on a moral scale. If you are a torturer or start an unjust war or support allies committing crimes against humanity or, on the domestic front, if you make it easier for nursing homes to kill the elderly, that’s a policy debate and not a scandal.

The Russia pseudo-scandal doesn’t excite left-wingers because it relies on the Democrats in high office to accomplish a feat of political organization and will. I simply don’t think they’re capable of making the (so far illusory) charges stick, or of getting Trump out of office without a serious political crisis and civil unrest afterwards. Imagine if Trump was kicked out of office because of a media driven scandal, what would all the heavily armed Trump supporters do?

The party is on life support and judging by the ongoing rift between leadership and non wealthy base it’s more likely to die than find new life with impeachment.

#50 Lee Arnold:

Except that the article defines Putin-connected as Russian. One of the people mentioned moved to the USA when he was a small child. And if we’re assuming that anyone who does business with Russia is Putin’s play thing (which seems like a stretch), what about the many many American business men to whom this also applies. Or the politicians like McCain, the many political operatives on both sides of the aisle.

steven t johnson @ 43

What I remember Gollum saying was, “It burns us!” and it is an elven rope binding him that causes his discomfort. The self-reference presumably reminds us of the degenerate narcissism induced by tasting the power of the ring. LOTR is not a favorite story for me and I was not intending to invoke associations with it.

JH, With respect, you’re doing something you almost never do, which is ignore the structure of the argument. I do not quote McCarthy, I do not suggest or imply that anyone rely on McCarthy, (or any other source, alone). I do repeatedly cite CNN and the Hill. I do repeatedly ask people to watch the CNN clip. Repeatedly. Repeatedly. I make one reference only the offending source and only to point out that CNN, the Hill have come to the same conclusions. Check for yourself:

Newer evidence confirms that the FBI and Justice started working on statements of exoneration before key witnesses had even been deposed. There’s a real, as in real, inspector-general’s investigation on these questions ongoing right now. And when you have CNN agreeing with Andy McCarthy at the NRO, that’s worth noting.

CNN is mentioned three times before McCarthy’s name comes up. The topic sentence of the second paragraph introduces CNN as support/expansion of the transition/concluding sentence of paragraph one. The entire third paragraph is devoted to CNN. At the end of that paragraph, I make what I believe to be an additional salient point – which you can read again in the quote above. I then, reasonably briefly, broadly explain the problems with focusing on the Mueller probe. I conclude, provide a link to CNN, provide a link to the Hill, a reasonably neutral source, with an extended quote, and finally a link to the third source, McCarthy, mentioned just once at the very end of the comment.

Which in your reading of the comment becomes – why do you cite Andrew McCarthy? I’d expect that from people unconcerned with the structure of arguments, but not you.

Democrats reading and citing the NYT, considering themselves far better informed (look ph snookered himself) are in the worst shape they’ve been in for decades, by many metrics, and post-2016, we have the entirely the same laziness and partisan reluctance to accept that maybe, just maybe, the entire sorry state of Dem affairs might be the result of Democrats themselves. And that rather than taking the tried and the manifestly, provably, and predictably untrue path, Dems might put down the Mueller crack pipe and up tools.

But that’s me, right-wing tool. Bon chance!

Heliopause: “Eventually they’ll come up with something concrete.”

The concrete stuff is hiding in plain side. The Russians sought to help Trump get elected, told him so, and acted on that ambition. For his part, Trump openly welcomed their interference, promised them a better deal if he was elected, and has tried to make good on that promise. Which of those things is not clearly true?

I was reading some recent threads, and people would state they were responding to kidneystones and when I went back to look at the referred comment, since I had not seen a kidneystones comment, the comment turned out to be by ph, so fro this I infer that ph=kidneystones

– and if I read one more time:
”If only there was an opposition party that put more focus on that than on process and personality issues, and if only there was an elite media that would cover it.”
I will put out the whole ”mind boggling motherlode” of reporting of the ”elite media” and all the opposition parties efforts to counter the whole motherlode of far – faaar too much nonsense and news which was produced by the F…face and his Fans.

I mean isn’t there something like ”too much information”? –

Like the totally crazy amount and literally mountain of… ”whatever” – which in the Presidential ”erection” made any… so called ”viewer and listeners” head spin to such an extent – that it was for sure ”too much information” in the sense my mother felt – when she learned about the (supposedly) ”golden shower” – and then – being a bit familiar with Moskau and the type of ”parties” going on there – she said:
This one I believe.

Now how much more ”focus” and ”cover” on ”anything” does anybody want – and just don’t tell me that it should have been more focus on ”process” -(instead personality issues) as there was truly such a motherlode on ”process” that our voters -(you know the American voters are really NOT that much into ”process”) – for sure by voting for the chaotic F…face – voted against too much ”political process”…

– and furthermore with all ”the stuff” WE ALL – always knew -(even the man who played such a great ”Leninist” on SNL) – couldn’t we finally laugh at all these funny commenters on CR – who for month knew exactly the same ”stuff” WE ALL knew – but for whatever reason felt like playing some kind of absurd ”Hide and Seek Game” that even now – after the ”famous American Leninist” has spoken about treason –
a commenter on CT –
ON CT!!!???
writes:
”Eventually they’ll come up with something concrete. Eventually. Maybe? It does raise an interesting philosophical question; how many days in a row of Jesus not returning would it take to make a first century Christian stop believing in the Second Coming?”

Is that poor comedy-writing – or what?!

Bruce Wilder #59: “feature or bug?”

Feature for sure. But the newness of social media makes it its effectiveness into a a bit of a crapshoot for the perps. What I really know is, about a third of my Facebook contacts are conservative Republicans, and they were sharing falsehoods that were mocked up graphically as if from real news websites. Then this stuff would come around in another few days or weeks, shared from a different mocked-up news site. I thought these were the product of a domestic op (although RT was one of the originating news sites; this is the first I heard of RT) until I read an article (well before the election) that this stuff was being generated by a fake news mill somewhere in eastern Europe. I think the article was reported out of Silicon Valley and now I can’t find it.

CNN, the Hill have come to the same conclusions.

This isn’t true, of course. What causes you to think someone would believe a silly statement like this?

Re 67, pretty sure kidneystones admitted that he was also ph.

He is the type of poster that you almost hope is trolling rather than sincere, for his sake, as it’s hard to imagine how someone could function on a day to day basis with his head so far up his ass.

“For his part, Trump openly welcomed their interference, promised them a better deal if he was elected, and has tried to make good on that promise. Which of those things is not clearly true?”

The better deal part. Trump seems to be pushing towards a war with Iran, a Russian ally. The one clear bit of collusion demonstrated so far was with Israel, which led to the meeting where Flynn attempted to persuade the Russians to side with Israel against Obama. He failed. Trump is colluding with this stupid Jerusalem decision. Trump also seems pretty closely linked to the Saudis.

Trump might be colluding with the Russians, but the deal seems to be that some embarrassing emails were released ( assuming the Russians did that) and the Russians allegedly posted some ludicrous crap on social media which along with a zillion other things might have swung 60,000 votes and in exchange the Russians receive basically nothing. Well, except for one thing— the world now sees us as total fools. Frankly, I think we are a nation of morons— both parties—, but Trump’s election brought it out even to ourselves. If this was a nefarious plot, I seriously think that was the Russian motive. Do some random crap, expose some dirty laundry, and let the idiot Americans do the rest. Almost no one actually thought Trump would win.

Bill Murray
faustusnotes
The identity between ph and kidneystones was explicitly confirmed by kidneystones/ph in a recent discussion; a comment appeared under the name of kidneystones and then a subsequent comment appearing under the name of ph asked to have the name on the first comment changed, the commenter explaining that the name kidneystones had been auto-inserted and that the name kidneystones had been retired in favour of ph.

kidneystones

Far better to focus exclusively on building better inroads into communities that went to Trump in 2016. Democrats have done nothing to date to get me to drop my own support for Trump. I don’t say this to be provocative, but rather to emphasize I see no change, or lessons learned since 2016.

When the Democrats start behaving like responsible adults instead of paying for piss-dossiers (literally) to try to win elections ,while relying on David Brock for moral clarity, I’ll consider returning to the fold.

Is it a good idea to take strategic advice from opponents? In general, I think not. To me it seems reasonable to suppose that my opponents do not, in general, have my best interests at heart, and that any strategic advice they offer me is unlikely to be prompted by a desire for my success; after all, if they’re my opponents, doesn’t it follow that my success is their failure?

More specifically, it seems to me that the Democrats (of whom I am not one, being a Foreignanian) would be fools to themselves if they decided to rely on Trump supporters for strategic advice.

John, when you say ‘the Republicans aren’t there yet’ in regards to openly arguing for political corruption, aren’t you arguing from an antiquated set of political ideas; i.e., when we live in a world where large portions of the Republican base are so tribal in their political affiliation that any fact can be warped to fit the narrative of their guy being right, isn’t the idea of the primacy of a cogent argument past its due-date?

I think of my in-laws – working class Evengelicals – to whom no argument can (categorically) exist that their interpretation of the Bible is wrong, and who now seem to have extended this aegis to Trump. And they do not seem to be alone.

J-D you’re right about taking advice from idiots like kidneystones, but in fact the “strategy” kidneystones outlines there is exactly what the Dems have achieved – they came to within a literal dice throw of changing government in Virginia, a huge turnaround, and stole Alabama from the repubs, putting their senate agenda in more jeopardy. They’re also fielding an unprecedented number of candidates at local levels. It’s as if they can pay attention to the Russia investigation and fight politics at the same time! This idea that they are using the Russia thing as an excuse for political failures is bullshit being peddled by the pro Russia left to try and convince themselves that a more radically left wing party is the only way to success in the developed worlds most conservative country. Keep dreaming, kids.

By his own lights, given recent actions and achievements, kidneystones should be returning to the Dems. He won’t thought because his lapsed dem shtick is a cover for the truth that he’s a racist troll who will vote Trump no matter what. And it doesn’t matter anyway because he’s a Canadian living in Japan. Now can we all please please ignore him until the mods finally get rid of him?

Hi John, fair enough. Thx, just missed yours.

@83
No, not “stupid shit that Trump and literally millions of other conservatives offhandedly said in 2016,” actual concrete evidence of collusion. If you haven’t got it just say so.

@90
”No, not “stupid shit that Trump… said in 2016,”

Yes – “stupid shit that Trump said” – as when he says he loves to eat Hamburger -(or grab Pussies) – you don’t have to see – with your own eyes how he does what he says he does –
to KNOW -(not believe) that he does what he says he does.

Which I believe I’m allowed to call ” actual concrete evidence” as much as some other silly people are allowed NOT to call it ”actual concrete evidence”?

And that’s actually the GREATEST thing about my homeland – Everybody knows it – but everybody is allowed to play with IT – like a little kid who adores fast food (thought)

@91
”so will you be confirmed as a left wing chump for Putin.”

Or did you mean: a right wing chump for Trump?

– and that might have become the real problem ? – as the ”left wing” might be as accurate as calling a basic ”F…face” – ”right wing” – in times where even the most simple Breitbart- Reader doesn’t know anymore who is fighting what and who – and for whom to root anymore?

Or in other words: Isn’t it possible that if Heliopause think himself that he himself is ”left wing” that he in reality actually is quite the opposite?!

http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/22/politics/us-ukraine-anti-tank-weapons-russia/index.html

We are supplying anti tank weapons to Russia’s opponents in the Ukraine.

I expect that Mueller will turn up evidence of various crimes— obstruction of justice is among the most likely. But there is a certain amount of cherry picking going on with the liberal story on Russiagate. Trump is actually and openly colluding with the Saudis against Iran and he is even more supportive of Saudi war crimes in Yemen than Obama was and he is supportive of the Israeli far right. One might want to investigate his connections here. He seems to be pushing for war with Iran, which is Russia’s ally, and he is giving weapons to Putin’s enemies in the Ukraine, a peculiar thing for a puppet to do.

I think the storyline about Trump’s close relationship with Putin is driven in large part by people in DC who want a more trustworthy warmonger in the WH. The thing about Trump is that you never know for sure what he is going to say or do. People who want a new Cold War with Russia and more military intervention in the Mideast quite rightly don’t trust Trump to do a competent job with any of this. This is a man who can lose a PR war with Kim Jong-un. If you want American imperialism to stay on track, you need a better salesperson.

It hardly matters whether there were specified quid pro quos. Putin is probably laughing out loud. Let’s construct a scenario: For years, Trump has been hobnobbing with the mob in the Wild West atmosphere of new Moscow. There must be a Russian intelligence psych profile of Trump (or else the Russian intelligence community is guilty of serious malpractice). Trump’s psych profile likely reads like a textbook on the “Dark Triad” (see link below). Putin was in the KGB’s First Chief Directorate. Putin must know that Trump’s psych profile is an exploitable weakness. Profiling and manipulation are standard Cold War spook stuff still practiced by both sides. So Putin slowly got Trump into a web of connections that might be exploited later when useful. U.S. law enforcement and intelligence watched all of this stuff helplessly. Comes Trump’s announcement to run for President. Bingo!! Maybe Putin bet that further infiltration into the Trump camp could cause more U.S. voters to question the legitimacy of their democracy. And/or, a Trump presidency would embarrass and weaken the U.S. in foreign policy. Who could resist giving the Americans a black eye? Mission totally accomplished!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_triad

Reading my most-recent post, I sound like an asshole. (Can I call myself that without being moderated out? We will see.) I worry that I have read so many nephrolithic posts that I am starting to emulate them.

Trump asking the Russians publicly to hack Hillary Clinton’s email server and then expose the those emails after being told privately that the Russians were kindly disposed toward his campaign

Don’t be silly. It was a rhetorical flourish in a campaign speech. He wasn’t even the first Republican to say something like that.

Did they tell Trump they wanted to help him? Yes, they did, through several channels, notably Donald Trump Jr and his campaign advisor Popadopoulos.

There’s still no evidence that these people were from the Russian government. Their behavior and history would rather suggest they that they weren’t, but were trying to con Trump’s team so they could get something for their client. I wonder how many Nigerian emails Trump Jr has responded to over the years…

Now granted it looks bad that members of Trump’s team were willing to meet ‘Russian Agents’, but the fact they were so easily conned also undermines the narrative that there was collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians. By all means make the claim that elements within the Trump campaign was open to such a relationship, but the evidence to date suggests they were unable to actually set anything up and the Russians weren’t terribly interested in doing so (probably because like Trump, they assumed he was going to lose badly).

As President-Elect, his designated National Security Advisor called the Russians specifically to undermine then-President Obama’s effortto punish Russia for the interference.

This doesn’t seem to be illegal (he’s been charged with lying to the FBI in what seems to have been a sting. I despise Flynn, but the FBI’s behaviour seems pretty questionable here), and president elects establishing back door communications is not particularly unusual. There’s no requirement for Trump to follow Obama’s lead on foreign policy.

Yes; even as a candidate he worked to weaken the party position on the Russia / Ukraine conflict.

So he can’t have his own foreign policy? Or are you saying anyone who doesn’t have a very bellicose attitude to Russia is some kind of Russian agent? Because there are plenty of people who are critical of Putin who also think the US adventures in Ukraine are a very bad idea.

Given that Trump has also done some things that will have really pissed off the Russians (e.g. Syria), the evidence is not nearly as strong as you want it to be.

Yes; as President, he tried to kill a bill in Congress that sanctioned the Russians; when they passed it anyway, he signed it but has simply ignored it.

Indeed. This is a thing presidents often do with legislation that they don’t like. I believe it’s called politics.

“nephrolithic”

You acid-tongued devil!

Cian #102: “still no evidence… the evidence to date…”

Probably best to go with “still no reportage” and “the reportage to date” because during an ongoing investigation the public often isn’t given all the evidence that has been uncovered. (For example, up until the day of Manafort’s indictment, the public did not know that there exists evidence of Manafort’s crimes.) Taking care in matters like this will prevent us jumping from the “suggestion” that the Russians were only imposters trying to con Trump’s team, all the way in the next paragraph to the “fact” that they were so easily conned. It’s not a fact. Further, while we might easily grant that they all are barely competent patsies and stooges, this wouldn’t necessarily undermine a narrative of collusion. Further, note that “collusion” is not necessarily a crime, you need something like conspiracy to commit a crime (such as to hack emails, or to receive stolen property such as hacked emails). On that matter, Trump asked the Russians publicly to hack Hillary Clinton’s email server and then expose those emails, a month or so AFTER Papadopoulos received information that the emails already had been hacked. Let’s assume (without evidence) that Papadopoulos would have sent his information up the chain of command. So then the question would be, why didn’t the Trump team report this possible crime to the FBI?

novakant @ 93.

Thank you. Should be required reading.

@various

Just a notion
For OUR fiery President “I-want-loyalty” Chump and his book banning lawsuit in the “Homeland”, CT’s own n****woman must, while in the Fatherland-most known-for this sort of thing—in public spectacle worthy of Leni Riefenstahl—torch a pile of Art of the Deal detritus on her way to doing HERSELF -a Comedy Intervention- on behalf of Angela Merkel in Berlin (who could use some laughs). . .

@ JH, it seems as if my reply to Cian’s 102 is no longer in moderation and has simply disappeared. If it was deleted for some reason, it would be helpful to know what that reason was.

But, in another sense, insofar as the issue is obstruction of justice, it’s not totally clear that we are doing more than seeking heretofore unknown, behind-the-scenes evidence – behavior of lawyers and such – of what Trump already told Lester Holt on national TV.

People often say Trump is lying or otherwise full of shit when they are defending him.

@116 Good point! But one can sell an anti-Trump book whilst admitting it’s full of crap!

Disclaimer Included in Michael Wolff’s ‘Insider’ Tell All:

“Many of the accounts of what has happened in the Trump White House are in conflict with one another; many… are baldly untrue. These conflicts, and that looseness with the truth, if not with reality itself, are an elemental thread of the book.

“Sometimes I have let the players offer their versions, in turn allowing the reader to judge them. In other instances I have, through a consistency in the accounts and through sources I have come to trust, settled on a version of events I believe to be true.”

Which connects back to your OP, John. Outrage clickbait should spike this weekend in a fresh niagara of Trump Outrage. We all know what happens when folks live next to the train tracks. Or, at least some do. My last for this thread.

Twitter resistance, Dennis Perrin’s still useful take on Liberals, Putin, and the Purity of Essence.

In denying facts like the Wikileaks contact Cian makes it very clear that, like kidneystones, he has no interest in reality at all. His only interest is defending his now obviously foolish assumption that Trump couldn’t be worse than Clinton – a position many in the pro Putin left were cleaving to here in 2016 regardless of how dangerous Trump obviously looked. Now – like pH and like Trump himself – they have to become increasingly untethered from reality to defend that position, but rather than admit their error and take the blame for whatever influence their faction had on Trump’s victory, they’re denying reality furiously. Sad!

Also I’m not erocan so how is it xenophobic of me to say Wikileaks are not American? Fuck you people are parochial!

This idea that Republican elites want Trump gone is more hilarious unreality of the kind we can only expect from pH or the pro Putin left. Republican elites love Trump , who will sign anything they give him, and who dropped any shred of evidence of economic populism as soon as he was elected. He will maintain business as usual with the plutocracy while letting the Republicans in Congress do whatever they like. He even offers plausible deniability while rallying the base on openly racist ideals. Perfect! Just issue a few rote Twitter condemnations every now and then while you keep looting the treasury. It’s great! Where exactly do you chumps get the idea elites want him gone? Because pH said so? Ryan and McConnell love him.

Sometimes I really feel like a lot of people posting on crooked timber these days are doing so from an alternate dimension, because you are completely out of whack with what’s going on in this one.

”Because – in many ways there’s a little bit of teh Donald in many of us”

This ”very wise phrase” from kidney is without any doubt the most important comment on this thread – and the reason why I love him so much and seriously think he should comment a lot more.
As just a day ago I commented in the NY Times that for US Americans – to elect an idiot was the idea of this erection.

And we succeeded.
-(and about this ”Russian thing” and this Mueller dude – isn’t Mueller a German name of making ”Mehl” and the way Trump ”colluded” with Russian Interior Design is ”beautiful” – Seriously guys – as we also currently paint everything gold!)

”In 2020, you all may get to make that choice for real! Something to look forward to, yes?”

YES!!

And about the choice between Cruz and Clinton – I probably should inform you that in 2010 there will be a candidate who will make the choice between her and Cruz and Clinton the easiest ever choice.

But as I have signed a ”nondisclosure agreement” I’m not not allowed (yet) – to release her name – until she herself – ON THE 17th of February will announce that she will win the next election –
(not ”erection” – as ”erections” are more or less reserved for… well you know – who!)

And right now I’d say I’d choose HER.
But that’s me – reasonable, reflective.

ph: “Would the FBI been rewrite the Clinton email report to keep her in the race against Cruz? Maybe. But maybe not.”

What’s your theory of the FBI’s crime here, kidneystones? As best as I can make it out, it is this:

The FBI (or the Establishment working through the FBI) wanted Trump to lose and Clinton to win. The FBI were in possession of evidence that Trump was colluding with Russia, and that Clinton used a private email server while she was Secretary of State. So, because the FBI (or the Establishment) wanted Trump to lose, they kept the information about his collusion with Russia a deep dark secret until after the election; and at the same time, because they (or the Establishment) wanted Clinton to win, they made a federal case out of her email practices, even to the point of torpedoeing her campaign with a late-October surprise that later turned out to be a nothingburger.

Now, do I have your theory right? If not, can you point at the wrong bits and correct them?

I saw no need to point it out to you at the time, but I’ll ask you to consider the question now, please.

Sure. I made several mistakes, but the key one was my erroneous belief that the vote of the electoral college would mirror the popular vote unless the popular vote was extraordinarily close.

But what about you? Unless I missed something, your entire argument over a period of months was based on the idea that Trump would win the presidency by getting more votes than Hillary. What happened?

I know you can’t answer my questions, but I am trying to understand your thinking. Here’s the answer that I propose: You were not wrong about the election, because Trump did get more votes than Hillary. Massive voter fraud led to the reporting of erroneous vote totals. Beyond the self-evident nature of that fraud, an overwhelming amount of independent evidence points to it.

1. Trump’s inauguration crowd was huge. The biggest ever, much larger than Obama’s. Likewise, counter-protests were minimal, much less than you’d ordinarily see.
2. The Democrats have been unable to express meaningful opposition to Trump on policy grounds, and are forced to rely on the Mueller investigation, which involves no substantive issues.
3. The Republicans have won a wave of victories as political candidates have maintained Trump’s popular vote margins nationwide. (Though obviously, voter fraud has favored the Democrats here, too.)

Did I miss anything?

Collin Street @ 121

I am inclined to agree, though I think it is less a conceptual error / conceptual error detection problem in the private thoughts of the individual than it is a social problem with storytelling, the attachment people feel to stories (narratives) and to each other thru storytelling, and the facility that social and personal appetite for storytelling provides for manipulative propaganda.

People like stories and they like to have their understanding of the world encapsulated and mediated by stories. A good story can compress a lot of information, both factual and (important!) moral and reinforces attachment to the story (which may include belief in the “truth” of the story) with subjective, emotional satisfaction of various possible kinds.

I have often made the point in comments that political arguments are far less likely to be framed and structured as logical proofs than as hypnotic trance inductions. Which is to say that political arguments are like salesmanship generally. They try to draw you in, building on what you already are inclined to believe and manipulating you emotionally, trying to build associations between certain ideas or memes and emotions, by inducing an emotional state and then associating that state with the notion being sold — kind of the way advertisers try to get you excited about a product by showing you pictures of beautiful, sexy people and then juxtaposing the product with all that happiness and arousing sex appeal. But, in politics, it is more than just emotional association — they want to sell you certain stories: little miniature dramas that give you a sense of insight into this person or program as well as tieing the story onto the long tangled skein of a worldview that defines your important place on a team in a dramatic world and provides opportunities to tieing additional stories later on. Stories with familiar dramatic arcs that can shape your expectations and interpretations of later developments, confirming and reinforcing your belief in the story. And, reinforce and maintain your attachment to the team telling “your” stories.

It is competitive and frequently combative, this contest for hearts and minds by means of contested storytelling and I think it tends to create a collective, shared mental landscape that has some of the features of an ecology: a political culture generating a spectrum of perennial niches and only transitory times of apparently stable equilibrium, chaotically evolving slow and fast thru the generations.

People are storytelling animals, their societies and cultures organized by and around their stories. It can be hard to reflect on that sometimes, because to reflect critically will undermine some attachments — that’s the value and threat of liberal education, no?

I would not claim to be psychologically exempt from storytelling. I know my horror at Obama’s course led me to detach from my life-long identification with the Democratic Party and that positioned me in the political landscape in a place from which I feel alienated from the apparently passionate commitment so many seem to have to the Russiagate narrative. I looked at the Vox piece JH linked to in the OP (“The 5 biggest Trump-Russia events to watch for in 2018 — Yes, one of them is indicting Donald Trump.” by Alex Ward) and I felt slightly nauseous. Reading that piece is opening up your unconscious mind to a whole raft of questionable suppositions, unleavened by much factual perspective — it is entertaining as storytelling can be, but as political “thinking” it strikes me as poisonous distraction, and it is an obvious setup for more of the same. And, it is part of a niagara of supposititious speculation built around this narrative of Russiagate (like the Ward piece, much of it taking Watergate as a script template) flowing thru a lot of political journalism. The sheer volume is daunting. I know several elderly people who love Rachel Maddow; I regard Rachel Maddow as the manifestation of a disease process, like a rash or a cyst. I say this as a confession to being just as emotionally rooted in my perspective as anyone else.

Clearly, there are other people who regard the Russiagate story as so much gaslighting by a Democratic establishment that wants to regain power in a replay of 2006-8, but with even less reform of the plutocracy. I identify with them and draw on their views in forming my own, just like all the other social, storytelling animals. I would rather tell a story about Hillary losing the election that attributed more cause-and-effect to the past failures of Democratic governance she represented (NAFTA, multiplying and perpetual war, neoliberal globalization, rank hypocrisy with regard to campaign finance, trying to make up loss of working class voters by appealing to suburban Republican women who would not expect any policy disturbing to the donor class). Hacking Podesta’s email and the DNC revealed truth; I’m old-fashioned enough about truth, that I lean toward narratives that attribute Hillary’s loss to being on the wrong side of the truth about the conduct of her campaign — being found out is not good for your narrative. Making up a story about curiously potent Russian meddling or collusion with Trump looks to me like an attempt to finesse problems that call for reform but the powers-that-be do not want to reform because then they would no longer be the powers.

The OP asked if focusing on the Mueller investigation normalized stuff we know. I don’t know what that means, in concrete terms. Generating outrage in one place means forgetting outrage somewhere else? The template script for this play, Watergate, had as its background simmering outrage over controversies like impoundment of funds and prolonging and expanding the Vietnam War. What’s the analogue?

This contest of storytelling which is sometimes laughably referred to as the political discourse — it does make a philosophic account of why some stories are more convincing than others, at least to some people, problematic. The factual truth can make a sharp stick, but not every player is likely to feel constrained to poke only with sticks honed against the hard rock of truth. I suppose that makes me part of “the Pro-Putin Left” in somebody else’s narrative.

I understand the form of stories that are likely to appeal to people whose psychology and political attitudes typify what are technically “right-wing authoritarian followers” are not much constrained by my values. Abandoning them to Trump’s racism and authoritarianism and then deploring them for being victims of Hillary’s economics as much as Trump’s economics doesn’t work for me as well as it apparently does Faustusnotes or Layman.

I am concerned that there is no mindspace in a political culture flooded with the Russiagate narrative to build opposition to neoliberal economics or perpetual war. Largely, maybe that’s a function of not owning significant media platforms and not having social organization outside the fishbowl of social media and it is pointless to protest against the mass self-deception that well-funded propaganda induces.

kidneystones

4/ The Democratic candidate has a proven pro-rich, pro-war record – Iraq/Libya/Syria.
5/ The GOP candidate is a race-bating, vulgarian buffoon hated by the elites.

Being the Republican candidate means having the proved pro-rich, pro-war record of the Republican Party; and to imagine that Trump personally has either egalitarian or pacifistic impulses (or both) is sheer folly.

6/ Given a choice between 4, or 5 – I’ll choose 5 all day long.

But you are not now being given a choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump; neither you nor anybody else will ever again be given that choice.

Mr. Wilder at 7:32 starts out with

= = = People like stories and they like to have their understanding of the world encapsulated and mediated by stories. A good story can compress a lot of information, both factual and (important!) moral and reinforces attachment to the story = =

and then he uncorks

= = = I know several elderly people who love Rachel Maddow; I regard Rachel Maddow as the manifestation of a disease process, like a rash or a cyst. = = =

What does that even mean? It is well-known that in the Limbaugh-Murdoch era the hard Radical Right has done a far better job of emotional propaganda than their opponents and that the Republican ownership of the media (plus the Republican leanings of the editor class of the traditional media) and there are multiple dozens of effective right-wing storytellers. OK, advantage Mellon/Scaife/Murdoch/Koch.

But to then classify one of the three or so effective progressive storytellers – who is outnumbered dozens to one and subject to the full force of the right wing Wurlitzer whenever she says something ‘out of line’ – as a “rash or a cyst” who is only liked by “elderly people” ? (nice ageist slam BTW Bruce). And then follows up with ” I don’t know what that means, in concrete terms. Generating outrage in one place means forgetting outrage somewhere else?” Uh, sure thing dude. No possibility of concern trolling from Mr. Wilder; I’m sure he’s no relative of kidneystones.

@128 My theory? “The FBI were in possession of evidence that Trump was colluding with Russia, and that Clinton used a private email server while she was Secretary of State.”

I don’t believe the FBI has any evidence of Trump colluding with the Russians, because unlike you I don’t believe in unproven conspiracy theories. As numerous individuals have pointed out, if such evidence existed it would have been leaked within months of the election. Second, Clinton’s use of a private email server has been knowledge for years. What the Hill reporting confirms is that Congressional investigators now have evidence that elements within the FBI, Comey’s ostensible subordinates rewrote the Comey report.

Go back and examine the original report and the edits. They’re available online. You’re normally very good with the legal stuff, I thought you’d have had the sense to leave this part alone.

Re: the counter-factual, apologies for the numerous typos. Was multi-tasking. My point is: would people prefer Ted Cruz was president? That’s it Ted Cruz and Mike Pence with a Republican congress.

I’m curious to learn who really sees Cruz as an improvement on Trump. I don’t. And there’s a real chance he’ll get the chance to run as Pence’s vp if Trump gets dumped.

Then what? Right now all the Dems have got is piss-dossier, son of piss-dossier, and the new book, piss-dossier 2018 – on your shelves now! Buying a copy? It’s your cup of truth.

kidneystones

… My point is: would people prefer Ted Cruz was president? … I’m curious to learn who really sees Cruz as an improvement on Trump. …

Since you ask: as between two Republicans, I don’t feel well enough informed to have a preference. For that matter, as between two Democrats I don’t feel well enough informed to have a preference. On the other hand, I’ve go a century and a half of the historical record as the basis for preferring Democrats to Republicans.

Every streak comes to an end, of course, and I am aware that originally the Republicans were a better choice than the Democrats. But that stopped being true after the Civil War ended and slavery was abolished. It figures it would take a similarly big change to make the Republicans the better choice again, and there hasn’t been one recently, so I’m still betting with the run.

ph: “I don’t believe the FBI has any evidence of Trump colluding with the Russians, because unlike you I don’t believe in unproven conspiracy theories.”

The entire world has evidence that Trump colluded with Russians. It is a matter of undisputed fact that someone claiming to represent the Russian government made an offer of help for the campaign to Trump Jr, and Trump Jr’s response was to say ‘I love it!’ and take the meeting, bringing along other campaign members for good measure. This is, in normal parlance, ‘evidence’. There are other examples, of course, but one will suffice.

Now that we’ve dealt with that digression, will you answer my question about your theory? If the FBI wanted Clinton to win and Trump to lose, why didn’t they shut down the Clinton investigation immediately, with a statement exhonerating her, and why didn’t they hold a press conference in July of 2016 to announce they were launching an investigation into ties between the Russian government and Trump and the Trump campaign? Why did they effectively do the exact opposite, i.e. make a grand show of investigating Clinton, along with public statements condemning her and an October surprise announcement seemingly designed to scare voters away from her, while keeping any mention of an investigation into Trump a dark secret?

@138
”I’m curious to learn who really sees Cruz as an improvement on Trump.”

Me!
Me!!
Here!!!
BE-cause Cruz seem to really like children – while Baby’s -(and that fact has been proven) absolutely hate the F…face and so I’m sooo with the Babies –
If you know what I mean? BUT as we all will elect a woman next time Cruz – firstly would have to do the Bruce Jenner thing before he would have a chance – and I somehow doubt it that he would be willing to get rid of his Schniedel?

Yan: “jfc what planet are we on? Are you aware of the history of the FBIand the CIA? How on earth is the burden of proof on their skeptics’ side?”

Yan, if you don’t grasp the difference between ‘evidence’ and ‘proof’, you should stay out of the conversation. I’m not asking you to agree that their claims are proven; nor am I asking you to prove the FBI and CIA are lying. I’m putting no burden of proof on you or anyone else. I’m asking you to acknowledge that there is actually some evidence of the claims, whether it is conclusive or not. That’s why I aimed my comment at the ‘there is no evidence’ crowd.

Donald Johnson: “I am not going to defend the preference BW said he had, but one silly ( IMO) comment months ago does not invalidate Bruces’s post 137.”

You’re welcome to that opinion, but I don’t share it. That comment wasn’t ‘silly’ in the sense that it was atypical of bw’s view; it was silly in the sense that it encapsulates his view, that Clinton is so bad that Trump is/was to be preferred. He’s been singing and dancing to that tune for more than a year, and I don’t really have any patience for his trying to weasel out of it now.

Layman @ 139: What does it mean to say that you prefer Trump to Clinton and that you would never say you support Trump? I confess I don’t really grasp the fine distinction . . .

This is pretty old news now, but OK, I will explain, though it never seemed to do any good to explain back in 2016.

There was an argument, repeated by many and pushed pretty hard as I recall by Layman, that all you really needed to know to decide who to vote for or who to cheer for, was “the differences” between Trump and Clinton: Clinton was “obviously” better, you can stop thinking now, went that argument.

When I read what people wrote, who took this “differences” line, it seemed to be that the argument often functioned to make Clinton look much better than she actually was. Trump would be identified with seemingly impulsive and bellicose rhetoric as prone to war, and Clinton would be perceived as “different” from Trump, her record as a reckless and foolish war monger surrounded by advocates of an aggressive and interventionist foreign policy erased from memory just before all thinking stopped.

Something similar would happen with regard to Clinton’s neoliberal economic ideas versus Trump’s nationalism and protectionism, though what was horrible in Clinton’s economic policy advocacy (in my view) had much more to do with her campaign and supporters punching left against Sanders while largely giving Trump and the Republicans a pass.

The whole long sordid history of how the Democratic Party has descended steadily down the slippery neoliberal slope from advocating for the working classes to protecting banksters on the strength of “lesser evil” arguments and punching left, pushing a policy ratchet that only turned one right-ward direction — all that disappeared from view in the “difference” argument. (Funnily, I do not think many bothered to argue that this time would be different!). I got off that train with Obama; I wasn’t going to go further in the same damnable direction with Clinton.

In my view, a legitimacy crisis was coming, and a Clinton Presidency would preside over that legitimacy crisis severely constrained by the domination of reactionary Republicans in most States and all other branches of the Federal government. A Clinton Administration would continue to punch left, discrediting and undermining any attempt to even think seriously about economic reform from the left or stop the foreign policy of perpetual and multiplying wars. The Republicans would force bad economic policy on Clinton or simply paralyze the government, while blaming Clinton and “liberal Democrats” for the all the consequences.

A Trump Presidency would be easier on the credibility and popularity of the emerging Democratic post-neoliberal left. Republicans would be blamed for the consequences of their own policies; the neoliberal Democratic establishment would be discredited by its losses. I foolishly thought that in the circumstances of a Trump Presidency and Republican domination of all government, even the Democratic center would drift left, reviving in opposition arguments against war and against plutocratic corruption last heard in the GWB administration. In the long run, a failed Trump Presidency might prove to be better for the country and the world than a failed Clinton Presidency, in its effects on the evolution of American politics especially in the opportunity to organize a post-neoliberal left in place of the discredited and increasingly degenerate neoliberal Democratic Party.

That’s the sense in which I “preferred” Trump over Clinton, while despising both and despairing about the on-coming crisis. As Clinton continues to demonstrate her cluelessness and the dead hand of the Democratic establishment works very hard to engineer a partisan wave election without making any commitments on policy that would disturb their plutocratic donors, I cannot say I am happy with the result, but i also cannot say I think Clinton-in-charge would be a certain improvement. In the alternative scenario, I expect we would be talking about impeaching Clinton and Clinton’s unfitness for office, and justifying the 11-dimensional chess of her proposing to gut Social Security or cut taxes for billionaires or arm Ukraine. Clinton’s attempts to find Republican-lite blue dogs for mid-term Senate and House races would be going famously, the gutting of the Democratic Party fundraising and apparatus by Obama and Clinton forgotten.

My primary concern here is not to win an argument. I do not necessarily want other people to agree with me, at least not in the sense of joining with me in endorsing some counterfactual fantasy of what a Clinton Presidency would be like, dystopia or not. I do prefer to get some agreement on observable, objective facts, but people are going to evaluate things differently and have differing theories of the world and that’s fine and sometimes interesting.

I prefer discussions in which meta-moves are expected and welcome. We commenters, imho, should mainly be trying to be reflective and thoughtful, not bullying and insulting. Civility is over-rated by those who prefer banality; I am ok with sharp wit — don’t get me wrong. I do not object to insults, per se; I sometimes enjoy them. I do object to excluding or trying to close off meta observations. And, I object to arguing by deliberately misunderstanding or simply refusing to understand your interlocutors.

Many of my comments are about how people get trapped way down a path to nowhere where the simplifying assumptions and imagined counterfactuals of their preferred narratives lead them. No human can escape storytelling; it is central to our nature. But, we can loosen its grip, and our own vulnerability to techniques of mass manipulation, by some degree of reflecting on meta issues, essentially backing up along our path and rethinking key assumptions and theories. Being stuck on a path to nowhere is the tragedy of neoclassical economics and I suppose my obsession with criticism of neoclassical economics has shaped my pre-occupation with understanding how narratives en-trance and trap our thinking.

When a commenter introduces false dichotomies and disparages “fine distinctions” on her way to slandering her interlocutor for an argument no one would make or pushing counterfactuals in place of facts, I don’t think she’s adding value here. ymmv

@150
that was a lot of words for agreeing with Susan (Sarandon) – and I also used to agree with Susan but only because a very long time ago I also thought that ”a Real Clown” could teach US to stop being Clowns – and then I realized we might love it being Clowns –
and then what?

Now?

Today?!

The most subtle of all forms of voter suppression is the most effective. This is how it’s being done today in America — straight out of Goebbels’ handbook — you tell a lie often enough, it becomes the truth. Fox, the handmaiden of the telling, told the country over and over that the Clintons were corrupt and criminal. No other member of the entertainment/media genre held Fox accountable. After repetition after repetition of their account, today, 64% of Americans think that Clinton committed a criminal act in re her email server. Fox had help: All the other media/entertainment outlets repeated the Fox accusations time and time again. Nightly during 2016, PBS’s Judy Woodruff asked, “… and what about those emails?” Newsweek, time, The Guardian, The NYT. The WP, … all took a hand at the repetition. As a consequence of further ‘Goebbels’ like assaults on Clinton’s character, giving them a reason to dislike her, half the nation come to think of her as a despicable person. This form of suppression is how Trump won, won with some 23% of the eligible vote.

kidneystones

@151 “what I meant… in the interests of brevity I did not spell that out explicitly.”
Gotcha.

To re-iterate, what happens when piss-dossier, son of piss-dossier, and the Wolff book don’t get ‘the job’ done? Trump gets a clean bill of physical and mental health sometime this spring, or summer. Then what? Pray for a terror attack, foreign war, or market crash?

What are the 5 2018 pro-Dem rallying points?

It is not clear whether you are asking me what the Democrats should campaign on in 2018, but I will respond to the question just in case.

Campaigns don’t influence how I vote; apparently (or so many people believe) they do influence how many people vote, but I don’t understand how. So I don’t have any ideas about what would be good campaign slogans for the Democrats in 2018. I don’t think my inability to suggest good campaign slogans is evidence for what’s likely to happen in the election; after all, I don’t have any ideas about what would be good campaign slogans for the Republicans, either.

@153
”Finally, thank you nw for the kind? words”?

You’re welcome – and just to be… clear? I don’t think that ”Cruz and the GOP establishment wouldn’t be means-testing social security and other programs as well as with full control of Congress.” And I don’t think that herd of corrupt cats wouldn’t be working even harder to privatize at an even faster rate all segments of the government?

But I just can’t think what that has to do with me thinking ”Cruz IS an improvement on Trump.”?

And that’s what I’m constantly ”thinking” – ever since a (since the eighties) proven idiot and racist Birther who got famous being called a F…face by Americas funniest Comedian ran for President?

What does the answer that nearly anybody in our homeland is ”an improvement on Trump.”? has to do with Monty Pythons declaration:

And Now to Something Completely Else?

And I’m not sayen that you are (not) Monty Python! to make that clear – also for… ”Bruce”.
-(and are we allowed to call him ”Bruce”?
or shouldn’t it be better to call him Mr. Wilder and wouldn’t that be really ”a quaint way of looking at the world”?!)

ph@claims the economy is booming. This was Obama’s claim, and it falseness was why no Democratic candidate was going to have an easy time, no matter who was running against them. This was allegedly one of the things the Trumpists held against Clinton (who has been in power since 1992 in the Trumpist world view—this isn’t often explicit because it’s so manifestly dishonest/crazy, but there it is.) Double standards are always useful for political swindlers. Not that there’s any reason to expect Trump’s policies to affect the policy immediately, as ph also knows. Things are booming for the rich, and ph sees God in the heavens and all right with the world.

ken melvin@154 Two addenda: The media did not report on Trump, they just gave him free publicity. This is big money support, meaning all claims about Clinton being “the” Wall Street candidate were false. Many of the claims were deliberately supported by military/security factions, also giving the lie to claims Clinton was the Deep State candidate. (This particular phrase has only reached it peak of popularity recently. But as a diversion from a serious analysis in favor of a quasi-conspiratorial bad guys agitprop the essentials of the charge was made against Clinton.)

Also, the damage done to minds by Orwell, who pretends that you have to have an physical Memory Hole before you can have historical falsification, means that the origins of the Clinton demonization in a viciously partisan, blatantly reactionary campaign carried out by mad dogs funded by the usual suspects has disappeared, completely. This might seem impossible but consider how a ph, or a Bruce Wilder, or a Corey Robin, don’t notice how their man lost the election. (Well, in Robin’s case, how Sanders lost the primary campaign and would never have won the general.) They supposedly want the old system smashed (because moral purity demands, whatever.) The loser, who has nothing but a hijacked party restive under his hostile takeover, has a lot less power to drain the swamp. You’d think they’d care enough about their goal to be realistic about the facts.

(The Clinton supporters who affirm Trump won the election are expressing their commitment to the Constitution, the principle that minority rule is true democracy, that the people are rabble, etc. ad nauseam. But if they don’t just say this, then they can congratulate themselves on their leftism, especially when they assail the evil people, so unlike themselves, who elected Trump.)

ph, Bruce Wilder, Corey Robin, all the Trumpists in my opinion are still falsifying the issues with the Trump presidency, by highlighting the continuities with previous Republican and Democratic administrations. Why would anyone expect Trump to be creative? Of course he’s mostly going to be copying, especially since he doesn’t really have a party base. Things that are different about Trump: The open militarization of the administration; the extension of the old tactic of starving social programs in order to label them failed, to a strategy of denying any political interference by trashing government administration itself; open and direct threats against other political elites in the best style, copied from the decline of the Athenian democracy and the Roman republic; the open reliance on threats of nuclear genocide. There are three more years to go, only a fool or a liar is confident that Trump won’t live down to his tweets.

It is now commonplace to rehabilitate Nixon as a liberal, whose fall was apparently some sort of weirdly pointless exercise in hysteria. But the savage turn to the right marked by the Cold War, the start of a murderous crusade that killed millions worldwide and permanently excised the Left from mass politics in the US, introduced a political logic, momentum for a post-democratic order. The phrase “there is a lot of ruin in a country” is popular around here, not least because it’s true. Nixon tried to carry the program further, but got slapped down. Trump is carrying out the updated program, but instead of getting slapped down, only criticism from the right is acceptable. ph, Bruce Wilder, Corey Robin have only one thing in their favor…you can’t criticize Trump from the right.

Ken Melvin:

Don’t be so bloody stupid. The way Republicans do voter suppression is by preventing people from voting. They do it through intimidation, by striking as many black and asian voters off the rolls as possible (completely illegal, but the Democrats don’t seem to care), by giving poorer wards fewer and crappier voting machines. By raising the voter requirements (you need an ID that costs $60 and can only be acquired by travelling 100 miles during the working day).

The continual disinterest of most Democrats in the continual, flagrant and completely illegal (in many cases) suppression of the vote speaks volumes. Particularly when so many of them subscribe to a conspiracy theory about Russian interference.

Layman @146

Yan, if you don’t grasp the difference between ‘evidence’ and ‘proof’, you should stay out of the conversation. I’m not asking you to agree that their claims are proven; nor am I asking you to prove the FBI and CIA are lying. I’m putting no burden of proof on you or anyone else. I’m asking you to acknowledge that there is actually some evidence of the claims, whether it is conclusive or not. That’s why I aimed my comment at the ‘there is no evidence’ crowd.

We don’t know this. They may have evidence, but until they choose to share it we don’t actually know if it exists. Some souls, believers in the integrity of the FBI and CIA may choose to assume that they wouldn’t act as they are without something. Others more familiar with their long sordid history would rather suspend judgement.

@117 Heliopause: Perhaps what Cian objected to was the wildly inflammatory characterization of this contact; “peddling info and offering to act as a window washer…”

That was exactly what I objected to. Thank you.

SusanC

On the other hand, if the VP becomes concerned about the president’s behavior, calls in a psychiatrist for a professional opinion, the psyhicatrist — after having properly examined the patient — makes an official diagnosis, the VP then decides to invoked the 25th amendment etc. that’s all by the book

I am imagining, for the sake of argument, Pence saying to Trump, ‘Please allow this psychiatrist I’ve called in to examine you in order to form an opinion about whether you have a mental illness that would make you incapable of discharging the duties of the Presidency.’

Is that a serious suggestion? Do you think Trump would even let Pence get to the end of that sentence?

The procedural requirements of section 4 of the Twenty-fifth Amendment don’t include an opinion from a psychiatrist, or any kind of doctor, or any kind of health professional, or any kind of professional. They do include the agreement of the Vice-President and a majority of ‘the principal officers of the executive departments’ — all of whom, let’s remember, were nominated by Trump. Which of them do you think would be likely to agree to a declaration of Trump’s incapacity? Ben Carson? Rick Perry? Betsy DeVos?

@165 Thanks. I’m being called forthright and evasive at the same time.

So, what am I hiding from? Claims I that I predicted Trump might win by a landslide. Said that. Trump could lose? Said that.

On balance, I called it while you and the rest of my intellectual and moral superiors here and elsewhere managed to ignore the millions of Trump voters in your midst. While wailing about Koch-funded faux-populism, you manage to miss the thousands of voters, and non-voters, Republicans and former Democrats lined up for hours to listen to Trump without Bono or Springsteen to bring in the crowds – and then be damned as bigots and racists for doing so.

Being wrong and fantastically indifferent to fact in your universe entitles you to demand that those who get things right give an accounting, of some sort. I don’t blame you in the slightest for looking backwards. The present is not the concentration camp promised by Maddow et al. As for the future, you can’t present a single positive reason to vote Dem in 2018, or 2020.

Unless you and your crowd remedy that you’ve no choice to pray for some disaster to befall the American people to relieve you of the burden of you know, actually coming up with a message for the American people better than MAGA. If you don’t think Trump is winning, you’re paying about the same attention to the lay of the land as you did in 2015-6. Remember? Trump can’t possibly win!! You’ve no new ideas and still no new message but one that’s produced nothing but failure to date.

Find something positive to say why don’t you?

Then again John, and in fairness, what would count as evidence that Trump was winning, for you?

I really ask honestly because I could not imagine Trump being serious about his primary run, I could not imagine him surviving GOP opposition, I could not imagine him defeating so easily his opponents, I could certainly not imagine him winning the Presidency, I could not imagine him being able to pass his tax abomination, destroy anything related to environmental policy and move the US embassy to Jerusalem in his first year and I could not imagine that after losing to Trump the Dems would not go in a genuine examination of what they stand for.

Yet all this happened. So sure I cannot imagine anything except a crushing D victory in the mid-terms and then them recapturing the Presidency in 2020. But should I be so confident in my predictive abilities?

“to the titular question…” of course

Cian: “They may have evidence, but until they choose to share it we don’t actually know if it exists.”

You see, this is a false statement. We do know that they have evidence. They have the analysis from Crowdstrike. That analysis is evidence, and they have it, and we know they have it. So when you say that they don’t have evidence, or that we don’t know if they have evidence, that’s not true. Yet you keep saying it. Why?

John

Correction: Trump looked like he was winning from the time I first watched. What made you think he was losing? Did somebody tell you and you believed them?

Meanwhile, the penny drops for David Brooks…

“I sometimes wonder if the Invisible White House has learned to use the Potemkin White House to deke us while it changes the country. I mention these inconvenient observations because the anti-Trump movement, of which I’m a proud member, seems to be getting dumber. It seems to be settling into a smug, fairy tale version of reality that filters out discordant information. More anti-Trumpers seem to be telling themselves a “Madness of King George” narrative: Trump is a semiliterate madman surrounded by sycophants who are morally,… ”

Brooks stumbles on the reality what a Trump WH looks like if Trump stops tweeting.

JH @171 Combining policy and the daily news—

An independent energy agency on Monday rejected a Trump administration plan to bolster coal-fired and nuclear power plants with subsidies. . . The administration’s plan was opposed by an unusual coalition of business and environmental groups that frequently disagree with each other. Critics said the plan would distort energy markets and raise prices for customers, especially in the northeastern and midwestern US. One called it “ludicrous” and perverse.

—The Guardian

That’s it, isn’t it? Ludicrous and perverse leadership.

Z: ‘Iwould find it extremely upsetting if the conventional media or quasi-historical wisdom eventually turned out to be “Trump’s first year in office was marked by an ongoing investigation of ties between his campaign and Russia” rather than, say, the rise of oligarchic power, the gutting of the EPA and of numerous environmental programs, brazen pro-ultrarich policies, atrocious foreign policy etc…’

I don’t really grasp the reasons for this concern. It’s not as if, right now, people aren’t decrying the rise of oligarchic power, the gutting of the EPA and numerous environmental programs, the brazen pro-ultrarich policies, the atrocious foreign policy etc.

The narrative from some seems to be that the ongoing Mueller probe and attendant political posturing from both sides makes it impossible to properly oppose those other things, or even to make noise about them; but there is plenty of opposition to them, and lots of eople are making noise about them. Every single Democrat in Congress opposed – loudly! – the tax bill and the regressive ACA repeal, and every media outlet on the left and in the center produced extensive coverage on them. The madness at the EPA, the INS, etc, gets covered virtually every single day. It’s a false narrative.

in a normal world, the ‘left’ would be up in arms over the creeping, nay, deluge of international kleptocratic norms into u.s. society.

Mario @ 183: “I wonder how many capable people the Democratic party has that, at the same time, satisfy all the very high purity criteria . . .”

Lee A. Arnold @ 181: “Idealists persist in believing that the Democratic Party must present a grand scheme of reform of the political economy.”

I wonder if, like Layman, you think the country is better off with a Democratic Party continuing in the grip of Wall Street donors and a neoliberal ideology of “getting things done” while fighting a half-dozen or more small wars? Nominating a Presidential candidate in 2016 that satisfied no idea of purity or “capable” and was adamantly opposed to all grand schemes of reform worked out so well that you think the Democratic Party should give it another go?

Using narrative tropes to disparage criteria for their “purity” or idealism for its impracticality obscures more than it reveals.

Lee, do you really imagine that the people who own and manage CNN or MSNBC need your advice? I don’t doubt you could offer them good advice on how to run their operations to better serve your tastes (or mine, for that matter). And, better serve the public good, too! But, don’t you think the way they are actually run reflects structural and systematic constraints? Not just the complex preferences of the corporate owners, but the ecology of politics and the press in a plutocratic state? Do you really imagine that your advice and insight is the strategic factor holding them back? back from what?

Mario, do you think the concern with who finances the political Parties and political campaigns (and how that money is deployed, e.g. in teevee advertising) is akin to an obsession with ritual purity? It is not a reasonable concern with the structures constraining the functioning of the political system? It is a badly worded prayer before bedtime? Or, committing to eat fish on Fridays during Lent?

The stock market is at record highs and life expectancy is declining. Whether that combo is good for Trump in 2020 is not really a question we should be pondering.

John Holbo #86: “if Trump started acting normal”

He showed a patch of coherence at today’s roundtable meeting on immigration. It may be best to separate three different things: 1. his unpreparedness for the job, 2. his short attention span and intellectual atomization, and 3. the possibility of his deterioration. (Some of his oldest friends are reported to have said there are real changes.)

Next, no matter whether it is 1, 2, or 3, look at how the Republicans got him to sign a tax bill that sends most of the money up to the 1% — something he assured his voters he would not do.

Then, look at the outcome of his relative patch of clarity at the today’s immigration roundtable — the result was to throw a couple of big wrenches into GOP policy preferences.

So regardless of the etiology, all is not well in Trumpland.

bruce wilder: “I wonder if, like Layman, you think the country is better off with a Democratic Party continuing in the grip of Wall Street donors and a neoliberal ideology of “getting things done” while fighting a half-dozen or more small wars?”

Why only half the question, Bruce? Better off with that than what, exactly? Trump? Cruz or Rubio? Is that even a serious question?

Bruce Wilder #192: “don’t you think the way they [CNN, MSNBC] are actually run reflects structural and systematic constraints? Not just the complex preferences of the corporate owners, but the ecology of politics and the press in a plutocratic state?”

No to the first question. To the second question, there is still a lot of room for more constructive creativity. Especially when it increases viewership.

Nastywoman #195: “Oprah”

I think you may have hit the nail on the head. Maybe Trump will begin to style himself after Oprah.

@191 Hi Pete, Well, you’re entitled to your opinions and your sources. I take a more granular approach, was trained in mixed-method research, and my guess is that the qualitative side collapsed badly in most of these polls. Polls that got it right – LA Times, and one or two others.

@On forcing change. The only tactic available to most of us is collective action, the threat of the withdrawal of labor, slow-downs-work to rule, and strikes. Unlike many here I came to academia and formal teaching after the age of thirty. My politics were informed by T.C. Douglas and my attitude towards companies by Homer Stevens. I belonged to five different unions and was involved in strikes and labor actions as recently as this century.

Unless people who are unhappy with the state of affairs are willing to go on strike and bankrupt the company, the company never changes. And all the purity police are doing the bosses’ work for them. The last action was involved with was a wildcat strike. I was initially against the action. An Australian colleague explained that if did not strike, the company would just draw out the negotiations through the next year as they had done the last. Hitting the company hard and suddenly was the only way to force the company to the negotiating table to make real concessions. We struck and the company bent.

This concept is utterly foreign to many here, for whom ‘being left’ means mouthing platitudes about the working class whilst living a bourgeois lifestyle. Many of the people I know work on one-year contracts. Going on strike means risking blackballing and a loss of income. Yet, it’s either that. Or, bend over and grab ankle. I choose the former.

Continue voting for and supporting the Clinton gang and the DNC and their moneyed backers will continue to retain their stranglehold on the Democratic party. Withdraw support now and then, cost them their place at the trough now and then, and ordinary folks might get their attention. Absent that, we don’t even exist for these pricks.

I’ve a massive project due and expect to post only in spasms. The new bloggers look very promising. I’ll wish them well here at the bottom of this thread, from the periphery, where folks like me belong.

alfredlordbleep, you failed to mention the $15 minimum wage. I wonder why?

Layman @188 It’s not as if, right now, people aren’t decrying the rise of oligarchic power, the gutting of the EPA and numerous environmental programs, the brazen pro-ultrarich policies, the atrocious foreign policy etc.

First let me be clear, I don’t want to diminish the importance of the Russiagate: the Trump campaign clearly had many shady deals with Russians, many lied about it, Trump tried to obstruct the investigation etc… All this should be properly investigated.

Now, I don’t live in the US so I can’t really capture the Zeitgeist, but I sometime have the impression that the Russiagate is treated as the single most damning thing about the Trump administration and produces the largest amount of news story, ink spilled and emotional responses. Maybe this is a completely mistaken impression, but if it is at least somewhat correct, then I find it regrettable, because even if the absolute worse is proven to be true about the Russiagate, it remains to me a rather minor affair compared to all the rest. Donald Johnson has already mentioned it here many times, but once again what the Trump administration has done completely openly with respect to Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Israel is directly comparable and a 100 times worse than anything that has been ever alleged with respect to Russia. This, they have done often with the tacit support of the media and mild Democratic opposition at best. So I would tend to doubt either the sincerity of the ethics of a Trump critic (either a person or a news organization) who is enraged at Russiagate but has nothing much to say about Saudi Arabia/Yemen/Israel (for instance).

Sometimes, I suspect that what makes the Russiagate so special is that it is an angle of attack from which Trump and Trump alone is vulnerable, whereas on most other topics, the rest of the Republican party and to a large extent the Democratic party including Obama and Clinton are also vulnerable. So attacking Trump along this line is the surest way to sink him while leaving the rest of the political system intact. I completely disapprove of this method of conducting political opposition for moral reasons. After Clinton lost to Trump (to Trump!) wielding this very method, I also seriously doubt its efficiency, at least in the American context.

kidneystones
I don’t know of any instance in which people have induced a political party to make desired policy changes by blackmailing the party with the threat of withheld votes; if that’s really what you’re suggesting, it seems to me a grossly self-indulgent fantasy. However, if I’m wrong, and if the tactic can work, then it’s clearly more important to apply it to the Republicans; getting them to change their policies is surely a higher priority than getting the Democrats to do so. By all means, withhold your support from the Republicans until you get their attention.

I’ve a massive project due and expect to post only in spasms.

Only since you mention it, my impression was that your comments have always been mostly spasms, but maybe that’s just me.

‘Absent that, we don’t even exist for these pricks.’

Literally everyone bearing the brunt of Trump don’t exist for some pricks.

Shorter Mario: I don’t care about sexual harassment and neither should you.

Z@206

Exactly!

Sometimes, I suspect that what makes the Russiagate so special is that it is an angle of attack from which Trump and Trump alone is vulnerable, whereas on most other topics, the rest of the Republican party and to a large extent the Democratic party including Obama and Clinton are also vulnerable. So attacking Trump along this line is the surest way to sink him while leaving the rest of the political system intact.—Z

I have always advocated approaching presidential elections by asking what a candidate can accomplish given core party ideology, who controls which branch of government or is within striking distance of doing so, what recent history of party acts shows etc. . . (Of course) last is a candidate’s peccadillos.

Any evaluation of a 2016 Republican candidate should have started with Bush-Cheney as the foundation of lamentable.

P. S. In this country, Z, your screen name suggests the mark of Zorro.
P.P.S. sidenote to Faustusnotes: sorry, I was emphasizing the omissions in your list. Neither of us can be exhaustive on the fly.

Adding some anecdotal data to the FAIR report I linked, I have never had a real life conversation about Yemen unless I brought it up. I am around educated upper middle class people and Trump comes up and Russiagate comes up all the time. The fact that we are complicit in a crime against humanity— never. I have brought it up a few times in real life ( many times at another blog ) and my impression is that some people know about it and some don’t, but obviously the FAIR piece reflects not just MSNBC’s coverage, but virtually everybody’s coverage.

Russiagate should be investigated and no doubt various acts of corruption will continue to be uncovered. I am agnostic about the Russiagate narrative, but it might be true. And Trump wouldn’t know an ethical constraint if it bit him. Which it might at the end of all this. But I think the obsession with it is for the reasons Z says— it is a way of picking one issue where the awfulness of our system can be focused on one subset of people. Issues like Yemen which implicate a much larger group get ignored. We even have the rehabilitation of some Bush Cheney figures, including Bush.

I also think Russiagate is in large part a way of pushing for a more hawkish foreign policy.

Layman I think you’re going to have to elaborate on how you measure the strength of opposition, or its mildness.

I guess that is a fair standard for you to impose, and again, maybe my impression is due to my foreign perspective (and undoubtedly my own limitations) but it stems from little bits like this:
-I understood immediately the title of this post, just like I would understand immediately a reference to Comey’s October surprise, yet I don’t know the name of the senator from California who opposed the Saudi-led and US-backed war on Yemen.
-I know of that senator because I listen to rather marginal outlets, if other joined his fight, it escaped my attention and the interest of the media source I consult.
-The US moving its embassy to Jerusalem provoked international protests. Did the Democratic party and the US media of reference really join in? It seemed to have escaped my attention and that of the media source I use if they did. I don’t think I even know the official position of the Democratic party on this.
-How often does the topic of the Russia collusion shows up here, on CT, either in OP or in comments? How often does the war in Yemen? The Kushner-managed Saudi-Israel-US alignment? The gutting of the EPA?

Finally, let me ask you a question in return. Imagine if Trump had gone to Russia and had signed billions in weapon deals with Putin. Imagine the reaction. Do you think the reaction to his trip to Saudi Arabia compares?

Now Faustusnotes gives a very intelligible rationale @211 and for all I know, all this could be in the eye of the beholder (i.e me) and not reflect any reality. Still.

alfredlordbleep @214P. S. In this country, Z, your screen name suggests the mark of Zorro.

Well, if you insist that the picture below is a picture of yours truly, I’m not going to deny too strongly.

http://e-cdn-images.deezer.com/images/cover/9960c4613f85e77c4691190a40c4285f/500×500.jpg

Per. Glenn Simpson’s testimony, this has all the elements of a good film noir.

For the Hollywood movie adaptation, feel free to imagine Glenn Simpson and Christopher Steele as basically being private investigators who are good buddies. (cf. Woodward and Bernstein in Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men, the Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey characters in True Detective, Sam Spade and Miles in The Maltese Falcon etc).

Glenn Simpson does the bits of PI work that involve looking up public records (like Trump’s tax returns); he used to be a journalist for the Wall Street Journal. Christopher Steele does the bits that involve going and talking to people; he used to work for the British spy agency MI6.

The film equivalent of Mary Astor’s character femme fatale character in The Maltese Falcon is presumably Hilary Clinton, although Simpson’s testimony is careful to avoid naming his client.

So the femme fatale or someone working on her behalf hires Simpson to investigate a presidential candidate, one Donald Trump. Simpson subcontracts out the legwork to his old buddy, Christopher Steele.

Simpson goes through the tax returns for Trump’s gold courses in Scotland, and finds they’re officially not very profitable. Maybe the tax authorities are being misled; maybe Trump is getting his money from elsewhere. Trump also has suspicious business contacts with Felix Sater and Tevfik Arif.

Meanwhile, Steele is contacting his sources in Russia. In the usual fashion of film noir movies, he uncovers rumours that Trump is a much bigger crook than they were led to expect. There are rumours of a sex tape involving Trump and Russian hookers in a hotel room, which implies the Russian FSB may be blackmailing Trump. he also hears that Trump has asked his Russian contacts to obtain information on the Democrat campaign using computer hacking.

Steele thinks this is big enough that they ought to call the cops. Steele discusses it with Simpson, then goes and talks to an old buddy of his who happens to work for the FBI.

The FBI have already heard something similar from a different source, likely a mole in the Trump campaign.

At this point, things start to go wrong. There’s a leak to the press that the FBI are investigating Trump’s Russian connections and (so the Halloween newspaper article claims) didn’t find anything.

Steele now doesn’t trust entirely trust the cops. He thinks there’s a mole inside the FBI who is leaking information back to Trump. (Maybe the agent inside the FBI is working for Russian organized crime, or maybe they’re just a Republican supporter). This, combined with Mark Comey’s announcements about FBI investigation into Clinton, makes him distrust the cops.

More film noir stuff happens, some of Steele’s contacts wind up dead, etc.

George Costanza: Just remember, Jerry, it isn’t a lie if you believe it.

Ah, but does kidneystones really believe it? Costanza’s discussion of lie detectors gets at the deeper questions: What does it mean to believe something? How ought we choose the things we believe?

We all know, including ph, that Hillary got more votes than Trump, so that’s not worth debating. The real question is: How cans someone say that more Americans preferred Trump?

I think Suskind’s “reality-based community” discussion is the Rosetta Stone for understanding people like ph and Trump — and therefore, for understanding much of modern politics. When ph talks about Americans’ preference for Trump — or when Trump talks about the relative size of his inauguration crowds — these aren’t attempts to describe reality. And calling them “lies” is too superficial; it doesn’t account for the actual work done by those false statements.

These are not attempts to deceive people about reality. They are attempts to shape reality.

So in a way, it’s really off-topic to respond to ph by discussing Hillary’s relative popularity, or whether the Democrats have acquiesced to Trump’s policies, or whether Russia’s intervention in the US election is important. Intelligent conversations can be had on those topics, but ph is explicitly opposed to that kind of conversation.

So what is his aim? I agree with ph that he is representative of something really important — something that is easy to miss for people like me — and I want to understand him better than I do. I’ve learned some interesting things in this thread.

153: Krugman, Mahr, Colbert, Maddow et al, the NYT, MSNBC, CNN and all liberal icons predicted catastrophe, mass deportations, prosecutions of the press, an end to freedom of speech and instead got a booming economy etc., a president who may well go to bed at 6:30 after a cheese burger, who still knows how to tie pretty much everyone in knots with his Twitter account.

179: If, or when, Trump starts tweeting less, his numbers will likely climb and he ended 2017 up. To win all Trump needs to do is survive. 1 year in, still kicking.

179: But the main reasons [ph thought Trump would win] were economic.

I don’t want to so much disagree with ph here but point out what he is revealing in comment 153, inadvertently. What positive things can he say about Trump? Three things, most pertinently a “booming economy” and Twitter skill.*

Those are positives, but the first one, the “booming economy,” is the same economy, pretty much, we had 14 months ago. Unemployment continues to edge lower, great, but if the economy is so good now, why were the main reasons to vote for Trump “economic,” as claimed in 179? This makes zero sense, really.

Then as for Trump’s skill with Twitter, yes, that’s one string to his bow, I agree. He’s very good at riling up his opponents, and (or thus) motivating Republicans to side with him. But then ph suggests he stop tweeting! Now (assuming again you believe the comment 179 argument about the economy and not the comment 153 argument) all that leaves us with (from 153) is the 6:30 cheeseburger!

It seems to me that Trump is in a bit of a conundrum – his favorability ratings are very low, and the only way to make them higher is for Trump to become less like Trump. Is he capable of doing that? I view him as applying his real-estate development skills to politics; if you can’t be smart, there’s at least a certain cunning in being aggressive and unpredictable and flouting norms and so on. I find it hard to believe that we’re going to get “Trump Lite” in 2020.

The question asked in the title of this post strikes me as a little odd, as of course once voters did actually vote for Trump, despite the subset of the bad things known about Trump that became issues during the campaign, to a certain extent a process of “normalization” of bad behavior has become inevitable, and I don’t see why the Mueller investigation is or will be particularly significant in this respect. Of course with “normalization” also comes “fatigue,” hence I think ph thinks Trump needs to cut back a little.

Like John Holbo 174, I think it’s hard to say whether Trump will win, or lose, or not run in 2020. But I specifically would tie the “Trump win” scenario to the “Democrats nominate another unattractive candidate” scenario, so I see it as out of Trump’s hands, pretty much. ph’s scenario of a kindler, gentler Trump in 2020 is kind of scary to me; I can only imagine this happening through some sort of “Manchurian Candidate” scenario. At this point, being kinder and gentler would I think diminish too much the value of his brand for Trump to agree to it voluntarily.

*To be fair in the preceding paragraph of153 ph mentions a fourth, the lack of a “new war,” but I wonder if the way Trump has amplified the NK conflict might not look like a new war to voters, at this point.

Z@206 sez:

…I sometime[s] have the impression that the Russiagate is treated as the single most damning thing about the Trump administration and produces the largest amount of news story, ink spilled and emotional responses.

For the Trump faithful, it is what the Democrats find most-damning. The right-wing noise machine told them so, repeatedly.

However, for the anti-Trumper, it does, as Faustusnotes points out, have the apparent potential to issue criminal indictments to much of Trump’s appointees/cabinet for violations of election laws. Haters-of-Trump find the high likelihood of indictments of Trump family members encouraging, too. (I fear that Trump might use the nuclear option if the indictments go that far. In this use, “nuclear option” may be something other than a metaphor.)

P.S. In this country, we do not grant titles of nobility, such as “Lord”.

– and could we please stop these… this… this expression ”Haters of Trump”? as there seems to be this weird thing in my homeland if you call somebody or something by it’s (proven) name it’s supposedly to be…?

What?

Or to be more precise – IF somebody – anybody – acts like a ”f… ing Moron” he actually wants to be called a ”f… ing Moron” and it would NOT be true to call him ”a nice person” -(for example) –
OR only if ”a nice person” would be code for being a F… ing Moron!
And nearly all the F… ing Morons I know – know that ”they are F… ing Morons” – Because they were told so plenty of times and never come up with the idea that anybody who stress this fact would ”hate” them?

Right?

Anonportly said—

“I don’t want to so much disagree with ph here but point out what he is revealing in comment 153, inadvertently. What positive things can he say about Trump? Three things, most pertinently a “booming economy” and Twitter skill.*

Those are positives, but the first one, the “booming economy,” is the same economy, pretty much, we had 14 months ago. Unemployment continues to edge lower, great, but if the economy is so good now, why were the main reasons to vote for Trump “economic,” as claimed in 179? This makes zero sense, really.”

I don’t object to pointing out contradictions in the statements of Trump and Trump supporters, but is it the progressive position that the economy is great and nobody has anything to complain about? My impression is that we have had a decades long trend of increased inequality. I am not an economist, but some people here are. The link below says most of the new jobs under Trump are poorly paid. If true, presumably that didn’t suddenly start under Trump.

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/washington-post-lied-correcting-president-trumps-1950-lies/

Rejecting people for being sexual predators is not equivalent to rejecting people for being promiscuous; do you really not grasp the difference?

Unmanaged empathy impairment might reasonably leave the afflicted unable to distinguish between “promiscuity” and “sexual predation” [because unmanaged empathy impairment leads to obvious problems with seeing both sides of consent issues].

All &c &c. Even the crimes they commit are reflective of not seeing others as human.

Snarking here rather than at home, while I can.

Layman Hyper-partisanship is the existing background state against which tactical decisions are being made, not the other way around.

I agree, but the way out, if there is any, is not to play the game.

Layman Dems decide to object more vehemently to drowning puppies than they do drowning kittens —> Dems embrace drowning kittens. Really?

The way I see it, it looks more like the first clause is “Dems decide to object more vehemently to taking the last cookie without asking first if anybody else wants it than they do drowning kittens”. In that case, yeah, I tend to suspect that they don’t care so much about drowned kittens, or at least can live with it.

Ogden Wernstrom I think I’ve lost track of the standard of ethics you espouse

The standard of opposing policies based primarily on their seriousness and not based primarily on who committed them.

– and how can I fit your disapproval of investigating/prosecuting election crimes into said ethical framework.

I wonder how you could come to the previous conclusion based on “First let me be clear, I don’t want to diminish the importance of the Russiagate: the Trump campaign clearly had many shady deals with Russians, many lied about it, Trump tried to obstruct the investigation etc… All this should be properly investigated.“

re the basic claim – people in here think about politics a lot. People out there do not. Lots of publicity about Russian mafia/dirty deals/arrests/pee parties draws people out there’s attention to politics, and specifically to Trump. And the more they attend, the more they pick up on the other horrible things, and the less they like Trump. Mueller is one voice in the chorus to us, but he’s a focusing lens to the world out there.

I don’t know what bunched-up alfredlordbleep’s panties @233, but my top two theories are:

(1)He thought I was calling him a furriner, or
(2)He knows that the Mueller investigation is not what the right-wing noise machine says is “all the Dems got on Trump”. kindeystones exhibits conclusive evidence that said noise machine is saying that the “piss-dossier” is all the Dems got.

JH: Thank you for the snarkotunity.