US Politics Mega-thread - Page 8078

On July 13 2017 10:39 Danglars wrote:

One of these days he'll either convince you that you're (1) barking up the wrong tree if you want to change Trump getting away with everything or (2) just as stubborn at doing the same thing over and over (making the same mistake over and over) as he is. If the Russia thread of agitation and group paranoia is high on your priority list, start opening yourself up to the idea that the theater feeds Trump. You're literally making your problems bigger. It's like the hardcore baseball fan that reads every tidbit of possible trades with his team in the offseason--GH's accurate "following every little drip" priority critique. It will consume your attention and give you myopic focus that fucks up any attempt to grasp the big picture. You'll lose easy elections, or maybe barely squeak by some easy elections, by focusing on the next silver stake that sinks Trump.

Secondly, your earlier "my opponents refuse to accept information" shows you're about as resistant to change as everybody else that looks for the easy-out way that shortcuts examination.

On July 13 2017 10:25 KwarK wrote:
Are we forgetting that the Trump voters actually didn't like Obama because he was black? Or are we just not supposed to talk about that? Birtherism didn't happen in a vacuum.

On July 13 2017 10:30 zlefin wrote:

odd; then why does the Republican message of disunity and their open numerous insults to many Americans, and their dislike of people who live in cities/coasts, succeed?
it's a mirror of the same thing; so why does it work for one and not the other?

President Trump is continuing to defend his eldest son's controversial meeting with a Russian lawyer where he hoped to get damaging information on Hillary Clinton as part of an effort by the Russian government to help Trump's campaign.

"I think many people would have held that meeting," Trump told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday.

The president first weighed in on Tuesday with a brief statement: "My son is a high-quality person and I applaud his transparency." Trump Jr. only released email exchanges regarding the meeting after the New York Times, which originally broke the story, was about to publish the electronic messages.

The president's son has come under fire after he admitted to meeting with Kremlin-linked attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya at the urging of publicist Rob Goldstone. In emails released Tuesday, Goldstone told Trump Jr. that Veselnitskaya had "very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump." Trump Jr. wrote back, "if it's what you say I love it especially later in the summer." In an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity Tuesday night, Trump Jr. admitted he "probably would have done things a little differently" but reiterated there was no information exchanged regarding Clinton at the meeting.

The president echoed what his son has maintained — that he didn't know about the June 9, 2016, meeting held at Trump Tower at the time, which was also attended by his then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, who is now a White House senior adviser.

"No, that I didn't know until a couple of days ago when I heard about this," Trump told Reuters.

The Times also reported that President Trump personally signed off on his son's initial statement about the meeting published by the newspaper on Saturday. In that initial statement, Trump Jr. portrayed the meeting as an opportunity to talk about a Russian adoption program. Trump Jr. later put out an amended statement clarifying what happened and that the meeting had also been about Clinton.

The deepening story has come as multiple congressional committees and a Justice Department special counsel are investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and possible collusion between aides to the Trump campaign and Russia. Trump Jr.'s meeting, with emails explicitly outlining that the Russian government was aiming to help his father, arguably provide some of the most clear possible links yet.

President Trump's firing of former FBI Director James Comey, which he has admitted was due to the deepening Russia probe, has only worsened the cloud around his administration. Christopher Wray, Trump's nominee to replace Comey atop the FBI, testified at his Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday that in the scenario of being presented opposition research by a foreign government, that was "the kind of thing the FBI would want to know."

House Speaker Paul Ryan sidestepped the question of the appropriateness of the meeting and the email exchange that preceded it, saying Wednesday he wouldn't "go into hypotheticals" as to whether or not he would have taken a similar meeting. Ryan did say it was "important" for investigators to "get to the bottom" of the meeting.

On July 13 2017 10:45 Danglars wrote:

::Dems have problems convincing poor families struggling to get by that they're members of the privileged class and didn't like Obama because he was black or Hillary because she was a woman
Kwark: Trump voters actually didn't like Obama because he was black.

There we have it, gentlemen. The ultimate perpetuating loop of rationalizing the division and justifying it. Please have some consultant in the Democrat's 2020 campaign that likes "You're all racists. No, really, I can prove it to you!"

You'll have to do a better job hiding the fact that you detest Republican voters and a vote against Obama was partially motivated by Obama's race.


Care to elaborate? Reactionary doesn't presume that this is the first cause-effect go-around.

On July 13 2017 10:55 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
He knew of it. Which will form the GOP defense, that he is/was new at this.



Source

U.S. intelligence officials heard Russian officials discussing associates of President Donald Trump in early 2015, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.

The report comes one day after the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. released screenshots of emails showing he was contacted in June 2016 about a meeting with a Kremlin-linked attorney promising damaging information about Hillary Clinton. Trump Jr. has defended his decision to take the meeting, describing it as routine gathering of opposition research. Paul Manafort, then Trump’s campaign manager, as well as Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, also attended the meeting.

According to the Wall Street Journal report, the conversations were picked up by intelligence officials who routinely monitor communications (including phone calls and emails) between people believed to be involved in Russian spying on the U.S. While WSJ’s sources did not say which associates were mentioned, they noted that the conversations included references to meetings between Trump’s allies and Russian officials held outside the U.S.

Officials are now reportedly revisiting those conversations in the wake of the Trump Jr. email revelations.

The White House didn’t immediately return HuffPost’s request for comment. But in a statement provided to BuzzFeed, a spokesman for Trump’s attorney dismissed the story as “double hearsay.”

The FBI, under the supervision of special prosecutor and former FBI Director Robert Mueller, is currently investigating whether Trump’s team actively colluded with Russian officials to influence the outcome of the 2016 election.

Manafort and Kushner are both under scrutiny in the investigation, as is the president’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn. Flynn resigned from his role in the administration after it was revealed he discussed repealing U.S. sanctions against Russia with that country’s ambassador to the U.S. prior to Trump’s inauguration, and then lied about the nature of those conversations.

The FBI is also reportedly looking at Carter Page, a onetime foreign policy adviser to the campaign, as well as Trump political adviser Roger Stone.

Trump and his team have vociferously denied any collusion.

Its not the nationalism that is a problem for EU-US international relations. Its stability.

China is politically stable and has shown little interest in interfering in EU politics or dragging anyone into wars.
The US on the other hand can swing rather wildly depending on which party has the Presidency. And no one likes such schizophrenic changes every 4-8 years.

On July 13 2017 10:56 zlefin wrote:

what's to elaborate on? the republicans use a message of disunity, and show open dislike of the people living in cities/coasts.
you say the Dems have a message of disunity and dislike of uneducated flyover voters. and that that hurts their chances.
why does the strategy work for republicans, yet not work for democrats?
this isn't really relevant to the reactionary part. it's a simple question of why does a strategy work for one side and not the other.

On July 13 2017 10:57 KwarK wrote:
I still honestly don't know if you're saying the Democrats shouldn't talk about how racist the Trump base is or if you don't think there was a racial component to the Trump Birther movement that propelled him onto the political stage.

On July 13 2017 11:26 KwarK wrote:
No, I totally get that racists get upset when you call them racists. I just don't know if you're trying to say that the racists aren't racists or if you're saying the Democrats should stop calling the racists racist.

On July 13 2017 11:21 Danglars wrote:

What's the message and why do you think it's one of disunity?

On July 13 2017 11:29 Achamian wrote:

spoiler alert: there are just as many republicans who hate blacks as there are liberals that hate whites, lets choose teams

On July 13 2017 11:26 KwarK wrote:
No, I totally get that racists get upset when you call them racists. I just don't know if you're trying to say that the racists aren't racists or if you're saying the Democrats should stop calling the racists racist.

On July 13 2017 11:36 Nyxisto wrote:


"hating white people" because they're white isn't actually a thing. The only place where that actually happens is South Africa and that's because of the whole apartheid thing. Nobody has ever institutionalized 'anti-white racism' because of alleged inferiority, that's just one of the long list of imaginary victim complexes that the modern right likes to conjure up

Smoke, meet gun.

On Tuesday morning, there was a stunning development in the Trump-Russia scandal: Donald Trump Jr. confessed. In yet another bombshell story, the New York Times reported on emails showing that the president’s oldest son had eagerly accepted an offer of help during the 2016 campaign from what he understood to be the Russian government. Trump Jr., the Times disclosed, had set up a meeting with a Russian attorney in the hopes of receiving derogatory information on Hillary Clinton straight from Putin’s regime. As the Times was publishing this story, Trump Jr. tweeted out those same emails.

The emails reveal that top Trump campaign advisers Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner attended the meeting and suggest that all three Trump advisers colluded in what seemed to be a Russian government-backed attempt to hurt Clinton in order to help Trump win the presidency. This new development contradicts the long series of denials from Trump defenders who have claimed that there was no collusion, that there was no evidence Russian leader Vladimir Putin wanted Trump to win, and that the Trump-Russia affair is merely a hoax perpetuated by loser Democrats and fake news outlets.

The Trump Jr. emails also provide partial support for some information within the Steele dossier.

The Steele memos, which Mother Jones first reported on a week before Election Day, were compiled during the campaign by a former British intelligence officer named Christopher David Steele, who was hired by a Washington, DC, research firm retained to unearth information on Trump. The documents contained troubling allegations about Trump and his connections to Russia and relayed unverified salacious information about the candidate. The first memo, dated June 20 and based on the former intelligence officer’s conversations with Russian sources, stated, “Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years. Aim, endorsed by PUTIN, has been to encourage splits and divisions in western alliance.” It asserted that Russian intelligence had “compromised” Trump during his visits to Moscow and could “blackmail him.”

Steele made the memos available to the FBI during the campaign, and the bureau investigated some of the information they contained.

The memos made headlines after the election, when CNN reported that Trump, as president-elect, and President Barack Obama had been told about their contents during briefings on the intelligence community’s assessment that Putin had mounted a covert operation during the campaign to hack Democratic targets and disseminate stolen emails in order to benefit Trump.

Trump and his supporters have denounced the Steele memos as unsubstantiated trash, with some Trump backers concocting various conspiracy theories about them. Indeed, key pieces of the information within the memos have been challenged. But the memos were meant to be working documents produced by Steele—full of investigative leads and tips to follow—not finished reports, vetted and confirmed.

One interesting element of the Donald Trump Jr. emails now in the news is that they track with parts of the Steele memos.

In that first memo, dated June 20, Steele wrote that Trump “and his inner circle have accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals.” The Trump Jr. email chain began on June 3, 2016. This was shortly after Trump had secured the Republican presidential nomination. It was that day that Rob Goldstone, a talent manager for a middling pop-star named Emin Agaralov, contacted Trump Jr. and said Emin’s father, Aras Agalarov, a Putin-friendly billionaire developer, had met with the “crown prosecutor of Russia,” who offered to provide the Trump campaign with negative information on Clinton. The Agalarovs and Goldstone had a close relationship to the Trumps, because they all had worked together in 2013 to bring the Miss Universe pageant, which Trump owned at the time, to Moscow. (Part of the deal was that Emin would get to perform two songs.) Following that event, both Trumps worked with both Agalarovs to develop a major project in Moscow. (It never happened.)

Let’s turn to Steele’s June 20 memo. It stated:

Source A confided that the Kremlin had been feeding TRUMP and his team valuable intelligence on his opponents, including Democratic presidential candidate Hillary CLINTON, for several years…This was confirmed by Source D, a close associate of TRUMP who had organized and managed his recent trips to Moscow, and who reported, also in June 2016, that this Russian intelligence had been “very helpful”.

The memo also reported that there was anti-Clinton information that Putin was sitting on:

A dossier of compromising material on Hillary CLINTON has been collated by the Russian intelligence services over many years and mainly comprises bugged conversations she had on various visits to Russia and intercepted phone calls rather than any embarrassing conduct. The dossier is controlled by Kremlin spokesman, PESKOV, directly on PUTIN’s orders. However it has not as yet been distributed abroad, including to TRUMP. Russian intentions for its deployment still unclear.

There has been no confirmation that Putin steadily fed information to Trump’s camp or that a Kremlin-controlled anti-Clinton dossier existed. But one of Steele’s overarching points in this memo was that Putin’s regime was funneling derogatory Clinton material to Trump. The Trump Jr. emails suggest that the Russian government was aiming to do that and that the Trump campaign was willing and eager to receive assistance from Putin. So Donald Trump Jr. has done what Steele could not: produce evidence that the Trump campaign was—or wanted to be—in cahoots with a foreign adversary to win the White House.

The latest revelations in the ongoing Trump-Russia saga confirm what most sentient beings have long understood: that there is more than an adequate basis for investigations into the relationships between important figures in the Trump presidential campaign and the shady underworld of people tied (tightly or loosely) to Russian business and government.

Reactions to the latest news follow the established patterns. Diehard Trump supporters are doubling down on denial, entrenching themselves in conspiracy thinking and otherwise constructing an alternate reality. Trump’s most embittered Democratic foes are counting the days until impeachment, and constructing fanciful scenarios that include Vice President Pence’s resignation after the 2018 midterms put the Democrats back in charge of the House, so that as Trump is forced out, Nancy Pelosi becomes President of the United States.

Meanwhile the press hunt for smoking guns and Pulitzer scoops continues, and much of the country’s available bandwidth continues to be consumed by the scandal.

At Via Meadia, we are disappointed but not surprised by the whole sorry spectacle. On the one hand, it is good news that, despite the overwrought fears of the anti-Trump zealots, the American Constitution and our basic institutions continue to work. President Trump can neither block the investigations or silence the press. We continue to live in a republic of laws.

But otherwise, the scandal is a disaster and whatever the implications legal and otherwise for the Trump campaign and its key operatives, it emphasizes America’s divisions without overcoming them. And it distracts the news media and the intelligent public opinion on which this country ultimately depends from underlying problems that grow more urgent. For both the Left and the Right, the ever-Trumpers and the never-Trumpers, the scandal is a bright shiny object that distracts. Our national house is on fire, and we are all focused on a particularly challenging level of a hot new video game.

The national disaster that the 24/7 scandal frenzy distracts us from isn’t that President Trump may have colluded with the Russians. It is that our national life is in such a state that tens of millions of voters voted for Trump in the spirit of lobbing a grenade into the national establishment. President Trump has his die hard supporters, those who think he is a genius or that he is being guided by God to deliver America, but that group was not large enough to give him the Republican nomination, much less put him in the White House. The critical mass of support for Trump came from those who saw many of the defects which energize his opponents—but who nevertheless believed that this man, with all his flaws, was a better choice than any of the slick nonentities and earnest wonks who would labor to maintain the status quo.

Too many Democrats think that the Trump scandals, pushed to their logical conclusion, will bring an end to troubles that have seen the party sink to its lowest national ebb since the 1920s. By personalizing the problem, by thinking of Trump as a uniquely unscrupulous, uniquely insightful, but also uniquely incompetent demagogue, Democrats construct a reality for themselves in which his impeachment, or at least his humiliation, will leave upper middle class technocrats back securely in control of the regulatory state, the haute educational establishment and the media that really count. The rebels, abashed at the demonstrated unfitness of their leader, will disperse, the districts will demobilize, the Hunger Games will relaunch, and life in the Capital will go on as before.

Perhaps unfortunately, life is not that simple. The problem the Democrats face has never been the Republican Establishment, the Tea Party, or the Trump insurgency. The Republican disarray of 2017 is nothing new; Republicans do not know how to fix health care or to solve the fiscal problems of local and state governments without raising taxes or cutting services anymore than Democrats do. What drives Republican success isn’t public confidence in Republican policy ideas, but a public belief that given a choice between a party committed to the status quo and a party open at least to reforming it, dumb reformers are a better choice than clever custodians of the status quo.