Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/09/12/former-fbi-deputy-director-and.html
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Impeach this president and the attorney general if possible. ENOUGH!
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Is the objective virtue signaling or is it to remove them from office (singly or jointly?)
The first is certainly good in its own right, but uncertain from a consequential standpoint.
The latter is simply not happening.
This is great news. If lack of candor is cause for indictment, the entire Trump administration is being carted out in full Hannibal Lecter gear as we type, right?
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I’m about to use a very bad word,
A word I never use unless I feel that
I have to to get my point across…
…dump trump, dump trump, dump trump!
Also, I’m with Lawrence Tribe, he must be impeached.
Politics has nothing to do with it.
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Failing to impeach the President sends a message as well: that the President will never, ever be held accountable for his actions by the one body that has the authority to do so.
We would do well not to underestimate the real-world consequences of such a message—not just in terms of what it means for this Administration, but for future ones as well (assuming the Republic even survives that long).
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This is why Trump is a [Samuel L Jackson’s favorite word] idiot.
All McCabe wanted to do was sit down and shut up until his retirement, then quietly exit, stage left. He’s a man who knows where a TON of bodies are buried; what he knows legally and what he knows but can’t prove is huge. Letting him have his retirement and sending a couple of guys around to let him know the score - that his silence would enable his retirement payments to proceed normally - that would have been smart. Bribing him with his own money.
Instead, like a junkie shooting up for the present with no regards for the future, Trump took away the pension; I hope he enjoyed it… because it’s about to be time to pay for it. Do you really think that looking at prison time and not getting his pension he’s going to keep his mouth shut? Or do you think he’s gonna squeal like a canary?
And that’s the big problem with Trump. He is an impulsive, non-calculating, blundering fool who not only isn’t playing two moves ahead, he’s playing four moves behind, trying moving pieces that are already on his opponent’s victory row. It’s not that he’s evil… it’s that he’s a clueless n00b.
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… and evil.
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I wager the DOJ drops the charges when it looks like he’s going to squeal. If it’s really bad, he’ll get his pension back.
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I quite agree. But if e.g. there was a serious prospect that impeach with no hope of removal would have not only that consequence but also seriously increase the risk of Trump’s reelection? Or that of a few Republican senators?
Easy for me sitting here to make a decision. I seriously hope that Pelosi and the others who are facing it for lives on the line aren’t making it lightly.
ETA: I recently had a chance to bring this up with my Representative and told her the same thing: essentially that I’d hired her to make that kind of decision from the field, not the stands.
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I don’t think so (Clinton’s approval rating didn’t exactly skyrocket after his impeachment) but I also don’t think that’s the right question to ask.
Impeachment isn’t supposed to be a tool for installing a President we like better, it’s supposed to be a means of holding the President accountable for their actions.
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Also agreed. The question is whether in the current circumstances it would serve that purpose. I’m not in any position to make that call.
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Isn’t “Lack of Candor” a polite way of saying “lying”? I thought lying to federal agents was a crime. So without seeing what the formal charges are, I don’t really have an issue with it. Yet, anyway, since I’m sure they’ll do something horrible anyway.
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Since it’s already a partisan political issue, it’s a bit late for that.
But let’s assume for the moment that, as a scene out of a heroic novel or play, Our Heroes in the House decide that there is no price too high to pay for the principle involved.
Really? Are you prepared to write off your own life, those of all of your family, all of your acquaintences, maybe a few hundred thousand others? Washington hardball isn’t Joe Biden’s game of fast pitch followed by beers together in the clubhouse. That “hundred thousand lives” is a fraction of the cost of a bad call in Washington 15 years ago. It’s also in the ballpark for John Roberts’ decision to hand the Medicaid expansion to Republican politicians in Red States – who, like the North Carolina legislature yesterday showed their own priorities by voting to override the veto of defunding the expansion in NC despite the fact that it would actually increase State spending and cost lives in NC.
Fortunately you and I aren’t making that call. But never forget, those are the real-life stakes.
I remember Vietnam. I lost classmates in Vietnam, and only the luck of the draw kept me from being in that hellhole. Currently, as a matter of policy preference, we are choosing to throw more lives than the USA lost in that war away every couple of years, and they aren’t soldiers. They’re children and other civilians. Give Republicans another four years in control of the Senate and White House and your demonstration of the importance of the rule of law will be at best a footnote in history when we have a 7-2 Federalist Society Supreme Court and similar proportions throughout the judiciary, along with a total green light to go full-throated with vote suppression, outright disenfranchisement, North Carolina style gerrymandering, and whatever else may be cooked up. Which, if it wasn’t already clear, would mean a nearly perfect right-wing lock on the Senate as well.
The Rule of Law is cold comfort when you have lost any effective say on the law.
“Lack of Candor” is when they can’t support a charge of lying. In this case, IIRC, they’re stretching his keeping his mouth shut except as required to pretend that he lied. McCabe is a lawyer, he’s intimately familiar with the law WRT Federal law enforcement, and far from stupid. You figure out why they are putting it that way.
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Arguably, if Clinton didn’t spend so much time being impeached, then there would have been a President Gore. Non-impeachment also risks the future you don’t want to see happen.
If Trump was in the middle of impeachment proceedings right now, it might energize some of his base, but it would also make him look like vulnerable in the way that it re-wrote Clinton.
Right now Trump looks like a mafia boss, but one that’s ordering people, not one that’s beholden to the Constitution and Congress in any big way.
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Yup. Tough call, isn’t it?
Is a world where a guy like that commits crime after crime and is never held accountable due to political expediency one in which you want to live?
Not I kind sir, madam or…
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No, it’s about congresses doing their job. The house impeaches and the senate convicts. If the senate doesn’t want to convict that’s their business.
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