Good points. If Putin had a checklist he looked at daily to determine whether to release the incriminating information he has on Trumpski, it would be like:
_ Trumpski is working against American interests in foreign policy
_ Right and left in America are at each other’s throats in America
_ Racial tension is inflamed in America
Getting direct benefits out of it - like freeing up oligarch money - is just a laughable bonus.
(ahem)
“Trump has literally put himself in a position where no one in their right mind would contemplate negotiating with him.”
Exactly. McConnell was MIA during almost the entirety of the shutdown after Trump bailed on the Senate compromise. Thanks, President Limbaugh/Coulter.
Good point. Politicians often get credit or blame through no direct action of their own. Or even if they had some hand in it, other forces were the main catalyst. The economy is mainly what I am thinking of. You can point to specific policies having effects long term. But like the 2008 recession wasn’t Obama’s fault, and the economy is doing OK despite Trumps efforts (tariffs definitely hindering it, but his policies aren’t helping it.)
Everyone wants to think there’s some sort of bombshell waiting to be exposed. Myself included. It’s a natural urge, under the circumstances. It’s a desire for some kind of closure and sense-making. There’s the hope that getting it out will change minds, alter the course of history.
What if there is none?
What if the secrets used to manipulate Trump are lame, pathetic, fizzles, or fabrications, even? Petty corruption, workaday marital infidelity, etc.? What if Putin has falsely hinted that “Trump Tower Moscow” was possible, and that is all that has been required? What if there is a secret, but it’s never found, never released, never confirmed?
What if there is no secret at all? What if it’s just the bottomless cavity inside Trump, driving him relentlessly on a misguided quest for the approval of a strict-father archetype, no matter the cost to himself or anyone else?
The people who voted for Trump will have the chance to vote again and again. Without a bombshell that turns them against Trump forever, they’re likely to fall for the same gag again, and vote for authoritarian/racist populists with big mouths.
Maybe instead of hoping to learn the secret of the bombshell, we should be figuring out how we can ever correct our course in the absence of such a bombshell.
It’s nothing against Pelosi but this is something people need to realize. Hopefully some people will remember this moment just enough to realize that individually we don’t count for much, but together our labor is the only thing keeping the country together and creating an economy. There’s power in that.
And the next such such populist almost certainly won’t be such an idiot. Imagine if Trump were actually using the levers of power? Imagine if he told the CIA and FBI what information he wanted found out, instead of watching Fox News eight hours a day?
I think it’s completely possible that Trump actually is just this much of a spaniel humping Putin’s leg out of his own vanity and short-sightedness. I hope for something more concrete to surface so that it sticks to the bastard, but I definitely think there’s a good chance that we’re actually just looking at greed and incompetence that just so happens to favor Russia because of deeply corrupted thinking that has infected a political party. That groundwork was laid 40 years ago though. Trump may just be the boil that signifies that infection.
That was rather the point of this:
And the large number of people regularly making this argument
In all likely hood Russia doesn’t have anything on Trump. Or least not anything more significant than is already out there. Confirmation of contacts and campaign violations from 2016. Details of his sketchy money handling through the eastern block. Business connections.
Because Russia doesn’t need anything on Trump.
From the first particular chunks of the fringe right, including the alt right and the areas Trump comes from are already friendly to Russia. Even where there isn’t the wholesale hard on for Putin as a white superman saving Europe, and Russia as favored fascistic model to aspire to. These people agree with Putin. The EU, the UN, and NATO are bad. They have an antipathy to base civil rights, and believe that the ability to silence speech and disappear dissenters is good. They already believe in what Russia wants on a great many policy points.
And frankly Russia does not need to blackmail Trump to manipulate him. They’re already pretty adept at using RT, their connections to various right wing groups, and those bot armies to bootstrap particular narratives into right wing online spaces, and jump them up into the right wing media. If they want to stir some crazy with this guy all they’ve got to do is get Ann Coulter to call him a pussy, because he’s already locked into following that end of the right wing media like fucking marching orders.
There doesn’t need to be a pee tape. And the various ways that Trump’s administration has been confirmably compromised on the security front. Are more along the line of they lied, manipulated, and broke the law. And anyone who can prove that can use that to pressure them.
On the investigation front. There have already been daily bombshells. And they’re increasingly not limited to just Trump’s inner circle, a good lot of it stands a chance of spinning out into the broader GOP. So while there may never be a “silver bullet” that sends Trump himself to jail. There’s already more than enough out there to condemn the guy, and seriously damage his party if it gains purchase with the public. And its very clear that there is more and that it will come out.
It does not matter in the end if Russia has Tiffany Trump locked in a cage with a gun to her head. And is making hourly “do this or we shoot” calls. As the criminality in Trump’s operation is clear. A cover up of connections to Russia, even if they aren’t the comprimat kind is still illegal. And if we discover tomorrow that the white house kitchen has been killing orphans and feeding them il Douche on a daily basis, at his request. Its not as if that can’t be prosecuted, or used for impeachment. Just because it doesn’t involve Russia.
Right, so the Speaker of the House who has been battling Trump and strategizing against him this whole time and holding out, did “nothing”
What a pathetically simple-minded and ignorant analysis, obviously by someone butt-hurt that Nancy Pelosi isn’t sufficiently “woke” for her tastes.
i think she held the line, and she helped the rest of the democrats do the same.
the best that can be said of the establishment democrats is that at least ( as compared to republicans ) they hold the space for people to the grassroots work necessary to actually move things forward.
in this case, i actually wonder if 45 caved in order to bring the attention back from roger stone. both as a distraction from that news, and because covfefe hates not being in the spotlight.
I don’t know if that’s the case. It seems to me that the establishment regularly scuttle more progressive grassroots initiative far more than the GOP does. The GOP has certainly shifted to the right since the rise of the Moral Majority, while the democratic party has shifted right in an attempt to capture those voters.
Then again, Pelosi did indeed give AOC a great committee position. Let’s hope they are going to start listening to the progressives in the party.
I wouldn’t be surprised at all!
hear! hear!
i think they might finally be getting the message ( re: aoc, clinton’s loss, sanders continuing popularity, … ) time will tell.
i guess my take is that with republicans we’re constantly relitigating old battles: women’s healthcare, tax law, environmental issues, lgbtq issues, and on - at least with the democrats we’re fighting forward.
yeah. and much to everyone’s detriment 
“She did nothing” is equal to “Obama did it”…
I would argue that labour solidarity ended the shutdown, but that Pelosi did something other than nothing: she held a firm line on “no”, whereas we know many of her fellow party members would have been open to giving Donny some of what he wanted in exchange for promises he’d just break.
She was facing a lot of pressure to cut a deal, or show willingness to compromise, and she didn’t.
At the same time, you know corporate America was blowing up phones when nobody could get to “important business meetings” and big doners doing the same when they couldn’t have their creature comforts. Imagine what more widespread disruption would cause. This was what? A couple of airports at the tipping point? If he does shut things down again, “bigger, better and faster” might be a good motto for labour to adopt.
I guess one could say “she had the will to do nothing when nothing was exactly the right thing to do.” And Trump walked away with exactly nothing as a result.
She probably didn’t even write the State of the Union Speech invitations. They have secretaries do that stuff. My brother’s friend used to do it for Senator Kassebaum.
“#TrumpCaved #pornhubmemes #pornhub #lol”
Yes kids now there’s “Wall Porn”
Via The Hill
“Conservative CNN host S.E. Cupp on Saturday called out President Trump for seeming to govern for a “wall porn crowd” in his quest to construct a barrier along the U.S.-Mexico border.”
“I consider myself a border hawk. I want strong borders. I think we need to make illegal immigration harder and legal immigration a little easier,” Cupp said on CNN’s “S.E. Cupp Unfiltered.”
"But there’s what I call a wall porn crowd, people like Ann Coulter and Rep.Steve King (R-Iowa) who almost seem to have a sexual fetish for a cement wall."
