I know it seems like the crazy horror show of this administration has gone on forever, but it has been less than a month. I think that the republican establishment will wait for the upcoming recession to hurt Trump’s popularity with his base. Many of them are free-marketers rather than dedicated social warriors, but they know that the NEED the guns and god crowd to stay in power. So they’ll bide their time until Trump loses popularity. They don’t like Trump, but they don’t want to split their party in two, which is a real risk at this point.
Not directly, but when it puts only one party in power at the state and federal level it affects things like voter identification laws, where polling places are plentiful or scarce, and a general sense of “why vote since my vote doesn’t matter?”.
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did you see @nungesser above?
He’s going Hillary.
Thats up there with Hasselhoff and his cheeseburgers, in my book. Sad.
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But remember, that’s all “fake news”, the stuff that Boingers read but real Americans know is to be ridiculed and ignored.
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I think the split will come anyway. There must be some wondering about impeaching him quickly to give them as long as possible to repair the damage as best they can before the mid-terms, surely? Probably not helpful that Mike Pence is hardly popular either, and if they dumped him too, Paul Ryan isn’t either.
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Don’t get me wrong, I hope something concrete turns up to impeach him but at the moment it’s just wishful thinking. A few rumors and his advisor resigning isn’t enough.
What now?[quote=“wrecksdart, post:96, topic:95107”]
nd the American public are actually listening this time.
[/quote]
too little, too late
True … but responsible citizen - educated voter yada, yada
Voting: A Right and a Responsibility
…
Voting is a fundamental right and responsibility of U.S. citizens — the right to have a say in how they are governed and the responsibility to be informed about candidates and issues when they go to the polls.
True not only for the US but for every voter in every democracy.
To you?
It wasn’t released to you, more or less, for the same reason Flynn wasn’t supposed to be talking about sanctions with russian intelligence. Because neither are public knowledge, for security reasons.
Are you inviting a double standard there? I submit for your consideration that you appear to be.
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Good thing for Trump he has surrounded himself with professionals and has no other scandals weighing him down.
It’s been the most impressive first three weeks of any administration I’ve ever seen, but don’t take my word for it, ask the professional government employees how it’s going.
/s
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Exactly. And as I described above, the U.S. is not alone in allowing right-wing populists a foot (or more) in the door. For me, it’s less surprising that the low-info American electorate would vote for this grifter than it is that the more educated European electorate would vote in significant numbers for garbage parties like UKIP, Front Nationale and AfD.
I don’t know if even that’s precise enough, given how messed-up the Electoral College system is.
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How about “enough of the US population voted for a moron to elect him.”
Poor phrasing by me. Some “links” were known, but were well overshadowed by any number of other things, not least of which was the GOP’s insistence that everything is perfectly fine. People hardly knew who Viktor Yanukovych was or what he might have to do with Manafort. HRC’s emails swallowed up all the oxygen in the metaphorical room–even her mentioning trump’s RF links in the debate was talked away as though it’s all false and Obama’s the real racist here, don’t you know it.
It all fits with trump’s mealy mouth wording of everything. He says things that make no sense whatsoever, so determining his exact meaning is impossible by design.
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That word has now been said enough times that I’m thinking about fudge. Damn it.
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Yes, by all means, have an investigation by congress. I was never suggesting there shouldn’t be.
In the meantime people can waver between speculation of trading BBQ recipes, to pussy grabbing tips, to planning out WWIII.
Well part of it is now public knowledge. It doesn’t have to be the exact transcripts, how about a summary? Why do I deserve to known there is an issue, but not the scope of the issue?
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I think what we’ll see is more and more damning leaks until congress decides to do something. They aren’t going to start off by handing out transcripts of phone calls, and they especially don’t want to verify the sources of those transcripts. They don’t want it to come to that. They don’t want to say, “This is what the president said to the large Russian bank and when he said it, here’s the tape.” If they did, Trump’s people would directly call it a lie and the CIA would be in a war with the president, which would be a hell of a crisis. They can’t oust the president, so they are applying pressure to Republicans in congress - if they don’t act, worse is coming.
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That’s what they did while we waited for the process over the Clinton email server, or Benghazi, or whatever went awry and got investigated. The investigation we have encourage first, and then wait for, if we want to, IN GOOD FAITH, compare fully investigated situations to uninvestigated ones.
For the same reason the russian intelligence contact didn’t deserve to know if there was a sanctions issue. Security Clearance.
And you do know the scope of the issue. There was confirmed contact repeatedly, and lies admitted to, and a firing/resignation in an unprecedented time frame of a key national security official (in an administration that touts its national security chops).
The scope of the issue 5 days after we heard about Clintons servers was nothing like this. Benghazi took months to catch this much attention.
The howls of outrage from the right, are indeed, what is most comparable on all these issues.
fyi, TRUMP BLAMED CLINTON FOR THIS. JUST THIS MORNING. (eta: in tweet and again in a press conference about Israel)
In summary, Flynn resigned, for cause. If you want to know more, the process takes a while. But there is already fire there. The clinton email thing was all smoke. Yes, both ‘scandals’ feature smoke. But friend, there is a fire here. That is the difference.
One was all talk about what might have happened, the other is currently talk about what definitley happened.
You seem to think the exact precise atomic nature of the conversations matter. That the subjects matter. They can. But also relevant, the metadata: the LEVEL of the contacts, and the FREQUENCY of contact and the DURATION of that relationship and the LIES told to obfuscate that. That’s your summary.
Yes, by all means, have an investigation by congress. I was never suggesting there shouldn’t be.
I do get that from what you have said.
It’s just a matter of having expectations today about what You, I , and the press should know,
That will take months to unravel, by congress, to be at the place to have the same sort of debate that was had about the previously investigated issues about Clinton, which didn’t lead to any high level firings/resignations.
The most apt comparison is 5 days after learning of burglaries at the the Watergate Hotel. Hell yeah, we want to know more. But that does not that mean that the american people should have all the information at a moments notice in all circumstances.
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Or as the nursery rhyme goes
Ride a cock loshad’1
To Krasnaya ploshchad’2
To see Orange President
Tweet loads of horseshad’
1 horse. Approximate pronunciation “loashit”
2 Red Square
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On the flip-side of that, the democrats kinda need trump to stick around too. The sooner he’s out, the more time for the electorate to forget about holding the GOP accountable for trump in the next election. Also, if trump goes, that takes a lot of the wind out of the sails of grass-roots organizers.
I think any strategy to keep trump around would be a huge mistake because the danger if it backfires is just too much. But I have to believe there are democrats who think otherwise and will try to make him last long enough for their goals. We won’t really know how many until trump does start losing his base and those democrats start backing off when they should be pushing for the coup de grace.
Not necessarily.
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It never ceases to amaze me that there are always folks willing to engage someone so brimming with gleeful malice at the very thought of the downfall of the US… but everyone’s gotta have a hobby I guess.
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