I’m not so sure about that. I think one of the lessons of the first half of the Trump presidency is that if they do something in public they won’t be held accountable. They’ve explicitly argued that if you do something publicly it can’t be obstruction of justice.
I fully expect next election Don Jr. will just tweet, “Going to get stolen files on [opponent] from Russian officials. This is going to be great!” an hour before the meeting.
And it’s absolutely the opposite of what the GOP did in a similar situation.
So is your takeaway from this article that the GOP is openly acknowledging that they intend to do crime? I mean, the actual “vows” dem politicians are making are against “knowingly weaponize or promote stolen hacked materials”. It’s not a crime to promote stolen hacked materials, or I would be in jail (along with the staff of the Washington Post).
I agree with you that politicians will do crimes, and I guess you’re right that sometimes they even do openly declare it. But I still think this story is about something other than the question of doing crime. There’s an effort here to shift the public norms around what kinds of information are considered legitimate in political discourse.
From that standpoint, I think we could find a lot of agreement in terms of what information sources should be questioned, treated with suspicion or even ridicule. For example, Fox News and Russian state propaganda should be treated with brutal skepticism because the content of their information is biased and false.
But I think excluding information from public debate simply based on the mechanism it was delivered to the public is amoral and technocratic.
“When they go low, we loose”
Under normal circumstances, yes, being the better person and going high is a good thing. But 40% of the country that votes and therefore matters are horrible, horrible people who WANT their elected officials to do horrible, horrible things.
I wish they would focus on winning and getting their stuff done instead of fighting a good, honorable, and doomed fight.
You’re still conflating people who risk their lives/freedom/livelihoods in order to expose corruption and gain nothing from it with people who steal information from an opponent in order to use it against them for gain.
The first is noble. The second is dispicable.
If you can’t deconvolve the difference, then I reiterate that you have problems. If you can’t see why a person or organization who knowingly uses stolen information for selfish purposes, I re-reiterate that you have problems.
That is the topic of the OP. One party has pledged not to use stolen information for gain. The other, after being caught seeking to do so multiple times, has said, “eh, can’t rule it out.”
My takeaway is that the GOP is openly acknowledging that they intend to reap every possible benefit from other people’s crimes and refuse to condemn any crimes that help their party, even when the crimes are committed by hostile foreign nations actively trying to influence our elections.
Yeah, pretty much. They intend to commit crimes and they don’t care that we know because the crimes they committed in the past don’t matter.
I agree that it’s better that information actually come out than that it not come out. The information problem with the last election was the withholding of information about the Trump campaign, not the sharing of information about the Clinton campaign (except for Comey’s last minute letter which was absurd). But I also think that Republicans have already openly made criminality into a partisan issue, and saying that people should be prosecuted for crimes they committed now strikes Republicans as a cheap political stunt. I also think that while a democratic president might not pardon Trump, a democratic DOJ is not going to prosecute him.
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