The Impeachment of President Donald J Trump

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Re: The Impeachment of President Donald J Trump

Postby slomo » Tue Dec 20, 2016 10:50 pm

Faithless electors didn't work, so now let's try impeachment.

It's the democratic equivalent of what I always tell my students: if the data from your study don't show what you want, keep torturing the numbers until p < 0.05.
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Re: The Impeachment of President Donald J Trump

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Dec 20, 2016 10:54 pm

I've had impeachment on the table since I started this thread Nov. 13

and this isn't a little study
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Impeachment of President Donald J Trump

Postby norton ash » Tue Dec 20, 2016 10:58 pm

The faithless voters were never likely. Trump could be impeached for many, many reasons.
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Re: The Impeachment of President Donald J Trump

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Dec 20, 2016 11:02 pm

this is a headline today in case anyone missed it

Trump National Security Adviser Met With Leader Of Party Founded By Nazis

that would be General Yellowcake Flynn
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Impeachment of President Donald J Trump

Postby kool maudit » Wed Dec 21, 2016 4:52 am

The probable cause thing over the FBI warrant is the next gambit. There are a lot of gambits. Clinton voters are in a sort of mass state of psychological distress.
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Re: The Impeachment of President Donald J Trump

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Dec 21, 2016 9:03 am

you have not seen anything yet...the whole country/world is going to be in a state of psychological distress and worse after Trump gets sworn in

there was no probable cause btw

are you giving Trumps kids a million dollars to party with the family?


from Esquire
Trump's Sons Might Be the Ones to Sink Him
Image
Plus, his national security advisor met with an Austrian far-right leader.

BY CHARLES P. PIERCE
DEC 20, 2016

The Center For Public Integrity, which is probably hiring at a frenzied pace at the moment, would like you all to sing along.

Gimme the beat, boys, and free my soul/I want to get lost in your rock and roll/And grift away.

Prospective million-dollar donors to the "Opening Day 2017" event — slated for Jan. 21, the day after inauguration, at Washington, D.C.'s Walter E. Washington Convention Center — receive a "private reception and photo opportunity for 16 guests with President Donald J. Trump," a "multi-day hunting and/or fishing excursion for 4 guests with Donald Trump, Jr. and/or Eric Trump, and team," as well as tickets to other events and "autographed guitars by an Opening Day 2017 performer."
I'm starting to get the feeling that the spalpeens are going to be the ones who get El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago's keister in a crack for him. They are young and energetic versions of Himself, and their desire to hoover up every last dime from the opportunity that fate and the Electoral College has dumped in their laps appears to be bottomless. Ivanka's going to be OK, I think, but the B'wana Twins would sell the Oval Office for parts and use the money to shoot up the National Zoo.

The brochure for "Opening Day 2017," an event described as "honoring President Donald J. Trump," offers sponsor packages ranging from $25,000 to $1 million. The event will "celebrate the great American tradition of outdoor sporting, shooting, fishing and conservation," the brochure states. Mike Ingram, an Arizona developer who is listed as one of the co-chairmen, said Beach approached him to help. "I'm honored to do it," he said. "It's not going to be a black tie event. It's going to be boots and jeans and camouflage and it's going to raise a lot of money to go to sportsman's charities" and conservation charities, he said.
For a mere quarter-mil, you can butch it up with some of the luckiest members of the Lucky Sperm Club. Break out the Zegna camo and sing it for us one more time.

Meanwhile, the basic ideological framework of the latest hirelings down at Camp Runamuck is becoming clearer almost by the day. For example, just this week, we learned that two of the new members of the staff have some interesting friends. It seems that the National Security Advisor is connected to European neo-Nazis, while the new budget director is a hot ticket among largely forgotten domestic wingnut organizations.

First, the latest on Michael Flynn, courtesy of Foreign Policy.

Heinz-Christian Strache, Freedom Party leader, and Norbert Hofer, the candidate who narrowly lost Austria's presidential election earlier this month, signed a "working agreement" on Monday with Russian President Vladimir Putin's United Russia Party, according to a statement from the Freedom Party. The statement also said Strache visited New York last month to meet with U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's nominated national security advisor, Michael Flynn. Trump team did not immediately respond to Foreign Policy's request for comment.
At the risk of being called a neo-McCarthyite, may I point out that this smacks an awful lot of the incoming administration's involvement in a worldwide right-wing movement at the center of which is our good friend Vladimir Putin. But, I guess I shouldn't be concerned because the Obama White House decided it wouldn't be, how you say, cricket to mention this whole thing to the voters before the election. The dumbassery of that move is going to echo for decades.

While General Nuisance there was networking among the jackboots-and-Armani crowd overseas, back in July, Mick Mulvaney, the president-elect's choice to help him manage the federal budget, climbed into the Wayback Machine and set the dials for 1952. Mother Jones found him there.

His July speech, flagged by the Democratic opposition research group American Bridge, was billed as an address on "the Federal Reserve's role in bailing out Europe." According to its website, the John Birch Society believes that the Federal Reserve is unconstitutional and should be abolished and that "the only constitutional money is gold and silver coin." After South Carolina Democrats criticized Mulvaney for appearing before the group, he defended the decision, saying, "I regularly speak to groups across the political spectrum because my constituents deserve access to their congressman. I can't remember ever turning down an opportunity to speak to a group based on the group's political ideology."
The JBS revived itself in recent years through gulling the rubes on subjects like the Fed and Agenda 21, the secret UN plan to steal all our golfs. To those of us of a certain age, however, they always will be the folks who thought Ike was a comsymp, and the people behind None Dare Call It Treason, which I read all the way through on a rainy afternoon while I was in high school and which kicked off my irresistible sweet-tooth for rightwing nutballishness. (And John Stormer is still alive? Who knew?) It's nice to know all those years of study haven't been wasted. This administration is turning into the grease trap of American political history.
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/po ... ight-wing/


from The Hill

FBI director under pressure to explain Clinton bombshell
BY KATIE BO WILLIAMS - 12/21/16 06:00 AM EST 1,760


FBI director under pressure to explain Clinton bombshell

Six weeks since Hillary Clinton’s surprise loss in the presidential election, FBI Director James Comey is under pressure to justify the bombshell announcement that rocked the final days of the campaign.

Democrats, still smarting from the Nov. 8 loss, have lashed out at Comey as the architect of Clinton’s defeat.

“James Comey cost her the election," former president Bill Clinton has said.

Outgoing Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has accused the once-unassailable director of being a “Republican operative” who helped Donald Trump win the White House.
Now, speculation has begun to swirl that Comey will publicly address the charges of partisanship.

Several former FBI officials told The Hill they had heard Comey is now weighing a possible press appearance after Trump is inaugurated on Jan. 20 to tell his side of the story.

The FBI declined to comment for this report.

Eleven days before the election, Comey shocked the political world with a letter informing Congress that investigators had discovered new emails that could be relevant to its probe, then considered completed, of Clinton’s private email server while she was secretary of State.

Comey for months passionately defended the integrity of the probe — first against Republicans when he declined to recommend charges against Clinton in the first place, and more recently against Democrats and internal critics who said that his eleventh-hour disclosure unfairly damaged Clinton.

The 6-foot-8 former prosecutor has made very few media appearances over the course of his career — he did sit for a “60 Minutes” interview in 2014 — but he has been forced into the harsh glare of camera lights throughout the past year.

He was thrust into the spotlight after Attorney General Loretta Lynch sparked outrage by meeting with Bill Clinton before the conclusion of the investigation this summer — a meeting they described as social — forcing her to announce that she would abide by whatever recommendation Comey made in the case.

Comey was then extraordinarily public with the FBI’s reasoning in declining to recommend charges against Clinton, holding a detailed press conference announcing its conclusions and later appearing before Congress in an open setting multiple times.

But he has been notably silent since his Oct. 28 letter to Congress.

Democrats, appalled by the fallout from his letter to Congress, have argued that Comey’s unprecedented disclosure in the final days leading up to the election was a massive break from bureau policy that blunted Clinton’s path to the White House. They say that although the FBI announced two days before the election that the new emails would not change its conclusions in Clinton’s case, the damage was done.

Critics hammered Comey’s vague letter for igniting a firestorm of speculation that the new emails contained a “smoking gun” — without providing any substantive information for voters to judge.

“Today's disclosure might be worst abuse yet. DOJ goes out of its way to avoid publicly discussing investigations close to election," former Justice Department spokesman Matthew Miller said in a Twitter storm at the time. “This might be totally benign & not even involve Clinton. But no way for press or voters to know that. Easy for opponent to make hay over.”

Trump did in fact run with Comey's announcement on the campaign trail, repeatedly telling supporters that the emails must contain something truly damning.

"I have a feeling those emails are going to be— whoa, there are going to be some beauties in there. Can you imagine? She's been deleting all the time, deleting," he said at a Florida rally shortly after the announcement.

Clinton herself has since told donors that she believes Comey’s disclosure, “raising doubts that were groundless, baseless, proven to be, stopped our momentum.”

It’s unclear how much of an effect the last-minute news had at the ballot box, but Trump’s narrow win in a number of battleground states and Clinton’s lead in the popular vote tally are giving fuel to those who say her loss could have been avoided.

One of Trump’s pollsters, veteran political strategist Tony Fabrizio, said just five counties made the difference: four in Florida and one in Michigan.

And post-election analysis from data guru Nate Silver and others has suggested that some voters shifted to Trump in the final weeks of the election, though he notes that the analysis is not cause-and-effect.

Comey himself was aware of the risks associated with the late October missive. In an internal memo to FBI employees, he acknowledged that “there is significant risk of being misunderstood.”

"We don't ordinarily tell Congress about ongoing investigations, but here I feel an obligation to do so given that I testified repeatedly in recent months that our investigation was completed," Comey wrote. "I also think it would be misleading to the American people were we not to supplement the record.”

Comey has a reputation as a fiercely independent and principled lawman — which some critics say has led him to operate outside of important institutional norms.

Others say Comey had no choice but to inform Congress of the existence of the emails — when he chose to go public with the details of the investigation’s findings over the summer, he pinned himself in a corner when the bureau realized it might have more work to do.

But throughout, Comey has been strident in his defense of probe.

“You can call us wrong, but don’t call us weasels. We are not weasels,” Comey declared during a House Judiciary Committee hearing during which Republicans suggested he had caved to political pressure from above.

“We are honest people and … whether or not you agree with the result, this was done the way you want it to be done.”

Pressure to speak out is mounting as more details have emerged about the circumstances surrounding the discovery of the new emails.

The search warrant used to go through the emails, unsealed Tuesday, confirmed that Comey delivered his letter to Congress two days before the warrant was granted — meaning that investigators didn’t yet know what was in them.

Investigators found emails they thought might be pertinent when they sorted and scanned the header information of messages stored on a laptop seized as part of its investigation of disgraced former Rep. Anthony Weiner.

The former New York congressman was under investigation for allegedly sending sexually explicit messages to a minor. Weiner is married to longtime Clinton aide Huma Abedin, though the two are separated.

Some of the accounts used on the seized computer correlated with those used by Clinton and her aides during her tenure at Foggy Bottom — accounts that investigators had previously concluded had been used inappropriately, the newly released documents show.

The FBI told a federal judge that it believed that was sufficient to show there was probable cause that the computer contained classified information pertinent to the Clinton probe.
http://thehill.com/policy/national-secu ... n-campaign
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Impeachment of President Donald J Trump

Postby kool maudit » Wed Dec 21, 2016 9:47 am

seemslikeadream » Wed Dec 21, 2016 8:03 am wrote:you have not seen anything yet...the whole country/world is going to be in a state of psychological distress and worse after Trump gets sworn in

there was no probable cause btw





Oh, I know! And the next thing that means he somehow can't be president will be true, and the next thing that means that effort is untenable will be false, and the next thing where he did a terrible thing will be true, and the next thing where his opponents are shown to be corrupted will be false, and so on and so on and so tiresomely on.
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Re: The Impeachment of President Donald J Trump

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Dec 21, 2016 10:18 am

kool maudit » Wed Dec 21, 2016 8:47 am wrote:
seemslikeadream » Wed Dec 21, 2016 8:03 am wrote:you have not seen anything yet...the whole country/world is going to be in a state of psychological distress and worse after Trump gets sworn in

there was no probable cause btw





Oh, I know! And the next thing that means he somehow can't be president will be true, and the next thing that means that effort is untenable will be false, and the next thing where he did a terrible thing will be true, and the next thing where his opponents are shown to be corrupted will be false, and so on and so on and so tiresomely on.


from Aljazeera
Donald Trump's cabinet bodes ill for the planet
The president-elect's appointments make it clear that we cannot rely on the government to protect the planet.

Image
A worker inspects crude oil resulting from mining processes at a well in Bojonegoro, Indonesia. The field is mined jointly by the state oil company Pertamina and a subsidiary of ExxonMobil [Getty]A worker inspects crude oil resulting from mining processes at a well in Bojonegoro, Indonesia. The field is mined jointly by the state oil company Pertamina and a subsidiary of ExxonMobil [Getty]
byLauren Carasik

Lauren Carasik is the Director of the International Human Rights Clinic at Western New England University School of Law.

President-elect Donald Trump's cabinet is shaping up as a nightmare for environmentalists and others committed to bold action on climate change. Trump tapped Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil, the biggest publicly trading oil company in the world, as secretary of state, where he would head the agency in charge of negotiating international climate agreements.

His selection rounds out a cabinet filled with climate sceptics, and signals a resurgence of oil and gas power inside the Beltway that is poised to dictate foreign policy while ignoring the staggering social costs of carbon.

Trump recently reaffirmed his hostility to climate protections, vowing again to "cancel the restrictions on the production of American energy including shale, oil, natural gas and clean, beautiful coal".

Kathy Mulvey, the climate accountability campaign manager at the Union of Concerned Scientists, denounced the choice. "[T]here's a real concern that President-elect Trump is creating a government of, by, and for the oil and gas industry," Mulvey said. "The analogy of the nomination of Rex Tillerson for secretary of state would be akin to nominating a tobacco CEO as surgeon general," she added.

Scott Pruitt and Rick Perry, selected to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Energy (DOE) respectively, are avowed climate sceptics.

Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general and loyal friend to the oil and gas industries, is set to take the helm of an agency whose legacy he appears determined to dismantle. Touting himself as a leading opponent of the EPA's "activist agenda", Pruitt helped spearhead state-led opposition to the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan, which is key to meeting the country's commitments under the Paris climate agreement.

Pruitt wrote in the National Review that "scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind".

Moreover, former Texas governor Rick Perry will head the DOE, an agency he once vowed to abolish, after committing the memorable faux pas of forgetting its name in a presidential debate.

Perry, who hails from a state with a powerful energy sector, sits on the board of Energy Transfer Partners, developer of the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline. Both are expected to advance Trump's anti-regulatory, pro-extraction agenda.

Fox guarding the henhouse?

Tillerson is cast as a pragmatic, experienced businessman who possesses a skillset seamlessly transferrable to statecraft. Yet, the oil magnate's globetrotting has been in service of corporate profit, not advancing the public good.

The elevation of an oil baron as the nation's top diplomat lays bare Trump's priorities. As Steve Coll observes in The New Yorker, "American power is best understood as a raw, neocolonial exercise in securing resources." Tillerson's ties with Vladimir Putin, and by extension with Russia's energy industry, have caused consternation, and he has promoted the company's interests abroad despite the significant human costs of doing so. Activists are alarmed by Tillerson's presumed loyalties and his company's conduct on climate change.

Tillerson's relative moderation cannot mask the irony that one of the cabinet nominees with the least extreme position on climate made his fortune by extracting carbon fuels.


ExxonMobil has come under fire for covering up what its scientists have long known about the dangers posed by carbon emissions. Separate reports by the Los Angeles Times and InsideClimate News last year prompted the attorneys general of Massachusetts and New York to investigate whether ExxonMobil committed consumer or securities fraud by failing to disclose to its shareholders what it knew about climate change.

The company claims it has not suppressed evidence of climate change, and Tillerson conceded it was real shortly after he ascended to the company's top position in 2006.

But the oil giant is aggressively fighting the investigation into its conduct, calling the effort politically motivated and even suing the attorney generals for violating the company's free speech and other constitutional rights.

Others have joined the effort to hold the oil giant to account. On December 14, the Pace Environmental Law Clinic filed a petition on behalf of the Waterkeeper Alliance to suspend ExxonMobil from contracts with the government, citing its "pervasive pattern of deceptive and damaging conduct related to environmental issues generally and climate change issues in particular".

Dispirited activists derive some small satisfaction from the fact that Tillerson may have to testify in confirmation hearings about what Exxon knew and when, potentially circumventing the company's obstructionism.

Tillerson espouses faith in technological advances and adaptation to remediate deleterious climate effects, and promotes the continued use of fossil fuels as a bridge to more sustainable resources. In so doing, he avoids the urgency of immediate action to curb emissions by deferring to the forces of the free market to fix the problem.

The company also justifies cheap energy as the key to alleviating poverty. Yet some anti-poverty institutions have a different view, including the World Bank, which concluded that "avoiding climate risks is the route to sustainable development".

ExxonMobil endorses the Paris climate agreement, along with a carbon tax, yet it continues to support institutions and politicians that oppose both.

It already begun

The chasm between words and deeds highlights the fact that it derives much of its income from the continued extraction of fossil fuels despite the imperative of keeping most of those resources in the ground.

Trump's transition team raised yet more alarm bells when it sent a questionnaire to the DOE asking for the names of people who had worked on initiatives to curb greenhouse emissions. An unbowed DOE refused to comply. After ensuing outrage, the Trump team claimed the questionnaire was unauthorised, but the chilling effect is clear.

The Washington Post reported that concerned scientists "have begun a feverish attempt to copy reams of government data onto independent servers in hopes of safeguarding it from any political interference".

Tillerson's relative moderation cannot mask the irony that one of the cabinet nominees with the least extreme position on climate made his fortune by extracting carbon fuels.

Trump's appointments make it clear that we cannot rely on the government to protect the planet: that stewardship will be up to civil society.

Lauren Carasik is a clinical professor of law and the Director of the International Human Rights Clinic at Western New England University School of Law. She has provided legal support for the water protectors.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinio ... 38604.html
Last edited by seemslikeadream on Wed Dec 21, 2016 10:20 am, edited 1 time in total.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Impeachment of President Donald J Trump

Postby Searcher08 » Wed Dec 21, 2016 10:18 am

slomo » Wed Dec 21, 2016 2:50 am wrote:Faithless electors didn't work, so now let's try impeachment.

It's the democratic equivalent of what I always tell my students: if the data from your study don't show what you want, keep torturing the numbers until p < 0.05.


:))) Thank you for that.

@kool
I have a relative staying for the holidays, who would be a model for an SJW Cringe video segment.

They literally think that
Trump is worse than Hitler,
that modern civilization is already ending,
that ovens are being prepared,
that there is going to be WW3 starting during the inauguration.

Their 'fact base' is MSM talking points;
absolutely NO interest in ANYTHING re Clintons as"it doesnt matter cos he is going to kill the world", NO interest in Podesta, Wikileaks etc

Any attempt at engaging with very mild curiosity(*) is perceived as starting an attack, any variance of communication other than echolalia lands as upsetting, with an added 1-up patronising flavour - a bit like "Your lack of sending approved messages only is... problematic".

This is a person who is extremely intelligent, caring and empathic.

"In order to understand better, can I ask something to clarify? When you say X .... does that mean ... "
"You just dont get it. It's OVER. It's OVER (tears). We are going to DIE. Someone drew a swastika on a WALL" etc etc

I see the same anxiety / trauma with some of my favourite friends here and am really unsure how to engage... some people say just don't talk about it, yet when I see a move towards posting far more political axe-grinding MSM talking point articles at RI, doing nothing seems to have negative consequences too. There seems to have been a process that has moved many Progressives towards the mainstream. Even been wondering if there is some aural entrainment technology being used on the MSM that is contributing towards it.

I don't think Trump will get impeached.
Large American businesses *always* have an avalanche of litigation against them and are used to operating in a hostile legal environment. Trump especially.

Neo-MacCarthyism
Yeah, that is starting to sound about right.
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Re: The Impeachment of President Donald J Trump

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Dec 21, 2016 10:21 am

THE EVIDENCE TO IMPEACH DONALD TRUMP MAY ALREADY BE HERE
We don’t need to wait to see Trump’s conflicts of interest in action. The ethical violations that will soon be illegal are already taking place.

BY EMILY JANE FOX
DECEMBER 20, 2016 10:45 AM

By Joe Raedle/Getty Images.
As Donald Trump inches closer to the Oval Office, much has been said about how he will unwind himself from the dealings he’s made in his glass office about 200 miles north in Trump Tower. A number of Democrats have called for the president-elect to start addressing potential conflicts of interests by selling his new D.C. hotel, the building from which he is leasing from the federal government (the lease explicitly states that it cannot be held by an elected official). More broadly, ethics experts and lawmakers have said that Trump’s plan to turn over his global real-estate business to his two sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, creates a different set of issues. Many have suggested that the only true way to avoid such ethical questions is for Trump to divest from the Trump Organization entirely.

Newt Gingrich, former House Speaker and current Trump booster, has a different plan. He acknowledges that his billionaire buddy may have a tough time unravelling himself from his multi-billion-dollar business. “It’s a very real problem,” Gingrich said in an NPR interview on Monday. “I don’t think this is something minor. I think certainly in an age that people are convinced that government corruption is widespread both in the U.S. and around the world, you can’t just shrug and walk off from it.” His solution, though, is perhaps the very definition of government corruption. He advised that should the president-elect run up against issues with ethics laws, he should just change those laws in order to suit him, using his presidential pardon powers to absolve a multitude of potential sins.

“In the case of the president, he has a broad ability to organize the White House the way he wants to. He also has, frankly, the power of the pardon,” he said. “It’s a totally open power. He could simply say, ‘Look, I want them to be my advisers. I pardon them if anyone finds them to have behaved against the rules. Period. Technically, under the Constitution, he has that level of authority.”

Aside from the fact that this is a completely unreasonable and unethical reading of the U.S. Constitution—and one that Gingrich’s co-guest on NPR noted would make him closer to a king than a U.S. president—the problem with Gingrich’s take is also that it assumes conflicts of interests could arise in the future. The fact of the matter is that they’ve already begun.

ThinkProgress reported on Monday that the Embassy of Kuwait allegedly canceled a contract it had signed with the Four Seasons for an event it usually holds at the Georgetown hotel after it received pressure from the Trump Organization to move it to the aforementioned Trump International Hotel, just a few blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. The embassy canceled with the Four Seasons, ThinkProgress noted, just after The Washington Post ran a story about the hotel hosting diplomats for an event at which it was actively encouraging diplomats to patronize the hotel. “Believe me, all the delegations will go there, ” one diplomat told the Post. A couple weeks later, Politico reported that Bahrain was planning to host a reception at Trump’s hotel in early December. The Republic of Azerbaijan decided to co-host a Hanukkah party there, as well.

Not all conflicts center around the 263-room hotel, though it may seem like a hotbed for them. Further south, in Texas, the Center for Public Integrity reported, a nonprofit run by Donald Jr. and Eric is offering access to the president-elect in exchange for million-dollar donations to conservation charities. Donors have the opportunity to win a private reception and photo opportunity with Trump and a multi-day hunting or fishing expedition with his two sons, according to the report. That’s a conflict very much in line with the kind of trouble the Trump children already ran into last week, when Eric and Ivanka caught heat for auctioning off a coffee date with the eldest Trump daughter to benefit St. Jude’s. (The auction was pulled after The New York Times noted that several bidders were using the opportunity to gain access to the incoming First Daughter for their own individual benefit.)

At the time, Eric told the Times that the family is still adjusting to the “new world” in which they’ve found themselves in. And to be fair, the Trumps are indeed entering a different sphere, one that, frankly, they probably did not anticipate or prepare enough to enter, despite campaigning to be part of that world for 16 months. It’s a complicated, unprecedented thing to do—unspooling a decades-old, billion-dollar family-business empire in a matter of weeks.

But you know who has to make a lot of really tricky, unexpected, gravely important decisions all the time, every day, without the benefit of some adjustment time? The president of the United States. That is the job. Complex, world-altering problems cross that desk. The president is tasked with making a choice.

Most presidents don’t get to say, “Hey, we’re going to address this potentially unconstitutional conflict in a press conference on December 15,” as Trump did on Twitter, and then cancel that press conference. His advisers noted that pulling together a Cabinet has taken up more time than anticipated, so Trump needed a few more weeks to figure it all out. Thoughtfulness and not rushing through vital decisions is a good thing, of course. Avoiding a tough call for a few weeks, potentially after he is already in office, is a disaster for the U.S. democratic system and for the American people, who deserve to know if their president is going to use his office to pressure diplomats to frequent his hotels or change ethics laws to suit his whims.

But with the exception of the Emoluments Clause, which provides a pathway to impeachment if Trump seeks gifts from foreign agents, few laws govern the president’s behavior, and Gingrich is right that we are in uncharted territory. It’s on Trump to do the right thing, to be transparent and forthcoming about his businesses and his plans. For the record, 146 days have passed since his last press conference. Trump has still not released his tax returns.
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/12/ ... st-impeach







Trump transition team for Energy Department seeks names of employees involved in climate meetings
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ene ... 0ad4ffdec9


Trump Team Revives McCarthyism in War on the Environment
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-sing ... 78484.html


What Donald Trump Learned From Joseph McCarthy’s Right-Hand Man
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/21/us/po ... -cohn.html


THE MODEL FOR DONALD TRUMP’S MEDIA RELATIONS IS JOSEPH MCCARTHY
By Jelani Cobb September 22, 2016
Just as Donald Trump does now, Joseph McCarthy benefitted from bombast and fearmongering—and from an often symbiotic relationship with the press.
Just as Donald Trump does now, Joseph McCarthy benefitted from bombast and fearmongering—and from an often symbiotic relationship with the press.
PHOTOGRAPH BY KEYSTONE / GETTY
One definition of judgment is the ability to distinguish outliers from outright liars, given that they tend to tell similar kinds of stories. Occasionally, an individual, by producing a great volume of mendacity, manages to occupy both categories. Donald Trump—fabulist, demagogue, and Presidential nominee—has raised unique challenges not only to the political system but to those tasked with writing about it. Earlier this week, Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the Times, commented to Quartz that the paper would point out Trump’s lies and label them as such sans euphemism. A few weeks ago, this publication began a series inspired by the candidate’s hostile relationship with facts, titled “Trump and the Truth.” (As David Remnick noted in an introduction to that series, “No one here is suggesting that Trump is the only politician ever to unleash a whopper. In fact, Hillary Clinton has had her bald-faced moments—moments that are too kindly described as ‘lawyerly.’ ” But Trump is in a category of his own.) Early on, the incendiary candidacy of the Republican nominee drew warranted comparisons to the brand of racist populism that George Wallace deployed in his 1968 campaign, and to Barry Goldwater’s 1964 electoral insurgency. Yet there is a growing contentiousness over Trump’s relationship with the media. It suggests another forebear whose life and career are a virtual template for the paranoid demagogy that has defined the 2016 election: Donald Trump is the second coming of Joseph McCarthy.

Trump and McCarthy share not only the kindred traits of demagogues—bombast and the manipulation of public fear in the service of their own ends—but a curiously close, almost familial resemblance. McCarthy’s hallucinatory anti-Communism was facilitated in part by a kind of swaggering masculinity that he deployed to differentiate himself from his patrician G.O.P. colleagues. He distorted his record of military service to portray himself as a fearless fighter against unambiguous evil. As with Trump’s, McCarthy’s world view was defined by a hypertensive, conspiratorial outlook. A conspiracy theory typically rests upon the extrapolation of a single shred of suggestion into a skein of unverifiable assertions—as with McCarthy’s 1950 claim that two hundred and five Communists had infiltrated the State Department. An internal government document had noted a number of employees whose background checks had revealed unspecified but troubling information, but there was no indication that these individuals were Communist moles. Trump’s Presidential campaign has been a miasma of conspiracy theories, virtually from the outset. Yet those parallels—disturbing as they may be—are surpassed by the similarities between Trump and McCarthy’s relationships with the press.

McCarthy’s demagogy was essentially enabled by a symbiotic press corps that was both frustrated by the senator’s pervasive dishonesty and beholden to him as a source of public interest and, therefore, newspaper sales. As David Oshinsky points out in “A Conspiracy So Immense,” his biography of McCarthy, the version of “objective” journalism in which the media simply reports the statements made by public figures, irrespective of their veracity, is uniquely vulnerable to manipulation by demagogues and serial liars. As Oshinsky writes,

Quite often, then, the reporter becomes a conveyor belt for material he knows to be false. He is helpless because the system inhibits him from imparting his version of the truth. In McCarthy’s case this objective approach was particularly frustrating. “My own impression was that Joe was a demagogue,” a newsman remarked. “But what could I do? I had to report—and quote—McCarthy. How do you say in the middle of your story ‘This is a lie’? The press is supposedly neutral.”
Strip away the default male pronouns, and this is similar to the situation that confronts the media covering Donald Trump in 2016—and precisely the kind of enabling that Chris Wallace’s refusal to fact-check during the Presidential debate he will moderate might resurrect. One McCarthy-era Kansas newspaper took to printing parenthetical corrections next to false statements by the senator—an approach that has found favor again in the Trump era. At the same time, the sheer volume of untruth McCarthy generated and the challenges of fact checking in the analog era of news reporting insured that a significant number of his lies made their way into print and were accepted as valid by a portion of the public susceptible to his manipulation. McCarthy struck back at journalists—in one instance literally, slapping and kicking Drew Pearson, a syndicated columnist—who did challenge his feverish distortions, labelling them dupes or knowing participants in Communist conspiracies. It should also be remembered that McCarthy’s disastrous feud with Edward R. Murrow was prefaced by an attempt to intimidate the CBS anchor away from critical coverage of McCarthy’s anti-Communist broadsides. Instead, the effort prompted Murrow to create a television segment pulling together McCarthy’s most transparently demagogic and embarrassing moments, which was rapturously received by the public.

It’s almost impossible not to see McCarthy in Trump’s genealogy when he announces his desire to change libel laws in order to rein in newspapers, when he denies news organizations credentials to his events, when he threatens to sue the Times and conducts a social-media feud with the “Morning Joe” hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. These dynamics would be concerning enough were there not an implicit way in which the media benefits from Trump’s presence. Like the members of the G.O.P. élite whose craven self-interest and calculation have prevented them from challenging a candidate who is a credible danger to the republic, many of the outlets that are covering Trump, and the orchestra of contempt he is conducting, are dealing with a conflict of interest. Jimmy Fallon’s tousling of Trump’s hair might well be dismissed as a reflection of a media committed to the rote rituals of election-year coverage—the standard playful exchanges with the Democratic and Republican nominees designed to allow the public to see their human side—were it not such an apt metaphor for the broader tendencies in Trump coverage. At best, it betrayed an inability to recognize that Trump is not a standard candidate but rather the kind of polarizing, knowledge-proof opportunist whom the Founders worried might one day come to power in their fledgling nation. At worst, there is also opportunism in the coverage of a dangerous man who has a flair for generating ratings.

It’s worth recalling that McCarthy’s demise came about not as a result of his disingenuous use of anti-Communism as a cudgel against his Democratic opponents but because he continued lobbing those grenades once the Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected. There is an operative lesson here for both Republicans and the media. Demagogues are incapable of maintaining an allegiance to interests other than their own. And those who are most responsible for showing the public exactly who they are might well be those who’ve previously benefitted from their presence.
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-com ... MediaREDEF




As Trump Builds His Authoritarian Presidency, Echoes of 1930s Germany and 1950s McCarthyism Abound
Domestic crackdowns. Militarism abroad?

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/t ... ccarthyism
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Re: The Impeachment of President Donald J Trump

Postby kool maudit » Wed Dec 21, 2016 10:46 am

Pretty good backspin on the McCarthyism!

(just anything... it's almost like an art form.)
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Re: The Impeachment of President Donald J Trump

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Dec 21, 2016 10:58 am

you know all about the form of art don't you Mr. kool?

no doubt

and the art of waiting one's turn in line
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Re: The Impeachment of President Donald J Trump

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Dec 21, 2016 11:02 am

The Case for Donald Trump’s Impeachability
By Jesse Singal

Before Donald Trump got elected, few Americans had heard of or paid much attention to the Emoluments Clause, a previously obscure-to-most-of-us provision in Article I of the Constitution dealing with corruption and curry-favoring at the hands of foreign governments. In the wake of his election, though, a growing chorus of voices, many of them legal experts, began debating about whether the wording of the clause could render Trump impeachable, more or less from the moment he is sworn in.

This conversation has ramped up in large part because Trump himself has insisted that should he choose to take office without divesting from his extensive, tangled business holdings — and that certainly appears to be his plan at the moment — it won’t be a problem. “I can be president of the United States and run my business 100 percent, sign checks on my business,” Trump famously told the New York Times last month. “The law is totally on my side, meaning, the president can’t have a conflict of interest.”

The Emoluments Clause is an important Yeah, but … response: Yes, some legal experts have argued, the president is exempt from certain federal conflict-of-interest laws that apply to other public servants. But he isn’t exempt from the Emoluments Clause — if he doesn’t divest, he’ll be violating that and could be impeached. Now, this isn’t a unanimous view. Last month, for example, Maynooth University law professor Seth Barrett Tillman argued that it isn’t clear the Emoluments Clause applies to elected officials like the president, as opposed to appointed ones. He also pointed out an instance in which George Washington apparently received foreign gifts without much protest from even his enemies, and, “As Professor Akhil Amar has reminded us, the precedents set by President Washington and his administration deserve special deference in regard to both foreign affairs and presidential etiquette.”

Last Friday, the Brookings Institute released a very helpful 23-page paper that serves as a rather forceful rebuttal to Tillman’s interpretation. The authors argue that a common-sense reading of the Constitution and the relevant legal theory and history all lead to the conclusion that Trump is, in fact, subject to the Emoluments Clause, and could therefore be walking into an unusual sort of constitutional danger zone. The paper was written by a bipartisan trio of legal experts who have been active in this discussion: Norman L. Eisen, a Brookings fellow, the chair of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, and a former chief White House ethics lawyer under Obama; Richard Painter, a vice-chair at CREW and former chief White House lawyer under George W. Bush; and Laurence Tribe, a constitutional-law professor at Harvard.

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The Emoluments Clause is found in Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution, and it reads, “No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” Eisen, Painter, and Tribe devote the first half of their paper to unpacking this loaded sentence, translating it into modern-speak to establish that it indeed applies to president-elect Trump and his business dealings.

The first key question is whether the clause applies to the president or, as Tillman argued, only to appointed officials. In a footnote, the authors criticize Tillman’s view that it doesn’t, explaining that it is an “idiosyncratic suggestion [that] is at best supported by ambiguous founding-era historical materials, [that] rests upon a strained and counterintuitive textual analysis, and [that] is flatly inconsistent with the recognized purpose of the Clause and the overwhelming thrust of modern (and historical) Executive Branch practice.” In the main body, they argue that this is actually an “easy question,” given that the Office of Legal Counsel — the president’s lawyers — wrote in 2009 that the “Office of Profit or Trust” language “surely” applies to POTUS, and that in past instances the office has ruled similarly. To Eisen, Painter, and Tribe’s knowledge, they write, every time the OLC has publicly released an opinion on the question of whether the clause applies to the president, it has affirmed that, yes, it does. Plus, throughout the rest of the Constitution, the framers refer to the presidency as an “office” in the same way they do in the Emoluments Clause.

The authors then move on to the question of what qualifies as an emolument. Drawing on historical evidence, they explain that in the 1790s, the clause’s words “were understood to encompass any conferral of a benefit or advantage, whether through money, objects, titles, offices, or economically valuable waivers or relaxations of otherwise applicable requirements.” So today, they write, the clause “unquestionably reaches any situation in which a federal officeholder receives money, items of value, or services from a foreign state.” And “foreign state” is defined broadly — in 1994, the OLC defined the term as encompassing not only the states themselves, “but also their agents and instrumentalities,” and in 2009 it determined that “corporations owned or controlled by a foreign government are presumptively foreign statements under the Emoluments Clause.”

In short, the Emoluments Clause covers just about any situation in which a public official profits in any way from a foreign state or such a state’s “agents and instrumentalities.” This broadness is by design: The authors argue that the entire point of the Emoluments Clause is for it to be read broadly (contra Tillman’s interpretation). The framers didn’t want there to be situations where the public or Congress would have to decide, on a case-by-case basis, whether a given instance in which the president or another powerful official profiting from a foreign entity was, in fact, bribery or favor-currying. That’s no way to run a government: As long as such questions exist, they corrode the system and sap public confidence in government.

Which brings us to Trump. The authors write that the sorts of concerns the Emoluments Clause is designed to head off “may be exacerbated in Mr. Trump’s case” because of how closely he has linked Donald Trump, president, to Donald Trump, magnate, during the campaign and his period as president-elect. There have already been numerous examples of Trump openly leveraging his new title in an attempt to benefit his businesses, from his wind-farm chat with Nigel Farage and his pals to a conversation with President Erdogan of Turkey (Ivanka was on it, too) in which Trump reportedly said nice things about Mehmet Ali Yalcindag, a Trump business associate in Istanbul. And just about anywhere around the world Trump is involved in business, the Brookings authors write, there is a potential Emoluments Clause violation.

Trump has been a bit all over the place in terms of his claims about what steps he’ll take to address these issues — recall that he was scheduled to have a press conference laying out a plan last week, but then rescheduled it. One idea floating around is that he could get himself out of potential constitutional trouble by fully handing his business — both operations and ownership stakes — off to his children. While it’s important to note that Trump hasn’t even offered to do this (the closest he’s come is talk of transferring day-to-day operations and management responsibilities), Eisen, Painter, and Tribe argue this wouldn’t pass muster anyway. “The Framers were familiar with the peril that could arise from lavishing benefits on the prince to win gratitude and loyalty from the King,” they write. (That said, they acknowledge that the legal landscape here is foggier.)

In light of all of this, write Eisen, Painter, and Tribe, “the only true solution is for Mr. Trump and his children to divest themselves of all ownership interests in the Trump business empire. That divestment process must be run by an independent third party, who can then turn the resulting assets over to a true blind trust.” At this point, of course, there is zero reason to believe this will happen — even if he wanted to, it’s unclear whether it would even be possible for Trump to unload his sprawling, opaque empire between now and inauguration. But, even if he refuses, Congress could force his hand by passing a law requiring the president to divest from his business interests. Various parties might also be able to file lawsuits claiming that Trump’s presidential/business practices put their businesses at an unfair disadvantage by forcing them to compete with POTUS. Just yesterday, for example, ThinkProgress reported that a few days after Trump’s victory, the Kuwaiti embassy in D.C. canceled an event at the Four Seasons, “citing political pressure to hold its National Day celebration at the Trump International Hotel instead” — pressure that came from the Trump Organization itself.

Here’s the big Emoluments Clause remedy, though:

[I]f Mr. Trump enters office in what would obviously constitute a knowing and indeed intentional violation of the Emoluments Clause and then declines to cure that violation during his tenure, Congress would be well within its rights to impeach him for engaging in “high crimes and misdemeanors.” This would not require any evidence of provable bribes or other specific malfeasance, since the whole aim and theory of the Emoluments Clause is that the President (among others) is not lawfully permitted to order his private dealings with foreign powers such that they are vulnerable to systemic, invidious, undetectable corruption. So long as Mr. Trump persists in doing so, Congress would have a plainly valid basis under the Constitution for concluding he cannot serve in office—both as a matter of first principles and given evidence that at least one prominent leader in the ratification process [Edmund Jennings Randolph] saw violations of this Clause as grounds for impeachment.
Of course, that doesn’t mean Trump will be impeached. Republicans control Congress now, and, barring some very unusual events, they will have zero incentive to engage in the please-primary-me-now exercise of impeaching a president their party’s base voted into power. But still, you never know: Should Trump’s popularity slip low enough, or should some new scandal engulf him, maybe the political calculus will change, too.

But even if that never happens, Trump’s potential impeachability will make for a very strange dynamic. “When this guillotine might fall is a matter of political more than legal calculation, and is thus beyond the scope of our analysis,” write the authors. “Likewise, just how the ongoing prospect of such an ignominious end to a Trump presidency would embolden his political adversaries at home and abroad, and undermine his legitimacy in the eyes of the American public and global community, is impossible to predict.” If their legal analysis is correct, we appear headed toward an unpresidented situation.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/20 ... ility.html
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Re: The Impeachment of President Donald J Trump

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Dec 22, 2016 1:07 pm

THURSDAY, DEC 22, 2016 04:00 AM CST
Is Donald Trump a traitor? His path to the White House suggests a pattern of profound disloyalty
There's a word for someone who colludes with a foreign power to subvert democracy and overthrow political norms
CHAUNCEY DEVEGA

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Republican nominee Donald Trump urged a foreign power, Russia, to interfere in the American election in order to undermine his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. Russia complied. The American intelligence community, including the CIA and FBI, has reached a “strong consensus” that the Russians interfered with the presidential election in order to help Donald Trump win.

It has also been reported that Russian president Vladimir Putin personally directed this espionage operation. So serious was Russian interference in the American presidential election that the Obama administration warned Putin that it was tantamount to “armed conflict.”

Republican leaders in Congress were briefed on Russia’s interference in the presidential election and how it was targeted at elevating Trump and hurting Clinton. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other congressional Republicans chose to block any public discussion of these findings. In what could be construed as a quid pro quo, McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, has been selected by President-elect Trump for a cabinet position in his administration.

Donald Trump’s flirtations with Russia and Vladimir Trump are part of a broader pattern of reckless and irresponsible behavior. Trump has numerous conflicts of financial interest that would appear to violate the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution. His sons, Eric and Donald Jr., were involved in a scheme (since withdrawn) that looked a lot like an attempt to sell access to his administration through million-dollar “charity” donations. Trump has threatened to violate the First Amendment by suppressing freedom of the press, has encouraged violence against Hillary Clinton and those he deemed his enemies, has suggested he would not respect the outcome of the election if he lost, and has promoted people widely regarded as white supremacists or white nationalists to senior positions in his administration. Donald Trump has also selected key advisers and cabinet level officials who have close personal and financial relationships with Russian leaders in banking, finance and government.

The sum total of these facts leads to a very troubling conclusion.

President-elect Donald Trump is a traitor. As suggested by Harvard University professor John Shattuck in the Boston Globe, Trump’s actions may approach the legal definition of treason as defined by United States federal law.

Members of the Republican Party who knew about Russia’s efforts to interfere with the presidential election and chose to suppress or block such information, for fear of hurting their candidate’s chances, are also traitors.

In light of Russia’s interference with the presidential election, Republicans and others who voted for and support Donald Trump are also traitors, at least to the degree that they do not now work against and denounce him.

Reconciling Donald Trump’s traitorous behavior with how Republicans and conservatives view themselves as the party of “patriotism” and “national security” is a puzzle of sorts. How do they resolve this state of cognitive dissonance?

Writing about Oscar Wilde, David Friedman observed that a celebrity is someone who is famous for being famous. This logic applies to the Republican Party and how it has presented itself in regards to national security. For example, this tautology ignores the fact that the Cold War was not won by one president — certainly not by Ronald Reagan, a figure who has been undeservedly elevated to sainthood in American political culture — but because of a continuity in foreign policy across both Democratic and Republican administrations. The Republican claim that theirs is the party of national security and that they are better than Democrats at “keeping America safe” is also gutted by the legacy of 9/11 and George W. Bush’s imperial misadventures in the Middle East, which taken together constitute one of the greatest foreign policy failures in the history of the country.

Trump voters and other American conservatives have been subjected to a several decades-long disinformation and propaganda campaign, led by Fox News and the broader right-wing news-entertainment media. This has created an alternate reality that exists separate and apart from the empirical, fact-based world. As shown by recent public opinion surveys, Donald Trump supporters hold many false and bizarre beliefs. As summarized in a recent essay by Salon’s Bob Cesca:

40 percent of Trump voters insist that he won the national popular vote.
60 percent of Trump voters think that Hillary Clinton received millions of illegal votes.
73 percent of Trump voters believe that George Soros is paying anti-Trump protesters.
29 percent of Trump voters don’t think California votes should be allowed to count in the national popular vote.
67 percent of Trump voters think the unemployment rate went up under President Obama. Only 20 percent accurately believe it went down.
39 percent of Trump voters think the stock market went down under Obama. And 19 percent are unsure.
14 percent of Trump voters think Hillary Clinton is connected to a child sex ring run out of a Washington pizzeria. Another 32 percent aren’t sure one way or another. Only 54 percent are certain that Pizzagate is a myth.
Conservatism is a type of political religion and cult; Donald Trump is now the leader of that cult.

As a group, in many regards American voters are not very sophisticated. They also do not have a schema for consistently and logically understanding and processing complex political events and issues. Because of the influence of corporate money and advertising (Trump reportedly received the equivalent of $5 billion in free advertising during the presidential campaign), the Fourth Estate has largely failed to fulfill its watchdog function or to educate the American people so that they can make informed and intelligent decisions about their leaders. A controversial new book by political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels suggests that voters are non-deliberative, casting their ballots based largely on prior assumptions and party loyalty and twisting the facts to fit their beliefs.

Republican-controlled states in the South and the Midwest also host a disproportionate number of military bases. Military officers also tend to identify as Republicans and to be more conservative. These two factors combine to give immediate credibility — however incorrect and superficial it may be — to the claim that Republicans are “stronger” on national defense.

Extreme political polarization, increasing authoritarianism and what is known as “negative partisanship” have also encouraged Republican voters to dramatically shift their attitudes towards Russia and its president Vladimir Putin. Writing at the National Review, David French explains:

After weeks of WikiLeaks’ releases and months of Trump apologetics for Russia’s dictator, the Republicans nonetheless view Putin more favorably than their own president. Between 2014 and today, Putin’s approval ratings with Republicans have almost quadrupled, from 10 percent to 37 percent. His net negative rating is a mere ten points. By contrast, the GOP net negative rating for Barack Obama is a whopping 64 points. Across the Web, “conservatives” fill Twitter timelines and comment boards with pro-Putin comments. Some of this is Astroturfed straight from Russia. Much of it is not. “At least WikiLeaks is doing what the mainstream media won’t” (as if it’s the media’s job to hack computers). “Putin disrespects Obama, not the United States.” “Well, at least Putin hates Islamic terrorists” (well, other than his close Iranian allies, the world’s leading state supporter of Islamic terrorism). We are seeing the terrible result of what the Pew Foundation has documented as negative partisanship. Americans dislike the opposing political party more than they like their own tribe. They’re willing to believe the worst possible things about their political opponents.

These are all important explanations for how Republicans and conservatives can rationalize their support of Donald Trump and his traitorous behavior with Russia. But they explicitly exclude another powerful force: the way(s) that nationalism, sexism and racism influence American politics more generally, and conservatives specifically.

Consider the following thought experiment. Imagine if Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders or any other Democrat had encouraged Russia to interfere with the election to undermine the process in order to favor their candidacy.

Given how the Republican Party and its news entertainment media flew into a collective conspiratorial frenzy over Hillary Clinton’s “classified emails” and a mysterious computer server, the outcome would have been something close to a literal witch hunt — at the least demands for an investigation, and at most, hysterical cries that a Russian-led coup or revolution had taken place. This difference in outcomes is more than a function of mere partisanship but rather a signal to deep divergences in political values and beliefs about belonging, community and citizenship in American society.

Obama or any other person of color would likely have been immediately and irrevocably delegitimized by the charges facing Donald Trump. From before the founding of the republic to the present, and despite their military and other public service, the loyalty of black and brown people in America is perpetually suspect.

Another factor here is that the American nation-state is gendered. Conservatives and right-wingers are engaged in a masculine, nationalist political project. Hillary Clinton was viewed as “weak” and “too emotional” because she is a woman. Clinton’s hypothetical alliance with Putin would have been seen as proof of those “deficits,” and such a scandal would be used to sexualize and demean her.

Since at least the Cold War, Republicans and their media have savaged Democrats, liberals and progressives as “weak.” The are not “real Americans”; they are “cowards” or “sissies,” “Commies” or “traitors.” If Russia and Vladimir Putin had interfered to aid a Democratic candidate, it would be presented by Republicans as final proof that Democrats are fundamentally disloyal to America.

But because Donald Trump is a white male conservative his loyalty and patriotism are viewed by many Americans as a given. This is a manifestation of white male privilege in action and an example of how racism can damage the safety and security of the United States.

During the age of Obama, the Republican Party completed its devolution into a radical and revanchist organization that aimed to overthrow the standing norms and consensus politics that have governed the United States since at least World War II. Trump and the Republicans are now following through on this in ways heretofore unimaginable. They have chosen partisanship over patriotism in their support of the authoritarian Trump and his apparent foreign sponsor, Vladimir Putin. The Russians wanted to undermine and damage one of America’s most sacred democratic institutions. Donald Trump and his party aided and abetted them.
http://www.salon.com/2016/12/22/is-dona ... isloyalty/
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They could still get him out of office.
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Re: The Impeachment of President Donald J Trump

Postby JackRiddler » Thu Dec 22, 2016 7:00 pm

kool maudit » Wed Dec 21, 2016 9:46 am wrote:Pretty good backspin on the McCarthyism!

(just anything... it's almost like an art form.)


"McCarthyism" (the paranoid anti-communist style and purges that got going after WWII, rooted in the first red scare from WWI, both starting under Democratic administrations and both run partly by Hoover, though it's McCarthy's name that got attached to it) is a very American phenomenon. So it is never surprising to see revivals of its techniques in more than one place and for different functions at the same time.

Only Trump, however, actually started his career with Roy Cohn himself as his mentor and counsel in court, however. And if you don't fully know who that is, and what it means, then you should figure it out. This is hardly just "anything" and requires no art to point out.

Probably as significant as the total lack of repentance on Cohn's part, and the style of attack that obviously rhymes with Trump's own and no doubt helped to cultivate it, is the fact that in the same years he was representing Trump, Cohn was also the lead lawyer for the New York mob chiefs of the time, Gotti and Co. (Hmmm, construction and casinos, what could possibly be the connection?)

I talked with a friend in Missouri the other day and he had this to say about the Trump supporters there: "They're not from New York, they don't know him. They still think he's a successful businessman." I wish that were enough, by the way, but what he meant was not that being from New York makes you smarter. It just means you've been exposed to this predatory and criminal character constantly for more than 30 years -- longer than the Clintons, and as well-known the whole time.

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