god damn deep state I'll you hwhat
Anddddd, during a speech this morning, Trump disparaged this brave soul, decided that the White House staff responsible for informing the whistle blower are "spies", and then pined for the treatment of spies and traitors in the old days, presumably implying that they should be hung. Just to throw in a dash of possible witness intimidation. His smiling little orange face is quickly disappearing down the hole that he's excavating with the world's largest metaphorical backhoe. In hindsight, the White House releasing the memo of Trump's phone call with Zelensky is like if a cop showed up to a murderer's house, and said "Goodday, sir, might I have a looksee inside your place, there are some nasty rumors flying around about you." The murderer then says "Nah man, I'm not gonna let you in without a warrant, but let me describe to you in detail what I've done with the body parts of missing people."
... https://twitter.com/donaldjtrumpjr/status/884789418455953413?lang=en I mean, they got away with it last time. Why not try it again?
If you think about it, they really pussied out last time. It was only Don Jr. trying to coordinate with an underling, not the leader of a country. And, ya know, you're not gonna get the best dirt without the power of the entire executive branch behind you, so THIS TIME around, we're gonna get her OTHER emails. Plus, last time, they hadn't recently finished being chastised for almost doing the thing they just did again, since it was their first time doing the thing. They didn't even have Rudy's help last go 'round, which has been an absolute godsend. Now they made sure to include almost everyone in Trump's cabinet, you wouldn't want to conduct things as secretly as last time, people might get their feelings hurt.
I'm beginning to wonder if what we're watching is the non-partisan intelligence community transitioning from "we've gotta suck it up on this one, we're not a political office, our duty is to the country, the Agency is forever and Trump is four years" to "...well shit this is kind of the sort of thing we're supposed to protect democracy from." The Don Jr. shit was the New York Times. That means there's nobody at any government agency tasked with making stuff happen unless they're directly ordered to. The Ukrainian conversation is a whistleblower, all lawyered up and procedural, calling flag on the play. Journalistic allegations? You can chase that if you want, or not, depending on political will and instruction from higher office. Properly sanctioned allegations of treason? Now we have a procedure and once we have a procedure, momentum lies with the action, not the status quo.
Yeah, this is canon. You also gotta wonder if someday they'll look at statistics of outed foreign agents embedded in our IC and discover a wealth of hiring dates during this administration. But again, I think Hanlon's razor applies primarily.
If failed shenanigans incur no cost, shenanigans will be attempted each and every time. Blowback to the FSB for this whole election thing? Maria Butina is serving 18 months. That's about three and a half Martha Stewarts. Guys who poisoned the Skripals? Showed up on television to say they were tourists. “There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump.”
“There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump.”
Maybe it's the gin and tonic but ZOMFG I this has to shellack the mutherfucker. Surely someone in Bakersfield has had enough of this asshole.House Minority Leader’s spending at Trump’s properties increased 32,000 percent after Nov. 8, 2016
It's not a huge amount of money compared to a campaign budget, though. This bothers me more on principle. We should have a statute for the emoluments clause applied to domestic interactions, because once again, the president's failure to de-couple himself from his businesses clearly provides the opportunity for abuse and corruption.
A roughly $2 million campaign seems a little light on funding to me, he must have been secure in his re-election. I'mma go check. Yep, he won in 2018 with 64% of the vote. The RNC and PACs wisely spent their money on actual battlegrounds.
Next on our menu, we have the second course: Stephen Miller fillets in a hostile Fox New sauce The first 30 seconds (~7:20 to ~7:50) are long-winded (srry), but omg when Miller begins his reply, NOW THAT'S WHAT I CALL COMEDY [VOL. II] "ChRiS.." (-_-) Actually, Wallace has been fantastic for a few years now. I know he's the token oppo (w/ Shep Smith) but he's actually really good. Do you think he has friends around the office? Like, maybe they think he's doing a shtick too, and he's a disarmingly nice guy?
Thing is? Chris Wallace is a dyed-in-the-wool conservative partisan. He's about as right as Jon Stewart is left. But he's not willing to say anything, do anything, be anything in order to advance the agenda of whatever Republican is calling the shots. We've just fallen so far that Democrats are cheering on the Lawful Evil the same way they rallied around the Dixie Chicks. Because holy mother of god. The alternative is Stephen Fucking Miller. That said, it is noteworthy that Stephen Fucking Miller went on a softball Sunday morning Fox News show thinking he'd get a softball interview and the best softball Fox News can serve up right now is "respectfully, cut the bullshit." Dollars to donuts, if Stephen Fucking Miller could have come up with some vaguely plausible talking points they would have let him run.
You can tell me not to get excited that there are still some people on the right living in the same reality as us and willing to call out Trump's brazen propagandists, but I'm still going to get excited. Edit: You never said that at all, I just got excited.
Where are y'all on the NYT publishing this? Their comments section is chock full of people criticizing the decision, and I'm inclined to agree. Seems just to endanger the whistleblower without revealing too much important info--it's not like those who've been chanting "POLITICAL HACK" will be convinced of the complaint's legitimacy just because the whistleblower works for the deep state or whatever.
Twitter has pointed out that at the Washington Post, it's Watergate all over again while the New York Times appears doomed to repeat the runup to the Iraq War. I'm vain; I cancelled my New York Times subscription because their Style section ran a really bitchy thing about Generation X and then signed up for the Washington Post because a childhood friend is now on staff. But maaaan. The NYT has been doing some excessively dumb shit of late.
Maybe you heard this already, but the justification was that the White House already knew that the individual was CIA, but I still worry that a simple analysis by not-dumb people can be usurped by the Trump administration to fill in gaps that they were too stupid to resolve themselves.