Trying to think of an educated name to call Donny Two-scoops is like trying to polish a turd.
Thank you, margin, for those details and clarifications.
Well to be fair, I was saying why we don’t get many conservative voices on here- and I stand by that- you can’t have a discussion about philosophy and policy if one side or the other persists in arguing it from a moral stance perspective. It’s apples and oranges. It’s why there’s no common ground in say… the abortion debate. One side is vehement that it’s killing babies and that’s WRONG!!! * Meanwhile, the other side is equally convinced that** it’s a woman’s body and HER right to choose!!!***
Neither side is truly right OR wrong here- it’s all dependent on where you are looking at it from.
The problem is that on here, on the SDMB, pretty much EVERY political or social argument gets tripped up by this kind of thing. Health care policy, criminal justice policy, etc… Anyone who’s not on board with the party line around here gets a huge dose of emotional/moral outrage because they don’t AGREE with the party line, and it offends people.
That’s a problem IMO. If we can’t debate on the merits of the actual policies/philosophies without having them all be eruptions of moral outrage, you get what we see here- a very few conservative posters who are mostly in it to troll people and/or argue. Nobody wants to come in and actually try and rationally argue anything, because they are instantly beset on all sides by people who are arguing from emotion and a moral/immoral perspective. I mean, you can be opposed to single-payer health care or universal health care without being some kind of monster- it’s not that simple. (and I bet someone tells me I’m wrong there in this thread)
Don’t take that to mean that I’m defending Trump. I’m not. There’s no real defending him or his gangsterish behavior- it’s out of the pale of how ANY elected official in a democratic government should behave, and I suspect had he been elected to any other government office, he’d have been removed or marginalized long before now.
But I also think that there are a lot of conservative (little-C) people out there who are just sort of laying low and who won’t engage on here on topics outside of defending Trump because of the hostile environment. And that is something I think is a problem.
Precious few moderates too.
The impeachment defenses for Trump are (I think):
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impeachment is an inherently political issue and you don’t have the votes to remove him
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you currently don’t have enough evidence to prove your allegations, too much of the evidence is hearsay. Just because Trump is preventing vital testimony that MIGHT prove them doesn’t mean that the testimony WILL prove them
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The threshold for overturning a democratically held election and pass the white house from trump to pence should be very high and right now we haven’t met that high threshold. If a Democrat led house cannot meet that threshold, a Republican led senate is under no obligation to meet that threshold for you
In much the same way that Emmett Till was good for the civil rights movement - paraphrasing Chappelle
His election has laid bare many things:. Depending on where you are on the political spectrum, you will think it is anything from America’s racism to America’s growing impatience with Woke SJW PC culture.
There are probably lessons for all sides.
I think if you go back to the Bush years, he was a lot better and he got slowly less substantive as the Obama years progressed. But a lot of that might have been in response to how this board was developing into a liberal echo chamber.
The outcome may be inevitable, but it doesn’t mean the reasons for impeachment should be overlooked.
You’re focusing on the FISA investigation. That’s not the reason for impeachment. Trump’s attempt to strongarm Ukraine is unconstitutional, and Trump himself gave the evidence. There’s plenty of other reasons for impeachment, but this is the most solid and unambiguous.
What does qualify for the threshold if violating the Constitution does not?
Who is the rapist? Because I’m pretty sure that none of them have been convicted of rape and no one is pursuing rape charges against any of them.
The Democrats don’t think they can prove Kavanaugh is a rapist. They just wanted to delay his confirmation long enough to have the mid term elections and hopefully flip the senate. When that didn’t happen, you never heard another word about those rape allegations. Not because it’s not possible that he attempted to rape Christine Blaisey Ford but because there was never enough evidence to establish that he had.
While Trump has more unqualified judicial nominees than most presidents before him, the vast majority of his nominees are rated as fully qualified by the ABA. He gets most of them straight from the Heritage Foundation’s list.
You want different judges? Then try winning an election. Right now trump is the devil we know, that is the incumbent advantage. None of your scolding follows voters into the voting booth.
Figure out why trump won and address those factors. If you conclude that trump won because americans are horrible people who like to vote for horrible people then all hope is lost and you might as well move to Sweden. Otherwise, you will have to convince people who don’t already think like you.
When you summarize Anti-Trump sentiment as a “liberal echo chamber,” you show you’re not considering their arguments. You’re not addressing their cause for concern. By doing so, you’re adding more to the conflict. That’s what the OP is trying to parse. Conservatives’ only answer to conflicts of their logic is to dismiss such questions as liberal whining, and it’s fucking maddening.
It should be overlooked if the senate says it should be overlooked. That is the nature of political questions. There simply isn’t enough to force politicians to vote against their partisan loyalties… yet.
I don’t think the impeachment is inevitable. Pelosi has more political acumen than you and me put together. Right now she has every Republican congressman on the record defending trump.
Perhaps she has an ace up her sleeve, perhaps she sees this as a cost free lottery ticket (if she just withholds the articles of impeachment from the senate.
If nothing changes, she can just sit on the impeachment and make republicans feel uncomfortable. If another shoe drops between now and election day, which dramatically changes the calculus, it is going to be very hard for those republican congressmen to nuance their way out of their vote to protect trump from impeachment. Then she gets a shit ton of moderates in her caucus and that allows her to outright ignore the far left wing of her caucus.
The recording is pretty damning but not unambiguous.
How did he violate the constitution again in a way that previous unimpeached presidents have not? Please explain how he has so clearly violated the constitution that Republican politicians are duty bound to vote against their own party?
Wait, are we looking for a better quality of Trump defense on the impeachment issue, or have we already stipulated that an intelligent defense or excuse is impossible, in which case what’s the point. On the impeachment-defense side, as Damuri Ajashi said, it’s a political call and it’s on the Senators’ consciences to make the right one.
As to the more general issues:
Well but then is that a reflection of the often mentioned broader IRL issue of “polarization” in which the debating sides become more Morally Absolutist about the other group being not just wrong but evil, combined with the rise of “All In Or Nothing” Whole-Package-ism – so, conservatives are put in a position of not being able to defend some specific policy without being expected, or presumed (with the burden on them to prove otherwise) to endorse *anything *that’s a GOP proposal AND be unconditional Scuzzbucket-in-Chief apologists.
And I’m sure there are small-c conservatives who would likely prefer to be able to be engaging on policy topics AS policy topics, except they know they will be challenged on “but what about Trump? you voted for him didn’t ya?” and that’s not in the SDMB alone: the ones I know from the IRL political world who have become disengaged I see mostly lying low hoping it’s over soon, but some of them did so in despair in that by now Trumpism IS the platform.
The echo chamber existed before trump was elected.
I am not a trump supporter and under any objective standard would be considered a moderate liberal, but I have friends that are trump supporters. They seem to support trump during impeachment for the same reason that feminists supported clinton during monica Lewinsky. There was a bigger policy objective they were concerned with.
Bigger policy objectives? I just retired from a firm where the most popular bumper sticker was a variation of the unauthorized “Calvin taking a piss”, only instead of Calvin’s face it is Trump’s and he is pissing on someone labeled as a “liberal”.
That figures, as there are good people on both sides… oh, wait! 
He got caught at it.
And they said stupidity is not a crime.
That’s funny. How come that’s not the standard you guys apply to Hillary? Or Obama? Or whatever Dem Trump and his fans are calling traitors these days----for not applauding him? Or for quoting him verbatim? Not to mention his charming attacks on the truth, sixteen-year-old girls, POWs, dead men, and pregnant Gold Star widows, of course.
This is why people call Repubs disingenuous.
No reason to delay? Aside from the fact that he ranted and screamed and sobbed and blatantly lied to Congress, who paid off hundreds of thousands of dollars of debts for him?
Let’s face it, NO proof would change a Republican mind. You will not read anything that’s not from one of your fever swamp paranoid hate sites, bit that doesn’t stop Repubs from demanding proof.
And it"s terribly odd aside from that, because when you guys are faced with innocent Dems, you just make shit up, like Qanon, Pizzagate, Benghazi-gate, Uranium One…James O’Keefe’s entire career consists of deceitfully editing videos till their subjects appear to be saying exactly the opposite of what they actually said. “LOCK HET UP!” Lying so far that reality becomes inverted is how Republicans cope with their disgusting beliefs.
The FBI was ordered to limit the investigation into Kavanaugh. There’s a big difference between “never heard again” and was willfully suppressed. Is that a personal problem or a tactical decision, because it resembles a lot of Repub lies? It’s practically a different language. “Background checks”, for example, when run through the GOP translation section of the GOP ‘brain’, comes out as, “OMAGAWD MARTHA THE JACKBOOTED THUGS AND THAT KENYAN MUSLIM DUDE ARE GOING TO TAKE OUR GUNS!”
All his judges are Reichwing nutjobs. They are anti choice, anti LGBTQ rights, pro-Trump----which alone says they’re not fit to be dogcatchers----and have to be crazed Rightwing loyalists.
You lying shitweasel. Mitch McConnell REFUSED to even hold hearings for any of Obama’s nominees. Not are you a lying scumsucker, you are actually blaming the recipient of your party’s abuse. This is added on top of the fact that Republicans are devoted to stripping Dems off voter rolls, gerrymandering Dems out of existence, and getting any and all foreign help they can is vile.
We already know why Trump won, and it’s because of lying assholes like you. And fuck you, I fought for this country once, and I’ll be fucked if I back down before a bunch of ranty geriatrics, Stolen Valor poseurs, basement incels and bleached blonde Cool Girls who can’t compete on the basis of brains.
Trump used the might and power of the office of the President of the United States to withhold military funding and weapons from a small nation being occupied by the forces of his great pal, Vladimir Putin. (If your standard of guilt for Repubs requires crystal clear confessions it’s a striking change from the way you guys treat Republican false accusations against Dems.) Hanging over the conversation was Putin, whose enemies and critics have a marked tendency to suddenly drop dead.
And now, after Trump abandoned the Kurds to be slaughtered, what form would such threats take?
Eleven people died while Trump jerked Zelensky around.
Why is that not bad enough?
I’m just here to say that this is hilarious. The whole thread is hilarious.