Insults, (not permitted in this forum), should be intelligible, relevant, and witty.
Do not practice in GD or P&E.
No Warning issued.
[ /Moderating ]
OK I’ll rephrase. The arguments put on were naive and simplistic and don’t reflect actual workplaces, govts, theaters of war, or law enforcement activities. So I feel I am the object of sport.
“Get her out tomorrow. I don’t care. Get her out tomorrow.”
I don’t think that interpretation is accurate. It’s difficult to confuse kicking someone out and murdering them, whereas it is reasonable for Donald to say dramatic things just to be dramatic.
Most likely he barely even understood who she was nor why they wanted her gone, he just understood that his friends were telling him that some lady was getting in the way of their business. As friends, he wants to get rid of her.
He doesn’t even understand that Parnas and Fruman aren’t part of the US government. He can’t keep his relationships and businesses separate.
He’s a doddering idiot who doesn’t understand things.
I agree with you fully but the Republican empathy deficit means this argument doesn’t work on them. You have to hit them where it matters, their selfishness. So I would say:
There is more stuff related to this issue yet to come out and it is not going to make Trump look better. At some point John Bolton might just say fuck it and give Rachel Maddow an hour long interview. Courts might demand production of documents. More recordings of Trump doing shady shit might come out (like the recording that came out today where Trump tells his lackeys to “take out” the Ambassador). If you put a vote on record that you are okay with all of this you are going to look like an idiot when the rest of the evidence surfaces.
Also, Trump isn’t finished being a criminal yet. In that category there are various crimes he has already committed (mostly sexual and financial) that will continue haunting him. There are also the crimes he is certain to commit once it is established that there is no level of oversight that can contain his base urges. And once those things start happening, you are going to have to defend him again for even more egregious, obvious criminality. You get to spend the rest of your political career cleaning up after a shit-flinging monkey that will never reward you for it. You get to be Trump’s bootlicking bitch, now and forever and you might end up getting roped into one of his schemes and ending up in jail for it while Trump pretends that he has no idea who you are.
Or you could grow a spine and vote the son of a bitch out right now, destroy his cult of personality and reclaim your party. And you even get to blame the Democrats for any chaos that ensues because they “overturned the will of the American people”.
I’ve read that Trump’s people have promised that any disloyal Senators will end up with their heads on pikes. Why should they accept that? Your political career is over anyhow so why not go out fighting? Is Trump the only one who has pikes? Because right now, four pikes would ruin his day and two dozen would end him altogether. But it is easier to be a bitch I guess.
If they convict and remove, it becomes effective immediately, as far as I understand it. It’ll be like Sara to the Goblin King: “You have no power over me.” He won’t be president. He’ll be a bitter old crackpot with a Twitter account and shouting conspiracy theories into the ether. The Republican senators will get some blowback from the deplorable fringe, but it’s not like they’ll suddenly vote Democrat in revenge.
According to MSNBC, ABC just posted to audiotape in question on their news website.
Deliriously so. Or maybe I’m just Delirious. I’m certainly confused. This dinner conversation takes place in April 2018, and the America-hating fuckstick Says he wants her gone tomorrow. And yet 13 months later, she is still there. What the fuck?
#TFA Bob Woodward Trump Book: Gary Cohn Stole Docs to Keep NAFTA, KORUS Trade Deals
Trump has no idea what’s going on. He just knows that he’s supposed to be loud and decisive. He didn’t realize that he was ordering people who don’t work for the government to fire Yovanovitch.
I know we have some here, but I thought folks might still enjoy watching this 9 minute video where a real lawyer reacts to Rep. Schiff’s closing arguments.
He mostly sits quietly through the 8.5 minutes of Rep. Schiff’s remarks, then offers a brief commentary.
Trump’s version: I barely know Lev Parnas. I may have taken a picture with him, but I pose for a lot of pictures.
Reality: Parnas is sitting next to Trump at dinner, feeding him lies about his ambassador, and manipulating him into firing people.
Yeah, that’s a good look for the POTUS.
And by the way, nobody on Trump’s staff seemed to notice or care that somebody was*** recording their dinner with the President without his knowledge***.
Just tactically speaking, I think the Trump team made an excellent decision to limit their presentation today and now they have a day and a half to decide how to finish after hearing the Managers’ case.
Frankly, my entire life I’ve been interesting in the law, history, and politics and this is BORING AS HELL. I usually watch for a couple of hours each night and hear the same thing over and over and over again. Twenty-four hours is simply too much for an opening statement. You cannot expect anyone to actually listen that long. You can force them to sit in their seats, but you cannot make them listen.
Even the public has not filled up the gallery: Trump impeachment: Half-empty spectator gallery puzzles senators
Wouldn’t it have been better to have four hours of hard hitting, point by point, to make your case?
Lesson for public speaking: sometimes less is more.
I would presume that he just had an app running on his phone, in his pocket.
I’ve heard some people say that Cold War spies could only have dreamed of having a device like a modern smart phone, for their work.
Pelosi should have hired some real lawyers.
I continue to get the impression that she thinks of the trial purely in terms of fundraising. She wants to give the House representatives some headline space for their election funding. If it was just some professional prosecutor who was damn good at his job…well, how do you make money off that?
Schiff has been great. Jeffries was strong. Nadler a disaster. The other were okay.
If you are bored by the presentations, please speak to McConnell. He decided the format, so the medium is the message. Witnesses should would make it more interesting, wouldn’t we all agree?
Not only that but the managers wern’t just making an opening argument. The format is such that they need to make their case and forego rebuttals. arguments will sound different under limitations like that.
I predict every motion for witnesses goes down 53-47 and that will also be the acquit/convict total.
I’d recommend following the Trump doctrine and asserting the reality you want.
Predicting acquittal, in a way, excuses it. No one can be blamed for going against goodness and right if no one expected it to begin with.
I’d rather that blame follow, should the Senate fail to do right.
The scheme to get the Ukrainian government to announce ‘we’re investigating Joe Biden’ did, indeed, begin in April 2019, which was when Biden announced he was running.
The April 2018 dinner-instructions, by contrast, were Trump’s reaction to Putin’s working on him, probably at each and every one of their unrecorded meetings and calls.
Putin wants Ukraine. Putin does not want interference in his plans for Ukraine from some uppity US ambassador who opposes his plans, and who is well-respected and effective.
So if we suddenly got access to recordings of Putin’s instructions to his idiot puppet, almost certainly we would find many instances of Putin telling Donald ‘the Ukrainians hate you and are plotting against you’ and ‘your ambassador Yovanovich hates you and is plotting against you.’ Donald, of course, would drink all this in without stopping to wonder what Vlad was up to, because Vlad loves and respects him and thinks only of helping him, right?
Yep. It’s Vlad!
Firing her with no visible cause was something Trump could have done, but he was being advised against it because it would lead to big problems. For one thing, it would clearly have been an overt action that had no rationale other than pleasing Putin. And the Administration was sensitive to accusations of being, well, Putin’s puppets.
So, instead, the plan was to muddy up her reputation via shenanigans by Rudy, Lev, Igor, et al—and then, ultimately, fire her (which is what happened).
That took time. And to be fair, Donald was distracted by many other plots and schemes that took his attention from the Fire the Too-Honest Ambassador plot. For one thing, he had to find new ways to charge taxpayers for elements of his stays at his golf clubs. That’s important!
Yeah, that, too.
True enough. The massive egos of Senators are legendary.
And they have enabled Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and others to employ the classic “tone argument” to justify their eventual vote to enable, support, and cradle-in-adoration Mr. Unfit-for-Office (via acquittal).
The pearl-clutching over remarks by Jerry Nadler and Adam Schiff amounts to outrage that these lowly Representatives have dared to forget the deference owed to SENATORS. As Jonathan Chait put it in the headline of a NYM article:
It is, of course, the Entitled who make use of tone arguments—‘I’d listen to you if not for your disrespectful tone’—in order to dismiss facts. And Senators are nothing if not entitled.
So far it would appear that Roberts has abandoned all interest in being seen as a disinterested ‘caller of balls and strikes.’
Legal analyst Barb McQuade posted, today:
It would be nice if this were to become a movement; the Trump defense team are plainly and repeatedly lying and otherwise violating rules in a way that Roberts—if he cares anything at all about his reputation—should find objectionable.
I spent the afternoon chatting with family members including a woman who is very moderate conservative and basically apolitical on a day to day basis. They haven’t been following the trial or any of the news around it.
We had the TV going in the living room when the Parnas / Trump tape story came on. There was a lull in the conversation, so we were watching it. This woman’s reaction was “Holy Shit, that doesn’t sound to me like he’s asking him to FIRE her”. It sounds like he’s telling them to do whatever it takes like maybe kill her”.
I must say, it felt good to hear that from a registered Republican.