Did you guys read Jimmy Breslin How the Good Guys Finally Won? He had an interesting take on Nixon/Watergate. He emphasized the rather dull and unexciting legal procedures, established patterns where this piece of paper demands a response which leads to a unavoidable consequence and followed by another. None of which makes the news, because its dull and legalistic. But Breslin emphasized that as soon as those gears began to turn, the outcome was pretty much pre-determined.
They don’t have to find bodies in the back yard, or major crimes. Just financial shenanigans that require legal correction, compensation, and penalty. Even financial misdemeanors can cost money. Bigger things require harsher medicine. And sunlight, of course, is a marvelous disinfectant. Nothing need be explicit, a wink, another, a say no more, just so he thinks that if he rolls up his circus tent and gets the hell out of Dodge toot sweet, he can keep his money. Well, most of it. Some. Depends on the degree of graceful cooperation.
His money is the axis upon which he spins. His money means more to him that his wife, his children or his dick. He will bail. Geronimo! and Adios, motherfucker…
I wouldn’t say he’s the face of the Republican party just yet - still too early to tell. But what he has done is to legitimize behavior that establishment Republicans once dismissed out of hand. The Republican party as a whole is a becoming culture of white Christian nationalist extremism, which is a trend that predates Bannon’s Breitbart. The GOP Revolution of 1994 was outdone by the Tea Party in 2010. And now the Tea Party is being outdone by Breitbart.
Sure, Boehner got tired of it, but quit. Corker got tired of it, but he’s quitting. The establishment Republicans, the adults in the room, make their statement by quitting - because they don’t want to face the same fate of Eric Cantor, who lost a primary. Nobody in the Republican party is fighting the extremists. They’re increasingly just getting bullied and beaten into submission.
It’s not just about political alliances; it’s tone and demeanor. Having Moore in the Senate means the normalization of the politics of Ted Cruz - except he’s actually worse than Ted Cruz, if that can be believed. But then imagine if instead of having one more blowhard in the Senate, there are two, three, four, or even five more who stun establishment types in a primary? They would probably do away with filibusters. They would shove extreme right wing policies down the throats of Democrats.
Nah, I don’t see that at all. The GOP controls state level politics, as they do in most of the south, and Tennessee hasn’t elected a Democratic senator since 1995. The state went overwhelmingly for Trump. ANd honestly, Trump is not entirely wrong in his tweets: Corker’s leaving not out of principle, but because he’s afraid of being primaried. The polling data show him to be very weak among GOP voters.
If the economy goes south, then I’ll be more optimistic about voters having a change of heart. But honestly, most voters are just plain stupid. I mean how did we end up in this mess to begin with? Our state of affairs isn’t the result of one bad election, but rather the result of decades of bad voting decisions. And the outcomes keep getting worse. It’s not just the republicans who are stupid either. A lot of progressives either sit out elections or don’t know what they’re voting for either. But as far as Trumpcare, a lot of Trump voters truly believe it’s best to have the federal government destroy all entitlements. Yes, you and I know what the consequences of that would be, but they don’t.
Most people aren’t really paying attention, or they’ll shrug and say “Both sides do it.” Back to their fantasy football team and Dancing With the Stars.
Trump will try to destroy the rule of law. The question is whether congressional republicans will aid and abet him, and whether they believe there is some benefit in helping him do that. Bannon will work to change the composition of congress so that it does. That’s the story between now and 2019.
It’s not a direct quote, it’s a feeling from all the reporting so far. If the Congressional investigators can’t rule out collusion just yet, it says to me perhaps they don’t have a smoking gun so far. But that could just be my interpretation.
Haven’t read the book, but I will. Thanks for the recommendation. I’m a big believer in the rule of law and need no convincing that it may be all that saves us in this situation. Trump’s attacks on and complete disregard for legal norms cause me enormous distress on a daily basis. I’ll take his departure on almost any terms.
Nut sure if “recommend” is the word. Its an intelligent and useful insight, to be sure, but a fairly long essay would have done the job. Mr. Breslin produced a book. I read it myself mostly because of a seething hatred for Nixon that had no competition until recently. Doubt very much its even “in print”. The book’s central theme is that the boring stuff is the most important, the stacks of legal paper piled on top of legal paper. Not exactly scintillating, certainly not titillating. Remainder House publishing.
asahi, I take your points and regard them as equally reasonable interpretations to my own. It would not be the first time I suffered from unbridled optimism that caused me to be completely wrong. But I’ve been right often enough that I continue to hope.
One thing I never see people consider is the extent to which they themselves may have been influenced by Russian propaganda. Frequently, someone says something like, “I hated Hillary so much…” yet it doesn’t seem to occur to them that maybe the Russian efforts worked a little bit on them. Or maybe a lot.
I spent some time thinking about this, remembering the crazy assertions I would see made about her around the web during the campaign. I admit that after awhile, even I was began to suffer from Hillary fatigue – and I was one of her solid supporters. I spend zero time on Facebook, Twitter and/or Instagram. In hindsight, I realized how well the Russians’ tactic worked. Could well be a big factor in 2018, too. In the South, they already consider Russia a “friend.”
If the pee tape is real, it would be a huge deal, but not because the pee tape exists. It would be huge because it would give more legitimacy to the rest of the dossier.
To be fair, outside of feeding the fire with the email dumps, I’m sure that nearly all of the anti-Clinton propaganda was started in the American media and then later paid for by the Republican party. It’s probably more accurate to say that Russia got lucky by striking it rich with the emails (even though they contained nothing of note in the end). In sheer dollars spent, they probably spent almost nothing compared to the RNC and the Wikileaks dump would have done nothing if it weren’t for the baseline of suspicion created in America by the American Press and amplified by Republican advertising.
There was a thin vein of gold in the Dem leadership e-mails, which offered the opportunity to fan the flames of the Bernie/Hillary rift. Perhaps they might not have put so much effort into it if they had more to work with? It is rare to see such a vociferous public feud between two principal antagonists who are both doing their best to tamp it down.
To the best of my recollection, Bernie never gave an ounce of comfort or encouragement to the “Bernie or Nobody!” hotheads. And I got a nickel that says if Bernie believed that his candidacy would lead to a Trump admin, he would have stuck his Hillary! button to his lapel, sat on his hands and kept his mouth shut in an agony of silence.
Not seeing anything that is new, though, really. The meeting was supposed to be about Magnitsky, but Goldstone upped the ante by mentioning dirt on Clinton - which seems like a strange thing to do minus some form of approval from the Russian government. I don’t find the idea very believable that some British dude would make such an offer on the part of Russia, for no particular reason. Why would he care enough about whether the Russians and the Trump campaign get together as to start changing Russia’s bid on his own?
And, of course, Veselnitskaya has admitted that she did have a folder on Clinton that she brought, before.
Not sure what the NDA stuff has to do with anything, one way or the other.
Is that your understanding of the limited nature of Russia’s involvement? My understanding is that it goes much deeper than that. Here are a few recent links:
The Hillary/Podesta email dumps were only one way Russia helped. Don’t forget the Goldstone email to Donnie Half-Scoop, indicating the dirt on Hillary was only “part of” the help they were providing to Trump. Which, incidentally, appeared to surprise no one who received that email.
Lastly, you have to ask yourself: If Trump and his campaign were not complicit in assisting Russia to deploy their propaganda, then why are they fighting the investigation so hard? Why the firing of Comey? Why the Devin Nunes charade? Why the anger at Sessions for his (lawful) recusal? Why the big campaign to try and paint the investigation as a “hoax?” Why no acknowledgement of Russian meddling despite the conclusions of all intelligence agencies? Why no assistance provided to states where Russia tried to hack their election rolls/voting equipment? Why all the lies by Flynn, Kushner, Ivanka, Sessions and others on their security clearance forms, whitewashing any contacts with Russians? I could go on.
Taken as a whole, it stinks like a body buried under the floorboards.
Your recollection is the same as mine.
I thought Bernie made an unfortunate move during the campaign when he claimed the election was “rigged” against him, for a couple of reasons. First, the word, ‘rigged,’ is inflammatory and was guaranteed to become a lightning rod phrase that was immediately mirrored by TrumpCo and thrown back at Dems; and second, his assertion was based on the super delegates in the Democratic party nomination process. The super delegates are there for a reason. They prevent the hostile takeover of the party by outliers who do not espouse the party’s own platform. Kind of like… well, you know. Plus Bernie knew the rules of becoming a Democratic party nominee long before he chose to run as a Dem. If he wanted to preserve his independence from their rules, he could have run as an independent.
But except for that mistake, Bernie was as supportive of Hillary as anyone could ask. It simply didn’t make any difference. The hate was baked in hard. As I’ve remarked elsewhere on this forum, it baffled me no end. In every other presidential election I’ve lived through, nominations were hard fought – but once the primary voters had spoken, all candidates and their followers coalesced behind the party’s nominee. Not this time. I wondered why. Now we know. There were some very powerful eastern headwinds.
While I commend you on your links, and it is still possible that more ads will be found that were financed by Russia, based on the numbers I have seen, I’d venture to guess that Russia dumped at most a million dollars or so into direct advertisements. And, to be certain, that’s more than nothing, but still eclipsed massively by the $250 million that was spent by the Trump campaign, and even more by the $5 billion that it’s suggested that the mass media donated to him, gratis.
And let’s not forget that the mass media and the RNC have been dumping on the Clintons since 1992. Russia probably had nothing whatsoever to do with Whitewatergate, the Lewinsky Scandal, Bengazi, etc.
Again, by no means am I saying that Russia didn’t do stuff, just that we did more on our own.
If, for example, the US media had decided to ignore the Wikileaks materials, how would Russia have spread the information to your average American? Even using Facebook, they would have had anything like the reach of the New York Times, Washington Post, Breitbart, The Economist, etc. all of whom took the Wikileaks information and spread it around for everyone to ogle.
Ultimately, we’re better served by figuring out how to make the mass media less sensationalist and less prey to the people who would want to manipulate them, than we would ever do by trying to prevent Russia from buying Facebook ads. We should still do the latter, but the former is a bigger opportunity for making the world into a better place.
I’ll grant, that is difficult to do given the pressures of the free market and then compounded by the First Amendment, but Russian advertising really isn’t (or doesn’t yet seem to be) a real concern. The hacking was an issue, but only due to the mass media, which is happy to run with anything that will sell newspapers.
Facebook probably has more reach than any of those, plus ads there can be very specifically targeted because Facebook knows nearly everything about you.
Respectfully, I disagree. As I have remarked before in this thread, I’m not sure many yet appreciate the force multiplier that social media is – how much bang there is for the buck. It is certainly true that the money spent does not compare to money spent in more traditional ways. But that doesn’t mean the effect wasn’t outsized.
Many people nowadays actually take their news from only social media. Horrifying thought, but apparently, it’s true.
It isn’t just Russia buying Facebook ads. It’s Russians posing as Americans and running Facebook groups and disbursing propaganda memes and Youtube videos across the strata of social media.
According to this WaPo article, Russian propaganda may have been shared hundreds of millions of times.
If it exists, and if it gets posted to YouTube, then it would be a big deal. What is seen, cannot be unseen. Locker room talk is one thing, but imagine the visuals of a sitting president peeing on Russian prostitutes. And God only knows what other crap is on the tape – is he wearing a diaper too?
My understanding is that the tape doesn’t show Trump urinating. Allegedly, it shows Russian prostitutes, which Trump had hired, urinating on a hotel bed that had once been slept in by the Obamas.
