That ain’t much distance.
There are some of the usual, occasionally-principled non-House Republicans:
And, of course, contrast that to the utterly reasonable, stable and factually correct :rolleyes: view of some House Republicans:
They’re distancing themselves from the memo but they’re not outright condemning it either. I already listened to Tim Hurd, a former CIA guy no less, who tried to explain concerns with the FISA warrants in the memo. Yeah, right, a Republican CIA guy concerned about FISA…since like fucking when? Didn’t Republicans just vote to extend FISA? If they’re so fucking concerned about it why not just eliminate it altogether?
Look, the Republicans know how FISA works. They know how intelligence works. They just don’t like the fact that their president and the donor class that writes the checks that keep their campaigns going have found themselves in a scandal that caught the attention of the FBI.
But here’s the thing, their pathological hatred of the FBI (and federal investigators) goes beyond just Russia. If the Republicans could, they’d weaken anti-corruption investigations. They’d weaken tax evasion investigations by the IRS. They’d weaken and undermine SEC investigations. They’d weaken federal investigations of workplace safety and discrimination. The Republicans see an opportunity to deconstruct the federal government, and they’re not going to let that pass.
This memo is the equivalent of a flea with a hard-on floating down the Potomac yelling “raise the bridge!”
Depends on if you can read the undertext.
He’s basically saying, “I’m sorry for my idiot brother. Yes, we all care about national security, but let’s keep our eye on things that actually happened.”
Neatly put.
Meanwhile, in less than 24 hours, the coverage on NECN, the regional cable news station for New England (affiliated with NBC) has gone from a brief uncritical recap of the “Scandal!” GOP take, through “each side says”, to “memo claims … but refuted by …”.
It’s a fail.
Page is a plant! This investigation is going over like a steel balloon!
Heh.
You might be going bonzo, but then again, as someone famous once said, we have not yet begun to fight
On what do you bass that opinion?
Well, now we have all the band members…
Wrong.
The damage is done.
Bit by bit, the assumption among the average apolitical person is that ‘they’re all crooks’ and that institutions are now corrupted by political bias. It doesn’t matter if Democrats win back control of the government and pledge to restore these institutions - the institutions have been corrupted. Remember that in the mind of the average person, there’s not much difference between the Democratic party and the Republican party, so in their minds, Republican corruption would simply be replaced with corruption that favors the Democratic party. You know…Giant Douche or Turd Sandwich. It’s funny on South Park, and it has appeal because that way we’re not offending one half of America. But the reality is that we’re making a false equivalency when it’s not valid. The consequence of this is, a false equivalency means the death of truth. The death of truth means…the death of democracy.
We’re fucked and there’s no way to reverse this fatal trend. This problem will not be solved with an election next year. We’re entering the authoritarian age and that’s inevitable. The way to defeat authoritarians is through massive, large scale civil disobedience. I doubt most people are really at that point yet.
I cannot believe Carter Page is the hill House Republicans, especially Nunes, have chosen to die on, so to speak with this memo. There seemed to be plenty of evidence for the FBI to suspect Page is some sort of agent for the Russians, even if just to raise suspicions and do a counterintelligence probe on. Page is pretty much an open book on trying to be buddy buddy with the Russians. For some reason, Nunes seems to think Page is being unfairly tarred by the FBI
Carter Page claims he’s an informal advisor to the Kremlin in a 2013 letter
Gee, he’s really just an innocent young man railroaded by a mean FBI, right?
Part of me wonders if they’re not expanding out the Big Lie - pushing an even more outrageous narrative, to see if people accept it, or at least aren’t rioting in the streets.
That said, I don’t think anyone’s really planning much of anything - they’re all just tapdancing from one lie to the next, holding onto the ears for as long as they can.
I agree, they’re just making shit up as long as they go along. They’re not necessarily cunning geniuses, which is what’s scary: they really don’t have to be particularly smart to achieve what they’re trying to do. The average person assumes that the entire system is rotten, so you have the die-hard GOP’ers, but then you also have people in the center who assume that they’re all rotten and that the Democrats are just as partisan in trying to deny what’s in the memo. And then you even have those who support the Democrats but find snippets of information in the memo that speak to them - like liberals hating FISA, for instance.
There’s a real world thing going on that doesn’t seem to be affected by it. I’m not sure what the achievement is they’re going for. They are harming institutions but not helping donald. What oucl dgo wrong?
What oucl dgo wrong, indeed [. . . sigh]
I don’t know what there is to wonder. That is clearly, unquestionably what they’re doing.
The memo is a Big Lie operation, nothing but. I mean, it’s a textbook example.
Surprise revelations from Grassley:
Ignoring the question that Grassley himself raises (since it’s being discussed in other threads), two interesting points:
- There’s a missing Steele memo that Buzzfeed chose not to publish?
- Steele was also collecting information from someone in the US State Department and, possibly others (The media? British intelligence?)
I think the “second memo” being referred to is the Cody Shearer memo, that may independently confirm some of Steele’s information.
However, the author has been Clinton-connected since the early 90s and is controversial. The FBI is investigating whether there is anything credible in that memo. Just as with the Steele dossier, Shearer’s information is only useful to the extent it can be verified as true.
I seriously doubt Christopher Steele relied on anything in the Shearer information for his findings. It would have been beneath his standards, and his own connections were far better.
You can already see what Republicans will try to do with the Shearer stuff, though. Apparently the concept that law enforcement/justice officials are capable of impartiality when reviewing information for the truth of a thing has gone right out the window. Only Republicans can judge other Republicans – and then only if they provide the “correct” answers.