Thought for the Day

[Stavros]

I know politicians talk rubbish, it comes with the job, but I wonder if I have ever lived through a time when the volume of rubbish is at such staggering proportions. That it comes from a 'vox pop' that seems to have no rules other than self-belief and self-promotion is the price we pay for free speech, just as once a week if it still happens, Sunday in the Park in London was crowded with inflammatory speakers and the crowds they loved to wind up.

But then you have Rudolph Giuliani making the most outrageous statements in defence of criminal behaviour and you realise the poison has infected the head, these are not normal times, that elementary facts are discarded and truth is no longer valued. The worst thing is people may actually believe him, though I wonder how Republicans would have reacted in 1980 had Jimmy Carter publicly called on Brezhnev to help his campaign, not missing out Putin who was a KGB officer at the time, and a member of the Communist Party -and has he changed his views since 1991?

On the lunchtime news Sir Anthony Meyer, a former ambassador to the US justified the State Visit on the grounds it is about the country and the Office of the Presidency rather than the incumbent, yet this is a President who has no respect for that very office and even less for his country. We can list all the undesirable thieves, liars and murderers who have been given State Visits, but that doesn't mean we must maintain a tradition of inviting the worst to ride with the Queen and have trumpets announce their arrival at dinner -we should not be giving this sack of shit a welcome of any kind, not least because of the way he insulted and abused Theresa May in the newspaper owned by the soft-porn publisher and criminal hacker Rupert Murdoch on the eve of his last visit. Who knows- if the Tory part has its way, she won't be Prime Minister by the time he arrives, we may have left the EU (but I doubt it), and when the Queen sees what the President wants, she may decide to 'go sick' and lumber Chuck with the problem.

[buttslinger]

I know politicians talk rubbish, it comes with the job, but I wonder if I have ever lived through a time when the volume of rubbish is at such staggering proportions. That it comes from a 'vox pop' that seems to have no rules other than self-belief and self-promotion is the price we pay for free speech....

Trump practically blows Putin onstage at Helsinki, …….where the fuck is the outrage?
Tolerance doesn't mean you cut your balls off, somebody's got to start calling balls and strikes because Conservative Media is playing by their own set of rules. I've always thought Trump wouldn't make it four years in the United States of America, maybe something truly nefarious is going on above and beyond the usual bullshit.

[buttslinger]

And... the cold fact is all I know is what they tell me. Shooting the messenger is where we're at now. In the USA, a dozen or two indictments against Trump for money laundering would be like killing that blue White Walker on Game of Thrones, all Trump's underlings would shatter like glass. I imagine Brexit's situation is more like groping the air, more complex than 3-D chess, with a blindfold.
When I used to get Viagra from Canada, the mis-information about competing clinics was off the charts, My urologist asked me what the best clinic was! Any time huge amounts of money are at stake, the competition is going to be epic.

[Stavros]

Surely the problem you now have in the US is that the President can break as many laws as he chooses to, deny he is breaking the law, maybe even boast he is breaking the law, because nothing will happen as a result -the mere fact that none of the Republicans who went ape when Bill Clinton committed one offence now see nothing, hear nothing and do nothing. It underlines the extent to which Congress is a useless vessel, a talking shop that has ceased to be a branch of government. Pelosi can't be bothered, and why should she insist the rule of law and democratic accountability shape the politics of the USA?

Admit that reason has all but disappeared in public life and you can retire your morals. States are passing laws to limit abortion by claiming that evidence of a heartbeat confirms and protects life when science could inform them there is not even a heart at 6 weeks to beat, but why would an American believe science is anything but bullshit? You might as well argue that when a state chops the heads off 37 people in one day it may be worse than Daesh but why should the US care what Saudi Arabia does as long as it is paying the President to keep his trap shut and bend the knee to MSB?

It remains to be seen if the US can recover from the most sustained attack on its Constitution, its laws and institutions since the attack on Fort Sumer in 1861, or be now forever divided against itself. Who needs the Greys when you have a degenerate moron in the White House protected by men utterly bereft of elemetary decency and respect for all that the US has achieved? Brexit is a poltical mess, your Republican party is a fatal disease. The UK may break up into its parts, England, Scotland and Wales, and Ireland be re-unified, but are you ready for the break up of the USA, and does anyone actually care?

[buttslinger]

I wish I could explain it, more importantly, I hope there's enough sanity left in the government that they understand at least. I heard a bit of the Mueller Report today ...they intercepted Russian phone calls on election night 2016 saying "Putin has won"
Maybe the insanity we see hides the greater insanity that we don't see.
I'm hoping one of the Democrats on the Mueller team is getting all his notes together to leak at the appropriate time. The Mueller Report did kill Trump, he just doesn't know it yet.
No fucking way does Putin not wake up the sleeping giant.

[filghy2]

Surely the problem you now have in the US is that the President can break as many laws as he chooses to, deny he is breaking the law, maybe even boast he is breaking the law, because nothing will happen as a result -the mere fact that none of the Republicans who went ape when Bill Clinton committed one offence now see nothing, hear nothing and do nothing. It underlines the extent to which Congress is a useless vessel, a talking shop that has ceased to be a branch of government. Pelosi can't be bothered, and why should she insist the rule of law and democratic accountability shape the politics of the USA?

Not only is he ignoring the laws himself, but there are reports that he has encouraged officials to ignore the law on the promise that he will pardon them. He has done this sort of thing publicly on several occasions already.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/...eenan-dhs.html

It's also clear that Trump's strategy on HoR attempts to investigate his administration will be to refuse cooperation on dubious legal grounds and try to tie it up in the courts until after the election. https://www.politico.com/story/2019/...gation-1289645

Could the presidential power to pardon (combined with court-stacking and a compliant party) be the Achilles heel in the US system of democracy and law? I guess we'll find out over the next couple of years.

The real reason to impeach Trump is this systematic pattern of law-breaking and not the specific question of collusion with Russia. I think one thing that history does tell us is that when would-be autocrats succeed it is usually because their opponents have been too timid in taking them on.

[broncofan]

The real reason to impeach Trump is this systematic pattern of law-breaking and not the specific question of collusion with Russia. I think one thing that history does tell us is that when would-be autocrats succeed it is usually because their opponents have been too timid in taking them on.

In the Federalist Papers you can find discussion about misuse of the pardon power and how impeachment is a remedy for that. They were aware of the possibility of self-dealing but thought impeachment would be a check on that. It doesn't mean they got it right, but if the Federalist Papers are any guide to what is impeachable, it should be that sort of pattern of corruption. Which leaves your next point about a compliant party.

The Russia investigation was always about getting to the bottom of what their campaign was to influence our election, what dirty money got into our system, what cyber crimes were committed, and what sorts of fraudulent and illegal actions took place. Trump may think that because the investigation did not find a smoking gun connecting him to Russia's campaign that such fact-finding was not necessary, but that's because he has no sense of responsibility to anyone other than himself. His actions were objectively corrupt, not part of normal partisanship, and threatened national security by interfering with attempts to uncover espionage.

I'm curious what you think Democrats could do to be less timid. I'm not saying this defensively, but there was a time when the criticism from some quarters was that Democrats had become shrill and obsessed with this issue.

[Stavros]

Before he entered office he was given the arguments by 'literalist' advocates that there are details in the relationship between the President and Congress that have never been codified or tested in law, and if there is one thing he learned froom Cohn it is to always attack and use the law as the weapon. Either this is a strength for the Democrats so that they can overhaul the legal relationship between the President and Congress, or he will simply get away with it, and frustrate any attempt to call his staff to testify by issuing a blizzard of writs or rejections of subpoenas (just say no!) and wait for the other side to get stuck in the legal process. But it does mean, as if we did not know it already, that everything is about HIM, not the law, not democracy, not Congress, not the Constitution, not 'norms and values', and certainly not basic decency. HIM, His Imperial Majesty.

Nancy Pelosi needs to think hard about the consequences of doing nothing and relying on the voters -but surely now their public campaign must be to put key Republican Senators in the spotlight to expose their hypocrisy in their refusal to impeach on clear evidence of illegality, so that it is the Republican Party that becomes responsible for participating in the demolition of the Constitution and the rule of law. It is quite extraordinary what this man is getting away with, but just as depressing is the relegation of Congress to an irritant to the King's Rule.

Watergate was often a confusing sequence of claims and revelations about the way individuals behaved after the break-in, and it ended with the sense that Nixon had undermined public trust in him, but not the Presidency. Then and since it was believed the system had shorted, but corrected itself, primarily because Nixon had lost the trust of his party in Congress. The situation we have now, as Biden suggested in his declaration video today, is one approaching existential levels, where the indifference of the GOP to law breaking theatens the basic purpose of government, and what's more, I really don't think they care if the system falls apart.

[filghy2]

I'm curious what you think Democrats could do to be less timid. I'm not saying this defensively, but there was a time when the criticism from some quarters was that Democrats had become shrill and obsessed with this issue.

I was thinking of Nancy Pelosi's reluctance so far to contemplate impeachment. I know there's an argument that it's better to focus on things that directly affect people (like health care) but at some point protecting the system has to take precedence. If Trump continues along his current trajectory they will probably have no choice but to proceed.

[trish]

My worry is that impeachment will only consolidate Trump's support, not diffuse it. Even if successful, it would leave Pence (who may not be as ignorant as Trump, but is certainly more backward) the incumbent in the next election. So far I'm siding with Pelosi on this matter.