No, you are wrong. Disgracing the POTUS with an unceremonious exit would wreck havoc on the Republican party.

The Republicans are worse and nobody doubts that, but I don't get where this random "we gotta fight" bs is coming from. #resistance? We're nowhere near an election, there's nothing for any of us to do.

I mean maybe donate to the DNC? They're having lots of trouble funding right now. Socialist groups are seeing unprecedented growth. So there's not really a solution in sight, things are basically going to suck and there's probably no recourse.

lol

If you don't know who Tucker Carlson is, you don't even know what you are up against in this propaganda war.

You could start by bringing back the fairness doctrine and getting rid of the AM radio band.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/SourceWatch will tell you far more about propaganda in this country than watching cable news.

Well okay but the Democrats didn't prosecute them, so either


1.) there was nothing to actually prosecute, or
2.) the Democrats wanted to avoid a precedent where their war crimes would get prosecuted too

which means either the MSM was leading Fox-style hysteria about Bush, or the Democrats are a really **** party, too. Or both! Why not?

I can think of a group of people who doubt that. Hint: you mentioned them in your same sentence.

Is #1 really worth bringing up? I don't think historians sensitive to human rights and civil liberties will look kindly on Bush (or Obama).

I could be wrong, but I am skeptical that president Gore would have been nearly as disastrous as Bush 43, post 9/11.

If you are ruling out #1 on faith, that means the only option is #2, so what about that is supposed to reassure me about the performance of a hypothetical Gore 43?

Actually now that I think about it there was all those blanket powers granted to the executive branch in the wake of 9/11, and Democrats are certainly complicit in that.

That said, the Hon. Jim Sensenbrenner, who authored the Patriot act (or did in part) went on to denounce it, after the NSA was shown to be abusing what was supposed to be temporary power that ended up being renewed by Congress and institutionalized.

Maybe we can at least agree that before you "lock someone up" you should still establish that they've done something to warrant it, and that the bar for removing a president from power is set lower than that.

As far as a president Gore? At a minimum, no Iraq war, and no torture. Probably some form of the Patriot act. I can't say they wouldn't do the kind of unconstitutional spying that Cheney pushed for early on and which was ruled unconstitutional but (I imagine) was the precursor to the later NSA programs.

I agree that the bar for impeachment is lower than that. At the same time Republicans won't do this to their own party except in the most disastrous of administrations, like Richard Nixon, who would have been impeached eventually.

Trump very likely broke money laundering laws (I am fuzzy on the details but his real estate stuff pre-presidency looks super shady). If Republicans can't bring themselves to deem their own man unfit, I argue that Democratic supporters ought not feel shame in relentlessly castigating Trump as ammunition for political warfare. Clinton may have broken the law, but I am just about certain that no Democratic base would have seized upon this issue the way the Republicans did, were it a Republican who committed the same crime.

So yeah, when I said the biggest problem is people vote Republican, and you gave me ****, what did you think I was talking about?

Literally the only problem Republicans have with Trump is he has holes in his brain and therefore says dumb things.

And yes, the president can be indicted. I'm not saying the Dems should start chanting "lock him up" before that happens, but from where the special prosecutor is going, it looks like they might get the chance.

Of course, the president can also pardon himself.

That's not true. Paul Ryan denounced the pardoning of Joe Arpaio today.

They have tons of problems with Trump. They are just committed enough to their legislative agenda that they won't take responsibility for him until the cost-benefit trade-off tips against Trump's favor.

He denounced it because it was stupid because Trump has holes in his brain.

We might agree. I dunno, your first post was a little sparse, but it just looked a lot like conservative rhetoric in that it still assumes Clinton is relevant at this point.

There is a reason they keep bringing up Clinton and Obama. The mistake is to fall into that trap rather than doing the same thing right back at them and focusing on Trump's flaws. Trust me, the problem here is not that liberals are too apologetic for Clinton.

That's an explanation of why Trump did what he did. There's a difference between doing something wrong, and saying something which is evidence of dementia. Paul Ryan would have been critical of any president who pardoned Arpaio, even if the for reasons for him/her doing so were other than dementia.

I'm an unabashed socialist and you think I'd be using conservative rhetoric? I made my comment because you quoted Shareblue, which is a neoliberal Clintonism rag.

Really? You sure?

Er, don't forget Operation Desert Fox. You're really underestimating how vindictive the US government is, in a totally non-partisan way. They were itching for a fight in Iraq for a long time. This was in no small part fueled by Saddam Hussein's own actions to make Iraq look like it had a nuclear program, even though it didn't. The US does not tolerate even the appearance of strength.

Ah, I remember when it was called "enhanced interrogation techniques".

I don't believe it. The CIA recommended this stuff, it was scientific - in a perverse way, but still methodical. The Democrats aren't exactly famous for declining the advice of the bureaucrats. Obama sure didn't do it, he even worked to block the report about CIA torture.

Republicans had a majority government, had already drafted the bill before the attack ever happened, and it would have been politically untenable not to sign it. Word. For. Word.



NSA programs started a long time ago. Obama did nothing to stop them, and tried to black bag the guy who leaked evidence that they even existed.

I'm pretty sure if they made an SNL skit of Trump coming out in a diaper and crying like a baby he would get so angry he would pop a blood vessel and have a stroke. I don't think Trump is actually mentally capable of having a sophisticated moral calculus.

Trust me, Trump's relationship with congressional leaders is not good right now. The only reason this isn't more disastrous than it already is for his polling numbers is that right wing radio like Limbaugh and Levin have brainwashed their listeners into seeing any but the most extreme right wingers as Rinos. They've been relentless in their attacks on McConnell for the past month or two.

Well, yeah, all it takes is Pentagon generals walking into the office and throwing down their same rhetoric about how Iran will invade 30 countries if we don't do something now, and every president folds.

They hate Trump because he makes them look bad. Don't pretend they actually give a **** about Arpaio.

One of Obama's only good things ever, the Iran deal, is likely to be cancelled by Holey Trump.

Impeachable =/= criminal

No, the president cannot pardon himself for taking a title of royalty and still keep his job

Many so-called socialists sound like conservative anti-anti-Trumpers these days, and many conservative anti-anti-Trumpers sound a lot like so-called socialists.

https://twitter.com/brianstelter/status/900872289490751488

I'm not about to watch a Fox News clip to understand the context in which Tucker Carlson was quoting Noam Chomsky, but it's a safe guess that he doesn't understand either the quote or the immense amount he has personally contributed to the situation Chomsky was talking about.

Oh, Obama had been awful on this NSA unwarranted dragnet stuff. But it was after 9/11 that Cheney pushed for warrentless wiretapping so hard that even the NSA lawyers balked. From a 2006 New York Times article:



https://www.truthdig.com/articles/cheney-reportedly-pushed-nsa-to-spy-domestically/

Not sure if Glenn Greenwald identifies as a socialist, but he's definitely anti-anti-Trump from the left who gets along with anti-anti-Trump conservatives.

Oh okay. Nice to know.

Also, in the later PBS documentary, I should add that the New York Times had a big story that the administration told them to suppress. They did. So I am not exactly sure how accurate that 2006 bit is in the end, but I imagine the truth is even less tame.

The video has nothing to do with the Chomsky quote. But I agree with you.