It concerns me that both Trump's approval rating and the support for impeachment in public polling has stalled for the past couple of weeks despite a steady onslaught of new evidence against him. I hope the public hearings will get the needle moving again.
The open hearings haven’t started yet, so we were kind of hitting a diminishing returns on how many people pay attention to the closed hearings.
I’m confident open hearings will give impeachment support another bump or two that’ll stick.
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I would love to see a reporter ask Trump if Lindsey's assesment that he's too incompetent to know that he was trying to do quid pro quo.
Honestly all reporters should, because then Trump would instinctively claim ownership. "I'm too smart for you idiots to understand my corruption."
Didn't Trump already essentially pre-empt this? Could have sworn I remember him saying that he was totally competent enough to do the quid quo pro if he wanted to.
If he ever decides to throw either Giuliani or Pompeo under the bus, this will be how he does it. There's already an established narrative that State and Giuliani were somewhat at odds and undermining each other. Trump could easily claim that <State Dept. / Giuliani> was doing a great job but <the other one> screwed it all up, and that's how this mess got started.
My money is on Trump backing Giuliani and turning on Pompeo and State because that's the dumbest option, but also the one that will generate the most TV content. Giuliani is willing to go on a lot more shows than Pompeo.
It concerns me that both Trump's approval rating and the support for impeachment in public polling has stalled for the past couple of weeks despite a steady onslaught of new evidence against him. I hope the public hearings will get the needle moving again.
Its basically at republican / non-republican divide now. As long as he remains popular with his base there isn't much further it can go.
It concerns me that both Trump's approval rating and the support for impeachment in public polling has stalled for the past couple of weeks despite a steady onslaught of new evidence against him. I hope the public hearings will get the needle moving again.
Its basically at republican / non-republican divide now. As long as he remains popular with his base there isn't much further it can go.
I think there's another 5% or so that can be chipped away out of the center-right; Trump's rock bottom approval rating has been around 36-38% several times, and we're not quite there yet. A solid third of the electorate will not abandon him pretty much no matter what comes out, though.
My zombie survival life simulator They Don't Sleep is out now on Steam if you want to check it out.
Nah, there is probably 5% that will flake off if their pocketbook takes a hit because of the economy going belly-up, but will stick with him if said pocketbook is fine, even if he kills a child in cold blood on live TV. Like I suspect in the conditions, his support could be lowered to 27-30%. Just that you'd need to economy to fall out. Probably get him to the low to mid 30s if some really damning stuff drops during the hearings and probably get majority support for removing his ass, if the economy holds.
I just don't see their latest defense going anywhere if it's going to boil down to, "they are too stupid to be corrupt." At that point, someone savvy could flip that on them and be like "well they seem pretty fucking dumb and ignorance of the law doesn't mean it wasn't broken, but hey, perhaps they are so idiotic that they are unfit for office." I also see this having a potential to blow up in there faces because that would be insulting Trump and Trump is pretty thin skinned.
Yeah, there’s already been polls showing Trump took a hit with his main demographic; non-college educated, rural, white males. That hit might not have been permanent, but it does show that Trump isn’t as secure as he brags to be and there’s some room to influence opinion against him with his base.
And in all honesty, the needle doesn’t have to move much to matter. With how the GOP gerrymanders shit, even one or two points in the right area will really fuck them in 2020 and they know this, but I guess we’ll see how it plays out.
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Incredible (and yet credible): Taylor told investigators that it was hard to gather natsec officials together to discuss Ukraine in part because the issue of "purchasing Greenland...took up a lot of energy in the NSC"
Schiff: "Ok. That's disturbing for a whole different reason."
It hadn’t even occurred to me that the Greenland-purchasing stuff would’ve consumed time and resources at the NSC.
Ukraine’s Zelensky Bowed to Trump’s Demands, Until Luck Spared Him
Aides to Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, decided that military aid and support for peace talks outweighed the risks of appearing to take sides in American politics.
Finally bending to the White House request, Mr. Zelensky’s staff planned for him to make an announcement in an interview on Sept. 13 with Fareed Zakaria, the host of a weekly news show on CNN.
Though plans were in motion to give the White House the public statement it had sought, events in Washington saved the Ukrainian government from any final decision and eliminated the need to make the statement.
But word of the freeze in military aid had leaked out, and Congress was in an uproar. Two days before the scheduled interview, the Trump administration released the assistance and Mr. Zelensky’s office quickly canceled the interview.
In Kiev, there is still a debate about whether Mr. Zelensky caved or held out. “The Zelensky team was ready to make this quid quo pro,” said Mr. Burkovskiy, the analyst. “They were ready to do this.”
But Pavlo Klimkin, Ukraine’s foreign minister until a change of government on Aug. 29, said there was no telling what Mr. Zelensky would have ended up saying in the interview, as there were so many versions of a statement under negotiation.
“From the contacts that took place, it’s difficult to say if they led, or did not lead, to concrete deals,” Mr. Klimkin said in an interview. In public, Mr. Zelensky has insisted he would never order a politicized prosecution.
Either way, Mr. Klimkin said, Ukrainian officials were at the least keenly aware of the stakes — a trade of United States assistance for political favors, even as Mr. Trump’s supporters have insisted they should not have viewed relations in this light.
“We are not idiots, or at least not all of us,” Mr. Klimkin said.
The evidence makes the quid pro quo absurdly clear.
'Ok. That's disturbing for a whole different reason" is an amazing line and I want to know how Schiff sounded when he said it.
That's one of the few lines from US politics in the last few years that I've been able to picture as being from The West Wing.
Most of the stuff recently has been material they wouldn't have even considered using in season 5.
Sr. White House official: "Pam Bondi and Tony Sayegh are expected to join the White House communications team to work on proactive impeachment messaging and other special projects as they arise. The roles within the White House will be temporary..."
You might know her as the Florida AG Trump made illegal contributions to and was accused of dropping an investigation into Trump University as a favor.
She's also a registered lobbyist for the government of Qatar...
Sr. White House official: "Pam Bondi and Tony Sayegh are expected to join the White House communications team to work on proactive impeachment messaging and other special projects as they arise. The roles within the White House will be temporary..."
You might know her as the Florida AG Trump made illegal contributions to and was accused of dropping an investigation into Trump University as a favor.
She's also a registered lobbyist for the government of Qatar...
Ukraine’s Zelensky Bowed to Trump’s Demands, Until Luck Spared Him
Aides to Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, decided that military aid and support for peace talks outweighed the risks of appearing to take sides in American politics.
Finally bending to the White House request, Mr. Zelensky’s staff planned for him to make an announcement in an interview on Sept. 13 with Fareed Zakaria, the host of a weekly news show on CNN.
Though plans were in motion to give the White House the public statement it had sought, events in Washington saved the Ukrainian government from any final decision and eliminated the need to make the statement.
But word of the freeze in military aid had leaked out, and Congress was in an uproar. Two days before the scheduled interview, the Trump administration released the assistance and Mr. Zelensky’s office quickly canceled the interview.
In Kiev, there is still a debate about whether Mr. Zelensky caved or held out. “The Zelensky team was ready to make this quid quo pro,” said Mr. Burkovskiy, the analyst. “They were ready to do this.”
But Pavlo Klimkin, Ukraine’s foreign minister until a change of government on Aug. 29, said there was no telling what Mr. Zelensky would have ended up saying in the interview, as there were so many versions of a statement under negotiation.
“From the contacts that took place, it’s difficult to say if they led, or did not lead, to concrete deals,” Mr. Klimkin said in an interview. In public, Mr. Zelensky has insisted he would never order a politicized prosecution.
Either way, Mr. Klimkin said, Ukrainian officials were at the least keenly aware of the stakes — a trade of United States assistance for political favors, even as Mr. Trump’s supporters have insisted they should not have viewed relations in this light.
“We are not idiots, or at least not all of us,” Mr. Klimkin said.
The evidence makes the quid pro quo absurdly clear.
I can’t blame him for nearly caving. He wouldn’t be president for long if Russia just strolled in and set up shop because they couldn’t defend themselves.
The infuriating thing among the billion other infuriating things is a lot of Republicans are using the Nixon defense that you can't produce definitive evidence he ordered the break into the Watergate so you can't prove he was responsible for the break in.
Who ordered it? “There is no evidence,” Dean writes, “in all the Nixon-Watergate-related conversations that anyone in the White House had advance knowledge that Liddy was going into the Watergate.” By “evidence” Dean must mean “definitive evidence,” because he quotes Haldeman saying that setting up the espionage team for Nixon’s re-election had been the idea of campaign chief and former attorney general John Mitchell. “Mitchell,” Haldeman told Nixon several months later, “was pushing” for “secret papers, and financial data that O’Brien had, that he was going to get.” That, too, is straight out of Dean’s book.
(In the Watergate tapes, Nixon repeatedly asks why and how the break-in occurred, but of course he alone knew that future generations were listening in. It’s also possible he couldn’t remember whether he’d ordered the break-in or not. Dean thinks Nixon was haunted by the possibility that he might have and then forgotten about it. Nixon was, after all, already in the break-ins business, having previously ordered the firebombing of the liberal Brookings Institution to steal some files – a yarn too rococo to detail here. Happily, that order was never carried out.)
A final consideration is this. Put yourself in the shoes of Mitchell and Magruder. Would you give Liddy a green light on burgling the DNC if you didn’t know for sure that your ultimate boss wanted it done? On the Watergate tapes, Nixon never admits knowing how the break-in came about, and he questions its wisdom. But he never expresses the slightest shock that anybody in his employ would commit such a crime.
Lindsey Graham now says there is something “suspicious” about Sondland revising his testimony.
“Why did Sondland change his testimony? Was there a connection between Sondland and Democratic operatives on the committee? Did he talk to Schiff?”
The answer is because he committed a wee bit of perjury and wanted to avoid the potential consequences of that.
To be fair theres also the fact that trump and his cronies have been caught completely flat footed by the discovery of this plot and like, more then a month after having been outed they still can't wrangle a credible defense of their actions.
It concerns me that both Trump's approval rating and the support for impeachment in public polling has stalled for the past couple of weeks despite a steady onslaught of new evidence against him. I hope the public hearings will get the needle moving again.
Its basically at republican / non-republican divide now. As long as he remains popular with his base there isn't much further it can go.
I think there's another 5% or so that can be chipped away out of the center-right; Trump's rock bottom approval rating has been around 36-38% several times, and we're not quite there yet. A solid third of the electorate will not abandon him pretty much no matter what comes out, though.
Basically, as I believe Chris Hayes more or less put it, what we are seeing with impeachment is all of Trump's polling asymptotically approaching his lowest possible approval rating number.
The infuriating thing among the billion other infuriating things is a lot of Republicans are using the Nixon defense that you can't produce definitive evidence he ordered the break into the Watergate so you can't prove he was responsible for the break in.
Who ordered it? “There is no evidence,” Dean writes, “in all the Nixon-Watergate-related conversations that anyone in the White House had advance knowledge that Liddy was going into the Watergate.” By “evidence” Dean must mean “definitive evidence,” because he quotes Haldeman saying that setting up the espionage team for Nixon’s re-election had been the idea of campaign chief and former attorney general John Mitchell. “Mitchell,” Haldeman told Nixon several months later, “was pushing” for “secret papers, and financial data that O’Brien had, that he was going to get.” That, too, is straight out of Dean’s book.
(In the Watergate tapes, Nixon repeatedly asks why and how the break-in occurred, but of course he alone knew that future generations were listening in. It’s also possible he couldn’t remember whether he’d ordered the break-in or not. Dean thinks Nixon was haunted by the possibility that he might have and then forgotten about it. Nixon was, after all, already in the break-ins business, having previously ordered the firebombing of the liberal Brookings Institution to steal some files – a yarn too rococo to detail here. Happily, that order was never carried out.)
A final consideration is this. Put yourself in the shoes of Mitchell and Magruder. Would you give Liddy a green light on burgling the DNC if you didn’t know for sure that your ultimate boss wanted it done? On the Watergate tapes, Nixon never admits knowing how the break-in came about, and he questions its wisdom. But he never expresses the slightest shock that anybody in his employ would commit such a crime.
Everything old is new again.
Except this doesn't work when the president himself was on the line with Zelensky telling him what he wanted and backed by multiple accounts stating that the goal was to get dirt on biden.
Like, this couldn't have been more clear if trump had uploaded a skype call to twitch.
The infuriating thing among the billion other infuriating things is a lot of Republicans are using the Nixon defense that you can't produce definitive evidence he ordered the break into the Watergate so you can't prove he was responsible for the break in.
Who ordered it? “There is no evidence,” Dean writes, “in all the Nixon-Watergate-related conversations that anyone in the White House had advance knowledge that Liddy was going into the Watergate.” By “evidence” Dean must mean “definitive evidence,” because he quotes Haldeman saying that setting up the espionage team for Nixon’s re-election had been the idea of campaign chief and former attorney general John Mitchell. “Mitchell,” Haldeman told Nixon several months later, “was pushing” for “secret papers, and financial data that O’Brien had, that he was going to get.” That, too, is straight out of Dean’s book.
(In the Watergate tapes, Nixon repeatedly asks why and how the break-in occurred, but of course he alone knew that future generations were listening in. It’s also possible he couldn’t remember whether he’d ordered the break-in or not. Dean thinks Nixon was haunted by the possibility that he might have and then forgotten about it. Nixon was, after all, already in the break-ins business, having previously ordered the firebombing of the liberal Brookings Institution to steal some files – a yarn too rococo to detail here. Happily, that order was never carried out.)
A final consideration is this. Put yourself in the shoes of Mitchell and Magruder. Would you give Liddy a green light on burgling the DNC if you didn’t know for sure that your ultimate boss wanted it done? On the Watergate tapes, Nixon never admits knowing how the break-in came about, and he questions its wisdom. But he never expresses the slightest shock that anybody in his employ would commit such a crime.
Everything old is new again.
Please continue to execute the Nixon playbook, Republicans. It worked out so well for him. Additionally, please draw more comparisons to one of the most famously corrupt and whackadoodle presidents we’ve ever had.
Nixon wasn't nearly as crazy as Trump. He was paranoid and drunk and sociopathic but he didn't get into crazy stuff like trying to purchase Greenland.
Nixon was just as crazy as Trump, he just wasn’t also a moron so the things he did at least tended to make some sort of basic logical sense because his craziness was filtered through a functioning brain.
It concerns me that both Trump's approval rating and the support for impeachment in public polling has stalled for the past couple of weeks despite a steady onslaught of new evidence against him. I hope the public hearings will get the needle moving again.
Onslaught of evidence, not an onslaught of new people hearing it. Public enquiry starts next week, see what the polls do then when testimony is on every TV screen in America.
The infuriating thing among the billion other infuriating things is a lot of Republicans are using the Nixon defense that you can't produce definitive evidence he ordered the break into the Watergate so you can't prove he was responsible for the break in.
Who ordered it? “There is no evidence,” Dean writes, “in all the Nixon-Watergate-related conversations that anyone in the White House had advance knowledge that Liddy was going into the Watergate.” By “evidence” Dean must mean “definitive evidence,” because he quotes Haldeman saying that setting up the espionage team for Nixon’s re-election had been the idea of campaign chief and former attorney general John Mitchell. “Mitchell,” Haldeman told Nixon several months later, “was pushing” for “secret papers, and financial data that O’Brien had, that he was going to get.” That, too, is straight out of Dean’s book.
(In the Watergate tapes, Nixon repeatedly asks why and how the break-in occurred, but of course he alone knew that future generations were listening in. It’s also possible he couldn’t remember whether he’d ordered the break-in or not. Dean thinks Nixon was haunted by the possibility that he might have and then forgotten about it. Nixon was, after all, already in the break-ins business, having previously ordered the firebombing of the liberal Brookings Institution to steal some files – a yarn too rococo to detail here. Happily, that order was never carried out.)
A final consideration is this. Put yourself in the shoes of Mitchell and Magruder. Would you give Liddy a green light on burgling the DNC if you didn’t know for sure that your ultimate boss wanted it done? On the Watergate tapes, Nixon never admits knowing how the break-in came about, and he questions its wisdom. But he never expresses the slightest shock that anybody in his employ would commit such a crime.
Everything old is new again.
Please continue to execute the Nixon playbook, Republicans. It worked out so well for him. Additionally, please draw more comparisons to one of the most famously corrupt and whackadoodle presidents we’ve ever had.
So uh Bolton is happy to throw Trump under the bus as long as he gets a thumbs up from the Courts he can without being sent to jail it seems. Aka he wants to but is scared of blow back because he still needs his fat Fox News checks later.
Former national security adviser John Bolton is willing to defy the White House and testify in the House impeachment inquiry about his alarm at the Ukraine pressure campaign if a federal court clears the way, according to people familiar with his views.
Bolton could be a powerful witness for Democrats: Top State Department and national security officials have already testified that he was deeply concerned about efforts by Trump and his allies to push Ukraine to open investigations into the president’s political rivals while the Trump administration held up military aid to that country.
The former national security adviser, who abruptly left his post in September, is expected to confirm their statements and describe his conversations with Trump, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing inquiry.
However, Bolton, a longtime GOP foreign policy adviser, does not want to comply with the Democratic inquiry without a court ruling on the ongoing constitutional dispute between the Trump administration and Congress, the people said.
So uh Bolton is happy to throw Trump under the bus as long as he gets a thumbs up from the Courts he can without being sent to jail it seems. Aka he wants to but is scared of blow back because he still needs his fat Fox News checks later.
Former national security adviser John Bolton is willing to defy the White House and testify in the House impeachment inquiry about his alarm at the Ukraine pressure campaign if a federal court clears the way, according to people familiar with his views.
Bolton could be a powerful witness for Democrats: Top State Department and national security officials have already testified that he was deeply concerned about efforts by Trump and his allies to push Ukraine to open investigations into the president’s political rivals while the Trump administration held up military aid to that country.
The former national security adviser, who abruptly left his post in September, is expected to confirm their statements and describe his conversations with Trump, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing inquiry.
However, Bolton, a longtime GOP foreign policy adviser, does not want to comply with the Democratic inquiry without a court ruling on the ongoing constitutional dispute between the Trump administration and Congress, the people said.
Ah Bolton, not the hero the GOP deserves but rather the one it needs; one with a mustache so thick and full it not only can defy the bus but perhaps send it back at the person trying to throw so many under it's wheels.
Because heres the thing with him; Bolton was a Loyal soldier in the republican cause for decades, faithfully and diligently working the bureaucracy as hard as he could so that people would support the (insane, sociopathic and petty) position of the GOP.
And unlike so many others Bolton isn't interested in public office (elected or otherwise) so he's in a position to shiv the fuck out of trump and not give a fuck about the machine turning against him. Hell, him flipping might (doubtful, but all of this has me a little high on hopium) even be enough to make Fox's leadership start thinking this is a post trump world and it's time to stop trying to polish the turd.
But Bolton is a true believer in the Republican party. He'd never hurt the party.
That's my worry. That he's trying to bait the dems into giving him relevance and importance and then give them nothing/worse actively hurt the case for impeachment. "I actually held up the aid, it was all on me and i got fired because of it."
I would like some money because these are artisanal nuggets of wisdom philistine.
I said it before also, Bolton is a true believe in the Neocon interventionist American Empire notion of the W. Republican party.
He isn't a Trump guy and was fired probably because Trump hates the idea of doing anything outside of the US or what he considers the US.
Bolton always has had a hard on for bombing NK, Iran, and well anyone else he sees fit. And he wants the US to go back to that and is happy to use his great mustached weapon to get back there.
I still don't trust Bolton to give anything worthwhile. He's actively smart enough to pretend like he's got something and then give the finger.
Theres nothing to be gained for him by him pulling this kind of shit; if trump doesn't go down then his career is over since he got thrown under the bus spectacularly and no one in the party will want anything to do with him.
I mean sure, it's possible that he's so bitterly spiteful towards the democrats he decides to sabotage an inquiry in hopes that he can cause the thing to collapse, but he strikes me as being enough of a pragmatist to understand that his only hope is being part of the "I was one of the only republicans to fight for my beliefs instead of the president" group.
I think Bolton could expect to be restored to power with a future Republican Presidency as long as he keeps his trap shut. Most of them hate Trump too (on a personal rather than political level.)
But Bolton is a true believer in the Republican party. He'd never hurt the party.
That's my worry. That he's trying to bait the dems into giving him relevance and importance and then give them nothing/worse actively hurt the case for impeachment. "I actually held up the aid, it was all on me and i got fired because of it."
Bolton has principles. They're terrible and stupid, but he has them, and they don't mix well with Trumpism. I can see him thinking that if he exposes Trump's malfeasance in foreign policy, his party will head back to his way of thinking.
Also, Bolton can try to claim that he engineered the whole mess, but that's going to contradict everything everyone else said, so I don't see it working too well.
I said it before also, Bolton is a true believe in the Neocon interventionist American Empire notion of the W. Republican party.
He isn't a Trump guy and was fired probably because Trump hates the idea of doing anything outside of the US or what he considers the US.
Bolton always has had a hard on for bombing NK, Iran, and well anyone else he sees fit. And he wants the US to go back to that and is happy to use his great mustached weapon to get back there.
Yeah, Trump took away his war with Iran. Imagine the thing you've wanted through four decades of conservative administrations, the planes are actually in the air, then your boss says "Nah, changed my mind, too many Iranians would die."
He has no reason to protect Trump. The faster Trump is gone, the faster Bolton can start working on the next president.
But Bolton is a true believer in the Republican party. He'd never hurt the party.
But if Bolton thinks Trump is hurting the party, the options are either leave or fight.
There are enough people that have fallen in line that I’d say Bolton would just do something similar if he accepted things. I don’t think he’s gonna show up to testify and troll the committee.
I think Bolton could expect to be restored to power with a future Republican Presidency as long as he keeps his trap shut. Most of them hate Trump too (on a personal rather than political level.)
Except if trump is vindicated then future republican presidents will treat him as the ideal to strive for; a president who is petty, stupid, self absorbed and communicates via stream of consciousness.
I said it before also, Bolton is a true believe in the Neocon interventionist American Empire notion of the W. Republican party.
He isn't a Trump guy and was fired probably because Trump hates the idea of doing anything outside of the US or what he considers the US.
Bolton always has had a hard on for bombing NK, Iran, and well anyone else he sees fit. And he wants the US to go back to that and is happy to use his great mustached weapon to get back there.
Yeah, Trump took away his war with Iran. Imagine the thing you've wanted through four decades of conservative administrations, the planes are actually in the air, then your boss says "Nah, changed my mind, too many Iranians would die."
He has no reason to protect Trump. The faster Trump is gone, the faster Bolton can start working on the next president.
How cruel and ironic fate is that years of planning would be dashed just because someone casually mentioned to Trump that Iranians and Mexicans aren’t the same thing.
Posts
The open hearings haven’t started yet, so we were kind of hitting a diminishing returns on how many people pay attention to the closed hearings.
I’m confident open hearings will give impeachment support another bump or two that’ll stick.
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I’m thinking one of the Rocky IV entrances.
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If he ever decides to throw either Giuliani or Pompeo under the bus, this will be how he does it. There's already an established narrative that State and Giuliani were somewhat at odds and undermining each other. Trump could easily claim that <State Dept. / Giuliani> was doing a great job but <the other one> screwed it all up, and that's how this mess got started.
My money is on Trump backing Giuliani and turning on Pompeo and State because that's the dumbest option, but also the one that will generate the most TV content. Giuliani is willing to go on a lot more shows than Pompeo.
Its basically at republican / non-republican divide now. As long as he remains popular with his base there isn't much further it can go.
I think there's another 5% or so that can be chipped away out of the center-right; Trump's rock bottom approval rating has been around 36-38% several times, and we're not quite there yet. A solid third of the electorate will not abandon him pretty much no matter what comes out, though.
I just don't see their latest defense going anywhere if it's going to boil down to, "they are too stupid to be corrupt." At that point, someone savvy could flip that on them and be like "well they seem pretty fucking dumb and ignorance of the law doesn't mean it wasn't broken, but hey, perhaps they are so idiotic that they are unfit for office." I also see this having a potential to blow up in there faces because that would be insulting Trump and Trump is pretty thin skinned.
And in all honesty, the needle doesn’t have to move much to matter. With how the GOP gerrymanders shit, even one or two points in the right area will really fuck them in 2020 and they know this, but I guess we’ll see how it plays out.
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It hadn’t even occurred to me that the Greenland-purchasing stuff would’ve consumed time and resources at the NSC.
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Edit: I can imagine it said in an exasperated voice, a calm voice, or a horrified voice and all work perfectly.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/07/world/europe/ukraine-trump-zelensky.html The evidence makes the quid pro quo absurdly clear.
Most of the stuff recently has been material they wouldn't have even considered using in season 5.
Time reporter:
Explains this one
Randon twitter account
I fully believe that Jared Kushner is one of the smartest people Pam Bondi has ever met
PSN/Steam/NNID: SyphonBlue | BNet: SyphonBlue#1126
I can’t blame him for nearly caving. He wouldn’t be president for long if Russia just strolled in and set up shop because they couldn’t defend themselves.
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/nixon-40th-anniversary-order-the-watergate-break Everything old is new again.
To be fair theres also the fact that trump and his cronies have been caught completely flat footed by the discovery of this plot and like, more then a month after having been outed they still can't wrangle a credible defense of their actions.
Basically, as I believe Chris Hayes more or less put it, what we are seeing with impeachment is all of Trump's polling asymptotically approaching his lowest possible approval rating number.
Except this doesn't work when the president himself was on the line with Zelensky telling him what he wanted and backed by multiple accounts stating that the goal was to get dirt on biden.
Like, this couldn't have been more clear if trump had uploaded a skype call to twitch.
Please continue to execute the Nixon playbook, Republicans. It worked out so well for him. Additionally, please draw more comparisons to one of the most famously corrupt and whackadoodle presidents we’ve ever had.
Nixon was just as crazy as Trump, he just wasn’t also a moron so the things he did at least tended to make some sort of basic logical sense because his craziness was filtered through a functioning brain.
Onslaught of evidence, not an onslaught of new people hearing it. Public enquiry starts next week, see what the polls do then when testimony is on every TV screen in America.
Steam: adamjnet
Nixon did not have a favorable Senate though.
So uh Bolton is happy to throw Trump under the bus as long as he gets a thumbs up from the Courts he can without being sent to jail it seems. Aka he wants to but is scared of blow back because he still needs his fat Fox News checks later.
pleasepaypreacher.net
Ah Bolton, not the hero the GOP deserves but rather the one it needs; one with a mustache so thick and full it not only can defy the bus but perhaps send it back at the person trying to throw so many under it's wheels.
Because heres the thing with him; Bolton was a Loyal soldier in the republican cause for decades, faithfully and diligently working the bureaucracy as hard as he could so that people would support the (insane, sociopathic and petty) position of the GOP.
And unlike so many others Bolton isn't interested in public office (elected or otherwise) so he's in a position to shiv the fuck out of trump and not give a fuck about the machine turning against him. Hell, him flipping might (doubtful, but all of this has me a little high on hopium) even be enough to make Fox's leadership start thinking this is a post trump world and it's time to stop trying to polish the turd.
That's my worry. That he's trying to bait the dems into giving him relevance and importance and then give them nothing/worse actively hurt the case for impeachment. "I actually held up the aid, it was all on me and i got fired because of it."
pleasepaypreacher.net
He isn't a Trump guy and was fired probably because Trump hates the idea of doing anything outside of the US or what he considers the US.
Bolton always has had a hard on for bombing NK, Iran, and well anyone else he sees fit. And he wants the US to go back to that and is happy to use his great mustached weapon to get back there.
Theres nothing to be gained for him by him pulling this kind of shit; if trump doesn't go down then his career is over since he got thrown under the bus spectacularly and no one in the party will want anything to do with him.
I mean sure, it's possible that he's so bitterly spiteful towards the democrats he decides to sabotage an inquiry in hopes that he can cause the thing to collapse, but he strikes me as being enough of a pragmatist to understand that his only hope is being part of the "I was one of the only republicans to fight for my beliefs instead of the president" group.
Also, Bolton can try to claim that he engineered the whole mess, but that's going to contradict everything everyone else said, so I don't see it working too well.
Yeah, Trump took away his war with Iran. Imagine the thing you've wanted through four decades of conservative administrations, the planes are actually in the air, then your boss says "Nah, changed my mind, too many Iranians would die."
He has no reason to protect Trump. The faster Trump is gone, the faster Bolton can start working on the next president.
But if Bolton thinks Trump is hurting the party, the options are either leave or fight.
There are enough people that have fallen in line that I’d say Bolton would just do something similar if he accepted things. I don’t think he’s gonna show up to testify and troll the committee.
Except if trump is vindicated then future republican presidents will treat him as the ideal to strive for; a president who is petty, stupid, self absorbed and communicates via stream of consciousness.
There will be no place for people like bolton.
How cruel and ironic fate is that years of planning would be dashed just because someone casually mentioned to Trump that Iranians and Mexicans aren’t the same thing.