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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024

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Granting that this is what happened, it sounds a lot like a case of what people here like calling "leopards eating faces" when it happens to the other side. Republicans are the law-and-order party that spent decades architecting a legal system where prosecutors have free rein to use tactics like blackmailing (or, equivalently, bribing) people to incriminate their allies, so as to be able to secure convictions in cases like gangs where they feel they caught a bad guy but can't find a legally watertight way to prove his guilt directly; now that they found themselves at the business end of this machinery, they are crying foul.

If this was a Bush/Romney Republican, this wouldn't have happened. The Republicans haven't gone after Democrat politicians, so that is also something to consider. They also aren't the only ones part of designing it.

And of course under your scenario, the spirit of the law that isn't violated when persecuting gangs is violated when getting Trump over this.

Through loopholes you can create a dictatorship out of any democracy and can abuse any system. And so, when such loopholes are abused, you either blame those who abuse them and oppose it, or promote a theory of leopards eating face, if you support the process of abusing the law to get your opponents. Any justice system to work well, requires respecting the spirit of the law, because you can manage to get a lot of people with technicalities, and by abusing the system. No system is so designed as to be infallible to that. There is always something one can find as an excuse if they support a transformation of the system into that.

Ironically, in addition to tit for tat, ideally towards actual crimes done by dem politicians as a deescalating force, to the extend liberals have such attitudes, it is actually justifiable and not just going after ones opponent to consider if people with such ideology are going to abuse their position as judges, bureaucrats, etc, etc. And even people like journalists, academics, have their own enormous influence that is going to affect everything. For the right, protecting the integrity of the system, and not letting their political opponents dominate it and abuse it then become interchangeable. For liberals, the opposite claim is not actually justifiable. Precisely because the right not only haven't prosecuted liberals over BS, but also have failed to prosecute more clear misconduct. And it is precisely that appeasement and sense of no consequences that has encouraged the liberal side into escalating.

Did Republicans really create this legal system? It seems noteworthy to me that these systems operate most often the way you describe in areas dominated entirely by Democrats.

I would vastly prefer to be in Trump's shoes in New York than in Georgia. The bar for proving RICO is so low there and it comes with a 5 year minimum sentence.

That trial won’t occur. Fani is getting kicked off.

It won't occur before the election. Willis may indeed be kicked off the case (and IMO she should be). But it's still an extremely serious case, and it doesn't automatically go away after the election happens.

In theory, it's a serious case, but if Willis gets booted, much of her office will be booted too, and almost none of the alternates have anywhere near the interest in trying the case.

((Also, the Georgia RICO statute dates back to at least the 1980s, and despite the popular history version, 1980 Georgia was not a deep red state.))

It isn’t a serious case. It is absurd and my guess is once Willis is kicked off no other prosecutor is going to take it.