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I’d just like you to not act as though your personal desire for fairness in lawfare means anything to those of us on the right. No lawfare is much preferred over one-sided lawfare.
In other words, I cannot argue in favor of a thing unless I personally have the means to implement it? Sorry, that's not a demand I'm going to comply with.
"No lawfare" is just corruption, because every public figure is partisan. Was Bob Menendez (D-NJ) a victim of lawfare when he was convicted of 16 counts of bribery? He has a D next to his name! George Santos? Michael Flynn? "Lawfare" absent any hard evidence of the motives of the prosecutors is little more than the idea that anyone you like can't be accused of a crime.
I'd also argue the right does know what lawfare is. What do you think all those people chanting "Lock her up!" were calling for?
You’re right. It is corruption. One-sided lawfare is also corruption, and of a more dangerous kind.
Bob Menendez will be replaced by another guy with a D next to his name so absolutely nothing was lost by the democrats. The occasional no-stakes sacrifice isn’t fooling anyone, especially when it took two decades for consequences.
They wanted lawfare. Your rules applied fairly and all that.
Oh come now. You ignore the point and pivot to calling it meaningless. The "lawfare" argument is that Menendez should never face consequences, because if Republicans bring charges it's lawfare and if Democrats do it it's a stunt I guess? Do we need to summon a being of true neutrality and law to bring prosecution or not?
They were doing this before Trump was ever even in office. And again, I don't have near as much a problem with it as you seem to. The whole "Oops I deleted it!" was at a bare minimum shady as fuck.
Exactly! Because you know your side will never actually face consequences!
Surely you can see there is an enormous qualitative difference between democrats ejecting an unpopular democrat in a safe-D state and democrats digging through the couch cushions and charging the opposing presidential candidate with whatever novel legal theories they can find?
I just posted examples of it happening and you pivot to finding a reason to say it doesn't count. Hell, they even pushed out Al Franken, who was at the time fairly popular, over mere accusations of inappropriate behavior.
Yes, there aren't a lot of examples because most politicians are at least smart enough to be corrupt in legal ways (see Pelosi). I don't think prosecuting someone for taking classified documents home, showing them to others, and hiding them from officials when they try to find them is novel. If anyone besides Trump did it, this wouldn't even be a discussion.
Prosecuting someone for trying to replace election officials with loyalists who will call the election for you or calling state officials to pull votes for you out of thin air has never happened in America because no one has tried it, but it's the same sort of thing that regularly happens in third world countries. Hell it's happening in Venezuela right now. For all the people claiming the election is insecure, prosecuting that sort of behavior would also be a slam dunk against anyone but Trump.
And again, under your proposed rules, how could it possibly ever happen?
Your examples do absolutely nothing to disprove a one-sided lawfare hypothesis so why should I grant you that point?
This is an extremely motivated reading of that phone call, especially with more recent revelations on the election in Georgia. Gotta be honest, it’s making me doubt your commitment to even-handed lawfare.
Prosecuting your political opponents? You’re right! The political valence is even the same!
ETA: I’ll grant you Al Franken in the sense that the democrats definitely did not have to get rid of him. My opinion is that they only did because it was peak #MeToo and their hand was forced by the appearance of hypocrisy and their extreme left faction. (It doesn’t hurt that MN is relatively safely blue.) Note that in the years since many people involved in his resignation have publicly come to regret it. Regardless, it definitionally wasn’t lawfare since he faced no charges.
The only evidence of your hypothesis to begin with is motivated reasoning that people don't like Trump, ergo they don't actually believe Trump committed crimes. I cannot prove what is in people's heads and neither can you, therefore you can insist forever. I can point out all the evidence forever, even things I believe are solid evidence. All I get in return is some other situation that's vaguely similar against a Democrat but didn't result in the outcome you say you don't want to begin with (but act like you do in fact want it), and how by my own rules I should support said hypothetical outcome. I say I'm absolutely fine with that and you effectively call me a liar, which again you can insist forever.
You then challenge me to find a counterexample, and when I do you simply add another condition to it until I can't. Now I have a find a Democrat convicted by Democrats and said conviction must have cost Democrats a seat. Of course you know these conditions are rare to begin with. I can either spend an hour finding some example from the 1800's, which you will say is too old to count, or if I manage to find a recent example I'll get told something like how it didn't count because Democrats still had a majority or some such. I have to present hard evidence and all you have to do is find a way to spin it that of course it was all a ploy by the Democrats. Of course nothing similar will ever be expected from Republicans.
So now you're the one complaining about motivated reasoning? Yes, I'm sure Trump only cares about election security. That's why he specifically hones in on a district that could be make-or-break in making him the winner. And spends an hour rambling with no specific allegations. And is clear that the outcome he wants is not to find fraudulent or miscounted votes, but to continue to do so until enough votes are found to declare him the winner. He insists that that this is possible with no information about how those votes were falsified, he spends pretty much the entire time talking in a "just find a way" tone.
Or trying to simply ignore election results and declare yourself the winner. One of the two.
My rules fairly > your rules fairly > my rules unfairly > your rules unfairly.
We are currently in “your rules unfairly”, and you’re right that I would prefer my rules unfairly over your rules unfairly.
I don’t necessarily want to call you a liar, because I believe that you would prefer yours rules fairly over your rules unfairly. But given that you won’t acknowledge that we are in the your rules unfairly stage we are at an impasse.
Engaging in lawfare against your presidential opponent is simply a significantly larger break in norms than any example you or anyone else can muster. And while you can say “it’s all good, come after my candidate too!” until you’re blue in the face, we both know that it will never happen due to many structural reasons cited elsewhere in this thread, so it rings incredibly hollow.
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It's better than two-sided lawfare too -- there's a reason why "don't go after past presidents for petty bullshit" has been the norm since forever; it's a good norm!
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