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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29444 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

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Sure, and how many articles have CNN, MSNBC, Et Al written about Trump?

That might be relevant if I had been complaining about the latest Hunter Biden hearing being planned to distract from a damaging Trump story. Moreover, Trump was a sitting president while Hunter Biden is the son of one, so a better analogy would be Jared Kushner.

The crux of the issue is that the DNC has explicitly rejected the principle of equality before the law in favor of "rules for thee and not for me" and I don't think they realize just how dangerous a game they are playing.

The crux of the issue is that Trump pushed the envelope on all of those issues farther than any of the examples you gave. Clinton conceded the election peacefully the morning after:

“Last night, I congratulated Donald Trump and offered to work with him on behalf of our country,” Clinton said. “I hope that he will be a successful president for all Americans. This is not the outcome that we wanted or worked so hard for, and I’m sorry that we did not win this election…. But I feel pride and gratitude for this wonderful campaign that we built together. This vast, diverse, creative, unruly and energized campaign. You represent the best of America, and being your candidate has been one of the greatest honors of my life.” Fighting back tears at times, Clinton acknowledged the crowd’s disappointment, saying she — “and tens of millions of Americans” — felt it, too. “This is painful, and it will be for a long time,” Clinton said. “We have seen that our nation is more deeply divided than we thought. But I still believe in America, and I always will.”

I'm still unaware of any concrete evidence that Joe pushed policy X or Y as a party to foreign influence either to enrich his family or otherwise. The closest I've seen has been pushing for the resignation of the Ukrainian prosecutor investigating Burisma, but a Republican-controlled senate investigation apparently turned up nothing years ago. While Hunter apparently illegally bought a gun, smoked a lot of crack, fucked a lot of hookers and enriched himself on his father's name it's still not clear to me how Biden harmed the interests of the United States to rake in the corruption money.

There's probably no point rehashing similar arguments from the other side; Jared Kushner receiving 2 billion from the Saudis after being staunchly pro-Saudi Arabia while directly serving in Trump's white house, Trump delaying hundreds of millions of aid to Ukraine while pressuring Zelenskyy to investigate the Biden's, so on and so forth.

I'm out of time, so you'll undoubtedly be devastated that we don't get to rehash the Clinton email saga again although I'll admit you're maybe closest to the mark here given that, if I remember correctly, she instructed her lawyer to destroy evidence.

I'm still unaware of any concrete evidence that Joe pushed policy X or Y as a party to foreign influence either to enrich his family or otherwise. The closest I've seen has been pushing for the resignation of the Ukrainian prosecutor

You mean aside from the proverbial smoking gun and the blood all over his clothes.

There's no evidence that Joe ever used his position of influence to enrich his family so long as you ignore that time he flat out admitted to doing so, Sorry bub, but you and I know that if Trump or one of his Sons had uttered those exact same words you'd be all over it like white on rice rather than trying to explain it away as a nothing-burger, and that is exactly why your feigned outrage carries no water.

The dude is literally making the case that bribery isn’t that bad provided it doesn’t harm the US interest. I just don’t see that as an honest interlocutor.

Devon Archer testified that Burisma wanted Hunter to take care of the prosecutor who was causing a problem. Joe Biden then took care of the prosecutor. Pretty closely tied.

If the argument is “well this didn’t really harm the US” maybe but maybe not. This is the corruption we know but there could be more and corruption is bad per se.

Again Trump was indicted for correctly sniffing out the corruption of the Biden’s and using government power to bring it to the forefront. How was what Trump did harmful to US policy? Is that really the only standard?

We are now stating “presidents or vice presidents can accept bribes as long as it doesn’t harm the US?”

I don’t believe you really believe that.

Again Trump was indicted for correctly sniffing out the corruption of the Biden’s and using government power to bring it to the forefront. How was what Trump did harmful to US policy? Is that really the only standard?

That's not what Trump was indicted for.

We are now stating “presidents or vice presidents can accept bribes as long as it doesn’t harm the US?” I don’t believe you really believe that.

Then maybe if the idea that I'm making a pro-bribery argument beggars belief you should consider that your interpretation of what I'm saying was flawed.

Just now realized we were talking last each other. I was referring to the impeachment as the indictment (which is what an impeachment is — it is an indictment)

That's not what Trump was indicted for.

Then why was the constant, repeated, over-and-over-again refrain that Trump's actions were "contrary to the interest of the United States"? This was incessant, and we have the tapes. Law professors spilt barrels of ink on the topics of possible mixed-motives, the proper method by which either the courts or an impeachment proceeding should determine "the interest of the United States", etc. This was perhaps the single dominant topic/question of the impeachment. They felt like they needed to show that his actions were contrary to the interests of the United States, and their method of doing so was to roll out bureaucrat after bureaucrat (who theoretically report to Trump) to say, "Well, actually, we decided what was in the interest of the United States, and what Trump did went against that."

Trump was indicted in New York for business record falsification, Florida for the documents case and DC/Georgia for election interference, denial, conspiracy, whatever. Replace those with whatever words you like so we don't have to haggle over how to describe those indictments.

Trump was impeached by the house, but not the senate, for the Ukraine dealings. Setting aside the absurd way zeke is describing those events (the burisma investigation was reportedly dormant at the time, there were compelling reasons to push for the ouster of the prosecutor completely unrelated to Burisma, everyone who testified to the senate claimed there was no connection between the Bidens nor was Joe influenced by his son's business interests - all this despite the best efforts of a Republican controlled investigation), do you agree that Trump was not indicted for those reasons?

Sorry, I was too hasty in my reading and mixed up indictment/impeachment, since we were talking about the other a couple comments away. I still maintain my description of the impeachment.

I think the NY indictment is for business records, but relies on a pretty sketchy reading of campaign finance laws. I think the FL indictment was for documents, but shows a bit more of the violent fight between Trump and the bureaucracy over who gets to decide. This one is, as you say, for election shenanigans (and my thoughts are posted elsewhere in this thread, mostly, "We'll see if they can substantiate anything direct implicating Trump this time." If they can, maybe there's some there there. If not, it may turn out that the best description is that they indicted Trump "to get Trump". They realized with the Cohen plea that it wasn't sufficient to just call him a 'co-conspirator' on an extremely sketchy campaign finance charge and not even try to bring anything to a court (NY is kinda trying to remedy that), so they've gotta actually take some direct shots.)

Of course Trump was charged with using his office for illegitimate ends. The ends here was pressuring Ukraine to investigate Trump’s political opponent. It is now reasonably clear (and even back then there was a bunch of smoke) that Trump wanted actual corruption of his political opponent investigated. So what I said was correct.

Maybe you shouldn’t write things with the effect “show me how it harmed US policy” if you don’t want people to believe you think bribes aren’t a big deal provided it didn’t harm US policy

We are now stating “presidents or vice presidents can accept bribes as long as it doesn’t harm the US?”

When you scratch the surface of many of the different attempts at lawfare against Trump, they're often undergirded by a necessary axiom: "The deep state, bureaucracy, The Party, whatever you want to call it, decides what is in the interest of the United States. If you do things that are counter to that decision, then it is inherently illegitimate, could only be for some nefarious personal interest, and is almost certainly illegal. But if you do things that are aligned with that decision, then you're a pretty good guy who really shouldn't be put through all the stress of, like, investigations and stuff. You're one of us." This was probably most obviously on full display during the first Trump impeachment.

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