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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
- Thread starter CdnGuy
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If the old Watergate expression says “It’s not the crime, it’s the coverup,” then today’s equivalent might say “It’s not the crime, it’s the crime’s offspring.”
Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York served a sweeping subpoena on President Trump’s inaugural committee on Monday. Nothing could more clearly illustrate the breadth of the president’s legal exposure and the limits of his nearly two-year strategy to attack and undermine special counsel Robert S. Mueller III -- because the special counsel’s work is merely the sturdy root of a veritable Mueller family tree.
What began as an FBI counterintelligence investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election has sprouted into multiple investigations in multiple jurisdictions examining multiple possible crimes. The case against the president’s personal lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen is the direct line, the first child. The investigation of the inaugural committee, which sprang from the Cohen case, is the grandchild. And on it goes.
The president no longer faces jeopardy from just one federal criminal probe, but at least three, and not just one prosecutor’s office, but the full resources of the entire Department of Justice. In his State of the Union Address on Tuesday, Trump asserted that “ridiculous partisan investigations” threatened the “economic miracle” that was happening on his watch. The threat of the investigations, however you characterize them, is to the president himself.
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It’s this threat of multiple ongoing investigations spanning the foreseeable future that should frighten the president the most. Whatever his personal criminal liability, it’s now proven that the organizations he has run – business, political and governmental – have been populated with actual criminals.
Six of his associates, including his longtime friend and political adviser, his lawyer, his campaign chairman, his deputy campaign chairman and a foreign policy adviser have been indicted or pleaded guilty.
It would be naïve at this point to believe that more such charges are not coming. That apple could fall very near the tree indeed.
A search analysis provided a list of somewhat venomous words President Trump included in his State of the Union speech that no president has used before. In fact “venomous” was one of those words. Also making their debut appearances were “sadistic” and “bloodthirsty.” These acrid words somehow found their way into a speech billed as a call to unity.
And yet in his exhausting hour-plus droning on about our state of affairs, he somehow didn’t get to ALL the things we need to be thinking about. Somehow he managed to go that entire time without once mentioning the most urgent and most dire issue facing us. That’s right: His thesaurus failed him when it came time to even discuss the climate crisis at all.
Actually, he did manage to introduce a couple of new words that could have been applied to this crisis. “Hurtling” could easily have described the speed at which we are entering the planetary death spiral, and “freeloading” would have been a vividly precise way of describing those who profit from fossil fuel use without recompense to solving the disaster they are bringing down on us.
But words or the lack of them don’t change the facts in the air, or on the ground beneath it. Or the oceans around us. The relentless march of heating continues whether we continue our historically stupid innovation of deciding scientific facts by public opinion, in a debate that has been loaded with misinformation just as the atmosphere has been overloaded with greenhouse gases.
The deniers, led hand in hand by the deliberate misinformers, have done their damage. The debate has been poisoned, and possibly beyond repair. IS it beyond repair? You tell me. We have been warned that our time is up and that if we don’t start serious action now, our goose, and climate, is cooked. And? And so where is the determination to act? Where are the proposals? I’ll tell you where. There is one and only one serious proposal on offer, to be released on Thursday. The Green New Deal.
And how will we respond to it? Already it is being described in this story as “lacking … a political path to becoming policy.” Oh. No path. No alternative. I know, how about we throw away our last best chance by declaring that the Green New Deal is not up to our lofty standards of responsibility, and politically impractical too! Let us ignore, marginalize and bury it and in its place offer … that’s right … nothing. Or maybe something something that also has no “political path.”
Our alternative policy is like carbon dioxide itself. Invisible. Who could that hurt?
We know that politics makes strange bedfellows, but few alliances are more surprising than the one linking the ultra-rich to ultra-nationalists. What could the wealthiest people in the world have in common with those upending politics in the name of the “forgotten man”? As I have found in over a decade of research on global elites and tax havens, a shared political project unites them: both seek to weaken or dismantle international alliances that constrain them.
For ultra-nationalists, this project means “taking back control” of their governments from foreigners. For the ultra-rich, it means eliminating the controls that international organizations and alliances have imposed on them individually and as a class: a world without the EU, or without the Global Magnitsky Act, is one in which the people who appeared in the Panama Papers can get even richer and expand their influence over an increasing share of the world’s governments and resources.
Thus what the media has treated as two separate news stories are actually manifestations of one big story, linking the shocks of the Panama Papers, the Paradise Papers, the Brexit vote, and the 2016 US election. It is a consummate irony that ultra-nationalism has been repackaged for voters as an effort to regain local control, protect national boundaries and reassert the dominance of local ethnic groups. What has been sold to working-class and middle-class voters as “a war for the little guy” is in practical terms the wishlist of the ultra-wealthy worldwide.
Senorman
Member
^Fucking spot on right there.
tRumpFuckingIdiot ... the action or an act of abolishing a system, practice, or institution.
One of the reasons that I find political narratives to be fascinating is because once they take hold, they are almost impossible to shake. For example, decades ago Republicans became the party of fiscal responsibility and, as such, their knee-jerk response to any Democratic initiative is that we can’t afford it. Perhaps the most persistent narrative in politics today is that the GOP is the party concerned about debt and deficits, when the exact oppositeis true.
That narrative continues to persist, even after Dick Cheney told George W. Bush that “deficits don’t matter” when they went on a spending spree to fight wars in 2003. Then Obama got elected and Republicans went so far as to threaten to blow up the global economy over the standard procedure of raising the debt ceiling.
Most recently, Trump and Republicans went on a spending spree and blew up the deficit by doing the two things Republicans always do: (1) increasing military spending, and (2) giving huge tax cuts to the wealthy. But in case you didn’t notice, there was no mention of deficits in Trump’s State of the Union address on Tuesday night. When Republicans asked budget director Mick Mulvaney about that, his response was that “nobody cares” about deficits anymore. That is the exact opposite of Mulvaney’s position when Obama was president.
Senorman
Member
She's a hottie for sure, especially if you're into redheads, which apparently the old NRA fellas were.
WASHINGTON—The U.S. military is preparing to pull all American forces out of Syria by the end of April, even though the Trump administration has yet to come up with a plan to protect its Kurdish partners from attack when they leave, current and former U.S. officials said.
With U.S.-backed fighters poised to seize the final Syrian sanctuaries held by Islamic State in the coming days, the U.S. military is turning its attention toward a withdrawal of American forces in the coming weeks, these officials said on Thursday.
Unless the Trump administration alters course, the military plans to pull a significant portion of its forces out by mid-March, with a full withdrawal coming by the end of April, they said.
The military-planning process comes as the Trump administration is struggling to come up with an agreement to protect Kurdish allies from being attacked by Turkish forces when the U.S. leaves.
The U.S. has been trying to work out a deal with Ankara on a political plan for northeastern Syria that would avert a destabilizing fight between Turkish forces and Kurdish forces in Syria that Turkey views as terrorists.
But the two sides have made little headway, current and former U.S. officials said, which means the U.S. military withdrawal is proceeding faster than the political track.
“The bottom line is: Decisions have to be made,” one U.S. official said. “At some point, we make political progress, or they’re going to have to tell the military to slow down, or we’re going to proceed without a political process.”
U.S. officials began briefing their European allies on the pullout from Syria this week in Washington when they came together for a conference to discuss the next chapter in the fight against Islamic State.
The Pentagon declined to comment on the plans.
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