Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[ldrews]

Swing and a miss!

 

You are right. The actual context for her statement was the Benghazi investigation where she said:

"Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night and decided they’d go kill some Americans," Clinton said. "What difference – at this point, what difference does it make?"

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2013/may/08/context-hillary-clintons-what-difference-does-it-m/

[barmar]

Political correctness prevents Trump and his followers from calling out these right-wing extremists as the domestic terrorists they are. But it will be a serious mistake for Trump to divert resources from this threat--more political correctness run amok.

Did you really use Trump and political correctness in the same sentence?

[Zelandakh]

You are right. The actual context for her statement was the Benghazi investigation where she said:

 

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2013/may/08/context-hillary-clintons-what-difference-does-it-m/

So the context is that she was interested in bringing the killers to justice more than their specific motives. What does this have to do with being careless with classified information?

[Winstonm]

Conservative columnist David Brooks has his eye on Donald Trump: When the World Is Led by a Child

 

 

Yes, but this has always been clear, even to many folks who voted for him. That's why he's such a weak man, and so easy to manipulate by his Russian buddies. We need some stronger folks around him to find ways to make him grow up.

 

Too late. 70 somethings don't change.

[Winstonm]

You are right. The actual context for her statement was the Benghazi investigation where she said:

 

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2013/may/08/context-hillary-clintons-what-difference-does-it-m/

 

Again, neither Clinton nor Obama are in office. Trump is. You said watch his actions. I am. He is clueless and clearly dangerous as he completely bamboozled a smart guy like you into voting for him.

 

Kali Holloway explains:

 

You didn’t have to be a political genius—or a genius of any kind, really—to see that Donald Trump was going to be a disaster at being president. He clearly has no interest in politics or policy and doesn't understand, or care to understand, the basics of the job. The Trump platform consists of unbelievable and unconstitutional lies all bound up with racist pipe dreams about how to Make America 1952 Again. To call Trump a con man is to insult hardworking, skilled con men and women the world over. Trump just recognized easy marks when he saw them, and told them what they wanted to hear. And what they wanted to hear was that someone else’s suffering would help them get ahead.

[Winstonm]

This report from the NYT raises genuine concerns about obstruction of justice committed by Trump; at the same time, I know that the chance for impeachment before 2018 is very near zero.

[y66]

From The 25th Amendment Solution to Remove Trump by Ross Douthat:

 

It was just three days and a lifetime ago that I wrote a column about Donald Trump’s unfitness for the presidency that affected a world-weary tone. Nothing about this White House’s chaos was surprising given the style of Trump’s campaign, I argued. None of the breaking scandals necessarily suggested high crimes as opposed to simple omni-incompetence. And given that Republicans made their peace with Trump’s unfitness many months ago, it seemed pointless to expect their leaders to move against him unless something far, far worse came out.

 

As I said, three days and a lifetime. If the G.O.P.’s surrender to candidate Trump made exhortations about Republican politicians’ duty to their country seem like so much pointless verbiage, now President Trump has managed to make exhortation seem unavoidable again.

 

He has done so, if several days’ worth of entirely credible leaks and revelations are to be believed, by demonstrating in a particularly egregious fashion why the question of “fitness” matters in the first place.

 

The presidency is not just another office. It has become, for good reasons and bad ones, a seat of semi-monarchical political power, a fixed place on which unimaginable pressures are daily brought to bear, and the final stopping point for decisions that can lead very swiftly to life or death for people the world over.

 

One does not need to be a Marvel superhero or Nietzschean Übermensch to rise to this responsibility. But one needs some basic attributes: a reasonable level of intellectual curiosity, a certain seriousness of purpose, a basic level of managerial competence, a decent attention span, a functional moral compass, a measure of restraint and self-control. And if a president is deficient in one or more of them, you can be sure it will be exposed.

 

Trump is seemingly deficient in them all. Some he perhaps never had, others have presumably atrophied with age. He certainly has political talent — charisma, a raw cunning, an instinct for the jugular, a form of the common touch, a certain creativity that normal politicians lack. He would not have been elected without these qualities. But they are not enough, they cannot fill the void where other, very normal human gifts should be.

 

There is, as my colleague David Brooks wrote Tuesday, a basic childishness to the man who now occupies the presidency. That is the simplest way of understanding what has come tumbling into light in the last few days: The presidency now has kinglike qualities, and we have a child upon the throne.

 

It is a child who blurts out classified information in order to impress distinguished visitors. It is a child who asks the head of the F.B.I. why the rules cannot be suspended for his friend and ally. It is a child who does not understand the obvious consequences of his more vindictive actions — like firing the very same man whom you had asked to potentially obstruct justice on your say-

 

A child cannot be president. I love my children; they cannot have the nuclear codes.

 

But a child also cannot really commit “high crimes and misdemeanors” in any usual meaning of the term. There will be more talk of impeachment now, more talk of a special prosecutor for the Russia business; well and good. But ultimately I do not believe that our president sufficiently understands the nature of the office that he holds, the nature of the legal constraints that are supposed to bind him, perhaps even the nature of normal human interactions, to be guilty of obstruction of justice in the Nixonian or even Clintonian sense of the phrase. I do not believe he is really capable of the behind-the-scenes conspiring that the darker Russia theories envision. And it is hard to betray an oath of office whose obligations you evince no sign of really understanding or respecting.

 

Which is not an argument for allowing him to occupy that office. It is an argument, instead, for using a constitutional mechanism more appropriate to this strange situation than impeachment: the 25th Amendment to the Constitution, which allows for the removal of the president if a majority of the cabinet informs the Congress that he is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” and (should the president contest his own removal) a two-thirds vote by Congress confirms the cabinet’s judgment.

 

The Trump situation is not exactly the sort that the amendment’s Cold War-era designers were envisioning. He has not endured an assassination attempt or suffered a stroke or fallen prey to Alzheimer’s. But his incapacity to really govern, to truly execute the serious duties that fall to him to carry out, is nevertheless testified to daily — not by his enemies or external critics, but by precisely the men and women whom the Constitution asks to stand in judgment on him, the men and women who serve around him in the White House and the cabinet.

 

Read the things that these people, members of his inner circle, his personally selected appointees, say daily through anonymous quotations to the press. (And I assure you they say worse off the record.) They have no respect for him, indeed they seem to palpate with contempt for him, and to regard their mission as equivalent to being stewards for a syphilitic emperor.

 

It is not squishy New York Times conservatives who regard the president as a child, an intellectual void, a hopeless case, a threat to national security; it is people who are self-selected loyalists, who supported him in the campaign, who daily go to work for him. And all this, in the fourth month of his administration.

 

This will not get better. It could easily get worse. And as hard and controversial as a 25th Amendment remedy would be, there are ways in which Trump’s removal today should be less painful for conservatives than abandoning him in the campaign would have been — since Hillary Clinton will not be retroactively elected if Trump is removed, nor will Neil Gorsuch be unseated. Any cost to Republicans will be counted in internal divisions and future primary challenges, not in immediate policy defeats.

 

Meanwhile, from the perspective of the Republican leadership’s duty to their country, and indeed to the world that our imperium bestrides, leaving a man this witless and unmastered in an office with these powers and responsibilities is an act of gross negligence, which no objective on the near-term political horizon seems remotely significant enough to justify.

 

There will be time to return again to world-weariness and cynicism as this agony drags on. Right now, though, I will be boring in my sincerity: I respectfully ask Mike Pence and Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell to reconsider their support for a man who never should have had his party’s nomination, never should have been elevated to this office, never should have been endorsed and propped up and defended by people who understood his unfitness all along.

 

Now is a day for redemption. Now is an acceptable time.

[Winstonm]

Fake news is not benign.

[Winstonm]

Thank you, WinstonM. Your revelations prompt obvious follow-up questions e.g.

• Was the National Security Advisor blackmailed?
• Is it a crime for Americans to meet with Russians?
• Did Trump negotiate too-good-to-be-true deals with Russians?

 

I don't claim that security departments always lie. I'm sure they tell the truth when it suits their purposes.

 

Nations spy on each other. The US destabilises elected foreign governments.

 

The Russians are alleged to have hacked emails showing that the Democratic party deliberately undermined the prospects of one of its own candidates. If this revelation were true, it would be a service to US democracy. But so far, the Russians have been given scant credit.

 

From the Washington Post:

Putin offers to provide Congress with details of Trump disclosures to Russian envoys

 

If you don't understand that this offer is Putin's way of mocking the U.S., I feel sorry for your naivete'.

[diana_eva]

From the Washington Post:

 

 

If you don't understand that this offer is Putin's way of mocking the U.S., I feel sorry for your naivete'.

 

It must be Putin's offer to work on world peace. He should provide the info while playing the piano naked on a horse. And dive in the sea to find a lost artefact at the end.

[barmar]

From The 25th Amendment Solution to Remove Trump by Ross Douthat:

I think there's little chance of this. While the people around him might not think he's truly fit, he still seems to support their policies. Who else would put a climate-denier in charge of the EPA, and someone who doesn't believe in public schools as the Education Secretary? He doesn't know what he's doing, so he lets the people around him tell him what to do. He's a figurehead and mouthpiece.

[Winstonm]

I think there's little chance of this. While the people around him might not think he's truly fit, he still seems to support their policies. Who else would put a climate-denier in charge of the EPA, and someone who doesn't believe in public schools as the Education Secretary? He doesn't know what he's doing, so he lets the people around him tell him what to do. He's a figurehead and mouthpiece.

 

Trump has been quoted by Michael D'Antonio as saying that "he is the same person now that he was in first grade", and, thusfar, he has given us no reason to doubt him.

[y66]

From Is the Comey memo the beginning of the end for Trump? by David Remnick:

 

Over the years, Trump has been the focus of investigations on housing discrimination, bribery, corruption, dealings with the mob, misleading earnings reports, fraud, and improper campaign contributions. (Of his behavior with women we shall not speak.) But that was nothing compared to the hard light that is on him now from the F.B.I., Congress, the press, the public, and various other realms of civil society. Discussion of Trump’s Presidency ending before his four-year term is up is no longer an oppositional fantasy. The events of these recent days­­—the Comey firing; the opera-buffa intel giveaway with the Russian delegation to the Oval Office; and now the news of the Comey memos—just may be the point of no return for a Presidency that has been a kind of emergency of chaos, incompetence, injustice, and deception from its first days.

 

But it will be a complicated road, legally and politically. To prove obstruction of justice, the subject must know that there is an investigation against him and take an action to obstruct that investigation with corrupt purpose. The next step, clearly, will be for Congress to inspect James Comey’s memos regarding his meetings and conversations with the President, which were written about Tuesday in the Times. Jason Chaffetz, the chair of the House Oversight Committee, has said that he is prepared to subpoena those memos if they exist.

 

We are likely to learn a great deal more about Trump’s behavior from those documents. Comey might have been grotesquely mistaken in his judgment regarding the Hillary Clinton e-mail case, but he has a reputation for righteousness and honesty. In Comey’s account, as relayed in the Times, the President, over dinner, demanded an oath of loyalty; Comey promised only his honesty. At the Valentine’s Day meeting in the Oval Office, Trump told the Vice-President and the Attorney General to leave the room before asking Comey to end the investigation into Mike Flynn’s relations with the Russian government. Trump even suggested to Comey that he consider prosecuting and jailing journalists for publishing classified material.

 

Is it conceivable that Trump made these requests with innocent purpose? Or was he attempting to obstruct justice? The same questions apply to the President’s insistence on firing Comey. First, he asked Comey to shut down the investigation, and, when he refused, the President fired him. Can one contrive an innocent motive in that? And if there are, indeed, tapes of White House conversations, what are the odds that Trump’s version is closer to the truth than Comey’s?

 

The point is that Trump has a long record of lying, shady business practices, public deception, and crossing legal lines. His instructors in this include Roy Cohn and Roger Stone and other base figures. Comey’s memos are far more likely to bury Trump than to exonerate him.

 

As Evan Osnos has pointed out, Trump will survive until he loses the Republican Party. Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan are not likely to act out of an attack of moral conscience. But at some point, and it may come soon, they will begin to feel political pressure—pressure from Republican constituents in swing states and districts; pressure on their own reputations—and their patience with Trump will run out.

[Winstonm]

Special counselor has been appointed by Justice Department.

[RedSpawn]

By the same reasoning, improved dialogue with Isis would also be the right direction? Russia attacked the U.S. election system, and by the testimony last week in Congress is still attacking the U.S. and other western countries via cyber warfare. You do not go out for a friendly dinner with the enemy while they are dropping bombs on your house.

 

I do have a burning question. Please review the following dusty link from the U.S. government from 2001.

 

See Rumsfeld and the Pentagon Bureaucracy.

 

If a Republican Defense Secretary suggests that the Pentagon bureaucracy reminds him of the old Soviet Union the day before 09/11/2001--the worst day in US History. . .

 

What's to stop all of the hacking of the election system (even the Democratic National Committee) from being perpetrated by the same organization that has immensely consolidated power in the federal government, can not account for about 25% of its annual spending, and has a management-leadership structure similar to the old Soviet Union, according to Rumsfeld?

 

Click the link below Trillions (with a T) missing from Department of Defense This is from FOX news in 2016 which is right-leaning!

 

SF Gate 2003 Article Missing Military Money ==> from left-leaning newspaper from 2003 (same problem just earlier and cheaper).

 

The Department of Defense has an accounting system from the 90's and it is missing trillions of $$$ -- The department doesn't exactly know what assets that trillions of dollars purchased. That is with a "T" everyone! Keep in mind, we are not talking millions. We are not talking billions. We are talking trillions. A trillion is like winning a million dollar lottery, one million separate times!

 

If you gave a cashier a cash register containing $6,500,000,000,000 in cash and at the end of the business day it was gone and he/she couldn't tell you where it went, would you keep him/her on payroll? Hmmmmmm.

 

When our federal government computer systems are hacked or the Democratic National Committee computer network is hacked, Congress goes to the FBI and the Department of Defense for answers. Now, if the Department of Defense, which has TRILLIONS of dollars missing from its budget, says Russia or China or North Korea did it, who are we to argue? But. . . .if the Department of Defense is implicated in the very hacking we are investigating because it wants a President that will bankroll its budget no questions asked unlike Hillary who won't grant budget increases to the Department of Defense, who do you think the Department of Defense wants elected?

 

If the Department of Defense did hack into the election system and into the Democratic National Committee computer network to help elect its favored candidate, one of the very first people that that needs to go after the blamestorming session is. . . . the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation as he is under the Department of Justice. The Department of Defense doesn't need the FBI or the Department of Justice sniffing around its interference or control of national security affairs until it installs the entire new Trump appointees into the proper positions.

 

You can say what you want to say, but the enemy isn't ISIS or Syria or Russia or even a laughable, saber-rattling North Korea, the enemy is much closer to home in Washington D.C. and no I am not kidding!

 

Follow the money trail....

[RedSpawn]

Special counselor has been appointed by Justice Department.

 

Keep your eyes firmly placed on the Department of Defense which as of last year can not tell you where $6,500,000,000,000 ($6.5 TRILLION) in cash was spent on!

 

If you find that money, you might be surprised how redundant the "special counselor" Robert Mueller will be.

 

Before we go to any war, this Department needs to account for that amount of money.

 

http://nation.foxnews.com/2016/08/18/trillions-go-missing-military-pentagon-cant-account-65t-taxpayer-cash

[Winstonm]

Keep your eyes firmly placed on the Department of Defense which as of last year can not tell you where $6,500,000,000,000 ($6.5 TRILLION) in cash was spent on!

 

If you find that money, you might be surprised how redundant the "special counselor" Robert Mueller will be.

 

Before we go to any war, this Department needs to account for that amount of money.

 

http://nation.foxnews.com/2016/08/18/trillions-go-missing-military-pentagon-cant-account-65t-taxpayer-cash

 

This thread is about Trump, his campaign, and its consequences. Your should start your own conspiracy thread if that is your cup of tea. But don't bring your claptrap to this thread, por favore.

[cherdano]

I literally LOL'ed :D

[RedSpawn]

This thread is about Trump, his campaign, and its consequences. Your should start your own conspiracy thread if that is your cup of tea. But don't bring your claptrap to this thread, por favore.

 

Just so we are clear.

 

$6.5 trillion is about twice the ENTIRE ANNUAL federal budget and you are busy chasing down a laughable Russia/Trump collusion conspiracy?

 

That is a red herring to keep your mind off of the sinister possibility.

 

The Department of Defense (the Pentagon) is in the business of holding its friends close and its enemies even closer. This means that the Pentagon has to build alliances with Russia even though it doesn't like it.

 

You tell me who is the conspiracy theorist! Russia/Trump conspiracy. Now, that, is laughable.

 

http://www.latimes.com/politics/washington/la-na-essential-washington-updates-trump-says-investigation-will-show-no-1495064828-htmlstory.html

 

"President Trump said a thorough investigation will confirm what he says is already known: that there was no collusion between his presidential campaign and 'any foreign entity.'"

 

Words matter in politics and in the legal system. Notice how "any foreign entity" is in quotes.

 

This is probably true. Trump has not colluded with any foreign entity.

 

The better question is, "Has there been any collusion between the Trump Presidential campaign and any United States federal government entity and its subsidiaries including but not limited to The Department of Defense (the Pentagon), The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Justice, the CIA, NSA, or entities which can be construed as the Military Industrial Complex?"

 

Trump knows he has hasn't colluded with "any foreign entity". Has he colluded with any "domestic federal governmental entity"?

 

Trump hasn't been asked nor has he answered that question.

 

We are still chasing down the laughable Trump/Russia connection which will lead to the same outcome as Hillary's e-mail server scandal---> no prosecution and no indictment.

 

Hmmmmmm.

[y66]

From California Today: A Big Win for Charter Schools by Mike McPhate:

 

School board campaigns are often sleepy affairs, not the sort of electoral battle that generates widespread attention and outside donations. But this week’s election for the Los Angeles Unified school board was something of an epic proxy fight. Some saw it as a battle over the influence of the teachers’ union. Others cast it as a fight against the education agenda of President Trump and Betsy DeVos and the expansion of charter schools.

 

After Tuesday’s results, the seven-member school board that governs the nation’s second largest public school system will be dominated by supporters of charter schools who may move to increase the number of publicly funded but privately run schools across the city.

 

The election drew in some $14 million — making it among the most expensive school board races in the country’s history — and a host of high-profile endorsements. In the end, the candidates who portrayed themselves as supporters of dramatic changes won out, leaving the teachers’ union and its supporters angered and worried about the future. Steve Zimmer, the school board president who lost to the challenger Nick Melvoin, was so angered by the defeat that he refused to make the customary congratulatory call. Mr. Zimmer called the results “devastating” and said he would never run for office again.

 

There are already more charter schools and charter school students in Los Angeles than in any other school system in the country; charter school students make up more than 20 percent of the district’s enrollment. But supporters of the schools say that there is room for many more and that students in the district should have more options.

 

The fight over the schools, however, obscures some of the district’s other pressing problems — including a declining enrollment and a projected deficit of nearly $1.5 billion.

 

Mr. Melvoin said he wanted to work to repair the divisions that had been exacerbated by the campaign, calling the union versus charter school paradigm a “false choice.”

 

“We have schools in every area of L.A. with a huge waiting list just a few blocks away from schools that have been under-enrolled for a long time now,” he said. “We haven’t learned the lessons of the charter movement in L.A. The district is not improving its own schools to please more parents.”

[RedSpawn]

I literally LOL'ed :D

 

You should.

 

I am laughing at the whole notion of a Trump/Russia connection (conspiracy). Now that sir is a red herring distracting the American public from the war machine we got at home that has out of control spending (to the tune of $6.5 trillion) and a penchant for war and stirring up various hornets' nests.

 

Keep in mind that our total federal debt is $18.96 TRILLION. And we have one department called the Department of Defense that can't account for $6.5 trillion it has received in budgetary appropriations. Hell, that is 32% of our total debt and we are worried about a potential Trump/Russia connection?

 

Don't forget we are still under the "War on Terror". That war started 09/11/2001. This war has been going on for 15 years, 8 months and 1 week to this very day.

 

Let me repeat the War on Terror has been a very exorbitant, FIFTEEN YEAR WAR and is still ongoing.

 

And keep in mind we conveniently have a faceless, ever-changing enemy that moves from the Taliban in Afghanistan, to ISIS in Iraq and Syria and Yemen and even stretches over to West Pakistan. Having a faceless chameleon-like enemy is good for a long lasting war and good for the Department of Defense budget and emergency war spending bills that get buried in other appropriation bills and approved without much fanfare or public outrage.

 

The public at large is war-weary but that hasn't stopped the war propaganda from popping up in the news cycle almost every week (to other week).

 

And here we are looking to Trump and Russia as a scapegoat to our current misery? Now that is funny. The enemy is much closer to home than Trump or Russia. It's the big elephant in the room that very few people want to talk about===>Department of Defense.

[barmar]

Just so we are clear.

 

$6.5 trillion is about twice the ENTIRE ANNUAL federal budget and you are busy chasing down a laughable Russia/Trump collusion conspiracy?

The Pentagon's money-management problems are a long-standing problem, not something related to the current (or any particular) administration. It would certainly be a good idea to address them, but that doesn't mean we should ignore other, totally-unrelated problems. Certainly not impeachable offenses by the Commander-in-Chief.

[Zelandakh]

Don't forget we are still under the "War on Terror". That war started 09/11/2001. This war has been going on for 15 years, 8 months and 1 week to this very day.

Has it? Are you sure? First of all the term has no legal weight outside of political rhetoric. Secondly, President Obama announced that the US was no longer persuing a war on terror back in 2013.

 

Finally, do you have som credible sources for your 6.5 billion black hole? It is actually expected for defence departments to have dark programs that do not appear on the books and it has always been that way. What the budget is for these in the USA I have no idea. That they do not ell you where the money goes does not mean that it is unaccounted for!

[PassedOut]

From the Post: I wrote ‘The Art of the Deal’ with Trump. His self-sabotage is rooted in his past.

 

In countless conversations, he made clear to me that he treated every encounter as a contest he had to win, because the only other option from his perspective was to lose, and that was the equivalent of obliteration. Many of the deals in “The Art of the Deal” were massive failures — among them the casinos he owned and the launch of a league to rival the National Football League — but Trump had me describe each of them as a huge success.

 

With evident pride, Trump explained to me that he was “an assertive, aggressive” kid from an early age, and that he had once punched a music teacher in the eye and was nearly expelled from elementary school for his behavior.

 

Like so much about Trump, who knows whether that story is true? What’s clear is that he has spent his life seeking to dominate others, whatever that requires and whatever collateral damage it creates along the way. In “The Art of the Deal,” he speaks with street-fighting relish about competing in the world of New York real estate: They are “some of the sharpest, toughest, and most vicious people in the world. I happen to love to go up against these guys, and I love to beat them.” I never sensed from Trump any guilt or contrition about anything he’d done, and he certainly never shared any misgivings publicly. From his perspective, he operated in a jungle full of predators who were forever out to get him, and he did what he must to survive.

 

Trump was equally clear with me that he didn’t value — nor even necessarily recognize — the qualities that tend to emerge as people grow more secure, such as empathy, generosity, reflectiveness, the capacity to delay gratification or, above all, a conscience, an inner sense of right and wrong. Trump simply didn’t traffic in emotions or interest in others. The life he lived was all transactional, all the time. Having never expanded his emotional, intellectual or moral universe, he has his story down, and he’s sticking to it.

 

A key part of that story is that facts are whatever Trump deems them to be on any given day. When he is challenged, he instinctively doubles down — even when what he has just said is demonstrably false. I saw that countless times, whether it was as trivial as exaggerating the number of floors at Trump Tower or as consequential as telling me that his casinos were performing well when they were actually going bankrupt. In the same way, Trump sees no contradiction at all in changing his story about why he fired Comey and thereby undermining the statements of his aides, or in any other lie he tells. His aim is never accuracy; it’s domination.

On the other hand, Tony Schwartz, the writer of this piece, ghost-wrote stuff for Trump that Schwartz knew to be complete bull. Possibly worse, "Tony Schwartz is the chief executive officer of the Energy Project, which helps companies tap more of people’s capacity by better meeting their core needs so they can perform more sustainably."

:)

[Winstonm]

I bet if I met Trump I would find him charming and likable - but that is part of being a great con and swindler.