Chuck Grassley and Republicans are more interested in the leakers than that a Foreign Power interfered in the American elections. Even Dick Cheney said that this was an act of war. Republicans are so afraid of what else is going to be exposed about Trump and the GOP and how they had their dirty little fingers all over this. The RNC is said to have contracted with a Russian company know to have ties to Putin to find dirt on Hillary Clinton. This is why a independent select committee and special prosecutor is required to get to the truth of the matter.
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ā¦a fishing expedition to find out who knew what before it became known unknowinglyā¦and to see how close it comes to his saggy behind.
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I really think this is the key to most of what the GOP has been up to - running scared with their hair on fire, trying to keep anyone from seeing the flames.
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As bad as the Trump-Putin scandal is going to be - and donāt get me wrong, I think it is going to be really bad - there arenāt any dead Americans from it yet. And thereās a pretty high bar to reach on that metric when you consider Nixonās interference with peace talks in Vietnam, and how many Americans died from the subsequent prolongation of that war.
Then thereās the Reagan Campaignās interference in getting hostages back from Iran, which very likely led to the hostage being kept by Iran for months longer than they would have otherwise.
So I would place both of those scandals as being worse than the GOPās Russian Connection in terms of damage to human lives, at least so far.
Treasonous collusion with Americaās enemies, to influence our elections, is a Republican tradition at this point - extending back to Nixon and Reagan.
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Senile useless Trump follower Grassley seeks to divert the investigation away from treason? Yep. Itās party above country for this fool.
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Yes. And I would point out that Christopher Steele doesnāt make his living by being wrong.
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I wonder what the magic number is, the one where Republicans start brazenly running away from PP. Iām thinking under 30% gets them there.
Only if the number gets low for Republican supporters. For Senators and gubernatorial candidates the general polling numbers are critical, but GOPers in the House likely donāt give a shit about general polling numbers that include Democrats unless they happen to live in a true swing district where the R advantage is not significant.
Those were very, very bad both in the effect on innocent lives and morally, of course. But I think in overall ability to shock the conscience and its sweeping effects on world affairs, this will be seen by history as much worse. Trump has almost certainly been laundering Russian mob money and government corruption money for years. He accepted the help of, coordinated with, and did the bidding of a hostile foreign nation in order to be installed at the highest level of political power on the globe. Putin has been systematically murdering people who knew about this. An entire political party and huge swathe of the nation went along with it. Our knowledge of the extent of the coverup and that extent itself grows daily. A competent, committed public servant was edged out of the competition and a lurid huckster put in place at the top of the worldās only superpower, where heās consistently done the hostile nationās bidding, destabilizing global alliances and threatening the entire world order in ways that havenāt played out yet. Thereās nothing in history that compares to it.
Yet.
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You mean like the people who were jailed for a conspiracy to torture thousands of prisoners? Or the people who were jailed for a conspiracy to defraud millions of homeowners?
I mean like the people who went to jail for offenses related to Watergate. Sometimes powerful people evade justice. Sometimes they donāt.
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No scandal in recent political history can match this one for the sheer number of bizarre characters and cinematic plot twists. Itās not an arcane land deal. Itās the stuff of espionage novels and political thrillers. And for that alone, scores of reporters are on this beat now.
It needs a better name though. Iām tired of just appending āgateā to every new scandal.
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Absolutely. Itās lazy and at least for this one, OMG does it trivialize it.
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Agreed. And as you point out, this has been happening right before our eyes - granted, some in the MSM have tried to downplay (looking at you, NYT) - as opposed to the Nixon / Vietnam and Reagan Iran/Contra stuff - which, while suspected, really didnāt come to light until much later, relatively speaking, IIRC.
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I donāt at all mean to minimize what Nixon and Reagan did, or what Bush did. And Iām not sure itās very important to rank these things, or that it can be done except by very broad, subjective measures you could argue endlessly. But the sheer unreality of watching this horrible miscarriage of, well, everything play out in the middle of our world certainly adds to to the depth of it. People see graffiti, they hear their friends and neighbors taking and defending bizarre positions on stuffāitās pervasive, and itās a shock.
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Bingo! If I didnāt know better, Iād think youād been living in Iowa the past 20 yearsā¦
Thatās a damn good question. I started to comment on this and got interrupted after a mistaken paste of unrelated text from another comment. Meant to cancel this comment, but must have hit the wrong button on my phone screen. Apologies - post deleted.
Weāve all been there! I just couldnāt quite figure out what point you were trying to make.
Have a good day!
Youāre not the first to wonder what the hell Iām talking about 