What a lovely fantasy world.
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I don’t know how Mitt suddenly becomes a winner.
He sure wasn’t when he ran against Obama and I don’t see why that would change if he ran against Biden.
Half of the GOP voters would likely not vote for Romney.
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None of the Trump humpers would after his impeachment vote.
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“If Mitt Romney ran and won the White House…” is on par with:
If your grandmother had balls, she would be your grandfather, an old Yiddish expression, usually politely translated into, “If your grandmother has wheels, she’d be a tricycle.”
Right now making common cause with the Never Trumpers is just common sense.
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Here is one of my takes.
The world is too fast for them, and there is too much media aimed at deluding and defrauding them. It appears about 55-60% of us manage to cope our entire lives. I don’t wonder so many can’t handle it. We are a model that is millions of years old. Every day is a fresh torrent of unnatural human-made demands. Our species was shaped to deal (mostly) with natural demands.
Your question about how do they maintain “postal” levels for so long? Like any lie, if they are truly going to stick by it…shit is going to get crazy. Forced, step by step into the most insane positions. On the left we are less ‘joiners’, can admit to being wrong, and give up on disgraced teams and thoroughly debunked ideas before we are trapped into spewing inanities.
Corporate owned Republicans knew what they were doing, cultivating that laziness and resentment for many decades. And racism. Racism is very useful to them but not essential. Does anyone here believe if race was magically made a non-entity, that all the people would just get along? This is about wealth and power manipulating the public. Some form of this would happen under any set of circumstances.
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Yep exactly - that’s what I meant.
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O god yes. And common sense does seem in short supply.
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You and Jimmy Carter
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Same reason I liked Veronica more than Betty.
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O lord yes. I never thought there was any contest.
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as a native New Yorker who’s work was in construction, Union Operating Engineer, in and around NYC for 25 years. I new exactly what the country bought into when they believed his BS. It was a moment of deep deep stomach churning nausea when he was given the job. Trump is exactly today as he has been his whole life. I just didn’t know it could get this bad for the country. But I’m definitely not surprised.
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Sorry, meant the election. We have these news stories, “Trump Did Horrible Thing,” “Trump Will Do Horrible Thing Next Week,” “Trump Doing Horrible Thing Right Now,” and we feel like we should talk about it and hold it in our minds for a while, but frankly he’s horrible all the time and maybe in a few months we can push his horrible self out the door. The horrible, in itself, isn’t news.
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I think I am blinded by the rage I have against trump. No, I hated Nixon but I didn;t want him removed by any means necessary. I knew he was logical after his fashion and if confronted with the inevitable would accede and leave…which he did. Trump? I don’t think he will leave even if shown the door by an election. It will take hand cuffs and soldiers to remove him.
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I disagree in part. First of all, what is at issue with Mueller is not his credibility, but his tactics. Mueller, like Lt. Col. Vindman, had great faith in the system, and if they worked hard and played by the rules and didn’t cheat, truth and justice would eventually prevail and they would ultimately be shown to be the good boy scouts they were. And maybe–with time–they still will be, if the country manages to survive that long.
And Mueller did, in the end, complete a report which, if incomplete because Trump & Co refused to cooperate, will be for history, one of the biggest indictments of Trump and his presidency. It was no small achievement that the Report we have (or eventually will fully have once we get the unredacted version) even was completed. But for people I am not wild about, like Jeff Sessions and Rod Rosenstein, we wouldn’t even have what we have, as they and others ran interference for months to allow Mueller to complete what we have.
Mueller simply trusted that once he had dutifully done his part, that others–those in the Senate–would do theirs. And they were derelict in their duty. Mueller must be bitterly disappointed by so many he had once considered friends and colleagues, for abandoning him to the attacks of Barr and Trump, who knew the ultimate boy scout would never breach legal protocols and fight back and fight dirty, like they would.
With Trump’s de facto pardon of Stone, I think Mueller was probably brought past the breaking point of being the brave, tight-lipped loyal warrior and soldier. And while it may no longer matter to the impeachment, it may matter once we get to a new administration, and to history, that in the end he fought back to defend the reputation of the work he and his people had done.
And you say Mueller could have stopped this two years ago. Well we can never know what would or wouldn’t have happened, but I am increasingly convinced he couldn’t have stopped Trump, no matter what he’d said or done. Just look at the GOP Senators and Congressmen since the impeachment–from Trump’s handling of the pandemic, to the Russian paid Afghani bounty hunters, to his openly racist rhetoric–very few Republicans (who hadn’t already quit the Party before Trump took the reins) have been willing to make Trump accountable for anything. And who, other than the Senate, could have stopped Trump? Other than Courts, some of the time, the GOP-run Senate is the only entity that could hold Trump accountable, but they wouldn’t and won’t or can’t, no matter what Trump does or says. They are all too beholden to the voters of the base and the money of the billionaires and terrified of making either mad.
So yeah while we all had hoped Mueller would be Superman and rescue the country from Trump, and he didn’t–many of us were disappointed. Maybe we all expected too much from him from the outset. The fact he didn’t do so doesn’t make him a villain. If you look at Mueller’s record through the years–from Vietnam to leading US Attorney’s offices and the FBI, I think it is unfair to accuse him of no courage or strength. Compare his record to that of Trump or Barr as to who has courage or strength, Or of most other Republicans. Or most of us.
Mueller may have been tasked with the impossible, and was probably the only one alive who could have, in the end, and through his discretion of tight lips and discipline, gotten us the written indictment of Trump and his enablers we will have for the ages. The full report will eventually get out. Stone and others may be spared jail (for now), but they won’t be spared the indictment of history. I think that, in the end, Mueller will still matter and we will owe him a debt of gratitude.
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He could feasibly correct his mistakes…we shall see…
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That’s what a rule is in the DoJ, per Neal Katyal. You want to argue with him, be my guest. They might also refer to it as a regulation. Semantics. It’s a legal opinion that’s binding on all DoJ prosecutors.
There are already churchgoing folk here who’ve said their kids call them hypocrites, don’t respect them at all and refuse to go to church. I have heard “ah…it’s just a phase. She or he will outgrow it .”
But then there’s the grandkids.
A bible-banger that I happen to know (mainly cause he lives down the block and I helped his wife shovel out his car once) got really pensive when I asked how his first grandchild was. After a while he told me his firstborn, Dustin, wouldn’t allow them to see the kid. It was because they were hypocrites, pure and simple.
He was hurt. The kid will be two in October and they have NEVER seen him.
This does not sound like a phase
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In fact Trump referrred to Mueller’s testimony the next day in his infamous Ukraine shakedown phone call, saying something along the line that the investigation was ridiculous and the testimony just proved how weak Mueller was. It actively emboldened him.
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My 5- and 6-year-old grandsons do it mostly at times I perceive them feeling a little concerned or worried.
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@george_spiggott : Ask me “What’s the most important thing in comedy?”
@squirreltown: “What’s the most important thing in…
@george_spiggott: “Timing!”
@squirreltown: …comedy?”
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