Maybe this feeling I have that Trumper’s are seeing the end of the road has a chance of happening.
They will kind of testify so they can say they stood up to Trump, kind of, and we the people should thank them not hate them.
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People having been buying Ambassadorships since 1789. No one is bucking 230 years of entrenched practice.
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Barr could well have hatched the scheme.
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Longer than I have left, my son has a shot at seeing it, my grandson will grow up wondering what the fuck we were doing.
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Well, there have been bad times and worse times …
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More likely he will be consumed by the outrages of his own times!
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It’s a crappy system, but as others have pointed out - with a ‘real’ state department and deep bench of knowledgeable advisers to back them up - status ambassadorships aren’t a total disaster.
Remove the professional backstop - as Trump has - and the foxes rule the hen-house.
(And in a serious administration - the ‘show ambassadorships’ are for the cushy, flashy appointments. Like Luxemborg or the Bahamas. Not the Ukraine)
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Perhaps, but there are times that transcend the predictable egocentricity of our lives.
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Yes, lulling is a feature of the system, not a bug.
Remember Mary Beth Tinker?
Most people don’t.
I guess we won’t be getting answers from Sondland today …
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Whenever I see Trump trying to lie his way out of a jam and shift blame my mind wanders to how some of his predecessors handled adversity and the possibility of failure.
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What Ike would say about Trump he would never have said in polite company.
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"But in making the decision on Tuesday, hours before he was scheduled to sit for a deposition in the basement of the Capitol, the Trump administration appears to be making the calculation that it is better off risking the House’s ire than letting Mr. Sondland show up and set a precedent for cooperation with an inquiry they have strenuously argued is illegitimate."
Well, that seems unsurprising.
But will he buck the order not to appear?
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Now that would be interesting. And it sounds like the Trumpers are worried about an avalanche getting started.
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I don’t think there’s any mystery there - tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks, oh, and judges. They never anticipated their idiot was going to be so hard to control though.
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I believe he truly was the last decent “Republican”.
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I don’t really think it’s a question of knowing better, and I hate to sound like a “classist”, but the reality is that many people in this strata of society simply do not believe the rules apply to them. To them, rules are for the less successful who clearly need everything well defined - a lack of financial means demonstrates that they aren’t very smart, savvy, motivated, or deserving. The “successful” believe their station in life is the result of their inherent superiority, and as such, the rules in place to guide and control the unworthy dullards that inhabit the rest of the world are inapplicable to them. The toxicity of this mindset needs affirmation to sustain itself, and as such these people limit their contacts to others like them, and in the congratulatory echo chamber that has replaced realistic self-awareness and personal reflection, their belief in their own personal superiority is reaffirmed and strengthened. The rest of us are NPC’s that toil in the background in service to their goals.
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If you exclude foreign policy from the analysis … which we have a bad habit of doing.
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Ayn Rand… is that you? I thought you were dead!
(And by the way, the Social Security Department called, they want their money back.)