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Bulwark Report: When All You Have Is an Anti-Trump Hammer…
I think Jonathan V. Last is a very funny fellow, in a dark and sardonic way. I enjoy him on the Sub-Beacon podcast and wherever else I hear him. He’s an amusing, irreverent, nebbish fellow, and I don’t like saying bad things about him.
But his latest piece at The Bulwark, entitled Donald and Jussie, Birds of a Feather, is trying too hard to fulfill The Bulwark’s mission, which is to spare no expense, grace, or integrity in its effort to besmirch the all-too-readily besmirchable President Trump.
JVL writes:
First, here’s President Donald Trump claiming “complete and total exoneration” of all charges in the Mueller investigation.
[ video clipped ]
And now here’s actor Jussie Smollett claiming that he’d been “truthful and consistent” in the face of charges that he’d committed a hate-crime hoax.
[ video clipped ]
The symmetry here is perfect. Absolutely perfect. The only thing we really know from Bob Mueller’s lips is that on the subject of obstruction: “while this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” That’s eerily similar to the words said by the prosecutor who dismissed the charges against Smollett, saying that he “does not believe [Smollett] is innocent.”
Now you can believe that both of these men have been judged as innocent because the legal system has declined to prosecute them. Or you can believe that both of them can be viewed with suspicion because the official verdict of the legal system is not the last word in actual culpability.
But you cannot claim that one of them must now be treated as totally and completely innocent but that the other is clearly guilty. Which is what most of America seems to be doing.
Do you see what he did there? It’s true that President Trump overstated the case with his “complete and total exoneration” comment. But is it true, as JVL claims, that the “symmetry here is perfect?”
On the one hand, we have a man who has just been definitively cleared of a charge that has hounded him for two years, who knew he was innocent the day the investigation started, who has professed his innocence all along, who could have stopped the investigation at any point but chose not to, and who almost certainly has not obstructed justice and, if he hasn’t, is fully aware that he hasn’t and that the justice department will now agree with him.
On the other hand, we have a man who has just been mysteriously absolved of responsibility for a crime he certainly committed, who has lied since the first moments of his case, and who continues to lie about his innocence now.
What Trump is saying, in essence, is “I didn’t collude with the Russians, and I didn’t obstruct justice in the investigation of a crime I know I didn’t commit. I allowed the investigation to run to its conclusion. I am exonerated.” His mistake was in his failure to add “… or I will be in a few days when the justice department acknowledges that I didn’t obstruct justice,” as it undoubtedly will.
What Smollett is saying is “I am innocent,” when in fact the little fraud is guilty as sin and everyone knows it.
That’s only “symmetric” if you’re tilted as far to one side as the good folks at The Bulwark appear to be.
Published in Politics
Sophistry. If one is “pro-choice” then one is logically pro-abortion. Or to put it another way, one is not opposed to killing one’s own offspring.
“You are lukewarm — neither hot nor cold — and I am about to spit you out.” — Jesus
I’m fine with anti-choice. It means the same as pro-life — I’m against a woman having the (legal) choice to kill another human being for any reason. I don’t call people “baby-killers” if I’m trying to engage them in conversation, but their position is indistinguishable from the eugenicist Margaret Sanger, who founded Planned Parenthood, from a practical standpoint. She wanted to eliminate defectives and blacks — there are more black babies aborted in NYC than there are born. It’s a genocide.
So allow me to offer a little advice on how to engage on Ricochet, Gare. Don’t advise people on how they should say things. Especially if you don’t share the same convictions. I think the men at the Bull— are damaging the country and the cause, and I don’t give a damn about their intentions. “You will know them by their fruits.” — also Jesus.
Free classy lessons!
Gettin’ my money’s worth today on Ricochet!
All that really matters is, if the general election comes down to Trump vs Bernie, or Hillary, or O’Rourke or whoever, do you vote for them instead of Trump or not vote at all because you’re so “pure,” or because Larry Hogan isn’t one of the choices?
I say above: “The question before me is not who I should vote for in the general election. This issue will not be before me for 19 months.”
Ask me 19 months from now. I am very aware that there are only 3 states that both Charlie Cook and Larry Sabato are swing states: AZ, PA and WI. My vote will make a real difference. I may vote for Trump. I may for a non-crazy Dem. I may vote for a third party. I do not know now who I will be voting for, but I do know that I will be holding my choice in prayer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3M4br46s7A
Oh, and a non-crazy Dem? Good luck with that. Even if you found a candidate – especially for president – who is individually non-crazy, they serve to enable the crazy ones. And even a non-crazy Dem president isn’t going to nominate judges or Supreme Court justices whose rulings you would be happy to live under.
Haha!! The Simpsons is great! Which character is your avatar?
That’s me, processed through the “Simpsonizer” that might still be available online somewhere. At the time I did it, it was a promotional thing through the Burger King web site or something, probably for The Simpsons Movie. After that promotion was over, it went “independent” for a while but I don’t know if it still exists.
Those are clearly negatives about voting for any Democrat. I hate to say it, but a factor to be considered is if Trump replaced RBG prior the general election. Former CO Governor Hickenlooper looks relatively non-crazy. Current Montana Bullock also looks relatively non-crazy.
I will be holding the decision in prayer, as my state is a swing state. (For my concerns about Trump, see Comment #204.)
Even if RBG is “safely replaced” before the 2020 election, there’s still the NEXT ones. There’s no guarantee that any Dem president elected in 2020 wouldn’t have one or more Supreme Court positions to fill. In possibly 8 years, if not in just 4. And even aside from that, there’s all the lower courts, which Trump has been able to at least bring back towards the center, if not farther. Plus all the agencies, etc. Any Dem president in 2020 would make it SO easy for DOJ and others to snap back to how they were – and in some ways, still are.
As well as comments, 3, 6, 14, 15, 16, 23, 27, 45, 48, 49–62, 67, 71, 73, 74, 84, 91–108, . . .
Those are certainly factors. That decision is not before me today.
The rest was too long, didn’t read.
a) Doesn’t matter where he was born. He’s not a loyal American citizen. He’s a globalist leftist.
b) Silly. Intended to provoke a reaction. It worked.
c) Nope, he won the electoral college according to the rules of our presidential elections. Do you favor abolishing the EC and going with the National Popular Vote? That’s a whole different campaign.
d) Who cares? Really. You’re still obsessing about that?
e) No, it was absolutely Trump on the HA recording, but you and the Left have distorted what he was saying, which is one of those uncomfortable truths — many women will let themselves be sexually exploited by rich and powerful men. He wasn’t speaking for public consumption. Obviously.
You’ve never answered the question of what policies the Democrats in the House are supposed to “check.” It’s always these irrelevant (to our national governance) exaggerations and un-pc comments, which no one is going to prevent, either Republican or Democrat. Answer the question, counselor!!
Trump knowingly lied about this.
Yes, and Harry Reid’s lies about Romney on the Senate floor worked. Both are despicable.
I support the Electoral College. My point is that Trump says that he won the popular vote. Do you think that he did?
Trump is still obsessing about this.
Apparently Trump is now suggesting that it isn’t his voice, which raises the issue of his character, integrity and/or capacity.
I wanted them to check Trump’s authoritarian impulses, because with McCain’s death, no one in Congress was willing to do so.
No, I am not running for office. And you are not one of the couple of judges that I appear before. Ricochet is described as people talking a dinner party. Well, at a dinner party, you don’t get to cross-examine other dinner guests.
The point is that even if the Dems nominate someone non-crazy for 2020 – a huge assumption that seems very unlikely given the facts on the ground – that person isn’t going to do the kinds of things you would want, and even if they tried to, the rest of the Dems would block THEM.
So, you can cook up all the reasons you care to, about how a “non-crazy” Dem is actually better than Trump. But the rest of us see what’s really going on.
Well, I am glad that you think that you know what is really going on, but I think that you probably don’t.
The question is if long-term it would be better for Trump to lose so that the Republican Party can return to its Reagan roots, or if the short-term value of having Trump win and be in office is greater, even though the Reagan roots may never be able to be recovered after 4 additional years.
That is just a fantasy and — no insult intended — it is sad you can’t let go of it.
It’s also sad that he thinks Trump being in office for now, has only short-term benefits. Or that it would somehow be harder to get back to first principles etc with perhaps one or two more conservative Supreme Court justices plus all the lower court positions that could be filled in another 4 years, many of which also carry life-time terms.
And he phrases it like that perhaps as some kind of defense mechanism, but really what other reason can there be to try and “square the circle” of some mythical non-crazy Democrat president being less of a problem for the country – and even the world – than Trump, other than he puts his desire to feel good about himself because of who he votes for – or doesn’t vote at all – over the good of the country and even really the world? To transpose an expression, That’s Partly (maybe even Largely) How We Got Obama. Because “It Was Time For A (half-)Black President.” Which makes as little sense as voting for Carter because “It Was Time For A Peanut-Farmer President.”
Vague, but finally answered.
This is not a realistic way to think about it. Just my opinion.
Answered, but what reason is there to believe that ceding control of one – or possibly both – houses of Congress to Democrat control was the only way to “check Trump’s authoritarian impulses?” To the extent they may have even actually existed, it Seems like Mitch McConnell and others were doing just fine.
It shows bad form to ask others questions, get answers , then refuse to answer theirs. Rude, really.
My problem with the NT is the willingness to play the long game, with no actual plan in the future other than a purging of some members …. and these are the ostensible intellectuals????
Let’s lose now for the next 2, 4, 8, years? For the good of the (R) Party?
That is insane to me …. the (R)’s won in 2016 and you immediately started planning how to lose in 2018 … for the good of the (R) Party of course?????
Here’s a little trick the (D)’s have always been acutely aware of, which would be nice if some in the (R) could pick up on: When the (R) wins an election you cram as much of your conservative agenda into law as is possible.
Here is what you don’t do: Start planning how to lose the next election.
I love this.
I don’t know a lot about this but the other thing the Democrats do is when they “cram their agenda” and they get voted out of office for cramming their agenda, those people get taken care of, one way or another. I mean fat salaries, doing whatever.
There is a lot of that in Minnesota. George Soros paid 100% of salary of someone working on Global warming in the Minneapolis City Hall. They gave her an office, but it was otherwise completely off the books. I think it was $127,000. She did that until she got another gig where she could push us all around the government.
That’s what they should’ve done to wipe out the ACA. But no.
Also I think because of ‘O Sullivan’s Law, the long game just isn’t going to work very well for the Republicans like it does the Democrats.
I never worried about Trump’s authoritarian impulses, because that’s never been who Trump is since 1977. Donald Trump made his name in the political commentary sphere by being a panderer to the NYC bridge-and-tunnel crowd, most of the time against the city’s Manhattan elites. But the bridge-and-tunnel crowd in the city has always been notoriously fickle about what they want — it took them until 1993 to line up en masse against the city’s Democrats and for Giuliani — as have the swing voters across the country, when Trump took his act national in the mid-1980s.
His schtick was always to gauge what the swing voters were thinking, and then use his access to the public print and airwaves to not just voice those concerns, but act like he was angrier than they were about whatever they were angry about. It was tough talk, but it was ideologically unfocused tough talk, because one year it would lean towards the Democrats and the next year towards the GOP.
That’s not authoritarian telling people what to do. That’s hearing what the people want and acting like you want it too, even if it’s 180 degrees opposite what you wanted 12 months ago. That was my fear with Trump going into 2016, and why I’ve been pleasantly surprised in the wake of the 2018 midterms that he hasn’t pivoted and tried to make deals with Pelosi and Schumer, after the swing voters went left during the midterms. He may not have had a choice, given the left’s now foaming-at-the-mouth hatred of him, but Gary’s fears of Trump the Authoritarian were only the ones reflecting the feelings of an angry and paranoid progressive media, whose every enemy has to be the next Hitler .
If Buttigieg would simply take the risk of saying he would get everyone covered and prevent single payer at the same time–universal coverage–the election would be over. If it didn’t work, he gets taken care of. That’s what the Republicans should’ve done anyway.
Right. I was worried about that and his lack of intellectual curiosity, civic knowledge, civic experience, and foreign-policy knowledge. He’s been okay. I was never concerned about anything else. He beats the crap out of the media and they deserve it. That is a huge win.
These are the same people who kept saying “Wait until we have…”
Well, we had all three, and did they overturn Obamacare? Nope. Did they fix immigration? Nope.
Basically, our betters want the conservatives to vote for them, then they can ignore them when they are in power.
It makes me crazy.
The Benedict Option makes a lot of sense.
Trump repeated Hillary’s “lie.” But, Obama lied first in one of his bios. Who you gonna believe Obama, or Obama?
Which just makes my point about no other Republican being able to win against Hillary. Not even Boy Scout Mitt Romney. Especially not a Boy Scout.
I think you’re misrepresenting his point. If you take out California and New York, I believe he won the popular vote. But, in any case, it couldn’t be less relevant to his governance or to my life. I only care that he won!
Haha! He’s not living rent-free in you head. You’re paying him to live there!
It has nothing to do with his governance. In fact, it couldn’t have less to do with his governance!