Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
The End Game for NeverTrumpers: A Response
This is a response to @polyphemus’s post entitled “What is the End Game for NeverTrumpers.” It started out as a comment, but I decided to make it its own post because despite several servers full of Trump commentary on this site, I honestly don’t feel like my perspective has been well represented all that often. So here we go.
What I want, first and foremost, is a commander in chief who I trust to do everything humanly possible to ensure the security of the country. That requires a certain amount of knowledge and a certain amount of judgment. I find Trump terrifyingly lacking in those departments and genuinely fear that something terrible will happen because of the combination of his ignorance and his impulsiveness. I’d just feel much better with a steadier finger on the trigger. (Mike Pence would do nicely.)
That’s always, ultimately, been my problem with Trump. He’s like a naked short on an overvalued growth stock. Yeah, there might be a lot of upside to the trade, but the downside risk is uncapped and unlimited. It’s a risk I’d just rather not take.
Ideally that meant — back in the day — a better nominee. Didn’t happen. Obviously. Despite a wealth of better options.
As of election day, honestly, hard as it is to say, I trusted Hillary more. Didn’t like her. Didn’t trust her. God knows I didn’t want to live through four years of her disastrous presidency. But given a choice between four years of guaranteed Hillary deterioration in the state of the country and Trump who, whatever the upside potential, comes with a small but not insignificant risk of absolute, sudden, complete (like, nuclear war or World War III complete) catastrophe, I would have limited my downside risk and sucked it up and taken Hillary.
Today the choice is Trump or Pence, and that’s a no-brainer. I pick Pence. Period.
And if you want to talk about 2018, or 2020, I think we’ve got a problem, regardless of what happens to Trump. We put a guy who’s demonstrably unsuited in the White House. We tied our wagon to him. And a lot of the electorate (polling suggests it’s a sizeable majority) has noticed. We’re very likely going to get punished, no matter what happens to the Trump administration. But it’s never too late to at least make things better by doing the right thing and correcting a mistake. It’s about the country, not the politics.
So end game? From where we are now? I’d like to see the President resign and ride off into the sunset, leaving government to people with the knowledge and temperament to handle it. Hopefully that will continue to include a good cadre of Republicans and conservatives even after the next couple election cycles. But from where we sit now, I suspect that there’s going to be some not insubstantial losses on our side no matter what happens to Trump, and I’m prepared to live with that.
All in the service of limiting the downside risk and living to fight another day.
Published in Politics
This is another story for which there is exactly zero evidence. Some guy speculated and the right wing versions of BuzzFeed picked it up and ran with it. We obviously don’t know who killed Mr. Rich, but the wilder the accusations, the more evidence we should demand.
“An anonymous person who works in DC” alleged on the internet. Yea, that’s proof positive. Really? Please take a look at the CoC @PHenry. Particularly this: “Infractions include, but are not limited to . . . Anything that makes the Ricochet Community look like a bunch of radical fruitcakes. This includes 99% of conspiracy theories.”
Not just “anonymous” but “Anonymous!”
Just a single question for you here. Do you apply the above to all reports published or aired by print or radio-tv media including such renown sources as The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN, NBC, ABC and CBS?
Please let’s include as anonymous equivalents: undisclosed sources, official sources, unnamed sources, and any other dressed-up anonymous source.
Cato, that’s how it is supposed to work in theory. Prosecutors who are committed to uphold the law investigate events where they have reasonable cause to believe that a crime has been committed and that a particular suspect may have been involved. They are constrained to make the best use of their available resources, but they do not abandon a legitimate investigation just because they don’t start out with proof positive. That would be legitimate. That would be fine.
But this is not that. This is an investigation that serves no purpose other than being a political cudgel, and which has no intention of getting to the truth of anything.
A perfect analogy would be if someone said “It is possible that Obama colluded with ISIS to carry out a terrorist attack. There is no evidence to support that accusation, but that just means that we need an investigation.” So the Republicans start demanding an investigation, a special prosecutor gets appointed, and the so-called investigation goes on for years. Over time it morphs into investigating other things, which had nothing to do with the original purpose of the investigation. And at the end of the day, because the special prosecutor is under pressure to produce some kind of results, he finds some poor schmoe who made a misstatement (however innocent and however insignificant) somewhere during the course of the investigation, and prosecutes said schmoe for perjury. It happened to Scooter Libby. It is what is going to happen here.
This is the politicization of the criminal law, and nothing could be more dangerous to the Republic.
Yes, I do, although even then, in terms of credibility there is a difference between 1) a major news outlet reporting information from a source who’s identity they are not disclosing but which they know, and for who’s credibility they are essentially vouching by reporting on it; and 2) a literally anonymous post on an internet site.
For example, when the NYT takes a leak from Joe Blow, the assistant undersecretary for meddling in people’s lives, and reports it, while knowing exactly who Joe Blow is and that he is, in fact, the assistant undersecretary, but accepting that he is unwilling to go “on the record”, that is different from picking up a comment on a Reddit thread from an entirely unknown person and reporting on it.
Both leave the reader with less than 100% confidence in the veracity of the report, but one is considerably closer to 0% certainty than the other. In other words, credibility isn’t just “on” or “off” — it’s a sliding scale.
And that GatewayPundit article was on the very lowest rung of credibility. Just a smidgen above the History Channel reports of alien abductions. A lot of the anonymous stuff that WaPo, NYT, CNN, etc. put out has credibility problems, but they have more indicia of credibility than that.
I am unwilling to give them the benefit of the doubt on such claims.
They earned that over many years of lying.
I’m not suggesting you should necessarily believe any particular report — only that you should evaluate the credibility of each with some subtlety, and on a case by case basis.
My solution is to ignore the MSM entirely. Reading and watching them is a waste of my time.
Seems like a dangerous proposition to me. And way too much work for a rag.
There is barely a sliver of difference today. Which is why I posted the story, and why I said at the top “It’s very hard to know what is the truth and what is the latest partisan spin”. The fact is that there is just as much, if not more, evidence that Seth Rich was the Wikileaks leaker who revealed the DNC emails as there is that Trump and Russia colluded to do so.
But you think the first is not worth examining, and the second demands investigation.
Hammer, meet nail.
Don’t put words in my mouth. You (obviously) don’t know what I think. You apparently don’t even know what I’ve said on this very thread.
Excuse me, I certainly didn’t mean to insult you. I assure you, I have read every word.
I’m just pointing out that there is a lot of BS thrown around on both sides, and some are selective on which unsubstantiated accusations they think should be investigated, and which are just not worth discussing.
Cato Rand (View Comment):
I didn’t say the Russians did it. Go back and re-read my comment Larry. I just said it happened. So I think one can reasonably investigate, “who did it?” And even if the Russians were involved, and assuming they won’t be extradited, I think one can reasonably investigate whether Americans were involved.
So it is reasonable to investigate Trump and the Russians based on the standard “It happened”, but not to investigate the Seth Rich angle. I happen to think neither has enough evidence to justify investigations nor even news reports. Until there is evidence, it is rank rumor.
Isn’t Seth Rich an American, or are only Trump campaign workers considered real Americans now?
Need I remind you that the Seth Rich angle is rank fruitcakery that may well offend the CoC. Yet the Russians and Trump did it are areas of serious concern.
Both the murder and the hacking are crimes. Both should be investigated by the proper authorities and those investigations should go where the facts lead. If that means Trump, or Hillary, or Flynn, or Podesta, so be it. If it doesn’t, so be it. Certainly nobody, not even the democrats, is suggesting that Seth Rich’s murder shouldn’t be investigated. It was a murder for gods sakes.
Thank you, I think we agree. My point is that ‘where the facts lead’ starts with actual facts and evidence, not some rumor started by the Democrat party to de legitimize the result of the election. What we should not be doing is entertaining those rumors as if they constitute scandal before any solid evidence is on the record.
You’re speaking in vagaries. It’s not the “Seth Rich angle” that merits investigation, it’s the Seth Rich murder. We should be open to whatever “angles” the facts in that investigation turn up.
And if, as you said, you’ve read every word I’ve written on this thread, you should have known I thought that. I have tried to drag this discussion back to the evidence (or lack thereof) repeatedly.
Again, I apologize for the impression that you did not. What I saw was that your post was premised that Trump should resign, and that we should be working toward a Pence presidency. I also saw that you support investigation of the rumors that Trump and Russia somehow fixed the election by hacking the DNC – despite the lack of any actual evidence. My point is around the very idea that rumors, rather than evidence, should generate investigations. No matter how serious the nature of the charge, what matters is the nature ( and actual existence) of the evidence.
And my point with the Seth Rich issue was not about the murder, but about the actual evidence as to the source of the Wikileaks leak. I think the rumor about who murdered Mr. Rich is no more credible than the one that Trump and Russia colluded to get the emails. I do think the evidence as to the source of the DNC email leak is pointing to Seth Rich, more so than to Russia and Trump.
I doubt that is Cato’s view. He explicitly opined that any Americans involved in the hacking should be investigated thoroughly.
I think this thread is over, but I think it’s worth an addendum to note that Fox News has now withdrawn this Seth Rich conspiracy theory story. Mr. Rich’s murderer(s) are obviously still at large, so there is more to learn, and I am hopeful that it is being genuinely investigated. But the rumor/speculation/fever dream that certain right leaning outlets about Hillary or the DNC being responsible is at this point clearly without evidence and therefore fairly described as “fake news.”