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A Meta-Defense of President Trump
About a year ago I wrote a post that could have been titled A Meta-Defense of Brett Kavanaugh, in that it made essentially the same argument I want to make here: allowing normal Constitutional processes to be distorted by unfounded and ambiguous accusations of wrongdoing is the same as surrendering those processes, and hence Constitutional governance, to the angriest voices in the least responsible mob.
Regardless of what one thinks of President Trump, it is a fact that he was elected President in 2016, and that no credible evidence has been presented that his election, however unexpected, was in any way irregular.
What has occurred since his inauguration, however, has been highly irregular. He spent two years being subjected to the outlandish yet apparently coordinated accusation of being a Russian stooge, a Russian agent, a Russian spy, and a traitor – accusations hurled from essentially every press and media spokesperson, many in Congress, and even some high-ranking Obama-era officials left inside his administration.
He was made the target of a special criminal investigation based on documents leaked by the head of the FBI – an investigation that ultimately found no basis for the accusations of Russian collusion but that nonetheless attempted to establish a predicate for his removal from office without actually committing itself to identifying specific and actionable wrongdoing: “we can’t prove anything, but we can’t disprove anything, either,” is essentially what it said.
Through a virtual carpet-bombing of hostile coverage, numerous unsubstantiated claims against him have entered the public consciousness as established wisdom: he’s a Russian agent, a misogynist, a racist, a lawless president, an ultra-Conservative monster – most outrageously, he’s accused daily of committing unspecified but nonetheless mortal injury to the democratic process itself. Such charges are notably devoid of specifics; when essentially all organs of the opinion-shaping media and institutional elite concur, the (political) science is settled.
President Trump is a very imperfect man. He is, however, the elected President, and his election was legitimate. His opposition inside and outside of government has consistently sought to prevent, then delegitimize, and ultimately to end his administration, using everything from likely criminal abuse of the intelligence apparatus to a sustained campaign of disinformation and subversion from within the administration itself.
Make his challengers speak honestly and precisely, and make them prove their charges. Make them acknowledge their errors as well. Whatever one thinks of President Trump, surrendering him to the mob sets a precedent that endangers the normal order of electoral politics.
Published in Politics
The Chicago Way: You impeach one of ours, you never have another one of yours finish a term.
It’s hard to de-escalate from this sort of non-sense. The only way to do so is to win.
I think Trump should tweet: “At least I’m not friends with Ed Buck!”
“Whatever one thinks of President Trump, surrendering him to the mob sets a precedent that endangers the normal order of electoral politics.”
It’s much worse. If they win, they’ll do what they can to never let “it” or anything close to “it” happen again.
It is time to seriously consider the future of the CIA. They are inept in most activities we know about. The Chinese and Iranians rolled up all networks and executed US agents in 2017 due to a failure of security.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/world/asia/china-cia-spies-espionage.html
Current and former American officials described the intelligence breach as one of the worst in decades. It set off a scramble in Washington’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies to contain the fallout, but investigators were bitterly divided over the cause. Some were convinced that a mole within the C.I.A. had betrayed the United States. Others believed that the Chinese had hacked the covert system the C.I.A. used to communicate with its foreign sources. Years later, that debate remains unresolved.
But there was no disagreement about the damage. From the final weeks of 2010 through the end of 2012, according to former American officials, the Chinese killed at least a dozen of the C.I.A.’s sources. According to three of the officials, one was shot in front of his colleagues in the courtyard of a government building — a message to others who might have been working for the C.I.A.
Still others were put in jail. All told, the Chinese killed or imprisoned 18 to 20 of the C.I.A.’s sources in China, according to two former senior American officials, effectively unraveling a network that had taken years to build.
The same thing happened with Iran. Perhaps the Chinese shared their intel with Iran.
Their principle interest seems to be thwarting a president they don’t like.
(sigh)
This is why I take notes on which Republicans support Trump versus which do not. Lindsey Graham has not drunk the Kool-Aid, but he has recognized exactly what you state.
The Democrats have no problem proving their charges. They can point to a plethora of investigations and news reports by known reliable sources to prove any/every charge they care to make/defend.
The CIA, FBI and maybe a few other organizations need to be disbanded and their employees banded from government service. They are Democrat controlled criminal organizations similar to the other organized crime groups with the exception that they have captured government authority and are thus somewhat outside the law.
They have already won. All we are doing now is wasting time until the next Democrat POTUS is placed.
Your penchant for proactive surrender never fails to impress me.
Are you French? Just wondering.
I agree. It is time for us to stop arguing about what Trump has or has not done lately and take a stand for our electoral system and our country itself. Whether you like him or not, if you accept America as a constitutional republic, then you should be appalled at the way the left is behaving and stand up in defense of our electoral process. It has managed to keep an ideologically divided country together for 250 years and made us greater than the sum of our parts. That is quite a feat and it is worth defending.
Why? You a racist? Just wondering.
The CIA has certainly proved itself inept and useless. It is a long way from the days when Tom Clancy wrote novels about their technical triumphs. The Chinese failure and that with Iran were apparently due to poor design and inept programing.
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-china-found-cia-spies-leak-2018-8
A firewall used by the CIA to communicate with its spies in China compromised their identities and contributed to their executions by the Chinese government, several current and former intelligence officials told Foreign Policy magazine in a report published Wednesday.
In a two-year period starting in 2010, Chinese officials began accurately identifying spies working for the US.
Chinese authorities rounded up the suspects and executed or imprisoned them before their handlers were able to determine what was going on.
“You could tell the Chinese weren’t guessing,” one of the US officials said in the report. “The Ministry of State Security were always pulling in the right people.”
“When things started going bad, they went bad fast.”
Arrogance of the institution was part of it.
Unbeknownst to the CIA, however, this system could be used to connect with mainstream CIA communications, used by fully vetted CIA sources.
This was under Brennan and Obama’s watch. Time to start over with a new system.
The FBI is OK on local subjects. My daughter has been an agent for 20 years and is a lawyer who passed the bar in California and Washington. She told me in September 2016 that she would not vote for Hillary. She is a natural Hillary voter; single female and left leaning. The FBI grapevine knew Hillary was dirty and, I think, Comey’s July 2016 presser was to hold off an agent revolt. The top layer is dirty. Probably anybody that has ever been assigned to headquarters.
New information on that “whistleblower” case. The form that allowed “hearsay” is brand new and it is difficult to find how and when it was changed.
https://mobile.twitter.com/climateaudit/status/1177580473566093312
Fortunately, Steve McIntyre is looking into it.
Here is something seriously strange. The Disclosure of Urgent Concern Form located earlier today at DNI is only two days old according to its pdf properties. https://dni.gov/files/ICIG/Documents/Hotline/Urgent%20Concern%20Disclosure%20Form.pdf
It’s disturbing in a couple of ways: (1) whistleblower status is designed to encourage reporting of wrongdoing you directly observe and protect you from retaliation — that is different from trading in gossip — so why was the change made?, and (2) who made the change — someone with a legitimate interest in dealing with some problem in the system, or a convenient opportunity to do a Fusion GPS style hit job characterized as a sympathy inducing “whistleblower” complaint?
Democrats and their longed-for impeachment. They just want a big show running during an election year. I hope Trump can nip it fast but even if innocent of anything huge, all they need to feed the press is something confusing and bad-looking to typical voter brains.
The Democrat base’s current attitude, and that of some of their leading politicians, recalls the 1971-72 time period, when the progressive wing of the party thought the Tide of History was on their side, and that by going all-in on their big government plans and blaming the U.S. for most of the world’s problems, they would win control of the White House from a president they hated with a passion and who had been elected with under 50 percent of the vote four years earlier. And the huge tide of new young progressive Baby Boomer voters would carry them to victory.
Sub out ‘Millennials’ for ‘Baby Boomers’ and you pretty much have the Democrats’ mindset today. The only difference is — what if the Democrats had tried to impeach Nixon before the ’72 election? It’s the memory of that successful effort in 1973-74 that has animated the Democrats since Bella Abzug demanded Gerald Ford be impeached for pardoning Nixon. The far left side of the party has talked about impeaching every Republican president since Eisenhower at some point (including GHWB over his alleged secret trip to Iran in 1980 to meet with the evil Iranian mullahs to keep them from releasing the hostages while Carter was in office), but today’s immediate gratification society, combined with the power of social media to drive issues and increase polarization and Trump’s combative style), has caused the Democrats to think they can use impeachment as a weapon, even when they have evidence it didn’t help the Republicans in the 1998 midterms, during the Clinton impeachment effort.
Nixon won 49 states thanks to swing voters’ fears about what a McGovern Administration would bring. The Democrats’ current mindset seems to be that McGovern would have won if only Nixon was being impeached during the ’72 campaign. But since the Democrats and the media have been trying very openly in public to get to impeachment since 11-8-16, the question is will swing voters see this as something new, or as an illegitimate tactic against Trump?
Yes the only thing we can do right now is to ensure that Trump, and any other politicians like him, shall go on to win in 2020, just like Dem politician Al Green suggests:
Yes somehow people on the lower levels of the FBI manage to stay honest and non-corruptible. I am glad to hear your daughter has a place in the agency where hopefully she can help change it for the better.
In New York, a pair of New York state-based FBI agents had the goods on the Clinton Foundation. They were quite sure way back in early autumn of 2016 that Hillary and Bill’s mishandling of monies and possible laundering of monies would be out there in the open before the election.
Comey found out about the work being done by this duo and told them that New York state didn’t have the resources and they should send the work they were doing down to Washington DC. The pair of agents did that, and nothing ever got done by Comey’s people.
And after the successful coup, we got 20% interest rates on mortgages and Vietnam boat people exceeded 500,000. Joan Baez even apologized.
Not sure the nation would have had those 20% mortgage rates if someone (perhaps Kissinger himself) had not been able to create an oil crisis where oil tankers were sitting immobile in the Atlantic, while prices of oil went soaring. Heads should have rolled for that, i.e. behind the scenes heads, again like that of Mr Kissinger or other CIA flunkies.
Suhprise! Suhprise! Suhprise!
Impeachment is not a legal process. Both the House and Senate adopt their own rules. An early proposal had the trial held by the Supreme Court, but this is a political process, not a judicial process.
And there is only one defense, the same used by Pres. Clinton’s team: “yes, he was a bad person, but does it rise to the level of impeachment”.
And it will not just be the Ukraine call. Everything he has done to irritate the dems will be part of the discussion.
So it comes down to one thing only: will there be enough Senators to support a conviction.
And if they do not remove, then what checks are there on Pres. Trump.
What checks other than the American free electors do you want between now and 2021? There have been plenty of court decisions on executive power that Trump has honored, so what are you really talking about?
Recall back in 2016, several times Trump said, in response to “he is not presidential”, “I will be so presidential”. Well, he never has done this.
We expect presidents to behave in certain ways. Let’s try some of this. As president you are the president of all of us. Not just your supporters. Remember this.
Even though the main stream media (what ever this means) do not like you, treat them with respect. They don’t like any republican so let’s be the adult in the room, not the petulant child. Do your own daily briefings. Sit for interviews by Rachel Maddow. If you can’t take that heat, then you are in the wrong job.
Let someone smash your phone.
Agreed, he has never done that. I don’t think he has it in him to do that.
We also expect Presidents to profess an unambiguous love for their country — for my country, the country they represent more than any other single person. It should go without saying. But, as we’ve learned over the last decade, even that low bar isn’t a given. And, looking at the crop of candidates coming up on the left, it probably isn’t even an option, anymore.
I find President Trump’s narcissistic childishness less offensive, somehow, than the suave citizen-of-the-world anti-Americanism of the last guy, or the frankly nutty petulant anti-Americanism of the socialist fruitcakes competing against Trump now.
I’ll stop short of saying “treat them with respect.” But I also would prefer it if the President were a little more… urbane, let’s say… in his attacks — aimed higher, and mocked with more refinement.
But I’ll rather more of what we’re getting than nothing at all, and those seem to be our choices.
I don’t think I’d want President Trump doing a lot of interviews in hostile environments. It isn’t his strength. President Cruz, now, that’s another matter.
With you there.
I understand. But it is nice to have a GOP POTUS that fights back. Maybe I came from a different place than you did. Where I come from you do what it takes to win. A fair fight is the one you win. Tired of GOP whose idea is winning is only giving the Left 99% what they want.
Why? Why does anyone need to fight? Act with reason, logic and be calm. These are critical elements of leadership.
As president your job is not to fight democrats.
Some of us may view it as self-defense.
yes, that was the problem. In the past GOP POTUS just surrendered to the Democrats and their agenda. they were only slightly better then the Progressives.