TBH all I think they're gonna do with this is make Beiden look like a chump and torpedo their chosen guy. Good job, dems. I was worried he would actually get the nomination.

Warren is probably gong to get the nomination anyway, so Trump just shot himself in the foot bigly by getting all paranoid about Biden and talking to Ukraine about him.

he suspended aid to the Ukraine a few days before calling and asking them to try to dig up dirt on a political rival. He moved the tapes to a classified server that is meant for info sensitive for national security reasons - which this is not. Now he's issuing thinly veiled death threats to the whistleblower and people in his own administration that cooperate. He acts more like a mafia don than a prez.

Biden and his son are dirty in the Ukraine too though. But you're insane to think this isn't worthy of impeachment.

unfortunately things are currently trending that way

I have a feeling she'd be Obama 2.0

It's not the first thing worthy of impeachment and I'm sure it won't be the last. Donald Trump is incapable of controlling his own behavior. But so long as the Democrats don't control the Senate that's a moot point and I doubt the American public will be all that amazed by anything considering what they've shrugged their shoulders about thus far. So I really don't see any winning endgame here for the Democrats. At best they'll exchange pointless broadsides that will result in a political stalemate. But they'll probably just embolden the opposition while pointing out some stupid **** Biden did.

An impeachment isn't politics. It's TV. There's plenty of actual politics that goes on in Washington but by the time it gets to the point of impeachment the politics is already decided and its the TV audience who are the point.

Our memory is short

Yea impeachment arguably helped Clinton's image

But it destroyed Nixon.

The devil is in the details. I don't think it's necessary they actually remove him from office via impeachment. The worse they can make him look before the election, the better for them. The only real risk is that the American people percieve it as an arbitrary witch-hunt like they did with Clinton and then it backfires.

I honestly have gotten to the point where part of me thinks he's too dangerous to leave in office, and the other part thinks that if the Dems got someone like Biden in that i would almost prefer Trump because at least he is stirring up genuine opposition.

Like I gave up on american politics by 2012. Can you imagine we would even possibly be debating things like single payer, free college, reparations, UBI if that mullet head fembot Hillary won in 2016? It would be business as usual.

But the danger he represents is the precedents he sets. Like you said if he is that invincible... You really think he'll be the last one to exploit that? Presidents are getting stronger and more powerful with each successive generation. Once you summon that genie there's no putting it back in the bottle.

Yeah definitely. I don't think Trump should be allowed to not be impeached for at least something, but I think ultimately it will be hollow. If he can get away with putting children in concentration camps then we are too far gone for this to truly matter.

The house impeaching him is basically just calling him a bad boy if I understand it correctly.

Is it more than just a chastisement?

well that's just a matter of what is impeachable and what isn't. Nixon did way worse **** than Watergate.

it's likely not going to pan out as removing him from office by impeachment because of the Republican lead Senate. But it could serve for a good bit of political cannon fodder heading into an election.

So yes it's more than just the chastisement they could do without an impeachment inquiry. It will presumably make it harder for the white House to stone wall to the same extent.

Like ant mentioned why not go after his tax returns... They have been, in rhetoric. Trump just stone walls. They will never socially pressure him into divulging anything he doesn't have to. They have to turn up the actual legal pressure.

Eminently true, but that just makes everything worse doesn't it? Worse than the establishment will ever admit?

@ Bat

It's unseemly yea but it is sorta complicated to me. Cause it's not always clear if the seemingly ****ed up action is in the country's best interest.

E.g. nuking Japan, for an extreme example

Yet it's abundantly clear that abusing state power to screw over political rivals or using state policy to enrich yourself or your cohorts is a clearly corrupt and self interested endeavor.

I dunno.. I think he has a shot but I wouldn't bet either way tbh

And I also liked Warren until I realized she's a shape shifting lizard person

That's the ironic truth.. she wasn't lying about being native American. Her ancestors actually settled in Oklahoma a few million years before homosapiens left Africa.

I'd say that preserving short term benefit at the expense of developing human morality is everything that is wrong with human civilization as it usually exists. A species that acts according purely to self-interest might as well be molten rock being acted on by a convection current, seemingly changing but ultimately changing nothing.

If man can not notice its own moral evolution and take heart in that noticeable change then it can have no hope for further change.

I think that we've been on a general upward moral trajectory, but it's a rough art

And in the moment self preservation will often seem more pressing

And I feel in the case of that decision, I don't think they really made the wrong choice

It's small potatoes in a sense because there's a few things in the way, including a long historical "tradition" of Presidents "negotiating" in ways with a lot of latitude that would give us pause if we were to judge them in today's "faster than realtime" media environment where everyone knows everything that's going on and leaks happen faster than the Millennium Falcon jumping to lightspeed.

In other words, there's a "precedent" to this stuff and it ain't pretty. Also, a few other things to keep in mind-

1. Clinton signed some kind of treaty with Ukraine way back when that gives the POTUS pretty wide ranging powers in regards to mutual investigations of "corruption" (which is pretty vague, but it is law).

2. Republicans screamed bloody murder when Obama told Putin's people he could "be more flexible after the 2012 election" in regards to messing around with sanctions and other things, which was viewed at the time as a more literal quid pro quo and a touchy situation because of Obama's support of arming other European countries with NATO missile systems that could be turned towards Russia. Democrats defended him even when quite a few Republicans called for him to be impeached over the matter. Nothing ended up happening.

I would say that deciding to drop bombs we don't understand is a morally grey area at best, but we still knew that the bombs would kill a number of people, civilians no less, that should have been horrifying to the point that we should have not dropped them (to say nothing of our world's shared moral failures for having conducted the war in the first place). But even giving allowance for a time and place where the morality would have tipped to dropping them we now should understand that dropping nuclear weapons on a civilian population is unconscionable and the lesson was learned by dropping them.

actually the problem isn't with asking for help in a corruption investigation. The problem is sending your personal lawyer who has no business representing the state's interests without being on state payroll, involving your AG in the scheme, selectively going after a direct and clear political rival in the run up to an election, and then trying to cover that up by misusing a classified server and having your incredibly corrupt AG help in trying to bury an investigation which also implicates him directly in addition to the president.

maybe I'm missing something but where's the quid pro quo? What is he asking the Russians for?

There was an article from the Independent that came out recently that sums it up better than I can.

The argument I've been seeing about why Trump classified the call and had it all moved onto that special server is because for the first part of the conversation (before Biden was brought up) he and Zelenskiy discussed Angela Merkel and also Macron. There was some back and forth there that wasn't very flattering to either of them. After the call, there was supposedly concern about how Germany and France would react to the knowledge that the U.S. and Ukraine were talking **** about them, so Trump used his executive privilege to deem the conversation classified as a result.

But because of the whistleblower's complaint and the resulting media fiasco, he just decided to release it anyway because he apparently thought the transcript would exonerate him of pressuring the Ukrainian President in some sort of forceful or coercive manner. Obviously that hasn't happened, but he must have felt pretty confident about it or he would have just continued to hide information about the contents of the call.

So wait... Asking him to be patient (based on the election cycle) is a more clear quid pro quo than withholding aid and asking him to dig dirt up on your political rival. Are you serious?

In what way exactly would a house impeachment hurt trump? I’m not even trying to be obstinate. I just don’t get it. Is the theory it would cost him votes? Or would he be forced to testify on live TV or what?

Yeah, because Obama did all that without consulting anyone and made promises ahead of actually getting re-elected. That's like Trump next year in 2020 talking to Putin or Kim Jong-un and telling them "I'm gonna do all this stuff for you after I get re-elected".

All I'm saying is that if that kind of thing wasn't impeachable in 2012, why would Trump expressing concerns about a Democratic nominee for POTUS having ties (financial or otherwise) to a country that colluded against him in 2016 with the DNC not be a concern?

Don't forget that the whole reason that Fusion GPS and then Christopher Steele got paid big bucks to go "dig up dirt' on Trump during the last election was because some people "thought" Trump had ties to another world power. And it wasn't even based on hard evidence.

It's a fact that Joe Biden squashed an investigation into his son and threatened to hold back billions in aid to Ukraine if Shokin (that prosecutor) wasn't fired. And the memos that have come out about that situation over the past few months have shown that it wasn't some cut and dry thing where Shokin wasn't doing his job either. It's super fishy and nobody ever really looked into it because the words "Trump" and "Russia" weren't stamped on a piece of paper.

"Butwutabout Obama?"

**** him too. It's not rocket science.

unless they have something to do with getting him reelected that's not a quid pro quo. He's literally just asking for more time to make a deal with them.

there are official channels to go through when pursuing a corruption investigating that isn't motivated by an upcoming election. Instead he sent his personal attorney and tried to keep the entire thing under wraps... While withholding aid and reminding the ukranian leadership vocally that we are basically the only thing standing between them and Putin. That's a classic example of extortion. I can't believe you don't see the difference.

I don't really get it either. Mitch McConnell has literal ice coursing through his veins. That isn't going to change just because Trump is having his own "hot mic" moment.

Lol dude, Bill Barr was mentioned explicitly in that transcript numerous times as the main point of contact to look into Biden. Giuliani appears to have been an overpaid coffee gofer and errand boy in the context they were discussing. Considering what Barr's role is, doesn't that imply that the Justice Department would have to look into it officially after determining whether or not there was anything more to the story about Shokin's firing?

And don't forget that Kurt Volker, our official envoy over there, literally just stepped down because it has been revealed that he gave Giuliani an officially sanctioned "go ahead" to go take a preliminary look into the situation over there and then tell Barr and Trump. That's like the State Department giving me an official stamp of approval to go represent the U.S. in Kenya for some government related function (even if I'm not someone who works for the State Department).

like I said presumably it will allow for more legal pressure to force the white House to address the issue instead of just stone walling in their usual fashion.

How? And what issue? The phone call?

In this case, the phone call and everything surrounding it. Withholding aid, sending his personal lawyer, trying cover it up via false classification, etc.

I don’t think it’ll add up to jack diddly but it’s not like they’re doing anything better.

I mean I am by no means sure or confident it will either, but I feel at this point it's worth a try

It's not crazy to me to think they could've applied more pressure to witnesses in the obstruction case, for example. They could've easily held lewandowski in contempt and possibly charged him for perjury. They didn't cause they lacked the political will to do so.

As that video Mindfulness posted indicated, an impeachment inquiry opens the door to possible grand jury information and will hopefully also lead to a tougher stance from the Democrats, who are notoriously weak and spineless queer loving lizard people.

This simple matter of fact statement redirected my thinking about this subject. I went to the wiki page and read the details of Nixon’s impeachment. I already knew the deets but I wasn’t drawing this important lesson from it as it might apply to Trump. Good post.

I think you would enjoy Oliver Stones untold history series on Netflix. It's a chomsky-esque propaganda piece on American history starting with ww2.

Ive seen it. It’s more Howard Zinn than Chomsky

I figured you might've

Charlemagne completely sonned Pocahontas tbh

We are not calling him that. He is Orange Man Bad.