Good god. This is like a tedious reality TV series about a Mafia family filled with bumblingly stupid people, people with no redeeming qualities at all, who every week do something jaw-droppingly idiotic. Yet the network just keeps airing it because there is an audience of yokels who love watching people who succeed despite being more incompetent and lazier than they are.
Yeah. Donald Trump Jr just dumped incriminating emails on Twitter, email in which he openly reveals that he was colluding with Russian agents to smear Hillary Clinton, and that the Russians wrote of their “government’s support for Mr. Trump”. He thinks it’s perfectly OK because nothing came of that meeting.
If they can somehow loop Ozzy Osbourne or the Kardashians into it, the next season’s gonna be a sure winner.
Imagine “game of thrones” where all of the main characters are half as smart as they think they are.
Hair furor is a constant liar; Jr may or may not be as constant in his lying, but at the moment I see no reason to believe much of anything he says. And yes, this is off the main point, even if he’s not lying and nothing came of the meeting, his claim / belief is still missing the point by such an altitude the Andromeda Galaxy is closer.
(Cross-posted from the Political Madness All the Time thread here at poopyhead’s.)
The Granuiad has a synopsis of jr furor’s e-mails, What is the significance of Trump Jr’s meeting with a Russian lawyer?. It’s worth reading in full. Three fairly short excerpts:
† “Trump” very probably means Sr (the father / alleged president), not Jr (the son) — a point which I suspect will be a continuing source of confusion and obfuscation.
The NYT already had the e-mails. Not clear that Fredo thinks it was “perfectly okay,” but he probably figured he might as well dump them himself rather than have the first appear as contextualized by NYT. The more interesting question is who is giving this stuff to the NYT, and why. Most likely answer, Fredo is the fall guy. Daddy actually already knew Natalia Veselnitskaya and Emin Ogalarov, he probably gave Fredo the assignment.
That reminds me of Mulroney’s stance in the Airbus Affair. He admitted he took the bribe money but claimed he didn’t do any the work involved, so it’s not a bribe.
For years my morning ritual has started with reaching for my phone to check the weather, text good morning to family members, and read news headlines. In the eight weeks or so before the election last November, this was more like a morning addiction to the constant flood of “here’s another abhorrent, god-awful metric ton of unbelievable bollocks courtesy of Donald Trump” headlines and op-eds. Millions of others on this side of the Atlantic were also engaged in this virtual obsession with car-crash media, and I think we loved it, despite the horror, because we thought “this guy is going to land on his ass so damned hard, and the US will have an intelligent, rational woman in the Oval Office and the GOP will wither”, and because it made for great comedy and conversation. And then we realised on 9th November that all the hateful, bigoted, utterly moronic fuckwittery made absolutely no difference whatsoever, that Trump could physically wipe his arse with the US Constitution in front of the Lincoln Memorial or on Hollywood Boulevard and he would still be trusted by nearly 50% of the electorate to run their country. Now, that thrill of finding out “what new nonsense is there from the Trump crowd today?!” is back, with the daily series of leaks and revelations and stupidity. And I fear, again, it will make fuck all difference. Teflon Trump the Destroyer of Worlds will probably coast through, happily propped up by the GOP, and he’ll probably be their candidate again in 2020.
It seems he doesn’t understand the meaning of the word ” collusion”. “She told me she had secret information damaging to HRC, and then she redirected it to herself. So I’m innocent of collusion, as much as I wanted to, she thwarted me.”
Collusion doesn’t require useful information to have been traded. The intent is the crime as much as the action.
I’m sorry but only the Repubelican controlled Congress can fire this guy and they won’t do it due to a lack of humanity.
It is a shame that Jimmy Breslin is no longer with us to write all this up.
The joking comments I read here sicken me. Is this America? If the Secret Service, FBI or CIA won’t put this sick, fucking, treasonous Trump family down, then perhaps a domestic uprising is in order.
busterggi,
The Republicans don’t care about Trump; they just want their misanthropic agenda to get through. If it gets to the point where keeping him around is more costly than dumping him, they’ll build him a bonfire. They’d much rather have Pence or Ryan in charge anyway.
Gormless idiocy runs in the family. Shooting themselves in the foot must be the family tradition, learnt at Daddy’s knee.
Regarding the whole Trump Jr. recent scoop, I found this series of tweets to be insightful although scary if true.
http://www.shakesville.com/2017/07/we-must-take-back-white-house-from.html
weylguy, #10
I guess that’s all part of normalization. The people make memes and jokes about it, and the politicians hold shows every now and then to make the public think they care. Trump will be fine. He called this last year (I can shoot somebody in Times Square…). Nothing will happen to Trump Jr. either.
And, yes, this is America.
Allow me a small correction: he thinks it’s perfectly OK because he knows he will get away with it.
A large number of US politicians and their voters have lost all sense of what is right and just or even what is remotely realistic. And we just saw some of the consequences at the G20 meeting. You’re screwed. My sympathies.
weylguy:
then perhaps a domestic uprising is in order.
It’d either look like a bunch more people in gitmo, or the US would look like Libya. Neither of those seems like a good outcome.
Isn’t this really high treason?
rietpluim@17, see @3: “If Mueller confirms evidence of active collusion with Moscow, the president could be looking at treason and espionage.”
Eh, not too shocked. I thought we knew this already.
But Trumptards want this anyway.
The fact that it’s impossible to punish a Republican for actual treason is a pretty good reason not to vote for Republicans. Am I right, red states? Hello? Is this thing on?
“Attempted murder,” now honestly, did they ever give anyone a Nobel prize for “attempted chemistry?”
— Sideshow Bob, from prison
It begins with emails, it ends with emails.
As a security professional, let me take this opportunity to remind you that email is not a very secure way of communicating. Don’t say anything in an email you wouldn’t be willing to see on a bathroom wall.
Most email security systems have a man-in-the-middle model (for obvious reasons: the US Government will try to shut them down or compromise them otherwise) – it may not be obvious but it’s there. If you’re going to try to engage in secure communications over open networks, you need to do a whole lot of work. And, if you do, the FBI’ll come “black bag” your house.
I haven’t lined up the times, but it sounds like Trump’s “hey if there are any russian hackers listening” comment was another example of his great skills at keeping a secret. Right?
Uh, yeah: Fredo has his meeting in June and Don Trumpleone yaks about it in the debate July 27.
Trump is going to eventually blurt any of the small number of things he knows, if he’s given a live mic, because it seems he says whatever flickers across the empty drive-in theater he’s got in his head.
blf — The Trump referred to in the Guardian article as tweeting “Where are your 33,000 emails that you deleted?” is definitely Donald Sr.
Here’s a question: Don Jr. says they met with this Russian lawyer, but got nothing from it. Someone please explain to me why I should believe him about that. They said there were no contact with Russians…there were tons. They said there were no collusion…now we have at least the attempt at collusion or conspiracy to violate election laws. All she had to do was confirm that Russian hackers had the emails and that distribution could be arranged, perhaps after some judicious alterations. You know, a two minute conversation and then turn to the issue of sanctions. Even the adoption sanctions angle could be a cover for discussions about more important sanctions, which was part of the conversation Flynn had with them. Certainly Manafort would have been interested in sanctions beyond adoption restrictions.
The other thing people are missing is the Russian plan here. If they hacked DNC emails and had dirt on Clinton and wanted to disrupt her campaign, they could have simply sent the material directly to a major news outlet. The fact that they offered it to the Trumps personally means they were trying to gain direct leverage within the Trump family.
I really think that Trump 1 has been so sheltered behind lawyers and corporate entities that it’s only a matter of time before he screws up so badly that not even the Repubs will continue to back him. He is well known for using all sorts of shady shenanigans but thus far has been kept safe behind so many firewalls he’s gotten away with it. Now, the scrutiny he’s under Will eventually (although not soon enough) force the hands of the Rebubs. Pence’s reign will be damaging but short lived.
/wishful thinking
@#9: Or Studs Terkel.
@#15, rietpluim
I think a strong majority of voters have a very good sense of what is right and, unfortunately, what is possible. That’s why we have such dismal turnout at elections. Pay attention in any detail, and you can see that for the last three decades, our two parties have existed to capture any hope of improvement for the country and smash it into pieces, and if possible throw the pieces into prison.
I don’t think there was a watershed moment, just a constant drip-drip-drip of Republicans being overtly horrible and Democrats deliberately subverting the values they claim in public to support. Take health insurance: in the last election, one party was firmly in the “let people die” camp from start to finish, the other one had one primary candidate who wanted single payer (which Obama admitted in a speech was the only system which works — after he got the ACA passed, of course), and one primary candidate who said universal coverage would never, ever happen, and that party chose the candidate who said it would never, ever happen. And even mocked the one they didn’t choose for being unrealistic.
You can vote for six of one, or a half-dozen of the same, one painted red and one painted blue, but one of them will pick up a sledgehammer and try to smash things, and the other one will watch as others smash things with the sledgehammer and make excuses for why they can’t do anything to stop it. Most people who I have met who don’t vote are actually pretty well informed about politics — and they say, why bother voting when the choice is between people who hate the country, and the only difference is the degree to which they will pretend to hide it?
(In other words, it’s the candidates, stupid.)
@#16, Marcus Ranum
The U.S. would look like Libya? You mean someone in another country would try to get their own country to declare war on us, fail explicitly, and then go and tell a bunch of lies — which, a later investigation would determine, must have been known to be lies even at the time they were told — to get an alliance of other countries to bomb us, destroying what little public order remained, and unleashing forces far worse than those which were — falsely — said to already exist? Unless we lose our nukes, I can’t see that happening.
@#26, YOB – Ye Olde Blacksmith
Assuming that Pence has the sense to not set off a nuclear war — and, frankly, of the two I think he’s more likely to do it than Trump; he’s an apocalyptic right-wing Christian of the kind who thinks the Left Behind series is a blueprint — “damaging” will be an understatement. I have relatives living in Indiana; the Indiana Republican Party was thankful that he had to give up the governorship to run for VP because he was so incompetent. Ever since he left, they’ve been repealing or scaling back pretty much everything he managed to push through, because even Bible-thumping small-government fanatics don’t want policy which doesn’t work for anybody; they don’t mind if only the rich benefit from something, but Pence’s policies were so bad they were failures to everybody. IIRC, he even fought against highway maintenance after there were a bunch of high-profile (within the state, anyway) infrastructure failures, although the legislature pushed it through anyway and he tried to pretend he had been in favor of it all along.
No, as has been explained before, it only counts legally as treason if the betrayal occurs during a stampede of wild elephants*, in your own living room, on the 4th of July, during a hailstorm.
*and one baby zebra
1. Only Congress can hold Trump accountable via Impeachment and removal from office.
2. As others have pointed out, the Republican-controlled Congress aren’t going to remove their rubber stamp no matter what he does,
3. The Republicans have gerrymandered themselves into a politically safe situation where their re-election is secure.
What are we going to do now?
Burn
Baby
Burn
The Washington Post is reporting this evening that Trump is fuming. There’s grumbling about leaks. There are rumors of staff shake ups. And, Pence is keeping low.
The thing that bugs me is the constant emphasis on “Russia.” It’s not Russia. It’s the Putin gang. But, there’s no reason to believe that Putin’s gang and Trump’s gang were the only players in what was going on last year. There were plenty of very rich Americans involved in manipulating the election. Helping Putin’s folks might have fit their strategy very well: what better way to keep attention off of themselves but get Americans fuming about Russians.
(Robert Smith is singing “Just Like Heaven” on the cafe audio. The opening line seems oddly appropriate.)
mudpuddles, @#6:
I wouldn’t agree with that – I think the “hateful, bigoted, utterly moronic fuckwittery” actively helped with a significant portion of his supporters.
Dunc @ #33 — Bingo. This is the population fed on reality TV, tabloid news, and kayfabe for decades.
By the way, a chilling look at how the right-wing media machine can shape the narrative: The Trump Internet’s defense of Donald Trump Jr.’s tweets shows how quickly messaging falls into place.
Cross posted from the Political Madness All the Time thread.
From Joy Reid:
Cross posted from the Political Madness All the Time thread:
Ever since Trump Senior was elected, Don Junior is supposed to be running Daddy’s businesses and steering clear of politics. However, it was White House advisors who wrote the first statement issued by Don Jr. about the meeting with the Russian lawyer.
According to the New York Times:
Team Trump claims there’s no formal or official relationship between Don Jr. and the White House. And yet, the White House is obviously writing statements for Don Jr.
As Steve Benen put it:
Nepotism 101.
/offtopic
I know there’s a button to report tech issues, but there seems to be no response. Is the email subscription service working for anyone? Because I cannot get a single thread to send me a single update since the migration. I’ve seen it mentioned by at least one other person; can someone be asked to look into this, please? Thank you. Sorry for the OT posting, but I really miss the Political Madness thread, and my phone won’t load it when it gets big.