US Politics VIII

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well, here's another interpretation, possibly more unnerving. there is no kompromat, there's just a dark, authoritarian heart beating in Trump's chest.


It is possible, is it not, that Donald Trump simply believes what he says.

I realize, of course, that this is technically impossible from moment to moment. But bear with me. The slackened jaws, widened eyes, and general shock that greeted his chuffed endorsement of the Kremlin over Washington this past week were understandable but misplaced. Everything Trump did in Europe — every horrifying, sick-making, embarrassing expostulation — is, in some way, consistent, and predictable, when you consider how he sees the world. It’s not a plan or a strategy as such. Trump is bereft of the attention span to sustain any of those. It is rather the reflection of a set of core beliefs and instincts that have governed him for much of his life. The lies come and go. But his deeper convictions really are in plain sight.

And they are, at root, the same as those of the strongmen he associates with and most admires. The post-1945 attempt to organize the world around collective security, free trade, open societies, non-zero-sum diplomacy, and multicultural democracies is therefore close to unintelligible to him. Why on earth, in his mind, would a victorious power after a world war be … generous to its defeated foes? When you win, you don’t hold out a hand in enlightened self-interest. You gloat and stomp. In Trump’s zero-sum brain — “we should have kept the oil!” — it makes no sense. It has to be a con. And so today’s international order strikes Trump, and always has, as a massive, historic error on the part of the United States.

There’s nothing in it for him to like. It has empowered global elites over national leaders; it has eroded national sovereignty in favor commerce and peace; it has empowered our rivals; it has spread liberal values contrary to the gut instincts of many ordinary people (including himself); it has led the U.S. to spend trillions on collective security, when we could have used that wealth for our own population or to impose our will by force on others; it has created a legion of free riders; it has enriched the global poor at the expense, as he sees it, of the American middle class; and it has unleashed unprecedented migration of peoples and the creation of the first truly multicultural, heterogeneous national cultures.

He wants to end all that. He always hated it, and he never understood it. That kind of complex, interdependent world requires virtues he doesn’t have and skills he doesn’t possess. He wants a world he intuitively understands: of individual nations, in which the most powerful are free to bully the others. He wants an end to transnational migration, especially from south to north. It unnerves him. He believes that warfare should be engaged not to defend the collective peace as a last resort but to plunder and occupy and threaten. He sees no moral difference between free and authoritarian societies, just a difference of “strength,” in which free societies, in his mind, are the weaker ones. He sees nations as ethno-states, exercising hard power, rather than liberal societies, governed by international codes of conduct. He believes in diplomacy as the meeting of strongmen in secret, doing deals, in alpha displays of strength — not endless bullshit sessions at multilateral summits. He’s the kind of person who thinks that the mafia boss at the back table is the coolest guy in the room.

This is why he has such a soft spot for Russia. Its kleptocratic elites see the world in just the same way. And if you wanted to undo the international system created by the U.S., an alliance with Russia is the first step you’d take. Aligning with Moscow against London, Berlin, and Paris is critical to breaking up multilateral institutions like the E.U. and NATO. Trump is not reticent about this. His trip to NATO included the first-ever threat by a U.S. president to walk away from it entirely, and to condition Article 5 on prompt payment of dues. His visit to the U.K. began with an attempt to undermine the government of Theresa May for her attempt to prevent the hardest of Brexits. He backs the new populist anti-immigrant government in Rome, because it too threatens a common European migration policy. And he is indifferent to Russian meddling in Western elections and media because it is designed to aid exactly those forces that Trump supports, from Brexit to Le Pen, Germany’s right-wing AfD, and the Trump wing of the GOP (which is now, of course, simply the GOP).

Why are we then searching for some Rosetta stone to explain his foreign policy? Some evidence of his being a Russian asset? Some bribe? Some document or email proving his fealty to Moscow? Yes, it’s perfectly possible that he knowingly accepted Russian help in defeating his opponent in the last election, and is even now encouraging Russia to help him again. But that’s simply the kind of unethical thing Trump has done for years, without batting an eyelid. He sees no more conflict here than he did in seeking Russian funding and German loans for his businesses.

It seems to me he is maddened by the Mueller investigation not just because it may cast some doubt on the legitimacy of his election, but because it has impeded his attempt, alongside Putin, to reconstruct a new world order on nationalist, rather than internationalist lines. And that was one of his core goals as president. As for the danger to him by the Russia scandal, I doubt Trump is that nervous. His base has already been taught to ignore whatever the “angry Democrats” convened by Mueller find. And he knows he is immune to impeachment, because his cult followers control a third of the Senate for the foreseeable future. What he wants from Putin is simply what he has always said he wanted: an alliance to advance his and Putin’s amoral and cynical vision of world politics.

Putin fascinates too, of course, because of his “very strong control” of his country. It’s how Trump instinctively feels a country should be run. The forms of democracy exist, but one party controls everything, and one boss controls the party. The press is either compliant or openly propagandistic. Massive spending on hard military power is the core source of pride. Fossil fuels provide the entire economic base. Putin acts with impunity on the world stage, invading Crimea, all but annexing parts of Ukraine, poisoning enemies in England, devastating civilians in Syria, discrediting his democratic rivals — all of it amounting to Trump’s wet dream of what being a strongman is. Putin mirrors Trump’s domestic politics as well: the cultivation of the religiously orthodox and the socially conservative in defense of a kleptocratic cult.

This is America First, in which Trump and America are indistinguishable, and in which Russia is the most natural ally. We will find out in due course what the Moscow-Washington alliance intends for Syria, Europe, China, and the broader Middle East. We don’t know right now, and neither, apparently does Dan Coats, Trump’s intelligence chief. The last thing strongmen believe in is transparency, after all, and they love surprises. But if I were an Estonian or a Montenegrin I’d be nervous, wouldn’t you? If I were a German, I’d be unnerved. If I were still British, I’d be very leery of door handles. There’s no Uncle Sam to look to for help anymore. The Americans are on the other side.

And we know now that the whole Kabuki drama in which we keep asking when the GOP will resist this, or stop it, or come to its senses, is simply a category error. This is what the GOP now is. It’s an authoritarian, nationalist leadership cult, hostile to the global order. Republican voters increasingly like Putin, and 71 percent of Republicans back Trump’s handling of Russia in the Reuters/Ipsos poll. A whole third of Republicans do not believe the Kremlin attacked our democracy in 2016, despite every single intelligence agency and the Republicans in the House saying so. Seventy-nine percent of Republicans in a SurveyMonkey poll actually approved of Trump’s performance in the Helsinki press conference.

This is not treason as such. It is not an attack on America, but on a version of America, the liberal democratic one, supported by one of the great parties in America. It is an attack on those institutions that Trump believes hurt America — like NATO and NAFTA and the E.U. It is a championing of an illiberal America, and a partnering with autocrats in a replay of old-school Great Power zero-sum politics, in which the strong pummel and exploit the weak. Trump is simultaneously vandalizing the West, while slowly building a strongman alliance that rejects every single Western value. And Russia — authoritarian, ethnically homogeneous, internally brutal, internationally rogue — is at its center. That’s the real story of the last week, and at this point, it isn’t even faintly news.

Andrew Sullivan: Why Trump Has Such a Soft Spot for Russia




Make America Russia Again (or perhaps for the first time)
 
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that's the thing about TV dramas, you need to keep lots of plates spinning -- i trust there will be a nice payoff in the second half of the season when we have it on tape that Trump paid for Shera Bechard's abortion.
 
Feels like Watergate!

It's Stupid Watergate, as John Oliver calls it :p.

I said this in another discussion elsewhere recently, but if there is one upside to all of this insanity, it's that these people are apparently truly that dumb (and arrogant) to where they didn't bother covering their tracks very well. Trump confirms he's in Putin's pocket at that summit, Butina went around openly telling everyone she could that she was a spy infiltrating places, Trump's son shared documents that proved there was a meeting at Trump Tower to try and take down Hillary... It's all enough to make Mueller/the FBI/etc. say, "Thanks for making our jobs that much easier, guys!"
 
that's the thing about TV dramas, you need to keep lots of plates spinning -- i trust there will be a nice payoff in the second half of the season when we have it on tape that Trump paid for Shera Bechard's abortion.

I'm curious how the abortion will play out with the GOP crowd who's already forgiven adultery, pedo/teenage love, and nearly everything else Trump is about.

Especially with the Supreme Court pick and the push to ban abortion (and all women's and minorities rights)

This is going to get a lot worse before it's better. We aren't even close to bottoming out.
 
if they wanted to be taken seriously, surely they could have come up with a better name for their documentary than "is the president a sex pest?"
 
Standing by President Trump’s side in Helsinki for their first bilateral summit, Russian President Vladimir Putin made what Trump described as an “incredible” offer: He would help U.S. investigators gain access to Russian intelligence officers indicted for the 2016 election hacking, on one small condition. “We would expect that the Americans would reciprocate and they would question [U.S.] officials … who have something to do with illegal actions on the territory of Russia,” Putin said, producing the name to indicate what actions he had in mind: “Mr. Browder.”

Bill Browder, an American-born financier, came to Russia in the 1990s. The grandson of a former general secretary of the Communist Party USA, Browder by his own admission wanted to become “the biggest capitalist in Russia.” He succeeded and was for a decade the country’s largest portfolio foreign investor. Whatever the sins of Russia’s freewheeling capitalism, Browder’s real crime in the eyes of the Kremlin came later, after he had been expelled from Russia in 2005. In 2008, his Moscow lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, uncovered a tax scam involving government officials that defrauded Russian taxpayers of $230 million. He did what any law-abiding citizen would, reporting the crime to the relevant authorities. In return, he was arrested and held in detention without trial for almost a year. He was beaten and died on Nov. 16, 2009, at Moscow’s Matrosskaya Tishina prison under mysterious circumstances. Officials involved in his case received awards and promotions. In a chilling act worthy of Kafka, the only trial held in the Magnitsky case was a posthumous sentencing of himself — the only trial against a dead man in the history of Russia

It was then that Browder turned from investment to full-time advocacy, traveling the world to persuade one Western parliament after another to pass a measure that was as groundbreaking as it would appear obvious: a law, commemoratively named the Magnitsky Act, that bars individuals (from Russia and elsewhere) who are complicit in human rights abuses and corruption from traveling to the West, owning assets in the West and using the financial system of the West. Boris Nemtsov, then Russia’s opposition leader (who played a key role in convincing Congress to pass the law in 2012), called the Magnitsky Act “the most pro-Russian law in the history of any foreign Parliament.”

It was the smartest approach to sanctions. It avoided the mistake of targeting Russian citizens at large for the actions of a
small corrupt clique in the Kremlin and placed responsibility directly where it is due. It was also the most effective approach. The people who are in charge of Russia today like to pose as patriots, but in reality, they care little about the country. They view it merely as a looting ground, where they can amass personal fortunes at the expense of Russian taxpayers and then transfer those fortunes to the West. In one of his anti-corruption reports, Nemtsov detailed the unexplained riches attained by Putin’s personal friends such as Gennady Timchenko, Yuri Kovalchuk and the Rotenberg brothers, noting that they are likely “no more that the nominal owners … and the real ultimate beneficiary is Putin himself.” Similar suspicions were voiced after the publication of the 2016 Panama Papers, which showed a $2 billion offshore trail leading to another close Putin friend, cellist Sergei Roldugin. Some of the funds in his accounts were linked with money from the tax fraud scheme uncovered by Magnitsky.

Volumes of research, hours of expert testimony and countless policy recommendations have been dedicated to finding
effective Western approaches to Putin’s regime. The clearest and the most convincing answer was provided, time and again, by the Putin regime itself. It was the Magnitsky Act that Putin tasked his foreign ministry with trying to stop; it was the Magnitsky Act that was openly tied to the ban on child adoptions; it was the Magnitsky Act that was the subject of the 2016 Trump Tower meeting attended by a Kremlin-linked lawyer; it is advocating for the Magnitsky Act that may soon land any Russian citizen in prison. It was the Magnitsky Act that Putin named as the biggest threat to his regime as he stood by Trump’s side in Helsinki.

After the Trump-Putin meeting, the Russian Prosecutor-General’s Office released the names of U.S. citizens it wants to
question as supposed associates of Browder. The list leaves no doubt as to the nature of the “crime.” It includes Michael
McFaul, senior director for Russia policy at the Obama White House and later U.S. Ambassador in Moscow who oversaw the “compiling of memos to the State Department … on the investigation in the Magnitsky case.” It includes David Kramer, former assistant secretary of state in the George W. Bush administration, who, as president of Freedom House between 2010 and 2014, was one of the most effective advocates for the Magnitsky Act. Perhaps most tellingly, it includes Kyle Parker, now chief of staff at the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, who, as the lead Russia staffer at the commission, wrote the bill that subsequently became the Magnitsky Act.

Vladimir Putin has left no doubt: The biggest threat to his regime is the Magnitsky Act, which stops its beneficiaries from doing what has long become their raison d’être — stealing in Russia and spending in the West. It is time for more Western nations to adopt this law — and for the six countries that already have it to implement it with vigor and resolve.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...sky-act/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.0324ff2322c1


I've been following journalist Sarah Kendzior on Twitter since before Trump was elected, and back then, she was saying Trump wants to be an autocrat/oligarch much like those in the former Soviet Union. She's on MSNBC sometimes giving her views during a panel. And everything she predicted is coming to light. I highly recommend following her to see how knee-deep in shit we all are.
 
The NFL commissioner needs to do exactly nothing... considering the NFL made a record amount of revenue last season.

Bubububut the anthem made people stop watching!!?!?!?

No, dummy, it didn't.

The percent drop in NFL viewership was actually less than the percent drop in total TV viewership (your cord cutters and such).
 
Don’t worry, he’s moved on to the unheard of case of law enforcement using a warrant to raid an attorneys office
 
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In New York State, it is not illegal to secretly record a conversation; one person has to consent. And if that one person is you, the recorder, then by all means it is legal.
 
Last week’s arrest of Marina Butina, the 29-year-old operative who allegedly wielded sex as a weapon to spy for Russia, revealed not one but two channels into American power pursued by Russian intelligence. We’ve known for a while now that the Russians have attempted to use the NRA, and America’s love affair with guns, to shape the nation’s politics. But Butina’s other “backdoor” was more surprising: the faith community, which she infiltrated through the National Prayer Breakfast.
The annual National Prayer Breakfast dates back to 1953, and every US president since Eisenhower has regularly attended, along with much of Congress, foreign heads of state and high officials. Invitations to the seemingly bland event come on congressional letterhead.
And yet the breakfast is entirely organized by and funded through a private and deeply secretive Christian organization called the Fellowship, known by its innermost members as “The Family.”
“The more invisible you can make your organization,” its longtime leader, the late Doug Coe preached, “the more influence it will have.”
That’s a sentiment Maria Butina and her handlers in Moscow could agree with.
The National Prayer Breakfast is the Fellowship’s only public display. The event itself is spoken of within the Fellowship as a recruiting tool to bring elites into private “cells” that will “work behind the scenes.” The breakfast itself, Coe once said in a rare interview, “is only one-tenth of 1 percent of the iceberg.”
Butina was clear about what the Russians wanted: “a back channel of communication” with American conservative elites. But what was in it for the Fellowship? Why would they not only allow their big event to be co-opted for Russian influence-peddling but actively facilitate such “back channels” with the government of Vladimir Putin, an autocratic American adversary?
Because Putin is their kind of guy. The Fellowship dates back to 1935, when founder Abraham Vereide believed God told him that Christianity had been getting it wrong for nearly 2,000 years by focusing on the “down and out.” God, Vereide said, wanted him to build a movement for the “up and out,” “key men” with the power to shape whole societies for Jesus.
Democracy, Vereide concluded, would only get in the way.
He followed instead what the organization calls to this day “the man method” — bringing “key men” — and, more recently, a few “key women,” such as Butina — together in private to work things out “beyond the din of the vox populi” — the voice of the people.
It’s not just the means that are antidemocratic. God, the Fellowship believes, can be understood through a study of strongmen. “You know Jesus said, ‘You got to put Him before mother-father-brother-sister’?” the late Doug Coe was fond of preaching. “Hitler, Lenin, Mao, that’s what they taught the kids.”
This isn’t just rhetoric: throughout its history, the Fellowship has provided “back channels” to American power for a long list of dictators, from the genocidal Suharto of Indonesia to Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, where the Fellowship’s men in parliament not long ago developed legislation known, accurately, as the “Kill the Gays” bill.
Putin would be a prize of another order. American fundamentalists admire his anti-LGBTQ crusades, his revival of the Russian Orthodox Church, his “family values” lip service, his bare-chested manliness. The GOP, observed Butina in The National Interest, a conservative foreign-policy publication, “derives much of its support from social conservatives … and those that support an aggressive approach to the war against Islamic terrorism. These are values espoused by [Putin’s] United Russia.”
Most of all, they admire Putin’s strength — and they’re glad at last to have an American leader who hits just as hard, even if he may be nearly as corrupt.
At a 2017 Prayer Breakfast in Moscow, Doug Burleigh — a current Fellowship leader and lifelong Russia hand — appeared alongside Butina’s handler, Alexander Torshin, to declare “a breakthrough in relations between Russia and the US is about occur.
“I believe,” the Fellowship leader continued, “that Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump will yet become friends.”

https://nypost.com/2018/07/21/why-the-christian-right-has-embraced-putin/

Holy shit, we're so fucked.
 
The NFL commissioner needs to do exactly nothing... considering the NFL made a record amount of revenue last season.

Bubububut the anthem made people stop watching!!?!?!?

No, dummy, it didn't.

The percent drop in NFL viewership was actually less than the percent drop in total TV viewership (your cord cutters and such).
Thank. You.
 
Since Trump is such a colossal narcissist I do believe there is validity to the USFL aspect of his grudge against the NFL. The fact that it's a dog whistle to his base is the biggest reason he does it. Of course somehow they don't seem to see that Trump's summit with Putin/his conduct during was far more disrespectful to our country than football players taking a knee. Far more damaging to our country is election meddling. Just another bizarre chapter in the world according to Trump.

Maybe the NFL should fly the Russian flag too and players should stand at attention.
 
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