The Tyrannical Minority

[_EAllusion]

Hahaha! I though that article sounded like Chris Cillizza. Sure enough, it's him. You probably should reconsider your position, and possibly your life, if you are thinking that Chris Cillizza has the savvy take.

This sounds very much like a mirror of a comment Ajax would make. Or droopy. Interesting choice of argument.

Yes, only Droopy or Ajax point out when people's sources are lacking in credibility to them. As we all know, pointing out when someone is citing a person with a reputation for getting things consistently wrong is a logical fallacy. You're supposed to bow your head in wisdom to it.

Anyway, tell me more about how Republicans suffered a massive defeat in 1998, that his was the result of not only their impeachment, but also investigating multiple things, and we can infer from this episode that any future attempts at impeachment involving multiple acts of wrongdoing will likewise result in poor political performance.

Since you aren't just citing Cillizza for his authority and the article itself does nothing to establish this thesis, I'm sure you won't mind filling in the blanks of this, ahem, "analysis."

[_EAllusion]

The other argument is Trump's numbers drop when the story hits UNTIL it gets reframed as a partisan issue.

Bad news, champ. This story is being framed as a partisan issue. Good news is that is happening with every story, all the time, almost immediately.

The deluge of bad stories, as you call it, has also worked in the opposite direction, coming across as Democrats trying to find something that will finally stick.

No, that's what Republicans and media allies have tried to spin those instances as - Democrats spinning their wheels trying to find something that will stick. But the actual outcomes haven't been as good. Trump remains unpopular given the fundamentals. The worst media cycles for the President have been those that 1) involve deeply unpopular legislation about to pass in Congress and 2) multiple bad stories about the President coming out at once. The relentless march of bad stories have left someone whose numbers normally would be in the upper 50's in the low 40's.

The couple of most impactful items that share wider Republican and Democrat concern have been issues that have been able to largely avoid partisan reframing. The abandonment of the Kurds is an example.

Impactful in what sense? It really does seem like you get your cues from what middlebrow pundits on cable news are telling you. Almost no stories have been framed as nonpartisan because Republicans have 100% control of whether something is framed as partisan. Republicans didn't criticize Trump on the Kurdish situation because it was framed as a non-partisan issue. It was framed as a non-partisan issue because Republicans didn't like what Trump did. I can't understand how you managed to get this exactly backwards. In terms of hurting Trump, the Kurd story you cite was occurring simultaneously as the Ukraine story was and is also an example of a deluge of bad news, so it's not a good candidate to pick in support of your thesis. There's also scant evidence that it hurt him at the moment, so it also fails on that ground. It may have, but that's more of a time will tell situation.

It's simple. It's a different case. It has the ability to bring out different witnesses and different issues that can avoid the intense attempts to cast it as a so-called witch hunt.

The other things that were called "witch hunts" also weren't witch hunts. You know that, right? What about these witnesses, as opposed to the ones in the Mueller report for contrast, makes them immune to "witch hunt" labeling in your view?

I also like how you've just ignored the entirety of the right wing media, and sources such as NPR and the New York Times, casting it as a partisan issue and just insisted that this one is different because it can't be cast as partisan. It's being cast as partisan right now. What makes it "partisan" in the eyes of those that matter is whether Republicans are going along with it or not. So long as Republicans don't go along with it and Democrats do, it is by definition "partisan." The cogency of the facts don't actually matter because partisanship is seen as a matter of party bifurcation. As long as Republicans stick together and oppose impeachment as a bloc, it will be seen as partisan. If they can be persuaded to break ranks, then it will be seen as non/bi-partisan. You have the causality backwards.

It's a war for the public's opinion, and wider cross-section of the public than participates on this board. If the case to people who want Trump's head on a platter can't be made that the Ukraine scandal is a good candidate to carry forward, needs to be handled deftly,

It's a good candidate, but lots of things are good candidates. They have a cumulative effect. What's the best candidate is Congress doing its job and providing meaningful oversight while exposing the depths of malfeasance in the administration to the public. If you want to fold you arms to that and say, "No" be my guest, but don't pretend like you are offering a detailed argument by just repeating this assertion over and over.

[_EAllusion]

The problem with the Droopy and Ajax's attacking of sources incidentally is:

1) They invariably get it backwards and distrust credible sources while trusting bad ones.

and

2) They substitute attacking sources for argument so often that you start to understand there's nothing underneath that. It's not an earned understanding of credibility so much as a way to dismiss contrary ideas without considering them.

But really, it's mostly #1.

[_EAllusion]

At some point, people stop hearing the details and just see...

I think what people see is, "I can't keep track of all this, but good God the President sure sounds corrupt."

You saw a version of this play out with "emails!" coverage for Clinton. It's not that a lot of people could even walk you through what the details of those emails stories were. I'm fairly certain that a decent chunk of the public who were "concerned" about them couldn't even tell apart the wikileaks story from the personal server story. What they understood was the macropicture of Clinton being portrayed as dishonest, corrupt, and under a cloud of investigation for improper behavior. The details didn't matter. The relentless drumbeat of negative coverage is what mattered. Chris Cillizza et. al. writing story after story after story of shallow, bogus analysis is what mattered.

Now imagine that, but instead it is 1) concerning genuinely major scandals that 2) involve the President of the United States that 3) are getting wall-to-wall coverage that even dwarfs the emails coverage.

[_honorentheos]

Exactly. The meta-narrative about Hillary Clinton being shifty was built over decades. The private server became the one, focused representation of that narrative that captured the public's mind going into 2016. Not Benghazi which was generally seen as a partisan white whale hunt or all of her and Bill's past though one heard about it among the hardcore Hillary haters. Other than MsJack I don't recall people bringing up Hillary's support of Bill lying about his sexual misbehavior and public shaming of those who made the claims, for example. Why not? Because it wasn't a winning argument and pushing it created weird eddies in the pool of public opinion due to ambiguity as to how one ought to feel about it. What mattered was in the center between those who hated Hillary and could rattle off a litany of reasons she should be in jail on the one side and those who were fierce defenders of who was supposed to become the first woman president after the first black president. What worked was simple and easy to reference. Every time the public between the poles started to focus on something else, the emails were used to remind them that Hillary had kept a private server that compromised national security which she had bleached to hide nefarious information like...well, like stuff in the emails.

To your credit, I find it a bit unusual you fail to recognize the strategic need here but then it also makes me wonder why you want to see the Democrats blow this since that's the most probable explanation for your resistance. Not being a fan of the two party system, even hostile to it, I leave open the option you aren't exactly hoping to see Pelosi and the Democrat leadership be successful in the end. That, or we've taken sides and some people just have wins on the internet to give meaning to their lives I guess. Anywho.

[_EAllusion]

Not Benghazi which was generally seen as a partisan white whale hunt

Clinton was quite popular before Benghazi and her popularity steadily eroded after it. Republicans bragged about Benghazi hurting her poll numbers. Can you demonstrate that they were wrong in this analysis?

Benghazi was ultimately responsible for her fall if only because the emails story was the result of those repeated fishing expeditions. But prior to that, Republicans thought Benghazi was hurting her and that's plausible. They were open about that being the goal. Her numbers were declining at the same time, though it's possible to come up with countervailing explanations for that.

Every time the public between the poles started to focus on something else, the emails were used to remind them that Hillary had kept a private server that compromised national security which she had bleached to hide nefarious information like...well, like stuff in the emails.

I'm losing faith in how you read what's happening in the news. The emails stories weren't a coup-countercoup situation. They were a constant, and they came from mainstream sources that imagine themselves to be politically neutral. Cillizza, for example. Because the coverage was so overwhelming - I'm not sure if you need me to link some analysis here, but the emails stories were by far the most heavily covered story of the election and absolutely dominated it - the effect was Clinton was covered as though she was in the middle of a Watergate level scandal. I am proposing to you this had an effect on public opinion if only because members of the public just had a vague sense she was in embroiled in her own Watergate and was on the verge of being caught. The prior work portraying her as dishonest and corrupt just fed into that narrative. You impute a level of reasoning to people that seems to exist in your mind and without evidence.

I am further suggesting to you that the same thing would happen to Trump, though worse. People react to their vague sense that the news is really bad for someone even if they don't grasp the particulars. I'd bet you my house that this is happening right now with support of impeachment for Ukraine. A % of those people who have switched their opinion couldn't explain to you the Ukraine story if their life depended on it, but they do know that it sounds bad and Democrats are impeaching over it, so best to get the bastard out.

To your credit, I find it a bit unusual you fail to recognize the strategic need here but then it also makes me wonder why you want to see the Democrats blow this since that's the most probable explanation for your resistance. That, or we've taken sides and some people just have wins on the internet to give meaning to their lives I guess. Anywho.

Yes, I want to see Democrats "blow" this by adopting a more effective strategy that also coincidentally better aligns with the right thing to do.

[_EAllusion]

Regarding political practicalities, it's clear that Pence is up to his eyeballs in this scandal and other, related ones. In a perfect world, both Trump and Pence are removed for their crimes against the nation, but there is zero chance Republicans would allow that to happen. Even if it could happen, I'm not sure that would sit well with the public even taking into account how they were betrayed.

Since Republicans are likely to acquit Trump, I haven't given it much thought, but it'd be very awkward if he was forced out of office and Pence remained. You even have to go deep into the roster of cabinet secretaries before hitting someone not obviously implicated in a serious scandal.

In conclusion, Congress should be cut out of the succession line to the Presidency in a Constitutional amendment. The amendment probably should extend the list of executive branch officials a little more.

[_Gunnar]

Regarding political practicalities, it's clear that Pence is up to his eyeballs in this scandal and other, related ones. In a perfect world, both Trump and Pence are removed for their crimes against the nation, but there is zero chance Republicans would allow that to happen. Even if it could happen, I'm not sure that would sit well with the public even taking into account how they were betrayed.

I'd bet that if Pelosi and McConnell were reversed in the line of succession, the Republicans would be every bit as eager to impeach and remove from office both Trump and Pence as the Democrats are.

[_Gunnar]

What do you think of the several reports from credible Republican sources that claim that up to as many as 35 Republican Senators privately admit to disliking Trump enough to vote against him if they could do so anonymously?

There's a whole genre of "in private, Republicans don't like this stuff" stories while their public statements and actions say otherwise. The assumption from people getting those stories is that Republicans are lying in their public actions and revealing their true self to them in those private moments. I don't doubt those private moments are occurring, but the people who are reporting them need to consider the possibility that Republicans are lying, but they are lying to them because they want to be seen a certain way in the elite cocktail party set. Then they go about doing the politics they want to do.

Once they understand, by Republicans own telling, that they are massive liars, they shouldn't be so vain as to think they'd never lie to them.

Nevertheless, though it may be unlikely that there would be a 2/3 majority of Senators voting for conviction, I think it is likely that there will be enough Republican Senators sufficiently disgusted with Trump to crossover and vote with the Democrats for conviction to constitute a majority in favor of it. It will be interesting to see how much, if any, what Senators vote on that matter will change their future chances of reelection.

[_EAllusion]

Regarding political practicalities, it's clear that Pence is up to his eyeballs in this scandal and other, related ones. In a perfect world, both Trump and Pence are removed for their crimes against the nation, but there is zero chance Republicans would allow that to happen. Even if it could happen, I'm not sure that would sit well with the public even taking into account how they were betrayed.

I'd bet that if Pelosi and McConnell were reversed in the line of succession, the Republicans would be every bit as eager to impeach and remove from office both Trump and Pence as the Democrats are.

If the situation were reversed, I'm certain the Democratic President would've already been removed with the necessary Democratic votes. My guess is Democratic Senators would be holding the line on removing VP turned President, but I suspect there'd be strong media pressure on them to do so. When there's a whiff of legitimate scandal for Democrats, the press tends to go into overdrive hammering them on it as a means of proving how not biased they are.