The Tyrannical Minority

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_Res Ipsa
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Re: The Tyrannical Minority

Post by _Res Ipsa »

EAllusion wrote:
Res Ipsa wrote: But I haven’t seen anything that has convinced me that proceed with impeachment on the Ukraine issue alone is a mistake.
Part of the issue here is the Ukraine issue not only connects thematically with other impeachable conduct, but appears to connect as part of a larger overarching scandal involving the same people and connected actions. Pulling threads on what happened with Ukraine gets you to other topics of impeachment. You can't really fully investigate Ukraine without getting bogged down in a lot of misconduct here.

Trump and co really do operate as an organized crime syndicate and it's hard to isolate wrongful behavior when it comes to that.


I think that’s a valid point. Tactically speaking, the House Democrats need to decide on a theme, and then build a story around a theme. For example, they could pick “obstruction.” They could pick “bribery.” They could pick “organized crime racket.” Obviously, some themes would be more difficult than others. And it’s also true that, the more complicated the facts, the harder it is to create a convincing story that hammers on the theme. So there’s always a decision to be made about how much of the story to include.
​“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”

― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
_honorentheos
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Re: The Tyrannical Minority

Post by _honorentheos »

This article from The New York Times, available through MSN, is worth reading. It paints a picture of how Trump's behavior mirrors that of the corrupting influences that led Ukraine to where it is, and to the condition where the idea the Ukraine has a corruption problem is accepted as a given by everyone on both sides of the political aisle in the US.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/ ... spartandhp

Donald Trump ought to be impeached and removed from office. This isn’t what I thought two months ago, when the impeachment inquiry began. I argued that the evidence fell short of the standards of a prosecutable criminal act. I also feared impeachment might ultimately help Trump politically, as it had helped Bill Clinton in 1998. That second worry might still prove true.

But if the congressional testimonies of Marie Yovanovitch, Bill Taylor, Gordon Sondland, Alexander Vindman and especially Fiona Hill make anything clear, it’s that the president’s highest crime isn’t what he tried to do to, or with, Ukraine.

It’s that he’s attempting to turn the United States into Ukraine. The judgment Congress has to make is whether the American people should be willing, actively or passively, to go along with it.

I’ve followed Ukrainian politics fairly closely since 1999, when I joined the staff of The Wall Street Journal Europe. It has consistent themes that should sound familiar to American ears.

The first theme is the criminalization of political differences. Years before Trump led his followers in “Lock Her Up” chants against Hillary Clinton, then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych did exactly that against his own political rival, Yulia Tymoshenko, who was sentenced to seven years in prison on a variety of byzantine charges after she had narrowly lost the 2010 election.

She spent three years in prison before her release during the 2014 Maidan Revolution. Key to Yanukovych’s efforts to discredit Tymoshenko was — who else? — Paul Manafort.

A second theme is the use of political office as a shield against criminal prosecution and as a vehicle for personal and familial enrichment. Why have so many of Ukraine’s oligarchs — including Burisma Holdings founder Mykola Zlochevsky — also served as government ministers? Simple: Because, until recently, it shielded them from criminal prosecution thanks to parliamentary immunity, while also providing them with the means to use government power for their own benefit.

The third theme is what one might call the netherworldization of political life, in which conspiracy theories abound, off-stage figures wield outsized influence, and channels of formal authority are disconnected from the real centers of power.

This reality came vividly to light in 2016, when a parliamentary effort to vote “no confidence” in the government of then-Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk unexpectedly collapsed, thanks to the usual string-pulling from the country’s wealthiest power brokers. As Ukrainian political commentator Maxim Eristavi noted at the time, in Ukraine “There are no party lines, no real policy debates, no ideological clashes: just cold-hearted vested interests and short-term alliances between various oligarchic groups.”

The fourth theme is covert Russian interference, usually facilitated by local actors.

Ukraine offers the world’s most extreme example of this kind of interference (nearby Georgia is a close second), since large parts of the country have been seized outright by Russia and its proxies. But long before the Kremlin’s “little green men” arrived in Crimea in 2014, Russia and its agents were using every dirty trick at their disposal, from poisoning a future Ukrainian president with dioxin to poisoning the media landscape with disinformation. Too often, it worked, whether because its victims were suggestible, corrupt, fearful or simply not paying attention.

That last point was also made by Fiona Hill in her testimony on Thursday, where she warned members of the House Intelligence Committee that they ran the risk of themselves falling victims to “politically driven falsehoods,” regarding a bogus theory about Ukrainian political interference, “that so clearly advance Russian interests.”

Yet the person who is both the principal consumer and purveyor of those falsehoods is the president of the United States, just as he has been a purveyor of so many other conspiracy theories. Even now, this should astound us.

It doesn’t, because we’ve been living in a country undergoing its own dismal process of Ukrainianization: of treating fictions as facts; and propaganda as journalism; and political opponents as criminals; and political offices as business ventures; and personal relatives as diplomatic representatives; and legal fixers as shadow cabinet members; and extortion as foreign policy; and toadyism as patriotism; and fellow citizens as “human scum”; and mortal enemies as long-lost friends — and then acting as if all this is perfectly normal. This is more than a high crime. It’s a clear and present danger to our security, institutions, and moral hygiene.

It’s to the immense credit of ordinary Ukrainians that, in fighting Russian aggression in the field and fighting for better governance in Kyiv, they have shown themselves worthy of the world’s support. And it’s to the enduring shame of the Republican Party that they have been willing to debase our political standards to the old Ukrainian level just when Ukrainians are trying to rise to our former level.

The one way to stop this is to make every effort to remove Trump from office. It shouldn’t have to wait a year.
The world is always full of the sound of waves..but who knows the heart of the sea, a hundred feet down? Who knows it's depth?
~ Eiji Yoshikawa
_EAllusion
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Re: The Tyrannical Minority

Post by _EAllusion »

Chris Cillizza is really, really bad Honor:

https://Twitter.com/CillizzaCNN/status/ ... 2101045248
_honorentheos
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Re: The Tyrannical Minority

Post by _honorentheos »

A bunch of adults yelling at one another over matters that almost no one watching understood or cares about.

While probably accurate in portraying how many saw today's hearing, yeah, it's irresponsible journalism. Fair point.
The world is always full of the sound of waves..but who knows the heart of the sea, a hundred feet down? Who knows it's depth?
~ Eiji Yoshikawa
_EAllusion
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Re: The Tyrannical Minority

Post by _EAllusion »

honorentheos wrote:A bunch of adults yelling at one another over matters that almost no one watching understood or cares about.

While probably accurate in portraying how many saw today's hearing, yeah, it's irresponsible journalism. Fair point.


The bigger problem is journalists feeding these narratives lead the public to taking that attitude, much in the same way that people like Cillizza covering Clinton's emails as a massive scandal had a major impact on public attitudes towards it.

Cillizza, seemingly unaware what his job is here, could try to get over his confusion and boredom and report relevant facts in context.
_EAllusion
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Re: The Tyrannical Minority

Post by _EAllusion »

Honor -

The media can't both sides Ukraine! It's too clear. Let's focus on that simple, easily digestible malfeasance for the sake of the public.

NYT: Hold my beer.

https://Twitter.com/hshaban/status/1204254100076011521
_EAllusion
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Re: The Tyrannical Minority

Post by _EAllusion »

Politico is reporting that a few moderate Democrats are floating trying to back out of impeachment for a lesser form of response:

https://www.politico.com/news/2019/12/1 ... ent-080311

It's hard to get my head around what atrocious, cowardly instincts these people have even before realizing they have a lot of power over the party's agenda.

At a certain point, you have to realize that hitching yourself to these people is itself a form of surrender and you're better off just directing your effort to making sure they don't get elected. You're into some very tough choices on short vs. long-term strategy at that point.

My best theory for these people is this:

A lot of them are in Trump-friendly swing districts and have just inane ideas about what best promotes their precarious election chances. They won in 2018 because midterm elections are generally good for the party opposite the Presidential incumbent with the popularity of the Presidential incumbent going a long way to determining how strong their advantage is. A rising tide lifts all boats, and Trump's unpopularity in a mid-term was sufficient to tilt swing and light red districts into their column. You can predict the final 2018 House results almost entirely by just looking at a few generic numbers without getting into the dynamics of specific races.

Presidential elections where there is an incumbent have a lot to do with the popularity of the Presidential incumbent. They also now have very strong coattail effects for down-ballot races in the House. The single most important factor on whether these Democrats are reelected is going to be how popular Trump is and/or how much illicit election interference he and his boosters can get away with.

Their behavior is about as ill-conceived as possible for driving Trump's numbers down. They are obsessed with their next election chances, but adopt a terrible strategy for maximizing their chances. Why?

Well, one idea I have is that these are people who ran election campaigns where they had to make countless decisions about what to say and do under the belief that those choices were meaningful for determining if they would win. They had consultants giving them advice on what to say and do to win. And they did it. And they won. This may be giving them a mistaken impression that what they were saying and doing - largely campaigning on solving specific issues and a sense of bipartisan cooperation - is what they need to do to win. This is so god damn dumb, but the election process might select people who think that way. It's amusing when you contrast against Republicans, a party filled top to bottom with people who believe the Earth is a few thousand years old, managing to understand how nationalized politics works at a basic level.

That might be totally wrong, though. Whatever is going on, it's unacceptable. They're people obsessed with appearing that they care about doing the right thing over political maneuvering by engaging in awful political maneuvering in lieu of doing the right thing.
_EAllusion
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Re: The Tyrannical Minority

Post by _EAllusion »

Donald Trump's political instincts are also terrible:

https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/10/politics ... index.html

Mitch McConnell has kicked Democrats' teeth in with a minority of public backing for the majority of his time in office. Maybe he knows what he's doing there, Trump?
_honorentheos
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Re: The Tyrannical Minority

Post by _honorentheos »

EAllusion wrote:Honor -

The media can't both sides Ukraine! It's too clear. Let's focus on that simple, easily digestible malfeasance for the sake of the public.

NYT: Hold my beer.

https://Twitter.com/hshaban/status/1204254100076011521

I thought we'd moved past these one-man plays.

Again, the argument was that the Ukraine scandal had multiple benefits for being the focus of the investigation, not least of which being the fact it was the Ukraine that was the injured party even though the target was Joe Biden. That allowed witnesses to come forward who crossed the line of party affiliation out of a sense of concern for the damage it was doing in our diplomatic mission in Eastern Europe. Should it have been more easily digestible? Sure. Did I hope the Democrat leadership was better prepared to make a simple case to the American people than they ended up making? Yeah. I think they chose the wrong target audience, playing to people who already were on board with impeachment in their choices for lines of questioning, witness selection, and what they chose to stress during the public inquiry. They should have instead been asking how they could reach independent voters in swing states who might not see the issue the same way the Democrat base does and tried to make the case specifically to them. They did a terrible job. And it was what I was concerned about going back to the aftermath of the Mueller report. So.

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The world is always full of the sound of waves..but who knows the heart of the sea, a hundred feet down? Who knows it's depth?
~ Eiji Yoshikawa
_EAllusion
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Re: The Tyrannical Minority

Post by _EAllusion »

honorentheos wrote:Again, the argument was that the Ukraine scandal had multiple benefits for being the focus of the investigation, not least of which being the fact it was the Ukraine that was the injured party even though the target was Joe Biden. That allowed witnesses to come forward who crossed the line of party affiliation out of a sense of concern for the damage it was doing in our diplomatic mission in Eastern Europe. Should it have been more easily digestible? Sure. Did I hope the Democrat leadership was better prepared to make a simple case to the American people than they ended up making? Yeah. I think they chose the wrong target audience, playing to people who already were on board with impeachment in their choices for lines of questioning, witness selection, and what they chose to stress during the public inquiry. They should have instead been asking how they could reach independent voters in swing states who might not see the issue the same way the Democrat base does and tried to make the case specifically to them. They did a terrible job. And it was what I was concerned about going back to the aftermath of the Mueller report. So.

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Democrats certainly tried their hardest to make a simple case, but that's hard to do in the face of a sophisticated disinformation campaign that takes some explaining to clear up. It was naïve to believe that anything, literally anything, could be reduced into a simple case. Even something as simple as Trump releasing a summary that includes a confession of an impeachable offense right on it, then going on TV to repeat the impeachable offense.

There is literally nothing the Democrats could do that will knock legacy media writers like the above off the narrative of, "Democrats say X, but Republicans say Y" when it is a negative story for Republicans. Shouty lying or the truth? Who is to say? Politics is a choose your own adventure. You can't pierce that narrative on any one story to those low information swing voters in swing states. Until such a time that this widespread journalistic ethic is purged, that's the reality Democrats should understand they inhabit.

The press can, however, be compelled to cover bad stories for Republicans over and over and over if Republicans are just going to keep on their path. And those low information swinger voters in swing states can least remember that Republicans sure do sound corrupt even if they trip up on the specifics. Republicans ground Hillary Clinton down with this strategy with mostly lies and innuendo. Democrats probably could pull it off in Trump's case with the truth.
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