Political Roundtable Part XII

[sfam]

It is Obama's Rwanda - closing in on a 1/2 million death mistake.

In his defense, there was not a clearly agreed upon better answer other than sending more American troops into the MENA region without congressional authorization. That at a minimum would have been required for meeting R2P requirements.

But then you don't give the Syrian coalition political, logistic and military support... you don't train nearly 10,000 rebel fighters at a cost of $1 billion a year since 2012 (wiki).

You don't go in half-way. Obama screwed that one up and it has been destabilizing for Europe and cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

I know he was in a bad position politically - he was trying to get us out of the region - but halfway never works.

I can't disagree with that. Syria is such a mess there isn't a Syria now any more than there's an Iraq. I don't know the right answer but that policy wasn't it.

[Illuminaire]

I know that people are eager to find smoking guns. I get that, I felt the same way about Hilary. I do suggest keeping a few things in mind though...

One, Flynn's conversations with the Russian diplomat were already cleared by the FBI. No illicit or criminal activity was found.

Two, the big drops here are coming through the Washington Post, which just happens to have a big contract with the CIA, which just happens to be a branch of the government that was strongly at odds with both Flynn and Trump. I don't think this is anywhere close to a coincidence, especially since leaking the wiretaps is just as illegal as anything Flynn is supposed to have done.

Three, the article linked above is heavy on innuendo and very soft on facts. The only specifics given are for conversations that, again, were already vetted and found clear of miss-conduct.

I am all for keeping an open mind about the possibility of corruption. Hell, I'm sure Trump IS corrupt. But it might not be in this way. It seems pretty clear to me that the CIA is doing everything possible to make life hell for the president, and if they had compelling evidence, one would think they would have leaked the raging fire instead of all this smoke. (Which is how I ended up feeling about wikileaks and Hilary. So if nothing else, we can bond over these incomplete and unsatisfying conspiracies. )

[JWizmentality]

I know that people are eager to find smoking guns. I get that, I felt the same way about Hilary. I do suggest keeping a few things in mind though...

One, Flynn's conversations with the Russian diplomat were already cleared by the FBI. No illicit or criminal activity was found.

Two, the big drops here are coming through the Washington Post, which just happens to have a big contract with the CIA, which just happens to be a branch of the government that was strongly at odds with both Flynn and Trump. I don't think this is anywhere close to a coincidence, especially since leaking the wiretaps is just as illegal as anything Flynn is supposed to have done.

Three, the article linked above is heavy on innuendo and very soft on facts. The only specifics given are for conversations that, again, were already vetted and found clear of miss-conduct.

I am all for keeping an open mind about the possibility of corruption. Hell, I'm sure Trump IS corrupt. But it might not be in this way. It seems pretty clear to me that the CIA is doing everything possible to make life hell for the president, and if they had compelling evidence, one would think they would have leaked the raging fire instead of all this smoke. (Which is how I ended up feeling about wikileaks and Hilary. So if nothing else, we can bond over these incomplete and unsatisfying conspiracies. )

Just finished watching foxnews? Yeah I've been laughing all day.

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[bealwithit]

Anyone know where Sexy Rexy Tillerson is at?

[JWizmentality]

Anybody else getting a huge kick out of Agent Orange complaining about leaks? I hope the intelligence community continues to destroy this administration. Patriots all of them. I salute you!

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[closg00]

Woooo. I know I said I'd stay away but I gotta enjoy this wreck. Burn baby baby!!

And how about Conway...dis b*tch looks terrible. Like she's about about to have a nervous breakdown any moment. And I have no sympathy for her.

And yes PIF, it is about time for nate to post an oppressed white person story.

Watch on YouTube

Conway is a very skillful liar, and spinner, but she finally ran into a set of facts that she was unable to out-maneuver her interviewer...Laurer totally owned her.

[dckingsfan]

In his defense, there was not a clearly agreed upon better answer other than sending more American troops into the MENA region without congressional authorization. That at a minimum would have been required for meeting R2P requirements.

But then you don't give the Syrian coalition political, logistic and military support... you don't train nearly 10,000 rebel fighters at a cost of $1 billion a year since 2012 (wiki).

You don't go in half-way. Obama screwed that one up and it has been destabilizing for Europe and cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

I know he was in a bad position politically - he was trying to get us out of the region - but halfway never works.

I can't disagree with that. Syria is such a mess there isn't a Syria now any more than there's an Iraq. I don't know the right answer but that policy wasn't it.

The worst is it is back to back to back. Clinton - Rwanda, Bush - Iraq, Obama - Syria.

[closg00]

I love irony and I love karma being played-out. Flynn, who was shouting "lock her up" with his nutter son, is under FBI investigation. This may be bigger than Watergate.

https://apple.news/AfZ7DTlPNQdeyZc9MQnpSNg


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[dckingsfan]

I love irony and I love karma being played-out. Flynn, who was shouting "lock her up" with his nutter son, is under FBI investigation. This may be bigger than Watergate.

https://apple.news/AfZ7DTlPNQdeyZc9MQnpSNg

This administration does remind me a bit of the Nixon days.

When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.
- Richard Nixon

[nate33]

Given the intense amount of scrutiny Trump is under regarding Russia, I think it would be insane of him to try to do anything sketchy even if he is the Manchurian Candidate some believe he is. It makes way more sense to lay low and work things slow and subtle, for maximum impact and benefit to your communist masters.

So my best guess is that ignorance and incompetence better explain this situation than malevolence.

You're assuming there is no financial liability. I honestly cannot for the life of me figure out why people are forgetting this. There is a real reason Trump won't release his taxes. My guess is that reason is tightly correlated with his intense and public love for all things Putin.

I wholeheartedly reject this notion that Donald Trump left his lucrative and easy private life, endured 2 years of scorn and hatred from half of the nation and literally BECAME PRESIDENT all because he was somehow being blackmailed by Putin. It's ridiculous. Insane. Paranoid delusional. You people have to stop believing this. It's going to drive you crazy.

If you want to believe that Flynn is somehow compromised, at least that I can at least understand. He did spend some time in Russia and was paid to speak at a gala there. The combination of these past financial ties and him having diplomatic discussions with Russia prior to the Inauguration, coupled with his lie to Pence makes him a target. I get that.

[nate33]

America's spies anonymously took down Michael Flynn. That is deeply worrying.
by Damon Linker

The United States is much better off without Michael Flynn serving as national security adviser. But no one should be cheering the way he was brought down.

The whole episode is evidence of the precipitous and ongoing collapse of America's democratic institutions — not a sign of their resiliency. Flynn's ouster was a soft coup (or political assassination) engineered by anonymous intelligence community bureaucrats. The results might be salutary, but this isn't the way a liberal democracy is supposed to function.

Unelected intelligence analysts work for the president, not the other way around. Far too many Trump critics appear not to care that these intelligence agents leaked highly sensitive information to the press — mostly because Trump critics are pleased with the result. "Finally," they say, "someone took a stand to expose collusion between the Russians and a senior aide to the president!" It is indeed important that someone took such a stand. But it matters greatly who that someone is and how they take their stand. Members of the unelected, unaccountable intelligence community are not the right someone, especially when they target a senior aide to the president by leaking anonymously to newspapers the content of classified phone intercepts, where the unverified, unsubstantiated information can inflict politically fatal damage almost instantaneously.

... In a liberal democracy, how things happen is often as important as what happens. Procedures matter. So do rules and public accountability. The chaotic, dysfunctional Trump White House is placing the entire system under enormous strain. That's bad. But the answer isn't to counter it with equally irregular acts of sabotage — or with a disinformation campaign waged by nameless civil servants toiling away in the surveillance state.

... Down that path lies the end of democracy in America.

This is from The Week. Definitely a left-of-center rag.

[nate33]

The Political Assassination of Michael Flynn
by Eli Lake

...Flynn himself traveled in 2015 to Russia to attend a conference put on by the country's propaganda network, RT. He has acknowledged he was paid through his speaker's bureau for his appearance. That doesn't look good, but it's also not illegal in and of itself. All of this is to say there are many unanswered questions about Trump's and his administration's ties to Russia.

But that's all these allegations are at this point: unanswered questions. It's possible that Flynn has more ties to Russia that he had kept from the public and his colleagues. It's also possible that a group of national security bureaucrats and former Obama officials are selectively leaking highly sensitive law enforcement information to undermine the elected government.

Flynn was a fat target for the national security state. He has cultivated a reputation as a reformer and a fierce critic of the intelligence community leaders he once served with when he was the director the Defense Intelligence Agency under President Barack Obama. Flynn was working to reform the intelligence-industrial complex, something that threatened the bureaucratic prerogatives of his rivals.

He was also a fat target for Democrats. Remember Flynn's breakout national moment last summer was when he joined the crowd at the Republican National Convention from the dais calling for Hillary Clinton to be jailed.

In normal times, the idea that U.S. officials entrusted with our most sensitive secrets would selectively disclose them to undermine the White House would alarm those worried about creeping authoritarianism. Imagine if intercepts of a call between Obama's incoming national security adviser and Iran's foreign minister leaked to the press before the nuclear negotiations began? The howls of indignation would be deafening.

From Bloomberg News. No friend of Trump.

[closg00]

Hey Nate, I think there's one thing here that I think we all can agree upon and that is Flynn is the fall guy here...or they hope it stops with Flynn. Flynn was acting on-behalf of Trump. What were his instructions? Other Trump campaign officials were purportedly in-touch with Russian intelligence throughout the campaign. This is bad, really bad.


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[sfam]

Given the intense amount of scrutiny Trump is under regarding Russia, I think it would be insane of him to try to do anything sketchy even if he is the Manchurian Candidate some believe he is. It makes way more sense to lay low and work things slow and subtle, for maximum impact and benefit to your communist masters.

So my best guess is that ignorance and incompetence better explain this situation than malevolence.

You're assuming there is no financial liability. I honestly cannot for the life of me figure out why people are forgetting this. There is a real reason Trump won't release his taxes. My guess is that reason is tightly correlated with his intense and public love for all things Putin.

I wholeheartedly reject this notion that Donald Trump left his lucrative and easy private life, endured 2 years of scorn and hatred from half of the nation and literally BECAME PRESIDENT all because he was somehow being blackmailed by Putin. It's ridiculous. Insane. Paranoid delusional. You people have to stop believing this. It's going to drive you crazy.

If you want to believe that Flynn is somehow compromised, at least that I can at least understand. He did spend some time in Russia and was paid to speak at a gala there. The combination of these past financial ties and him having diplomatic discussions with Russia prior to the Inauguration, coupled with his lie to Pence makes him a target. I get that.

I really hope its delusional but actual facts are pointing in the other direction. It has already been widely reported that Trump - the King of Debt - couldn't get financing from US banks, and did in fact get financing from Russia. So there are ties there.

We have reporting from multiple outlets with multiple current and retired sources from multiple agencies indicating that there has been constant contact between multiple Trump officials and Russian officials, throughout the campaign.

The FBI is currently investigating this AS WE SPEAK. Literally, the agency who leaked like a sieve that Hillary was about to be indicted is currently investigating this.

Flynn may not have been a rogue agent - in fact that notion seems absurd. Donald Trump seems very much in charge in that sense.

Regarding the financial part, the easy solution would be a law requiring the POTUS and final party candidates to release their taxes. The issue of possible collusion on attacking our US democracy is a separate question.

Bottom line, there is no theory of the case to explain Trump's love affair with all things Putin. None. There is no view of the world in any body of thought which explains this. Looking at Occam's Razor seems like a reasonable approach at this point,

[JWizmentality]

Given the intense amount of scrutiny Trump is under regarding Russia, I think it would be insane of him to try to do anything sketchy even if he is the Manchurian Candidate some believe he is. It makes way more sense to lay low and work things slow and subtle, for maximum impact and benefit to your communist masters.

So my best guess is that ignorance and incompetence better explain this situation than malevolence.

You're assuming there is no financial liability. I honestly cannot for the life of me figure out why people are forgetting this. There is a real reason Trump won't release his taxes. My guess is that reason is tightly correlated with his intense and public love for all things Putin.

I wholeheartedly reject this notion that Donald Trump left his lucrative and easy private life, endured 2 years of scorn and hatred from half of the nation and literally BECAME PRESIDENT all because he was somehow being blackmailed by Putin. It's ridiculous. Insane. Paranoid delusional. You people have to stop believing this. It's going to drive you crazy.

If you want to believe that Flynn is somehow compromised, at least that I can at least understand. He did spend some time in Russia and was paid to speak at a gala there. The combination of these past financial ties and him having diplomatic discussions with Russia prior to the Inauguration, coupled with his lie to Pence makes him a target. I get that.

I know right! Almost as ridiculous as a pedophilia ring run out of a pizza shop! Let's focus on that some more.

[sfam]

Its becoming clear now why we are seeing so many leaks from the National Security Establishment - they clearly think many in the Trump administration are traitorous. There's no other explanation for this.

Folks in that world have a visceral hate with all things USSR, or now its more updated name. We're just now finding out they've known about continuing connections between Trump staff and Russian officials the entire campaign. They don't seem to catch the joke.

[nate33]

GOP Intel Chair: ‘Pretty Sure FBI Didn’t Have Warrant’ To Record Flynn

WASHINGTON — House Select Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes called foul on the leaks of classified information relating to conversations between former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and a Russian ambassador.

“Any intelligence agency cannot listen to Americans’ phone calls,” Nunes told reporters Tuesday night. “If there’s inadvertent collection that you know is overseas there’s a whole process in place for that.”

He explained, “It’s pretty clear that’s not the case, so then they could have been listening to someone else and inadvertently picked up an American. If that happens, there’s a whole process in place to where they have to immediately get rid of the information unless it’s like high level national security issue and then someone would have to unmask the name — someone at the highest levels.”

“So in this case it would be General Flynn and then how did that happen. Then if they did that, then how does all that get out to the public which is another leak of classified information,” Nunes added. “I’m pretty sure the FBI didn’t have a warrant on Michael Flynn.”

http://dailycaller.com/2017/02/14/gop-intel-chair-pretty-sure-fbi-didnt-have-warrant-to-record-flynn/#ixzz4Yk5sXjIL

[sfam]

You're assuming there is no financial liability. I honestly cannot for the life of me figure out why people are forgetting this. There is a real reason Trump won't release his taxes. My guess is that reason is tightly correlated with his intense and public love for all things Putin.

I wholeheartedly reject this notion that Donald Trump left his lucrative and easy private life, endured 2 years of scorn and hatred from half of the nation and literally BECAME PRESIDENT all because he was somehow being blackmailed by Putin. It's ridiculous. Insane. Paranoid delusional. You people have to stop believing this. It's going to drive you crazy.

If you want to believe that Flynn is somehow compromised, at least that I can at least understand. He did spend some time in Russia and was paid to speak at a gala there. The combination of these past financial ties and him having diplomatic discussions with Russia prior to the Inauguration, coupled with his lie to Pence makes him a target. I get that.

I know right! Almost as ridiculous as a pedophilia ring run out of a pizza shop! Let's focus on that some more.

OMG, too funny! If only there were a physical basement in that pizza place where the pedophilia ring supposedly operated, then maybe, just maybe pizza-gate could have survied.

[sfam]

Anyone know where Sexy Rexy Tillerson is at?

Getting ready for a G20 meeting I think. Its as if the real world has to continue, even during this chaos.

[dckingsfan]

Hey Nate, I think there's one thing here that I think we all can agree upon and that is Flynn is the fall guy here...or they hope it stops with Flynn. Flynn was acting on-behalf of Trump. What were his instructions? Other Trump campaign officials were purportedly in-touch with Russian intelligence throughout the campaign. This is bad, really bad.

I don't think it will. I think there is an entire bureaucracy that feels threatened. Lots of Trump's cabinet picks believe in smaller government and question even having certain cabinet level positions.

This is going to be fascinating to watch unfold. I am betting on the bureaucracy taking down the President.