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Why do you have to go point by point? Cannoli Send a noteboard - 06/02/2020 09:29:12 PM

And while I don't disagree that Joe Biden would've done better to recuse himself from Ukraine policy after his son took that position, the fact remains that the ouster of that official was a shared goal of the wider international community, the EU as well as the US. It wasn't Biden who made the difference in that policy, even if he later boasted about having taken point on it.
He boasted about demanding the prosecutor be fired, and withholding aid contingent upon the firing!

Again, I don't particularly have a problem with the Senate declining to remove Trump from office. I have a problem with officials being able to do whatever they want, legal or not, just because they won an election and their party in the legislative doesn't have the guts to stand up to them when appropriate.

"Elections have consequences" B Hussein Obama. If you get elected to an office, you have the right and the obligation to exercise the powers of that office. The reason we elect people to offices instead of agree on a flowchart of government responses to situations, is that discretion is sometimes required. So, yes. Doing whatever he wants.

Not following you there - you're referring to local media in red states which would also attack them if they didn't vote Trump's way? Or what do you mean?
YES. What else would I mean? Do you think the media in red states works for incumbent Congressmen? Or do you think the AP or USA Today are neutral, let alone right wing? Even most local papers these days are owned by media conglomerates.

There's all sorts of ways, whether it's just paying the money directly to the end recipient instead of going through foreign governments, or making future aid dependent on various conditions about this year's aid. Though to be clear, I'm talking about foreign aid in general - not so much military aid like what was at stake here. Which in any case tends to be a gift to the donating nations' military-industrial complex as much as to the receiving nation...
Which is pretty much why I'm opposed to all foreign aid in principle, and more than willing to see whatever aid is allocated being sabotaged or interfered with for whatever reason. IMO, the worst thing Trump did here was actually get the aid to Ukraine.

And again, it's not that the president has no ways of blocking such aid if he thinks it's going against his foreign policy objectives. But that requires going back to Congress and negotiating about it. If he doesn't do that and simply holds the aid until the deadline runs out without any discussion with Congress, he's acting illegally.

But it's still a technicality where the precedent is to withhold aid for all sorts of reasons, and they're only making a case about the Ukrainian aid instead of all the other aid that was withheld, not to mention by his predecessors. Because they invented a quid pro quo, which is bullshit, because Trump never made the aid contingent, Ukraine didn't know it was being held up and there is no mention of that in the transcript. And the leading Congressman on the impeachment issue lied about that conversation. Tell me that a DA lying to the grand jury about the defendant's words and concealing his main witness wouldn't have the case thrown out in a red hot minute.
He was already the front-runner for the nomination last July.

In whose mind? You can find some pundit willing to claim anyone is the front-runner. Polls? Why should Donald Trump, of all people, worry about polls? Are we supposed to accept that he acted out of the belief that the same process that said in July 2015 he didn't have a chance of winning the White House was correctly predicting he'd have to face Biden in the general election this time?
And see above re: 'highest profile example of corruption in Ukraine'. A high profile example of a politician's family member making big money from the family name, certainly, but corruption not so much until there's actual facts. And I'm sure Biden isn't the first American official to brag about bullying other countries into doing things, but brag as he may, it wasn't him personally who had determined that Shokin had to go.
No, he bragged about exerting influence over the people that made Shokin go. He directly attributed his influence as the cause of the going. As for the actual facts, Trump asked Ukraine to look into it. Are we supposed to just sit around and hope the oligarchs come clean on their own?

Biden certainly did not boast of doing worse.

Yes, he did.

And of course the Russians didn't know it would work. If you view the Russian interference in the US elections in a broader view, considering also their interference in various elections in Europe, you'd have to conclude that the primary goal, ahead of any dreams of swaying the election one way or the other, is simply to set people against each other and delegitimize governments of all stripes. Putin may have preferred Trump over Clinton, but what he really wanted most was to turn Americans against each other, even more than they already were.
But again, what did they do that was wrong? And isn't it the Democrats who are doing their work for them by claiming that Trump is illegitimate and a Russian tool? Free speech and political speech is not restricted to Americans in this country. Russian citizens have a right to express an opinion as well as anyone. The Russians have not "cheated" or "interfered" any more than an obnoxious heckler in the stands is cheating, interfering or affecting the outcome of a sporting event.
I think in the whole ultra-polarized political climate in the US, that point has kind of gotten lost, because the left finds it more convenient to spin the issue as simply 'Putin was trying to put Trump in the WH and succeeded', while the right counters by trying to cast doubt on the simple facts of the Kremlin's involvement in doubt, and to manufacture outrage about the FBI's surveillance of Papadopoulos.
And it's not outrageous? Surveilling an opposition political operative is not political corruption? If asking people about their membership in Russian funded and Russian controlled organizations was the height of tyranny in America, what could possibly justify a Democratic administration using federal law enforcement apparatus to investigate an opposing campaign?
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You seem kind of confused about what Trump's request for investigations was about in the first place. It was about Hunter Biden and Burisma, not about the firing of Shokin or Joe Biden's role in that. The latter was in any case public knowledge and required no further investigation. And with regard to Hunter Biden, again, there wasn't any known wrongdoing, so Trump wanted to make Ukraine dig until it found some,

Ah, once again, that miraculous telepathic leftwing insight into Trump's innermost thoughts and private motivations...

At the very least when a US official brags about getting an official fired, and it turns out that his son might have benefited from it, an investigation is the least one can do. As with the Valerie Plame exposure, the "smearing" by a GOP administration only occurred because the other side made it public. Hunter Biden and Burisma only became household words because the Democrats decided to make a federal case about Trump asking the Ukrainian president to look into a matter and they have to publicize the actions of the supposed victim so people would understand what they were all het up and bothered about. It's like when Democrats passive-aggressively attack each other in the primaries by saying "But we know the Republicans are vicious, so how is my opponent going to handle their savage attacks on his mother's orgies in Kenya, or his wife's drug problem or his son's no-show job?"


Also, unless you want to claim in the face of all known evidence that the Russian hackers were acting on their own volition without any Kremlin instructions, I have no idea what the point of your first sentence here was.

You said: "It's also not proven whether targeting Biden was the sole purpose of the hold, that's the kind of thing that's impossible to prove"

My point was, if it's impossible to prove, it has no business being part of a criminal proceeding. You can't charge and convict someone on motives that are impossible to prove. It's not up to Trump to prove his motives are pure, it's up to the prosecution to prove they were not. Otherwise, innocent until proven guilty. Foundation of common law justice, etc. If you're not going to respect that, you're worse than anyone you imagine might be putting the squeeze on foreigners to make another politician look bad.

Hell, the participation of multiple Senators who were declared candidates for the Democratic nomination to oppose Trump in the election should have invalidated the whole impeachment process, if embarrassing a political opponent is such a detrimental motive for official action. Booker, Harris, Warren, Sanders... they have explicitly declared an ulterior motive months in advance. The Spanish Inquisition would literally have refused to accept their sworn testimony against Trump on that basis alone, let alone allow them to sit on a jury.


If it's the kind of thing that's impossible to prove, anyone who tried to make a criminal case about it is a far worse transgressor against the letter and spirit not just of the Constitution, but the entire common law tradition of innocent until proven guilty. Schiff, Nadler and Pelosi should never again hold an office of public trust, if they are going to flagrantly ignore something that important. The rest of us can't hire Rudy Giuliani and Alan Dershowitz to make that point.

Cannoli
“Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.” GK Chesteron
Inde muagdhe Aes Sedai misain ye!
Deus Vult!
*MySmiley*
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