Trump 44: Finally on Trial

[47of74]

Fuck trump and fuck Fox for showing that stupid fucking ad. I had my way fucking hell would freeze over before Fox ever gets the super bowl again.

[Mela99]

I watched a bit of the Super Bowl and Twitler had an ad showing a black woman thanking him for getting her out of prison early (she had been in for a non-violent drug crime and he changed the rules).  Hope nobody falls for this...

I was in the middle of coloring with Jackson when that came on and I had a moment. I may have yelled and or flipped off the tv. . .

[JMarie]

2 hours ago, Dandruff said:

I watched a bit of the Super Bowl and Twitler had an ad showing a black woman thanking him for getting her out of prison early (she had been in for a non-violent drug crime and he changed the rules).  Hope nobody falls for this...

Is this the woman who Kim Kardashian helped, and inspired KK to study law but not go to law school?8

Just saw another Trump commercial. I thought he hated the NFL because he didn't get to buy the  buffalo Bills?

Edited February 3, 2020 by JMarie
additional thoughts

[SPHASH]

Yes Mango Mussolini tweeted this..."Congratulations to the Kansas City Chiefs on a great game, and a fantastic comeback, under immense pressure. You represented the Great State of Kansas and, in fact, the entire USA, so very well. Our Country is PROUD OF YOU!" 

[thoughtful]

Trump's goin' to Kansas City, Kansas City, here he comes.
He's goin' to Kansas City, Kansas City, here he comes!
But I don't know if he'll make it there,
'Cause he is so fuckin' dumb.

 

[fraurosena]

Everyone is having a field day with his Kansas City tweet. And you're not the only one to set it to music, @thoughtful!

 

[GreyhoundFan]

3 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Everyone is having a field day with his Kansas City tweet. And you're not the only one to set it to music, @thoughtful!

 

As usual George Takei has a great response:

 

A few more good responses:

Spoiler

 

 

[fraurosena]

You'd think that someone who made this their campaign slogan would have at least made some headway by now. Yet almost four years later he' still screaming about it.

 

[Alisamer]

4 hours ago, fraurosena said:

You'd think that someone who made this their campaign slogan would have at least made some headway by now. Yet almost four years later he' still screaming about it.

 

We're TRYING! 

If those damn republicans would grow some consciences and quit blocking every attempt at progress, we might be succeeding.

[fraurosena]

5 minutes ago, Alisamer said:

We're TRYING! 

If those damn republicans would grow some consciences and quit blocking every attempt at progress, we might be succeeding.

There is no chance of Trump ever making America great. It used to be great before he came along. Before TraitorMictch got the Senate in a stranglehold.

I know you are trying. I know every American poster here is trying. And I really and truly have faith that you will win in November. And I love you all for it. ♥️

[fraurosena]

Such respect for his country.

 

[47of74]

Game. Set. Match.

https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/1224378743730462720.

[fraurosena]

7 minutes ago, 47of74 said:

Game. Set. Match.

https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/1224378743730462720.

The link doesn’t work. Can you repair/repost it?

[SassyPants]

22 hours ago, thoughtful said:

Trump's goin' to Kansas City, Kansas City, here he comes.
He's goin' to Kansas City, Kansas City, here he comes!
But I don't know if he'll make it there,
'Cause he is so fuckin' dumb.

 

Just sang this to my husband and we both were literally rolling on the couch LOAO! Made my day!

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump freaked out over Ebola. Coronavirus doesn’t push the same buttons for him."

Spoiler

President Trump is not a calm man. And yet, faced with one of the most ominous outbreaks of an infectious disease in years, he has remained shockingly cool.

In response to the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, China has shut down factories, banned travel and shuttered whole cities. Airlines have canceled routes to the mainland. As the number of U.S. cases has crept upward (to 11, as of this writing), the federal government has declared a public health emergency, taking what Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar has called “fairly incremental” steps, such as expanding airport screenings and quarantining U.S. citizens.

Meanwhile, the president has offered only a few bland asides. This, at signing ceremony last week: “We’re very much involved with them [China] right now on the virus that’s going around.” He blithely assured Fox News: “We are in great shape. China is not in great shape right now, unfortunately. But they’re working very hard. We’ll see what happens.”

On Twitter, he offered this anodyne and only mildly self-congratulatory update: “Just received a briefing on the Coronavirus in China from all of our GREAT agencies, who are also working closely with China. We will continue to monitor the ongoing developments. We have the best experts anywhere in the world, and they are on top of it 24/7!” On Super Bowl Sunday, he put the problem almost entirely in the past tense: “We’re gonna see what happens, but we did shut it down, yes.”

It’s remarkable restraint from the man with a legendary, self-professed phobia for germs, whose entire political career stems from an almost otherworldly ability to kindle similar fears of foreign contact in others and stoke support for stronger barriers and closed borders.

On one memorable occasion, Trump’s twin anxieties about disease and people he views as “unclean” met in the hospitable medium of Twitter, where they feasted on an overhyped suspicion and it bloomed, algae-like, into obsession. His response to the 2014 Ebola outbreak exemplified the fast-fingered, fact-light paranoid style we all recognize today.

In the space of 90 days, Trump tweeted or retweeted almost 100 times (which, back then, seemed like a lot). He took to talk radio and “Fox & Friends” to speculate that the virus was much more contagious than the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stated. At every venue, he stoked panic and nudged along misinformation, usually at the same time: “A single Ebola carrier infects 2 others at a minimum. STOP THE FLIGHTS! NO VISAS FROM EBOLA STRICKEN COUNTRIES!” (That “infecting two others” thing is not true, and, according to the CDC, travel bans could have made things worse, hampering the flow of aid.)

Despite a genuinely frightening wave of deaths in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, health professionals never deemed Ebola a major concern within our borders. Ebola can only be contracted through physical contact with bodily fluids, and so transmission is fairly easy to contain. Only two people contracted the virus in the United States, both nurses who treated a doctor who had just returned from West Africa; all three of them survived. Trump responded to these developments with callous, unthinking cruelty, offering tepid praise for volunteer efforts only to insist that medical workers be barred from returning home: “People that go to far away places to help out are great — but must suffer the consequences!” He did seem to find a bright side to the situation: “Something very important, and indeed society changing, may come out of the Ebola epidemic that will be a very good thing: NO SHAKING HANDS!”

Nearly a third of Trump’s tweets from that time harp on the outbreak’s origin in West Africa, punctuated with florid epithets: The region was “Ebola-stricken” or “Ebola-torn” or “Ebola-infested.” By 2014, he had already become the most well-known proponent of the false, bigoted conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama was from Africa — and so the president played an outsize role in Trump’s Ebola hysteria. Trump called him a “delusional failure,” “arrogant,” and “a stubborn dope.” He theorized that maybe Obama “just doesn’t care” and even declared, “President Obama has a personal responsibility to visit & embrace all people in the US who contract Ebola!”

These sentiments fit right in with the feverish conservative commentary of the time. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) — the eye doctor! — echoed Trump’s paranoid claims about Ebola’s transmission rate, claiming that some patients contracted the virus after they “simply helped people get in or out of a taxicab.” Paul blamed Obama’s insufficient response on “political correctness.” At the fringe conservative outlet WorldNetDaily, one of the former stars of “Dallas” mused that the Obama administration was actually preparing for a wave of Ebola deaths, “so martial law can be declared, guns can be seized and the populace can be controlled.”

Trump’s outsize reaction to the vanishingly faint possibility of a domestic Ebola outbreak prefigured his style of governance, and how he would navigates actual crises and the promotional opportunities he disguises as crises. Again and again, his attitude has depended on his ability to reap personal benefit from the situation, and, of course, it’s been brazenly racist. The anxieties he preys upon (used “stokes panic” above) often fall under the category of “scaring the white folk”: “bad guy” immigrants described as “animals,” the “war zone” in Chicago, the “invasion” at the southern border. And then there are the picayune situations he attempts to coax into emergency status so he can claim to be a savior. The army had run out of bullets before he came around. He’ll take care of the syringes spewing out of storm drains in San Francisco. When Hurricane Sharpie almost hit Alabama, he was, in fact, the only person to see it coming.

Coronavirus presents a situation where Trump’s usual instincts run up against his personal interest. His reticence “is part of a strategy to avoid upsetting the stock market or angering China,” reports the Associated Press. He seems to have staked his economic strategy on a trade deal with China that he promises will “put Americans first.” Critics noted that “phase one,” announced in January, left in place most of the trade-war tariffs that have raised prices for U.S. consumers and forced Trump to bail out the agricultural sector. It also left significant conflicts about subsidies and state-run enterprises on the table and didn’t clearly spell out any enforcement mechanisms to guarantee that China will follow through on its pledge to buy $200 million in U.S. goods. “Phase one” only proves how important “phase two” will be — all the more reason for Trump to maintain cordial relations with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

I know better than to predict what Trump will do, but I suspect he’s compartmentalized the coronavirus in a clean room of the mind. It cannot be allowed to mingle with the half-truths and hazy projections that usually fuel his Twitter binges — he has to stay focused on the agreement he imagines as his legacy.

It’ll be interesting to see if they shake on it.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Good burn! I bet it will drive Twitler crazy:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Most Trump clemency grants bypass Justice Dept. and go to well-connected offenders"

Spoiler

Two days after President Trump freed a great-grandmother sentenced to life in prison, he praised the reality-television star and social influencer who had championed the woman’s release.

“Kim Kardashian was great because she brought Alice to my attention,” Trump said in 2018 of Alice Marie Johnson, who had served nearly 22 years for first-time, nonviolent drug-trafficking crimes.

Johnson’s image reappeared Sunday during the Super Bowl in an ad run by Trump’s reelection campaign touting his record on criminal justice.

The ad didn’t mention Kim Kardashian West — or that all but five of the 24 people who have received clemency from Trump had a line into the White House or currency with his political base, according to a review by The Washington Post. As the administration takes its cues from celebrities, political allies and Fox News, thousands of other offenders who followed Justice Department rules are waiting, passed over as cases that were brought directly to Trump leaped to the front of the line.

For more than 125 years, the Office of the Pardon Attorney in the Justice Department has quietly served as the key adviser on clemency, one of the most unlimited powers bestowed on the president by the Constitution.

Under Trump, the pardon office has become a bureaucratic way station, according to government data and interviews with lawyers, criminal justice advocates, and former pardon and White House officials.

Most of Trump’s grants of clemency have gone to ­well-connected offenders who had not filed petitions with the pardon office or did not meet its requirements, The Post review shows.

“The joy you get finding meritorious people, working on those cases, making recommendations that go to the White House, seeing people receive the grants — you feel like you’ve done something,” said Larry Kupers, the former head of the office, who quit last year. “If that’s not happening, it feels like you are spinning your wheels.”

Trump’s approach is legal. The Constitution’s only restriction on the pardon power is that it applies exclusively to federal crimes and not to impeachment.

Trump has reveled in that clout, saying “the power to pardon is a beautiful thing” and claiming he has the “absolute power” to pardon himself.

He has used the power, however, very sparingly.

After about three years in office, Trump’s six predecessors had signed off on hundreds or even thousands of petitions forwarded from the Justice Department. Most were denials, a disappointing but vital step for offenders in limbo who can’t ask for clemency again until they are turned down.

Ronald Reagan set a low bar with 669 decisions during his first three years; 3,993 petitions processed during Barack Obama’s first three years reached a high-water mark.

Trump has ruled on only 204 clemency requests — 24 approvals and 180 denials. That is the slowest pace in decades.

 “I almost wish it would get denied. At least I would know that someone had looked at it,” said 39-year-old Nichole Forde, who handwrote her petition in 2016 from the Minnesota prison where she is serving a 27-year sentence for nonviolent drug crimes.

In the most recent end-runs around the pardon office and over the objections of Pentagon officials, Trump in November pardoned two former Army officers: Maj. Mathew L. Golsteyn, facing trial for premeditated murder, and 1st Lt. Clint Lorance, convicted of murder after ordering soldiers to fire at unarmed men in Afghanistan. The White House cited endorsements from several Republican congressmen and a Fox News host.

Golsteyn’s pardon means he will not stand trial. Three weeks after the Lorance and Golsteyn pardons, Trump brought the men onstage at a closed Republican fundraiser in Miami.

During the Super Bowl, the reelection campaign sent out a fundraising appeal invoking Johnson’s release with “Go Alice!”

Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale said the ad reflects Trump’s view that there is a right way and a wrong way to address inequities in the criminal justice system. The 30-second ad“clearly communicates how President Trump expressed his concerns about the issue — he acted and he helped improve people’s lives,” Parscale said.

The White House declined to answer detailed questions about the president’s approach to clemency.

Asked what advice he would give offenders seeking leniency, Kupers said: “Find a way to get to Kim Kardashian. I’m very serious about that.”

What is clemency?

Clemency can take two forms: Commutations shorten sentences, and pardons erase the civil consequences of criminal convictions, including limits on gun ownership, jury service and voting rights.

For decades, federal offenders filed petitions for clemency with the pardon office, which assigns a staff attorney to investigate each case.

The office may be one of the least visible and least understood corners of a federal government scorned by a president who has declared war on what he calls the “deep state.”

With an annual budget of about $4.5 million, the office employs about 19 people, including 11 attorneys.

For pardons, the office looks for acceptance of responsibility and good conduct for a substantial period of time after conviction, among other considerations, according to Justice Department guidelines. Commutations hinge on the undue severity of a sentence, the amount of time served and demonstrated rehabilitation.

The pardon office’s decisions undergo scrutiny by the deputy attorney general, the No. 2 official at the Justice Department, who makes final recommendations to the Office of White House Counsel. During the Trump administration, the counsel’s office has been almost singularly focused on selecting conservative judicial nominees and, more recently, impeachment.

What’s more, the administration inherited a backlog of more than 11,300 petitions, according to Justice Department statistics.

As of late January, nearly 7,600 petitions have been filed since Trump took office. About 5,900 petitions have been closed by the pardon office during Trump’s presidency because the inmate was released, died or was ineligible for clemency.

Trump’s decisions on only 204 petitions means that nearly 13,000 people are waiting.

A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to say how many of its recommendations are backlogged at the White House.

The current pardon attorney, Rosalind Sargent-Burns, said she was not authorized to talk to reporters.

Justice Department spokeswoman Nicole Navas declined to comment on the pace or nature of clemency grants under Trump but noted his singular authority.

“The president always retains the plenary power granted to him by the Constitution to pardon or commute sentences, and does so at his sole discretion, guided when he sees fit by the advice of the pardon attorney,” Navas said.

A former senior White House official, who, like some others interviewed, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal decisions, echoed that assessment.

“The pardon power is one of the few presidential powers that is subject to few, if any, limitations,” the official said. “Trump has used it in a way that is probably more transparently political than his predecessors, but all things considered, he’s been reasonably restrained in the number of times he’s exercised it.”

Starting with his first pardon, for former sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona, Trump signaled that he would ignore convention.

Arpaio, a Trump booster who had defied a judge’s orders on detaining suspected undocumented immigrants, had not filed a petition and was pardoned one month after his conviction on a contempt charge. Justice Department guidelines generally prohibit pardon requests until five years after conviction or release from confinement, whichever comes later.

A lawyer for George Papadopoulos, a former Trump campaign aide who served 12 days in prison in 2018 for lying to the FBI in the Russia investigation, requested a pardon only a few months after his release.

“Because of the unique circumstances of George’s case . . . it was very clear to me that a traditional submission to the DOJ Office of the Pardon Attorney would not be the most prudent strategy,” said his attorney, Caroline J. Polisi. “Given what we knew about the unorthodox way the president has approached his granting of other pardons, we decided a less formal approach was appropriate.” She declined to say whom in the White House she approached.

Former White House officials describe a freewheeling atmosphere in which staff members have fielded suggestions from Trump friends while sometimes throwing in their own recommendations.

Former White House staff secretary Rob Porter, whose job was managing the flow of paperwork and people into the Oval Office, took a leading role refereeing pardon requests before he left, according to four former or current officials. Senior advisers Kellyanne Conway and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, also have relayed clemency requests to Trump in largely informal settings, those officials said.

When Trump began talking about pardoning Arpaio in the spring of 2017, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions advised waiting until after a verdict. Trump was undeterred; Arpaio had endorsed Trump in early 2016 when he was a long-shot candidate, and the president thought the ex-lawman had been treated unfairly, former White House officials said.

“It was so obviously political,” a former official said. “The first early discussion we had was about Joe Arpaio, and there was discussion about, ‘Do you want this to be the first?’ ”

How other presidents did it

Most presidents in recent decades have faced accusations at one time or another that they exploited the pardon power. Bill Clinton issued pardons in the final hours of his presidency to his half brother, a Whitewater business partner, his former housing secretary and a fugitive commodities trader married to a major Democratic donor.

Presidents also have circumvented the formal pardon process to advance national interests, as when Obama offered clemency to seven Iranians charged with violating U.S. trade sanctions in exchange for the release of four Americans imprisoned in Iran, including Post reporter Jason Rezaian.

Under Trump, however, politically motivated grants have become the rule, not the exception.

“I don’t blame Kim Kardashian putting forward names. I blame them for listening to her,” said Kevin Ring, president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a nonprofit that promotes sentencing reform. “It makes people cynical because the process isn’t based on merit.”

Of the five people who received clemency without White House connections or appeal to Trump’s political base, one went to a man whose pardon from Obama mistakenly omitted one conviction. The other four were for men who committed minor crimes in the 1980s and ’90s.

Roy McKeever, one of the four, said he was a “stupid kid who wanted fast money” in 1988 when he was busted for transporting marijuana from Mexico to Oklahoma. He served one year in prison and a year of probation. He applied for the pardon in 2016, he said, “so my dad wouldn’t be so disappointed.”

“It surprised me, too,” ­McKeever, now 50, said when he heard last year that he had been pardoned. “I didn’t think you could get a pardon unless you knew somebody.”

Oklahoma City lawyer Michael Risley said he had no idea how his client — his first for a federal pardon — got to the front of the line. “My sincere hope is that it’s because we did a good job on the paperwork,” Risley said.

Money and access have proved to be far more valuable under Trump.

Celebrity attorney Alan Dershowitz, a Trump ally who defended the president at his impeachment trial, got in a pitch for client Sholom Rubashkin during a 2017 visit to the White House to discuss Middle East policy. Dershowitz said he used a few minutes with Trump in the Oval Office to urge clemency for the Iowa kosher meatpacking executive sentenced to 27 years for money laundering. Trump was sympathetic to the argument that the business owner had been mistreated by the government, Dershowitz said.

“That resonated with him. As a businessman, he understood it,” Dershowitz said of Trump.

Dershowitz said Trump also was moved by his assertion that anti-Semitism had resulted in a disproportionately harsh sentence. Rubashkin’s backers included conservative Jews and evangelical Christians, significant strands of Trump’s political coalition. Kushner, an Orthodox Jew, was Rubashkin’s most vocal advocate inside the White House, according to two former officials.

Other Trump advisers urged caution because of the severity of Rubashkin’s crimes, in which prosecutors said he had bilked lenders out of more than $26 million.

But Obama’s denial of clemency for Rubashkin helped motivate Trump to adopt the opposite view, two advisers said.

“I would suspect a lot of pardons are given after face-to-face meetings,” said Dershowitz, who had failed to persuade Obama to help Rubashkin.

Obama's clemency approach

Obama granted a record-setting 1,700 commutations under a sweeping initiative that prioritized nonviolent drug offenders and expanded the criteria for commutations, triggering a ­flood of applicants.

Nearly all of those selected had been sentenced under the mandatory-minimum penalties deployed during the “war on drugs” of the 1980s.

Obama’s clemency program was widely described as historic but also inefficient and chaotic. Then-Pardon Attorney Deborah Leff resigned in January 2016 in part, she said, because her office needed more staff and resources.

An inspector general’s report in 2018 said the program made “significant strides” in its final year.

Kupers was a former federal public defender who joined the pardon office as a senior attorney in 2014, induced by Obama’s program.

“The clemency initiative set up these hopes and then they were virtually and entirely dashed after Trump’s election,” Kupers said.

Under Trump, the pardon office quietly reverted to the stricter pre-Obama guidelines for commutations.

Yet Trump also has raised hopes — with off-the-cuff remarks that have surprised his own aides.

On the day after Johnson’s release, Trump vowed to grant more pardons. “We have 3,000 names,” he told reporters. “We’re looking at them. Of the 3,000 names, many of those names really have been treated unfairly. . . . And I would get more thrill out of pardoning people that nobody knows.”

Kupers, who served as acting pardon attorney and deputy pardon attorney during Trump’s first two years in office, said he didn’t know what the 3,000 referenced.

The White House declined to comment on the meaning of what Trump said.

Some criminal justice advocates said they assumed the president was referring to names sent directly to the White House — not the official pipeline.

But that mention rang like a fire alarm in the community of roughly 175,000 federal inmates and their families.

Forde, the inmate who said she handwrote her petition in a sweltering room, dripping sweat onto the form, was so excited to hear about Trump’s “list” that she followed up with a letter to the White House.

More than three years later, Forde is losing hope.

“Why did he bring it up at all?” she wrote in an email to The Post. “It makes me want to pull my hair out. To feel like freedom is so close.”

“I wonder if that list is still sitting there,” she added.

Mary Anne Locke, serving a 20-year sentence in the same prison as Forde, thought she, too, finally had a shot at a second chance after word of Trump’s remarks spread through channels that people familiar with the criminal justice system dub “inmatedotcom.” She was indicted in 2008 as part of a methamphetamine distribution scheme. The long sentence stunned her family because she had cooperated with law enforcement.

“I’m extremely happy for each and every person that gets any kind of relief, but I wish there were more opportunities for those of us without those connections,” Locke, 41, said in a telephone interview. “If a connection is what it takes, then I pray for the right person to come along for me.”

Her father, John Owen, wrote an open letter in the Des Moines Register in July 2018 to Trump, describing his daughter’s struggle to overcome her drug addiction.

“I’m frustrated that the entire system is so slow moving,” he said in a recent interview with The Post.

A bureaucratic slog

Lawyers who specialize in clemency say the system has moved slowly for decades.

The way they tell it, the pardon office is like a black box — the only updates available on petitions are “pending” and “denied.” Deputy attorneys general, who make the final determination before petitions reach the Office of White House Counsel, tend to be reluctant to mitigate decisions made by fellow prosecutors in the criminal justice system.

In that climate, a Kardashian West endorsement becomes all the more coveted.

“It feels UNBELIEVABLE & AMAZING to have her (Kim) support me & advocate for my release!” Chris Young, 31, an inmate in Texas serving a life sentence for drug crimes, wrote in an email to The Post. His commutation request was turned down by Obama, but Kardashian West has talked him up to Trump. “I still have to keep a ton of humility & patience in me, cause i still haven't been released,” Young wrote.

Even the judge who sentenced Young, Kevin H. Sharp, has praised Kardashian West’s advocacy for Young, tweeting after he left the bench: “What I was required to do that day was cruel and did not make us safer.”

Young’s attorney, Brittany K. Barnett, is the co-founder of a legal project that has received funding from Kardashian West and assists inmates serving life sentences. Barnett has built a national reputation helping to secure commutations for eight people, including Johnson, whose clemency request had been rejected by Obama.

“I don’t feel that someone seeking clemency should have to have a celebrity endorsement, but as a lawyer, if that’s the avenue I have to free my client, then we have to pursue it,” Barnett said. “My alternative would be to let my client die in prison because Trump’s not following the protocol.”

Kardashian West declined an interview request.

Lorance, the former Army infantry officer convicted of murder, also failed to win clemency from Obama. After Trump’s election, Lorance’s story gained traction in the media as Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Pete Hegseth championed his case, and a Starz documentary highlighted inconsistencies in the prosecution.

“You never really know which pebble you drop on the scale of justice tips the balance,” said Lorance’s attorney, John Maher. “We were of the thought to use all of them.”

The made-for-television decisions by Trump are what drove Kupers to leave the pardon office in June. His colleagues included graduates of Yale, Northwestern and University of Texas law schools and former prosecutors and defense attorneys chosen for their strong analytical and writing skills.

“We had impartial lawyers who developed over time an expertise in evaluating applications and the skills to determine whether this is a person who could be a danger to the public,” Kupers said. “If you leave it to the White House, you are more likely to get arbitrary, capricious pardons that may be perfectly legal but are not what the Founding Fathers had in mind.”

 

[fraurosena]

The very first tweet about the state of the union I saw on my feed was this. I love, love, love the symbolism. Her face as she nonchalantly tears the paper and throws it on the desk is priceless.

 

[fraurosena]

Oohh, it seems she really burned him.

And the childish wanker refused to shake her hand.

 

[tabitha2]

Yeah. She should not have torn that speech or said what she said for Reasons other than her Despising Trump and a handshake you know she did not want anyway. Real talk  She showed real disrespect to the Presidency itself  not to mention those mentioned in the speech and it made her look very spiteful and childish. She could have been the bigger more mature person but chose differently.  
 

The Democrats really don’t need this kind of press and drama right now. 
 

Bring on the F you’s and down votes but I call it as I see it

 

 

[fraurosena]

@tabitha2, I don't downvote when I disagree with someone's point of view. Everybody has the right to their personal opinions.

That said, I do disagree with you as to Pelosi's motivations. It was not spite. Instead, she did something well thought out and incredibly smart when she tore up those papers so demonstrably. Because what is everybody talking about? Right. Not the speech itself... so she effectively nullified all of Trump's mendacious talking points.

As to disrespecting the presidency? Trump is doing that all on his own. Pelosi has justifiable animosity for the person, not the office. The former Republican Party, that has now morphed into the trumplican party, are the ones disrespecting the presidency for allowing a criminal to inhabit the office.

 

[fraurosena]

After seeing this, together with all the other weird slurring and jerking and inability to speak properly he's been exhibiting, I believe a lot of trumplicans are willing to keep him in office because they think they will be able to control him due to his obvious mental decline. They did it once before with Reagan, why not do it again?

 

[AnywhereButHere]

@tabitha2 

I can see your point about disrespect and maturity, but I could make the argument that she tried by her offer to shake hands in the first place. The democrats have seemed to me to always try for the moral high ground by compromising and giving in and basically rolling over to the republicans in years past, and this is where it’s got us. President Fucknut. He has sullied the Office so much that there is no separating it from the man and to sit back and applaud politely as he spouts his nonsense is to condone his actions.

Sometimes you have to cede the moral to a few well placed elbows.

Edited February 5, 2020 by AnywhereButHere

[thoughtful]

The returning soldier stunt was so fucked up. I had the same reaction as the person commenting on Rupar's thread:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Pelosi ripped up a speech. Trump is ripping up our democracy."

Spoiler

Nancy Pelosi ripped up a copy of President Trump’s State of the Union speech on Tuesday night, and the civility police are on a rampage: On “Morning Joe,” host Willie Geist lectured that the House Speaker’s act is “not what the country needs.”

As many pointed out, Pelosi’s theatrical gesture, which came after Trump appeared to refuse to shake her hand at the outset, is tame alongside Trump’s own constant shredding of decorum — the hate rallies, the insulting of lawmakers and so forth.

But there’s a more precise point to be made here. If the underlying premise of the criticism of breaches of decorum is that they pose a threat to our democracy’s functioning, then much of what Trump has done well beyond such breaches — for three years now — actually does pose a severe threat to that functioning, while acts like Pelosi’s actually do not pose any remotely comparable threat.

This isn’t whataboutism. It’s meant to correct a massive category error. Breaches in civility are not the main threat to our political system. Indeed, if Trump only went on half-cocked rally rants and merely insulted Democrats, the current damage would not be nearly as severe.

It’s all the other misconduct that threatens the fabric of democracy — Trump’s unchecked lawlessness, his abuses of power, his public racism, his unprecedented lying, his treatment of the opposition as illegitimate.

In this context, hand-wringing about a mutual deterioration of decorum — the New York Times discerned a “mutual snubbing,” while an NBC reporter sniffed that Pelosi indulged in “antics” that are “Trumpian” — is profoundly misleading about the wildly asymmetrical realities of the moment.

Pelosi defended the gesture, describing Trump’s speech as a “manifesto of mistruths.” As it happens, Trump’s speech actually was full of lies, but for some reason this isn’t seen as a breach.

More broadly, their showdown is now being widely treated as the capstone of a troubled relationship — a “tumultuous” and “sour” one — which culminated in Trump’s impeachment.

But such descriptions won’t do. This is not a matter of Pelosi being angry at Trump for his policies and rhetoric on one side and Trump being angry at Pelosi for impeaching him on the other.

Trump treats the opposition as illegitimate

When the Senate acquits Trump, it will come after Trump worked in every conceivable way to render the House an illegitimate or even nonexistent arm of the government.

No matter how vigorously Trump’s propagandists lie to the contrary, the impeachment — for extraordinary abuses of power designed to subvert our national interests to Trump’s own and to corrupt our elections, the foundation of democratic government — was a legitimate exercise of constitutional authority. It was handled in a manner commensurate with the gravity of the undertaking.

The Trump administration refused to turn over any documents and laid down a blanket (but only partly successful) ban on witness cooperation. And so, Trump didn’t merely say the House’s constitutional impeachment function was illegitimate — “a coup” — he treated it as such in a manner designed to make this so.

In acquitting Trump while refusing witnesses and evidence, Senate Republicans will not only be clearing him for the article levied for this obstruction of Congress (as well as for abuse of power). They will be carrying through that delegitimization of the House’s institutional role to completion.

Team Trump argues he’s above accountability

Trump’s team has unabashedly argued throughout that Trump is not subject to legitimate accountability of any kind.

During the special counsel investigation, Trump’s lawyers argued he can close down an investigation into himself for any reason, even if it amounts to a corrupt effort to shield his wrongdoing from scrutiny. Then, during impeachment, they argued Trump cannot be impeached for abuses of power, a view widely dismissed by legal scholars.

As political theorist Will Wilkinson noted, the upshot of this is that the House lacks the “legitimate authority to second-guess anything the president does,” in effect meaning that “Democratic power is illegitimate.”

Acknowledging the legitimacy of the opposition is a hallmark of accountability in government. In allowing for it, a president in effect allows he’s not just accountable to his own voters but also to those of the opposition — such as the national majority that elected the Democratic House in 2018.

But this conception of accountability, for Trump, is simply a dead letter. Trump has delivered speeches that are literally scripted to make opposition voters disappear. He declared impeachment an affront to “the American voter,” as if only his voters, and not those who elected the House, exist.

And well before impeachment, Trump vowed to stonewall “all” House subpoenas, to protect his corrupt profiteering off the presidency — which itself is severely destructive to democracy’s functioning — through maximal resistance to legitimate congressional scrutiny.

Trump’s lawyers also argued that impeaching Trump would disenfranchise voters by denying them a choice in the next election, which is the proper mechanism of accountability. But they also claimed that in soliciting foreign interference rigging that same election, Trump did nothing wrong. In short, no political accountability mechanism for Trump is legitimate or beyond Trump’s corrupting powers.

On top of all this, there are the threats to turn loose law enforcement on political opponents; the constant racist denigration of parts of the country represented by nonwhite lawmakers (which are not mere “antics,” but tear at the country’s fabric); the nonstop lying (a form of deep contempt for the very idea of deliberative democracy) and the perpetual manipulation of government to validate lies (another form of deep contempt for government in the public interest).

I don’t claim to know whether Pelosi’s act was bad or good politics. It probably won’t matter in the least. But in this broad context, debates about an erosion in decorum are at best utterly meaningless and are at worst actively misleading about the deep hole we’re in.