sorry for the whataboutism

[Pete F.]

Originally Posted by Jim in CT

same expert who said bringing 250 troops back home, would
cause world order to collapse? that’s someone to listen to!
Posted from my iPhone/Mobile device

Don't worry, Mexico will pay for the wall, Windmills give you cancer and Rick Perry made me call him.

That's someone you believe and trust to run the country!

[Jim in CT]

Originally Posted by Pete F.

Don't worry, Mexico will pay for the wall, Windmills give you cancer and Rick Perry made me call him.

That's someone you believe and trust to run the country!

again, the difference between us is that even though i voted for trump, i can admit that he broke a promise to get mexico to pay for the wall, and i can admit he deserves criticism for that. i’m not going to
dodge that, i don’t have to, i can admit the flaws of those on my side. and i can admit the good qualities of those on the other side. because no one is all good or all bad.

ask yourself, who are the ones here, who cannot ever criticize their own side, not can they ever sincerely credit the other side? its the liberals, sure as hell not me.
Posted from my iPhone/Mobile device

[Pete F.]

As Trump and his defenders were doing all this positioning and repositioning, news coverage of the Ukraine call was piling up. It was no longer possible to deny the existence of the whistleblower complaint. So Trump adjusted tactics and began attacking its veracity. On September 22, he began arguing that the whistleblower was not to be trusted because he or she did not have “firsthand” information about the Ukraine call:


Donald J. Trump
✔
@realDonaldTrump
Now the Fake News Media says I “pressured the Ukrainian President at least 8 times during my telephone call with him.” This supposedly comes from a so-called “whistleblower” who they say doesn’t even have a first hand account of what was said. More Democrat/Crooked Media con.....

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On September 23, Trump broadened the critique of the report, claiming that not only did the whistleblower lack firsthand information but he/she didn’t “know the correct facts.”

And then, on September 24, Trump’s story evolved again as he insisted that the full, “unredacted transcript of my phone conversation” would show “NO quid pro quo.” Note the progression from this is Fake News to he doesn’t know what I really said to there was no quid pro quo.

Then came a watershed moment: Early on the evening of September 24, Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the beginning of a formal impeachment inquiry.

Following Pelosi’s press conference, the president went on something of a Twitter drag. He sent out seven tweets pushing clips from Fox News Channel’s primetime shows, all of which suggested—and here I paraphrase—that nothing at all inappropriate had taken place and this was all a TOTAL WITCH HUNT.

At 7:14 the next morning, President Trump paused to give National Review’s Andy McCarthy a plug for his new book.


Donald J. Trump
✔
@realDonaldTrump
Great new book by the brilliant Andrew McCarthy, BALL OF COLLUSION, THE PLOT TO RIG AN ELECTION AND DESTROY A PRESIDENCY. Get it, and some other great new books which I will soon be recommending. They tell you about the Crooked Pols and the Witch Hunt that has now been exposed!

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McCarthy has historically been something of an impeachment enthusiast. In 2014 he wrote a book titled Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment. In August 2016 he wrote not one, but two pieces arguing that Congress should impeach Hillary Clinton before she was elected president.

Thus far, McCarthy seems to believe that there are no reasonable grounds upon which to impeach President Trump.

After logrolling McCarthy on September 24, President Trump shifted positions once again, retweeting a claim from @JoeGooding that the Inspector General had determined that the whistleblower “had a political bias.”


Donald J. Trump
✔
@realDonaldTrump
So bad for our Country! https://twitter.com/joegooding/statu...67137831837696 …

Joe Gooding 💯🇺🇸
@joegooding
This “whistleblower” was found by the Intelligence Community IG to have a political bias against @POTUS @realDonaldTrump and supports one of his opponents in the 2020 race. You. Don’t. Say. #Hannity

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This claim is and was entirely untrue. Who is @JoeGooding? His Twitter bio notes that he’s been retweeted by Trump three times and features a permanent link to an anti-vaxxer blog.

So the president’s official line had now transitioned to outright conspiracy theory.

[Pete F.]

On September 25, in advance of the release of the not-quite-transcript of the Ukraine call, Trump began trying to set expectations, Bill Barr-style, by saying that Democrats would have to apologize once they saw the document.

And then, once the document was in the wild, Trump went back to insisting that, however bad it might look, there was no direct quid pro quo.


Donald J. Trump
✔
@realDonaldTrump
“You don’t see a direct quid pro quo in this.” @BretBaier

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Donald J. Trump
✔
@realDonaldTrump
“He (President Trump) didn’t specifically mention the explicit quid pro quo of…unless you investigate this…we’re going to withhold military aid to you.” Pamela Brown

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You may have forgotten, but on the morning of the document release, Trump’s allies set expectations reasonably high in their insistence that the whistleblower report had dramatically overpromised any wrongdoing by the president. This turned out to be incorrect and most unbiased observers were fairly gobsmacked by what Trump had said.

To take just one example, hours before the document was released, Chris Christie confidently predicted that Trump would be totally in the clear so long as he didn’t say something terribly incriminating, such as “do me a favor.” Which, of course, is almost exactly what Trump said (“I would like you to do us a favor though”).

The end result was that by the next day, September 26, the new line was that Trump had not committed a high crime or misdemeanor.


Donald J. Trump
✔
@realDonaldTrump
“Is there a case for impeachment? Absolutely not! There is no high crime or misdemeanor, no crime, no extortion, no treason.” Robert Ray @FoxNews

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Over the next two days, Trump went back to some of his previous positions: That the whistleblower report was “inaccurate,” that the account of the call was “completely different and at odds” with the actual conversation, and there may have been a “spy” involved.

On September 28 he brought out a new line of attack: whataboutism.


Donald J. Trump
✔
@realDonaldTrump
Can you imagine if these Do Nothing Democrat Savages, people like Nadler, Schiff, AOC Plus 3, and many more, had a Republican Party who would have done to Obama what the Do Nothings are doing to me. Oh well, maybe next time!

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Indeed, it is difficult to imagine what it would have been like had Republicans been such “do nothings” in regard to Barack Obama that they had, say, refused to vote on a nomination to the Supreme Court. Or try to imagine Republicans being so convinced of Obama’s illegitimacy that certain of them spent eight years obsessing over whether or not his birth certificate was a forgery.

It boggles the mind.

[Pete F.]

But the best moment in this flurry of shifting stories and conspiracy theories came on October 6. You’ll have to follow along:

(1) On Wednesday, October 2, a spokesman for Adam Schiff issued a highly-lawyered statement that seemed to suggest that some staff from the House Intelligence Committee may have spoken with the whistleblower prior to the filing of the complaint.

(2) Trump took this statement and extrapolated, claiming in a press conference that Schiff actually wrote the whistleblower report himself:

I think he’s probably helped write it. Okay? That’s what the word is. And I think it’s—I give a lot of respect for the New York Times for putting it out.

It just happened. As I’m walking up here, they handed it to me. And I said to Mike—I said, “Whoa, that’s something. That’s big stuff.” That’s a big story. He knew long before, and he helped write it, too. It’s a scam. It’s a scam.

(3) FoxNews.com then wrote up the story about Trump’s press conference with the headline: “Trump says Schiff ‘helped write’ whistleblower complaint, after House panel admits advance knowledge.”

(4) Lindsey Graham then tweeted out the Fox News story, adding that “it’s not right” what the Democrats were doing.

(5) And finally, Trump retweeted Graham’s tweet as if it were evidence supporting his original—totally unfounded—claim that Schiff had written the whistleblower report. Which—again—is a completely unsourced charge without any supporting evidence.



Just another day in the executive office of the most powerful nation in the history of mankind. What could possibly go wrong?

As it happens, Trump’s personal campaign is lagging behind the vanguard of his defenders. Because it turns out that just about everyone thinks that his conversation with Ukraine’s president was a big deal and not in a good way.

Don’t take my word for it. Here are Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel writing at the Daily Caller:

Donald Trump should not have been on the phone with a foreign head of state encouraging another country to investigate his political opponent, Joe Biden. Some Republicans are trying, but there’s no way to spin this as a good idea. Like a lot of things Trump does, it was pretty over-the-top. Our leaders’ official actions should not be about politics. Those two things need to remain separate. Once those in control of our government use it to advance their political goals, we become just another of the world’s many corrupt countries. America is better than that. That’s also why it’s good that there are finally investigations looking into the extent to which the Obama FBI may have used our government—and even foreign governments—to try to crush Trump in the last election.

The key question with Trump’s Ukraine call, though, is whether the president’s actions, advisable or not, rise to the level of an impeachable offense.

But even as fast as the goalposts are moving, they may not be able to keep up with the facts on the ground.

On the day this saga began, Trump boasted about how the public did not support impeachment. That was true three weeks ago. Today, support for impeachment is up to 44 percent.

As I write this, the RealClear Politics average for Trump’s job approval is 43.4 percent.

[wdmso]

he is governing with the mentality he is above the law. See Below


Trump administration has blocked the US ambassador to the European Union from testifying to a congressional impeachment investigation.