Sixties Fan
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Then Goodbye. Have a nice life.
Let those who know how to read articles and then judge what they say based on facts, evidence take their turns on this thread.
Emerging authoritarianism doesn’t look like an ideology
- Thread starter Sixties Fan
- Start date
Let those who know how to read articles and then judge what they say based on facts, evidence take their turns on this thread.
pknopp
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I don't need to read it to understand that Graham is an awful person. I would never argue otherwise, unlike others do concerning others.
Sixties Fan
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Part 4
The Comey firing, coupled with the exposure of Trump’s efforts to corrupt the Russia investigation, escalated the crisis. Trump now held the power of the presidency, and he was using it to shield himself from accountability. He was directly attacking the rule of law.
Graham believed in the rule of law. But he didn’t want to turn his back on the president in whom he had invested so much. So he looked for a way to defend Trump without betraying the law.
The solution, he decided, was to become, in effect, Trump’s attorney.
In the weeks after Trump fired Comey, Graham continued to speak to Trump through TV cameras. But the senator’s advice was no longer about Syria or Iran. It was about the Russia investigation.
Graham wasn’t a member of the president’s legal team. But he had worked as a defense attorney in the military, and he knew what kind of counsel Trump needed. “You need to listen to your lawyers, Mr. President,” he told Trump in one interview. “I am trying to help you. But every time you tweet, it makes it harder on all of us who are trying to help you.”
Thinking like a defense attorney eased Graham’s dilemma. Representing the president’s legal interests felt like a responsible thing to do. And it allowed Graham to set aside his troublesome obligations as a senator. He could stop worrying about the country and just focus on serving his client.
The first thing Graham did was abandon all discussion of Trump’s character. In 2015, Graham had explained how Trump’s depravity led to heinous ideas such as torture and banning Muslims. Now, in his informal role as an attorney, he could ignore Trump’s personal corruption and stick to the letter of the law.
By coercing and firing the FBI director, Trump had subverted the principle of accountability. But could anyone prove he had violated a statute? Trump’s private demands for Comey’s loyalty were “not a crime,” Graham argued. And Trump’s warnings to the FBI director were insufficient to convict the president of obstructing justice.
On June 15, in a radio interview with Brian Kilmeade, Graham parsed Trump’s February 14 conversation with Comey. “He didn’t say, ‘Stop the Russian investigation,’” Graham pointed out. “He said, you know, ‘Could you go easy on Mike Flynn?’” Trump was just trying to be a good guy, Graham argued. “There’s no belief in my mind he was trying to stop the investigation illegally.”
Trump’s words belied this gloss. The day after he fired Comey, the president had met privately with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. In the meeting, he had toldLavrov, “I just fired the head of the FBI. . . . I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”
The remark to Lavrov underscored Trump’s corrupt motives. But when Graham was asked about the Trump-Lavrov meeting, he insisted that “the president didn’t do anything illegal.”
As Trump’s advocate, Graham selectively withheld information. On May 18, behind closed doors, Rosenstein briefed senators on the memo he had written about Comey’s shortcomings as FBI director, which Trump had solicited to justify the firing. Graham emerged from the briefing to tell reporters that Rosenstein had defended what he wrote in the memo. But when Graham was asked whether Rosenstein had been “tasked” to write the memo, he declined to answer.
He also tried to silence his client. After Comey testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee on June 8, Trump offered to testify in response. As a senator, Graham should have welcomed the offer. Instead, he advised Trump to say nothing. “It is inappropriate for the president to testify publicly,” said Graham. “It’s not good for our democracy.”
To accommodate Trump’s abuses of power, Graham would have to do more than reorient his moral framework. He would have to revise some of his previous positions.
To begin with, Graham had to reverse his portrayal of Comey. Previously, Graham had recognized the FBI director as a “good man.” On May 10, immediately after Trump fired Comey, Graham acknowledged that Comey was “very sincere” and “a fine man.” But after the Times reported on May 11 that Comey had told associates about Trump’s attempts to corrupt him—and after the paper revealed that Comey had recorded these events in memos—Graham realized that Comey’s credibility had to be destroyed. So he recast the former director as a bitter hatchet man.
Comey “was fired. Almost everybody fired is mad at the person that fires them,” Graham told Kilmeade on June 2. He warned of a “hit job on President Trump, where Comey just talks about selective conversations between him and the president in the White House and tries to create an impression of maybe obstruction of justice.”
Two weeks later, Graham went after Comey again. “After he gets fired, he talks about bad encounters with the president, which he did absolutely nothing about, in terms of reporting it as a crime,” Graham charged. “He’s got a political agenda.”
This whole line of attack was a sham. Comey hadn’t waited until he was fired to record his bad encounters with Trump. He had documented the encounters months earlier, in real time. That was the point of the memos. It wasn’t Comey who had changed his story. It was Graham.
specialto.thebulwark.com
Trump’s Pro-Bono Lawyer
THE COMEY FIRING WAS A TURNING POINT in Graham’s relationship with Trump. In 2016, he had tried to coach Trump through a series of authoritarian outbursts. At that time, the stakes were lower, because Trump was only a candidate. Then Trump became president and continued the outbursts. The danger to the country had increased, but again, Graham confined himself to coaching.The Comey firing, coupled with the exposure of Trump’s efforts to corrupt the Russia investigation, escalated the crisis. Trump now held the power of the presidency, and he was using it to shield himself from accountability. He was directly attacking the rule of law.
Graham believed in the rule of law. But he didn’t want to turn his back on the president in whom he had invested so much. So he looked for a way to defend Trump without betraying the law.
The solution, he decided, was to become, in effect, Trump’s attorney.
In the weeks after Trump fired Comey, Graham continued to speak to Trump through TV cameras. But the senator’s advice was no longer about Syria or Iran. It was about the Russia investigation.
Graham wasn’t a member of the president’s legal team. But he had worked as a defense attorney in the military, and he knew what kind of counsel Trump needed. “You need to listen to your lawyers, Mr. President,” he told Trump in one interview. “I am trying to help you. But every time you tweet, it makes it harder on all of us who are trying to help you.”
Thinking like a defense attorney eased Graham’s dilemma. Representing the president’s legal interests felt like a responsible thing to do. And it allowed Graham to set aside his troublesome obligations as a senator. He could stop worrying about the country and just focus on serving his client.
Graham: I think the whole thing with Comey and the president was about Mike Flynn. He didn’t say ‘Stop the Russian investigation.’
The first thing Graham did was abandon all discussion of Trump’s character. In 2015, Graham had explained how Trump’s depravity led to heinous ideas such as torture and banning Muslims. Now, in his informal role as an attorney, he could ignore Trump’s personal corruption and stick to the letter of the law.
By coercing and firing the FBI director, Trump had subverted the principle of accountability. But could anyone prove he had violated a statute? Trump’s private demands for Comey’s loyalty were “not a crime,” Graham argued. And Trump’s warnings to the FBI director were insufficient to convict the president of obstructing justice.
On June 15, in a radio interview with Brian Kilmeade, Graham parsed Trump’s February 14 conversation with Comey. “He didn’t say, ‘Stop the Russian investigation,’” Graham pointed out. “He said, you know, ‘Could you go easy on Mike Flynn?’” Trump was just trying to be a good guy, Graham argued. “There’s no belief in my mind he was trying to stop the investigation illegally.”
Trump’s words belied this gloss. The day after he fired Comey, the president had met privately with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. In the meeting, he had toldLavrov, “I just fired the head of the FBI. . . . I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”
The remark to Lavrov underscored Trump’s corrupt motives. But when Graham was asked about the Trump-Lavrov meeting, he insisted that “the president didn’t do anything illegal.”
As Trump’s advocate, Graham selectively withheld information. On May 18, behind closed doors, Rosenstein briefed senators on the memo he had written about Comey’s shortcomings as FBI director, which Trump had solicited to justify the firing. Graham emerged from the briefing to tell reporters that Rosenstein had defended what he wrote in the memo. But when Graham was asked whether Rosenstein had been “tasked” to write the memo, he declined to answer.
He also tried to silence his client. After Comey testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee on June 8, Trump offered to testify in response. As a senator, Graham should have welcomed the offer. Instead, he advised Trump to say nothing. “It is inappropriate for the president to testify publicly,” said Graham. “It’s not good for our democracy.”
To accommodate Trump’s abuses of power, Graham would have to do more than reorient his moral framework. He would have to revise some of his previous positions.
To begin with, Graham had to reverse his portrayal of Comey. Previously, Graham had recognized the FBI director as a “good man.” On May 10, immediately after Trump fired Comey, Graham acknowledged that Comey was “very sincere” and “a fine man.” But after the Times reported on May 11 that Comey had told associates about Trump’s attempts to corrupt him—and after the paper revealed that Comey had recorded these events in memos—Graham realized that Comey’s credibility had to be destroyed. So he recast the former director as a bitter hatchet man.
Comey “was fired. Almost everybody fired is mad at the person that fires them,” Graham told Kilmeade on June 2. He warned of a “hit job on President Trump, where Comey just talks about selective conversations between him and the president in the White House and tries to create an impression of maybe obstruction of justice.”
Two weeks later, Graham went after Comey again. “After he gets fired, he talks about bad encounters with the president, which he did absolutely nothing about, in terms of reporting it as a crime,” Graham charged. “He’s got a political agenda.”
This whole line of attack was a sham. Comey hadn’t waited until he was fired to record his bad encounters with Trump. He had documented the encounters months earlier, in real time. That was the point of the memos. It wasn’t Comey who had changed his story. It was Graham.
Chapter Two: A Trump’s Best Friend
A WEEK AFTER Trump’s election, Graham went on TV to start sucking up. He had congratulated the president-elect; now he wanted to build a relationship.
specialto.thebulwark.com
Sixties Fan
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Part 5
The second thing Graham needed to adjust was the hard line he had drawn against intimidation of the FBI. On March 4, at a town hall in South Carolina, Graham had pledged to “make sure the FBI, if they are investigating Trump-Russia ties . . . should be able to do it without hesitation or fear.”
Now that Trump’s attempts to intimidate the bureau had been exposed—including the sacking of its director—the “hesitation or fear” standard had to be dropped. So Graham switched to a more flexible position. Intimidation and decapitation of the FBI were okay, he reasoned, because firing one person wouldn’t necessarily stop the investigation. “I don’t believe the system’s been compromised,” said Graham. “The system is bigger than Mr. Comey.”
Graham also needed to revise what he had previously said about Flynn’s back-channel phone calls with the Russian ambassador. In February, Graham had stipulated that if Flynn’s conversations included “the idea that the Trump administration would relieve existing sanctions, that would bother me greatly.” The reason, Graham had explained, was that such discussions would have undercut the sanctions and would have rewarded Russia for intervening in the U.S. election to install a Russia-friendly president.
On May 8, the day before Trump fired Comey, Graham had reaffirmed that stipulation.
After the firing, and after Comey’s memos were revealed, this stipulation became a problem. If Flynn’s phone calls with the ambassador were improper, then Trump’s pressure on Comey to drop the Flynn investigation might qualify as obstruction of justice.
So Graham dropped the stipulation. In the months after Comey’s termination, he came around to the view that if Trump had fired Comey for investigating Flynn, that was fine, because “what Flynn lied about is not a crime.”
“I don’t think it’s wrong for a transition person to talk to a foreign government about changing policy,” said Graham, outlining his new position. “I don’t have a problem with the Trump administration reaching out to the Russians [to say] ‘We’re going to take a different view about sanctions.’”
Flynn’s conversations with the ambassador were okay under Graham’s new standard in part because they had taken place after the election. Graham could still say there was no proof of collusion between Russia and Trump or Trump’s aides during the campaign. Without proof of collusion, Graham figured, nothing Trump had done to Comey could count as obstruction of justice, because there was no underlying crime to hide.
Then the proof showed up. On July 8, the Times revealed a meeting that had been held a year earlier at Trump Tower. In the meeting, which took place on June 9, 2016, three top officials in Trump’s campaign—his son, Don Jr.; his son-in-law, Kushner; and his campaign chairman, Paul Manafort—had sat down with a Russian lawyer connected to the Kremlin.
In an email chain to set up the meeting, an intermediary working with the Russian side had offered “to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary,” as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Those were the exact words in the email. To this, Trump Jr. had replied: “If it’s what you say I love it.”
These explicit references, in writing, to the Russian government and its support of Trump made the Trump Tower meeting an open-and-shut case of attempted collusion. And Trump had tried to cover it up. On July 31, 2017, the Washington Post reported that the president, in an attempt to play down the meeting, had personally dictated a misleading public statement that concealed the Russian offer.
Faced with this evidence, Graham did what he had to do. He narrowed his definition of collusion.
Graham argued that the Trump Tower meeting didn’t count—“We’ve found no collusion,” he continued to insist—in part because Trump’s son didn’t think it was collusion. “Don Jr. didn’t know it was inappropriate,” Graham pleaded, ignoring the email in which Don Jr. had explicitly welcomed the Russian offer to collude. “It was a mistake. He didn’t commit a crime.”
Graham now also specified that collusion had to involve Russian “intelligence services.” Back in February and March, he had defined collusion broadly—as “activity between the Russians and the Trump campaign” or “campaign contacts between the Russians and the Trump campaign.”
After the Trump Tower revelations, Graham tightened his language. In December 2017, he defined collusion as a conspiracy “to coordinate with Russian intelligence services.” In April 2018, he said he was still awaiting proof that the campaign had collaborated with “Russian intelligence services . . . I’ve seen no evidence of that.” In June 2018, he dismissed the Russian visitors to Trump Tower as “these kind of weird Russians. . . . I’ve seen absolutely no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign [and] any Russian intelligence service.”
In December 2018, Graham added two further provisos. First, he said the purpose of the Russia investigation was specifically to look for collusion pertaining to emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee. By this definition, the Trump Tower emails, which apparently had nothing to do with the DNC, were irrelevant.
Second, Graham said the central question was whether “the Trump campaign [got] an advantage from colluding with the Russians.” This proviso created another reason to ignore the Trump Tower episode. The Russians who came to Trump Tower didn’t have the dirt they had promised. Therefore, the Trump campaign got no advantage from the meeting, and Graham could still claim that there was “no evidence of collusion.”
specialto.thebulwark.com
The second thing Graham needed to adjust was the hard line he had drawn against intimidation of the FBI. On March 4, at a town hall in South Carolina, Graham had pledged to “make sure the FBI, if they are investigating Trump-Russia ties . . . should be able to do it without hesitation or fear.”
Now that Trump’s attempts to intimidate the bureau had been exposed—including the sacking of its director—the “hesitation or fear” standard had to be dropped. So Graham switched to a more flexible position. Intimidation and decapitation of the FBI were okay, he reasoned, because firing one person wouldn’t necessarily stop the investigation. “I don’t believe the system’s been compromised,” said Graham. “The system is bigger than Mr. Comey.”
Graham also needed to revise what he had previously said about Flynn’s back-channel phone calls with the Russian ambassador. In February, Graham had stipulated that if Flynn’s conversations included “the idea that the Trump administration would relieve existing sanctions, that would bother me greatly.” The reason, Graham had explained, was that such discussions would have undercut the sanctions and would have rewarded Russia for intervening in the U.S. election to install a Russia-friendly president.
On May 8, the day before Trump fired Comey, Graham had reaffirmed that stipulation.
After the firing, and after Comey’s memos were revealed, this stipulation became a problem. If Flynn’s phone calls with the ambassador were improper, then Trump’s pressure on Comey to drop the Flynn investigation might qualify as obstruction of justice.
So Graham dropped the stipulation. In the months after Comey’s termination, he came around to the view that if Trump had fired Comey for investigating Flynn, that was fine, because “what Flynn lied about is not a crime.”
“I don’t think it’s wrong for a transition person to talk to a foreign government about changing policy,” said Graham, outlining his new position. “I don’t have a problem with the Trump administration reaching out to the Russians [to say] ‘We’re going to take a different view about sanctions.’”
Flynn’s conversations with the ambassador were okay under Graham’s new standard in part because they had taken place after the election. Graham could still say there was no proof of collusion between Russia and Trump or Trump’s aides during the campaign. Without proof of collusion, Graham figured, nothing Trump had done to Comey could count as obstruction of justice, because there was no underlying crime to hide.
Then the proof showed up. On July 8, the Times revealed a meeting that had been held a year earlier at Trump Tower. In the meeting, which took place on June 9, 2016, three top officials in Trump’s campaign—his son, Don Jr.; his son-in-law, Kushner; and his campaign chairman, Paul Manafort—had sat down with a Russian lawyer connected to the Kremlin.
In an email chain to set up the meeting, an intermediary working with the Russian side had offered “to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary,” as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Those were the exact words in the email. To this, Trump Jr. had replied: “If it’s what you say I love it.”
These explicit references, in writing, to the Russian government and its support of Trump made the Trump Tower meeting an open-and-shut case of attempted collusion. And Trump had tried to cover it up. On July 31, 2017, the Washington Post reported that the president, in an attempt to play down the meeting, had personally dictated a misleading public statement that concealed the Russian offer.
Faced with this evidence, Graham did what he had to do. He narrowed his definition of collusion.
Graham argued that the Trump Tower meeting didn’t count—“We’ve found no collusion,” he continued to insist—in part because Trump’s son didn’t think it was collusion. “Don Jr. didn’t know it was inappropriate,” Graham pleaded, ignoring the email in which Don Jr. had explicitly welcomed the Russian offer to collude. “It was a mistake. He didn’t commit a crime.”
Graham now also specified that collusion had to involve Russian “intelligence services.” Back in February and March, he had defined collusion broadly—as “activity between the Russians and the Trump campaign” or “campaign contacts between the Russians and the Trump campaign.”
After the Trump Tower revelations, Graham tightened his language. In December 2017, he defined collusion as a conspiracy “to coordinate with Russian intelligence services.” In April 2018, he said he was still awaiting proof that the campaign had collaborated with “Russian intelligence services . . . I’ve seen no evidence of that.” In June 2018, he dismissed the Russian visitors to Trump Tower as “these kind of weird Russians. . . . I’ve seen absolutely no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign [and] any Russian intelligence service.”
In December 2018, Graham added two further provisos. First, he said the purpose of the Russia investigation was specifically to look for collusion pertaining to emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee. By this definition, the Trump Tower emails, which apparently had nothing to do with the DNC, were irrelevant.
Second, Graham said the central question was whether “the Trump campaign [got] an advantage from colluding with the Russians.” This proviso created another reason to ignore the Trump Tower episode. The Russians who came to Trump Tower didn’t have the dirt they had promised. Therefore, the Trump campaign got no advantage from the meeting, and Graham could still claim that there was “no evidence of collusion.”
Chapter Two: A Trump’s Best Friend
A WEEK AFTER Trump’s election, Graham went on TV to start sucking up. He had congratulated the president-elect; now he wanted to build a relationship.
specialto.thebulwark.com
Dragonlady
Designing Woman
Every nation in the first world, instituted, lockdowns and quarantines for the “greater good”. This is been standard pandemic response since the Black Death.
The only people in the entire first world, who saw this, and some sort of nefarious plot to strip them of their rights, were American conservatives. Instead of your leaders uniting around the safety and security of the American people, the Republican party chose to deny the science and use the pandemic response as a wedge issue based on lies and quackery.
The American response resulted in your country, with 3% of the worlds population, having more than 15% of the all of the Covid illness and death in the world. Despite the most advanced treatments and drugs available. And the deaths are continuing at the rate of 500 a week or more.
Let’s compare that to the swine flu pandemic in 2008 and 2009, which resulted in the USA, having fewer than 1% of the deaths in the world.
I live in a country which had all of the strict lockdowns, and vaccine mandates And we had much lower levels of both disease and death. We had fewer waves of infection. Our economies didn’t crash, and we were back to “normal” a year ago.
By the time the stupid trucker convoy left the west coast, heading towards Ottawa, all of the lockdowns they were protesting, and been lifted.
Your Covid emergency ended today. Ours ended in the Summer of 2022. There isn’t a single nation in the first world, that use the lockdowns, or the mandates to further restrict the rights and freedoms of their citizens.
Even in China, when the people revolted against lockdowns and restrictions, the totalitarian government relented.
This is why we referred to the crazy rantings of right wing Americans around lockdowns, quarantines, and men vaccine mandates “freedumbs”.
We saved lives, and we saved our economies, and saved real “freedoms”. Then we saved a few tax dollars along the way, because we didn’t have to pay for the treatment of millions of people who should never have gotten sick in the first place.
The Republican Party was willing to sacrifice the American people, in order to win an election. More people died in counties and states that voted heavily for Donald Trump than in state that voted for Democrats.
Oddball
Unobtanium Member
It's sooo amusing to watch you moonbats pretend that all this "authoritarianism" that you disingenuously wring your hands over, just dropped down out of the ether on 20 Jan 2017!Part 4
Trump’s Pro-Bono Lawyer
THE COMEY FIRING WAS A TURNING POINT in Graham’s relationship with Trump. In 2016, he had tried to coach Trump through a series of authoritarian outbursts. At that time, the stakes were lower, because Trump was only a candidate. Then Trump became president and continued the outbursts. The danger to the country had increased, but again, Graham confined himself to coaching.
The Comey firing, coupled with the exposure of Trump’s efforts to corrupt the Russia investigation, escalated the crisis. Trump now held the power of the presidency, and he was using it to shield himself from accountability. He was directly attacking the rule of law.
Graham believed in the rule of law. But he didn’t want to turn his back on the president in whom he had invested so much. So he looked for a way to defend Trump without betraying the law.
The solution, he decided, was to become, in effect, Trump’s attorney.
In the weeks after Trump fired Comey, Graham continued to speak to Trump through TV cameras. But the senator’s advice was no longer about Syria or Iran. It was about the Russia investigation.
Graham wasn’t a member of the president’s legal team. But he had worked as a defense attorney in the military, and he knew what kind of counsel Trump needed. “You need to listen to your lawyers, Mr. President,” he told Trump in one interview. “I am trying to help you. But every time you tweet, it makes it harder on all of us who are trying to help you.”
Thinking like a defense attorney eased Graham’s dilemma. Representing the president’s legal interests felt like a responsible thing to do. And it allowed Graham to set aside his troublesome obligations as a senator. He could stop worrying about the country and just focus on serving his client.
Graham: I think the whole thing with Comey and the president was about Mike Flynn. He didn’t say ‘Stop the Russian investigation.’
The first thing Graham did was abandon all discussion of Trump’s character. In 2015, Graham had explained how Trump’s depravity led to heinous ideas such as torture and banning Muslims. Now, in his informal role as an attorney, he could ignore Trump’s personal corruption and stick to the letter of the law.
By coercing and firing the FBI director, Trump had subverted the principle of accountability. But could anyone prove he had violated a statute? Trump’s private demands for Comey’s loyalty were “not a crime,” Graham argued. And Trump’s warnings to the FBI director were insufficient to convict the president of obstructing justice.
On June 15, in a radio interview with Brian Kilmeade, Graham parsed Trump’s February 14 conversation with Comey. “He didn’t say, ‘Stop the Russian investigation,’” Graham pointed out. “He said, you know, ‘Could you go easy on Mike Flynn?’” Trump was just trying to be a good guy, Graham argued. “There’s no belief in my mind he was trying to stop the investigation illegally.”
Trump’s words belied this gloss. The day after he fired Comey, the president had met privately with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. In the meeting, he had toldLavrov, “I just fired the head of the FBI. . . . I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”
The remark to Lavrov underscored Trump’s corrupt motives. But when Graham was asked about the Trump-Lavrov meeting, he insisted that “the president didn’t do anything illegal.”
As Trump’s advocate, Graham selectively withheld information. On May 18, behind closed doors, Rosenstein briefed senators on the memo he had written about Comey’s shortcomings as FBI director, which Trump had solicited to justify the firing. Graham emerged from the briefing to tell reporters that Rosenstein had defended what he wrote in the memo. But when Graham was asked whether Rosenstein had been “tasked” to write the memo, he declined to answer.
He also tried to silence his client. After Comey testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee on June 8, Trump offered to testify in response. As a senator, Graham should have welcomed the offer. Instead, he advised Trump to say nothing. “It is inappropriate for the president to testify publicly,” said Graham. “It’s not good for our democracy.”
To accommodate Trump’s abuses of power, Graham would have to do more than reorient his moral framework. He would have to revise some of his previous positions.
To begin with, Graham had to reverse his portrayal of Comey. Previously, Graham had recognized the FBI director as a “good man.” On May 10, immediately after Trump fired Comey, Graham acknowledged that Comey was “very sincere” and “a fine man.” But after the Times reported on May 11 that Comey had told associates about Trump’s attempts to corrupt him—and after the paper revealed that Comey had recorded these events in memos—Graham realized that Comey’s credibility had to be destroyed. So he recast the former director as a bitter hatchet man.
Comey “was fired. Almost everybody fired is mad at the person that fires them,” Graham told Kilmeade on June 2. He warned of a “hit job on President Trump, where Comey just talks about selective conversations between him and the president in the White House and tries to create an impression of maybe obstruction of justice.”
Two weeks later, Graham went after Comey again. “After he gets fired, he talks about bad encounters with the president, which he did absolutely nothing about, in terms of reporting it as a crime,” Graham charged. “He’s got a political agenda.”
This whole line of attack was a sham. Comey hadn’t waited until he was fired to record his bad encounters with Trump. He had documented the encounters months earlier, in real time. That was the point of the memos. It wasn’t Comey who had changed his story. It was Graham.
Chapter Two: A Trump’s Best Friend
A WEEK AFTER Trump’s election, Graham went on TV to start sucking up. He had congratulated the president-elect; now he wanted to build a relationship.
Good God, are you schmendricks ******* pathetic.
Sixties Fan
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Part 6
Democracy-Washing
WITH EACH ADJUSTMENT, Graham became more adept at accommodating Trump’s transgressions. But one big problem remained. In 2015, Graham hadn’t just criticized Trump’s behavior and ideas. He had indicted the man’s character. He had explained why Trump was fundamentally dangerous.
Now that Graham was trying to charm, appease, and protect Trump, that indictment was an embarrassment. Graham needed to make it go away.
The senator couldn’t erase his words. But there was another way to expunge them: He could argue that voters, by electing Trump, had rejected and discredited Graham’s criticisms of him. Democracy had cleansed the authoritarian.
Graham had begun to form this idea in 2016. Now he fully embraced it. At a Senate hearing on March 20, 2017, two weeks after his first lunch with the president, Graham joked that he would never have criticized Trump during the campaign, “saying all the things I said,” if he had known Trump was going to win. “But apparently what I said didn’t matter. And that’s okay with me,” said Graham. “The American people chose Donald Trump.”
Later, Graham used the same argument to renounce his most famous line about Trump. “I said he was a xenophobic, race-baiting religious bigot,” Graham recalled. “I ran out of adjectives. Well, the American people spoke. They rejected my analysis.”
Graham didn’t really believe, as a general rule, that elections nullified his criticisms of the winning candidates. The 2008 and 2012 elections hadn’t softened his views about Obama, and the 2020 election wouldn’t stop him from maligning Joe Biden. The only president truly cleansed by the judgment of “the American people,” according to Graham, was the one who subverted his accountability to the people.
Graham didn’t just invoke democracy to repudiate his own criticisms of Trump. He also invoked it to defend Trump against criticisms from others. In October 2017, when former President George W. Bush spoke out against “bullying and prejudice in our public life”—a comment widely recognized as a rebuke of Trump—Graham replied that Trump, not Bush, had the support of the people. “Donald Trump couldn’t have won without rejecting the last 16 years,” said Graham. “There were a lot of people like Bush running in our primary, and all of them got creamed.”
In particular, Graham said the election had vindicated Trump’s harshness. On Meet the Press, Graham told Chuck Todd: “The first thing Donald Trump talked about was pretty tough. And he never stopped, and he won.”
“What does that say about us?” asked Todd.
“It means that we want somebody who’s not traditional,” Graham replied.
This was an inversion of what Graham had said in 2015. Back then, he had disowned Trump’s voters as bigots and haters. “I’m going for the other crowd,” he had professed.
But now Graham was embracing Trump’s voters. He called them we.
Graham offered the same retort a month later, when Republican Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona was caught criticizing Trump on a hot mic. “President Trump is president because the country elected him,” said Graham. “So you’ve got to give the president some credit for having a message and an agenda that people like.”
As Trump pressed on, Graham trailed after him, making the necessary adjustments. On November 28, the Times reported that the president, in conversations with advisers, was still claiming to have won the popular vote. He was also still disputing the authenticity of Obama’s birth certificate. When CNN’s Kate Bolduan asked Graham about Trump’s bizarre statements, the senator blamed the media for fussing about them. “What concerns me about the American press,” Graham complained, “is this endless, endless attempt to label the guy as some kind of kook, not fit to be president.”
It was a strange accusation. The Times story hadn’t called Trump kooky or unfit. That language had come from Graham. “I think he’s a kook. I think he’s crazy. I think he’s unfit for office,” the senator had said of Trump in February 2016.
But that was long ago. By November 2017, Graham no longer recognized his own words.
specialto.thebulwark.com
Democracy-Washing
WITH EACH ADJUSTMENT, Graham became more adept at accommodating Trump’s transgressions. But one big problem remained. In 2015, Graham hadn’t just criticized Trump’s behavior and ideas. He had indicted the man’s character. He had explained why Trump was fundamentally dangerous.Now that Graham was trying to charm, appease, and protect Trump, that indictment was an embarrassment. Graham needed to make it go away.
The senator couldn’t erase his words. But there was another way to expunge them: He could argue that voters, by electing Trump, had rejected and discredited Graham’s criticisms of him. Democracy had cleansed the authoritarian.
Graham had begun to form this idea in 2016. Now he fully embraced it. At a Senate hearing on March 20, 2017, two weeks after his first lunch with the president, Graham joked that he would never have criticized Trump during the campaign, “saying all the things I said,” if he had known Trump was going to win. “But apparently what I said didn’t matter. And that’s okay with me,” said Graham. “The American people chose Donald Trump.”
Later, Graham used the same argument to renounce his most famous line about Trump. “I said he was a xenophobic, race-baiting religious bigot,” Graham recalled. “I ran out of adjectives. Well, the American people spoke. They rejected my analysis.”
Graham didn’t really believe, as a general rule, that elections nullified his criticisms of the winning candidates. The 2008 and 2012 elections hadn’t softened his views about Obama, and the 2020 election wouldn’t stop him from maligning Joe Biden. The only president truly cleansed by the judgment of “the American people,” according to Graham, was the one who subverted his accountability to the people.
Graham didn’t just invoke democracy to repudiate his own criticisms of Trump. He also invoked it to defend Trump against criticisms from others. In October 2017, when former President George W. Bush spoke out against “bullying and prejudice in our public life”—a comment widely recognized as a rebuke of Trump—Graham replied that Trump, not Bush, had the support of the people. “Donald Trump couldn’t have won without rejecting the last 16 years,” said Graham. “There were a lot of people like Bush running in our primary, and all of them got creamed.”
In particular, Graham said the election had vindicated Trump’s harshness. On Meet the Press, Graham told Chuck Todd: “The first thing Donald Trump talked about was pretty tough. And he never stopped, and he won.”
“What does that say about us?” asked Todd.
“It means that we want somebody who’s not traditional,” Graham replied.
This was an inversion of what Graham had said in 2015. Back then, he had disowned Trump’s voters as bigots and haters. “I’m going for the other crowd,” he had professed.
But now Graham was embracing Trump’s voters. He called them we.
Graham offered the same retort a month later, when Republican Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona was caught criticizing Trump on a hot mic. “President Trump is president because the country elected him,” said Graham. “So you’ve got to give the president some credit for having a message and an agenda that people like.”
As Trump pressed on, Graham trailed after him, making the necessary adjustments. On November 28, the Times reported that the president, in conversations with advisers, was still claiming to have won the popular vote. He was also still disputing the authenticity of Obama’s birth certificate. When CNN’s Kate Bolduan asked Graham about Trump’s bizarre statements, the senator blamed the media for fussing about them. “What concerns me about the American press,” Graham complained, “is this endless, endless attempt to label the guy as some kind of kook, not fit to be president.”
It was a strange accusation. The Times story hadn’t called Trump kooky or unfit. That language had come from Graham. “I think he’s a kook. I think he’s crazy. I think he’s unfit for office,” the senator had said of Trump in February 2016.
But that was long ago. By November 2017, Graham no longer recognized his own words.
Chapter Two: A Trump’s Best Friend
A WEEK AFTER Trump’s election, Graham went on TV to start sucking up. He had congratulated the president-elect; now he wanted to build a relationship.
specialto.thebulwark.com
Independent thinker
Diamond Member
- Oct 15, 2015
- 38,301
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So, you're saying you agree with taking people's rights away. You didn't have to write a speech about it.
Great informative article by the New York Times! It's lengthy but hits all the nitty gritty details in depth!
Dragonlady
Designing Woman
No fool I’m saying that no one took our any of our rights away. We have always had vaccine mandates. I have great grandchildren, and I had vaccine mandates when I was a child. At that time, a large percentage of children died of diseases that have now, largely disappeared. And those vaccines were far more dangerous and untested than the Covid vaccines were taking today.
You don’t have the right to go around infecting people in a pandemic. It says so, in the public health acts that govern your country. Or at least they did until this latest pandemic, when Republicans started repealing all of them.
This is why the rest of the world says that the American Republican Party has become a ”death cult”.
Independent thinker
Diamond Member
- Oct 15, 2015
- 38,301
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Like I said, you don't have to write a speech saying that you believe in taking people's rights away. Just be open and honest about it. Hell, the left continually say that we should listen to the experts and yet when medical professional experts disagreed with the official government line on Covid, they had their licenses taken away. We had to show our vaccine papers if we wanted to go out in public and we got fired from our jobs if we didn't get vaccinated. And there were also mask mandates. No mandate to wear an N95 mask, all you had to do was wear a mask, any kind of a mask would do. Didn't even have to cover your nose. But, if you dared to not let the government order you to mask up, you were punished. And, the government encouraged relatives, neighbors, and friends to rat out people not following government decrees as if we lived during Nazi times.
Sixties Fan
Diamond Member
- Mar 6, 2017
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- Thread starter
- #72
You had a total failure in understanding the danger of the Covid virus. You chose to believe those who said that there was nothing to it.
Too many Republicans who did believe the Republican version of no need for masks or vaccines, have ended up 6 feet under.
The fact is, that more than any other country in the world, and being the wealthiest one, the then government of the USA chose to go against all common sense when it comes to deadly diseases and go the opposite way. Therefore the higher number of Americans who died because they refused to used masks or take the vaccine which are meant to diminish the ability of the virus to spread to others, and then others, and then others.
Cry your Republican crocodile tears. The pro life Party is not Pro Life AT ALL.
there4eyeM
unlicensed metaphysician
- Jul 5, 2012
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Authoritarians will take advantage of any ideology (religions included) for their goals.
Independent thinker
Diamond Member
- Oct 15, 2015
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Most of the left now even admit that lockdowns and masks didn't really work. So, most of the right were right from the very beginning. You just showed up late to the show. Some of you have never shown up at all.
A Johns Hopkins study says 'ill-founded' COVID lockdowns did more harm than good
The researchers say lockdowns had no noticeable effect on reducing COVID-related deaths and a "devastating effect" on economies and social ills.
health.wusf.usf.edu
Masks in Hospitals Did Little to Slow COVID-19 Omicron Transmission
New research shows hospital mask mandates did little to slow the transmission of COVID-19 when Omicron was the dominant variant. The findings are part of an observational study conducted in London between December 2021 and September 2022 that has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed...
www.healthline.com
Sixties Fan
Diamond Member
- Mar 6, 2017
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- Thread starter
- #75
Nonsense. Go peddle all of these in the right threads about the Pandemic. All of these has been discussed ad nauseam. Your garbage has been debunked ad infinitum.Most of the left now even admit that lockdowns and masks didn't really work. So, most of the right were right from the very beginning. You just showed up late to the show. Some of you have never shown up at all.
A Johns Hopkins study says 'ill-founded' COVID lockdowns did more harm than good
The researchers say lockdowns had no noticeable effect on reducing COVID-related deaths and a "devastating effect" on economies and social ills.health.wusf.usf.edu
Masks in Hospitals Did Little to Slow COVID-19 Omicron Transmission
New research shows hospital mask mandates did little to slow the transmission of COVID-19 when Omicron was the dominant variant. The findings are part of an observational study conducted in London between December 2021 and September 2022 that has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed...
Dragonlady
Designing Woman
The people you are calling “medical experts“ we’re nothing of the kind. They were medical cons and quacks who were profiting off the snake oil cures they were selling you.
When Donald Trump was rushed to Walter Reed Hospital to be treated for Covid, why wasn’t he treated with Hydroxychloroquine? Why was he given experimental monoclonal antibodies?
There is not one peer reviewed study, which recommends either drug for the treatment of Covid. And they’ve been studied all over the world.
But still, you believe the quacks and the con artists and refuse to look at the actual statistics on the spread of Covid, and on the success of masks, lockdowns, and vaccines.
That’s why 5000 Americans are still dying every month.
Oddball
Unobtanium Member
/https%3A%2F%2Ftf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Ffiler_public%2Fb5%2Fa6%2Fb5a6ea8c-14bf-4b0e-8dc9-d13a14081a69%2Fasdfs.jpg)
The Japanese WWII Soldier Who Refused to Surrender for 27 Years
Unable to bear the shame of being captured as a prisoner of war, Shoichi Yokoi hid in the jungles of Guam until January 1972
www.smithsonianmag.com
sartre play
Gold Member
- May 4, 2015
- 13,245
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My experience,
My choice was to try and follow the wacked out changing guide lines.
(often based on political party's use of negatives to support a political party's alliance by members of that party)
My personal end result was I did not get sick & I did not pass the virus to anyone else.
It was a total insane mess, Political party's interfering with what should have been a clear calm UNITED response to a Medical situation.
My choice was to try and follow the wacked out changing guide lines.
(often based on political party's use of negatives to support a political party's alliance by members of that party)
My personal end result was I did not get sick & I did not pass the virus to anyone else.
It was a total insane mess, Political party's interfering with what should have been a clear calm UNITED response to a Medical situation.
Sixties Fan
Diamond Member
- Mar 6, 2017
- 73,305
- 12,706
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- Thread starter
- #79
[ No-one who embraces Democracy, brings together neo Nazis to an event, on purpose ]
Scott McKay and Charlie Ward will appear on the latest leg of the ReAwaken America tour. Both have expressed antisemitic views and support of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, noted Maddow.
Trump scion Eric Trump, his wife, Lara Trump, and “a whole bunch of other Trump administration folks” will also talk at the event on Friday and Saturday, said Maddow.
“I can’t really believe they are going ahead with it,” the MSNBC host said of the tour, which was co-founded by Michael Flynn, Trump’s disgraced former national security adviser.
The Anti-Defamation League, on its website, describes the tour as “a series of controversial far-right conferences” featuring “prominent QAnon influencers, anti-vaxx activists, election fraud conspiracy theorists, Christian pastors, political candidates and elected officials.”
(full article online)
www.huffpost.com
Scott McKay and Charlie Ward will appear on the latest leg of the ReAwaken America tour. Both have expressed antisemitic views and support of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, noted Maddow.
Trump scion Eric Trump, his wife, Lara Trump, and “a whole bunch of other Trump administration folks” will also talk at the event on Friday and Saturday, said Maddow.
“I can’t really believe they are going ahead with it,” the MSNBC host said of the tour, which was co-founded by Michael Flynn, Trump’s disgraced former national security adviser.
The Anti-Defamation League, on its website, describes the tour as “a series of controversial far-right conferences” featuring “prominent QAnon influencers, anti-vaxx activists, election fraud conspiracy theorists, Christian pastors, political candidates and elected officials.”
(full article online)
Rachel Maddow Names Pro-Hitler Speakers Appearing At Same Event As Eric Trump
“I can’t really believe they are going ahead with it," the MSNBC anchor said of the upcoming ReAwaken America tour being hosted at a Donald Trump hotel.
Dragonlady
Designing Woman
When the shit hit the fan in Canada, we had a Liberal federal government, and Conservative governments in 7/10 provinces. From Day 1 in the pandemic, all partisan bickering ceased, and all levels of government spoke as one.
The Conservative Premiers all thanked Trudeau for his leadership, and the Minister of Health for her guidance. In every case it was country over party.
Both Liberals and Conservatives joined together to do whatever it took to get Canadians through this.
That’s all over with now. Politics as usual is what’s happening.
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