AG Barr, Mueller Investigation and the Future of Politics

It's hard to quantify such things. Is Trump supporting the effort to find out the extent of Russian involvement, or does he place personal politics over the interests of the nation?

 

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If the ballots were handled centrally by one government body, I would be concerned. I have no doubt that the Russians, Chinese, Koreans Germans, Saudis, etc., etc. tried to play a role in our elections, as we most certainly do in the elections of others. If you were compelled to vote for Trump but are now having second thoughts, I suppose we could blame the Russians.

 

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I see, you are in complete denial of foreign attempts to subvert our democracy, and subscribe to the lie that the only motivation in investigating this is partisan opposition to the winner. This in opposition to conclusions by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA.

 

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All of the ballots are handled centrally by the one government of the State involved. These State governments were targeted by the Russians. So you should be concerned.

And they succeeded in corrupting them, as the US has others. That's OK with you? You don't mind having your government selected by the Russians and the Chinese and the Saudis?

 

But you aren't concerned about the law apparently, unless it applies to Hillary.

 

I'm skeptical that anyone outside the election offices of the individual states can manipulate the ballots. I'm not concerned.

It's should be obvious that I don't believe they have, but if you have a plan to prevent foreign actors from playing a role, I would be interested in hearing your solution.

Example?

 

Some of those agencies truly are experts at subverting elections. I agree.

 

So?
The ones inside the election offices can - and the Russians are targeting them. We already know they can be corrupted - look at what happened in Florida in 2000, Ohio in 2004, Wisconsin in 2016, etc etc etc.

Paper trail voting, audited. Transparent and open source vote tabulation software, as well as machinery. Criminal prosecution of officials who rig the voting registration (Kobach et al). Elimination of gerrymandering. Restoration of the "Fairness Doctrine" regulation of mass media during campaigns. Complete elimination of corporate or other "legal person" political financing, and sharp restrictions on individual financing of politicians or Parties - including public disclosure of all of it. Federal law enforcement monitoring of foreign contributions to US politics, and public disclosure of all such contributions - including naming their sources.

And so forth. Transparency, in other words - set it up so voters can make informed choices and they will be counted accurately.

 

Meanwhile: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/05/impeaching-trump-reasonable/588496/
It's not just the Mueller report - tipping point though that may be.

And regarding Barr: https://newrepublic.com/article/153775/democrats-must-make-example-bill-barr
Barr also occupies an office from which he could be impeached - and there are plenty of grounds, as well as ample precedent (Watergate).

 

In our age of information, you are concerned about informed choices?

 

I honestly hope they do try to impeach. It would be spectacular. Do you really believe they will try?

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Yep.
Look at the choices you made, for example - granted you are moral garbage, like all Republican voters since 1994 or so, but at least some of your behavior traces to lack of information.

They took an oath of office. Barr lied to them. So the penalty for not impeaching Barr, at least, if he continues to stonewall, will be the loss of whatever integrity and authority they still have as elected representatives sworn to uphold the Constitution.

But that's only if he continues to stonewall.

In Watergate, all it took was the threat of arrest - and those were higher class criminals than these guys. Trump's crowd is not exactly known for its courage - Barr has simply never faced consequences before; his life of lying and covering up has never faced an actual threat of jail time. Jail is for little people, in Barr's world.

 

If your best argument is to attack my character, I assume you have nothing more to contribute.

Cool. I hope the Dem's try to impeach. It's been quite a show for the past two years, the lowest form of politics I've seen yet.

 

The people paying attention during W's shitshow might have an argument for you - but then, you've forgotten all that. (remember the forklift pallets of bundled US currency vanishing into the warehouses of Iraq, the VP with his own personal safe in the official office he used for meetings with oil industry execs, the scenes of the President and his Cabinet officers watching torture interrogations on live video feed, the alligators eating the bodies floating around Louisiana while FEMA ice trucks wandered the freeways of Pennsylvania and the President made jokes about drinking too much in New Orleans bars, the Federal budget that omitted the entire cost of the Iraq War, the photos from Abu Ghraib - published months before those same Republican voters voted for more of that please).
The eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, as they say - there's a reason no Republican voter can remember what they said and did all those years - or months, or weeks, or even days - ago.

 

You agree that our country was attacked and that the president and his minions couldn't care less, in violation of his oath of office.

 

Ballot interference is only one aspect of election fraud, and it's certainly not the most popular. Information warfare, PAC money, bribes, and blackmail are some of the techniques employed by Russia. You sound perfectly clueless on the issues involved. Which one would expect in a low information voter. A perfect Trump supporter.

 

Mod Hat — On contribution

I don't know about this, Bowser; it takes a certain sort of talent to be as awful as the person you show us, and something of an effort to sustain such behavior over long periods: How seriously are people expected to take generally meaningless talking points with clear political poles offered explicitly in ignorance?

The character you play here is that of a terrible human being. To what degree that reflects your actual belief and behavior in the world is, like anyone else, between you and yourself.

You've been at it for years. Taking you seriously, as if you have anything sincere to say, is demonstrably futile.

There has been some unfortunate sharpness, of late, from people who otherwise have complaint. I am presently unwilling to dress up in green in to chastise them explicitly at this time specifically because moderators are also expected to give passes to certain misbehavior according to a complicated pretense intended to avoid acknowledging that some arguments just do not, at present, have rational basis and support; neither does this framework like to acknowledge its effective, and, yes, predictable result, which is a race to the bottom.

What's really weird about it is that the pretense also looks very poorly upon the people it protects, but unintentionally; it presumes posters incapable of expressing themselves any better, or even differently, than they do in a given moment. In its own way, the presumption tacitly acknowledges the lack of rational basis and support; much like the behavior it protects, trying to explain it logically becomes an exercise in circular argument dressd up like fancy grillework.

As daily experience, it seems absurd to expect those with reasonable complaint to perpetually sit by and give whatever effort to pretending the grifters aren't grifting. Now and then, people sharpen up their responses to explicitly extraneous pretenses of stupidity. This thread, technically, is unnecessary in terms of the ongoing discussion of the Mueller investigation and report; its whole purpose seems to be, as the topic post indicates, to push partisan talking points under a pretense of ignorance.

Taken as sincere behavior, I recall my own rough assessment (#44↑): Ignorance is so woven into the character you play here, nobody is surprised when the uneducated right-winger who announces his ignorance at the outset is certain of a well-known, uneducated, right-wing trope. There are a number of points I might recall about the more detailed analysis (#51↑). To wit, I took a jab at a weird plastic-capsule description of politics—(center-left, mostly liberal on social issues but sometimes more fiscally conservative)—in there because it is indistinguishable from similar meaningless generalizations over the years, and that much of that orbits a self-centered priority more aesthetic than rational. The thing is, having encountered it recently in my life, I found myself wondering once again why the person using that description was also handing me so many rightist arguments. That sort of strange behavior is not entirely uncommon, and when it shows through we generally find its benefit more oriented toward preserving irrationality, inequality, and injustice, than otherwise. A common behavior between you is the polymer pabulum in lieu of informed discourse.

There comes a point at which people's behavior is either unbelievable or not, and the difference in practice is the manner in which we address the problem. And I noted an earlier routine↗, you're still at it. You're not accidentally stumbling into cruel, irrational, antisocial tropes you've never encountered before; that was clear when you expected us to believe you couldn't find any information about a subject other than declared political denunciation. Between the suggestion incompetence about not being able to find easily accessible discourse, to the one, and the prospect of trying to calculate so clumsy and ugly a sleight, to the other, we might consider for a moment the Thumper Rule as contrast in deciding whether to critique the scandalous antisociality and mean spirit, or seek reasonable accommodation of apparent cognitive disability or other learning disruption. When the coin toss is between incompetence and willful despicability, neither outcome speaks well of behavior or individual.

There are certainly issues having to do with how others are addressing what they consider trolling behavior, but when the intention is that the best route forward anyone else has is to simply normalize bigotry and the extraordinary stupidity required to carry it forward, sure, they're occasionally going to take the moment to say what they say, and if the rest of us are lucky they will at least contain themselves to such a degree as to not become the problem. Naturally, it doesn't help over the long run, but, at the same time, neither is it useful to expect some people's conduct to be anything better than worse than useless.

That is to say, we get it: You're ignorant. That said, no, it's not necessarily helpful when people take to shorthand expressions of what misfortune you represent within and unto the human endeavor; meanwhile your complaint that someone has "nothing more to contribute" is forfeit, a result of your own contribution to regressive antisociality. It's one thing if a particular expression criticizing your behavior is unhelpful and of dubious propriety, but you are also running your own thread into the ground, which in turn seems to have been the point of this one from the outset.

• #1↑: Partisan talking point framed as expression of ignorance.
• #3↑: Uncited "understanding" expressing false information.
• #6↑: Personal sentiment reinforcing show of ignorance.
• #9↑: Standard partisan line, bland platitude, unsupported equivocation.
• #12↑: Traditional white-supremacist political argument; advocacy of partisan talking point.
• #15↑: Non sequitur as misdirection; uninformed non sequitur (falling apart within two weeks, if it wasn't broken when you posted it); stale equivocation; meaningless vague concurrence with contrast point.
• #17↑: White supremacist talking point disregarding law and Constitution; bourgeois white supremacist talking point steeped in ignorance; mix of cynicism and white supremacist tropes.
• #18↑: White supremacist talking point disregarding law and Constitution.
• #20↑: Apparent ignorance, or cynicism masquerading as such; partisan talking point aging poorly; fallacious misdirection and projection as accusation, with personal political expression; cynical trolling in lieu of argument.
• #25↑: Unsubstantiated accusation and equivocation as justification for personal conduct.
• #27↑: Request for more information as response to note of falsehood about #3. That is to say, more expression of ignorance.
• #28↑: Partisan talking point.
• #32↑: Partisan talking point; expression of ignorance.
• #42↑: Partisan talking point.
• #43↑: Partisan nonsense.

→ #42-43 came three minutes apart, and are composed of a single short sentence, each; setting aside consecutive-posting rules complicated under other circumstances that don't apply here, we find here a pretty straightforward reminder of just how little effort you are putting into your ignorance.​

• #52↑: Platitude as equivocation.
• #59↑: Apparent expression of ignorance.
• #60↑: Straw man fallacy.

→ Eleven minutes between #59-60; those extra sentences might have required some effort, or was it stuffing the sosobra?​

• #62↑: Speculation from ignorance.
• #66↑: Unsupported and insupportable expression of skepticism as justification; request for information; request for information.
• #67↑: Non sequitur.

→ Two minutes, this time; cheap fallacies are quick and easy.​

• #70↑: Non sequitur.
• #71↑: Non sequitur.

→ Three minutes. There just isn't much thought or effort going into this.​

• #73↑: Protest against complaint about your behavior; the second part is very nearly on topic even according to your title and opening pretense, but appears to rely on fallacious equivocation.​

So, yes, do take a moment to think about contributions made to your extraneous thread; twenty-four posts, and still, you've brought nothing.

 

In Republican voter posts generally, everything after the word "if" is bullshit.
The Fox News "if" is a field mark of the moral sewage embodied by the Republican Party.
For example: I was attacking your ignorance, not your character. And I wasn't making an argument from it.

You posted a definition of evil that describes your behavior here perfectly. That's remarkable, from a certain point of view. You can't expect people to just ignore things like that - they jump off the screen.