"Mueller ultimately didn’t accuse the president of obstruction of justice, he wrote that he couldn’t rule out the possibility and declare that the president is exonerated."

Three years of "Russian collusion" and this is the best you guys came up with. Bravo.

Thanks for the insight, Don. Very astute.

"Someone's been hitting the Hannity a little too hard." - Don Lemon

Trump's invoking privilege to justify a blanket stonewalling of Congress is clearly outside the boundaries set by U.S. v Nixon. Therefore Congress would not be making a "ruinous" novel judgment. Nor is it a disastrous precedent to assert Congress will not tolerate a blanket refusal to comply with any all subpoenas.

Do you believe that every president that evokes executive privilege against congressional demands—Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush Sr., Reagan, Carter, Ford, Kennedy, for example—should be impeached for doing so?

If it’s misinformation it should be easy to refute. Oddly enough, any valid response to my arguments and/or accurate information is missing in your rebuttal, which is diaper-full of unjust accusations and anti-Trump histrionics.

Again, the Whitehouse doesn’t comply because 1) the subpoenas for documents were invalid, unauthorized and thus unconstitutional, and 2) to ensure testimony does not disclose privileged communications. This was done at the advise of the Office of Legal Council. Unless they can deny the opinion of the OLC (I’ll link them again for you below), based as they are on precedent and the constitution, House Democrats have nothing but their fee-fees and fallacy to run with, because they never settled the dispute in the judiciary when they had the chance. This might work on those prone to fallacy and pathos, but it will not work on sober legal analysis.

If They want to undo the 2016 election, blur the separation of powers, and deny the constitution because the Whitehouse followed the legal counsel of the DOJ, it’s going to be ruinous to any future presidency if they are not censured by the Senate. History will be unkind to this witch-hunt.

https://www.justice.gov/olc/file/1236346/download
https://www.justice.gov/olc/file/1214996/download

Being Marxist and being 'left-wing' are totally different. Somebody advocating for social security and a welfare state doesn't make him or her to be a marxist. Marxists (especially old school Marxist-Leninists) didn't get along at all with social democrats. PC is more of a phenomenon, not a conspiracy lead by some cabal.

No one said otherwise.

I like your nuanced take on it here. Well said.

What Piffle. The article of impeachment is “obstruction of Congress”, which relates to the impeachment inquiry, not to any investigation regarding 2016, all of which turned up nothing on the president.

Further, house inquiry subpoenas for White House documents were invalid. The House had not specifically authorized the committees to issue subpoenas in furtherance of an inquiry. The subpoenas were issued prior to the full House formally voting to pursue an impeachment inquiry, which is unconstitutional, because the the full House of Representatives—all of them, not just the ones Pelosi chooses—“shall have the sole Power of Impeachment”. The White House Council said if the House had done it properly, that is constitutionally, they were ready to start the accommodation process for documents. Of course they wouldn’t wait to do that.

As for the testimonies of officials, the Whitehouse was acting on the guidance of the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice, not out of its own self-interest.

As for new evidence and testimony, the senate will deliberate on that matter in a week or so after hearing the opening cases. So all this talk about “concealing evidence” is a Democrat lie, and you’re falling for it.

The Courts interpret the Constitution, they don't make law. SCOTUS' interpretation is binding for matters that come to them. However, Congress is also free to interpret the Constitution - they do this all the time when passing laws. SCOTUS can overrule their interpretation and throw out laws when (and only when) a case comes to them. However, in the case of impeachment - there is no appeal to the Supreme Court, so the Senate could, in theory, interepret the President's blanket rejection of all subpoenas as unconstitutional and remove him from office for that.

Further, it's a reasonable interpretation. There's zero probability SCOTUS would agree that a President has the authority for a blanket rejection of all subpoenas associated with an impeachment inquiry - it would be contrary to US vs Nixon, which was a unanimous SCOTUS decision. In that decision, SCOTUS directly rejected Nixon's claim to an "absolute, unqualified Presidential privilege of immunity from judicial process under all circumstances."

Senate could interpret it that way, but they would be stupid to do so, because it would be ruinous to the constitution and any future presidency. It would blur the separation of powers and set up any future presidents (and all past presidents) for impeachment just for asserting executive privilege.

US vs Nixon was regarding a judicial process, not a political one. So though it made a decision on Executive privilege vis-a-vis a federal district court grand jury, it never made a decision on executive privilege vis-a-vis congressional demands.

“The Supreme Court has never addressed executive privilege in the face of a congressional demand for information”.

https://fas.org/sgp/crs/secrecy/R42670.pdf

So we’re probably treading new ground on the issue here.

The Senate Majority is putting out some pretty sophisticated propaganda here.

It makes no sense to think that any more evidence and/or testimony is needed. The obstruction charge has been proven beyond all reasonable doubt. No one in their right mind would disagree. Trump has done everything in his power to stop the process.

It was never proven because it was never taken to court. That is where matters of executive privilege vs congressional subpoenas are settled. For instance Bolton said he would take the House to court if they subpoenaed him. The court may or may not have allowed Bolton to testify, but democrats refused to go that route,

Without looking at the media and Twitterati analysis, the beginning of the impeachment trial was a bad one for the House managers. They spent the entire day begging the Senate to amend the resolution to allow for more witnesses and evidence, something they failed to do in the inquiry. It’s damning to their case because they drafted articles of impeachment and voted on them based on the testimony and evidence they gathered in the inquiry, so it makes no sense that they require more to make their case.

Lol. Fair enough. Yeah it seems too odious to touch. But the prevalence of left-wing academics and their influence on the growth of political correctness I think deserves a fair hearing.

On the one hand we have marxists and academics using the term “cultural Marxism” to describe the critique of culture, and on the other we have it is a dumb right-wing meme. Is criticism of the academic use of the term possible? Surely one can criticize it without invoking Jewish conspiracies and gay agendas.

What I'm commenting is that this is the wrong way to criticize PC culture, because it's nonsense. In fact, in this forum I think we do discuss matters with genuine Marxists (if there are any) or hardcore leftists, and they have nothing to do with "Cultural Marxism".

Just curious but why is the “cultural Marxism” theory nonsense? I’ve heard that it is an alt-right conspiracy theory, but upon taking a further look I find books and articles on it written by non-right-wing, even Marxist professors and academics.

Some examples:

Cultural Marxism and Cultural Studies
Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left and the Origins of Cultural Studies
Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism

Carlin’s claim was certainly counterfactual and thus cannot be proven to be the case, but I think his general point about how the jargon buries any humanity behind sterility is valuable.

Here’s the bit in a video as he does it more justice (trigger warning)

I don’t believe “political correctness” is any intended consequence or agenda. The phenomenon, if we can even call it that, is so amorphous that it’s difficult to put a finger on (ironically, “political correctness” seems itself a euphemism) or to blame any one ideology.

You’ve brought up “cultural Marxism” in reference to my posts many times even if I’ve never mentioned it. For the record I don’t believe in it, nor have I read anyone who espouses the theory. So I don’t think we can completely blame academia. The faculty of any university is not monolith. But given the prevalence of political correctness on any given campus, and the general lack of life experience of the students, it appears this sort of culture is at least learned there.

There is, like you said, an element of public relations in it, as is evident by the use of euphemism and self-censorship. On the one had there are companies, academic institutions, broadcasters and bureaucracies that employ politically correct language to protect their public image by avoiding offence and stigma. On the other hand there is always a censorial group of human beings ready to pounce on anyone who runs afoul of their preferred way of speaking. This relationship seems to set the conditions.

The problem is that individuals don’t often have a public relations department. Recall the lady who made an unfortunate joke about Africa on Twitter just before flying there, only to realize she had been fired from her job before landing. People took offence, found out where she worked, and to save face the company fired her. As I recall some Twitter-users actually went to the airport to film her coming off the plane, her life ruined. Political correctness claims another scalp.

In the sense that this behavior doesn’t allow clarification, follow up, or even redemption, which is often necessary in plain conversation, there is mob mentality and cruelty in it. And of course there is the censorship. This is why it should be opposed, no political affiliations required.

I’m not so sure of that. Political correctness is a tool of the privileged, not of the economically marginalized. According to its biggest critics it derives from the halls of higher academia, some of the most privileged institutions in the history of the universe. It also manifests in corporate censorship. According to the Hidden Tribes poll it is only progressive activists who actively defend it. American Indians are one of the biggest opponents of political correctness, while having some of the greatest poverty and unemployment rates in the country.

P.C. Wouldn’t be perceived as a problem if the big money hadn’t pushed Reagan/Thatcher policies that vastly shrank the middle class. Censorious P.C. is a reaction to the volume of anti P.C. sentiment that gets aired when scapegoats (minorities and women) are required, someone for the poorer majority to blame. This is all a distraction.

But censorious PC has brought down nobel laureates, tenured professors, Harvard presidents, comedians, actors and musicians, politicians left and right, not to mention the countless others who have neither the fame nor power to defend their names. They were all innocent of anything evil save for stepping beyond the bounds of an unforgiving linguistic orthodoxy, for speech and thought crimes. So I do not think it is a distraction, though some might use it as such.

False. Trump has been caught dead to rights, is lying his way out of it, and you promote his lies, because you’re a disinformation agent.

I get it. You've been strung along by democrat lies this entire time. When they said "bribery" or "extortion" you followed along, parroting it willingly and uncritically. When they didn't show in articles of impeachment you sing "abuse of power" at the top of you lungs. You've been duped. You know I know that, you know I can see that, and the best you can do is resort fantasy in an attempt to alleviate the dissonance.

↪NOS4A2 to sum up my thoughts, the global billionaire mafia are hoping the people they have made poor by loudly pushing siphon up economic policies as if they actually could work will scapegoat others. Being anti PC is useful to them, and social media certainly help in the trend to polarization. P.C. wouldn’t even be in the news, we would just continue to progress to more inclusivity as communication shrinks the world if it weren’t for the economic cruelty insisted upon by the GBM and the fact that dupes don’t place the blame where it is deserved. I’m more afraid of the influence of the right with its legitimation of siphon up economics than I am of P.C. censoriousness, which is just a reaction.

That's completely fair. We should worry when the far-right or the far-left adopt legitimate criticism to further their extremist agendas. But I'm afraid of lions more than I am of political correctness. That doesn't mean political correctness isn't a problem that humans beings face.

Correct. Usually the over the top PC arguments are caused by a huge overreaction to something where the 'outraged' people who are there to 'defend' correct values have quite a conspirational view of something valuable being attacked indirectly or in a hidden views. It is all about dog whistles and hidden meanings. And the normal response would be "You cannot be serious!", but the current climate makes us more likely just to be mute.

From the perspective of the right-wing and conservatives, Political Correctness can be seen from issues like defending "family values". Jerry Falwell attacking the British childrens TV show 'Teletubbies' and accusing one of the characters being gay because of the color purple and other 'gay symbols' is a good example right-wing PC outrage. The denial of the producers of having any sexual innuendos in a program intended for toddlers doesn't matter. It just "shows" how vast the "conspiracy" is when it's started at such young age.

And phenomenon won't go anywhere, it will likely just become worse.

There is another component to PC that should be addressed, and that is the use of euphemism and a kind of bureaucratic "broadcaster-speak" to alleviate offense. As an example Good ol' George Carlin, an enemy of political correctness, brought up the point that many soldiers with "post traumatic stress disorder" might have been given help a lot sooner if they had left the malady as "shell shocked". I think it's a good point that political correctness will disguise reality in favor of making palpable, like taking a hard-to-swallow pill by eating it with ice cream.

That is what they’re saying, but it has no foundation in fact. Furthermore the impeachment enquiry was established on the basis of witness testimony and in accordance with constitutional principles. So the claim that the trial is improperly established is also completely false.

As always with Trump, he accuses his accusers of the blatant wrongdoing that he himself has committed. That is his ‘defense’.

The charade is not in accordance with constitutional principles because Trump is well within his constitutional powers to do what they claim he did. Not only that but he didn't do what they claimed he did.

"Article 1 Fails because House Democrats have no evidence to support their claims" (The case rests entirely on Sondland's speculations, which he admitted were presumptions)

"Abuse of Power" is a concocted theory that does not rise to the level of "Treason, Bribery, or other High Crimes and Misdemeanors".

It also presents a dangerous precedent, allowing a hostile House to attack almost any presidential action if s/he does them for what they believe are the wrong reasons, expanding impeachment beyond constitutional bounds.

Anyways there is much to go through in their defense.

https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6662414/Trump-Legal-Team-Impeachment-Trial-Memorandum.pdf

Actually the defense is saying the impeachment effort is a "brazen and unlawful attempt to overturn the results of the 2016 election and interfere with the 2020 election". The articles are "constitutionally invalid, founded on falsehoods" and thus should be rejected.

Nice sentiment, but I don't understand why he's "proclaiming" it a Federal Holiday. Ronald Reagan signed it into law (despite initially opposing it) as a Federal Holiday in 1983.

I think every president does it every year to specify the exact day. Trump did it last year. Obama did it before him. Bush also.

If you mean this, then how do you account for the fact that for at least 2500 years, and no doubt longer, this has been an important topic?

For the same reason you know what words to use and in what order to place them. We could quibble about definitions and may be justified in doing so, but there is a general consensus on what words mean and how they could be used, hence the dictionary.

Then why are you so misguided on and about Trump? Are you incompetent? Or is your proposition false or disingenuous? (All, clearly!)

Your virtue-signalling doesn’t find any currency with me, unfortunately. It might curry favor and advantage in your world, but looks pathetic and self-serving in mine.

This is partly true. Sure, you can find examples of this, but on the other hand you can find the opposite too. There is great open discussion also. And is this REALLY such a big problem is a valid question. And where I disagree with (for example Jordan Peterson) is that this trend would be a well thought agenda pushed by some (Marxists) leftists. It isn't. Nobody has planned this. It's not even the woke left that actually make this any kind of problem. The left has been all the time like this. It was worse when there still was the Soviet Union. Hence to think that this is a big issue is wrong. The World is far more conservative than it looks to be.

I think you’re right about this. Political correctness is not limited to any sort of political party or persuasion, manifests in many ways, and all sides practice variations of it (though in the hidden tribes study only 30% of American progressives believed political correctness is not a problem, deviating from the norm who mostly think it is).

I think Orwell, always prescient, touched on political correctness before the term “political correctness” came into use. He described it as “intellectual cowardice”, which he saw as a problem.

This kind of thing is not a good symptom. Obviously it is not desirable that a government department should have any power of censorship (except security censorship, which no one objects to in war time) over books which are not officially sponsored. But the chief danger to freedom of thought and speech at this moment is not the direct interference of the MOI or any official body. If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves.
...

At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/the-freedom-of-the-press/

Most competent people can figure out what words mean on their own accord.

There is no need to 'start over'. When you successfully repel a thief from your home, or incapacitate a mugger, you needn't step back and ask yourself 'How now shall we organise society?' 'Society' is what happens when we don't aggress against one another and invade one another's property. The State will not be abolished through an overnight coup, from which we will have to wait for the dust to settle so that we can then rebuild civilisation. In some ways the State has grown, and in other ways the State has been totally out-manoeuvred by free enterprise, and shown to be the lumbering, ineffectual brute that it is (technology and the internet, especially, have contributed to this). If there is an end to the State, it will be through successive out-maneouverings by more competent service-providers, and in this sense the trajectory is good. We need not have a structural vision in our heads to anticipate the occurrence of such.

Engels made the argument that in a socialist society the institutions of the state would just whither away and coercion would no longer be necessary for a society to function. The state is replaced by “the administration of things”, which seems to me a distinction without a difference save for that it would be administered voluntarily. In practice, however, the state only became more entrenched or collapsed under their own weight in those societies.

Since the state operates in many ways as a monopoly (Crown corporation in the commonwealth, for example), could the free enterprise route to a the withering of the state risk trading one monopoly for another, one state for another?

Given the voice if anti P.C. is far shriller, louder, and more powerful, and the shut-them-down P.C. contingent is a small, youthful minority, and the communications errors of this youthful contingent is being used by the far right to shore up its appeal, I would say that your fears of P.C. being able to bring consensus to a closed point is misplaced. The FAR greater threat is the far right.

Being anti-P.C. spans the entire political spectrum, at least in America.

Americans Strongly Dislike PC Culture
Warning To Democrats: Most Americans Against U.S. Getting More Politically Correct

The far-right is a greater threat than the PC crowd, but they both employ the same censorial tactics, and so we can oppose them for the same reasons.

I hope you guys are enjoying the holiday.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, DONALD J. TRUMP, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim January 20, 2020, as the Martin Luther King, Jr., Federal Holiday. On this day, I encourage all Americans to recommit themselves to Dr. King’s dream by engaging in acts of service to others, to their community, and to our Nation.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/proclamation-martin-luther-king-jr-federal-holiday-2020/

An expert is only an expert in a certain field, but not much else.

Propaganda is much broader in scope because it employs images, music, statues and other artifacts, including rhetoric itself. So when the propaganda is limited to just rhetoric it becomes rhetoric. When that’s the case, the intention behind either may be all that’s left to differentiate between the two. Maybe something like rhetoric is intended to convince while propaganda is intended to control.

Warren, Sanders and Klobuchar will be tied up in impeachment (though they should recuse), limiting much of their campaigning time, keeping them away from Iowa for much of the final two weeks before the Feb. 3 caucuses. This was a master-stroke of the corporate wing of the DNC.

Are you referring to Zelensky' statements? That is something, but it is at odds with testimony by the diplomats. It would be risky for Zelensky to say he felt pressured, and to his benefit to convey to Trump that "he loves your ass". On the other hand, the diplomats took a risk by testifying, and they corroborate one another.

And the Ukrainian foreign minister. His recent interview pretty much refuted the entire case against Trump. No quid pro quo, no pressure, implicit or otherwise, refutes Sondland, says everything was routine... I wonder if they would be able to testify.

What's the point of testimony by Hunter and the whistleblower?

They are the start of this whole mess and would be useful to the defense.

It's said to be likely that the thoroughly corrupted Republican senate will vote to acquit anyway, but one can only hope this is not a foregone conclusion.

I have a sinking suspicion the GOP might betray the president. I hope I’m wrong, but you might just get what you desire.

There is testimony evidence of pressure, and documentary evidence the aid was held up illegally. If the requested investigation was not for criminal purposes, what else could it be other than simply digging up dirt on an opponent? The fact that Trump's position that his call was "perfect" is troubling, because it suggests we can expect more of the same.

Recall that I'm not convinced his action is necessarily worthy of removal from office, but that it was important to send him the message that it's wrong. My hope is that a fair number of Republicans will send him that message - voting to acquit solely because it doesn't rise to the level of "high crime" but noting that he shouldn't have done that.

From the Ukrainian side there is exculpatory evidence that there was no pressure, that hold ups on the American side are routine, and that nothing amounted to any quid pro quo. This is direct evidence considering it involves people on the phone call, the supposed victims. It’s a shame their words were not even considered in the inquiry, but that’s to be expected in such a partisan inquiry.

I actually would like to hear Bolton’s testimony, and also Hunter Biden’s, Lev Parnas’, and the whistleblower’s. Let the chips fall where they may.

I’m glad we can agree it is deserving of scrutiny. Luckily there was no pressure, nor any call for criminal investigations from the president.

I think where we disagree is whether Trump abused the power of his office. Considering that abuse of power is one of the articles of impeachment hopefully more facts will come to light in the upcoming trial.

I get that it looks bad for Hunter to have taken the high paying job, but he's hardly the first person to profit from a name and connections (e.g. Giuliani; Trump's kids). You need something more than the mere fact that he worked for Burisma.

What about your standard, avoid any action that could potentially be perceived as unethical or illegal? Sounds like it’s not so much a standard anymore, at least when applied to the Bidens.

I didn't say there was necessarily anything wrong with Ukraine investigating. I said there's something with Trump pushing an investigation of a political opponent.

You said it “looks wrong on its face”, that it is not “appropriate”. This is the court of opinion, and given that the standard here is selectively applied, it seems partisan.