Quote:
Originally Posted by Adder
They are all political. It is a political process. Which is why your judgment of what's "impeachable" doesn't matter, and why W wasn't impeached. Congress can't hold someone accountable for what it was complicit in.
Which, incidentally, is part of the Senate's problem right now.
This is why you're among those that Thurgreed describes as "gone." You're completely unable to see anything as right or wrong. It's all just a power game. You're just like the GOP.
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I do think it’s mostly a power game. But I’m not saying I support that notion. You’re confusing a dark view with a belief corruption is okay.
I don’t think corruption is okay. But I’ve been directly in politics and seen that the political and the official blur together all the time. I think it’s a reality that “corruption” is and has been rampant in politics forever. Trump takes it to a new level, but that’s not because of quantity so much as stupidity, transparency, and audacity.
What he did in Ukraine (used a foreign country for political gain) has been done before. He is simply so stupid he didn’t know how to roll out a pretext and do it thru channels that would always allow for plausible deniability.
Shit, most of the things politicians do are partly pretextual and involve political motives. SCOTUS is taking up the validity of that very argument as a defense in the Bridgegate case.
Trump does have autocratic leanings, so I do think enhanced resistance to his politicization of the office is prudent. And if he’s going to be as brazen about it as he is, well, that level of dumb perhaps leaves those who are charged with oversight little choice but to impeach.
Politics and government will always be intertwined and officials will always be engaged in technically corrupt acts. To the extent any politician decides to do anything based on political considerations, he or she has spent taxpayer money (his salary) and donor money for his own benefit. The system is inherently flawed in this regard and designed to accommodate a power game where the only real crime is being dumb enough to get caught.
I don’t like it, but calling out any single instance of “corruption” as uniquely lurid or offensive in DC is in most cases pointing out that which was done stupidly while ignoring the thousands of technically corrupt acts done smartly and thus unnoticed or unprovable every day.
