Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Bad people in a position to do bad things will do bad things because they are bad people. End of story.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

My right to basic bodily autonomy is not on the table. that’s the new deal.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

Mediocre white men think RFK Jr’s pathetic midlife crisis is inspirational. The bar is set so low for them, it’s subterranean.

“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.”

I might just take the rest of the day off and do even more nothing than usual.

Stop using mental illness to avoid talking about armed white supremacy.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

The words do not have to be perfect.

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

SCOTUS: It’s not “bribery” unless it comes from the Bribery region of France. Otherwise, it’s merely “sparkling malfeasance”.

Republicans in disarray!

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

The low info voters probably won’t even notice or remember by their next lap around the goldfish bowl.

You cannot love your country only when you win.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

“In the future, this lab will be a museum. do not touch it.”

Disappointing to see gov. newsom with his finger to the wind.

“Perhaps I should have considered other options.” (head-desk)

Tick tock motherfuckers!

The line between political reporting and fan fiction continues to blur.

They are not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.

You are here: Home / Politics / Impeachment Inquiry / Impeachment Eve Open Thread

Impeachment Eve Open Thread

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Sad-trombone coda:

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52Comments

  1. 1.

    Adam L Silverman

    This is an incorrect assessment of the situation:

    Right now the entire US in general and the executive branch in specific are the President’s toys. The actual votes on impeachment are scheduled for 4 and 6 PM EST. The next 17 to 19 hours are, perhaps, the most dangerous hours that our self governing democratic-republic have ever faced!

  5. 5.

    Mike in NC

    Time to listen to Carly Simon singing “Anticipation”.

    Pence is absolutely up to his eyeballs in the Ukraine caper.

  6. 6.

    The Dangerman

    @Adam L Silverman:

    The next 17 to 19 hours are, perhaps, the most dangerous hours that our self governing democratic-republic have ever faced!

    I agree. One couldn’t possibly have an impeachment vote if we were getting it on with (insert usual suspect country here).

  7. 7.

    Colleeniem

    Go back.
    Read the speech he gave to The CIA the first week of his presidency.
    I’ll wait.
    He wasn’t well then, and people laughed it off, or ignored it completely.
    So…did things get better, or worse?
    It’s a rhetorical question.
    This is why the democrats and worthless republicans have to stand and be counted.

  8. 8.

    Jeffro

    @Adam L Silverman: 

    Have to disagree…trumpov won’t be calling directly for violence against his domestic political enemies until at least Day 2, maybe even Day 3 of the actual Senate trial.

  9. 9.

    Jeffro

    Zeddy is right, btw. I was talking with my daughter, just home from her first semester at college, explaining exactly who Rick Gates is and what he’s going to jail for.

    She was like, “WHAT?!???”

    And then we talked a bit about Wikileaks, Roger Stone, Manafort, the pro-Russia plank in the 2016 RNC platform, etc etc. But it is a lot to take in at once, I guess.

  10. 10.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Colleeniem: Hell, go back to June 2015 when the POS called Mexicans criminals, drug dealers and rapists.

    Glad we’re finally impeaching the Trump trash.

  12. 12.

    Jeffro

    @Colleeniem: 

    He’s been trying to pull the wool over peoples’ eyes since forever…so from that perspective, nothing new here. Just gradually increasing degrees of insanity ever since he went under the microscope as POTUS, since the Mueller investigation started, and most especially since the impeachment hearings/ investigations started…

  14. 14.

    debbie

    If he were a smart narcissist, he would have released that letter months ago. But he’s not, and I hope this stupid narcissist is choking on what is coming for him.

  16. 16.

    Adam L Silverman

    @rikyrah: What’s interesting is that part of what was disclosed at Rick Gates’ sentencing today, aside from Manafort trying to bribe Gates not to cooperate, is that Gates has agreed to continue to assist the government in ongoing criminal investigations that are currently being conducted. So who, exactly, is still under investigation? Who are the targets and subjects of these investigations?

  17. 17.

    MoCA Ace

    How many bomb scare phone calls will be received at the Capitol building on Wednesday?

    How many will come from inside the White house?

  18. 18.

    chopper

    @Jeffro: 

    narcissists like trump are, deep down, huge weaklings on account of a massive inferiority complex. he’s not going to explode and destroy everything, if anything he’s going to pick on someone small to assuage his hurt feelings. someone he has easy power over.

    this isn’t ‘the most dangerous time in american history’.

  19. 19.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Jeffro: There’s a lot of damage he can do without explicitly calling for violence against those he perceives as opposing him.

  21. 21.

    Jeffro

    @Adam L Silverman: Ok.  This is a guy who’s already calling his opponents guilty of treason…I think he suggested that Schiff get treated “the way they do in Guatemala” today (what’s that, trumpov: imprisonment, torture, execution?)…he’s about a degree shy of explicitly calling for violent and certainly is already implicitly calling for it.

    The most dangerous thing he could do right now is to call on his supporters to march, armed, straight to the nearest Democratic representatives’ offices and demand they stop the impeachment OR ELSE.  He could also tell his fundie and gun nut bases to rise up and…do the same.  But it’s likely that almost nothing will happen there, except that America as a whole will be appalled/horrified/ready to expedite his impeachment, and his GOP allies will quickly desert him.  It’s not, after all, the kind of thing an innocent guy does.

    And yes, there is the ever-present threat of folks like the FL pipe bomber, or a shooter somewhere.  I’m talking about large-scale stuff.

    trumpov throwing off the mask and telling his supporters to save him by any means necessary means…if the Dems have the stones to stand firm and call it what it is…that almost everyone outside the FoxBubble (and maybe a few in it) see that this is not what an innocent/well person does.

  22. 22.

    Sab

    @debbie: Are there “smart narcissists?” In my own limited experience that is an oxymoron. Narcissists are not capable of being smart. They can be good manipulators, but they can’t be smart long term. Their vision is much too limited. It’s all about today’s pain.

  23. 23.

    AJ

    OT re: depression and John’s recent post – –

    For him or anyone else going through that these days, I feel for you. I’ve had a rough time since Labor day as work has been slow, I’m self employed and I live alone.

    lack of structure is brutal for me so not a good Fall and early Winter. Luckily this week I have client work so that’s good, but it helped me feel less alone seeing John’s post even as I’m sorry to imagine him going through that.

    Sending strength and warmth to anyone else who wrestles with the Black Dog.

  24. 24.

    sab

    @Adam L Silverman: Right now he just wants to stop impeachment. That is his whole world. Once they don’t remove him from office, then he will decide to nuke Iran.

    Hoarse whisperer has this guy pegged. As he says, easy peasy : they are scary but not at all complicated. The problem is that most people haven’t encountered these beasts in real life.

  25. 25.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Jeffro: No, the most dangerous thing he could do, because he’s got a Supreme Court approved National Emergency declaration active, is to actually use the powers that a National Emergency declaration gives him. Those powers are vast. They are not subject to judicial review now that the Supreme Court has blessed off that the declaration they’d be made under is constitutional, and they give him almost limitless power if he chose to use it.

    I’m not sure he’s aware of this given who he’s surrounded himself with as staff. Other than AG Barr. I’m pretty sure he understands what the President could do under that declaration. We can only hope that Barr has decided not to explain it to him.

  26. 26.

    Adam L Silverman

    @sab: Any idea who Hoarse Whisperer actually is? Male? Female? Ambisexual walnut? American? Canadian? Highly educated? Never finished high school? White? African American? Asian? LatinX?

    I find Hoarse Whisperer’s and similar other’s tweets interesting. But neither you nor I know anything about who he or she is. We don’t know what they do for a living. We don’t know where they live. We don’t actually know what they want. All we know is that he or she is a nym that tickles a lot of our priors and assumptions about what is going on right now.

  27. 27.

    Yarrow

    @Adam L Silverman: His identity was outed several months ago. I can’t remember his name but he posted a photo of himself and several high profile accounts know him. He lives in New Jersey, which he has talked about for several years. I think he works, or worked, in advertising or consulting of some sort. I can’t remember the particulars.

    Here’s his picture. He has it in a pinned tweet that’s a collection of his Twitter threads. https://twitter.com/HoarseWisperer/status/1164310330174005248

  29. 29.

    Mike in NC

    All bullies are cowards, and our Russian stooge Fat Bastard lacks the spine to launch the Doomsday Project.

  34. 34.

    Anne Laurie

    @Adam L Silverman:

    All we know is that he or she is a nym that tickles a lot of our priors and assumptions about what is going on right now.

    On the internet, nobody knows if you’re a dog. But Hoarse Whisperer was recently doxxed by angry BernieBros; I chose not to follow their wormtrails, but the guy who posts the tweets admitted he was a marketing advisor living in northern NJ, which is just what he sounds like, IMO.
    I never believe more than 90% of anything, but I enjoy reading his stuff (enough to contribute a small amount to his Patreon).
    TBF, I’ve never actually met you, or you me. Maybe I’m a very sophisticated bot my own self, y’know!

  35. 35.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Yarrow: Does he actually have any expertise to support what he’s asserting? Educational? Experiential? Has he provided any actual evidence?

    I understand the need to use nyms. I’m not arguing that everyone needs to out themselves. But I’m making a domestic national security argument based on significant experience as an appointed mobilized civilian supervising senior civil servant with my name on it. He’s making assertions from behind a nym. I’m telling you what you may not want to hear, but what I know to be accurate. He’s telling you what you want to hear whether it is or is not accurate at all.

  39. 39.

    Sebastian

    @Adam L Silverman:

     

    i’ve been following him for quite a while and he spent a lot of time talking about his experiences with narcissists. For him it was an abusive relationship if I am not mistaken.

  40. 40.

    NotMax

    @Adam L. Silverman
    The difference being a track record and history accompanying that nym here, along with the comments made here, for here, under that nym not being intended (or offered) for dissemination to the universe at large.

    ;)

  43. 43.

    Yarrow

    @Adam L Silverman:  Well, the twitter stuff isn’t his full time job so people can take it for what it’s worth. If someone has read his feed long enough it’s pretty clear he was married to a narcissist and it took him a long time to figure out what the issue was and extricate himself from the relationship.

    From what I can tell, people who have done that often have a pretty clear understanding of what narcissists are and how they operate. He seems to fall in that category, as do several people who post here who pretty much agree with his assessments. It seems to be a hard won understanding and leaves people fairly clear-eyed about how narcissists operate and how to deal with them.

    His take is his take. It seems unlikely that any actual national security people are making national security decisions based on his Twitter feed. For the rest of us his insights have been interesting and his predictions of Trump’s behavior in various situations has been quite accurate.

  44. 44.

    Anne Laurie

    @Adam L Silverman: Understood.  I’ll admit that I ‘trust’ HW, to a degree, because the dysfunctional personal background he describes is familiar to me.  So the instincts that make you go Who *is* this personage?  make me go Yep, been there done that.

    And it’s pretty hard to hurt my feelings.  But the collateral damage to other readers, well — yeah, you’ve got a good point.

  46. 46.

    Anne Laurie

    @Sebastian: That story is an exemplar of why I gave up reading Salon during the 2008 primaries.  Its front-pagers can’t all be crazy people with unworkable agendas, but the signal-to-noise ratio…

  47. 47.

    joel hanes

    popehat is correct that the true horror of the moment is that, as horrible and corrupt as Trump is, the Republicans fervently, enthusiastically defend and support him.

    But Trump’s letter to Pelosi is appalling. Beyond appalling, beyond unsuitable, beyond unhinged.

  52. 52.

    Gvg

    @Adam L Silverman:  he posts based on personal experience with narcissistic personalities. He and others like him just had the bad luck to encounter one. It doesn’t leave a job record usually nor a degree so it can’t be evaluated the same way your national security experience can be. There could be someone posting who actually has a degree in this field, but I don’t know of any, and they would also have to be good at explaining to the rest of us to get heard. All I have to judge is confirmation from other people who have lived the experience.
    He is interesting, but only a small part of what I listen to. I am actually currently more angry that others are getting away with breaking laws while we focus on the Presidency. I think there are members of Congress behaving so suspiciously that they should be investigated and nobody is. I think there must be a money trail to explain the behavior of certain powerful republicans and it predates Trump. If we don’t clean it all up, we will be repeating crisis over and over.

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