Come back! Need discussion...2020 PresidentialFollow

Yes. Politics have really gotten in the way of good solid nation building. Also, immigration needs fixing and our workers need to get their rights back.

"People's Champ" by the band Arkells sums it up nice for me.

But I'm Canadian and identify our current leadership with that song, even though it is rather clearly about President Trump.


Ignoring party affiliation entirely, it would be nice to see a crop of political leaders that are "honored to serve" and actually do serve the best big-picture interests of their country in a classy, tactful manner --which would often mean compromise with the other party. Extremely polarized politics with a slice of Jerry Springer on top seems really unproductive to me.

I realize that is a naive and delusional hope.

Oh, right, I came here to post that if the Mueller report gets released, and if it lines up with the summary from the AG and the AAG, then I will gladly say that Donald Trump is a bad human being, but not a convicted criminal.

Edited, Mar 25th 2019 1:14pm by stupidmonkey

Since Mueller didn't find cause to indict trump it's like we're supposed to now accept that he's is a competent, empathetic, honest, transparent individual that is qualified to serve this country as president. Hah!

trump is a corrupt dolt, but just another misshaped cog in the bureaucratic machine.

My sister is now flashing Pete Buttigieg stuff all over the families social media. He's seems nice. Experience holds weight for me. He lacks it - specially in comparison to others he'll be running against.

Anyone live in South Bend?

Biden could have beaten trump in 2016, but I don't think he can now. There is no way Warren, Booker, Sanders can beat him. I doubt Harris can. The best bet in a general election would be Hickenlooper as he is a sane sounding moderate...but sane sounding moderates don't win primaries in the DNC.

I think Trump will replace Pence on the ticket in 2020 to put an electable (probably minority) VP at his side. I would expect Marco Rubio if I had to guess.

The only thing you're supposed to accept is that he didn't do what people accused him off.

Sure were a lot of criminals in his inner circle, though, weren't there? Anything to say about that?

In my country, no politician could survive the scandal of having so many criminals coincidentally working for them. It's interesting that you don't even find it notable.

Wait, no, the opposite of that. Boring.

Um.. Sure. You're using a pretty broad definition of "a lot", and "inner circle". There were exactly 6 people indicted who were directly associated with Trump. Only three of those people worked on the campaign. Not a single indictment was for anything done during the campaign itself. Well, except perhaps for Cohen, but his charges basically stem from him personally attempting to take advantage of his association with Trump for his own financial benefit by attempting to sell influence he didn't actually have. Well, and being a general jerk off.

There's a reason why we don't allow instant replay to be used to find fouls in football. Because if you look long enough and hard enough, you will always find one (or many). The same applies to investigations. If you put enough people under a microscope and look hard enough at a long enough period of their entire professional lives, you will find a few cases of past behavior that you could decide to charge them with. This is the same no matter what group of people you target.

This is also precisely the reason why our legal system does not normally allow this sort of investigation. You have to start with clear evidence of a specific crime and then investigate that crime. We require that because otherwise, you have a condition where people are not found guilty of crimes because they committed the crime, but because the government chose to target them instead of others who have done the same thing. And when that targeting is done based on political association, this become incredibly problematic.

How about we approach this in another way. Go do some research and write a paper on "why the US has the fourth and fifth amendments to the constitution". Along the way, you might just figure out why this sort of thing is wrong.



Um... Criminals? It's not like these guys were running drug trafficking rings or murdering people. Two of them were found (retroactively) to have failed to properly declare their filing status on past taxes. A "crime" which is normally an administrative issue, managed by re-filing and paying any penalties and fines associated. Three others were indicted for process crimes (crimes that only occurred as a result of the process of being investigated in the first place). This is commonly known as a "perjury trap". The point being that anyone could be indicted for that *and* the only reason they were ever in a position to be caught was because the investigation existed.

The only one you can actually point to as having behaved in a directly criminal manner is Cohen. And his crimes were committed *against* Trump, not for him.

So yeah. Not really seeing the claim you are making.

Six is a lot of people, yes. Two would be a lot of criminals to have working for you by coincidence.

Um... Criminals?

Yes. They committed a crime, they are criminals. I'm not interested in your limp wristed hand wringing over it; you're too soft on crime. I'm glad it's Trump in that chair and not you, or America would be buried under gangsters and crooks by Monday.

Edited, Mar 28th 2019 8:16pm by Kavekkk

I think you are grossly overestimating the severity of the crimes we're talking about, and grossly underestimating the commonality of such among any organization made up of several hundred people (or more). I already laid this out, and you more or less ignored what I wrote. I'm reasonably certain that if you dug this thoroughly into the background of any random board of directors for a large corporation, or non-profit, you'd find similar amounts of white collar crimes somewhere as well. Remember, we're talking about tax filing issues.

We just don't normally look that hard. Which is part of the issue here. We don't see this sort of thing going on in the Clinton campaign, for example, not because it didn't, but because we only appointed a special prosecution to look at the Trump campaign. If we'd spent the same amount of effort focused on her campaign, or any previous presidential campaign by any major party, we would find similar rates.



Yeah. But we do make a distinction between say armed robbery, and say "creative tax filing", right? I mean, it's not like Trump worked with admitted domestic terrorists who detonated bombs at multiple federal buildings or anything. Or a campaign bundler charged with assault. Or the other bundlers who were associated with Mexican crime boss. Or the numerous folks associated with him who were convicted of fraud, conspiracy, and other issues Oh wait! That was Obama. Funny that the same standards don't seem to apply. Or, well, any standards at all when it comes to looking at the other side of the fence.

A few white collar crimes are nothing. Again. Look closely enough and you'll find them. And the stuff that went on with folks associated with Obama are massively more brazen and problematic than with Trump. There's no evidence Trump (for example) benefited in anyway from the decades old tax filings of Manafort and Gates. Obama did benefit directly from his dealings with Tony Rezko, for example. Obama's rise to prominence is almost a textbook case of a young rising politician willing to (as Danny DeVito would say in Johny Dangerously) "Play Ball!", in order to advance his career. Pretty much every corrupt figure in Chicago politics sits clearly in Obama's past. Yet, these associations were ignored or dismissed by the media as nothing at all

But hiring someone who, after the fact, is discovered to have mis filed some taxes a decade earlier, when that person had no association to the candidate at all? That's so serious we need to look into it? Um... No. It's not. Folks actively engaged in fraudulent and corrupt practices while you are directly working with them, and even in many cases on your behalf, is a problem.

Again. The only crimes which anyone associated with Trump committed during the campaign itself was Cohen, and his crimes were committed *against* Trump, not on his behalf. You're applying a strange set of criteria here IMO.




Um... I've only spoken of Obama. Have you looked at the folks Clinton is associated with? Or Clinton herself? I am by no means a fan of Trump. I am by no means a fan of Clinton. But I can objectively analyze the behaviors of both people and categorically state that Clinton appears to have far far far more dirty stuff going on than Trump. The majority of her money was gained through questionable interactions with government agencies, either through influence peddling, pay for play, or any of a number of other corrupt methodologies. The Clinton foundation appears to have primarily worked as a means for foreign parties to pay into the campaign to get favorable treatment or lobbying from the Clintons themselves. Her husbands fees for speaking in Russia suddenly quadrupled during her tenure as SoS, and then again when she was running for president and appeared likely to win. 3/4ths of all the people outside of the government who ever received a personal meeting with Clinton while she was SoS were donators to the foundation.

Yet, no one seems to want to investigate this. And that's really the sick part of all of this. We have a system that is driven, not by the rule of law, but by public outcry. And that outcry is largely controlled by the media, which overwhelmingly leans left and has no desire to see harm come to prominent Democrats. And so those prominent Democrats just plain get away with this stuff. Over and over.

But you cry about Trump. That's pretty darn biased IMO.

Edited, Apr 1st 2019 4:42pm by gbaji

I miss the good old days when I had so much more time to read and respond to those walls of texts.

If the election were held today, President Trump would probably win. The Democrats went full Bernie-crazy for attention. They won 2018 on healthcare, now everyone wants to undo what everyone fought for the past 10 years instead of just enhancing it.

In the past, I would've said the same thing for here but I'm not so sure this time around.

I drool for the New Zealand boss lady.

I haven't seen any new candidates declare recently. I'm stuck on Warren for the moment.

Edited, Apr 8th 2019 6:20pm by Elinda