The Room Where it HappenedFollow

"Surely this will be the thing that finally takes down Trump!" they said for the 81st time.

It'll be out of the news cycle in two weeks.

This.. It doesn't matter. First, it was "he didn't do it". Then it was "ok, maybe he did it, but it's not impeachable".

No joke, I would watch a reality show about the Trumps a la "The Osbournes".

In my head, Melania is the protagonist trying to manage her husband, her step sons, and the national spotlight all while trying to raise Barron into a semi-decent human being.

Edited, Jun 19th 2020 8:59am by Demea

Which policy is it to *illegally* withhold funds after congressional approval for personal gains in the dark?

I didn't even know who Bolton was until the Democrats complained about electing a war hawk. If I knew, then the administration knew.

One gives you money? Plus if that were the case, why didn't the GOP/administration call his bluff and allow to testify? Why prevent him? Let him lie, prove him wrong, send him to jail and bolster your defense. Finally, there were a number of people under oath that said the same thing. This is why the GOP said "Ok, 'twas wrong, but not impeachable". The evidence was there.

I didn't even know who Bolton was until the Democrats complained about electing selecting a war hawk. Are you implying that the Administration was unaware of Bolton's reputation before hiring him? You fire him for doing what he is most known for doing?

The moment he dances around the question, is the moment that he bolsters the administration. Furthermore, he would be deflating his book. If he has no real information at the hearing, why buy his book?

I watched Hamilton this weekend on tv and learned that 'the room where it happens' is a song/dance number from that play. Was Bolton's book title a reference to that?

TOO OUT OF THE LOOP TO COMMENT.

And yeah, as someone mentioned - yesterdays news, completely gone from any talking points. Congress could still be 'looking into it', but it's likely another big nothing.

SOMETHING, SOMETHING...BIZ AS USUAL.

But! Now we have the Ghislaine Maxwell arrest; Will she remain breathing until a trial?

"DIED DUE TO COMPLICATIONS FROM COVID-19."*

Will said trial reveal any dirties about any of the worlds high-profile politicians?

*SEE ABOVE

[

Well. The actual language was that the OMB "violated the ICA", which is a fairly obscure law defining the mind numbing process of managing budget allocations. Specifically, the OMB used incorrect language in their notifications of extensions to the obligations (the actual payments, which at this point is really just paper pushing funds around internally so no one really cares). It's the legal equivalent of violating the rules of order at a meeting or something. Yeah, technically wrong, but no one usually cares about it. I'd bet that if you looked at other internal holds in the past you'd find similar boiler plate type language, for no other reason than the person who's typing up that piece of paper on that specific day probably doesn't have time to go look up the actual exact reason for the delay. And isn't going to spend that time because at the end of the day everyone involved knows that it doesn't matter. What matters is the fiscal year end date (Sep 30th), at which funds must be released in full or not. And the "not" requires actions and decisions way way way above the pay grade of the folks writing those notifications.

It's a nonsense thing being made into a real thing. I'll also point out that the "White House" did not violate the law, the OMB did. And that's because when they were asked for details on those delays, they wrote back that it was to comply with the President's policies, which is both an non-allowed reason *and* not true. When the White House was asked they said it was due to concerns that corruption may still exist in Ukraine, and the President wanted to be sure the money would not end up being spent at cross purposes to the US foreign policy (which btw *IS* an allowed reason for such delays of obligation). So basically some idiot at OMB just wrote the wrong thing down. Again likely because he or she didn't bother to ask the White House why they'd asked for the holds. And again again, because usually no one actually cares about this stuff.

You certainly can't lay that on the head of Trump himself. This would not even be a thing except that after the fact we're putting a microscope on every little detail of the process because of speculation that the hold could have been based on one thing that was talked about in the phone call (Biden having a Ukrainian prosecutor filed to protect the business his son was being paid a ridiculous salary to "sit on a board" of) instead of another (the talk at the beginning of the new president's commitment to fighting corruption and illegality and the even newer wins of his party to majority in their parliament and their commitment to the same).

At the end of the day, except for some people's fanatic lunacy, none of this matters. There was no leverage used to push the Ukrainians to do anything since the Ukrainians didn't even know about the holds. So kinda hard to argue that the President was telling Ukraine "Do this for me or I wont give you your money", if he never actually mentioned the money in the conversation. But hey. Let's not let little details like that get in the way of a good speculative scandal.

Oh. And meanwhile the start of this was Biden bragging (on video) that he did actually threaten the Ukrainian president with withholding funds if he didn't fire said prosecutor that was investigating said business his son was receiving payments from. So... Um... We don't have to speculate there, now do we?



Um. Because people are not defined by a single thing. Bolton has a lot of foreign policy experience. He has a lot of contacts with various counterparts around the world. He also happens to be hawkish. He's a great person to have in that position *if* he can constrain himself to enacting the Presidents policy and not just doing what he thinks is best. It turned out that Bolton couldn't do that, so Trump fired him.



Did you watch the same impeachment trial I watched. It was chock full of folks singing and dancing around, giving vague statements, speculative arguments, and giving "testimony" that would never have been allowed in an actual courtroom. Hearsay is not evidence and is not allowed by a witness. Yet, that's pretty much all that was presented in that "trial".

It was a joke. And Bolton being called and doing the same vague stuff would not have made any of the news agencies who breathlessly reported those same wild allegations and innuendos do so any less. No one stopped and said "hey, you know he didn't actually say that the president did anything wrong with that statement, so maybe we should ignore the 5 minutes that witness spent talking about how unqualified the president is, how he's a big meanie, talks down to people, etc". Seriously, I watched that dreck (as much as I could), and it was hour after hour of people giving their opinions of the president and pretty much zero actual legally defined testimony. There were little to no "facts" presented. Just people's opinions, often on second or third hand accounts of something. It was ridiculous.

Not sure why you're asking in this thread instead of the one or two others about coronavirus, but whatever.

It's unclear what you're asking. Measuring a "response" is a subjective thing. I think that the US response was one of the best in the world (again though: subjective). The US was among the first nations to recognize and take actions with regard to covid-19. We very quickly put up travel restrictions, began tracking patients, setting up quarantines, etc. Helps that the CDC is pretty much the best at this in the world though.

As far as results, that's a different story. You'd need to define "among the worst" though. There's a lot of countries in the world, and the US is currently ranked 8th in terms of overall mortality rate from covid-19 (that's per-capita, not per cases). So our "result" so far is better than Belgium, UK, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Chile, and France. But worse (on paper anyway) than a hundred and so on other nations. So you could say we are "among the worst", but that also includes just about every western and first world nation too. When you have populations with easy travel within your borders (and across them), a virus like this is going to tend to spread quickly. Doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the "response" issue above.

I'll also point out a couple other things (which I think I already mentioned in the covid specific threads). There are differences between nations and how they report deaths. We tend to count any one who dies and has covid-19 as a "covid-19 death". Other nations may only do so if it's absolutely clear that the person would not have died if not infected. Others stand somewhere in between. I'd go into the political and economic reasons behind this, but I already did in another thread.

I'll additionally point out, on the possibility that your point in bringing this up is to just make a "Trump did poorly" argument (likely a good guess, but I don't want to assume here), that the federal level response to covid-19 was pretty spot on. Trump was way ahead of the game on this. He was ringing the alarm bell on this back in early to mid January, while the Dems were dismissing it as a distraction from the impeachment process. When he pushed the WHO to call out China on what appeared to be false claims about the virus (just based on the cases we were seeing in the US, and in other countries), they eventually were dragged kicking and screaming to acknowledge (only on Jan 15th) that the virus was indeed transmittable human to human. Prior to that point, China was claiming it was not, and the WHO was just parroting their claim.

Trump was also ahead of the game with travel restrictions. And no, not targeting people based on ethnicity, but geographical locations based on covid-19 outbreaks. He first restricted travel from China directly (Jan 26th I believe). Then followed up with restrictions from Iran (not a hard thing anyway) and Italy, because those two had the biggest initial outbreaks. Over the next couple weeks in Feb, he expanded the restrictions to all of continental Europe (because the EU didn't put any travel restrictions on folks in Italy, so anyone could just hop on the Eurorail system and travel anywhere they wanted, doh!).

The Dem response was pathetic. At first they claimed he was exaggerating, and then distracting from the impeachment trial. Then when he instituted travel restrictions, it was xenophobia. He must just hate Chinese people. Then I guess it was Italians he hated? Then all of Europe, which still resulted in a ridiculous slam from the Left that he was favoring the UK for political reasons (you know the whole Brexit thing,right?). Um... Never mind this was about geography. Same deal with Australia being allowed for travel. Both are separated by seas from other areas, and thus travel was more easily restricted and thus infections were less likely to expand to those areas (well, in the short term anyway). That's why the restrictions went in the direction and order they did. They were based on infection rates and geographic travel patterns, ie: science. But the Left just turned it into an identity political thing.

Nancy Pelosi gave a freaking photo op on Feb 24th in Chinatown in SF. Why Chinatown? Because she was making a point that "See, I'm not a xenophobe. I like Chinese people, hur, hur". She stood in a crowd declaring it was perfectly safe, and no one should take Trump seriously. At the same point in time, Trump's white house was already putting together their task force, and was releasing health advice for folks to follow (wash hands, avoid touching your face, avoid large crowds, social distance, etc). So the Dems were telling people to do the exact opposite of what they should have been doing to slow down the spread. And that wasn't the last time. Chuck Schumer did another media op, this time in Times Square, again making the whole thing appear to be made up by Trump to scare people. This was on March 4th. He said that it was perfectly safe to be in big crowds, no one should give into the fearmongering of Trump, we're not going to cancel the St. Patty's day parade, cause it's perfectly safe, etc.

Realize that mass shutdowns hit New York just two weeks later, and frankly, I think they waited a week too long. How many people spread covid because of the wrong messaging from the Dems? One side was right. One was wrong. The irony is that it wasn't even late march to early april when those same politicians were declaring Trump's response to be "sluggish" and "too little too late". Um... really?

Meanwhile, Trump was meeting with big business owners in the US to work with them on helping out. Of course, this got panned by the Left as him giving hand outs to big businesses and rich folks, but the reality is that he knew that China held a virtual monopoly on PPE and other goods, and was hording it. So our supplies would rapidly run out. He was getting them to re-tool their facilities to make stuff that would be needed here in the US. Not just medical equipment, but a ton of regular day to day stuff we buy that for decades have been built in China and shipped here. It's unclear just how big a positive impact this had. We still had shortages of many things, but how much worse would they have been if the "The islands not sinking, so let's sing the one that goes tum te tum tum tum!" Democrats had been in charge? He didn't wait for problems to occur, but was incredibly proactive. So yeah, on the federal level our "response" was very very good.

The real issues have occurred at the state level. And again, we've seen a pattern where the states run by Democrats just didn't do well. They waited too long to take any actions, and when they did, they were overboard and didn't make sense with regards to the actual virus. It has been like the Dems through this entire crisis have been taking actions that they believe will benefit themselves politically, and not those that will save the most lives while creating the least negative impact on the people.

IMO, Coumo was the worst. The guy whined constantly about not having this or that (from Trump of course, so it was just about pointing fingers), but failed to take actions he was responsible for. And when those failures cost lives, instead of taking responsibility, he again just pointed the finger at Trump. So apparently, Trump wasn't just supposed to advise NY on what to do, but they were supposed to actually do it for them as well? That's... not how our system works. And that's before we get into Coumo ordering that nursing homes must accept covid-19 positive patients. How many elderly died because of that? And it wasn't even like it was just a mistake, or no one thought of it. The hospitals wanted to move elderly covic-19 patients from their own care facilities (costs maybe?) to the nursing homes. The nursing homes said no, because they knew it would result in infections spreading to other at-risk people and result in lots of deaths. Coumo stepped in and ordered the homes to take the patients. He knew the facts and made the exact wrong decision.

Meanwhile, the hospitals he was clearing of those patients never actually reached capacity for covid-19, he barely touched the overflow facilities that Trump had built for him, and only a handful of patients ever saw the inside of the hospital ship Trump sent for him. So whining got him resources he didn't actually need, but his own incompetence managed to gets tens of thousand more people killed in his state. Good going man!

But he gets praise from the Left, while they repeat the mantra that Trump somehow failed. Right...

Edited, Jul 22nd 2020 2:01pm by gbaji

That was inciteful. Er... Not.

Like many laws. So, the law was broken. Thank you

That doesn't change the point. This isn't a "single thing", this is his *philosophy*. There are many people with foreign policy experience and contacts with various counterparts, to include Democrats. What you hire is someone who aligns with your vision.

Yet, none of them were selling a book. You just agreed that dancing around the question or being vague only benefits the administration. So as I said, him doing the same thing would only hurt his book sales.

An incredibly minor infraction of a minor law. By the OMB, not Trump, nor anyone in the White House. I'm just making sure we're in agreement that this violation of the law in no way reflects on Trump, nor should be given any weight with regards to whether he should have been impeached. Right? We agree on that now, right?



So you're saying that a president should only select people to his cabinet and other advisory positions who already agree with him on everything? So... yes men, right?

A good president selects people with a variety of opinions to positions around him, precisely so he will get suggestions and advice that represent as wide a range of ideas as possible. That's what Trump did. I'd assume that if we removed Trump from the equation and just spoke in general about a generic president, you'd agree with that.

Might want to do some internal introspection as to why you're taking this line of reasoning in this case though.



No. It would have added to the ridiculous dog and pony show. Which the administration, obviously, would want to minimize. When you realize that the whole thing is a show trial to allow the opposition party as much air time on national TV as possible to say bad things about your party's president, you kinda have a vested interest in minimizing that. So no, the Trump administration did not want Bolton testifying. Not because they were afraid that he had any testimony that would change the needle in terms of the outcome of the trial, but because it would be one more media displayed dump of garbage to try to make Trump look bad.

As to your second point, that's hard to say. Bolton's dog and pony contribution might have increased books sales, but you're probably right that by not testifying, it gives people the idea that the "secrets he couldn't tell on the stand" might be in the book, which would drive up book sales.

There can be multiple reasons for why someone may do something. This is one of those times.

Edited, Jul 23rd 2020 12:27pm by gbaji

I honestly blame the spell checker on my browser, which still to this day can't seem to figure out that adding "ful" as a suffix should still be a correct spelling. Um... then... brain fart or something as I kept trying to fix the stupid spelling. Sigh...

placing blame is the name of the game.