I that’s giving Gaetz WAY WAY WAY too much credit. He’s a dingdong looking for headlines.
1 Like
Particularly betraying them to a country that is literally an ally. It’s obviously a decision that the president has the authority to make and not an abuse of office. Now maybe it’s the wrong decision or a bad decision or an immoral decision. But the president making a foreign policy decision that you disagree with isn’t impeachable. The Constitutional remedy to Trump abandoning the Kurds isn’t impeachment, it’s the Congress declaring war on Turkey on behalf of our Kurdish allies. Which gets tricky as that would trigger our Article 5 obligation to Turkey.
My idea is to stick it to the Turks by having Dems openly support Kurdish independence, turning Middle Eastern politics into more of a mess that Trump will find a way to screw up.
What are the odds that the current situation radicalizes some Kurds into wanting to take revenge on the US through terroristic actions?
Who knows. Probably a more likely target is Turkey, more accessible and more responsible. But it seems like the Kurds were always going to eventually get abandoned here. The US is never going to back the Kurds in any serious way against Turkey no matter who the president is.
I’d like to see Democrats asked at the next presidential debate if independence is the only way for the Kurds to be able to protect themselves.
1 Like
https://twitter.com/NatashaBertrand/status/1183789521751724032
https://twitter.com/NatashaBertrand/status/1183790686178627587
I’m so glad I quit Facebook. Zucks can go ahead and fuck off.
I’m so glad younger people hate Facebook and don’t use it.
5 Likes
No but they’re using Instagram which is still in Zuck’s fiefdom
1 Like
Today’s daily STOP USING FACEBOOK, INSTAGRAM, WHATSAPP reminder.
3 Likes
We’re sanctioning Turkey for attacking Kurds while demanding Turkey attack faster so they’ll take over the ISIS prisons our troops abandoned & also Kurds should let Assad in and we will bomb Assad if he enters Kurdish territory to protect our not-there troops who are still there.
1 Like
Impeachment is a political process. It’s impeachable if the United States House of Representatives says it’s impeachable. I think it is. I think it’s pretty easy to draft an Article of Impeachment that says he’s being impeached for betraying our own national security interests and risking the safety of our troops by allowing so many ISIS prisoners to predictably escape.
Then when the Senate fails to convict, you hang it around the GOP’s head that they voted in support of releasing ISIS prisoners. Let them try to make the argument about how it wasn’t impeachable even though they oppose it, then just hit them with it again, “I don’t know about all that, but it was pretty clear that you voted in support of Trump releasing ISIS prisoners.”
This seems like a huge deal. It’s a win for Russia, that’s for sure.
I think that impeachment ought to be limited to serious crimes and abuses of office. Otherwise you’ll get people crying impeachment every time a president makes an unpopular decision. A bad policy decision that the president is empowered to make shouldn’t be impeachable. The congress can pass a law trying to mitigate or overrule that decision or the people can vote the president out if they disagree with the decision strongly enough.
1 Like
There’s still a pretty good chance this turns out to be linked to a serious crime or abuse of office, but regardless it’s a serious crime against humanity. And I guarantee you that the GOP will be crying impeachment when the next Dem POTUS tries to do something on healthcare, gun control, income inequality, etc… There’s no point in trying to prevent it by handcuffing ourselves. Impeachment is a political process, and should be treated accordingly when warranted, with the expectation that the GOP will abuse it if given the chance.
There are bad policy decisions and then there are abject disasters like this that are totally inexplicable.
Yeah hand wringing over norms is dumb at this point. It’s dumb because the norms are dead and we’re in a full blown political war with the GOP. To be clear the norms are dead because they killed them very loudly and very publicly… and we should pull out all the stops and embrace the wartime footing.
We have no business using any rulebook but the actual laws (and even there we should be transgressing when we think it would be popular and we could get away with it) until we’ve completely stomped out the modern GOP. Then the moderate Democrats can break away and form a new second party that takes up most of the former GOP voters except for the true deplorables who will be effectively disenfranchised because their numbers have dwindled through age down to nothing.
After that’s over we can establish new norms and go back to normal. But there’s nothing normal about our enemies here. We’re definitely at the ‘it’s time to start bombing civilian areas because there are factories that make bullets there’ stage of the political war. We really need to stop fighting them with one hand tied behind our backs because the norms say you just don’t do some stuff. It all needs to be on the table. Packing the Supreme Court, Gerrymandering, Voter Suppression, Constitutional Amendments, and any other dirty trick we can think of up to and including calling people pedophiles in FB ads. It’s long past time for Sherman to march to the sea here.
We should be making people register to vote in some way that will disenfranchise a lot of old people… and we should be forcing PR and DC in as states any way we can.
6 Likes
I’ve noticed that when people quote posts with tweets the avatar of the quoted tweet defaults to 400x400. Can that be fixed? One way to do it to manually edit the “400 x 400” to like “80 x 80”.
Yeah, while I agree that the GOP will do it, it will be harder to dismiss it as rank partisan grandstanding when they can point to the Dems doing the same thing over issues the President is empowered to act on. If they’re able to turn up evidence that he ordered the withdrawal because of some corruption, that’s a different issue.
We joke about it, but they didn’t actually try to impeach Obama over policy issues. If the Dems start down that road, we’ll see just how much better the GOP is at this sort of crap. I’m all for GTO tit-for-tat, but the Dems would not get away with this–it would not be popular to impeach over and it would cheapen the actual impeachable offenses they’re pursuing.
1 Like