https://www.washingtonpost.com/graph...=.4d81d19c2775

Game recognizes game.

Am I capturing this correctly?:

Critics of hysteria over Russia should be hideously embarrassed because with the time and attention paid to it, we have:

1. passed some ultimately toothless sanctions that won't stop Putin that much but
2. also guaranteed free and fair elections by stopping Trump's worst impulses

Which part did I get wrong here? Seems like this argument is counting a whole heckuva lot on the assumptions underlying #2. Which was basically like all of the responses you've gotten so far -- that this probably isn't going to constrain the Trump/GOP/Russia nexus which seeks to disenfranchise and rile up angry old racists.

In the end, this seems like some awfully preemptive back patting for something that by your own admission doesn't actually effect much but which you hope portends some sort symbolic victory that keeps Trump on the straight and narrow.

Needless to say I remain skeptical that these sanctions protect the sanctity of our elections and Trump still seems pretty gung ho about fellating Trump so in conclusion, your argument is bad.

I wasn't trying to imply that our elections were safe from future interference or that Trump had lost interesting in eroding free and fair elections. The voter fraud commission is gravely concerning. And there was an OpEd in the NYT this morning about how our voting processes would be much more secure if they were run on an open source platform rather than a Microsoft platform.

Just started reading. Trying to persuade him of his sway with Mexicans by bragging about winning 84% of the Cuban vote is pretty tight.

He signed it only because it had a veto-proof majority. Im not sure it would have played out any differently without Russiaghazi.

Then why do you keep posting here you lying sack of ****?

No. You are not capturing my point correctly. Whatever you or I would have done about Russian interference isn't really relevant to the question of whether the media and Democratic focus on Russia has had the salutary effect of pushing Trump in the direction of a more orthodox posture towards Russia. And I never, ever said that we have prospectively guaranteed free and fair elections by stopping Trump's worst impulses. But thwarting his worst impulses is always worth doing, even if he retains the ability to create havoc and erode norms in the future.

I'm not sure why any of this strikes you as controversial.

Collectively, Democrats, left activists, our allied media, etc. have a limited amount of time, energy, resources, page space, etc. to communicate with the public. Time spent achieving symbolic victories to ensure Trump maintains a more orthodox statutory posture towards Russia is a highly questionable investment of time, money, resources, etc.

More generally, thwarting Trump is of course a great thing but it is not the only thing. Therefore it may not always be worth doing (I will leave it open ended for now whether we are headed for say impeachment or whether Trump is now truly stymied by Russia alone, and therefore this is part of a larger strategy or whatever; that's plausible enough). The left has a habit of organizing against monsters rather than against the conditions that created them. It is not an enduring truth that our politics be personal and reactive and solely bent toward obstructionism. It could be far more focused on movement building, our ideals, and how we seek to achieve power ourselves to put our ideals into action.

Your ideas remain highly controversial and trending to bad, indicative of how you end up with Trump and the current political climate.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/...83735633129472

Almost time for vacay!

An NSC Staffer Is Forced Out Over a Controversial Memo
The document charges that globalists, Islamists, and other forces within and outside the government are subverting President Trump’s agenda

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics...l-memo/535725/

The amount of incoherent stupidity in that memo is breathtaking, and also fairly representative of Trump supporters and hires.

This Nieto/Turnbull leak seems like the worst one yet. Wow at those quotes--just hideous.

I suspect that wherever we are now with Russia is more than a symbolic improvement over the "but for" world where the media and Democrats capitulated to poconoder's nothing-burger view of Russian interference.

Yeah the donkey is holding the nuts. Easiest fist pump snap call in history.

"They were from wherever they were." JFC.

FLASHBACK:

They were told.



https://twitter.com/woodruffbets/sta...13379245010944

No comment from white house so far. Will be interesting to see how they play this. A lot of it is awful of course, but a lot of it makes Trump out to be a cowering pussy so the "I did, it so what" defense doesn't really work here. Would be pretty ballsy to go the fake news route.

With Trump on vacation, he'll have time to catch up on his tv watching and tweetin'. I wonder if Kelly will be around to keep control of people getting access. More than two weeks of free-ranging Trump could be a wild ride.

I haven't seen anything in them that will hurt him. If anything they'll help his popularity imo.

But he's a horrible piece of **** obviously

There is porn on internet? Could people pm me links? I depend on Oui magazine once a month, just like my father and his father and his father all the way back to when I had an ancestor bestowed Oui pamphlet as France assisted us versus the British. Can this porn be gotten through my iOS magazine app or a service like Texture?

No, he should have said, "Stephen, we're not talking about me here, we're talking about the administration you're working in and its policies."

This.

It will trigger Ann Coulter types who are semi-literate, will see this article, understand well enough it's not a fabrication, and have it reinforced for them that Trump was entirely full of **** about the wall.

This is an older tweet ldo but indicative of her tone lately:



I suspect she's in a very small minority among deplorables who actually want to see a brick and mortar wall, as mostly simply saw the wall rhetoric as symbolic of Trump being a fellow-traveler ******* rather than as a formal promise he actually had to keep.

But still, it's perhaps emblematic of how he's going to have a hard time keeping the entirety of Deplorable America satisfied since he's just lying and bull****ting as a rule and eventually the political gravity of that will catch up with you.