GOP2020: What Becomes Of The Collaborators Post-Trump?
basil said:
Exactly, we re-elected a war criminal and then we elected a con man. That should suppress all this nonsense about "american exceptionalism" for a while. In fact I don't hear that term a lot lately.
This whole administration is filled with grifters and con men. And how many Americans died for GWB's useless war?
What's really sad is they're never held responsible. GWB living his life of comfort. Many of Trump's grifters, even the ones he let go, are very comfortable.
To our future leaders the lesson is "you can do whatever you want and no matter what, you will continue living lives of comfort that most Americans could only wish for."
drummerboy said:
Hell, if a man like Trump is not impeached, then exactly what kind of behavior will it take to impeach someone else?
Lying about a blow job. Which Trump would never do. Instead he would boast that he gets the best blow jobs.
BG9 said:
basil said:This whole administration is filled with grifters and con men. And how many Americans died for GWB's useless war?
Exactly, we re-elected a war criminal and then we elected a con man. That should suppress all this nonsense about "american exceptionalism" for a while. In fact I don't hear that term a lot lately.
What's really sad is they're never held responsible. GWB living his life of comfort. Many of Trump's grifters, even the ones he let go, are very comfortable.
To our future leaders the lesson is "you can do whatever you want and no matter what, you will continue living lives of comfort that most Americans could only wish for."
And how many iraqis died because he invaded their country for false reasons? Him and Cheney and Rumsfeld are the definition of war criminals. American exceptionalism all right.
The Trump administration decreed that immigrants working in the cannabis industry can be denied citizenship, even if they are doing so in states where it is legal.
They could switch to prostitution, the industry that surely meets Trump's standard of morality.
basil said:
BG9 said:And how many iraqis died because he invaded their country for false reasons? Him and Cheney and Rumsfeld are the definition of war criminals. American exceptionalism all right.
basil said:This whole administration is filled with grifters and con men. And how many Americans died for GWB's useless war?
Exactly, we re-elected a war criminal and then we elected a con man. That should suppress all this nonsense about "american exceptionalism" for a while. In fact I don't hear that term a lot lately.
What's really sad is they're never held responsible. GWB living his life of comfort. Many of Trump's grifters, even the ones he let go, are very comfortable.
To our future leaders the lesson is "you can do whatever you want and no matter what, you will continue living lives of comfort that most Americans could only wish for."
Agree. Bolton was also in this. Yet, here he is, our current National Security Advisor.
STANV said:
Lock them up!
"No man is above the law and no man is below it: nor do we ask any man's permission when we ask him to obey it."
Now if only that were really true. Individual 1 would be preparing to go to jail. Also the black:white ratio in our prison system would be very different.
“Nor do we ask ... when we ask” makes no sense. Theodore Roosevelt was smarter than that. In his third State of the Union address, he wrote, “Nor do we ask any man’s permission when we require him to obey it.”
LOST said:
Lying about a blow job. Which Trump would never do. Instead he would boast that he gets the best blow jobs.
Or, if we were talking about Putin, gives. When it comes to our man, Vlad the Impaler, I am sure Trump is a very generous lover.
Is there a mechanism for Congress to censure the President without impeaching him?
Klinker said:
Is there a mechanism for Congress to censure the President without impeaching him?
Whether there is or not I'll bet Trump would love to be censured by Pelosi & the Dems. I don't think it would serve any purpose.
Red_Barchetta said:
Klinker said:Whether there is or not I'll bet Trump would love to be censured by Pelosi & the Dems. I don't think it would serve any purpose.
Is there a mechanism for Congress to censure the President without impeaching him?
It would serve the same purpose as impeachment without having to go through a doomed Senate trial.
He's a criminal who should be in a cell without hair products. And the temptation to impeach is strong.
But Pelosi is right. Investigate the hell out of this dark period in American history and force him from office the "old fashioned way" as Mayor Pete says. He needs to be rejected outright and by large numbers in order for justice to prevail.
As I've said earlier, I've been through Watergate, Iran Contra, and Iraq and this is surely the most morally bankrupt we've ever seen the GOP.
Even if the Senate does not convict after an impeachment (which seems highly probable), impeachment would allow for a televised show trial of all the gory evidence of collusion and obstruction that Trump and his cronies have been engaged in, to better educate the public, in preparation for 2020. In addition, It would satisfy the sense of duty that many feel that the crimes in the Mueller report deserve as righteous a legal rebuke as possible at this time, and it might force the Senators to stand on their record of voting against. Third, it would allow more easily for Congress to succeed in an enforceable subpoena to obtain all Mueller documents and data in response to a legal proceeding. A decision to impeach does not have to be made tomorrow, but it is becoming more and more of a meaningful option.
Klinker said:
It would serve the same purpose as impeachment without having to go through a doomed Senate trial.
Klinker said:
Red_Barchetta said:It would serve the same purpose as impeachment without having to go through a doomed Senate trial.
Klinker said:Whether there is or not I'll bet Trump would love to be censured by Pelosi & the Dems. I don't think it would serve any purpose.
Is there a mechanism for Congress to censure the President without impeaching him?
Not the same purpose at all. The debate prior to censuring would be watched only by CSPAN fanatics and would be a one day story, if that. A Senate trial of Trump would be a very, very popular TV show. The trial would last for weeks, probably.
The trial is the whole point of the impeachment.
Jasmo said:
Even if the Senate does not convict after an impeachment (which seems highly probable), impeachment would allow for a televised show trial of all the gory evidence of collusion and obstruction that Trump and his cronies have been engaged in, to better educate the public, in preparation for 2020. In addition, It would satisfy the sense of duty that many feel that the crimes in the Mueller report deserve as righteous a legal rebuke as possible at this time, and it might force the Senators to stand on their record of voting against. Third, it would allow more easily for Congress to succeed in an enforceable subpoena to obtain all Mueller documents and data in response to a legal proceeding. A decision to impeach does not have to be made tomorrow, but it is becoming more and more of a meaningful option.
Klinker said:
It would serve the same purpose as impeachment without having to go through a doomed Senate trial.
I think it could backfire big time, just like the Kavanaugh hearings basically riled up Trumps base and got him confirmed, an impeachment process could get Trump re-elected. Just saying.
I think that's fair, but I also believe that if it's not this, Trump will find something else to rile up his base. It won't be something with the consequences of impeachment.
Jasmo said:
Even if the Senate does not convict after an impeachment (which seems highly probable), impeachment would allow for a televised show trial of all the gory evidence of collusion and obstruction that Trump and his cronies have been engaged in, to better educate the public, in preparation for 2020.
Doesn't having Mueller, Barr, and other key players appearing at high-profile hearings (as I believe is House leadership's current plan) serve much the same purpose with much less political risk?
basil said:
I think it could backfire big time, just like the Kavanaugh hearings basically riled up Trumps base and got him confirmed, an impeachment process could get Trump re-elected. Just saying.
The Kavanaugh confirmation was about a month before the 2018 midterms. Now, if the argument is that the Democrats would have done even better absent that, I don't know.
basil said:
Exactly, we re-elected a war criminal and then we elected a con man. That should suppress all this nonsense about "american exceptionalism" for a while. In fact I don't hear that term a lot lately.
To which alleged war criminal/president were you referring?
Apparently, all US presidents* are war criminals. See attached articles from Glen Ford of BAR and Noam Chomsky.
*- according to Noam Chomsky, all post-war US presidents are war criminals.
PS According to Glen Ford and Noam Chomsky, war criminal is a synonym for US president.
====================================================
https://blackagendareport.com/all-us-presidents-living-and-dead-are-war-criminals
All US Presidents, Living and Dead, are War Criminals
Glen Ford, BAR executive editor
06 Dec 2018
All US Presidents, Living and Dead, are War Criminals
Especially at state funerals, media and politicians pretend that US presidents are honorable men, instead of the mass murderers that all of them become in office.
“The US has caused the deaths of 20 to 30 million people since World War Two, a level of carnage approaching that inflicted on Europe by Hitler.”
The daily whitewashing of imperial crimes that masquerades as “news” on corporate media becomes high ceremony when a Genocider-in-Chief dies. Now it is George Herbert Walker Bush’s turn to be canonized for bringing “'a ‘thousand points of light’ illuminating the greatness, hope, and opportunity of America to the world," in the words of the current CEO of Empire, Donald Trump. Former White House denizens Obama, Clinton and Carter also lauded the life and works of their accomplice in global predation, as did the son-of-a-Bush, George W., the under-achiever who wound up out-doing his daddy in mass murder.
As high priests of American Exceptionalism, corporate news anchors absolve the dead leader of culpability for the mega-deaths inflicted on those countries targeted for invasion, drone strikes, regime change, proxy wars, or crippling economic sanctions under his watch -- an easy task for the media glib-makers, since their colleagues sanitized those crimes while they were in progress, decades ago. But the whitewasher’s job is never done; the bodies keep piling up, “regimes” go “rogue,” meaning they disobey American dictat or otherwise get in the way of the imperial project, or run afoul of vital U.S. allies, as with the unfortunate Yemenis and Palestinians.
“The whitewasher’s job is never done.”
Whatever the human cost, it is “worth it,” as Clinton’s former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright said of the half a million Iraqi children that died as a result of U.S. sanctions and the bombing of Iraqi infrastructure – carnage begun by Daddy Bush and continued by Bill Clinton, and then begun again with Bush Junior’s “Shock and Awe” demonstration of U.S. military might. Obama got hundreds of thousands more Iraqis killed when he armed and trained head-chopping legions of Islamist jihadists to swarm the region in an attempted imperial comeback that has killed half a million Syrians, to date.
Presidential funerals are venues of absolution, mainly for crimes that are unacknowledged.
Most Americans would be shocked – or feign surprise -- if told that their country had caused the deaths of 20 to 30 million people since World War Two, a level of carnage approaching that inflicted on Europe by Hitler. But they do know the U.S. leaves dead bodies in its wake all around the planet -- Americans are not clueless, and that which they don’t know is due as much to deliberate, determined ignorance as it is to the failings of the news media. A nation born in genocide and slavery does not change its nature without undergoing a revolution, and the United States has not experienced such a transformation. At least half the population sees the death of millions of non-whites as “collateral damage” from America’s civilizing mission in the world: it’s “worth it.”
“A nation born in genocide and slavery does not change its nature without undergoing a revolution.”
In such a country, eight million murdered Congolese can be vanished from national consciousness without a trace of guilt. The Rwandans and Ugandans that carried out this holocaust under U.S. protection, with U.S. arms, and in service to U.S. imperial objectives, are also absolved, lest their crimes taint the reputations of Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama, or besmirch the U.S. national character.
The oldest of the living former presidents, Jimmy Carter, has spent decades building houses for the poor to atone for his crimes in the Oval Office. In addition to contributing to the carnage in Angola and backing fascist military regimes that slaughtered or disappeared hundreds of thousands in Latin America, the peanut-farming bible-thumper set in motion the U.S. alliance with al-Qaida. The creation of the first international network of Islamist jihadists, initially to force the Soviets out of Afghanistan, was the brainchild of Carter national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. Tens of thousands of heads have rolled since then, thanks to the honorable and righteous Jimmy Carter.
“Jimmy Carter set in motion the U.S. alliance with al-Qaida.”
Barack Obama is a methodical man who claimed to be completing Dr. Martin Luther King’s work but instead added his own wars to the continuum of the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” Obama told the U.S. Congress that his unprovoked attack on Libya was not a war, at all, because no Americans died, thus establishing a new doctrine and definition of warfare in which only U.S. deaths count. His secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, established new lows in diplomacy when she greeted news of Muammar Gaddafi’s death, cackling, “We came, we saw, he died” – which could be the said of all the tens of millions of deaths at the hands of U.S. presidents.
International law has no place in U.S. foreign policy, or U.S. corporate media broadcasts, or in the U.S. political discourse. Bernie Sanders, the Great Gray Hope of leftish Democrats, prefers not to speak of foreign policy at all, and can thus ignore the millions of corpses left behind as a result of U.S. policy. And he is also considered to be an upright and moral man.
The current occupant of the White House has so far committed less carnage in the world than his peers, although the so-called “Resisters” that seek his ouster from office behave as if Trump is a greater criminal and threat than any of his predecessors. They applaud Trump only when he launches military attacks. Since he loves applause, it is certain that Trump will increase his body count before the election season begins in earnest.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
===================================================
https://chomsky.info/1990____-2/
If the Nuremberg Laws were Applied…
Noam Chomsky
Delivered around 1990
If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged. By violation of the Nuremberg laws I mean the same kind of crimes for which people were hanged in Nuremberg. And Nuremberg means Nuremberg and Tokyo. So first of all you’ve got to think back as to what people were hanged for at Nuremberg and Tokyo. And once you think back, the question doesn’t even require a moment’s waste of time. For example, one general at the Tokyo trials, which were the worst, General Yamashita, was hanged on the grounds that troops in the Philippines, which were technically under his command (though it was so late in the war that he had no contact with them — it was the very end of the war and there were some troops running around the Philippines who he had no contact with), had carried out atrocities, so he was hanged. Well, try that one out and you’ve already wiped out everybody.
But getting closer to the sort of core of the Nuremberg-Tokyo tribunals, in Truman’s case at the Tokyo tribunal, there was one authentic, independent Asian justice, an Indian, who was also the one person in the court who had any background in international law [Radhabinod Pal], and he dissented from the whole judgment, dissented from the whole thing. He wrote a very interesting and important dissent, seven hundred pages — you can find it in the Harvard Law Library, that’s where I found it, maybe somewhere else, and it’s interesting reading. He goes through the trial record and shows, I think pretty convincingly, it was pretty farcical. He ends up by saying something like this: if there is any crime in the Pacific theater that compares with the crimes of the Nazis, for which they’re being hanged at Nuremberg, it was the dropping of the two atom bombs. And he says nothing of that sort can be attributed to the present accused. Well, that’s a plausible argument, I think, if you look at the background. Truman proceeded to organize a major counter-insurgency campaign in Greece which killed off about one hundred and sixty thousand people, sixty thousand refugees, another sixty thousand or so people tortured, political system dismantled, right-wing regime. American corporations came in and took it over. I think that’s a crime under Nuremberg.
Well, what about Eisenhower? You could argue over whether his overthrow of the government of Guatemala was a crime. There was a CIA-backed army, which went in under U.S. threats and bombing and so on to undermine that capitalist democracy. I think that’s a crime. The invasion of Lebanon in 1958, I don’t know, you could argue. A lot of people were killed. The overthrow of the government of Iran is another one — through a CIA-backed coup. But Guatemala suffices for Eisenhower and there’s plenty more.
Kennedy is easy. The invasion of Cuba was outright aggression. Eisenhower planned it, incidentally, so he was involved in a conspiracy to invade another country, which we can add to his score. After the invasion of Cuba, Kennedy launched a huge terrorist campaign against Cuba, which was very serious. No joke. Bombardment of industrial installations with killing of plenty of people, bombing hotels, sinking fishing boats, sabotage. Later, under Nixon, it even went as far as poisoning livestock and so on. Big affair. And then came Vietnam; he invaded Vietnam. He invaded South Vietnam in 1962. He sent the U.S. Air Force to start bombing. Okay. We took care of Kennedy.
Johnson is trivial. The Indochina war alone, forget the invasion of the Dominican Republic, was a major war crime.
Nixon the same. Nixon invaded Cambodia. The Nixon-Kissinger bombing of Cambodia in the early ’70’s was not all that different from the Khmer Rouge atrocities, in scale somewhat less, but not much less. Same was true in Laos. I could go on case after case with them, that’s easy.
Ford was only there for a very short time so he didn’t have time for a lot of crimes, but he managed one major one. He supported the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, which was near genocidal. I mean, it makes Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait look like a tea party. That was supported decisively by the United States, both the diplmatic and the necessary military support came primarily from the United States. This was picked up under Carter.
Carter was the least violent of American presidents but he did things which I think would certainly fall under Nuremberg provisions. As the Indonesian atrocities increased to a level of really near-genocide, the U.S. aid under Carter increased. It reached a peak in 1978 as the atrocities peaked. So we took care of Carter, even forgetting other things.
Reagan. It’s not a question. I mean, the stuff in Central America alone suffices. Support for the Israeli invasion of Lebanon also makes Saddam Hussein look pretty mild in terms of casualties and destruction. That suffices.
Bush. Well, need we talk on? In fact, in the Reagan period there’s even an International Court of Justice decision on what they call the “unlawful use of force” for which Reagan and Bush were condemned. I mean, you could argue about some of these people, but I think you could make a pretty strong case if you look at the Nuremberg decisions, Nuremberg and Tokyo, and you ask what people were condemned for. I think American presidents are well within the range.
Also, bear in mind, people ought to be pretty critical about the Nuremberg principles. I don’t mean to suggest they’re some kind of model of probity or anything. For one thing, they were ex post facto. These were determined to be crimes by the victors after they had won. Now, that already raises questions. In the case of the American presidents, they weren’t ex post facto. Furthermore, you have to ask yourself what was called a “war crime”? How did they decide what was a war crime at Nuremberg and Tokyo? And the answer is pretty simple. and not very pleasant. There was a criterion. Kind of like an operational criterion. If the enemy had done it and couldn’t show that we had done it, then it was a war crime. So like bombing of urban concentrations was not considered a war crime because we had done more of it than the Germans and the Japanese. So that wasn’t a war crime. You want to turn Tokyo into rubble? So much rubble you can’t even drop an atom bomb there because nobody will see anything if you do, which is the real reason they didn’t bomb Tokyo. That’s not a war crime because we did it. Bombing Dresden is not a war crime. We did it. German Admiral Gernetz — when he was brought to trial (he was a submarine commander or something) for sinking merchant vessels or whatever he did — he called as a defense witness American Admiral Nimitz who testified that the U.S. had done pretty much the same thing, so he was off, he didn’t get tried. And in fact if you run through the whole record, it turns out a war crime is any war crime that you can condemn them for but they can’t condemn us for. Well, you know, that raises some questions.
I should say, actually, that this, interestingly, is said pretty openly by the people involved and it’s regarded as a moral position. The chief prosecutor at Nuremberg was Telford Taylor. You know, a decent man. He wrote a book called Nuremberg and Vietnam. And in it he tries to consider whether there are crimes in Vietnam that fall under the Nuremberg principles. Predictably, he says not. But it’s interesting to see how he spells out the Nuremberg principles.
They’re just the way I said. In fact, I’m taking it from him, but he doesn’t regard that as a criticism. He says, well, that’s the way we did it, and should have done it that way. There’s an article on this in The Yale Law Journal [“Review Symposium: War Crimes, the Rule of Force in International Affairs,” The Yale Law Journal, Vol. 80, #7, June 1971] which is reprinted in a book [Chapter 3 of Chomsky’s For Reasons of State (Pantheon, 1973)] if you’re interested.
I think one ought to raise many questions about the Nuremberg tribunal, and especially the Tokyo tribunal. The Tokyo tribunal was in many ways farcical. The people condemned at Tokyo had done things for which plenty of people on the other side could be condemned. Furthermore, just as in the case of Saddam Hussein, many of their worst atrocities the U.S. didn’t care about. Like some of the worst atrocities of the Japanese were in the late ’30s, but the U.S. didn’t especially care about that. What the U.S. cared about was that Japan was moving to close off the China market. That was no good. But not the slaughter of a couple of hundred thousand people or whatever they did in Nanking. That’s not a big deal.
There’s a Bigger Prize Than Impeachment
Keeping Trump in office will destroy the Republican Party.
By Joe Lockhart
Mr. Lockhart served as White House press secretary from 1998 to 2000.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/22/opinion/theres-a-bigger-prize-than-impeachment.html
drummerboy said:
Not the same purpose at all. The debate prior to censuring would be watched only by CSPAN fanatics and would be a one day story, if that. A Senate trial of Trump would be a very, very popular TV show. The trial would last for weeks, probably.
The trial is the whole point of the impeachment.
Mitch McConnell would find a way to avoid it, if at all possible.
Is insanity a defense at an impeachment trial? It occurs to me that it is Pence who should be impeached for failure to invoke the 25th Amendment. That is certainly a crime.
STANV said:
drummerboy said:Mitch McConnell would find a way to avoid it, if at all possible.
Not the same purpose at all. The debate prior to censuring would be watched only by CSPAN fanatics and would be a one day story, if that. A Senate trial of Trump would be a very, very popular TV show. The trial would last for weeks, probably.
The trial is the whole point of the impeachment.
Is insanity a defense at an impeachment trial? It occurs to me that it is Pence who should be impeached for failure to invoke the 25th Amendment. That is certainly a crime.
Pence and God are very happy with the current situation:
Meanwhile, Mike Pence called Flake, whom he knew from the House, and told him that “God brought us to D.C. for such a time as this….You have a moment to make history,” he said. “Trust my friendship.”
Jake Sherman & Anna Palmer. The Hill to Die On.
GL2 said:
There’s a Bigger Prize Than Impeachment
Keeping Trump in office will destroy the Republican Party.
By Joe Lockhart
Mr. Lockhart served as White House press secretary from 1998 to 2000.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/22/opinion/theres-a-bigger-prize-than-impeachment.html
I agree 1,000%
I just saw an excerpt from this article on Morning Joe and thought it might be worth considering. It was written by a member of the transition team, J. W. Verret
I'm still in the camp that is calling for impeachment and I'm usually a pragmatist who would consider how this would play politically but as I'm watching the tension build as Trump pushes back against congress, on everything from his taxes to his aides testifying it seems that we have to do something to formalize the complaints. I've heard the argument that impeachment charges only helped Clinton but I see no comparison. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/gop-staffer-advocates-trumps-impeachment/587785/
basil said:
GL2 said:I agree 1,000%
There’s a Bigger Prize Than Impeachment
Keeping Trump in office will destroy the Republican Party.
By Joe Lockhart
Mr. Lockhart served as White House press secretary from 1998 to 2000.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/22/opinion/theres-a-bigger-prize-than-impeachment.html
That's too bad because it's one of the more crappy pieces of political analysis ever written. It's filled with idiocy.
If Trump blocks the committee investigations, impeachment proceedings may be the only way remaining:
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Exactly, we re-elected a war criminal and then we elected a con man. That should suppress all this nonsense about "american exceptionalism" for a while. In fact I don't hear that term a lot lately.