Russia

[Phoebe]

Well, I've reached the point where I just don't want to read the newspaper anymore. I mean, what comes of this? A terrible thing happened, it's not like there weren't journalists screaming to the mountaintops that this was happening before the election, and nobody who can do anything much about it seems to care, and the Republican Congress isn't going to do anything about it, and Trump isn't going to do anything about it (pardon me, he's going to do the opposite: he's going to scour the country for any friend of Russia to install in our government), and here I sit praying that Reagan's ghost and the living, breathing George H.W. Bush do something to bring these people back to reality. Fucking with our democracy should be The End Mistake for any foreign state who tries it, period. We have essentially handed an invitation to the Chinese and Israelis and whoever to do this next, because nothing will come of it. All I can say is that I still have a shred of faith that Obama is not the kind of person to fuck around, and his calm demeanor on the outside is masking the rollout of Stuxnet2.0x1000 on the inside. It makes me want to quit my job and spend three years studying computer security, kind of like people used to be fired up to shoot Nazis. I am fired up to destroy every computer on the north Asian continent until this shit is ended.

Also: do you not find it interesting that after 8 years of the Republicans saying that Obama was giving aid and comfort to America's enemies and was a secret Muslim and etc etc, we now literally will have a Republican President doing these things with Russia? It was like a real life world-ending game of Boy who Cried Wolf.

[akiva]

Keep in mind that these are the same Republicans who created and supported individual mandates to buy health insurance, until Obamacare proposed it and it became a destroyer of liberty. And the same Republicans who refused Obama's stimulus package but seem likely to pass a Trump's. And the same Republicans who screamed that Obama was destroying the economy with his deficits, but are now likely to explode the deficit. All they care about is winning and destroying the opposition. They don't care about policies or compromise.

[Tahlvin]

To be fair, the Democrats are no better. The same Dems who mocked Mitt Romney for saying during the debates that Russia was the top international threat are now screaming for Russian blood.

[Phoebe]

Hey, I was one of them, even if not a D per se! I thought it was silly at the time, and I'm more than happy to say he was right and I was wrong. Would that he were deciding things right now! I doubt Romney would refuse either to receive or believe his intelligence briefings. The current problem absolutely transcends partisanship.

[bralbovsky]

The operative question here is not whether Putin knew. That's a dumb question. The question is when Trump knew, because clearly he knows now. A guy who didn't know but cared about 'legitimacy' would be encouraging, not obstructing an investigation. And if it comes to light that he knew before the election, that's even worse than an electoral college revolt. What crimes does one charge him with, and who ends up as president in the interim?

[Cazmonster]

See, the real shit-kicker would be an Electoral College revolt where nobody gets enough votes and Obama stepping in and saying "enough bullshit. I am going to remain President to get us another damned election. And if Trump was in cahoots with Putin before the election, you all need to find another candidate cause he's spending the rest of his life in jail as a traitor along with his fucking Stepford family."

Seeing Trump and his sons in cuffs and jumpsuits would give me great joy.

[Tahlvin]

[Mike]

20+ minutes. Worth it.

[Phoebe]

There is a journalist named Franklin Foer who uncovered lots of these connections last summer and was absolutely slammed for it. He was like our Cassandra. Putin has been giving millions in financial support to Marine Le Pen too, and look what's happening in France. By aligning himself with the nationalist right, and pushing leaders who are financially beholden to him, he has been able to destabilize and fragment one of his biggest threats: a unified West with NATO, EU, US. My grandfather, the Army & Eisenhower guy, is rolling in his grave.

[Cazmonster]

[Mike]

Jeff Sessions lied to the Senate. The GOP is starting to call for a special prosecutor and a full investigation of his connections to Russia. This is good.

If there is an actual investigation of Jeff Sessions, it opens the door for investigation of the entire Russia connection. This is good.

I'm trying to figure out how the administration is going to head this off. I suspect that Sessions is sacrificed. He cops to some version of him acting independently, having poor judgment, guilty of... whatever. In order to save the taxpayers the expense of a pointless investigation he and a couple other lesser actors get the equivalent of a plea deal, where they admit that it was all them, and no one else in the campaign knew or coordinated, and certainly not Trump himself. Sessions and the other scapegoats are fired, and we have a story that allows the Republicans to call it a settled matter without further investigation. We all know they're lying, but they control the House and Senate and White House for now, so what can we do?

[Phoebe]

As long as Pence comes out unscathed, they can get what they want either way. But it's tricky! How can they prove all they need to overcome their own fervently pro-Trump base long before midterm elections? Trump wants a few things that are wayyy better than what Paul Ryan or some of the other characters in Congress want.

[FlameBlade]

Manafort.
Page.
Flynn.
Sessions.

What do they have in common?

[Cazmonster]

I hope this is enough to get the Democrats to fight. Give them nothing until these investigations bear fruit and Trump is left with an empty cabinet.

[salvation122]

[salvation122]

[Stan]

[Cazmonster]

This is why kings are bad. I can only hope that somebody can do something.

Of course, after the tsars, how long was it before a Russian tyrant was violently overthrown?

[bralbovsky]

Not speculative.

Eventually this will explode. The question is how much on fire everything will be afterward. Then the question will be can someone sensible make repairs.

[Bonefish]