The Batlord

Eminently true, but that just makes everything worse doesn't it? Worse than the establishment will ever admit?

__________________

jwb

@ Bat

It's unseemly yea but it is sorta complicated to me. Cause it's not always clear if the seemingly ****ed up action is in the country's best interest.

E.g. nuking Japan, for an extreme example

Yet it's abundantly clear that abusing state power to screw over political rivals or using state policy to enrich yourself or your cohorts is a clearly corrupt and self interested endeavor.

jwb

I dunno.. I think he has a shot but I wouldn't bet either way tbh

And I also liked Warren until I realized she's a shape shifting lizard person

That's the ironic truth.. she wasn't lying about being native American. Her ancestors actually settled in Oklahoma a few million years before homosapiens left Africa.

The Batlord

I'd say that preserving short term benefit at the expense of developing human morality is everything that is wrong with human civilization as it usually exists. A species that acts according purely to self-interest might as well be molten rock being acted on by a convection current, seemingly changing but ultimately changing nothing.

If man can not notice its own moral evolution and take heart in that noticeable change then it can have no hope for further change.

__________________

jwb

I think that we've been on a general upward moral trajectory, but it's a rough art

And in the moment self preservation will often seem more pressing

And I feel in the case of that decision, I don't think they really made the wrong choice

Anteater

It's small potatoes in a sense because there's a few things in the way, including a long historical "tradition" of Presidents "negotiating" in ways with a lot of latitude that would give us pause if we were to judge them in today's "faster than realtime" media environment where everyone knows everything that's going on and leaks happen faster than the Millennium Falcon jumping to lightspeed.

In other words, there's a "precedent" to this stuff and it ain't pretty. Also, a few other things to keep in mind-

1. Clinton signed some kind of treaty with Ukraine way back when that gives the POTUS pretty wide ranging powers in regards to mutual investigations of "corruption" (which is pretty vague, but it is law).

2. Republicans screamed bloody murder when Obama told Putin's people he could "be more flexible after the 2012 election" in regards to messing around with sanctions and other things, which was viewed at the time as a more literal quid pro quo and a touchy situation because of Obama's support of arming other European countries with NATO missile systems that could be turned towards Russia. Democrats defended him even when quite a few Republicans called for him to be impeached over the matter. Nothing ended up happening.

__________________
Anteater's 21 Fav Albums Of 2020

Anteater's Daily Tune Roulette

The Batlord

I would say that deciding to drop bombs we don't understand is a morally grey area at best, but we still knew that the bombs would kill a number of people, civilians no less, that should have been horrifying to the point that we should have not dropped them (to say nothing of our world's shared moral failures for having conducted the war in the first place). But even giving allowance for a time and place where the morality would have tipped to dropping them we now should understand that dropping nuclear weapons on a civilian population is unconscionable and the lesson was learned by dropping them.

__________________

jwb

actually the problem isn't with asking for help in a corruption investigation. The problem is sending your personal lawyer who has no business representing the state's interests without being on state payroll, involving your AG in the scheme, selectively going after a direct and clear political rival in the run up to an election, and then trying to cover that up by misusing a classified server and having your incredibly corrupt AG help in trying to bury an investigation which also implicates him directly in addition to the president.

maybe I'm missing something but where's the quid pro quo? What is he asking the Russians for?

Anteater

There was an article from the Independent that came out recently that sums it up better than I can.

The argument I've been seeing about why Trump classified the call and had it all moved onto that special server is because for the first part of the conversation (before Biden was brought up) he and Zelenskiy discussed Angela Merkel and also Macron. There was some back and forth there that wasn't very flattering to either of them. After the call, there was supposedly concern about how Germany and France would react to the knowledge that the U.S. and Ukraine were talking **** about them, so Trump used his executive privilege to deem the conversation classified as a result.

But because of the whistleblower's complaint and the resulting media fiasco, he just decided to release it anyway because he apparently thought the transcript would exonerate him of pressuring the Ukrainian President in some sort of forceful or coercive manner. Obviously that hasn't happened, but he must have felt pretty confident about it or he would have just continued to hide information about the contents of the call.

__________________
Anteater's 21 Fav Albums Of 2020

Anteater's Daily Tune Roulette

jwb

So wait... Asking him to be patient (based on the election cycle) is a more clear quid pro quo than withholding aid and asking him to dig dirt up on your political rival. Are you serious?