OccultHawk

The house impeaching him is basically just calling him a bad boy if I understand it correctly.

Is it more than just a chastisement?

jwb

well that's just a matter of what is impeachable and what isn't. Nixon did way worse **** than Watergate.

jwb

it's likely not going to pan out as removing him from office by impeachment because of the Republican lead Senate. But it could serve for a good bit of political cannon fodder heading into an election.

So yes it's more than just the chastisement they could do without an impeachment inquiry. It will presumably make it harder for the white House to stone wall to the same extent.

Like ant mentioned why not go after his tax returns... They have been, in rhetoric. Trump just stone walls. They will never socially pressure him into divulging anything he doesn't have to. They have to turn up the actual legal pressure.

The Batlord

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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