Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy

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Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy

Post by blindpig » Sat Aug 24, 2019 7:58 pm

kidoftheblackhole wrote:
Sat Aug 24, 2019 3:35 pm
blindpig wrote:
Sat Aug 24, 2019 10:59 am
kidoftheblackhole wrote:
Sat Aug 24, 2019 1:50 am


His peers have no more idea what to do than their Moron-in-Chief does. They don't necessarily want Trump (at least not the persona) but..the old axis of power is crumbling. In Trump they/we see the outline of a new one. Trump himself will pass like some bad gas after Taco Night.
Dunno, this tariff business is putting the squeeze on some cash flow....but for sure, Trump is an example to all hustlers and will be emulated.
If there was a consensus or coherent position on China that was deemed viable, this wouldn't be happening. To the extent that there has been a position, it isn't working and they are in the lurch. You can pretty much bank on the most reactionary element(s) filling that void.
China's secret weapon: American capitalists.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy

Post by blindpig » Fri Aug 30, 2019 1:31 pm

This is worth it just for the "translation".
SANCTIONED PLANET
Roberto Hernández Montoya

June 17, 2019 , 5:00 a.m. .

Image
Since 2015 with the "Obama Decree", Venezuela has suffered the onslaught of the financial blockade (Photo: Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)

Exiled on the Turkish island of Prinkipo, Leon Trotsky requested visas that no one granted him. There he wrote The planet without a visa . Trump will end up writing something like that because there is no corner of the planet with which he has not irritated, except those who drag him away, Pedro Sánchez, Fulanito Macron ... This, on the 75th anniversary of D-Day, not only was he pulling but it was icing on and I swung him. Until one day he doesn't crawl according to his whim.

He has now craved even his allies, actually pedestals, sometimes not even that and then I don't know what they are. They hit the anger when they break the script that they swarm or when they feel like the Emperor of the Central Galaxy, like Magnón, that friend of Mandrake the Magician.

WILL TRUMP END UP SANCTIONING THE UNITED STATES?

He does not aspire unless His Gracious Majesty Donald John Trump, who, as you may have noticed, looks at everything with contempt, as he looked at Macron. You put the Koh-i-Noor ahead of you, the diamond of the billion euros, jewel of the British Crown, and he will look at it with disdain, asking how much that is in dollars in case he gives Melanija Knavs the stitch to enjoy more, immigrant with whom the grandson of immigrants married. This will be an excellent way for Trump to tolerate him looking at him with distaste in his presence and in public. Because the thing goes from arrogance to pride, the king of the Seven Deadly Sins because others emanate from him.

It also bewitches, as you can see with the opposition leadership, whose arrogance is only comparable to their mental insufficiency. Inhuman history is full of pride, which I don't even try to list because I don't have time to waste time. In addition, just open any random history book so that cases are rolled on the floor.

But the most pathetic is the superb proxy, such as the opposition that is superb by Trump's delegation or whoever is in the Air Force One. They get the stone spoken in French — I don't recommend it because they go into hysteria, so If you speak French, tais-toi , "shut up."

The world map is running out and he no longer finds who to sanction. Will it end up sanctioning the United States? I didn't miss you because that's the pride: delirious, infinite. I hope nothing happens, because pride is dangerous if you don't know how to drive. And nobody knows.
http://misionverdad.com/opini%C3%B3n/planeta-sancionado

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Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy

Post by blindpig » Mon Sep 16, 2019 12:49 pm

Honest to fuckin gawd I dunno what's to be done with these people, impotence is their comfort zone. From twitter:
CIA controls Trump. They don't push his buttons. He's a puppet, just as Obama was & every president since JFK's assassination.

no everything he’s doing is calculated ruling class strategy, goal as always is to reduce real wages everywhere as much as possible, maximize surplus value extraction, prepare path for global slave society

Trump's now a puppet. He ran as a populist, similar to Bernie, but isn't as president. Bernie would've easily become president, but he had an agreement that Hillary was the chosen nominee. Hillary was supposed to win, but they didn't rig enough to overcome Trump's landslide.
One of these posters is someone I've long considered a stealth wrecker like Mike B, the other I consider a disgruntled Bernie bot fishing for partisan Dem advantage.
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Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy

Post by blindpig » Tue Oct 08, 2019 1:28 pm

TELEPHONEGATE AND ITS DISCONTENTS
Posted by MLToday | Oct 7, 2019 | Featured Stories

Image

TelephoneGate and Its Discontents
BY GREG GODELS
SEPTEMBER 30, 2019

Only a person who embraces her or his historical short-sightedness could be aghast at Trump’s self-serving phone call to the president of Ukraine. Actually, it is not the people in the US who are shocked and appalled by Trump’s heavy-handed, supposedly “unprecedented” attempt to undermine a political rival; it is the cable TV chatterboxes, the Democratic Party hitmen, and their addicted acolytes who self-righteously recoil from Trump’s brazen, ham-fisted corruption.
How soon they forget Nixon’s sabotage of the Vietnam peace talks in order to hurt his Presidential rival, Hubert Humphrey. Or Reagan’s deal with the Iranians to hold the hostages and deny James Carter in the 1980 election.
Even more recently, our news media shrugged its collective shoulders at the audacious and successful effort of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign to derail Bernie Sanders’ 2016 primary run. And, of course, the Fusion GPS “research” organization contracted by the Clinton team and targeting Trump drew not only foreign operatives into the effort, but the corrupted leadership of the intelligence agencies.
Trump brought his customary vulgar directness and child-like simplicity to the phone conversation (“…very bad people…). Lacking any finesse, he directly asks President Zelensky to investigate the role of Biden and his son in Ukrainian affairs, offering the sleazy Rudolph Giuliani as an enabler. For his part, Zelensky shows himself to be the fawning puppet of the US: “We are trying to work hard because we wanted to drain the swamp here in our country…You are a great teacher for us.…”
Sharing the spirit of political retribution with Trump, Zelensky asks “the great teacher” to punish the US Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovich: “Her attitude towards me was far from the best as she admired the former president and she was on his side.” Tit for tat! Biden for Yovanovich!
And don’t forget we need more sanctions and Javelin missiles to combat the evil Russians!
It’s more than curious that the purveyors of fast-food news do not identify Zelensky as an Eastern European Trump wannabe. Their dishonest portrayal of Ukraine as a bastion of democracy will not permit them to read the phone-call transcript as revelatory of the legacy of corruption and US intervention in Ukrainian affairs. Zelensky, like his predecessor, owes his position to a US-engineered coup that brought Ukraine firmly into the US sphere of influence. As adamantly as the media wants to portray Zelensky as “Mr. Smith Goes to Kiev,” the transcript suggests a different interpretation.
Lost in the impeachment flurry is the unsightly, corrupt role of presidential aspirant, Joe Biden. Biden has postured as a modest friend of the working man and woman, a commoner drawn to public service. In fact, Biden is a corporate Democrat through and through, with a nasty history of opposing affirmative action and supporting the militarization of the police and the growth of the incarceration industry. His foreign policy views are taken from the chicken hawks and the generals.
Along with Victoria Nuland, Biden was the leading figure in conducting US intervention in Ukrainian affairs during the Obama administration. His fingerprints are on the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014.
And then a curious thing happened. Two months later, Hunter Biden– Joe’s ne’er-do-well son– was appointed to the board of directors of Ukraine’s largest energy company, Burisma Holdings, at a reported $50,000 per month. The head of Burisma had apparently been impressed with Hunter Biden’s deep experience in business, especially the oil and gas business.
But Hunter had no experience in business, any business. He was fresh from expulsion for cocaine use from a very brief and privileged entry into the Naval Reserve, hardly a sterling qualification for a big-time job on the Burisma board.
Could it have been that Mykola Zlochevsky, the founder of Burisma, saw Biden as a free pass for his being on the wrong side of US-written history? Was Hunter Biden’s appointment a down payment on forgiveness for Zlochevsky’s support of the deposed Yanukovych, given Vice President Joe Biden’s key role in shaping US policy toward its client state?
Certainly those possibilities never occurred to our then apparently somnambulant media. No one saw a hint of impropriety, a scent of influence peddling, or the stench of corruption in the halcyon days of 2014.
With one exception: James Risen, writing in The Intercept, claims that he, in fact, anticipated the dust-up about Joe and Hunter way back in 2015 when Risen was a writer for the august New York Times. Risen assures us, however, that Joe Biden’s intervention in Ukraine affairs had nothing but the most noble motives, an assertion that proves that some NYT writers actually found the paper’s editorial line to be credible.
Astonishing: Risen and others can actually defend Biden’s role in Ukraine without acknowledging that he and other US officials were actively and effectively interfering in the internal affairs of a sovereign country, a despicable sin that has singularly, but one-dimensionally occupied the US media obsessively for the last two years. Interference is only interference when it is alleged against the US or by a self-perceived foe of the US. That’s the kind of twisted logic employed by a government intoxicated with its own sense of moral infallibility and sold by a compliant media.
“Still,” Risen assures us, “when Joe Biden went to Ukraine, he was not trying to protect his son — quite the reverse.” Why would anyone think differently? Tell that to the insightful David Rovics: A Biden Ballad.
Would it come as a surprise if the “whistleblower” in this sordid affair turned out to be– not a disgruntled intelligence officer afraid of retribution– but the highest echelon of the intelligence apparatus bent on keeping Zelensky securely under its thumb and on board with its anti-Russia program?
Whistleblower protection was supposedly meant to protect the employees, not the employers! It is undoubtedly abused in this case.
An examination of the nine-page “whistleblower” letter and appendix directed to the Senate and the House intelligence committee chairpersons reveals a remarkable access to numerous high-level “officials,” a wealth of intelligence information, and impressive analytical and research resources. The brief would constitute a difficult, herculean task for any low- or mid-level intelligence officer following the lead of hearsay or water-cooler gossip. Likely, the secret service leadership has contrived a composite “whistleblower” to exploit the anonymity guaranteed by existing legislation.
Unlike the Watergate “deep throat” leaker whose identity obsessed the media for decades, news people have a puzzling lack of interest in uncovering the anonymous “whistleblower.” Maybe they know there really isn’t one?
The “whistleblower” document is a point-by-point response to any counter-narrative that some, including many skeptics on the left, might construct to the bi-partisan, “color” revolution, regime-change program of US imperialism. It is, in essence, an expression of US unilateralism and the US’s attempts to isolate its rivals. Trump is the target of the exercise only because his own narrowly focused, personal objectives clash with the ruling class’s perception of its own interests and the calculated mythology of US moral authority; his MAGA vision is at odds with the global vision embraced by most of the ruling class establishment.
For the “news”/entertainment industry, an impeachment process is Christmas come early. The corporate moguls well know the jacked-up ratings that have followed past presidential impeachment hearings and the high drama of political maneuvers that ensue. They have stoked the fires of outrage to pressure a Democratic Party leadership reluctant to follow the impeachment path.
Like RussiaGate, TelephoneGate is a two-edged sword aimed at the populace. On one edge, it attempts to conjure Trump criminality without suggesting that his behavior represents the general lawlessness of the capitalist class. And on the other edge, it promises to distract US voters from the real crisis facing most citizens. With impeachment unfolding over the next year, TelephoneGate will accomplish that task.
Even a cursory examination behind the media curtain demonstrates that the sordid affair tarnishes all who have participated: Trump, his team, Biden and his DNC promoters, Biden, the younger, the intelligence establishment, the political cabal, the monopoly media, and the rest of that for which the disingenuous Trump and his junior partner Zelensky use the nonetheless useful term, “the swamp.” For well over a decade, confidence in the swamp and the institutions populated by the swamp rats has sunk in every opinion poll.
Over the next months, we will be asked to pick sides in a contest with charlatans and scoundrels dominating both sides. There will be no winners beyond the charlatans and the scoundrels.
If, paraphrasing the oft-quoted Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire, the Nixon impeachment was a tragedy and the Clinton impeachment was a farce, what is the Trump impeachment?

https://mltoday.com/telephonegate-and-its-discontents/

Bolded for hitting nail on head.

Seems to me that the Dem's crusade against Trump only gains traction when it coincides with imperialist's interests.

I have great dislike for the term "deep state", it is melodramatic x10. Nonetheless there is a continuity of policy effected by career personnel which seems to exist in every human social organization and it is probably necessary. It is only when imperialist's foreign policy objectives coincide with the Dem attack that the attack gains ground. Their piling on Trump for his latest foray into military deployment shows they know which side the bread is buttered on.
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Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy

Post by blindpig » Tue Oct 15, 2019 1:04 pm

Imperial hatchetman John Bolton throws Trump personal fixer Giuliani under the bus. The plot thickens...
John Bolton instructed ex-Trump aide to notify White House lawyers about Ukraine efforts
Fiona Hill, President Donald Trump's former top Russia adviser, testified to House investigators on Monday that the former national security adviser told her to alert the chief lawyer for the National Security Council about Rudy Giuliani's role in US foreign policy toward Ukraine, NY Times first reported.

****************

Breaking via NYT: John Bolton instructed Fiona Hill to notify the chief lawyer for the National Security Council that Rudy Giuliani was working with Mick Mulvaney on a rogue operation with legal implications, Hill told the investigators.
Image

***********************

Breaking: Bolton instructed aide to report Giuliani pressure campaign to White House lawyer. “I am not part of whatever drug deal Rudy and Mulvaney are cooking up,” Bolton said, according to testimony to House investigators.
@npfandos
The moral of this story is that you can be six kinds of an asshole & crook but when your politics transgresses the imperial project that crosses the line.
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Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy

Post by blindpig » Wed Oct 16, 2019 5:06 pm

Never-Before-Seen Trump Tax Documents Show Major Inconsistencies

The president’s businesses made themselves appear more profitable to lenders and less profitable to tax officials. One expert calls the differing numbers “versions of fraud.”
by Heather Vogell Oct. 16, 4 a.m. EDT

Documents obtained by ProPublica show stark differences in how Donald Trump’s businesses reported some expenses, profits and occupancy figures for two Manhattan buildings, giving a lender different figures than they provided to New York City tax authorities. The discrepancies made the buildings appear more profitable to the lender — and less profitable to the officials who set the buildings’ property tax.

For instance, Trump told the lender that he took in twice as much rent from one building as he reported to tax authorities during the same year, 2017. He also gave conflicting occupancy figures for one of his signature skyscrapers, located at 40 Wall Street.

Lenders like to see a rising occupancy level as a sign of what they call “leasing momentum.” Sure enough, the company told a lender that 40 Wall Street had been 58.9% leased on Dec. 31, 2012, and then rose to 95% a few years later. The company told tax officials the building was 81% rented as of Jan. 5, 2013.

A dozen real estate professionals told ProPublica they saw no clear explanation for multiple inconsistencies in the documents. The discrepancies are “versions of fraud,” said Nancy Wallace, a professor of finance and real estate at the Haas School of Business at the University of California-Berkeley. “This kind of stuff is not OK.”

New York City’s property tax forms state that the person signing them “affirms the truth of the statements made” and that “false filings are subject to all applicable civil and criminal penalties.”

The punishments for lying to tax officials, or to lenders, can be significant, ranging from fines to criminal fraud charges. Two former Trump associates, Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort, are serving prison time for offenses that include falsifying tax and bank records, some of them related to real estate.


“Certainly, if I were sitting in a prosecutor’s office, I would want to ask a lot more questions,” said Anne Milgram, a former attorney general for New Jersey who is now a professor at New York University School of Law.

Trump has previously been accused of manipulating numbers on his tax and loan documents, including by his former lawyer, Cohen. But Trump’s business is notoriously opaque, with records rarely surfacing, and up till now there’s been little documentary evidence supporting those claims.

That’s one reason that multiple governmental entities, including two congressional committees and the office of the Manhattan district attorney, have subpoenaed Donald Trump’s tax returns. Trump has resisted, taking his battles to federal courts in Washington and New York. And so the question of whether different parts of the government can see the president’s financial information is now playing out in two appeals courts and seems destined to make it to the U.S. Supreme Court. Add to that a Washington Post account of an IRS whistleblower claiming political interference in the handling of the president’s audit, and the result is what amounts to frenetic interest in one person’s tax returns.

ProPublica obtained the property tax documents using New York’s Freedom of Information Law. The documents were public because Trump appealed his property tax bill for the buildings every year for nine years in a row, the extent of the available records. We compared the tax records with loan records that became public when Trump’s lender, Ladder Capital, sold the debt on his properties as part of mortgage-backed securities.

ProPublica reviewed records for four properties: 40 Wall Street, the Trump International Hotel and Tower, 1290 Avenue of the Americas and Trump Tower. Discrepancies involving two of them — 40 Wall Street and the Trump International Hotel and Tower — stood out.

more...

https://www.propublica.org/article/trum ... sistencies

Ya gotta laugh at the feigned puzzlement & shock of the professionals queried. This is biz as usual for the ruling class & the game is set up for them to play. 'Corruption' is so prevalent in capitalist relations that it can hardly be called that. It will of course be presented as 'rogue' behavior, atypical, but it is not, not at all. At bottom this is a class issue.
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Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy

Post by blindpig » Sat Oct 19, 2019 3:09 pm

We interrupt our regularly scheduled madness for this zinger outta the Imperial Disinformation Office:
Clinton suggests Russia grooming Gabbard to run as third-party 2020 candidate
BY MAX GREENWOOD - 10/18/19 12:30 PM EDT

Hillary Clinton appeared to suggest that Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) is the “favorite of the Russians” to win the 2020 presidential election and is being groomed by Moscow to run as a third-party candidate against the eventual Democratic nominee.

In an interview on the podcast “Campaign HQ,” the former secretary of State warned that the Russian government was poised to once again meddle in the U.S. presidential election through online disinformation efforts and by encouraging a third-party challenger to stir chaos in the contest.


The Russians already have their “eye on somebody who’s currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate,” she said, in an apparent reference to Gabbard.

“She’s the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her, so far,” Clinton told David Plouffe, the podcast’s host and the campaign manager for former President Obama’s 2008 campaign.

“And that’s assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because she’s also a Russian asset,” Clinton added, referring to the 2016 Green Party presidential candidate.

Clinton did not mention Gabbard by name. But her comments were a clear swipe at the Hawaii congresswoman, who has repeatedly been accused by political rivals and critics of being a potential Russian asset. Gabbard has denied those allegations.

During a Democratic presidential debate this week, Gabbard criticized news outlets — The New York Times and CNN, in particular — for accusing her of being “a Russian asset and an Assad apologist,” calling the allegations “completely despicable.”

A spokesperson for Gabbard’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment on Friday about Clinton’s remarks, but the congresswoman later tweeted a blistering response, accusing Clinton of being the "personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long."

The Hawaii Democrat has already said that she will not mount an independent bid for president if she does not win the party's nomination in 2020.

Gabbard has become a target for criticism from both Democrats and Republicans for her foreign policy views. In particular, she has drawn scrutiny for her views on American military involvement in Syria and arguing that the U.S. has waged so-called regime-change wars in the Middle East.

She has been reluctant to criticize Syrian President Bashar Assad, even in the face of suspected war crimes and crimes against humanity, and met with him secretly during a trip to Syria in 2017.

More recently, some Democrats have expressed concerns about what they say is online bot activity supportive of Gabbard’s presidential campaign. After the first Democratic debate in June, for instance, the hashtag #KamalaHarrisDestroyed trended among Gabbard’s supporters on Twitter, leading to speculation that it had been amplified by bots on the website.

Twitter has said it did not uncover any significant bot activity around the hashtag and there is no evidence that the campaign was involved with spreading the hashtag.

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4 ... party-2020
Gabbard of course is a 'smart imperialists', way too 'nuanced' for the Clinton/Bolton meathammer wing of imperialist. And from the US imperialist viewpoint Clinton is proly more correct, any and all resistance must be crushed ruthlessly in order to clear the field for the big dance number with China. Insanely powerful but slipping in almost every relevant category time ain't on the US's side. The one category where they rest easy is 'consent of the governed', we as a people lay quietly in a dark sack, cocooned in gizmos & lies.Given their command of the electronic high ground we must do what we can, work, work, work, and not pin our hopes on change in the material condition of the working class. Being reactive ain't good enough & the bosses have proven adept at finding bread & circuses, while surreptitiously moving the goalpost.(The ruling class ain't moving into 'tiny houses' until we make them).

Mao may not have said "Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent." but that quote certainly applies to bourgeois democracy. What follows ain't gonna be pretty but there ain't no other way to get where we are going.
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Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy

Post by blindpig » Sun Oct 27, 2019 5:47 pm

Concerning the supposed Bhagdadi snuffing:

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/19/worl ... e=REGIWALL

I read it then the paywall jumped up. Suffice to say US military spox in Iraq in 2007 said the reason the elusive Bhagdadi continually evaded capture was that he never existed.

One way or the other there is a terrible arrogance in play here. Either they don't care about being right or they don't care about getting caught in a lie. Perhaps both, the hubris is palpable.

Edit: There are reports that the Russian Minister of Defense has stated that there were NO US air strikes in Idlib province yesterday.

They don't care.
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Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy

Post by blindpig » Wed Nov 27, 2019 2:40 pm

The House Will Not Vote On Impeachment. It Will Censure Trump.
The live TV impeachment inquiry circus is for now over. The procedural parts are ready to begin. Both sides, the Republicans and Democrats, will have to decide which tactical moves they will now make.

Adam Schiff, who presided over the investigative part, wrote to his colleagues that he wants to immediately move forward:

As required under House Resolution 660, the Committees are now preparing a report summarizing the evidence we have found this far, which will be transmitted to the Judiciary Committee soon after Congress returns from the Thanksgiving recess.
...
Chairman Nadler and the Members and staff of the Judiciary Committee will proceed in the next phase of the impeachment inquiry.
Nadler will write up articles of impeachment which will be referred to the whole House to vote on them. No Republican is likely to vote for impeaching Trump. It would be political suicide to do so. The Democrats have 233 Representatives and need 218 votes for a majority decision. They can afford a few abstentions but not too many.

At least one House Democrat, Brenda Lawrence from the swing state Michigan, has said that she will no longer support impeachment but that she prefers to censure the president instead of impeaching him. A censure is a formal reprimand by a majority vote that has no further consequences.

More are likely to follow that path as several recent polls show that impeachment is no longer en vogue:

The latest national poll from Emerson College finds 45 percent oppose impeaching President Trump, against 43 percent who support it. That’s a 6-point swing in support from October, when 48 percent of voters supported impeachment and only 44 percent opposed.
More importantly, the poll shows more independents now oppose impeachment than support it, a significant change from Emerson's polling in October. The new poll found 49 percent oppose impeachment compared to 34 percent who support it. In October, 48 percent of independents polled supported impeachment, against 39 percent who opposed.

Since October, Emerson has found Trump’s job approval rating jump by 5 points, from 43 percent to 48 percent.

This is the second poll this week to show voters are increasingly likely to oppose impeachment, ..

Even Democrats are losing interest in the issue. There is also this curious issue:

Josh Jordan @NumbersMuncher - 13:32 UTC · Nov 26, 2019
CNN Poll: There is a *forty* point gender gap with regards to impeaching and removing Trump.
Men oppose impeachment 40-53 while women favor it 61-34.
That's a pretty stunning contrast.

If more Democratic swing-state representatives defect from the impeachment camp, which seems likely, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will have a big problem. How can she proceed?

If the House votes down impeachment Donald Trump wins.
If the House holds no vote on the issue Donald Trump wins.
If the House votes for censure Donald Trump will have won on points and the issue will be over.
If the House votes for impeachment the case goes to the Senate for trial.
The Republican led Senate has two choices:

It can decide to not open an impeachment trial by simply voting against impeachment. Trump wins.
It can open a impeachment trial, use it to extensively hurt the Democrats and, in the end, vote against impeachment. Trump wins big time.
Should the House vote for impeachment the Senate is likely to go the second path.

During impeachment the whole Senate sits as the High Court. The House of Representatives sends 'managers' who act as prosecutors. The chief justice of the U.S. presides. A vote for impeachment at the end of the trial requires a two-third majority.

The Republican majority in the Senate could use such a trial to bring disarray into the Democrats' primary. Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar and Michael Bennet are all senators and Democratic primary candidates. They would probably have to stop campaigning to attend the trials. Another leading Democratic candidate would be a top witness.

The Republican senators would immediately call up a number of people for questioning. These would include Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, his business partner Devon Archer, John Kerry who was Secretary of State when Biden intervened for Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky and of course the CIA spy and (not-)whistleblower Erik Ciaramella. It would also be of interest to hear how deep the former CIA director John Brennan was involved in the issue.

The Senators could use the impeachment trial to dig into all the crimes the Democrats under Obama committed in Ukraine. They would concentrate not on the Maidan coup but on the aftermath when the deals were made. There surely is a lot of dirt out there and it is not only Joe Biden's.

Then there is Russiagate. Did the Obama administration use illegal means to spy on the Trump campaign? As the issue is related to whatever Trump did there is good reason to include it into the trial.

The circus the Senate would open if the House votes for impeachment would play for many many months. The media would be full of this or that crime some Democrat or deep state actor supposedly committed. All this would play out during the election season.

An impeachment trial in the Senate would be a disaster for the Democrats.

I can not see why the Democrats would want to fall into such a trap. House leader Nancy Pelosi is experienced enough to not let that happen. But she will have to do some serious talking to convince the party that a vote on impeachment is not the best way to proceed.

The only sensible alternative is to censure Trump and that is why it is likely the way Nancy Pelosi will want to go. A partisan vote to censure Trump will do no damage to him but the Democrats would have at least done 'something' - even if it was only gesturing.

The whole impeachment show did little damage to Trump. His approval numbers are still fine. The show has given Trump another chance to run as the underdog who will drain the swamp in Washington DC. A major Democratic candidate is now damaged goods. Joe Biden no longer has any chance to win the presidency and it would be astonishing if he survives the primaries. The U.S. relations with the Ukraine have also been seriously damaged.

All this was easily predictable two months ago when the Democrats launched their impeachment show:

Instead of running on policy issues the Democrats will (again) try to find vague dirt with which they can tarnish Trump. This is a huge political mistake. It will help Trump to win his reelection.
After two years of falsely accusing Trump of having colluded with Russia they now allege that he colludes with Ukraine. That will make it much more difficult for the Democrats to hide the dirty hands they had in creating Russiagate. Their currently preferred candidate Joe Biden will get damaged.
...
The Democrats are giving Trump the best campaign aid he could have wished for. Trump will again present himself as the victim of a witch hunt. He will again argue that he is the only one on the side of the people. That he alone stands with them against the bad politicians in Washington DC. Millions will believe him and support him on this. It will motivate them to vote for him.

The Democrats should ask themselves how they put themselves into the current situation. Who was the genius who came up with the (not-)whistleblower idea and pushed for the move. The shallow-brained Adam Schiff? The devious John Brennan?

Whoever it was the Democrats should shun that person before it creates more damage to their party.

Posted by b on November 26, 2019 at 19:41 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/11/t ... trump.html

Reasonable analysis. Worst Party Ever.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Donald Trump, Avatar of his Class, Capitalism & the Decline and Fall of Bourgeois Democracy

Post by blindpig » Wed Dec 04, 2019 4:31 pm

Trump’s mental state is deteriorating dangerously due to impeachment with potentially ‘catastrophic outcomes’, psychiatrists urgently warn Congress
Exclusive: Statement to be accompanied by petition with at least 350 signatures from mental health professionals endorsing conclusions

Andrew Feinberg @AndrewFeinberg

A group of mental health professionals led by a trio of pre-eminent psychiatrists is urging the House Judiciary Committee to consider Donald Trump’s “dangerous” mental state arising from his “brittle sense of self-worth” as part of its inquiry into whether to approve articles of impeachment against him.

“We are speaking out at this time because we are convinced that, as the time of possible impeachment approaches, Donald Trump has the real potential to become ever more dangerous, a threat to the safety of our nation,” said Yale Medical School Professor Dr Bandy Lee, George Washington University Professor Dr John Zinner, and former CIA profiler Dr Jerrold Post in a statement which will be sent to House Judiciary Committee members on Thursday.

The statement will be accompanied by a petition with at least 350 signatures from mental health professionals endorsing their conclusions.

All three psychiatrists have said they are willing to testify as part of the impeachment inquiry.

The statement warns that “[f]ailing to monitor or to understand the psychological aspects [of impeachment on Mr Trump], or discounting them, could lead to catastrophic outcomes.”

“[W]e implore Congress to take these danger signs seriously and to constrain his destructive impulses. We and many others are available to give important relevant recommendations as well as to educate the public so that we can maximise our collective safety,” the psychiatrists write.


While Dr Lee and her colleagues have previously offered themselves to be consulted by impeachment investigators, she told The Independent they felt it necessary to come forward once more because the US president is “is ramping up his conspiracy theories” and “showing a great deal of cruelty and vindictiveness” in his “accelerated, repetitive tweets,” which she explained are signs that he is “doubling and a tripling down on his delusions”.

“I believe that they fit the pattern of delusions rather than just plain lies,” she continued, pointing to the claim he made during a meeting with Jens Stoltenberg, Nato’s secretary-general, that “many legal scholars” were “looking at the transcripts” of his 25 July phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and agreeing with his description of the call as “absolutely perfect” as an example of his pathology.

Dr Lee, an expert on violence prevention, acknowledged that members of congress – especially Republicans who are supportive of the president – might dismiss the warning she and her colleagues are delivering as just a product of differences of political opinion, but stressed that the fact that they should be taken seriously because their training enables them to recognise Mr Trump is exhibiting “definitive signs of severe pathology of someone who requires an advanced level of care” and who “meets every criterion of lacking a rational decision making capacity”.

“The one thing that we are trained to do is to distinguish between what is healthy and what is abnormal, and when the pattern of abnormality fits, then we recognise that it is pathology and not part of the wide variation of which healthy human beings are capable,” she said. “What we recognise is a pattern of disease and that may look like another political ideology or another political style to the everyday person who is unfamiliar with pathology, but to us it is a very recognisable pattern.”

Dr Lee explained that the president’s continued embrace of conspiracy theories was actually a public health issue because of his ability to draw members of the public into a “shared psychosis at the national level”.

“His detachment from reality... his pathology is actually gaining ground more quickly than the ability of rational actors to bring up the facts,” she said, adding that the House should consider these issues in the same way they are examining the legal and constitutional aspects of impeachment.

“They are having four constitutional scholars testify, but alongside the legal aspects, we must consider the psychological aspects. In fact, the psychological aspects are more basic because the legal process presumes psychological health and equipment and capacity,” she said.


Donald Trump ignores impeachment question as he leaves Downing Street
Dr Zinner, a former National Institutes of Mental Health researcher who has taught about and consulted with intelligence agencies on narcissistic personality disorders, told The Independent that members of congress need to be warned about the danger impeachment poses when the presidency is held by someone of Mr Trump’s pathology, which he described as a textbook case of Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

“Impeachment is the greatest threat to his self esteem that he’s experienced so far, and we’re very worried that his rage will be even more destructive than it’s been in the past,” he said.

He also dismissed Republicans who defend Mr Trump by claiming that his style is that of a blunt-talking New York businessman as “simply ignorant about the whole area of psychology that pertains to him”.

“These aren’t alternative viewpoints,” Dr Zinner explained, calling one “the product of very sound psychology... that comes from mainly from psychoanalytic theory, but is very established and sound and studied,” and the other “just ignorance and dismissiveness”.

Dr Zinner said the goal of the petition is to reach legislators to educate them. “Most people don’t really know this is a coherent, well-studied, well-defined condition,” he said.

“Even those that don’t dismiss [the diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder] say, ‘well, you know, these are just a lot of random bad, insane behaviours,’ but they don’t see how it coheres around the self esteem issue,” he continued.

“And others, they say, ‘well, he’s a liar and he’s a cheat and he exploits people and all of that stuff,’ but those are just random traits, whereas all of it hangs together around his developmental deficiency of not having an internal stable self-esteem.”


Donald Trump repeatedly refused to believe intelligence briefings, former deputy director says
He rejected the suggestion that the so-called Goldwater rule prohibits him from speaking out on the president's mental state. The Goldwater rule suggests that it is unethical for psychiatrists to give opinions on the mental health of someone they have not personally examined.

But Dr Zinner said: "It's not a rule, it's really a principle or a standard, which is very different because the preamble of the code of ethics of the American Psychiatric Association that establishes the basic guidelines for the ethical canons says that a psychiatrist's responsibility, first and foremost, is to his or her patients and to society and to his colleagues and himself in that order.

"You know ... the people that have written most strongly in favour for the rule themselves have diagnosed Trump. In other words, they're total hypocrites," he said, before adding that a one-on-one interview wasn't necessary to diagnose the president because of his myriad public statements and public behaviour.

Dr Post, who created psychological profiles of Israel’s former prime minister Menachem Begin and Egypt’s former president Anwar Sadat for former president Jimmy Carter to use when negotiating the Camp David Accords, and who founded the CIA’s Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior, told The Independent that evidence of Trump’s lack of self-esteem and the danger that impeachment will bring by exacerbating his precarious mental state can be found in the way he pardons convicted war criminals like Navy Chief Petty Officer Eddie Gallagher and labels them heroes.

“He’s identified with these war criminals because he knows that he’s being seen as a criminal. So he’s trying to redefine them as heroes, just like he is. People challenge his intelligence, so he accuses Maxine Walters of being ‘low IQ’ and says, but I’m a stable genius,” said Dr Post, who founded George Washington University’s Political Psychology Center after his retirement from the CIA.

Dr Post warned the strong connection between Mr Trump and his followers means the possibility he would call for violence against his perceived political enemies “cannot be discounted”.

“Watching his rallies, there’s an almost palpable connection between Trump and his followers, who have taken his invitation to externalize and project their problems upon [other groups],” he said. “He’s basically saying he understands where their problems are coming from and he will rescue them, so to hurt their rescuer is very painful [for his followers] indeed.”

Any challenge to Mr Trump’s power, whether impeachment or an election loss next November, could be a significant trauma for him and his supporters, Dr Post said.

Asked for a prediction of how Mr Trump would react to either, Dr Post invoked the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas: “He will not go gentle into that good night, but will rage, rage at the dying of the light.”

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/worl ... 32386.html

Bolding added, whadda coincidence...

I have never given shrinks much credit, but i'll take this. Though it almost sounds as though they are trying to talk Dems out of impeaching because of the possible repercussions I think their analysis of the man pretty accurate. It ain't rocket science, he let's it all hang out. But I say 'bring it on', this is the sort of thing which erodes faith in bourgeois democracy, a prerequisite for revolution.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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