Nancy Pelosi. after an interminable delay, has finally announced the start of a formal impeachment inquiry into Trump’s egregious conduct. We still don’t know what exactly this will mean, but things are definitely starting to heat up for Trump.
Discuss. No trolls.
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@ Lainy
Congratulations! May next month, and all the years to come, bring you joy.
@Naglfar
Thanks, I had forgotten that C4twoman also thinks autistic people who don’t make eye contact are “lazy.” What an empathetic person!
@Ohlmann
Hillary Clinton was quite popular on these boards as I recall. As far as present day politics, Joe Biden is not currently a government official of any sort, so nothing he’s doing is as outrageous as the head of the House of Representatives actively sanctioning our ongoing descent into utter fascism.
Open-thread brag: I completed the first draft of my first novel last Sunday; it’s very short (48,000 words), but I can probably bump that up to at least 50,000 in the revisions.
@Naglfar
I understand the rhetorical point you are trying to make, but We Wept Without Tears is a book documenting how it is not always so, and the erasure of entire stories of pain and suffering due to that perception. There are less extreme variants and gradations of similar situations. Not everyone is a fighter.
@Big Titty Demon
You’re right, I should have been clearer. What I meant was that by not using her power to stand up to Trump, she is complicit in his regime. I did not mean to erase the suffering of others. Sorry.
Gonna second what Naglfar said about Pelosi and her “”””cold calculations””””” leading her not to defend members of her own caucus (namely AOC and Ilhan Omar).
Which makes the blind faith that some of the crowd over on Wonkette have in Pelosi all the more baffling. Granted, opinions in their (non-)comment section are split given Pelosi’s obfuscation since becoming Speaker, but still, there’s enough of them there that post that dumb photo of her with the sunglasses saying “She Got This!”
M’kay. Should happened months ago with some moral fortitude, but I guess if this is all we got….
@c4twomen
Then leave asshole. No one wants you or your trash opinion here. If we were talking in person I’d say that to your face without blinking even once.
Pelosi waited until now because she needs an impeachment case that won’t lose the House for the democrats in 2020.
The first responsibility of the democrats is to preserve democratic government in America, and not let it sink into a fascist dictatorship. The House is the only thing that stands between that and the preservation of the government. If Trump should be re-elected, and the House goes republican, that’s the end of America.
So Pelosi was proceeding slowly to build an absolutely solid impeachment case that could not be seen as some kind of partisan power play. They were collecting information in committees, to try to get that.
What has changed is that Trump confessed on national television to crimes, specifically to bribery, which is mentioned explicitly in the constitution as an impeachable offense. She’s got what she needed out of his own mouth, now she can run with it.
Trump, while pronouncing that the impeachment was Totally Good For Him, The Best, said the following:
I know all of these words, but put together like this they have no meaning. Text-generating bots are more coherent than this moron.
I would argue that, from a rhetorical standpoint, it’s better to reserve the term “white supremacist” for folks who are Steven Miller/Donald Trump-level racists.
And I would argue that not calling out people who uphold white supremacy because they’re not as bad as other people who uphold white supremacy sends the message that white supremacy is tolerable in small amounts. It is not.
This.
And if we want to be any better than the Republicans, we need to call out white supremacy no matter what party it appears in.
There is no safe level of white supremacy.
All form of racism is bad. Calling one worse then the other is like saying it’s okay to catcall a woman because its not like it’s rape. Both are bad and both make up rape culture. Even the smallest form of racism holds up white supremacy and it all needs to be snuffed out
Also thanks for the wedding wishes. Its been actually pretty funny planning. I have a lot of older relatives that keep asking me where we are going for our honey moon and it’s like… Fam were generation z. We’re poor. I make 20 dollars an hour and it’s part time.
@Lainy
Congrats on your wedding!
@Garnetstar
No, she wasn’t “slowly gathering evidence”. There’s been plenty of evidence on several impeachable offenses, and her first reaction to finding out the news about Ukraine was to double down on the whole “we are not impeaching him”.
No, she had to be dragged by her caucus to pursue this. It was also not a calculated effort not to lose the House in 2018, because even after she won she refused to impeach him.
Though I will admit it might be because she knows the Senate will block it and spin a victim narrative. But that strategy can be just as dangerous too, because by staying silent they just empower him to do more harm. So far he’s been attacking democrats nonstop, yet they offer little to no counter.
But other than that the narrative that Pelosi is a brilliant strategist, biding her time until Trump makes a mistake is ludicrous. She has been merely staying inside her comfort zone, so a not jeopardize her own political interests and career. If not she would have been impeaching him over the concentration camps he’s putting people of my ethnicity in, the moment she got the chance.
So, er, how’s QAnon going to spin this one, do we know? Me? I’m popping the popcorn and resolving to never feeling bad about a typo in an email EVER AGAIN.
https://theweek.com/speedreads/867641/white-house-accidentally-emailed-ukraine-talking-points-nancy-pelosi
@Jesalin, Garnetstar, Diego Duarte:
From what I’ve been hearing elsewhere, a lot of the push for impeachment now comes from other ‘centrist’ Democrats like Pelosi who just got back from the House recess and told her of the holy hell they’d been getting from their constituents over all this, along with risks of being primaried from the left and the possibility of a lot more folks like AOC getting into the House. That was Pelosi’s tipping point, that she was losing control within the party and a lot of her ‘safe’ compatriots weren’t feeling safe anymore.
Since this is an open thread, I figure it’s as good a spot as any to dump some links. First is an article about the current research into animal consciousness, and the problems inherent in just defining the term ‘consciousness’ to begin with:
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/a-journey-into-the-animal-mind?utm_source=pocket-newtab
The second is an update on the dogfighting dogs seized from Michael Vick a decade ago. The article not only covers the lives they lived after their rescue, but how their successful rehabilitation showed how other rescued dogfighters could also be saved from being automatically put down:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/sports/michael-vick-dogfighting-dogs/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
And now for something completely different: for those who claim that dragons don’t real because nothing could ever get that big and heavy and still fly, I present to you you….Cryodrakon!
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/new-dinosaur-the-size-of-a-plane-discovered-in-canada-a4237611.html
You’re welcome. 😀
@jenora Feuer
Thank you! THAT sounds like a much, more reasonable and believable explanation than “Pelosi is playing 3D, astral dimension chess with Trump”. She absolutely loathes AOC and progressives, and they know we might be coming after them.
Hopefully she does get primaried because, despite Trump and Right wing pundits encouraging violence against AOC and Latinos, she thought it was a fine idea to attack and isolate her. Part of me wishes it was only a coincidence, but I believe she took the opportunity of all the violence being committed against us to try and “send a message”.
Trump then pounced on the chance and turned up the volume to 11 with his racist attacks, which further emboldened those who already wanted to hurt or kill her.
I will NOT hear a word of defense about Pelosi on this matter. What she did was highly irresponsible at best, and malevolent and manipulative at worst.
@diego Duarte:
‘No, she wasn’t “slowly gathering evidence”. There’s been plenty of evidence on several impeachable offenses, and her first reaction to finding out the news about Ukraine was to double down on the whole “we are not impeaching him”.
Yes, at first Pelosi didn’t favor impeachment over the Ukraine scandal.
Then Trump confessed to the crimes on national television. That’s what she needed, and she moved on it.
“The first responsibility of the democrats is to preserve democratic government in America, and not let it sink into a fascist dictatorship.”
No, the first responsibility the Democrat leadership has is preserving capitalism and the status quo, even if that means letting America turn into a fascist dictatorship.
Liberals hate socialists more than fascists. Always have.
I don’t really know if this is some kind of white liberal thing, but it astounds me that, even with the system having broken down to this extent, any non-conservative would still insist on defending centrist Democrats’ actions and be more offended by accusations of racism than the actual racism and its consequences. It’s as if they’ve envisioned a line of acceptable racism that was crossed in 2015 when Trump announced his latest, and successful, run for president. Until then I guess racism didn’t exist?
People are like, the Democrats have to strategically cave to Trump, otherwise he’ll gain even more power and break THE SYSTEM and that’s the end of America. Well, “America” is just an idea. It has already been the end of far, far too many Americans, and other people in the world, as a result of, yes, white supremacy, and it stretches back to before Trump. People are like, we can’t let America slip into a fascist dictatorship. Well, again, for far too many Americans, it may as well already have been a fascist dictatorship before Trump. But I guess none of that matters as much as the precious system.
And then they wonder why people under 40 aren’t enthusiastic about voting for them.